[D2 ME, Archives] Cultural Competency

[Zanja]

((looking for a little bit of information, but otherwise open!))

Master Oblero had said the Archives had good files on facial tattooing among Zanja's people. It felt a bit weird to go and look up stuff about her own heritage in a library, but Zanja wanted some context for her own fragmented childhood understanding about those traditions.

It seemed like this was yet another area where a Jedi upbringing left you to find your own way, even with stuff your parents might have told you if you'd stayed at home. Not that Zanja's parents had had a lot of time to spare being concerned for their children's cultural education, anyway.

So, after dinner, she shuffled into the archives in search of the promised files.

[Eir]

After her discussion at lunch, Eir had gotten an idea in her head. It was one of those lofty ideas that would actually involve a lot of mental work over a lot of hours, only to be abandoned and forgotten after putting it away one evening and never coming back to it. Assuming she even started, that is.

That's how she found herself in the archives that evening. She nodded to Zanja, not wanting to disturb the zabrak's research without invitation.

[Zanja]

"Hey." Zanja looked up from her spot--tucked up cross-legged on a chair, peering into one of the data display plates set in the top of the library table--and gave Eir a nod. If Eir peeked, she would see that Zanja's screen seemed to be showing close-up images of the faces of Zabrak men and women, surrounded by text.

[Eir]

Eir glanced at Zanja's screen as she passed by. She selected a terminal, not the one next to Zanja, that would be impolite, but one over. Though she did pick the side that let her walk past and get a glimpse of what the zabrak was working on. It looked a lot more interesting than what she'd come for. "Hey, Zanja. Working on anything interesting?"

[Zanja]

"It's not work. Just personal."

After a beat or two, perhaps realizing how curt that sounded, Zanja revised, "I'm getting inked tomorrow. I was a little kid when I left..." rather than finish that thought, since she wasn't exactly sure what noun to conclude it with, she made a sketchy gesture at the screen. "So I'm looking up some things. I don't really remember everything about it, or maybe nobody ever told me some of this stuff."

[Eir]

Eir's eyes widened, "whoa, cool." She leaned over, "do they have meanings? do you know what you're gonna get?"

[Zanja]

"It depends on all kinds of stuff." Zanja shrugged diffidently. "There are clan patterns back on Iridonia, but we don't have clans on Zionolis, except for the real toffs." She pokes at the screen, flicking between images. "And families pass down patterns, but if we had anything like that, I don't really remember. So I'll make something up. Loads of people do that, too. Some kinds of marks are symbolic... it's not a whole dictionary or anything, though."

[Eir]

“Damn,” a hint of envy crept into Eir’s voice, “you’re gonna look so badass, Zanja.”

[Zanja]

"I'll look like a Zabrak should." Which was... neither agreement nor disagreement, really. Zabrak accountants and infant creche carers had tattoos too, after all. But Zanja did have a secret, only partly conscious hope that hers were going to make her seem cooler, more grown-up, in the right place in her own skin.

"It's just something everybody's supposed to do, like the trials for Jedi. Lots of planets have something like that, I guess."

[Eir]

“Yeah, probably,” Eir agreed. She subsided, activating her terminal and starting a search of the archives.

[Zanja]

"Whatcha looking at?" Zanja asked in turn, after a bit more quiet browsing. "Stuff about the Trials?"

[Eir]

"Nothing as interesting as that," she answered, and gestured to the screen, "I was thinking about how there are all of these history texts, and I was wondering if there was a way to arrange a table so that you could bring up, say, all the entries about the Battle of Heros Prime as a single article, instead of a bunch of separate ones."

[Zanja]

"Huh. Wouldn't that be pretty much the same thing over and over again, just from different angles?" Zanja tucked back a strand of coarse black hair that was trying to fall between her eyes ans her screen.

[Eir]

"Yeah, I mean, that's kinda the point." She screwed up her nose at the screen, "Mir was asking me how you sorted the truth out of all the different accounts, and I thought... y'know," now she felt stupid, "it might help?"

[Zanja]

"So if there's something they all agree about, it's probably true?" Zanja rubbed absently at the base of one of her horns. "What if they're all just copying off each other, though? Or what about things only one of them mentions?"

[Eir]

Eir groaned, “I dunno, this would be a lot easier if people would write down what they mean instead of making us guess.”

[Zanja]

"They don't write what they mean?" Zanja gave her screen a skeptical look. "What's the point of that?"

[Eir]

Shrugging, "sometimes honesty isn't the goal. No one account can be perfect, but plenty of historians have had an agenda to push."

[Zanja]

"You can tell the truth and still have an agenda. Or have an agenda but still be telling the truth." In point of fact this was not a purely historiographical insight on Zanja's part, as her slightly shifty look might well give away.

[Eir]

"Well, doy," Eir rolled her eyes, "but put all of these next to each other, and how are you supposed to tell how true any of them are?"