The human male alternately known as Darius Kunne sat
staring at the projection screen, wishing he were
anywhere but B-law right now. He’d lost track of the
professor shortly after the words "Today we will
be..." Hence the reason he was currently mentally
picturing himself in a lightsaber battle with the
usual faceless opponent. He’d already been branded as
addicted to Star Wars, so why not? Sure, he kept an
Exar Kun costume in his closet, and had spliced a
Darth Maul lightsaber handle with the blades from two
Obi-wan sabers to make a blue double-ended lightsaber
to match the Kun outfit, but that wasn’t addiction,
that was just being a fan.
A fan who’d won twenty bucks with that costume in a
contest last Halloween.

The class bell finally rang, and Darius fled the room
after shoving his books back into his bag. He was
halfway across the lawn to other building before he
realized he’d forgotten his notebook in B-law. He
grumbled a few curses, the headed back for the
classroom.

No-one noticed the figure in black crouched beneath
the shrubbery next to the building.
"He’s headed back to the previous location," he
whispered into a small communicator concealed in his
palm. The person on the receiving end of the message
simply clicked the comm twice, then stuffed it into
his pocket. Five other men dressed in black hid along
the walls of the classroom, safely out of sight of the
door.
"He’s coming," the leader said, setting the battered
notebook on the desk where Darius had been sitting.
"All too easy," one of the others chuckled, before
being hushed by the others.

---

Darius caught himself whistling the Imperial March as
he approached the door to the classroom. He checked
through the window to make sure the room was empty,
then reached for the door handle. His hand froze at
the handle, the odd feeling of being followed
prickling along the back of his mind. He shook it off
as paranoia, shoving open the door and heading for his
desk.
A few paces inside the door, someone slammed the door
shut behind him. He spun, startled, but before the
eight years of martial arts classes could manage to
override the ‘scream like a girl and flee’ reflex, he
was slammed off the wall, his hands pulled behind his
back and bound. The last thing he remembered before
the stun-gun to the back of the neck knocked him out
was that the Algebra professor was not going to be a
happy monkey if he missed class again.

---

Darius awoke lying face-down on a cool, damp floor.
His experience of getting lost in a cave once managed
to bring back just enough panic to make him open his
eyes. Nope, not a cave. Sunlight streamed down
through high, narrow windows cut into the stone walls.
[Stone walls?]
He managed to twist his face far enough to notice two
of the men in black who’d grabbed him standing a short
distance away, arguing.
"But he has blue eyes, the Ancient had green," one
hissed.
"So what? Maybe he changed them to avoid suspicion,"
another voice grumbled.

Darius blinked, trying to shake away the haze, then
remembered- he was still wearing his contacts. "Hey
brainless, they’re called contact lenses, and if you
mess them up or lose them, you owe me five-hundred to
get a new pair!" he announced, startling the two
people. "Now let me up or I file charges!"
"Flaming hells, he’s awake!" the one exclaimed, then
rushed out of the room. The second stepped closer,
then pulled off his hood. "Forgiveness, sir, but you
did not react well to being seized," the second said,
loosening his restraints and helping him to sit up.

(Okay, First, if you’ve never had dirt in your
contacts, it burns like nothing you can imagine.
Second, yes, it can actually distract you from
noticing that the person you’re talking to isn’t a
human for all of five seconds.)

Darius blinked dully at the green-skinned being with
twin head-tails crouched beside him on the floor.
Then, the trusty old ‘scream like a girl and flee’
instinct woke up. Then, as any macho adult male just
kidnapped by aliens would do, he screamed and
panicked, trying to scramble away.
"Holy shit!" were the first real words out of his
mouth, followed by a pause as the initial terror wore
off, and the kidnapper looked just as terrified as the
kidnap-ee. "You.....," he began, stunned, "You’re not
human!" he managed to gasp in awe, causing the green
being to blink curiously.
"Of course not," he replied, "I am Twi’lek."
Another gap in consciousness blurred through Darius’
mind, ordering him to smack himself senseless, because
that person did not just say what he thought he heard.
Person hell. Person with green skin, head-tails, and
pointy teeth....
The thought was interrupted as he was roughly hoisted
to his feet and turned to face the group that had
arrived. His mind briefly tallied one very ugly
human, two not-that-bad humans, one something he
couldn’t identify, and one extremely ugly woman with
tattoos down the side of her face and neck.
Ms. Very ugly with tattoos laughed, "This is the best
you could do? He doesn’t even look like Kun." She
grabbed him by the chin, holding his face still for a
better inspection.
(Please tell me I didn’t just hear that,) Darius’
sanity begged the rest of his mind, which just
shrugged.
"He has the marks! The crystal lit up when we
targeted him," someone said off to the side. Ms. Ugly
snorted, releasing him. "Give me the Artifact,
cretins," she snapped, snatching something from the
one he couldn’t identify.
She held up what looked like a large, layered
amethyst crystal with some sort of silver metal
sculpting around it. A dim blue glow formed from the
center of the crystal as she looked through it at him.
She lifted one Japanese-hooker-style eyebrow at him,
then dropped the crystal into a pouch at her side.
"Okay, bring him, he can’t do any worse than
incinerate like the last three," she said offhandedly,
stalking off toward the door.
(Incinerate???) ‘This is not good’ was the only
thought he could manage as they dragged him along.
For some strange reason, Jar-Jar’s voice saying any
help would be pretty hot right now flashed to memory,
followed by the image of Jar-Jar being beaten
unconscious with a nerf-bat, which cheered him up for
all of a half-second before they dragged him into the
next room.
"Oh crap."

Too many dollars spent on comic books, coupled with
too much time spent memorizing said comics immediately
told him this was not a good place to be. Stone
altars, torches, a really frightening and obviously
sacrificial altar exactly where it had been in the
comic.
"Double crap," Darius muttered, half-expecting to see
some Massassi running around somewhere. Ms. ugly
looked back and smiled, then turned to one of the
others. "Any last words before we sacrifice your
essence to restore Exar Kun to life?" she announced,
and Darius’ mind went blank.
"Umm, one or two....," he muttered, then drew a deep
breath in.
"HELP!!!!!!!!!!" he screamed at the top of his lungs,
and Ms. ugly started laughing. "Anybody, somebody,
this isn’t funny!! HELP!" he continued to yell while
being dragged toward the altar. "No ya don’t," He
growled, propping his feet against the altar as they
struggled to drag him closer.
"Ow, would you let go! Kun is paste! He’s
antimatter, he’s fried like a bad light-bulb! Wake up
and get over it!" Darius rambled, struggling. Ms.
Ugly suddenly took extreme offense, lashing out and
kicking his foot off the edge of the altar. Having
lost his balance, he found himself pinned face-down
over the edge of the stone. "This is not good," he
muttered, face pressed against the stone by a hand on
the back of his head. Ms. Ugly just smiled, then
started chanting something, pulling a dagger from her
belt.
She whacked a little lock of Darius’ ponytail off,
then held the strands out to show him.
"MY HAIR!!!" the pissed-off sense of vanity that
pampered that hair like a child of his own cried. He
elbowed one of the dudes holding him in the gut,
squirming far enough away from the other dude to stand
up. The eight years of martial arts finally kicked
in, and he Darth-Maul kicked the other guy in the
face, then tried to wriggle his wrists free. Someone
managed to grab him and slam him down against the
altar before he could do a Houdini however.
Ms. ugly chuckled, amused by some private joke. She
resumed her incantation, and Darius just glared
viciously, squished against the stone table.
"Yeah, pick on the only dude who skipped Buffy last
night for homework. C’mon, let me up, I’ll kick all
your asses from here to New Mexico," he grumbled, just
trying to annoy someone. "Hey, ugly chica, you one of
those Dathomir people? You know, you’re ugly enough
to be one. Kinda more like their Rancors though.
Been face-surfing in some razor-wire?"
Darius found himself and his two guards tossed a good
six feet from where they had been. Ms. Ugly had a
definite expression of pissed-off on her face, one
hand still outstretched in the gesture that had tossed
him.
Mad evil lady: bad thing. the fact his ropes had been
knocked loose: good thing. Good thing outweighs bad
thing, run like hell.
Darius scrambled to a half-stand, then bolted for the
nearest exit. Mr. ugly was faster however, and Darius
ended up on the bottom of a dog-pile of bad-guys, with
Ms. ugly snarling like she was about to deep-fry him.

"You know, I really didn’t mean that razor-wire
thing," Darius quipped as they hauled him to a stand.
"I meant taking a facial in acid."
A flashback to being six years old and his older
cousin talking him into sticking a butter-knife into
an electrical outlet suddenly hit him, as well as an
extremely painful bolt of something blue and angry.
The next couple minutes dissolved into a blur, filled
with noise, himself hitting a cold stone floor, and a
lightsaber flashing out of somewhere. (Lightsaber?)
he wondered in a brief flash of curiosity before his
vision began to clear slowly.
A hand touched his shoulder, and he jerked
instinctively.
"Hey, I’m one of the good guys," a female voice said.
She helped him to stand quickly, and he saw her
looking at him strangely. The room had quieted
already.
"They’re on the run into the jungle, who’s he?" a
young-sounding voice said.
"I’m the guy who’s pissed off because he doesn’t know
what’s going on around here!" Darius snapped angrily,
wiping his hands on his shirt.
"The others are tracking them back to their ship.
Who is he?" a WAY too familiar voice said as Darius
popped out his contacts.
"Five hundred bucks," he growled, looking down at the
abused iridescent blue lenses. "Whoever miss
leather-ass and her buddies are, you can tell them
they owe me a new set of lenses," Darius snapped,
wrapping the lenses up in a tissue and sticking them
into his pocket. He looked up to the people gathered
around him already.
"What?" he asked, looking around the small group.
"They’re contacts, occasionally I like to confuse
people who are used to seeing me with brown eyes. I
also have a green set and a purple set," he said,
shrugging. Someone snickered, and then the owner of
the familiar voice spoke up.
"Why did they bring you here?" he asked. Darius
turned toward him, then froze.
(Of all the people to....) he began mentally, then
smacked himself mentally. (Okay, get a grip, it’s
Luke Skywalker, you’re on Yavin 4, and someone was
about to swap Exar Kun’s spirit into your body. Yeah,
this I can handle.... STUPID!)
"Umm," he began, "They mentioned sacrificing me to
Exar Kun, but I was hoping for a roman orgy," he said,
then smacked himself in the forehead at the giggles
from the group. "Sorry, when I’m scared, I turn into
a smartass," he said with a shrug. Skywalker just
smirked, casting a glance at the others, silencing the
snickers.
"You should be glad you did. If you hadn’t made Lady
Iouri mad enough to use her powers, we’d have never
known they were back," the girl who’d helped him said.

"Yeah, they mentioned frying a couple others," Darius
said.
The room fell silent with a few glances cast that
indicated they knew what had happened. "You they did
not fry, however," a non-human girl said, sounding a
tad suspicious.
Darius shrugged, "Maybe she was too mad to."
"Maybe she should not have chosen one with the gift
of the foul mouth," someone said from an unseen
location. The others looked around for the speaker,
but Darius had the impulse to look up. A woman in
skin-tight red leather lowered herself on a descender
from the ceiling above their heads.
"Not another leather-ass," Darius grumbled to
himself. The group moved out of the way as she
reached the ground. She continued the descent to rest
on one knee before Darius.
"My lord," she said, bowing her head. Everyone
looked at Darius as if he’d suddenly grown a tail or
something, even though he was twice as confused. "I
knew someday they would find the right one," she said,
head bowed. "It was only a matter of time and
patience," she said, standing. Everyone continued to
stare at Darius, and he in turn gaped dumbstruck at
the woman.
She suddenly smiled, "I’d already forgotten, they
brought you from another realm, you have no idea who
you are." Darius managed to blink, and that was about
all his mind could handle at the moment.
"Excuse me, since you seem to be the only one who
knows what’s going on, how about telling the rest of
us?" Skywalker asked.
The woman bowed, "Of course. I am Shai Shatterstar,
Watcher of the Sith." The stunned staring turned to
vicious glares. She just smiled, then continued.
"Not long ago, a dark-side prophet foretold that Exar
Kun would be reborn in part within a new form. His
spirit was to be given the chance to right his
previous existence’s wrongs by being granted a second
chance at life, but without memory of his previous
existence. Karma, your people call it I believe?" she
said, mostly speaking to Darius, but for the benefit
of the room.
"And this concerns me how?" Darius asked, still
somewhere between stunned and angry.
"You are his reincarnation." she said simply.
The vicious glares quickly de-evolved into little
snarling prickles that made Darius feel like hiding
under a rock.
"Woah, woah, wait, wrong guy. Look, I’m a college
student, I live above my uncle’s garage, I work at a
fast-food restaurant, everything I own is either on
loan from my parents or scavenged from garage sales.
I am definitely, positively, without a doubt NOT the
guy you think I am."
Shai just folded her arms over her chest and smiled,
"Then why do you keep a replica of his armor in your
closet?" she asked.
"Umm, you know, Halloween, trick-or-treating, it’s
just a costume, occasionally I wear it to conventions,
but it’s just something I slapped together for fun!"
he defended.
She sighed, "And the lightsaber?"
"Umm," was the brilliant reply.
"And the dreams about a duel with a phantom enemy?"
she added with the lift of an eyebrow.
"Okay, whoa, stay out of my head," Darius snapped.
"And just how did you know I was scanning you?" she
asked. Darius flicked a nervous glance at the unhappy
Jedi surrounding him.
"Umm, maybe this isn’t the best time to discuss
this..." he said sheepishly, trying not to notice the
little prickles of energy that indicated one big bunch
of angry Jedi. Shai laughed.
"Dear boy, do you seriously think that after
four-thousand years of waiting, I’d let you be killed
by a bunch of fool Jedi without giving you a chance to
redeem Exar’s spirit?"
He blinked stupidly, being killed hadn’t occurred to
him. "Hey!" one of the Jedi complained, offended,
"You really think we couldn’t stop you?" Shai laughed
again, casting him a derisive glare.
"Don’t even imagine the attempt," she said, "You
might strain what little there is of a mind in there."
The entire group looked a few degrees less friendly
now.
"Hey, um, Shai, bad idea to piss off the Jedi,"
Darius half-whispered, taking a few steps backward.
He bumped into someone slightly older than him
wearing a darker colored robe than the others.
"Um, hehe, hi," Darius said smiling weakly. "Umm,
how about we just ignore the psycho in leather and
forget what she said, okay?" he asked no one in
particular. The glares didn’t lessen. "Okay, then
how about leather-ass takes me home and we forget
about all this? Huh? You know, I really got a lot of
homework to finish before class tomorrow," he rambled.
"Good idea," Shai said with a smile, then waved her
hand in front of his face.
Suddenly, Darius found himself back in the B-law
classroom. It was night outside, and all the lights
in the building were off. His backpack was still on
the floor where he’d left it, along with his notebook.
He blinked, then looked around the room. He ran a
mental tally of the weird things so far, and
desperately hoped it had all been a hallucination.
The figure in red laughed lightly, leaning on his
shoulder.
"I’m real," he said, reading his thoughts.
She tugged on the shorter strands in his ponytail,
flipping it over his other shoulder. "And so was all
that," she added softly, kissing the side of his neck
before he had time to even register that he was home
and safe. He jumped in panic as she touched the
stun-gun burn on the back of his neck, and yanked away
from her. "What in the hell is wrong with you? Just
go poof and disappear or something, leave me alone,"
he grumbled, hoisting his backpack onto his shoulder
and stuffing his notebook into the bag.
She just smiled, watching him leave. She reappeared
sitting on the retaining wall next to the parking lot
as he fumbled with his keys, too busy to notice her.
A twisted and brown leaf falling from a nearby tree
floated past her, and she smiled. She reached out and
plucked the leaf from the air by the stem. It
shimmered in a merging of realities, transforming into
a kitten-sized reptilian creature with two heads and
wings like a miniature dragon. It squawked at her,
sitting on her hand, twisting its tail around her
wrist for stability in the breeze.
"Watch out for him," she said softly, sending the
creature fluttering into the air. It barely made it
through the car door with a few leaves as Darius
slammed the door. She smiled, watching him drive
away.
"You *are* the one," she whispered aloud, visually
tracking him down the road until he was out of sight.
Another leaf fluttered by, and transformed into
another two-headed lizard creature as it landed on her
shoulder. She scratched the crimson creature under
one of its chins with a finger, smiling. It croaked
at her, refolding its wings and huddling closer
against the wind.
Shai Shatterstar disappeared in a shimmer of
merged-realities, leaving Darius Kunne alone, as he
had wished. At least for now...

-----end-----for now------------------------