Where is Yain from originally?
Yain rubs the space between her eyes and pats the space of the table closest to the nearest empty chair.
"It’s a long story." Her hand drops to the table as she angles a look over her shoulder to the door, and back. "You get to hear the long of it.
"I don’t have an accent. I worked very hard to get rid of it. Don’t ask me why, because the why ain’t important." It is, of course, but that’s personal—the kind of personal she can’t talk about, so she won’t. "I was born on a wet planet, in the Tunl'e't'sa star cluster, between major nomadic migrations of a mandalorian clan. They’d never seen Mandalore, never cared to, for a number of reasons. The quick explanation is that they’re so integrated and far removed that they no longer call themselves mando’ade — and the dialect is … unrecognizable. But the short of it —”
She raises a hand, closed fist and bent with the elbow still on the table. One finger unfurls towards the ceiling. “One, the politics.” A second finger follows. “Two, the settling.” And a third. “Three, Resol’nare.”
The hand drifts back to the table, spraying out the fingers wide to smooth the underside of her knuckles over the wood.
"One. Y’ ever look at the visible population of Mandalore and wonder why they’re all tsin’jla?" She laughs. "Cin’yc."
"No people, no matter how insular, with the kind of trade and political connections Mandalore had as head of Neutral Systems, can maintain genetics in that way —peacefully. But y’smart, I don’t need to spell it out for you.
"Two. My clan was too used to movement—too built into the rise and fall of seasons across stars, of the mood of elliptical orbits and twin suns against four dwarf stars and one blue giant. And the star clusters, and their planets, grew too dependent in return of my clans movements. Without them, over growth. Without them, the allowance of predatory, and prey, species to unbalance—scales tipped by agriculture and hunting, ocean farming and massive irrigation that stretches far inland…"
She trails off, eyes unfocused as she presses her lips together. “…Mandalore is no wet planet by any stretch o’ th’imagination, and the closest connection the clan had are, at earliest, from a millennia ago.” A few quick blinks bring her dark pupils back into focus.
"Resol’nare is both the same, and different. As we understand it … " The frustration of putting into words echoes in lines across her brow. "Little differences that mean nothing, and everything."
"So where am I from?" She blinks, compresses her lips, then continues. "I was born to the clan…" A pause to inhale and exhale, then inhale again. "…doctor. Well, her and a … Mandalorian, straight outta one of Mandalore's outlier colonies, the coldest one. He was ready to join the clan, ready to run through our trials to prove himself."
Her smile compresses to a thin line. “An’ he did.”
Lacing her fingers together, she presses her things into the dip of the bridge of her nose between her eyes on either side.
"The thing about aruettise, even mando’ade, is that even when they think they’ve made the decision to change, they still screw up. They still think in lines—still see the galaxy through a lens of their understandings, not quite willing to shift when their way has always been the way."
The soft rap of her knuckles over the wooden table accompany a thin smile.
"Where was I? Ah, right.
"The clans’ migrational periods depended on the positions of the planets during their orbital cycles, across a cluster of stars, along the edge of the MidRim. We—they were mostly equipped for hot, heavy, humid weather—can even breathe in thick atmosphere too choked with hydrogen for the common baseline human." A tap to the table. "The difference, with me, is that I have a tolerance for cold that surpasses my… extended family."
Another tap. "When I was old enough—about three—my mother took me an’ left. Training, she said. Teach me the ways so I can take up the mantle in her place."
A smile that twitches at the corners of her mouth and pulls tight the visible tendons of her neck and shoulders.
"Didn't turn out that way." Yain unlaces her fingers. "History. Any more questions?"