Chapter Thirty One

Shaak Ti smiled as she finished drying off Aayla's lekku while all around them the girls were finishing up their designated bathing time. The ship had a limited water supply for such things, but since the boys had voted to use the sonic showers alone, the girls were able to use it all for themselves, and that day's physical exercises had been tough for them all. "I think it's time to get you started on wearing a training bra Aayla."

The blue skinned girl had closed her eyes in bliss as the older woman had carefully dried her lekku. As a Togrutan, Shaak Ti knew how sensitive they could be, and her gentle touch coupled with Aayla's exhaustion had almost made the girl fall asleep. Now she opened her eyes, looking up at the tall red-skinned knight. "Training bra?"

Lily laughed, gesturing Zule to hold up one of hers. "They will help your body from becoming too sore as you continue to grow up luv."

Blinking Aayla looked between the two adults and the object her friend was holding. Then her hands rose to touch her budding chest and she grinned standing up abruptly and rushing out clad only in her pants into the training room where the boys were still cleaning up after the class. "Look Harry, I've got boobies!"

"GAH!" Harry howled, blushing brightly and turning away along with the other boys old enough to have an inkling that girls were interesting as Shaak groaned.

Lily pursed her lips in an attempt to keep a laugh from escaping while Zule nodded sagely. "She seems rather proud of them, good for her!"

Some moments however were sad. At one point the Explorer went into lockdown as the masters and knights left the ship to help the planet they were orbiting over with a plague. Since it targeted young people with their undeveloped immune systems none of them were willing to risk the children in it. The children, with only Master Zeltesh and Lily left aboard, watched a lot of the local news, and began to realize that being a Jedi wasn't all fun or even all action. Sometimes it was sad and deadly.

But as should be expected, the training both in the new Force techniques (Lily had finally caved and begun to use the local terminology) and the Jedi's own training was the center of the initiate's lives. It took over everything, with the classes becoming more intensive on as the months passed, changing the initiates from young children into Jedi trainees in truth, both body and mind. And on top of that, Harry had his ongoing training with his mother, which were always rewarding.

Sometimes the techniques Harry came up with were simply better than anything Lily had run into back on Earth. A case in point occurred one evening when he asked, "I wonder why there aren't any spells which allow you to take control of the elements? I mean there are spells that summon up fire and water, but nothing that lets you control the element you conjure up except in a very simple, point it in the right direction, sort of way."

Lily thought for a few moments, then shrugged her shoulders. "It would come down to your ability to control the spell itself I expect. There were a few Dark spells based on creating a Dark magic infused fire, and they relied on total control of the fire or else it would get out of control and burn the user just as willingly as the victim."

She went on much more seriously looking down at Harry. "But Harry, burning someone alive is a horrible way to kill someone, it's incredibly painful and very dangerous."

Harry thought for a moment then shuddered as he realized what that would feel like. "Right, so not fire. But what about air?"

"Hmm, there are a lot of spells whose effect makes it seem as you're controlling the wind, making things float, summoning objects to you pushing them away. And the Jedi seem able to do some of the same things… wind could be the underlying element." Lily mused. "Yes Harry, that certainly sounds possible."

From that moment Harry decided to devote his time to learning how to move wind as he wanted to, into an actual attack rather than to push or pull a solid object.

For a few days he made no progress, but then Aayla got involved. "You're concentrating too hard with these," she said poking him right above the eyes gently for a moment. "Close them."

"What are you talking about?" Harry asked, somewhat irritated. This was hard darn it!

"You don't see the air silly!" Aayla said with a grin. "You feel it on your skin, smell it through your nose, and with humans, sense it with those little disgusting hairs you have all over your body.'

"I don't," Harry said automatically to which Aayla shuddered in theatrical relief. Hair was an amusing subject with Aayla. She thought hair on top of your head was interesting and fun to work with, which had become something of a bonding thing between the girls of the clan. But she didn't like the little hairs on people's bodies elsewhere. She found them gross to look at.

Harry had already determined that he wouldn't allow himself to grow any, even if he had to will that into occurring somehow.

"You know Harry she's right," Lily mused. "And possibly we're starting this from the wrong end of the wand as it were. Maybe we should start with the air already moving, and let you try to manipulate that instead of having to conjure up a wind of your own."

They asked Master Saa for help with that, and she agreed, coming by later the next day. Concentrating for a few moments, she began to move the air of the room they were in slowly in a circle around them, enough to ruffle their hair. Or at least the mortal's hair, Lily's stayed right where it was. Force powers like that couldn't work on her for some reason.

Aayla gave Harry's hand one brief squeeze, then let it go watching intently, with both her growing Force senses and her normal ones.

For his part Harry closed his eyes, feeling the wind on his skin, remembering where the target was, imagining the effect he wanted to create. Then he opened his hand and thrust it out quickly towards the target opening his eyes as he did. From his hand came a sharp shrieking sort of sound as they air around it suddenly sped up to incredible speed, Lancing forward to crash into the target with devastating force.

"Interesting," Saa said dryly as the target collapsed cut straight through in several sections. "Very dangerous too. I believe that should join the other spells you shouldn't share with anyone you don't trust Harry."

On the other hand, it is one that Masters like myself could replicate now that we know it was possible. Frowning lightly, Saa let the Force behind the wind still whipping around them in the room died down, before gesturing with her hand as Harry had. The target was now destroyed, exploding outwards. "Not as concentrated as yours was but still quite devastating."

Aayla quickly learned how to use air magic like that as well, and the two of them gleefully continued on, using air to deflect physical assaults, creating a miniature storm in the room to gather up dust which had been spread around it just for that purpose. Aayla also learned the Incendio spell as well as several other small-scale spells. The Masters were a little leery about a few of them, but Harry insisted that she learned them, and after extracting a promise from her not to use them except entire cases of emergency, Aayla was allowed to learn a few more attack spells. Harry's version, not the original ones. The original ones were too specific, Harry preferred to create his own, which was what Lily had been hoping for all along.

But if the learning of attack spells was going reasonably well, the experiments with runes certainly got off on the wrong track immediately.

Hearing the door open Lily looked up from where she was leaning over Harry's shoulder, reading text along with him as part of their ongoing education in this universe, while nearby the other children were hard at work on their own homework. It was a quiet industrious classroom, despite not actually be a classroom at the moment, rather the free time central living area for the children.

In the doorway Master Fay smiled as all the children looked up at her waving or smiling intern, before gesturing Lily to follow her. Lily patted Harry on the head just once, and he looked up smiling before going back to his work as she turned away. Outside in the corridor, fay waited for her before gesturing down the hallway. "I have a granite slab like the one you instructed us to get, as well as several other materials. Do you think we can start working on seeing if runes actually work here now?"

"Certainly," Lily replied with a smile, moving to follow the other woman to an adjacent room. It had been devoted to workstations for the creating lightsabers according to a few of the others Jedi, but with only a single clan rather the four that could have fit on the training vessel, and with none of the initiates being of an age for their lightsaber training to even begin, it had been repurposed.

Lily's ghostly form settled into a chair opposite Fay across from the granite slab, and Lily began to instruct Fay in a precautionary tale she had been told as a student. How you could never connect to runes together until you were certain what they would do was what you wanted, how never to use multiple languages in a single system, and to always be careful when experimenting. "More spell researchers and runesmiths die because of a simple lack of precaution than any other reason."

"Understood." Fay said crisply. "Show me what to do."

"This first test will be of a simple glow array." Lily instructed. "It should turn the entire granite piece into a large lightbulb."

With that they began to work on carving out a few simple runes into the stone. Of course this wasn't the first time Fay had worked on runes, Lily had been instructing her on them for weeks now with the use of a sandbox. Because of this her hand was steady as she worked, and only twice did Lily have to correct her when she was going to make a line of the rune wrong in some small fashion.

Fay did everything right under Lily's watchful gaze, though it took a while, and by the time she was finished, Harry had finished his lessons, joining them with Master Saa along with a few other interested students. Even Toramund and Shaak Ti, the first two of the new teachers to be cleared for learning about the runes, which was a level below knowing about all of Harry's abilities, were there.

"What's this supposed to do Mistress Lily?" asked Knight Ti, gesturing to the runic array on the slab of Granite as Fay finished the last rune, carefully carving a small curve at the end of the last line.

"It's supposed to make the granite glow like a light, but is supposed to run on the Force itself rather than electricity." Lily reiterated, before pointing at each part of the array in turn.

There were some smiles at that idea, while Saa and the other Jedi leaned forward intently. This would be a major game changer, if they in fact could learn to harness the power of the Force, it would be an incredible boon to the Order as a whole in many ways.

Even so Saa narrowed her eyes. Runes had always struck her as highly suspect, making her remember some tales about certain Sith Lords and their abilities to carve the Force into objects, thus strengthening them tremendously. She and Yoda had talked about it before the Grand Master had been forced to return to Coruscant, and despite that worry had decided to let Lily and Fay continue their experiments. The Light Construct, which Harry and Lily called the Patronum Defender, still blazed in her mind that these two represented a force for Light rather than the Dark, even more so now given Saa's own recreation of a similar technique.

"I think I'm done," Fay said, stepping back from the table to allow Lily to hover over it closer. She could have course even passed through Fay's body to do so, but feeling the Force Ghost move through you like that was odd and not wholly pleasant.

Lily worked down the array one Rune at a time, until finally she nodded. "It's good to go. Now all you need to do is to push a bit of your Force power into it to activate the array using this rune here," She said, tapping one of the larger runes in the array. "Once you jumpstart it, the array should automatically begin pulling the Force from the universe around us instead, but you have to start things off."

Fay nodded, pressing one finger against the activation rune, then began to push a bit of her Force power into it. She backed away slightly as the runes glowed, the runes themselves glowing slightly, a yellow color almost. Then the entire granite slab began to glow a very pretty mixed gold and orange color, like a sunset almost.

Then the slab of rock began to glow brighter, and brighter, and brighter until people were shielding their eyes.

"That shouldn't be happening!" Lily said "Harry!"

Saa and the two knights however had already reacted, flinging up their hands protective shields forming around everyone between them and the granite slab. The slab exploded the second later, the light going out abruptly as it did, though that wasn't nearly as important as the shards of rock that zoomed around the room like shrapnel. Dozens impacted the shields of the Jedi, bounding off or dropping to the floor, all their momentum taken from them, and the children all breathed a sigh of relief, thanking the knights profusely for their quick reaction.

Several dozen also zoomed through Lily's spectral form to no effect, and she sighed faintly shaking her head. "Okay, that shouldn't have happened. I used that very same runic array when I was 14. It was one of our first projects and I don't remember anyone blowing up like that. It's specifically used because you can't blow things up even if you mess up a few of the runes or put them in the wrong order."

"I felt the Force pour into the slab," Fay said thoughtfully. "It almost seemed to condense the Force too, though I'm uncertain of that…"

"That's it!" Lily said, smacking her for head with one of her hands. "Of course! At home, gathering the magic is often difficult depending on where you are, but there's so much Force in this universe that it's taking in too much. I should have realized that would be the case! We'll have to figure out how to put a limiter into even the least power intensive array."

That was but the first misadventure Fay and Lily had with runes. When Fay tried to create a Notice-Me-Not array like those that covered the magical lands back on Earth, she forgot where she put it. Only Lily being able to actually take her hand and move it towards the slab of steel Fay had used that time allowed her to find it once more and cross out one of the runes to cancel the array. An expansion array placed on a small maintenance closet got the both of them lost for an entire day. The same didn't happen to the expansion charm oddly enough, but there were a few things the expansion runic array could do that the charm could not, so they kept at it.

It took months of experimentation, but finally Lily and Fay were able to create an actual working array, with limitations built into it to limit the amount of force it could siphon in. From there, Fay dove into further experimentation with a will, using Fay's yacht, the Windblown, as a test bed for several of them. Master Saa also joined them at this point, eager to learn this new, extremely advanced and esoteric type of Force ability.

Harry surprisingly wasn't much help in this, being slow to learn the runic scripts himself. He instead concentrated on actual Force manipulation, and enhancing his direct combat abilities.