I have a message from another time...

                     Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
                               presents

                UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT
                   -= WARRIORS OF THE OUTER RIM =-

                     A Dark and Silent Rendezvous

                         Benjamin D. Hutchins

     (with a lot of inspiration from the worlds of George Lucas)

                (c) 2002 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


        Leonard awoke faster than he normally did, coming straight
from insensate darkness to alert wakefulness all in one rush.  Before
he fully realized that he was awakening, he found himself sitting up
in bed, his lone blanket bunched up at his waist.  He steadied himself
and stretched out his awareness, trying to feel what had prodded him
so rapidly awake; but whatever it had been, it was gone.  Puzzled, he
glanced across the small room.
        Whatever it was, it had apparently not been a disturbance in
the Force.  If it had been one, strong enough to awaken him, then Emmy
certainly wouldn't still be sleeping.  Her sensitivity to such things
was much greater than his own - but she slept peacefully on, curled
happily into a warm bundle of quilted Jyuraian silk, only a splash of
her hair and the tip of her right ear visible.
        (Emmy was very fond of this particular sort of silk.  Her
bedding and most of her clothes were made from it.  Len owned a single
shirt of it; it was so light and breathable that he always felt as if
he hadn't put on a shirt at all when he was wearing it, and had to
keep glancing down to make sure he was really dressed.  A pair of
pants in the same material would make him absolutely paranoid, even if
they -were- fireproof and highly resistant to blaster fire.)
        Whether the jolt that awakened him came from within or
without, Len felt an uneasiness, a strange sense of dread, which he
found quite displeasing.  He threw aside the blanket, got out of bed,
and dressed quietly, though he knew a brass band wouldn't awaken Emmy
as long as they didn't disturb the Force.  Before leaving the room, he
hesitated for a moment, then picked up his lightsaber and hung it in
its place on his belt.
        The lightsaber was an unfamiliar weight bumping against his
leg, and Len made a mental note to change the positioning of its hook
the next time he had the opportunity.  The saber was new; he'd
completed it only days before, and was quite proud of it.  The
successful completion of a lightsaber was an important step on the
road to becoming a Jedi Knight.  Len had always liked working with his
hands (though perhaps not as much as his craftsman brother Corwin), and
in the saber he could take pride in having made something truly
unique.
        Part of that was luck, of course.  The outer casing of the
saber was nothing too great to look at.  In fact, the bulk of it was
made from nothing more than steel plumbing components.  It was heavier
than average and its balance was not perfect - it was tip-heavy, an
unusual affliction in a bladeless lightsaber.  Len's kendo-trained
fighting reflexes found that heaviness appropriate, though, and in his
hands the ugly, heavy saber behaved like a laser-tooled precision
instrument.  What really made it special, though, was what lay within
it, and that was where the luck came in.
        Here again, most of its internal components were mundane,
off-the-shelf power-handling and control parts cannibalized from other
equipment.  The power cell had come from, of all things, a hand-held
anti-gravity module, intended for use in heavy industrial load-
lifting.  Nestled in the middle of it all, though, was an absolutely
perfect collimator crystal, a Veridian diamond the size of a golf ball
which Len had spent months carefully, painstakingly polishing into a
regular icosahedron and then encasing in a slowly, laboriously fused
mirror chamber.
        The resulting collimator's perfection was evident when Len
first activated the saber: its beam was a pure, brilliant white,
without the colored edge so characteristic of Jedi lightsabers.  Len
had been a little disappointed by that - he had been hoping for blue -
until Master Gajic had explained what made it so special and
significant.
        The colors of most lightsabers, he explained, come from
chromatic aberrations, imperfections, in either the crystal, the
collimator chamber, or both; the odds of both being absolutely perfect
in the same saber are vanishingly small.  As the construction of the
chamber and the polishing of the crystal are both activities in which
the builder is assumed to be guided by the Force, for Len to have come
up with a white blade on his first attempt was a very rare and special
thing - an omen, perhaps, of things to come.  Len wasn't sure he'd go
that far with the mystic interpretation, but he was proud of his
workmanship all the same.
        Len walked silently out of the room and passed the doorway to
the house's second bedroom, the one occupied by Master Gajic himself.
Nothing stirred within except the sound of the Jedi Master's faint
snoring - one more proof that whatever had jarred Len awake hadn't
touched the Force.  He went through the darkened kitchen without
turning on a light, opened the door softly and went outside.
        Aldous Gajic's house, like his student Leonard's lightsaber,
was not much to look at on the outside.  It was a rather squat
structure of stressed plasticrete and metal, imposed on the side of a
small, rocky hill in the badlands of Bonadan, a hundred kilometers
from the spaceport city of Bonadota.  Nothing surrounded it but
scrubby hardpan, a few more hills, the outbuilding housing the
wellpump and power generator, and Gajic's battered but serviceable
antique Land Rover.  There was nothing to indicate that it was the
home of one of the galaxy's last remaining Jedi Knights - which was as
Gajic intended it to be.  He spent long periods away from home,
hunting for the lost Stanley Cup, and his house's rundown appearance
discouraged burglars.
        Len became more and more puzzled as he emerged into the cool
scrubland night.  Overhead, the stars sparkled, vivid as they could
only be in a desert far from city lights.  As Len surveyed the half of
the horizon he could see, he felt a curious compulsion to walk in a
particular direction.  It was the same kind of whispering intuition
that had led him to accept Master Gajic's offer of a lift to the Rim
when he had felt the need to leave New Avalon, and to advocate Emmy's
acceptance as the master's second Padawan when Gajic had been ready to
refuse her.  It had served him well in those two occasions, so he
followed it and started walking.

   /*  Information Society  "Ozar Midrashim"  _Don't Be Afraid_  */

        Half an hour's walk brought him to another hill, lower than
the one containing Master Gajic's house.  The ground around it was
scuffed and rutted by much wheeled traffic, but all the ruts were old
and round-edged, eroded by wind and the occasional rainstorm.  Nothing
had passed by here for many years.  A pair of rusting rails led to a
square "doorway" cut into the side of the hill and framed with
timbers.  It was an abandoned silver mine, one of the first ones sunk
by Bonadan's first settlers two hundred years earlier.
        Whatever was calling Leonard was down the mine.
        He hesitated at the threshold, most of him wanting to go back
to the house and bed.  There could be nothing of interest down the
abandoned mine; it had played out a century and a half ago and been
abandoned like the rest of Bonadan's worthless hinterland.  It could
be dangerously unstable after all this time unmaintained.  That would
be quite an irony, wouldn't it - aspiring Jedi Knight drawn out into
the desert by the aftereffects of a forgotten dream and crushed to
death in a cave-in while exploring an abandoned silver mine he had no
business being down.
        But whatever had pulled him here wasn't relinquishing its hold
now that he'd reached its doorstep, and Len began to wonder if he
wasn't resisting the urge to go down the mine because he was afraid of
what he might find.
        He took a deep breath, banished his fears, and entered the
mine.  The darkness of the shaft swallowed up the starlight, and for a
moment he considered drawing his lightsaber just for the light it
would provide.  Then, as his eyes adjusted, he realized that it was
not pitch-black in the mine as he would expect it to be underground.
There was a low greenish-white glow coming from the rocks - no; from
some kind of phosphorescent moss growing on the rocks.  It wasn't
much, but as long as he kept calm, he could feel his footing and the
distance to the walls around him.  He kept the way back to the surface
in mind and advanced, slowly and cautiously.
        The feeling grew stronger as he descended, abandoning any
pretense of exploration and simply following the tugging he felt in
his mind.  Len felt faintly puzzled.  How could such a phenomenon
-not- be of the Force?  But if it were, how was it that Emmy and
Master Gajic had not felt it?
        After a few minutes he lost all track of time.  He kept
following the cart rails and the sensation of calling, down tunnels,
into branches, slowly and surely.  The unchanging greenish-whiteness
of the rocky tunnels became hypnotically monotonous, as if he'd been
delving into the abandoned mine forever.
        Suddenly a change caught his eye and brought his mind back to
alertness.  It was a small change, but against the utter
unchangingness of the mine it stood out like a beacon - the glow at
the corner ahead was brighter than normal, and lacked a green tint.
As he drew closer, Len realized that it was quite a lot brighter.
There was a white light source of some kind around that corner.
Perhaps this was what had drawn him down here?  His pulse quickened a
little bit, though he took pains to remain calm as he approached, and
then turned, the corner.
        At which point all the surreality of the long walk into the
mine smeared into mundanity in comparison with what confronted him
there.
        There, deep in an abandoned silver mine on the planet Bonadan
in the Outer Rim Territories, he turned a corner and entered a
hardwood-floored, skylit dojo on a beautiful sunny day.  He could
smell cherry blossoms in the air and hear birds singing.  Some of the
dojo's windows were cranked open to let in the pleasant afternoon
breeze.
        At the opposite end of the room stood Achika Shannon, her
black hair tied back in a ponytail.  She was dressed in a monsuke and
hakama, just as she had been when Leonard had last seen her.  She
raised her eyes to the doorway and smiled at his entrance, looking
happy and healthy despite the alarmingly bloody bandage secured around
her head.  In her hands she held a katana, freshly polished and
bright.
        Leonard had not even time to gasp out her name before she
raised that blade and came at him, loosing no sound at all from her
throat as she struck at his head.  He stumbled back a step, and though
his brain was completely frozen with shock, his hands knew what to do.
They tore his own katana from the scabbard thrust through his obi and
blocked her attack with a ringing clash of steel.
        His mind and body never did fully reconnect during the next
few minutes.  He saw himself in blurred slow-motion, dreamlike and
faceless, as he sidestepped Achika's charge and knocked her blade
aside with his own.  She turned, grinning cheerfully, and launched
another attack.  Leonard's body defended itself on autopilot, then
eased into a counterattacking posture.  The pattern felt familiar as
they back-and-forthed up and down the room, smashing their blades
together.  Though the dojo was cool, dry and breezy, Len began
sweating.  Achika did not.  Her face never changed as they fought, up
and down.  She never spoke, never made a sound, which was eerie, since
her fighting style was usually very vocal.
        With a thrill of horror, Leonard realized why the pattern
seemed familiar.  He tried to stop himself, break out of the rhythm of
combat even if it meant letting her strike him down.  With a rising
sense of panic he tried to make his pattern ragged, find an opening to
disengage.
        None came.
        And so the moment approached with the inevitability of
tectonic drift when Achika would strike, block down, pivot on the ball
of her foot, and slip slightly out of position, extending herself too
far in an attempt at catching him off-balance.
        Leonard made one final attempt, screaming at himself to
release the sword, throw it across the room, fall on it, anything but
let it go on doing what it was about to do.
        Then the shuddering jolt ran up his arms to his shoulders and
hot blood splashed against his face.
        Then, only then, could his hands release the katana's grip.
        Blind with grief, he turned away without looking at what he'd
wrought and ran, eyes closed and streaming with tears.  How long he
ran, lunging without thought down corridors, changing direction by
crashing against walls, he would never be able to remember - only the
sudden stunning shock as he burst out of the mouth of the mine and
into the brilliant light of midday.
        So abrupt was the plunge into light that he skidded to a halt
two feet past the threshold, then fell to his knees and threw up in
great racking sobs.
        When he'd regained some control of himself, he wiped at the
tears and sweat in his eyes and sat back on his haunches to see Master
Gajic standing silently by a rock a dozen feet away.  He looked
immeasurably sad.
        "Whuh - awhuh - awhuh," Len panted, trying to speak.
        "Slowly," said Master Gajic softly.  "Remember the peace
within."
        Len looked at his knees and fought fruitlessly for control for
several seconds, then stopped trying and found it.  When he raised his
eyes again to his master, the panic was gone, but the haunted look
remained.
        "What... what -was- that?" he murmured.
        "Fear.  Anger.  Hatred.  The Dark Side," said Gajic.  "Take
your choice - they're all the same."
        "I thought... I was past all that," said Len wearily.  "What
am I supposed to have learned by living through that again?"
        "That's for you to decide, Leonard," said Gajic.
"Come... let's get home.  You need rest."

        Emmy sat at a bench in the house's basement workshop, doing
her best to concentrate on what was, after all, a very curious day.
She'd awakened at dawn to find Len already gone - nothing in his bed
but a tangled blanket.  Len never got up before Emmy, and never left
his bed unmade either.  What could have drawn him out of his bed and
away from the house in the middle of the night, yet passed unnoticed
by the house's other occupants?
        Master Gajic also rose at dawn, as was his custom.  He looked
grave and troubled, not his usual cheerful self though the day was
bright and sunny.  He didn't answer Emmy's questions - just told her
to see to her breakfast and mind things around the house until he
returned, then packed some field rations and walked off into the
badlands, leaving Emmy with no answers for her questions and a
very uneasy feeling.  She spent most of the morning in an ill temper,
then realized that hanging around in a dudgeon wasn't going to do
anyone any good and sought to immerse herself in work.  Leonard wasn't
the only Padawan who needed a lightsaber.

        Leonard didn't talk about that morning.  Not when he returned,
clearly shaken, from the badlands that afternoon; not when they were
alone in the darkness of their room that night, away from Master
Gajic's ears.  Emmy asked him once, saw the look on his face, and
didn't press.  When she asked Master Gajic if he knew what had
happened, the master only looked slightly sad and said that Emmy would
learn soon enough what her slightly senior comrade had faced.

        The training of Aldous Gajic's two Padawans continued apace,
and by and large he was very pleased with their progress.  Both were
good workers, both motivated, both dedicated, and their training was
just reaching the stage where it was becoming interesting, their
individual strengths and weaknesses molding them away from the
standard training and into their own unique warriors.
        Emmy's talents, it was plain, lay in the moment - her ability
to sense the flow of the Force in a conversation, an encounter, or a
battle was unmatched even by her master once her powers of
concentration were honed by training.  Leonard's rapport with the
Force, on the other hand, was more cosmic; he could sense the big
picture, sometimes too big for his mind to make sense of what he was
feeling, though that was getting better with practice.  He could look
backward from pivotal places and times, and Gajic thought it likely
that he would eventually develop the ability, rare even among Jedi, to
see forward as well.
        In their ways of battle, too, Gajic's two students were
developing their own quirks.  Well, they'd always had them, really,
since both had known a style of sword combat before coming under their
master's wing.  Leonard was a journeyman of the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, 
a kenjutsu form whose founder's best friend had been a Jedi Knight,
and Emmy was proficient in the Hyelian East Seacoast style of
fencing.  Rather than attempt to erase those skills and start over
with the traditional Jedi forms, Gajic instead layered those forms
over what the students already knew, encouraging them to blend the
elements together and find their own unique paths, and now they were
starting to reach the plateau of skill where those paths were becoming
obvious.
        In due time, Emmy graduated from training with the lightsaber
she had inherited from her ancestor, the great Second Epoch Jedi
Master O'bi-Wann Kyn'o'bi, and began exploring the use of the sabers
she had constructed for herself.  Her master found them interesting,
two short, light sabers intended to be wielded one in each hand, but
he wasn't certain that they would prove robust enough to withstand the
rigors of field service as the primary weapons of a Jedi Knight.
Still, they seemed to hold up fine in Len and Emmy's training bouts,
and the two Padawans were now at the level where those bouts were all
but the real thing.
        Emmy had progressed faster than Len, it was true; she had come
to Gajic almost a year after the redheaded young man, and now, as they
neared the end of Len's fifth year with Gajic, their levels of skill
and power had achieved a rough parity.  This didn't bother Leonard; it
was plain for their master to see that the young man was relieved that
he would probably not have to leave her behind when he faced his
trials and, hopefully, struck out on his own.  Though not lovers
(which Gajic thought was fortunate - too many volatile emotions
involved in that kind of thing for students to endure), the two were
clearly very fond of each other, and so Gajic was just as pleased that
they would, in all likelihood, be able to study together for the rest
of their time with him.
        But, of course, there was one fly in that ointment, for as
they entered Len's sixth year with Gajic, there was one thing left
that Leonard Hutchins had done and M'yl'ya Kyn'o'bi had yet to do.

        Emmy Kyn'o'bi was not afraid of physical hardship; had she
been so, she never would have attempted to become a Jedi Knight.  That
wasn't to say that she relished it, though, and so she wasn't
particularly pleased to be tramping through the ice crevasses of
Halloran V, a planet so frigidly unpleasant that Emmy couldn't imagine
by what stretch of whose imagination it had ever been judged Class M.
Oh, it was for a good cause, right enough - missing children were
always a priority, and Emmy was both pleased and proud to be part of
the search for little Mark Kaminsky, missing since the night before
from the ice harvesting settlement of Okotoks.
        She just wished she and Leonard hadn't had to split up to
cover more ground.  Even so, she recognized the need for it.  The
temperature was approaching zero and the air had that leaden feeling
that an approaching storm brings.  If Mark wasn't found tonight,
chances were high that he wouldn't be found alive.
        Emmy was just having this rather bleak thought when she
happened across the mouth of an ice cave, one of the thousands that
riddled the walls of the crevasses.  She shined her handlamp into it,
but the dark depth of it swallowed the beam almost immediately.
        "Mark?" she called, hearing her voice echo off the walls of
the cave and rattle away down its depths.  "Mark Kaminsky?  Can you
hear me?"
        Nothing.  She closed her eyes and stretched out with her
awareness, trying to feel the nearness of another life.  If he had
gone far enough down one of these caves that she couldn't sense him
from its entrance, there was little hope of ever finding him... 
        ... yes!  There!  A bright spot, deep in the massive ice
cliff, huddled and fearful but alive.  Her eyes snapped open, piercing
the darkness with a sight beyond visual, and without bothering with
her useless handlamp she plunged into the darkness of the cave.  She
kept her awareness locked on that single bright life, navigating the
cold ice walls by feel, trusting in the Force to lead her to him and
keep her out of pits and crevices.  As she drew nearer and nearer, she
felt her spirits rising further and further.  She'd done it!  She'd
found him!  Just around one more corner and then everything would be
all ri - 
        She stopped short, eyes flying wide in astonishment even as
they tried to squint against the sudden brightness of the light, for
as Emmy rounded that last corner, she emerged not into a further
segment of ice tunnel containing a lost and frightened little boy, but
a high-ceilinged, brightly lit, tapestry-bedecked corridor of dark
stone block.  It looked familiar, very familiar, but it was so
unexpected and out of place that Emmy took several seconds to place
it.  Not until she whirled and saw the great oak doors with the
Hyelian royal crest did she realize that she was in the corridor
leading to Queen Ts'riinah's throne room.
        "But - how... ?" she murmured.  Before she could get further
into her confused interrogation of no one, however, the doors at the
other end of the hall slammed open as if punched by a giant's fist,
and through them strode a black-clad apparition of terror.  Emmy's
blood, already cooled by her tramp through the ice planet's valleys,
ran sluggish in her veins as the sound of his mechanical breathing
rasped against the stone walls.  She looked around, wondering why she
was having this vision again, what was making her hallucinate the last
moments of her revered ancestor O'bi-Wann, three thousand years ago,
in this place and time.
        But O'bi-Wann wasn't there.
        Darth Vader was coming for -her-.

    /*  Stabbing Westward  "The Thing I Hate"  _Darkest Days_  */

        Emmy barely made that realization in time, throwing herself
backward as the Dark Lord's scarlet lightsaber hissed to life and
slashed at her.  She hit the carved door of the throne room hard,
jolting the breath from her lungs, then crumpled and rolled to the
right as Vader's blade bit into the ancient wood and carved a line
straight down through where she had been.  He didn't say a word, only
whirled like some malevolent gargoyle, fixed her with the blank eyes
of his hideous helmet, pulled his weapon from the smoking door and
came after her again.
        Well, if that was how it was going to be, then fine!  She
might not know how she got here, or when it was, or what was
happening, but no Kyn'o'bi would ever dishonor O'bi-Wann's memory by
lying down and meekly waiting for the Sith Lord of Sith Lords to slay
her!  Emmy plunged her hands into her sleeves and drew her twin
shortsabers, their blades snapping to violet life.  She held them
backward by normal swordfighting standards, the blades angled back
toward her elbows, and squared off against the Sith Lord as he
approached.
        "Why are you here?" she demanded of his hateful visage.  "How
did you get here?  What do you want?!"
        Vader said nothing.  He merely advanced, silent but for his
awful breathing, and attacked, only this time, Emmy met him.
        His strength was breathtaking, greater even than she had
expected from the sight of his massive frame.  The grace and speed
with which he moved, though his body was reputed to be a ruin held
together only by that armored suit he wore, was equally so.  Within
two passes, Emmy Kyn'o'bi knew that she was in for the absolute fight
of her life.
        And that was before he started tearing the swords, sconces,
shields, torches and loose blocks from the walls and throwing them at
her from all sides with the power of the Force.
        And yet, through it all, as her body became battered and sore
and she narrowly evaded death on all sides, Emmy gained strength.  The
Force sang to her, it drew patterns for her, and she followed its lead
unconsciously.  Despite her obvious disadvantages in size, strength
and reach, she was the Dark Lord's equal in speed and his better in
agility.  Where she had begun the fight determined to go out as hard
as possible, she now began to entertain the thought of -winning-.  How
sweet would that be?  To erase the stain on her family's honor, purge
this ancient horror from the universe, set the Force right with her
own hands?  It would be the ultimate, crowning achievement of her or
any life, to be the one who killed Darth Va - 
        He caught her in a corner, crossed her guard like a whisper
and agony bloomed in her right side.  Screaming, her concentration
shattered, she flew the full length of the corridor, flung by the
invisible hand of the Dark Side to smash against the far doors hard
enough to spring their hinges.  Her lightsabers spiraled away from her
nerveless hands at the moment of impact, and as she crumpled to the
red carpet of the floor she struggled just to remain conscious.  She
forced herself upright, her legs weak and trembling, and pressed a
hand against the crusty, sticky wound in her side as nauseating waves
of pain rolled over her.
        Emmy tried to keep her breathing normal despite the anguish,
forcing her tear-swimming eyes to focus as Vader slowly, unhurriedly
trod the length of the corridor to finish her.  Panic welled up within
her; the pain tapered away to a high keening noise and vanished as her
fear of the Dark Lord swept away everything else in her mind.  She
looked around frantically for some escape, her mind barely working,
and her free hand felt something cold and metallic at her belt.
        Master O'bi-Wann's lightsaber!  She snatched it up like a holy
talisman, thumbed its bright blue blade to life and brandished it like
a torch, her last salvation, her only hope.  If she had hoped to
banish Vader merely with its very light, though, she was disappointed,
for he kept coming, not visibly impressed.  Hope died and terror was
reborn, flowering blackly in her heart, this time edged with the
hysterical hate all life has for that which it knows will end it.
        She shrank back, leveling the weapon.  Her eyes shrank to
pinpoints as she screamed at him, "No!  Stay away!  Go back!"
        He ignored her and kept advancing as she trembled and raved
for him to leave her alone, and when he was ten feet away, she
snapped.
        "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOO!!" she howled, launching herself
forward with all her strength, the injury forgotten.  Streaks of
colored light obliterated her vision as her blade plunged into Vader's
chest, exploding the control panel there in a tremendous burst of
sparks and smoke.  Still he made not a sound.  The mortal wound didn't
seem to faze him at all.
        Only then did Emmy realize that while she had plunged her
weapon into his chest, he had plunged his into hers.
        There was no pain as the world fell away; only a deep and
profound sense of disappointment.  As she fell backward, darkness
collapsing around her, she saw Vader turn, completely unconcerned by
the hole straight through him - turn his back and walk away.
        Then there was the gently shattering impact of the ground
under her back and everything was gone.

        When she woke, it was dark but for the yellow glow of a small
camp light, and there was a figure next to the soft pallet on which
she lay.  The light was in the wrong place for her to see his face,
but she didn't have to; either her sensitive Hyelian nose or the Force
would have told her who he was without even opening her eyes.
        "Len?" she whispered, her throat raw and painful.
        Leonard's big, strong hand took hold of her slim little one,
and his voice replied softly, "Right here, Emmy."  He leaned over her
so that the light caught the honest, concerned lines of his face.
        "What... the boy?" she asked, as the one fact of what she had
last been doing bubbled up from the dizzying whirl of her awakening
mind.
        "He's safe, he's all right," said Len.  "Master Gajic found
him an hour before the storm hit.  I wasn't so lucky," he added with a
wry chuckle.  "I found -you- an hour -after-.  You're heavier than you
look with a thermosuit on... "
        "Sorry," said Emmy weakly.  "But... what... what happened to
me out there?  The last thing I remember, I was... "
        ... being killed by Darth Vader.
        She gasped, breath racking into her body explosively, her
fingernails digging painfully into Len's hand.  He bore it stoically,
his expression showing nothing but deepening concern for her.
        "What's wrong?" he asked, though from the tone of his voice he
knew.
        "I... I saw... in the cave... "
        Len nodded.  "So," he said.  "It was your turn."
        Emmy blinked, the terror washed from her eyes by confusion.
"My turn for what?" she asked.
        Len told her about his journey to the mine on Bonadan, his
terrible reliving of the worst day of his life, and Master Gajic's
cryptic explanation of what it had meant.  Emmy described her
experience, poured out her shame at having come unraveled so
profoundly when she should have realized it couldn't possibly be
real.  Len comforted her with the knowledge that it was a trick of the
Dark Side, no ordinary illusion, and that passing through it wasn't
about a win or loss - the experience, he supposed, was the lesson in
itself.
        "I've been thinking about it a lot since it happened to me,"
he finished, "and that's the conclusion I've reached.  It's given you
something to think about, something to work on for the future.  That's
all it is.  It's not a premonition... just a metaphor for something
that has to be contemplated to be seen."
        Emmy thought that over, then nodded.  "I'll contemplate it,"
she said in a small voice, "but right now... will you just stay with
me?  After all that... I'd rather not think about it alone for a
while."
        Len nodded, smiling.  "Sure," he said.  "I'll be right here."
        Emmy smiled, thanking him with her eyes, and then lay back and
drifted off to sleep.
        Leonard smiled at her sleeping face for a moment, then glanced
up as something tickled his awareness, just in time to see the flap of
fabric that was all the inn had for inside room doors fall back into
its resting position.  Outside, he could sense only a faint whisper of
satisfaction tinged with slight melancholy, and then Master Gajic was
gone.
        Keeping hold of Emmy's hand, Len settled back into the chair
and dropped into light meditation.  Like his Padawan partner, he had
much to consider.

  /*  Big Country  "Bass Dance"  _Steeltown_ (European Remaster)  */

                     Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
                              presented

                        UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES
                           FUTURE IMPERFECT

                    -=WARRIORS OF THE OUTER RIM=-
                     A Dark and Silent Rendezvous

                               starring
                       Leonard W. Hutchins III
                           M'yl'ya Kyn'o'bi

                                 with
                             Aldous Gajic
                            Achika Shannon
                                 and
                             Darth Vader

                        written & directed by
                         Benjamin D. Hutchins

                                gaffer
                           Kris Overstreet

                               key grip
                           Kelly St. Clair

                                 with
                          The Usual Suspects

                         E P U (colour)  2002