Leonardis Mission

"Pity the Jedi who has no experience of the Pull of the Dark Side; for they are more vulnerable to it"

- Master Leonardis

Overview

Leonardis Mission ((SL Name: Leo Mission)) is a human (Ysannan) male Jedi of imposing stature and with lupine grey hair and a deep grey gaze. He is a prominent Jedi Council Master in the (new era) Jedi Order called the Jedi Guardians of the Peace, based on the on the Praxeum world of Ossus. He is one of the oldest and most experienced Jedi currently alive and is also Senator for the world of Ossus in the Galactic Senate, and a former Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic.

He has had a long and distinguished career, but was originally trained by several Masters including Praegorn Sachertorte, Pantera Asturias and finally the ironically named Darth Aridian and also received specialised light saber training from Master Shaymar Sullivan in the venerable Jedi Master Order (which later became the Jedi Guardians of the Peace).

It has been said of Leonardis that he resembles in manner and abilities the legendary Jedi Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, in that he prefers to negotiate and avoid conflict but when he needs to, he can be a dangerous swordsman and a gifted military tactician. Over time, his role has become that of Consular, but he has never forgotten his original path as Guardian or the subtlties of Sentinel, which he has also been between these two phases.

Biography

Early Life

"There goes a "man" with a Mission..."

- Smirking travellers, seeing a young Leo travelling alone

Not much is known of Leonardis' early days. He was much later determined by genetic analysis to be of Ysannan descent (therefore a native of Ossus) but where he was born and what family he was born to no-one knows, including himself. He has vague memories of playing as a young boy in a grassy meadow with silken gossamer lit by sunlight, and perhaps of an older sister and of two adults - perhaps his parents. One thing he does remember however is that something changed all that, something violent and sudden. He has memories of living shadows of hooded figures and red flashes of light, electrical energies, screaming and destruction. He was also hurt in this massacre but due to his small size, managed to escape before collapsing from his injuries and dehydration a few days later. Lying like a dead thing, the boy was found by a reclusive old man who took him back to his hut and who slowly nursed him back to health. The old man later took the boy in and taught him many things, including how to read. The old man was however ancient indeed, and the roles were reversed within a year, young Leo initially helping with the chores and eventually nursing the old man before he died of old age. Leonardis recalls being saddened but not distraught at the old man's death. He had seen his protector's suffering and pain from physical ailments and realised that he was now free of these.

Searching through the hut, Leo came across two very important artifacts, which were to change his life forever. One was a Jedi's lightsaber, old and battered beyond functioning but which he identified as one of the 'laser swords' which destroyed his original community, the other being an ancient cuboid object with arcane carvings on the outside and which, when touched, displayed a starmap of several planets around the Galaxy, showing great temples where brown-robed individuals wielded the laser swords with effortles ability and skill and none of the violence of his dark-robed attackers. Whether the old man was a Jedi himself or had happened to come across the possessions of a Jedi is unclear; but the objects were left in a way that was impossible for Leo to miss them - clearly he was meant to find them and to make use of them. A strange, almost horrified fascination with the lightsaber entered the boy's mind; again whether it was a subtle mind control or whether it was just seeing the images and being entranced by the whirling flashes of blue and green is unknown, but Leo firmly became obsessed with finding such a temple and learning the skills he could see in the holo-images.

And so it was that about the age of eight or nine Galactic Standard years, Leo ended up without a home and without family, a galactic waif who stowed aboard star freighters and who searched with determined singlemindedness for the places he found in the holocron. Legend has it that his surname is not his own but a moniker given to him by amused seasoned travellers, who saw the young boy travelling alone with focused intent and said: "There goes a man with a Mission" - and that Leo, hearing this on more than one occasion, adopted it as his surname, being unable to recall his own.

The Force must have been with Leo even then, for despite being a rather vulnerable and naive child. he managed to avoid mishap (specifically the Slavers who might have captured him to sell on) and arrived first at a great Temple amonst swirling desert sands, called The New Holstice. There, he beheld the Jedi of his holocron, twirling their sabers and performing dazzling feats of acrobatics. He was mesmerised, and decided to spend some time finding out about these strange people, the Jedi. No-one really noticed the ragged and slightly underweight urchin steal into the Great Archives and read from them, spending days there and reading as far as his command of written Basic would allow. It is postulated that even then Leo could unconsciously manipulate the Force, a skill he may have developed to avoid being noticed on his long and lonely space trips, for he was never disturbed in the Archives or challenged as to why he was there. After several days finding out about the Jedi Order and of observing the trainees there, Leo decided this was the life for him and he made his mind to join the Order. He filled out an application form with his unpractised childish scrawl on flimsi and was about to drop it into the application box when all about him suddenly were cries of distress and sounds of lightsabers echoing throught halls of the great temple, shattering the sanctity of that place for good. Here adn there were dark robed figures emerging as out of Leo's nightmares wield red lightsabers, but more striking to the shocked boy was the sight of Jedi fighting Jedi - not just sparring but actually fighting to the death, blue and green sabers clashing in fury and passion he had not seen before...in terror he ran from the Tempople and it was a good thing that he did so, for a short while after, the mighty edifice crumbled from its foundations and crashed into the floor, becoming naught but old ruins. Leo remembered running into a padawan in his mid teens, injured and looking distressed and confused, saying over and over again: "I can't believe it, Masters Sion and Gorilla have fallen to the Dark Side...Master Moreau has fled, it's over, we're finished, it's all over..." Leo still remembered years afterwards the tears of betrayal and hurt on the older boy's face, for a moment before the padawan spotted a Dark Sider hewing down a friend and charged on, in desperate and futile courage, falling almost instantly to the Sith Master's twirling saber-staff.

Leo fled as fas as his wings of fear could take him and when he had no more strength, sank to the ground and wept. Not only had he seen death and destruction reminiscent of that which had destroyed his family, but it seemed that his dream of becomng a Jedi was over, the Sith having put them all to the sword. The boy cried himself to sleep and even on waking, lay in a torpor of despair ready to lie give up and die. Idly, he played with the old man's holocron, viewing the images again and again. Suddenly, he sat up bolt upright...The New Holstice Temple was not the only Jedi Temple in the Galaxy!! It may seem like a strange thought to those coming later, but most of the Jedi in the Galaxy were trained at the New Holstice amongst the Jedi Alliance, and Leo had assumed that with their destruction, the Jedi Order was dead. In fact there were a couple other Temples briefly mentioned by the holocron, though their exact locations were not revealed. Leo recalled falling asleep and dreaming, perhaps Force-Seeing - which Sectors of the Galaxy to focus on in his continued search. And so it was, that Leo came eventually upon a place that was not a Jedi Temple, but which he recognised as a place of ancient duelling practice and heard for the first time in months, the thrum and clash of lightsabers. The Force must have been with him again, for that place lay deserted and abandoned for much of the time, the Jedi Knight and her student only happening to be visiting at that particular time, evidenced by their ship resting on a landing pad not far away.

Leo sat down quietly and watched as the Jedi Knight instructed her young student - a brown-haired human boy a few years older than himself in the art of saber combat. But Leo only had eyes for the Knight, who was tall and statuesque, her almost-wite blond hair rolled in a bun behind her head, and whose moves were fluid and swift. Though she made the student look clumsy in comparison, Leo was nonethless impressed with the older boy's grasp of fairly complex moves. He quite clearly had Talent.

After an hour or so of duelling, the Knight let the other boy rest for a while and strode over to Leo, noticing the ragged urchin watching from the sidelines. She asked him if she could help him, and he would remember his abashed words - after all this time not being able to find the right thing to say and being unable to meet her piercing gaze: "I'm lost, can you help me to find the way?", to which she smiled and replied: "Somehow I don't think you are lost anymore."

The Knight took him back with the other boy to the Temple of New Hope, washed and dressed him in the plain brown tunic and pants of a Jedi Youngling and presented him to a Council Master, Praegorn Sachertorte, for consideration to join the Jedi Order. Almost immediately the Master could see the Potential of the boy and not only admitted hum into the legendary Jedi Master Order but also within a couple of weeks petitioned for him to be raised to Padawan Learner and indeed his own Apprentice. Despite this, Leo kept close links with the Knight - Shaymar Sullivan - and her Padawan, Arciem Sillanpaa, with whom he he became fast friends with and looked up to like an older brother. And so it was that Leo became a Jedi student; his teachers noticed the same intense focus that had given Leo his monikered surname and commented that great things might one day be expected from him.

Padawan Learner

"You've picked this up so quickly, you make me want to give up!"

- Master Praegorn Sachertorte, to his Padawan Learner Leo Mission

Leo continued his previous obsession with the lightsaber, a fascination shared by Arciem, and the two boys would spend hours, sometimes even whole days in the duelling arena, until their clothes were soaked with sweat and attracting worried glances from the older Jedi. Sometimes Leo would be instructed by his own Master - the Order's Weapons Master - and other times he would join Shaymar and Arciem in their sessions. Shaymar was also particularly gifted in the saber and would still manage to best both boys together, and they learned much from these sessions. So much so infact that within a short period of time, Leo had managed to best Shaymar's old Master, Pantera Asturias, in a duel - much to his surprise - and Leo's own Master joked with him after a being pushed particularly hard one day: "You've picked this up so quickly, you make me want to give up!" Arciem also improved rapidly under Shymar's guidance and the two boys developing a healthy rivalry, each wanting to out-do the other but each admitting the other was more gifted!

One terrible day, as the boy and his Master were at a Galactic fair on a nearby planet in the same Sector, they received a distress call from their base. They hastened back to the Temple, stopping in shock as they found it utterly destroyed as if exploded by a bomb and yet there was no trace of explosives but rather a deep wound in the Force. It came to light that the deed had been carried out by one of the Masters in the Order - Master Molly Morrison - who, having recently failed in a bid to unite the Jedi Orders and set herself up as the head of the Council, fell to the Dark Side. Being blocked, even from within her own Order by Grand Master Aridian, she revenged herself on Jedi Master by using the Force to destroy the Temple and fled - a crime of almost unparallelled heinousness. The Order was devastated by the loss of what was after all a new and state-of-the-art facility which had not even been fully finished yet. Nonetheless, they were not without home, for the former base on the gas planet of Bespin had not yet been decommissioned, and the Order retreated there and Leo continued his learning in this 'new' setting.

As he started to approach the skill level with lightsabers of his Master, Leo realised that their relationship was somewhat flawed. His Master was young and similarly gifted with the lightsaber - he was more like an older brother or a favourite young uncle rather than a true Master to him. They had many good times together but once Leo stopped learning so much about lightsaber craft from Master Sachertorte, he realised he wasn't learning really very much at all, since his Master was mainly focused himself on sabercraft. The other real talent of Master Sachertorte was in flying starfighters and at that point Leo felt himself very inept and unable to even begin that. He also wanted to learn more history, lore, philosophy and about the Force, and Master Sachertorte began to struggle to 'feed' his gifted but insatiable student. Perhaps a little unfairly, Leo began to feel somewhat ignored and neglected, not realising that his young Master was simply struggling to know what to do with him.

By now in his early teens, Leo entered a slightly rebellious phase where he spent less time with his Master and more with Arciem, honing his battle skills even more. He seemed set on the path of the Guardian, and did not want anyone to hold him back. Similarly impetuous, Arciem would be a willing companion on adventures including crossing sabers with Sith Master Darth Malice in defence of the Temple of the New Order of the Jedi - a defeat which taught them they still had much to learn but only fuelled them onwards. Struggling to control his wayward pupil, the young Master Sachertorte in the end resorted to a threat he had no intention of carrying out and which he would deeply regret uttering: to have Leo cast out of the Jedi Order. Utterly shocked by his Master's statement, Leo ran in a very distressed state to Grand Master Aridian who, calming down the almost hysterical boy, took only a few moments to realise that Master Sachertorte - a former Padawn of his - was out of his depth with this unusually gifted but headstrong student. He therefore relieved Master Sachertorte of the sole responsibility for Leo and placed him under the collective guardianship of all the Masters. While in time Leo and Master Sachertorte would become friends again, their Master/Padawan relationship was never the same again.

Under Master Aridian's firm but patient hand, Leo started to read more and spent less time with his lightsaber. Eventually Master Pantera Asturias took young Leo on trips around the Galaxy with him, and the boy learned much about diplomacy and about non violent self-defence from the wise old Master and grew to love these trips. In a sense - though it was never formalised - Leo spent this middle part of his Padawanship as Master Asturias' Apprentice. Meanwhile, Master Sachertorte struggled with feelings of self worth, having considered himself to have "failed" with Leo and seeing Master Asturias' relative success with the boy, began to doubt his own abilities and the conviction of his path. Gradually, almost imperceptably, he withdrew into himself and then one day announced that he and the Jedi Order were done and that he would now seek a Darker Path. On hearing of this, Leo went to argue with him, seeking to change his mind, to no avail. Begging, pleading and even tears failed to dissuade Sachertorte, who smiled sadly at Leo and lifted the boy's chin looking into his tearful eyes and told him gently to stay, not to follow him and to be a good Jedi. Saying this, he got into his starfighter and departed.

Struggle with the Dark Side

"I should leave, I don't deserve to be a Jedi..."

- Leo Mission to Master Kokiri Saarinen

The Fall of his former Master precipitated a real crisis in young Leo's mind. Coming up to Trials at the time, Leo found himself utterly unable to concentrate on his studies, blaming himself intensely for the state of his old friend and feeling an exorable pull to go to find him, but knowing that this would almost inevitably mean he fell also to the Dark Side. Realising this weakness in him, Leo started to doubt his strength and talents and like a vicious circle this fuelled his despair. With Master Asturias away on a long trip, he was left to his own devices and had too much time to berate himself and to sink in a deeper miery. Added to which, the cunning Darth Malice, having crossed sabers and having been secretly impressed with the talent of the young Jedi, sensed Leo's mental weakness and began to whisper through the Force, complimenting and flattering him, saying that he was wasting himself away with the Jedi...

((To be continued....))

Leonardis 00:30, 25 August 2008 (UTC)