Anakin stepped up to the balustrade beside her, leaning in very close. He closed his eyes and inhaled the sweet scent of Padme, felt the warmth of her skin.
'When I was in Level Three, we used to come here for school retreat,' she said. She pointed out across the way, to another island. 'See that island? We used to swim there every day. I love the water.'
'I do, too. I guess it comes from growing up on a desert planet.' He was staring at her again, his eyes soaking in her beauty. He could tell that Padme sensed his stare, but she pointedly continued to look out over the water.
'We used to lie on the sand and let the sun dry us… and try to guess the names of the birds singing.'
'I don't like the sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating. And it gets everywhere.'
Padme turned to look back at him
'Not here,' Anakin went on. 'It's like that on Tatooine- everything's like that on Tatooine. But here, everything's soft, and smooth.' As he finished, hardly even aware of the motion, he reached out and stroked Padme's arm. He nearly pulled back when he realized what he was doing, but since Padm didn't object, he let himself stay close to her. She seemed a bit tentative, a bit scared, but she wasn't pulling away.
'There was a very old man who lived on the island,' she said. Her brown eyes seemed to be looking far away, across the years. 'He used to make glass out of sand-and vases and necklaces out of the glass. They were magical.'
Anakin moved a bit closer, staring at her intensely until she turned to face him. 'Everything here is magical,' he said.
'You could look into the glass and see the water. The way it ripples and moves. It looked so real, but it wasn't.'
'Sometimes, when you believe something to be real, it becomes real.' It seemed to Anakin as if she wanted to look away. But she didn't. Instead, she was falling deeper into his eyes, and he into hers.
'I used to think if you looked too deeply into the glass, you would lose yourself,' she said, her voice barely a whisper.
'I think it's true…' He moved forward as he spoke, brushing his lips against hers, and for a moment, she didn't resist, closing her eyes, losing herself. Anakin pressed in closer, a real and deep kiss, sliding his lips across hers slowly. He could lose himself here, could kiss her for hours, forever…
But then Padme pulled back, suddenly, as if waking from a dream. 'No, I shouldn't have done that.'
'I'm sorry,' Anakin said. 'When I'm around you, my mind is no longer my own.'
He stared at her hard again, beginning that descent into the glass, losing himself in her beauty. But the moment had passed, and Padme gathered her arms in close and leaned again on the balustrade, looking out over the water.
As soon as the starlight shrank back from its speed-shift elongation, Obi- Wan Kenobi saw the 'missing' planet, exactly where the gravity flux had predicted it would be.
'There it is, Arfour, right where it should be,' he said to his astromech droid, who tootled in response from the left wing of the fighter. 'Our missing planet, Kamino. Those files were altered.' R4 beeped curiously.
'I have no idea who might have done it,' Obi-Wan replied. 'Maybe we'll find some answers down there.'
He ordered R4 to disengage the hyperspace ring, a band encircling the center area of the starfighter, with a pair of powerful hyperdrive engines, one on either side. Then he took the Delta-7 away, gliding in casually, registering information on his various scanners.
As he neared the planet, he saw that it was an ocean world, with no visible landmasses showing behind the nearly solid cloud cover. He checked his sensors, searching for any other ships that might be in the area, not really sure of what he should expect. His computer registered a transmission directed his way, asking for identification, and he flipped his signal beacon on, transferring all the information. A moment later, to his relief, there came a second transmission from Kamino, this one containing approach coordinates to a place called Tipoca City.
'Well, here we go, Arfour. Time to find some answers.' The droid beeped and set the coordinates into the nav computer, and the fighter swooped down at the planet, breaking atmosphere and soaring along over rain- lashed, whitecapped seas. The trip across the stormy sky was rougher than the atmospheric entry, but the fighter held its course perfectly, and soon after, Obi-Wan got his first look at Tipoca City. It was all gleaming domes and angled, gracefully curving walls, built on gigantic stilts rising out of the lashing sea.
Obi-Wan spotted the appropriate landing pad, but did a flyby first, crossing the city and circling about, wanting to observe this spectacular place from all angles. It seemed as much a work of art as a practical and magnificent piece of engineering, the whole of the city reminding him more of the Senate Building and the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. It was brightly lit at all the right places to highlight the domes and curving walls.
'There's so much to see, Arfour,' the Jedi lamented. He had visited hundreds of worlds in his life, but viewing a place as strange and beautiful as Tipoca City only reminded him that there were thousands and thousands more yet to see, too many for any one person to visit even if he did nothing else for the entirety of his life.
At last Obi-Wan put his fighter down on the designated landing pad. He pulled his hood up tight over him, then slid back his canopy and scrambled out against the wind and the rain, rushing across the permacrete to a tower across the way. A door slid open before him, spilling out brilliant light, and he went through, crossing into a brightly lit white room.
'Master Jedi, so good to see you,' came a melodic voice. Obi-Wan pushed back his hood, which had offered little protection from the driving rain, and brushed the water from his hair. Wiping his face, he turned to face the speaker, and then he paused, caught by the image of the Kaminoan.
'I am Taun We,' she introduced herself. She was taller than Obi-Wan, pasty white and amazingly slender, with gracefully curving lines, but there was nothing insubstantial about her. Thin, yes, but packed with a solid and powerful presence. Her eyes, huge, almond-shaped, and dark, were sparkling clear, like those of an inquisitive child. Her nose was no more than a pair of vertical slits, connected by a horizontal one, sitting on the bridge above her upper lip. She reached out gracefully toward him with an arm that moved as smoothly as any dancer
