In Days Gone By[]
"Omnium rerum principia parva sunt."
"The beginnings of all things are small."
A Corellian Street Rat[]
“The streets lie, the sidewalks lie, everything lies You can try and read it but you're gonna get it wrong...all wrong The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter but you're gonna get it wrong And it's gonna sink its teeth into your flesh and pull you to the bottom.”
Without the benefit (or detriment) of a family, Bethany grew up on the streets of Coronet City, Corellia. Her closest friends, and indeed, the only ones she considered "family" were the other kids that had banned together to form a small gang. Over the years, the small band grew, from just herself and Roan, a street boy a year her senior, to include a variety of kids of varying species, all who viewed the pack as their family. Bethany was closest to Roan by far. Perhaps due to their age, perhaps due to the fact that they were nearly the surrogate parents of this group of beggars and thieves, it was hard to tell. She learned to pick pockets, pick locks, some of the most basic mechanics and most importantly to her at the time, how to slice into a variety of electronic locks and computer access panels. Though the life of a thief suited the slip of a girl well, she always knew that she wanted more. Someday perhaps she'd be a real mechanic, or, if she could ever get her hands on a ship, a starship pilot.... someday.
She took the last name "Kismet" when she was eleven, having no surname of her own. She'd picked the pocket of a wealthy Corellian, Hunter Kismet. Roan decided that "Hunter" would be an appropriate name to add to his own, while Bethany decided that she liked the sound of the word "Kismet." No one has ever questioned her as to her rights to that name.
About this time she had her first run in with Rikkard, a man she would come in contact with many years from now and under unexpected circumstances. She, Roan, and the rest of the gang had come across a broken down landspeeder, likely left by its owner until the machine could be towed... it was towed... by a band of children, off to a hiding place in the depths of the city. Looking over the mechanics, Bethany was certain she would be able to fix the machine and sell it. None of the grifter kids had a use for the vehicle itself, but the credits it would bring it would feed their little band for a month. The one thing she was missing were the tools to do it with. Without hesitation and with Roan's help, she snuck into a local mechanic's shop, lifting the tools she needed for the job. Oddly enough, it was the act of returning the tools that led to her being caught by the shop owner, a grizzled old mechanic named Rikkard. Though initially planning to cart her off to CorSec officials, his attitude changed when he found out that she was returning the tools. Though she could have gotten away with the tools themselves, or even sold them, she had come back, intending to put them back where she had found them when she was finished. Rikkard let her go, and even offered her a part time job doing odd things around the shop. The job eventually moved into a near apprenticeship, with Rikkard allowing her to help on jobs as they came up, giving her a chance to get truly familiar with the inner workings of the machines that were brought in.
When she was thirteen, events were put into motion that would shape the rest of her life.
While attempting to pick the pocket of an elderly, white haired man, Bethany was shocked when his hand reached out, plucking her wrist out of the air before she was even able to touch him. With a vice like, but surprisingly gentle, grip, the older man turned to face her, kind blue eyes looking down at the street rat.
"You can be so much more than what you have become," he said quietly.
He released her hand the moment she tried to pull away. Within moments she was lost in the crowd.
Flight to Naboo[]
"Sometimes by running away from what you fear, you end up running toward it. It makes you act in ways you might not normally, and that is truly the heart of fear."
After that fateful encounter, Bethany decided to leave Coronet City. She couldn't risk leading that strange man back to her crew. It was a rule, never to bring danger back with you. Though she couldn't know it at the time, it was more the Force nudging her than her own fear for her friends that drove her away from the only place she'd ever known. Though she never saw any of them again, even long into her training as a Jedi, she thought of them, especially Roan, and wondered what they had become.
She spent several months traveling, earning money as a mechanic on several merchant and smuggler ships. Duing this time she learned the basics of piloting, the owners often indulgently letting the girl handle the ship in times of sub-hyperspace travel between gravity wells. Though it wouldn't be until her time with the Jedi that the skills she picked up would be tested in a combat situation, the clear ease she had with the machines and her ability to learn quickly earned her more flight hours than perhaps the pilots had originally intended.
It was while working with one of the smugglers that Bethany first came into contact with one of her oldest friends, the boy that would one day become the well known Jedi Master, C'orringath Ven'traas. Finding herself involved with a raid on the prison planet of Kessel along with the smugglers, she helped rescue not only the boy she would known as Corrie in later years, but a number of slaves whom she would keep contact with over the years. Though they couldn't know it then, C'orringath and Bethany were just setting off on a road of what would be a decade long friendship.
Her travels brought her finally to Naboo, and though she didn't know it was to be her final destination at the time, something here called to her. She spent those first weeks wandering around the city, taking in the sheer and amazing differences between this wholly organic and lovely city versus the one she had grown up in. The sights, even the smells were different. There was not the rampant crime, a lack of beggars and homeless in the streets that she had seen on Corellia. Just this tranquility that she'd never felt before.
The calmness and peace seemed to billow out from one location in the city in particular. The Jedi Temple. Bethany knew little of the Jedi. And what she knew had never appealed to her. It was this peace that started to change her mind. It was also something about the proximity to these people that perhaps brought out something in her that she had never thought of before. Sensations seemed stronger, the few times here when it would happen, her sense of danger, of wrongness, was more acute than it had ever been before. On more than one occasion she realized that she had removed herself from a dangerous situation before she had even consciously realized that she was in it. And it left her tired, exhausted... and confused. After a brief meeting with a padawan, Windsor Gray, the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, the Jedi would be able to help her- not to train her, but to cure her. It was with that in mind that she vowed to go to the Jedi that following day, and to ask for them to get rid of whatever Force illness plauged her.
And Theed Burned[]
“The fire you kindle for your enemy often burns yourself more than them.”
Though there was no way for her to know, Bethany arrived in Theed on Naboo mere weeks before the infamous Siege of Theed.
The Life of a Padawan[]
"You must learn to walk to the edge of the light, and perhaps a few steps into the darkness; for you will find that the light will appear and move ahead of you."
Actions of a Jedi Healer[]
"One of the secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others”
Thrust into Masterhood[]
"There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending."
A Teacher of Ways[]
"A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others."
"My teaching is not a philosophy. It is the result of direct experience... My teaching is a means of practice, not something to hold onto or worship. My teaching is like a raft used to cross the river. Only a fool would carry the raft around after he had already reached the other shore of liberation," she said once, in gentle admonishment.
Ghost of a Rose[]
"Promise me when you see a white rose you'll think of me... "
Healers of Lianna[]
"We have not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things are connected."
A Curious Meeting[]
"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it.... It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
Under a Glass Moon[]
"...a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing."
The Future[]
"The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."