SW Fanfiction: Episode 9--Secret of the Kyber Crystals

Well, last time I was on here, I told you I would be doing a post that would NOT be just a fun picture or video. It would be something original, something where I actually talk about fandoms. Something more than just “oh, look at that, isn’t THAT awesome!” I’m Clara Murphy, Queen of Fan Theories, and today, I’m going to do exactly what I promised. 

Okay, but before I do that, HAPPY BACK TO THE FUTURE DAY!! 

I couldn’t resist. This is just such a cool video! Gremgem did such a good job, and she has a BEAUTIFUL voice. I kind of love acapella music, and this is at the top of my list.

But once you’re done watching and listening to this lovely video, I do in fact have a fan theory. Or… well, maybe not a theory. Sort of like a HISHE (or How It Should Have Ended) But since it hasn’t ended yet, I guess it’s not that either. How It Should End, maybe.

What “it” am I talking about?

 

Yes, “it” is Star Wars!

And I know, today is supposed to be Back to the Future Day (a tradition started by Grace on Time Traveller’s Daughter). But I have my reasons for posting this on Back to the Future Day. You'll see those soon enough.

Anyway, as you may have deduced, this post will deal with the new Star Wars trilogy, specifically Episodes VIII and IX. It’s my idea of what they might do in Episode IX. To be honest, they might have to do something like this just to follow up Last Jedi.

Last Jedi.

 

 

It stinks. I can’t believe Kathleen Kennedy worked on both Back to the Future AND this.

There’s just so much wrong with this movie, I don’t even know where to begin! And I don’t know how THEY’LL know where to begin, with the next one, or where to go with it. There’s pretty much nothing left.

Of course, that’s why I’m writing this “How It Should End”! I don’t know what they’ll do for real, but this is one possibility. And I think it’s rather a neat one. I’ll call it…

EPISODE IX
  
SECRET OF THE KYBER CRYSTALS
 

The Resistance is dying. With forces spread thin, and the First Order burning cities and assassinating old heroes, it seems little hope is left.
 

However, after an SOS from famed hero Lando Calrissian, a team is dispatched by Resistance Leader Rey to meet him on the planet Telcontar, and bring him and his crew to safety.

 

However, the leaders of both sides are nowhere to be seen. Supreme Leader Ren gives orders from his throne room, seeing no one. And Jedi Rey, putting General Dameron in command, has left on a mysterious mission of her own…. 

 

***

All right, so it’s not a genius title crawl. But now you know what’s going on, so it does the job. Now I can go on and describe the plot of the film without any confusion.

 

Finn and Rose meet up with Lando on the planet. And Lando is not impressed with them or the state of the Resistance. However, he teaches Finn a few things, as a sort of mentor I guess, while they’re trying to get back to their hidden transport.

They also run into DJ on the planet (that’s the guy who betrayed them in TLJ), and one or other of them chews him out. Rose seems more unstable, so probably her. They might even meet Phasma on the planet—badly scarred, and they don’t realize who she is until she tells them, but still alive. If so, she’s probably following them, bent on revenge.

Meanwhile, Rey is on some other planet with R2. She’s looking for things—really strange, mystical-seeming things. She confides in R2 that in the Jedi Books, she found out there was a way to travel through time.

 

 

 

Yeah, NOW you see how this ties in to Back to the Future Day!

Well, Rey read about it in the Jedi Books. The Jedi thought it was too dangerous, so they hid the instructions on how to do it in several different places. Scattered them across several books. Part was in one of the Jedi Books they have, and part was in other books. Those books are hidden somewhere on this planet.

Oh, and the Jedi Books she already has also say that time travel is the reason they used Kyber crystals for their lightsabers, rather than something else. Kyber crystals act as time shields, protecting the Jedi’s minds, memories, and bodies from being affected by changes in the past. (More details on ‘time shields’ here) If some Sith were to get hold of the information and went back in time, the Jedi would be unaffected by whatever he changed. ‘Kyber crystals remember’ is probably an old saying.

So, Rey wants to travel back in time to see who her real parents were. Maybe she thinks she can even bring back Luke, I don’t know. But when R2 hears that she’s trying to time travel, he gets really excited, beeping and whistling and all. She can’t figure out why. But they try to find things to do with time travel—like how Doc needed plutonium and the Flux Capacitor for his time machine—and the other Jedi books.

 

 

Meanwhile, the Resistance and First Order are doing things too. Poe is in charge when they witness the destruction of one of the old places, and the death of some old heroes, at the hands of the First Order. Poe realizes they can’t keep hiding like this. They have to take action. But with so few men, what can they do?

 

 

As that’s going on with them, Hux is starting to have doubts. Kylo isn’t having them go after military targets, but historical targets. Burning the past, you see. He’s staying in his room, comming his instructions to the leaders, and rarely even showing his face then. And when he does… Well, Hux is beginning to think Kylo is crazy, and maybe even dangerous to the First Order. In the past, the Empire has always had a Sith Lord as its leader. Perhaps, he thinks, it’s time to burn down that particular tradition of the past.

 

 

What ends up happening is that Hux finds the Resistance, and comes to them, alone (or maybe with two troopers) to meet with Poe. He wants the Resistance to kill Kylo Ren. If they do so, they’ll all get a pardon for their past crimes. And he’s in earnest, too—he’s not trying to trick them. They’re both kind of wary of each other, but they agree to work together.

 

 

It comes to a bit of a head on one planet. Finn, Rose, Lando, and that group escape to the planet, pursued by a group of First Order Troopers. (I think they lost Phasma somewhere along the line). Rey, having found clues to the location of the final book, goes to the planet to find it. Hux and Poe bring their forces to the planet to take down Kylo. They all sort of run into each other there. To be honest, they probably would have all worked together to take down Kylo Ren.

 

 

But things don’t go so well. Rey wanders off to find the last Jedi book, and accidentally alerts their presence to… certain parties. When the Resistance tries to take down Kylo, they aren’t very successful—it’s like he gained all these powers he never had before. Then Hux and his troopers join in and try to help them. But then the troopers that had been chasing Lando show up, and Kylo tells them Hux is a traitor, and they start fighting. And it gets worse. When Hux sees the Sith Lord, he realizes—that’s not Kylo Ren. This golden-eyed Sith, even though he looks like Kylo, is in fact Snoke. He’s possessing Kylo.

 

  

So yeah, things aren’t going so well.

 

 

The other heroes show up, though. Lando leads them, I think, and there’s a big battle. He and Finn do the best. Rose is kind of impressed. But Snoke-as-Kylo wasn’t alone on the planet, because the Knights of Ren come on the scene. Those are the Jedi students he corrupted way back when, the ones mentioned in Force Awakens. They’re powerful and dangerous, and turn the tables on them.

 

 

Things go from worse to horrible. Even the Resistance, Hux’s First Order troops, AND the other heroes, all combined, are no match for their enemies, and badly outnumbered. Lando gets shot down (which is particularly hard on Finn). It’s like that Alamo thing in America. No way of escape, surrounded, outnumbered. The soldiers of both Poe and Hux are fighting and dying side by side.

 

 

But that’s when Rey and R2 show back up. She shows Finn what she’s found. If it works, they can stop this battle from happening, they can save Luke Skywalker, they can stop Snoke-as-Kylo. They can fix this.

 

 

Now, here’s how I think the way to time travel is. You hold up the lightsabre, unignited, and you channel the Force and focus on the crystal inside the lightsabre. And it’ll ignite on its own, in a strange, different way. The ‘light’ of the lightsabre looks different somehow. And you whirl the lightsabre around in a specific way, and it sort of cuts open a time travel portal. Rey explains it to Finn.

 

 

Of course, right as Rey is doing this, Snoke-as-Kylo shows up. He tries to stop them from time travelling, and there’s a bit of a fight. Even R2 does something. But then, just as Rey gets a time portal opened, there’s a sort of explosion—a wayward grenade or something—and all four of them get knocked into Rey’s time portal.

 

 

They find themselves in… well, what you might call an Inbetween. Not in the normal world, not in eternity. And they can actually physically see the Force, both the Light Side and the Dark Side (though they probably can’t use the Force there, now I think about it). And they can physically see Time as well. They’re in the Force-Time Continuum, you could say.

Now, I’m not entirely sure how Time and the Force look, how they tell the difference. Or how they can tell which parts are past and which parts are future. Because I’m sure they can do that.

But since they can in fact see the Force, and can in fact see Time, they also see that something isn’t right. The Dark Side is grown bigger than the Light Side, especially in the not-too-distant future. And Time… well, they can all tell somehow that something’s not right. That something hasn’t been right all this time.

Well, the four of them end up in the future—oh, we’ll say about a decade or two—and are separated. Rey and Finn are together, but they don’t know where Snoke or R2 are. But then they see what this future is like. Snoke, still in Kylo Ren’s body, is in complete control of the galaxy. His Knights of Ren control the people’s minds. He reigns supreme with his Sith Queen, known as Averna, who never shows her face. All opposition is gone. In this future, Snoke’s plan has succeeded.
  

Something is very wrong here...

 

It’s at this point that R2 finds them again. And he’s more excited than ever, beeping and whistling all over the place. They don’t know what it is. R2 plays them a message, recorded in his data banks. But it’s not the one we’re familiar with, the one where Leia asks Obi-Wan Kenobi for help. It’s a message recorded by Luke.

And it’s not the Luke of the Original Trilogy, but an older Luke. He is dressed in Jedi robes. He says that Snoke is attacking the Jedi Library to capture the books about time travel. If the worst comes to the worst, and he succeeds… well, that’s why he’s recording this message. 
 

You see, he’s installed, in R2, a Kyber crystal. R2 is protected from the time waves, and will remember what really happened, if the past is ever changed. Luke gave him instructions to find someone who would be able to stop Snoke, and show them this message.

(Side note: I think he also explains about the map. It’s actually a locator, activated by the piece Lor San Tekka gave Poe Dameron in the first movie. It locates Luke’s Force presence by using the Kyber crystal or something. It’s very experimental tech, though, so it might shut R2 down until the activator is plugged in. I don’t know. But what that means is that Luke wants to rejoin the fight, no matter what is changed in his past, and gives them a means to get to him.)

 

Well, he tells them Snoke’s plan was to change the past and get rid of all opposition, so he can successfully take over the present. That’s the plan that succeeded and resulted in the future the heroes are currently in, and that’s what was wrong in the Force-Time Continuum.

  

Luke starts to mention something further, an ultimate weapon Snoke created. But just then, Han comes in and tells him they’re gonna have company real soon. Luke draws his lightsaber, then ends the message by admonishing the heroes. They have to go back in time and stop Snoke from changing the past, and restore the galaxy. They’re the only hope they have left. Then the message cuts off.

 

Well, the trio heads off to fix the timeline, but they are followed by the Snoke-as-Kylo from their time, as well as Queen Averna. There’s a chase scene through the Continuum as they find their way into each of these different places in time. It’s easy enough to find them, since they can physically see things that are wrong in time. There’s chases and fights, and they change stuff back. Sometimes, they’re stopped from fixing things—oh, and sometimes, Rey sees someone changing things, someone who looks like Queen Averna (but not the one chasing them).

 

So they keep changing things, but then they see that the messed-up parts of Time keep popping back up. Something keeps changing things back. And it’s not Snoke-as-Kylo, because he’s right there, and it doesn’t appear to be Averna. So the heroes go to the mess-up that goes back the farthest. The place is a Sith Temple, somewhere in the wilderness.

 

But there’s a fight between the two heroes and the two villains. And during the fight, Averna’s face is revealed, and that’s when they get a huge shock. Because it’s the face of REY. They don’t understand what’s going on. But as they fight and hide, Snoke-as-Kylo explains.

 

Turns out Darth Plagueis really could manipulate midichlorians, and at this one special Sith place (and I think it’s the last one the Jedi didn’t destroy), he created a Sith being that could be the greatest Force-user ever. But Darth Sidious, afraid that this being would make him obsolete, decided to sabotage this plan, and kidnapped the being before her Sith genes could be activated, sending her forward in time.

 

Of course, he didn’t know that Plagueis had made a clone of himself, just in case. The clone found out Sidious’ plan, and went to find the Sith. The clone went through many times trying to find her, and got scarred up pretty bad. (About here, they realize the clone was Snoke.)

 

Well, Snoke found out she was in this time, but didn’t know where. So he decided to use it to his advantage, and took Kylo Ren under his wing, setting up the First Order with resources stolen from other times. Turned out she was the perfect age to begin the mission, so Snoke also stopped Kylo’s search for Luke after Rey got there.

 


Why? Because Rey is the Sith being. Their plan to change time to their advantage is imprinted on her genes. She carries it out without even trying or knowing what she’s doing.
 

 

All Snoke needs is to activate her innate Sith nature, and she will become unstoppable. I guess Averna (Future Sith Rey) went back in time after she became a Sith and changed things to be really bad.

 

At the end of this explanation, Snoke-as-Kylo finds Rey. He tries to activate those Sith genes, and red lightning dances around her, and actually hurts her. But every time he tries to do that surge of Dark energy, it dies back down. Something is stopping it. Is it the Light Side? No, there would be blue lightning if it was. They don’t know what it is.

 

 

But Finn and R2 rescue Rey. They get split up when they run off, but they manage to hide. They also realize that the Sith Temple they're near is the place where Plagueis is about to "create" Rey. In fact, Plagueis is on his way there right then. Finn is the one who realizes this, and looks for the others so he can tell them. He spots Rey and R2, and it appears as though she just finished recording something, like a message. He comes over to them.

Rey says that it’s literally imprinted on her genes to mess up their future. They can’t unravel her being and reorganize her DNA—that would take a Force-user the likes of which the world has never seen (except in Darth Plagueis, and he’s clearly not going to cooperate). The only way to change things back to the way they should be is if she never existed. So they come up with a plan to stop this.

 

Rey, lightsabre in hand, steps out in sight of Snoke-as-Kylo and Averna. She says she knows why his Force surge isn’t working, but she’ll only tell him if he lets Finn and R2 go free. He agrees, because Finn is stupid (he thinks). She tells him that there can’t be two Sith versions of her in the same time—it would cause a paradoxical imbalance in the Force, so the Force compensates by preventing the creation of another Sith Rey. She read about it in the Jedi Books. It makes sense to Snoke, so he orders Averna to return to her own time.

 

Finally, facing Snoke alone, Rey throws away the lightsabre. Snoke comes up and does his Force surge again—at the same time that Plagueis is creating Rey out of midichlorians. She’s currently not ‘she’, but a swirling mass of red and black lightning.

 

So Snoke-as-Kylo is turning Rey into Averna, but he forgot about Finn. And Finn takes the lightsabre that Rey dropped and stabs it into the Sith-storm that Plagueis is manipulating. That destroys it. Rey vanishes. Then there’s a huge explosion when he gets rid of the Sith-storm, and it destroys the place.

 

What happens then? Does Snoke vanish forever? Is he kicked out of Kylo, because his mind is reverting to normal? I think so. Kylo is returning to normal, because he doesn’t have his lightsabre, I guess—his mind is being restored to the natural, good future version, the one where Snoke isn’t in his mind. So Snoke’s evil Sith spirit goes out before he can be destroyed and goes into the Force-Time Continuum. He can’t do any harm there. He probably becomes one with the Dark Side or whatever.

 

Kylo, upon Snoke’s exit, falls over, unconscious. Finn gets him, and uses the lightsabre and the technique Rey showed him to send him, R2, and Kylo back to the future.

 

(And yes, he is able to do that, even though it’s a very difficult Force thing. You see, after he destroyed Plagueis’ Sith-storm, and everything was going back to normal, he felt a surge of energy, as if the power of the Force just suddenly flowed into him. He wasn’t sure why at the time.)

 

Kylo wakes up in that time, still remembering what happened. Finn tells him it was just a bad dream. And he believes it.

 

But now they look around at the present, and see how it’s changed. Kylo remembers it—or, I should say, Ben. He woke up with all his memories of this time. But Finn doesn’t remember this present. Not at first. But the longer he stays, and the more people he meets, the more new memories appear in his head of what his present self is like.

 

 

To start with, Han and Luke are alive and well, and they’re happy. Luke is the teacher of many young Jedi, and the Jedi are thriving. Han and Leia are happily married with several children (of whom Ben is only the second). In fact, the oldest of these is actually Poe, who had in the alternate timeline been taken away from them early on.

 

The galaxy is at peace. Those who had been in the First Order—Phasma and Hux specifically—are no longer enemies. They’re probably in the Senate or something, as is Holdo. Finn recognizes Phasma, his old commander, but she doesn’t recognize him. She’s very different.

 

But what about Finn himself? For one thing, I think Rose is his girlfriend—his pretty, feisty, but above all, stable girlfriend. She’s actually got a consistent personality. But for another thing, Finn himself is a Jedi now. His family (yes, family) put him into training with Luke, and he’s one of his best students. Might even be a classmate of Ben. He’s still friends with Poe, too. But he’s now one of the top new Jedi.

 

That night, at the end of the movie, he calls them all together. He plays for them a message from Rey, recorded on R2 (so it survived the time change). Nobody there knows who she is, except for Finn and R2. They say that she’s a friend, and a hero.

 

But she knew nobody would know her. She knew what was going to have to be done. So she recorded this message. She says that even though she wasn’t meant to, she’s learned a lot from those she knows to be heroes, and considers her friends. She's learned that they should honour the past, and never let it burn or be forgotten. That they should take what time they have now, and use it to work hard for peace, and fight for it if needs be, always staying true to each other. That if they do, they will build a future of strength, of light, of hope.

 

And at the very end of her message, she actually changes her expression, and smiles.

 

Trumpet flourish! Roll credits! Everything is right in the galaxy once again!

 

Well, I certainly hope that you all were able to stick with me throughout that whole thing, because it was long.


But that’s my idea of Episode XI of Star Wars (coming out... what is it, next year?). Not too bad, I think. Of course, they probably won’t do anything like it. But since we don’t know anything about it yet, who knows? Even if they don’t, it’ll always be here.


Either way, I hope you enjoyed this little How It Should End—the first—no, I'm wrong, second fanfiction I've posted on my blog! If you include the Summer Holiday Tag. Anyway, let me know what you thought of it down in the comments!


Happy Back to the Future Day, everyone!