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tsaomengde · 6 years

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DVD commentary meme! Anything from Aliit (Chapter 9 of Calamities II), please? Because feels trains are always wild? ^_^

Commentary below the cuuuut

Padmé shot another droid in the head and ducked back beneath their makeshift barricade, narrowly avoiding the withering hail of fire which its fellows hurled at her. “How’s that door coming?” she called.

There was a loud sparking sound, followed by a hearty Mando curse. “They really don’t want us getting into the command superstructure, that’s how,” Kal’s son Kom’rk growled. He was sitting on the floor, surrounded by a mess of wires trailing out of a console in the wall. To the left of the console was a truly massive door, which was – as far as the boarding party had been able to determine – the only way that creatures larger than a mouse droid could get into the command tower of the Executor.

Skirata’s other five Null ARC sons, as well as the little Sergeant himself, were gathered around the door, either trying to slice its controls, jump-start its hydraulic release, or just burn through it. Padmé, Jango Fett, Walon Vau, Rav Bralor, Mij Gilamar, and half a dozen other Cuy’val Dar Mandos were holding off the droid advance. Their barricade had begun its life as ten large cargo crates they’d appropriated from a nearby hangar when it had become clear they needed to batten down for a siege. It had since expanded considerably in the last twenty minutes, as more and more dead droids had been heaped atop and between the crates themselves.

This scene was a combination of “Jesus, I have too many Mando’ade” and “I haven’t done enough with the Cuy’val Dar, they all need to do something”

There was a loud blast, and Jango dropped back behind the barricade to Padmé’s left with a hiss. “Shab!”

“What happened?” Padmé asked. “I was reloading.”

“One of these di’kutla hut’uune just shot a mini-spider droid in the fuel cells,” Jango growled, jerking a thumb at the rest of the Mando contingent. “I just felt a piece of shrapnel hit me under my left arm.”

“Usen’ye, Jango!” Bralor bellowed at him. “It was shoot it in the fuel cells or watch it plant a be’senaar right in the middle of our wall! Or did you not see the underslung launcher?”

Jango gave her a rude gesture as he slashed open his undertunic with his wrist knife and slapped a bacta patch against the impact site. That would keep the wound from getting infected, Padmé thought, until the splinter of metal could be removed.

“Be’senaar?” Padmé asked, popping back up to take another few shots before the droids began focusing on her again. “I don’t know that one.”

“Missile,” Jango said. “Specifically a low-yield one used against people. Proton torpedoes and the like are me’senkyr’am. ‘Ship death.’”

“We could use one of those to deal with this blasted door,” Padmé said.

Thank God for Wookiepedia and their complete Mando’a dictionary.

To her right, Vau, who had spent most of the protracted shootout silently offing droids with a Verpine rifle he’d borrowed from Skirata, laughed quietly. The sound was barely audible over the blaster fire and occasional grenade, but Padmé could still hear it. “We’d need to be a quarter kilometer away not to go up with it if we tried that.”

“And?” Padmé asked. “Any other reason why that wouldn’t work?”

“It might destabilize the ship’s structural integrity too much for us to even be able to get access to the command superstructure,” Jango told her. “This is the slow, annoying way to do it, but it’s also the way that’ll work.” He snapped off another shot at the droids. “Assuming that certain people haven’t massively exaggerated how good their sons are at slicing!” he called pointedly over his shoulder.

This was the point at which I paused, asked, “Why aren’t they using explosives?”, and had to cover my butt. Well, when shoehorning in explanations, add sass to cover it up.

“Mir’osik,” Skirata barked back at Jango. Dung for brains, Padmé mentally translated. She was picking up quite a lot of Mando’a, at this point. “My lads know their stuff. Not their fault that Vader’s got his ship sealed up tighter than a –”

The door made a loud boom as its seal broke, and the two massive halves began to slide apart.

“See?” Skirata laughed. “Like magic. I –”

Padmé stared in horror as the passageway on the other side of the door began to disgorge dozens of Myrmidons. Lightsabers blazing, they fell on Skirata and his sons, while others leapt over their fellows’ heads to take the fight to the rest of the Cuy’val Dar, pressing them up against the barricade which had been keeping them alive a moment earlier.

I initially introduced the Myrmidons both as a nod to the old EU’s wishy-washy rules about how cloning Jedi works - in Force Unleashed II, you play Starkiller’s clone, and the final battle against Vader has you cutting through literally hundreds of the failed versions of you - and as a threat that could give Jedi trouble, but not to the same extent as my rapidly-shrinking cast of Sith Lords. (Clone Wars’s version of this threat is to have Grievous show up, chew scenery, and lose every five episodes, thus making him completely unintimidating.) Then it occurred to me that while the Mando’ade are Jedi-killers, they’d still have a lot of trouble with the Myrmidons, and cackled a little.

One of them landed in a crouch of in front of Padmé. She felt a terrific, invisible force slam into her chest, crushing her against the cargo crate behind her. If she hadn’t been wearing beskar, she was certain the impacts would have broken every bone in her chest and back. The Myrmidon followed up with a lightsaber jab straight into her heart, but the beskar turned the blade aside. It corkscrewed away along the surface of the Mandalorian iron to embed itself deeply into the crate.

Padmé, in pain and winded, still managed to snap her blaster up to fire half a dozen shots into the Myrmidon’s gut. Its armor absorbed the first three shots, but the last three penetrated. The cyborg staggered back, Anakin’s eyes glaring out at her from beneath its metal mask. Padmé seized the opening and twitched the blaster up to beneath the thing’s chin, where there was a hint of flesh visible between the mask and the sheath of armor around the throat. She fired a single bolt.

Green plasma flames erupted from the eye holes in the mask and the Myrmidon dropped. Padmé knew, from Ordo’s report, that it could get back up if the cybernetic implants in its brain were still functional. Fortunately, she was confident that this one no longer had a brain.

Padme kicking ass is my fetish.

Myrmidons and Mandalorians were struggling everywhere she looked. Vau, wielding his beskar saber, deftly parried a vicious blow from an opponent, then skewered it through the torso. He tossed the saber to his other hand, drew his pistol, and shot it in the head to keep it down. Gilamar got his crushgaunt-clad hand’s fingers hooked into the eyes of another Myrmidon, then let his weaponized gauntlets trigger, literally pulping the creature’s face.

oh God I’d forgotten about the crushgaunt thing. that’s gross and wonderful

She looked for Skirata, and felt her heart stop. He was down, a Myrmidon towering over him, lightsaber held aloft. The Nulls were all occupied with foes of their own, too far away to get to him.

Padmé screamed a challenge, knowing that it was useless with these cold-blooded things but unable to contain her fear and anger. She snapped up her blaster and fired into the Myrmidon’s back, over and over, not expecting to penetrate the thicker armor there but hoping to distract it, keep it from delivering the coup de grace while she closed the distance.

It staggered around to confront her. She was less than a meter away when it lashed out with a deadly kick at her head. Helmet or no, it would definitely drop her if it landed. Padmé let her legs go out from under her, and she skidded beneath the kick into the Myrmidon’s other leg, spilling it to the floor.

Grappling with it was a poor decision, but letting it keep its lightsaber hand free would be a worse one. Padmé flipped herself onto her back, whirled a leg around to kick out at the blazing weapon’s hilt. Her armored toe landed perfectly against the Myrmidon’s metal wrist, sending the lightsaber flying from its grip to skid across the floor. It twisted on top of her, its other hand going for her throat.

Self-defense reflexes kicked in. Padmé got her left forearm between the Myrmidon’s grasping fingers and her throat, keeping it from strangling her or just ripping out her windpipe. She tried to bring her blaster around next, but it pinned her wrist with a heavy prosthetic knee. Its saber hand, now empty, came around, fingers curled into a metal fist, and slammed into the side of her helmet with bone-jarring force.

I can’t take another hit like that. She might already be concussed, and if she lost consciousness that would be the end of her. Padmé got a knee into the Myrmidon’s stomach, levered her other foot beneath her, and pushed her muscles into a convulsive wave, hurling the cyborg off of her while also kipping herself back up. She landed on her knees rather than her feet, which was less than ideal, but at least she was no longer on the ground.

The Myrmidon had turned, going for its lightsaber. Padmé shoved herself to her feet, took three running steps, and leapt atop its back, wrapping her left arm in a chokehold around its neck and grabbing her wrist with her other hand. With all her might, she squeezed.

Its neck was armored, but by necessity it was light, flexible material rather than hardened plates. Padmé’s crushing grip forced that material into the flesh of the Myrmidon’s throat, pressing on its windpipe.

It took less than fifteen pounds of pressure to collapse a human windpipe. Myrmidons, seemingly, were not exceptional in that regard.

When it collapsed beneath her, taking her down with it, Padmé scrabbled for its lightsaber. She got the hilt into her hand, ignited the crimson blade, and stabbed down through the back of the dying creature’s head. It gave one last shudder and died.

I wanted Padme to have to take one of the Myrmidons down barehanded, because yes, but then I found myself wondering how one kills a phrik-armored cyborg barehanded. The answer, of course, is to fuck up a sleeper hold so it puts pressure on the windpipe instead of the arteries. Necks are hard to armor.

Padmé dropped the weapon and ran back to Skirata, picking up her blaster as she did. Around her, the Mandalorians were recovering from the ambush, killing the last of the Myrmidons and resuming suppressing fire against the droids on the other side of the barricade – none of which had managed to make it over, thankfully. It had been a brutal melee, but it had been mercifully short.

“Kal,” she breathed as she got to him. He was face-down, not moving, his helmet fallen several feet away. Blood slicked the deck beneath him. “Kal, we got them. Stay with me.”

With a grunt, she managed to turn him over. She felt the blood drain from her face as shock flooded her. The Myrmidon had punched its phrik fist clean through his beskar chestplate. Blood frothed at his lips every time he breathed, and his breaths were shallow.

His eyes fluttered open. “Pad’ika,” he murmured. “Shabla thing jumped me.” He coughed, violently, his blood spraying all across her breastplate.

“MIJ!” Padmé bellowed for their unit medic. “MIJ, HURRY!”

Gilamar was there in two seconds, bleeding himself from a nasty head wound but seemingly unaffected. He swore when he saw Skirata’s chest. “Kal, you di’kut. Not good. Not good.” He knelt, began undoing the seals on Skirata’s armor.

“Mij, it’s too late,” Skirata told him, his voice quiet. A terrible gurgling sounded beneath his words. “Punctured lung. Slashed aorta. Drown in my own blood, if blood loss doesn’t… get me first.”

Padmé barely heard the weapons of the fire of the Cuy’val Dar returning to the barricade, beating back the advancing droids. Her own pulse seemed to thud in her ears, unbearably loud. This was war, she knew. People died. People you cared about.

But not Skirata. He wasn’t supposed to die.

I’m a self-admitted fan of Skirata, but he is an Author’s Pet. So, naturally, I wanted to use him myself, and then fridge him to cause Padme pain.

She became aware of the fact that six white-armored figures stood around her, Skirata, and Gilamar. Looking up, she saw the Nulls, helmets off, all staring down at their father.

“Got to… do it now,” Skirata gasped.

“Udesii, buir,” Ordo whispered, dropping to one knee next to him. “Mij is the best. Let’s just get this armor off, and –”

“No!” Skirata barked, his eyes blazing. He shoved Mij away. “No rest. Got to do this now.” He grasped Ordo’s hand, reached out and grabbed Padmé’s too. “The gai bal manda.” He swept his gaze across his sons. “Ni kyr’tayl gai sa’ad – Ordo, Mereel, Jaing, Kom’rk, A’den, Prudii.”

Padmé forced herself to breathe as he looked at her. “Ni kyr’tayl gai sa’ad – Padmé.”

He closed his eyes, sighed, and was suddenly gone.

As I mentioned in my reply to one of the comments on that chapter - maybe yours, even, I can’t remember - the spinoff story from this development would be how Jango dies, or quits being Mandalore, and Padme throws her helmet into the ring for the job now that she’s Mando, to stop some Death Watch fuckstick like Pre Vizsla from getting the job. But I don’t have the time and energy these days to even write Venge when I want to, so. Someone else can write that.

“Kal,” Padmé said, almost not recognizing her own voice. She sounded weak, and lost.

“Not Kal,” Ordo told her, looking at her over Skirata’s body. “Buir. He adopted you. He made it official with us, just now, but he also adopted you. You’re kin, now. Aliit.”

The other Nulls began moving in. Each of them took something off of Skirata’s body; Padmé realized they were all taking a piece of his armor. A gauntlet, a vambrace, his belt. Jaing lifted the Verpine pistol free from Skirata’s holster.

Ordo let his brothers finish before he claimed Kal’s armor tallies. He hung them around his own neck, nestling them beneath his armor. Then he looked at Padmé. “You too, vod,” he said. “We take him with us, now.”

In the realm of things I think are good about Mando’a: vod is entirely gender-neutral. Most of the language is, actually. Good shit.

Padmé nodded. There would be tears later, she knew. Right now, they were still on a mission, and the other Mando’ade were fighting back droids to give her and the Nulls this moment, this sacred moment to say goodbye.

Gilamar had gotten Skirata’s breastplate half-off before he’d been pushed away. A jagged piece of beskar protruded from the wound in his chest, punched free of the rest of the armor by the Myrmidon’s fatal blow. Padmé seized it and pulled; it came free, though she felt it bite into her palm even through her gauntlet.

She slipped the metal, still slick with Skirata’s blood and her own, into a pouch at her belt.

“Let’s go,” she said, getting back to her feet. “We still have someone to save.”

I feel a little bad, because as the story turned out, Padme and the rest of the Cuy’val Dar end up being used in a hostage gambit by Vader, which then backfires on him and allows Venge and Anakin to force the alliance that lets them beat Plagueis. So they contribute, but not in a glorious or badass way.

But it would have been inconsistent with the fiction and Vader’s established full power for them to have even the remotest chance, so. I like how this chapter turned out, and vaguely regret that it didn’t amount to more. There will definitely be references to it in the epilogue of the Venge series, though.

#star wars #venge #dvd commentary #norcumi

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