(D2 LA) Admiral Snackbar

[Mir]

"As a kid I hated it. And my ears too." I got bullied a lot." he admitted. "Now I don't mind. I don't know how you folks don't strain your necks. You have to turn your heads to turn your ears."

[Eir]

Finished with her meat and salad, Eir tapped her claws against her cup before lifting it up to drink. "I guess we just live with not really hearing as well?" She gave the farghul a sudden curious look, "have you ever strained like, your ear muscles? You ever whip an ear around so quick to hear something, you hurt yourself?"

[Mir]

"Possibly? I think my hearing's normal. Didn't think it'd be that good. I mean, I thought I had a good hunch of what people thought. Turns out I was using the Force to reach out. Still trying to come to understand how I did it." Mir explained before taking an another sip from his soup, pausing to scratch the back of his paw. "Uh, I don't think I've ever done that myself. Others have." his ears slanted as if he tried to hide them. "They are pretty easy to grab in a brawl."

"So what's your Force trick? Can you do things?" wiggling his fingers, Mir moves his paw over his half-empty bowl.

[Eir]

"I don't do tricks," she returned indignantly, "I'm not a street magician." Eir shot a glare at Mir, turning her tray around with huffy movements, bringing the cake and pudding closer.

[Mir]

"Eh." he frowned. "You know what I mean. Don't be like that." Mir didn't quite yet grasp the sanctity of the Force.

[Eir]

Eir sliced off the corner of her brownie with her fork and lifted it to her mouth. When she had swallowed, she begrudgingly answered, her tone indicating that, though she was mollified by his explanation, she still wasn't pleased. "I have had some training in using the Force to heal wounds. I can't levitate things or mess with people's heads or anything like that."

[Mir]

"Oh, that sounds convenient." he murmured, smiling sheepishly. Eir could well see all the sharp teeth in detail. "I wish I could do something like that. Would have been really convenient back when I was a kid. Like that one time they branded me." the he blinked. "I probably could actually do something like that, if I studied it, no?"

[Eir]

Nodding, "certainly. Master Bakash would be happy to help you with that." The mention of branding, however, made her tap thoughtfully on the side of her cup once more, "branded where?"

[Mir]

"Right, she would not, wouldn't she." Mir stuck his tongue out and pressed his paw to his forehead. "I have had to spend a fair a bit of time catching up. Stuff like 'what's Republic' or 'What do politics mean'." he waved his paw as if he wanted to brush such topics away. "And then worked my form with Farissa. There aren't enough hours in the day."

"My back. It's the sign of the Ogon guild. A crude eye." a paw reached to pat his right shoulder. "It's pretty well healed now. The skin feels still of and it's often itchy."

[Eir]

Eir giggled, Mir sticking out his little pink tongue was adorable. She polished off the last of her brownie and prepared to start on the custard pudding. Instead of dipping the utensil into the custard, she pressed the back of the spoon against the surface so, when she lifted it away, it had a thick layer of the dessert stuck to it. The girl licked the back of the spoon and repeated the process.

"There sure aren't, but you also have to be careful of generalising too much. You spread yourself too thin," like Eir was beginning to worry that she had done, "and you won't be good at anything."

[Mir]

Mir gulped. "Well. I didn't think of that." his ears slanted to the side ever so slightly. "I just felt a little outsider you know? Some people talk about particular senators and what they have done or haven't. Four years ago I didn't know what Senate even was."

[Eir]

Eir shrugged, cleaning her spoon again. "I'm not big on politics, I don't think working with the Senate is in my future." The spoon went into the pudding again. "Besides," she gestured with the spoon, "you're a good fighter, so as long as you don't let that lapse."

[Mir]

"I don't know what's in my future. But the senate seems to have all the power. And that makes me want to understand the." Mir explained, the fur on his tail standing a little. "Thanks." he looked positively embarrassed. "I wish I had seen how you did. Some of the bigger humans chose to face two masters. That's crazy!"

[Eir]

Eir shook her head, "I couldn't imagine trying to take on Master Orgus and Knight Farrissa at the same time. It was tough enough keep Master Orgus at bay. Not that I would dare fight Master Jaric." A thought occurred to her, "I should see how T'ame is doing, when I'm finished lunch." She shook off the distraction, "it's not a bad thing to have a better understanding of how the Senate works, but stuff about taxes and tariffs and galactic debt, it's all too much for me."

[Mir]

"Well, he hits like a metric ton of bricks, that's what he does." Mir reached to rub his upper arm where the training saber had singed him. "Mhmh, I think he did alright for himself? I didn't see him getting dragged out like O'Vala. Poor girl." Mir shook his head. "It is too much." he meowed. "Like, you have like eight different masters who've written the history of the Republic. Master Mus, Master Reke, Master Ekorn and and.. yeah, I can't even recall the rest. Like, do you really need eight histories. You'd think that one would be enough and then the next master could just add to what the first had written, but noo."

[Eir]

"Trouble is that people see things different ways. So one Master writes an account, and another says 'well, that's not how it goes' and writes his own version. Then a hundred years later we have twelve different texts and are trying to work out which parts are closest to the truth."

Eir was still working on her custard. It was taking a long time.

[Mir]

"And another fifty years down the line there will be thirteen different versions." the young farghul sounded sardonic. "Then comes a student, say, a young farghul who is trying to make sense out of it all. And cannot. But the archivists say that history is supposed to let us understand the past. Problem is with the twelve... no, thirteen versions is that the whole mess just gets even more murky."

[Eir]

"Consider this. Two people go to the marketplace. Perhaps they know each other, perhaps they are strangers." Eir paused to go through the process of getting some pudding on her spoon and licking it off. "While at the market, a nuna runs past, knocking one of the people over. Each goes home and recounts their experience in a diary."

With a significant pause, Eir caught the farghul's eyes, "will those accounts be the same?"

[Mir]

"Likely not." Mir shook his head. "But most of these masters are writing things about time none of them ever saw. With the two people we can at least try to figure out what actually happened. But when people disagree with the past, how do you sort that out?"

[Eir]

Eir looked thoughtful, the germ of an idea was beginning to develop. What if you took all the accounts and made it so you read them simultaneously, this distracted her for a long moment, before she realised she’d neglected to answer Mir’s question. “It helps to look at how the writer came to their account. Are they writing an interpretation, a commentary? Where did they get their information?”