Act 1 – Caught in a Storm: Riley

The day starts off normally.

Riley hits the snooze button on her phone twice before she finally rolls out of bed. Then it's a half-asleep stumble to the bathroom and she goes through the same routine she does every day. Get up, brush her teeth and fix her hair, get dressed, and then make sure her bag's packed.

Her tea sits on the counter, waiting for her when she comes down the stairs. There's a Starbucks and two Timmies on campus, so she'll grab something to eat from one of those – depending on what she feels like. She snags her trusty boots from where they're sitting on the rubber mat by the door, pulls them on, and laces them up.

The last thing she does before she heads for the door is grab her tea off the counter.

The weather today's awfully mild, moving steadily from the last clinging remnants of winter into spring, so she shrugs on a light coat and leaves. She triple-checks the door behind her as she locks it, before going to see whether or not her shitty roommate has actually checked their mail or not.

Nothing but junk mail in their slot, so she chucks it in the recycling. Then crosses the road from their residence complex to make the short walk the rest of the way into campus.

Most of the snow has melted by now, leaving little dirty piles of it along the sidewalk and the sides of the road. It's also warmer than she thought it was, so she unzips her coat and shifts her travel mug to her other hand. Checking her phone, she sends off a reply to her mom's text from a ridiculous hour of the morning (because time differences fucking suck) and replies to her friend.

Her day is off to its usual, boring start. There's nothing unusual about it.

Obviously, that's why it's going to go completely and totally to fucking shit.

Simply put, there's no real way to describe what happens next.

For in one moment, she's about to take another step forward. In the next, it feels like she's being pulled apart at the seams; she's been stretched thin, across a vast amount of space. There's no noise. She cannot scream. She's being torn apart and as though every inch of her flesh is on fire. There's bile in her throat, but nowhere for it to go.

And as she's pulled, she feels things race through her. Too many emotions, thoughts, fragments of words and sentences, nothing that she can catch. She tries. She tries to latch onto something – anything – but there's nothing. Her hands won't move, her mind cannot reach. Her head feels too small to fit all of this, but she'll never forget.

Sorrow. Anger. Happiness. Love. Triumph. Loss. Heartbreak. Pain. Hope.

Each emotion flits through her, there and gone before she can do much more than identify them. She's in a whirlwind of emotions, memories, thoughts. It feels like she's drowning, the input completely overwhelming.

Her life falls apart with a bang and a flash of light.

She opens her eyes to brilliant shades of greens, deep vivid blues, mixed in with purples and browns. Trees and vines and plants of all kinds; the connection instantaneous enough that she doesn't have to think about it too much: she's in a jungle.

She's also not alone.

It takes her seconds to take in the green skin, the robes, the fucking lightsaber, and she just stares. Her vision goes blurry, her legs go weak, and just before her eyes roll back and she goes down, she manages to say one thing.

"Shit."

What Riley remembers is walking down the sidewalk towards the heart of campus, her boots crunching in the last of the snow. She remembers the bite of wind on her face, overcast grey skies, and slipping on a hidden patch of ice that sent her knee first into a drift.

But that could have been yesterday.

She rolls over, curling up on her side. What makes her jerk awake – and nearly smack her face into the curved metal wall – is not the shitty futon that feels identical to hers, but that the sheets smell wrong. She always dumps too much Downy in the wash with hers – meaning she goes through the stuff faster than anyone probably has any right to – but they smell so good when she does.

These sheets smell like deceit. They also crinkle like really cheap hotel linen.

Riley scrambles back off the bed, tangles her legs up in the too thin comforter, and falls out of the bed.

"Fuck."

She's still fully dressed, minus her boots which are actually sitting at the foot of the bunk she just fell out of. So much for thinking that the snow drift was yesterday.

Pain's a great way to clear away the sleep fog of half-wakefulness in a hurry, and her memory hits her like a two-by-four to the solar plexus. 'Fucked' does not even begin to cover the situation she's in.

Well, that only applies if it's real. It could be a dream, brought on by all that binge-watching she's done lately. Maybe staying up until four-in-the-fucking-morning to finish rewatching the entire original trilogy was a bad idea. That… doesn't explain anything, though, because if that was the case then she really should have popped up in front of Han Solo and Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon.

That's usually how these sorts of dreams go – or she thinks they do. She goes off to have nonsensical adventures with various members of the Star Wars mythology and then she wakes up right when she gets to the part where either the Death Star blows up or someone decapitates the Emperor.

Her dreams, though, don't usually revolve around anything she's actually watched. Fandom dreams are not something she's ever really had. And she never remembers her dreams when she wakes up, either. At least, not once she's out of that bleary-eyed state of half-wakefulness that usually disappears when she walks into the bathroom door or trips over the vacuum.

Flopping back onto the floor, Riley stares up at the ceiling. The weird jungle is gone, replaced by what looks like the inside of the Starship Enterprise. It's all smooth, clean curved lines and when she turns her head to the side, there's a huge curved window that looks out onto a massive blur that is – oh holy fuck.

She scrambles to her feet, forgets that her legs are still tangled in the sheet, and instead crashes back to the ground. Her knees hurt and her wrists are probably plotting her very bloody murder right then, but Riley absolutely does not care at this moment while she frantically crawls over to the window and presses her hands up against it because that is very definitely fucking hyperspace outside the damn window.

The window is cool and solid under her fingers, which further emphasizes that she's absolutely not hallucinating or dreaming this because everything is too real. There are none of the blurry, indistinct qualities that are so characteristic of dreams – it's all fucking real.

Her head's spinning wildly and it's not just from the vertigo of watching space blur past the window.

She flops back to sit, landing heavily and just stares blankly at the window.

This is real.

She's not hallucinating.

It's all real.

She's in fucking Star Wars.

She feels lightheaded, vision going blurry and there's a loud rushing noise in her ears. There's just no way that this can be actually happening because it's not possible. Her next thought is that she has to be hallucinating, that maybe she got hit by a car and this is all just a dying dream as her brain slowly shuts down.

That doesn't explain why her dying dream has her on a starship going to who-the-hell knows where in a galaxy far, far away.

Riley has to clasp her hands together so tightly that her hands start shaking from the effort. Her knuckles ache from it, which just implies further that all of this is real, it's not her hallucinating or some dying dream. She's really here.

For whatever reason, all of this is real and that includes the fact that the last thing she remembers is that she fainted in front of a fucking actual Jedi Knight. Though it shouldn't be so clear, the Jedi's face is, even though she only saw it for a brief moment before she blacked out.

Riley flops back onto the floor with a groan. Mental roster time, she thinks, flicking through her memory while trying to put a name to the face. Placing the large black eyes, green skin and sort-of amphibian appearance doesn't take long: Kit Fisto. That's the Jedi who found her and oh fuck.

She has no idea when she's appeared in terms of when anything happens. For all she knows, the Clone Wars could be in full swing and she's just been tossed into the centre of it and she has no idea why. She sits back up, willing down the panic coursing through her and tries to take several deep, steadying breaths. If she can put together a mental list of everything she knows, then maybe she can work this out.

Here is what Riley knows for certain: She's definitely sometime in the Old Republic, but she has no idea how to narrow that down further. Naboo could still be under blockade, Anakin Skywalker could still be a slave on Tatooine, Palpatine could already be Chancellor. Worse, she can't ask any of these questions because that either reveals that she knows shit that she shouldn't, or that she knows what's coming.

It's a horrible catch-22. Riley can either start asking questions to figure things out, or… or she can keep her mouth shut until she can figure out when she is. The where, Riley thinks, isn't as important as the when.

She finally gets around to untangling her legs from the sheet and stands up. The room she's in is nothing more than a very small cabin aboard a spacecraft of some kind. Hyperspace means a ship, means that they're going somewhere. Where, she doesn't know, but she'd like to.

Aside from the narrow bunk, there's a desk with what Riley's pretty sure is a computer. She steps towards it, taps at the screen with her finger tentatively, and it lights up. The interface is semi-holographic. And completely in glyphs that she has absolutely no clue how to read.

Riley drops her head into her hands, rubs her face and starts up a mental repetition of the word 'shit' over and over again. That dashes the hope that she might have been able to figure this out on her own.

She drops into the chair by the desk and just stares at the unfamiliar glyphs on the screen. Scrubs at her eyes with her hands, "What the fuck am I gonna do now?"

Mulling it over, the first thing that pops into her head is: 'What would Allu do?'

Following that, she goes, 'We're not going to do that, that's murder.'

Her options are limited. Riley's pretty sure that however she made her grand entrance, it made a definite impression. Clearly, because she's not in the jungle anymore and they're going somewhere. Putting it together, they're likely going to Coruscant – probably to the Jedi Council itself. A strange girl appears right in front of you, the only possible answer is that the Force did it.

"Oh fuck," Riley whispers. The Force brought her here. The Force brought her here and she's got no fucking idea why.

There has to be a reason. It wouldn't bring her here unless it wanted something from her.

Begs the question of why it chose her specifically, but that's… not as important.

She's sometime in the period of the Old Republic. That much she does know. If Riley's meant for some grand purpose, she's not entirely certain what it is. Some guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.

She snorts and massages her temples. Old Republic means that's not the case.

Riley's still got no bloody clue what she's supposed to be doing when the door to the cabin slides open with a soft whoosh. Her head snaps to look and there stands Kit Fisto, staring at her and she has absolutely no idea what to make of his expression.

She sucks in a deep breath, "I… I won't speak to anyone but the High Council."

The only thing that she tells Kit Fisto is her name. He's nice enough to not ask her anything more than that, but he shows her around the small transport they're on. There's not a lot, just a handful of cabins centred around a large, open common space that houses the craft's small canteen.

Riley can't read anything on the menu, though, and ends up just blurting out, "Same as him!"

Luckily for her, she ends up with something that resembles shepherd's pie in both taste and texture. Given that this is Star Wars, she decides that it's a good idea not to ask what it actually is or what's in it. She doesn't want to think about it.

She encounters the same problem with the shower in the small bathroom in her cabin. There's no colour indicator on hot or cold, just two glyphs. It's easy enough to deal with, she turns the water on, cranks it to the middle, and then sticks her hand under the spray while she adjusts the temperature. Despite what one of the other passengers says about the amenities being basic, Riley doesn't think so. She spends a good hour trying to figure out what everything does.

Their transport comes out of hyperspace just shy of Coruscant. Riley presses her face against the window in her room, staring with wide eyes. She's seen the planet before numerous times, but seeing it for herself for real and with her own eyes? It takes her breath away.

Coruscant is a glittering planet. It reminds her of the satellite pictures of Earth at night, where the cities are lit up with light. Coruscant looks exactly like that only on a truly massive scale. It sparkles with lights, making it look as though it's a cluster of stars itself rather than a planet.

She stays pressed up against the glass until their transport lands, watching as the city materializes around them. The skyscrapers are each a shimmering mass, stretching farther into the sky than any she's ever seen before. Coruscant would put New York to shame.

Kit Fisto comes to get her once they've docked.

Stepping out into Coruscant, everything hits her at once. There's so many scents, the hum of life and energy that rushes through her and leaves her feeling a little giddy. But that isn't all she feels. There's a warm pulse, it settles low inside of her, near her heart, and… and there's something else.

She can actually feel a pressing darkness.

The darkness feels cold, fear slashing through her and clenching around her heart. Riley stumbles. That's enough to jerk her out of the grasp of the worst of it, though she can still feel its clinging, clammy fingers about her heart. Wrapping her arms around herself, her fingers are cold and she shivers.

"Something wrong?"

"I – no, it's – it's nothing," Riley replies.

It's a lie. Riley knows that, but she can't explain it here. She offers him a completely unconvincing smile and shakes off the rest of his concern.

Something is very wrong.

She should not be able to feel his concern, brushing against her like a phantom brush of fingers.

Riley swallows, shoves the dizziness away, and follows Kit Fisto into rush of Coruscanti traffic. There's a small, speeder-like craft waiting for them and the driver greets the Jedi Master with a smile. Riley lets the driver help her into the craft, sitting down and trying to not look around with wide-eyes. She's aware that she probably looks like a child in candy store, but she needs to take everything in.

Coruscant is like if New York got a huge futuristic upgrade. Buildings reaching up into the sky, looking as though they might even touch the stars themselves. There's a fog clinging to the buildings, blocking out her view of the ground below. Looking down gives her a horrible case of vertigo, so she sits back and squeezes her eyes closed, taking deep breaths.

It's too much to take in all at once. She doesn't know where to look. Each place she looks, there's something new; something that looks sort of familiar, only it isn't.

She's not in fucking Kansas anymore.

Riley spots the Jedi Temple easily. The tall spires reaching high into the skyline. Approaching it, she feels a sense of calm wash over her, steadying her nerves and brushing away the last vestiges of darkness that clung to her like an unwanted veil.

This is it, she thinks. This is really fucking happening.

Hopefully, she doesn't vomit.

So, some stuff to know about the fic: chapters alternate POVs and you can check the chapter title to figure out who is the narrator this time around – the chapters themselves aren't titled. If you've got questions, I'll answer them so you can either leave them here or on my tumblr.

This is not going to be a short fic, it's going to be long. Currently, I've projected four acts for this fic with corresponding interludes between each one. It's going to be a hellish adventure. Originally, I wasn't going to start posting until I'd finished the first act, but then Self Insert Week was a thing while I was working on it and I decided fuck it, perfect time to post this hell of my creation. I'm planning on having a regular updating schedule for this fic, but I'm going to wait till I've finished more of it before I commit to anything. And, as always, that schedule is subject to change.