#building in little easter eggs for my KotOR friends has been fun

[kotorswtor]

Heck with it, we’re posting this. Here’s the Episode 0 to a Mando/Force-sensitive OC series I’m working on. Master post and/or coherent formatting to follow once I’m not on mobile.

The Mandalorian had a foundling, a commission to return it to its kin, and despite himself, no plan and no clue for how to proceed.

Initial attempts to identify the Child by species failed. The Armorer had suggested that its strange abilities were characteristic of a people called the Jedi, and he’d undertaken research on them as a starting point. Information on these sorcerers was thin on the ground, though, and scarcer yet when one tried to separate fact from wild confabulation. The historical enemy of his people, like his people, had been lately persecuted by the rise of the Empire. Few had relevant knowledge even before the propaganda campaigns and the fear of reprisal complicated the search for answers, and for those who did, reticence was a hard-to-break habit. A university librarian on Raltiir, who had laughed harder than he thought strictly necessary, corrected his assumption that all Jedi were knee-high, gundark-eared, and green. Like Mandalorians, they could be drawn from any race. While that absolved him of the need to locate a tribe of beings that no resource he consulted and no subject-matter expert he contacted had ever seen before, it created a new problem- the search parameters had exploded from no one to potentially anyone.

Later that evening, while the bulkheads of the Razor Crest vibrated in sympathetic outrage with the Child’s complaints because he had prevented it from dropping everything not bolted down into the vac-head for the fourth time that day, it occurred to him that he might have an idea of whom to consult next. He’d met the contact early in his hunting career, and it had ended so bizarrely, he’d done his best to block it out of his memory in the meantime. But discomfort was becoming second nature, and any lead was preferable to scrabbling around for the single grain he needed in two tons of scorching Nevarran sand.

The job had looked a little suspect from the start. As advertised, it was a straightforward, preferably live apprehension of a human female, about fifteen standard years old, from an off-grid farming commune on Dantooine’s sprawling, empty Khoonda plains. At first he’d ignored it; the assignment was far enough out of his way that the pay barely compensated for travel time, fuel, and the likelihood of being obliged to wait out checkpoints or inspections along the route. The file sat in the back of the queue over several weeks, the number of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors of record metastasized, and the payout on offer steadily grew. In his experience, the former indicated probable Imperial involvement, and the latter meant that the job was more complicated than advertised. Eventually he ran out of more attractive prospects. A job that began as a well-organized, cooperative engagement on Alzoc-3 devolved into a barely-salvaged, chaotic scramble. After that, a solitary, simple gig, even one with a long commute, sounded like a welcome change.

He put the Crest down on a cracked, rutted landing pad. The precipitously-tilting remains of a sunken, four-spired compound loomed over a brick-bordered expanse of weeds that might’ve been a temple precinct in ages past, an expanse of fallow hills and neat, square tracts of farmland. Standing on the loading ramp, he surveyed the area, first with a set of quadnoculars, second with the infrared sensors in his helm. He found no present or recent indications of sentient activity- deeply suspicious at the height of planting season. He slung the Amban over his shoulder, ran a quick mental check on his other armaments, and set off in the direction indicated by the tracking fob.

The further he progressed into the settlement, the more unsettling the scene became. Not only were there no workers about the usual chores, he saw no livestock, heard no wild animals. For once in his life,the sight of survey droids or automated harvesters might have been welcome, but there were none to be found.

His prior intelligence-gathering had indicated that the Sandral stakehold was a haven for deserted troops, refugees, and asylum-seekers, fleeing the last gasp of the Clone Wars or the magma-like subsumptive spread of the Empire. That information seemed suspicious; usually communities of bucolic non-combatants didn’t put up enough resistance to warrant a large and growing bounty. Now he saw that he wasn’t looking at a pacifist enclave so much as a competent, well-prepared army under siege.

Something crunched under his boot. He lifted his foot to find a human scapula and the blasting cap from a buried explosive. Flowering weeds were already sprouting in the crater. He looked up and noted that the landscape was dotted with similar scars. Fifteen careful paces later, a toe scuffed against the chitinous shell of a very large dead arthropod. Similar fragments carpeted a dip in the ground, hard packed earth covering what he guessed had once been the entrance to a nest. A neat stack of bundles wrapped in shining fibers and assembled on one side of the hollow were, he belatedly realized, not bales of livestock feed. He passed the blast-scarred head of a cistern. The jagged line painted over the cover and the reek emanating from under it indicated that it had been repurposed as a mass grave.

The tracker led him to a squat, sprawling compound sunken into the top of a hill. He made a wide circuit around the facility, noting fortifications, armaments, and a faint infravision impression of the sentients inside. The disarticulated carcass of an Imperial troop transport sprawled across the landing pad on the roof, and the massive front door had been welded shut. A small service bay door to the rear looked like a more likely prospect.

He had a breaching charge placed and partly armed when the door to the compound shot open from under his hands. A human adolescent, raw-boned and hollow-eyed, slid out and squinted into the light. Her hair was darkened and matted down with sweat, and between the grime and healing bruises, her natural skin tone was hard to determine. Even from behind his helmet, he could tell that she hadn’t had the opportunity to bathe or change clothes in a long time.

“Atash Anteros?”

She scowled and flapped her hands at her soot-smudged, much-mended tunic “No, the queen of Naboo, can’t you tell?”

A wail rose from inside the house. Sighing, she shut the door again, abruptly cutting it off.

She peered into the void of his visor for a long moment with beskar-gray eyes. “I know why you’re here,” she said finally. “Let’s get on with it.”

Unsettled and uncertain whether his blaster was the better thing to be grabbing, he reached for the binders on his belt.

She spat something that sounded midway between a cough and a curse. “Do unarmed children usually give you much trouble?”

He shrugged off the taunt in silence, reclaimed and stowed the explosives. She blundered past him with the unsteady, wobbling gait of someone who’d spent a long time in confinement. His hand hovered by his holster.

“You want a fight, so that this feels worth your effort.” she commented without turning around. “Given the armor, that tracks. Should have come earlier.” She jerked her head to the side. A combine thresher, cockpit shot out and internals still smoldering, was augured into an embankment a few yards away. He counted several pairs of stormtrooper limbs caught in its tines

The sheer surreality of the scene outweighed his usual professional reticence ”How much earlier?”

She shot a bleary, quizzical glance at the horizon. “Siege started in earnest, what, about ten weeks ago? Maybe closer to twelve. This is my first trip outside in about four.” She sidestepped the buckled remains of an Imperial helmsman’s cuirasse embedded in the dirt. “Can’t say much for the re-landscaping that’s been done in the meantime.”

Her blithe demeanor was undercut by evident exhaustion. She stumbled and nearly fell three times on the way back to the ship. He threw out an arm to catch her each time. Each time she acknowledged the gesture with a sharp nod.

They arrived within sight of the Razor Crest and he keyed in the remote-unlock sequence on his vambrace, watching her carefully for a sudden change of bearing. “No holding cell on the ship. You’ll be placed in carbon freeze.” he said.

If anything, she looked even less poised to fight or flee. Maybe just more tired. “It will be nice to sleep, finally.” she replied, earnestly wistful. “I’m so tired of…” she tilted her head to indicate the heaps of wrecked machinery and disturbed turf and the half-toppled temple “...all of this.” She faced the tumbledown remains of the temple and bent forward slightly in an approximation of a bow, then looked to him to lead on.

He ushered her up the loading ramp and into the ship. He thought she’d belatedly made up her mind to fight when she stopped a few steps into the hold with her hands out, fingers splayed; it turned out that she hadn’t adjusted to the sudden reduction in light. He guided her toward and around into the mobile freezing unit with one hand on her shoulder and the other close to his blaster.

She edged forward. There was the resistance he was expecting. He caught her arm and pressed her back into the freezing chamber’s frame with an annoyed grunt.

Her free hand darted out in a blur, and found a sliver of bare skin under his vambrace, between his gauntlet and the sleeve hem of his hauberk. Her fingertips connected, and a silent, invisible explosion ripped through him. His ears buzzed. The deck tilted and fell away from beneath his boots. The hand that should have unholstered and fired his pistol in a fraction of a second refused to respond.

He heard her breathing, her heartbeat alongside his. His familiar, comfortable armor grew crowded and airless, as if she’d not so much destroyed as infiltrated it, crawled into it with him. Sparks bloomed behind his eyes and resolved into images from elsewhere: a procession of motley Guild hunters, Imperial infantry and featureless, faceless suits of black armor collided with farmers and artisans. Torrents of plasma fire and arcs of strange glowing, chakram-hilted staves cut through a poisonous haze of weaponized fertilizer and pesticide. Light artillery cut ragged wounds into farmland already scarred by improvised fortifications and hastily-excavated graves.

He jerked his hand away with a yelp and slammed down the button to engage the carbon freeze.

“Beroya, Returcye’mhi.” she murmured through the hissing gas. Maybe we’ll meet again, Hunter.

“Huh?”

The asset’s features froze into a coldly direct, level stare. She wouldn’t be able to clarify how a ragged Outer-Rim dirt farmer learned to speak the language of his people. He sagged against the control panel, chest heaving, dashing at his visor with shaking hands.

What the hell are you? he mouthed silently between gasps.

The rush of blood in his ears reassembled itself into her voice. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Fighting a gut-stab of pure panic, he ventured a furtive glance at the carbonite slab. She stared, as before.

He bit off a curse and stumbled back to the cockpit. The slab remained in the chamber, and he avoided even walking past it for the duration of the four-day flight to Dubrillion.

He dug back through his archives of old chain code data. Twenty years was a long time; she might be anywhere. She might be dead. The problem of the Child entirely aside, a small part of him hoped she was. He’d spent a long time agonizing over whether...whatever she’d done, whatever she might have seen when she touched him constituted a breach of the Creed. He hadn’t told the Armorer or anyone else, out of fear of the consequences, fear of ridicule because an unarmed serf who was barely strong enough to stand had counted coup on him, fear that he’d finally taken one too many hits to the head and the whole impossible episode had been a hallucination.

After a very long gap in her record, there was a ping on Doniphon, then Kestis Minor. Most recently, a derelict orbital station near Telos IV. He held out his hand. The Child persisted in its experiments with jamming a spare tracking fob into the Razor Crest flight controls, up its nostrils, and into the corners of his visor. He offered a doll he’d improvised out of a hydrospanner and a string of jingling metal washers tied with shreds from his cape, and the Child made the trade with a shriek of glee. With a deep breath and a few decisive taps on the terminal, he programmed the tracking fob, then laid in a course on the navicomp. They were bound for Telos.