Post by Ani-Chay Pinn on Oct 23, 2005 17:56:07 GMT -5
I almost never do back stories for my costumes, but both TJA and RL had them, so I made something up last year when I joined (Dec 2004). This is just an expansion of the original story.
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Ani-Chay Pinn was expelled as a padawan from the Jedi Temple just before the outbreak of the Clone Wars. The official reason given was a lack of seriousness in her use of the Force. Unofficially, members of the Jedi Council might admit that they had no other choice of action after an unfortunately public incident during an official Republic function at the Temple (though Ani-Chay still maintains that Master Windu laughed when Senator Malast's hair blew up.). Senator Malast did not find the incident funny and he pursued the maximum penalty for the culprit with the tenacious malice of a seasoned politician. Ani-Chay, being a typical Jedi Padawan, had ‘fessed up to the deed as soon as the inquiry started. Sadly, this meant the end of her life as a Jedi apprentice. Despite her acceptance of her fate, the expulsion was fairly traumatic; on the Council’s orders, her grieving master dismantled her lightsaber before her and then gave her a ticket off planet.
Some considered her a possible candidate for reinstatement in the Order later because, "the Dark Side would never have her," but the Clone Wars pushed that item to the bottom of everyone's priority list.
None of the Jedi Council considered her offense to be serious; she replaced a covered serving dish of steamed buns with Xacid jumping pods, one of which (when uncovered and free to cause havoc) knocked over a pitcher of red tea, which tipped over a floral centerpiece which landed in the middle of a flaming dessert, causing it to catch fire, sending up a shower of sparks, one of which landed on Senator Malast’s elaborate and regrettably flammable hairdo. But technically she had poisoned the food at the banquet arranged by the Senate caterers. The argument that one would need to catch one of the Xacid pods and bash it with a heavy object (many times) to get at the insides to eat it (leading to a severe case of diarrhea) was not given any weight in Senator Malast’s inquiry.
Her former master, Jedi Knight J’hart Stoan was fairly broken-hearted that he’d failed his padawan; he’d tried to assume responsibility for the deed because he’d complained loudly about the excesses of the Senate caterers in the Jedi Temple, along with many other Jedi, including members of the Council. His guilt was officially accepted and his official punishment was to lose his padawan.
Knight Stoan was killed on Genosis in the opening battle of the Clone Wars. Senator Malast was himself imprisoned and then executed soon after Chancellor Palpatine (also known by his Sith identity as Darth Sidious) proclaimed himself emperor and destroyed the Jedi Order. Having migrated to the Outer Rim with a generous severance package (generous by the standards of someone who’d lived a monastic life of Jedi privation up until that point) from the Jedi Order, Ani-Chay was unaccounted for when Palpatine purged the Jedi and established the Galactic Empire.
Working and acquiring skills from various day jobs over the years, she refrained from showing any public Jedi-ness because even she could see that it wasn't very popular anymore. However, privately, she maintained her skills with the Force, so when the Emperor finally went down (a cataclysmically happy event that even a lapsed Jedi apprentice on the Outer Rim of the galaxy could sense) she popped right back into Jedi mode and assumed the rank of Master, "Because there's no one left alive to tell me I'm not." It is unknown what the Jedi of the New Republic would make of this peculiar Jedi variant outside it's borders, should it flourish.
There are two distinctive features in Ani-Chay Pinn’s Jedi style. The first is the rather obvious “lightsaber trick” of holding the hilt of the lightsaber up to one ear and having the blade emerge out of the other one. The origin of it goes back to Ani’s time as an initiate at the Jedi Temple. There were many tedious and “character building” exercises that Jedi masters assigned to the initiates. One of Ani Pinn’s tasks was to sort through a four-hundred year accumulation of old lightsaber focusing crystals. All of the ones that were truly useless and broken had been discarded by the droids, but there still remained a residue of hundreds of others that might still be useful. Pinn had to meditate over each one and test it in a practice saber for hours to pass judgement on it’s disposition. But there is only so much of turning lightsabers on and off that anyone can take before looking for a little variety, especially for a task that lasted years, well into her apprenticeship to Knight J’Hart.
Ani-Chay Pinn’s variation was to discover that a little, well-placed squeeze with the Force on the focusing crystal would cause a lightsaber blade to focus and emerge above the hilt of the saber. This is actually fairly bad for the crystal and can cause it to crack, but since the crystals Pinn was working with were questionable already, no one noticed the losses caused by her practicing this technique. Even with little differences between crystals, she eventually learned how to compensate for their variations and Force-squeeze them all with a minimum of breakage. She managed to extend the gap between hilt and blade to be as wide as her head, thus leading to the visual gag of having the lightsaber blade apparently emerge from her head. She had shown her trick to Master Stoan shortly before her expulsion–and almost gave him a heart attack–but he laughed it off later. He had refrained from telling anyone else about it until he learned how to do it himself without breaking his own lightsaber. Depressed about the loss of his padawan from the Order, he had not perfected it before he was killed on Genosis. Ani Pinn also learned even more damaging ways to squeeze the crystals, making the blade curve or bend at right angles–leading to some really good looking maneuvers where she would appear to deflect lightsaber blades with her bare hands. But the lightsaber-through-the-head trick remains her signature move.
The second aspect of the Pinn Jedi style is that all it’s practitioners wear hats. No one knows why.
Ani-Chay Pinn has one “Jedi-purge story” that the curious may ask her about at their own risk. A few years after the purge and the Empire had firmly established itself, one of Ani’s occupations was performing as a back-up musician for a night-club band despite the fact that she has no natural musical ability at all (this being the type of band where that wasn’t very important, but this being the sort of job where showing up on time was). Two Jedi fugitives had tried to lose Darth Vader and his contingent of storm trooper clones in the crowd, but were still caught backstage between shows. Just as Vader prepared to dismember the wounded Jedi, Pinn abandoned her triangle and, in a fit of preposterously rampant idealism, took up one of fallen lightsabers against the Dark Lord.
She was quite out of practice and had never been top of her class in lightsaber fighting anyway even when she was in shape for it, so this was a massively bad idea. But just as Vader was about to dispatch this new annoyance, the band manager distracted him, giving her enough time to do her “trick” on his Sith-red lightsaber. So, after what he thought would be the fatal slash, Vader stared at his uninjured opponent, then held up his saber and uttered a memorable, “What?!” at the huge gap in his blade, thus giving Ani-Chay Pinn the chance to leap up and get in one big kick to Vader’s breastplate. She grabbed the injured Jedi and escaped (even battle-hardened from the Clone Wars that squad of troopers still couldn’t hit anything; they’d always relied on their numbers to get the job done). But even with his breathing apparatus disabled, the Sith Lord still had enough strength to take a good swipe at the fleeing fugitives with his lightsaber, leading to Ani-Chay Pinn’s “battle scar”. Asking her about it only leads to a chance for Pinn to drop her pants and moon the questioner, because Vader was on his knees and “I was running away at the time.” It was years later before Ani Pinn discovered why someone suddenly yelling, “Hey, Ani!” would make Darth Vader turn around at that crucial moment like he did.
