As a youngling initiate within the immense structure of the Jedi Temple, the training regime was, at best, mildly interesting and, at worst, crushingly boring.
Each day seemed indistinguishable from the last, following a rigid pattern: meditation was scheduled at least five times daily, interspersed with intensive sessions dedicated to studying the immense volumes of Jedi rules, galactic regulations, local laws, planetary customs, and various languages.
Some elements of the curriculum held a genuine intellectual appeal. The galaxy's legal structures, in particular, were worth studying.
With the critical eye of an adult mind, I could spot potential loopholes, ambiguities, and methods to leverage or take advantage of specific regulations. However, this practical information was invariably hidden behind a dense wall of complex, arcane lawyer jargon.
I was able to power through these texts using the sheer experience of my previous life, driven by the adult mentality of simply getting your required work done. But looking around the classroom, I could clearly see that the other nine children who made up my specific youngling clan were struggling. Their attention often frayed, their minds wandering, or their small bodies nodding off into frustrated sleep.
Our instructors were a fluctuating mix of whoever happened to be free at the time. This meant that sometimes we would be taught by a seasoned Jedi Master, offering profound, if sometimes cryptic, guidance. Other times, we were instructed by a Padawan learner, only slightly more experienced than we were. It was fine, nothing special, but the inconsistency was evident.
No, the single biggest problem for me was the sheer, overwhelming quantity of mandated meditation. I could perform the technique adequately, achieving the required state of mental quietude, but the duration and frequency felt like a massive waste of my limited time.
I initially rationalized this commitment as the necessary cost of gaining access to the immense power of the Force, a price I was perfectly willing to pay.
However, I quickly learned that the Jedi's rationale for this practice was not solely about power, but about mental hygiene. Meditation, in their view, was primarily a tool for clearing and cleaning the mind of emotional problems and turmoil. Upset about something? The solution was time to meditate. Lost a loved one? The answer was always to meditate.
The Jedi's reflexive answer to every emotional challenge seemed to be just to meditate. They offered a single, one-size-fits-all solution for profound emotional processing. I realized that this approach was dangerously limited.
It was no wonder that Jedi who did fall to the dark side often did so with such catastrophic and total commitment. If your established coping mechanism is to effectively 'do nothing' and ruthlessly cut yourself away from negative existence and feelings, then when a genuine emotional crisis hits, you are more likely to violently break instead of having the resilience to simply bend.
Nighttime was predictably lonely, even for an adult consciousness inhabiting a child's body. I could often hear the soft, muffled sniffing of crying children.
The Jedi, in their pursuit of the greater good, did their new initiates dirty in the transition process. This isolation was precisely why younglings were immediately grouped into small clans, in the hope that they would adopt each other into a new, replacement family structure.
It took me a mere three days before I was utterly sick of the mandatory meditation schedule. Yet, I knew I would be a fool to voice this to any of my teachers.
I could already hear their inevitable, droning lectures in my head: "Darkside this, blah blah, dark side that, blah blah." They would instantly mark me as undesirable, a potential source of discord and darkness.
If I was going to fully learn the Force and exploit its power, I needed to maintain an outward appearance of quiet conformity and relaxed adherence to their dogma.
I had to constantly remind myself that the Jedi Order had developed all kinds of esoteric Force skills that could potentially read my innermost intentions and even glimpse my future actions through prophetic visions.
As a crude, internal defense mechanism, I visualized an image where I placed all my rebellious, non-Jedi-like thoughts into a sturdy, heavy mental box and locked them away.
It was a shallow, perhaps psychologically flawed, thought process, and yet, it was the only immediate self-preservation tool I had. It most likely wouldn't be effective against a true Master, but something that definitely would work was a healthy dose of reason and realism, underscored by a dash of skepticism and self-deprecating humor.
The first step in my personal rebellion would be to ensure I actually enjoyed myself. I needed to do the things I wanted to do and ensure I didn't regret my compulsory stay here. After all, unhappiness leads inexorably to annoyance. Annoyance leads to spitefulness. Spitefulness leads to becoming a complete dick, and no one likes a dick, not even the Dark Side of the Force.
So, instead of purely meditating and allowing the Jedi's teaching to drive out my individuality through the prescribed methods of how a "good Jedi" should behave, I decided to do it my way. I would diligently study the things that genuinely interested me, and strategically avoid or minimize the required coursework that did not, all without regret.
And yet, despite my adult mind and advanced planning, I was still just a three-year-old child. Even if I was a potential Jedi in the making, I didn't have access to anything substantial. I desperately wanted to visit the main Jedi library and go through the vast sea of data cards stored there. But, of course, that was an impossibility. Jedi Temple rules of some sort restricted unauthorized movement and access for younglings.
The Jedi held certain specific beliefs and, while they didn't explicitly prohibit everything, they most definitely looked down upon most things they considered "mundane" or "attachment-driven." It completely boggled my mind how the Jedi could wholeheartedly embrace the use of a lightsaber a highly advanced piece of plasma-containment technology yet simultaneously look down on the mechanics and engineering required for, say, droid making or starship maintenance.
At their core, the Jedi were just like a cult, structurally similar to the Sith, but with different superficial ideas and moral guidelines. But at the heart of both organizations, it was all about the Force and its mastery.
Six months of required political studying and institutional history was beginning to seriously grind my nerves down. There was literally a whole galaxy's worth of interesting technology, science, and history at my fingertips, but the curriculum remained stagnant.
The only thing that truly saved my mind from turning into mush was the quiet work I did: creating theoretical designs and technical schematics using the very few blueprints and engineering documents I could occasionally sneak a look at.
Yet, without the resources to actually fabricate my constructions, they would remain stranded on a data chip. It turned out the Jedi, in their wisdom, did not give out an allowance or stipend to the younglings. The prevailing opinion was that a youngling doesn't need cash, and in a way, it was true. The typical daily schedule was: meditate, study, eat, sleep, and maybe a couple of hours of playing unimaginative children's games with the other initiates.
What a truly terrible life to live. I wasn't going to spend long hours meditating. I wasn't going to play child games that offered zero intellectual stimulation. Studying was becoming a drag without variety. The only things left were sleeping and eating, and even the food here was painfully plain. This was not the case for the older students, who could go out for meals in the surrounding city, but that option was absolutely off-limits for us. I'll be damned if the only thing I could look forward to was a bowl of plain oat porridge.
One of the compulsory assignments involved studying the precise layout of the Jedi Temple, as well as memorizing the names and significance of the many statues that lined the lengthy halls. I used this requirement to my advantage.
I was aware that walking with extreme confidence and purpose could allow an adult or older student access to many areas they shouldn't be, but a three-year-old walking purposefully down a main corridor amongst battle-hardened Jedi stood out like a sore thumb. There was no way I would be left alone to my own devices in the public areas.
However, there was a different way, a clear path that the Jedi, in their absolute focus on the Force, had overlooked.
The countless droids that maintained the temple's immaculate condition had their own dedicated passage system.
I first discovered this network of access tunnels and maintenance conduits when I deliberately followed a cleaning droid. Now, I possessed a hidden avenue to almost everywhere in the Temple, including the massive kitchen, or what the Jedi formally called the refectory.
The kitchen was dominated by droids preparing food for the Temple's strictly vegetarian diet. The core belief was that the Force was in all living creatures, and the thought process was that it would be inherently wrong-ish to eat meat.
So, while eating flesh wasn't technically banned by Temple law, it was looked at with questioning and disappointed eyes. Other, more philosophical Jedi would argue that eating flesh was part of the natural cycle and thus a part of the Force, but those people typically just ate out in the wider Coruscant city.
The kitchen droids were meticulously cutting and pounding their ingredients, preparing everything for the next meal service. I tried to get them to prepare something outside the menu for me, but they were programmed to only take orders from the Council or senior quartermasters. I supposed that programming was wise, as any assassin could easily slip in and order the food to be poisoned. If I wanted something genuinely good to eat, then it would seem I would have to do it myself.
Standing precariously on an overturned box filled with orange-colored cabbage, I created my first Temple meal: a small serving of fried, heavily salted mushrooms placed on a slice of heavily buttered toast. It tasted okay, certainly not gourmet, but it was rich enough to make the dish acceptable.
Cooking was incredibly hard when you only had the reach and strength of a three-year-old. It didn't help that the actions of the droids were so precise and planned out that every available space in the kitchen was constantly filled with moving metal arms and bodies. Quite a few times I flinched when a large droid came too close to my face with a hot pot, but never once did they actually hit me. That was the core power of Temple droids: absolute, consistent precision.
With the toast successfully constructed and consumed in hand, I continued my clandestine exploration. The droid pathways seemed to be fixed behind the main walls and deep within the structural foundations of the Jedi Temple.
There were small utility rooms now and again, but never any windows. This entire area was purely for the maintenance droids. Sometimes the rooms held nothing of interest; other times, I opened a door to be met with droids bathing in specialized oil lubricants and undergoing system checks. That was an awkward few seconds as I quickly closed the door slowly under the unnerving stares of the motionless droids, which somehow made me feel self-conscious.
I cataloged the rooms: a room with non-functioning droids waiting for repair, a room full of atmosphere-controlled climate machines, and another room that I didn't even know what it was used for, but it contained a large number of opaque boxes with blinking lights.
This secret life was, by far, more interesting than the mandated meditation. I was even able to bypass some of the clearly marked "no-go" areas that were publicly blocked to me and the other younglings.
I didn't dare go too far down these forbidden paths, as I didn't know if a powerful Jedi could actually sense my presence or intent through the thick walls. droid pathway was a treasure trove of easy knowledge and tactical movement. It would be a catastrophic waste if I was caught and the droid pathway was consequently closed off to me forever.
I quietly returned to my small room for a quick, light nap before the dreaded history of the Hutts class was scheduled to start.