'Miss Author...' The ever-medically alert CMC began, watching Jack draw on her arm with a pen that might or might not have been terribly healthy for her to be using on her bare skin, '...What are you doing?'
"Making notes." Jack replied, writing twenty-one abbreviations of the paradigms on her arm. Right over it, she'd taken great care to copy the kanji for the whole of the Jedi Code, including an unusual combination of three different symbols to make up one kanji for the final 'The Force'. For the twenty-one paradigms, however, Jack had only gotten so far as to write down the first letter, maybe a second one if there were other words that were spelled similarly, in neat rows of three by seven.
'Right.' Sissy remarked, 'You never know when you'll have a pop quiz on the Jedi Code and the virtues they're supposed to emulate.'
Jack resisted the urge to kick Sissy.
"They're here so I can remember and remind myself in the middle of the day. Y'know, like a meditation chant, or something."
'Yeah, because it's just been doing you SO much good this year, what with all the nightmares, and the times you snapped at people, and the mental breakdowns...' Akitaro agreed, every bit as sweet and understanding as Sissy had been.
And now, Jack glowered at Akitaro. Why did all her characters have to be so sarcastic?
'Why not also look up the kanji for the twelve paradigms?' Taro asked, examining the letters Jack was writing on her arm. To give herself some credit, Jack had at least written them in Aurebesh. Still, Star Wars nerd that she was, those letters were just the same as Roman letters to her eyes, now.
"I wanted to, but I went to look them up and there were a lot of different kanji, depending on the context and meaning of the word in that situation. For example, the word loyalty has three different kanji attached. One was the same as the character for justice, but then, we have two different concepts. The second was loyalty as most would define it: allegiance, devotion, fidelity... but the third was loyalty as in a pledge of loyalty, which had a different character for the word."
Each of her Japanese characters thought this over for a moment, before understanding what she meant.
'So, which characters, or which meanings or contexts do you use?' Tensora-san summarized.
"Exactly." Jack agreed. Then she paused, "Come to think of it, what do other members of the Temple make of the paradigms? How do they interpret them, how much importance do they have, that kind of thing?"
'Alright, so that's the topic: How does everyone else here define or view the paradigms? Prowess, justice, loyalty, defense, courage, faith, humility, fearlessness, nobility, franchise, pure motive, discipline, focus, discretion, meditation, training, integrity, morality, engagement, intervention, harmonizing...' Kendalina recited, then paused to count backwards, '...That's twenty-one, right?'
