- Location
- SF Bay Area
In official media, yes, but it's taken hold in the fandom more broadly as well.
The Slave Who Makes Free: An Anakin Skywalker Quest
- Thread starter Kirook
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
Ah, it happens. With the popularity of the Mandalorian, things snowballed from there. And I'd honestly rather have Din and the weird stuff with his Covenant clan than the insane stuff that came out of Traviss's later works like Order 66 and LOTF.
Infact, I'm curious to see your take on Satine and the pacifistic Mandalorians in general. I'm not the biggest fan of TCW, but I dug the idea of Mandalore trying to become a more peaceful society in the middle of the biggest war in Galactic history; hell, the idea of a Game of Thrones-esque environment where all of Mandalorian space is divided in civil war over joining or staying out of the Clone Wars is potential for a show's season or two right then and there.
Plus, it'd be interesting for this Anakin to get an idea of neutrality in crises. He's always seen one side acting as the aggressor towards another here, so him finding out about a third option to conflicts could lead him to some interesting introspection for the coming future.
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
The man will be too busy sipping wine and snacking on popcorn over Satine and Obi-Wan.
It would be interesting to go through the deathwatch conflict that occurred pre clone wars a exploration of the factions pre Satine takeover could be novel given how much tension there was in legends over it.
- Location
- SF Bay Area
It absolutely would. Unfortunately, as a side effect of being about Anakin rather than Obi-Wan, this fic starts well after the end of the Mandalorian Civil War. I can (and almost certainly will) still get into the nature of the Mandalorian factions and their visions for the future of their people, but a lot of what set Mandalore on the path we see it on in The Clone Wars is, at this point, already set in stone.
- Location
- SF Bay Area
The characters on the list currently are those Anakin knows either personally or by reputation, i.e. those someone reading this story might reasonably need to know about. More entries will be added as he meets more people (and Tholme and T'raa Saa may be among them), but for now I don't want to overload people trying to get context for this story with information they might not need.
- Location
- Infraspace
Actually, Togruta have both! The montrals are the upward-swept horns, and then they have 3 lekku to the Twi'lek's 2.Technically, Twi'leks have lekku and Togruta have montrals
- Location
- SF Bay Area
Oh, huh, yeah. Apparently the singular is "lek", which makes sense from the species name but is just kind of odd to imagine as a word on its own. And for some reason Togruta head-tails count but Tholothian ones don't? Weird.
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
No doubt a subject of much dispute and consternation among the galaxy's taxonomists.
neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Maybe Togruta and Twileks have a more recent common ancestor that had head tails, so that they're essentially the same structure, and the similar structures on Tholothians evolved independently.
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
But how would a shared common ancestor have crossed the distance between Ryloth and Shili, the Togruta homeworld?
Pre-hyperspace travel sleeper ships. Near humans apepar to be related to humans, since they can interbreed, so likely the same thing happend. Alternatively, Rakata were involved.
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Those damn Rakatans and their-
*shuffles through cards*
-random drop-offs of other species on planets!
*shuffles through cards*
-random drop-offs of other species on planets!
I do suspect that Disney would have launched their own continuity anyway- they would want to not be bound by some obscure tie-in novels that Lucas always had a complicated relationship with anyway, and there were already rumblings during the terminal-era EU (pre-Disney purchase) of LFL/Del Rey/etc looking to soft-reboot the continuity.
Regarding the New Jedi Order and Vergere, it's worth noting that "Vergere was totally a Sith!" was a later retcon by that hack Denning- Matthew Stover and James Luceno (author of Traitor and project lead on the NJO, respectively) viewed her as sincere and a genuine help to Jacen and the Jedi during the war. IIRC Luceno saw the end of the NJO (The Unifying Force) as sort of an endpoint for the post-ROTJ continuity as a whole- certainly the last scene has a real cut-to-credits feel to it- so until Denning pitched Dark Nest, the Legends continuity would have ended with Jacen Solo having utilized Vergere's philosophical insights on the Force to defeat the Yuuzhan Vong without destroying them as a people.
Huh, I'm surprised you're not an old EU head- based on the writing of this quest, you've got a real understanding of the Legends material and how to use it for a good story.
Worse yet, legacy of the force was originally gonna be a oc based story set during kotor times, then they decided to forcibly plaster it on to post-rotj character assassinating Jacen and throwing fellow author Timothy zhan skywalker family exploring the unknown regions(that he was in the process of writing no less) books under the bus... before using that very same premise in the next series of novels...
This short story perhaps tells us how Zhan felt about the whole affair...https://web.archive.org/web/20120403153706/http://star-wars.suvudu.com/2012/04/post-star-wars-fate-of-the-jedi-news-and-exclusive-epilogue-by-timothy-zahn.html
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- Location
- SF Bay Area
I wouldn't really consider myself a diehard fan of either continuity in particular. I've been making my way through Legends partly to find material for this quest and partly for fun, but in a franchise this big there are bound to be some gaps somewhere.
The old eu is just pound for pound larger particularly in the prequel era(tcw is a weird nebulous in between area) disney star wars for good or ill spent much of its years early been mainly focused on the ot era(thanks goodness they've been recently relaxing it).
4.1: Flight
- Location
- SF Bay Area
Jedi discipline is all well and good. But sometimes you just need to fly.
Podracing is the galaxy's most famous extreme piloting sport, but it's far from the only one. And on a planet as densely packed with all forms of sapient life as Coruscant, there's no niche of experience that can't be filled if one knows where to look. So when you needed a break from the seemingly endless hours of studying…
[ ] Lightsaber forms.
[ ] Force techniques.
[ ] Galactic diplomacy.
[ ] Survival skills.
…you began to sneak out to explore the city while Obi-Wan slept. It wasn't long before you stumbled across exactly the thing you were looking for: an exhilaratingly dangerous and extremely illegal sport known only as "pit racing". And today, you enter your first heat.
You strap your custom-built racing wings to your back—no speeders or Pods here, just a jury-rigged apparatus halfway between a glider and a jetpack—and look over the eponymous pit. One thing you've learned during your time on Coruscant is that everything is bigger on this planet, be it buildings, landing platforms, power generators…or even garbage disposals.
Yawning before you, some two kilometers wide and half again as deep, is the waste disposal pit for the subsector of the city containing the Jedi Temple. Right now, all you can see is the top of its dome, a gently curving sheet of durasteel and plastoid perforated at regular intervals with ten-meter-wide holes. But you know that beneath it—and two others like it—is the pit floor.
Although "floor" is, in truth, something of a misnomer. There's nowhere down there to actually stand, only a bubbling, roiling chemical lake where the accumulated refuse of countless billions of people comes to rest. Swarms of salvage droids fish through the toxic soup for anything that can't simply be melted down into sludge—from radioactive materials to rare and exotic metals to old hyperdrive cores. They load these finds into magnetic accelerators, firing canisters full of them through repulsor fields and micro-tractor beams in the three domed shields into orbit, there to be recycled or launched into Coruscant's sun.
Everything else goes into the bellies of the garbage worms.
The worms are genetically engineered beasts hundreds of meters long, distant relatives of the exogorths (more commonly known as "space slugs"). They make their homes in the chemical lake, chewing up metals and plastics and other Coruscant detritus into a recyclable form. Their glassy, glittering scales are the objective of this race: your task is to fly, on your makeshift wings, down through the holes in the three shields, reach the lake at the bottom, pluck one from a worm's back, and be the first return to the surface with it in hand.
"Get hit by a canister and you die," the race recruiter told you when you signed up. "Get caught in the tractor fields and you die. Fall into the lake and you die. Stay beneath the shields and breathe in the fumes too long—"
"I see the pattern," you deadpanned.
"Then you're smarter than most people who compete here," she muttered, waving you ahead.
In the end, though, it's less about being smarter and more about being better. The slavemasters of Tatooine, a Sith Lord, and the assembled fleets of the Trade Federation couldn't kill you. Compared to all of that, a quick flight through a garbage pit is less than nothing.
A smirk flits across your face with that thought as you make the final adjustments to your wings before the race. But before you can walk into the maintenance tunnel that leads to the starting line, you hear a voice behind you say, "Hello, Anakin."
You whirl around, because you recognize that voice—but what Palpatine would be doing here is utterly beyond you.
The word "Chancellor" is halfway to your mouth before he raises a finger to his lips. The gesture buys your mind a moment to catch up with your eyes and ears. Instead of his usual Chancellorial robes, he's wearing a simple cloak with the hood pulled up over his head, shrouding most of his face. For whatever reason, he's here incognito.
"Sorry," you mutter, and only then does it occur to you that he's technically just caught you in the act of committing a crime. You glance around for holocam droids and, finding none, ask him, "Are you, uh…here to shut this place down?"
"I would never take flight away from you, Anakin," he assures you. "And besides, it would make a hypocrite of me to crack down on youthful amusements when far worse goes on every day in the halls of the Senate. Which is actually what I wished to speak with you about."
"I don't see what Senate corruption has to do with pit racing, but I'm listening," you say, bemused.
"All in good time, Anakin," says Palpatine. Then he produces a holo from the folds of his cloak. It depicts a being with bulging eyes, a wide, thin mouth, and a cascading mane of hair everywhere around his face except for the top of his head, dressed in flowing midnight-blue robes. "This is Senator Colandrus of Suntilla. He's a notorious influence peddler who's known to offer his vote in the Senate to the highest bidder. So far, he's managed to evade Senate Intelligence scrutiny, I suspect through further bribery. But like all beings, Colandrus has a weakness. He's an inveterate gambler—to put it bluntly, an addict."
"And today he's betting on the races," you surmise.
Palpatine shoots you a pleased look, like a teacher whose student has just earned full marks. "Just so. And if he were to lose badly enough—say, to a human adolescent entering for the first time with home-built race wings—his addiction would begin to spiral. He would make larger and larger bets to try to recoup his losses, and become more brazen in his illegal dealings to finance them. My agents could finally catch him out, and purge his corruption from the body politic for good."
You don't bother to keep the grin off your face. Obi-Wan is always telling you not to celebrate too early—but Obi-Wan isn't here. "And all I have to do is win the race?"
"Yes," he says. "But it would help if you won it dramatically."
You nearly scoff before remembering that you're still talking to the Chancellor. All of your victories are dramatic. "Five minutes or less. Make the bet."
"I shall," he says with a satisfied smile. "You're doing the Republic a great service today, Anakin."
"I'm glad I could help," you reply, as the siren summoning the racers to their starting position rings out across the pit. "One last thing, though. How did you know you could find me here?"
He chuckles. "I could tell you that I wasn't lying when I said I would keep an eye on your career, or that it was simply a lucky guess. But the real truth is that I simply asked myself where I would have gone as a boy. You see, in my youth, I was something of a daredevil racer myself."
He leaves you to ponder that as you prepare to fly.
You assemble at the mouth of the tunnel with the other racers, all overseen by the tunnel keeper, of a species you're told is called "Naplousean"—a braided triple helix of bare muscle fibers with a cluster of insectile eyes at the top. They get hardly a passing glance from the racers, who are familiar with the sight of their chief official by now; you, on the other hand, attract some strange looks. But that doesn't bother you: once upon a time, other Podracers looked at you the same way.
Given the sheer variety of sensory organs to be found among the racers and the watching crowd, the countdown announces itself in several different ways: numbers on a clock, colored lights on the roof of the tunnel above you, echoing sonic tones, even puffs of scented chemicals. But the gist is the same no matter what race you're flying in, on whatever planet:
Three. Two. One. Go.
The other racers launch ahead, igniting the booster jets on their wings in a roaring chorus of fire. You, however, simply step forward and drop.
The secret of pit racing, which you discovered in the course of building your wings—a secret that forms the final, tragic realization of many a life—is that a backpack harness simply cannot carry enough fuel to propel a racer all the way to the bottom of the pit and back. To rely solely on your thrusters is to lose control at a crucial point, and plummet to your doom or be obliterated by a canister in midflight.
If you want to win, you must instead use your environment to your advantage. You must direct yourself with the thermal updrafts from the boiling chemical lake, the turbulent wakes of the canisters hurtling starward, the subtle pressures of the tractor fields that control their ascent. You must feel the flow of air and energy around you.
In other words: you must use the Force.
You spread your wings as the shield rushes up to meet you, catching the air under them and swooping forward like a hawk-bat. Skimming low over the durasteel beneath you—in a maneuver that puts you in mind of your battle against the Trade Federation's droid control ship—you nudge your course downward just so and tuck your wings close to your body, allowing you to slip through a hole in the first shield and emerge nearly horizontal, having lost hardly an iota of momentum.
Simple.
A few moments later, racers begin to drop through other openings around you. You weave between them in tight arcs that press your lungs against your ribs with G-force, sometimes missing them by mere centimeters. But as you maneuver, your keen ears pick up new sounds from up ahead: over the endless churning of the chemical lake and the distant booming of the mass drivers comes a chorus of piercing shrieks and leathery wingbeats. In a place like this, that can only mean a swarm (an annoyingly Ferus-like voice in your head reminds you that a group of them is actually called a "scold") of mynocks.
Though their usual diet is energy and fuel rather than meat, that's hardly a comfort to someone only kept aloft by a rickety assemblage of technology—especially not when they find that food by rending spacecraft hulls with their claws and teeth. And at your current speed, it will only be seconds before they're upon you. With your Jedi reflexes that would normally be more than long enough to react…but with a mission from the Chancellor to fulfill, dodging them all would take time you don't have.
You'll simply have to go straight through.
You tuck your wings once again and pulse your thrusters, sending you into a spin even as your already blistering speed heightens even further. Hurtling towards the scold like a bullet from an antique slugthrower, you pierce into the writhing mass. There's a moment of darkness and earsplitting noise as countless wings beat against your face and body…and then you're back out into the open air.
Your daring has, not for the first or last time, helped you avoid an ugly fate. Not all of the screams from behind you are those of mynocks.
But you haven't escaped unscathed either. A series of urgent beeps warn you of damage, and when you check the display in your goggles, your stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with changing altitude: one of your fuel lines has been severed, and is leaking fast.
Breaking the racing record is no longer just a favor for the Chancellor. It's now a matter of life and death.
That means you'll have to take more drastic measures. You cast your eyes about until they alight on a shortcut—a hole in the shield the other racers are avoiding because of the arcs of blue and purple energy crackling across it, no doubt from the cables the mynocks were chewing on before the race stirred them up. You'll need to time this just right.
Your wings flare out at an angle to your flight, slowing you, and a brief thruster burst (which makes you wince as it takes a chunk out of your already dwindling fuel supply) does the rest. Blood rushes to your head with the deceleration, but it's only momentary before Coruscant's standard gravity takes over completely, sending you into free fall.
Your knowledge of power systems, your piloting instincts, and a little touch of Force precognition all go to work ensuring that you make it to the next layer safely. And even then, it's a near thing. A stray fork of lightning brushes painfully against your legs as you fall through the hole, sending a nasty shock and then a wave of numbness through them. But it's just pain, and you've been through far worse.
And with that, you're through. Only one more level to go.
You consider letting yourself fall straight down, all the way to the bottom, but the hums of tractor beams and a buzz of danger you can feel in your teeth put an end to that idea. You hastily swoop out of the way as a canister rushes up behind you, buffeting you around with the vortices of air in its wake. You're some fifteen or twenty meters away before you regain control. Even for you, that one was too close.
You swing around in a wide arc, trying to conserve fuel and find the closest way down. The motion lets you spot one of your competitors, perhaps nearly as reckless as you, entering this level of the pit nearby…and then you hear that building hum again, and a resonating boom beneath you. You try to shout a warning, but the roar of the engines and the echoes of the garbage pit snatch away your words.
There's no thud or splat when the canister hits them. They're just gone.
A spark in the Force gutters out, but you have no time to mourn a life cut short. If your energy is not wholly focused on seeing this mission through and escaping with your life, you won't be far behind them. You wait until the vortices of wind stirred up by its passing spiral away to nothing, and dive once more, taking you to the lowest level—where your prize awaits.
The vast sprawl of the pit unfolds around you as you descend towards the bubbling lake at the bottom. It's almost beautiful in its own way. High-powered floodlights sweep over the lake's iridescent surface, causing its glistening black "waters" to shimmer in faint colors. Trails of smoke waft from the surface and curl into exotic shapes in their beams. Here and there, salvage droids dart back and forth like flocks of birds, and the gargantuan bodies of garbage worms break through the surface in a way that reminds you of nothing so much as krayt dragons "swimming" through the sands of Tatooine. Even the smell isn't as bad as you feared; you expected to be choking on the scent of sewage, but anything organic in the mix below has long been rendered down to its constituent hydrocarbons, leaving the air smelling less like feces and rot and more like burning fuel.
But you've wasted enough time admiring the view.
Your wings are running on fumes…and speaking of fumes, you can feel the burn in the soft tissues of your throat when you try to breathe down here.
You alight on one of the worms' backs—an easy enough task, given that it's practically big enough to be a landing strip—and grab one of its scales in both hands. With heavy work gloves protecting your skin from chemical burns and sharp edges alike, you easily yank loose a crystalline scale the size of a dinner plate, strapping it to the harness on your chest. Now it's just a matter of bringing it back in one piece.
But then the incessant beeping in your ear stops, replaced by one long tone that sounds almost mournful. Your fuel tank is completely empty.
You growl in frustration. Even with the leak, you should have had at least some left. Your near-miss with the canister must have cost you more than you thought—and now you're left stranded in a place where the very air is poison. The shrill tone of your alarm is a death sentence, an inevitable pronouncement of doom in retribution for the hubris of taking on this challenge.
You silence it and prepare to fly.
But not in the same way you did on your way down here. Instead, you reach up and catch the grasper of a passing salvage droid—meant to ferry heavy metals and starship reactors, it hardly notices a few dozen extra kilos—letting it lift you into the air and ferry you across the pit. Earlier, your "shortcut" to a lower level required expert timing—but what you're about to do will make that look practically sluggish. You can only hope that, as it has so many times before, the Force will reward your boldness.
When the salvage droid reaches the apex of its flight, you let go of its arm and glide into an arc. And as the arc reaches its terminus, you feel it: the gathering up of power, the moment when potential becomes actuality. The boom of the mass driver is deafening, and once again the canister—on its boosted trajectory to orbit and beyond—barely misses you. But this time, that's what you were counting on.
Your timing and positioning were perfect. You are in exactly the right spot to be swept up in the canister's wake as it rockets spaceward, pulled along as surely as if you had clung to its durasteel surface. You're a leaf on the wind, or perhaps a raindrop in a storm—except that instead of falling you're rising, soaring towards home and victory.
Of course, a raindrop in a storm doesn't get a smooth ride to its destination, and neither do you. You're tossed about by the winds of the wake and the tractor fields as you burst through, and to your horror your wings begin to warp and distort under the strain. You push your piloting skills to the limit to keep them steady, and reach out with the Force to hold them together for those precious few seconds of flight.
At last, you erupt from the top of the shield, tearing yourself free of your path as the garbage canister continues towards the planet's orbit. Your damaged wings creak in protest as you half-glide, half-fall towards the tunnel entrance from which you emerged. Your knees buckle when your feet hit the ground, and you tumble end-over-end in a tangle of flesh and metal that will no doubt leave you with a fair few bruises to explain to Obi-Wan later. But you're back with your prize in hand. Unclipping the scale from your chest, you sprint over and thrust it into the tendrils of the Naplousean tunnel keeper.
You check the race clock. 04:37.
There isn't much of an audience here—the nature of this type of race makes it nearly impossible to watch by means of anything other than holocam droids. But you can imagine the roar of the crowd as it was after your fateful Podrace on Tatooine, half approval and half disbelief.
"Well done, Anakin." Palpatine's cloaked form seems to unfold from the shadows. "I never doubted you for a moment."
"That makes two of us," you say with a smirk, still riding the high of your victory.
He chuckles. "It's always a pleasure to see your confidence growing. And well it should. What you've done today will help build a Republic where power isn't merely for sale."
You nod in satisfaction. "I just wish I could see the look on Colandrus's face."
"Actually," says Palpatine, matching your smirking expression, "I might be able to let you do just that." He produces his holoprojector again, but this time it's not displaying a static image of Colandrus—it's a live feed of him, broadcast from some seedy gambling den. "The Senate Intelligence Bureau has been surveilling him at my order for some time, you see…"
The way the Senator's expression falls and then twists into fury when he sees the announcement of your win is practically a work of art. And then, just to cap it all off, he overturns the table in a fury, sending glittering credit chips scattering everywhere as the other gamblers scramble for cover, before storming out.
You clap a hand over your mouth for a second or two to stop yourself from bursting out laughing. When you can finally trust yourself to speak again, you say, "That was amazing."
"That, my dear boy, was just the start of what we can accomplish," he replies. "But perhaps you should be going now. It wouldn't do for the Jedi to discover that you've been here."
It most certainly would not.
It's not exactly uncommon for Jedi to return to the Temple in the wee hours of the night. As much as Coruscanti would prefer it—and have endeavored to standardize galactic time to make it so—not every other place in the galaxy keeps a schedule that matches up to the galactic capital's planetary rotation. With your robes on and your hood up, you hardly attract a second glance as you make your way back up to your room.
The Force makes it more complicated, of course. But with some effort, you're able to bank the solar fire of your presence until you merely seem extremely powerful, instead of…yourself.
The door to your quarters slides open without a sound. You half (or more than half, if you're honest) expected to see Obi-Wan in your living area with a lecture already prepared for you on what you've just done, but the space is empty. He must still be fast asleep.
Given all the excitement you've experienced tonight, it might not hurt for you to do the same. For all the energy coursing through your body, you still need to rest sometime.
And yet, for all your need for peaceful sleep, it seems you'll get nothing of the kind tonight. Because tonight, you dream.
It isn't the first time. Long before you ever met Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan you dreamed of becoming a Jedi, and in time the galaxy placed a lightsaber in your hand. And in those last hours as a slave your dreams whispered to you of freeing yourself with the keenness of your mind and the steadiness of your hands, and then you flew to liberation in a Podracer you had built yourself.
But this time is different—disjointed, confused. "Always in motion is the future", Master Yoda sometimes says, but tonight there's so much "motion" that it feels like watching a race from the sidelines: events whip past your vision in moments, so quickly that you catch only impressions of what's happening.
And it's also different in another way. Those past premonitions were visions of a better future. These are visions of a future hanging in the balance. That balance can be tipped to light or to darkness…and the burden of the choices that may tip it falls upon you.
What do you see?
[ ] A poisoned world. The end of an endless war. A soldier, or a Jedi, or both?
[ ] A living world. Imperious visages, plotting. The birth, and perhaps the death, of something beautiful.
[ ] A peaceful world. Killers, remorseful and remorseless. The gratitude, or ire, of a friend.
[ ] A prosperous world. Walking unseen in the crucible of power. A rivalry extinguished, or burning anew.
Podracing is the galaxy's most famous extreme piloting sport, but it's far from the only one. And on a planet as densely packed with all forms of sapient life as Coruscant, there's no niche of experience that can't be filled if one knows where to look. So when you needed a break from the seemingly endless hours of studying…
[ ] Lightsaber forms.
[ ] Force techniques.
[ ] Galactic diplomacy.
[ ] Survival skills.
…you began to sneak out to explore the city while Obi-Wan slept. It wasn't long before you stumbled across exactly the thing you were looking for: an exhilaratingly dangerous and extremely illegal sport known only as "pit racing". And today, you enter your first heat.
You strap your custom-built racing wings to your back—no speeders or Pods here, just a jury-rigged apparatus halfway between a glider and a jetpack—and look over the eponymous pit. One thing you've learned during your time on Coruscant is that everything is bigger on this planet, be it buildings, landing platforms, power generators…or even garbage disposals.
Yawning before you, some two kilometers wide and half again as deep, is the waste disposal pit for the subsector of the city containing the Jedi Temple. Right now, all you can see is the top of its dome, a gently curving sheet of durasteel and plastoid perforated at regular intervals with ten-meter-wide holes. But you know that beneath it—and two others like it—is the pit floor.
Although "floor" is, in truth, something of a misnomer. There's nowhere down there to actually stand, only a bubbling, roiling chemical lake where the accumulated refuse of countless billions of people comes to rest. Swarms of salvage droids fish through the toxic soup for anything that can't simply be melted down into sludge—from radioactive materials to rare and exotic metals to old hyperdrive cores. They load these finds into magnetic accelerators, firing canisters full of them through repulsor fields and micro-tractor beams in the three domed shields into orbit, there to be recycled or launched into Coruscant's sun.
Everything else goes into the bellies of the garbage worms.
The worms are genetically engineered beasts hundreds of meters long, distant relatives of the exogorths (more commonly known as "space slugs"). They make their homes in the chemical lake, chewing up metals and plastics and other Coruscant detritus into a recyclable form. Their glassy, glittering scales are the objective of this race: your task is to fly, on your makeshift wings, down through the holes in the three shields, reach the lake at the bottom, pluck one from a worm's back, and be the first return to the surface with it in hand.
"Get hit by a canister and you die," the race recruiter told you when you signed up. "Get caught in the tractor fields and you die. Fall into the lake and you die. Stay beneath the shields and breathe in the fumes too long—"
"I see the pattern," you deadpanned.
"Then you're smarter than most people who compete here," she muttered, waving you ahead.
In the end, though, it's less about being smarter and more about being better. The slavemasters of Tatooine, a Sith Lord, and the assembled fleets of the Trade Federation couldn't kill you. Compared to all of that, a quick flight through a garbage pit is less than nothing.
A smirk flits across your face with that thought as you make the final adjustments to your wings before the race. But before you can walk into the maintenance tunnel that leads to the starting line, you hear a voice behind you say, "Hello, Anakin."
You whirl around, because you recognize that voice—but what Palpatine would be doing here is utterly beyond you.
The word "Chancellor" is halfway to your mouth before he raises a finger to his lips. The gesture buys your mind a moment to catch up with your eyes and ears. Instead of his usual Chancellorial robes, he's wearing a simple cloak with the hood pulled up over his head, shrouding most of his face. For whatever reason, he's here incognito.
"Sorry," you mutter, and only then does it occur to you that he's technically just caught you in the act of committing a crime. You glance around for holocam droids and, finding none, ask him, "Are you, uh…here to shut this place down?"
"I would never take flight away from you, Anakin," he assures you. "And besides, it would make a hypocrite of me to crack down on youthful amusements when far worse goes on every day in the halls of the Senate. Which is actually what I wished to speak with you about."
"I don't see what Senate corruption has to do with pit racing, but I'm listening," you say, bemused.
"All in good time, Anakin," says Palpatine. Then he produces a holo from the folds of his cloak. It depicts a being with bulging eyes, a wide, thin mouth, and a cascading mane of hair everywhere around his face except for the top of his head, dressed in flowing midnight-blue robes. "This is Senator Colandrus of Suntilla. He's a notorious influence peddler who's known to offer his vote in the Senate to the highest bidder. So far, he's managed to evade Senate Intelligence scrutiny, I suspect through further bribery. But like all beings, Colandrus has a weakness. He's an inveterate gambler—to put it bluntly, an addict."
"And today he's betting on the races," you surmise.
Palpatine shoots you a pleased look, like a teacher whose student has just earned full marks. "Just so. And if he were to lose badly enough—say, to a human adolescent entering for the first time with home-built race wings—his addiction would begin to spiral. He would make larger and larger bets to try to recoup his losses, and become more brazen in his illegal dealings to finance them. My agents could finally catch him out, and purge his corruption from the body politic for good."
You don't bother to keep the grin off your face. Obi-Wan is always telling you not to celebrate too early—but Obi-Wan isn't here. "And all I have to do is win the race?"
"Yes," he says. "But it would help if you won it dramatically."
You nearly scoff before remembering that you're still talking to the Chancellor. All of your victories are dramatic. "Five minutes or less. Make the bet."
"I shall," he says with a satisfied smile. "You're doing the Republic a great service today, Anakin."
"I'm glad I could help," you reply, as the siren summoning the racers to their starting position rings out across the pit. "One last thing, though. How did you know you could find me here?"
He chuckles. "I could tell you that I wasn't lying when I said I would keep an eye on your career, or that it was simply a lucky guess. But the real truth is that I simply asked myself where I would have gone as a boy. You see, in my youth, I was something of a daredevil racer myself."
He leaves you to ponder that as you prepare to fly.
You assemble at the mouth of the tunnel with the other racers, all overseen by the tunnel keeper, of a species you're told is called "Naplousean"—a braided triple helix of bare muscle fibers with a cluster of insectile eyes at the top. They get hardly a passing glance from the racers, who are familiar with the sight of their chief official by now; you, on the other hand, attract some strange looks. But that doesn't bother you: once upon a time, other Podracers looked at you the same way.
Given the sheer variety of sensory organs to be found among the racers and the watching crowd, the countdown announces itself in several different ways: numbers on a clock, colored lights on the roof of the tunnel above you, echoing sonic tones, even puffs of scented chemicals. But the gist is the same no matter what race you're flying in, on whatever planet:
Three. Two. One. Go.
The other racers launch ahead, igniting the booster jets on their wings in a roaring chorus of fire. You, however, simply step forward and drop.
The secret of pit racing, which you discovered in the course of building your wings—a secret that forms the final, tragic realization of many a life—is that a backpack harness simply cannot carry enough fuel to propel a racer all the way to the bottom of the pit and back. To rely solely on your thrusters is to lose control at a crucial point, and plummet to your doom or be obliterated by a canister in midflight.
If you want to win, you must instead use your environment to your advantage. You must direct yourself with the thermal updrafts from the boiling chemical lake, the turbulent wakes of the canisters hurtling starward, the subtle pressures of the tractor fields that control their ascent. You must feel the flow of air and energy around you.
In other words: you must use the Force.
You spread your wings as the shield rushes up to meet you, catching the air under them and swooping forward like a hawk-bat. Skimming low over the durasteel beneath you—in a maneuver that puts you in mind of your battle against the Trade Federation's droid control ship—you nudge your course downward just so and tuck your wings close to your body, allowing you to slip through a hole in the first shield and emerge nearly horizontal, having lost hardly an iota of momentum.
Simple.
A few moments later, racers begin to drop through other openings around you. You weave between them in tight arcs that press your lungs against your ribs with G-force, sometimes missing them by mere centimeters. But as you maneuver, your keen ears pick up new sounds from up ahead: over the endless churning of the chemical lake and the distant booming of the mass drivers comes a chorus of piercing shrieks and leathery wingbeats. In a place like this, that can only mean a swarm (an annoyingly Ferus-like voice in your head reminds you that a group of them is actually called a "scold") of mynocks.
Though their usual diet is energy and fuel rather than meat, that's hardly a comfort to someone only kept aloft by a rickety assemblage of technology—especially not when they find that food by rending spacecraft hulls with their claws and teeth. And at your current speed, it will only be seconds before they're upon you. With your Jedi reflexes that would normally be more than long enough to react…but with a mission from the Chancellor to fulfill, dodging them all would take time you don't have.
You'll simply have to go straight through.
You tuck your wings once again and pulse your thrusters, sending you into a spin even as your already blistering speed heightens even further. Hurtling towards the scold like a bullet from an antique slugthrower, you pierce into the writhing mass. There's a moment of darkness and earsplitting noise as countless wings beat against your face and body…and then you're back out into the open air.
Your daring has, not for the first or last time, helped you avoid an ugly fate. Not all of the screams from behind you are those of mynocks.
But you haven't escaped unscathed either. A series of urgent beeps warn you of damage, and when you check the display in your goggles, your stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with changing altitude: one of your fuel lines has been severed, and is leaking fast.
Breaking the racing record is no longer just a favor for the Chancellor. It's now a matter of life and death.
That means you'll have to take more drastic measures. You cast your eyes about until they alight on a shortcut—a hole in the shield the other racers are avoiding because of the arcs of blue and purple energy crackling across it, no doubt from the cables the mynocks were chewing on before the race stirred them up. You'll need to time this just right.
Your wings flare out at an angle to your flight, slowing you, and a brief thruster burst (which makes you wince as it takes a chunk out of your already dwindling fuel supply) does the rest. Blood rushes to your head with the deceleration, but it's only momentary before Coruscant's standard gravity takes over completely, sending you into free fall.
Your knowledge of power systems, your piloting instincts, and a little touch of Force precognition all go to work ensuring that you make it to the next layer safely. And even then, it's a near thing. A stray fork of lightning brushes painfully against your legs as you fall through the hole, sending a nasty shock and then a wave of numbness through them. But it's just pain, and you've been through far worse.
And with that, you're through. Only one more level to go.
You consider letting yourself fall straight down, all the way to the bottom, but the hums of tractor beams and a buzz of danger you can feel in your teeth put an end to that idea. You hastily swoop out of the way as a canister rushes up behind you, buffeting you around with the vortices of air in its wake. You're some fifteen or twenty meters away before you regain control. Even for you, that one was too close.
You swing around in a wide arc, trying to conserve fuel and find the closest way down. The motion lets you spot one of your competitors, perhaps nearly as reckless as you, entering this level of the pit nearby…and then you hear that building hum again, and a resonating boom beneath you. You try to shout a warning, but the roar of the engines and the echoes of the garbage pit snatch away your words.
There's no thud or splat when the canister hits them. They're just gone.
A spark in the Force gutters out, but you have no time to mourn a life cut short. If your energy is not wholly focused on seeing this mission through and escaping with your life, you won't be far behind them. You wait until the vortices of wind stirred up by its passing spiral away to nothing, and dive once more, taking you to the lowest level—where your prize awaits.
The vast sprawl of the pit unfolds around you as you descend towards the bubbling lake at the bottom. It's almost beautiful in its own way. High-powered floodlights sweep over the lake's iridescent surface, causing its glistening black "waters" to shimmer in faint colors. Trails of smoke waft from the surface and curl into exotic shapes in their beams. Here and there, salvage droids dart back and forth like flocks of birds, and the gargantuan bodies of garbage worms break through the surface in a way that reminds you of nothing so much as krayt dragons "swimming" through the sands of Tatooine. Even the smell isn't as bad as you feared; you expected to be choking on the scent of sewage, but anything organic in the mix below has long been rendered down to its constituent hydrocarbons, leaving the air smelling less like feces and rot and more like burning fuel.
But you've wasted enough time admiring the view.
Your wings are running on fumes…and speaking of fumes, you can feel the burn in the soft tissues of your throat when you try to breathe down here.
You alight on one of the worms' backs—an easy enough task, given that it's practically big enough to be a landing strip—and grab one of its scales in both hands. With heavy work gloves protecting your skin from chemical burns and sharp edges alike, you easily yank loose a crystalline scale the size of a dinner plate, strapping it to the harness on your chest. Now it's just a matter of bringing it back in one piece.
But then the incessant beeping in your ear stops, replaced by one long tone that sounds almost mournful. Your fuel tank is completely empty.
You growl in frustration. Even with the leak, you should have had at least some left. Your near-miss with the canister must have cost you more than you thought—and now you're left stranded in a place where the very air is poison. The shrill tone of your alarm is a death sentence, an inevitable pronouncement of doom in retribution for the hubris of taking on this challenge.
You silence it and prepare to fly.
But not in the same way you did on your way down here. Instead, you reach up and catch the grasper of a passing salvage droid—meant to ferry heavy metals and starship reactors, it hardly notices a few dozen extra kilos—letting it lift you into the air and ferry you across the pit. Earlier, your "shortcut" to a lower level required expert timing—but what you're about to do will make that look practically sluggish. You can only hope that, as it has so many times before, the Force will reward your boldness.
When the salvage droid reaches the apex of its flight, you let go of its arm and glide into an arc. And as the arc reaches its terminus, you feel it: the gathering up of power, the moment when potential becomes actuality. The boom of the mass driver is deafening, and once again the canister—on its boosted trajectory to orbit and beyond—barely misses you. But this time, that's what you were counting on.
Your timing and positioning were perfect. You are in exactly the right spot to be swept up in the canister's wake as it rockets spaceward, pulled along as surely as if you had clung to its durasteel surface. You're a leaf on the wind, or perhaps a raindrop in a storm—except that instead of falling you're rising, soaring towards home and victory.
Of course, a raindrop in a storm doesn't get a smooth ride to its destination, and neither do you. You're tossed about by the winds of the wake and the tractor fields as you burst through, and to your horror your wings begin to warp and distort under the strain. You push your piloting skills to the limit to keep them steady, and reach out with the Force to hold them together for those precious few seconds of flight.
At last, you erupt from the top of the shield, tearing yourself free of your path as the garbage canister continues towards the planet's orbit. Your damaged wings creak in protest as you half-glide, half-fall towards the tunnel entrance from which you emerged. Your knees buckle when your feet hit the ground, and you tumble end-over-end in a tangle of flesh and metal that will no doubt leave you with a fair few bruises to explain to Obi-Wan later. But you're back with your prize in hand. Unclipping the scale from your chest, you sprint over and thrust it into the tendrils of the Naplousean tunnel keeper.
You check the race clock. 04:37.
There isn't much of an audience here—the nature of this type of race makes it nearly impossible to watch by means of anything other than holocam droids. But you can imagine the roar of the crowd as it was after your fateful Podrace on Tatooine, half approval and half disbelief.
"Well done, Anakin." Palpatine's cloaked form seems to unfold from the shadows. "I never doubted you for a moment."
"That makes two of us," you say with a smirk, still riding the high of your victory.
He chuckles. "It's always a pleasure to see your confidence growing. And well it should. What you've done today will help build a Republic where power isn't merely for sale."
You nod in satisfaction. "I just wish I could see the look on Colandrus's face."
"Actually," says Palpatine, matching your smirking expression, "I might be able to let you do just that." He produces his holoprojector again, but this time it's not displaying a static image of Colandrus—it's a live feed of him, broadcast from some seedy gambling den. "The Senate Intelligence Bureau has been surveilling him at my order for some time, you see…"
The way the Senator's expression falls and then twists into fury when he sees the announcement of your win is practically a work of art. And then, just to cap it all off, he overturns the table in a fury, sending glittering credit chips scattering everywhere as the other gamblers scramble for cover, before storming out.
You clap a hand over your mouth for a second or two to stop yourself from bursting out laughing. When you can finally trust yourself to speak again, you say, "That was amazing."
"That, my dear boy, was just the start of what we can accomplish," he replies. "But perhaps you should be going now. It wouldn't do for the Jedi to discover that you've been here."
It most certainly would not.
It's not exactly uncommon for Jedi to return to the Temple in the wee hours of the night. As much as Coruscanti would prefer it—and have endeavored to standardize galactic time to make it so—not every other place in the galaxy keeps a schedule that matches up to the galactic capital's planetary rotation. With your robes on and your hood up, you hardly attract a second glance as you make your way back up to your room.
The Force makes it more complicated, of course. But with some effort, you're able to bank the solar fire of your presence until you merely seem extremely powerful, instead of…yourself.
The door to your quarters slides open without a sound. You half (or more than half, if you're honest) expected to see Obi-Wan in your living area with a lecture already prepared for you on what you've just done, but the space is empty. He must still be fast asleep.
Given all the excitement you've experienced tonight, it might not hurt for you to do the same. For all the energy coursing through your body, you still need to rest sometime.
And yet, for all your need for peaceful sleep, it seems you'll get nothing of the kind tonight. Because tonight, you dream.
It isn't the first time. Long before you ever met Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan you dreamed of becoming a Jedi, and in time the galaxy placed a lightsaber in your hand. And in those last hours as a slave your dreams whispered to you of freeing yourself with the keenness of your mind and the steadiness of your hands, and then you flew to liberation in a Podracer you had built yourself.
But this time is different—disjointed, confused. "Always in motion is the future", Master Yoda sometimes says, but tonight there's so much "motion" that it feels like watching a race from the sidelines: events whip past your vision in moments, so quickly that you catch only impressions of what's happening.
And it's also different in another way. Those past premonitions were visions of a better future. These are visions of a future hanging in the balance. That balance can be tipped to light or to darkness…and the burden of the choices that may tip it falls upon you.
What do you see?
[ ] A poisoned world. The end of an endless war. A soldier, or a Jedi, or both?
[ ] A living world. Imperious visages, plotting. The birth, and perhaps the death, of something beautiful.
[ ] A peaceful world. Killers, remorseful and remorseless. The gratitude, or ire, of a friend.
[ ] A prosperous world. Walking unseen in the crucible of power. A rivalry extinguished, or burning anew.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Lightsaber forms.
[X] A living world. Imperious visages, plotting. The birth, and perhaps the death, of something beautiful.
Zonama Sekot?
[X] A living world. Imperious visages, plotting. The birth, and perhaps the death, of something beautiful.
Zonama Sekot?
birdmaster01
Big Tech's Strongest Soldier
[X] Galactic diplomacy.
[X] A living world. Imperious visages, plotting. The birth, and perhaps the death, of something beautiful.
[X] A living world. Imperious visages, plotting. The birth, and perhaps the death, of something beautiful.
[ X] Force techniques
[X ] A peaceful world. Killers, remorseful and remorseless. The gratitude, or ire, of a friend.
[X ] A peaceful world. Killers, remorseful and remorseless. The gratitude, or ire, of a friend.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Lightsaber forms.
[X] A poisoned world. The end of an endless war. A soldier, or a Jedi, or both?
[X] A poisoned world. The end of an endless war. A soldier, or a Jedi, or both?
- Location
- Somewhere in the area
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
[X] Lightsaber forms.
[X] A poisoned world. The end of an endless war. A soldier, or a Jedi, or both?
[X] A poisoned world. The end of an endless war. A soldier, or a Jedi, or both?
[X] Lightsaber forms.
[X] A poisoned world. The end of an endless war. A soldier, or a Jedi, or both?