It's taken me this long to realize that I've dropped bits of hints here and there about Ara writing short stories, having a publisher, having them edited by the shadows before they can be sent to the publisher, etc....
SO. In the new timeline, Ara gets her sexuality training at age 22, and once that's done she goes to The Teaching Dungeon with Quinlan and Jitters. She learns a lot and does a lot. The Force is her wingman and nudges her towards or away from various partners. Sometimes the "away from" is a "not yet," and Ara notices that the "not yet" nudges-away tend to be in relation to older male authority figures, and when she starts getting the nudge-toward starting at age 24, she makes the educated guess that the Force was waiting for the older man in question to see her as an adult.
ANYWAY. Ara has kept a detailed journal since she was an initiate. Once she hits puberty (at 15, old for a baseline human but young for a Sphinxian peasant), she starts to have fantasies, pause for TLK and recovery (well, recovery is a life-long process but the two years immediately following are the most intensive), then Ara
gets her groove back (the events of the actual Sixth Night That Never Happened are roughly the same but Ara is 17), reads
all the things and fantasizes and writes it down,
finally gets her S-training at 22, gets into kink stuff, has a wide variety of sex with a wide variety of adults, and writes. down. everything.
And after awhile, she decides that she wants to submit some of her own stories to the literary magazine that publishes her favorite kinky and/or sexy short stories. It's kind of embarrassing, because she starts by telling her Master and Step-Master (Jocasta Nu and Yan Dooku), because even if you include her mind-healer, they are are her most trusted adults, even now that she's been Knighted. Master Jo cringes through her almost-daughter's sex stories but sees the literary merit. Master Yan doesn't read the stories but takes Head Archivist Nu's word for it. Dooku's already left the order by now (he left shortly before Ara's S-training), so he's already the Count of Serenno. He's had his doubts about the Order and Ara had grown up debating Jedi Order and Galactic Republic policy with Jo and Yan, and they disagree on a fair amount, but when it comes to money, Ara knows she's out of her depth. Master Yan sets up a bank account for Ara on Serenno, that only she can access.
Ara thinks that her earnings should go directly to the Order, since they've funded her entire life and education since she was five months old, but Yan convinces her that there's security and freedom in having funds that nobody but you can touch. She agrees with that, but lists the Order as her next of kin and quietly vows to draw from the account as little as possible or not at all. Eventually it'll be settled that the initial payment for each story will go into Ara's bank account, but any royalties will go to the Fenrish Rangers, the anti-slavery group that helped Jo and Yan and the other Jedi on that mission rescue Ara and the other captives during TLK.
Ara and Master Jo take her stories to the Council to get their permission to submit Ara's erotic short stories for publication. After all, these stories are written from the point of view of a Jedi Senior Padawan/later a young Jedi Knight, so while it could [insert better word than "humanize"] the Jedi, it could also be bad PR. The Council assigns two Shadows to make sure that the Jedi equivalent of state secrets aren't revealed, and that the "serial numbers" are thoroughly "filed off" of any real people, Jedi or civilian, and that while the Order doesn't have to be portrayed as perfect, it should be portrayed in as good a light as possible.
So her short stories get published. Her self-insert original character, and her pen name, is Relly Adoy. Relly is one of Perry the Padawan's creche-mates (Perry the Padawan is a series of stories for initiates with "Perry the Padawan and..." type titles. This is my worldbuilding, not ATLL. Ara will later describe her stories as "Perry the Padawan Gets His Freak On."), and Adoy is "Yoda" spelled backwards. She honors Yoda in this way because Yoda accepted her for who she was, weirdness and all (
this, but in the new timeline she's ten by the calendar but six developmentally).
Some of the stories are based on Ara's real sex life, some are fantasies, some are combinations of the two. Often Ara will lie about which stories are which to protect the identities of the people the characters are based on--especially the fantasized-about, who might not know that they've been fantasized about by The Horny Little Jedi.
Yep, that's what she goes with. She's 24 when she starts to publish (so developmentally 16), and she thinks it's hilarious and loves the titling scheme. (She'll learn sometime around age 30 that the age of consent for a Sphinxian peasant is 25, but she's exiled from Sphinx, she's a citizen of Coruscant and a legal adult by Coruscant law, and she's spent all of her life that she can remember trying to keep up with her agemates and therefore growing up before her time.)
I came up with some of these titles back in November/December 2023. There were two daydreams that were going to be part of the story but wound up not being canon once I decided that Ara and Obi-Wan are never going to hook up. With the THLJ stories, I can repurpose those into in-universe stories, but they'll be unpublishable and they'll only be shared with Yoda once their D/s is established, and Yoda can share them with Obi-Wan at his discretion.
Anyhow, here are some of the titles I came up with:
The Horny Little Jedi...
...Should Really Know Better By Now
...Meets Her Match
...Rides the Green Dragon
...Goes Out On The Town
...Really Dodged A Blaster Bolt There
...Release Her Pent-Up Energy Into The Force And Does Her Homework. (Just Kidding.)
...In The Dungeon
...Respects Her Elders
...Doesn't Kink-Shame The Jedi Fetishists (Much)
...And The Petty Revenge
...Uses Her Safe Word
...Tries Age Play Exactly Once
( some nsfw under the cut )That's all the detail I have for now.
No, there's one more thing. At some point Ara is going to win a literary award for one or more of her erotic short stories, and there's only a handful of people she can tell because of the whole super secret pen name thing (she doesn't find her sex life or her fantasy life shameful, but she also doesn't want the whole Temple to know or to become a subject of gossip, especially since the small percentage of the Order that know her name either know because of TLK or because of her promiscuous reputation under her own name). She describes her character Relly Adoy in the stories as being a few centimeters taller than herself and having shoulder-length straight red hair (the real Arala Melnau is 4'6" with long curly blonde hair), and a shape-shifter assumes the character description and wears an earpiece so Ara can feed them her speech and comments for the reception after (Ara's not the only recipient, so it's a fairly long ceremony and reception). The magazine publisher is in on the deception because Master Yan did a lot of the initial negotiating before even the first of Ara's stories got published and there are severe penalties for the magazine if anything they do contributes to Ara's true identity being revealed to the public.
Okay, now that's it for now. If anyone has questions about anything in the Arala Melnau 'verse, or prompts, or constructive criticism, please comment. I'm going to post this stuff anyway, but it'd be nice to know that I'm not just typing into the void.
Edit, 4/21/24: There's no way Master Jo or the Council would let a Padawan publish smutty short stories, even if that Padawan was a legal adult and post-S. No, it'd be after she was knighted at 25, which would feel right in the Force, though they won't know why until Ara (or Arrek) learns that the Sphinxian age of majority is 25 standard for her caste. As in, only after being knighted would she even bring it up. She'd probably be 26 by the time the first story was scrubbed by the Shadows and published, so only a year's worth of stories by the time of the events of ATLL. But ATLL and FF take place over 4 years, and there's all the time after that, so there's plenty of time to have mention of different stories and writing awards (if any).
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