Jedi Academy

Zanja slouched down casually in her chair and waited for her examiner to arrive. She'd done better than she had expected on the written test... well, except for the frankly embarrassing blank-out when she'd tried to recite the Jedi Code, but brain freeze happens to everybody sometimes, right? Right?

Now, though, she had to get through an oral examination without pissing off her interlocutor.

Lucky Zanja, she'd have the most mellow and reasonable interlocutor of them all.

"Good morning, Zanja," Jaric said stifly as he walked in to take a seat.

"Oh." Zanja hastily straightened up in her seat. "Good morning, Master Jaric."

He straightened out his robes with one fluid motion, not even looking at his datapad to check her answers again.

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to anger. Quite the circle you made there. You believe that the fall to the darkness is more of a neverending loop, than say - a spiral or merely a divergence in a path?"

"Uhh." Zanja's cheeks burned with a darker grayish flush. "It's like a feedback loop, right? The madder you get, the madder you stay. When you lean into it, anyway."

She could have just admitted she knew her answer was wrong--given a hint or a bit more time, she could probably pull out the right one. But nope, forward.

"Mhmmm..." he did not seem terribly impressed. "If it is a feedback loop, would you then say that redemption is impossible?"

"It happens sometimes, so it's possible. But it's gotta be really hard." That was an answer Zanja felt a bit more confident of.

"Really hard," he snorted briefly with dry amusement. "And how do you think it is done, to redeem someone from the dark side?"

"It's more like something you have to do yourself, innit?" Being laughed at made Zanja prickle up a bit. "Nobody can make somebody else come back from the Dark Side. They have to want to do it." She shrugged, relenting a little to the terms of the question. "You could make it easier for them, some. Like keep away stuff that will upset them until they're ready."

"Like taking away an unruly child's toy when they are misbehaving, hm?" he said with some dry humor to his tone as he looked at Zanja with a raised eyebrow. "Is that what you would do if one of your friends here were to fall?"

"Uh. Maybe?" Zanja scowled, which, unfortunately for everybody in the Order, was what her 'thinking' face looked like. "Somebody who I thought was getting close to the edge, I'd probably try to protect them from, uh, bad emotions. We're supposed to protect each other, yeah? But if they went all the way over, I'd have to make sure they weren't gonna hurt anyone else, first. Then see if they even wanted my help. "

Jaric similarly had somewhat of a scowl when he put on his thinking face, so some would probably say he must be thinking a lot.

"And how would you say we can protect our fellow Jedi from bad emotions?"

"Uh, not let people get away with bullying them. Or ask them to do stuff that's too close to the Dark Side." Zanja twirled a strand of hair around her finger, still scowling. "But also just tell someone if you think they're going too far that way, I guess. Let them know you're looking out for them."

The problem was, Zanja was pretty sure that if she personally tried to warn someone they were within imminent reach of the Dark Side, she'd probably just piss them off. But in theory there were Jedi who ought to be capable of it, right?

Jaric scowled thoughtfully, but seemed to take her answers seriously at least, rather than scoffing at them.

"Are you afraid of your fellow Jedi's reaction if you were to insinuate to them that they were treading close to falling to the Dark Side? Because they might hurt you, or is it social reaction that worries you?"

Zanja gave the Master a slightly sharp look. That obvious, huh?

"I figure there's a chance I'd just make them mad," she admitted, shrugging. "Push them further away."

"And should that be a reason for a Jedi to not speak up, or do what must be done, to save someone before it's too late?" he inquired stoicly, even if he did seem to have moved her in this direction deliberately.

"I'd say something." Zanja shrugged again, a bit more tightly this time. "I dunno what else to do. But if I said the wrong thing, pis--uh, made them angry, and they turned further away from the path... it would be my fault. That's a lot."

Jaric nodded once, looking at Zanja with his intense gaze in silence for a moment. "It is easy to blame oneself, and carry the burdens of others. But never blame yourself if that comes to pass one day, Zanja. In the end, it is they who make the choice to hurt themselves so... not you. No one falls to the Dark Side because of that one incident when someone expressed concern about them doing so, they were already fallen if they make that out to be the final straw."

"Yeah, all right." Zanja slouched in her chair, the picture of sullen adolescence. "It means you could've helped and you did the opposite, though. But like you said, it's on that person, not you. They had a choice."

Jaric nodded, still stoic and unaffected by her adolescent sullenness, but almost fatherly too. "Are you worried some of your friends will fall to the Dark side?"