Star Wars: Saviors of the Broken

Chapter XIV

"The Force does not belong to us. It was there long before we started using it, and it will be there long after we are gone." - Oola Kitar, from Collected Wisdom of the Jedi Masters

"You're a Jedi?" Laura said to Mikey after she'd climbed out of the wreckage of the Black Mariah.

The pieces of the ship were still floating in mid-air, but when Mikey heard that, he lowered his hand, causing them all to fall to the ground. "No, I'm not," Mikey said. "I don't even know how I did that! The Force isn't even real!"

"I hate to break it to you, Mikey, but I don't think you can say that after you just did...well, whatever that was," Gerard said.

"I'm serious!" Mikey said. "That shouldn't have been possible."

"With the Force, even impossible things become possible," Gerard said. "Altux Wen said that, right? Volume three, issue 26 of Heroes of the Old Republic?"

Mikey rolled his eyes. "Comic books aren't real, Gerard," he said.

"I beg to differ," Ray said. "Those comic book writers do their research. The ones who wrote about the Clone Wars really captured what it was like to be on the frontlines."

"Just admit it, Mikey," Gerard said. "You may not be a Jedi, but you're like them. You have their powers. You're Force-sensitive."

Mikey didn't respond, his face completely expressionless. Meanwhile, Frank stepped toward the pieces of the Black Mariah, wondering what had happened to his beloved ship. Laura was thankfully alive and unharmed, but Frank's brand new TIE fighter was completely destroyed. For a moment, he wished that he'd found a buyer on Cloud City instead of just giving his diamonds away to Lando. If he had, maybe he would have had enough money to buy another ship. As it was, he worried that he would be stuck on Alsakan for the foreseeable future.

"I think it's fixable," Laura said, as if she was reading his mind.

"Really?" Frank said.

"It will take some time, but I can repair this," Laura said.

"Why did it break in the first place?"

"I'm not sure, but I think some of the structural supports might have come undone. It's nothing that can't be fixed." Laura then turned to Mikey. "I know you say you're not a Jedi, but you do kind of remind me of these two Jedi that came in last week."

"Wait a second," Ray said. "There were Jedi here?"

"Who were they?" Gerard asked.

"I don't know," Laura said.

"Then how do you know they were Jedi?" Mikey asked.

"One of them tried to do a Jedi Mind Trick on me, and the other one argued with him about it the whole time I was fixing their ship," Laura said. "They wanted me to install a hyperdrive on this scrappy-looking escape pod for some reason."

"What did they look like?" Gerard asked.

"Gerard, this isn't important..." Mikey said.

"Maybe they were characters in the True Clone Wars Adventures," Gerard said.

"The one that tried to do a Jedi Mind Trick on me was kind of short, and he had black hair and a ton of eyeliner. The other one was even shorter, and he was wearing a hat. Also, he had brown hair, blue eyes, glasses..."

"I think I know who you're talking about," Ray said.

"Me too," Gerard said.

"It's Patrick Stump," the two of them said in unison.