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[sandwormie]

the_library  app.

Out Of Character
Name: Joysweeper
Age: 22
Journal: joysweeper
Contact: joysweeper@hotmail.com; Joysweeper on Plurk.

In Character
Name: Luke Skywalker
Canon: Star Wars Expanded Universe
Canon Point: A few weeks after he and Biggs find the Valley of the Winds (the Tusken camp that Anakin slaughtered).
Sex/Gender: Male
Actual Age/Apparent Age: Thirteen but a late bloomer, looks eleven/twelve-ish.

Belongings: Sturdy, coarse Tatooine farmer's clothes, mostly in off white. Boots and a hat. Goggles. A canteen of water. Toolkit. A little knife. Power paks. Datapad. About a handful of coarse-grained glassy sand in pockets and boots and so on.

And a laser rifle. It's a long blaster rifle, old and well worn but also well maintained. It's best for use at fairly long range, however at very short range it can stand up to smashing into things.

Skills and Powers:

Luke's a moisture farmer, noted for already being fully capable of doing all related duties. He can traverse the scorching wastes of Tatooine without much difficulty; he has fantastic tolerance for high heat and intense light, and he's got a lot of endurance.

He's got good aptitude for repair, not just of moisture vaporators but also droids, vehicles, and machines in general.

Also, he's a very good shot, and can drive/fly some things, albeit not perfectly.

As far as powers go...

The Force loves Luke. His potential in it is absurdly high. If he started training he would learn at staggering speeds - as it is, his powers are much more limited. He's not even particularly aware of them.

The Force communicates to Luke; he doesn't consciously hear it, but he tends to be “lucky”; if there’s a coin toss, he tends to call out the side that lands face up; when he’s randomly wandering and there are things of note around he’s likely to find them; he may notice important details that aren’t obviously important. It’s not a guarantee, just a better than average chance. The Force also shrinks his reaction time and helps with his aim and timing.

At times through it he knows what will happen before it happen. A general anticipatory feeling, a warning, can start hours before an event, but that's rare for Luke at this time. Usually he knows just before it happens. He doesn't anticipate everything.

All beings, sentient or not - including droids - have sort of auras or presences in the Force. Luke can sense these, but his perception is so completely unrefined that he's not even aware that he feels them. He can't even reliably pick up moods or whether a sentient being is human or not. He does feel everyone as having their own distinct presence, as distinct as a face but much harder to conceal. He can also sense a little intent - not much, but he can sense if something's about to hurt him.

Luke's got a form of psychometry that doesn't actually require physical contact. At this point it basically lets him come into a room and know if someone whose presence he knows has spent much time in it or experienced something with a lot of emotion involved. It also influences his moods; if something horrible or wonderful happened somewhere and he visits later he can feel an echo of that emotion in himself. Luke has no idea what he's doing there.

If he was trained in the Jedi arts he could easily pick up telekinesis and other Jedi skills, but while he'd learn alarmingly fast and well, he'd plateau long before reaching the heights he achieves as an adult.

On entry, his powers really wouldn't be curtailed at all, because they're almost entirely sensory and non combatant-y. His Force-assisted aiming skill is sensory, not telekinetic. If he was trained in Jedi skills there would be a higher degree of limitation.

Physical Description: Luke Skywalker at thirteen is runty, not quite five feet tall. Near-constant exposure to the suns of Tatooine has leatherized his skin a bit - he will never have a perfect complexion - and bleached his hair blond, though without sun it’s more a pale brown at this age. His eyes are blue.

Luke’s a little scrawny, but surprisingly rugged and strong. Farm kid, remember. He has worker’s hands, already a bit hard and very steady.

How he stands and moves seriously depends on his mood and how tired he is. Luke's body language is highly expressive, but he does also sometimes slouch and lean on things. He tends to move a little more surely and with slightly better coordination than is normal with kids that age.

Book Description:

Luke's Book comes with a slipcase, a kind of close-fitting five-sided protective box that the book is slipped into and out of. The slipcase is bound with faded old dewback leather, though softer-looking and more worn than that book; it's also just a little dented in one corner and extremely plain. It's got a little button tab to be put over the open side and prevent the book from coming out. The slipcase is overlarge; it looks like two books of the same size should fit there, but instead some cardboard has been fitted inside to keep the book from rattling in the case. The only other thing of note is a tiny stamped emblem of the Old Jedi Order on the spine.

The Book itself is a glossy new-looking hardcover novel with pages too smooth to be woodpulp paper. The covers are slick enough to easily slide free of the slipcase if it's held wrong and the tab's open. Unlike the slipcase, the covers are colorful, even a little gaudy; the front cover is a big corner-to-corner art piece of a boy looking out over the desert at a binary sunset, while the back is an equally big piece of an image of deep space, with many stars and nebula and distant galaxies and a couple small ships. "THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE SKYWALKER" is in gold on the spine. It takes a moment to notice, but someone with a lot of patience and a Sharpie has carefully covered over and obliterated symbols in the cover, something that comes after SKYWALKER, something on the front cover - so it appears there are shadowed figures watching the boy - and some stars on the back. Those areas get the glossy-cover look too.

The Bookmark is slick blue plastic with a design like blueprints from some sort of spaceship on it. It's got a rectangular depression in the back, as if something was removed.

History:

Luke lives in a homestead on the remote desert planet Tatooine with his aunt and uncle. He was always a bit odd, often knowing things would happen before they did, or being aware that someone was watching him, or being able to find lost items without having to search much. He also longed to go to space from an early age.

When he was seven years old he was caught sneaking outside to stargaze often enough that his uncle decided to teach him to use a laser rifle, a good year or two before farmer children learned this in survival school. He made friends there, but he was something of an outsider among them, being small and weird, which earned him the nickname Wormie. It bothered him, but he tried not to show it, desperate to not be rejected.

Luke's aunt and uncle were very loath to tell him almost anything about his parents, particularly his father. He treasured the scraps they shared and the conversations he eavesdropped on, though he felt guilty about spying. When he was ten and coming down with dust fever Luke lost his temper with their secrecy, was grounded, and decided to sneak off to another farm, but he timed this badly and ended up in the worst sandstorm in the century.

This should have killed him, but a shade of Darth Vader appeared in the storm. It faded and in its place came a young Anakin Skywalker, about Luke's age and completely mystified about how he'd got there. He helped Luke out and they talked a little, never mentioning last names but at least bringing up their mutual weirdness and longing to leave and fly. Anakin disappeared when a krayt dragon attacked. Luke heard his voice and threw a gaffi stick through the roof of the dragon's mouth into its brain, killing it. After the sandstorm, his uncle found him half buried in sand and persuaded Luke that those events could never be mentioned to anyone and were just a fever dream anyway. Luke never tried to run away again.

His friend Biggs Darklighter was five years older and from a wealthier family. He drove Luke around sometimes, and once bought tickets for both of them to go in a shuttle to one of the moons. Luke was ecstatic. On the way up the shuttle's shields and engines glitched catastrophically; despite the panic of the passengers Luke managed to fix things, but was very dismayed when they just turned back without ever leaving orbit.

Luke helped one friend, Windy, raise a dewback, a riding animal that Luke considered also a friend. Older kids, including Biggs, were flying out in landspeeders to spend a day in a specific location when Luke was thirteen; on his own initiative Luke decided to go with Windy on the dewback and meet them, but a storm whipped up and they were cornered by another dragon, which killed the dewback. The boys were rescued by Ben Kenobi, who Luke knew well but was considered very strange by everyone else. Ben talked to him about responsibility and the interconnectedness of all things.

Though Luke was too young to be legally allowed behind the wheel of a landspeeder, Biggs let him take it sometimes when they were out in the open going after womp rats. They saw Sand People and decided to follow them from a distance, and ended up in a long-abandoned camp after the Sand People left. Biggs found it creepy, but Luke became more terrified than he'd ever been in his life, for no reasons he could explain, and begged him to take them away from there.

Personality: Luke is a good kid, to a startling degree. He trusts easily enough that he's had to be taught not to talk about sensitive things, and is generally willing to believe the best of everyone. He’ll apologize without being prompted, and will accept responsibilities and try to carry them out.

He does has a temper. It’s not a severe one and it doesn’t usually show, it’s largely nothing more than some unkind thoughts, but it’s there and it can surface. Like most people his age, he’s a bit self-centered and can feel persecuted at the slightest provocation. He can whine and mope, and like many kids sometimes seems mildly manic-depressive, with highs of ferocious enthusiasm and sad, foot-dragging lows. He’ll make assumptions about people based on first impressions. He’s not boastful, but he does believe he can be someone big. When there are laws or rules he thinks he can break surreptitiously without hurting someone, he’ll break them without a qualm.

And he’s fearless, or nearly - he’ll get scared sometimes, but it hardly deters him. He doesn’t think of himself as brave, he’s just... restless for adventure and new things. He’s a curious boy who likes novelty and craves escape and new experiences, and he can get in trouble searching for those. He felt and kept to himself a great deal of scorn towards friends who panicked in rough spots until he finally experienced panic himself.

But again, he is a good kid. Luke’s got a lot of empathy; he hates seeing seeing someone in distress or pain, and he wants to help people. He loves his family even if he knows they don’t understand him, and knows his escapades make them fear for him, which also means making them angry, and he always hates that. Which doesn’t mean he won’t go do things he knows they’d disapprove of, but it does curtail them. He sees running away - properly running away, for good - to be something akin to a betrayal, and he believes that’s what his father did to earn his aunt and uncle’s enmity. He will seek to get away from his uncle before Owen can give him a new chore, but he won't shirk existing ones.

Recently his recklessness was tempered by a venture in which an animal friend of his was killed. Luke was wracked with guilt, and Obi-Wan gently urged him to consider his actions and the repercussions from then on. He'll still do stupid things and tends to overestimate himself, but not as badly. He enjoys the challenge of killing animals at range but doesn't actually like the killing part.

Luke doesn’t really like to disagree strongly with someone - he dislikes prolonged arguments. He may whine, but he doesn’t go on and on - he complains about the perceived injustice, then gets on with things. When he’s annoyed with someone, he’s fully able to suppress it. Generally he likes people and is afraid that if he doesn't do things right he will be rejected.

Most of his peers think he’s weird for wanting to leave home and see the stars. That desire is a bigger factor in their calling him ‘Wormie’ than his stature is - the latter gave rise to the nickname, but the former kept it in use. They look at him, a little guy always talking about seeing distant places and making a difference and being someone, and see someone who thinks he’s better than them.

Really, he's a bit of a weird kid in general. Something about him is not all that childlike, though it rarely shows - under the moodswings and the naivete, he's got a bit of an old soul, you could say.

Though he’s always eager to see new things and escape a dreary existence, he’s been in one place for as long as he can remember. He can get deeply, sincerely homesick, and would seek to channel this into whatever’s at hand.

Samples

First Person/Action brackets:

Paper books. [Luke shakes his head, blue eyes merry.] Paper! I've only ever seen one or two of those things before. Talk about archaic! I hope they don't all just fall apart.

Well, anyway. [He taps the Bookmark lightly.] Anyone on?

Third Person/Prose:

He hadn't expected it, but books had a smell. No, Luke corrected himself, they had a wide range of smells, from crisp and sharp to dank and suspiciously urine-like, sometimes like the leather on the binding of some of them, sometimes like the mushrooms that grew around some vaporator bases.

It was interesting but, he thought, they also tended to smell horribly dusty. Luke sneezed hard into his elbow, jarring his rifle on its strap, and blinked dazedly. He looked up at the ceiling.

Funny. He wouldn't have ever thought he'd miss the dry searing winds of home, but...

Luke flinched and turned the instant before a thump happened out among the book stacks. He had his rifle in his hands in the next instant, and waited.