KAYLIRA TRAMINO

Kaylira gave Han, Leia and Luke her usual evening meal: rakino fruit stew, nelling berries as a side dish and coarse bread baked from kwhyen grains. It would cost her a day’s rations, but she had to feed them. There were few things that one could eat on Uluno, as she had discovered upon her arrival. Other than mongello birds and the occasional ground animal, the majority of the other life forms were poisonous. Luckily, she had chosen to bring a small, battered, handheld computer with her, and had been able to figure out what could and couldn’t pass her lips.

As she ate, she thought about how much she missed her old Master, who was the best person to go to for relationships that one wanted advice on. She had also had to deal with Anakin Skywalker, who was Luke’s father and had been Ahsoka Tano’s Jedi Master. She would know what to do.

Kaylira hadn’t been old enough on Tatooine to form attachments with anyone save those who helped her, and simple, schoolgirl crushes. There had been other padawans in the New Jedi Order that had caught her eye, but nothing had amounted to anything serious.

This led to another thought. Luke Skywalker didn’t know anything about the society of Jedi living peacefully less than a parsec away, or that she had had a Jedi padawan’s training. How to tell him? But there were ways that she could get them to bring her to the planet’s surface without telling them anything…

Han spoke, shattering her pensive state as she cleaned up the wooden dinner dishes. “We’d like to see those spare parts now, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure. But I have to ask you not to come in there with me. The spare parts storage area is a total mess, and only I can move around in there without knocking something over, and find what I want.” She walked over the narrow bridge. “Excuse me for a minute. I need to locate the hyperdrive section.”

She had to root around for more than a few minutes to find the parts that she was looking for. Even though she had been living alone on an uninhabited jungle planet for the past five years, her love for all things mechanical had never died. Her Master had taught her a few tricks, and her abilities were the only reason that she had survived Tatooine’s city slum districts. “What hyperdrive brand are you looking for?” she asked, digging through a pile of hyperdrive pieces.

“HE-47C,” Solo called. “Does it make 0.5 past lightspeed?”

As she hauled the piece of machinery out for inspection, she said, “Yeah, I think so. Or 0.6, at the most. It’s one of the newer models, so I think it’ll suit you.”

At the last minute, she plucked a small, but still significant piece from the hyperdrive as she put it down. A plan was forming in her mind. Luke came over to look too, and Kaylira’s heart thumped just a tiny bit harder.

“The spark plug is missing,” he said, as she put the said piece in her pocket using a sleight-of-hand trick.

She sighed convincingly. “Ugh! That’s just great! I remember now, I lent it to an old friend of mine on Cialone. I forgot to ask for it back. If we can repair your ship to fly it there, then I might be able to convince them to give it to me.”

“I think we can go and get it ourselves, then,” said Leia. “You can always use that Jedi mind trick on them, can’t we?”

“No, that won’t work. She’s resistant to that hypnotism thing, I’ve seen her do it with my own eyes.” It was true enough. “And you’ll need a guide to get to her place once you get there. It’s really well hidden.” Also true.

“How do you know that it doesn’t affect her?” Luke was clearly interested by this point.

“That’s my own business,” she said, with a little too much hostility, desperate to keep her cover. “Now let’s pack some provisions and fix your ship.”