Nix was annoyed and that increased the likelihood that someone was going to get hurt.

“I did warn you that finding archives of other Force using traditions was going to be difficult,” Ravas said, for the moment merely an invisible presence to side of Nix’s left elbow.

“You did.” Nix’s admission did not lower her general annoyance level at all.

“But you paid hard credits for this lead,” Ravas said, her tone bland enough that Nix couldn’t tell if there was a rebuke hiding in there somewhere, or if Ravas meant to sound sympathetic.

“Yes. A lot of hard credits,” Nix said, again not diminishing the overall aggravation she felt.

“And now you would like to go back to the information broker on Arctus Secondi and Force choke him until he returns the credits and gives you some useful information.”

Nix drew in a long breath.

She could deny Ravas’ assertion, but there was a danger in doing so. Pretending to be a good and saintly person could sometimes work as a ‘fake it till you make it’ sort of plan, but other times repressed negative emotions could manage to turn into something much worse rather than evaporating. That wasn’t the real danger though. What Nix knew she needed to worry about more than the content of her response was that she might start believing any lies she told.

“I would,” she confessed. “I’m not going to, because I’d hate myself a moment afterwards, and we’re wanted in enough systems as it is, but the temptation is there.”

“So what do you want to do that doesn’t involve flirting with the Dark Side then?” the former Dark Side ghost asked. 

“We could head back to Arcswell,” Nix said, trying out the idea on her tongue.

“Your wife would be glad to see you,” Ravas said.

“Yours would to,” Nix said.

“I’m not sure I am eligible to call her that,” Ravas said. “Unlike you and yours, we never swore a binding troth.”

Nix paused, her lost credits and frustration momentarily pushed aside. 

“You waited for each other for a THOUSAND YEARS,” she said, drawing a few stares from the people in the market she was walking through. The comm rig she wore over her left ear explained her seemingly random conversation to casual onlookers but the shouting drew attention regardless.

“I was asleep for most of that,” Ravas said. “I don’t know that it counts.”

“Manifest right now so I do some manner of violence to you,” Nix said. “Seriously, its been months. Have you and Kelda honestly not made things official yet?”

“There’s been your training,” Ravas said, the defensive tone in her voice clearly backed by the knowledge that she had no real defense to offer. “And before that the search for Arcswell, and the Jedi temple.”

“It. Has. Been. Months,” Nix said. “You realize that Kelda probably thinks you already know that the two of you are married right? Like by the Force or something?”

“She hasn’t said anything about it either,” Ravas said.

Nix could feel her aggravation over the lost credits and false trail converting into frustration with her two mentors.

Kelda and Ravas were both brilliant masters of the Force. From their shared time as Padawans to the starkly different life paths they’d followed, they’d racked up a tremendous amount of knowledge about the Force, both theoretical and practical. Throw in a thousand years or so as ghosts in direct communion with the Force and they harbored a pool of wisdom Nix doubted she could ever fully plumb of the depth of.

And yet they were so incredibly stupid at the same time too.

Some days, Nix grieved the loss of the Jedi and saw how much brighter the galaxy could be if there were even a few dozen left to sort out the big problems which remained. Other days, she was darkly glad that they’d been swept away, them and their horrid child rearing techniques with them.

Which was unfair.

She knew both Kelda and Ravas were outliers in terms of the how Padawan’s responded to the Jedi’s teachings. For as far off the path as Ravas had fallen, and from Ravas’ own stories that had been pretty damn far, she was possibly the one who was the less impacted by their upbringing.

Prior to Kelda’s fateful decision to cast aside her place among the Jedi and search for Ravas, she’d pushed herself to excel to such an unhealthy level that even the other Jedi had tried to council her to relax and find the harmony in moderation rather than perfection.

Which of course had made Kelda simply strive for ‘Perfected Moderation’ all the harder.

“I don’t think I want to go back to the temple yet,” Nix said, the words tasting right as she said them.

“Afraid of returning in failure?” Ravas asked.

“No. I know Ayli and Kelda aren’t counting on me to succeed here, and this is curiosity not compulsion that’s driving me to look for an archive on the Force from other perspectives.”

“I envy you,” Ravas said. “My curiosities became compulsions far too often.”

“You were a kid though,” Nix said, and spied a courtyard on the level below them where a group of twenty people in brightly colored robes were either dancing or exercising in beautiful unison. “I still think you and Kelda both need to cut your younger selves more slack. You were young and stupid and made some mistakes. That was a long time ago and you can do better now.”

“Can we? We’ve talked about that, she and I,” Ravas said. “I can’t make amends for any of the harm I did. And I can’t touch the world as you can anymore.”

“You touched the world just fine in Praxis Mar,” Nix said, thinking back to the moment when Ravas destroyed her former master in order to save the rest of them.

“As a projection of the Force, other Force emanations are within my purview still,” Ravas said. “And some parts of the living world as well. Those I’m bound to. The places I knew in life. Those people who will let me work through them. But that’s not life, and I do not know that we are capable of change as you are. We are dead, we do not grow any longer.”

Nix paused. She drew in a deep breath through her nose. She released the breath.

“Nope. Can’t just let this one go,” she said, mostly to herself, before reaching to her side and grabbing Ravas’ spiritual arm.

With a grunt she dragged Ravas into a full manifestation, pulling the two of them into an empty alleyway she did.

“You’re not alive? You can’t change?” she asked, daring Ravas to repeat those words.

“It is as I…oww!” Ravas complained as Nix pinched the skin of Ravas’ ghostly arm.

“Hmm, seem alive enough to notice that,” Nix said. “Also you’re being stupid, which seems to be the province of living things.”

Ravas huffed. 

“How…I am not being stupid,” she said.

“Yes you are,” Nix said. “I get that you’ve got a lot of baggage. I get that working out things with Kelda has some significant complications to it. I even understand that you feel like your mistakes are eternal and unforgivable. And I’m not the one who can fix any of that. Your baggage is yours to carry or put down, not anyone else’s. And you and Kelda are the only ones who get to say what you mean to each other. But to say you can’t change? A year ago you were trying to tempt me to the Dark Side and now you’re walking through a boring old market with me on a silly treasure hunt and trying to make sure I’m remembering to process my feelings before they process me. Under what ridiculous star does that not count as change?”

“I…I could be trying to trick you?” Ravas said, with an absolute lack of conviction. “Also, I was never trying to lure you to Dark Side. You seemed too well balanced. It was your wife I thought I could persuade to be what I thought I needed her to be.”

“And you did. You had her. And you let her go. If I told you that anyone else had done that would you even hesitate to believe they’d changed?”

“No, but it wasn’t like that for me. There were other circumstances, I just did what I wanted to.”

“Yes. Exactly. Because you wanted to do what was right.”

“No! It was because…because…” 

Nix sighed again. Which, she felt, was a better answer than Force Lightning.

“Because you chose to believe Kelda when she said that she still loved you.”

“She didn’t…”

“Yes she did. Not with those simple words, but with the proof of her love standing in front of you. With her need for you to be okay. She loved you a thousand years ago and she still does. And despite losing yourself as deeply into the Dark Side as you could go, you saw that and let yourself believe it. You changed. You can pretend you didn’t. You can pretend you can’t, but I’m not going to help you with any of that.”

Ravas was silent for a long moment before a smirk played across her lips.

“Padawans are not supposed to have more wisdom than their mentors,” she said at last.

“Good thing I’m far too old to be a Padawan then I guess,” Nix said.

“Yes, I suppose there’s nothing left I can teach you,” Ravas said with the faux-wounded air that said she already had a lesson in mind.

“You know where to find the archive,” Nix guessed. It was something of a wild hope, and she didn’t feel the Force guiding her, but something in Ravas’ tone or the glint in her spectral eye told Nix she was right..

“As do you,” Ravas said. “To be quite honest, I only noticed it because you did.”

“But you could feel it was here?” Nix asked, wondering why Ravas hadn’t questioned their destination sooner. The Force didn’t seem to have much to say either for or against the existence of an archive detailing its secrets, but that was to Nix’s human senses. She knew Ravas was just a wee bit more plugged into the Force than she was.

“Yes and no,” Ravas said. “There is knowledge of the Force here, particularly knowledge which isn’t related to the Jedi or the Sith, but it’s not stored in a holocron or data archive from what I can sense.”

Nix pondered that, trying to work out what the options could be.

“Stone tablets? An ancient tradition could have inscribed them tens of thousands of years ago I suppose.”

“I cannot say that such do not exist,” Ravas was looking beyond the alley as she spoke. “But the Jedi sought those out from the time of their founding till the day they fell. The Sith as well. A new discovery might still be possible, but I don’t believe that is what we have stumbled on here.”

“Because you’ve seen the archive,” Nix said and an image of brightly colored cloth danced across her mind’s eye. “And so have I!”

“You really are a delight to deal with,” Ravas said. “I know she didn’t have any children, but there are times I could swear you were one of Kelda’s descendants.”

“It would be nice to think so, but given the generations which separate us even if I was I would have inherited almost nothing from her specifically.”

“Perhaps. The Force does work in mysterious ways though.”

“Well let’s go see how it dances,” Nix said, letting Ravas return to her spectral state as she left the alley and hopped over the balcony on the far side of the road to fall to the courtyard below before the dancers could disperse and leave her searching once more.

With a tiny bit of Force assistance, Nix landed at the edge of the courtyard, feather light and near silently. She’d been as concerned about interrupting the dancers as she had about missing their departure but it seemed even with her quiet approach she’d attracted their attention.

“What is that,” one of the dancers, a slim fellow, asked.

“Unclean,” another, much larger, dancer said. “Unclean and possessed.”