Shifti - User contributions [en]

Never That Simple

2011-04-12T03:31:25Z

Joysweeper: Created page with 'James Brosseau, TK-0480 of Makaze, rested his hand on the curved, porous surface and said, "Julia, I miss you." He sighed. "I know you probably can’t hear me. You probably d…'

James Brosseau, TK-0480 of Makaze, rested his hand on the curved, porous surface and said, "Julia, I miss you."

He sighed. "I know you probably can’t hear me. You probably don’t know how often I’ve been here. But if you do… or if you’re listening now…" He’d told the story in full several times now, and this simplified version just about every day. There was still an ache, but he didn’t have to force the words out anymore.

"I’ll say it again. You died just over two weeks ago." It had been that blasterproof shark with metal insectoid legs, the one that they’d been told to look for, since it had eaten two bystanders and injured several more. Other patrols who hadn’t been able to kill it had warned that you could tell if it was near by the smell, but Makaze had been in a skunked area that hadn’t been neutralized yet, and even Julia, who had kept taking off her breath mask, hadn’t known it was there until it was among them. She hadn’t been in full armor.

"We killed it. You don’t have to worry about that." Its skin had been blasterproof, or at least highly blaster-resistant, but it hadn’t been able to withstand a lightsaber. Getting back to base with her body had been a nightmare. The SL wasn’t organized like Julia was, and he’d generally relied on her to call the shots. The whole patrol had.

"And some Femtroopers found us on the way back. I don’t know what would have happened if Aurek Four hadn’t been there and reinforced us," he lied. If not for Aurek’s sharpshooters, SL-0075 would have killed them. They weren’t supposed to do that, not with anything remotely intelligent – there’d been paperwork and questioning over the shark, even though they’d dragged it back to be analyzed and it had been proven that it was just a rampaging monster. But officers were able to sort of modulate Vaders, keeping them that much calmer, and without Julia there to remind him…

James rubbed his face with his free hand. "ID-5290, I don’t know if you know him, got assigned to the patrol. I don’t think he’s as good as you, though. He’s a little too diffident. Though he also hasn’t been choked yet, so that’s something."

"Anyway, I got leave from the squad and went through attendant training. Except for the waiting, it’s not that difficult." He let his gaze drift over the surface of the man-sized egg, its subtle discolorations not really evident in the dim lighting of the incubation room. "I asked SL-0075 to come in and identify which one had you in it, and he did. He left right after. Said it was the humidity. I think rebirth just makes him uncomfortable."

As he always did at about this point, James said, "If he was wrong and you’re not Julia, uh, I’m sorry for doing this all the time. Come back soon, whoever you are."

"My shift isn’t until midmorning." He hesitated. "I'm just here because I had a nightmare where you came back lagniappe." She’d broken through the shell and stood up, her head down, and when he’d touched her chin to tilt her face up… The chamber was very warm and humid, but he shivered.

Rebirth through these giant eggs took time – roughly fifteen days of incubation and another ten to recover, usually at Outpost where it was safe – but it was the safest, simplest, and most practical way to raise the dead, as far as he knew. Even so, there were issues, like the chimerae, the ones who hatched as Strangers, and of course lagniappe. The word meant "something extra and unexpected".

"Don’t do that, okay? I’ll be here. I love you."

On the other side of the chamber, the door opened and the oldest attendant, Amelia, came in with a kit in hand, glancing briefly at the humidifier. She clearly knew he’d been talking to Julia’s egg, but out of all the incubator attendants she was the one who made the least fuss about it. Some of the girls thought it was sweet. Others said it was weird or creepy, or brought up the whole issue about the problems that could result when a subordinate trooper had relations with his immediate superior. Amelia, if she’d passed judgment, didn’t tell him.

"This isn’t your usual shift," she said instead. He’d come in just before Rosie’s shift ended and just before Amelia’s began, and Rosie had decided that leaving him there meant the eggs weren’t unattended, so she could just go to bed instead of waiting. That wasn’t something troopers would have stood for, but most attendants were from the Imperial Service Organization, not troopers.

He told her, "I’ll be out of here soon enough. I just couldn’t get back to sleep," which was true.

"Nightmares, hun?" Amelia got down on her knees next to an egg, took a stethoscope out of her kit, and started listening to various points on the shell, a small, distracted frown on her face.

"Yeah." Talking to Julia had helped, and there was always something calming about Amelia, how matter-of-fact she was, that made bad dreams snap into perspective. He was getting sleepy again. Stifling a yawn, James said, "The usual. Just dreams about everything going wrong."

"Try not to worry too much, honey. Eggs very rarely go wrong. I’ve worked here since we started, and I’ve been at every hatching. I’ve only ever seen one lagniappe. Everyone else, well, they don’t come out at their best, but you don’t usually know if they’re Strangers until later, and chimerae are mostly just confused." She took the stethoscope out of her ears and put it around her neck, then stood up to look him in the eye.

"If she is a chimera, though, you still have to take care of her. Even though she’ll be mixed up with someone else, and she won’t really be your Lieutenant, she’ll need someone to lean on and to tell her that she matters. Chimerae are their own people, and they need a lot of support." Her lips twitched up into a sardonic half-smile. "And don't hold it against her. I’m told that it’s very depressing to find that everyone either half of you knew rejects you."

James winced. "I know. I’ll try to do that."

"You're not in a kiddie-league competition. Trying doesn’t count. You have to ''do''." Even as she said it, Amelia scowled and put her hand to her forehead. "Argh. I swear, I didn’t mean to paraphrase a Jedi." ISO women and the few men among them shared a lot of 501st sentiments, including distrust, at best, of Jedi.

"No, I know what you mean." It was a painful thought. He’d half-lost Cory and too many other friends to Xanadu already. In some ways it was worse than outright losing them. But Amelia had a point, and it wouldn’t be the chimera’s fault. "I’ll do that. I just hope I won’t have to."

"Good." The ISO worker posted her hands on her hips and looked over the egg chamber. "We’re very close to hatching now. It could happen in five minutes or in another four days."

"What?"

"You heard me. If one egg’s not entirely silent anymore, all of them are like that. That’s how it works. Each clutch is linked, and when one starts, they’ll all start."

He already knew all that. Everything anyone in the 501st knew about rebirth through these eggs had been taught to him during attendant training. Even so, James felt a prickle of alarm. This soon? He’d wanted this to be over quickly, but now…

It wasn’t up to him. He just had to deal with it. Taking a deep breath, he nodded.

He hung around for a little after that, trying not to be rude, until Amelia put on her music and got out a reading light. Then he made his excuses and left. James didn’t really care for big-band music.

As an attendant, he’d been assigned a small room very near the incubation chamber, right in the best-defended heart of Base. It was only a floor down from the suite the new Council had claimed.

His room’s dimensions were identical to those of the other attendants, big enough for a narrow bed and a dresser and not much else. There was a full-length mirror on the inside of the door, and that was about it. The other attendants, he knew, decorated their rooms. But he hadn't planned to be here for long, and he knew that there would probably be another trooper in this room waiting for the next clutch.

James lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. So soon. Admittedly, there had been times during the past two weeks when he’d wondered if it was possible to die of waiting. Several times he’d thought about resigning as an attendant and going back to the patrol. He’d always felt incredibly guilty for thinking that, though. People who’d just been brought back were at their most vulnerable. He couldn’t leave Julia like that.

Leah, Makaze’s female trooper, had encouraged him, telling him about her stint as an attendant months ago, back when the revival eggs were new phlebotinum and she’d been volunteering. The ISO hadn’t been involved in it back then, when they hadn’t been sure if it would even work in Base, or if what came out of the eggs would be dangerous.

And then Leah had been killed on patrol, and from time to time James wondered if he could have made a difference if he’d been there. More guilt. He’d have to talk to her when she came back. If she came back. A lot of people didn’t. He'd heard various explanations for that, including that the people who came back had only been "mostly" dead, or that they had unfinished business, but frankly he thought all of those explanations boiled down to "I don't know."

He knew Julia was in that incubation chamber. SL-0075 wouldn’t have lied about that. He hoped. It wouldn’t be long now before he found out.

The waiting had felt like it was taking ages. But now that the time was here, or almost here…

He was 501st. He had to deal with it. James turned over and tried to get back to sleep.

He must have succeeded, since the alarm woke him up. It was several long confused seconds before he realized that this wasn’t the invasion alarm, it was the gentler but equally urgent chimes that meant the rebirth eggs were moving. The attendant in the incubation chamber had pushed the button.

By the time he registered that, James had already pulled up his lowers, slid his cuirass over his head, and was locking his thigh armor and greaves in place. Donning his armor was a much easier, more automatic task than it had been before Xanadu; he had literally done it alone, in less than a minute, and without help. Making a snap decision, he put on his bracers but left his gloves, hand armor, blaster, belt, boots, and helmet where he’d lined them up. There would be no place for them in a hatching.

He left the room without a glance at the mirror and lined up with the other attendants outside the anteroom to the incubation chamber.

The attendants mostly yawned or fidgeted, clearly not as anxious as he was. With one exception, they were all ISO and wore the uniform – a tan short-sleeved button-up shirt with a unit patch over the heart, black skirts or slacks, hose if there were skirts, and sturdy black shoes. The only other non-ISO was TI-7531, a TIE pilot who went by Kepler, and who looked almost as out-of-place as James did.

James had gotten to know Kepler fairly well in the past two weeks. Pilots had been quite effectively grounded, and unless they had the leadership skills to be officers or the inclination to become troopers, they were fairly useless outside of strategy sessions. Since they were 501st with or without their equipment, most of them found ways to make themselves useful.

Kepler made eye contact with James, who nodded tightly. His stomach was putting itself in knots. This was no time to talk.

James was both dreading this and wishing it was over. One way or another, it seemed like a very long time before the door opened and Amelia waved them in.

The attendants all packed shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back into the tiny anteroom just outside of the incubation chamber, James pulling the outer door closed. The eggs needed heat and humidity, and an anteroom kept both from escaping into the rest of Base.

"Now remember," Amelia said, ostensibly to all of them but probably to James, since he was the newbie here, "it’s like with birds. You ''assist'' the hatching. You don’t force it. Wait until they’ve actually made holes before you do anything except encourage. And take it slow. We’ll be here for a while."

She opened the inner door and let them come the rest of the way in.

The incubation chamber already seemed very different than it had been only hours ago. It was as dark as before, and almost as quiet, but back then the atmosphere had been one of rest and melancholy, no more than a few people inside at any one time. Now, three senior attendants only slightly younger than Amelia milled purposefully, making initial checks and fiddling with the climate controls to make it still warmer.

The other attendants boiled out into the room among them, already forming lines for the blankets and the medkits and the soft hatching tools. James held still, uncertain despite all the times he'd imagined this.

Amelia swept up behind him and patted him high on the back, making him jump. "It’ll be fine," she said when he looked at her. "Get in line, drink some coffee or water or tea when it get here, and settle down. Take a nap if your nerves let you. It’s going to be a while yet before we get any pipping." Another ISO worker called to her, and she went over, telling him over her shoulder, "You’re not the first trooper to be in here waiting for someone, and you won’t be the last."

He took her advice, collecting the items and lowering himself to sit besides Julia’s egg. When he touched the shell, he could feel the nearly-imperceptible shifting as it moved, very slightly. It put an unbearable excitement in his chest.

James wanted to get up, run around, hug people or shake them and demand to know if they’d heard this. He wanted to run to where the Makaze patrol bunked and wake everyone up to make them come see. He wanted to crack the shell now, and finally see Julia and tell her that he wouldn’t let this happen again. Ever.

But he would get to see her again, soon, and he could wait a few more hours. James settled on getting up, helping the attendants who brought in things to eat and drink, accepting reassurances from the many people who evidently could see his nervousness, always coming back to Julia. Some time passed that way, and he couldn’t have told how long it was before the hatching started in earnest.

Someone else started first, in the egg next to this one. Kepler, for all that he’d done this before, almost fell over at the tentative scratching sound, and he whooped and started talking to the egg in excited, energetic tones. As if this had been a signal, the room filled with scraping and tapping sounds and attendants’ voices.

Julia started. She faltered when he said her name, then started up again, stronger if anything.

Sometimes she stopped to rest, and he did his best not to bother her, but inevitably she would start again or he wouldn’t be able to keep quiet.

When he spoke, or when he tapped the shell with his fingers, she tapped back, jarring the shell. James found himself grinning ear to ear, hardly able to take his hands off the surface.

Moment by moment, the tapping became less uncertain, more impatient. Some of the eggs, he noticed during one rest period, were all but knocking, and there were muffled voices from one or two. Nothing coherent yet, mostly nonverbal things like coughing or moans.

Eventually the shell pipped – Julia’s eggtooth, repeatedly hitting the same spot, first cracked, then pulverized a small section of shell, then made it bow outwards, conelike, and finally broke through the membrane. The eggtooth showed pale and gleaming and smooth for a moment, then withdrew.

James used his fingers to break off and pull away the shell fragments around the hole, not caring that the edges were sharp or that the membrane was damp and clung to his skin. Wet human fingers reached through, grabbing at the edges of the hole.

He stroked them and they moved, reaching out to catch his hand. He could have pulled away – the grip was weak – but he stayed, stroking them gently over and over with his free hand, until they let go and withdrew back into the dark egg.

Then they got to work. James had hatching tools made of a sort of rubbery material, which he could use to widen cracks and holes, but he could only help. The real work was Julia’s. She had the eggteeth, those short, sharp, temporary projections on her elbows, and they worked just fine, even without much room in the egg to swing them. He could improve on her efforts whenever she rested, which was often.

During one of those breaks, when he was trying to lever open the top of the shell, a woman screamed. He dropped the tool, shoved himself to his feet, and turned to see an ISO attendant throwing herself away from the egg she’d been working on, away from what was coming out of it.

A wordless dread swept through him as he reached for his holster and his bare hand slapped his armor. He’d left his E-11 in his room.

There was a silent moment as all of the ISO workers stared and, almost in unison, instinctively drew away from it. Slowly, it rose to its feet.

It was a bit bigger, the calm part of him observed, than the shell should have been able to hold. Unless it had been compressed somehow. My, that was a lot of tentacles. And legs too? What unusual physiology. Vaguely cthuloid, although since it fit in the room and he hadn’t gone insane from looking at it, it probably wasn’t Lovecraftian.

The rest of him had a short and furious argument about staying with Julia versus protecting the ISO workers. Protecting won. He and a TIE pilot were the only able fighters in a room full of civilians.

He interposed himself between it and the closest of them – why weren’t they running? – with his arms out, barring the way. It was not taller than him, but it ''was'' more massive. If it caught him, he was going to get hurt.

It turned, smaller facial tentacles questing, and he interposed himself again, looking directly into what he had to assume were its eyes. There were a lot of them.

"Don’t look away!" Amelia shouted from somewhere behind him. Almost immediately his eyes started to water. He’d never been that good at staring contests.

She was talking again, quietly enough that he couldn’t hear what she was saying, far too quietly to be addressing him. Comlink? Did she have a comlink? Yes, he remembered, a little silver one on the collar of her shirt. She’d be calling for backup. An SL, he was hoping. One of the surgical ones, who didn't cause collateral damage.

The thing groaned low in its throat with what sounded like at least three voices, all disharmonious.

"Don’t do it," James said in what he hoped was the right tone. "Don’t do it!" His eyes were burning and tearing. All at once, it moved and he felt himself switch out of rational mode and into fight-or-flight, and the world seemed to slow down and get simpler.

It lunged at him, but he’d seen it gathering himself and was able to dive out of the way. As it hurled past, oddly graceful, he realized that that being out of the way meant he wasn’t between it and the civilians. It landed, he pushed off of the ground, and as it was reorienting he lunged at it.

Not his brightest idea. It turned and swatted at him. He twisted aside, but not quickly enough to keep it from catching at his chest. His armor saved him from its claws, but its hand or paw or foot drove him to the floor.

James rolled out of the way and surged back to his feet. He had its full attention now. Just great. What was he supposed to-

It started after him again and recoiled as a blaster bolt hit it, backing up and groaning, facial tentacles writhing.

"We have to split its attention," Kepler said, edging into James’s field of view and appearing as a factor into his narrowed worldview. He had a hold-out blaster. Tiny, with only enough charge for a few shots, and evidently not enough to bring it down, but much better than nothing. And now James had backup.

As it started to focus on the pilot, James took a step forwards, stomping, distracting it. Kepler, a second later, took his cue and stomped as it turned again.

It groaned again, more loudly, throwing what passed for its head up like a dog baying, and then it lowered its front section like it was sniffing the floor, turning its narrow back on them.

James waited, and Kepler also did nothing. His adrenaline was up, but he forced himself to wait. They had to be cautious, reactionary. He doubted they could subdue it, and if it realized how little they could hurt it, they probably wouldn’t be able to stop it.

It was… heading back to its broken egg? Did that mean it had had enough, and it was going to lie down and the whole situation could be resolved?

No.

It spun, startlingly fast, and flung a large piece of its eggshell at Kepler, who was lightly built and unarmored and not at all ready. The pilot fell with a sharp cry, reflexively firing once into the ceiling.

James hissed an obscenity and went after it as it started moving. He barreled into its side, knocking it off its feet, and rode it down to the floor, knotting his hands in its bizarrely soft, yielding flesh. The impact didn't stun it; it bucked and slapped at him; most of its claws just scraped against his armor, but one found its way into the collar of his cuirass, just barely going through his bodysuit and nicking his lower throat, but hooking the armor and drawing him close, not pushing him away.

Its facial tentacles parted, and he saw that it didn't have teeth or jaws, but that beak was formidable enough. And he wasn't wearing his helmet. James tried to brace his bare feet against the floor and scrabbled at its forelimb, bending its digits backwards, gouging for sensitive spots before it could get him close enough to bite.

Another blaster bolt hit it, close enough that James felt the heat of it singe his skin, and saw the facial tentacles that had been hit blacken and curl. It let go, groaning, and he scrambled back.

Amelia snapped "Don't do that again. We have an SL on the way," and shot its face a second time. She also had a hold-out blaster. Actually, four of the ISO workers had tiny blasters trained on the thing. They were, James saw while risking a glance around, covering the others, who were moving the cracked eggs back towards the door.

That would have been just fine if they’d been threatened by something that could be put down by a few hold-out shots. But while being shot was making this thing flinch and growl and paw at itself, it wasn’t acting like it was really hurt.

They didn’t have to kill it, just stall it before the SL got here. But if it went on a rampage...

Keeping an eye on it, James went to where Kepler was trying to sit up.

"I'm fine," the pilot said tightly. "Leave me. I can still fight." James ignored this to half-drag, half-carry him back towards the entrance and look him over. The eggshell hadn't cut through his flight suit, but James didn't like the crease it had left. He started opening Kepler's flight suit, only to have his wrists seized.

"Hey, hey! What are you doing!" The pilot's blue eyes were as wide as they'd been when the shell had hit him.

Kepler had said at one point over the past two weeks that he'd been a woman before Xanadu. "Sorry," James said. "I don't mean anything by this. I just need to see if you're hurt."

"I told you, I'm fine. I just had the wind knocked out of me, that's all."

James had to stop and look back over his shoulder when he heard more groaning. The ISO was keeping the situation under control, it seemed. He wasn't needed, and could turn his attention back to Kepler.

"''All'' pilots say that." No matter if they were 501st or Rebel Legion, absolutely right or completely wrong, it was just what pilots said. Admittedly a lot of others said that kind of thing too, but pilots were infamous for it. "Look, I just need to check. Because if you pretend you're not hurt if you actually are, you're going to cause us a lot of grief."

Kepler sighed and let go of James's hands. "All right, all right. But I get to do it." He opened his flightsuit to the waist, spread it wide, and raised his undershirt. "Happy?"

"That's going to be a very nasty bruise," James told him, eyeing his skin critically. "You should definitely see a healer and make sure you don't have a cracked rib."

"At least ''I'm'' not bleeding from the neck. Emperor's black bones, James, worry about yourself."

The door opened then, and the SL strode in. James saw the suit and briefly thought he was a Vader, but the man's uncovered face and head and lack of a chest box ruled that out. He walked into the room without pausing to evaluate the situation, like he'd known what was there.

"You will stop," he said, calm and steady-voiced. The ISO workers backed away from it, leaving him closest.

It growled, and the SL shook his blond head. "No."

He stood by as it groaned, and although James only saw him from the back, he thought the man seemed to be listening with every evidence of fascination. "I see. Consider this a friendly warning, then. If anyone here is to be killed, it will be you."

James flinched as it snarled, a higher and much louder sound than it had made before. The SL was utterly unmoved. "Because they're all on my side, more or less, and some of them are my friends. And you're not. And you won't be able to hurt ''me'' at all."

It made this bizarre snorting, snarling coughing noise and started advancing on him, not leaping but stalking, showing its beak.

In one fluid motion, the SL drew and ignited his green lightsaber and took a ready stance. For the first time, he didn't sound entirely serene, but mildly irritated and supremely confident. "You think I'm lying? Try it."

The SL was ready when it jumped at him - it hung suspended in midair and started flailing and writhing has he walked slowly up to it and reached for it with his free hand, his lightsaber lowered casually. It groaned and keened and tried to twist away, but he lowered it to the ground and laid his palm on what passed for its head. It went still.

A moment passed like this, and another, long enough that James jumped in surprise when Kepler touched his neck, causing the pilot to mutter something unkind about stormtroopers and poor situational awareness while putting something over the scratch it had given him.

Finally the SL let out his breath in a long sigh and lifted his hand away from it, and it rose to its feet, facial tentacles completely still and limp. He closed his lightsaber down, turned around, and James finally got a good look at his face. It was the Darkluke.

"Take it out of here. Tell it to follow you, pull it along, whatever. Find someone who can tell you where to put it." No one moved. Shaking his head, the Darkluke stepped right up to it and slapped its side, right over one of its blaster burns. It didn't react, although the blow was loud and made its flesh wobble. "It's safe. It should stay in a trance for at least a few hours, maybe more. And I think its reaction time just got a lot slower, maybe permanently. I had to get rough," he added, apologetic and a little regretful.

"Right. Rosie!" Amelia clapped, once, like a schoolteacher. "Are we 501st or not? Stop staring and get to work." Over the sudden bustle, she called out, "Rosie, take it to... hmm. Go find whoever it is on guard duty who's up at this hour. Thanks, Luke."

"You know I'm always happy to help, Amelia," he said, surveying the incubation chamber.

"Well, that's done," Kepler muttered, calling James' attention back. "Hopefully the eggs didn't come to any harm and we can get back to this."

Eggs. Hatching. Julia!

He was able to find her again, and tell her that there had just been an attack but everything was fine. He heard her saying something incoherent, and they went back to work.

It was easier now, with the Darkluke striding confidently from one egg to another, not touching anything but somehow making the work less tiring. Eventually, Julia's eggshell split down the middle, and he caught her, not caring that his hands and forearms got covered in a wash of leftover egg fluids.

Her body was limp, with no strength in it, and she couldn’t quite hold her own head up. Her skin was coated with slime and seemed gray-tinged, though it could have been the lighting, and the hooked eggteeth on her elbows were strange and alien. But her eyes, though half-closed, were still bright and alive, maybe brighter than before, maybe just in contrast to the rest of her.

"I, I, I," she gasped, shivering. James almost wrapped his arms around her to try and warm her up, but remembered just in time that he was wearing armor. Instead he put a blanket around her, knelt, and took both of her hands, rubbing his thumbs over them to try and improve her circulation.

"It’s okay," he told her. "It’s okay. I’m here. I love you."

She flashed him a smile, and then closed her eyes and took several deep, purposeful breaths, clearly working up her strength.

"I… I have, I have something important... to tell the, the Council," she gasped.

"What? Why?"

"You're much too weak for that, sweetie," Amelia said, standing over them with her arms crossed.

"That... doesn't matter." Just speaking was an obvious effort, but she continued, "This is... important."

"Sweetheart, rest. We'll take care of everything. They'll hear about this in due time."

Breathing hard, Julia opened her eyes. "You don't... understand. It's not that. I, I have to give them... a report." She had to stop to gasp for air in the middle of each sentence.

The Darkluke came up and stood over Amelia, though not by much. Both of them were smaller than stormtroopers and the Darkluke's glossy boots didn't help that much. "I don't sense deception or any great confusion," he said. "She's telling the truth to the best of her knowledge."

The ISO worker turned on him with a scowl. "She's in no condition to even be conscious for more than a few minutes at a time. Look around. It will be at least another twenty hours before anyone should even be holding a real conversation."

"If it's really as urgent as I sense, we might not have twenty hours," the Darkluke countered, folding his arms. "Lieutenant, if you told one of us, we could relay it to the Council for you. I could do it."

The muscles in Julia's neck tightened, but she wasn't quite able to lift her head. "No. They won't... listen to you. They'd... listen to James or... the Servicewoman, but they wouldn't... wouldn't act. Not fast enough."

The Darkluke sagged, his entire posture turning dejected. He was an odd case, unique. He responded to "Luke" and had no SL designation, even though he was technically more Sith than any of the Maras. The 501st wasn’t particularly comfortable with him. Neither was the Rebel Legion. Most people weren't. According to rumor, ''he'' wasn’t particularly comfortable with him.

After all, he was a Luke; idealistic, forgiving, moral, readily placing others before himself, gentle, simply and genuinely good in a way not many people were. And even on the Dark Side, those Luke traits were there. Yes, he was prideful, he had a temper, he wasn't terribly patient, and he believed the ends justified the means. But he was so openly unhappy about those means, and he didn't fit in with anyone. Rumor said that he only had so long as a Sith before someone talked him into becoming a Jedi again, sort of sad-eyed and wiser like the other older Lukes.

James found his voice. "Julia, I don't want you to hurt yourself. You shouldn't stress yourself like this."

"Sorry, James." She managed another smile. "Priority... override. Bigger than me or... you."

"In that case," the Darkluke said, shaking off his gloom and gesturing with a gloved hand. Julia rose away from James like a puppet, clear off the ground, and floated to him. He closed his eyes and put his palm on her forehead, the same palm he'd used before. Julia's eyes closed.

"Wait, what are you-" James blurted, getting to his feet.

"Relax," Amelia said, resigned. "I've seen him do this before. He's done it to me, come to that, that time he was defending us during the Femtrooper raid. It's just a strength-transference thing. It looks strange, but this ''will'' help." In an undertone, she added, "And he gets so tortured if he can't help. That's Lukes for you."

Julia gasped. James took her in his arms and felt her weight settle as the Darkluke stopped using his power to hold her up. Now she wasn't entirely limp, holding her head up, her eyes more open.

"That's as much as I can do without knocking you out," the Darkluke said. "About as good as a day of rest. You can still overexert yourself, though, so take it easy."

"Thank you." Julia smiled. "That's much better."

"You're still about as weak as a furkit," he warned, his face serious, hooking his thumbs into his belt like a younger, more benign Vader. "See me later, and I can put you in a healing trance. Actually, maybe I should trance everyone who needs it, if it would help. They'll be sleeping even if I don't."

"If you'd like," Amelia said, standing out of the way as he swept away, his cape flagging behind him. She stared after him for a moment, watching him kneel and touch someone's forehead, then turned back. The ISO worker eyed Julia for a moment. "All right. I'll comm some people and tell them that we need the Council to meet, or at least a few members. Don't expect a miracle." She turned away and brought her comlink up to her face.

"Julia, you're sure about this, right?" He'd been prepared to care for her until she was strong enough to be driven out to Outpost to recover. Plans were flexible, of course, but if something major was happening...

"I'm sure." She pressed her face against his armor and tried to reach for him, but she missed. He shuffled her weight carefully, freeing one hand to take hers. "It's that important. Trust me." She closed her eyes. "I missed you."

"I missed you more," he said immediately, making her grin.

Her eyes flew open. "Oh, oh. My greens. You have to get me into my greens, they won’t take me seriously if I’m not in uniform."

He carried her into his room, since he'd had one of her uniforms folded in a drawer, and laid her on his bed. She tried to sit up and just about managed it, but she shook badly enough that he stopped her. He'd have to do this for her.

James wiped the worst of the egg-slime off her with a soft cloth, seeing as he did that it was vaguely reddish, and her navel had been covered over with smooth skin. Then, moving her arms and legs like she was a doll, he dressed her in her underthings and her uniform. He had some trouble getting her arms through her sleeves, since the eggteeth caught on and pierced the fabric, wriggling like loose milk teeth.

"I was hoping," she told him while he secured her boots, "that Luke was exaggerating when he said that I'm as weak as a furkit."

"Well, don't die next time," he told her, trying for a flippant tone.

She nodded seriously. "I don't plan to. I didn't plan to this time. Why didn't 0075 warn us in time?"

There was a knock at the door, saving him from trying to answer, and he opened it to find Kepler.

"Half an hour. Give the council that long at minimum to wake up and assemble," he said. "Some of them are out on patrol, and they need to get back. And the boss had me bring this."

"A wheelchair," Julia said flatly.

Kepler nodded. "You can’t walk. You won’t be able to walk for a couple of days, and not for more than a little ways at a time."

"They won’t take you seriously if I have to carry you in, either," James said.

Julia sighed. “I know. I just – ugh. I hate being this weak.”

Amelia arrived, took the wheelchair handles from Kepler, and bulled into the little room while the pilot found somewhere else to be. "You’re going to have to get used to it, sweetie. Just staying awake and talking is going to tax you. This news had better be important."

"It is. I wouldn’t give an override for something trivial."

Amelia took Julia’s feet, and James took her under the arms, and they swung her into the wheelchair. It had a back high enough that her head didn’t loll back far enough to keep her from seeing in front of her - she could hold it up now, but this way she could rest her neck muscles.

"Don't try to stand, don't get into any screaming arguments, and don't gesture heavily," Amelia ordered. "If you have to make some kind of a speech, make it a short one. You'll start getting the shakes and might pass out, which is not going to help your case."

Julia frowned at this, but she agreed. "All right. No overexertion."

Amelia left, muttering something about paperwork. Pausing long enough to kiss her forehead, James wheeled Julia out into the hall.

Which was, unexpectedly, more crowded than when he'd left it, and not just with attendants carrying out people on stretchers. In fact, it was full of healthy troopers, most of them in armor, yawning and talking together and lining up, eyes on him and Julia. He took a moment before he was able to recognize them. It was Makaze Squadron. ''All'' of Makaze Squadron, or nearly. He hadn't seen everyone together at once since they split into long-term patrols, taking a different name for each one.

They greeted Julia gladly, each seeing her for a moment and congratulating her, or saying that she'd been missed, or trying to fill her in on something she hadn't been there to hear about. The troopers nodded at or otherwise acknowledged James, but he obviously wasn't what they'd come for. For her part, Julia was clearly a little startled, but was gracious.

James grabbed Roan, someone from ''his'' fragment of Makaze, the one that had kept the name. Roan wasn't a close friend, but he ''was'' one of the ones who had visited him while he was languishing as an attendant, and who had told him about Leah's death. "Was this planned?"

"Not really, no," the older trooper said. "We heard that she was out and wanted to see the Council - you know how fast news travels here, even when we have to wake each other up to trade it. The Lieutenant is well-liked. As officer types go, she's a good one."

"We could have used the squadron during the attack," James said, slightly bitter.

"Yeah, I heard about that." Roan scratched the back of his head, looking down at the floor. "News travels fast, but all I heard was that there was an attack in Base and an SL was taking care of it. Sure, I armored up just in case, but I didn't even know it was happening in the incubator until it was over. And I'd vouch for everyone else here thinking pretty much the same thing."

Now it was James' turn to look down. "I know, I know. Sorry. I'm kind of on edge."

"Well, it's a busy night, and it's probably not going to get much better. Take care, James. We're on the old frequency if anything comes up."

The troopers who had seen Julia and said what they'd come to say sort of hung around talking until someone saw the attendants struggling with a stretcher and went to help, and the others joined in. Troopers, as a general rule, didn't particularly like having nothing to do.

As the line disappeared, the officers showed up one at a time to see Julia. There was less variety in how they greeted her, James noticed; some troopers had been dignified, some had been exuberant, some touched her shoulder or clasped her hands. Some had tried to make her laugh. Among the officers, he could generally tell who was closest to her based on how long they talked to her, how broadly they smiled, that kind of thing, but ''all'' of them kept their dignity up.

While waiting, he went back into the little room and finished putting on his armor, including his belt and blaster, cradling his helmet down around his side rather than putting it over his head. Coming out, he saw her looking for him and smiling as she saw him. He stood by as a couple of SLs turned up. A Revan, masked and robed and very quiet, appeared rather dramatically and told Julia something in a voice too low for James to understand. Julia said something equally low, and the Revan swept out again. A Mara showed up with much less fanfare, but she said barely a word before seeing the Darkluke and going to talk to him, to his obvious surprise.

James watched her herding him off to the side and briefly considered trying to separate them, but no one else seemed really concerned, so he shrugged it off. Lukes had to be kept away from Vaders, and the Darkluke moreso than the young one or any of the ones in the Rebel Legion, but Maras as a rule didn't start fights. Arguments, sometimes, but no one would get killed.

Finally, ID-5290 seemed not so much to approach as to simply appear at James’s elbow. Like every other time James had seen the officer, he was impeccably well-groomed. "Lord 0075 requested that I convey to Lieutenant 4102 his deepest regrets that he was unable to save you. He desired me to tell you that it is his fault entirely for becoming too confident."

With equal formality, Julia said, "Thank you. Please tell my lord that I appreciate his regrets, and in the future I trust he will be able to warn us in time." This made James wince - SL-0075 had never exactly spilled out his heart, but not long after Julia died he'd said something about how his power was useless if he couldn't ''save'' people. Roan had, on his last stopover, said that it had gotten even worse after Leah's death.

The other officer bowed slightly. "I will give him your message. My lord has also instructed me to give you this. In private?"

Enough people had already gone into his attendant room. "We'll go up a floor and use one of the side rooms," James said.

"So we'll be closer to the Council room when they're ready," Julia observed. "Good. Walt, would you carry the chair up for us? Thanks."

All three of them went into a side room with a small conference table, and after closing the door 5290 held out his hand. There was something glossy and dark in his palm. At Julia’s fractional nod, James took it and showed it to her.

"Bring it closer. My eyes aren’t focusing right." She squinted at it as James first brought it close, then turned it so she could see the other side. Then her eyes widened. "What? Why would he give me this?"

"My lord believes that if you are to give the Council news they will not like, it would be best if you had the strength to stand, lieutenant," 5290 said. "It’s to be administered intravenously."

Julia stiffened, inhaling sharply and pushing herself almost upright. "I can’t do that. That’s not – look, Walt, I know 1984 trained you, and he had to have covered this. These are very specifically tailored to – and won’t he – it’s…" She sagged back into the wheelchair as muscle tremors started. Too much effort, too soon.

"I shouldn’t. But I just hate being so weak," she muttered, staring at 0075’s gift.

As far as James could tell, it was just a flattened glossy cylinder, as big around as Julia’s little finger and nearly as long, cool to the touch and oddly heavy for its size. "What is it?"

"That," Julia said, "is a dose of very powerful stimulants and medications designed and made, I don’t know by who, for Vaders."

"I - Julia, no." His voice came out much more quietly than he'd intended.

5290 cleared his throat. "Actually, ah, our Federation trading partners synthesize it." He said it self-consciously and deliberately, like he expected them to be shocked and horrified. "The Council has decided that it is counterproductive to make a secret of our alliances, so I probably won’t get written up," he added defensively.

"That shouldn’t have been a secret anyway. We’ve been on decent terms with the Trekkies since day one," Julia told him, frowning. "Aside from some blustering back and forth, we haven’t even had any serious disagreements. And they already make our fuel and blaster canisters, and a few other things. Or is that secret too?"

"No, but still, what the Council decides is secret should not be common knowledge," 5290 started, then shook his head. "At any rate, this discussion is for another time. The Council will be ready soon."

"Julia, you can't take this," James insisted, almost pleading. "This has got to be a very high dose."

5290 said, "0075 informed me that one dose probably won't hurt."

"''Probably'' isn't good enough," James growled.

"Calm down," Julia said, not loudly but firm.

James blinked, and consciously settled a bit. "Look, this is made for Vaders. They've all got ridiculous tolerance to stimulants, don't they?"

"That's true."

"So this," and he held up the dose, "has got to be extremely potent. And Julia, you've got a lot more blood for it to move in, but you haven't built up tolerance for this kind of thing."

"I understand that, and I think 0075 does too," Julia said. "I burned off too much energy with Makaze. This won't be pleasant, but I'll live. We can find Luke again, and he can clean it out of my system."

"I just don't want to lose you again," he said.

She smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "Oh, James. Have faith."

He pulled the cap off and yes, there was a needle, darker than hypodermic needles usually were, and fairly large. It had a point, but it didn’t look nearly as sharp as he'd expected.

"None of them have a lot of peripheral veins left, and there’s actually a chestbox port that takes fluid directly to the heart. So they really don’t need these to be sharp," Julia told him, anticipating his thoughts.

"This is a bad idea," he said, knowing this would change nothing.

"I don’t have a good feeling about this either, but I can't be passing out in the middle of a report. Do it."

Wincing, he rolled up her sleeve past the eggtooth and found a vein in her forearm. 5290 pulled out a small brown bottle and a swab - why he had those, James had no idea - and wiped the spot down.

Julia turned her face away and tried to keep from crying out as James forced the needle in. She stiffened in the chair and made a strangled keening moan. He felt like a monster doing it. Julia started bleeding as he pulled the needle out, and she closed her eyes and held still while 5290 wrapped a bandage around her arm, like she'd been donating blood.

After a moment she opened her eyes again, frowning.

"I don't think it's wor- oh." Her eyes rolled up in her head and she started to shake.

Julia convulsed, her back arcing against the chair, breathing in fast, ragged gasps, not responding to James when he shouted her name, a trace of foam showing on her lips. And then, just as he was about to go for help, it was over, and she was moving.

She pushed herself out of the wheelchair, stood up stiffly, and took a few uncertain steps. "I'm fine." She sounded as much like she was arguing as making a statement. "I'm... perfectly fine." Julia winced and clutched at her ribcage with both hands.

"Well, mostly. It's just chest pains. Ow. Pretty sure that's because this is a ''slight'' overdose. Maybe more than slight. It's that, isn't it?" she demanded, whirling to stare at them with wild, dilated eyes. "My uniform isn't changing color? I'm not getting covered in burn scars?"

"You're not," 5290 said, watching her pace up and down. "You're very red, but I think that's just bloodflow. How do you feel?"

"Good. Good. I feel... wow. I can't hold still." Both of her hands, now back down at her side, were closing into fists and opening, again and again. "Mostly I feel good. Not entirely. It's... interesting. Look, after this is over, if I want more, ''don't give it to me''. But I'm functional. Wow." She held absolutely still, staring blankly at a wall.

"Are you okay?" James asked, almost afraid to touch her.

"I'm... fine. Fine." Julia shook her head rapidly and scrubbed her hand once up her face and over her head, from her chin to her forehead over her scalp. Her motions were quick and not particularly smooth or coordinated. "It's like my veins are filled with ants. There are chest pains, but they don't hurt, except that they do. This is ''not'' nice stuff. Hah, wow. I know I'm not making any sense."

With a growl of "Emperor!" she put one hand to the side of her neck, raised that elbow, took hold of the eggtooth on that arm, and wrenched it off with a thin snap and a trickle of blood. She did the same with the eggtooth on the other arm, tossing both to the floor and very reluctantly letting James bandage her arms, all the while shifting restlessly.

"Lieutenant, I'll check to see if the Council is ready yet," 5290 said cautiously. He waited until her nod before leaving Julia alone with James as he finished wrapping her elbows.

She focused on him, and putting her hands on his shoulders, to look searchingly into his eyes, and although he knew she was smaller than him, he could see it, there was a split second when she seemed to tower over him. He'd imagined it, he was sure.

Julia’s eyes had always been a dark amber. He’d fixed that in his mind since that time that she’d teased him about not knowing. It was hard to tell around her huge, dilated pupils. Were her irises a different color now? A shade paler? Almost gold?

"I missed you," she said at last. There was still a confrontational slant to her tone, but her voice was gentler. "I know you were waiting for me. If this had happened to you, I wouldn't have been able to do as much as you did. I'd have visited you as often as I could, and I'd have been there, but I couldn't have stayed."

"Well, you're an officer," he told her. "You're more important than I am. I'm just a trooper." He'd made his peace with that during the wait. If he hadn't been 501st he might have had more trouble. But the need of the Legion outweighed personal matters.

"Have I told you lately how much I appreciate you?" Then she kissed him, suddenly enough that their teeth clashed, savagely, wrapping one arm around the back of his head to pull him closer. He leaned in, closing his eyes.

"They're ready now," 5290 said from the doorway, breaking them up. "And they're not all that happy about being called together like this. Your report had better be good."

"Oh, it is," Julia promised darkly. "We need to be ready ''now.''" She strode, still a bit stiff and jerky, out. James followed.

User:Joysweeper

2011-04-12T03:29:19Z

Joysweeper: /* Posted stories */

{{my stories
|name=Joysweeper
|category=Joysweeper}}

I'm Joysweeper.

[[Image:Altjoysweeperov5.png]]

I haven't been here all that long, and even though my ego would claim otherwise I know I'm pretty average. I'll get better. I'd appreciate any constructive crits anyone would care to hand out - I'm pretty good with spelling and grammar, but less certain about anything else.

I suppose a bio is in order... gee, I've never written one of those before... um...

Joysweeper, also known as Perpetually Distracted, was born on the same day of the month that Kennedy announced the Apollo program in '61, the same day of the month that ''Star Wars'' was released in '77. This was in the same year that the ''Exxon Valdez'' had that oil spill, Nintendo started selling the Game Boy, Tianaman Square's ''Goddess of Democracy'' was built, unveiled, and destroyed, the people of the Baltic states joined hands to form a human chain six hundred klicks long as a demand for freedom, the Berlin Wall fell, and Disney's version of "The Little Mermaid" hit theaters. In other words, she's pretty young. Twenty, to be exact.

She has also displayed a passion for Star Wars, space programs, scifi/fantasy novels, comic books, dragons, and video games. Her schedule is erratic. Occasionally she has been seen drawing or sculpting things out of clay, but a common complaint is that everything she does turns into some kind of dragon. This isn't the case with her writing, though.

Joysweeper's TSA-related writing primarily takes place in [[Xanadu (setting)]]. It allows her to mush a number of her interests into a single universe. So far, a distinct preference for Star Wars characters and dragons is pretty evident, but that might change.

How she joined TSA-Talk is annoyingly complicated. Draconity to Baxil's site to Drakenfluegel to the TSA, then eventually the List. She forgot where she was going with that point. At any rate, she has a [http://joysweeper.livejournal.com/ Livejournal account], but it is almost purely personal.

In an effort to look artsy and distinct, she attempted to create a unique symbol using her computer's Paint program. It turned into a dragon, as did subsequent efforts. Joysweeper was last seen giving up and settling for a stylized fairy-dragon thing.[http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/667/symbolil7.png]

It is absurdly easy to inspire Joysweeper. ''Everything'' gives her ideas. Most of them never see the light of day, and for good reason, but there are some that make her excited which for various reasons she can't work on right now. She calls these [[Joysweepers Incoherent Idea Bank]] and is aware that this might be a bad idea.

She is a [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LumperVsSplitter Lumper.]

== Posted stories ==
(all from Xanadu):

[[501st]] The Five-Oh-First Legion is a fan-based Star Wars organization of cosplayers with Imperial leanings. They're a rather large group, enough so that it's easy to imagine a number of them came to Xanadu. So... what happens when one of the members doesn't go? Incidentally, Joysweeper thinks that this image is awesome. [http://www.albinjohnson.com/501stlog/history2003-05/dorman-501st-finished.jpg] It is "a pitched battle led by Lord Vader himself and the awesome 501st Legion", taken from a website made by the founder of the 501st. [http://www.albinjohnson.com/501stlog/history2003-05/history2003-05.html]

[[Femtroopers]] What is the greatest threat to the Five-Oh-First Legion?

[[Nameless]] We'll see where this ends up.

[[Dragon Dancer]] So four guys come to Xanadu in the kind of Oriental dragon costume you'd expect to find on Chinese New Year. What do you suppose happens after the Event? (I've tried writing a sequel to this. It's trickier than I thought.)

[[Behjopiray]] I tried another sequel attempt. It's a bit better, so I'll put it here.

[[Revan Saga]] The first piece of this was written way back when I first joined the TSA List; the prerequisite Xanadu self-insertion story. It was followed by many others, and then I realized how flawed they were and have started editing the whole thing. Oh, does it need editing... I'm putting it here so if something happens, I won't lose what's already been written. Multi-chaptered and slightly incoherent.

[[The Perils of Voice Acting]] Sometimes the past comes back to bite you. Does not have anything to do with Star Wars or dragons. For once.

[[A More Peaceful Endeavor]] I don't know why I haven't uploaded this yet...

[[Flag]] Inspired by [http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/5612285.html?thread=209220861#t209220861 this] conversation, and written in a frenzy of inspiration. And insanity. On scans_daily, we call things like this "crack".

[[Roadtrip]] For lack of a better name. One of the characters from [[Walker Imperial Ranger]] won't let me leave him alone. He's got a family, he told me. He's got friends.

[[Never That Simple]] This got lost, huh? Good thing I had a copy left...

{{author page}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Joysweeper}}

Joysweepers Incoherent Idea Bank

2009-08-30T18:02:27Z

Joysweeper:

This is Joy's Idea Bank. It isn't a story. It isn't an article. It is a list, and a list without organization, at that. To get ridiculously metaphorical, this is a garden of story-seeds, fertilized with things that supercharge me with enthusiasm, and populated by aggressive plot gizka. Joysweeper is easy to inspire, but for various reasons can't act on everything. This is a backup - her computer is crashy, and she doesn't want to lose all of these. Why is she typing in third person?

You can look through it, but it isn't for you. By which I don't mean that you can't use bits and pieces of it - I mean that I picked things out for me, and I haven't reformatted it, explained the in-jokes, or anything like that. To go back to the garden metaphor, I haven't hewn a path, and although I know where everything is and what is or isn't pleasing to touch, smell, or eat, ''you're'' likely to be lost.

----
Pictures.
[[Image:501stJulia.GIF]]

[[Image:Tranced.JPG]]

And of course, there is still joy and beauty, because joy and beauty are as tenacious as fear and sorrow.

Female does not equal feminine, damn it!

I love the intense colors in shades beyond blue and white and green.

I love wearing shorts, even though my legs frighten small children.

I suspect that many, many people in the world drank that special kool-aid and believe there really is a magical little thing that can heal the world.

I have known, worked, and lived with many Catholics over the course of my life, and only a few of them are clinically insane.

Fear not, for we come from outer space.

I'm not crazy! Everyone else is just blind to my genius! I'll show you I'm not crazy! I’ll show every last one of them I'm not a foaming-mad megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur! As soon as I perfect my atomic supermutant alloygators, you'll all see I wasn't crazy!!!

It's like manipulating someone into doing something they don't want to do by trying to turn them into the person you want them to be instead of letting them be the person they are.

Even when mine don't turn into nightmares, they're so exhausting, I go for weeks wishing I could just *rest* instead of dreaming.

He did make sure YHG had good handwriting though. If I wrote a taunting message like that on something, there would have been confusion and cries of 'gross! someone smashed, like, ten millipedes in this book!'

"How many times have you died? I'm actually getting impressed."

It's the little things that count. Like being able to go to the local market without being ambushed by giant mole-rats and eaten by cannibals.

If you are to both succeed and to live with yourself, you must, must, ''must'' learn to never grieve. You must, must, ''must'' convince yourself that if you succeeded, and anybody else didn't, that there was nothing you could possibly have done to save them.

And I woke with a mask on my face and a burning feeling across my chest.

had to admire a man who could keep his sense of humour when there was a sense of ... something coming towards them.

"It was lunchtime; it was on my plate. It was not moving or attacking me. It did not say 'help me' or 'don't eat me' in a tiny voice. It was not made of metal or plastic or anything else non-organic. Of course I ate it."

I know these are English words, my brain just registers them as carnival organs and slide whistles.

"So if A = B, and B = walnut, then C = Detroit. I am following his logic perfectly!"

Amazing: ''Every word you say'' is a lie, including ''and'' and ''the''.

To keep vaguely functioning in society, I need brain pills, pain pills, pills to protect my organs from the pain pills, sleepytiems pills, pills to protect my organs from the sleepytiems pills, yet more pain pills and iron pills. On a relatively pain-free day, I take twelve pills.

when I'm really hungry, I get to wondering what the people around me might taste like, and whether anyone would miss them.

Oh, what I wouldn't give for a good female villain like Ysanne Isard from the Star Wars EU. Now she had none of the "She's just a good girl who got hurt, a little love will redeem her" that most other female villains written in comics today seem to have hanging over their heads.

I found my day went a lot smoother when I consulted my guide maps instead of consulting the Elite team. (That's supposed to be ironic, right?)
I got turned around on day and just wanted to know the best way down to there from where I was. The guy thought it was a panel or something. I swear we'd be better off with the Storm Troopers as security. At the very least the Droid Hunt would take on a whole new level.

fandom bylaws require at least one Klingon at a convention.

• Sanguine (blood): Exhibits optimism, good cheer, a love of fun, extroversion, enthusiasm. On the flip side, they may be impulsive, arrogant, self-indulgent, wear their hearts on their sleeves or even be a space case.
• Choleric (yellow bile): Exhibits leadership, dominance, ambition, charisma, passion; also quick to anger, narrow-minded, obsessive.
• Melancholic (black bile): Kind, thoughtful, creative; but also high-strung perfectionists whose insanely high standards lead to depression.
• Phlegmatic (phlegm): Are calm, stoic, rational, reliable, compassionate, observant; but also lazy, reactionary, docile.

This morning at about 5:30, I was woken up because somehow I had managed to get hiccups in my sleep and they were painful.
This was one of the more ridiculous experiences of my life. I hope I do not replicate it any time soon.

And unless the cover says "Timothy Zahn", I am not paying $27 for ANY book under 300 pages.

except where his required immense power hers required near-perfect control.

And, as pretty well evidenced in this thread, not afraid of anything, including people coming rapidly towards them on clunky mountain bikes. They just stand there hissing. It's disturbing. They must know they're impossible to kill.

They took the plan apart, examined it, debated it, and – in places – changed it; and then they put it together again and pronounced it sound.

She seemed to move with the restricted motions of one deathly afraid of knocking something over.

“You should know by now that clear-cut victories are as rare as oxygen worlds.”

A Titan complex. The belief that one is so powerful that one is above normal laws and standards. Handing someone all that physical power at once, instead of having to acquire and use it in small increments, essentially sidesteps the usual adjustment mechanisms.

Picture this: Two around six foot humans, one a cop, one a hockey player, two Great Danes, a Rottweiler and an American Pit Bull Terrier, fleeing across a field at top speed.
We were being chased by one solitary (but hissing) Canada goose.
Yes, that was my Saturday evening. That damned thing chased us for ten minutes!

They wheeled a set of stairs up to the plane and we all stepped out into a hot, humid night. 90 F (32C) and FOGGY. It was unbelievable. It was like being underwater, and the heat and humidity sapped the energy out of your body like so much water.

Dying is expensive.

Who thinks, "Today is a great day to beat a fawn to death!" NO-ONE SANE, THAT'S WHO.

"YOU ARE ALLOWED TO MISS ME. I am glad that people will miss me! But I do not want them to be depressed! Hence the orange punch. I cannot remain depressed after drinking that stuff. It has eerie powers."

This is a solid material thing I can look at and go "There. ''That!'' That improved the universe!" It is important to be able to do this occasionally.

If you can walk down the street and not get noticed IT'S NOT A COSTUME!

There will come a point when you get sick of each other, no matter how hard you try. It may even happen multiple times. Chances are at least one person is feeling overwhelmed or crowded, and needs some time alone. Don't whine about this. Remember the rule about respecting each other's space and time? If you're really feeling neglected, talk about it, make a date for attention when the other person(s) isn't feeling so fragged, and be prepared to do at least some emotional self-regulation. And if you're the one feeling overwhelmed, again speak up. Not saying anything and giving the other person(s) whatever they want, when they want it, isn't going to help the matter.
The other thing to be prepared for is for all the little annoying things about each other to come out in greater force than before. You're going to get very, very well acquainted with whoever you're with precisely because you don't have the distance of a day job to give you a break from each other. This may mean that you end up fighting over stupid little things (or big issues) that never really bothered you before, simply because you can no longer get away from them.

That was freaky, how would you like your namesake to be a much sought after utility that people climbed inside of and proceeded to make go at very fast speeds.

It's amazing what going to three all-female schools does to a girl; I have lost any ability to be patient and try to explain that my ovaries do not impair my thinking ability. I just go straight for ''oh fuck you'' rage.

I don’t know how long he was there, but it was a long time. Long enough to become kind of “Amazon-ed”. Changed. Altered by the experience. Not one of the regular folks anymore, if you know what I mean. He had a different outlook on life.

Relaxed, at-peace-with-self eyes. Looking into something inscrutable, unobtainable, deeper than we can possibly imagine, an old soul that reflected something bigger, ineffable, eternal.

Just another day trying to keep my mind off the fact that my body is wasting away, devouring its own living cells for sustenance.

There is a joy in working towards a common goal, in being able to put aside difference.

Whenever my pain level got out of control, I landed in the hospital and they had to give me 20 to 40 units of morphine. To put this in perspective, a badly wounded soldier on the battlefield is given 10 units to treat his pain. Twenty units will kill a grown man. Only a doctor would administer my injection, since no nurse would take the risk. Yet, after this massive dose my blood pressure fell only slightly. When you’re in that much pain, your body goes into a hyper state of “fight or flight”, so much adrenaline that it counters the morphine.

My doctors said I would never get better, that I would always be in this state of outrageous pain and lassitude, lost in this deep pit, unable to climb out.

"They call me insane? I'm sane. Oh God am I sane."

"Even electronic brain pancake crystal elderly."

It seems like one in every four people is Extremely Sensitive [I forget the correct term for it] to sensory stimuli—painfully so—and I’m one of them. Seriously, after annejumps posted about that on her journal, there were soooo many things that made sense to me—why I had a mild panic attack-verging-on-tantrum in a tiny LOUD New Orleans club last year, why the smells of certain foods make me violently ill, and… why I can’t wear commercial perfume.

I said it would take you places. I never said they’d be places you wanted to go.

I was once plucked up by a bunch of football players who thought I would make a cute souvenir of their night at the strip club. That was scary enough and I had two bouncers, a bartender and several MPs all determined to keep me from going anywhere.

At least the world didn’t end this time.

They use real words and all those words have real meanings but they string them together and it ends up making no sense.

You know this and I know this, but remember that we're talking about deluded bigots.

Total nonsense can be difficult to refute. How do you use logic against the utterly illogical?

Almost everytime I look in the mirror, I get this small heartskip that is caused by a mix of excitement or fear. Hard to tell why but I seem to be expecting/afraid of seeing something else instead of my own reflection. No idea what but every time I look in the mirror, it is a mix of fear (what if I finally see it?) and relief that I am still looking at my familiar self. It all happens in a second but it almost always happens.

[He] burst into a luminous, knowing smile, looked at me, and locked his bright blue eyes onto mine. Strangely, it suddenly felt as if he were inside of me, as if there were now a direct neural connection between his eyes and my heart.

Every single generation is sure that the one following them is destroying culture.

"You white?"
...no?
"Black?"
...No.
"Chinese?"
No.
"What are you?"
Human?

One time I laughed so hard I seemed to bruise my chest from the inside.

[http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=4233223 Their conversation was] interrupted by fade-outs and static, but it was a minor miracle that they were able to talk at all, the astronauts and the aquanaut, each in their respective tin cans, crossing their respective voids. They talked about what it was like spending so much time inside their own heads and what they missed about their former lives. They laughed about craving the strangest things: the smell of an orange, a drink with ice cubes clinking in it. But mostly they talked about things only people who have ventured so far from home can know. People say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but the astronauts and the aquanaut knew love isn't a function of how long two things have been apart -- what matters is how far.

"I am given to understand that this establishment provides coffee? Have I heard correctly, or am I mistaken in that belief?"

When I was in my 20s-30s, I hung around with a lot of That Guys. They were members of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), and even though we could all party like it was 1099, the men were chivalrous and respectful of the women. Or else. (First offense of being drunk and disorderly was being tied to a tree. Second - if there was a second, and most guys were too embarrassed for a repeat - was usually unofficial shunning.) The guys also looked out after the younger women, especially if they thought they were getting over their head. It was the safest I ever felt in my life - and you have no idea how funny it can be when a guy is flirting with you and a big Viking comes stomping over, looms over him, and asks, "Milady, is he bothering you and should I make him go away?"

It was wrong. I stopped it. I’m not sorry.

I stopped in a reception area, looked at the night sky from the second story window, and though how strange it was that the world — my world had changed so dramatically — yet the sky looked just the same.

"S-see how easy that was? And now we can start all over again and fix what was wrong and we'll all be one big happy family again and ''everything will be alright you'll see''--"

I've known a few very old cats, and the combination of fragility and vitality is so charismatic and powerful.

Maybe when our outrageous spirit for living has died down a little bit and we slip into that phase of one's life where you start giving up on your dreams and all the amazing things you thought you were going to do, and you just start to panic that you're going to die alone.

That is the essence of love. When you feel it so strongly, and so deeply, that it has the power to draw others into it, and they can live it too, then you know that despite logic, reason, science, religion, or anything else manmade, that love transcends what we are, and who we are, and delivers unto us, something far greater than we ever suspected.

Makes me very, very angry, and very, very tired, and reminds me of the nights I sat alone in my car in parking lots, frantically eating, then running home to throw up because I knew something bad had happened to me but I couldn't say why, or what, and I just needed it to not be happening any longer.

It's heavier than it looks in my hand, whispering dark promises of madness and filth like a digital Necronomicon.

“Who are you?” “I don’t know. I used to know what I was. But now… now I am something else.”

Lawlis

Congratulations, you have made me inhale my drink. My forced evolution to liquid respiration is one step further.

Tyrannical is definitely your color

That face is...'' ugh''... if my remaining biological systems had the ability to vomit, I would be doing so right now.

I guess it's really not that long in the grand scheme of things--it blows my mind a little that it was ONLY two years, it seems like something that happened so long ago, in another country in another language under another sun--but it throws my whole day a little off-kilter when it happens, and I spend the morning grumping around trying to get back.

It is not so easy a thing to come to terms with your once strong body failing on you. If you are 40 possibly you recall a vigor of 18 that's now on vacation and which you miss with creaking fondness. Remember the vigor of 40 when you're pushing your 82nd birthday.

Because the retina is the darkest part of the eye and it moves around, one can sometimes look into the eye of a jumping spider and see it changing color. When it is darkest, you are looking into its retina and the spider is looking straight at you.

I've been working a long time on getting my mental image of my face to line up with my actual face.

It's totally like staring into the sun. And having the sun stare also into you.

I felt like murdering them. All of them.

I don't like WarHammer because the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness (sorry, I like my fantasy/sci fi to have hope in it, I'm weird that way), but really doesn't this all come back to the same crap?

I keep thinking that I ought to become immune to this by now, but every time it gives me a punch in the gut. Hope springs eternal I guess, which is how it can be quashed over and over again.

He was an Imperial officer, and Imperials never gave up. Ever.

True to form for my life, the one in the laundry room decided I was a friend and tried to get me to play, and I had the hardest time convincing her that yes, I wanted her to leave.
Holy f**k, one just WALKED ACROSS THE DINING ROOM SKYLIGHT. Several are crashing around on the porch.
We are under siege. If you don't hear from me, send help; we have been eaten by tiny, deceptively appealing bears.

I'm grateful that you like me enough to greet me with somersaults and tail flips and leaps out of the water, which, since you are the size of trout, makes for a pretty impressive display. But truly, it's not really necessary to slam a quart of water into my face whenever you see me. Honestly, you don't have to worry about my drying out.

[[http://singingnettle.livejournal.com/2008/06/16/]]

Suddenly the diffident and marginally competent Major Tierce who’d served as his military aide for eight months was gone. In his place stood a warrior. Disra had once heard it said that a discerning person could always recognize an Imperial stormtrooper or Royal Guard, whether he stood before you in full armor or lay dying on a sickbed. He’d always discounted such things as childish myths. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

A Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges. Ever. His entire goal in life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. His goal in life, and his desire in death.

The being that I was is gone… the change is complete… But I am incomplete because you have made it so…

What a sweet little girl, plotting how she will eventually wreak bloody revenge on those who wronged her.

This jelly-like 1.5kg mass inside our skulls, containing hundreds of billions of cells which between them form something like a quadrillion connections, is responsible for our every action, emotion and thought.

This is the guy who was still so heavily loaded with shrapnel that he had to carry a doctor's note with him to all public buildings and airports, because he'd set off the metal detectors.

He retreats to an inward space as his body slowly fails him a step before his mind.

I can just imagine some sort of army having one of those radars and going "Sir! We're detecting high amounts of sexual energy!"

Anyway, humans breathe oxygen, one of the most poisonous materials in the universe. It's the same fucking thing that makes FIRE. It fucking kills METALS, and we need it to BREATHE.

I'm actually crying, right now, I'm laughing so hard at that one.

Point- it would be impossible to be insulted if you are able to understand every facet of an action.

Also, we used to use a couple variants on the fortune cookie thing in college: "in bed with whips and chains", and "thus ending the age of wonders". Uh, yeah, we were a bunch of geeks.

So sorry that life usually has consequences for you, pookie, but get over it. You take the responsibility, you take all of it. You don't get to pick and choose the parts you like.

Watch closely as I deftly flip these eggs in a needlessly dramatic fashion... ''WATCH CLOSELY! AS IF YOUR '''LIVES''' DEPEND ON IT!'' For, indeed, if you are as inept as I suspect you are, you would surely '''starve''' were it not for ''these... Very... '''Eggs.'''''

In the foundation of our hearts, none of us sees ourselves as old. Mentally we are all teenagers—teenagers who happen to be trapped in increasingly unreliable bodies.

Rheum is a medical term for the natural mucus discharge from the eyes. It is formed by a combination of mucus consisting of mucin discharged from the cornea or conjunctiva, tears, blood cells, skin cells from the eyelids, and dust.

Kletecka, Dostis

[I spent time going through Ursala Vernon's Livejournal. Many bits are from it.]

I had this nightmare last night.
I dreamed I was a dolphin.
It sucked.

That hard, acrid chemical taste is really quite revolting to me--beer is even worse because it's chemical mixed with rot--and despite my ability to acquire many other tastes, like blue cheese and black coffee, alcohol eludes me.

I'm reading "The Mummy Congress" which is about mummy research. It's riveting. I am riveted. Like...big...steel...neat...rivets...The weird thing about reading while drugged to the gills is that you don't realize how out of it you're getting--you just keep focusing in on the written word until you look up and the world goes whomwhomwhom around you, gray sweeps in at the edges of your vision, and you make some witty observation like "Oooglleeey..." before sliding gently to the floor.

The funny thing about pain, though, is that anticipating pain is bad, and mysterious pain is scary and bad, but just plain jaw-shattering agony from a known source somehow isn't as bad as it could be. There's no anticipation--it hurts as bad now as it will five minutes from now. And there's no fear--I know exactly why it hurts, I know approximately when it'll stop (two days). So in a weird kinda way, it's more bearable than it could be.

First we had laws against illegal things. And that was fine. And then we started having laws against people doing stupid things to themselves, and that was not fine, that was bad, because it meant that common sense no longer held sway, and people could blame their stupidity on something other than themselves. And now we have laws against saving people's lives. And this is pure, profound idiocy.

I wander around snorfling and growling to myself and revisiting the age old truth that you shouldn't cry when lying on your back because your ears fill up with water, which tickles, and stomping snivelling into the bathroom to clean your ears out really ruins the mood of an otherwise perfectly good mope.

"Will this hurt?" "A great deal, yes." “In ways you have never imagined.”

Evolutionary Ingrates http://ursulav.livejournal.com/19596.html#cutid1

That's the one thing about religion I am absolutely not willing to dispense with--much, much better curse words.

I wonder if some people just get a lot angrier than other people--the maddest I've ever gotten, I never hit walls because I'm smart enough to know that hitting the wall will hurt me and cause structural damage to the wall, while not doing anything to affect the cause of the frustration. If I must do something hysterical, I will cry, since it's easy to clean up. But I know plenty of other people who, in a rage, will smack furniture or whatever, who don't seem any dumber than the usual run of people. So I dunno--it's possible that I deal with it better, or I'm repressing it all in something that will eventually erupt in a homicidal explosion. Or it's possible that I simply don't get that mad--I mean, I will display fits of temper where people walk around me on eggshells in terror of what I might say, but I never get into a screaming, blistering rage where I can't control my actions, the way that some people appear to.

Got a date, got a date with 7378

Eight months of sandal wearing means that I now feel like I've got cinderblocks strapped to my ankles. I pick up a foot. Ungh. I set it down. Thunk. I feel absurdly taller, as if I've got those pimpin' platform shoes with goldfish in the heels.

I like packing, as I've said before, but I pretty much hate every other part of moving, and generally spend it in a nerve-frayed state, waiting for Something To Go Wrong. Actually, "I hate moving" isn't descriptive enough. I feel it lacks resonance. How about "Moving gives me the feeling that my chest cavity has been filled up with a number of small furry animals, all of them milling about and climbing on top of each other with their tiny little sharp claws, and--this is the key bit--all screaming in unison."

But I will prevail! Once I can feel my hands again, once more into the breach!

"The Emperor's Embrace" by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

But I still nearly squealed. (I didn't, however. My gravitas is unshakeable. Also, I'd forgotten to breathe, so I didn't have anything to squeal with.)

"You know, I'll never forget..."
*dead silence for at least a minute*
"You'll never forget what?"
"What?"

Possibly I have some unresolved issues.

"Because I knew it would be more fun to listen to you grovel."

One should not lose entire families. It is not the natural state in which people should live.

My friend has had jaw surgery recently and is still on liquid and pureed foods. She has been extremely busy lately and has not had a lot of energy available to figure out how to eat with her jaws held together with rubber bands. I am going to evilly feed her before she sallies forth.

"core dump." Trying to compress into the course of a few hours an expression of who you are, for someone else's benefit, and to receive the same.

I am so exhausted I want to cry.

Snow smells like tin. I'm never sure if I'm a thin skin of transparent cheerfullness stretched over an abyss of grief, or a slightly melancholy tinge on a crazy hysterical joy. I don't know whether I want to laugh or cry or both. Large mammal seeing the end of winter. Deer and bears and for all I know, chickens and frogs probably do it too. It's that sort of feeling. I feel restless, full of some powerful emotion, but either there isn't a word for it, or there's a perfectly good word that I just never thought to apply. And just as this isn't quite the thaw smell, I don't feel quite like that--but the smell brings back those memories of that weird feeling, a sort of reminder, enough to make me a little jittery and generally useless in the studio, unable to concentrate for long enough periods of time.

Stomach acid has a pH of 1.2, which is only slightly higher than battery acid.
One drop of stomach acid will burn through wood, drop to the floor, and burn through the carpet, and if chewing through all that didn't neutralize it, it would burn through the floor below as well. Drinking more than 4 oz of water within 20 minutes of a meal will disturb digestion by diluting the acid, which has a job to do.

It's like having a lover: you can be passionately intense but you don't really know where it's going...and for all the excitement, you know who you come home to.

Felt this terrible fragile happiness.

It's a good thing humans don't speak Bird, or else we probably wouldn't find these bloodthirsty paeans nearly so charming.

As people who have thrown their back out know, it's a weird sensation, it'll almost not hurt for a bit, and then you'll move a millimeter, or it'll just get bored, and everything suddenly seizes up and the world does a kind of breathless wobble-and-flop around you, and for a brief, bright moment there is nothing in the universe but you and the God of Back Pain. That's much worse. A low, perpetual ache is peanuts.

They have little pipes threaded along the edges of the patios, and every few minutes, they release a fine spray of mist. Because the droplets are so fine, and the air so dry, you don't get wet, you just get a wash of coolness across your skin as the droplets evaporate before they quite touch you

Birds are the scions of dinosaurs.

The entry told me that it was often confused for another, similiar owl, called a pulwit, so I was flipping back and forth between entries trying to figure out which one it was, and finally the fact that there was a heated battle going on in the rest of the house, between the last defenders of righteousness and an army of gobliny things, became too distracting and I had to stomp out, owl only tentatively identified, and kick some ass.

Nobody to the front of me
Nobody to the back of me
Nobody to the side of me
There must be nobody here but me..
It's about the two of us
Just the two of us
It's always about just the two of us...

Also, the answer to "Will this hurt?" is not "Maybe a little," it is "Oh, hell, yeah."

Isn't that always the way, though? The agonizing ones don't bruise, even though you feel that much pain bloody well deserves it, and then you get something that looks like the Mark of Cain and you can't remember what the heck happened, maybe the desk gave you a sharp look or something?

I think I need a t-shirt made up that reads, "Because I'm the human. That's why."

It's a luxury to be able to take a stance of nonviolence. Someone has to buy it for you. Sometimes it’s you.

So, I've been having these heart flutters for a few years, and sometimes they're absent for a while, and sometimes they're very frequent and upsetting. And it's possible they're not even my heart...it's possible they're spasms in some other nearby organ; everything's so crowded in the box of your chest and abdomen that it's hard to tell what sensation is coming from what place.

Life isn't infinite and I'm tired of being sad and grieving for my lost self, the one that existed before I got sick. So I'm just not going to do it anymore. I'm done.

The distressing fact is that I often have no color except for purple shadows under my eyes and whatever color I've dyed my hair (currently red), but last night it occurred to me that I looked...''normal''. This might not mean anything to someone who hasn't walked around for several years looking like they were just a few steps above legally dead, but trust me, looking just normal is for me about as exciting as it would be for the average woman to wake up and find that all her cellulite has disappeared overnight.

A truly colorful fall, on the other hand, is like a thunderstorm, or thaw, an almost meteorological event, the sort where you don't know if you're happy or despairing, if you're on the verge of nirvana or a midlife crisis, a state where you actually comprehend "melancholy" as something other than the domain of comsumptive poets. It's not something you get used to quickly. A good fall will leave you wrung out and drained, the way you get when you're sick as a dog, wrapped in a welter of blankets on the couch, trying to find something on TV at 3 AM, and you find Bob Ross or TV evangelists and it's so damn funny and you're so weak that you start laughing and can't stop, and every time somebody said "Praise Jesus!" or "...happy little tree..." it sets you off again.

Because failure is only failure, but not doing it smacks of ''defeat.''

The thought of 200K legal fees if he lost gave him pause, but Mavis, who's intestinal fortitude I have praised before, said "No. They Have Annoyed Me." This is the sort of ground where angels fear to tread.

I recall a show once where several scientists set out to see just how aggressive cottonmouths were. At one point, they were standing around poking the thing with sticks, trying desperately to provoke an attack, and the snake was just "Let me go, let me go, I have no quarrel with any of you, let me go, let me go." They eventually concluded that as long as you don't step on them, and don't try to play with them, you'll probably be fine. This is good advice with any animals, and most artists.

Not that he gets off scott-free on the wax front. The wax is a trifle messy, it sticks to things like, well, ''wax'' and I learned I had not cleaned up thoroughly when the plaintive cry came from the bathroom--"OH MY GOD! ''Why am I welded to the floor?!''"

I go a step further. My shaving is so sporadic, and my skin in such bad condition right now, that I have PATCHES of hair of all different lengths. And I've got too many androgens, so the hair isn't just downy fluff, but dark mean tough wiry stuff that WILL NOT STAY DOWN. Shaving's kind of a pointless exercise for me.
I wear long pants a lot.

You pulled the Catheter out with your toes? well my arms were tied down because I kept pulling out my IV's and chewing through my breathing tubes. Apparently I'm not a Nice Person when you dose me with steroids.

It hurts. As pain goes, it's a bizarre jabbing tingly thing, like a fine gauge wire drifting through my hand. It still hurts, too, and apparently it's not going away for at least a day. Ice helps, but once I remove it, it starts right back up. It is a weird and distracting pain.

Well, twentysome hours after the bite, it's subsided to only hurting when I move my hand, jar my hand, or think about touching my hand. No swelling, and other than a tiny crease, you can barely see where the bite was. So it could be a lot worse. Still, it's rather extraordinary how persistent it is--whang my hand, and it's a bolt of pain almost as intense as the first ten minutes of being bitten. There is a brief sense of the top of your head coming off.

A goldfish can live as long as a human, or longer.

Rocket trooper!

Naturally, the Dark Side/Light Side thing is mostly a non-issue. No survivor of Prof. West's 8 AM philosophy classes, taught by a snarky ex-Jesuit who could convince you that down was up and up was morally indefensible will ever be even mildly interested in the cheap social darwinism of the Sith, particularly not when delivered by an NPC whose metamucil I want to spike with arsenic. And I can be kind and charitable to low-poly models 'til the cows come home, because decades of gaming have hammered into me that no milkrun, however lowly, is below me. We live for milkruns. If I ever made a game, it would be a fantasy quest to deliver a bottle of dragon milk across a continent or something.

odd glasses and a girl
on impulse he opened
his wings and leaped

reason revan and
furiously thinks you are not
supposed to be

evidently i
like things best when they're somewhere
around the middle

what was in the way
he hopped off half spreading
his wings and shoved

Yeah, after the Big Moment, every time a dialog option showed up with some variation on "I don't have to put up with this crap, I'm the Dark Lord of the Sith!" I had to fight off temptation with a stick.

It is unbelievably fun. It is sick and twisted fun.

I’m still not quite sure what I was, but I’m damn sure I was not a derelict who raved to herself on street corners. Let’s have a little dignity here.

I think he may be the most purely ruthless hero I've ever tried to write. It's not that he's a bad guy, exactly, but he's very, very practical and in his world, there are no innocent bystanders and no such thing as collateral damage and absolutely everything is justified. He engages in no soul-searching whatsoever. It's a sort of moral feedback loop--"I have total confidence that I am right, therefore anything I do must be right and justified, because it's me doing it." It dovetails nicely with Rail, who is quite sure some of what she does is reprehensible, but believes firmly that her ends justify the means, because after all, it's her doing it.

Well, this is always what it comes down to in the end, being alone with yourself in the dark.

It's a weird thing to be grateful to one's own creations, and yet, not a bad sensation.

Having another living being around does something to the human brain. We're stronger in the company of other people, as much out of pride, I suspect, as anything more noble.

It's been the longest year of my life, and very nearly the worst. And I kept on going, and I kept being strong. And I kept throwing myself into things, because I thought that strength was inexhaustible.
Guess not.
Live and learn, huh?

I hate being so fragile.

Eventually you stop that queasy "I can't eat..." and start thinking "Man, I could totally go for something with salami about now." Before long panic fades, you think "God, I'm an idiot..." and sanity returns.
Well, for a certain questionable value of sanity. It's me, after all.

One thing I ''did'' know is that there is a point where you shut off. The emotional breaker gets thrown, with an almost audible ''click'', and suddenly you are cold, cold, cold. You are calm. You have never been so calm in your entire life. It is not a healthy calm. It is a bad, bad calm, the hurt calm that radiates out from the belly, the eye of the hurricane, the rattlesnake coiling, the old, cold little voice that comes into your brain saying ''I will take this from here.''
I encountered this before, during the bad bits of my divorce, and what I should have learned then is that when this hits, it has a purpose. The purpose is to give you time to stand up, get your purse, and walk away, time to say "Ah, yes. I see," and hang up the phone. This is the calm that lets you extricate yourself. Do not stay there and hope to remain calm. This is the airstrike your brain calls in to cover your retreat. It is a finite gift. Don't waste it.

I don't feel miraculously better, but I'm not seized with an urge to cry, and I'm not yelling at anybody inside my head, so there's a lot to be said for that.

Sort of like the way Vicodin works--you call still see all the pain, it's just on the other side of that vague grey wall there. It doesn't fix it, exactly, it just puts it at a distance so you can turn your head and say "No, no, we're not going to look at that..." and go on about the day. It cures no pain, it just slaps a restraining order on pain's ass.

More importantly, I feel like ME again. And crimony, you never really appreciate yourself until you're gone.

Have discovered I cannot chew.
Send pudding.

And to think, it took only six years of them seeing me every day for them to decide that I'm not Satan.

[http://singingnettle.livejournal.com/698090.html#cutid1 Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be.] Gods, I love Al Gore’s global warming speech.

Note to the cat: No, the turtles are not going to leap out of their temporary tank and fly through the air like Gamera and clamp themselves onto your nose, as rocks seldom become airborne without a precipitating event. So you can remove your claws from my neck anytime now. And why you think behaving like the result of an unholy alliance between a muffler and a cactus will save you from flying attack turtles anyway, I don't know.

Only problem so far is that I can't kneel or crouch in them. The leather bends fine, but I take a row of spikes in the back of the thigh, and nobody wants that.

I...I feel this strange feeling in my angry, blackened heart. I think it is called....love....

I have to admit that having animals that are so very dependent on us for their environment and whose environment can go toxic in the minute that you're not monitoring it, is getting old.

I am once again stupified by how much damage a small animal on a mission can accomplish.

"I am sitting here at home alone with large portions of my body covered in painted-on latex. ''Damn'' this is sexy. Why have I not ''done'' this before?"

I suspect part of it is that the last few moves I've made have been INCREDIBLY depressing--of the duct-tape-and-sobbing variety--so it's a bit Pavlovian--perhaps my brain now equates moving with despair. But moving into this place was good for me. I threw myself into it like a psychotic, trying to make a place that reflected ME, as part of that whole identity-nesting thing that you always go through after a divorce. You're not entirely sure who you're going to be, so "I am the person who lives HERE," is a pretty good starting point.

Suddenly you become a human thermometer. The metal bits can get really cold, and you feel that.

Will it change the whole world? Oh, probably not. The world is big and it rolls along with fine disregard for most of us. But it'll sure as hell change my corner of it.

A buddy of mine says that I just give off some kind of vibe that says in essence "I'm a very nice, laid-back person, and if you push me too far '''I WILL DESTROY YOU'''." I can't speak to the truth of that, but occasionally, at certain times of the month, I hope it's true.

Kill it with fire. Bring the grenades.

Dreamed I was a stormtrooper at Base, part of Tampa Bay, hit by it and taking Pyms, and desperate to keep anyone from knowing about it. But when I ran out of time, and I didn’t want anyone to know it was me, it was okay. Went around without my armor and talked to people. Part of how I got around involved balloons with strings in strategic places. I talked to Wedge in a cafeteria and was ridiculously happy about this. Because WEDGE! He was polite, but a little unnerved. I don’t think he knew why I was so happy.

"you open your mouth to scream, but you no longer have a throat, let alone a larynx!"

Ooh! ASL-swearing. A motion like clapping once, only with just the fore two fingers extended. Also similar to the rude Brit gesture.

A period of uncertainty led to a night and a day of what might charitably be called soul-searching.
Verdict: Yup, I'm still me. (Not as obvious an outcome as you might think.)

That wasn’t scary. That was a cataclysmic primal force that crawled from the darkest depths of hell to wreak cosmic horror on all humanity.

I told him I believed in him... but did he believe me? And was I right to do so? The Jake I knew would never do something so awful... but he'd lost his memory. Could he have been a different person... before? All I know is, I doubted, and I think he doubted too...

I’m not in a good mood today, what with the whole destruction of everything I’ve ever known.

Clearly we’d not killed him hard enough.

"I have tried so hard to do right."

Remember: If the skirt is poofy and long enough, you can hide a person under there.

sense of community and camaraderie and nostalgia

Belief that life is meaningful, they are saying, seems to require a belief in something like justice. But, well, ''look around''. For this idea of justice to matter in any meaningful sense then there must be more to it than what we see here in this world -- there must be some kind of transcendent justice in the long run, some kind of ultimate balancing of the scales for those wretched who suffered more than they deserved as well as for those wicked who may have inflicted or ignored that suffering.

Aerobatics! Long periods of aerobatics = nausea.

Made me think that being able to get around freely is one of these things you just can't possibly appreciate fully until it's curtailed, and then you realize how awesome it was to have been able to do that without even thinking about it.

Cardiopulmonary bypass

I mean, the freakiest thing my mom did was buy octopus tentacles, stick them down the kitchen sink drain so it looks like Cthulhu was trying to climb out, and stack a bunch of dirty dishes on top.

Sometimes I think my subconscious mind just likes toying with me.

The breaking story of the day was a Canadian politician who was being indicted because he attacked his political rivals with his massive zombie army.

fem(me fat)ale

[http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/04/dont-stop-believin.html If you want] to control your teenager -- if you want to protect him from the big, bad world and to ensure that he never strays from or escapes the sheltering bubble of your religious subculture, that he never encounters any thought or feeling or emotion too big to put into words, too alive to define and categorize and pin down on cardboard -- then you really do need to prevent him from listening to music.
Any music.
And every single one of them meant it. Even if what it was they meant, specifically, was something they'd never be able to put into words.
Music can do this. Even cheesy power ballads. It can take you out of yourself. It can catch you up. It can make you lose your cool.
Music is not easily controlled or contained. Those who believe in controlling and containing every thought and every emotion -- whether hipsters or fundies -- would do best to avoid it altogether.

I've been feeling either a step behind or a step ahead, but generally at a fifteen degree angle to the rest of the world.

An order to put polish on my boots means the whole boot.

There's something kind of sad about people who succeed so completely that they stop existing on the same planet as the rest of us.

[http://naamah-darling.livejournal.com/tag/bpal Scent reviews.]

There are few things more pitiable and terrifying than a rabid ninja.

[http://ursulav.livejournal.com/729088.html Something had locked itself] in my old bedroom because it thought it was me. Some kind of variation on the thing-that-won't-die dreams, I think, except that it was less "really annoying" and more "absolutely horrific." Not even Ben could protect me, and my subconscious, resisting all knowledge of the psychology of cats, had him trying. I even dreamed that I woke up, and went to pet him, and found crusts of scar tissue all along his back, and of course that meant that it was real, and then I was right back in the dream again.

and then there was much panicking and running in circles and flapping of vestigial wings.

I have spent my entire life on a quest for the honey I had once in my youth, a wildflower honey, still in the comb, that tasted like the essence of wildflowers. It was lightweight and fragrant and melted on the tongue, and I would claw my way over the piled bodies of the dead to get more.

I'll match my hokey religion and ancient weapon against your blaster any day.

I actually had to go look up the difference between mania and hypomania -- apparently hypomania means the same emotional state but not as psychotic as true mania. (That is, true mania is a loss of contact with reality, while hypomania leaves intact the bit of your brain that can look at the rest of it and go, "Man, I am acting WEIRD!") No psychosis.

"Somnio ergo caeles" 'I dream, therefore I am divine'.

As Joseph Campbell once said, "Anyone that animals speak to, or offer aid to, wins."

*after "What's the worst that could happen"* "Ooh, did you just feel that? It's like Fate just stood up and said 'ooh ooh I know the answer! Pick me!"

And then there was the time that my husband and I were deep in discussing our Champions tournament on the bus. "It's not enough to murder him," one of us said: "It's got to be messy. When they find him it has to send a message.." As the noise level on the bus dropped, we looked up to find that we suddenly had empty seats around us...

Despite all stresses there is an itchy kind of joy that fills up the back of my skull and the hollow spot under my breastbone. Something to do with spring and love and the belief that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well (as St. Julian is supposed to have said.)

"It's a good life if you don't weaken."

The Lovecraftian citrus would be Buddha's Hand. It's also formally known as Fingered Citron, colloquially "the Cthulhu Fruit" among most varieties of Fandom, and almost invariably "time to call the produce manager over" when trying to check out of the grocery store.

Oooh. Now there's a power! Someone who can hear the soundtrack.

Sometimes you just wanna go "Pay attention, world! Somebody good died!"

"Bonk" by Mary Roach

I still keep doing this randomly. It's not even traumatic so much as just so WEIRD, ya know? I mean...really?

Anyone who talks to me on the phone has known me to utter such phrases as "Get off the ceiling!" and "STOP using the ironing board as a springboard!"

There are random crashing noises wafting up the stairs, as the cats systematically dismantle the house. I fear to go and assess the damage.

"Mad Scientist University" Any game where I can yell "We'll get to the center of the earth using genetically engineered eighty-foot tall lava-sucking mosquitos!" is a good thing.

You wear it so well.

"I have to wear two layers so they can't see the nipple rings."

[http://ursulav.livejournal.com/833150.html]

Close my eyes to look at you.

Very odd, meeting someone you know well in some ways and not at all in others.

She is very bubbly and vivacious and ruffled my hair frequently, which was an interesting experience as people don't generally treat me like I'm cute. Particularly people who have to reach up to ruffle my hair.

Rabbits are cute to look at, but man, I get creeped out looking into their eyes. They're just...they're soulless, or something.

"I had to go through puberty twice, but it was worth it."

Just happens like that.

You’ll never escape me.

we turned off all the lights the other night, and I hear I didn't glow any more than usual

I could have my nose and my upper respiratory passages back any time now. Also my voice. Also my mind. Thankyouverymuch. Life without an immune system is so much fun.

Wow. Look at how much I get done when I don't sleep or eat.

This is the most bizarre virus. We're both tired but can't sleep, and have stomach-aches but are also constantly hungry. I think this virus is doing something with calories. Maybe it's building a particle collider.

There's no need to hog the cookies, 'cuz it's an infinite bag of cookies.

Yes! Just checked the mail and got my company-name registration. I am now something other than merely myself. Just wait. Someday I will rule the universe.

I am rapidly developing the impression that dealing with Israeli bureaucracy is like slamming your head repeatedly into a very slightly padded wall.

Crow is either terminally insane or having a really bad day and wants everyone to share it. Either that, or he is a Norse god really peeved about being imprisoned in the body of a small bird.

Crows with small, roughly triangular gullets attempting to swallow whole saltines: FAIL.

We named her Mystery, Myst for short, because her appearance in our lives was a mystery. And a blessing. And so it remains. As is true, I think, of all love.

Oh, WOW. There goes the mature eagle. If I thought having the juvenile eagle fly toward the house was impressive...oh. my. god. It's like having a deity turn up in your dishwasher, or something.
Why should the sight of a bird move me to tears? It is just a prettily feathered North American vulture, really. In the most blazing white and depthless black.
But oh, such magnificence on wings. This world is too beautiful and we'd better work damned hard to preserve it, because we are not the only beings who matter. it just soared over this megaconsumer development looking supernaturally beautiful and utterly out of place.

No, really. I'm not being sarcastic. I take the little ferry over to the city as a commuting method, but most of the people on it during the summer are tourists, and they're so happy and excited and smiling and taking photos and oohing and aahing over Seattle's considerable natural beauty, over which I am still not jaded after 18 (!!!) years. Then some of them take the little shuttle 'round Alki Point and there's more oohing and aahing when the view opens up to the beach.
I love people loving my city...and even if we move, it'll still always be my city.
But I don't love the tourist who just walked past the house, leaned over the fence, and picked yet another damned rose.

X was very social this past week. Now I'm solidly in control again, and I feel like crap. And weirded out by her actions. I got to jump in here and there, but a lot of it was her.

When bored supervillains don't have heroes to play stupid games with they tend to commit real crimes.

Palmares. Equally important was the complex political organization that these colonies developed, often based at least in part on traditional African practices, with their own kings, military discipline, and internal social stratification. In essence, they constituted nations in exile.

It's about half kendo, half fencing. Strangely, the Jedi never seemed to take advantage of the fact that the lightsaber is effectively bladed 360 degrees around and has no appreciable mass, and only rarely take advantage of the ability to retract and extend the blade at will.

Charivari - a noisy mock serenade (made by banging pans and kettles) to a newly married couple

But humans are pack animals, and it gives us enough sense of community to keep us from going insane.

“Aw c’mon stop complaining, this is fun!”

[http://www.journalfen.net/community/otf_wank/595339.html?thread=48507531#t48507531]

Super Tongan Nassarius. It is a snail. It sounds like a mecha anime.

Photos of it will not develop if taken.

No! I am ''not'' allowed to lust after X!

Avengers v3 56: "Lo, There Shall Come... an Accounting"

Nothing like waking up to find that a part of you died.

My mother learned to gauge how badly I was hurt or how scared I was by how hysterical the laughing was at the time.

Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra

[http://summer-jackel.livejournal.com/tag/writing] "On the third day away from all people, I became silent. It began to happen almost immediately; now, I said nothing, calling my dogs only when needed, with a short whistle or a movement of my hand. Even the written word seemed obtrusive."

"[http://baratron.livejournal.com/597493.html I have] a virtually complete copy of everything I missed. However, the DVR picks up all sounds and seems to favour things like paper rustling, overhead projector whirring, and air conditioning over the human voice, even though I can't imagine anyone wanting to record any of those noises. Despite using both the low cut filter (which is supposed to remove low frequency machine noise) and the playback noise filter, there's still an awful lot of distracting extra sound. And because the playback noise filter cuts out some human voice frequencies along with the noise, the speaker sounds somewhat robotic and some words are inaudible."

"Tell me about Rovac."
"It's a place where the ground's the ground and the sky's the sky. The people there are born of women, some nine months after their parents couple. To live they eat and drink; at the end of living they find they die."

I am a woman, not a pod babies grow in. I'm not the life support system for a womb and ovaries.

[http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=936]

Presume not that I am the thing I was, for I have turned away from what I once was. Oh, it is excellent to have a giant's strength! But it is tyrannous to use it. (PLOT GIZKA. Yay TSSM!)

Informatio-Scope

[http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunnybusiness/53170.html FESTIVAL OF STUPID!]

My name comes from Greek for "rational"! That or it's derived from "Alice", which is derived from French "Adelais" which is in turn derived from old Germanic "Adalheidis", "of nobility". "Alexander" and its derivatives mean "Defender/protector/savior of mankind." ARGH STOP WITH THE PLOT GIZKA.

I had an aunt who believed that the world would end in 1978; Apocalypse and riders and all.

Everyone who knew me before thinks I'm dead.

Leyolet! Why didn't I think of that before?! See, "Level Up", said really quickly and with my weird inflection, sounds like "Leh vyol yup", and at some point I just started using Leyolet. Okay then.

"I've put on enough muscle in my legs that even relaxed-fit pants are painfully tight and cut off my circulation. By texture, it's not fat."

You guys, you guys, I finally discovered what everyone's been saying: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg skilled] dancing is incredibly sexy! Yeah, I know, but I'm slow at figuring these things out. Skilled dancing is awesome. And so is [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cYWfq this!]

Tech bubble, housing bubble, thaumic bubble.

Big face on a big neck.

Many soldiers, when they march into battle, do so with their heads down like they're going into a strong wind, hunkered down to present a smaller profile. Not us. Our heads are high, backs straight, daring the enemy.

Ladarks

Je ne sais quoi. "I don't know what."

Or Xenos. That means "stranger" in Latin.

http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/poetry/TheSpelloftheYukon/chap19.html

DON'T LOOK DOWN.

"[[http://www.journalfen.net/community/otf_wank/609478.html And]] the children were asking, where is the boy who is Jesus Christ? We have seen his controversy in the East and are come to go trick-or-treating with him.
And lo, the boy who is Jesus Christ and his followers went trick-or-treating, and received gifts of Butterfingers, Kit-Kat bars, and M and Ms. Plus some weird old guy who gave them myrrh.
And having been warned by the older kids not to go to Old Lady Murray's house, they got into their parents' cars and returned home by another way."

"He'd lost his home, his family, his past. All that was left to him was his future, one that had then seemed threatening instead of inviting." I love Wedge.

[[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/fun/freestuff/audio/VIXY_AND_TONY_Rich%20Fantasy%20Lives.mp3 Some whispering poem was calling us home, to a place we know never existed.]]

Chris texted from DC that his plane crashed and he was dead, but thought he'd be okay. I wrote back and told him to stay out of the sun.

You have destroyed me utterly.

Do it again.

What's love? This sense of freezing-bitter loss, the pit of anguish whose eyes I can't quite bring myself to fully meet yet, and which I am becoming heartily sick of? Or the way the sunlight catches briefly on a strand of your hair and the world collapses itself into a
breathless and giddy moment of beauty, as piercing and pure-tasting as ice water? The moment in which I catch a breath of your scent by accident and, before I check myself, am moved to bliss?

It's November, and I can feel myself dying again. I'm starting to forget how many times it's been, but then I've never been fantastic with numbers. I wonder what new thing will rise from my compost heap this time?

FDR: "A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest-at the command — of his head."

Siren (ginger, jasmine, vanilla and apricot)

He is a lovely, lovely singer. His acting skills are on par with a certain Captain James "The T Stands For Manwhore, What Do You Mean I Failed Spelling?" Kirk portrayer.

'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia !'

'Be yourself. Everyone else is taken!'

Fainting: "I was walking, and then I was asleep with silent blackness all around me, and then I heard music and people talking and dishes clinking like at a party, and then I woke up and I was sitting in a chair with worried people all around me and my vision was clouded with little silver-edged black sparkles. I felt like I had been asleep for hours, but everyone said it was only a few seconds. I kept asking "Where am I?" but I knew where I was, I just couldn't comprehend what was going on. I felt like I must have traveled some enormous distance, I must have passed out and been unconscious for hours, surely they would have taken me to a hospital, so why would I still be at the doctor's office? It was completely disorienting. Being passed out felt ''just'' like being asleep."

Let me insert a slightly more annoyed rant about what it's like to be a non-traditional bio-female in the army. Judging from what other people say, every female (I think we're still at less than 10% of the total military population) has this same rocky reef to navigate, so my own personal set of grievances is just the way that this institution manifested in my case. I have heard it summed up like this:
- If you don't sleep with any of the army guys, you must be a lesbian.
- If you sleep with one army guy, then you're probably okay, or at least normal.
- If you sleep with more than one army guy, then you're a total slut and deserve no respect.
- (And if you watch enough Powerpoint briefings, bullet points really start to grow on you.)

Dantooine - dorian passion fruit

"Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String"

Breathe easy?! I'm trapped inside a psychopathic corpse! I can't get out!

I am the boomstick.

I have needs now - dirty, horrible needs.

I, for one, think it's pretty awesome that a god-tier space lord with phenomenal cosmic powers can just kick back every so often and have a brew with his dad, talking about all the wicked cool shit he's been doing.

I'm happy, hope you're happy too.

The main difference, I guess, is that the hydraulic “muscles” work more by pushing, while human muscles work by pulling.

Tomorrow starts today.

[http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/6495598.html Dead!]

"And that's why I don't like magic, Captain. 'cos it's ''magic''. You can't ask questions, it's magic. It doesn't explain anything, it's magic. You don't know where it comes from, it's magic! That's what I don't like about magic, it does everything by magic!"

I thought it was a guiding omen, but it screams in the night.

Greek term thauma (marvel)

Technically, Zaktan from Bionicle. When his old boss tried to vaporize him, he was somehow able to pull himself back together as microscopic "protodites". In this new, permanent state, Zaktan can easily avoid attacks by turning into an insect swarm; change the shape of body parts; heal damage by filling the gaps with Protodites; and engulf a foe in an attack that must feel like getting hit with thousands of needles. Zaktan himself calls it a curse however, as his voice now sounds like a crowd speaking; and whenever he wakes up he can feel his body shifting "where there once were tissue and solid metal".

The boss of a level who plans to kill a bunch of civilians to cover his tracks is revealed to be an ex-employee of Stark industries fired for stealing supplies: "My inventions helped make you rich Stark! You never should have fired me!" Tony (Iron Man) "You were stealing pens!"

[lj-cut text = "This is a massive piece of ASM"]
Lots of pictures
[/lj-cut]
But with pointy brackets instead of square brackets.

"Tony is molested by technology" is almost as popular an Iron Man storyline as "Something's wrong with Tony's heart/nervous sytem/etc--again!" Then there's the combination plot of "Tony's armor is killing him, yet he keeps wearing it anyway because he's just that stubborn."

"See, a side-effect of being able to break bricks with my bare hands is that I have a hard time fitting into clothes that are designed for the average woman. My arms are just too big and muscular (and so are my thighs, and my calves…)"

Human brains are 21% of our bodyweight.

"humans are actually very weak for animals their size, due to a difference in muscle protein structures. A typical adult chimpanzee could rip the arms off an Olympic weight lifter." "Chimps have a lot of dense quick-burst muscle, but they can't swim and they have very poor endurance." "Humans have great long-term endurance, though." "Yeah. We're built for chasing gazelles. For miles. Until the damn thing falls over from exhaustion and we beat its head in with whatever's handy. (See Niven's "Folk Tale.") Lions can't do that. They're sprinters." "The average office worker (ie, unfit sod who walks at most a mile a day) can train themselves up within a month to run 4-5 miles in one go, and then you have this thing called a 'marathon'. I don't think anyone even contemplates asking a horse to do that. That's not even counting how long someone can row or cycle for."

Human endurance running ability has been inadequately appreciated because of a failure to recognize that "high speed is not always important," [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041123163757.htm Bramble says.] "What is important is combining reasonable speed with exceptional endurance." Hairless, clawless, and largely weaponless, ancient humans used the unlikely combination of sweatiness and relentlessness to gain the upper hand over their faster, stronger, generally more dangerous animal prey, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman said Thursday (April 12). “Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom,” [http://www.physorg.com/news95954919.html Lieberman said.] [http://barista.media2.org/?p=3080] While animals get rid of excess heat by panting, they can’t pant when they gallop, Lieberman said. That means that to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans didn’t have to run further than the animal could trot and didn’t have to run faster than the animal could gallop. All they had to do is to run faster, for longer periods of time, than the slowest speed at which the animal started to gallop. [http://www.google.com/search?q=persistence+hunting&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS234US234]

I love being human.

[http://joysweeper.livejournal.com/54369.html Another Idea Bank dump].

[[http://joysweeper.livejournal.com/58885.html#cutid2 More overflow.]

Walker Imperial Ranger

2009-08-29T02:27:19Z

Joysweeper: /* The Rebel Legion */

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Xanadu]][[Category:Story]][[Category:Alien]][[Category:Inanimorph]][[Category:Transgender]][[Category:Joysweeper]][[Category:Bryan]]
{{universe|Xanadu}}
{{byline|author=Joysweeper|user=Joysweeper}}

By Joysweeper, with some help from Bryan.

Don't read this story yet :)

It'll be done when it's done. For the record, I intend to finish before Duke Nukem.

Links to some pictures of AT-ATs, for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-hlc.jpg] Close up of chin-mounted heavy laser cannons
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:MCQ-battleofhoth.jpg] Low-angle concept art
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SWRSIIIRSWP.jpg] More concept art(Talk about uneven odds. Luke > everything.)
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:BlizzardForce.jpg] ESB screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Blizzard_2.jpg] Another screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-swrs3rs.jpg] High-angle(sort of) image
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:AT-AT_egvv.jpg] Schematics
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT_height.jpg] Bad bluescreen, but it does convey size pretty well.

Links to some pictures of Red Guards, also for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Guard.png] Red robes and a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos_NEGTC.jpg] Kir Kanos, helmet off, showing the armor. He never uses a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos.jpg] The Emperor's guards aren't just for show.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kanos3.JPG] Kir Kanos showing the armor again. Different look at the belt.

Have to thank [http://community.livejournal.com/brains_in_a_jar/ brains-in-a-jar] for thoughts on a human brain in a very nonhuman mechanical body, and also all kinds of things about static. Also have to thank Robert T. Bakker for writing "The Dinosaur Heresies"; that bit on a lizard's wrist was extremely interesting.

And I found this quote on one of the 501st homepages. It is so ''perfect''. "Some fans are content to collect action figures...other fans want to ''be'' action figures. Nothing professes your fandom quite like building your own detailed costume replica of a classic Star Wars villain, and there's nothing quite like the feeling that comes from bringing the characters of Star Wars into the real world and sharing the magic with others. A truly engaging Star Wars experience only occurs through a convincing appearance. To this end, the 501st constantly strives to improve the quality and accuracy of its member's costumes. Our goal is to appear as if our characters have just stepped off the big screen and into this world." I hope I can find some way to use this ironically. Probably not ''this'' story, but I'm going to have to stow it away.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Hoojib.jpg]]

==Bryan's intro==

"The door, the door!" Steph called out and lunged to intercept the handle swinging in to catch Garrett's back, stopping it just in time to prevent another ding in the cardboard that might be difficult to repair now that they were at the convention itself.

Garrett let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks." He had turned sideways but thanks to the huge boxy hump over his back it didn't make him any narrower and only really served to make it harder to keep track of everything. And with the two giant cardboard constructs mounted over his arms there wasn't really much he could do anyway; his hands were busy just holding the internal braces in place.

Steph grinned and slipped lithely around to join him in the lobby once Garrett had managed to make it inside. "You'd think armor capable of repelling turbolasers could handle a door handle."

Garrett shook his head. His costume was particularly fragile, being both bulky and made primarily out of cardboard, but it had been surprisingly quick and easy to make as a result. "It'll last until judging. Spray a jot of black on any tears and call 'em battle damage, the Rebels must've got a few lucky hits in." The lobby was sparsely populated right now, with just a few folks still lined up at the front desk buying passes to glance in surprise at Garrett's outfit, but Garrett decided it was showtime. He leaned forward and fell into his quadrupedal stance, the big round footpads of his forelimbs clomping to the ground to support him and the headpiece tilting down into the correct orientation.

There were a few appreciative murmurs as the onlookers finally recognized the iconic Imperial walker he was dressed as. Steph gave a little flourish and a bow, as if taking credit for the outfit, and then stepped forward to give Garrett something to follow. They'd considered trying to rig up a periscope of some sort so that Garrett could see forward more easily but they'd run out of time for details like that; it was enough that the AT-AT's legs were able to support him as things were, they'd had to compromise on the costume's proportions a bit just to make it work.

The majority of the work had taken only a single week. Since it only really had to survive for a single day of use ease of construction had been a fair tradeoff. Garrett was like that with all of his projects; a flash of inspiration, a whirlwind of construction, and then once it was finished the itch was satisfied and he would lose interest and let it go. Steph counted it as sheer luck that this time around the inspiration had come when they might make some money off of it. He'd been tight with Garrett for a couple of years now, both of them in the same engineering degree at the nearby University of Midtral, and was the less-imaginative and more-practical of the two.

"Two please," Steph signed in. "Stephen Midder and Garrett Thompson. Just for today." He pointed to identify themselves.

"Registered for any of the contests?" The man behind the desk asked. Garrett nodded silently, the walker-head bobbing almost comically. "Right..." The man shuffled through a list, presumably checking for Garrett's name, and then looked back up once he'd checked it off. "Ten for him, thirty for you."

"Eh? Aww." Steph got out his wallet to pay for the passes. "Should've worn a costume myself." ''Not that I could have got a discount for any costume that cost under twenty dollars, of course.'' But he supposed that wasn't really the point.

The two of them had done some pretty wacky and nerdy things together. The AT-AT costume had blown away everyone at the Halloween party they'd been to on campus just a few nights previous, in fact that had been the primary impetus for building the thing in the first place. But as they proceeded down the hall toward the convention rooms where the main population of conventiongoers were congregating, Steph began wondering if they'd finally reached their level. The variety and creativity of hand-crafted costumes on display was enormous. Still, there wasn't anything quite like the AT-AT costume Garrett wore and it still drew a good share of attention.

Upon entering the first convention room - a dealer's room, from the look of the tables set up along the side walls, but nonetheless full of costume-wearers - they almost immediately encountered someone in a Stormtrooper outfit. It was a perfect replica in every detail, clearly a labor of love, and the person wearing it was dedicated enough to playing the role that he resisted the temptation to drop out of character.

"You're out of uniform, pilot," the trooper commented as he gave Steph a nod of acknowledgment in passing.

Steph was at a loss for a response but Garrett gave a most un-AT-AT-like chuckle. Garrett had been shuffling along behind Stephen on all fours, barely able to see more than the backs of Stephen's heels, and he took the opportunity after the trooper had passed to stand back up again and look around. "Lots of competition."

"Yeah." Steph sighed; the prospect of winning any of the prize money seemed more distant now that he'd seen some of what they were up against. This was just the first room and there was an amazing gargoyle with what looked like pneumatically-operated wings, a really hot fox-girl who had made a masterful blend of both plush fabric and her own natural attributes, and a lizard-man... no, Steph corrected himself, a Gorn. The Gorn's costume was nearly as good as the one from the original Star Trek episode had been. "Still, nothing like an AT-AT, eh?"

"Excuse us, please," A small woman in a jockey costume asked from behind Garrett's cardboard bulk. He shuffled to the side to let her through, leading a man in an amazing horse costume. The thing made him seven feet tall, with a long neck and perfect horse's head, and the hoof-gloves made Steph wonder if he could get down on all fours too.

"Heh. Damn." Garrett shook his head. "Well, thank goodness for categories, eh?"

Steph gave a wry grin. "Yeah. Though I'm feeling a bit under-dressed myself now."

It didn't really matter much since Garrett was the center of attention, as intended; Steph was along just to open doors and do the other things Garrett couldn't manage in that hulking outfit. But as they proceeded through the room Steph found his gaze lingering on some of the costuming wares being sold.

People would stop to stare, take photos, or ask Steph questions about the AT-AT costume. Since he was the one leading the way, with Garrett's face down and concealed under the cardboard headpiece, it was natural that they'd assume he was in charge. But when Garrett reared up to proudly answer the questions they'd immediately switch to ignoring Steph instead. It was quickly beginning to annoy him; though the idea and the design for the AT-AT costume had been Garrett's they'd worked on it together.

"Hang on, Garrett," Steph finally called. They were on their way to the exhibition hall but they were still quite early, they'd left plenty of flex in their schedule to account for difficulties with the costume. "I want to look at some of the stuff they're selling here."

"Stuff?" Garrett got up and looked around.

There weren't any Star Wars branded costume supplies at hand, and if there were they'd probably be too expensive. ''Twenty dollars, eh? I can spend twenty dollars.'' That left mainly just the cheesier costume gear.

After a few minutes of browsing Garrett got back down on all fours and spent a little while tromping back and forth. The arms of the AT-AT costume were quite heavy; in addition to the cardboard shell they had a pair of aluminum canes inside, trimmed short and affixed to the broad metal bucket lids that formed the soles of his "forefeet". Despite the crick he was sure he'd eventually develop in his back it was actually easier moving around like this.

There wasn't as much of an audience in here, though. The people who already had costumes were gravitating off somewhere else and those were the ones he was most interested in impressing with his ingenuity and attention to detail. He wasn't a big Star Wars fan himself but he'd dug up some schematics from a scan of some old Star Wars book. He'd even hung a Luke Skywalker pilot action figure on a string from his underside, mimicking the famous scene from Empire Strikes Back where the proto-Jedi had grappled up on board one after being shot down on Hoth, but he'd lost that particular accessory somewhere during the Halloween party and hadn't bothered looking for a replacement. There didn't seem to be anything like that in this area of the dealer's room...

He tromped over to Steph. "We going to move on?" He prompted.

Steph sighed. The twin goals of 'attention-grabbing' and 'cheap' weren't meshing very well. "Okay, just let me grab something." Something totally incongruous would probably be best. So... "Ah, I'll take that." A pair of fuzzy bunny ears on a headband for just ten bucks. Garrett didn't even look up and Steph grinned; he'd be startled when he did.

They continued onward.

==Joysweeper's pre-TF setup==

On the way they'd called it a "function" as if it'd been some kind of social event, and in a desultory fashion they'd been trying to get donations to the Leukemia Society, but it was far from formal. The Kublai Con attendees were pretty generous – TR-1407, given name “Angela Kincaid”, calling herself “Anj” while in costume - had once heard it said that furry cons generated more money than scifi cons, and Xanadu was a mixture of both.

What had made the effort fun was the “act”. Angela lost count of just how many times she’d heard friends declaring with feigned authority that the 501st Legion was here to keep the peace and maintain order. Essentially they’d just threatened anyone who looked impressive enough, and almost everyone had played along, reacting in fear or challenging the Imperials to a duel.

She’d personally “fought” an armored anthro dragon with a very realistic whipping tail, matching her forcepike with his curved fiberglass sword, and although she’d “lost” she had also had the pleasure of seeing him back down when faced with the blasters of eighteen stormtroopers. Good donation from that one, too, when they'd explained and everything.

The "TR" prefix in front of the number she had picked as her identification - she'd chosen fourteen oh seven - indicated which costume was her favorite. "TK" meant stormtrooper, "TC" was clonetrooper, "SL" was Sith Lord... there were a number of them for the various types. "TR" meant that she favored the Emperor's guards in their red helmets and flowing robes. They were called Red Guards, Royal Guards, and various other combinations of "Red", "Royal", "Imperial", and "Emperor's". Frankly, Angela preferred "Red Guard". The arguments some of her friends got into about nomenclature gave her a headache - fanwank was one thing, and you had to be a little anal to care about a screen-accurate costume, but some people went too far.

She’d heard from one of them that someone had actually caught a pickpocket in the act and had proceeded to instill the fear of the Empire into him, winning a lot of amusement from everyone else in the process, but she hadn’t seen it herself, nor had anyone who told the story. It was probably hyperbole. That didn’t stop the thought from being entertaining.

Now it was over and the group was dispersing. TR-1407 was glad to leave, frankly. The costume, with heavy cloth robes over already-stifling armor, had slowly become hot enough to, as the phrase went, fry fleek eels with, the ice packs had either thawed or hadn't been working in the first place, and no amount of water or robe-flapping could make it entirely tolerable. The bodysuit under the plating under the robes was so drenched with sweat that she'd probably have to peel it off.

Not for the first time she wished that she hadn’t bothered with the tight bodysuit and the armor that went over it. It wasn’t like it would have visibly made a difference. Some Red Guards liked to keep their robes thrown behind their shoulders like a cloak, the better to show off the detailing on their armor. Angela, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone guessing that she was female, and so kept her robes arranged about her body, hiding everything but her hands, her feet, and her helmet. It still would have been far, ''far'' too hot – the helmet was the next thing to airtight, and only the respirator that threaded down to her waist kept her from suffocating – but at least she wouldn’t feel like sparks were smoldering under her robes.

But… no. More than once during the “fight” her robes had swept about, and both before and after they hadn’t exactly hung neatly. She would ''never'' have heard the end of it if she were to come to an event “half-dressed”.

“Remember, there’s a march at three,” she told her friend and former pupil SL-1984 as they left, part of a stream. The majority of Tampa Bay Squad happened to be heading in the same direction. “We meet before two thirty in the southwest parking lot.” Little single-squadron things like the function were fun, but the real thrill was always when the entire 501st, or as much of it as was attending any particular convention, marched together. There was just something about it that felt exhilarating. Like she was part of something bigger than herself.

“I knew that,” he protested, but mildly. “Micheal Porter”, as he was usually known – although he preferred to answer strictly to his designation when in costume – was tall enough, laid-back enough, and attention-loving enough to pull off a White Vader costume. It was exactly what it sounded like – the Darth Vader rig, all in white, sometimes called “Vader Redeemed.” The images that the costume was based off of had appeared for literally two panels at the very end of a comic that wasn’t even canon. Even by 501st standards that was unusual - and the 501st Legion was infamous for being made up of fans who weren't content to simply ''collect'' action figures, they wanted to ''be'' them.

His protest was put on hold briefly as a fairly well-done white tiger furry with an articulated jaw interrupted, waving her pawhands and generally being as relentlessly upbeat as possible. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but gestured and showed off a disposable camera on a strap around her neck enthusiastically enough that it was pretty clear that she wanted pictures.

TR-1407 had never been all that comfortable with being hugged by complete strangers for photographs, but she didn’t have any serious objections to it, and she wasn’t carrying her wallet with her this time, so there was no chance of getting robbed again. Fortunately the tiger was much more interested in SL-1984, and ''he'' was perfectly willing to mug and pose as much as desired, supported by three or four stormtroopers who got beckoned into the shots and played along, rather than shaking their heads and passing by. Maybe it was just that white fur went better with white robes and armor than with red. It was probably more that the kid was naturally showy.

After the Red Guard had obligingly snapped enough pictures and handed the camera back to the furry, the white tiger left to accost someone else, and they picked up where they had left off.

“Angela, you really don't need to remind me about everything anymore. I know the schedule."

“Don’t call me Angela when I’m in uniform, please." Sweat was pooling in the tips of her gloves. Angela flexed her hands against it. The moment she let them relax, it pooled again. "It's only been what, a year since I let you walk off and you missed it because you were buying original issues of 'Spider-Girl'?"

"A year and a half. I am ''so'' much better at juggling my hobbies now," he said dryly. "Why, I even remember things that the schedule said and Pike forgot to bring up."

A trooper listening in muttered "You had to bring the Squad Leader into this. Now you're in for it."

Another trooper who'd been a few steps behind got right up besides the taller Vader. She was a snowtrooper, and probably suffering almost as much as Angela in the heat. Despite the helmet speaker and a tired note in her voice, she sounded crisp and alert. "Hey, don't complain. I'm sorry we haven't made an announcement, but we've got a lot more on our plate than you do; ''you'' just have to show up at the right time and place, and we're not here to babysit you. We've been setting things up and working out scheduling conflicts since five in the morning. It's been a long day at the end of a long week already and I'm glad John was there to take over after eleven." The snowtrooper slipped into character and finished, very dryly, "So don't complain about your superiors, my lord. Circumstances tend to be more complicated than they seem."

"Ah," SL-1984 said, briefly assuming character himself. "My apologies, Ma'am. That was merely a breach in my personal discipline. No disrespect was meant." Following along, Angela couldn't help feeling a little surge of goodwill. She loved this group. They argued a lot, and Shanda Pike admittedly could be touchy, but it never got too far. Probably in part because while Michael loved the limelight, he had very little ego or temper.

"I'll overlook it, so long as you don't let it happen again," Pike allowed very seriously. A smile crept into her voice. "You're mixing up your honorifics, by the way. I'm only "ma'am" in the Tusken Raider suit and as Mara."

"Again, my apologies. Sir," he added. Everyone pretended not to notice the slight skip in his amplified voice.

With a nod, the snowtrooper peeled away and dropped back, staying in sight but effectively bowing out of the conversation. In an aside, Angela told her friend that his voice-changer was failing.

“What? Testing, testing... You’re right.” SL-1984 thumped the speaker hidden in his chest box, then removed his helmet, careful of the trailing wires that ran from it down into the rest of the costume. “This thing always gets screwy an hour or so in.”

There was always something just a little bit disturbing about seeing someone in costume but without their helmet on. It didn’t take long to get used to seeing troopers, but with a Vader it ''always'' looked strange. Michael had opted for the ski-hood-under-the-helmet thing that Vaders usually wore. His, naturally, was white. Removing helmets while trooping tended to be frowned on, but everyone in the 501st knew that sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Angela told him, “You really ought to try a pair of Vortex Twos. I’ve never made a Vader-“

Michael left off frowning into the helmet for a moment. “You’re not nearly tall enough to pull it off. You'd have to do the three-fourths scale version. And maybe get body padding.”

“I know. Shut up.” Angela sighed. “I’ve never made a Vader, but I have a helmet, therefore I use a speaker. Vortex. Got it with my tax returns. I know that Hasbro thing is cheap and easy to get, but, well, the downside is quality. Vortex is the best.” She indicated the general location of her own voice amplification unit with a quick gesture. It made her voice audible despite the almost airtight helmet, flattening it out in the process.

“I know, but that’s a bit of an investment. I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. Had to stop working on that Tusken Raider one… I could barely afford to come ''here.'' This will hold for a bit longer. Going to have to try and fake it when it does fail. The iPod with the breathing loop's still good, at least.” Replacing the helmet and straightening it with both hands, he faced her directly. “Any plans?”

“I’m getting out of this costume before I cook.” She flapped her robes in another vain attempt to get some cool air circulating. Under her helmet, a little curl of hair had plastered itself over one eye, sticking to the lid as she blinked. Just about every time she wore a helmet she found herself wishing she'd cut her hair short. Tampa Bay Squadron's other Red Guard kept hers cropped and said it made something of a difference.

SL-1984’s speaker system relayed the sound of his mouth opening, so she cut him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need any help, Micheal. Seriously, if I stay in this any longer I’ll get heatstroke. Every time I get into this thing I regret it, I swear.”

"If you want me to call you Anj, don't call ''me'' Michael." SL-1984 raised his voice to be heard over the shouting match going on between two balding men in spandex. Taking up a standard Vader mannerism with ease that betrayed several movies' worth of casual study, he locked his hands around his belt. “This is why white’s a good color. I’m not sweating half as much as I did in the black sauna suit, so I think I’m good for a while yet. I'd like to see the sights. There are some ''really'' nice costumes this year. Maybe I’ll swing by those set pieces people keep talking about. I heard that they got David and his crew to do the Hutt set again this year, plus Carmen said that Makaze Squad brought in that Death Star made of like a million Legos. I have no idea how they could have got it in the doors.”

People had collected in a chattering knot around someone or something, clogging the way. It was possible to squeeze past, but that just wouldn't do. Angela raised her voice. “Move along, come on now citizens, you can collect in a spare room much more easily than out here. Move along, move along.” The voice amplifier lent her voice a little more kick and made it audible. Despite that, she saw no sign that more than a few people had heard, let alone intended to obey.

Her former pupil, his voice changer having given up entirely, repeated the order with the same intonation, doing his best with the voice. This time, people listened and obeyed, breaking up and dispersing. They’d been clustered around a yellow lab – not a furry, an actual, panting dog that barely seemed disturbed at all by the crowd – wearing one of those novelty pet costumes. It went very nicely with his owner, though Angela wasn’t sure about the meaning of the dog being Batman when the man was Robin.

What she ''was'' sure about was that the kid she’d once sponsored – hardly a kid despite her teasing, she couldn't be more than five or six years older than him - was just ''better'' at some of this than she was. Particularly when it came to giving orders to people neither of them knew. Partly it was because, although she wasn’t shy by anyone’s standards, she didn’t like to stand out overmuch. Hence why her preferred costumes were the Red Guard and obscure ones like AT-AT drivers or Imperial Army Pilots, as they were called, while ''his'' was arguably the most conspicuous costume in the 501st.

A trooper that Angela knew from the squad finally answered the question. “The Lego Death Star? It breaks apart into sections and gets reassembled. We had to get a cart for the pieces, but it's simpler than it looks. Tampa Bay had it one year, but that was before your time. Sir.”

TR-1407 decided to break it off. She really didn’t know where the closest ‘changing room’ was, but she’d been told that they were everywhere, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to find one. The longer she waited, the longer the costume stayed on. “Have fun, guys. I think I’ll get most of this off before I make more plans. Don’t hurt yourself showing off.”

“Don’t forget to put it back on by two thirty. I’ll see you by then if not before, An- Anj.” He and those troopers who hadn't already gone their own ways kept moving in the same direction, and she arbitrarily took a left.

It was pretty close to noon; compared to just an hour ago, the hallway was half empty. The people who had been rushing around trying to get to various things had reached them, apparently. This wasn’t anywhere near the dealer’s room or any of its offshoots, the SIGs were already in progress, and as far as she could remember from the big con schedule the only event going on would be that big awards ceremony.

Angela toyed with the idea of going, but the oppressive heat of her costume decided her. Anything worth seeing would surely keep; she'd been to enough conventions to know that the truly impressive costumes would probably stick around for a bit, both soaking up the praise and trying not to break anything. Getting there in time to see the whole thing wouldn’t be worth the broiling and the probability of being jostled by a crowd. She’d hate to break the forcepike that she was carrying braced against her shoulder; it was easily the most fragile part of the costume, and making it had been a trial.

The heat was like a physical thing trapped against her body. Not for the first time, she wished that she’d worn her officer uniform instead. Fewer layers, and her face, neck, and hands were exposed to the air. But officer getup was just so ''plain'', so ''ordinary'' compared to the Red Guard robes and armor. And somehow it drew more attention, not less. In a weird way, Red Guards could be ignored pretty easily. A perk of being a member of Star Wars's version of the Secret Service, she supposed.

Up ahead it was crowded again; all fursuiters from the look of things. Enough of them were breaking the unwritten rule about staying silent in costume that the group was quite, quite loud, even with the helmet cutting off some of the sound. From the laughter, the movement, and the general tone of conversation, they were having a good time. Having nothing better to do Angela approached them, deciding that if nothing else she might as well find out what if anything was going on.

As she passed within thirty feet of the closest of them she felt something like a chill traveling down her spine, prickling against the bodysuit stuck to her skin. The Red Guard would have brushed it aside as nothing, but for one reason or another she noticed that some of the furries who had been talking or laughing or demonstrating dance moves had stopped, abruptly in some cases. A number of them carried on, oblivious, but several stopped what they were doing.

TR-1407 thought she saw a gray feline's mouth opening far wider than a baklava could allow for. She told herself that it was a trick of the light or a flaw in her visor. That was when the chill became strong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and branching to prickle her arms, the base of her skull, her chest and lower than that, strong enough that she shuddered involuntarily. Her bones started to ache, followed by the rest of her body. There was a moment where she thought ''Heatstroke?'' and started to raise her hands to her helmet.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the world.

== Lead up to Garrett and Steph's TFs==

The density of Star Wars costumes steadily increased as they progressed. The population of the convention was extremely diverse but various factors - the impending themed contests, the large number of rooms providing partitioning, natural human cliquishness - were conspiring to make it clumpy.

''Or maybe word's just getting around about Garrett's costume,'' Steph reflected. The stormtroopers seemed eerily organized for just a bunch of fans who'd happened to show up wearing the same thing.

But to Steph's relief, he wasn't feeling quite so annoyed by the attention Garrett was getting any more. The bunny ears had actually ''helped''. Not in that they were anything particularly interesting themselves, of course; they were nothing at all in comparison to even the simplest of the animal costumes he'd seen on display. No, ironically enough it was a synergistic effect.

A big clunky AT-AT clomping around? Worth a double-take, of course. A big clunky AT-AT clomping around being led by a man in bunny ears? That apparently was worth two double-takes.

A small impromptu honor guard had formed around Garrett, a constantly-renewing cluster of Star Wars fans trailing along to examine the AT-AT's details before being left behind or moving on to other things. But though fewer, the Star Wars fans who were puzzling over Steph were puzzling longer. One of them was even a Darth Vader complete with audible breathing, though in an all-white suit for some reason.

Steph wasn't about to ask. He was already being pelted with far more intricate details of the Star Wars universe than he could possibly take in. "So," the white-armored Vader was musing. "I doubt that the Empire has begun accepting nonhumans into service since my conversion, so you cannot be a pilot. I don't think you have the height for a Gerb or Lepus Carnivorous, but I might be mistaken."

"Uh, no, don't think so," Steph shook his head. ''Lepus Carnivorous? Is he making this up on the spot?'' The only carnivorous rabbit that came to mind was from Monty Python.

"Are you a Kushiban? Be at ease, my mission no longer entails the deaths of Force-Sensitives."

That one sounded less fake, and Steph was about to accept the title if only to have something meaningful to say. But then one of the Storm Troopers turned from peering at the detailing on Garrett's head and said in his best tinny trooper-voice, "My Lord, are you forgetting the Hoojib?"

"I was just getting to that." The chuckle seemed quite out of character for a Darth Vader, and to Steph's relief he seemed to be recognizing how far out of his depth Steph was. "I apologize for my men. When you're obsessed, it's a bit hard to remember that ''not everyone knows or cares.''" That last bit seemed to be aimed at the other fans, who variously shrugged, drew back a little, and hung their helmeted heads in probably-mock shame. "Kushiban and Hoojibs are both rabbitlike creatures, not very large. Kushiban are more like cat-monkey creatures with soft rabbit ears and big squirrely tails; they're about, oh, ''this'' tall standing up -" he bent down to hold his gloved hand a foot and a half above the floor "-but usually walk on all fours. They do a lot of handweaving and tend to be Force-Sensitive; generally they're portrayed with a calm demeanor. By most standards they are considered very, ah, cute."

It was Steph's turn to chuckle. "I'll leave cute to the furries."

"Aww." Garrett rose to his hind legs, surprising Steph by having been paying attention, and took a moment to set one of the forelegs down so he could adjust his headpiece. One of the side-mounted gun turrets had hooked on someone and been pulled askew. "You'd think with all those bunny-based aliens there'd be a more crossover, like with those Caitans we saw earlier."

"Ixnay on the Artrek Stay," Steph warned with a grin. He didn't seriously expect anyone to be offended, there was far too much good-natured mixing of genres and universes going on for that, but the rivalry between those two franchises almost seemed traditional.

"I'm dressed as an AT-AT, I think I'm strong enough in the Star Wars Force for my reputation to survive being revealed as a fancier of catgirls in miniskirt uniforms."

The white Vader nodded, still chuckling. "Certainly. You have no idea how many of our aliens look like cats or bugs or yes, rabbits. Hoojib, for example. They're about ''this'' big-" too small to bend down for, he held out his gloved hands as if cupping a normal-sized bunny in them "-they're mute but telepathic, they eat energy. They look more like rabbits with huge eyes and splayed bird feet. They also have large noses, no visible mouth, and one antenna or feeler on the forehead that they use to drain energy with. A relic of the Marvel comics back in the seventies. Frankly, most of us think the writers were dropping something, but the Hoojib are not quite as implausible as some of the others."

"Weird is good," Steph answered with a nod. ''Hoojib, eh?'' The wheels were spinning quickly in Steph's head; even though he'd never seen pictures of one of those things the description was pretty distinctive. He thought back over some of the stuff he'd glimpsed on the tables they'd passed... "I can pull that off. I'll be right back, you okay Garrett?"

Garrett nodded. "Just tromping around." He had finished his adjustment and was considering whether to go back down on all fours, but as Steph headed off into the bustle he found himself welcoming the excuse to stay upright a while longer. His back wasn't hurting yet, and thanks to the angle of the headpiece he didn't have to hold his neck at a bad angle, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned to the white Vader instead. "So, if it's not a faux pas to ask, did you not have time to paint your outfit before the con?"

SL-1984 chuckled again. "I've got the black getup too. You don't want to know how hot that gets if you don't have real leather. This is a more recent relic of comics, actually. One where the Dark Lord has left the Empire and joined his children, and inexplicably looks ''exactly the same'' except for color. Just as absurd in its way, although I'll give it points for not having talking hedgehogs or superweapons that look like pinball machines. Dark Horse, not Marvel. Star Wars Infinities...? No?"

"No," Garrett said, shaking his head. The headpiece didn't weigh much, but still made the motion ponderous. "Believe it or not, I'm really lost with all this Extended Universe stuff. I just watched the movies and liked the toys." Despite Garrett's demurral it was actually something of an understatement; Star Wars toys were probably the main reason Garrett had become an engineer. The long hours spent playing with his older brother's stash of plastic space ships and robots had put a visceral love of fantastic machinery into Garrett's heart. But he'd never really got into the fictional side of it all, if that made any sense.

"Well, the toys are certainly a major part of the fandom too," SL-1984 agreed. "Collectors have their own subset of obscure encyclopedic knowledge. Wouldn't know what a Hoojib was, perhaps, but they could tell you exactly how rare any given run of a Luke action figure was. But I suspect that you are more inclined towards the tech manuals."

Garrett grinned, hefting the heavy walker forelimb assemblies. "What gave you that idea?"

For his part, Steph wasn't any of those things - he just liked a challenge. And within a minute he was back, another ten dollars poorer and well on the way to meeting his next challenge. He'd found himself a rubber koala nose, best match to his mental image of the description the Vader had given him, and was busily tearing apart a pair of dealie-bobbers as he walked. His only tools were a paper clip, some rubber bands, and MacGuyver innovation. "One second longer..." He finished the work on the addition to the rabbit headband and slipped them back into place, the single spring-loaded antenna bobbing up in the middle between his ears. "Eh? Eh? Hoo da jib?" He spread his arms to display his work.

SL-1984 let out a slightly muffled laugh. His hands moved slightly as if to adjust the new addition, then dropped to hook his thumbs into his belt. "Very nice. Certainly, nobody will mistake you for anything else now. No fan, at any rate."

"Well, that's silly," Garrett evaluated. Steph nodded back, making the antenna bounce but not jarring it loose; the anchor he'd rigged up was holding. ''Excellent.''

"Speaking of silly," Steph said, grinning, "shall we carry on toward the judging room? Despite my progress I doubt my costume's going to win any awards on its own."

"Sounds good." The judging was being staggered over the course of the day to account for the many individual contests that were running - the first winners were almost due for announcement, in fact - but Garrett figured it would be a good idea to get in on his as soon as possible. When dealing with a costume made mostly of cardboard, there was a certain inexorable degradation with use. And besides that, the costume was clunky and heavy. Garrett was looking forward to being out of it for a while.

"In that case I'll bid you adieu. Troops, clear the muster zone!" The Vader slipped back into character and the remaining Storm Troopers did likewise, stepping back in unison as if to let a much larger transport pass through. Garrett obliged them, dropping back down to all fours and resuming his tromp with Steph walking ahead. Steph felt even more ridiculous than before with his extra accessories, but it was a good kind of ridiculous.

It was a strange feeling. So strange that Steph overlooked the other strange feelings at first as they started tingling at the edges of his senses.

Garrett felt it first. He had just started to get back into the gait of an AT-AT when he found himself stumbling slightly, the heavy costume becoming noticeably heavier. Garret paused for a moment, his foreleg supports setting down on the floor below him with a pair of unexpectedly solid clomps.

The cardboard forelegs actually felt ''tight'' on his arms. That was wrong; if anything there should have been too ''much'' play inside them, they wobbled around if he wasn't careful. Garrett tried to let go of the cane handles and tried standing up to pull his hands out of them.

The forelegs stayed firmly and snugly in place, and they were ''heavy''. "Wha..." Garrett choked, his voice coming out low and grating as if by speaking he was using his throat in a way it wasn't intended. The exclamation was accompanied by the faint but noticeable whine of small motors of some sort and Garrett could feel the tension build in his hips as he held the cardboard legs up in front of him.

Cardboard no longer, it seemed - the surface finish had a distinctly metallic luster to it that the gray paint had failed to evoke previously. There was no explaining it; his costume had suddenly become a whole lot ''better''. It was still improving before his eyes, new details resolving and the proportions subtly shifting toward more accurate dimensions.

It was getting heavier. Garrett could feel his hips beginning to fail, the boxy body and outstretched forelegs too much to bear. But Garrett resisted the weight with all his might; he had no idea what was going on and from the frantic hammering of his heart he could tell he was most likely panicking, but even so he somehow ''knew'' deep in his gut that he would be in deep trouble if he fell over. He had to stay up. He ''had'' to...

Garrett's groan came from somewhere inside his chest, the vibration thrumming through his body in new and unfamiliar ways, and after resisting for just seconds he toppled forward to land again on his forelegs for support. The two round footpads slammed solidly down onto the carpeted floor and Garrett felt the impact travel up the metal structure into his shoulders. An alien surge of relief washed through him; ''thank God, I'm stable.'' But it didn't last long against the growing panic. He tried to open his mouth to yell for help and found that he couldn't. ''Oh God, I can't breathe!''

Garrett tried to look up toward Steph, servos in his neck whining in protest at the angle. He caught just a glimpse. Up ahead, Steph was having troubles of his own; his clothing seemed to be disintegrating, white fur bursting up underneath it. Everyone else Garrett caught in that glimpse seemed to be having some outlandish thing happening to them too, too many and too strange for him to process in that split second he had available.

Then Garret's vision cut off as his eyelids fused shut into the smooth, unbroken hull of the underside of the AT-AT's cockpit-head. A moment later vision returned in a kaleidoscopic burst of sensory input; Garrett would have screamed if he'd been able. ''My eyes! Where are my eyes!?'' He could see everywhere at once and couldn't process any of it. He could only stagger ponderously back a step, his limbs moving with unexpected strength and smoothness. ''Whirr''-chrt! ''Whirr''-chrt! It was the best possible replica AT-AT costume in existence now, and Garrett wanted ''out''. But his attempts to shift even the tiniest bit inside the solid metal shell failed, every part stuck solidly and directly to his skin. Fused with it. ''Becoming'' it.

And then the hollowness came. Garrett felt a hole open up inside his gut, swelling inside his abdomen and squeezing his vitals aside. Garrett's vision was disrupted just as it had started to coalesce again, panic flaring more brightly in his mind. ''Oh God Oh God Oh God...'' He could only set his legs and try to hold as steady as possible as the bubble spread up into his chest, up his throat, into his head...

''Ghoooood.'' The thought trailed off in a tumult of strange emotions and sensations. His guts were settling now, the final details pulling into their new configuration. He was empty inside, but what was left was ''solid.'' Strong. Steel. Or something like it, anyway... The hammering of his heart faded away, replaced with the unfamiliar, almost subliminal throb of some sort of power plant.

Vision returned again, more stable this time, but it didn't bring any clarity to the situation. Garrett stood stable on all four legs, round footpads planted firmly on the carpet right where he'd been when the change had first come upon him. But his body was an island of stability in a sea of chaos. All around him people were yelling and running around in terror, many of them no longer human. Garrett turned his head, the motion ponderous and not really necessary given his all-encompassing field of view but psychologically important for keeping his attention focused. ''Where's Steph?'' He didn't know what his friend could do about any of this, but it was a straw of hope to grasp for in the maelstrom.

Thunderous footsteps grabbed his attention. Something was coming, big and round and red-

Too fast. How could something so big move so fast? Garrett barely had time to move before the huge creature brushed past him, slamming against his side as it went. Garret's legs weren't jointed to deal very well with lateral movement and he staggered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced. Whirr, chrt, whirr, chrt, cHRT...

''FALLING!'' Garrett screamed in the form of bolts of light shooting from his chin to blast scorched pockmarks up the wall and ceiling, and slammed to the floor. A table crushed to splinters under him, cushioning what would otherwise have been a tremendously damaging impact, but still jarring. He felt a vestige of pain, which faded the moment it registered, leaving him numb.

Stunned, lying on his side, alone, ''empty''. Garrett wasn't sure if AT-ATs could faint, but he found himself doing a very good imitation of it.

== Steph's post-TF segment==

Steph was trembling and overwhelmed with confusion at what had happened to him, what had happened to everyone around him. But at the same time he felt strangely comforted cradled here by giant white-armored arms, even if he was getting pressed into the hard edge of a chest box, so he managed to keep the fear suppressed below blind panic. He had no idea ''why'' being held like that should have been comforting but for the moment he was willing to just go with it while he tried to straighten out what else had happened.

He hadn't noticed that Garrett wasn't keeping up with him until he'd heard that strange noise of protest. He'd turned around and there it had been, right before his eyes, the gaps between the pieces of Garrett's costume abruptly sealing up as the gray cloth underneath swelled to fill them. As Garrett ''himself'' swelled to fill them. Steph still wasn't sure which had done the changing, Garrett or his costume - was Garrett somehow trapped inside that thing? That had been his first thought, that the costume had somehow been magically replaced with a giant animatronic of fearsome quality.

But then he'd realized what was happening to him, and now he had no idea what was going on. His clothing was disintegrating, falling away into nothingness, and the skin underneath was sprouting a thick white pelt of fur. ''His'' skin, not some costume layered over top. He'd tried pulling on it and felt pain.

Steph wasn't entirely proud of what he'd done next; he'd let out a shriek that was equal parts surprise and alarm, turned away from his friend still struggling inside that developing machine's body, and had tried to run away.

'Tried' being the operative word. It wasn't just his skin that was changing, the size and shape of his entire body was warping. Steph had managed to stagger just a short distance before his shortening legs and enlarging feet tripped him up, sending him stumbling into broad white-caped back of one of the other conventiongoers. The man was ''huge'' - or rather, in hindsight, it was Steph who was shrinking - and absorbed the impact easily.

The man snapped "What?", spinning to confront Steph and reflexively reaching for his lightsabre. It was the white-armored Darth Vader Steph had been speaking with just moments earlier. The Sith Lord's mechanically augmented voice was deeper and more imperious, the armor more fully fleshed out.

Steph's eyes widened in alarm as he found himself craning his neck to look so far up at the man's masked face. "Heee," he gasped breathlessly, his own voice coming out a high-pitched squeak. "Heep!"

It felt like a lot of things were going on, but the biggest was the sense of falling. From increasingly high above SL-1984 watched him unreadably, reaching up to clamp one gloved hand on the opposite wrist, then letting go. Then Steph found himself on all fours, eyes level with a bit of detailing on the man's shiny white shin armor. No, lower than that. He let his joints lock and stood as if frozen.

Giant hands plunged from above and lifted him up out of harm's way just before the huge bulk of the Kool-Aid Man came barreling through the room.

There was a tremendous smash. "OH YEAH!"

"Fall back!" SL-1984 barked.

"Lord Vader!" Someone else nearby exclaimed. Then there was a burst of blaster fire followed by another crash.

Steph couldn't handle it all; he'd simply gone limp and allowed himself to be carried as SL-1984 and the handful of Stormtroopers that had been close at hand retreated from the chaos erupting inside the room. They'd taken up a defensive position in a short hallway just outside, apparently leading to a utility closet of some sort and devoid of any other activity.

It gave them a few minutes' respite and as the shock wore off Steph began to tremble. In the midst of everything that was going on SL-1984 had apparently forgotten that he was holding Steph, but the movement drew his attention back to his immediate surroundings again and he looked down. "So you were a Hoojib after all."

Steph felt his rabbitlike ears lay down flat against his back and the long, flexible tendril that sprouted between them curled tightly in an unfamiliar reflex. ''I never heard of them until just minutes ago!'' Steph tried to object, but he wasn't even able to produce a squeak that time; his mouth no longer seemed to be connected to his trachea and all he could do was let out a small snort.

SL-1984 seemed to get the message well enough anyway, though. "Yes, I suppose that's my fault. Well, what else would you call yourself?" He knelt down and lowered Steph back down, hands wrapped all the way around his ribcage like he was carrying a cat, to deposit him on the floor.

Steph huddled there on all fours, digging the claws on his fingers and toes into the carpet as he looked up in nervous awe at how gigantic everything was. He had a momentary overpowering desire to be picked back up again, he just didn't feel ''safe'' being so small, but he forced it down and tried to focus inward. His body was indeed quite a bit like a bunny's, just as had been described, but with longer fur and long, splayed, birdlike toes on his feet. Frustratingly, his ''hands'' were more like a rabbit's, or maybe a dog's - useless clawed, padded paws with stubby fingers he could barely wriggle independently. There were thumbs, sort of. Maybe dewclaws. They could just about manage grasping, or at least bending far enough that the finger pads met the big pad, but he couldn't stand without them. His face had a blunt, leathery Koala nose, and his tiny mouth was hidden in the fur underneath it. Probing with his surprisingly long tongue, he couldn't even feel any teeth.

He had to admit, he was ''exactly'' like he'd pictured a Hoojib looking like. His vision blurred as his enormous brown eyes started filling with tears.

"Hey, now. Hey." SL-1984 seemed very distracted, bringing one hand up against the side of his helmet and pacing a few steps away to stare intently at nothing visible.

''I didn't want to be here,'' Steph thought miserably to himself. ''I just want to be home.''

"Don't we all," murmured the stormtrooper crouched nearest him. It was a breach of squad discipline, of course, but everyone was too busy with their own troubles to notice. Steph himself wouldn't realize the more important fact that the stormtrooper had actually ''heard'' him until much later on.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus1.jpg]]

Something lithe and feline and clad in ruffles chose that moment to slink past the dead end where the little group held their position. It paused to stare at them with unblinking green eyes, then opened its mouth and hissed furiously. The occupants locked their blaster rifles into position, but one of the troopers, raising an arm to check them, snapped, "Hold your fire! Establish intent, ''then'' act!"

The cat-thing flattened its ears back against its head, looking spooked, then continued on its way at a slightly faster pace.

It was quiet. SL-1984 was the first to move. He pulled off one white glove, exposing a prosthetic hand that gleamed like bronze. It was all but skeletal, sparse of detail with only the transparent synthetic "muscles" keeping it from looking like metal bones. He turned it over before his mask and flexed the fingers gently, then covered it again. "I thought as much," he said in a low rumble, both resigned and keeping what might have been anger under tight control. "Is that how it is? Fine."

"Sir?" The speaker was a trooper with the breather hood, oversuit, and specialized armor of a snowtrooper, the same trooper who had told the others not to shoot. He broke position to stand closer to SL-1984, keeping himself oriented towards the opening to the dead end. "Sir, aren't you - Didn't you switch sides?"

"What? Oh. You, you're Shanda Pike?"

"I - yes, my lord," Pike said, voice firming. In the far distance something bellowed like a foghorn, forcing the trooper to speak louder. "My husband John and I share duties as Squad Leader. He's not here now, sir. I'm the only member of the squad's command staff present."

"Use my designation, Pike. I did leave the Empire, but I am still part of this squad. You're a squad leader, I'm not, that means - damn." SL-1984 went quiet. The constant rhythm of his mechanically-assisted breath was quieter and not as harsh as it was for 'classic' Darth Vader, but it could still be heard, even over the background noise.

"Sir? Something wrong?"

"You're not a ma'am." SL-1984 crossed his arms just underneath his chest box. There was a smile in his artificial voice.

Pike hesitated for several breaths. "Beg pardon?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." SL-1984 chuckled and uncrossed his arms to hook his thumbs into his belt. He was definitely more amused than was appropriate for a man who'd just gone on life support and become a quarter of a century older. "You're a man. You can't keep a wallet in your codpiece anymore. I suppose it makes sense... snowtroopers are specialized stormtroopers, and we don't generally admit women into the trooper academies... Who - yes, everyone in here's a trooper. Ursala, Crystal, Sky - You're all men. No worries, Shad, Jeff, you're men too. Heh. Well, this should make things interesting. Heh. That's... that's actually kind of funny."

"Oh." The snowtrooper waited. The other three had reacted, but a muffled crash from out there had brought them back into position, watching with ready blasters. For a moment, Pike sounded unnaturally calm, as if this was a situation he'd been trained for. "You're right. I hoped you were wrong, sir, but you're right." Another moment passed as SL-1984 crossed his arms again and laughed quietly; one by one every other helmet in the alcove turned towards Pike. Even Steph, huddled pitifully on the floor with his eyes glazed, looked up.

"Fusst you. ''Fusst'' you, you - you ''Sithspawn''. Stop laughing." He stepped forwards, getting into the Vader's faceplate. "''This isn't funny'', Nineteen Eightyfour. This is a ''big'' problem that goes past us, and it's only going to get bigger. And apparently I can't swear. So ''don't laugh.''" The outburst was quiet but unmistakeable. Pike kept his back straight as he added, rather sarcastically, "Sorry, sir. Momentary lapse in personal discipline."

"It won't happen again," SL-1984 agreed in a more serious tone. "Consider it corrected. You're in charge, I suppose. We're going to need a plan..." He trailed off, head coming up as if he'd heard something. "No. Oh, no. ''Hell'' no. How is that even ''possible?''" The white-clad Vader's voice was as low as it could get.

Down on the floor, forgotten until that moment, Steph was mute. Still, he tried. ''What? What is it?'' Pike echoed the sentiment, raising his blaster.

This time, SL-1984 didn't respond to either of them. He stepped forwards, turning his head as if searching. "...I can't let that happen," he said at last, more to himself than anyone else. "I don't even want to think about that. Gravitational pull alone could - and even if it didn't, the superlaser - wrong hands, there aren't even any ''right'' ones - I ''won't'' let that happen."

''Let what happen? What's going on?''

SL-1984 turned the corner at a dead run and was gone. Bitterly Pike muttered, "No way we'll be able to keep up with him. We should have at least synched our comm frequencies. Okay. Let's do that now. Frequency - Aurek Corellia Delta." Almost as one, the troopers switched to the same comm channel. "We can't stay here. First priority is finding the rest of Tampa Bay; once we've done that we can worry about what in the nine hells is going on. I know where my - my husband is, or should be at the moment. We have to start from there."

The snowtrooper continued to speak aloud, nervous energy spilling into his voice. "This is not going to be a blue milk run, boys. We can't afford to waste any time; everyone move fast and don't get distracted. We ''must'' regroup, or we are lost. I'm on point; Shad, you're at the rear. Sing out if something happens to you, even if it looks like we've seen it. We can ''not'' afford to leave anyone behind! Blasters to stun; Ursala, lower the setting on your forcepike. Nothing turns a crowd into a mob faster than a death, and ''don't ask me how I know that''. Let's move out!" Pike headed out at a rapid march, followed by the other five.

In the dead end, Steph hunkered, forgotten.

==Red Guard==

Everything was darkness and confusion and helpless nausea. When the world fell out from under her it took her stomach with it. Gravity meant nothing; she felt as if she was falling, spinning on the worst amusement park ride ever imagined. A timeless period later she tasted blood and realized that she'd bitten the inside of her lip.

And then the world was back, or one very much like it. Struck by the very physical sensation of falling, even though she could feel her boots firmly planted on the floor, Anj instinctively assumed a defensive crouch, opening eyes that she hadn’t remembered closing.

She could see! She could hear! Long ago Anj had gotten used to the way the Red Guard helmet cut her visibility and muffled all sound; it was inevitable, after all. She’d all but stopped noticing. Now, though – now the flattened ovoid of the visor was still there, but a little smaller, and the space around it was no longer dark.

She could see as well and as much as she could when bareheaded, and all sounds were crisp and clear, not muffled in the least. It wasn’t that the helmet was gone; even though it was cool to the touch and non intrusive she could feel it, tight against the contours of her face, pressing against her skin with only a few gaps to let air circulate. But the inside, so close that her eyelashes brushed a smooth surface every time she blinked, was full of light and color and motion. For a moment it was completely disorienting.

Training kicked in as she glanced frantically from one thing to the next. These were the screens in her helmet. They negated the disadvantage of having an enclosed faceplate. The ones on the sides gave her left and right views. This lowest monitor, the short wide one, was her peripheral display. It showed her what was in back. Her aural pickups caught sound and relayed it into her ears in such a way that she could determine the source and how distant it is. They also blunted the effects of sonic weaponry. The analysis calmed her, steadied her, and she could finally pay attention to what she saw in front of her.

It took a moment to realize that these were the same furries who'd been grouped together before. They barely bore any resemblance to any fursuits she had seen, ever – even the best of the best had always looked artificial. Wet, flickering eyes with fully mobile eyelids, subtle facial expressions, a mouth that did more than open and close, pawhands that did not look like gloves, skin that shivered, fur that sprouted from the skin, muscles and tendons moving beneath it, toes that splayed against the ground, tails and ears that moved silently and with purpose – admittedly she wasn't exactly involved with the furry scene, but in all the conventions and events she had ever attended she had never seen a fursuit that still looked real up close. Not when she compared a costume to a real animal. Some things just couldn’t be faked.

Yet the people she saw before her, gasping and touching themselves and looking wildly about… Some were more or less humanlike than others, but one or two looked like nothing less than bipedal wild animals with slightly altered forelimbs and faces. The inarticulate confused things that they said were not in the voices of men or beasts, but a combination of both. They ''breathed'', they ran wet tongues over bestial teeth and ductile lips, they staggered on well-formed legs, their faces and body language reflected shock and disbelief and joy and horror and sudden fear. More than one turned a hybrid face towards the Red Guard.

Training once more came to the fore, and she welcomed it. No one to protect but herself, that was good. She needed to be cautious. They were disorganized and might not mean any harm, but as a whole they looked to be on the verge of blind panic. With her armor on, TR-1407 could probably survive being trampled, but she wouldn't like it. Anj took half a step backwards and stumbled – her feet, her legs seemed bigger and heavier than they should have been, and her center of gravity had shifted. Her balance had changed completely. She compensated even as the realization hit her that something was fundamentally different. The costume was tight, but ''beneath'' it-

Set off, either by her motion or by the low, coughing feline roar uttered by one of them, the furries split. Hooves and paws pounded the carpet as they ran, most of them headed ''away'' from TR-1407, but a gazelle and a zebra sprang past her, giving her a wide berth. She had half turned to stare after them in bewilderment when her spine chilled and she saw something huge and white and blue in one of her helmet screens.

Reacting almost instantly, TR-1407 jerked out of the way, her arms reflexively following through on the motion and swinging the tip of her weighty forcepike into contact with her assailant. It connected solidly, making a tiny crackling noise that was all out of proportion to the effect.

Momentum kept it going, but the enormous white tiger’s leap ended gracelessly as it lost consciousness. It hit the floor with an impact that looked painful and lay limp, flat red tongue sticking out of its fanged, slack mouth. Anj looked from it to the forcepike clasped in her gloved hands.

The stun module mounted on the vibro-edge head at the very tip gleamed dully. Fully extended, the weapon was two meters from the thin tip past the black grip to the weighted base, and it was much, ''much'' heavier than it had been before, maybe seven or eight kilograms - Seven. It was regulation-issue, so it definitely weighed seven kilos - but it felt ''right'' in her hands, sleek and balanced. Perhaps it wasn’t as elegant and deadly as a lightsaber, but here was a weapon that could kill or incapacitate, equally effective in pitched battle or nonlethal crowd control. Set to maximum it could tear through the hull of a starship or take off a man's arm at the shoulder; set to the lower setting and it could knock out a grown Wookiee. Or, apparently, a leaping tiger. That thought brought her back out of contemplation.

“…Yeah. What was that?” Anj’s eyelashes brushed her visor as she blinked. Something weird had happened to the helmet speaker. Normally it just relayed her voice; it distorted it just a little bit, making it slightly tinnier and more mechanical, but that was all. It didn’t ''change'' her voice, not really. It made it a bit less feminine, but it was still recognizable as ''hers''.

But something had happened to that speaker. This wasn’t her voice; this was nothing like it, in fact. The speaker was making her sound like an entirely different person. Why in the Emperor's name-

Focus! Were all local threats neutralized? What about her assailant? Anj moved closer and crouched to examine the white tiger. It was huge, easily three meters from the tip of its tail to its whiskered muzzle. Why meters and not feet? Feh, that wasn't important. At first glance it looked almost exactly like the tranquilized big cats that she'd seen on documentaries, down to the rapid, heavy way its sides heaved as it breathed. The only immediate oddity was the fact that it seemed to be wearing ''clothes'' – something like a tube top and close-fitting boxers, both pale blue.

But another moment showed her that it – no, she, for there was a suggestion of breasts in that tube top – had forepaws that would do poorly for bearing weight. They were long, the fingers well formed with prominent thumbs. Her head also bore hair, short and pattered in the same way as the striped fur, but distinct. No tiger looked like ''that''.

Around her thick neck, too, there was a strap holding a disposable camera…

TR-1407 tensed up as another cold tingle swept up her spine, glancing automatically towards a particular section of wall. Almost immediately that section bowed inwards, breaking with a wild shower of plaster and bricks as something almost spherical burst through, pudgy fists clenched, cubes ricocheting against each other and the interior as red liquid sloshed.

“'''OH YEAHHH!'''”

Apparently she, or the world, had gone mad. Even as the thought flashed through her mind, Anj was acting, one-handedly drawing her blaster rifle - where had that come from, she hadn't brought a blaster trooping today - from where it was holstered beneath her robes and firing.

The blaster bolt - it wasn't supposed to ''work''! - hit a curved, transparent surface that absorbed the energy, heating and deforming slightly. On the inside, bubbles formed at the site and floated rapidly up to the top; barely a second later they had stopped and the melted region had returned to its former unblemished state.

The – whatever it was – adjusted its footing as the three frosted translucent cubes floating inside of it rattled and clinked. Below them the lacquered black indents that served as sketchy facial features - eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a wide smiling mouth, all highly stylized – moved to assume an expression that looked like furious, homicidal joy. Its short arms, placed in relation to its eyes where ears would have been on a humanoid, reached towards the Red Guard, fingers twitching as if to fix around her neck.

Anj fired twice more, with the same minimal result – small parts of the clear surface melted and re-formed, a little of the liquid boiled up without lowering the level within, and the thing displayed anger. It was walking, short legs with their rounded toeless feet looking ridiculous under its bulk, but slowly. She didn't know if it was limited to that speed or it was deliberate. Anj felt another chill on her spine and knew, in a burst of insight, that that didn't matter. It could gather itself and leap hard and fast enough to cover nearly four meters in an eyeblink, breaking through anything in its way. She was almost in range of such a leap.

Still, it couldn't jump several times in succession. If she moved now, she could leave it behind. It looked like – it looked completely impossible. Like a round-bellied pitcher, entirely hollow and complete with flared spout and glass handle, low-set arms and legs stuck on like an afterthought. It was filled, limbs included, with a translucent red liquid - she could see ''through'' it even if the other side was distorted. Somehow Anj thought she’d seen it or something like it before, but just by ''existing'' it was an affront to reality. It couldn’t ''possibly'' stand upright on those small featureless feet, and as for moving! It had no skeletal structure, no visible muscles or joints, it was ''an anthropomorphic pitcher of'' punch, ''how'' could it move?!

TR-1407 shoved her blaster back into its holster on her leg. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and she had no desire to be killed by it. Time to go. Yet something stopped her.

The tiger furry was still out cold. She was only slightly further from the pitcher than Anj was, and the Red Guard had no reason to doubt that the thing was willing to take out its frustration on whatever couldn’t get out of the way.

Even so.... Abruptly TR-1407 recalled her training on Yinchorr, where they had tried to pound stormtrooper training out to make way for something a little different. There'd been the hierarchy of service. Empire above all, Emperor, ranking staff and those she had been assigned to protect, peers and those of lower rank, Imperial citizens, everyone else. For these, she would lay down her life. There was a mantra in that somewhere, so ingrained that it was a part of her, essential enough that she was slow to register that it was completely new.

Yes, the tiger had leaped at her and she had reacted as if under attack, stunning it. And on the scale of people she needed to protect, attackers ranked somewhere below saving herself. However, she had no way to know if that leap really had been an act of aggression. What to do...

Indecision lasted for only a split second. It made no difference if she was or wasn't attacked, that thing's in danger because I put her there. So Anj would get her out. Didn't matter how ridiculous the situation is, she still had a duty. TR-1407 changed her stance, gripped her forcepike in both hands and held it before her in ready position.

If the pitcher thing had been any faster she would have been caught while thinking, but it was forced to shuffle forwards to get within range. She had the feeling that it could only run with any speed if it still had the momentum from a leap. Anj readied herself and thumbed the setting as it tensed to spring.

“'''OH ''YEAHHH!'''''”

Although she’d known this was going to happen, TR-1407 was still surprised at its speed. Barely in time, she dived and rolled under it the instant before it hit. When it landed it did so on three points, splintering the floor underneath it and making everything around tremble with the impact.

Spinning to face it again, Anj swung one-handed and smashed the forcepike's tip into her opponent's body. This time a sharp ''crack!'' rang through the air; as it spun to face her she adjusted her grip and swung the heavy weapon in a high vertical stroke, then again, horizontal, hitting the curved glassy surface ''hard''. The sound was high and sharp, both unpleasant and nearly musical.

There was the tingle again, strong and focused. Acting with it the Red Guard dodged a flailing arm and struck once more, to the left of center, then tried to get some distance between herself and the target, stepping back. Almost immediately she smacked into the wall, hard enough to thump her armor. Damn, her situational awareness had slipped! As she recovered and tried again to pull away she almost fell over her own feet, once more becoming aware that something was ''different''. There'd been a bit of a bounce where no bounce should be, not on a woman. Fortunately her stumble went unnoticed.

The pitcher thing looked at first glance to be unaffected; if it had been made out of durasteel every impact would have left great rents, but its shape was intact and it hadn't stopped moving. On second glance TR-1407 saw the white fractures that were spiderwebbed dramatically across the surface.

She kept her visor pointed squarely at its enraged lacquered eyes, holding her forcepike up in an unvoiced threat.

The indents that appeared to be eyebrows lowered and drew together as it frowned slowly. Across its sketchy features a white fracture, which had started to gradually fill in, lengthened and widened again with a sound that reminded the Red Guard of thin ice on the surface of a pond.

The pitcher thing’s right arm began to leak, red liquid forming drops and pattering down into the carpet. The glass there, thinner than on its curved body, had all but shattered, and repaired itself only slowly. Slowly, the thing’s eyes slid from its arm to Anj’s visor.

“Press me and you’ll be dead,” she warned, not knowing if it could understand her or not, talking slowly and evenly. “I can keep this up faster than you can fix yourself.” Her grammar had gotten a little mangled. The message was obvious nonetheless.

“I can throw a grenade into you and vaporize your contents. I can sweep your legs out from under you and shatter them so you can’t stand. Once I’ve done that, I can smash you into a thousand shards, which I can then scatter.” Even as she said the words, noticing again that the voice saying these words was not hers, she was confident that this was not an empty threat. Interfere with an Imperial Red Guard in the performance of his duty and you’re coming off second-best, she knew.

TR-1407 advanced half a step and brought her forcepike into ready position. The pitcher thing’s eye indents became larger, then smaller again. A sense of rage so strong that it was palpable radiated off of it, but it had sense enough to know a hopeless fight. Still dripping, it shuffled backwards and began to turn ponderously. A moment later, and it bounded away through another wall with a shower of plaster. The Red Guard watched through the hole it left until she was satisfied that it wasn't going to come back.

Hah. Straightening, Anj looked over the comatose tiger once more. Her white-furred flanks had been decorated with a coat of dust and plaster fragments, but the furry had escaped harm.

Now what? The immediate danger was past, but TR-1407 knew better than to assume that things were safe now. The tiger was still out and would likely remain that way for an hour or so. Anj wasn’t going to stay around guarding her. Duty to comrades outweighed duty to strange nonhumans who might have attacked her and weren't even Imperial citizens. Some of her responsibility had been discharged just now, but she knew one way to make a stunned sentient recover faster.

It took a bit of searching - and a moment of staring at her own gloved hands, which appeared to be bigger than she remembered - to find the site where the stun module in her forcepike had hit; the tiger’s fur was thick enough that the little bruised patch of skin was hidden. It was on the furry’s muscular upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Anj closed the tiger’s jaws with an effort, then took a handful of her crimson robes and pressed it against the furry’s nose, plugging the nostrils with the tips of her fingers. She counted slowly to ten and jabbed the bruised patch with the armored knuckles of her free hand, hard. The angle was too awkward for it to be a punch.

Almost immediately the white tiger started to make throaty sounds of complaint, fingers and ears twitching. Anj peeled back a furred eyelid and saw the pupil of the blue eye contract.

That would probably do it. Not willing to be there when the tiger woke up, TR-1407 walked away, almost stumbling on legs that were longer than they should have been. Despite the exertion, Anj's breath had been only slightly quickened. Without that pressure to act, she felt strange. Okay. Okay. Now to find someplace private and try to make sense of all this…

==Steph comes out of hiding==

Steph had been passive until now - almost comatose, for that matter. Events had swept along too rapidly and too outlandishly for him to get much of a grip. But now he realized he couldn't stay that way any longer. The strangely protective presence of the huge armor-clad people was gone. He was just a Hoojib huddled on the floor, and if he didn't get a grip - didn't get ''moving'' - who knew what horrors would catch him?

First there was simply learning how to walk. He was on all fours, but he couldn't crawl - his thighs were short, his knees were far from pronounced, and he couldn't plant his palms on the floor; his wrists didn't bend like that. Instead, when he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. His toes were long enough that he had to turn them outward.

He wobbled and wavered at first, unsure of his limbs like he was a kitten or a puppy or something, or like he'd been on an one of those all-night benders at the end of Finals Week. Still, as he practiced it quickly became easier. The reflexes seemed to be built in - how to stand, how to walk, coordination, the whole deal. That was a mercy, he supposed.

Keeping huddled against the wall for some modicum of concealment Steph crept back up the short hallway to peer out into the room he'd come from.

It was hard to comprehend what he was seeing at first. His senses had been distorted just as much as his body, his perspective something like half a foot off the floor. The scent of smoke in the air was almost buried under the other less identifiable smells Steph's enhanced nose was picking up. His enormous ears were catching more sounds than he knew what to do with, and there was something new and weird with tugging and heat and distant inaudible violin notes... But his vision was still quite clear and comprehensible, at least. Most of the tables had been upended in the rush as people had fled, scattering a lot of junk on the floor.

Excellent. Cover. As soon as the coast seemed relatively clear Steph bounded out across the floor, not quite running and not quite hopping, shelter under the nearest upright table. The space under the tablecloth was still cavernous at his scale, but much better than the soaring vastness of the room outside or even the hallway. He paused there to gather his wits and figure out what he was doing.

He had to get it together. He had to... he needed to find Garrett, before anything else. Easier thought than done, though - he hadn't gone far but the changes to everything had disoriented him. Where was he now? Where had he left his friend?

And would he recognize him when he found him? Steph's ears and antenna perked up, nose twitching nervously, as something large came moving through the room outside his shelter. Larger even than a normal human, heavy footfalls thudding solidly on the thin carpet... Steph would have whimpered had he been able to make any actual sounds. ''Oh God, please don't find me, I don't want to be eaten by a... whatever...''

The footfalls came to an uncertain stop nearby. "Huh?" It rumbled, voice deeply guttural and deeply confused. "No find... what?"

This time Steph ''did'' notice the coincidence between his own thoughts and the creature's words. ''Can he read my mind? Wait, no... am ''I'' telepathic? I don't believe it! But that Vader guy said Hoojibs were telepathic-''

"Who's there?" The big creature bellowed, and for a moment Steph found himself caught in a confusing mental tangle as he tried to stifle the volume of his thinking. His antenna curled and he had to force himself ''not'' to speculate about the appendage's psionic functions for fear of being overheard. It was an impossible task.

Fortunately there were still plenty of other distractions out there, and after only a few seconds the sound of frantic sheep bleating in the distance drew the attention of whatever it was that was standing nearby. "Hah!" it grunted, lumbering off with some new unknown purpose in mind. Steph let out a tiny sigh of relief.

''Okay, so I guess I'm glad I can still communicate somehow... assuming that wasn't all just a coincidence,'' he thought. No one was nearby to confirm it and he gave a snort of derisive amusement. ''God, so much to figure out! Take this one thing at a time. So I turned into a Hoojib. If everyone else has turned into what they were dressed as too...'' He shook his head. It made too little sense, he couldn't get his mind around it.

Would Garrett still be inside that cardboard-turned-metal shell he was wearing? Steph hoped he'd got out of it somehow, but if he hadn't... Cautiously poking his head out from under the tablecloth and peering around to check for danger first, Steph forced himself to dart deeper into the room.

His attention immediately went to a heap of detritus, taller than he was, that had formed against a ragged mass that had been a tabletop mere minutes ago. Some of it had obviously been ''on'' the table, originally - graphic novels were strewn everywhere, many of them burnt. Pages had collected here, and other things as well, probably kicked into place in the rush. Great tufts of fur, bits and pieces of clothing, food scraps that had escaped from trash cans, tablecloths, splintery pieces of other tables - Steph shuffled closer, then thought to wonder why it had drawn his attention. This was not the only pile of trash scattered around the room - there had been several filled trash cans, even this early in the day - and none of ''them'' were all that interesting.

It was like this one was tugging at him - specifically, his antenna. He could feel it sort of warming in response. No, 'tugging' wasn't quite the word - it was almost a smell, but not quite that either. Like... he could almost swear there was a small, cheap violin playing, just one very high continuous note, but he didn't actually hear anything. Something about it was comforting.

Steph snorted. ''Why am I so interested in a pile of trash?'' It wasn't food, that was for sure. There was tons of food in the room, mostly from upended trash cans, and the smell was ''everywhere''; spilled soda and cheap beer, a salad with dressing, corn chips, a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich that was starting to go bad, applesauce, Skittles, an entire box of donuts. And that was just in this room. None of it appealed to him - the smell was just ''there'', like the smoke or the ink on the comic books. His mouth wasn't even watering. He wasn't even sure if he still had salivary glands.

If he was quick about it, it wouldn't hurt to check. Steph climbed gingerly atop the pile, long toes curling to grip at an abandoned canvas bag full of hard objects. The feeling was coming from here. Still uncertain - he felt so ''exposed'' - he scraped at some wet pages that had stuck together.

''There! What's that?'' Something hard, probably plastic, and just a little smaller than his head. Steph sat on his haunches, freeing him to draw whatever it was up. He could grasp and his dewclaws were jointed more or less like thumbs, but the job of wrestling it out took longer than it should have.

Steph's ears quivered. More footsteps! Where was the best place to hide? Taking a step forward - a much more complicated action than it had been when he'd had two legs - he felt his toes flex on the thing. ''Maybe...''

He was going to get caught out in the open if he didn't hide ''now''. Steph hobbled on three legs into the dubious shelter of another table, this one apparently intact, though missing its covering. Edging behind a pile of plastic boxes that had probably once held statuettes, Steph ducked his head under his belly and took a look at his prize, clutched in the wiry toes of his foot. That foot distracted him - earlier, he'd paid much more attention to what had happened to his hands.

His feet were so huge that when he stood in the position that came most naturally the clawed tips of his toes were level with his elbows. They really did look something like bird's feet, covered in slightly wrinkly grayish skin rather than scales or more white fur, though not like any bird he'd seen. More importantly, they were at least somewhat better than his paws at flexing and holding things.

He'd misjudged how far away the footsteps were; that, or the one making the footsteps hadn't moved in a straight line. Now they pounded past, not as heavy as the big creature or even the stormtroopers but very quick. He could hear a girl's voice spouting a steady stream of "OW OW OW get OFF AHH OW" sprinkled with invective, and as she raced past Steph saw a pair of towering stockinged legs pumping. Something smaller and greenish clung to one of them, but they were both gone before he could get a better look.

Not everything was out to get him. Good to know.

The thing that he'd picked up turned out to be a cell phone, the kind that flipped open. It tingled pleasantly and somehow made that high violin note to Steph's antennae, a comforting feeling. He set it down and prized it open with a certain amount of difficulty, knowing that this wasn't helping him find Garrett but telling himself that he'd only be another minute.

The phone was on, and its screen glowed. Not entirely certain about just what he was doing, Steph put his face up so close that the phone's wallpaper blurred out of focus, tilted his head until what had been his chin sank into the fur on his chest, and felt his antennae uncoil, reaching out to touch the keypad, above the part of the phone that the tingling and humming was coming from.

It was a nice feeling. A very nice feeling. Steph closed his eyes and leaned into it for a long moment, sighing almost inaudibly through his nose. He could feel it moving up into his head and body. It was soothing. The violin note held for a few long seconds, then wavered. As that happened the heat lessened.

His eyes snapped open. ''What am I doing? Damn it.'' Steph peeled his head away and heard the phone chirp the low power alert before the screen went black. ''What was that? What was I - didn't the Vader guy say something about eating energy? Damn it, I wish I'd paid more attention.''

He whipped his head around. That ''tugging'', a little like a smell, a little like feeling heat through his antenna, maybe a little like hearing high violin notes, it was back. He could sense something interesting, several somethings, most about as big and with similar high cheap-violin notes, scattered around the room. More phones? Maybe dropped cameras?

For the third time Steph sensed something moving, and close. Still hidden under the table and behind boxes, he pressed himself against the wall. It was moving in a different direction than the other two, and it was - it was ''right on the other side of that wall!''

He shot out from under the table, smacking one gigantic ear against a table leg, and froze against a pile of rags, out in the open. The ceiling yawned high above, he was exposed - but nothing was going to collapse on him.

This turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever it was, it kept moving. He could barely hear its footsteps, and he might not have noticed - now that he was listening, this wasn't the only set of footsteps - but he could sense it as a sort of interesting moving heat and a whole ''orchestra'' playing, getting fainter as it got farther away.

''Wait.'' Steph's ear was stinging. ''How would I know anything about whatever was running except how big it is? Unless'' - His eyes were huge, and when he crossed them above his nose he could sort of see the blurred, doubled shape of that antenna, arcing above his head. ''What, can Hoojibs sense electricity too? Or what, robots? This is just weird.''

Now that he thought about it - there were a lot of other interesting warm things and bowstringed instruments were playing from all sides. Warm wasn't really the word, maybe... maybe ''powered''. Some were small, others larger. Some were moving. It was the same sense, now that he thought about it, that he'd gotten from his rescuer. Same sense as from the phone, but the big things, the moving ones, he could feel through the walls and over a distance. He only 'heard' anything when it was close enough, but the ''powered'' part of the sense could go a lot farther, apparently.

He could feel... Up ahead. Something big, something motionless. Steph wasn't at all sure what direction he'd been going even before he'd literally run into SL-1984, but it seemed like this might be the right way. Hesitantly at first, then with more and more certainty, he followed the antenna.

''There.'' It couldn't be anything else. Even on its side, two right legs sticking out rigidly into open air with only rubble keeping it from lying flat, it loomed up above Steph, head hanging down at a thirty degree angle, resting on what looked like the buckled remains of a chair. The powered sense here was much, ''much'' stronger than anything he'd felt coming from any of the dropped electronics. There was enough power thrumming in it that even from here his antenna was warm, and the note was much deeper than the ones he'd 'heard' before, like a double bass. Or whatever they were called; it had been years since his last music class. He had to fight off the lulling feeling that came with it.

It didn't look remotely human. From Steph's perspective, it took a moment to recognize it as an AT-AT. He moved closer, tentative.

Each round footpad had four thick toe flaps. These were slowly, very slowly, swinging out and in on their hinges. The toe flap articulation was so minimal that they couldn't point straight out. The motion looked aimless.

''Garrett?'' he tried. ''I still don't know if this really works or not... Garrett? Are you in there? Can you hear me?''

Steph shuffled closer. ''What do I do now? I don't know how telepathy works. Or if you could hear it. Or if I even ''have ''it. Or if he's here.'' The AT-AT's boxy head was bigger than his whole body. ''I could probably fit into a shoebox, so that doesn't mean much. God. I probably'' can ''fit into a shoebox.'' The head had a dark horizontal slot running across the very front, like a very narrow visor or something. On either side of it were two bulging domes like flattened compound eyes, each housing a slender pipelike structure. Its chin had two more, slightly larger pipelike things, fixed forwards.

Closer. Steph rose shakily onto his hindquarters, almost pitching over as he overcompensated. His toes splayed against the ground strongly enough that if he kept perfectly still he could almost, ''almost'' stand up, though his ankles started to burn the moment he straightened them and his knees refused to unbend. Ignoring that, he stared into that slot, vertical since the thing was on its side. It was mostly opaque, but he could sort of see... were those chairs? ''A room? No, a cockpit.''

His breath fogged the view and cleared slowly.

''Garrett? It's me. Steph.'' That black slot was reflective enough that from this angle, looking right into it from as high up as he could get without finding something to stand on, he could see himself. Big, ''big'' eyes, barely on this side of being appealing rather than grotesque, huge ears, both long and wide, that flagged behind him but wouldn't stand straight up. A bulbous black nose, the mouth beneath it so small that fur around the edges made it look like a pit, and that antennae, curling like a fern. He hadn't exactly seen himself before.

Steph was distracted enough that he didn't register as the thrumming increased in tempo and the bass note picked up. He almost missed one of the pipes - the medium blasters on the temples - as it swiveled slowly to point directly at him.

==Steph and Garrett==

An alert came on and pinged, setting the other systems into motion.

Something huge and white loomed up against his head, almost touching his command viewport, and he reactivated. The white thing - some kind of animal, details were popping in like graphics on an overworked PC - flinched and fell back, and seemed to shrink as the rest of his vision started loading, quickly from a cold start instead of little by little. There was sound, or something like sound, and words, or something close, but he already had plenty of them, and the ones he had were louder.

There was movement from the white animal, he could see now that it was only very big, not huge, and it suddenly traveled a hundred meters away in a few shuffling steps. It seemed to be clinging to a wall that he was pressed against.

Something was wrong. His vision was still loading, everything that wasn't right in front of his head was still glossy smooth and sparse of detail, but he could see that nothing was at the right angle - oh. Oh. He'd fallen over. That explained why there was nothing under his footpads and no weight on his legs, too. Reorienting, he managed to figure out which way was "up". Vaulting high above him was a ceiling, higher up than the hold of a Star Destroyer should be, and there were walls. They seemed very far apart. Something was wrong with this.

Of course it was wrong! He'd fallen over! He was down, and anyone could climb up to get at a boarding hatch and ''at his crew!'' They must have been stunned by the impact, thrown against his bulkheads -

Alert and evacuate the crew! Why isn't that alarm on yet? Start it now!

Though he didn't have any speakers on his outside, as the prerecorded evacuation message started up internally he saw the white animal perk up, monstrous ears folding, cupping as if funneling sound to its head. If he was judging by how big it was compared to him, and he was, it was at least the size of, of - well, it was almost as big as his head, his ''moveable command section'', part of him said, and it was ''fast'' too, already advancing, covering three meters in a stride -

It was ''big'', it was ''fast'', it was already coming towards him, at any second now it was going to circle past his head and ''get in at his crew!''

'''NO!'''

He wasn't going to let that happen! With a supreme effort, the servos in his neck; his ''flexible armored tunnel''; jerked, pointing the two Taim & Bak MS-1 fire-linked heavy laser cannons at the animal. It froze, stared at him with ridiculously big brown eyes, and there was that almost-sound again, like it was saying his name, but it was still big and fast and a danger to his crew and it ''still'' hadn't moved.

His heavy laser cannons, mounted on either side of his chin, the underside of his moveable command section, were cold. It took a moment to muster the power he needed to warm up the lasers that heated the blaster gas in his cannon energizer. Several seconds passed.

While that was happening, the animal held still. As he fired both in tandem, it twitched out of his sights, and he couldn't re-orient in time. Nothing with legs should have been able to move as fast as it did. When he fired, the beams shot into a stretch of wall, impacting with a minor explosion. Texture popped in, and he saw that he'd left two dramatic black scars with a tiny flame guttering in each. Six seconds later and his heavies had recharged, but he didn't need them again so soon.

The animal was scared off, if only for the moment, and he had some time to catch his brea- no, that wasn't right. To lie helplessly on his side and try to regroup. For the moment, there was no further threat to the crew. Above the heavy laser cannons he had two fire-linked medium repeating blasters, useful for smaller, more agile threats, since they could swivel as needed. All he could do was heat those up, check the gas reserves for them and his heavies, send off a distress signal, and wait.

The signal took barely a second to set up and broadcast. It would, of course, be hours or days or more before anything came of it; that was how that went. He was a very valuable piece of equipment, and depending on the commander and the situation he might or might not be a high priority during a crisis.

Crew was more important than the question of where he was, how he'd gotten there, and how he'd get out of this. Without his crew... He turned his attention to his interior, remembering to watch in case the large animal returned.

Neither of the boarding hatches or any of his four escape hatches, or even the hatch to the vehicle bay, had been opened. He knew that. His atmospheric exchangers and filtration unit - part of the life-support systems built into his interior - were running a steady stream of breathable air through his passenger/troop section and command cockpit. He could feel it luffing across his deck.

A notice came up, that he was stressing the mechanisms in his neck, his ''flexible armored tunnel''. Slowly he lowered his head until it hit something and he was at that same angle he'd activated with. He could feel whatever it was, just barely. Just a sense that it was ''there'', nothing about hardness or softness or texture. This still wasn't good for his servos, but he couldn't do anything about that yet.

There was no movement in his interior. It was as if he didn't have any crew at all. That didn't really make sense, though. How could he be active without a crew? His drive motor shouldn't even be running.

Still nothing. At last, interior cams activated and he got a look at his insides. Both levels of his passenger/troop section were empty, without so much as a cleaning droid poking around. No one was in the maintenance shaft to his motor. There were several speeder bikes racked up like throwing darts back in his rear vehicle bay, and some gear in crates, disarrayed a little by the fall, but nothing that moved on its own. It made him feel vaguely uneasy to see all that.

Only one cam was in his tunnel. More of them were in and around his command cockpit. The seats for pilot and gunner, as well as the larger and more imposing one for the commander, were fixed to his deck, though they were adjustable and currently hanging from their bearings. He saw that very clearly; cams were positioned to fix on the faces of crew in the three essential stations, making it easier for them to send real-time messages or recordings on his holoprojector.

He saw the bulky shapes of the consoles that made up his mainframe. On them, status lights blinked or shone steady, and monitors glowed steadily. These were the displays made for his crew. Who, apparently, wasn't there, not even in the cockpit. That wasn't right. Even standing down, inactive in his berth, there should be at least one technician. And there wasn't so much as a fingerprint on a console or a stretch of flattened upholstery at any of the three essential stations. Like they'd never been touched. Not so much as a speck of dust either. Was he factory-new? Couldn't be. He knew that his hull was scored and dented, cosmetic damage that meant he'd seen action.

This was not good. Bad enough to be helpless on his side waiting for his crew to evacuate and send for backup, which presumably would at some point involve either retrieving him whole or in components or blasting him so that no one else could have him. Worse to be helpless on his side with no crew.

No crew. He'd skirted that phrase, because 'no crew' meant 'empty'. That was meaningless when he was inactive and a protocol breach when he was standing down, but he was live now, systems running, and he couldn't...

[This does not actually fit anywhere. I'll delete it when I'm sure I'm not going to use anything from it. "Autonomy, actualization, psyche emulation identity and personality emulation, records, software analog of organic-brain emotional response, and many others, often very similar."

There was one subroutine housed in one particular console, one last major program in the master computer, that hadn't gone live yet. No. Untrue on both counts. Several subroutines, many or most of them linked so that one could not be active without others. Currently there was only one running at optimum, but all were functioning at one level or another. There was a great deal of overlap among the many, many subsubroutines, and many redundancies, and it was altogether more complex and puzzling than any other set of programs. The console wasn't planned or built by the same mind as the rest of him.

It was unmarked, as far as he could tell, and set apart from the others. It had the normal complement of monitors and status lights, but only a few controls. From the lights, some systems were active, most weren't. He was not entirely sure what, if anything, it did.

Should he start it up now? It couldn't be essential. This would just burn power faster. But why not? He couldn't find any crew, so without autonomy he wasn't going to be able to do anything. Besides, his life support was running with no life to support, his hologram projection pod was live with nothing to receive, and he had readied everything in his drive motor even though he was hardly using it at all, what with being motionless. No crew meant no action, the moment when he'd fired at the large animal notwithstanding. He might as well. Power was rerouted, his drive motor sped up slightly to compensate, and bank after bank of status lights on the last console glowed to life.

Garrett jerked. ''Beep... beep... beep... beep...'' Automatically he reached out to swat at the alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock, and his leg just swung forward and back, smacking against something. He felt the impact dully as it traveled up into his body. It didn't really sound like an alarm clock, it sounded like - ''No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! Stress on flexible armored tunnel! Warning!''

That meant - what that meant was that he was FALLING!

Garrett's legs churned forward and back, but hit rubble, unidentifiable heaps of trash. No. He wasn't falling, he was already down, and he'd figured that out already. He was already down, he remembered the fall and how it had started slow and then became much faster and then he'd hit the ground, and now he was ''on'' the ground, though he could barely feel what was underneath him.

The costume. That was it, that had to be it, the costume was keeping things from touching his skin. Yes. Under it, Garrett could feel things, his nerves hadn't all gone dead. As soon as he got it off, he'd be fine. That emptiness, that sickening hollow space inside, that would wear off. Yes. So would the feeling that he was somehow both stretched and compressed somehow. He just had to get the costume off.

The alarms in his cockpit were getting annoying, and nothing was happening with the evacuation alarm, so he disabled them. Indicators on monitors and bank after bank of status lights updated continuously, but they showed nothing he couldn't sense for himself except, perhaps, why the lights on the mystery console, already blinking in rapid patterns, went mad.

He wasn't breathing! He wasn't breathing! Whatever he used to breathe - diaphragm? Rib muscles? - was missing, his sides were totally rigid and immobile. It didn't hurt, but God, he couldn't breathe!

Garrett shuddered, or tried to. The seats at his three essential command stations readjusted convulsively, his flexible armored tunnel quivered, his medium blasters rocked, and his legs bent slightly where they met his drive motor and at the knee joints, toe flaps flicking up and down. Otherwise he didn't move. Just a costume, he told himself. A costume and maybe some highly illegal combination of substances which would make the University very unhappy. He hadn't knowingly taken anything, but that never made much difference with the staff. At the moment, the thought of Midtral kicking him out wasn't all that bad.

The console displays worked silently, making it much easier for crew to see just what was going on with him. One housed the housekeeping subroutines and displayed temperature and pressure readings, air supply, life support, lighting, and half a dozen other systems, both readings and controls, all for the places where crew would be. Most of that was locked to him, off limits, part of some security measure. More consoles were devoted to other things. Weaponry. Data from sensor arrays, holographic targeting systems, inside cams, impulse terrain sensors. The console for both of his KDY FW62 compact fusion drive systems, all the fiddly details that went with them and his fuel slug tank and blaster cannon energizer. Other consoles too, with purposes of their own. Most of them didn't appear to be connected, but under the deck each was linked by numerous thick cables, to each other and the rest of his body. They were, Garrett knew, what his brain had turned into.

After he took the costume off Midtral would kick him out for substance abuse, the way they also did with people who got weird piercings or large tattoos or got in the paper for suspicious reasons. It was in the college contract; people hated it, but no one had a legal leg to stand on. They would give him time to pick up his stuff and find a motel, and he and Steph could go together to that bar just off campus to complain and rage and drink. Later they could stagger back to the motel, and wake up side by side in the morning with matching hangovers, and both of them could claim to have no memory of the previous night. The first and last time he'd done it, he'd sworn never to do it again, and Steph had clutched his head and said "Never, ''ever'' again". But another all-night bender with his friend sounded a lot better now.

He laughed wildly - and silently except for a burst of static on the internal comms. On the - yes, it was the system the commander used to give orders to the troops, it might as well be an intercom, why not? The static was loudest from the hologram pod, loud enough to fill the cockpit. It was purely internal, with not one speaker on his outside. He didn't have to pause for breath. Static hissed and crackled through his intercom, rising in a snarl of terrible, meaningless sound that went on and on. Who was he kidding? Nothing was coming off, and he was so empty that the noise echoed around his internals. The static died down as he stopped, feeling sick.

Not breathing. This time the realization didn't spark panic. He felt hot and cold at once.

He couldn't get up. Oh, it was easy enough in theory, Garrett knew. Contract abdominal muscles. Prop up on one elbow. Curl knees in along the floor. Turn so that hands and knees are on the ground and body is above. Push off with hands and stand up. Such a pity that he couldn't do that.

Okay, focus, he told himself, trying desperately not to start laughing again. He was on his side, not quite flat. The pocked squares on the ceiling - it was a drop ceiling, part of him noticed - somehow looked ridiculously far distant, same with the walls, though he had no problem making out details. A few hundred meters away - no, that couldn't be right, but several times longer than his body - he saw an abandoned, tapering cylindrical plastic thing partially filled with clear liquid, somehow completely intact. "Aquafina", the label read. It looked like a water bottle. Although it was much smaller than he was and he was looking ''down'' to see it, it still seemed huge. Quite a bit larger than a man, almost the size of a speeder... or, yes, a car. But that couldn't be right.

It dawned on Garrett then that it wasn't that any of these things were too large. No, they were exactly as big as they were supposed to be. It was that ''he'' was too ''small''. He was - he was an AT-AT. The distance from footpad to back was supposed to be at least twenty, twenty-five meters. How many feet was that? Fifty, sixty? If he remembered right, the drop ceiling was supposed to be ten feet up, maybe less. Even if he was standing now, his back would only be halfway to that ceiling, if that. That wasn't right. Maybe it explained the compressed feeling, though.

Movement. The furry white animal was back, and although it was moving very cautiously it still seemed far too quick for something without repulsorlifts. Garrett decided that it was probably the size thing - it seemed as big as a bantha, or... or an elephant. Those weren't supposed to move like this. But the animal was close to the floor and far, far from the ceiling, so it was probably small. Now, he couldn't help noticing that it looked like a combination of various animals. Long haired cat, wading bird, field rabbit, maybe some kind of bug.

It was coming around from Garrett's other side, staying away from his heavies this time. Halfheartedly, he followed it with the swiveling medium repeating blasters on either side of his viewport - or rather, he followed it with one blaster, because the other was pressed by his weight against what looked like a magnified piece of canvas. It didn't seem worth the effort to fire. What was the point? He didn't have any crew to protect. He was ''empty''.

''So'' empty. It was the strangest feeling. A little bit like hunger, a little like cold, slightly nauseating, something like being touch-starved, and a ''lot'' like loneliness so strong that it was crippling. Somehow it was all of those things wrapped up together, with something he had no words for. Continued breathlessness didn't help. ''Empty.''

He tried to shudder again, with the same result as last time. The white animal froze where it stood, the weird curling thing on its head unbending partially.

''Garrett?''

He jerked.

Steph? he said, or tried to say. It came out as purely internal static, like the buzzing hiss of an analog TV on an empty channel. Just like when he'd had that moment of wild laughter earlier.

''Garrett, it's me, Steph. Can you hear me?''

I hear you, I hear you! More static. Was that really Steph? How? What had happened?

''Look, don't try to shoot me again. I don't want - Are you even in there? Somewhere?''

Yes. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you, he tried. Still no words. It was just static on his intercom.

''Look, if you're there, say something.''

I don't think I can, he tried. Static. The creature that said it was Steph had its huge ears cupped around its head again, but Garrett didn't think it was hearing him. The intercom was internal, the hatches were shut. And he was producing static.

He jerked the servos in the armored tunnel that had once been his neck, making his head bob. He had to fight gravity. It wasn't an easy motion, and although he couldn't see it himself, he knew it didn't look smooth.

''Do that again.''

Garrett did. Whatever was between his head and the ground, underneath the too-close canvas, made a weird sort of ''crunch''. He could barely hear it; it seemed soft and far away.

''Okay. Uh, okay. You can't talk, but you can hear me, right?''

A third time, and now he was getting faint complaints. He wasn't designed for this kind of activity, not small repetitive movements. If he kept this up, he'd start damaging the blaster on that side. After a moment, he swung one leg forward and back. A foreleg.

He couldn't see most of his body, but he could see his legs, sticking out rigidly, like he was a flipped card table. There was the joint where each leg met his body. The joint could swing the entire leg forwards and back, and spread the legs a little apart, independently, but the spreading had a very limited range and apparently he couldn't do it lying on his side. His legs were just too heavy; the joints weren't built for this. He had knee joints, and four toe flaps at the end of each leg. And there was some kind of wristlike joint between knee and footpad, where the end of the leg pincered on to the footpad, but he couldn't move it. It was probably like a lizard's wrist; press the hand against something and the arm could move at all kinds of angles, but without something, the ground, a wall, to press against none of those wrist angles were really possible.

''Is that a yes?''

If he'd had eyes, Garrett would have rolled them. As it was, he felt the medium blaster that wasn't pinned twitch. Steph could get like this when he was excited or nervous, chattering inanely and giving off the impression that he wasn't nearly as smart as he was.

He tried talking again, asking, What do you think? Static. Of course. He swung the leg again.

''Okay, yeah. So - I guess I'm telepathic now. Right? My voice is gone, but if you can hear me, what else could it be?''

Garrett lay still, waiting as Steph babbled about what had happened, obviously ''just'' on this side of hysteria. He couldn't blame the little guy - Garrett could feel it pressing in on him, like any minute now he'd burst out in mad static laughter again. And maybe this time he wouldn't stop. But as long as Steph was here, he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

Was this telepathy, then? It was ''like'' hearing Steph's voice, but not quite. He didn't have any sense of where it was coming from. And... no, there wasn't really a sensation of hearing anything. It was like imagining a voice, imagining very strongly. Which raised the question of whether or not he ''was'' imagining it. But that way lay madness.

Eventually, Steph ran down. ''And I'm sorry, I ran away! I shouldn't have. I know.'' Had he? Obviously that was bad, but Garrett wasn't sure that he'd noticed. Not with all this. He wished - well, not like it mattered. Obviously he didn't need to breathe. It just felt like he should.

''Look, I - I should really try and get someone to help you up. I don't want to stay here, it's too open.''

Finally! Garrett staticked and swung forward and back, vigorously enough that he got a stern internal notice about not damaging his legs on obstacles. On the ground, Steph shuffled anxiously, black nose twitching.

''Right. I'll, uh, I'll be right back.'' He took off on all fours. Garrett watched him go. Why was Steph some kind of weird alien rabbit thing? What the hell had ''happened''? There was a way to undo it, right? He hoped there was. He really hoped there was.

He didn't ''want'' to be an AT-AT! He'd never wanted this. A month ago - less than a month ago - this costume hadn't even been a vague idea! He wasn't even a big fan or anything. He didn't want to be a walking beast-shaped tank. He could feel ''air'' blowing through his ''insides''.

He heard faint static crackling out of the intercom, and several bewildered seconds passed before he realized that he was trying to whimper.

==Anj's post-TF segment==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus2.jpg]]

Anj holstered his collapsed forcepike, removed his helmet, pushed his overrobe back over his shoulders like a cape, and stared at the reflection in the mirror, shying away from the eyes. The reflection stared back.

The reflection's face wouldn't turn heads. It was pretty normal, all things considered, no obvious scars or nonhuman colors. There was a certain hardness to it, yes – something in the forehead, the set of the jaw, the chin – but the mouth and the surprised expression saved him from looking too unforgiving. What made it disorienting was the way it was at once strange and familiar. There was a lurching shock like he'd dropped into a hole in the ground, registering that this wasn't some stranger's face. There was a smaller shock of recognition - this was his face. This was him.

“Uh. This is the part of the dream where my teeth fall out or I find out I can fly, right?” Anj winced and saw the reflection do the same. '' I don’t sound anything like me. I don’t even sound like my father.''

“Doesn’t feel like a dream, but how would I know? I guess there's nothing wrong with my voice amplifier. I, uh... Well, this is weird.” It was a very expressive face – the wince hadn’t just been a twitch of the eyelid; there’d also been more than a little reaction in the lips and eyebrows. He looked away.

It made a certain amount of sense, though. After that exchange with the bizarre pitcher-thing he had barely been breathing hard. He'd known something was different, he'd sort of expected this, it wasn't just the - well, the sense that now and again something jostled that shouldn't. Though that had been part of it. “Damn. Well... only men are officially accepted into the Stormtrooper Corps. Only the best stormtroopers can be trained as Red Guards. The screening process - yeah, I don't think a woman would go unnoticed. So yeah.”

He was taller, definitely. Not ''really'' tall, maybe, he could be wrong. When he turned his head and tilted it down it seemed like his shoulders on either side extended out too far, though part of that was the pauldrons. They didn't look bad in the mirror. But - wow, yeah, he was definitely taller. Yes. And his arms were thicker, even aside from the armor. Self-consciously, he flexed his free arm and felt his bicep press into the armor of his lower arm, the vambrace.

Also he was taller. Anj moistened his lips and realized that he was nervous.

For some reason recognizing that made him plant his feet and stand straighter - and yes, taller. Hopefully that would stop surprising him soon, it wasn't like he'd hit his head on the doorjamb or anything. He was nervous - okay, afraid.

Earlier, he'd decided to find an empty bathroom to look at himself in, rather than join the crush of people trying to get out. That had taken a little longer than he'd expected. He might have been dragging his feet a bit, putting it off. He'd known something would happen - maybe he was deluding himself, but it was like there was a wave above him, ready to crash down.

He would have liked to avoid it for a little bit longer. He knew he could. But something inside, almost impossible to make out at first, then louder and clearer to the point where it startled him, said ''No. No. That's not how it goes. Resolve internal crises before they impact performance.''

Anj closed his eyes, then opened them. He started talking, the words forming just before he said them. "I was born in - in Coronet City on Corellia. We moved to Imperial center when I was about three, and lived in a domicile in a shabby-genteel section, on a level that was patrolled enough to keep down the violence." He wanted to stop, this wasn't right - he'd been born in Flagstaff Arizona, they'd moved when he was almost four. "The sun - the sun was visible, there was natural light, but only at high noon. When it rained, and it did that a lot, the water came to us through sluices, and it was never clean." The memory hit him, as strong as any he'd ever had - walking through the marketplace with his mother, ten minutes after a storm had passed overhead, and the water had poured off the awning they ducked under, reflecting rainbows.

"No, that's not right." He made himself stop and shake away the memory of how oily the water was, its smell. His pulse was quickening. "I don't remember Arizona except as bright and red, we just have pictures of the little blue house." There had been holograms of Coronet City in the domicile, projecting on the walls. They weren't the shiny sanitized holos of famous or scenic places that got sold to tourists. His older brother had borrowed a holocam and recorded the scenes himself. "I- we lived in an apartment for a while. It snowed in the winter. First time I'd seen snow, and it made night less dark. It was wetter than I'd thought."

"Smelled a little like tin. Smelled like -" Anj rubbed his face with his gloved free hand, shifting his grip on his helmet with the other. He'd heard more than once that fresh snow smelled like tin, but he couldn't - Oh, Emperor, he remembered the landlord's kid, half a year older and always red-faced, showing up and asking if he'd mind wagering on which of the hired men would be the one to knock down the hawk-bat nest. Why not, he was a Corellian, right? "I, I made friends with a neighbor girl who never stopped telling me and Valerie that the - the show with the puppets was stupid and babyish. I wanted to impress her so I agreed, but I still watched it. Sometimes Valerie told her I was lying..."

This went on for some time, and he kept having the feeling that whatever he was fighting, he was losing. Anj paced, restless, sometimes with uncertainty and other times aggressively. Eventually he forced himself to stop and looked back at the mirror, this time looking into his reflection's eyes. His eyes were wide-open, worried, with irises dark enough that they were hard to distinguish from his pupils. Hadn't they been paler before this? Anj looked away, unsure.

"What happened?" he asked in a low voice, not quite a whisper. "I don't understand. It's like - wait, wait. Am I - am I ''talking'' to myself?" He was. "Emperor's bones," he said, the last two words coming out as a mild oath. He really wasn't in the habit of talking to himself, he knew that for sure. It was probably just to listen to his voice. He'd talked to himself at length right after rigging the voice amp the first time, feeling out how it made him sound. Her sound, at the time. No, wait, he'd done that the first time he'd put on a helmet at the Academy, too. Once he'd quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the the other time he'd read the helmet's instruction manual out loud.

He looked down, saw his hand trembling, and had to clench it into a fist to make it stop. He had to finish this. He just really, really didn't want to, and he wasn't sure what 'this' was or why it scared him. Maybe he could put it off for another minute.

Briskly, Anj used some paper towels to dry the counter where the sinks were, switching off a dribbling faucet at the same time, then set his helmet there and removed his robes, folding them quickly and with mechanical precision.

“Huh.” Despite their irregular shape, he’d folded them into a perfect square, flat and unwrinkled. And why had he bothered wiping down the counter first? Anj dropped his folded robes besides his helmet, deliberately letting a corner hang over the edge of the counter. Immediately he felt the nagging urge to adjust the robes, make them line up precisely, but it wasn’t very strong. Apparently he had a thing for neatness. He hoped it was neatness, and not some kind of cleaning mania.

Looking into the mirror again, Anj glanced over his armor. Red plating, the same crimson as his helmet and robes, with a thick textured bodysuit underneath. The bodysuit - the underarmor - was black, naturally, no sign of the armor weave visible. The plating was fashioned like the contours of a very well-defined muscular body. Better defined then he actually was and a serious display of narcissism, he knew, but ''he'' hadn’t designed the armor.

This was both distressing and a sight he'd seen nearly every day. ''That'' was what he had to finish. He had to get both stories to fit together. He couldn't just pick one - well, he ''could'', it would be easy, he could just be Anj, part of the Stormtrooper Corps since he'd volunteered at fifteen, which was younger than was officially allowed, eventually picked for Red Guard training on Yinchorr. He could pick that, let all the sketchy details fill in and flesh out, and be Anj of the 501st on a planet that was only vaguely familiar to him. The more he thought about that backstory, the more complex it would become. But he knew he shouldn't, he really, ''really'' shouldn't.

"Okay," he said quietly. "The obvious answer is that I was - I ''am'', still, Anj - ''Angela'', and this other stuff is new, but there's no way I can ignore it." He had to figure this out. Anj ran a gloved finger along the raised detailing on his pectorals, stopping as he realized what he was doing. He remembered making the armor with Ursala, one of the other Tampa Bay Red Guards - and he remembered getting it at the end of training, before being shipped off to a new post. Both felt real.

This would take some doing.

Anj paced a little more, then stretched out on the linoleum, resting weight only on his forearms and toes, and kept his abdomen taut, silently counting the seconds as his muscles burned. He couldn't reject it. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing was ever that simple. Still, there had to be something he could do.

Holding "plank" position was easy; even with the weight of the armor, he could stay like that for an hour, no trouble. Anj shifted position, put his palms against the floor, and started to push up and lower himself down in a steady rhythm, breathing easily.

Why one or the other? Why not both? Wouldn't that be ideal?

Could he even do that? Easy enough to ''think'' it, but...

A shredded bit of toilet paper scudded off across the linoleum tiles, blown by his breath, and Anj stopped as he realized that he'd just stretched out and started doing pushups on a bathroom floor. A women's bathroom, admittedly, and therefore not ''too'' awful, but still. He scrambled back to his feet as quickly as if he’d been ordered, and stared for the third time at his reflection.

This time he didn't look away, staring intently into the mirror, ignoring the discomfort, the awkward feeling that really he shouldn't be doing this. Every time he saw himself, it was a little easier.

And now - now, if he pushed away the visceral shock of seeing someone else and the other, smaller shock of recognition, and it did feel like he was pushing them back - now he honestly could tell himself that that face ''was'' familiar. That the nose had once been broken rather spectacularly and had for the most part healed straight. That the hair-fine scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, ''his'' dark eyebrow, was ''not'' from a training incident or an injury he'd picked up on duty, but a remainder of something incredibly stupid he’d done as a teenager. He could remember idly imagining a face like this, going with the fairly vague biography he’d made. Anj thought he'd sketched this face, or one like it, in a notebook.

In fact, to his surprise he looked just a little like his ex. Like Angela’s ex. Anj's ex. It wasn’t a ''major'' resemblance, but it was there, something about the bone structure and the texture of his close-cropped dark hair, though it wasn't curly. Oh, right - he'd been on that faces kick, filling up page after page of head studies. Since this had been when he, as Angela, had been engaged to Scott, and Scott hadn't objected to a little modeling, most of them reflected him somehow.

Anj was oddly relieved to find that there was still an echo of that old pain when he thought about Scott. Things just hadn't worked out between them. They'd left on friendly enough terms, yes, it had been almost two years and it was barely awkward anymore when they ran into each other, but there'd just been too much emotional investment for it to be painless.

It was weird, thinking of Scott when he looked like this, but almost reassuring.

Maybe he could do this after all. "I shouldn't worry about it," Anj told himself. He didn't dislike his voice. "Maybe if I just stop making a problem out of it - mind over matter, right?" There was still a blanket sense of unease, but he wasn't afraid now. He smiled tentatively, mostly to try out how it looked on his face. This didn't have to be bad. He'd - he'd try not to think of it as bad.

There would be time later to strip off every piece of armor and examine everything. For now – well, he ''knew'', but it wouldn’t hurt just to check. Anj found the seam in his underarmor and stretched it open. There was the dance belt thing keeping everything supported, and under it another piece of padded armor, common sense really, a protection that was smaller and not nearly as obvious as the codpiece worn by stormtroopers. And under ''that'' -

He wasn't sure if it was supposed to be - the angle was new, but it looked normal - he hadn't expected - right, well, Scott had been cut, and -

“…Yeah. I definitely went in the wrong refresher. Bathroom. Whatever it's called.” Feeling a little embarrassed, Anj straightened his armor and exhaled firmly. "I don't think I'll do that again for a while." Not that he would have a choice; his bladder had to fill eventually. But it could wait.

"No more periods. Huh. I'm going to have to get new clothes. ''All'' new clothes. It's probably going to be a comprehensive shopping spree." A daunting thought. As Angela, ever since he was a little girl he'd hated shopping for new outfits, since it was ''never'' quick or simple. He'd hated it vocally enough that it had become a family joke. Somehow he doubted that had changed - and, for whatever reason, this was another oddly comforting thought. There was a little pronoun confusion and what could only be called a double set of memories, but Angela and Anj were the same person at heart. He hoped.

He still felt weird, but it was a relief to be sure that whatever else was going on, this was a convention in Florida, and he had walked in as a woman in costume. In Red Guard costume. The furries he’d seen – the same thing had happened to ''them.'' It was safe to assume it had also happened to the people he’d passed on the way ''here'', the ones who’d been rushing for the exits or milling in confusion. Had it happened to everyone? In the world, or locally, or just ''here''?

He’d become a real Red Guard; his forcepike had become a real forcepike, the biography had filled out extensively, and so had... other things. The furries had become actual, living animal people. The image, the dream, had become reality. Although, really, he’d never longed to have more than the image, he’d spent a lot of idle thought on it but never felt that he was ''supposed'' to be a Red Guard, really. And – well, it followed logically that the pitcher man hadn’t been more than the image before, because who could ''possibly'' want to be a pitcher? There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

… What had happened to the rest of the squad? To his friends, to SL-1984? Had this happened to ''them'', too? Anj felt a sharp, unsettling lurch in the pit of his stomach, as all the unease he'd managed to dispell came back in a lump. Why wasn’t he with them? ''How'' could he have thought it was a good idea to leave them in this unfamiliar territory? He had no idea where they were, so why wasn’t he out looking for them?

“Why do I feel so ''guilty'' about this? I don’t know what in the Emperor’s name they’re doing, this isn’t exactly covered in training!” Anj blinked. “Not training. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Going to have to do ''something''.” But what, ''that'' was the question. Where to start? He wasn't entirely sure where ''he'' was, let alone any of the others!

Restless again, Anj made a quick circuit of the bathroom. He’d chosen well; when he’d passed this place early in the day there had been an impressive line, but everyone’s priorities had shifted well before he got here.

All stalls were open, and the bathroom was empty – he wouldn’t have removed his helmet and started talking to himself if it hadn’t been – but it didn’t hurt to check.

He found it rather disheartening when he had trouble reading a piece of graffiti. It was scratched deeply into the side of a stall, in large, relatively neat letters that were easy to distinguish, but it still took longer than he’d have liked before the squiggles resolved into “ADRIAN WAS HERE”. Apparently he now had trouble reading English.

Otherwise, the only thing of note was a pile of clothing just inside the handicapped stall. The shirt at the top of the pile had what looked like a long elastic bandage, ragged at the tip, trailing out of the neck opening. Very gingerly, touching only with the very tips of his gloved fingers, Anj separated and folded the clothes neatly, stacking them together on the linoleum. He told himself as he did it that it was a courtesy. The other end of the bandage was wrapped around a bra left inside the shirt, for some reason that Anj couldn't fathom. Crumpled under those and sitting atop a dusty pair of sandals were short pants with panties inside - and in ''those'' was a winged Maxi pad with just a little blood on it.

Just seeing that made Anj feel incredibly uncomfortable and voyeuristic. If women had a set of bathroom rules, hiding all evidence of periods was one of the big ones. It seemed like that rule had carried over - he was embarrassed for whoever this was, and entirely unwilling to touch it. And yet Anj couldn’t help thinking that if the clothing had simply been removed, it would just be heaped together, underthings on top. This looked like more like the occupant had dematerialized – or shrunk dramatically. Yet it was completely empty, and he hadn't seen any-

''-Wait. '' I ''wouldn't try and approach someone who looked like me, if this happened. And she could've got out earlier, maybe even when I opened the door. I wasn't exactly in a state to notice. Whatever this is about, it's going to stay a mystery. One that I'm glad isn't happening to'' me.

A light sort of twitch traveling up his spine brought Anj out of his thoughts. “Right,” he mused under his breath as he returned to the sink. “Weakly Force-Sensitive, untrained and not good for much more than intuition and a warning. Wrote that in the bio. Inexplicable spinal sensations mean something is happening, and if it's mild like this-“

He could hear it, tinny and faint, coming from his helmet on the counter. It must have tuned in on an active frequency. Without hesitation Anj took it up and settled it over his head, the insides tight against his face. The voice over the com became clear. Female, clear, commanding, and with a bit of an accent that sounded vaguely British - No. Not British. ''Imperial.''

“-ling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, report for instruction, report for instruction, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr. Repeat; this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st-“

Words could not have expressed how Anj’s heart leaped on hearing the officer’s voice. He wasn’t alone! Almost as fast as he could think it, he had gone to the specified frequency.

“This is TR-1407 of Tampa Bay Squadron.” Relief loosened his tongue in spite of training. “And I am ''very'' glad to hear from you! Orders, sir?”

The voice that responded over the comlink wasn’t the same one, although if anything the Imperial accent was stronger; this was a harried-sounding older man. “You may change your mind when you see this, Royal Guard. Get to the rendezvous outside of the structure. We’re on the blacktop rectangle to the southwest.”

== Garrett ==

Nothing was happening. He supposed that there must be commotion going around - he and Steph hadn't been the only ones, right? He'd seen something like that before falling over, right? - but he couldn't hear anything. Literally. It was silent. Now and again he felt what were sort of like faint tremors going up into his body. Maybe he'd gone deaf, at least on the outside. Inside it was different.

Experimentally, he swung a hind leg. It hit something. He swung again, harder. Yes - there ''was'' a sound, but it was so faint! Distant, like it was several rooms away.

Now he charged his heavies, waiting the long seconds until they were good and hot, and fired into the wall. The minor explosion that resulted ''was'' louder, but again - faint and far away. The sound of both heavy cannons charging and going off had been perfectly clear - it was the same oddly high laser ''tcheeer'' shriek he remembered from watching Empire Strikes Back - which he supposed made sense, since the sound could probably travel through him and to whatever worked like ears now.

He couldn't breathe. Garrett would have given a lot right now to be sure if he'd been stuck on an inhale or an exhale - he couldn't tell, it felt like both and neither. Mildly uncomfortable.

There was... something... related to the intercom, somewhere in a console in his cabin, but not as intimately a part of him as the intercom. It was picking up something. Probably had been for a while. A signal? Several signals?

''"-xty-two is down!" "I'm still functional, sir. It knocked me over, that's all." "Get back over here - oh, no, it's coming back, Force preserve us-"''

''"-SAID HOLD YOUR FIRE! Damn you, Thirteen, it's just a bird." "Sorry! Sorry! I couldn't help myself, it just came up so fast." "No harm done. My lord-?" "The Lieutenant was ri-"''

''"-see, I told you, the flashing orange bit is its weak point!" "What, like a videogame? Isn't that awfully convenient?" "Don't give me lip. It keeps doing that swing-and-dodge thing, then you can see the orange bit. Cover me, I'll-"''

He cycled through a handful of channels or frequencies or whatever, listening to voices, until he found ones that seemed vaguely familiar, though they were distorted enough that he couldn't quite figure out where he'd heard them before.

''"-nd telling us where you went in such a hurry, ''sir?'' And how you managed to lose half an arm? I can see the sparks from here." "Pike, you would not believe me if I told you. Count yourself fortunate that I found you, I can proba- ah, more of them. How charming." "Fusst! Can you take them?" "Certainly I could, but saving you is a bigger priority than killing animals. Stay where you are.” "You're going to play at being a ''troop transport?!'' "Yes, if you want to put it that way. Do you have a better idea?"''

Without warning, the voices dissolved into gibberish and white noise, a lot louder. He could sort of make out words in that mess, a panicked babbling. This might not even be the same channel. Alarmed, Garrett shut that part of himself off.

What had that been? What the ''hell'' had that been? What was going on out there?! What had happened?! Beneath the aching emptiness of his insides, along his belly, Garrett's drive motor was running hard and fast. Like he was breathing hard and his heart was racing - except, of course, that they weren't. He was a relatively thin set of rigid metal plates wrapped around air and fuel and a walking apparatus, and even that motor under his belly, the closest thing he had to guts, was riddled with spaces, gaps, hatches for mechanics to get into. All of them so empty.

There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do. Gradually, his drive motor slowed, until once again it was an almost subliminal hum. He lay there, wishing he had eyes to close.

He couldn't breathe. He did have the feeling that he hardly noticed that when he was paying attention to something else. But there wasn't a lot else to even think about.

Nothing continued to happen. Garrett felt that horrible emptiness inside and tried not to laugh or start whimpering again. Something must have happened to Steph. Something had got him, maybe. He'd turned into something else. He'd gotten lost. Or maybe... maybe he'd just run off and abandoned Garrett.

Garrett pushed that last thought away. It wouldn't happen. He wouldn't have been abandoned. Not by Steph. They'd known each other since Orientation, and although they weren't roommates they shared about half of their classes. They'd - Garrett was straight, that one time when they'd both gotten very drunk at the end of Finals Week did ''not'' count, and Steph had said Garrett wasn't his type, but that didn't matter. Steph was still one of Garrett's best friends, the only one who always pitched in when he had some new idea, the one he went to whenever a wasp got into his dorm while his roommate was out. If he had anyone who wouldn't leave him, it was Steph.

Of course, the thought came back. Damn it, he was an ''AT-AT''. He couldn't even talk. Good God. Why ''wouldn't'' Steph just walk away?

And he was so ''empty''. Static hissed softly through his command section and the big troop cabin, falling silent only when he made the intercom stop. Laugh, cry, he wanted to do both and couldn't manage either properly. Damn it, he tried to say. Static.

It made sense, he supposed, that he couldn't speak. Maybe he could - there ''was'' that intercom - but he had no idea how to make words without a throat or vocal chords. He tried again, and managed to chop the burst up. Hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet. Not as noisy or intense as the laughter had been, louder than the whimpering.

''Damn'' it. HISS-quiet-hiss-quiet. Now he could sense the mechanisms in the speakers. They were entirely unfamiliar. How ''did'' radios and speakers of any kind turn signals back into voices, sounds, music? He had no idea. Nothing to do but try.

Garrett was lost for some time, trying to bully his intercom into producing anything that wasn't static. He made progress, if slowly - managing a few vowel sounds, almost drowned by the hiss. Still, he didn't miss the movement outside.

First, there came the bees. When the first few appeared, zigzagging up near the ceiling, he had trouble figuring out what they were. They seemed as big as Thanksgiving turkeys and almost as weighty, dark wings moving in a blur. The first handful were high up and spaced out, moving purposefully from one side of his vision to the other. As time passed more and more bees passed through, sometimes several at a time. Garrett practiced what sounded vaguely like an "ah" and watched them, feeling his drive motor start to speed up again. He didn't like bees all that much.

Soon enough it was a whole ''cloud'' of passing bees, all headed in the same direction. The air was thick with them, along the floor as well as the ceiling, and there were enough that the droning of their collective wings was going up his legs and through his hull into the inside. He could actually hear them. It almost managed to be loud.

Many bees flying low smacked into him - he was surprised to find that he could feel them hitting, the insects were ''strong'' - and crawled up his body before taking off again. He couldn't quite see them doing that, or feel them crawling across his surface, but it was a logical assumption, and that was what the ones on his legs were doing. There were so many bees that he could have hit a few dozen just by swinging a leg, but he didn't dare. He could have fired and taken out a lot more, he really wanted to try it, but that would just make them mad, wouldn't it? They were ''everywhere'', there were ''thousands'' of them. He knew, he ''knew'' that he couldn't be stung, but-

Garret made a very odd sound over his intercom, a combination of a high pure synthetic tone and an "ahhhkssshhksshhh" that quickly devolved into furious static. A bee had crawled onto his viewport, seemingly from nowhere, he could see the segments of its wide-spread legs and the yellow hairs coming off it, and oh God it had a pointy red tonguelike thing gleaming between two mandibles, and agggh, it ''licked'' him, and its two antennae were tapping at him... He couldn't feel it at all, but that didn't help, and even though it was many many times smaller than him it was still a GIANT BEE climbing around-

Bee claws on his hatches! He felt ''that''. They were crawling, oh God how could that tickle ''and'' itch, and he couldn't feel their clawed legs ''around'' the hatches or ''on'' them, but at the edges, where they were sealed shut, ''there'' he felt them, and they were ''everywhere''! He was covered in them. They were going to gouge one of the hatches open and ''get inside!'' His drive motor was picking up, throbbing a pitch that started low and built higher, he couldn't just lie still anymore but he couldn't ''do'' anything-

And then the one on his viewport took off, and there were fewer bees in the air, and he didn't feel claws on his hatches anymore. Barely a minute later and it was back to a thin stream of the things moving across the ceiling. Soon enough there were none.

The silence as his drive motor wound back down again was deafening. Garrett had to wonder if he'd just imagined that. But no - there was a little streak of residue, barely visible, on his viewport. Disgusting. God, he didn't like bees. He'd been pleased about them dying off until he'd found that that just meant more ''wasps'', which were worse, if anything.

How was it, he had to ask himself, that he could essentially see outwards from his skin - no, not skin, more like a hull - but he hadn't been able to see any of the bees crawling on his body? He'd looked down his legs and seen them, and he'd seen the one on his viewport from beneath its six clawed feet. Why none of the others?

Vision as he had it now, interior and exterior, was - well, it wasn't a set of alternating views, nor was it overlaid, and he didn't know how this was working at all. It ''was'' working, at any rate. Everything seemed to be in full color and three dimensions.

Fuel reserves were now at ninety-eight point zero four eight one six percent. Had he been topped up when this - when this started? He didn't know. He hadn't checked it before. Right now he was on standby; powered up and burning fuel, but not going anywhere. Even if he figured out how to shut down a few systems, being active at ''all'' drained the reserves. Slowly, yes, but it was happening, and speeding up his drive motor like he'd been doing only hastened the process, as fuel moved up out of the cylindrical tank and was consumed. Garrett had the sudden thought that he would lie here immobile until he had either drained the last milliliter of fuel or he voluntarily shut himself down. He didn't know what would happen then. It was not a pleasant thought.

== Help ==

Time passed, long enough for Garrett to get too lonely and restless to keep trying to figure out his speakers. He wasn't used to having nothing to do. Usually, if nothing else presented itself, he'd start doodling on stray paper, trying to conceptualize various things he'd heard or thought of over the course of the day. Sometimes he'd get lucky and inspiration would strike. And then of course there would be the breathlessly fast calculation of taking an idea and making it ''work''... He wasn't used to being bored.

It wasn't like he could even hold a pencil, Garrett thought. He moved the toe flaps on one foot - hinge joints, all four of them, no other joints, limited flexibility up or down, he could move them independently, but that made little difference. These feet were made for walking, and that was all they could do. Pretty close to useless.

It didn't help that he was almost painfully aware of all his internal surfaces, and he kept coming back again and again to how utterly empty and alone he was. He couldn't even quite muster up any interest in how the hell his body worked, and it seemed like every few seconds he was reminded that he wasn't breathing, like a tic. This was miserable.

So although he didn't see Steph at the feet of the two people who came into view - wherever he was, he didn't seem to be having great luck - he was so desperate to see someone that he almost didn't mind.

They were incredibly tall, walking on thick pillarlike legs, huge and fleshy. Garrett took several seconds to realize that they were human at all. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around that. Humans didn't get anywhere near that big, and although logically he knew that these probably weren't any larger than normal, they still ''looked'' absolutely enormous. If he had been up on all fours, they would still have been considerably taller than him, though all in all somewhat less massive.

Garrett really only assumed they were human at all by their hands. Meaty, both broad and long, with skin covered with a network of fine grooves, a little puffy. Five unique digits, each placed and sized differently with wrinkled skin on the joints, each tapering, rounded, and tipped with a sort of curved scale. They looked like alien appendages until he saw knuckles and a standing vein in the back of one, and lines in a palm; then, something sort of ''clicked'', and he realized how they looked very much like human hands. Grossly enormous human hands, yes, as long as Steph's body, or almost. Still human.

If they had human hands, they were humans, right? They were just so out-of-scale, looming up cone-shaped, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, that he couldn't quite think of them as people, only pick out things like hands and gigantic sloping feet. It took some bewildered staring before he could even recognize that the fibrous stuff hanging from their bodies was ''clothing''.

Then, he saw past the size and realized that, even if they weren't any bigger than usual, they would still have attracted stares from anyone with eyes. The two had stopped within his sight and were now talking animatedly together. He couldn't hear them at ''all'', Garrett realized unhappily. They weren't loud enough for sound to get into his interior. Maybe if he opened a hatch... okay, how exactly did he do that? It wasn't like moving his head or legs, that was for sure.

The smaller of the two, the top of its - his? - head arrayed with a glinting mass of coarse fibers that might have been hair, Garrett could barely see it from here, had two vast flapping leathery things like wings or sails on either side of its head.

There was something wrong with that one's face, like its nose had melted into a gray wrinkled thing that moved, like a tentacle or a tail. Above that, it had ''four'' eyes. Two were set into its head with a bristling ridge above each, the other two were wide-set, gleaming, and very dark. Maybe this one wasn't human after all. It was twisting around, gesturing, generally looking unsettled.

The taller one, and now Garrett could see that it was ''considerably'' larger, was a little more normal, if he could judge. Its eyes were similar to the closer-set pair on the deformed one's face, and he supposed that the bristly ridges were eyebrows. The skin that wasn't covered by hanging folds of cloth was a very pale, almost chalky color. This one had bent its forelegs... no, arms, they had to be arms... and crossed them one over the other.

In a fit of whimsy, Garret decided to call them Mutant and Big Guy. Why not? It wasn't like they'd overhear him and take offense. He was starting to feel a growing sense of unreality. Being unable to put a couple of humans or almost-humans into perspective was just odd.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't real, after all. It just didn't make enough sense. If he was supposed to be an AT-AT, why could he fit into a room? What was up with that thing that had knocked him over, the red thing that had looked so much like the Kool-Aid Man? And why was a rabbit-bug thing telling him that it was Steph?

Garrett knew that he'd already run through part of this, at least. But the idea that he'd passed out in his cardboard shell from a nasty combination of spray paint fumes and an accidental dose of some illegal substance, and was now having a weird dream of epic proportions was - well, it was comforting. Or maybe he was awake, but hallucinating a wildly distorted version of events.

Mutant and Big Guy seemed to be wrapping up their conversation. Their Easter Island-esque heads were doing much less side-to-side swiveling and much more tilting up and down, and gestures were far less expansive. Abruptly, Garret made up his mind. What did he have to lose, if this was or wasn't a dream?

He swung a leg forwards and back.

Big Guy, moving ridiculously fast, got between Garrett and Mutant, bending its limbs like it was about to leap. Mutant moved, but stopped and backed away when Big Guy opened its mouth and did something with it. Garrett had never learned to lipread. What he could see of lips and mouth moving was weird and creepy, like he'd stumbled into the Uncanny Valley. Was that a matter of scale, or...

No one moved for a long moment, until Garrett finally jerked what used to be his head. Now he was being stared at. He moved his command section to point in their general direction and swung a leg forwards, trying to go for 'pathetic'. It wasn't exactly acting. He wished he could heave a sigh.

Big Guy did something with its mouth again, directing it at either Garrett or Mutant. Mutant crept still further away, the sails on its head flapping. Big Guy turned and followed it, twisting around weirdly to look back at Garrett. They stopped at the very edge of his vision, which apparently didn't extend all that far, to gesture and flap their mouths at each other some more. Eventually they stepped out of view entirely.

Garrett waited. Time passed, he had no idea how much. Long enough that he went back to trying to figure out his intercom. He made a heartening leap of progress when he figured out how to make and adapt the synthesized beep, though at his best he sounded about as clear as a toddler lisping into a poorly-kept drive-through speaker. He could only even do ''that'' if he focused very hard on the syllables and went slowly, true, and what wasn't a hiss came out in a robotic high-toned monotone, but progress was progress. What would he do if - ''when'' - he finally got to the point of speaking clearly and with some inflection?

He could try and recreate his voice. And... and other people's voices. Then he could - what? Reenact campy old TV shows?

It didn't get to that point, thankfully. Garrett thought about counting the seconds and decided against it, not really wanting to measure how long it took, but he only felt the I'm-not-breathing tic four times before Big Guy came back and did - well, did ''something''.

Big Guy had sort of... folded up, Garrett guessed, legs practically folded in on themselves, somehow not falling over despite the awkwardness of the position. It was... no, not sitting, couldn't be sitting, not kneeling either... crouching? Yes, that was it. He couldn't help noticing that its legs were ''considerably'' thicker than either his legs or the armored tunnel that had used to be his neck, and it was crouching ''within'' his legspan, looming up over him. Stretching an arm over his side, and from the little vibration that Garrett vaguely felt in his hull, the probably-human was dragging a hand over-

What the hell? Had it just ''stroked'' him? Now Big Guy's mouth was moving, and damn it, Garrett wished he could just ''say'' that he couldn't hear or understand any of that, say it and actually be heard, anyway -

Why not? ''Just help me up.'' Damn the static, he could do better than that, he'd managed-

They came in from the edge of his vision, walking with startlingly quick, fluid motions, as if moving was easy despite all that bulk. Two, three - no, ''four'' of them, like flexible animated towers fidgeting and breathing and pendulumming effortlessly from one leg-column to another in a walk that seemed at every step to be a barely-averted fall. He saw the flapping sails and knew that one of them was Mutant, but he didn't recognize any of the others at all. One didn't have anything like the pillar-like body structure of the others, carrying most of its mass almost horizontally.

They went from the edge of his vision to looming up over him, and static started to hiss and crackle through Garrett's interior. Too big, too close!

Heat, moisture on his right fore footpad! Weight - slight weight, nothing near the right amount, none on the others, and yes he knew he was already down but that sensation spelled FALLING! Garrett tried to swing his legs, tried on some instinctual impulse to fire. But his legs stayed locked still, toeflaps flicking madly, only one of them hitting anything at all, and the power to all four blasters was being leached away as quickly as he could route it in.

He felt like a heavy soft blanket had been pressed over him. ''Him'', not this half-insensate walker body, he could almost ''feel'' it wrapped over and over. Like it was between him and everything else. He felt his drive motor fight something, grinding alarmingly for a moment, and then slow, winding down as rapidly as it had sped up. Garrett saw now that Big Guy was - was ''gripping a footpad'' in one massive appendage. That was why he'd felt, was still feeling, some sensation there. It wasn't moving to wrench it off, it was just... holding it. Okay, that was weird.

Big Guy, still folded up, was mouthing at the new giants, who were no smaller than before but somehow less threatening, now. Garrett found that he could feel the vibrations of speech, faintly, through the hand on his footpad. He still couldn't understand it, annoyingly enough. Still, he knew for certain now that Big Guy was talking.

Garrett also found that he couldn't move his legs at all, just the toeflaps. Nothing was touching them, and they were working fine, he could feel it, they just couldn't move. Something invisible had a hold of him. Whatever it was, he knew, he knew that if it could slow his drive motor and persuade his legs to still, if he couldn't resist it, it could probably pop his hatches and and bare his interior and take him apart bit by bit. But it wasn't. It was holding him still. Very, very still. He found himself adjusting the seating in his command cockpit just to see if he still could.

He was calm now. Very calm, disassociated even. He had to wonder about that firing reflex. It hadn't been a conscious attempt at all, which was pretty inconvenient - he'd fired earlier to see if he could hear it, yes, but he wasn't quite sure how. Well, no sense worrying, was there? Garrett couldn't seem to muster either concern or a great deal of interest. It could be his drive motor, he supposed. It was running ''very'' slowly now. He knew that he ought to be nervous about that. If the computers in what had been his head were really serving as his brain, they needed to be powered. Not much he could do about that, though, was there?

They were talking over him. The giants. Big Guy, not moving, seemed to be trying to direct the others, who were on his other side, around his back. He couldn't see quite as well from his back-side than from his flank-sides or belly-side, but this was close enough that it didn't matter much.

Garrett watched with mild interest. They were all on two legs; one carried itself horizontally and had inexplicable projections that he guessed were a long S-curved neck and rigid tail. And most of it was coated with branching filaments that could be hair, or maybe feathers. Feathers - yes, on the tail and along the limbs they were shaped like feathers, with central shafts. The rest of it, as far as he could tell, had some kind of overlapping armor made of keratinous scales, most of them smaller than a meter across. Something about it was familiar... pictures... a movie?

Oh! He knew what it was! A feathery dinosaur! Maybe a raptor, he wasn't sure, but definitely a bird-dinosaur. Bigger than any dinosaur ought to be, of course, and from here its proportions looked terribly off, but it was recognizable. The movements of its curved neck and wedge head, small from this perspective, were even faster and more sudden than what he'd seen the others doing.

His eyes went - no, he didn't have eyes, did he? Or the sensation of having them, to roll and flick wetly from one thing to another and blink, that was gone. Weird. His ''attention'' went to the others - he was moderately sure that they were human, or rather, human''like'', just distorted by some quirk of his vision. And by the fact that part of him ''knew'' that he was over twenty meters tall, and no human could so much as see over his footpad without something to stand on. How was it that he could recognize and accept a live dinosaur that looked several times bigger than the T. Rex skeleton at the Chicago Field museum, but not humans at the same scale?

Well, Big Guy's hand - good God, each finger was a slab of meat and bone as thick as the kind of conduit that people could creep through - was still on his footpad, but there were no more vibrations going through it, and after looking around quickly Garrett had to conclude that the others had stopped too. They were ''very'' close. Okay, now they were bending, folding over, now they were touching him, he couldn't feel it but it was a safe assumption... his drive motor kept to the same slow pace, he was still wrapped up tightly, calm and motionless and a little bit distant.

How was this going to work? He wasn't built like an animal - he couldn't be tipped onto his belly, not with legs like these - were they planning to just carry him out? Surely he was too heavy for that. And even though he couldn't see any doorways, he was pretty sure that he couldn't be carried out of one.

Great huge hands, some of them clawed, got under him. He wasn't lying entirely flat, or they wouldn't have been able to do that. Big Guy took the hand that wasn't gripping his footpad and laid it on his side, big pale fingers splayed. That hardly seemed like the thing to do, if he was being lifted! For some reason that struck him as funny, but he didn't quite laugh.

His view ''lurched''. The pocked grid of the ceiling wobbled and seemed to get bigger. Simultaneously the faint sensation along his left side, the dull feeling where his flank lay against whatever he'd fallen on, went away. Garrett didn't have any inner ears now, so a few vaguely confused seconds passed before he realized that they were related, and together meant that he was being lifted up. He really couldn't tell how hard they were working - for that matter, the four of them, including Mutant, were shoulder-to-shoulder at his back, and Big Guy's hands hadn't moved.

He was ''above'' whatever he'd been on, now, and he could see it now, though Garrett still couldn't tell what it was. It looked like maybe four or five meters, but it was probably a lot less, if he was right about not actually being larger than a man. He'd stopped moving. Now what?

Big Guy was talking yet again, and the other giants moved around - two stayed at his back, the dinosaur stood at his vehicle bay, and on his other side Mutant positioned itself so that Garrett's command section was between its arm and its body. Each of them stuck its forearms under him - somehow, he'd kept completely steady during all that, like they hadn't been bearing his weight at all. Now, surrounded on all four sides, he had the sudden bizarre thought that they were planning to use him as a conference table.

Knowing full well that he couldn't be heard, Garrett still found himself trying to ask them what they were doing. Then Big Guy took its hand off of his flank.

Immediately he dipped and rocked, the view shuddering like he was in an earthquake, and by minute unsteady increments his body crept back up and leveled, although he was still tipping legwards and trembling. Garrett felt his drive motor intensify by some tiny increment, only to slow back down. He couldn't seem to worry much. There just wasn't enough power in his system for that.

He noticed, then, that the giants who were not Big Guy were disturbed. Strained, breathing heavily, shoulders hunched, moisture beading on oily skins that were flushing or paling. He couldn't help but wonder how eyes that bulged like that didn't just pop and run down out of their sockets. This took effort, evidently. The dinosaur was a little different, head thrown back on its long neck, mouth open. It had great pointed teeth. From his other flank he saw bent knees and massive far-spread feet.

Big Guy kept one hand steady on Garrett's footpad and reached underneath him with its free hand. There was something in it, something that gleamed. Some kind of tool? Despite the feeling of being under wraps, Garrett's found himself interested. What could that-

A beam of ''solid light'' just ''shot'' out of the thing, and for one long not-quite-panicked moment Garrett didn't see that it was finite, coming to a clearly defined tip, under twelve meters long. And it stayed attached to the emitter, too, not blazing off to burn through things like a turbolaser bolt. The thing was white-cored and blue along the edges, and he had ''no idea'' what it was.

Moving uncannily fast, as usual, Big Guy kept its hand wrapped around the emitter and manipulated the beam, holding it horizontal and passing it down, ''through'' whatever Garrett had been lying on. Smoke or steam curled up and dissipated. When the glowing beam was brought back up - moving quickly, too quickly; what if Big Guy made a mistake? - and moved aside, he saw that the mystery material had been ''cut'', and cleanly. The beam tool was like a propane torch, but big enough to make the body of a cruiseliner and without the facemask and sparks and burning.

There was a bit of new input from his air filters. An increase in... what was that, ozone?

Big Guy kept at it and chopped the stuff into long, somewhat rectangular shapes. Whatever it was Garrett had fallen over onto, part of it was a very solid slab of something weird and porous that smoked very little when cut, at least compared to the woven stuff that he thought was probably cloth.

Then the creature's fingers moved on the tool, and the blue-tinted beam sort of evaporated and was gone. Big Guy started clearing away the cut slabs, barely seeming to touch them - just sort of gesturing and causing them to whisk off. That couldn't be possible, could it?

What ''was'' that beam thing, Garrett had to ask himself. It seemed like something he ought to know, but what was the ''point'' to making a cutting rod half the size of a telephone pole?! Some kind of mining tool maybe? Although that train of thought seemed interesting, and he felt like he was missing something obvious, he had to let it go. Drive motor was a little too sluggish to keep it up.

The debris was more or less cleared, revealing... some kind of bumpy ground covering. Big Guy's free hand, minus the beam tool, came back to Garrett's flank, and by the vibrations said something. Something in his balance shifted, and the four giants straining to hold him up pulled away almost as one. Garrett didn't have to strain to see them as human to read the relief. He was very heavy.

...Which left him rather inexplicably floating in midair. He flicked his toe pads a little. He wasn't going to worry about it, but Big Guy was hardly at an angle to hold him up. Particularly alone. Although this was an odd time to notice it, Garrett saw, now, that there were no fibery hairs coming off Big Guy's domed head - instead, in the skin, there seemed to be bold faded-blue stripes running back over his skull; one really thick one over each eyebrow, a thinner one starting near each ear. Weird.

He was lifting up now, the hand gripping his footpad never faltering. Up... ten meters, thirteen, fifteen... he knew if he were to fall now, from here, at less than his full height, he would be seriously damaged, certainly more than simply falling over. No sense in worrying. Up... Big Guy was standing straight now, arms shifting position, still gripping steadily. It said something, and in response Mutant and one of the others, not the dinosaur, came closer and touched Garrett again, clutching at his hull.

"Ohhhhh..." He was surprised at how clearly the uneasy word came out, but now - now he was being turned, like a turtle flipped on its back, and it made him very uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't have inner ears - even so, he ''felt'' his insides shifting as things went from bulkhead to deck, and it was a weird feeling. It reminded him - and with all this excitement he'd almost managed to forget, too! - that he had no lungs or other organs and there was a great hollow cavity sitting in him, all but empty. Distant feeling or no distant feeling, that was unpleasant.

Still, he was being turned over, increment by increment. He was almost at the standing point now. Big Guy's hand slipped away from his footpad, and he rotated the last few degrees - slowly eased down, and his toeflaps were all sticking outwards as far as they could, and TOUCHDOWN!

He felt it as a sort of ''chunk'' as his weight came down on all four footpads, and something above the kneejoints telescoped slightly. The weird feeling of distance evaporated, and he found that he could move again. His drive motor sped up by some tiny increment. Garrett briefly forgot that he couldn't sigh, and had another weird moment where he tried to breathe but couldn't find the right equipment.

It felt so good to have his footpads on the ground! He pressed his toeflaps into it, feeling its bumpiness and its give, getting the sense that it was slightly uneven but level underneath. He was pretty sure that what looked like a landscape of weird, fibrous alien moss was really carpet. It was a good surface. Solid. Stable. Now he could move. Now he could ''walk.''

Big Guy was talking again, and the assorted weird creatures were backing off, still moving with the kind of fluid speed that made him nervous, but moving ''away'' from him, so he didn't feel crowded. He had to appreciate that. Better to think about this unexpected consideration, and not what life was going to be like if he panicked every time people who were not Big Guy stood next to him.

During a pause Garrett endeavored to bob his head minutely, although he had no idea what was being said. Even if he'd learned to lip-read, even though the giant had his big blocky face tilted downwards, at this angle Big Guy's most prominent features were his chin and the underside of his nose. He was like a tower, the kind they topped with turrets and left to guard cities.

Big Guy said something, very short this time. Garrett head-bobbed again and was either rewarded or chastised by muscles tightening under the maybe-human's skin; he thought it could be a frown. Big Guy leaned down and in close, so that his mouth and nose and eyes filled Garrett's command viewport, and said something else, moving his mouth with slow, deliberate exaggeration. There were some tiny bubbles gleaming in that wet mouth, and a bit of discoloration on at least one of the teeth, and oh God the pores in that pale skin, and the capillaries under it, and the barely-visible clear hairs scattered about - ugh. Whoever said that beauty was skin deep had never looked too close.

Garrett did nothing, vaguely wishing he could blink, and felt his command cockpit get stared through for a second time. Whatever Big Guy was looking for, he probably didn't find it, because he breathed out in a long stream that fogged Garrett's viewport and reared back up to his full height. A big hand came up and very lightly smacked Garrett on the moveable command section - ''thump'' pause lift ''thump'' pause lift, light but enough to get his head to move - and it might have been an attack, some of his systems certainly thought so, but he kind of doubted it.

Something came through with the thumps - or had they been a pat on the head? - a general feel of well-wishing. Damn it, this was frustrating. ''Almost'' communication! What if he tried shooting into the wall, writing something that wa - no, no, bad idea, he'd burn through too much of his fuel and it probably wouldn't even look like a word. And he didn't have anything like enough articulation to scratch letters with his feet.

Big Guy turned and walked away at a speed that still looked ridiculous, a tiny tremor going up Garrett's footpads with each step. He had to have phenomenal shock absorbers in those monster boots; another AT-AT would have had half that stride and more than twice the impact, even on this fibery surface. Very quickly, surprisingly so, the maybe-human was gone, and this time he probably wasn't coming back.

"Dahhhschhhn hhit." Hey, that had practically been comprehensible! Garrett grabbed on to that tidbit of accomplishment, determined to stop moping. He was on all fours now. He could walk, he could get out. He ''would'' get out. Everything else would have to wait.

The convention center as he saw it was a labyrinthine monstrosity built for long-limbed fast-moving giants. He was very vague on exactly where he was or how to get out; by now there probably wasn't anyone to follow. Maybe if he'd been quicker-witted earlier. Ah well. He took a couple of test steps, kicking aside some of the debris he'd been lying on.

Walking was - well, it was different. Taken one way, it was much, ''much'' more deliberate. He had to consciously lift, swing, and plant each footpad in turn, which was a bit complicated since he had four of them and they were all new to him. Not damaged, at least, and he probably had to count that as a stroke of luck, since looking back at when he'd lost his balance and fallen over he wasn't sure how he'd been knocked off his footpads without wrenching them or at least losing toeflaps. Taken the other way, he could set a course, which involved picking a point within his vision and doing something that felt a little like blinking. Or maybe double-clicking. There really wasn't a good human analog. Course-setting was less deliberate and he could set multiple points to reach in turn, but to get around obstacles he had to either cancel the distant set point and make new ones or manually take control, step around things, and let whatever walked him along a course work again.

There was a problem with this. He had a major design flaw - not all of the consoles in and around his cockpit were essential, but even the ones that didn't do something like control his feet or internal temperature used up a lot of power. Particularly one of them - he didn't know what it did, but it was a significant drain. So significant that when he was walking for any serious length of time, either deliberately or along a set course, he had to keep his drive motor at its highest safe output to feed the walking apparatus, the consoles that had something to do with them, "housekeeping" - life support and lighting, which he couldn't seem to shut off - and the mystery console. He wouldn't be able to generate the power to fire his lasers, not on top of all the rest.

Well, from the little he'd seen before being knocked over, he had to conclude that this was a very dangerous place now. He should have had a durasteel hull no thinner than half a meter thick at any point, he should have been close to invincible, but for some reason he was barely larger than a big man, and his hull was perilously thin. Thin enough to let some sound travel through the air into his interior. Although somehow he hadn't been found by anything more lethal than a swarm of bees, he couldn't count on that luck holding. He had to protect himself. And what was the harm in neglecting one mystery console? It couldn't be essential. The thing was connected to the other consoles, but nothing else.

Garrett prepared to move in earnest, and felt more fuel piping into channels deep in his drive system, down in what was left of his guts under the gaping void of his interior. All of his other systems downshifted and fluctuated until they readjusted. He felt his vision fade and surge, so that for a moment the world was made of enormous smooth polygonal shapes, before details popped back in. Some status lights burned brighter, others dimmed to a faint spark or quit entirely.

Things became a lot simpler. In a vague, distant way, Garrett was relieved. All he had to do was make it out. It would be hard, without a crew, but he would do it.

He oriented to the best of his ability, satisfied himself that the ground would continue to support his weight, picked a direction and a course point, and started to walk.

== The Rebel Legion ==

[[Image:File:Illus4.jpg]]

"No, ''I'' am the one asking the questions," the man insisted. He was a bit rumpled and looked - well, he looked pretty distinct, but Steph didn't recognize him. "One more time. What are you and what is your business here?"

''Damn it, apparently I'm a Hoojib! And I'm looking for a friend! Have you seen an AT-AT or not?!'' For his part, Steph was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd gotten a blaster or several aimed at him when he first came close to this group, but they were pointed away now and the edge had come off of his fear, even though now he had an angry man on one side and a suspicious crowd on the other.

A ''lot'' of these people, and there were a lot of people, were armed, he could sense their weapons, and the closer ones had pale violin notes of their own, but there wasn't that building rush of soundlike sensation he'd felt before Garrett had fired that time, and he didn't think it was going to come.

"''Nev''er heard of them," the man said, evidently taking a lot of pleasure in being unhelpful. He made eye contact, but managed to look down his nose while doing so, and Steph couldn't see much of his expression. He would have backed up to try and get more in view, but he was a bit afraid that that would mean being rather far away. "How do I know this isn't a trap? Oy, Rebs! Any of ''you'' heard of a Hoojib?"

The nearest people who were being referred to as 'Rebs', the people who made up the group Steph had approached, denied knowing. From the muttering - he couldn't really pick up on any one speaker - they thought the man was rude, but were preoccupied themselves, mostly listening to some tinny voice he could barely pick up on, but seemed to be coming from a lot of sources. The group was diverse, although even from a distance he'd recognized the orange jumpsuits of a number of X-Wing pilots. That's why he'd tried to go closer. He'd thought they might be willing to help. Apparently not.

"Anyone? ''Anyone''?" The man shook his head in an exaggerated motion. "Guess your ruse isn't working, eh? I don't think anyone but you knows what a Hoojib is. Protip: if you're going to make up a species, pick a better name."

"It's not made up," a woman's voice said, loudly enough for it to carry. People yielded for her, just far enough that she didn't have to turn sideways or push, as she passed to the edge where Steph could actually see her.

She was very tall - everyone seemed tall from Steph's level - but not as tall as a lot of the others. Something about her face was vaguely familiar, though he knew he'd never seen her. It was a sharp face with intense eyes, but pretty enough, he supposed. More striking was the sense of total composure coming off of her, a kind of unshakable confidence or dignity.

The man shook his head again, this time seriously. "This could be a trap. You shouldn't be so trusting."

"If it is, I can handle it. I'm just going to talk. I won't go on any wild chases." They locked eyes over Steph's head, and then the man looked away and sighed.

"Fine. It's your neck on the line, and I'm not getting paid enough to be a nursemaid. I'll be on the perimeter." The man shouldered his rifle, pointedly turned his back, and walked a good distance away. Facing outwards, he took what looked a lot like parade rest, shoulders squared.

Under her breath, the woman said, "Better with us than against us, yes, but I almost wish he hadn't come." She shook her head, faced Steph, and, to his surprise, went down on one knee in front of him. He actually had to keep himself from flinching - she'd just come a whole lot closer very quickly. This way, though, it was much easier to watch her face.

She looked down at him for a long moment, staring hard enough that he had to keep himself from preening nervously. Finally, she told him, "My brother and I worked closely with Spokesmind Plif and his people during the Nagai-Tof war. I know Hoojibs."

He would have protested, but staring up into her eyes, he got a sudden image of what she meant. Smaller, able to fit in her hand, and much more insectile, with bigger, paler eyes, floppier ears, high energy, an entirely different appearance and demeanor. Somehow she'd shown that to him, and he was - well, he was at a loss for words. Crap.

''Uh. Sorry?'' He winced inwardly at how hesitant he'd sounded. ''If I'm not a Hoojib, what am I, then?''

She took pity on him. "There is a chance that you belong to some subspecies. I don't believe that you're part of a trap, anyway. You aren't one of us. What brought you here?"

''Have you seen an AT-AT anywhere? Gray, four-legged, around human-sized? He's my friend.''

She pursed her lips, and even more than earlier he knew that face and couldn't place it. "I haven't, but I've been part of the committee since I called us together. A latecomer or someone on the perimeter may have seen it. Hold on." She stood up, raised her hand - it probably held something, but from down here he couldn't see - to her mouth, and said a long phrase in some foreign language. His ears caught the same phrase coming from a number of other places in the crowd, and after a moment something in her hand gave a very tinny two-syllable response. Steph realized where he'd seen her before.

Oh. ''Oh''. She didn't have the hair buns or the white dress or the metal bikini for that matter, there were a few more lines on her face and she wasn't shouting, but he saw it now.

''You're Princess Leia!''

"''Chief of State'' Leia Organa Solo," someone in the crowd corrected sharply.

"The Chief of State is Mon Mothma," she snapped back, composure slipping. "I'm not-" Leia stopped, closed her eyes, opened them again. "I'm only sort of Leia. Things are complicated. We're all having difficulties." That last sentence came out reluctantly, without the sharp edge of a lot of the things she said.

''That's totally understandable,'' Steph told her. He was finding this pretty surreal. Ridiculous, even. Princess Leia - "sort of" or not, that was who she looked and sounded like - was talking to him, a weird-looking animal, as if this was completely normal.

"We're having some trouble staying together and not fighting," she admitted, then shook her head and looked back at him. "But our issues aren't yours, I'm sure. I know we're far from organized at the moment, but we are the Rebel Legion. Most of us are local, from Ra Kura Base. I am a member of the Royalty/Senatorial Detachment."

''Okay,'' he said. None of that meant anything to him, of course. He had the sense that either these people had named and divided themselves ''very'' quickly, or the fan world was a lot more complicated than he'd thought. Had been. ...Whatever. ''I'm Steph. What were you saying earlier? When you stood up?''

She smiled ruefully. "We're talking in code over the comm, since it's unsecured. It's probably unnecessary, of course, but I think the Legion is hardwired for paranoia. I gave a description of you and relayed your request. Someone should respond. I'll stay with you until then. It's not like I'm missing much."

''Okay,'' he said again. He couldn't think of anything to say and she, despite what she'd said about not missing anything, didn't kneel down again. In fast, she seemed preoccupied, turning away and talking into her hand some more, still in code. He couldn't see her face properly, but it sounded like she was arguing with someone. Steph groomed a little, just for something to do. It was a process involving clawraking and patting down his long white fur, trying to get it arranged right, and was probably instinctual. Steph tried to think of it as the equivalent of brushing down his shirt or trying to flatten his hair, but he knew the obvious parallel was to a cat or a bird preening. They were both anxious grooming behaviors, he knew.

He supposed he was glad that he wasn't licking himself. This was just depressing. Still - still, it had to be worse for Garrett. He had to focus on finding him.

Something caught his attention and he froze in place, twisted sideways with his fingers buried in fur, trying to tell what it was. It was the energy-sense, of course. Now that he'd had some time and all, he knew the sense really wasn't like hearing violins or feeling heat. Steph had interpreted it like that at first, but it was more complicated. He couldn't help but think of how he'd visited a lab partner's blog – had it really been less than a week ago? – and it was full of reviews of things from some company called "Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs", describing one of their products as having coolness and roundness and resonance and shadows, throbbing base notes, and something feral and dangerous lurking beneath. And then she'd told him that these were all ''perfumes'', and she ''had'' to describe them like that, since the right words just didn't exist.

He understood that a lot better now. Energy-sense didn't really map to hearing or touch or anything else, but the words didn't exist to describe it.

What he'd sensed... He hadn't gotten a handle on the energy-sense at the time, but he recognized this particular flavor, getting more distinct by the second, even accounting for the crowd, which was larger than he’d thought. Sort of bitter-salt. Steph strained, feeling his antenna uncoil slightly, until he sensed the notes. There was an entire orchestra's worth playing out there, distinct from the paler notes scattered all throughout the crowd. He knew this one.

He waited a bit longer to make sure. The person was some distance away and there were all these other people in the way, he could barely hear it, but Steph's ears were huge, and he thought he'd recognize that particular amplified breathing, and that sort of hitch between inhale and exhale, anywhere.

''Hey! Over here!'' Steph shouted, or as close as he could to shouting without a larynx.

The woman who looked like Leia exhaled sharply, her face going absolutely blank and still. "Fantastic," she said darkly, lowering her hand away from her mouth. Several people nearby were muttering unhappily.

Steph was rather taken aback. ''What is it? What's wrong?''

For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to respond. "I hate him," she said at last, biting the words out. "I know that's not right, it's more complicated than that, but I can't forgive him. Not that easily." Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she turned to face someone in the crowd, which seemed downright agitated.

The people, packed together though they were, had let Leia pass unimpeded. For the man who looked like Darth Vader in white, they parted. There was an entire bubble of space around him and the two storm troopers following him.

He had... he had a presence of his own, a sense of composure a little like Leia's. Different, though. Steph couldn't really put a finger on it - whatever senses or mental processes got used to detect how people carried themselves, they weren't as immediate as his energy-sense, which was... he'd been moving away from perceiving it as sound, but there was ''percussion'' here. Drums - several kinds - and cymbals, underneath the rest of it. He pushed that sense away, trying not to get distracted.

Steph wasn't terribly good at gauging distances, especially now that he was the size of a housecat, but even so, the space around the white Vader and his storm troopers seemed a little excessive. Belatedly he smelled something burning.

Last time he'd somehow managed to miss noticing the other's cape. It was massive, seeming to be in mid-billow even when he was still. On the right side, though, it was tattered pretty badly. That was when Steph sensed discordant notes and saw that most of the man's right arm was missing. Whatever had happened, fat blue sparks were falling from it at irregular intervals, sometimes dying before they hit the carpet, sometimes making it smoke until it died or someone stamped it out. That had to be the burning smell.

Without preamble, the woman who looked like Leia said, "Four beings have come to us since you arrived, and you're interested in this one. Why?" Her voice was flat, accusatory.

For his part, the white Vader spoke carefully and with a lot of deliberation, saying, "I encountered a Hoojib before taking leave of my squadron, Leia Organa Solo, and was curious to know if the one you spoke of was the same. Now I see that he is." Steph couldn't read any inflection beyond caution in his voice.

"Hoojibs don't look like that." They were talking about him, but Steph felt like he was listening in on a private conversation. He couldn't be the only one - every eye in the crowd was on the two, he couldn't hear anyone else talking in the immediate vicinity - but he was starting to feel uncomfortable.

"It doesn't matter." The Vader hesitated before telling her, "Think of it as an alternate universe issue."

"Like you, then," she said. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest. Steph looked away, at the stormtroopers. They were big, of course, like everyone else.

"Exactly. You should return to the committee; they need another diplomat. I can take this from here." Maybe if he braced his feet and sat up on his haunches he'd be level with their knees. But he wouldn’t do that. He’d fallen off his back feet once already, stretching up to claw at a door handle.

The farther storm trooper had something dark spattered and smeared on his armor, beading like a liquid. Paint? Oil? Blood? "What are you planning to do, then?"

"I spoke before about contacting the Five-Oh-First. Now may be the best time; we might cut down two problems in one stroke."

Leia was silent for long enough that Steph stopped studying the armor to glance back up at her. Her face was still unreadable, at least to him. "Really? Now?"

"Now. If a peace is not established immediately, we will be at odds in the very near future. It will be difficult enough now, because of Tampa Bay Squadron. Organa, none of this is going away, as much as anyone might wish it. I believe I am the best hope for this."

"I've guessed as much. But I don't trust you to do anything alone. We're sending someone with you."

"Good. I trust that I do not need to tell you

[Characters continue to be stubborn but finally do what I want]

Steph looked up at the damage. Oddly enough, there was no charring on the white cloth or armor. They were torn and pitted in places, but not discolored. ''You know that you look terrible, right?''

"I am aware of that, yes. But I've fought in worse conditions. During the second Yevetha incursion-" He stopped himself, paused, and in a slightly different tone said, "Never mind. At any rate, this is nothing. My - Organa said that you were looking for a walker."

Steph told him, trying not to get excited enough to babble, about coming back to find Garrett gone, doubling back to explain that he'd found the walker earlier and left to look for help. Then he had to confirm that by Garrett, yes, he did mean the AT-AT. And his own name was Steph. Steph Midder.

The Vader paused, then told him, "There are a great many names I could go by, but I believe I will stay with my designation. It is Ess Ell One Nine Eight Four. If you don't want to reference Orwell, call me Eightyfour," he said with just a faint trace of amusement.

''Orwell? Oh, right.'' Nineteen Eighty Four. Designation? What did that mean? Should he ask?

"Midder. Walk with me." Not waiting any longer, he swept past Steph, away from the Rebel crowd. The two storm troopers followed a few steps behind. Taken a bit by surprise, Steph had to scramble to catch up. The man on the perimeter visibly flinched as they passed. There were people around out here, milling aimlessly through the grass, but they stayed clear.

For someone so big, SL-1984's footsteps were surprisingly quiet. Thanks no doubt to perspective he seemed to have incredibly long strides, but his pace was slow enough that Steph could keep up at a fast walk, close enough that if the other's cape hadn't been tattered on this side it would have brushed against him. High above, the broken prosthetic – specifically an exposed wire, part of the broken prosthetic - sparked, sending pleasant tingles and an intense but not unpleasant bitter-salt sense down Steph's antenna into his skull.

"We are being shadowed. Organa's doing, I am sure of it."

Steph started to twist around to see, but stopped trying as he realized that trying to see back over his shoulder when walking quickly on four legs was tricky, and he didn't want to make himself look like an idiot. Instead he focused on the energy-sense - past the complex bittersalt notes of SL-1984's entire body, past the paler, less distinct notes of the storm troopers, in the background... He had trouble focusing, but yes, there was the high steady note he'd started to associate with blasters, following at a distance. He wasn't sure how far; close enough that he sensed it as a note, probably far enough to be discreet.

But that didn't make sense, did it? ''I thought she was just letting you go.''

SL-1984 inclined his helmet. "She was, yes. She knows that I will not charge off on my own. Well," he amended, "Not to do this. I will address any crises that I see the need to interfere in, and if I report to anyone beforehand it will be as a courtesy, nothing more. But I have agreed to her terms, and will not go to the Five-Oh-First without an escort. The one you met may not have set this watcher - there is more than one Organa."

''So you've been dealing with that all day, huh?''

"All day? Not quite." SL-1984 said something else about Organa and youth, but his arm sparked several times as he moved the stump, calling Steph's attention up to the notes.

They didn't really stay constant, not like the notes Steph sensed in blasters or the storm trooper armor. Instead his notes rose and fell and wove together, horns and bowed instruments sometimes competing, sometimes playing as one, sometimes silencing for different instruments, always with the percussion steady in the background, always coming back and repeating this one sequence of specific notes. Snare drums keeping a constant pace underneath it all.

Steph shook himself violently, re-coiling his antenna, in time to pay attention again. "But these are not your issues."

Notes preceded and shadowed SL-1984’s voice as he told Steph, "The Rebel Legion’s intelligence is not well established as of yet. They have among them too many strong-willed leaders used to too-high positions, and they have had little time to adjust. Even now they are working out a hierarchy, and this occupies the thoughts of nearly everyone there, and this leaves them vulnerable."

"I would prefer to avoid hostilities between the Five-Oh-First and the Rebel Legion; even if in one mode they are enemies, in the other they are knit together. What I am working up to proposing, Midder, is this. An Imperial all-terrain transport in perfect miniature, such as you have described, ''has'' been sighted, and I could provide to you the locations and times of these sightings. But enough time has passed that I doubt you will find your Garrett."

There was something hypnotic about his voice, or possibly about the complexity and strength of the notes, and Steph had to force himself again and again to pay attention.

"The Five-Oh-First has resources and is organized, Midder. Join me, and I will see to it that some degree of those resources and that organization is assigned to your cause. This will help mine as well, and we may both benefit." There was something familiar about how he said that.

''You're, uh..." Steph hesitated a moment more, then had to say it. "You're not going to cut something off if I say no, are you?''

"What?" The other stared for a moment, still walking at a slow and deliberate pace, then laughed. It went on for slightly too long, long enough that Steph wondered if he or the stormtroopers were supposed to join in. "No, no. I haven't been that kind of person for decades. Should you refuse, I will tell you what the Rebel Legion knows and allow you to leave. You will have a better chance working with me, though. Some time has passed and he has surely not kept still. Consider it."

SL-1984 fell silent. Steph weighed whether or not this would waste time, but this wasn't really a hard decision. He'd had enough running around underfoot, and SL-1984, though he was a little creepy, had saved his life once already. Wherever he was, Garrett could wait just a bit longer, couldn't he? Steph felt vaguely guilty about this, but... surely... argh, the sparks were distracting him. They were dying as they fell, each vanishing in a bittersalt note before it could hit him. Well, he had a moment. He could use it to focus a little on the source of the sparks.

Energy-sense was sort of more intimate than hearing, but even with the sense of almost tasting bitterness and salt, the easiest analogies were still music-related. Steph could clearly imagine the members of a massive orchestra playing with furious attention, with a conductor at their center gesturing strongly. Some of them, mostly close together but scattered through the ensemble, had broken instruments which they still tried to play, to poor effect, and there were a lot of empty seats. Maybe – he supposed it was just the opposite of that mental image; energy or music powering the mechanisms or musicians and their instruments. It just so happened that they worked very closely together and responded to one another, so that as Steph spent longer and longer considering it, it seemed more and more to have a melody.

A familiar melody, at that. Almost… surely not, but… the Imperial March?

Couldn’t be. It was slower, for one, not so martial or ''march'' like, different concentrations of instruments. If he kept with the music analogy, it was a complicated song, with layers of harmony, beats and counterbeats, even some vocals, all blending together. There were still snares in the background, though they were mostly drowned out. It was quite a different song. But that basic tune, those nine notes... Garrett had had John Williams music looping for the past week, and the Imperial March showed up a lot in different ways... it was a leitmotif, wasn't it? Steph found himself wishing he hadn't forgotten practically everything about classical music.

And it seemed to be tapering off, anyway, as if the members of the orchestra were tiring and putting their instruments down.

Steph realized that he had slowed to a creep to stay alongside SL-1984, who had begun moving stiffly with less and less surety. He had started favoring his closer leg, and even as Steph watched, he stopped walking altogether to fold in on himself like an old man, and clutch with his remaining arm at or just beneath his chest box, from this perspective it was hard to tell. The notes were fading out raggedly, and the fluttering of the snares wasn't obscured now, but even they were fading fast. Despite that, the salt-bitter was strong.

The storm troopers started towards him as the quality of his breathing changed entirely, becoming labored.

''What’s wrong?'' Steph asked, or rather tried to ask. It seemed like just as the thought was forming he was shoved back, by a pair of invisible but unyielding hands. They pushed faster than he could back up, at least this suddenly – the world seemed to tumble as he fell entirely off his feet and slid along the carpet, against the grain of his fur. Instinctively he flailed, trying to both regain his feet and claw at the hands, but despite the very solid pressure of them he connected with nothing but air. One hard, rounded fingertip making a dent in the long fur under his collarbones traced quickly upwards, not quite brushing against first his throat and then his hastily-closed eye, and stopped at the base of his antenna.

Steph froze in place. The pressure had lessened as it climbed and was feather-light by the time it stopped, but his antenna and especially the bulge in his head at its base were extremely sensitive. Earlier in the day he’d accidentally scratched it with a dewclaw, and it had been agonizing. The pushing hands and the fingertip vanished; he stopped sliding and tentatively picked himself back up, then shook himself off.

Before him, at a far enough distance that he didn't have to crick his neck to see their helmets, the spattered storm trooper went on guard, holding his weapon ready as if expecting an attack, while the other attended to SL-1984.

"Power cells are going dead. I'm losing systems," he said, his voice fainter and pained, getting more so with almost every word. After a moment he added, "I can't hear you. My comm is dead."

The closer storm trooper, the clean one, was visibly anxious. "My lord, if either of us can do anything, if you need to swap with ours-"

"No, no. This suit was not designed with conveniently accessible power cells. They are not supposed to die one after the other like this. Give me a moment." He leaned heavily on the closer trooper as his breathing changed again, becoming strained as well as labored. "Chain reaction. There's not enough left to trigger the auxiliaries. I can... aargh. That will take too long. I'll risk it."

Bracing himself, he pulled away from the closer storm trooper to stand on his own and said, "Six twenty-five, step back. Two-eight ninety seven, fire on me."

The closer one backed away; the farther one whipped around to face him. "Sir?!"

SL-1984’s voice was raspy and horrible as, word by word, he got out, “That was an order.”

There was no further delay; the spattered trooper raised his blaster rifle, and taking hardly an eyeblink to aim it he fired it directly at SL-1984. Steph saw the man’s arm snap around to intercept the red bolt during that pause. When it hit, the discharge was momentarily blinding. He sensed a rush of discordant notes rise and squawk and sort of transmute into a burst of wild fiddling, which settled rapidly into something that felt very, very bittersalt, all of this happening fast enough that he had to take a moment to sort it out.

SL-1984 was standing tall again, though there was now some charring in the palm of his hand and along his arm, tracing down to the edge of his chest box. His notes were strong and ordered again, but even as Steph felt them the sensation of a finger just barely resting on the base of his antenna returned.

“Don’t leech off of me,” SL-1984 said, and although his amplified voice sounded much the same as it had before, both solemn and vaguely amused, now there was a hint, just a hint, of menace behind it. Already the dramatic mark from the blaster was bleaching white, leaving almost a scar where the material had burned away.

Steph blanched. ''I didn't know!''

"Yes. I suppose that makes sense," the other rumbled after the slightest hesitation.

After another moment, he added, "I believe you. Be at ease; if I was angry, it would be at myself. I should have predicted this. You must learn control. You ''must''. Otherwise you could very well kill me. Troopers, stand down," he barked as the stormtroopers reacted, evidently not as deaf to the conversation as they seemed. Turning to them for a moment and using a somewhat quieter voice that Steph still heard clearly, he said, "If you truly want to follow me, you must learn to trust my judgment. Now, let me handle this."

"You could kill me," SL-1984 told Steph, in an almost casual tone. "You almost just did. Most of my body is cybernetic, and the little that is left is on life support and a variable mixture of chemicals. Drain the power from that, and even with the Force I can't sustain myself."

''Sorry,'' Steph said, wincing. Episode Three. Lava. An evil psychic samurai cyborg overlord with a bad temper.

"Technically it's my fault, not yours. If I had refrained from mentioning energy-eaters... well, done is done, and I can't let you wander around like this. No one else is here that could teach you, so it must be me. Very well."

''Well... if you can help me...'' It sounded like a waste of time he could have spent looking for Garrett, but wasn't this the least he could do after half killing someone? He was going to owe a lot of favors by the time the day was over, wasn't he.

SL-1984 locked his arm behind his back. "I need to establish a few things. Whether you can sense without draining. Your range. This won't take long."

==Escaping==

Fuel reserves were at ninety-three point seven nine four five oh. He wasn't burning it at the ideal rate; one of the filters wasn't quite right, so the mixture had some fine particulates which were affecting consumption. It didn't harm his performance too much, not for one mission, but the techs were definitely going to have to take a look at it when he was back in his berth.

He kept all four blasters hot. This was a big expenditure, but without a gunner sitting in one of the pilot chairs he was quite a bit slower, and the couple seconds between registering a threat and being able to fire might make a difference here, where everything was so fast. He'd had some trouble deciding to do that. Eventually he'd just stopped walking for a few minutes, which let power reroute until he could balance the pros and cons.

How long had he been walking? No one had set a timer, he didn't know. A few kilometers. He had no plan for getting out. Random directions all the way. There'd been a thing. Swinging cliff-gate. Door. No, two doors, side by side - double doors, that was it. They'd stopped him for a while, until he'd thought of shooting out the metal thing that kept them closed. After that they had swung open for him. He couldn't recall when that had been.

He was fairly certain that he'd gone in a few circles; he was continuously plotting new courses and had lost track of the old ones. There had been some more ambulating towers, and each time he'd seen one he'd stopped in his tracks to watch them, but they'd ignored him. Good. He was more effective on targets that didn't outmass him or move that damn fast.

Now, finally, it looked like he was getting somewhere! Ahead, at the far range of his vision, more things. Doors. Different surface, clear, yes, glass doors, he couldn't see through them yet but they ''were'' glass. Ground was still good, he didn't detect any major holes or anything that would hide treacherous ground, so he shifted the pace up to maximum, the ground-eating charge that he could only keep up for so long without risking damage.

''Dead end! Stop, stop!'' As he reached the doors he turned and pulled to the side, shedding momentum and not quite presenting his flank. Glass though they were, the doors were closed and all the nonvisual sensors tagged them as yet another unscaleable cliff. Coming to a stop, power rerouting smoothly with hardly a flicker in his vision, he thought that this place was absolutely riddled with these sheer cliffs. They didn't seem natural.

A moment later, and Garrett thought, of ''course'' they didn't seem natural. Good God. They were ''walls''. They kept the ceiling away from the floor, the outside away from the inside. What, had he forgotten somehow? How could he forget about ''walls''?

That was worrying. Still, he couldn't stop for that now. He had to get out. His side-views somehow couldn't see through the glass of the doors; they were just reflective, smooth planes, totally unnatural looking, and it took a few seconds to figure out that the sheets of thinner organic material were probably flyers that had been taped up at eye level - yeah, they were some distance above him, but he could read the writing on the closest one, a billboard-scaled proclamation about staying hydrated and bathing. By backing up and turning awkwardly, footpads thumping and ''chrt!''-ing loudly in his mind's ear, he could see out of his command viewport, and the glass was properly transparent.

Outside, while the nearest bits of paving looked like the kind of job that involved getting regional politicians to cut a ribbon at the end of a dedication ceremony before the thing could be used, everything he took as signs of scale - trees, people, cars - was distant. Within sight, yes, but the distance shrank them, and the sight of humanoids his size or larger seemed like a trick of his eyes or cameras or whatever, rather than the presence of towering fast monsters. For a strange moment of disconnect he could almost believe that the convention had simply moved outside and was going on just fine, maybe a little more disorganized by the move.

Then Garrett made himself look closer, and actually see the scaled-up people, what they looked like beyond not seeming like moving towers. What was unmistakeably a gout of fire shot into the air and fizzled out as the androgynous pretty-boy producing it was interrupted by something with a pair of gigantic bat wings, spreading them incredibly wide and flapping them with what looked like a tremendous gust of wind. To the side, an angry-looking cat furry bandaged a small boy in a whirlwind of linen strips, showing long, pointed teeth as he shouted or snarled at the bat-winged thing. ... Yeah. He was pretty sure most of that didn't happen in a convention that was going on just fine. Come to think of it, he didn't see any balding middle-aged men dressed like their favorite anime girls.

A lot more leggy women dressed as popular anime girls, though.

Garrett thought he had some idea about what had happened. Not how or why, of course. But it was pretty clear that he wasn't the only one.

Maybe it was just as well.

He wasn't breathing. No, of course he wasn't breathing. It was that tic again. Better ignore it.

He checked his fuel reserves. Ninety-three point five oh oh nine two. He was burning it just by standing here. Now Garrett thought he knew what that mystery console was, the one that he had to leave underpowered every time he moved. It was his frontal lobe, or something like that. His engine didn't produce enough power. It was optimized for walking and shooting, and powering the thinking console at the same time was more than the motor could handle. He guessed so, anyway. It would certainly explain why things had gotten so much simpler, and why he'd forgotten about walls. Dismaying thought. He got stupid every time he moved; he might literally be unable to walk and think in abstract concepts at the same time. Or - well, fine, he was fairly sure he could walk and think at least somewhat, but not while keeping his blasters primed.

But he'd paused to decide to heat up his blasters. It looked like whenever he stopped walking he got that console back. Maybe there weren't any ill effects to that. Maybe it only lasted until he had enough power to reroute. Was he stupider now than he'd been when he was lying on his side?

...Okay, that was an idiotic question, Garrett admitted to himself. No way to tell. It was better to just assume that he could trade walking or the ability to shoot first for the ability to think about things that weren't directly related to walking or shooting. He just couldn't have all three at once. Oh God, it was like the crossing-the-river puzzle, he just had to put the fox and the grain in the boat and leave the chicken back on the riverbank. Or something. Hopefully it wouldn't wander off and the boat wouldn't capsize. Because if he didn't think he could get whatever passed for his brain back, he wouldn't do anything at all, would he?

Very suddenly the emptiness hit him again, hard enough that he felt like something had peeled back his plating and bared both levels of his inner structure. He saw his insides, felt that yawning cold void and the irrational fear that always came when he thought about it. Sickening. Empty. Empty, and the plating around it utterly still, as only an inanimate object could be. It had never exactly gone away, he'd just managed not to think about it. Maybe not having thoughts wasn't so bad.

Garrett not-quite-shuddered. Standing up, that meant adjusting his legs enough to make his body rock slightly. He had the tic again.

Well, he wasn't going to get anywhere just standing here. Better get out now, before something got him.

Okay. The doors towered up above him, glass in metal frames that might be aluminum. Remembering when he'd first come in, he was pretty sure that they were pull doors, at least from the outside, and didn't have the kind of latch that needed a turning doorknob or handle. The latch was some kind of one-way deal to keep it from swinging all over the place. At the top of the frame there was some kind of... armature thing connecting frame and door. He'd majored in Engineering, not Architecture, but he thought that it kept the door from swinging out.

From inside, it was a push door. He really couldn't push, though. He wasn't built for that, and he'd probably break something trying. That meant trying to shoot it open and hoping that it wasn't balanced. The armature looked easier.

It was a little too high up to reach with his heavies, not without backing up, so Garrett trained his medium repeating blasters at the metal and fired, bracing against the recoil. He'd kept them hot, so there was no moment of charging.

The sound, muted though it was, wasn't anything like earlier, when he'd fired into a wall to see if he could hear anything. When the smoke or vapor or whatever cleared - yes, a good bit of the armature was gone, and some of the doorjamb past it, and there was a blackened crater in the wall. A tiny flame guttered in the middle of it. The glass near that was in one piece, but browned.

He guessed his blasters were more powerful than he'd thought. It was a good thing he hadn't hit that thing that might have been Steph. Garrett suppressed another shudder at the thought.

The armature was gone, which left the latch. Feeling cautious, Garrett backed up stiffly and deliberately, fighting the urge to clutch his nonexistent stomach with limbs that didn't bend that way as he felt the tic. It was funny how he'd never appreciated being able to do things like ''back up'' without having to think about it. Better to just get on with it. Aim. Fire.

Okay, the latch was gone, but apparently the doors weren't weighted to swing in or out, because they weren't locked in place anymore but they also weren't opening on their own like the last set of doors. Damn!

Looking out through the glass, seeing the pale blue sky through his forward viewport, seeing the walls and ceiling and floor through all his other senses, Garrett fought a sudden wild surge of claustrophobia. This was less a building and more of a tomb, or maybe ''he'' was the tomb, or maybe - God, it didn't matter, he felt sick and hollow and everything inside with him seemed too close.

The tic again. He was beginning to hate that thing. Forget not having the necessary organs, he didn't feel like he'd had the wind knocked out of him or anything like that. He only felt like he had to breathe when the tic hit him and made him remember that he wasn't doing it. It wasn't a good feeling.

Garrett deliberately focused on his interior, trying to ignore the surge of revulsion at all that empty space inside. He had life support systems built around the void, though of course they were for his crew, not him. Some of those were devoted to atmosphere - he had some kind of air recycling unit, but since the relevant sensors reported that the external air was just fine, air was just being sucked into intake scoops and filtered. Those motors, the fans they ran that circulated air around, they were important. He couldn't control them, but they were important. They'd have to do.

It wasn't like breathing could possibly be as good as the tic kept reminding him, he told himself. No one would ever get anything done.

Driven air, filtered and cooled and dehumidified and constantly monitored by the housekeeping console, blew gently through the void. It wasn't tidal at all, but it was moving air, and he let himself imagine that he was taking a deep breath.

Right. Right. There was a kickback every time he fired, and that probably implied that blaster bolts had kinetic energy. This was not how lasers worked. That didn't matter. This would either work or it wouldn't.

''I am not going to be trapped here!'' This time he used his heavies in linked-fire mode. Door on the right, doorframe in the lower left corner. Aim. Fire. The recoil, stronger with his heavies, made his ''flexible armored tunnel'' compress momentarily as his command center jerked back. The bulk of the door had moved a little. This was working! Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Repeat as necessary - stop!

The door opened enough that the wind caught and pushed at it. He wasted no time in setting a course through the opening while nervously watching the doorjam. Most of the way through, the wind must have faltered and the door must have been weighted, because it swung on him. It hit hard enough that he felt the impact through his hull, and although it was jarring and loud and he was forced to very consciously shuffle sideways to keep his balance, there was no pain. Just the feeling that pain should have been there.

But he barely noticed that. It was - God, the world was bright. He reached the point he'd set and stopped. The world was bright. He couldn't see. Gah! This didn't hurt, not quite, and it didn't exactly feel like heat, but it was very unpleasant, it was- God, too bright! Everything was hot light, he couldn't see anything, he was blind! This didn't make sense, it had been fine through the window!

Part of him remembered moving his roommate's plants outside on a sunny, nearly cloudless day, he couldn't remember why, and how the plants had suffered for that. His roommate - oh, God, he couldn't remember his name! Vernon? Jacob? MacKenzie? He was in interior design or cellular biology or something and happened to be utterly forgettable - had told him very patiently that it didn't matter that they'd been tropical plants, there had still been too much light; the dorm room with the lights on was anywhere from fifty to maybe four hundred lux, if the windows were open on a bright day. Direct sunlight on a day like that was somewhere between thirty and one hundred thirty ''thousand'' lux, and the plants had effectively been sunburned. Vernon or Jacob or whatever his name was had gone on to say that direct sunlight was incredibly, exponentially more powerful than indoor lighting, it was just that human eyes adjusted so well that people barely noticed, part of Garrett remembered.

The rest of him was locked in place, frozen, trying not to panic, trying to will the brightness to fade. He wasn't blind, not ''quite', he could sort of sense where the sun was, like it was actively hating him, like his vision was a sense of touch. And his underside, he could vaguely make out his legs and his shadow. But he couldn't see, even when he reluctantly switched to the too-dark internal cams, everything was brightness that felt suspiciously like pain, he couldn't stare out at any of it, he had a ''very'' strong compulsion to tear up defensively, screw his eyes shut, shade them, but ''he couldn't do that'', he couldn't even turn away, ''he didn't have eyes''.

Garrett's motor was working back up out of the near-subliminal hum, getting louder. Too bright! ''Too bright!'' He couldn't - God, too bright! His motor was running, he could move, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn't even go back because the door had shut, and he couldn't ''see''... ''Threat! Threat!''

He backed, sidled, tried to get his command section and his heavies into position, couldn't, it was too high up, aimed his medium repeating blasters, fired. Of course he didn't do any good, he was aiming at the goddamn ''sun'', but he fired anyway, and did it again.

This was useless, he was just burning power, how was his fuel - oh God, ninety two point eight two oh five one that couldn't be good, he was running his motor like he was moving at full tilt blasters blazing and he ''couldn't slow it down'', couldn't see, anything could be out here with him, couldn't move for risk of crashing, too bright, too hot ''threat threat threat'' - was this what going insane felt like?

He managed to make himself stop firing and finally picked up on the terrain sensors in his footpads. The surface was solid. It was stable! Too bright, yes, he couldn't see, yes, this was probably as close to pain as he was going to get, but ''the ground was firm'', damn it!

That helped a little, long enough that he realized that the terrain sensors could substitute for sight. Sort of. It was easier to focus on them without sight getting in the way. Garrett could pick up on sort of a vague outline of the raised hardened surface he was on - sidewalk, right - and where it met the less certain surfaces around it, which was probably the grass. He was still - God, this was insane, he couldn't ''see'', why couldn't he seem to adjust to this, it was just ''daylight'', it was agony, he couldn't stop the static popping in bursts over his intercom and didn't know what kind of vocalization that was supposed to be - but this was something. Like echolocation. Sort of.

It only extended out in an oval maybe, oh, seventy meters long - no, only a few times his body length and he wasn't huge, so it had to be smaller than that. He had to find some shade and he couldn't turn back around, he thought there'd been awnings over the door he'd come in through - hadn't there been? Had that been a different door? - but there weren't here, he had to get moving.

Trees, there'd been trees he'd seen from inside, the kind that got planted around parking lots to shade some of the cars, those had been the closest. He'd gotten partially turned around, but he was pretty sure they were this way, along the pavement. Garrett set course points and hoped.

Terrain-sensing, it turned out, could pick up on people. Sort of. And only if they were the monumentally-scaled ones here - no, no, he had to get it straight, they were probably normal size. He felt them - well, more properly, he felt their footsteps against the ground. The footsteps were shaped vaguely like feet, so some of them were sort of beanlike and others were disks or different shapes, as they hit the ground, some walking or running, some basically holding position. He hadn't given much thought to how much something that breathed shifted its weight when it was just standing in place, and he was a little startled at how bitter the thought was.

It seemed like there were more closer than farther away, which probably just meant that Garrett could sense the heavier things from farther away, and no doubt there were some holding too still for him to sense like this. He kept setting points and walking, he was trying to be calm, but this wasn't sight. God. Even assuming he got to shade, even assuming he was able to communicate somehow, so someone didn't whisk him away and dismantle him as a curiosity, he'd probably end up living in one of those trailers for the disabled and -

Not living. ''This wasn't living.'' Existing, then, until his fuel ran out. It would. He didn't know what was in his tank but he was pretty sure it wasn't something you could get on Earth, and there'd probably be scale issues. And he needed regular maintenance, though he knew nothing was going to be able to get at his engines without taking them apart. Otherwise, he'd... well, he wouldn't last too long without maintenance, he was already having mild engine trouble and it would only get worse. What then?

Maybe it was better not to -

Whoah! Footsteps, closer, ''really damned fast'', okay, unless they changed direction they'd just pass him by-

SCRAPING HIS HULL oh God what was it engines building to fever pitch SCRAPING THE SEAL OF HIS BOARDING HATCH prepping his heavies, heating heating hurry up he could HEAR IT nonononono STOP he fired his heavies without thinking and tried to bring a medium repeater in line but of course the ''thing'' was running now, too fast, where was it it was gone!

"KKKKSSSSHHHT! KKSSSSHHHHHHH," he staticked in alarm, only the static was much longer and had a terrified snarl in it, he was not sure if that was an attempt at cursing but damn it of ''course'' sensing footsteps wasn't the same as sight and he had no idea what the rest of the body was doing and if anything flew he wouldn't know about it at ''all'' he was blind he was deaf good Lord in Heaven there could be another one RIGHT NOW move move movemovemovemove''move''.

And he was walking as fast as he could, almost running, knowing he couldn't keep this up and all discretionary power was in everything ''but'' his not-a-brain but ''that didn't matter'' keep going go go go, SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - REACHED COURSEPOINT, CONTINUE TO NEXT, ''DODGE'' - SET NEW COURSEPOINT.

Later - it felt like much later - he remembered that the settings for the holocams had to be manually told to adjust to major changes in light. One of the pilots, whoever was serving as the gunner, usually hit that switch. He didn't have a gunner, and the horrible wrongness inherent in a phrase like that did not summon one up. He couldn't hit the switch, but he could turn it on, and he did.

Better. The blinding light on all sides tinted, then seemed to dial down and he could see again. Not even any bright afterimages, but then didn't you need retinas for those? He could see. Much better.

...He had a life-form analyzer as part of his sensor package, too. But he needed someone of commander rank to authorize its activation, so even if he'd remembered it back there, it wouldn't have helped.

Funny, something was different, but he couldn't get a reading on it. Maybe if he slowed down, free up more power to route to the smart console - No. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't slow down. He did not want to slow down.

Ahead there was an obstruction in his path, hanging across just above his mobile command center, where it would disastrously scrape the upper edge of his back if he just went under it. Trivial to destroy it. He did. Two heavy shots, two medium, and he cleared the gap with meters to spare, footpads pounding on the rubble. He shouldn't maintain this pace, it was potentially damaging, but that was fine. He didn't slow down.

What had changed - he was under open skies, not one sheer cliff in view. The surface was somewhat different - he'd noticed several surface changes, but glancingly, since it hadn't been important. It was some other material, dark gray, smoother and thinner and not as good a surface since it wasn't up to his weight. But that was fine.

No hyper-fast bipedal towers. Definitely fine.

Another obstruction, the same kind, this one a little smaller and level with his command viewport. He destroyed it, too, and two heavy shots seemed like overkill.

Underfoot, civilian groundcars on wheels, unarmored, brightly colored, swerved wildly to avoid him. He considered shooting them. He considered altering his course to kick at them or - yes, they were small enough to step on, at least some of them. He didn't. One thing to do this - it was a sin, yes, but he'd take that. Another thing, a worse thing, to take them with him.

Part of him twitched. Okay, if the giant towers were humans, what was with this? Bit by bit, he was able to register that ''this'' was a big road with several lanes, those were cars, those were trees, all at a scale of much smaller than him, which felt more natural. There was yet another obstruction ahead, and this time he recognized it. Freeway overpass. Even lower than the other two.

Huh. Well, he wasn't going to slow down to think about it. He was alone, empty, it didn't matter where he went as long as he didn't stop until the end. There was a moment when he was distracted by flying atmospheric craft, some loud enough to hear, but he didn't stop. He kept going. Full tilt, getting to each new course point at his highest speed.

He'd always loved getting caught up in a new idea, the way it took over his life, practically singing under his skin, as immediate as his heartbeat. Only now the heartbeat was gone, and in place of the singing was the jarring music of engines.

There was a kind of terrible joy in this. This was what he was good at, what he was built to do; why ''not'' take pride in it? Even if it ''was'' just destruction for no purpose, no cause, not even anyone telling him either to stop or keep going. He was good at pounding forwards and shooting whatever was in his way. That was all there was to it.

Fuel reserves were at eighty-nine point oh nine one two seven and going down. That was fine. He wasn't stopping, even with no crew and no purpose. Even with so little power going to it, the strange console had some current. He had autonomy. He wasn't stopping.

==Anj Outside==

Outside, it was chaos, pure and simple. Anj hadn’t been in the crowd when ''it'' happened. He’d seen people and creatures of all descriptions fighting to get outside while he’d been looking for a private place. By the time he’d picked up on the broadcast and left the bathroom, most of them had already gone – the halls had hardly been deserted, but the majority had already fled. He could hear them outside, a dull roar formed by thousands of throats. ''Not a happy crowd'', he decided. ''Better than a mob, though. I don't know what I'd do with one of those.''

As he approached the empty frame of a double door - it had once, apparently, held glass, but that was nowhere to be seen - Anj felt the warning tingle and heard what first sounded like another shrieking alarm. In response he sidestepped out of the way, and none too soon. Some kind of very large heronlike bird with pale gold-orange feathers skidded unsteadily around a corner, then powered past him in a lurching run. The moment its wings cleared the doorframe, it launched itself into the air. As it winged upwards and away the Red Guard realized that it was making a high, panicked call that sounded vaguely like screaming.

He glanced back at where the bird had come from and stilled himself. Nothing, not even the warning tingle that was his precognition. Maybe the bird had been fleeing something, maybe it hadn't, but any trouble was slow enough that if he kept moving it wasn't going to bother ''him.''

TR-1407 stepped outside and was struck by what he saw. People, creatures, and stranger things that defied categorization littered the landscape, rushing about, standing and sitting and reclining in a few cases. Some were alone, others in groups. There were some fighting or arguing with each other, others trying to subdue the wild ones, some hightailing it as if the Emperor’s finest were at their heels, some examining themselves frantically, some just sitting back with mouths open as if howling or screaming, though the Red Guard couldn’t pick out individual voices in the collective noise. Almost no one was close to the complex; most people that Anj saw were on the grass.

As he automatically went through a threat assessment, picking out specifics from all the bewildered bystanders, he marveled at the sheer number. He hadn’t thought the Orlando Convention Center could hold so many – yes, it had been crowded, and he hadn’t canvassed the entire place and seen for himself how big it was, but still. It was like a “Where’s Waldo” poster, writ large.

Maybe it wasn't just inside, he thought suddenly. Maybe it was ''everywhere'', and just more obvious here. If the image had become real - well, it had to be more than just the image, or he wouldn't have gotten taller. If little unarticulated thoughts, like ''a forcepike weighs seven kilograms'' and ''Imperials use the metric system for measurements'' had also carried over, what about others? What about the cheater's assumption that ''I will not be caught'', or the youth's that ''I am immortal''?

Still on the instruction frequency, the officer who had told TK-1407 where to go was tersely repeating those instructions to someone else who had reported. ''I need to stay focused. I can speculate later. Need to find my squadron before I do anything else.''

Some of the figures in the crowd looked like security forces – ''no, police, they're called police.'' Police, firefighters, paramedics, what looked like a SWAT team in black, some Animal Control officers, of all things - there were more than a few people that had probably been called in from all across the state, if not country. They clearly were supposed to try and control or at least contain this madness. Just as clearly, they were as confused and uncertain as anyone else, but trying their best to impose order in some form. Anj sympathized. This was not a job he envied.

It was weird – the outsiders looked and ''felt'' somehow a little different from all these others, and not just because ''they'' were all human. Like all of the changed, big and small, were larger-than-life in one way or another. Maybe he was imagining things.

Flickers on his peripherals made TR-1407 tilt his chin up. The sky, a lovely cloudless blue, was barely less crowded than the ground – far, far above something streaked up into the atmosphere, and hardly any closer small military-looking jet planes or fightercraft roared overhead in formation. Even closer there were news helicopters already, sharing airspace with winged things of all description and wingless humanoids who had no visible way of staying aloft.

The Red Guard saw bright costuming and at least one cape fluttering in the wind as fliers swerved around each other or hovered in place. Someone in red and blue tights streaked upwards abruptly at impossible speeds, within seconds ''catching up to the jets'' and paralleling their course, far enough away that the red cape was barely visible. Anj saw this and, incredulous, thought, ''Superheroes? Really?''

There was no denying what they looked like, no matter how improbable the thought was. Anj realized what he was thinking and grinned involuntarily. ''As if I’m perfectly reasonable in comparison. This is insane. So what? The 501st needs me. And reality doesn't care whether or not you believe it.''

With that reminder, he turned. ''Southwest blacktop? Must be that parking lot where we planned to meet. Ah… it’s midday or thereabouts, so by the sun’s position'' that'' way is west, which means south is...'' there. ''Not far.'' Doing his best not to attract any attention, the Red Guard started moving at a lope.

''I don’t know where the closest military outpost is,'' Anj realized. ''Still, with something like this we can probably expect troopships any minute now; orbital reinforcements – No, no,'' no! ''This is Earth! '' Earth! ''Not part of the Empire! There are no orbital reinforcements. No fleets. We might get some part of the Army here, but they don’t have the technology I’m expecting. Rockets, not turbolasers. Helicopters and jets, not troopships, not snubfighters.'' Why did that thought make him uncomfortable?

''I wouldn’t worry about him, even with a sword like that… Watch out for her, she’s dangerous… He’s fine for now, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to push him… she looks like she could do some serious damage, but somehow I don’t think she’ll be a problem… Better not go near that one. Looks like everyone else’s picked up on it too… Emperor’s bones, that thing is huge, but I don’t think it’s up to anything…'' There were a ''lot'' of people to assess, particularly on the run. It niggled at the Red Guard that he was only doing a cursory check of each, but seeing that his options were to ignore everyone, give only the briefest of inspections, or slow down to a crawl to inspect everyone...

''There!'' Anj's heart jumped in his chest. Inexplicably he felt an incredible sense of relief, strong enough that he was almost lightheaded.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the large knot of people standing together on the asphalt were just as confused and disorganized as anyone else. Quieter, perhaps, but still random. An outsider might believe that they had formed into a cluster at random, and that it was chance that explained why they almost all looked like Imperials, mostly troopers.

The outsider would be wrong. Anj's eyes flicked as an indicator sounded and saw that no fewer than ten Imperial frequencies were active. He didn't see anyone lined up in ranks, but training helped him to find the subtle signs that there was organization, purpose, ''order'' in the group, not just the amorphous mixing of the crowd. They were, indeed, bewildered and unsettled just like everyone in or out of the complex. An effort was being made to remedy that.

TR-1407's footsteps hastened. A stormtrooper with the battered armor and single orange pauldron that signified his rank as a sandtrooper squad leader stopped him with a gesture, then nodded. The Red Guard joined the growing mass.

It was startling to check IFF - Identify Friend/Foe - tags on a monitor and see so many designations. Some were familiar, others less so. There were several SL - Sith Lord - indicators scattered about, but Anj didn't see SL-1984, and this was worrying. Other Vaders, yes, and the Red Guard couldn't help boggling a little at the concept of more than one Lord Vader. But none in white, and none with the right designation. What would he have done, anyway?

''Right. I should report in. To whom, though?'' The mass was ''trying'' to order itself, but it had a good ways to go yet. Almost no one with a helmet was speaking "out loud" with their voice amplification units. With the amount of noise that the rest of the crowd was putting out, that was probably just as well. Instead the comm frequencies were abuzz with orders and counterorders, the beginnings of arguments, complaints and others chewing out the complainers. One channel had been set aside for those who had been separated from squadmates. It didn't help that this part of the parking lot was nowhere near clear. Not every space was filled, but there were enough cars and the like to force the group to encircle them.

Where was his squad? Anj scanned again, and again, and didn't find any of them. No. They had to be here. Despite himself he opened the "searching" channel. "Tampa Bay? Tampa Bay Squad, come in! Tampa Bay?"

This particular frequency was filled with similar requests. "Is there anyone else from Georgia Garrison? Please, Georgia Garrison?" "Pacific Outpost, all units report in. Pacific Outpost..." "Michigan Squad, we have two missing from Michigan Squad, please report." "Anyone from Bast Alpha Squad, come in. Did everyone get out okay?" Most of them were representing a particular squad, or garrison, or outpost, and were looking for missing friends. But he heard one or two who had been separated completely, like him. Some got answers; Anj overheard the starts of several reunions, each cutting off as the speakers switched channels. Others didn't.

"Tampa Bay! Come in Tampa Bay Squad!" It didn't make ''sense''. Anj was starting to sweat into the lining of his armor. Where could they be? He hadn't exactly been quick in getting here, he ''couldn't'' be the first from his squad! Where had they all gone? TR-1407 scanned IFF again as the last of his relief evaporated. It made no sense! The three other squadrons of Florida Garrison - Everglades, Makaze, Parjai - were there. There were forty-nine people in Tampa Bay Squadron - not all of them had come to Xanadu, and some might be a little slow in getting here, but he should have heard from ''someone''.

"Tampa Bay Squad? Please come in. Tampa Bay? Is anyone there? Anyone? Tampa Bay!" Anj forced himself to stop before he lost all control of his voice. He could hear someone else pleading, close to tears if not already crying - "Neon City Garrison, ''where are you?'' Please! Damien, Ray, Greg - ''where are you?''"

To his horror, Anj found his throat constricting in panic. Where were they? ''Where was his squad?'' He tried, squeezing his hands into fists and desperately telling himself that they were late, that's all, he tried to keep calm, but it had been a trying day already and he had no orders to follow and ''his squad was missing.'' That was the big thing, the worst thing. He'd lost them, he had failed his oath as a Red Guard and a soldier of the Empire. The feeling was strong enough to make his eyes water. Anj made sure to close his connection and all of his speakers so that none would hear when he lost it. The rest of the 501st had enough distractions.

Something pulled on his robe. Surprised, Anj looked down at the round-topped droid as it retracted its manipulator arm and crooned something wordless at him.

It was a moment for him to blink fiercely and swallow that lump in his throat, and he covered the delay by reactivating a speaker so that his voice could be heard. "Yeah. There is. I - I've lost my squad." The admission almost stuck on the way out. "I don't know where ''any'' of them are."

The droid, an R2-series astromech with highlights in ''pink'', of all colors, whistled and cooed sympathetically.

"Well, no. Not a word. I have no idea where they are." It seemed like the tightness was easing off, becoming less immediate. He welcomed the distraction. "We got separated a while back, and I haven't seen or heard from any of them since. And it's not like we have our own personal frequency, either - it wasn't like we'd have had any use for it." As he realized what he'd just said, Anj smiled humorlessly into his helmet. Of ''course'' there wouldn't have been a use! It had been a game, or something close!

The R2 beeped, imperious. Its single black photoreceptor was steady. Just like that, things were in perspective. Anj might have laughed, if he hadn't still felt so uneasy.

"That's true. My squad is tough. I'm sure they're fine - it's just, they aren't ''here,'' and I don't know how my friends are. I haven't seen them since all ''this'' started, and I'm worried." This was true, and he knew that they had to have run into trouble, or he wouldn't be by himself like this. But - they were tough, and they were smart. If they needed help they would call for it, and they would make it through.

And if they didn't, well... For a moment he had trouble drawing breath. It was a ''terrible'' thought, and sickening enough that he tasted bile and felt his heart pounding in his throat. ''May the Force help their murderers, because nothing less will stop me,'' he swore, meaning every word. Terrible thought. '' Terrible'' thought.

A sharp whistle brought his attention back down to the droid, who chattered up at him. He had to make an effort to look in control and stable for it. He was sure he knew who and what it was. If it ''was'' R2-KT - well, virtually everyone in Star Wars fandom knew that story. In comparison, he had no grounds for complaint.

"I'll be fine. I'm a Red Guard - I work best alone or with only a few people, and it's not like I'm really by myself - I'm surrounded by the 501st." And they were his Legion, the closest to the Empire that he was ever likely to find. How could he despair? "Thanks."

With a final, cheery whistle, the pink R2 swiveled and trundled away. It had some kind of a logo banner, pink on white, on its back, but it slipped out of sight between two troopers and a robed man before he could read it. Less than a minute later, the single terrified member of Neon City Garrison got off the comm.

Anj felt better now. Still a little shaken, but he was functional, and that was what mattered. This still begged the question - ''now'' what? The Red Guard went after the first fresh distraction that presented itself.

There was a flurry of activity at the edges of the gathering. TR-1407 wasn't exactly short, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the helmets of the people around him. Still, he got a flash of someone else in flowing scarlet and something large, yellow, and moving. The Red Guard looked to his nearest neighbor and boosted the output to his speakers, realizing ''how'' he did it only after it was done.

"Do you know what that's about?" The woman in the form-fitting jumpsuit and the hoodless brown cape turned towards him.

She was - well, she was stunning, and Anj found himself glad that his helmet hid his gaze. She had an alertness about her, like she was aware of everything that was going on around her at all times. He couldn't tell what her position was - probably some kind of agent, by the lower-leg guards and nonstandard firearms. The woman had a striking sort of confidence, almost an aura of "I know what I'm doing and I'm proud to be doing it".

It didn't hurt that she really was pretty - her features were too sharp and strong for conventional beauty, but attractive. Red hair, intense green eyes, and under the jumpsuit she was fit and muscular with good shoulders, a far cry from the handful of sultry pin-up style women that Anj had glimpsed before. He hadn't found ''them'' particularly attractive, but -

Anj saw the lightsaber and the IFF-provided designation at roughly the same time. SL-3268, in a clear voice, answered, "There's a car, I'm guessing a Camaro, without a driver that's started moving erratically and making abortive charges at us. One of your fellow Guards is trying to dissuade it. I don't think there'll be a problem." Just as he was hoping she hadn't noticed, the Mara Jade added with a quirk of her lips, "And I'm flattered, but taken."

''She's one of the Emperor's Hands. I'm lucky that she hasn't taken offense.'' That realization effectively took any desire, killed it, and mangled it beyond any recognition. Anj was glad of the helmet hiding his face, and vaguely wished that he could find a hole in the ground in which to crawl into and die. Even with the cooling systems in his armor, he knew he was blushing furiously, hard enough that he felt sunburned. ''Next time, check IFF first.'' He didn't bother wondering how she'd known. Force Sensitivity and all that.

Probably just as well. Anj had no idea what he'd have done. He was on duty anyway; even with nothing immediate going on it would be un-Imperial to get too distracted. Fortunately not every woman was striking in quite that way - prettier, yes, often curvier and not immediately off-limits, but markedly less impressive. Picturing someone like the Mara Jade alongside, say, Scott, was... interesting. But of course there was also the fact that less than an hour ago ''he had been female'' - how, ''how'' could that have slipped his mind? - and feeling attracted to people while male was a tangle he ''really'' didn't want to unravel just yet.

3268's auburn head came up. Anj felt the warning tingle in the instant before a commanding voice came on all frequencies. The IFF code marked the speaker as TK-0210. '''Our Beloved Founder', Albin Johnson,'' Anj realized. ''Well well. There wouldn't be a 501st without him. I'd forgotten that he showed up. His R2 is here, so of course he's here too.''

"Something new has come up. Would everyone please listen to the situation." It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt that it was an order. Within seconds all voice traffic had stopped. The rest of the crowd carried on with the panicking, but here everyone listened as the founder explained an exchange that someone had heard taking place on a frequency that was decidedly not Imperial.

Specifically, it was one of the radio frequencies used by the United States military. The Founder didn't mention exactly what frequency it was, or when anyone had started listening in on it. What had been overheard was a report on something going off Xanadu grounds and following the highway. Something very large. One of the ones reporting said it was "like something out of Star Wars". The physical description exactly matched that of an Imperial Walker, specifically an All Terrain Armored Transport. Or, as the Rebellion and most civilians in the Galaxy called it, an AT-AT.

''This is a ''very'' sudden development.'' If he'd expected anything, TR-1407 would have thought that the Founder would have just summarized what had just happened, tendered some kind of advice or orders. He hadn't expected a fresh problem, particularly one like ''this''.

The gathering was silent barely long enough for the Founder's report to sink in before a member stated that there had ''not'' been a Walker exhibit, followed by other testimonies that confirmed that wherever this had come from, it wasn't 501st. Exactly what had been happening before all ''this'' was muddled, but people were quite adamant that they knew nothing.

Talking into a handheld comm unit so that everyone could hear her, 3268 had another opinion. "Why would it matter whether or not this thing is one of ours? Imperial is Imperial. The question is, what do we do about it? I think it's reasonable to assume that some rogue element has taken control of an assault walker for an unknown reason." Standing fairly close to Anj as she was, he heard the odd duality of the Mara Jade's voice coming simultaneously through his audio pickups and helmet comm.

It would be unacceptable for ''anyone'' - the automatic assumption seemed to be Rebels, smugglers, or saboteurs, although nobody really expected that to be true - to get away with stealing Imperial property, particularly something as gigantic and dangerous as an assault walker, the common consensus was. The damage one could do, particularly in an urban area, was tremendous, even on a civilized planet in the Empire, where units could quickly be dispatched to take it down. Here on Earth, on a day like today...

Anj heard someone unfamiliar speak out. "There was a young man earlier, some sort of student of engineering - I overheard his name, Gary or Garth or something - who wore a walker costume. He might be driving it." Several others remarked with surprise that they remembered something of the sort.

With confidence, Anj added, "It's difficult to pilot a walker without a copilot, but possible. Normally one drives, the other shoots. The automated systems would help compensate."

"He had a friend with him. It's entirely reasonable to think that two pilots can manage without a commander." If it occurred to anyone that maybe this student ''hadn't'' become a pilot, they kept silent.

A plan didn't actually get proposed until after the Founder made another report, one possibly even more alarming than the last. Tanks and military choppers were being dispatched to intercept the rogue walker before it could reach the next city - and if the cryptic military lingo had been translated properly, somewhere near Washington a jet loaded with missiles had just taken off.

Suddenly the entire gathering was moving, setting up a course of action, proposing and vetoing various aspects to the plan. There would have to be a pursuit, it was decided almost instantly. They needed a small number of autonomous agents. Agents who could subdue anyone within the walker without damaging it, agents who could ''control'' the walker, and someone with enough diplomatic acumen to defuse the situation once it was under control. Preferably agents would have at least some proficiency in at least two of the three. Every member of the team would also need to be able to use grappling hooks and high-tension wires to get up there. It would also help to have the tools all stormtroopers carried, including shaped charges, binders, and a Proper Resonator.

The gathering was rapidly polled, and all those with the right skill set were chosen, then evaluated and kept or not. Unsurprisingly, there were no Imperial Army Pilots who could be identified as such by their armor - AT-AT pilot uniforms were far from popular. No one had worn his or hers to Xanadu. However, a number, Anj included, had made the costumes - and somehow that translated into experience in the cockpit.

Anj was questioned and admitted that he'd never earned the license, and was met with a thinly-disguised quiz in the form of a barrage of questions from two others. He passed. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Red Guard and both willing to work with others and well able to subdue someone with minimal damage, meant that he was on the team.

Some others at least as qualified as him weren't, largely because they had trouble cooperating. There had been many Emperor's Hands, some of them Mara Jades, others not, in the initial pickings, but the fact that most of them seemed to strongly resent each other meant that only three were kept. The final selection consisted of eight individuals. These were the Hands, SL-3268 among them, Anj and another two Red Guards, a clonetrooper sergeant, and a single sandtrooper who really seemed to believe that he was Davin Felth, the trooper who had the line "Look, sir, droids" in ''A New Hope''.

At the same time the other half of the pursuit was being organized. Speederbikes were mentioned, but only two, both from a display, could actually be accounted for, and at any rate they might not have done much good. They were incredibly fast and agile, but with only two, they couldn't carry much. Average cars or trucks were considered and rejected in the same breath. It would be too hard to get an operative out of the vehicle and up into the walker, not to mention the fact that a car was a nice big target, if what's-his-name proved both unreasonable and able to use the walker's weaponry and crushing feet. This left motorcycles, a healthy selection of which were at hand. They would have to do.

More polling; TR-1407 was only peripherally aware of it, but at the end of it seven scout troopers and one Mandalorian soldier were chosen to do the driving. From the first report to the final team, only a few minutes of whirlwind activity had passed. The 501st, while not exactly up to optimal yet, was far more organized than it appeared.

The last problem was actually getting the bikes, taken from all across the lot, to ''work''. Five or fewer of them belonged to people within the gathering - and ''none'' of them had the keys on them. Seized by a wild idea, Anj stepped up during the discussion.

"We don't ''need'' keys," he said, coming to the closest one and uncompressing his forcepike. He had no idea what kind of motorcycle this was. He'd never had anything to do with the things. Still, he could find the ignition easily. Lining it and the lethal tip of his weapon up, the Red Guard thumbed a setting and delicately maneuvered the weapon. The thin metal around the keyslot tore and twisted, and the engine coughed to life.

Just as Anj was enjoying a swell of triumph the fickle machine died miserably, exhaust pipe emitting a stream of thick, oily smoke that spread in a cloud around ankle-height. An inhuman blue-skinned officer in white covered his nose as if offended by the fumes, which weren't evident to anyone with a proper, air-filtering helmet.

No one said anything on the comm channels for a long moment. "Okay," he said lamely, again glad of the helmet that hid his face. "I guess we ''do'' need keys. Today of all days, you'd think this would work." It was a mercy that the attention of the gathering shifted off of him then. He hadn't sensed much in the way of condemnation or scorn, and even amusement had been quiet. It was still embarrassing.

The alien officer in white - a Grand Admiral, apparently - ended up getting several technically-proficient people to hotwire the motorcycles. These included one of the Vaders in the gathering, a man seething with so much barely-suppressed rage and malevolent Force energy that Anj caught his breath and adopted a rigid posture. He was fairly frightening, seemingly hanging on to rationality by the thinnest of margins. The Red Guard fervently hoped that his friend hadn't ended up like ''that''. But whatever else could be said about SL-2128, he worked quickly and well, finishing in time to take over from an officer whose work was slower.

Something else came up; Anj picked up only a few of the details, but a squad that hadn't gotten out reported in to say that they were under attack by unfamiliar hostiles. Once again plans were formed and battered about. They had little to do with the walker interception team. It gave him a pang to think that he might be riding away from his squad, if they were in danger, but duty was duty. TR-1407 soon found himself mounted up behind a scout, roaring away on one of the motorcycles.

The locals barely noticed them go by. They had more than enough trouble as it was - nevertheless, Anj felt a slight pang of mixed contempt and sympathy. He let it pass. They could only do their best. The Five Hundred and First was here for when it wasn't enough.

The Founder sent his best wishes after them on an open frequency. His confidence audibly faltered a little. Anj thought he knew at least part of why. "Good Luck" wasn't right, and they were servants of the Empire, so "May the Force Be With You" might not be good either. Even so, "Emperor's Blessings" was just wrong - and, somehow, so was "The Empire will ''always'' strike back", the belief that any setbacks would be met with a more powerful counterattack. In the end, he settled for, "We're counting on you. You won't let us down."

==Camera guy==

[I fangirl over Tank Man. I really do. I love that we don't know who he was, if he's alive or dead, what he said to the driver of the lead tank - everything. ''How'' could he and the rest of the country have failed? The picture gives me chills. I'd link to it in my bank if the inspiration it gives me wasn't of the "feel small, sit still and tremble in awe and existentialness" variety. So I figured I'd bring it up, since the chance of me working it into, well, ''anything'' else are pretty small.

[Did a little research here, but I have to say that the details pertaining to the helicopter and Doug's camera are probably all wrong. I worked with news cameras in high school and already I've forgotten what piece is called what. The Internet failed me - you'd think I was the only one to wonder who shoots traffic reports, with what, and how. :P]

In June of 1989 an American photographer named Jeff Widener crouched on the sixth-floor balcony of a hotel in Beijing. He was covering the infamous government crackdown on protesters, and only the day before, during the massacre, had been concussed and bloodied by a thrown brick. Widener worked at a range of roughly half a mile with a titanium camera featuring a 400-millimeter telephoto lens. Using borrowed film with the wrong f-stop setting, he covered a column of at least seventeen tanks headed for Tiananmen Square being blocked by one man, alone and unarmed, with a shopping bag in each hand.

Widener wasn't the only one to get pictures of this happening. But, purely by chance, his picture spread fastest. It's now one of the most famous photographs on Earth, seen everywhere except the nation where it was taken - where it happens to be banned. It is iconic in every way, and purely by chance. If Widener hadn't heard that soldiers on the ground were forcibly confiscating cameras, if he hadn't met the fellow Westerner living in that room on the sixth story, if that Westerner hadn't had compatible film available or had been unwilling to stuff that film into his underwear and pass angry Chinese soldiers to get it developed - another photographer's shot of "Tank Man", the "Unknown Rebel", would be the world-famous one. But Widener was in the right place, at the right time, in all the right circumstances.

Doug Maines was in the right place at the right time, and in his view the circumstances didn't look too bad either. Specifically, he was in a Eurocopter Ecureuil news chopper, cruising at two thousand feet and circling with nearly three-quarters of a mile between it and that ''thing''. The camera was a modified 24 frame KCK-40, and at any moment he could start broadcasting live to the network.

Normally he and the pilot shot and delivered traffic reports and overflew accident scenes. Today, not too long after finishing the morning rush's report, they'd been ordered into the air again and told to circle around the Orlando Convention Center to cover something that had come up there. As he adjusted the focus, Doug mused that he hadn't thought much of it - last spring, for instance, a school had been evacuated due to a gas leak, and he had recorded and broadcast video of the students streaming out into the tennis courts.

But there'd been so much air traffic above the Convention Center that both Doug and his partner were wary. Every news station within range had sent someone over to cover it, whatever it was, and both of them knew what happened when helicopters collided in midair. They had spotted the thing heading away, and the chopper had changed course to follow it.

He'd studied for years at photography, cinematography, and the graphic arts, but if Doug had learned one thing it was that aiming high didn't always work out. He had become resigned to aiming his camera at reporters and traffic jams, something he'd never have settled for as an ambitious newbie daydreaming about fame and glory. He was no Widener.

Just as well - Doug didn't have the stomach for following revolutions. He felt a trace of amusement at the thought. ''Right place, right time, and no one's filming but me.'' He was recording now, but the network trusted him enough to let him decide for ''himself'' whether and when to broadcast live.

Something about it screamed ''tank'', clearly enough to make Doug think remember the university and Widener's shot of Tank Man. It was boxy and about as long as the largest legal semitrailer truck, maybe sixty feet in all, though much wider. But it had to be five times taller than any of them, mounted on four flat, jointed legs with round feet half the size of its strange, blocky head. The long legs and the head, and the red laser-things that sometimes shot out of that head, reminded Doug of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. Something about crushing Styrofoam cups in a commercial...

Three years of this job reminded him to check before and behind the tank thing. The highway was several lanes broad, which was probably all that saved oncoming cars from being crushed. Many had crashed into each other or run off the road as drivers gaped, and hardly any had actually passed it. The tank thing was fairly slow, no more than fifty miles an hour at most, and so heavy that it damaged the road, leaving a trail of massive craters and cracked, buckled asphalt in its wake, with a few crushed or burning wrecks scattered about and at least one demolished overpass. All of them had been oncoming traffic; right now nothing was going in the same direction as the walking tank.

Wait, that wasn't right. The distance made them tiny, but even without zooming in Doug saw a pack of motorcycles weaving around and breaking the speed limit, gaining quickly on the tank thing. They were going to get stepped on and ruin the shot, he was sure of it. He had to get an establishing moment before the action started, or it wouldn't look right.

Doug swallowed against his heartburn - no time to take an antacid pill now, he didn't want to miss it - and hit the button that would broadcast live. In a situation like this, he didn't have to report. He just had to film. Wide-angle shot first, to show how big the thing was, including a few wrecks to get a sense of the scale... he then zoomed in to catch little details like the rapid, ponderous motion of the legs and the toe flaps flexing against the ground. He very consciously kept his hands, and the camera, steady against the minor shuddering of the helicopter.

This was in time for the motorcycles to catch up, and he noticed that the riders weren't dressed in anything resembling normal biker gear. Heart pounding, Doug focused on them. He'd have thought ''publicity stunt'' if he'd seen people dressed like this anywhere else. All white and red.

Well, this was bound to be interesting.

[More stuff goes here.]
[No, really.]

==Rocket Trooper==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus3.jpg]]

TX-7255, "Barve" to his friends, saluted after a moment's hesitation. He'd been earnestly telling some groundpounder troops that the group was vulnerable from the air when he'd gotten the summons for an on-the-fly mission. He'd answered immediately - of course - but he hadn't expected to be briefed by the Lord Darth Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet.

...Sort of. Barve tended to focus on his jetpack. How to maintain it, fix it, how to fly it with increasingly intuitive controls, aerial tactics, maintaining and fixing his various weapons and practicing with them, tweaking the minor powered exoskeleton built into his armor, practice with different gravities and atmospheres, dabbling in repulsor packs. Combined with his love for comparing different models and modifying the ones he had, looking for perfection, he was never more than vaguely aware of any politicking.

Even so, he thought he'd have heard if the Supreme Commander decided to reverse his color scheme. The man was also missing most of one arm, and apparently he was a cyborg, because there were occasional blue sparks instead of bloodstains. Since the stump hadn't even been capped off, it had to have been removed recently, and probably in a fight. Barve hadn't heard anything concrete about action or details about where he'd been deployed. This fit in with everything else, really. Everyone here was so disorganized.

A good meter too far away to be at the Supreme Commander's feet was a small, furry alien with big ears and large, alert eyes. Barve split his attention between the two - helmet screens were useful for that - until he was told that he had to carry the alien through the air.

He was surprised enough to blurt, "My Hush-About was modded with elements from the Aratech Screamer." This meant a lot of things, but he knew from experience that only another rocket trooper understood or cared. Even snubfighter jockeys glazed over. "She's a powerful machine. Launch scorches anything that isn't armored, and fur is flammable. My lord." He wasn't supposed to contradict the Supreme Commander, was he? Damn. Well, it wasn't like he'd run into the protocol before.

"I see. One moment." The Dark Lord - light lord? This really didn't make any sense, ''why'' was he in white - turned to the groundpounders for a moment. Barve ignored what they were saying - he wasn't supposed to listen in, and if it was important, they'd tell him - and watched the alien glance from helmet to helmet as the curved antenna on its head quivered. He had to be careful around aliens. You never knew what they would do.

A ground trooper with the type of armor and white fabric oversuit that some of them wore to protect against cold took off his helmet, turned it upside down, and knelt. The alien climbed into the helmet and shifted about as the ground trooper tugged the white cloth on the helmet so that it stood rigid, making a sort of bucket with the alien at the bottom. The trooper stood, holding his helmet by the cloth. Only the alien's ears showed.

"We have a runaway AT-AT that was bearing [direction] before a team intercepted and stopped it. I need you to take Midder into it as quickly as - as quickly as is feasible. Get him there alive and conscious." This was the same thing he'd said before being distracted by the launch thing. "I don't know how well he tolerates flight, so you must determine your speed on your own. We will comm ahead and tell the intercept team to be ready. Do not engage hostiles. Do not get killed."

Weird mission. Still, Barve took the helmet from the trooper, locking his fingers in the stiff fabric. The little alien inside shifted its weight and stared up at him. Helmet and alien together were moderately heavy, but still lighter than his DN bolt-caster, still holstered.

A not-quite-voice said, ''Don't drop me. God, this is a bad idea. Please don't drop me''.

The ground trooper said, "Please don't drop him. I'll want my helmet back."

"Midder, keep control of your ability. The comm channel is running on an open frequency. You are not to fire on anything without clear provocation. I cannot stress that enough."

"Acknowledged." Not like he could even draw a weapon with his hands full.

The Supreme Commander hesitated, then nodded and told him, "Clear skies."

He knew the slang for "good journey?" Well, he knew the Supreme Commander was a damned impressive snubfighter pilot - that knowledge generally fell under politicking, but one of the memories recorded and passed down from his original had been a series of truly superior pilots, Lord Vader being at the top of the list - and snubbie pilots shared a bit of lingo with rocket troopers. ...Besides, now that he thought about it, 'clear skies' was probably the most obvious piece of flyboy slang ever.

Everyone had backed far enough away that even if he had a catastrophic failure and his jetpack exploded, none of them would die. He felt a little scorn at that kind of caution. Yes, jetpacks could explode at launch, ''if'' they weren't properly cared for, but Barve had been at this for five years. That was basically all his life - the Spaarti cylinder didn't count, acclimation had taken maybe two weeks, and he'd had eight months of jetpack training to build on the basic flash memories - and he'd had plenty of time to get in the habit. Not like natural-borns, with that baggage from growing up all haphazard.

Barve set his stance and brought up flight control, rapidly checking the systems. Everything was green, not that he ever expected otherwise. Take care of your gear, and it will take care of you, the saying went, and no one took better care of a jetpack than TX-7255. He braced the helmet against his chest and as an afterthought shifted his grip so that he pinched the fabric over the alien, covering it. Hopefully it wasn't flammable.

There was enough open space around him, but still, regulations said that if he wasn't taking off in a specifically cleared space or doing a touch-and-go, he had to give a verbal warning. Some rocket troopers used the short "Dusting off!" or the even shorter "Launching!", but Barve liked the traditional phrase, said in one way or another since the first soldiers to take to the air on their own.

"Clear the blast zone!" He tensed, leaped as high as the light exoskeleton built into his armor would take him, and kicked in the rockets.

The first few seconds were always uncertain, as the jets fought gravity and flared, close enough to the ground that they licked the armor on his legs and slagged the spot where he'd been standing. The not-voice protested weakly. But he took care of his jetpack, and she held him steady at the top of the jump. He let her kick in a little harder, and she dragged his heavy flesh and armor up in a tower of sound and fire.

He modulated the thrust when he judged himself high enough and triggered the maneuvering jets on the right side, spinning in a slow, complete circle to take in the world. This looked like one of those planets which couldn't collectively decide what it wanted to specialize in, so it went for city and wild stuff and farmland all at once. Those weren't as interesting as city worlds, at least not from a jetpack, but it was exponentially better than flying over ocean. At least it had a nice sky. He had his bearings now. Buildings, crowds, ground, roads, yep, atmospheric flyers, oh yes, and ''this'' way was North and ''this'' was South, good, and so his course was - that way.

Barve swung his legs and flipped over so his back was to the sky, working with his jetpack to find his balance in that second of freefall, and gave her the gun.

Immediately he was flying proper, losing a little altitude in a shallow dive and regaining it, then leveling off and holding steady. There were some other things in his airspace, but they ignored him, and he did the same. He loved flying fast, the landscape zipping by below him, wind shrieking against his armor and trying to tug things out of his hands, even the alternating sense that he was either weightless or something massive was pressing down on him. His jetpack was loud at her highest speed - since part of her was a Screamer, this was only to be expected - but of course he wasn't going at top speed, or anything all that close to it. He kept slow, almost too slow to fly. By the groaning of the not-voice, he probably didn't dare go any faster.

Pity, really. Even after all this time, even with the conditioning and the stuff they'd done to him in the Spaarti cylinder, his jetpack was fast and strong and agile enough to make him struggle to keep conscious, without vibrating him to pieces in the process. Some people didn't like tasking their g-tolerance; none of ''them'' had his genome. He loved flying. He couldn't imagine being a groundpounder.

Sometimes, though, he wondered what it would have been like if he'd been sorted into pilot training instead. TIEs might not be as agile, but they went so much faster, they could fly faster than the human eye could track - and with inertial compensators, they could ''do'' that, make changes in their flightpaths that would kill him uncompensated. If he hadn't been sorted into the rocket trooper corps, then he'd be flying in space, too, and going after bigger targets. His original had been a snubbie pilot. The flash-memories he'd recorded and passed down included one of the joy and pride that came with piloting. Barve didn't really like thinking about that. Done was done, and the Empire wasn't going to let anyone but a ''really'' prime natural-born get retrained. Besides, a ship would mean losing his jetpack. She was his baby.

Okay. Barve scanned the ground. This was probably the right road, and there was some suspiciously regular cracking on the surface ahead, but he didn't see anything yet. He'd been told to watch for footprints in the road and wrecked cars. ...He really should have asked what a car was. Was it the same thing as a groundcar, which he'd seen a lot of here, or something more obscure? It wouldn't be the first time he got tripped up by similar-sounding unrelated words.

The not-voice had kept a lot of quiet, wordlessly unhappy not-sounds, particularly when he gained or lost altitude suddenly. He felt safe in assuming that the not-voice belonged to the alien curled up in the helmet he was carrying, and they were a good sign that it hadn't lost consciousness. Should he talk to it? Why not. It might know. Okay, he'd been told that the groundpounder helmet was on the open frequency, right? This far from all the others, there weren't a lot in the way of transmissions. Barve lowered his comm output to about ten meters so he wouldn't spam the people back there or at his destination.

"You know Basic, right?"

There was a pause, and he wondered if the wind was too loud. There were sound mufflers in ''his'' helmet, and his audio pickups filtered out most irrelevant noise, but helmets tended not to work as well when they weren't connected to armor.

Finally he not-heard it. ''Uh... sort of. It's been a while. I think I've forgotten most of what I picked up. Why?''
The not-voice seemed surprised and a little queasy.

"Oh good. I think you speak it fine," Barve said, adding, "I understand Huttese, I ''sort'' of get Bocce, and I know a little Sy Bisti, but I don't know any other languages." Understanding so few was kind of embarrassing, but only Basic and Huttese had been flash-programmed and he never really made a focused effort to study languages, so he thought he was doing pretty well. "Though I guess you were talking earlier in Basic, so it wasn't a good question."

''Wait, what? ...Do we even mean the same B.A.S.I.C.? Because I thought you meant the programming language.''

Barve frowned under his helmet. "I meant Basic. Official language of the Empire. ''This'' language."

Another pause, this one rather long. Maybe the alien was addled. ''You know, usually people call it English.''

At the very least, the alien was confused. "No, the Empire calls it Basic. So did the Republic. So does the rest of the galaxy. Basic, Galactic Basic, Galactic Basic Standard... Basic."

''What? You actually think - no, don't antagonize the crazy guy with the jetpack. He could drop you. Then you'll never get there.'' That last part wasn't nearly as clear, and Barve suspected he wasn't supposed to not-hear it. But he could handle being considered crazy, even though he'd been growing in the Spaarti cylinder for a healthy two years and there was really very little chance of the madness getting him. After all, he'd seen someone in the depths of the madness, and it was probably worth being cautious, at least at first. Other batches might not be as stable as his.

"Alien, I need to know if 'car', in this case, means little groundbound vehicle or is an acronym for something."

''Maybe he ''does'' think he's - Yeah. It's the vehicle.'' Good, then he was headed in the right direction. There was more cracking on the road now too. The alien paused, then said, ''I'm Steph, by the way. Not 'alien'.''

"I'm TX-7255 from batch three," he said. Wait, natural-borns who weren't troopers didn't usually like going by designations. "Call me Barve."

''Barve?''

"It's a nickname. A barve is a clumsy six-legged meat animal. You only get the prime names like "Firebrand" if you're important." He couldn't enjoy a military flick without getting annoyed at that.

''Right. You don't have any other names?''

"Not that I've heard." Did he want the name of Barve's original? No, he'd surely ask if he did. "You're feeling okay, right? Are your eyes being pushed into your head?" He'd feel like such an idiot if Steph had some kind of delayed reaction to acceleration and passed out.

''A little. It was worse when we took off. Everything went sort of gray at the edges.''

"Yeah? That makes sense." He felt like he couldn't leave it at that, so he added, "Humans tend to tolerate horizontal axis g-forces a lot better than vertical ones. It has to do with how our spines are aligned with the axis and how our blood gets forced around. I don't know what you are, but I'd guess it works the same for you."

''Well, ''that's'' good to know. I'm a Hoojib, I guess.'' More indistinctly, Steph said, ''She said I looked all wrong, but Eighty-four told her it didn't matter.''

He was not supposed to listen in; if he overheard anyway, he was supposed to pretend otherwise. "Never heard of you. We're well within standard human tolerance, and I'll keep slow for you if I can, but if something comes up and I have to go evasive, you'll have some trouble. Should that happen, try straining your muscles and remember to breathe short, hard, and often. It could help."

''Thanks. I think. It had better not come to that.''

In places, the road was crossed by roads that passed above it. The ones he'd seen so far had been intact, but one up ahead, getting closer by the second, had been shot out, and the pattern of cracks that passed underneath it could reasonably be called footprints. Checking behind himself - the rearwards display was small and not meant for ground details, so he did this by pulling upright, spinning as he stalled, then correcting himself and falling back into flight position, a set of maneuvers that did not please Steph in the least - Barve saw that the set of buildings that he'd taken off near was still visible, though small in the distance.

If he had no further orders, maybe they'd let him fly back at any speed he wanted. Fuel readings were a little lower than they should have been at this point, even with the extra weight, but nothing too alarming.

At this speed he'd be a few more minutes. This thing had gone pretty far. Flying slowly with absolutely nothing going on - usually, he'd be listening to the other rocket troopers, comparing notes and expectations, maybe trying to outmaneuver them. He was hazy on why he'd been deployed without the rest of his unit. They'd acclimatized together and gone through training at the same time and everything, and he'd never been far apart from them. Being alone was boring.

No, he wasn't quite alone. Small talk. How did that work again? Right. "How are you talking? Nothing's getting to my ears."

''I don't have a vocal tract anymore, so I'm guessing telepathy. Better than nothing, but it's annoying.''

"That's too bad," Barve said. It looked like the burden of conversation was on him. He was the worst in his unit at that, frankly, especially with people who weren't familiar with flight and the mechanics of it, but questions were usually good. "So you're one of those aliens that has a metamorphosis, huh? What were you before?"

There was another pause. Incredulous, Steph said, ''I - but - you - you actually haven't figured it out? What - you don't even remember what happened, do you? Do you have a real name? Do you even know what'' planet '' this is?''

Barve hadn't known it was possible to stutter telepathically, but then, he reminded himself, there were a lot of things he didn't know. "No. Are you going to tell me?"

''Oh Jesus Christ.'' Ah. He didn't think Barve was in danger of the madness, he thought Barve was ''stupid''. Barve briefly considered, oh, accelerating a bit more, perhaps flying a bit less steadily, but dismissed the idea. He had a package or a passenger to deliver.

He wasn't angry, quite, but he had to correct the alien. "Hey. I'm not - yeah, I know everyone says I'm a bit simple. Maybe. Maybe. Most of the time." He got the sense that Steph was about to say something, and he didn't let him, raising his voice. "But I'm plenty advanced about flying, and if there's a jetpack malfunction a couple klicks above the ground, the smartest being in the Empire, the ''very'' best and brightest, is me. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it's that I don't know. Don't make insinuations like that!"

''Aaah! Oh God, don't drop me. I'm sorry, geeze. It's just really weird that you don't know.''

There were a few men in his unit who could have started on something about ignorance, but he wasn't one of them - as far as lectures went, he only had this and the one about untested new equipment. After a moment, Barve became uncomfortable. He wasn't supposed to be hostile to people who weren't the enemy, even if they ''were'' rude aliens. He'd probably have a few bad sleepcycles if he didn't say something.

"Sorry. It's fine. Just... I'm not stupid, okay? Don't tell me I'm stupid."

''Yeah. Sure. God, this was a bad idea.''

Well, ''that'' hadn't gone well. Pity his unit wasn't here. He could have used a people person, or several.

Anyway, by now he could see the runaway walker. It had come to a stop, right in the middle of the road, and as he flew closer he saw that one of the big hatches in the side, the hatches that groundpounders rappelled out of, was open. He was probably meant to land there, on the staging platform.

"We're just about here. Hold on." It took a bit of maneuvering. A long shallow dive followed by flipping upright and shedding his momentum, then the tricky process of moving laterally while in the standing position without letting the rockets set fire to the inside of the vehicle, and getting close enough to switch them off and fall to his feet without breaking anything. Nothing he couldn't handle. He made it a point of pride that he hardly ever used his repulsor pod when landing, and he didn't use it this time either.

Barve landed hard enough that he was forced to drop to three points, which while visually impressive was just bad form. If his unit had been there, it would not have gone unnoticed, but if the groundpounder who met him had judged his landing, he declined to comment on it. The moment Barve put the helmet down, Steph half climbed, half leapt out and shuddered all over so that his fur stood on end. Then he sat on his haunches and started wiping or patting himself down with his forelegs, like he wanted to make sure everything was in one piece.

He'd have been a little bit insulted by that - hadn't he kept slow? Hadn't he maintained his jetpack well enough that there was virtually no vibration, and flown her well enough that it had been smooth? - but he ''had'' gone off on that upset lecture. And some people just didn't fly well. And even if Steph didn't like hearing it, he was an alien and might or might not tolerate the forces of acceleration that well.

The groundpounder looked from Barve to Steph and back. "You sent us an ''alien''?" he asked over the open channel. "Is he an ambassador or something? I thought you were sending some friend."

Steph stopped grooming and looked up sharply. ''I ''am'' a friend. And I can hear you, you know, the speaker in the helmet's still on.'' He waggled an ear in a gesture that was probably sarcastic, but still looked silly.

"Oh, sorry," the groundpounder said. "And I guess you're not really an alien. It's kinda hard to keep things straight. C'mon, we need you in the cockpit." He nodded acknowledgment to Barve and turned, heading towards the fore of the walker. Steph followed, still staggering a little.

Barve picked up the helmet again and took the chance to have a look around. He'd seen the big walkers before, just not from inside. Usually during an engagement, too, so he hadn't had time to peer into the interiors before.

He'd landed on the lower of the two levels. At the fore and the aft there were rungs in recessions in the walls that led up to the other level, with sort of a landing in the middle. Entrance to the tunnel leading to the cockpit was through a locking access hatch on the landing in the fore ladder that locked and sealed behind the groundpounder carrying Steph. The aft ladder had another one that probably led to cargo space. A third hatch was set forewards in the flooring, possibly going to engines. Then there were the various external ones like what he'd dropped through. There were troop benches with backpack chargers built into the walls, and the setup for the drop lines and cable winches built around the boom racks. Recessed round lights and some dangling handholds were set in the ceiling. That made sense, he guessed. These things ''were'' personnel carriers, though they were better suited for annihilating ground targets.

Otherwise, the lower level was abandoned. Apparently the team who'd gone out here were all in the cockpit, which had to be a tight fit. Before he commed back for further orders, Barve noticed one more thing. Coming from the speakers built into the ceiling was a faint, barely audible hiss of static.

[There. I wrote you. I even put in that damn rant. Now get out of my head.]

Walker Imperial Ranger

2009-07-23T18:53:49Z

Joysweeper: /* Rocket Trooper */

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Xanadu]][[Category:Story]][[Category:Alien]][[Category:Inanimorph]][[Category:Transgender]][[Category:Joysweeper]][[Category:Bryan]]
{{universe|Xanadu}}
{{byline|author=Joysweeper|user=Joysweeper}}

By Joysweeper, with some help from Bryan.

Don't read this story yet :)

It'll be done when it's done. For the record, I intend to finish before Duke Nukem.

Links to some pictures of AT-ATs, for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-hlc.jpg] Close up of chin-mounted heavy laser cannons
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:MCQ-battleofhoth.jpg] Low-angle concept art
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SWRSIIIRSWP.jpg] More concept art(Talk about uneven odds. Luke > everything.)
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:BlizzardForce.jpg] ESB screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Blizzard_2.jpg] Another screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-swrs3rs.jpg] High-angle(sort of) image
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:AT-AT_egvv.jpg] Schematics
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT_height.jpg] Bad bluescreen, but it does convey size pretty well.

Links to some pictures of Red Guards, also for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Guard.png] Red robes and a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos_NEGTC.jpg] Kir Kanos, helmet off, showing the armor. He never uses a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos.jpg] The Emperor's guards aren't just for show.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kanos3.JPG] Kir Kanos showing the armor again. Different look at the belt.

Have to thank [http://community.livejournal.com/brains_in_a_jar/ brains-in-a-jar] for thoughts on a human brain in a very nonhuman mechanical body, and also all kinds of things about static. Also have to thank Robert T. Bakker for writing "The Dinosaur Heresies"; that bit on a lizard's wrist was extremely interesting.

And I found this quote on one of the 501st homepages. It is so ''perfect''. "Some fans are content to collect action figures...other fans want to ''be'' action figures. Nothing professes your fandom quite like building your own detailed costume replica of a classic Star Wars villain, and there's nothing quite like the feeling that comes from bringing the characters of Star Wars into the real world and sharing the magic with others. A truly engaging Star Wars experience only occurs through a convincing appearance. To this end, the 501st constantly strives to improve the quality and accuracy of its member's costumes. Our goal is to appear as if our characters have just stepped off the big screen and into this world." I hope I can find some way to use this ironically. Probably not ''this'' story, but I'm going to have to stow it away.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Hoojib.jpg]]

==Bryan's intro==

"The door, the door!" Steph called out and lunged to intercept the handle swinging in to catch Garrett's back, stopping it just in time to prevent another ding in the cardboard that might be difficult to repair now that they were at the convention itself.

Garrett let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks." He had turned sideways but thanks to the huge boxy hump over his back it didn't make him any narrower and only really served to make it harder to keep track of everything. And with the two giant cardboard constructs mounted over his arms there wasn't really much he could do anyway; his hands were busy just holding the internal braces in place.

Steph grinned and slipped lithely around to join him in the lobby once Garrett had managed to make it inside. "You'd think armor capable of repelling turbolasers could handle a door handle."

Garrett shook his head. His costume was particularly fragile, being both bulky and made primarily out of cardboard, but it had been surprisingly quick and easy to make as a result. "It'll last until judging. Spray a jot of black on any tears and call 'em battle damage, the Rebels must've got a few lucky hits in." The lobby was sparsely populated right now, with just a few folks still lined up at the front desk buying passes to glance in surprise at Garrett's outfit, but Garrett decided it was showtime. He leaned forward and fell into his quadrupedal stance, the big round footpads of his forelimbs clomping to the ground to support him and the headpiece tilting down into the correct orientation.

There were a few appreciative murmurs as the onlookers finally recognized the iconic Imperial walker he was dressed as. Steph gave a little flourish and a bow, as if taking credit for the outfit, and then stepped forward to give Garrett something to follow. They'd considered trying to rig up a periscope of some sort so that Garrett could see forward more easily but they'd run out of time for details like that; it was enough that the AT-AT's legs were able to support him as things were, they'd had to compromise on the costume's proportions a bit just to make it work.

The majority of the work had taken only a single week. Since it only really had to survive for a single day of use ease of construction had been a fair tradeoff. Garrett was like that with all of his projects; a flash of inspiration, a whirlwind of construction, and then once it was finished the itch was satisfied and he would lose interest and let it go. Steph counted it as sheer luck that this time around the inspiration had come when they might make some money off of it. He'd been tight with Garrett for a couple of years now, both of them in the same engineering degree at the nearby University of Midtral, and was the less-imaginative and more-practical of the two.

"Two please," Steph signed in. "Stephen Midder and Garrett Thompson. Just for today." He pointed to identify themselves.

"Registered for any of the contests?" The man behind the desk asked. Garrett nodded silently, the walker-head bobbing almost comically. "Right..." The man shuffled through a list, presumably checking for Garrett's name, and then looked back up once he'd checked it off. "Ten for him, thirty for you."

"Eh? Aww." Steph got out his wallet to pay for the passes. "Should've worn a costume myself." ''Not that I could have got a discount for any costume that cost under twenty dollars, of course.'' But he supposed that wasn't really the point.

The two of them had done some pretty wacky and nerdy things together. The AT-AT costume had blown away everyone at the Halloween party they'd been to on campus just a few nights previous, in fact that had been the primary impetus for building the thing in the first place. But as they proceeded down the hall toward the convention rooms where the main population of conventiongoers were congregating, Steph began wondering if they'd finally reached their level. The variety and creativity of hand-crafted costumes on display was enormous. Still, there wasn't anything quite like the AT-AT costume Garrett wore and it still drew a good share of attention.

Upon entering the first convention room - a dealer's room, from the look of the tables set up along the side walls, but nonetheless full of costume-wearers - they almost immediately encountered someone in a Stormtrooper outfit. It was a perfect replica in every detail, clearly a labor of love, and the person wearing it was dedicated enough to playing the role that he resisted the temptation to drop out of character.

"You're out of uniform, pilot," the trooper commented as he gave Steph a nod of acknowledgment in passing.

Steph was at a loss for a response but Garrett gave a most un-AT-AT-like chuckle. Garrett had been shuffling along behind Stephen on all fours, barely able to see more than the backs of Stephen's heels, and he took the opportunity after the trooper had passed to stand back up again and look around. "Lots of competition."

"Yeah." Steph sighed; the prospect of winning any of the prize money seemed more distant now that he'd seen some of what they were up against. This was just the first room and there was an amazing gargoyle with what looked like pneumatically-operated wings, a really hot fox-girl who had made a masterful blend of both plush fabric and her own natural attributes, and a lizard-man... no, Steph corrected himself, a Gorn. The Gorn's costume was nearly as good as the one from the original Star Trek episode had been. "Still, nothing like an AT-AT, eh?"

"Excuse us, please," A small woman in a jockey costume asked from behind Garrett's cardboard bulk. He shuffled to the side to let her through, leading a man in an amazing horse costume. The thing made him seven feet tall, with a long neck and perfect horse's head, and the hoof-gloves made Steph wonder if he could get down on all fours too.

"Heh. Damn." Garrett shook his head. "Well, thank goodness for categories, eh?"

Steph gave a wry grin. "Yeah. Though I'm feeling a bit under-dressed myself now."

It didn't really matter much since Garrett was the center of attention, as intended; Steph was along just to open doors and do the other things Garrett couldn't manage in that hulking outfit. But as they proceeded through the room Steph found his gaze lingering on some of the costuming wares being sold.

People would stop to stare, take photos, or ask Steph questions about the AT-AT costume. Since he was the one leading the way, with Garrett's face down and concealed under the cardboard headpiece, it was natural that they'd assume he was in charge. But when Garrett reared up to proudly answer the questions they'd immediately switch to ignoring Steph instead. It was quickly beginning to annoy him; though the idea and the design for the AT-AT costume had been Garrett's they'd worked on it together.

"Hang on, Garrett," Steph finally called. They were on their way to the exhibition hall but they were still quite early, they'd left plenty of flex in their schedule to account for difficulties with the costume. "I want to look at some of the stuff they're selling here."

"Stuff?" Garrett got up and looked around.

There weren't any Star Wars branded costume supplies at hand, and if there were they'd probably be too expensive. ''Twenty dollars, eh? I can spend twenty dollars.'' That left mainly just the cheesier costume gear.

After a few minutes of browsing Garrett got back down on all fours and spent a little while tromping back and forth. The arms of the AT-AT costume were quite heavy; in addition to the cardboard shell they had a pair of aluminum canes inside, trimmed short and affixed to the broad metal bucket lids that formed the soles of his "forefeet". Despite the crick he was sure he'd eventually develop in his back it was actually easier moving around like this.

There wasn't as much of an audience in here, though. The people who already had costumes were gravitating off somewhere else and those were the ones he was most interested in impressing with his ingenuity and attention to detail. He wasn't a big Star Wars fan himself but he'd dug up some schematics from a scan of some old Star Wars book. He'd even hung a Luke Skywalker pilot action figure on a string from his underside, mimicking the famous scene from Empire Strikes Back where the proto-Jedi had grappled up on board one after being shot down on Hoth, but he'd lost that particular accessory somewhere during the Halloween party and hadn't bothered looking for a replacement. There didn't seem to be anything like that in this area of the dealer's room...

He tromped over to Steph. "We going to move on?" He prompted.

Steph sighed. The twin goals of 'attention-grabbing' and 'cheap' weren't meshing very well. "Okay, just let me grab something." Something totally incongruous would probably be best. So... "Ah, I'll take that." A pair of fuzzy bunny ears on a headband for just ten bucks. Garrett didn't even look up and Steph grinned; he'd be startled when he did.

They continued onward.

==Joysweeper's pre-TF setup==

On the way they'd called it a "function" as if it'd been some kind of social event, and in a desultory fashion they'd been trying to get donations to the Leukemia Society, but it was far from formal. The Kublai Con attendees were pretty generous – TR-1407, given name “Angela Kincaid”, calling herself “Anj” while in costume - had once heard it said that furry cons generated more money than scifi cons, and Xanadu was a mixture of both.

What had made the effort fun was the “act”. Angela lost count of just how many times she’d heard friends declaring with feigned authority that the 501st Legion was here to keep the peace and maintain order. Essentially they’d just threatened anyone who looked impressive enough, and almost everyone had played along, reacting in fear or challenging the Imperials to a duel.

She’d personally “fought” an armored anthro dragon with a very realistic whipping tail, matching her forcepike with his curved fiberglass sword, and although she’d “lost” she had also had the pleasure of seeing him back down when faced with the blasters of eighteen stormtroopers. Good donation from that one, too, when they'd explained and everything.

The "TR" prefix in front of the number she had picked as her identification - she'd chosen fourteen oh seven - indicated which costume was her favorite. "TK" meant stormtrooper, "TC" was clonetrooper, "SL" was Sith Lord... there were a number of them for the various types. "TR" meant that she favored the Emperor's guards in their red helmets and flowing robes. They were called Red Guards, Royal Guards, and various other combinations of "Red", "Royal", "Imperial", and "Emperor's". Frankly, Angela preferred "Red Guard". The arguments some of her friends got into about nomenclature gave her a headache - fanwank was one thing, and you had to be a little anal to care about a screen-accurate costume, but some people went too far.

She’d heard from one of them that someone had actually caught a pickpocket in the act and had proceeded to instill the fear of the Empire into him, winning a lot of amusement from everyone else in the process, but she hadn’t seen it herself, nor had anyone who told the story. It was probably hyperbole. That didn’t stop the thought from being entertaining.

Now it was over and the group was dispersing. TR-1407 was glad to leave, frankly. The costume, with heavy cloth robes over already-stifling armor, had slowly become hot enough to, as the phrase went, fry fleek eels with, the ice packs had either thawed or hadn't been working in the first place, and no amount of water or robe-flapping could make it entirely tolerable. The bodysuit under the plating under the robes was so drenched with sweat that she'd probably have to peel it off.

Not for the first time she wished that she hadn’t bothered with the tight bodysuit and the armor that went over it. It wasn’t like it would have visibly made a difference. Some Red Guards liked to keep their robes thrown behind their shoulders like a cloak, the better to show off the detailing on their armor. Angela, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone guessing that she was female, and so kept her robes arranged about her body, hiding everything but her hands, her feet, and her helmet. It still would have been far, ''far'' too hot – the helmet was the next thing to airtight, and only the respirator that threaded down to her waist kept her from suffocating – but at least she wouldn’t feel like sparks were smoldering under her robes.

But… no. More than once during the “fight” her robes had swept about, and both before and after they hadn’t exactly hung neatly. She would ''never'' have heard the end of it if she were to come to an event “half-dressed”.

“Remember, there’s a march at three,” she told her friend and former pupil SL-1984 as they left, part of a stream. The majority of Tampa Bay Squad happened to be heading in the same direction. “We meet before two thirty in the southwest parking lot.” Little single-squadron things like the function were fun, but the real thrill was always when the entire 501st, or as much of it as was attending any particular convention, marched together. There was just something about it that felt exhilarating. Like she was part of something bigger than herself.

“I knew that,” he protested, but mildly. “Micheal Porter”, as he was usually known – although he preferred to answer strictly to his designation when in costume – was tall enough, laid-back enough, and attention-loving enough to pull off a White Vader costume. It was exactly what it sounded like – the Darth Vader rig, all in white, sometimes called “Vader Redeemed.” The images that the costume was based off of had appeared for literally two panels at the very end of a comic that wasn’t even canon. Even by 501st standards that was unusual - and the 501st Legion was infamous for being made up of fans who weren't content to simply ''collect'' action figures, they wanted to ''be'' them.

His protest was put on hold briefly as a fairly well-done white tiger furry with an articulated jaw interrupted, waving her pawhands and generally being as relentlessly upbeat as possible. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but gestured and showed off a disposable camera on a strap around her neck enthusiastically enough that it was pretty clear that she wanted pictures.

TR-1407 had never been all that comfortable with being hugged by complete strangers for photographs, but she didn’t have any serious objections to it, and she wasn’t carrying her wallet with her this time, so there was no chance of getting robbed again. Fortunately the tiger was much more interested in SL-1984, and ''he'' was perfectly willing to mug and pose as much as desired, supported by three or four stormtroopers who got beckoned into the shots and played along, rather than shaking their heads and passing by. Maybe it was just that white fur went better with white robes and armor than with red. It was probably more that the kid was naturally showy.

After the Red Guard had obligingly snapped enough pictures and handed the camera back to the furry, the white tiger left to accost someone else, and they picked up where they had left off.

“Angela, you really don't need to remind me about everything anymore. I know the schedule."

“Don’t call me Angela when I’m in uniform, please." Sweat was pooling in the tips of her gloves. Angela flexed her hands against it. The moment she let them relax, it pooled again. "It's only been what, a year since I let you walk off and you missed it because you were buying original issues of 'Spider-Girl'?"

"A year and a half. I am ''so'' much better at juggling my hobbies now," he said dryly. "Why, I even remember things that the schedule said and Pike forgot to bring up."

A trooper listening in muttered "You had to bring the Squad Leader into this. Now you're in for it."

Another trooper who'd been a few steps behind got right up besides the taller Vader. She was a snowtrooper, and probably suffering almost as much as Angela in the heat. Despite the helmet speaker and a tired note in her voice, she sounded crisp and alert. "Hey, don't complain. I'm sorry we haven't made an announcement, but we've got a lot more on our plate than you do; ''you'' just have to show up at the right time and place, and we're not here to babysit you. We've been setting things up and working out scheduling conflicts since five in the morning. It's been a long day at the end of a long week already and I'm glad John was there to take over after eleven." The snowtrooper slipped into character and finished, very dryly, "So don't complain about your superiors, my lord. Circumstances tend to be more complicated than they seem."

"Ah," SL-1984 said, briefly assuming character himself. "My apologies, Ma'am. That was merely a breach in my personal discipline. No disrespect was meant." Following along, Angela couldn't help feeling a little surge of goodwill. She loved this group. They argued a lot, and Shanda Pike admittedly could be touchy, but it never got too far. Probably in part because while Michael loved the limelight, he had very little ego or temper.

"I'll overlook it, so long as you don't let it happen again," Pike allowed very seriously. A smile crept into her voice. "You're mixing up your honorifics, by the way. I'm only "ma'am" in the Tusken Raider suit and as Mara."

"Again, my apologies. Sir," he added. Everyone pretended not to notice the slight skip in his amplified voice.

With a nod, the snowtrooper peeled away and dropped back, staying in sight but effectively bowing out of the conversation. In an aside, Angela told her friend that his voice-changer was failing.

“What? Testing, testing... You’re right.” SL-1984 thumped the speaker hidden in his chest box, then removed his helmet, careful of the trailing wires that ran from it down into the rest of the costume. “This thing always gets screwy an hour or so in.”

There was always something just a little bit disturbing about seeing someone in costume but without their helmet on. It didn’t take long to get used to seeing troopers, but with a Vader it ''always'' looked strange. Michael had opted for the ski-hood-under-the-helmet thing that Vaders usually wore. His, naturally, was white. Removing helmets while trooping tended to be frowned on, but everyone in the 501st knew that sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Angela told him, “You really ought to try a pair of Vortex Twos. I’ve never made a Vader-“

Michael left off frowning into the helmet for a moment. “You’re not nearly tall enough to pull it off. You'd have to do the three-fourths scale version. And maybe get body padding.”

“I know. Shut up.” Angela sighed. “I’ve never made a Vader, but I have a helmet, therefore I use a speaker. Vortex. Got it with my tax returns. I know that Hasbro thing is cheap and easy to get, but, well, the downside is quality. Vortex is the best.” She indicated the general location of her own voice amplification unit with a quick gesture. It made her voice audible despite the almost airtight helmet, flattening it out in the process.

“I know, but that’s a bit of an investment. I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. Had to stop working on that Tusken Raider one… I could barely afford to come ''here.'' This will hold for a bit longer. Going to have to try and fake it when it does fail. The iPod with the breathing loop's still good, at least.” Replacing the helmet and straightening it with both hands, he faced her directly. “Any plans?”

“I’m getting out of this costume before I cook.” She flapped her robes in another vain attempt to get some cool air circulating. Under her helmet, a little curl of hair had plastered itself over one eye, sticking to the lid as she blinked. Just about every time she wore a helmet she found herself wishing she'd cut her hair short. Tampa Bay Squadron's other Red Guard kept hers cropped and said it made something of a difference.

SL-1984’s speaker system relayed the sound of his mouth opening, so she cut him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need any help, Micheal. Seriously, if I stay in this any longer I’ll get heatstroke. Every time I get into this thing I regret it, I swear.”

"If you want me to call you Anj, don't call ''me'' Michael." SL-1984 raised his voice to be heard over the shouting match going on between two balding men in spandex. Taking up a standard Vader mannerism with ease that betrayed several movies' worth of casual study, he locked his hands around his belt. “This is why white’s a good color. I’m not sweating half as much as I did in the black sauna suit, so I think I’m good for a while yet. I'd like to see the sights. There are some ''really'' nice costumes this year. Maybe I’ll swing by those set pieces people keep talking about. I heard that they got David and his crew to do the Hutt set again this year, plus Carmen said that Makaze Squad brought in that Death Star made of like a million Legos. I have no idea how they could have got it in the doors.”

People had collected in a chattering knot around someone or something, clogging the way. It was possible to squeeze past, but that just wouldn't do. Angela raised her voice. “Move along, come on now citizens, you can collect in a spare room much more easily than out here. Move along, move along.” The voice amplifier lent her voice a little more kick and made it audible. Despite that, she saw no sign that more than a few people had heard, let alone intended to obey.

Her former pupil, his voice changer having given up entirely, repeated the order with the same intonation, doing his best with the voice. This time, people listened and obeyed, breaking up and dispersing. They’d been clustered around a yellow lab – not a furry, an actual, panting dog that barely seemed disturbed at all by the crowd – wearing one of those novelty pet costumes. It went very nicely with his owner, though Angela wasn’t sure about the meaning of the dog being Batman when the man was Robin.

What she ''was'' sure about was that the kid she’d once sponsored – hardly a kid despite her teasing, she couldn't be more than five or six years older than him - was just ''better'' at some of this than she was. Particularly when it came to giving orders to people neither of them knew. Partly it was because, although she wasn’t shy by anyone’s standards, she didn’t like to stand out overmuch. Hence why her preferred costumes were the Red Guard and obscure ones like AT-AT drivers or Imperial Army Pilots, as they were called, while ''his'' was arguably the most conspicuous costume in the 501st.

A trooper that Angela knew from the squad finally answered the question. “The Lego Death Star? It breaks apart into sections and gets reassembled. We had to get a cart for the pieces, but it's simpler than it looks. Tampa Bay had it one year, but that was before your time. Sir.”

TR-1407 decided to break it off. She really didn’t know where the closest ‘changing room’ was, but she’d been told that they were everywhere, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to find one. The longer she waited, the longer the costume stayed on. “Have fun, guys. I think I’ll get most of this off before I make more plans. Don’t hurt yourself showing off.”

“Don’t forget to put it back on by two thirty. I’ll see you by then if not before, An- Anj.” He and those troopers who hadn't already gone their own ways kept moving in the same direction, and she arbitrarily took a left.

It was pretty close to noon; compared to just an hour ago, the hallway was half empty. The people who had been rushing around trying to get to various things had reached them, apparently. This wasn’t anywhere near the dealer’s room or any of its offshoots, the SIGs were already in progress, and as far as she could remember from the big con schedule the only event going on would be that big awards ceremony.

Angela toyed with the idea of going, but the oppressive heat of her costume decided her. Anything worth seeing would surely keep; she'd been to enough conventions to know that the truly impressive costumes would probably stick around for a bit, both soaking up the praise and trying not to break anything. Getting there in time to see the whole thing wouldn’t be worth the broiling and the probability of being jostled by a crowd. She’d hate to break the forcepike that she was carrying braced against her shoulder; it was easily the most fragile part of the costume, and making it had been a trial.

The heat was like a physical thing trapped against her body. Not for the first time, she wished that she’d worn her officer uniform instead. Fewer layers, and her face, neck, and hands were exposed to the air. But officer getup was just so ''plain'', so ''ordinary'' compared to the Red Guard robes and armor. And somehow it drew more attention, not less. In a weird way, Red Guards could be ignored pretty easily. A perk of being a member of Star Wars's version of the Secret Service, she supposed.

Up ahead it was crowded again; all fursuiters from the look of things. Enough of them were breaking the unwritten rule about staying silent in costume that the group was quite, quite loud, even with the helmet cutting off some of the sound. From the laughter, the movement, and the general tone of conversation, they were having a good time. Having nothing better to do Angela approached them, deciding that if nothing else she might as well find out what if anything was going on.

As she passed within thirty feet of the closest of them she felt something like a chill traveling down her spine, prickling against the bodysuit stuck to her skin. The Red Guard would have brushed it aside as nothing, but for one reason or another she noticed that some of the furries who had been talking or laughing or demonstrating dance moves had stopped, abruptly in some cases. A number of them carried on, oblivious, but several stopped what they were doing.

TR-1407 thought she saw a gray feline's mouth opening far wider than a baklava could allow for. She told herself that it was a trick of the light or a flaw in her visor. That was when the chill became strong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and branching to prickle her arms, the base of her skull, her chest and lower than that, strong enough that she shuddered involuntarily. Her bones started to ache, followed by the rest of her body. There was a moment where she thought ''Heatstroke?'' and started to raise her hands to her helmet.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the world.

== Lead up to Garrett and Steph's TFs==

The density of Star Wars costumes steadily increased as they progressed. The population of the convention was extremely diverse but various factors - the impending themed contests, the large number of rooms providing partitioning, natural human cliquishness - were conspiring to make it clumpy.

''Or maybe word's just getting around about Garrett's costume,'' Steph reflected. The stormtroopers seemed eerily organized for just a bunch of fans who'd happened to show up wearing the same thing.

But to Steph's relief, he wasn't feeling quite so annoyed by the attention Garrett was getting any more. The bunny ears had actually ''helped''. Not in that they were anything particularly interesting themselves, of course; they were nothing at all in comparison to even the simplest of the animal costumes he'd seen on display. No, ironically enough it was a synergistic effect.

A big clunky AT-AT clomping around? Worth a double-take, of course. A big clunky AT-AT clomping around being led by a man in bunny ears? That apparently was worth two double-takes.

A small impromptu honor guard had formed around Garrett, a constantly-renewing cluster of Star Wars fans trailing along to examine the AT-AT's details before being left behind or moving on to other things. But though fewer, the Star Wars fans who were puzzling over Steph were puzzling longer. One of them was even a Darth Vader complete with audible breathing, though in an all-white suit for some reason.

Steph wasn't about to ask. He was already being pelted with far more intricate details of the Star Wars universe than he could possibly take in. "So," the white-armored Vader was musing. "I doubt that the Empire has begun accepting nonhumans into service since my conversion, so you cannot be a pilot. I don't think you have the height for a Gerb or Lepus Carnivorous, but I might be mistaken."

"Uh, no, don't think so," Steph shook his head. ''Lepus Carnivorous? Is he making this up on the spot?'' The only carnivorous rabbit that came to mind was from Monty Python.

"Are you a Kushiban? Be at ease, my mission no longer entails the deaths of Force-Sensitives."

That one sounded less fake, and Steph was about to accept the title if only to have something meaningful to say. But then one of the Storm Troopers turned from peering at the detailing on Garrett's head and said in his best tinny trooper-voice, "My Lord, are you forgetting the Hoojib?"

"I was just getting to that." The chuckle seemed quite out of character for a Darth Vader, and to Steph's relief he seemed to be recognizing how far out of his depth Steph was. "I apologize for my men. When you're obsessed, it's a bit hard to remember that ''not everyone knows or cares.''" That last bit seemed to be aimed at the other fans, who variously shrugged, drew back a little, and hung their helmeted heads in probably-mock shame. "Kushiban and Hoojibs are both rabbitlike creatures, not very large. Kushiban are more like cat-monkey creatures with soft rabbit ears and big squirrely tails; they're about, oh, ''this'' tall standing up -" he bent down to hold his gloved hand a foot and a half above the floor "-but usually walk on all fours. They do a lot of handweaving and tend to be Force-Sensitive; generally they're portrayed with a calm demeanor. By most standards they are considered very, ah, cute."

It was Steph's turn to chuckle. "I'll leave cute to the furries."

"Aww." Garrett rose to his hind legs, surprising Steph by having been paying attention, and took a moment to set one of the forelegs down so he could adjust his headpiece. One of the side-mounted gun turrets had hooked on someone and been pulled askew. "You'd think with all those bunny-based aliens there'd be a more crossover, like with those Caitans we saw earlier."

"Ixnay on the Artrek Stay," Steph warned with a grin. He didn't seriously expect anyone to be offended, there was far too much good-natured mixing of genres and universes going on for that, but the rivalry between those two franchises almost seemed traditional.

"I'm dressed as an AT-AT, I think I'm strong enough in the Star Wars Force for my reputation to survive being revealed as a fancier of catgirls in miniskirt uniforms."

The white Vader nodded, still chuckling. "Certainly. You have no idea how many of our aliens look like cats or bugs or yes, rabbits. Hoojib, for example. They're about ''this'' big-" too small to bend down for, he held out his gloved hands as if cupping a normal-sized bunny in them "-they're mute but telepathic, they eat energy. They look more like rabbits with huge eyes and splayed bird feet. They also have large noses, no visible mouth, and one antenna or feeler on the forehead that they use to drain energy with. A relic of the Marvel comics back in the seventies. Frankly, most of us think the writers were dropping something, but the Hoojib are not quite as implausible as some of the others."

"Weird is good," Steph answered with a nod. ''Hoojib, eh?'' The wheels were spinning quickly in Steph's head; even though he'd never seen pictures of one of those things the description was pretty distinctive. He thought back over some of the stuff he'd glimpsed on the tables they'd passed... "I can pull that off. I'll be right back, you okay Garrett?"

Garrett nodded. "Just tromping around." He had finished his adjustment and was considering whether to go back down on all fours, but as Steph headed off into the bustle he found himself welcoming the excuse to stay upright a while longer. His back wasn't hurting yet, and thanks to the angle of the headpiece he didn't have to hold his neck at a bad angle, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned to the white Vader instead. "So, if it's not a faux pas to ask, did you not have time to paint your outfit before the con?"

SL-1984 chuckled again. "I've got the black getup too. You don't want to know how hot that gets if you don't have real leather. This is a more recent relic of comics, actually. One where the Dark Lord has left the Empire and joined his children, and inexplicably looks ''exactly the same'' except for color. Just as absurd in its way, although I'll give it points for not having talking hedgehogs or superweapons that look like pinball machines. Dark Horse, not Marvel. Star Wars Infinities...? No?"

"No," Garrett said, shaking his head. The headpiece didn't weigh much, but still made the motion ponderous. "Believe it or not, I'm really lost with all this Extended Universe stuff. I just watched the movies and liked the toys." Despite Garrett's demurral it was actually something of an understatement; Star Wars toys were probably the main reason Garrett had become an engineer. The long hours spent playing with his older brother's stash of plastic space ships and robots had put a visceral love of fantastic machinery into Garrett's heart. But he'd never really got into the fictional side of it all, if that made any sense.

"Well, the toys are certainly a major part of the fandom too," SL-1984 agreed. "Collectors have their own subset of obscure encyclopedic knowledge. Wouldn't know what a Hoojib was, perhaps, but they could tell you exactly how rare any given run of a Luke action figure was. But I suspect that you are more inclined towards the tech manuals."

Garrett grinned, hefting the heavy walker forelimb assemblies. "What gave you that idea?"

For his part, Steph wasn't any of those things - he just liked a challenge. And within a minute he was back, another ten dollars poorer and well on the way to meeting his next challenge. He'd found himself a rubber koala nose, best match to his mental image of the description the Vader had given him, and was busily tearing apart a pair of dealie-bobbers as he walked. His only tools were a paper clip, some rubber bands, and MacGuyver innovation. "One second longer..." He finished the work on the addition to the rabbit headband and slipped them back into place, the single spring-loaded antenna bobbing up in the middle between his ears. "Eh? Eh? Hoo da jib?" He spread his arms to display his work.

SL-1984 let out a slightly muffled laugh. His hands moved slightly as if to adjust the new addition, then dropped to hook his thumbs into his belt. "Very nice. Certainly, nobody will mistake you for anything else now. No fan, at any rate."

"Well, that's silly," Garrett evaluated. Steph nodded back, making the antenna bounce but not jarring it loose; the anchor he'd rigged up was holding. ''Excellent.''

"Speaking of silly," Steph said, grinning, "shall we carry on toward the judging room? Despite my progress I doubt my costume's going to win any awards on its own."

"Sounds good." The judging was being staggered over the course of the day to account for the many individual contests that were running - the first winners were almost due for announcement, in fact - but Garrett figured it would be a good idea to get in on his as soon as possible. When dealing with a costume made mostly of cardboard, there was a certain inexorable degradation with use. And besides that, the costume was clunky and heavy. Garrett was looking forward to being out of it for a while.

"In that case I'll bid you adieu. Troops, clear the muster zone!" The Vader slipped back into character and the remaining Storm Troopers did likewise, stepping back in unison as if to let a much larger transport pass through. Garrett obliged them, dropping back down to all fours and resuming his tromp with Steph walking ahead. Steph felt even more ridiculous than before with his extra accessories, but it was a good kind of ridiculous.

It was a strange feeling. So strange that Steph overlooked the other strange feelings at first as they started tingling at the edges of his senses.

Garrett felt it first. He had just started to get back into the gait of an AT-AT when he found himself stumbling slightly, the heavy costume becoming noticeably heavier. Garret paused for a moment, his foreleg supports setting down on the floor below him with a pair of unexpectedly solid clomps.

The cardboard forelegs actually felt ''tight'' on his arms. That was wrong; if anything there should have been too ''much'' play inside them, they wobbled around if he wasn't careful. Garrett tried to let go of the cane handles and tried standing up to pull his hands out of them.

The forelegs stayed firmly and snugly in place, and they were ''heavy''. "Wha..." Garrett choked, his voice coming out low and grating as if by speaking he was using his throat in a way it wasn't intended. The exclamation was accompanied by the faint but noticeable whine of small motors of some sort and Garrett could feel the tension build in his hips as he held the cardboard legs up in front of him.

Cardboard no longer, it seemed - the surface finish had a distinctly metallic luster to it that the gray paint had failed to evoke previously. There was no explaining it; his costume had suddenly become a whole lot ''better''. It was still improving before his eyes, new details resolving and the proportions subtly shifting toward more accurate dimensions.

It was getting heavier. Garrett could feel his hips beginning to fail, the boxy body and outstretched forelegs too much to bear. But Garrett resisted the weight with all his might; he had no idea what was going on and from the frantic hammering of his heart he could tell he was most likely panicking, but even so he somehow ''knew'' deep in his gut that he would be in deep trouble if he fell over. He had to stay up. He ''had'' to...

Garrett's groan came from somewhere inside his chest, the vibration thrumming through his body in new and unfamiliar ways, and after resisting for just seconds he toppled forward to land again on his forelegs for support. The two round footpads slammed solidly down onto the carpeted floor and Garrett felt the impact travel up the metal structure into his shoulders. An alien surge of relief washed through him; ''thank God, I'm stable.'' But it didn't last long against the growing panic. He tried to open his mouth to yell for help and found that he couldn't. ''Oh God, I can't breathe!''

Garrett tried to look up toward Steph, servos in his neck whining in protest at the angle. He caught just a glimpse. Up ahead, Steph was having troubles of his own; his clothing seemed to be disintegrating, white fur bursting up underneath it. Everyone else Garrett caught in that glimpse seemed to be having some outlandish thing happening to them too, too many and too strange for him to process in that split second he had available.

Then Garret's vision cut off as his eyelids fused shut into the smooth, unbroken hull of the underside of the AT-AT's cockpit-head. A moment later vision returned in a kaleidoscopic burst of sensory input; Garrett would have screamed if he'd been able. ''My eyes! Where are my eyes!?'' He could see everywhere at once and couldn't process any of it. He could only stagger ponderously back a step, his limbs moving with unexpected strength and smoothness. ''Whirr''-chrt! ''Whirr''-chrt! It was the best possible replica AT-AT costume in existence now, and Garrett wanted ''out''. But his attempts to shift even the tiniest bit inside the solid metal shell failed, every part stuck solidly and directly to his skin. Fused with it. ''Becoming'' it.

And then the hollowness came. Garrett felt a hole open up inside his gut, swelling inside his abdomen and squeezing his vitals aside. Garrett's vision was disrupted just as it had started to coalesce again, panic flaring more brightly in his mind. ''Oh God Oh God Oh God...'' He could only set his legs and try to hold as steady as possible as the bubble spread up into his chest, up his throat, into his head...

''Ghoooood.'' The thought trailed off in a tumult of strange emotions and sensations. His guts were settling now, the final details pulling into their new configuration. He was empty inside, but what was left was ''solid.'' Strong. Steel. Or something like it, anyway... The hammering of his heart faded away, replaced with the unfamiliar, almost subliminal throb of some sort of power plant.

Vision returned again, more stable this time, but it didn't bring any clarity to the situation. Garrett stood stable on all four legs, round footpads planted firmly on the carpet right where he'd been when the change had first come upon him. But his body was an island of stability in a sea of chaos. All around him people were yelling and running around in terror, many of them no longer human. Garrett turned his head, the motion ponderous and not really necessary given his all-encompassing field of view but psychologically important for keeping his attention focused. ''Where's Steph?'' He didn't know what his friend could do about any of this, but it was a straw of hope to grasp for in the maelstrom.

Thunderous footsteps grabbed his attention. Something was coming, big and round and red-

Too fast. How could something so big move so fast? Garrett barely had time to move before the huge creature brushed past him, slamming against his side as it went. Garret's legs weren't jointed to deal very well with lateral movement and he staggered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced. Whirr, chrt, whirr, chrt, cHRT...

''FALLING!'' Garrett screamed in the form of bolts of light shooting from his chin to blast scorched pockmarks up the wall and ceiling, and slammed to the floor. A table crushed to splinters under him, cushioning what would otherwise have been a tremendously damaging impact, but still jarring. He felt a vestige of pain, which faded the moment it registered, leaving him numb.

Stunned, lying on his side, alone, ''empty''. Garrett wasn't sure if AT-ATs could faint, but he found himself doing a very good imitation of it.

== Steph's post-TF segment==

Steph was trembling and overwhelmed with confusion at what had happened to him, what had happened to everyone around him. But at the same time he felt strangely comforted cradled here by giant white-armored arms, even if he was getting pressed into the hard edge of a chest box, so he managed to keep the fear suppressed below blind panic. He had no idea ''why'' being held like that should have been comforting but for the moment he was willing to just go with it while he tried to straighten out what else had happened.

He hadn't noticed that Garrett wasn't keeping up with him until he'd heard that strange noise of protest. He'd turned around and there it had been, right before his eyes, the gaps between the pieces of Garrett's costume abruptly sealing up as the gray cloth underneath swelled to fill them. As Garrett ''himself'' swelled to fill them. Steph still wasn't sure which had done the changing, Garrett or his costume - was Garrett somehow trapped inside that thing? That had been his first thought, that the costume had somehow been magically replaced with a giant animatronic of fearsome quality.

But then he'd realized what was happening to him, and now he had no idea what was going on. His clothing was disintegrating, falling away into nothingness, and the skin underneath was sprouting a thick white pelt of fur. ''His'' skin, not some costume layered over top. He'd tried pulling on it and felt pain.

Steph wasn't entirely proud of what he'd done next; he'd let out a shriek that was equal parts surprise and alarm, turned away from his friend still struggling inside that developing machine's body, and had tried to run away.

'Tried' being the operative word. It wasn't just his skin that was changing, the size and shape of his entire body was warping. Steph had managed to stagger just a short distance before his shortening legs and enlarging feet tripped him up, sending him stumbling into broad white-caped back of one of the other conventiongoers. The man was ''huge'' - or rather, in hindsight, it was Steph who was shrinking - and absorbed the impact easily.

The man snapped "What?", spinning to confront Steph and reflexively reaching for his lightsabre. It was the white-armored Darth Vader Steph had been speaking with just moments earlier. The Sith Lord's mechanically augmented voice was deeper and more imperious, the armor more fully fleshed out.

Steph's eyes widened in alarm as he found himself craning his neck to look so far up at the man's masked face. "Heee," he gasped breathlessly, his own voice coming out a high-pitched squeak. "Heep!"

It felt like a lot of things were going on, but the biggest was the sense of falling. From increasingly high above SL-1984 watched him unreadably, reaching up to clamp one gloved hand on the opposite wrist, then letting go. Then Steph found himself on all fours, eyes level with a bit of detailing on the man's shiny white shin armor. No, lower than that. He let his joints lock and stood as if frozen.

Giant hands plunged from above and lifted him up out of harm's way just before the huge bulk of the Kool-Aid Man came barreling through the room.

There was a tremendous smash. "OH YEAH!"

"Fall back!" SL-1984 barked.

"Lord Vader!" Someone else nearby exclaimed. Then there was a burst of blaster fire followed by another crash.

Steph couldn't handle it all; he'd simply gone limp and allowed himself to be carried as SL-1984 and the handful of Stormtroopers that had been close at hand retreated from the chaos erupting inside the room. They'd taken up a defensive position in a short hallway just outside, apparently leading to a utility closet of some sort and devoid of any other activity.

It gave them a few minutes' respite and as the shock wore off Steph began to tremble. In the midst of everything that was going on SL-1984 had apparently forgotten that he was holding Steph, but the movement drew his attention back to his immediate surroundings again and he looked down. "So you were a Hoojib after all."

Steph felt his rabbitlike ears lay down flat against his back and the long, flexible tendril that sprouted between them curled tightly in an unfamiliar reflex. ''I never heard of them until just minutes ago!'' Steph tried to object, but he wasn't even able to produce a squeak that time; his mouth no longer seemed to be connected to his trachea and all he could do was let out a small snort.

SL-1984 seemed to get the message well enough anyway, though. "Yes, I suppose that's my fault. Well, what else would you call yourself?" He knelt down and lowered Steph back down, hands wrapped all the way around his ribcage like he was carrying a cat, to deposit him on the floor.

Steph huddled there on all fours, digging the claws on his fingers and toes into the carpet as he looked up in nervous awe at how gigantic everything was. He had a momentary overpowering desire to be picked back up again, he just didn't feel ''safe'' being so small, but he forced it down and tried to focus inward. His body was indeed quite a bit like a bunny's, just as had been described, but with longer fur and long, splayed, birdlike toes on his feet. Frustratingly, his ''hands'' were more like a rabbit's, or maybe a dog's - useless clawed, padded paws with stubby fingers he could barely wriggle independently. There were thumbs, sort of. Maybe dewclaws. They could just about manage grasping, or at least bending far enough that the finger pads met the big pad, but he couldn't stand without them. His face had a blunt, leathery Koala nose, and his tiny mouth was hidden in the fur underneath it. Probing with his surprisingly long tongue, he couldn't even feel any teeth.

He had to admit, he was ''exactly'' like he'd pictured a Hoojib looking like. His vision blurred as his enormous brown eyes started filling with tears.

"Hey, now. Hey." SL-1984 seemed very distracted, bringing one hand up against the side of his helmet and pacing a few steps away to stare intently at nothing visible.

''I didn't want to be here,'' Steph thought miserably to himself. ''I just want to be home.''

"Don't we all," murmured the stormtrooper crouched nearest him. It was a breach of squad discipline, of course, but everyone was too busy with their own troubles to notice. Steph himself wouldn't realize the more important fact that the stormtrooper had actually ''heard'' him until much later on.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus1.jpg]]

Something lithe and feline and clad in ruffles chose that moment to slink past the dead end where the little group held their position. It paused to stare at them with unblinking green eyes, then opened its mouth and hissed furiously. The occupants locked their blaster rifles into position, but one of the troopers, raising an arm to check them, snapped, "Hold your fire! Establish intent, ''then'' act!"

The cat-thing flattened its ears back against its head, looking spooked, then continued on its way at a slightly faster pace.

It was quiet. SL-1984 was the first to move. He pulled off one white glove, exposing a prosthetic hand that gleamed like bronze. It was all but skeletal, sparse of detail with only the transparent synthetic "muscles" keeping it from looking like metal bones. He turned it over before his mask and flexed the fingers gently, then covered it again. "I thought as much," he said in a low rumble, both resigned and keeping what might have been anger under tight control. "Is that how it is? Fine."

"Sir?" The speaker was a trooper with the breather hood, oversuit, and specialized armor of a snowtrooper, the same trooper who had told the others not to shoot. He broke position to stand closer to SL-1984, keeping himself oriented towards the opening to the dead end. "Sir, aren't you - Didn't you switch sides?"

"What? Oh. You, you're Shanda Pike?"

"I - yes, my lord," Pike said, voice firming. In the far distance something bellowed like a foghorn, forcing the trooper to speak louder. "My husband John and I share duties as Squad Leader. He's not here now, sir. I'm the only member of the squad's command staff present."

"Use my designation, Pike. I did leave the Empire, but I am still part of this squad. You're a squad leader, I'm not, that means - damn." SL-1984 went quiet. The constant rhythm of his mechanically-assisted breath was quieter and not as harsh as it was for 'classic' Darth Vader, but it could still be heard, even over the background noise.

"Sir? Something wrong?"

"You're not a ma'am." SL-1984 crossed his arms just underneath his chest box. There was a smile in his artificial voice.

Pike hesitated for several breaths. "Beg pardon?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." SL-1984 chuckled and uncrossed his arms to hook his thumbs into his belt. He was definitely more amused than was appropriate for a man who'd just gone on life support and become a quarter of a century older. "You're a man. You can't keep a wallet in your codpiece anymore. I suppose it makes sense... snowtroopers are specialized stormtroopers, and we don't generally admit women into the trooper academies... Who - yes, everyone in here's a trooper. Ursala, Crystal, Sky - You're all men. No worries, Shad, Jeff, you're men too. Heh. Well, this should make things interesting. Heh. That's... that's actually kind of funny."

"Oh." The snowtrooper waited. The other three had reacted, but a muffled crash from out there had brought them back into position, watching with ready blasters. For a moment, Pike sounded unnaturally calm, as if this was a situation he'd been trained for. "You're right. I hoped you were wrong, sir, but you're right." Another moment passed as SL-1984 crossed his arms again and laughed quietly; one by one every other helmet in the alcove turned towards Pike. Even Steph, huddled pitifully on the floor with his eyes glazed, looked up.

"Fusst you. ''Fusst'' you, you - you ''Sithspawn''. Stop laughing." He stepped forwards, getting into the Vader's faceplate. "''This isn't funny'', Nineteen Eightyfour. This is a ''big'' problem that goes past us, and it's only going to get bigger. And apparently I can't swear. So ''don't laugh.''" The outburst was quiet but unmistakeable. Pike kept his back straight as he added, rather sarcastically, "Sorry, sir. Momentary lapse in personal discipline."

"It won't happen again," SL-1984 agreed in a more serious tone. "Consider it corrected. You're in charge, I suppose. We're going to need a plan..." He trailed off, head coming up as if he'd heard something. "No. Oh, no. ''Hell'' no. How is that even ''possible?''" The white-clad Vader's voice was as low as it could get.

Down on the floor, forgotten until that moment, Steph was mute. Still, he tried. ''What? What is it?'' Pike echoed the sentiment, raising his blaster.

This time, SL-1984 didn't respond to either of them. He stepped forwards, turning his head as if searching. "...I can't let that happen," he said at last, more to himself than anyone else. "I don't even want to think about that. Gravitational pull alone could - and even if it didn't, the superlaser - wrong hands, there aren't even any ''right'' ones - I ''won't'' let that happen."

''Let what happen? What's going on?''

SL-1984 turned the corner at a dead run and was gone. Bitterly Pike muttered, "No way we'll be able to keep up with him. We should have at least synched our comm frequencies. Okay. Let's do that now. Frequency - Aurek Corellia Delta." Almost as one, the troopers switched to the same comm channel. "We can't stay here. First priority is finding the rest of Tampa Bay; once we've done that we can worry about what in the nine hells is going on. I know where my - my husband is, or should be at the moment. We have to start from there."

The snowtrooper continued to speak aloud, nervous energy spilling into his voice. "This is not going to be a blue milk run, boys. We can't afford to waste any time; everyone move fast and don't get distracted. We ''must'' regroup, or we are lost. I'm on point; Shad, you're at the rear. Sing out if something happens to you, even if it looks like we've seen it. We can ''not'' afford to leave anyone behind! Blasters to stun; Ursala, lower the setting on your forcepike. Nothing turns a crowd into a mob faster than a death, and ''don't ask me how I know that''. Let's move out!" Pike headed out at a rapid march, followed by the other five.

In the dead end, Steph hunkered, forgotten.

==Red Guard==

Everything was darkness and confusion and helpless nausea. When the world fell out from under her it took her stomach with it. Gravity meant nothing; she felt as if she was falling, spinning on the worst amusement park ride ever imagined. A timeless period later she tasted blood and realized that she'd bitten the inside of her lip.

And then the world was back, or one very much like it. Struck by the very physical sensation of falling, even though she could feel her boots firmly planted on the floor, Anj instinctively assumed a defensive crouch, opening eyes that she hadn’t remembered closing.

She could see! She could hear! Long ago Anj had gotten used to the way the Red Guard helmet cut her visibility and muffled all sound; it was inevitable, after all. She’d all but stopped noticing. Now, though – now the flattened ovoid of the visor was still there, but a little smaller, and the space around it was no longer dark.

She could see as well and as much as she could when bareheaded, and all sounds were crisp and clear, not muffled in the least. It wasn’t that the helmet was gone; even though it was cool to the touch and non intrusive she could feel it, tight against the contours of her face, pressing against her skin with only a few gaps to let air circulate. But the inside, so close that her eyelashes brushed a smooth surface every time she blinked, was full of light and color and motion. For a moment it was completely disorienting.

Training kicked in as she glanced frantically from one thing to the next. These were the screens in her helmet. They negated the disadvantage of having an enclosed faceplate. The ones on the sides gave her left and right views. This lowest monitor, the short wide one, was her peripheral display. It showed her what was in back. Her aural pickups caught sound and relayed it into her ears in such a way that she could determine the source and how distant it is. They also blunted the effects of sonic weaponry. The analysis calmed her, steadied her, and she could finally pay attention to what she saw in front of her.

It took a moment to realize that these were the same furries who'd been grouped together before. They barely bore any resemblance to any fursuits she had seen, ever – even the best of the best had always looked artificial. Wet, flickering eyes with fully mobile eyelids, subtle facial expressions, a mouth that did more than open and close, pawhands that did not look like gloves, skin that shivered, fur that sprouted from the skin, muscles and tendons moving beneath it, toes that splayed against the ground, tails and ears that moved silently and with purpose – admittedly she wasn't exactly involved with the furry scene, but in all the conventions and events she had ever attended she had never seen a fursuit that still looked real up close. Not when she compared a costume to a real animal. Some things just couldn’t be faked.

Yet the people she saw before her, gasping and touching themselves and looking wildly about… Some were more or less humanlike than others, but one or two looked like nothing less than bipedal wild animals with slightly altered forelimbs and faces. The inarticulate confused things that they said were not in the voices of men or beasts, but a combination of both. They ''breathed'', they ran wet tongues over bestial teeth and ductile lips, they staggered on well-formed legs, their faces and body language reflected shock and disbelief and joy and horror and sudden fear. More than one turned a hybrid face towards the Red Guard.

Training once more came to the fore, and she welcomed it. No one to protect but herself, that was good. She needed to be cautious. They were disorganized and might not mean any harm, but as a whole they looked to be on the verge of blind panic. With her armor on, TR-1407 could probably survive being trampled, but she wouldn't like it. Anj took half a step backwards and stumbled – her feet, her legs seemed bigger and heavier than they should have been, and her center of gravity had shifted. Her balance had changed completely. She compensated even as the realization hit her that something was fundamentally different. The costume was tight, but ''beneath'' it-

Set off, either by her motion or by the low, coughing feline roar uttered by one of them, the furries split. Hooves and paws pounded the carpet as they ran, most of them headed ''away'' from TR-1407, but a gazelle and a zebra sprang past her, giving her a wide berth. She had half turned to stare after them in bewilderment when her spine chilled and she saw something huge and white and blue in one of her helmet screens.

Reacting almost instantly, TR-1407 jerked out of the way, her arms reflexively following through on the motion and swinging the tip of her weighty forcepike into contact with her assailant. It connected solidly, making a tiny crackling noise that was all out of proportion to the effect.

Momentum kept it going, but the enormous white tiger’s leap ended gracelessly as it lost consciousness. It hit the floor with an impact that looked painful and lay limp, flat red tongue sticking out of its fanged, slack mouth. Anj looked from it to the forcepike clasped in her gloved hands.

The stun module mounted on the vibro-edge head at the very tip gleamed dully. Fully extended, the weapon was two meters from the thin tip past the black grip to the weighted base, and it was much, ''much'' heavier than it had been before, maybe seven or eight kilograms - Seven. It was regulation-issue, so it definitely weighed seven kilos - but it felt ''right'' in her hands, sleek and balanced. Perhaps it wasn’t as elegant and deadly as a lightsaber, but here was a weapon that could kill or incapacitate, equally effective in pitched battle or nonlethal crowd control. Set to maximum it could tear through the hull of a starship or take off a man's arm at the shoulder; set to the lower setting and it could knock out a grown Wookiee. Or, apparently, a leaping tiger. That thought brought her back out of contemplation.

“…Yeah. What was that?” Anj’s eyelashes brushed her visor as she blinked. Something weird had happened to the helmet speaker. Normally it just relayed her voice; it distorted it just a little bit, making it slightly tinnier and more mechanical, but that was all. It didn’t ''change'' her voice, not really. It made it a bit less feminine, but it was still recognizable as ''hers''.

But something had happened to that speaker. This wasn’t her voice; this was nothing like it, in fact. The speaker was making her sound like an entirely different person. Why in the Emperor's name-

Focus! Were all local threats neutralized? What about her assailant? Anj moved closer and crouched to examine the white tiger. It was huge, easily three meters from the tip of its tail to its whiskered muzzle. Why meters and not feet? Feh, that wasn't important. At first glance it looked almost exactly like the tranquilized big cats that she'd seen on documentaries, down to the rapid, heavy way its sides heaved as it breathed. The only immediate oddity was the fact that it seemed to be wearing ''clothes'' – something like a tube top and close-fitting boxers, both pale blue.

But another moment showed her that it – no, she, for there was a suggestion of breasts in that tube top – had forepaws that would do poorly for bearing weight. They were long, the fingers well formed with prominent thumbs. Her head also bore hair, short and pattered in the same way as the striped fur, but distinct. No tiger looked like ''that''.

Around her thick neck, too, there was a strap holding a disposable camera…

TR-1407 tensed up as another cold tingle swept up her spine, glancing automatically towards a particular section of wall. Almost immediately that section bowed inwards, breaking with a wild shower of plaster and bricks as something almost spherical burst through, pudgy fists clenched, cubes ricocheting against each other and the interior as red liquid sloshed.

“'''OH YEAHHH!'''”

Apparently she, or the world, had gone mad. Even as the thought flashed through her mind, Anj was acting, one-handedly drawing her blaster rifle - where had that come from, she hadn't brought a blaster trooping today - from where it was holstered beneath her robes and firing.

The blaster bolt - it wasn't supposed to ''work''! - hit a curved, transparent surface that absorbed the energy, heating and deforming slightly. On the inside, bubbles formed at the site and floated rapidly up to the top; barely a second later they had stopped and the melted region had returned to its former unblemished state.

The – whatever it was – adjusted its footing as the three frosted translucent cubes floating inside of it rattled and clinked. Below them the lacquered black indents that served as sketchy facial features - eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a wide smiling mouth, all highly stylized – moved to assume an expression that looked like furious, homicidal joy. Its short arms, placed in relation to its eyes where ears would have been on a humanoid, reached towards the Red Guard, fingers twitching as if to fix around her neck.

Anj fired twice more, with the same minimal result – small parts of the clear surface melted and re-formed, a little of the liquid boiled up without lowering the level within, and the thing displayed anger. It was walking, short legs with their rounded toeless feet looking ridiculous under its bulk, but slowly. She didn't know if it was limited to that speed or it was deliberate. Anj felt another chill on her spine and knew, in a burst of insight, that that didn't matter. It could gather itself and leap hard and fast enough to cover nearly four meters in an eyeblink, breaking through anything in its way. She was almost in range of such a leap.

Still, it couldn't jump several times in succession. If she moved now, she could leave it behind. It looked like – it looked completely impossible. Like a round-bellied pitcher, entirely hollow and complete with flared spout and glass handle, low-set arms and legs stuck on like an afterthought. It was filled, limbs included, with a translucent red liquid - she could see ''through'' it even if the other side was distorted. Somehow Anj thought she’d seen it or something like it before, but just by ''existing'' it was an affront to reality. It couldn’t ''possibly'' stand upright on those small featureless feet, and as for moving! It had no skeletal structure, no visible muscles or joints, it was ''an anthropomorphic pitcher of'' punch, ''how'' could it move?!

TR-1407 shoved her blaster back into its holster on her leg. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and she had no desire to be killed by it. Time to go. Yet something stopped her.

The tiger furry was still out cold. She was only slightly further from the pitcher than Anj was, and the Red Guard had no reason to doubt that the thing was willing to take out its frustration on whatever couldn’t get out of the way.

Even so.... Abruptly TR-1407 recalled her training on Yinchorr, where they had tried to pound stormtrooper training out to make way for something a little different. There'd been the hierarchy of service. Empire above all, Emperor, ranking staff and those she had been assigned to protect, peers and those of lower rank, Imperial citizens, everyone else. For these, she would lay down her life. There was a mantra in that somewhere, so ingrained that it was a part of her, essential enough that she was slow to register that it was completely new.

Yes, the tiger had leaped at her and she had reacted as if under attack, stunning it. And on the scale of people she needed to protect, attackers ranked somewhere below saving herself. However, she had no way to know if that leap really had been an act of aggression. What to do...

Indecision lasted for only a split second. It made no difference if she was or wasn't attacked, that thing's in danger because I put her there. So Anj would get her out. Didn't matter how ridiculous the situation is, she still had a duty. TR-1407 changed her stance, gripped her forcepike in both hands and held it before her in ready position.

If the pitcher thing had been any faster she would have been caught while thinking, but it was forced to shuffle forwards to get within range. She had the feeling that it could only run with any speed if it still had the momentum from a leap. Anj readied herself and thumbed the setting as it tensed to spring.

“'''OH ''YEAHHH!'''''”

Although she’d known this was going to happen, TR-1407 was still surprised at its speed. Barely in time, she dived and rolled under it the instant before it hit. When it landed it did so on three points, splintering the floor underneath it and making everything around tremble with the impact.

Spinning to face it again, Anj swung one-handed and smashed the forcepike's tip into her opponent's body. This time a sharp ''crack!'' rang through the air; as it spun to face her she adjusted her grip and swung the heavy weapon in a high vertical stroke, then again, horizontal, hitting the curved glassy surface ''hard''. The sound was high and sharp, both unpleasant and nearly musical.

There was the tingle again, strong and focused. Acting with it the Red Guard dodged a flailing arm and struck once more, to the left of center, then tried to get some distance between herself and the target, stepping back. Almost immediately she smacked into the wall, hard enough to thump her armor. Damn, her situational awareness had slipped! As she recovered and tried again to pull away she almost fell over her own feet, once more becoming aware that something was ''different''. There'd been a bit of a bounce where no bounce should be, not on a woman. Fortunately her stumble went unnoticed.

The pitcher thing looked at first glance to be unaffected; if it had been made out of durasteel every impact would have left great rents, but its shape was intact and it hadn't stopped moving. On second glance TR-1407 saw the white fractures that were spiderwebbed dramatically across the surface.

She kept her visor pointed squarely at its enraged lacquered eyes, holding her forcepike up in an unvoiced threat.

The indents that appeared to be eyebrows lowered and drew together as it frowned slowly. Across its sketchy features a white fracture, which had started to gradually fill in, lengthened and widened again with a sound that reminded the Red Guard of thin ice on the surface of a pond.

The pitcher thing’s right arm began to leak, red liquid forming drops and pattering down into the carpet. The glass there, thinner than on its curved body, had all but shattered, and repaired itself only slowly. Slowly, the thing’s eyes slid from its arm to Anj’s visor.

“Press me and you’ll be dead,” she warned, not knowing if it could understand her or not, talking slowly and evenly. “I can keep this up faster than you can fix yourself.” Her grammar had gotten a little mangled. The message was obvious nonetheless.

“I can throw a grenade into you and vaporize your contents. I can sweep your legs out from under you and shatter them so you can’t stand. Once I’ve done that, I can smash you into a thousand shards, which I can then scatter.” Even as she said the words, noticing again that the voice saying these words was not hers, she was confident that this was not an empty threat. Interfere with an Imperial Red Guard in the performance of his duty and you’re coming off second-best, she knew.

TR-1407 advanced half a step and brought her forcepike into ready position. The pitcher thing’s eye indents became larger, then smaller again. A sense of rage so strong that it was palpable radiated off of it, but it had sense enough to know a hopeless fight. Still dripping, it shuffled backwards and began to turn ponderously. A moment later, and it bounded away through another wall with a shower of plaster. The Red Guard watched through the hole it left until she was satisfied that it wasn't going to come back.

Hah. Straightening, Anj looked over the comatose tiger once more. Her white-furred flanks had been decorated with a coat of dust and plaster fragments, but the furry had escaped harm.

Now what? The immediate danger was past, but TR-1407 knew better than to assume that things were safe now. The tiger was still out and would likely remain that way for an hour or so. Anj wasn’t going to stay around guarding her. Duty to comrades outweighed duty to strange nonhumans who might have attacked her and weren't even Imperial citizens. Some of her responsibility had been discharged just now, but she knew one way to make a stunned sentient recover faster.

It took a bit of searching - and a moment of staring at her own gloved hands, which appeared to be bigger than she remembered - to find the site where the stun module in her forcepike had hit; the tiger’s fur was thick enough that the little bruised patch of skin was hidden. It was on the furry’s muscular upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Anj closed the tiger’s jaws with an effort, then took a handful of her crimson robes and pressed it against the furry’s nose, plugging the nostrils with the tips of her fingers. She counted slowly to ten and jabbed the bruised patch with the armored knuckles of her free hand, hard. The angle was too awkward for it to be a punch.

Almost immediately the white tiger started to make throaty sounds of complaint, fingers and ears twitching. Anj peeled back a furred eyelid and saw the pupil of the blue eye contract.

That would probably do it. Not willing to be there when the tiger woke up, TR-1407 walked away, almost stumbling on legs that were longer than they should have been. Despite the exertion, Anj's breath had been only slightly quickened. Without that pressure to act, she felt strange. Okay. Okay. Now to find someplace private and try to make sense of all this…

==Steph comes out of hiding==

Steph had been passive until now - almost comatose, for that matter. Events had swept along too rapidly and too outlandishly for him to get much of a grip. But now he realized he couldn't stay that way any longer. The strangely protective presence of the huge armor-clad people was gone. He was just a Hoojib huddled on the floor, and if he didn't get a grip - didn't get ''moving'' - who knew what horrors would catch him?

First there was simply learning how to walk. He was on all fours, but he couldn't crawl - his thighs were short, his knees were far from pronounced, and he couldn't plant his palms on the floor; his wrists didn't bend like that. Instead, when he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. His toes were long enough that he had to turn them outward.

He wobbled and wavered at first, unsure of his limbs like he was a kitten or a puppy or something, or like he'd been on an one of those all-night benders at the end of Finals Week. Still, as he practiced it quickly became easier. The reflexes seemed to be built in - how to stand, how to walk, coordination, the whole deal. That was a mercy, he supposed.

Keeping huddled against the wall for some modicum of concealment Steph crept back up the short hallway to peer out into the room he'd come from.

It was hard to comprehend what he was seeing at first. His senses had been distorted just as much as his body, his perspective something like half a foot off the floor. The scent of smoke in the air was almost buried under the other less identifiable smells Steph's enhanced nose was picking up. His enormous ears were catching more sounds than he knew what to do with, and there was something new and weird with tugging and heat and distant inaudible violin notes... But his vision was still quite clear and comprehensible, at least. Most of the tables had been upended in the rush as people had fled, scattering a lot of junk on the floor.

Excellent. Cover. As soon as the coast seemed relatively clear Steph bounded out across the floor, not quite running and not quite hopping, shelter under the nearest upright table. The space under the tablecloth was still cavernous at his scale, but much better than the soaring vastness of the room outside or even the hallway. He paused there to gather his wits and figure out what he was doing.

He had to get it together. He had to... he needed to find Garrett, before anything else. Easier thought than done, though - he hadn't gone far but the changes to everything had disoriented him. Where was he now? Where had he left his friend?

And would he recognize him when he found him? Steph's ears and antenna perked up, nose twitching nervously, as something large came moving through the room outside his shelter. Larger even than a normal human, heavy footfalls thudding solidly on the thin carpet... Steph would have whimpered had he been able to make any actual sounds. ''Oh God, please don't find me, I don't want to be eaten by a... whatever...''

The footfalls came to an uncertain stop nearby. "Huh?" It rumbled, voice deeply guttural and deeply confused. "No find... what?"

This time Steph ''did'' notice the coincidence between his own thoughts and the creature's words. ''Can he read my mind? Wait, no... am ''I'' telepathic? I don't believe it! But that Vader guy said Hoojibs were telepathic-''

"Who's there?" The big creature bellowed, and for a moment Steph found himself caught in a confusing mental tangle as he tried to stifle the volume of his thinking. His antenna curled and he had to force himself ''not'' to speculate about the appendage's psionic functions for fear of being overheard. It was an impossible task.

Fortunately there were still plenty of other distractions out there, and after only a few seconds the sound of frantic sheep bleating in the distance drew the attention of whatever it was that was standing nearby. "Hah!" it grunted, lumbering off with some new unknown purpose in mind. Steph let out a tiny sigh of relief.

''Okay, so I guess I'm glad I can still communicate somehow... assuming that wasn't all just a coincidence,'' he thought. No one was nearby to confirm it and he gave a snort of derisive amusement. ''God, so much to figure out! Take this one thing at a time. So I turned into a Hoojib. If everyone else has turned into what they were dressed as too...'' He shook his head. It made too little sense, he couldn't get his mind around it.

Would Garrett still be inside that cardboard-turned-metal shell he was wearing? Steph hoped he'd got out of it somehow, but if he hadn't... Cautiously poking his head out from under the tablecloth and peering around to check for danger first, Steph forced himself to dart deeper into the room.

His attention immediately went to a heap of detritus, taller than he was, that had formed against a ragged mass that had been a tabletop mere minutes ago. Some of it had obviously been ''on'' the table, originally - graphic novels were strewn everywhere, many of them burnt. Pages had collected here, and other things as well, probably kicked into place in the rush. Great tufts of fur, bits and pieces of clothing, food scraps that had escaped from trash cans, tablecloths, splintery pieces of other tables - Steph shuffled closer, then thought to wonder why it had drawn his attention. This was not the only pile of trash scattered around the room - there had been several filled trash cans, even this early in the day - and none of ''them'' were all that interesting.

It was like this one was tugging at him - specifically, his antenna. He could feel it sort of warming in response. No, 'tugging' wasn't quite the word - it was almost a smell, but not quite that either. Like... he could almost swear there was a small, cheap violin playing, just one very high continuous note, but he didn't actually hear anything. Something about it was comforting.

Steph snorted. ''Why am I so interested in a pile of trash?'' It wasn't food, that was for sure. There was tons of food in the room, mostly from upended trash cans, and the smell was ''everywhere''; spilled soda and cheap beer, a salad with dressing, corn chips, a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich that was starting to go bad, applesauce, Skittles, an entire box of donuts. And that was just in this room. None of it appealed to him - the smell was just ''there'', like the smoke or the ink on the comic books. His mouth wasn't even watering. He wasn't even sure if he still had salivary glands.

If he was quick about it, it wouldn't hurt to check. Steph climbed gingerly atop the pile, long toes curling to grip at an abandoned canvas bag full of hard objects. The feeling was coming from here. Still uncertain - he felt so ''exposed'' - he scraped at some wet pages that had stuck together.

''There! What's that?'' Something hard, probably plastic, and just a little smaller than his head. Steph sat on his haunches, freeing him to draw whatever it was up. He could grasp and his dewclaws were jointed more or less like thumbs, but the job of wrestling it out took longer than it should have.

Steph's ears quivered. More footsteps! Where was the best place to hide? Taking a step forward - a much more complicated action than it had been when he'd had two legs - he felt his toes flex on the thing. ''Maybe...''

He was going to get caught out in the open if he didn't hide ''now''. Steph hobbled on three legs into the dubious shelter of another table, this one apparently intact, though missing its covering. Edging behind a pile of plastic boxes that had probably once held statuettes, Steph ducked his head under his belly and took a look at his prize, clutched in the wiry toes of his foot. That foot distracted him - earlier, he'd paid much more attention to what had happened to his hands.

His feet were so huge that when he stood in the position that came most naturally the clawed tips of his toes were level with his elbows. They really did look something like bird's feet, covered in slightly wrinkly grayish skin rather than scales or more white fur, though not like any bird he'd seen. More importantly, they were at least somewhat better than his paws at flexing and holding things.

He'd misjudged how far away the footsteps were; that, or the one making the footsteps hadn't moved in a straight line. Now they pounded past, not as heavy as the big creature or even the stormtroopers but very quick. He could hear a girl's voice spouting a steady stream of "OW OW OW get OFF AHH OW" sprinkled with invective, and as she raced past Steph saw a pair of towering stockinged legs pumping. Something smaller and greenish clung to one of them, but they were both gone before he could get a better look.

Not everything was out to get him. Good to know.

The thing that he'd picked up turned out to be a cell phone, the kind that flipped open. It tingled pleasantly and somehow made that high violin note to Steph's antennae, a comforting feeling. He set it down and prized it open with a certain amount of difficulty, knowing that this wasn't helping him find Garrett but telling himself that he'd only be another minute.

The phone was on, and its screen glowed. Not entirely certain about just what he was doing, Steph put his face up so close that the phone's wallpaper blurred out of focus, tilted his head until what had been his chin sank into the fur on his chest, and felt his antennae uncoil, reaching out to touch the keypad, above the part of the phone that the tingling and humming was coming from.

It was a nice feeling. A very nice feeling. Steph closed his eyes and leaned into it for a long moment, sighing almost inaudibly through his nose. He could feel it moving up into his head and body. It was soothing. The violin note held for a few long seconds, then wavered. As that happened the heat lessened.

His eyes snapped open. ''What am I doing? Damn it.'' Steph peeled his head away and heard the phone chirp the low power alert before the screen went black. ''What was that? What was I - didn't the Vader guy say something about eating energy? Damn it, I wish I'd paid more attention.''

He whipped his head around. That ''tugging'', a little like a smell, a little like feeling heat through his antenna, maybe a little like hearing high violin notes, it was back. He could sense something interesting, several somethings, most about as big and with similar high cheap-violin notes, scattered around the room. More phones? Maybe dropped cameras?

For the third time Steph sensed something moving, and close. Still hidden under the table and behind boxes, he pressed himself against the wall. It was moving in a different direction than the other two, and it was - it was ''right on the other side of that wall!''

He shot out from under the table, smacking one gigantic ear against a table leg, and froze against a pile of rags, out in the open. The ceiling yawned high above, he was exposed - but nothing was going to collapse on him.

This turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever it was, it kept moving. He could barely hear its footsteps, and he might not have noticed - now that he was listening, this wasn't the only set of footsteps - but he could sense it as a sort of interesting moving heat and a whole ''orchestra'' playing, getting fainter as it got farther away.

''Wait.'' Steph's ear was stinging. ''How would I know anything about whatever was running except how big it is? Unless'' - His eyes were huge, and when he crossed them above his nose he could sort of see the blurred, doubled shape of that antenna, arcing above his head. ''What, can Hoojibs sense electricity too? Or what, robots? This is just weird.''

Now that he thought about it - there were a lot of other interesting warm things and bowstringed instruments were playing from all sides. Warm wasn't really the word, maybe... maybe ''powered''. Some were small, others larger. Some were moving. It was the same sense, now that he thought about it, that he'd gotten from his rescuer. Same sense as from the phone, but the big things, the moving ones, he could feel through the walls and over a distance. He only 'heard' anything when it was close enough, but the ''powered'' part of the sense could go a lot farther, apparently.

He could feel... Up ahead. Something big, something motionless. Steph wasn't at all sure what direction he'd been going even before he'd literally run into SL-1984, but it seemed like this might be the right way. Hesitantly at first, then with more and more certainty, he followed the antenna.

''There.'' It couldn't be anything else. Even on its side, two right legs sticking out rigidly into open air with only rubble keeping it from lying flat, it loomed up above Steph, head hanging down at a thirty degree angle, resting on what looked like the buckled remains of a chair. The powered sense here was much, ''much'' stronger than anything he'd felt coming from any of the dropped electronics. There was enough power thrumming in it that even from here his antenna was warm, and the note was much deeper than the ones he'd 'heard' before, like a double bass. Or whatever they were called; it had been years since his last music class. He had to fight off the lulling feeling that came with it.

It didn't look remotely human. From Steph's perspective, it took a moment to recognize it as an AT-AT. He moved closer, tentative.

Each round footpad had four thick toe flaps. These were slowly, very slowly, swinging out and in on their hinges. The toe flap articulation was so minimal that they couldn't point straight out. The motion looked aimless.

''Garrett?'' he tried. ''I still don't know if this really works or not... Garrett? Are you in there? Can you hear me?''

Steph shuffled closer. ''What do I do now? I don't know how telepathy works. Or if you could hear it. Or if I even ''have ''it. Or if he's here.'' The AT-AT's boxy head was bigger than his whole body. ''I could probably fit into a shoebox, so that doesn't mean much. God. I probably'' can ''fit into a shoebox.'' The head had a dark horizontal slot running across the very front, like a very narrow visor or something. On either side of it were two bulging domes like flattened compound eyes, each housing a slender pipelike structure. Its chin had two more, slightly larger pipelike things, fixed forwards.

Closer. Steph rose shakily onto his hindquarters, almost pitching over as he overcompensated. His toes splayed against the ground strongly enough that if he kept perfectly still he could almost, ''almost'' stand up, though his ankles started to burn the moment he straightened them and his knees refused to unbend. Ignoring that, he stared into that slot, vertical since the thing was on its side. It was mostly opaque, but he could sort of see... were those chairs? ''A room? No, a cockpit.''

His breath fogged the view and cleared slowly.

''Garrett? It's me. Steph.'' That black slot was reflective enough that from this angle, looking right into it from as high up as he could get without finding something to stand on, he could see himself. Big, ''big'' eyes, barely on this side of being appealing rather than grotesque, huge ears, both long and wide, that flagged behind him but wouldn't stand straight up. A bulbous black nose, the mouth beneath it so small that fur around the edges made it look like a pit, and that antennae, curling like a fern. He hadn't exactly seen himself before.

Steph was distracted enough that he didn't register as the thrumming increased in tempo and the bass note picked up. He almost missed one of the pipes - the medium blasters on the temples - as it swiveled slowly to point directly at him.

==Steph and Garrett==

An alert came on and pinged, setting the other systems into motion.

Something huge and white loomed up against his head, almost touching his command viewport, and he reactivated. The white thing - some kind of animal, details were popping in like graphics on an overworked PC - flinched and fell back, and seemed to shrink as the rest of his vision started loading, quickly from a cold start instead of little by little. There was sound, or something like sound, and words, or something close, but he already had plenty of them, and the ones he had were louder.

There was movement from the white animal, he could see now that it was only very big, not huge, and it suddenly traveled a hundred meters away in a few shuffling steps. It seemed to be clinging to a wall that he was pressed against.

Something was wrong. His vision was still loading, everything that wasn't right in front of his head was still glossy smooth and sparse of detail, but he could see that nothing was at the right angle - oh. Oh. He'd fallen over. That explained why there was nothing under his footpads and no weight on his legs, too. Reorienting, he managed to figure out which way was "up". Vaulting high above him was a ceiling, higher up than the hold of a Star Destroyer should be, and there were walls. They seemed very far apart. Something was wrong with this.

Of course it was wrong! He'd fallen over! He was down, and anyone could climb up to get at a boarding hatch and ''at his crew!'' They must have been stunned by the impact, thrown against his bulkheads -

Alert and evacuate the crew! Why isn't that alarm on yet? Start it now!

Though he didn't have any speakers on his outside, as the prerecorded evacuation message started up internally he saw the white animal perk up, monstrous ears folding, cupping as if funneling sound to its head. If he was judging by how big it was compared to him, and he was, it was at least the size of, of - well, it was almost as big as his head, his ''moveable command section'', part of him said, and it was ''fast'' too, already advancing, covering three meters in a stride -

It was ''big'', it was ''fast'', it was already coming towards him, at any second now it was going to circle past his head and ''get in at his crew!''

'''NO!'''

He wasn't going to let that happen! With a supreme effort, the servos in his neck; his ''flexible armored tunnel''; jerked, pointing the two Taim & Bak MS-1 fire-linked heavy laser cannons at the animal. It froze, stared at him with ridiculously big brown eyes, and there was that almost-sound again, like it was saying his name, but it was still big and fast and a danger to his crew and it ''still'' hadn't moved.

His heavy laser cannons, mounted on either side of his chin, the underside of his moveable command section, were cold. It took a moment to muster the power he needed to warm up the lasers that heated the blaster gas in his cannon energizer. Several seconds passed.

While that was happening, the animal held still. As he fired both in tandem, it twitched out of his sights, and he couldn't re-orient in time. Nothing with legs should have been able to move as fast as it did. When he fired, the beams shot into a stretch of wall, impacting with a minor explosion. Texture popped in, and he saw that he'd left two dramatic black scars with a tiny flame guttering in each. Six seconds later and his heavies had recharged, but he didn't need them again so soon.

The animal was scared off, if only for the moment, and he had some time to catch his brea- no, that wasn't right. To lie helplessly on his side and try to regroup. For the moment, there was no further threat to the crew. Above the heavy laser cannons he had two fire-linked medium repeating blasters, useful for smaller, more agile threats, since they could swivel as needed. All he could do was heat those up, check the gas reserves for them and his heavies, send off a distress signal, and wait.

The signal took barely a second to set up and broadcast. It would, of course, be hours or days or more before anything came of it; that was how that went. He was a very valuable piece of equipment, and depending on the commander and the situation he might or might not be a high priority during a crisis.

Crew was more important than the question of where he was, how he'd gotten there, and how he'd get out of this. Without his crew... He turned his attention to his interior, remembering to watch in case the large animal returned.

Neither of the boarding hatches or any of his four escape hatches, or even the hatch to the vehicle bay, had been opened. He knew that. His atmospheric exchangers and filtration unit - part of the life-support systems built into his interior - were running a steady stream of breathable air through his passenger/troop section and command cockpit. He could feel it luffing across his deck.

A notice came up, that he was stressing the mechanisms in his neck, his ''flexible armored tunnel''. Slowly he lowered his head until it hit something and he was at that same angle he'd activated with. He could feel whatever it was, just barely. Just a sense that it was ''there'', nothing about hardness or softness or texture. This still wasn't good for his servos, but he couldn't do anything about that yet.

There was no movement in his interior. It was as if he didn't have any crew at all. That didn't really make sense, though. How could he be active without a crew? His drive motor shouldn't even be running.

Still nothing. At last, interior cams activated and he got a look at his insides. Both levels of his passenger/troop section were empty, without so much as a cleaning droid poking around. No one was in the maintenance shaft to his motor. There were several speeder bikes racked up like throwing darts back in his rear vehicle bay, and some gear in crates, disarrayed a little by the fall, but nothing that moved on its own. It made him feel vaguely uneasy to see all that.

Only one cam was in his tunnel. More of them were in and around his command cockpit. The seats for pilot and gunner, as well as the larger and more imposing one for the commander, were fixed to his deck, though they were adjustable and currently hanging from their bearings. He saw that very clearly; cams were positioned to fix on the faces of crew in the three essential stations, making it easier for them to send real-time messages or recordings on his holoprojector.

He saw the bulky shapes of the consoles that made up his mainframe. On them, status lights blinked or shone steady, and monitors glowed steadily. These were the displays made for his crew. Who, apparently, wasn't there, not even in the cockpit. That wasn't right. Even standing down, inactive in his berth, there should be at least one technician. And there wasn't so much as a fingerprint on a console or a stretch of flattened upholstery at any of the three essential stations. Like they'd never been touched. Not so much as a speck of dust either. Was he factory-new? Couldn't be. He knew that his hull was scored and dented, cosmetic damage that meant he'd seen action.

This was not good. Bad enough to be helpless on his side waiting for his crew to evacuate and send for backup, which presumably would at some point involve either retrieving him whole or in components or blasting him so that no one else could have him. Worse to be helpless on his side with no crew.

No crew. He'd skirted that phrase, because 'no crew' meant 'empty'. That was meaningless when he was inactive and a protocol breach when he was standing down, but he was live now, systems running, and he couldn't...

[This does not actually fit anywhere. I'll delete it when I'm sure I'm not going to use anything from it. "Autonomy, actualization, psyche emulation identity and personality emulation, records, software analog of organic-brain emotional response, and many others, often very similar."

There was one subroutine housed in one particular console, one last major program in the master computer, that hadn't gone live yet. No. Untrue on both counts. Several subroutines, many or most of them linked so that one could not be active without others. Currently there was only one running at optimum, but all were functioning at one level or another. There was a great deal of overlap among the many, many subsubroutines, and many redundancies, and it was altogether more complex and puzzling than any other set of programs. The console wasn't planned or built by the same mind as the rest of him.

It was unmarked, as far as he could tell, and set apart from the others. It had the normal complement of monitors and status lights, but only a few controls. From the lights, some systems were active, most weren't. He was not entirely sure what, if anything, it did.

Should he start it up now? It couldn't be essential. This would just burn power faster. But why not? He couldn't find any crew, so without autonomy he wasn't going to be able to do anything. Besides, his life support was running with no life to support, his hologram projection pod was live with nothing to receive, and he had readied everything in his drive motor even though he was hardly using it at all, what with being motionless. No crew meant no action, the moment when he'd fired at the large animal notwithstanding. He might as well. Power was rerouted, his drive motor sped up slightly to compensate, and bank after bank of status lights on the last console glowed to life.

Garrett jerked. ''Beep... beep... beep... beep...'' Automatically he reached out to swat at the alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock, and his leg just swung forward and back, smacking against something. He felt the impact dully as it traveled up into his body. It didn't really sound like an alarm clock, it sounded like - ''No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! Stress on flexible armored tunnel! Warning!''

That meant - what that meant was that he was FALLING!

Garrett's legs churned forward and back, but hit rubble, unidentifiable heaps of trash. No. He wasn't falling, he was already down, and he'd figured that out already. He was already down, he remembered the fall and how it had started slow and then became much faster and then he'd hit the ground, and now he was ''on'' the ground, though he could barely feel what was underneath him.

The costume. That was it, that had to be it, the costume was keeping things from touching his skin. Yes. Under it, Garrett could feel things, his nerves hadn't all gone dead. As soon as he got it off, he'd be fine. That emptiness, that sickening hollow space inside, that would wear off. Yes. So would the feeling that he was somehow both stretched and compressed somehow. He just had to get the costume off.

The alarms in his cockpit were getting annoying, and nothing was happening with the evacuation alarm, so he disabled them. Indicators on monitors and bank after bank of status lights updated continuously, but they showed nothing he couldn't sense for himself except, perhaps, why the lights on the mystery console, already blinking in rapid patterns, went mad.

He wasn't breathing! He wasn't breathing! Whatever he used to breathe - diaphragm? Rib muscles? - was missing, his sides were totally rigid and immobile. It didn't hurt, but God, he couldn't breathe!

Garrett shuddered, or tried to. The seats at his three essential command stations readjusted convulsively, his flexible armored tunnel quivered, his medium blasters rocked, and his legs bent slightly where they met his drive motor and at the knee joints, toe flaps flicking up and down. Otherwise he didn't move. Just a costume, he told himself. A costume and maybe some highly illegal combination of substances which would make the University very unhappy. He hadn't knowingly taken anything, but that never made much difference with the staff. At the moment, the thought of Midtral kicking him out wasn't all that bad.

The console displays worked silently, making it much easier for crew to see just what was going on with him. One housed the housekeeping subroutines and displayed temperature and pressure readings, air supply, life support, lighting, and half a dozen other systems, both readings and controls, all for the places where crew would be. Most of that was locked to him, off limits, part of some security measure. More consoles were devoted to other things. Weaponry. Data from sensor arrays, holographic targeting systems, inside cams, impulse terrain sensors. The console for both of his KDY FW62 compact fusion drive systems, all the fiddly details that went with them and his fuel slug tank and blaster cannon energizer. Other consoles too, with purposes of their own. Most of them didn't appear to be connected, but under the deck each was linked by numerous thick cables, to each other and the rest of his body. They were, Garrett knew, what his brain had turned into.

After he took the costume off Midtral would kick him out for substance abuse, the way they also did with people who got weird piercings or large tattoos or got in the paper for suspicious reasons. It was in the college contract; people hated it, but no one had a legal leg to stand on. They would give him time to pick up his stuff and find a motel, and he and Steph could go together to that bar just off campus to complain and rage and drink. Later they could stagger back to the motel, and wake up side by side in the morning with matching hangovers, and both of them could claim to have no memory of the previous night. The first and last time he'd done it, he'd sworn never to do it again, and Steph had clutched his head and said "Never, ''ever'' again". But another all-night bender with his friend sounded a lot better now.

He laughed wildly - and silently except for a burst of static on the internal comms. On the - yes, it was the system the commander used to give orders to the troops, it might as well be an intercom, why not? The static was loudest from the hologram pod, loud enough to fill the cockpit. It was purely internal, with not one speaker on his outside. He didn't have to pause for breath. Static hissed and crackled through his intercom, rising in a snarl of terrible, meaningless sound that went on and on. Who was he kidding? Nothing was coming off, and he was so empty that the noise echoed around his internals. The static died down as he stopped, feeling sick.

Not breathing. This time the realization didn't spark panic. He felt hot and cold at once.

He couldn't get up. Oh, it was easy enough in theory, Garrett knew. Contract abdominal muscles. Prop up on one elbow. Curl knees in along the floor. Turn so that hands and knees are on the ground and body is above. Push off with hands and stand up. Such a pity that he couldn't do that.

Okay, focus, he told himself, trying desperately not to start laughing again. He was on his side, not quite flat. The pocked squares on the ceiling - it was a drop ceiling, part of him noticed - somehow looked ridiculously far distant, same with the walls, though he had no problem making out details. A few hundred meters away - no, that couldn't be right, but several times longer than his body - he saw an abandoned, tapering cylindrical plastic thing partially filled with clear liquid, somehow completely intact. "Aquafina", the label read. It looked like a water bottle. Although it was much smaller than he was and he was looking ''down'' to see it, it still seemed huge. Quite a bit larger than a man, almost the size of a speeder... or, yes, a car. But that couldn't be right.

It dawned on Garrett then that it wasn't that any of these things were too large. No, they were exactly as big as they were supposed to be. It was that ''he'' was too ''small''. He was - he was an AT-AT. The distance from footpad to back was supposed to be at least twenty, twenty-five meters. How many feet was that? Fifty, sixty? If he remembered right, the drop ceiling was supposed to be ten feet up, maybe less. Even if he was standing now, his back would only be halfway to that ceiling, if that. That wasn't right. Maybe it explained the compressed feeling, though.

Movement. The furry white animal was back, and although it was moving very cautiously it still seemed far too quick for something without repulsorlifts. Garrett decided that it was probably the size thing - it seemed as big as a bantha, or... or an elephant. Those weren't supposed to move like this. But the animal was close to the floor and far, far from the ceiling, so it was probably small. Now, he couldn't help noticing that it looked like a combination of various animals. Long haired cat, wading bird, field rabbit, maybe some kind of bug.

It was coming around from Garrett's other side, staying away from his heavies this time. Halfheartedly, he followed it with the swiveling medium repeating blasters on either side of his viewport - or rather, he followed it with one blaster, because the other was pressed by his weight against what looked like a magnified piece of canvas. It didn't seem worth the effort to fire. What was the point? He didn't have any crew to protect. He was ''empty''.

''So'' empty. It was the strangest feeling. A little bit like hunger, a little like cold, slightly nauseating, something like being touch-starved, and a ''lot'' like loneliness so strong that it was crippling. Somehow it was all of those things wrapped up together, with something he had no words for. Continued breathlessness didn't help. ''Empty.''

He tried to shudder again, with the same result as last time. The white animal froze where it stood, the weird curling thing on its head unbending partially.

''Garrett?''

He jerked.

Steph? he said, or tried to say. It came out as purely internal static, like the buzzing hiss of an analog TV on an empty channel. Just like when he'd had that moment of wild laughter earlier.

''Garrett, it's me, Steph. Can you hear me?''

I hear you, I hear you! More static. Was that really Steph? How? What had happened?

''Look, don't try to shoot me again. I don't want - Are you even in there? Somewhere?''

Yes. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you, he tried. Still no words. It was just static on his intercom.

''Look, if you're there, say something.''

I don't think I can, he tried. Static. The creature that said it was Steph had its huge ears cupped around its head again, but Garrett didn't think it was hearing him. The intercom was internal, the hatches were shut. And he was producing static.

He jerked the servos in the armored tunnel that had once been his neck, making his head bob. He had to fight gravity. It wasn't an easy motion, and although he couldn't see it himself, he knew it didn't look smooth.

''Do that again.''

Garrett did. Whatever was between his head and the ground, underneath the too-close canvas, made a weird sort of ''crunch''. He could barely hear it; it seemed soft and far away.

''Okay. Uh, okay. You can't talk, but you can hear me, right?''

A third time, and now he was getting faint complaints. He wasn't designed for this kind of activity, not small repetitive movements. If he kept this up, he'd start damaging the blaster on that side. After a moment, he swung one leg forward and back. A foreleg.

He couldn't see most of his body, but he could see his legs, sticking out rigidly, like he was a flipped card table. There was the joint where each leg met his body. The joint could swing the entire leg forwards and back, and spread the legs a little apart, independently, but the spreading had a very limited range and apparently he couldn't do it lying on his side. His legs were just too heavy; the joints weren't built for this. He had knee joints, and four toe flaps at the end of each leg. And there was some kind of wristlike joint between knee and footpad, where the end of the leg pincered on to the footpad, but he couldn't move it. It was probably like a lizard's wrist; press the hand against something and the arm could move at all kinds of angles, but without something, the ground, a wall, to press against none of those wrist angles were really possible.

''Is that a yes?''

If he'd had eyes, Garrett would have rolled them. As it was, he felt the medium blaster that wasn't pinned twitch. Steph could get like this when he was excited or nervous, chattering inanely and giving off the impression that he wasn't nearly as smart as he was.

He tried talking again, asking, What do you think? Static. Of course. He swung the leg again.

''Okay, yeah. So - I guess I'm telepathic now. Right? My voice is gone, but if you can hear me, what else could it be?''

Garrett lay still, waiting as Steph babbled about what had happened, obviously ''just'' on this side of hysteria. He couldn't blame the little guy - Garrett could feel it pressing in on him, like any minute now he'd burst out in mad static laughter again. And maybe this time he wouldn't stop. But as long as Steph was here, he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

Was this telepathy, then? It was ''like'' hearing Steph's voice, but not quite. He didn't have any sense of where it was coming from. And... no, there wasn't really a sensation of hearing anything. It was like imagining a voice, imagining very strongly. Which raised the question of whether or not he ''was'' imagining it. But that way lay madness.

Eventually, Steph ran down. ''And I'm sorry, I ran away! I shouldn't have. I know.'' Had he? Obviously that was bad, but Garrett wasn't sure that he'd noticed. Not with all this. He wished - well, not like it mattered. Obviously he didn't need to breathe. It just felt like he should.

''Look, I - I should really try and get someone to help you up. I don't want to stay here, it's too open.''

Finally! Garrett staticked and swung forward and back, vigorously enough that he got a stern internal notice about not damaging his legs on obstacles. On the ground, Steph shuffled anxiously, black nose twitching.

''Right. I'll, uh, I'll be right back.'' He took off on all fours. Garrett watched him go. Why was Steph some kind of weird alien rabbit thing? What the hell had ''happened''? There was a way to undo it, right? He hoped there was. He really hoped there was.

He didn't ''want'' to be an AT-AT! He'd never wanted this. A month ago - less than a month ago - this costume hadn't even been a vague idea! He wasn't even a big fan or anything. He didn't want to be a walking beast-shaped tank. He could feel ''air'' blowing through his ''insides''.

He heard faint static crackling out of the intercom, and several bewildered seconds passed before he realized that he was trying to whimper.

==Anj's post-TF segment==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus2.jpg]]

Anj holstered his collapsed forcepike, removed his helmet, pushed his overrobe back over his shoulders like a cape, and stared at the reflection in the mirror, shying away from the eyes. The reflection stared back.

The reflection's face wouldn't turn heads. It was pretty normal, all things considered, no obvious scars or nonhuman colors. There was a certain hardness to it, yes – something in the forehead, the set of the jaw, the chin – but the mouth and the surprised expression saved him from looking too unforgiving. What made it disorienting was the way it was at once strange and familiar. There was a lurching shock like he'd dropped into a hole in the ground, registering that this wasn't some stranger's face. There was a smaller shock of recognition - this was his face. This was him.

“Uh. This is the part of the dream where my teeth fall out or I find out I can fly, right?” Anj winced and saw the reflection do the same. '' I don’t sound anything like me. I don’t even sound like my father.''

“Doesn’t feel like a dream, but how would I know? I guess there's nothing wrong with my voice amplifier. I, uh... Well, this is weird.” It was a very expressive face – the wince hadn’t just been a twitch of the eyelid; there’d also been more than a little reaction in the lips and eyebrows. He looked away.

It made a certain amount of sense, though. After that exchange with the bizarre pitcher-thing he had barely been breathing hard. He'd known something was different, he'd sort of expected this, it wasn't just the - well, the sense that now and again something jostled that shouldn't. Though that had been part of it. “Damn. Well... only men are officially accepted into the Stormtrooper Corps. Only the best stormtroopers can be trained as Red Guards. The screening process - yeah, I don't think a woman would go unnoticed. So yeah.”

He was taller, definitely. Not ''really'' tall, maybe, he could be wrong. When he turned his head and tilted it down it seemed like his shoulders on either side extended out too far, though part of that was the pauldrons. They didn't look bad in the mirror. But - wow, yeah, he was definitely taller. Yes. And his arms were thicker, even aside from the armor. Self-consciously, he flexed his free arm and felt his bicep press into the armor of his lower arm, the vambrace.

Also he was taller. Anj moistened his lips and realized that he was nervous.

For some reason recognizing that made him plant his feet and stand straighter - and yes, taller. Hopefully that would stop surprising him soon, it wasn't like he'd hit his head on the doorjamb or anything. He was nervous - okay, afraid.

Earlier, he'd decided to find an empty bathroom to look at himself in, rather than join the crush of people trying to get out. That had taken a little longer than he'd expected. He might have been dragging his feet a bit, putting it off. He'd known something would happen - maybe he was deluding himself, but it was like there was a wave above him, ready to crash down.

He would have liked to avoid it for a little bit longer. He knew he could. But something inside, almost impossible to make out at first, then louder and clearer to the point where it startled him, said ''No. No. That's not how it goes. Resolve internal crises before they impact performance.''

Anj closed his eyes, then opened them. He started talking, the words forming just before he said them. "I was born in - in Coronet City on Corellia. We moved to Imperial center when I was about three, and lived in a domicile in a shabby-genteel section, on a level that was patrolled enough to keep down the violence." He wanted to stop, this wasn't right - he'd been born in Flagstaff Arizona, they'd moved when he was almost four. "The sun - the sun was visible, there was natural light, but only at high noon. When it rained, and it did that a lot, the water came to us through sluices, and it was never clean." The memory hit him, as strong as any he'd ever had - walking through the marketplace with his mother, ten minutes after a storm had passed overhead, and the water had poured off the awning they ducked under, reflecting rainbows.

"No, that's not right." He made himself stop and shake away the memory of how oily the water was, its smell. His pulse was quickening. "I don't remember Arizona except as bright and red, we just have pictures of the little blue house." There had been holograms of Coronet City in the domicile, projecting on the walls. They weren't the shiny sanitized holos of famous or scenic places that got sold to tourists. His older brother had borrowed a holocam and recorded the scenes himself. "I- we lived in an apartment for a while. It snowed in the winter. First time I'd seen snow, and it made night less dark. It was wetter than I'd thought."

"Smelled a little like tin. Smelled like -" Anj rubbed his face with his gloved free hand, shifting his grip on his helmet with the other. He'd heard more than once that fresh snow smelled like tin, but he couldn't - Oh, Emperor, he remembered the landlord's kid, half a year older and always red-faced, showing up and asking if he'd mind wagering on which of the hired men would be the one to knock down the hawk-bat nest. Why not, he was a Corellian, right? "I, I made friends with a neighbor girl who never stopped telling me and Valerie that the - the show with the puppets was stupid and babyish. I wanted to impress her so I agreed, but I still watched it. Sometimes Valerie told her I was lying..."

This went on for some time, and he kept having the feeling that whatever he was fighting, he was losing. Anj paced, restless, sometimes with uncertainty and other times aggressively. Eventually he forced himself to stop and looked back at the mirror, this time looking into his reflection's eyes. His eyes were wide-open, worried, with irises dark enough that they were hard to distinguish from his pupils. Hadn't they been paler before this? Anj looked away, unsure.

"What happened?" he asked in a low voice, not quite a whisper. "I don't understand. It's like - wait, wait. Am I - am I ''talking'' to myself?" He was. "Emperor's bones," he said, the last two words coming out as a mild oath. He really wasn't in the habit of talking to himself, he knew that for sure. It was probably just to listen to his voice. He'd talked to himself at length right after rigging the voice amp the first time, feeling out how it made him sound. Her sound, at the time. No, wait, he'd done that the first time he'd put on a helmet at the Academy, too. Once he'd quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the the other time he'd read the helmet's instruction manual out loud.

He looked down, saw his hand trembling, and had to clench it into a fist to make it stop. He had to finish this. He just really, really didn't want to, and he wasn't sure what 'this' was or why it scared him. Maybe he could put it off for another minute.

Briskly, Anj used some paper towels to dry the counter where the sinks were, switching off a dribbling faucet at the same time, then set his helmet there and removed his robes, folding them quickly and with mechanical precision.

“Huh.” Despite their irregular shape, he’d folded them into a perfect square, flat and unwrinkled. And why had he bothered wiping down the counter first? Anj dropped his folded robes besides his helmet, deliberately letting a corner hang over the edge of the counter. Immediately he felt the nagging urge to adjust the robes, make them line up precisely, but it wasn’t very strong. Apparently he had a thing for neatness. He hoped it was neatness, and not some kind of cleaning mania.

Looking into the mirror again, Anj glanced over his armor. Red plating, the same crimson as his helmet and robes, with a thick textured bodysuit underneath. The bodysuit - the underarmor - was black, naturally, no sign of the armor weave visible. The plating was fashioned like the contours of a very well-defined muscular body. Better defined then he actually was and a serious display of narcissism, he knew, but ''he'' hadn’t designed the armor.

This was both distressing and a sight he'd seen nearly every day. ''That'' was what he had to finish. He had to get both stories to fit together. He couldn't just pick one - well, he ''could'', it would be easy, he could just be Anj, part of the Stormtrooper Corps since he'd volunteered at fifteen, which was younger than was officially allowed, eventually picked for Red Guard training on Yinchorr. He could pick that, let all the sketchy details fill in and flesh out, and be Anj of the 501st on a planet that was only vaguely familiar to him. The more he thought about that backstory, the more complex it would become. But he knew he shouldn't, he really, ''really'' shouldn't.

"Okay," he said quietly. "The obvious answer is that I was - I ''am'', still, Anj - ''Angela'', and this other stuff is new, but there's no way I can ignore it." He had to figure this out. Anj ran a gloved finger along the raised detailing on his pectorals, stopping as he realized what he was doing. He remembered making the armor with Ursala, one of the other Tampa Bay Red Guards - and he remembered getting it at the end of training, before being shipped off to a new post. Both felt real.

This would take some doing.

Anj paced a little more, then stretched out on the linoleum, resting weight only on his forearms and toes, and kept his abdomen taut, silently counting the seconds as his muscles burned. He couldn't reject it. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing was ever that simple. Still, there had to be something he could do.

Holding "plank" position was easy; even with the weight of the armor, he could stay like that for an hour, no trouble. Anj shifted position, put his palms against the floor, and started to push up and lower himself down in a steady rhythm, breathing easily.

Why one or the other? Why not both? Wouldn't that be ideal?

Could he even do that? Easy enough to ''think'' it, but...

A shredded bit of toilet paper scudded off across the linoleum tiles, blown by his breath, and Anj stopped as he realized that he'd just stretched out and started doing pushups on a bathroom floor. A women's bathroom, admittedly, and therefore not ''too'' awful, but still. He scrambled back to his feet as quickly as if he’d been ordered, and stared for the third time at his reflection.

This time he didn't look away, staring intently into the mirror, ignoring the discomfort, the awkward feeling that really he shouldn't be doing this. Every time he saw himself, it was a little easier.

And now - now, if he pushed away the visceral shock of seeing someone else and the other, smaller shock of recognition, and it did feel like he was pushing them back - now he honestly could tell himself that that face ''was'' familiar. That the nose had once been broken rather spectacularly and had for the most part healed straight. That the hair-fine scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, ''his'' dark eyebrow, was ''not'' from a training incident or an injury he'd picked up on duty, but a remainder of something incredibly stupid he’d done as a teenager. He could remember idly imagining a face like this, going with the fairly vague biography he’d made. Anj thought he'd sketched this face, or one like it, in a notebook.

In fact, to his surprise he looked just a little like his ex. Like Angela’s ex. Anj's ex. It wasn’t a ''major'' resemblance, but it was there, something about the bone structure and the texture of his close-cropped dark hair, though it wasn't curly. Oh, right - he'd been on that faces kick, filling up page after page of head studies. Since this had been when he, as Angela, had been engaged to Scott, and Scott hadn't objected to a little modeling, most of them reflected him somehow.

Anj was oddly relieved to find that there was still an echo of that old pain when he thought about Scott. Things just hadn't worked out between them. They'd left on friendly enough terms, yes, it had been almost two years and it was barely awkward anymore when they ran into each other, but there'd just been too much emotional investment for it to be painless.

It was weird, thinking of Scott when he looked like this, but almost reassuring.

Maybe he could do this after all. "I shouldn't worry about it," Anj told himself. He didn't dislike his voice. "Maybe if I just stop making a problem out of it - mind over matter, right?" There was still a blanket sense of unease, but he wasn't afraid now. He smiled tentatively, mostly to try out how it looked on his face. This didn't have to be bad. He'd - he'd try not to think of it as bad.

There would be time later to strip off every piece of armor and examine everything. For now – well, he ''knew'', but it wouldn’t hurt just to check. Anj found the seam in his underarmor and stretched it open. There was the dance belt thing keeping everything supported, and under it another piece of padded armor, common sense really, a protection that was smaller and not nearly as obvious as the codpiece worn by stormtroopers. And under ''that'' -

He wasn't sure if it was supposed to be - the angle was new, but it looked normal - he hadn't expected - right, well, Scott had been cut, and -

“…Yeah. I definitely went in the wrong refresher. Bathroom. Whatever it's called.” Feeling a little embarrassed, Anj straightened his armor and exhaled firmly. "I don't think I'll do that again for a while." Not that he would have a choice; his bladder had to fill eventually. But it could wait.

"No more periods. Huh. I'm going to have to get new clothes. ''All'' new clothes. It's probably going to be a comprehensive shopping spree." A daunting thought. As Angela, ever since he was a little girl he'd hated shopping for new outfits, since it was ''never'' quick or simple. He'd hated it vocally enough that it had become a family joke. Somehow he doubted that had changed - and, for whatever reason, this was another oddly comforting thought. There was a little pronoun confusion and what could only be called a double set of memories, but Angela and Anj were the same person at heart. He hoped.

He still felt weird, but it was a relief to be sure that whatever else was going on, this was a convention in Florida, and he had walked in as a woman in costume. In Red Guard costume. The furries he’d seen – the same thing had happened to ''them.'' It was safe to assume it had also happened to the people he’d passed on the way ''here'', the ones who’d been rushing for the exits or milling in confusion. Had it happened to everyone? In the world, or locally, or just ''here''?

He’d become a real Red Guard; his forcepike had become a real forcepike, the biography had filled out extensively, and so had... other things. The furries had become actual, living animal people. The image, the dream, had become reality. Although, really, he’d never longed to have more than the image, he’d spent a lot of idle thought on it but never felt that he was ''supposed'' to be a Red Guard, really. And – well, it followed logically that the pitcher man hadn’t been more than the image before, because who could ''possibly'' want to be a pitcher? There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

… What had happened to the rest of the squad? To his friends, to SL-1984? Had this happened to ''them'', too? Anj felt a sharp, unsettling lurch in the pit of his stomach, as all the unease he'd managed to dispell came back in a lump. Why wasn’t he with them? ''How'' could he have thought it was a good idea to leave them in this unfamiliar territory? He had no idea where they were, so why wasn’t he out looking for them?

“Why do I feel so ''guilty'' about this? I don’t know what in the Emperor’s name they’re doing, this isn’t exactly covered in training!” Anj blinked. “Not training. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Going to have to do ''something''.” But what, ''that'' was the question. Where to start? He wasn't entirely sure where ''he'' was, let alone any of the others!

Restless again, Anj made a quick circuit of the bathroom. He’d chosen well; when he’d passed this place early in the day there had been an impressive line, but everyone’s priorities had shifted well before he got here.

All stalls were open, and the bathroom was empty – he wouldn’t have removed his helmet and started talking to himself if it hadn’t been – but it didn’t hurt to check.

He found it rather disheartening when he had trouble reading a piece of graffiti. It was scratched deeply into the side of a stall, in large, relatively neat letters that were easy to distinguish, but it still took longer than he’d have liked before the squiggles resolved into “ADRIAN WAS HERE”. Apparently he now had trouble reading English.

Otherwise, the only thing of note was a pile of clothing just inside the handicapped stall. The shirt at the top of the pile had what looked like a long elastic bandage, ragged at the tip, trailing out of the neck opening. Very gingerly, touching only with the very tips of his gloved fingers, Anj separated and folded the clothes neatly, stacking them together on the linoleum. He told himself as he did it that it was a courtesy. The other end of the bandage was wrapped around a bra left inside the shirt, for some reason that Anj couldn't fathom. Crumpled under those and sitting atop a dusty pair of sandals were short pants with panties inside - and in ''those'' was a winged Maxi pad with just a little blood on it.

Just seeing that made Anj feel incredibly uncomfortable and voyeuristic. If women had a set of bathroom rules, hiding all evidence of periods was one of the big ones. It seemed like that rule had carried over - he was embarrassed for whoever this was, and entirely unwilling to touch it. And yet Anj couldn’t help thinking that if the clothing had simply been removed, it would just be heaped together, underthings on top. This looked like more like the occupant had dematerialized – or shrunk dramatically. Yet it was completely empty, and he hadn't seen any-

''-Wait. '' I ''wouldn't try and approach someone who looked like me, if this happened. And she could've got out earlier, maybe even when I opened the door. I wasn't exactly in a state to notice. Whatever this is about, it's going to stay a mystery. One that I'm glad isn't happening to'' me.

A light sort of twitch traveling up his spine brought Anj out of his thoughts. “Right,” he mused under his breath as he returned to the sink. “Weakly Force-Sensitive, untrained and not good for much more than intuition and a warning. Wrote that in the bio. Inexplicable spinal sensations mean something is happening, and if it's mild like this-“

He could hear it, tinny and faint, coming from his helmet on the counter. It must have tuned in on an active frequency. Without hesitation Anj took it up and settled it over his head, the insides tight against his face. The voice over the com became clear. Female, clear, commanding, and with a bit of an accent that sounded vaguely British - No. Not British. ''Imperial.''

“-ling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, report for instruction, report for instruction, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr. Repeat; this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st-“

Words could not have expressed how Anj’s heart leaped on hearing the officer’s voice. He wasn’t alone! Almost as fast as he could think it, he had gone to the specified frequency.

“This is TR-1407 of Tampa Bay Squadron.” Relief loosened his tongue in spite of training. “And I am ''very'' glad to hear from you! Orders, sir?”

The voice that responded over the comlink wasn’t the same one, although if anything the Imperial accent was stronger; this was a harried-sounding older man. “You may change your mind when you see this, Royal Guard. Get to the rendezvous outside of the structure. We’re on the blacktop rectangle to the southwest.”

== Garrett ==

Nothing was happening. He supposed that there must be commotion going around - he and Steph hadn't been the only ones, right? He'd seen something like that before falling over, right? - but he couldn't hear anything. Literally. It was silent. Now and again he felt what were sort of like faint tremors going up into his body. Maybe he'd gone deaf, at least on the outside. Inside it was different.

Experimentally, he swung a hind leg. It hit something. He swung again, harder. Yes - there ''was'' a sound, but it was so faint! Distant, like it was several rooms away.

Now he charged his heavies, waiting the long seconds until they were good and hot, and fired into the wall. The minor explosion that resulted ''was'' louder, but again - faint and far away. The sound of both heavy cannons charging and going off had been perfectly clear - it was the same oddly high laser ''tcheeer'' shriek he remembered from watching Empire Strikes Back - which he supposed made sense, since the sound could probably travel through him and to whatever worked like ears now.

He couldn't breathe. Garrett would have given a lot right now to be sure if he'd been stuck on an inhale or an exhale - he couldn't tell, it felt like both and neither. Mildly uncomfortable.

There was... something... related to the intercom, somewhere in a console in his cabin, but not as intimately a part of him as the intercom. It was picking up something. Probably had been for a while. A signal? Several signals?

''"-xty-two is down!" "I'm still functional, sir. It knocked me over, that's all." "Get back over here - oh, no, it's coming back, Force preserve us-"''

''"-SAID HOLD YOUR FIRE! Damn you, Thirteen, it's just a bird." "Sorry! Sorry! I couldn't help myself, it just came up so fast." "No harm done. My lord-?" "The Lieutenant was ri-"''

''"-see, I told you, the flashing orange bit is its weak point!" "What, like a videogame? Isn't that awfully convenient?" "Don't give me lip. It keeps doing that swing-and-dodge thing, then you can see the orange bit. Cover me, I'll-"''

He cycled through a handful of channels or frequencies or whatever, listening to voices, until he found ones that seemed vaguely familiar, though they were distorted enough that he couldn't quite figure out where he'd heard them before.

''"-nd telling us where you went in such a hurry, ''sir?'' And how you managed to lose half an arm? I can see the sparks from here." "Pike, you would not believe me if I told you. Count yourself fortunate that I found you, I can proba- ah, more of them. How charming." "Fusst! Can you take them?" "Certainly I could, but saving you is a bigger priority than killing animals. Stay where you are.” "You're going to play at being a ''troop transport?!'' "Yes, if you want to put it that way. Do you have a better idea?"''

Without warning, the voices dissolved into gibberish and white noise, a lot louder. He could sort of make out words in that mess, a panicked babbling. This might not even be the same channel. Alarmed, Garrett shut that part of himself off.

What had that been? What the ''hell'' had that been? What was going on out there?! What had happened?! Beneath the aching emptiness of his insides, along his belly, Garrett's drive motor was running hard and fast. Like he was breathing hard and his heart was racing - except, of course, that they weren't. He was a relatively thin set of rigid metal plates wrapped around air and fuel and a walking apparatus, and even that motor under his belly, the closest thing he had to guts, was riddled with spaces, gaps, hatches for mechanics to get into. All of them so empty.

There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do. Gradually, his drive motor slowed, until once again it was an almost subliminal hum. He lay there, wishing he had eyes to close.

He couldn't breathe. He did have the feeling that he hardly noticed that when he was paying attention to something else. But there wasn't a lot else to even think about.

Nothing continued to happen. Garrett felt that horrible emptiness inside and tried not to laugh or start whimpering again. Something must have happened to Steph. Something had got him, maybe. He'd turned into something else. He'd gotten lost. Or maybe... maybe he'd just run off and abandoned Garrett.

Garrett pushed that last thought away. It wouldn't happen. He wouldn't have been abandoned. Not by Steph. They'd known each other since Orientation, and although they weren't roommates they shared about half of their classes. They'd - Garrett was straight, that one time when they'd both gotten very drunk at the end of Finals Week did ''not'' count, and Steph had said Garrett wasn't his type, but that didn't matter. Steph was still one of Garrett's best friends, the only one who always pitched in when he had some new idea, the one he went to whenever a wasp got into his dorm while his roommate was out. If he had anyone who wouldn't leave him, it was Steph.

Of course, the thought came back. Damn it, he was an ''AT-AT''. He couldn't even talk. Good God. Why ''wouldn't'' Steph just walk away?

And he was so ''empty''. Static hissed softly through his command section and the big troop cabin, falling silent only when he made the intercom stop. Laugh, cry, he wanted to do both and couldn't manage either properly. Damn it, he tried to say. Static.

It made sense, he supposed, that he couldn't speak. Maybe he could - there ''was'' that intercom - but he had no idea how to make words without a throat or vocal chords. He tried again, and managed to chop the burst up. Hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet. Not as noisy or intense as the laughter had been, louder than the whimpering.

''Damn'' it. HISS-quiet-hiss-quiet. Now he could sense the mechanisms in the speakers. They were entirely unfamiliar. How ''did'' radios and speakers of any kind turn signals back into voices, sounds, music? He had no idea. Nothing to do but try.

Garrett was lost for some time, trying to bully his intercom into producing anything that wasn't static. He made progress, if slowly - managing a few vowel sounds, almost drowned by the hiss. Still, he didn't miss the movement outside.

First, there came the bees. When the first few appeared, zigzagging up near the ceiling, he had trouble figuring out what they were. They seemed as big as Thanksgiving turkeys and almost as weighty, dark wings moving in a blur. The first handful were high up and spaced out, moving purposefully from one side of his vision to the other. As time passed more and more bees passed through, sometimes several at a time. Garrett practiced what sounded vaguely like an "ah" and watched them, feeling his drive motor start to speed up again. He didn't like bees all that much.

Soon enough it was a whole ''cloud'' of passing bees, all headed in the same direction. The air was thick with them, along the floor as well as the ceiling, and there were enough that the droning of their collective wings was going up his legs and through his hull into the inside. He could actually hear them. It almost managed to be loud.

Many bees flying low smacked into him - he was surprised to find that he could feel them hitting, the insects were ''strong'' - and crawled up his body before taking off again. He couldn't quite see them doing that, or feel them crawling across his surface, but it was a logical assumption, and that was what the ones on his legs were doing. There were so many bees that he could have hit a few dozen just by swinging a leg, but he didn't dare. He could have fired and taken out a lot more, he really wanted to try it, but that would just make them mad, wouldn't it? They were ''everywhere'', there were ''thousands'' of them. He knew, he ''knew'' that he couldn't be stung, but-

Garret made a very odd sound over his intercom, a combination of a high pure synthetic tone and an "ahhhkssshhksshhh" that quickly devolved into furious static. A bee had crawled onto his viewport, seemingly from nowhere, he could see the segments of its wide-spread legs and the yellow hairs coming off it, and oh God it had a pointy red tonguelike thing gleaming between two mandibles, and agggh, it ''licked'' him, and its two antennae were tapping at him... He couldn't feel it at all, but that didn't help, and even though it was many many times smaller than him it was still a GIANT BEE climbing around-

Bee claws on his hatches! He felt ''that''. They were crawling, oh God how could that tickle ''and'' itch, and he couldn't feel their clawed legs ''around'' the hatches or ''on'' them, but at the edges, where they were sealed shut, ''there'' he felt them, and they were ''everywhere''! He was covered in them. They were going to gouge one of the hatches open and ''get inside!'' His drive motor was picking up, throbbing a pitch that started low and built higher, he couldn't just lie still anymore but he couldn't ''do'' anything-

And then the one on his viewport took off, and there were fewer bees in the air, and he didn't feel claws on his hatches anymore. Barely a minute later and it was back to a thin stream of the things moving across the ceiling. Soon enough there were none.

The silence as his drive motor wound back down again was deafening. Garrett had to wonder if he'd just imagined that. But no - there was a little streak of residue, barely visible, on his viewport. Disgusting. God, he didn't like bees. He'd been pleased about them dying off until he'd found that that just meant more ''wasps'', which were worse, if anything.

How was it, he had to ask himself, that he could essentially see outwards from his skin - no, not skin, more like a hull - but he hadn't been able to see any of the bees crawling on his body? He'd looked down his legs and seen them, and he'd seen the one on his viewport from beneath its six clawed feet. Why none of the others?

Vision as he had it now, interior and exterior, was - well, it wasn't a set of alternating views, nor was it overlaid, and he didn't know how this was working at all. It ''was'' working, at any rate. Everything seemed to be in full color and three dimensions.

Fuel reserves were now at ninety-eight point zero four eight one six percent. Had he been topped up when this - when this started? He didn't know. He hadn't checked it before. Right now he was on standby; powered up and burning fuel, but not going anywhere. Even if he figured out how to shut down a few systems, being active at ''all'' drained the reserves. Slowly, yes, but it was happening, and speeding up his drive motor like he'd been doing only hastened the process, as fuel moved up out of the cylindrical tank and was consumed. Garrett had the sudden thought that he would lie here immobile until he had either drained the last milliliter of fuel or he voluntarily shut himself down. He didn't know what would happen then. It was not a pleasant thought.

== Help ==

Time passed, long enough for Garrett to get too lonely and restless to keep trying to figure out his speakers. He wasn't used to having nothing to do. Usually, if nothing else presented itself, he'd start doodling on stray paper, trying to conceptualize various things he'd heard or thought of over the course of the day. Sometimes he'd get lucky and inspiration would strike. And then of course there would be the breathlessly fast calculation of taking an idea and making it ''work''... He wasn't used to being bored.

It wasn't like he could even hold a pencil, Garrett thought. He moved the toe flaps on one foot - hinge joints, all four of them, no other joints, limited flexibility up or down, he could move them independently, but that made little difference. These feet were made for walking, and that was all they could do. Pretty close to useless.

It didn't help that he was almost painfully aware of all his internal surfaces, and he kept coming back again and again to how utterly empty and alone he was. He couldn't even quite muster up any interest in how the hell his body worked, and it seemed like every few seconds he was reminded that he wasn't breathing, like a tic. This was miserable.

So although he didn't see Steph at the feet of the two people who came into view - wherever he was, he didn't seem to be having great luck - he was so desperate to see someone that he almost didn't mind.

They were incredibly tall, walking on thick pillarlike legs, huge and fleshy. Garrett took several seconds to realize that they were human at all. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around that. Humans didn't get anywhere near that big, and although logically he knew that these probably weren't any larger than normal, they still ''looked'' absolutely enormous. If he had been up on all fours, they would still have been considerably taller than him, though all in all somewhat less massive.

Garrett really only assumed they were human at all by their hands. Meaty, both broad and long, with skin covered with a network of fine grooves, a little puffy. Five unique digits, each placed and sized differently with wrinkled skin on the joints, each tapering, rounded, and tipped with a sort of curved scale. They looked like alien appendages until he saw knuckles and a standing vein in the back of one, and lines in a palm; then, something sort of ''clicked'', and he realized how they looked very much like human hands. Grossly enormous human hands, yes, as long as Steph's body, or almost. Still human.

If they had human hands, they were humans, right? They were just so out-of-scale, looming up cone-shaped, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, that he couldn't quite think of them as people, only pick out things like hands and gigantic sloping feet. It took some bewildered staring before he could even recognize that the fibrous stuff hanging from their bodies was ''clothing''.

Then, he saw past the size and realized that, even if they weren't any bigger than usual, they would still have attracted stares from anyone with eyes. The two had stopped within his sight and were now talking animatedly together. He couldn't hear them at ''all'', Garrett realized unhappily. They weren't loud enough for sound to get into his interior. Maybe if he opened a hatch... okay, how exactly did he do that? It wasn't like moving his head or legs, that was for sure.

The smaller of the two, the top of its - his? - head arrayed with a glinting mass of coarse fibers that might have been hair, Garrett could barely see it from here, had two vast flapping leathery things like wings or sails on either side of its head.

There was something wrong with that one's face, like its nose had melted into a gray wrinkled thing that moved, like a tentacle or a tail. Above that, it had ''four'' eyes. Two were set into its head with a bristling ridge above each, the other two were wide-set, gleaming, and very dark. Maybe this one wasn't human after all. It was twisting around, gesturing, generally looking unsettled.

The taller one, and now Garrett could see that it was ''considerably'' larger, was a little more normal, if he could judge. Its eyes were similar to the closer-set pair on the deformed one's face, and he supposed that the bristly ridges were eyebrows. The skin that wasn't covered by hanging folds of cloth was a very pale, almost chalky color. This one had bent its forelegs... no, arms, they had to be arms... and crossed them one over the other.

In a fit of whimsy, Garret decided to call them Mutant and Big Guy. Why not? It wasn't like they'd overhear him and take offense. He was starting to feel a growing sense of unreality. Being unable to put a couple of humans or almost-humans into perspective was just odd.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't real, after all. It just didn't make enough sense. If he was supposed to be an AT-AT, why could he fit into a room? What was up with that thing that had knocked him over, the red thing that had looked so much like the Kool-Aid Man? And why was a rabbit-bug thing telling him that it was Steph?

Garrett knew that he'd already run through part of this, at least. But the idea that he'd passed out in his cardboard shell from a nasty combination of spray paint fumes and an accidental dose of some illegal substance, and was now having a weird dream of epic proportions was - well, it was comforting. Or maybe he was awake, but hallucinating a wildly distorted version of events.

Mutant and Big Guy seemed to be wrapping up their conversation. Their Easter Island-esque heads were doing much less side-to-side swiveling and much more tilting up and down, and gestures were far less expansive. Abruptly, Garret made up his mind. What did he have to lose, if this was or wasn't a dream?

He swung a leg forwards and back.

Big Guy, moving ridiculously fast, got between Garrett and Mutant, bending its limbs like it was about to leap. Mutant moved, but stopped and backed away when Big Guy opened its mouth and did something with it. Garrett had never learned to lipread. What he could see of lips and mouth moving was weird and creepy, like he'd stumbled into the Uncanny Valley. Was that a matter of scale, or...

No one moved for a long moment, until Garrett finally jerked what used to be his head. Now he was being stared at. He moved his command section to point in their general direction and swung a leg forwards, trying to go for 'pathetic'. It wasn't exactly acting. He wished he could heave a sigh.

Big Guy did something with its mouth again, directing it at either Garrett or Mutant. Mutant crept still further away, the sails on its head flapping. Big Guy turned and followed it, twisting around weirdly to look back at Garrett. They stopped at the very edge of his vision, which apparently didn't extend all that far, to gesture and flap their mouths at each other some more. Eventually they stepped out of view entirely.

Garrett waited. Time passed, he had no idea how much. Long enough that he went back to trying to figure out his intercom. He made a heartening leap of progress when he figured out how to make and adapt the synthesized beep, though at his best he sounded about as clear as a toddler lisping into a poorly-kept drive-through speaker. He could only even do ''that'' if he focused very hard on the syllables and went slowly, true, and what wasn't a hiss came out in a robotic high-toned monotone, but progress was progress. What would he do if - ''when'' - he finally got to the point of speaking clearly and with some inflection?

He could try and recreate his voice. And... and other people's voices. Then he could - what? Reenact campy old TV shows?

It didn't get to that point, thankfully. Garrett thought about counting the seconds and decided against it, not really wanting to measure how long it took, but he only felt the I'm-not-breathing tic four times before Big Guy came back and did - well, did ''something''.

Big Guy had sort of... folded up, Garrett guessed, legs practically folded in on themselves, somehow not falling over despite the awkwardness of the position. It was... no, not sitting, couldn't be sitting, not kneeling either... crouching? Yes, that was it. He couldn't help noticing that its legs were ''considerably'' thicker than either his legs or the armored tunnel that had used to be his neck, and it was crouching ''within'' his legspan, looming up over him. Stretching an arm over his side, and from the little vibration that Garrett vaguely felt in his hull, the probably-human was dragging a hand over-

What the hell? Had it just ''stroked'' him? Now Big Guy's mouth was moving, and damn it, Garrett wished he could just ''say'' that he couldn't hear or understand any of that, say it and actually be heard, anyway -

Why not? ''Just help me up.'' Damn the static, he could do better than that, he'd managed-

They came in from the edge of his vision, walking with startlingly quick, fluid motions, as if moving was easy despite all that bulk. Two, three - no, ''four'' of them, like flexible animated towers fidgeting and breathing and pendulumming effortlessly from one leg-column to another in a walk that seemed at every step to be a barely-averted fall. He saw the flapping sails and knew that one of them was Mutant, but he didn't recognize any of the others at all. One didn't have anything like the pillar-like body structure of the others, carrying most of its mass almost horizontally.

They went from the edge of his vision to looming up over him, and static started to hiss and crackle through Garrett's interior. Too big, too close!

Heat, moisture on his right fore footpad! Weight - slight weight, nothing near the right amount, none on the others, and yes he knew he was already down but that sensation spelled FALLING! Garrett tried to swing his legs, tried on some instinctual impulse to fire. But his legs stayed locked still, toeflaps flicking madly, only one of them hitting anything at all, and the power to all four blasters was being leached away as quickly as he could route it in.

He felt like a heavy soft blanket had been pressed over him. ''Him'', not this half-insensate walker body, he could almost ''feel'' it wrapped over and over. Like it was between him and everything else. He felt his drive motor fight something, grinding alarmingly for a moment, and then slow, winding down as rapidly as it had sped up. Garrett saw now that Big Guy was - was ''gripping a footpad'' in one massive appendage. That was why he'd felt, was still feeling, some sensation there. It wasn't moving to wrench it off, it was just... holding it. Okay, that was weird.

Big Guy, still folded up, was mouthing at the new giants, who were no smaller than before but somehow less threatening, now. Garrett found that he could feel the vibrations of speech, faintly, through the hand on his footpad. He still couldn't understand it, annoyingly enough. Still, he knew for certain now that Big Guy was talking.

Garrett also found that he couldn't move his legs at all, just the toeflaps. Nothing was touching them, and they were working fine, he could feel it, they just couldn't move. Something invisible had a hold of him. Whatever it was, he knew, he knew that if it could slow his drive motor and persuade his legs to still, if he couldn't resist it, it could probably pop his hatches and and bare his interior and take him apart bit by bit. But it wasn't. It was holding him still. Very, very still. He found himself adjusting the seating in his command cockpit just to see if he still could.

He was calm now. Very calm, disassociated even. He had to wonder about that firing reflex. It hadn't been a conscious attempt at all, which was pretty inconvenient - he'd fired earlier to see if he could hear it, yes, but he wasn't quite sure how. Well, no sense worrying, was there? Garrett couldn't seem to muster either concern or a great deal of interest. It could be his drive motor, he supposed. It was running ''very'' slowly now. He knew that he ought to be nervous about that. If the computers in what had been his head were really serving as his brain, they needed to be powered. Not much he could do about that, though, was there?

They were talking over him. The giants. Big Guy, not moving, seemed to be trying to direct the others, who were on his other side, around his back. He couldn't see quite as well from his back-side than from his flank-sides or belly-side, but this was close enough that it didn't matter much.

Garrett watched with mild interest. They were all on two legs; one carried itself horizontally and had inexplicable projections that he guessed were a long S-curved neck and rigid tail. And most of it was coated with branching filaments that could be hair, or maybe feathers. Feathers - yes, on the tail and along the limbs they were shaped like feathers, with central shafts. The rest of it, as far as he could tell, had some kind of overlapping armor made of keratinous scales, most of them smaller than a meter across. Something about it was familiar... pictures... a movie?

Oh! He knew what it was! A feathery dinosaur! Maybe a raptor, he wasn't sure, but definitely a bird-dinosaur. Bigger than any dinosaur ought to be, of course, and from here its proportions looked terribly off, but it was recognizable. The movements of its curved neck and wedge head, small from this perspective, were even faster and more sudden than what he'd seen the others doing.

His eyes went - no, he didn't have eyes, did he? Or the sensation of having them, to roll and flick wetly from one thing to another and blink, that was gone. Weird. His ''attention'' went to the others - he was moderately sure that they were human, or rather, human''like'', just distorted by some quirk of his vision. And by the fact that part of him ''knew'' that he was over twenty meters tall, and no human could so much as see over his footpad without something to stand on. How was it that he could recognize and accept a live dinosaur that looked several times bigger than the T. Rex skeleton at the Chicago Field museum, but not humans at the same scale?

Well, Big Guy's hand - good God, each finger was a slab of meat and bone as thick as the kind of conduit that people could creep through - was still on his footpad, but there were no more vibrations going through it, and after looking around quickly Garrett had to conclude that the others had stopped too. They were ''very'' close. Okay, now they were bending, folding over, now they were touching him, he couldn't feel it but it was a safe assumption... his drive motor kept to the same slow pace, he was still wrapped up tightly, calm and motionless and a little bit distant.

How was this going to work? He wasn't built like an animal - he couldn't be tipped onto his belly, not with legs like these - were they planning to just carry him out? Surely he was too heavy for that. And even though he couldn't see any doorways, he was pretty sure that he couldn't be carried out of one.

Great huge hands, some of them clawed, got under him. He wasn't lying entirely flat, or they wouldn't have been able to do that. Big Guy took the hand that wasn't gripping his footpad and laid it on his side, big pale fingers splayed. That hardly seemed like the thing to do, if he was being lifted! For some reason that struck him as funny, but he didn't quite laugh.

His view ''lurched''. The pocked grid of the ceiling wobbled and seemed to get bigger. Simultaneously the faint sensation along his left side, the dull feeling where his flank lay against whatever he'd fallen on, went away. Garrett didn't have any inner ears now, so a few vaguely confused seconds passed before he realized that they were related, and together meant that he was being lifted up. He really couldn't tell how hard they were working - for that matter, the four of them, including Mutant, were shoulder-to-shoulder at his back, and Big Guy's hands hadn't moved.

He was ''above'' whatever he'd been on, now, and he could see it now, though Garrett still couldn't tell what it was. It looked like maybe four or five meters, but it was probably a lot less, if he was right about not actually being larger than a man. He'd stopped moving. Now what?

Big Guy was talking yet again, and the other giants moved around - two stayed at his back, the dinosaur stood at his vehicle bay, and on his other side Mutant positioned itself so that Garrett's command section was between its arm and its body. Each of them stuck its forearms under him - somehow, he'd kept completely steady during all that, like they hadn't been bearing his weight at all. Now, surrounded on all four sides, he had the sudden bizarre thought that they were planning to use him as a conference table.

Knowing full well that he couldn't be heard, Garrett still found himself trying to ask them what they were doing. Then Big Guy took its hand off of his flank.

Immediately he dipped and rocked, the view shuddering like he was in an earthquake, and by minute unsteady increments his body crept back up and leveled, although he was still tipping legwards and trembling. Garrett felt his drive motor intensify by some tiny increment, only to slow back down. He couldn't seem to worry much. There just wasn't enough power in his system for that.

He noticed, then, that the giants who were not Big Guy were disturbed. Strained, breathing heavily, shoulders hunched, moisture beading on oily skins that were flushing or paling. He couldn't help but wonder how eyes that bulged like that didn't just pop and run down out of their sockets. This took effort, evidently. The dinosaur was a little different, head thrown back on its long neck, mouth open. It had great pointed teeth. From his other flank he saw bent knees and massive far-spread feet.

Big Guy kept one hand steady on Garrett's footpad and reached underneath him with its free hand. There was something in it, something that gleamed. Some kind of tool? Despite the feeling of being under wraps, Garrett's found himself interested. What could that-

A beam of ''solid light'' just ''shot'' out of the thing, and for one long not-quite-panicked moment Garrett didn't see that it was finite, coming to a clearly defined tip, under twelve meters long. And it stayed attached to the emitter, too, not blazing off to burn through things like a turbolaser bolt. The thing was white-cored and blue along the edges, and he had ''no idea'' what it was.

Moving uncannily fast, as usual, Big Guy kept its hand wrapped around the emitter and manipulated the beam, holding it horizontal and passing it down, ''through'' whatever Garrett had been lying on. Smoke or steam curled up and dissipated. When the glowing beam was brought back up - moving quickly, too quickly; what if Big Guy made a mistake? - and moved aside, he saw that the mystery material had been ''cut'', and cleanly. The beam tool was like a propane torch, but big enough to make the body of a cruiseliner and without the facemask and sparks and burning.

There was a bit of new input from his air filters. An increase in... what was that, ozone?

Big Guy kept at it and chopped the stuff into long, somewhat rectangular shapes. Whatever it was Garrett had fallen over onto, part of it was a very solid slab of something weird and porous that smoked very little when cut, at least compared to the woven stuff that he thought was probably cloth.

Then the creature's fingers moved on the tool, and the blue-tinted beam sort of evaporated and was gone. Big Guy started clearing away the cut slabs, barely seeming to touch them - just sort of gesturing and causing them to whisk off. That couldn't be possible, could it?

What ''was'' that beam thing, Garrett had to ask himself. It seemed like something he ought to know, but what was the ''point'' to making a cutting rod half the size of a telephone pole?! Some kind of mining tool maybe? Although that train of thought seemed interesting, and he felt like he was missing something obvious, he had to let it go. Drive motor was a little too sluggish to keep it up.

The debris was more or less cleared, revealing... some kind of bumpy ground covering. Big Guy's free hand, minus the beam tool, came back to Garrett's flank, and by the vibrations said something. Something in his balance shifted, and the four giants straining to hold him up pulled away almost as one. Garrett didn't have to strain to see them as human to read the relief. He was very heavy.

...Which left him rather inexplicably floating in midair. He flicked his toe pads a little. He wasn't going to worry about it, but Big Guy was hardly at an angle to hold him up. Particularly alone. Although this was an odd time to notice it, Garrett saw, now, that there were no fibery hairs coming off Big Guy's domed head - instead, in the skin, there seemed to be bold faded-blue stripes running back over his skull; one really thick one over each eyebrow, a thinner one starting near each ear. Weird.

He was lifting up now, the hand gripping his footpad never faltering. Up... ten meters, thirteen, fifteen... he knew if he were to fall now, from here, at less than his full height, he would be seriously damaged, certainly more than simply falling over. No sense in worrying. Up... Big Guy was standing straight now, arms shifting position, still gripping steadily. It said something, and in response Mutant and one of the others, not the dinosaur, came closer and touched Garrett again, clutching at his hull.

"Ohhhhh..." He was surprised at how clearly the uneasy word came out, but now - now he was being turned, like a turtle flipped on its back, and it made him very uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't have inner ears - even so, he ''felt'' his insides shifting as things went from bulkhead to deck, and it was a weird feeling. It reminded him - and with all this excitement he'd almost managed to forget, too! - that he had no lungs or other organs and there was a great hollow cavity sitting in him, all but empty. Distant feeling or no distant feeling, that was unpleasant.

Still, he was being turned over, increment by increment. He was almost at the standing point now. Big Guy's hand slipped away from his footpad, and he rotated the last few degrees - slowly eased down, and his toeflaps were all sticking outwards as far as they could, and TOUCHDOWN!

He felt it as a sort of ''chunk'' as his weight came down on all four footpads, and something above the kneejoints telescoped slightly. The weird feeling of distance evaporated, and he found that he could move again. His drive motor sped up by some tiny increment. Garrett briefly forgot that he couldn't sigh, and had another weird moment where he tried to breathe but couldn't find the right equipment.

It felt so good to have his footpads on the ground! He pressed his toeflaps into it, feeling its bumpiness and its give, getting the sense that it was slightly uneven but level underneath. He was pretty sure that what looked like a landscape of weird, fibrous alien moss was really carpet. It was a good surface. Solid. Stable. Now he could move. Now he could ''walk.''

Big Guy was talking again, and the assorted weird creatures were backing off, still moving with the kind of fluid speed that made him nervous, but moving ''away'' from him, so he didn't feel crowded. He had to appreciate that. Better to think about this unexpected consideration, and not what life was going to be like if he panicked every time people who were not Big Guy stood next to him.

During a pause Garrett endeavored to bob his head minutely, although he had no idea what was being said. Even if he'd learned to lip-read, even though the giant had his big blocky face tilted downwards, at this angle Big Guy's most prominent features were his chin and the underside of his nose. He was like a tower, the kind they topped with turrets and left to guard cities.

Big Guy said something, very short this time. Garrett head-bobbed again and was either rewarded or chastised by muscles tightening under the maybe-human's skin; he thought it could be a frown. Big Guy leaned down and in close, so that his mouth and nose and eyes filled Garrett's command viewport, and said something else, moving his mouth with slow, deliberate exaggeration. There were some tiny bubbles gleaming in that wet mouth, and a bit of discoloration on at least one of the teeth, and oh God the pores in that pale skin, and the capillaries under it, and the barely-visible clear hairs scattered about - ugh. Whoever said that beauty was skin deep had never looked too close.

Garrett did nothing, vaguely wishing he could blink, and felt his command cockpit get stared through for a second time. Whatever Big Guy was looking for, he probably didn't find it, because he breathed out in a long stream that fogged Garrett's viewport and reared back up to his full height. A big hand came up and very lightly smacked Garrett on the moveable command section - ''thump'' pause lift ''thump'' pause lift, light but enough to get his head to move - and it might have been an attack, some of his systems certainly thought so, but he kind of doubted it.

Something came through with the thumps - or had they been a pat on the head? - a general feel of well-wishing. Damn it, this was frustrating. ''Almost'' communication! What if he tried shooting into the wall, writing something that wa - no, no, bad idea, he'd burn through too much of his fuel and it probably wouldn't even look like a word. And he didn't have anything like enough articulation to scratch letters with his feet.

Big Guy turned and walked away at a speed that still looked ridiculous, a tiny tremor going up Garrett's footpads with each step. He had to have phenomenal shock absorbers in those monster boots; another AT-AT would have had half that stride and more than twice the impact, even on this fibery surface. Very quickly, surprisingly so, the maybe-human was gone, and this time he probably wasn't coming back.

"Dahhhschhhn hhit." Hey, that had practically been comprehensible! Garrett grabbed on to that tidbit of accomplishment, determined to stop moping. He was on all fours now. He could walk, he could get out. He ''would'' get out. Everything else would have to wait.

The convention center as he saw it was a labyrinthine monstrosity built for long-limbed fast-moving giants. He was very vague on exactly where he was or how to get out; by now there probably wasn't anyone to follow. Maybe if he'd been quicker-witted earlier. Ah well. He took a couple of test steps, kicking aside some of the debris he'd been lying on.

Walking was - well, it was different. Taken one way, it was much, ''much'' more deliberate. He had to consciously lift, swing, and plant each footpad in turn, which was a bit complicated since he had four of them and they were all new to him. Not damaged, at least, and he probably had to count that as a stroke of luck, since looking back at when he'd lost his balance and fallen over he wasn't sure how he'd been knocked off his footpads without wrenching them or at least losing toeflaps. Taken the other way, he could set a course, which involved picking a point within his vision and doing something that felt a little like blinking. Or maybe double-clicking. There really wasn't a good human analog. Course-setting was less deliberate and he could set multiple points to reach in turn, but to get around obstacles he had to either cancel the distant set point and make new ones or manually take control, step around things, and let whatever walked him along a course work again.

There was a problem with this. He had a major design flaw - not all of the consoles in and around his cockpit were essential, but even the ones that didn't do something like control his feet or internal temperature used up a lot of power. Particularly one of them - he didn't know what it did, but it was a significant drain. So significant that when he was walking for any serious length of time, either deliberately or along a set course, he had to keep his drive motor at its highest safe output to feed the walking apparatus, the consoles that had something to do with them, "housekeeping" - life support and lighting, which he couldn't seem to shut off - and the mystery console. He wouldn't be able to generate the power to fire his lasers, not on top of all the rest.

Well, from the little he'd seen before being knocked over, he had to conclude that this was a very dangerous place now. He should have had a durasteel hull no thinner than half a meter thick at any point, he should have been close to invincible, but for some reason he was barely larger than a big man, and his hull was perilously thin. Thin enough to let some sound travel through the air into his interior. Although somehow he hadn't been found by anything more lethal than a swarm of bees, he couldn't count on that luck holding. He had to protect himself. And what was the harm in neglecting one mystery console? It couldn't be essential. The thing was connected to the other consoles, but nothing else.

Garrett prepared to move in earnest, and felt more fuel piping into channels deep in his drive system, down in what was left of his guts under the gaping void of his interior. All of his other systems downshifted and fluctuated until they readjusted. He felt his vision fade and surge, so that for a moment the world was made of enormous smooth polygonal shapes, before details popped back in. Some status lights burned brighter, others dimmed to a faint spark or quit entirely.

Things became a lot simpler. In a vague, distant way, Garrett was relieved. All he had to do was make it out. It would be hard, without a crew, but he would do it.

He oriented to the best of his ability, satisfied himself that the ground would continue to support his weight, picked a direction and a course point, and started to walk.

== The Rebel Legion ==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus4.jpg]]

"No, ''I'' am the one asking the questions," the man insisted. He was a bit rumpled and looked - well, he looked pretty distinct, but Steph didn't recognize him. "One more time. What are you and what is your business here?"

''Damn it, apparently I'm a Hoojib! And I'm looking for a friend! Have you seen an AT-AT or not?!'' For his part, Steph was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd gotten a blaster or several aimed at him when he first came close to this group, but they were pointed away now and the edge had come off of his fear, even though now he had an angry man on one side and a suspicious crowd on the other.

A ''lot'' of these people, and there were a lot of people, were armed, he could sense their weapons, and the closer ones had pale violin notes of their own, but there wasn't that building rush of soundlike sensation he'd felt before Garrett had fired that time, and he didn't think it was going to come.

"''Nev''er heard of them," the man said, evidently taking a lot of pleasure in being unhelpful. He made eye contact, but managed to look down his nose while doing so, and Steph couldn't see much of his expression. He would have backed up to try and get more in view, but he was a bit afraid that that would mean being rather far away. "How do I know this isn't a trap? Oy, Rebs! Any of ''you'' heard of a Hoojib?"

The nearest people who were being referred to as 'Rebs', the people who made up the group Steph had approached, denied knowing. From the muttering - he couldn't really pick up on any one speaker - they thought the man was rude, but were preoccupied themselves, mostly listening to some tinny voice he could barely pick up on, but seemed to be coming from a lot of sources. The group was diverse, although even from a distance he'd recognized the orange jumpsuits of a number of X-Wing pilots. That's why he'd tried to go closer. He'd thought they might be willing to help. Apparently not.

"Anyone? ''Anyone''?" The man shook his head in an exaggerated motion. "Guess your ruse isn't working, eh? I don't think anyone but you knows what a Hoojib is. Protip: if you're going to make up a species, pick a better name."

"It's not made up," a woman's voice said, loudly enough for it to carry. People yielded for her, just far enough that she didn't have to turn sideways or push, as she passed to the edge where Steph could actually see her.

She was very tall - everyone seemed tall from Steph's level - but not as tall as a lot of the others. Something about her face was vaguely familiar, though he knew he'd never seen her. It was a sharp face with intense eyes, but pretty enough, he supposed. More striking was the sense of total composure coming off of her, a kind of unshakable confidence or dignity.

The man shook his head again, this time seriously. "This could be a trap. You shouldn't be so trusting."

"If it is, I can handle it. I'm just going to talk. I won't go on any wild chases." They locked eyes over Steph's head, and then the man looked away and sighed.

"Fine. It's your neck on the line, and I'm not getting paid enough to be a nursemaid. I'll be on the perimeter." The man shouldered his rifle, pointedly turned his back, and walked a good distance away. Facing outwards, he took what looked a lot like parade rest, shoulders squared.

Under her breath, the woman said, "Better with us than against us, yes, but I almost wish he hadn't come." She shook her head, faced Steph, and, to his surprise, went down on one knee in front of him. He actually had to keep himself from flinching - she'd just come a whole lot closer very quickly. This way, though, it was much easier to watch her face.

She looked down at him for a long moment, staring hard enough that he had to keep himself from preening nervously. Finally, she told him, "My brother and I worked closely with Spokesmind Plif and his people during the Nagai-Tof war. I know Hoojibs."

He would have protested, but staring up into her eyes, he got a sudden image of what she meant. Smaller, able to fit in her hand, and much more insectile, with bigger, paler eyes, floppier ears, high energy, an entirely different appearance and demeanor. Somehow she'd shown that to him, and he was - well, he was at a loss for words. Crap.

''Uh. Sorry?'' He winced inwardly at how hesitant he'd sounded. ''If I'm not a Hoojib, what am I, then?''

She took pity on him. "There is a chance that you belong to some subspecies. I don't believe that you're part of a trap, anyway. You aren't one of us. What brought you here?"

''Have you seen an AT-AT anywhere? Gray, four-legged, around human-sized? He's my friend.''

She pursed her lips, and even more than earlier he knew that face and couldn't place it. "I haven't, but I've been part of the committee since I called us together. A latecomer or someone on the perimeter may have seen it. Hold on." She stood up, raised her hand - it probably held something, but from down here he couldn't see - to her mouth, and said a long phrase in some foreign language. His ears caught the same phrase coming from a number of other places in the crowd, and after a moment something in her hand gave a very tinny two-syllable response. Steph realized where he'd seen her before.

Oh. ''Oh''. She didn't have the hair buns or the white dress or the metal bikini for that matter, there were a few more lines on her face and she wasn't shouting, but he saw it now.

''You're Princess Leia!''

"''Chief of State'' Leia Organa Solo," someone in the crowd corrected sharply.

"The Chief of State is Mon Mothma," she snapped back, composure slipping. "I'm not-" Leia stopped, closed her eyes, opened them again. "I'm only sort of Leia. Things are complicated. We're all having difficulties." That last sentence came out reluctantly, without the sharp edge of a lot of the things she said.

''That's totally understandable,'' Steph told her. He was finding this pretty surreal. Ridiculous, even. Princess Leia - "sort of" or not, that was who she looked and sounded like - was talking to him, a weird-looking animal, as if this was completely normal.

"We're having some trouble staying together and not fighting," she admitted, then shook her head and looked back at him. "But our issues aren't yours, I'm sure. I know we're far from organized at the moment, but we are the Rebel Legion. Most of us are local, from Ra Kura Base. I am a member of the Royalty/Senatorial Detachment."

''Okay,'' he said. None of that meant anything to him, of course. He had the sense that either these people had named and divided themselves ''very'' quickly, or the fan world was a lot more complicated than he'd thought. Had been. ...Whatever. ''I'm Steph. What were you saying earlier? When you stood up?''

She smiled ruefully. "We're talking in code over the comm, since it's unsecured. It's probably unnecessary, of course, but I think the Legion is hardwired for paranoia. I gave a description of you and relayed your request. Someone should respond. I'll stay with you until then. It's not like I'm missing much."

''Okay,'' he said again. He couldn't think of anything to say and she, despite what she'd said about not missing anything, didn't kneel down again. In fast, she seemed preoccupied, turning away and talking into her hand some more, still in code. He couldn't see her face properly, but it sounded like she was arguing with someone. Steph groomed a little, just for something to do. It was a process involving clawraking and patting down his long white fur, trying to get it arranged right, and was probably instinctual. Steph tried to think of it as the equivalent of brushing down his shirt or trying to flatten his hair, but he knew the obvious parallel was to a cat or a bird preening. They were both grooming behaviors that also got acted out during anxious periods, he knew.

He supposed he was glad that he wasn't licking himself. This was just depressing. Still - still, it had to be worse for Garrett. He had to focus on finding him.

Something caught his attention and he froze in place, twisted sideways with his fingers buried in fur, trying to tell what it was. It was the energy-sense, of course. Now that he'd had some time and all, he knew the sense really wasn't like hearing violins or feeling heat. Steph had interpreted it like that at first, but it was more complicated. He couldn't help but think of how he'd visited a lab partner's blog – had it really been less than a week ago? – and it was full of reviews of things from some company called "Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs", describing one of their products as having coolness and roundness and resonance and shadows, throbbing base notes, and something feral and dangerous lurking beneath. And then she'd told him that these were all ''perfumes'', and she ''had'' to describe them like that, since the right words just didn't exist.

He understood that a lot better now. Energy-sense didn't really map to hearing or touch or anything else, but he really had no other way to describe it.

What he'd sensed... He hadn't gotten a handle on the energy-sense at the time, but he recognized this particular flavor, getting more distinct by the second, even accounting for the crowd, which was larger than he’d thought. Steph strained, feeling his antenna uncoil slightly, until he sensed the notes. There was an entire orchestra's worth playing out there, distinct from the paler notes scattered all throughout the crowd. He knew this one.

He waited a bit longer to make sure. The person was some distance away and there were all these other people in the way, he could barely hear it, but Steph's ears were huge, and he thought he'd recognize that particular timbre of amplified breathing anywhere.

''Hey! Over here!'' Steph shouted, or as close as he could to shouting without a larynx.

The woman who looked like Leia exhaled sharply, her face going absolutely blank and still. "Fantastic," she said darkly, lowering her hand away from her mouth. Several people nearby were muttering unhappily.

Steph was rather taken aback. ''What is it? What's wrong?''

For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to respond. "I hate him," she said at last, biting the words out. "I know that's not right, it's more complicated than that, but I can't forgive him. Not that easily." Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she turned to face someone in the crowd, which seemed downright agitated.

The people, packed together though they were, had let Leia pass unimpeded. For the man who looked like Darth Vader in white, they parted. There was an entire bubble of space around him and the two storm troopers following him.

He had... he had a presence of his own, a sense of composure a little like Leia's. Different, though. Steph couldn't really put a finger on it - whatever senses or mental processes got used to detect how people carried themselves, they weren't as immediate as his energy-sense, which was... he'd been moving away from perceiving it as sound, but there was ''percussion'' here. Drums - several kinds - and cymbals, underneath the rest of it. He pushed that sense away, trying not to get distracted.

Steph wasn't terribly good at gauging distances, especially now that he was the size of a housecat, but even so, the space around the white Vader and his storm troopers seemed a little excessive. Belatedly he smelled something burning.

Last time he'd somehow managed to miss noticing the man's cape. It was massive, seeming to be in mid-billow even when he was still. On the right side, though, it was tattered pretty badly. That was when Steph sensed discordant notes and saw that most of the man's right arm was missing. Whatever had happened, fat blue sparks were falling from it at irregular intervals, sometimes dying before they hit the carpet, sometimes making it smoke until it died or someone stamped it out. That had to be the burning smell.

Without preamble, the woman who looked like Leia said, "Four beings have come to us since you arrived, and you're interested in this one. Why?" Her voice was flat, accusatory.

For his part, the white Vader spoke carefully and with a lot of deliberation, saying, "I encountered a Hoojib before taking leave of my squadron, Leia Organa Solo, and was curious to know if the one you spoke of was the same. Now I see that he is." Steph couldn't read any inflection beyond caution in his voice.

"Hoojibs don't look like that." They were talking about him, but Steph felt like he was listening in on a private conversation. He couldn't be the only one - every eye in the crowd was on the two, he couldn't hear anyone else talking in the immediate vicinity - but he was starting to feel uncomfortable.

"It doesn't matter." The Vader hesitated before telling her, "Think of it as an alternate universe issue."

"Like you, then," she said. Her arms were crossed defensively. Steph looked away, at the stormtroopers. They were big, of course, like everyone else.

"Exactly. You should return to the committee; they need another diplomat. I can take this from here." Maybe if he braced his feet and sat up on his haunches he'd be level with their knees. But he wouldn’t do that. He’d fallen off his back feet once already, stretching up to claw at a door handle.

The farther storm trooper had something dark spattered and smeared on his armor, beading like a liquid. Paint? Oil? Blood? "What are you planning to do, then?"

"I spoke before about contacting the Five-Oh-First. Now may be the best time; we might solve two problems in one stroke."

Leia was silent for long enough that Steph stopped studying the armor to glance back up at her. Her face was still unreadable, at least to him. "Really? Now?"

"Now. If a peace is not established immediately, we will be at odds in the very near future. It will be difficult enough now, because of Tampa Bay Squadron. Organa, none of this is going away, as much as anyone might wish it. I believe I am the best hope for this."

"I've guessed as much. But I don't trust you to do anything alone. We're sending someone with you."

"Good. I trust that I do not need to tell you

[Characters continue to be stubborn but finally do what I want]

Steph looked up at the damage. Oddly enough, there was no charring on the white cloth or armor. They were torn and pitted in places, but not discolored. ''You know that you look terrible, right?''

"I am aware of that, yes. But I've fought with worse. During the second Yevetha incursion-" He stopped himself, paused, and in a slightly different tone said, "Never mind. At any rate, this is nothing. My - Organa said that you were looking for a walker."

Steph told him, trying not to get excited enough to babble, about coming back to find Garrett gone, doubling back to explain that he'd found the walker earlier and left to look for help. Then he had to confirm that by Garrett, yes, he did mean the AT-AT. And his own name was Steph. Steph Midder.

The Vader paused, then told him, "There are a great many names I could go by, but I believe I will stay with my designation. It is Ess Ell One Nine Eight Four. If you don't want to reference Orwell, call me Eightyfour," he said with just a faint trace of amusement.

''Orwell? Oh, right.'' Nineteen Eighty Four. He got it. Designation? What did that mean?

"Midder. Walk with me." Not waiting any longer, he swept past Steph, away from the Rebel crowd. The two storm troopers followed a few steps behind. Taken a bit by surprise, Steph had to scramble to catch up. The man on the perimeter visibly flinched as they passed.

For someone so big, SL-1984's footsteps were surprisingly quiet. He seemed to have incredibly long strides, but his pace was slow enough that Steph could keep up at a fast walk, close enough that if the man's cape hadn't been tattered on this side it would have brushed against him. High above, the broken prosthetic – specifically an exposed wire, part of the broken prosthetic - sparked, sending pleasant tingles down Steph's antenna into his skull.

"We are being shadowed. Organa's doing, I am sure of it."

Steph started to twist around to see, but stopped trying as he realized that trying to see back over his shoulder when walking quickly on four legs was tricky, and he didn't want to make himself look like an idiot. Instead he focused on the energy-sense - past the distinct, complex notes of SL-1984's entire body, past the paler, less distinct notes of the storm troopers, in the background... He had trouble focusing, but yes, there was the high steady note he'd started to associate with blasters, following at a distance. He wasn't sure how far; close enough that he sensed it as a note, probably far enough to be discreet.

But that didn't make sense, did it? ''I thought she was just letting you go.''

SL-1984 inclined his head. "She was, yes. She knows that I will not charge off on my own. Well," he amended, "Not to do this. I will address any crises that I see the need to interfere in, and if I report to anyone beforehand it will be as a courtesy, nothing more. But I have agreed to her terms, and will not go to the Five-Oh-First without an escort. But if it wasn't her who set this watcher - there is more than one Organa."

The notes of SL-1984 didn't really stay constant, not like the notes Steph sensed in blasters or the storm trooper armor. Instead his notes rose and fell and wove together, horns and bowed instruments sometimes competing, sometimes playing as one, sometimes silencing for different instruments, always with the percussion steady in the background, always coming back and repeating this one sequence of specific notes. Snare drums keeping a constant pace underneath it all.

"But these are not your issues."

Notes preceded and shadowed SL-1984’s voice as he told Steph, “The Rebel Legion’s intelligence is not well established as of yet. They have among them too many strong-willed leaders used to too-high positions, and they have had little time to adjust. Even now they are working out a hierarchy, and this occupies the thoughts of nearly everyone there, and this leaves them vulnerable.”

“I would not have hostilities between the Five-Oh-First and the Rebel Legion; even if in one mode they are enemies, in the other they are knit together. What I am working up to proposing, Midder, is this. An Imperial all-terrain transport in perfect miniature, such as you have described, ''has'' been sighted, and I could provide to you the locations and times of these sightings. But enough time has passed that I doubt you will find your Garrett. What I want from you

There was something hypnotic about his voice, or possibly about the complexity and strength of the notes, and Steph had to force himself again and again to pay attention.

SL-1984 fell silent for a long moment, letting Steph focus on the notes.

Energy-sense was sort of more intimate than hearing, somehow reminding him of taste, but the easiest analogies were still music-related. Steph could clearly imagine the members of a massive orchestra playing with furious attention, with a conductor at their center gesturing strongly. Some of them, mostly close together but scattered through the ensemble, had broken instruments which they still tried to play, to poor effect, and there were a lot of empty seats. Maybe – he supposed it was just the opposite of that mental image; energy or music powering the mechanisms or musicians and their instruments. It just so happened that they worked very closely together and responded to one another, so that as Steph spent longer and longer considering it, it seemed more and more to have a melody.

A familiar melody, at that. Almost… surely not, but… the Imperial March?

Couldn’t be. It was slower, for one, not so martial or ''march'' like, different concentrations of instruments. If he kept with the music analogy, it was a complicated song, with layers of harmony, beats and counterbeats, even some vocals, all blending together. There were still snares in the background, though they were mostly drowned out. But that basic tune, those nine notes... Garrett had had John Williams music looping for the past week, and the Imperial March showed up a lot in different ways... it was a leitmotif, wasn't it? Steph found himself wishing he hadn't forgotten practically everything about classical music.

And it seemed to be tapering off, anyway, as if the members of the orchestra were tiring and putting their instruments down.

Steph found that he had slowed to a creep to stay alongside SL-1984, who had begun moving stiffly with less and less surety. He had started favoring his closer leg, and even as Steph watched, he stopped walking altogether to fold in on himself like an old man, and clutch with his remaining arm at or just beneath his chest box. The notes were fading out raggedly, and the fluttering of the snares wasn't obscured now, but even they were fading fast.

The storm troopers started towards him as the quality of his breathing changed entirely, becoming labored.

''What’s wrong?'' Steph asked, or rather tried to ask. It seemed like just as the thought was forming he was shoved back, by a pair of invisible but unyielding hands. They pushed faster than he could back up, at least this suddenly – the world seemed to tumble as he fell entirely off his feet and slid along the carpet, against the grain of his fur. Instinctively he flailed, trying to both regain his feet and claw at the hands, but despite the very solid pressure of them he connected with nothing but air. One hard, rounded fingertip making a dent in the long fur under his collarbones traced quickly upwards, not quite brushing against his throat and then his hastily-closed eye, and stopped at the base of his antenna.

Steph froze in place. The pressure had lessened as it climbed and was feather-light by the time it stopped, but his antenna and especially the bulge in his head at its base were extremely sensitive. Earlier in the day he’d accidentally scratched it with a dewclaw, and it had been agonizing. The pushing hands and the fingertip vanished; he stopped sliding and tentatively picked himself back up, then shook himself off.

Before him, at a far enough distance that he didn't have to crick his neck to see their helmets, the spattered storm trooper went on guard, holding his weapon ready as if expecting an attack, while the other attended to SL-1984.

"Power cells are going dead. I'm losing systems," he said, his voice fainter and pained, getting more so with almost every word. After a moment he added, "I can't hear you. My comm is dead."

The closer storm trooper, the clean one, was visibly anxious. "My lord, if either of us can do anything, if you need to swap with ours-"

"No, no. This suit was not designed with conveniently accessible power cells. They are not supposed to die one after the other like this. Give me a moment." He leaned heavily on the closer trooper as his breathing changed again, becoming strained as well as labored. "Chain reaction. I didn't... aargh. I'll risk it."

Bracing himself, he pulled away from the closer storm trooper to stand on his own and said, "Six twenty-five, step back. Two-eight ninety seven, fire on me."

The closer one backed away; the farther one whipped around to face him. "Sir?!"

SL-1984’s voice was raspy and horrible as, word by word, he got out, “That was an order.”

There was no further delay; the spattered trooper raised his blaster rifle, and taking hardly an eyeblink to aim it he fired it directly at SL-1984. Steph saw the man’s arm snap around to intercept the red bolt during that pause. When it hit, the discharge was momentarily blinding. He sensed a rush of discordant notes rise and squawk and sort of transmute into a burst of wild fiddling, which settled rapidly into something that tasted very like the opening notes of the Imperial March, if the Imperial March could have a taste, all of this happening fast enough that he had to take a moment to sort it out.

SL-1984 was standing tall again, though there was now some charring in the palm of his hand and along his arm, tracing down to the edge of his chest box. His notes were strong and ordered again, but even as Steph felt them the sensation of a finger just barely resting on the base of his antenna returned.

“Don’t leech off of me,” SL-1984 said, and although his amplified voice sounded much the same as it had before, now there was a hint, just a hint, of menace behind it. Already the dramatic mark from the blaster was bleaching white, leaving almost a scar where the material had burned away.

''I didn't know!''

SL-1984 locked his arm behind his back

He didn't like this. But it seemed like the best chance he had.

[Note to self: STOP HAVING THESE DREAMS. Aaaaah.]

==Escaping==

Fuel reserves were at ninety-three point seven nine four five oh. He wasn't burning it at the ideal rate; one of the filters wasn't quite right, so the mixture had some fine particulates which were affecting consumption. It didn't harm his performance too much, not for one mission, but the techs were definitely going to have to take a look at it when he was back in his berth.

He kept all four blasters hot. This was a big expenditure, but without a gunner sitting in one of the pilot chairs he was quite a bit slower, and the couple seconds between registering a threat and being able to fire might make a difference here, where everything was so fast. He'd had some trouble deciding to do that. Eventually he'd just stopped walking for a few minutes, which let power reroute until he could balance the pros and cons.

How long had he been walking? No one had set a timer, he didn't know. A few kilometers. He had no plan for getting out. Random directions all the way. There'd been a thing. Swinging cliff-gate. Door. No, two doors, side by side - double doors, that was it. They'd stopped him for a while, until he'd thought of shooting out the metal thing that kept them closed. After that they had swung open for him. He couldn't recall when that had been.

He was fairly certain that he'd gone in a few circles; he was continuously plotting new courses and had lost track of the old ones. There had been some more ambulating towers, and each time he'd seen one he'd stopped in his tracks to watch them, but they'd ignored him. Good. He was more effective on targets that didn't outmass him or move that damn fast.

Now, finally, it looked like he was getting somewhere! Ahead, at the far range of his vision, more things. Doors. Different surface, clear, yes, glass doors, he couldn't see through them yet but they ''were'' glass. Ground was still good, he didn't detect any major holes or anything that would hide treacherous ground, so he shifted the pace up to maximum, the ground-eating charge that he could only keep up for so long without risking damage.

''Dead end! Stop, stop!'' As he reached the doors he turned and pulled to the side, shedding momentum and not quite presenting his flank. Glass though they were, the doors were closed and all the nonvisual sensors tagged them as yet another unscaleable cliff. Coming to a stop, power rerouting smoothly with hardly a flicker in his vision, he thought that this place was absolutely riddled with these sheer cliffs. They didn't seem natural.

A moment later, and Garrett thought, of ''course'' they didn't seem natural. Good God. They were ''walls''. They kept the ceiling away from the floor, the outside away from the inside. What, had he forgotten somehow? How could he forget about ''walls''?

That was worrying. Still, he couldn't stop for that now. He had to get out. His side-views somehow couldn't see through the glass of the doors; they were just reflective, smooth planes, totally unnatural looking, and it took a few seconds to figure out that the sheets of thinner organic material were probably flyers that had been taped up at eye level - yeah, they were some distance above him, but he could read the writing on the closest one, a billboard-scaled proclamation about staying hydrated and bathing. By backing up and turning awkwardly, footpads thumping and ''chrt!''-ing loudly in his mind's ear, he could see out of his command viewport, and the glass was properly transparent.

Outside, while the nearest bits of paving looked like the kind of job that involved getting regional politicians to cut a ribbon at the end of a dedication ceremony before the thing could be used, everything he took as signs of scale - trees, people, cars - was distant. Within sight, yes, but the distance shrank them, and the sight of humanoids his size or larger seemed like a trick of his eyes or cameras or whatever, rather than the presence of towering fast monsters. For a strange moment of disconnect he could almost believe that the convention had simply moved outside and was going on just fine, maybe a little more disorganized by the move.

Then Garrett made himself look closer, and actually see the scaled-up people, what they looked like beyond not seeming like moving towers. What was unmistakeably a gout of fire shot into the air and fizzled out as the androgynous pretty-boy producing it was interrupted by something with a pair of gigantic bat wings, spreading them incredibly wide and flapping them with what looked like a tremendous gust of wind. To the side, an angry-looking cat furry bandaged a small boy in a whirlwind of linen strips, showing long, pointed teeth as he shouted or snarled at the bat-winged thing. ... Yeah. He was pretty sure most of that didn't happen in a convention that was going on just fine. Come to think of it, he didn't see any balding middle-aged men dressed like their favorite anime girls.

A lot more leggy women dressed as popular anime girls, though.

Garrett thought he had some idea about what had happened. Not how or why, of course. But it was pretty clear that he wasn't the only one.

Maybe it was just as well.

He wasn't breathing. No, of course he wasn't breathing. It was that tic again. Better ignore it.

He checked his fuel reserves. Ninety-three point five oh oh nine two. He was burning it just by standing here. Now Garrett thought he knew what that mystery console was, the one that he had to leave underpowered every time he moved. It was his frontal lobe, or something like that. His engine didn't produce enough power. It was optimized for walking and shooting, and powering the thinking console at the same time was more than the motor could handle. He guessed so, anyway. It would certainly explain why things had gotten so much simpler, and why he'd forgotten about walls. Dismaying thought. He got stupid every time he moved; he might literally be unable to walk and think in abstract concepts at the same time. Or - well, fine, he was fairly sure he could walk and think at least somewhat, but not while keeping his blasters primed.

But he'd paused to decide to heat up his blasters. It looked like whenever he stopped walking he got that console back. Maybe there weren't any ill effects to that. Maybe it only lasted until he had enough power to reroute. Was he stupider now than he'd been when he was lying on his side?

...Okay, that was an idiotic question, Garrett admitted to himself. No way to tell. It was better to just assume that he could trade walking or the ability to shoot first for the ability to think about things that weren't directly related to walking or shooting. He just couldn't have all three at once. Oh God, it was like the crossing-the-river puzzle, he just had to put the fox and the grain in the boat and leave the chicken back on the riverbank. Or something. Hopefully it wouldn't wander off and the boat wouldn't capsize. Because if he didn't think he could get whatever passed for his brain back, he wouldn't do anything at all, would he?

Very suddenly the emptiness hit him again, hard enough that he felt like something had peeled back his plating and bared both levels of his inner structure. He saw his insides, felt that yawning cold void and the irrational fear that always came when he thought about it. Sickening. Empty. Empty, and the plating around it utterly still, as only an inanimate object could be. It had never exactly gone away, he'd just managed not to think about it. Maybe not having thoughts wasn't so bad.

Garrett not-quite-shuddered. Standing up, that meant adjusting his legs enough to make his body rock slightly. He had the tic again.

Well, he wasn't going to get anywhere just standing here. Better get out now, before something got him.

Okay. The doors towered up above him, glass in metal frames that might be aluminum. Remembering when he'd first come in, he was pretty sure that they were pull doors, at least from the outside, and didn't have the kind of latch that needed a turning doorknob or handle. The latch was some kind of one-way deal to keep it from swinging all over the place. At the top of the frame there was some kind of... armature thing connecting frame and door. He'd majored in Engineering, not Architecture, but he thought that it kept the door from swinging out.

From inside, it was a push door. He really couldn't push, though. He wasn't built for that, and he'd probably break something trying. That meant trying to shoot it open and hoping that it wasn't balanced. The armature looked easier.

It was a little too high up to reach with his heavies, not without backing up, so Garrett trained his medium repeating blasters at the metal and fired, bracing against the recoil. He'd kept them hot, so there was no moment of charging.

The sound, muted though it was, wasn't anything like earlier, when he'd fired into a wall to see if he could hear anything. When the smoke or vapor or whatever cleared - yes, a good bit of the armature was gone, and some of the doorjamb past it, and there was a blackened crater in the wall. A tiny flame guttered in the middle of it. The glass near that was in one piece, but browned.

He guessed his blasters were more powerful than he'd thought. It was a good thing he hadn't hit that thing that might have been Steph. Garrett suppressed another shudder at the thought.

The armature was gone, which left the latch. Feeling cautious, Garrett backed up stiffly and deliberately, fighting the urge to clutch his nonexistent stomach with limbs that didn't bend that way as he felt the tic. It was funny how he'd never appreciated being able to do things like ''back up'' without having to think about it. Better to just get on with it. Aim. Fire.

Okay, the latch was gone, but apparently the doors weren't weighted to swing in or out, because they weren't locked in place anymore but they also weren't opening on their own like the last set of doors. Damn!

Looking out through the glass, seeing the pale blue sky through his forward viewport, seeing the walls and ceiling and floor through all his other senses, Garrett fought a sudden wild surge of claustrophobia. This was less a building and more of a tomb, or maybe ''he'' was the tomb, or maybe - God, it didn't matter, he felt sick and hollow and everything inside with him seemed too close.

The tic again. He was beginning to hate that thing. Forget not having the necessary organs, he didn't feel like he'd had the wind knocked out of him or anything like that. He only felt like he had to breathe when the tic hit him and made him remember that he wasn't doing it. It wasn't a good feeling.

Garrett deliberately focused on his interior, trying to ignore the surge of revulsion at all that empty space inside. He had life support systems built around the void, though of course they were for his crew, not him. Some of those were devoted to atmosphere - he had some kind of air recycling unit, but since the relevant sensors reported that the external air was just fine, air was just being sucked into intake scoops and filtered. Those motors, the fans they ran that circulated air around, they were important. He couldn't control them, but they were important. They'd have to do.

It wasn't like breathing could possibly be as good as the tic kept reminding him, he told himself. No one would ever get anything done.

Driven air, filtered and cooled and dehumidified and constantly monitored by the housekeeping console, blew gently through the void. It wasn't tidal at all, but it was moving air, and he let himself imagine that he was taking a deep breath.

Right. Right. There was a kickback every time he fired, and that probably implied that blaster bolts had kinetic energy. This was not how lasers worked. That didn't matter. This would either work or it wouldn't.

''I am not going to be trapped here!'' This time he used his heavies in linked-fire mode. Door on the right, doorframe in the lower left corner. Aim. Fire. The recoil, stronger with his heavies, made his ''flexible armored tunnel'' compress momentarily as his command center jerked back. The bulk of the door had moved a little. This was working! Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Repeat as necessary - stop!

The door opened enough that the wind caught and pushed at it. He wasted no time in setting a course through the opening while nervously watching the doorjam. Most of the way through, the wind must have faltered and the door must have been weighted, because it swung on him. It hit hard enough that he felt the impact through his hull, and although it was jarring and loud and he was forced to very consciously shuffle sideways to keep his balance, there was no pain. Just the feeling that pain should have been there.

But he barely noticed that. It was - God, the world was bright. He reached the point he'd set and stopped. The world was bright. He couldn't see. Gah! This didn't hurt, not quite, and it didn't exactly feel like heat, but it was very unpleasant, it was- God, too bright! Everything was hot light, he couldn't see anything, he was blind! This didn't make sense, it had been fine through the window!

Part of him remembered moving his roommate's plants outside on a sunny, nearly cloudless day, he couldn't remember why, and how the plants had suffered for that. His roommate - oh, God, he couldn't remember his name! Vernon? Jacob? MacKenzie? He was in interior design or cellular biology or something and happened to be utterly forgettable - had told him very patiently that it didn't matter that they'd been tropical plants, there had still been too much light; the dorm room with the lights on was anywhere from fifty to maybe four hundred lux, if the windows were open on a bright day. Direct sunlight on a day like that was somewhere between thirty and one hundred thirty ''thousand'' lux, and the plants had effectively been sunburned. Vernon or Jacob or whatever his name was had gone on to say that direct sunlight was incredibly, exponentially more powerful than indoor lighting, it was just that human eyes adjusted so well that people barely noticed, part of Garrett remembered.

The rest of him was locked in place, frozen, trying not to panic, trying to will the brightness to fade. He wasn't blind, not ''quite', he could sort of sense where the sun was, like it was actively hating him, like his vision was a sense of touch. And his underside, he could vaguely make out his legs and his shadow. But he couldn't see, even when he reluctantly switched to the too-dark internal cams, everything was brightness that felt suspiciously like pain, he couldn't stare out at any of it, he had a ''very'' strong compulsion to tear up defensively, screw his eyes shut, shade them, but ''he couldn't do that'', he couldn't even turn away, ''he didn't have eyes''.

Garrett's motor was working back up out of the near-subliminal hum, getting louder. Too bright! ''Too bright!'' He couldn't - God, too bright! His motor was running, he could move, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn't even go back because the door had shut, and he couldn't ''see''... ''Threat! Threat!''

He backed, sidled, tried to get his command section and his heavies into position, couldn't, it was too high up, aimed his medium repeating blasters, fired. Of course he didn't do any good, he was aiming at the goddamn ''sun'', but he fired anyway, and did it again.

This was useless, he was just burning power, how was his fuel - oh God, ninety two point eight two oh five one that couldn't be good, he was running his motor like he was moving at full tilt blasters blazing and he ''couldn't slow it down'', couldn't see, anything could be out here with him, couldn't move for risk of crashing, too bright, too hot ''threat threat threat'' - was this what going insane felt like?

He managed to make himself stop firing and finally picked up on the terrain sensors in his footpads. The surface was solid. It was stable! Too bright, yes, he couldn't see, yes, this was probably as close to pain as he was going to get, but ''the ground was firm'', damn it!

That helped a little, long enough that he realized that the terrain sensors could substitute for sight. Sort of. It was easier to focus on them without sight getting in the way. Garrett could pick up on sort of a vague outline of the raised hardened surface he was on - sidewalk, right - and where it met the less certain surfaces around it, which was probably the grass. He was still - God, this was insane, he couldn't ''see'', why couldn't he seem to adjust to this, it was just ''daylight'', it was agony, he couldn't stop the static popping in bursts over his intercom and didn't know what kind of vocalization that was supposed to be - but this was something. Like echolocation. Sort of.

It only extended out in an oval maybe, oh, seventy meters long - no, only a few times his body length and he wasn't huge, so it had to be smaller than that. He had to find some shade and he couldn't turn back around, he thought there'd been awnings over the door he'd come in through - hadn't there been? Had that been a different door? - but there weren't here, he had to get moving.

Trees, there'd been trees he'd seen from inside, the kind that got planted around parking lots to shade some of the cars, those had been the closest. He'd gotten partially turned around, but he was pretty sure they were this way, along the pavement. Garrett set course points and hoped.

Terrain-sensing, it turned out, could pick up on people. Sort of. And only if they were the monumentally-scaled ones here - no, no, he had to get it straight, they were probably normal size. He felt them - well, more properly, he felt their footsteps against the ground. The footsteps were shaped vaguely like feet, so some of them were sort of beanlike and others were disks or different shapes, as they hit the ground, some walking or running, some basically holding position. He hadn't given much thought to how much something that breathed shifted its weight when it was just standing in place, and he was a little startled at how bitter the thought was.

It seemed like there were more closer than farther away, which probably just meant that Garrett could sense the heavier things from farther away, and no doubt there were some holding too still for him to sense like this. He kept setting points and walking, he was trying to be calm, but this wasn't sight. God. Even assuming he got to shade, even assuming he was able to communicate somehow, so someone didn't whisk him away and dismantle him as a curiosity, he'd probably end up living in one of those trailers for the disabled and -

Not living. ''This wasn't living.'' Existing, then, until his fuel ran out. It would. He didn't know what was in his tank but he was pretty sure it wasn't something you could get on Earth, and there'd probably be scale issues. And he needed regular maintenance, though he knew nothing was going to be able to get at his engines without taking them apart. Otherwise, he'd... well, he wouldn't last too long without maintenance, he was already having mild engine trouble and it would only get worse. What then?

Maybe it was better not to -

Whoah! Footsteps, closer, ''really damned fast'', okay, unless they changed direction they'd just pass him by-

SCRAPING HIS HULL oh God what was it engines building to fever pitch SCRAPING THE SEAL OF HIS BOARDING HATCH prepping his heavies, heating heating hurry up he could HEAR IT nonononono STOP he fired his heavies without thinking and tried to bring a medium repeater in line but of course the ''thing'' was running now, too fast, where was it it was gone!

"KKKKSSSSHHHT! KKSSSSHHHHHHH," he staticked in alarm, only the static was much longer and had a terrified snarl in it, he was not sure if that was an attempt at cursing but damn it of ''course'' sensing footsteps wasn't the same as sight and he had no idea what the rest of the body was doing and if anything flew he wouldn't know about it at ''all'' he was blind he was deaf good Lord in Heaven there could be another one RIGHT NOW move move movemovemovemove''move''.

And he was walking as fast as he could, almost running, knowing he couldn't keep this up and all discretionary power was in everything ''but'' his not-a-brain but ''that didn't matter'' keep going go go go, SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - REACHED COURSEPOINT, CONTINUE TO NEXT, ''DODGE'' - SET NEW COURSEPOINT.

Later - it felt like much later - he remembered that the settings for the holocams had to be manually told to adjust to major changes in light. One of the pilots, whoever was serving as the gunner, usually hit that switch. He didn't have a gunner, and the horrible wrongness inherent in a phrase like that did not summon one up. He couldn't hit the switch, but he could turn it on, and he did.

Better. The blinding light on all sides tinted, then seemed to dial down and he could see again. Not even any bright afterimages, but then didn't you need retinas for those? He could see. Much better.

...He had a life-form analyzer as part of his sensor package, too. But he needed someone of commander rank to authorize its activation, so even if he'd remembered it back there, it wouldn't have helped.

Funny, something was different, but he couldn't get a reading on it. Maybe if he slowed down, free up more power to route to the smart console - No. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't slow down. He did not want to slow down.

Ahead there was an obstruction in his path, hanging across just above his mobile command center, where it would disastrously scrape the upper edge of his back if he just went under it. Trivial to destroy it. He did. Two heavy shots, two medium, and he cleared the gap with meters to spare, footpads pounding on the rubble. He shouldn't maintain this pace, it was potentially damaging, but that was fine. He didn't slow down.

What had changed - he was under open skies, not one sheer cliff in view. The surface was somewhat different - he'd noticed several surface changes, but glancingly, since it hadn't been important. It was some other material, dark gray, smoother and thinner and not as good a surface since it wasn't up to his weight. But that was fine.

No hyper-fast bipedal towers. Definitely fine.

Another obstruction, the same kind, this one a little smaller and level with his command viewport. He destroyed it, too, and two heavy shots seemed like overkill.

Underfoot, civilian groundcars on wheels, unarmored, brightly colored, swerved wildly to avoid him. He considered shooting them. He considered altering his course to kick at them or - yes, they were small enough to step on, at least some of them. He didn't. One thing to do this - it was a sin, yes, but he'd take that. Another thing, a worse thing, to take them with him.

Part of him twitched. Okay, if the giant towers were humans, what was with this? Bit by bit, he was able to register that ''this'' was a big road with several lanes, those were cars, those were trees, all at a scale of much smaller than him, which felt more natural. There was yet another obstruction ahead, and this time he recognized it. Freeway overpass. Even lower than the other two.

Huh. Well, he wasn't going to slow down to think about it. He was alone, empty, it didn't matter where he went as long as he didn't stop until the end. There was a moment when he was distracted by flying atmospheric craft, some loud enough to hear, but he didn't stop. He kept going. Full tilt, getting to each new course point at his highest speed.

He'd always loved getting caught up in a new idea, the way it took over his life, practically singing under his skin, as immediate as his heartbeat. Only now the heartbeat was gone, and in place of the singing was the jarring music of engines.

There was a kind of terrible joy in this. This was what he was good at, what he was built to do; why ''not'' take pride in it? Even if it ''was'' just destruction for no purpose, no cause, not even anyone telling him either to stop or keep going. He was good at pounding forwards and shooting whatever was in his way. That was all there was to it.

Fuel reserves were at eighty-nine point oh nine one two seven and going down. That was fine. He wasn't stopping, even with no crew and no purpose. Even with so little power going to it, the strange console had some current. He had autonomy. He wasn't stopping.

==Anj Outside==

Outside, it was chaos, pure and simple. Anj hadn’t been in the crowd when ''it'' happened. He’d seen people and creatures of all descriptions fighting to get outside while he’d been looking for a private place. By the time he’d picked up on the broadcast and left the bathroom, most of them had already gone – the halls had hardly been deserted, but the majority had already fled. He could hear them outside, a dull roar formed by thousands of throats. ''Not a happy crowd'', he decided. ''Better than a mob, though. I don't know what I'd do with one of those.''

As he approached the empty frame of a double door - it had once, apparently, held glass, but that was nowhere to be seen - Anj felt the warning tingle and heard what first sounded like another shrieking alarm. In response he sidestepped out of the way, and none too soon. Some kind of very large heronlike bird with pale gold-orange feathers skidded unsteadily around a corner, then powered past him in a lurching run. The moment its wings cleared the doorframe, it launched itself into the air. As it winged upwards and away the Red Guard realized that it was making a high, panicked call that sounded vaguely like screaming.

He glanced back at where the bird had come from and stilled himself. Nothing, not even the warning tingle that was his precognition. Maybe the bird had been fleeing something, maybe it hadn't, but any trouble was slow enough that if he kept moving it wasn't going to bother ''him.''

TR-1407 stepped outside and was struck by what he saw. People, creatures, and stranger things that defied categorization littered the landscape, rushing about, standing and sitting and reclining in a few cases. Some were alone, others in groups. There were some fighting or arguing with each other, others trying to subdue the wild ones, some hightailing it as if the Emperor’s finest were at their heels, some examining themselves frantically, some just sitting back with mouths open as if howling or screaming, though the Red Guard couldn’t pick out individual voices in the collective noise. Almost no one was close to the complex; most people that Anj saw were on the grass.

As he automatically went through a threat assessment, picking out specifics from all the bewildered bystanders, he marveled at the sheer number. He hadn’t thought the Orlando Convention Center could hold so many – yes, it had been crowded, and he hadn’t canvassed the entire place and seen for himself how big it was, but still. It was like a “Where’s Waldo” poster, writ large.

Maybe it wasn't just inside, he thought suddenly. Maybe it was ''everywhere'', and just more obvious here. If the image had become real - well, it had to be more than just the image, or he wouldn't have gotten taller. If little unarticulated thoughts, like ''a forcepike weighs seven kilograms'' and ''Imperials use the metric system for measurements'' had also carried over, what about others? What about the cheater's assumption that ''I will not be caught'', or the youth's that ''I am immortal''?

Still on the instruction frequency, the officer who had told TK-1407 where to go was tersely repeating those instructions to someone else who had reported. ''I need to stay focused. I can speculate later. Need to find my squadron before I do anything else.''

Some of the figures in the crowd looked like security forces – ''no, police, they're called police.'' Police, firefighters, paramedics, what looked like a SWAT team in black, some Animal Control officers, of all things - there were more than a few people that had probably been called in from all across the state, if not country. They clearly were supposed to try and control or at least contain this madness. Just as clearly, they were as confused and uncertain as anyone else, but trying their best to impose order in some form. Anj sympathized. This was not a job he envied.

It was weird – the outsiders looked and ''felt'' somehow a little different from all these others, and not just because ''they'' were all human. Like all of the changed, big and small, were larger-than-life in one way or another. Maybe he was imagining things.

Flickers on his peripherals made TR-1407 tilt his chin up. The sky, a lovely cloudless blue, was barely less crowded than the ground – far, far above something streaked up into the atmosphere, and hardly any closer small military-looking jet planes or fightercraft roared overhead in formation. Even closer there were news helicopters already, sharing airspace with winged things of all description and wingless humanoids who had no visible way of staying aloft.

The Red Guard saw bright costuming and at least one cape fluttering in the wind as fliers swerved around each other or hovered in place. Someone in red and blue tights streaked upwards abruptly at impossible speeds, within seconds ''catching up to the jets'' and paralleling their course, far enough away that the red cape was barely visible. Anj saw this and, incredulous, thought, ''Superheroes? Really?''

There was no denying what they looked like, no matter how improbable the thought was. Anj realized what he was thinking and grinned involuntarily. ''As if I’m perfectly reasonable in comparison. This is insane. So what? The 501st needs me. And reality doesn't care whether or not you believe it.''

With that reminder, he turned. ''Southwest blacktop? Must be that parking lot where we planned to meet. Ah… it’s midday or thereabouts, so by the sun’s position'' that'' way is west, which means south is...'' there. ''Not far.'' Doing his best not to attract any attention, the Red Guard started moving at a lope.

''I don’t know where the closest military outpost is,'' Anj realized. ''Still, with something like this we can probably expect troopships any minute now; orbital reinforcements – No, no,'' no! ''This is Earth! '' Earth! ''Not part of the Empire! There are no orbital reinforcements. No fleets. We might get some part of the Army here, but they don’t have the technology I’m expecting. Rockets, not turbolasers. Helicopters and jets, not troopships, not snubfighters.'' Why did that thought make him uncomfortable?

''I wouldn’t worry about him, even with a sword like that… Watch out for her, she’s dangerous… He’s fine for now, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to push him… she looks like she could do some serious damage, but somehow I don’t think she’ll be a problem… Better not go near that one. Looks like everyone else’s picked up on it too… Emperor’s bones, that thing is huge, but I don’t think it’s up to anything…'' There were a ''lot'' of people to assess, particularly on the run. It niggled at the Red Guard that he was only doing a cursory check of each, but seeing that his options were to ignore everyone, give only the briefest of inspections, or slow down to a crawl to inspect everyone...

''There!'' Anj's heart jumped in his chest. Inexplicably he felt an incredible sense of relief, strong enough that he was almost lightheaded.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the large knot of people standing together on the asphalt were just as confused and disorganized as anyone else. Quieter, perhaps, but still random. An outsider might believe that they had formed into a cluster at random, and that it was chance that explained why they almost all looked like Imperials, mostly troopers.

The outsider would be wrong. Anj's eyes flicked as an indicator sounded and saw that no fewer than ten Imperial frequencies were active. He didn't see anyone lined up in ranks, but training helped him to find the subtle signs that there was organization, purpose, ''order'' in the group, not just the amorphous mixing of the crowd. They were, indeed, bewildered and unsettled just like everyone in or out of the complex. An effort was being made to remedy that.

TR-1407's footsteps hastened. A stormtrooper with the battered armor and single orange pauldron that signified his rank as a sandtrooper squad leader stopped him with a gesture, then nodded. The Red Guard joined the growing mass.

It was startling to check IFF - Identify Friend/Foe - tags on a monitor and see so many designations. Some were familiar, others less so. There were several SL - Sith Lord - indicators scattered about, but Anj didn't see SL-1984, and this was worrying. Other Vaders, yes, and the Red Guard couldn't help boggling a little at the concept of more than one Lord Vader. But none in white, and none with the right designation. What would he have done, anyway?

''Right. I should report in. To whom, though?'' The mass was ''trying'' to order itself, but it had a good ways to go yet. Almost no one with a helmet was speaking "out loud" with their voice amplification units. With the amount of noise that the rest of the crowd was putting out, that was probably just as well. Instead the comm frequencies were abuzz with orders and counterorders, the beginnings of arguments, complaints and others chewing out the complainers. One channel had been set aside for those who had been separated from squadmates. It didn't help that this part of the parking lot was nowhere near clear. Not every space was filled, but there were enough cars and the like to force the group to encircle them.

Where was his squad? Anj scanned again, and again, and didn't find any of them. No. They had to be here. Despite himself he opened the "searching" channel. "Tampa Bay? Tampa Bay Squad, come in! Tampa Bay?"

This particular frequency was filled with similar requests. "Is there anyone else from Georgia Garrison? Please, Georgia Garrison?" "Pacific Outpost, all units report in. Pacific Outpost..." "Michigan Squad, we have two missing from Michigan Squad, please report." "Anyone from Bast Alpha Squad, come in. Did everyone get out okay?" Most of them were representing a particular squad, or garrison, or outpost, and were looking for missing friends. But he heard one or two who had been separated completely, like him. Some got answers; Anj overheard the starts of several reunions, each cutting off as the speakers switched channels. Others didn't.

"Tampa Bay! Come in Tampa Bay Squad!" It didn't make ''sense''. Anj was starting to sweat into the lining of his armor. Where could they be? He hadn't exactly been quick in getting here, he ''couldn't'' be the first from his squad! Where had they all gone? TR-1407 scanned IFF again as the last of his relief evaporated. It made no sense! The three other squadrons of Florida Garrison - Everglades, Makaze, Parjai - were there. There were forty-nine people in Tampa Bay Squadron - not all of them had come to Xanadu, and some might be a little slow in getting here, but he should have heard from ''someone''.

"Tampa Bay Squad? Please come in. Tampa Bay? Is anyone there? Anyone? Tampa Bay!" Anj forced himself to stop before he lost all control of his voice. He could hear someone else pleading, close to tears if not already crying - "Neon City Garrison, ''where are you?'' Please! Damien, Ray, Greg - ''where are you?''"

To his horror, Anj found his throat constricting in panic. Where were they? ''Where was his squad?'' He tried, squeezing his hands into fists and desperately telling himself that they were late, that's all, he tried to keep calm, but it had been a trying day already and he had no orders to follow and ''his squad was missing.'' That was the big thing, the worst thing. He'd lost them, he had failed his oath as a Red Guard and a soldier of the Empire. The feeling was strong enough to make his eyes water. Anj made sure to close his connection and all of his speakers so that none would hear when he lost it. The rest of the 501st had enough distractions.

Something pulled on his robe. Surprised, Anj looked down at the round-topped droid as it retracted its manipulator arm and crooned something wordless at him.

It was a moment for him to blink fiercely and swallow that lump in his throat, and he covered the delay by reactivating a speaker so that his voice could be heard. "Yeah. There is. I - I've lost my squad." The admission almost stuck on the way out. "I don't know where ''any'' of them are."

The droid, an R2-series astromech with highlights in ''pink'', of all colors, whistled and cooed sympathetically.

"Well, no. Not a word. I have no idea where they are." It seemed like the tightness was easing off, becoming less immediate. He welcomed the distraction. "We got separated a while back, and I haven't seen or heard from any of them since. And it's not like we have our own personal frequency, either - it wasn't like we'd have had any use for it." As he realized what he'd just said, Anj smiled humorlessly into his helmet. Of ''course'' there wouldn't have been a use! It had been a game, or something close!

The R2 beeped, imperious. Its single black photoreceptor was steady. Just like that, things were in perspective. Anj might have laughed, if he hadn't still felt so uneasy.

"That's true. My squad is tough. I'm sure they're fine - it's just, they aren't ''here,'' and I don't know how my friends are. I haven't seen them since all ''this'' started, and I'm worried." This was true, and he knew that they had to have run into trouble, or he wouldn't be by himself like this. But - they were tough, and they were smart. If they needed help they would call for it, and they would make it through.

And if they didn't, well... For a moment he had trouble drawing breath. It was a ''terrible'' thought, and sickening enough that he tasted bile and felt his heart pounding in his throat. ''May the Force help their murderers, because nothing less will stop me,'' he swore, meaning every word. Terrible thought. '' Terrible'' thought.

A sharp whistle brought his attention back down to the droid, who chattered up at him. He had to make an effort to look in control and stable for it. He was sure he knew who and what it was. If it ''was'' R2-KT - well, virtually everyone in Star Wars fandom knew that story. In comparison, he had no grounds for complaint.

"I'll be fine. I'm a Red Guard - I work best alone or with only a few people, and it's not like I'm really by myself - I'm surrounded by the 501st." And they were his Legion, the closest to the Empire that he was ever likely to find. How could he despair? "Thanks."

With a final, cheery whistle, the pink R2 swiveled and trundled away. It had some kind of a logo banner, pink on white, on its back, but it slipped out of sight between two troopers and a robed man before he could read it. Less than a minute later, the single terrified member of Neon City Garrison got off the comm.

Anj felt better now. Still a little shaken, but he was functional, and that was what mattered. This still begged the question - ''now'' what? The Red Guard went after the first fresh distraction that presented itself.

There was a flurry of activity at the edges of the gathering. TR-1407 wasn't exactly short, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the helmets of the people around him. Still, he got a flash of someone else in flowing scarlet and something large, yellow, and moving. The Red Guard looked to his nearest neighbor and boosted the output to his speakers, realizing ''how'' he did it only after it was done.

"Do you know what that's about?" The woman in the form-fitting jumpsuit and the hoodless brown cape turned towards him.

She was - well, she was stunning, and Anj found himself glad that his helmet hid his gaze. She had an alertness about her, like she was aware of everything that was going on around her at all times. He couldn't tell what her position was - probably some kind of agent, by the lower-leg guards and nonstandard firearms. The woman had a striking sort of confidence, almost an aura of "I know what I'm doing and I'm proud to be doing it".

It didn't hurt that she really was pretty - her features were too sharp and strong for conventional beauty, but attractive. Red hair, intense green eyes, and under the jumpsuit she was fit and muscular with good shoulders, a far cry from the handful of sultry pin-up style women that Anj had glimpsed before. He hadn't found ''them'' particularly attractive, but -

Anj saw the lightsaber and the IFF-provided designation at roughly the same time. SL-3268, in a clear voice, answered, "There's a car, I'm guessing a Camaro, without a driver that's started moving erratically and making abortive charges at us. One of your fellow Guards is trying to dissuade it. I don't think there'll be a problem." Just as he was hoping she hadn't noticed, the Mara Jade added with a quirk of her lips, "And I'm flattered, but taken."

''She's one of the Emperor's Hands. I'm lucky that she hasn't taken offense.'' That realization effectively took any desire, killed it, and mangled it beyond any recognition. Anj was glad of the helmet hiding his face, and vaguely wished that he could find a hole in the ground in which to crawl into and die. Even with the cooling systems in his armor, he knew he was blushing furiously, hard enough that he felt sunburned. ''Next time, check IFF first.'' He didn't bother wondering how she'd known. Force Sensitivity and all that.

Probably just as well. Anj had no idea what he'd have done. He was on duty anyway; even with nothing immediate going on it would be un-Imperial to get too distracted. Fortunately not every woman was striking in quite that way - prettier, yes, often curvier and not immediately off-limits, but markedly less impressive. Picturing someone like the Mara Jade alongside, say, Scott, was... interesting. But of course there was also the fact that less than an hour ago ''he had been female'' - how, ''how'' could that have slipped his mind? - and feeling attracted to people while male was a tangle he ''really'' didn't want to unravel just yet.

3268's auburn head came up. Anj felt the warning tingle in the instant before a commanding voice came on all frequencies. The IFF code marked the speaker as TK-0210. '''Our Beloved Founder', Albin Johnson,'' Anj realized. ''Well well. There wouldn't be a 501st without him. I'd forgotten that he showed up. His R2 is here, so of course he's here too.''

"Something new has come up. Would everyone please listen to the situation." It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt that it was an order. Within seconds all voice traffic had stopped. The rest of the crowd carried on with the panicking, but here everyone listened as the founder explained an exchange that someone had heard taking place on a frequency that was decidedly not Imperial.

Specifically, it was one of the radio frequencies used by the United States military. The Founder didn't mention exactly what frequency it was, or when anyone had started listening in on it. What had been overheard was a report on something going off Xanadu grounds and following the highway. Something very large. One of the ones reporting said it was "like something out of Star Wars". The physical description exactly matched that of an Imperial Walker, specifically an All Terrain Armored Transport. Or, as the Rebellion and most civilians in the Galaxy called it, an AT-AT.

''This is a ''very'' sudden development.'' If he'd expected anything, TR-1407 would have thought that the Founder would have just summarized what had just happened, tendered some kind of advice or orders. He hadn't expected a fresh problem, particularly one like ''this''.

The gathering was silent barely long enough for the Founder's report to sink in before a member stated that there had ''not'' been a Walker exhibit, followed by other testimonies that confirmed that wherever this had come from, it wasn't 501st. Exactly what had been happening before all ''this'' was muddled, but people were quite adamant that they knew nothing.

Talking into a handheld comm unit so that everyone could hear her, 3268 had another opinion. "Why would it matter whether or not this thing is one of ours? Imperial is Imperial. The question is, what do we do about it? I think it's reasonable to assume that some rogue element has taken control of an assault walker for an unknown reason." Standing fairly close to Anj as she was, he heard the odd duality of the Mara Jade's voice coming simultaneously through his audio pickups and helmet comm.

It would be unacceptable for ''anyone'' - the automatic assumption seemed to be Rebels, smugglers, or saboteurs, although nobody really expected that to be true - to get away with stealing Imperial property, particularly something as gigantic and dangerous as an assault walker, the common consensus was. The damage one could do, particularly in an urban area, was tremendous, even on a civilized planet in the Empire, where units could quickly be dispatched to take it down. Here on Earth, on a day like today...

Anj heard someone unfamiliar speak out. "There was a young man earlier, some sort of student of engineering - I overheard his name, Gary or Garth or something - who wore a walker costume. He might be driving it." Several others remarked with surprise that they remembered something of the sort.

With confidence, Anj added, "It's difficult to pilot a walker without a copilot, but possible. Normally one drives, the other shoots. The automated systems would help compensate."

"He had a friend with him. It's entirely reasonable to think that two pilots can manage without a commander." If it occurred to anyone that maybe this student ''hadn't'' become a pilot, they kept silent.

A plan didn't actually get proposed until after the Founder made another report, one possibly even more alarming than the last. Tanks and military choppers were being dispatched to intercept the rogue walker before it could reach the next city - and if the cryptic military lingo had been translated properly, somewhere near Washington a jet loaded with missiles had just taken off.

Suddenly the entire gathering was moving, setting up a course of action, proposing and vetoing various aspects to the plan. There would have to be a pursuit, it was decided almost instantly. They needed a small number of autonomous agents. Agents who could subdue anyone within the walker without damaging it, agents who could ''control'' the walker, and someone with enough diplomatic acumen to defuse the situation once it was under control. Preferably agents would have at least some proficiency in at least two of the three. Every member of the team would also need to be able to use grappling hooks and high-tension wires to get up there. It would also help to have the tools all stormtroopers carried, including shaped charges, binders, and a Proper Resonator.

The gathering was rapidly polled, and all those with the right skill set were chosen, then evaluated and kept or not. Unsurprisingly, there were no Imperial Army Pilots who could be identified as such by their armor - AT-AT pilot uniforms were far from popular. No one had worn his or hers to Xanadu. However, a number, Anj included, had made the costumes - and somehow that translated into experience in the cockpit.

Anj was questioned and admitted that he'd never earned the license, and was met with a thinly-disguised quiz in the form of a barrage of questions from two others. He passed. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Red Guard and both willing to work with others and well able to subdue someone with minimal damage, meant that he was on the team.

Some others at least as qualified as him weren't, largely because they had trouble cooperating. There had been many Emperor's Hands, some of them Mara Jades, others not, in the initial pickings, but the fact that most of them seemed to strongly resent each other meant that only three were kept. The final selection consisted of eight individuals. These were the Hands, SL-3268 among them, Anj and another two Red Guards, a clonetrooper sergeant, and a single sandtrooper who really seemed to believe that he was Davin Felth, the trooper who had the line "Look, sir, droids" in ''A New Hope''.

At the same time the other half of the pursuit was being organized. Speederbikes were mentioned, but only two, both from a display, could actually be accounted for, and at any rate they might not have done much good. They were incredibly fast and agile, but with only two, they couldn't carry much. Average cars or trucks were considered and rejected in the same breath. It would be too hard to get an operative out of the vehicle and up into the walker, not to mention the fact that a car was a nice big target, if what's-his-name proved both unreasonable and able to use the walker's weaponry and crushing feet. This left motorcycles, a healthy selection of which were at hand. They would have to do.

More polling; TR-1407 was only peripherally aware of it, but at the end of it seven scout troopers and one Mandalorian soldier were chosen to do the driving. From the first report to the final team, only a few minutes of whirlwind activity had passed. The 501st, while not exactly up to optimal yet, was far more organized than it appeared.

The last problem was actually getting the bikes, taken from all across the lot, to ''work''. Five or fewer of them belonged to people within the gathering - and ''none'' of them had the keys on them. Seized by a wild idea, Anj stepped up during the discussion.

"We don't ''need'' keys," he said, coming to the closest one and uncompressing his forcepike. He had no idea what kind of motorcycle this was. He'd never had anything to do with the things. Still, he could find the ignition easily. Lining it and the lethal tip of his weapon up, the Red Guard thumbed a setting and delicately maneuvered the weapon. The thin metal around the keyslot tore and twisted, and the engine coughed to life.

Just as Anj was enjoying a swell of triumph the fickle machine died miserably, exhaust pipe emitting a stream of thick, oily smoke that spread in a cloud around ankle-height. An inhuman blue-skinned officer in white covered his nose as if offended by the fumes, which weren't evident to anyone with a proper, air-filtering helmet.

No one said anything on the comm channels for a long moment. "Okay," he said lamely, again glad of the helmet that hid his face. "I guess we ''do'' need keys. Today of all days, you'd think this would work." It was a mercy that the attention of the gathering shifted off of him then. He hadn't sensed much in the way of condemnation or scorn, and even amusement had been quiet. It was still embarrassing.

The alien officer in white - a Grand Admiral, apparently - ended up getting several technically-proficient people to hotwire the motorcycles. These included one of the Vaders in the gathering, a man seething with so much barely-suppressed rage and malevolent Force energy that Anj caught his breath and adopted a rigid posture. He was fairly frightening, seemingly hanging on to rationality by the thinnest of margins. The Red Guard fervently hoped that his friend hadn't ended up like ''that''. But whatever else could be said about SL-2128, he worked quickly and well, finishing in time to take over from an officer whose work was slower.

Something else came up; Anj picked up only a few of the details, but a squad that hadn't gotten out reported in to say that they were under attack by unfamiliar hostiles. Once again plans were formed and battered about. They had little to do with the walker interception team. It gave him a pang to think that he might be riding away from his squad, if they were in danger, but duty was duty. TR-1407 soon found himself mounted up behind a scout, roaring away on one of the motorcycles.

The locals barely noticed them go by. They had more than enough trouble as it was - nevertheless, Anj felt a slight pang of mixed contempt and sympathy. He let it pass. They could only do their best. The Five Hundred and First was here for when it wasn't enough.

The Founder sent his best wishes after them on an open frequency. His confidence audibly faltered a little. Anj thought he knew at least part of why. "Good Luck" wasn't right, and they were servants of the Empire, so "May the Force Be With You" might not be good either. Even so, "Emperor's Blessings" was just wrong - and, somehow, so was "The Empire will ''always'' strike back", the belief that any setbacks would be met with a more powerful counterattack. In the end, he settled for, "We're counting on you. You won't let us down."

==Camera guy==

[I fangirl over Tank Man. I really do. I love that we don't know who he was, if he's alive or dead, what he said to the driver of the lead tank - everything. ''How'' could he and the rest of the country have failed? The picture gives me chills. I'd link to it in my bank if the inspiration it gives me wasn't of the "feel small, sit still and tremble in awe and existentialness" variety. So I figured I'd bring it up, since the chance of me working it into, well, ''anything'' else are pretty small.

[Did a little research here, but I have to say that the details pertaining to the helicopter and Doug's camera are probably all wrong. I worked with news cameras in high school and already I've forgotten what piece is called what. The Internet failed me - you'd think I was the only one to wonder who shoots traffic reports, with what, and how. :P]

In June of 1989 an American photographer named Jeff Widener crouched on the sixth-floor balcony of a hotel in Beijing. He was covering the infamous government crackdown on protesters, and only the day before, during the massacre, had been concussed and bloodied by a thrown brick. Widener worked at a range of roughly half a mile with a titanium camera featuring a 400-millimeter telephoto lens. Using borrowed film with the wrong f-stop setting, he covered a column of at least seventeen tanks headed for Tiananmen Square being blocked by one man, alone and unarmed, with a shopping bag in each hand.

Widener wasn't the only one to get pictures of this happening. But, purely by chance, his picture spread fastest. It's now one of the most famous photographs on Earth, seen everywhere except the nation where it was taken - where it happens to be banned. It is iconic in every way, and purely by chance. If Widener hadn't heard that soldiers on the ground were forcibly confiscating cameras, if he hadn't met the fellow Westerner living in that room on the sixth story, if that Westerner hadn't had compatible film available or had been unwilling to stuff that film into his underwear and pass angry Chinese soldiers to get it developed - another photographer's shot of "Tank Man", the "Unknown Rebel", would be the world-famous one. But Widener was in the right place, at the right time, in all the right circumstances.

Doug Maines was in the right place at the right time, and in his view the circumstances didn't look too bad either. Specifically, he was in a Eurocopter Ecureuil news chopper, cruising at two thousand feet and circling with nearly three-quarters of a mile between it and that ''thing''. The camera was a modified 24 frame KCK-40, and at any moment he could start broadcasting live to the network.

Normally he and the pilot shot and delivered traffic reports and overflew accident scenes. Today, not too long after finishing the morning rush's report, they'd been ordered into the air again and told to circle around the Orlando Convention Center to cover something that had come up there. As he adjusted the focus, Doug mused that he hadn't thought much of it - last spring, for instance, a school had been evacuated due to a gas leak, and he had recorded and broadcast video of the students streaming out into the tennis courts.

But there'd been so much air traffic above the Convention Center that both Doug and his partner were wary. Every news station within range had sent someone over to cover it, whatever it was, and both of them knew what happened when helicopters collided in midair. They had spotted the thing heading away, and the chopper had changed course to follow it.

He'd studied for years at photography, cinematography, and the graphic arts, but if Doug had learned one thing it was that aiming high didn't always work out. He had become resigned to aiming his camera at reporters and traffic jams, something he'd never have settled for as an ambitious newbie daydreaming about fame and glory. He was no Widener.

Just as well - Doug didn't have the stomach for following revolutions. He felt a trace of amusement at the thought. ''Right place, right time, and no one's filming but me.'' He was recording now, but the network trusted him enough to let him decide for ''himself'' whether and when to broadcast live.

Something about it screamed ''tank'', clearly enough to make Doug think remember the university and Widener's shot of Tank Man. It was boxy and about as long as the largest legal semitrailer truck, maybe sixty feet in all, though much wider. But it had to be five times taller than any of them, mounted on four flat, jointed legs with round feet half the size of its strange, blocky head. The long legs and the head, and the red laser-things that sometimes shot out of that head, reminded Doug of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. Something about crushing Styrofoam cups in a commercial...

Three years of this job reminded him to check before and behind the tank thing. The highway was several lanes broad, which was probably all that saved oncoming cars from being crushed. Many had crashed into each other or run off the road as drivers gaped, and hardly any had actually passed it. The tank thing was fairly slow, no more than fifty miles an hour at most, and so heavy that it damaged the road, leaving a trail of massive craters and cracked, buckled asphalt in its wake, with a few crushed or burning wrecks scattered about and at least one demolished overpass. All of them had been oncoming traffic; right now nothing was going in the same direction as the walking tank.

Wait, that wasn't right. The distance made them tiny, but even without zooming in Doug saw a pack of motorcycles weaving around and breaking the speed limit, gaining quickly on the tank thing. They were going to get stepped on and ruin the shot, he was sure of it. He had to get an establishing moment before the action started, or it wouldn't look right.

Doug swallowed against his heartburn - no time to take an antacid pill now, he didn't want to miss it - and hit the button that would broadcast live. In a situation like this, he didn't have to report. He just had to film. Wide-angle shot first, to show how big the thing was, including a few wrecks to get a sense of the scale... he then zoomed in to catch little details like the rapid, ponderous motion of the legs and the toe flaps flexing against the ground. He very consciously kept his hands, and the camera, steady against the minor shuddering of the helicopter.

This was in time for the motorcycles to catch up, and he noticed that the riders weren't dressed in anything resembling normal biker gear. Heart pounding, Doug focused on them. He'd have thought ''publicity stunt'' if he'd seen people dressed like this anywhere else. All white and red.

Well, this was bound to be interesting.

[More stuff goes here.]
[No, really.]

==Rocket Trooper==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus3.jpg]]

TX-7255, "Barve" to his friends, saluted after a moment's hesitation. He'd been earnestly telling some groundpounder troops that the group was vulnerable from the air when he'd gotten the summons for an on-the-fly mission. He'd answered immediately - of course - but he hadn't expected to be briefed by the Lord Darth Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet.

...Sort of. Barve tended to focus on his jetpack. How to maintain it, fix it, how to fly it with increasingly intuitive controls, aerial tactics, maintaining and fixing his various weapons and practicing with them, tweaking the minor powered exoskeleton built into his armor, practice with different gravities and atmospheres, dabbling in repulsor packs. Combined with his love for comparing different models and modifying the ones he had, looking for perfection, he was never more than vaguely aware of any politicking.

Even so, he thought he'd have heard if the Supreme Commander decided to reverse his color scheme. The man was also missing most of one arm, and apparently he was a cyborg, because there were occasional blue sparks instead of bloodstains. Since the stump hadn't even been capped off, it had to have been removed recently, and probably in a fight. Barve hadn't heard anything concrete about action or details about where he'd been deployed. This fit in with everything else, really. Everyone here was so disorganized.

A good meter too far away to be at the Supreme Commander's feet was a small, furry alien with big ears and large, alert eyes. Barve split his attention between the two - helmet screens were useful for that - until he was told that he had to carry the alien through the air.

He was surprised enough to blurt, "My Hush-About was modded with elements from the Aratech Screamer." This meant a lot of things, but he knew from experience that only another rocket trooper understood or cared. Even snubfighter jockeys glazed over. "She's a powerful machine. Launch scorches anything that isn't armored, and fur is flammable. My lord." He wasn't supposed to contradict the Supreme Commander, was he? Damn. Well, it wasn't like he'd run into the protocol before.

"I see. One moment." The Dark Lord - light lord? This really didn't make any sense, ''why'' was he in white - turned to the groundpounders for a moment. Barve ignored what they were saying - he wasn't supposed to listen in, and if it was important, they'd tell him - and watched the alien glance from helmet to helmet as the curved antenna on its head quivered. He had to be careful around aliens. You never knew what they would do.

A ground trooper with the type of armor and white fabric oversuit that some of them wore to protect against cold took off his helmet, turned it upside down, and knelt. The alien climbed into the helmet and shifted about as the ground trooper tugged the white cloth on the helmet so that it stood rigid, making a sort of bucket with the alien at the bottom. The trooper stood, holding his helmet by the cloth. Only the alien's ears showed.

"We have a runaway AT-AT that was bearing [direction] before a team intercepted and stopped it. I need you to take Midder into it as quickly as - as quickly as is feasible. Get him there alive and conscious." This was the same thing he'd said before being distracted by the launch thing. "I don't know how well he tolerates flight, so you must determine your speed on your own. We will comm ahead and tell the intercept team to be ready. Do not engage hostiles. Do not get killed."

Weird mission. Still, Barve took the helmet from the trooper, locking his fingers in the stiff fabric. The little alien inside shifted its weight and stared up at him. Helmet and alien together were moderately heavy, but still lighter than his DN bolt-caster, still holstered.

A not-quite-voice said, ''Don't drop me. God, this is a bad idea. Please don't drop me''.

The ground trooper said, "Please don't drop him. I'll want my helmet back."

"Midder, keep control of your ability. The comm channel is running on an open frequency. You are not to fire on anything without clear provocation. I cannot stress that enough."

"Acknowledged." Not like he could even draw a weapon with his hands full.

The Supreme Commander hesitated, then nodded and told him, "Clear skies."

He knew the slang for "good journey?" Well, he knew the Supreme Commander was a damned impressive snubfighter pilot - that knowledge generally fell under politicking, but one of the memories recorded and passed down from his original had been a series of truly superior pilots, Lord Vader being at the top of the list - and snubbie pilots shared a bit of lingo with rocket troopers. ...Besides, now that he thought about it, 'clear skies' was probably the most obvious piece of flyboy slang ever.

Everyone had backed far enough away that even if he had a catastrophic failure and his jetpack exploded, none of them would die. He felt a little scorn at that kind of caution. Yes, jetpacks could explode at launch, ''if'' they weren't properly cared for, but Barve had been at this for five years. That was basically all his life - the Spaarti cylinder didn't count, acclimation had taken maybe two weeks, and he'd had eight months of jetpack training to build on the basic flash memories - and he'd had plenty of time to get in the habit. Not like natural-borns, with that baggage from growing up all haphazard.

Barve set his stance and brought up flight control, rapidly checking the systems. Everything was green, not that he ever expected otherwise. Take care of your gear, and it will take care of you, the saying went, and no one took better care of a jetpack than TX-7255. He braced the helmet against his chest and as an afterthought shifted his grip so that he pinched the fabric over the alien, covering it. Hopefully it wasn't flammable.

There was enough open space around him, but still, regulations said that if he wasn't taking off in a specifically cleared space or doing a touch-and-go, he had to give a verbal warning. Some rocket troopers used the short "Dusting off!" or the even shorter "Launching!", but Barve liked the traditional phrase, said in one way or another since the first soldiers to take to the air on their own.

"Clear the blast zone!" He tensed, leaped as high as the light exoskeleton built into his armor would take him, and kicked in the rockets.

The first few seconds were always uncertain, as the jets fought gravity and flared, close enough to the ground that they licked the armor on his legs and slagged the spot where he'd been standing. The not-voice protested weakly. But he took care of his jetpack, and she held him steady at the top of the jump. He let her kick in a little harder, and she dragged his heavy flesh and armor up in a tower of sound and fire.

He modulated the thrust when he judged himself high enough and triggered the maneuvering jets on the right side, spinning in a slow, complete circle to take in the world. This looked like one of those planets which couldn't collectively decide what it wanted to specialize in, so it went for city and wild stuff and farmland all at once. Those weren't as interesting as city worlds, at least not from a jetpack, but it was exponentially better than flying over ocean. At least it had a nice sky. He had his bearings now. Buildings, crowds, ground, roads, yep, atmospheric flyers, oh yes, and ''this'' way was North and ''this'' was South, good, and so his course was - that way.

Barve swung his legs and flipped over so his back was to the sky, working with his jetpack to find his balance in that second of freefall, and gave her the gun.

Immediately he was flying proper, losing a little altitude in a shallow dive and regaining it, then leveling off and holding steady. There were some other things in his airspace, but they ignored him, and he did the same. He loved flying fast, the landscape zipping by below him, wind shrieking against his armor and trying to tug things out of his hands, even the alternating sense that he was either weightless or something massive was pressing down on him. His jetpack was loud at her highest speed - since part of her was a Screamer, this was only to be expected - but of course he wasn't going at top speed, or anything all that close to it. He kept slow, almost too slow to fly. By the groaning of the not-voice, he probably didn't dare go any faster.

Pity, really. Even after all this time, even with the conditioning and the stuff they'd done to him in the Spaarti cylinder, his jetpack was fast and strong and agile enough to make him struggle to keep conscious, without vibrating him to pieces in the process. Some people didn't like tasking their g-tolerance; none of ''them'' had his genome. He loved flying. He couldn't imagine being a groundpounder.

Sometimes, though, he wondered what it would have been like if he'd been sorted into pilot training instead. TIEs might not be as agile, but they went so much faster, they could fly faster than the human eye could track - and with inertial compensators, they could ''do'' that, make changes in their flightpaths that would kill him uncompensated. If he hadn't been sorted into the rocket trooper corps, then he'd be flying in space, too, and going after bigger targets. His original had been a snubbie pilot. The flash-memories he'd recorded and passed down included one of the joy and pride that came with piloting. Barve didn't really like thinking about that. Done was done, and the Empire wasn't going to let anyone but a ''really'' prime natural-born get retrained. Besides, a ship would mean losing his jetpack. She was his baby.

Okay. Barve scanned the ground. This was probably the right road, and there was some suspiciously regular cracking on the surface ahead, but he didn't see anything yet. He'd been told to watch for footprints in the road and wrecked cars. ...He really should have asked what a car was. Was it the same thing as a groundcar, which he'd seen a lot of here, or something more obscure? It wouldn't be the first time he got tripped up by similar-sounding unrelated words.

The not-voice had kept a lot of quiet, wordlessly unhappy not-sounds, particularly when he gained or lost altitude suddenly. He felt safe in assuming that the not-voice belonged to the alien curled up in the helmet he was carrying, and they were a good sign that it hadn't lost consciousness. Should he talk to it? Why not. It might know. Okay, he'd been told that the groundpounder helmet was on the open frequency, right? This far from all the others, there weren't a lot in the way of transmissions. Barve lowered his comm output to about ten meters so he wouldn't spam the people back there or at his destination.

"You know Basic, right?"

There was a pause, and he wondered if the wind was too loud. There were sound mufflers in ''his'' helmet, and his audio pickups filtered out most irrelevant noise, but helmets tended not to work as well when they weren't connected to armor.

Finally he not-heard it. ''Uh... sort of. It's been a while. I think I've forgotten most of what I picked up. Why?''
The not-voice seemed surprised and a little queasy.

"Oh good. I think you speak it fine," Barve said, adding, "I understand Huttese, I ''sort'' of get Bocce, and I know a little Sy Bisti, but I don't know any other languages." Understanding so few was kind of embarrassing, but only Basic and Huttese had been flash-programmed and he never really made a focused effort to study languages, so he thought he was doing pretty well. "Though I guess you were talking earlier in Basic, so it wasn't a good question."

''Wait, what? ...Do we even mean the same B.A.S.I.C.? Because I thought you meant the programming language.''

Barve frowned under his helmet. "I meant Basic. Official language of the Empire. ''This'' language."

Another pause, this one rather long. Maybe the alien was addled. ''You know, usually people call it English.''

At the very least, the alien was confused. "No, the Empire calls it Basic. So did the Republic. So does the rest of the galaxy. Basic, Galactic Basic, Galactic Basic Standard... Basic."

''What? You actually think - no, don't antagonize the crazy guy with the jetpack. He could drop you. Then you'll never get there.'' That last part wasn't nearly as clear, and Barve suspected he wasn't supposed to not-hear it. But he could handle being considered crazy, even though he'd been growing in the Spaarti cylinder for a healthy two years and there was really very little chance of the madness getting him. After all, he'd seen someone in the depths of the madness, and it was probably worth being cautious, at least at first. Other batches might not be as stable as his.

"Alien, I need to know if 'car', in this case, means little groundbound vehicle or is an acronym for something."

''Maybe he ''does'' think he's - Yeah. It's the vehicle.'' Good, then he was headed in the right direction. There was more cracking on the road now too. The alien paused, then said, ''I'm Steph, by the way. Not 'alien'.''

"I'm TX-7255 from batch three," he said. Wait, natural-borns who weren't troopers didn't usually like going by designations. "Call me Barve."

''Barve?''

"It's a nickname. A barve is a clumsy six-legged meat animal. You only get the prime names like "Firebrand" if you're important." He couldn't enjoy a military flick without getting annoyed at that.

''Right. You don't have any other names?''

"Not that I've heard." Did he want the name of Barve's original? No, he'd surely ask if he did. "You're feeling okay, right? Are your eyes being pushed into your head?" He'd feel like such an idiot if Steph had some kind of delayed reaction to acceleration and passed out.

''A little. It was worse when we took off. Everything went sort of gray at the edges.''

"Yeah? That makes sense." He felt like he couldn't leave it at that, so he added, "Humans tend to tolerate horizontal axis g-forces a lot better than vertical ones. It has to do with how our spines are aligned with the axis and how our blood gets forced around. I don't know what you are, but I'd guess it works the same for you."

''Well, ''that's'' good to know. I'm a Hoojib, I guess.'' More indistinctly, Steph said, ''She said I looked all wrong, but Eighty-four told her it didn't matter.''

He was not supposed to listen in; if he overheard anyway, he was supposed to pretend otherwise. "Never heard of you. We're well within standard human tolerance, and I'll keep slow for you if I can, but if something comes up and I have to go evasive, you'll have some trouble. Should that happen, try straining your muscles and remember to breathe short, hard, and often. It could help."

''Thanks. I think. It had better not come to that.''

In places, the road was crossed by roads that passed above it. The ones he'd seen so far had been intact, but one up ahead, getting closer by the second, had been shot out, and the pattern of cracks that passed underneath it could reasonably be called footprints. Checking behind himself - the rearwards display was small and not meant for ground details, so he did this by pulling upright, spinning as he stalled, then correcting himself and falling back into flight position, a set of maneuvers that did not please Steph in the least - Barve saw that the set of buildings that he'd taken off near was still visible, though small in the distance.

If he had no further orders, maybe they'd let him fly back at any speed he wanted. Fuel readings were a little lower than they should have been at this point, even with the extra weight, but nothing too alarming.

At this speed he'd be a few more minutes. This thing had gone pretty far. Flying slowly with absolutely nothing going on - usually, he'd be listening to the other rocket troopers, comparing notes and expectations, maybe trying to outmaneuver them. He was hazy on why he'd been deployed without the rest of his unit. They'd acclimatized together and gone through training at the same time and everything, and he'd never been far apart from them. Being alone was boring.

No, he wasn't quite alone. Small talk. How did that work again? Right. "How are you talking? Nothing's getting to my ears."

''I don't have a vocal tract anymore, so I'm guessing telepathy. Better than nothing, but it's annoying.''

"That's too bad," Barve said. It looked like the burden of conversation was on him. He was the worst in his unit at that, frankly, especially with people who weren't familiar with flight and the mechanics of it, but questions were usually good. "So you're one of those aliens that has a metamorphosis, huh? What were you before?"

There was another pause. Incredulous, Steph said, ''I - but - you - you actually haven't figured it out? What - you don't even remember what happened, do you? Do you have a real name? Do you even know what'' planet '' this is?''

Barve hadn't known it was possible to stutter telepathically, but then, he reminded himself, there were a lot of things he didn't know. "No. Are you going to tell me?"

''Oh Jesus Christ.'' Ah. He didn't think Barve was in danger of the madness, he thought Barve was ''stupid''. Barve briefly considered, oh, accelerating a bit more, perhaps flying a bit less steadily, but dismissed the idea. He had a package or a passenger to deliver.

He wasn't angry, quite, but he had to correct the alien. "Hey. I'm not - yeah, I know everyone says I'm a bit simple. Maybe. Maybe. Most of the time." He got the sense that Steph was about to say something, and he didn't let him, raising his voice. "But I'm plenty advanced about flying, and if there's a jetpack malfunction a couple klicks above the ground, the smartest being in the Empire, the ''very'' best and brightest, is me. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it's that I don't know. Don't make insinuations like that!"

''Aaah! Oh God, don't drop me. I'm sorry, geeze. It's just really weird that you don't know.''

There were a few men in his unit who could have started on something about ignorance, but he wasn't one of them - as far as lectures went, he only had this and the one about untested new equipment. After a moment, Barve became uncomfortable. He wasn't supposed to be hostile to people who weren't the enemy, even if they ''were'' rude aliens. He'd probably have a few bad sleepcycles if he didn't say something.

"Sorry. It's fine. Just... I'm not stupid, okay? Don't tell me I'm stupid."

''Yeah. Sure. God, this was a bad idea.''

Well, ''that'' hadn't gone well. Pity his unit wasn't here. He could have used a people person, or several.

Anyway, by now he could see the runaway walker. It had come to a stop, right in the middle of the road, and as he flew closer he saw that one of the big hatches in the side, the hatches that groundpounders rappelled out of, was open. He was probably meant to land there, on the staging platform.

"We're just about here. Hold on." It took a bit of maneuvering. A long shallow dive followed by flipping upright and shedding his momentum, then the tricky process of moving laterally while in the standing position without letting the rockets set fire to the inside of the vehicle, and getting close enough to switch them off and fall to his feet without breaking anything. Nothing he couldn't handle. He made it a point of pride that he hardly ever used his repulsor pod when landing, and he didn't use it this time either.

Barve landed hard enough that he was forced to drop to three points, which while visually impressive was just bad form. If his unit had been there, it would not have gone unnoticed, but if the groundpounder who met him had judged his landing, he declined to comment on it. The moment Barve put the helmet down, Steph half climbed, half leapt out and shuddered all over so that his fur stood on end. Then he sat on his haunches and started wiping or patting himself down with his forelegs, like he wanted to make sure everything was in one piece.

He'd have been a little bit insulted by that - hadn't he kept slow? Hadn't he maintained his jetpack well enough that there was virtually no vibration, and flown her well enough that it had been smooth? - but he ''had'' gone off on that upset lecture. And some people just didn't fly well. And even if Steph didn't like hearing it, he was an alien and might or might not tolerate the forces of acceleration that well.

The groundpounder looked from Barve to Steph and back. "You sent us an ''alien''?" he asked over the open channel. "Is he an ambassador or something? I thought you were sending some friend."

Steph stopped grooming and looked up sharply. ''I ''am'' a friend. And I can hear you, you know, the speaker in the helmet's still on.'' He waggled an ear in a gesture that was probably sarcastic, but still looked silly.

"Oh, sorry," the groundpounder said. "And I guess you're not really an alien. It's kinda hard to keep things straight. C'mon, we need you in the cockpit." He nodded acknowledgment to Barve and turned, heading towards the fore of the walker. Steph followed, still staggering a little.

Barve picked up the helmet again and took the chance to have a look around. He'd seen the big walkers before, just not from inside. Usually during an engagement, too, so he hadn't had time to peer into the interiors before.

He'd landed on the lower of the two levels. At the fore and the aft there were rungs in recessions in the walls that led up to the other level, with sort of a landing in the middle. Entrance to the tunnel leading to the cockpit was through a locking access hatch on the landing in the fore ladder that locked and sealed behind the groundpounder carrying Steph. The aft ladder had another one that probably led to cargo space. A third hatch was set forewards in the flooring, possibly going to engines. Then there were the various external ones like what he'd dropped through. There were troop benches with backpack chargers built into the walls, and the setup for the drop lines and cable winches built around the boom racks. Recessed round lights and some dangling handholds were set in the ceiling. That made sense, he guessed. These things ''were'' personnel carriers, though they were better suited for annihilating ground targets.

Otherwise, the lower level was abandoned. Apparently the team who'd gone out here were all in the cockpit, which had to be a tight fit. Before he commed back for further orders, Barve noticed one more thing. Coming from the speakers built into the ceiling was a faint, barely audible hiss of static.

[There. I wrote you. I even put in that damn rant. Now get out of my head.]

Walker Imperial Ranger

2009-07-23T05:10:49Z

Joysweeper: /* Escaping */

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Xanadu]][[Category:Story]][[Category:Alien]][[Category:Inanimorph]][[Category:Transgender]][[Category:Joysweeper]][[Category:Bryan]]
{{universe|Xanadu}}
{{byline|author=Joysweeper|user=Joysweeper}}

By Joysweeper, with some help from Bryan.

Don't read this story yet :)

It'll be done when it's done. For the record, I intend to finish before Duke Nukem.

Links to some pictures of AT-ATs, for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-hlc.jpg] Close up of chin-mounted heavy laser cannons
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:MCQ-battleofhoth.jpg] Low-angle concept art
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SWRSIIIRSWP.jpg] More concept art(Talk about uneven odds. Luke > everything.)
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:BlizzardForce.jpg] ESB screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Blizzard_2.jpg] Another screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-swrs3rs.jpg] High-angle(sort of) image
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:AT-AT_egvv.jpg] Schematics
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT_height.jpg] Bad bluescreen, but it does convey size pretty well.

Links to some pictures of Red Guards, also for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Guard.png] Red robes and a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos_NEGTC.jpg] Kir Kanos, helmet off, showing the armor. He never uses a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos.jpg] The Emperor's guards aren't just for show.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kanos3.JPG] Kir Kanos showing the armor again. Different look at the belt.

Have to thank [http://community.livejournal.com/brains_in_a_jar/ brains-in-a-jar] for thoughts on a human brain in a very nonhuman mechanical body, and also all kinds of things about static. Also have to thank Robert T. Bakker for writing "The Dinosaur Heresies"; that bit on a lizard's wrist was extremely interesting.

And I found this quote on one of the 501st homepages. It is so ''perfect''. "Some fans are content to collect action figures...other fans want to ''be'' action figures. Nothing professes your fandom quite like building your own detailed costume replica of a classic Star Wars villain, and there's nothing quite like the feeling that comes from bringing the characters of Star Wars into the real world and sharing the magic with others. A truly engaging Star Wars experience only occurs through a convincing appearance. To this end, the 501st constantly strives to improve the quality and accuracy of its member's costumes. Our goal is to appear as if our characters have just stepped off the big screen and into this world." I hope I can find some way to use this ironically. Probably not ''this'' story, but I'm going to have to stow it away.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Hoojib.jpg]]

==Bryan's intro==

"The door, the door!" Steph called out and lunged to intercept the handle swinging in to catch Garrett's back, stopping it just in time to prevent another ding in the cardboard that might be difficult to repair now that they were at the convention itself.

Garrett let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks." He had turned sideways but thanks to the huge boxy hump over his back it didn't make him any narrower and only really served to make it harder to keep track of everything. And with the two giant cardboard constructs mounted over his arms there wasn't really much he could do anyway; his hands were busy just holding the internal braces in place.

Steph grinned and slipped lithely around to join him in the lobby once Garrett had managed to make it inside. "You'd think armor capable of repelling turbolasers could handle a door handle."

Garrett shook his head. His costume was particularly fragile, being both bulky and made primarily out of cardboard, but it had been surprisingly quick and easy to make as a result. "It'll last until judging. Spray a jot of black on any tears and call 'em battle damage, the Rebels must've got a few lucky hits in." The lobby was sparsely populated right now, with just a few folks still lined up at the front desk buying passes to glance in surprise at Garrett's outfit, but Garrett decided it was showtime. He leaned forward and fell into his quadrupedal stance, the big round footpads of his forelimbs clomping to the ground to support him and the headpiece tilting down into the correct orientation.

There were a few appreciative murmurs as the onlookers finally recognized the iconic Imperial walker he was dressed as. Steph gave a little flourish and a bow, as if taking credit for the outfit, and then stepped forward to give Garrett something to follow. They'd considered trying to rig up a periscope of some sort so that Garrett could see forward more easily but they'd run out of time for details like that; it was enough that the AT-AT's legs were able to support him as things were, they'd had to compromise on the costume's proportions a bit just to make it work.

The majority of the work had taken only a single week. Since it only really had to survive for a single day of use ease of construction had been a fair tradeoff. Garrett was like that with all of his projects; a flash of inspiration, a whirlwind of construction, and then once it was finished the itch was satisfied and he would lose interest and let it go. Steph counted it as sheer luck that this time around the inspiration had come when they might make some money off of it. He'd been tight with Garrett for a couple of years now, both of them in the same engineering degree at the nearby University of Midtral, and was the less-imaginative and more-practical of the two.

"Two please," Steph signed in. "Stephen Midder and Garrett Thompson. Just for today." He pointed to identify themselves.

"Registered for any of the contests?" The man behind the desk asked. Garrett nodded silently, the walker-head bobbing almost comically. "Right..." The man shuffled through a list, presumably checking for Garrett's name, and then looked back up once he'd checked it off. "Ten for him, thirty for you."

"Eh? Aww." Steph got out his wallet to pay for the passes. "Should've worn a costume myself." ''Not that I could have got a discount for any costume that cost under twenty dollars, of course.'' But he supposed that wasn't really the point.

The two of them had done some pretty wacky and nerdy things together. The AT-AT costume had blown away everyone at the Halloween party they'd been to on campus just a few nights previous, in fact that had been the primary impetus for building the thing in the first place. But as they proceeded down the hall toward the convention rooms where the main population of conventiongoers were congregating, Steph began wondering if they'd finally reached their level. The variety and creativity of hand-crafted costumes on display was enormous. Still, there wasn't anything quite like the AT-AT costume Garrett wore and it still drew a good share of attention.

Upon entering the first convention room - a dealer's room, from the look of the tables set up along the side walls, but nonetheless full of costume-wearers - they almost immediately encountered someone in a Stormtrooper outfit. It was a perfect replica in every detail, clearly a labor of love, and the person wearing it was dedicated enough to playing the role that he resisted the temptation to drop out of character.

"You're out of uniform, pilot," the trooper commented as he gave Steph a nod of acknowledgment in passing.

Steph was at a loss for a response but Garrett gave a most un-AT-AT-like chuckle. Garrett had been shuffling along behind Stephen on all fours, barely able to see more than the backs of Stephen's heels, and he took the opportunity after the trooper had passed to stand back up again and look around. "Lots of competition."

"Yeah." Steph sighed; the prospect of winning any of the prize money seemed more distant now that he'd seen some of what they were up against. This was just the first room and there was an amazing gargoyle with what looked like pneumatically-operated wings, a really hot fox-girl who had made a masterful blend of both plush fabric and her own natural attributes, and a lizard-man... no, Steph corrected himself, a Gorn. The Gorn's costume was nearly as good as the one from the original Star Trek episode had been. "Still, nothing like an AT-AT, eh?"

"Excuse us, please," A small woman in a jockey costume asked from behind Garrett's cardboard bulk. He shuffled to the side to let her through, leading a man in an amazing horse costume. The thing made him seven feet tall, with a long neck and perfect horse's head, and the hoof-gloves made Steph wonder if he could get down on all fours too.

"Heh. Damn." Garrett shook his head. "Well, thank goodness for categories, eh?"

Steph gave a wry grin. "Yeah. Though I'm feeling a bit under-dressed myself now."

It didn't really matter much since Garrett was the center of attention, as intended; Steph was along just to open doors and do the other things Garrett couldn't manage in that hulking outfit. But as they proceeded through the room Steph found his gaze lingering on some of the costuming wares being sold.

People would stop to stare, take photos, or ask Steph questions about the AT-AT costume. Since he was the one leading the way, with Garrett's face down and concealed under the cardboard headpiece, it was natural that they'd assume he was in charge. But when Garrett reared up to proudly answer the questions they'd immediately switch to ignoring Steph instead. It was quickly beginning to annoy him; though the idea and the design for the AT-AT costume had been Garrett's they'd worked on it together.

"Hang on, Garrett," Steph finally called. They were on their way to the exhibition hall but they were still quite early, they'd left plenty of flex in their schedule to account for difficulties with the costume. "I want to look at some of the stuff they're selling here."

"Stuff?" Garrett got up and looked around.

There weren't any Star Wars branded costume supplies at hand, and if there were they'd probably be too expensive. ''Twenty dollars, eh? I can spend twenty dollars.'' That left mainly just the cheesier costume gear.

After a few minutes of browsing Garrett got back down on all fours and spent a little while tromping back and forth. The arms of the AT-AT costume were quite heavy; in addition to the cardboard shell they had a pair of aluminum canes inside, trimmed short and affixed to the broad metal bucket lids that formed the soles of his "forefeet". Despite the crick he was sure he'd eventually develop in his back it was actually easier moving around like this.

There wasn't as much of an audience in here, though. The people who already had costumes were gravitating off somewhere else and those were the ones he was most interested in impressing with his ingenuity and attention to detail. He wasn't a big Star Wars fan himself but he'd dug up some schematics from a scan of some old Star Wars book. He'd even hung a Luke Skywalker pilot action figure on a string from his underside, mimicking the famous scene from Empire Strikes Back where the proto-Jedi had grappled up on board one after being shot down on Hoth, but he'd lost that particular accessory somewhere during the Halloween party and hadn't bothered looking for a replacement. There didn't seem to be anything like that in this area of the dealer's room...

He tromped over to Steph. "We going to move on?" He prompted.

Steph sighed. The twin goals of 'attention-grabbing' and 'cheap' weren't meshing very well. "Okay, just let me grab something." Something totally incongruous would probably be best. So... "Ah, I'll take that." A pair of fuzzy bunny ears on a headband for just ten bucks. Garrett didn't even look up and Steph grinned; he'd be startled when he did.

They continued onward.

==Joysweeper's pre-TF setup==

On the way they'd called it a "function" as if it'd been some kind of social event, and in a desultory fashion they'd been trying to get donations to the Leukemia Society, but it was far from formal. The Kublai Con attendees were pretty generous – TR-1407, given name “Angela Kincaid”, calling herself “Anj” while in costume - had once heard it said that furry cons generated more money than scifi cons, and Xanadu was a mixture of both.

What had made the effort fun was the “act”. Angela lost count of just how many times she’d heard friends declaring with feigned authority that the 501st Legion was here to keep the peace and maintain order. Essentially they’d just threatened anyone who looked impressive enough, and almost everyone had played along, reacting in fear or challenging the Imperials to a duel.

She’d personally “fought” an armored anthro dragon with a very realistic whipping tail, matching her forcepike with his curved fiberglass sword, and although she’d “lost” she had also had the pleasure of seeing him back down when faced with the blasters of eighteen stormtroopers. Good donation from that one, too, when they'd explained and everything.

The "TR" prefix in front of the number she had picked as her identification - she'd chosen fourteen oh seven - indicated which costume was her favorite. "TK" meant stormtrooper, "TC" was clonetrooper, "SL" was Sith Lord... there were a number of them for the various types. "TR" meant that she favored the Emperor's guards in their red helmets and flowing robes. They were called Red Guards, Royal Guards, and various other combinations of "Red", "Royal", "Imperial", and "Emperor's". Frankly, Angela preferred "Red Guard". The arguments some of her friends got into about nomenclature gave her a headache - fanwank was one thing, and you had to be a little anal to care about a screen-accurate costume, but some people went too far.

She’d heard from one of them that someone had actually caught a pickpocket in the act and had proceeded to instill the fear of the Empire into him, winning a lot of amusement from everyone else in the process, but she hadn’t seen it herself, nor had anyone who told the story. It was probably hyperbole. That didn’t stop the thought from being entertaining.

Now it was over and the group was dispersing. TR-1407 was glad to leave, frankly. The costume, with heavy cloth robes over already-stifling armor, had slowly become hot enough to, as the phrase went, fry fleek eels with, the ice packs had either thawed or hadn't been working in the first place, and no amount of water or robe-flapping could make it entirely tolerable. The bodysuit under the plating under the robes was so drenched with sweat that she'd probably have to peel it off.

Not for the first time she wished that she hadn’t bothered with the tight bodysuit and the armor that went over it. It wasn’t like it would have visibly made a difference. Some Red Guards liked to keep their robes thrown behind their shoulders like a cloak, the better to show off the detailing on their armor. Angela, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone guessing that she was female, and so kept her robes arranged about her body, hiding everything but her hands, her feet, and her helmet. It still would have been far, ''far'' too hot – the helmet was the next thing to airtight, and only the respirator that threaded down to her waist kept her from suffocating – but at least she wouldn’t feel like sparks were smoldering under her robes.

But… no. More than once during the “fight” her robes had swept about, and both before and after they hadn’t exactly hung neatly. She would ''never'' have heard the end of it if she were to come to an event “half-dressed”.

“Remember, there’s a march at three,” she told her friend and former pupil SL-1984 as they left, part of a stream. The majority of Tampa Bay Squad happened to be heading in the same direction. “We meet before two thirty in the southwest parking lot.” Little single-squadron things like the function were fun, but the real thrill was always when the entire 501st, or as much of it as was attending any particular convention, marched together. There was just something about it that felt exhilarating. Like she was part of something bigger than herself.

“I knew that,” he protested, but mildly. “Micheal Porter”, as he was usually known – although he preferred to answer strictly to his designation when in costume – was tall enough, laid-back enough, and attention-loving enough to pull off a White Vader costume. It was exactly what it sounded like – the Darth Vader rig, all in white, sometimes called “Vader Redeemed.” The images that the costume was based off of had appeared for literally two panels at the very end of a comic that wasn’t even canon. Even by 501st standards that was unusual - and the 501st Legion was infamous for being made up of fans who weren't content to simply ''collect'' action figures, they wanted to ''be'' them.

His protest was put on hold briefly as a fairly well-done white tiger furry with an articulated jaw interrupted, waving her pawhands and generally being as relentlessly upbeat as possible. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but gestured and showed off a disposable camera on a strap around her neck enthusiastically enough that it was pretty clear that she wanted pictures.

TR-1407 had never been all that comfortable with being hugged by complete strangers for photographs, but she didn’t have any serious objections to it, and she wasn’t carrying her wallet with her this time, so there was no chance of getting robbed again. Fortunately the tiger was much more interested in SL-1984, and ''he'' was perfectly willing to mug and pose as much as desired, supported by three or four stormtroopers who got beckoned into the shots and played along, rather than shaking their heads and passing by. Maybe it was just that white fur went better with white robes and armor than with red. It was probably more that the kid was naturally showy.

After the Red Guard had obligingly snapped enough pictures and handed the camera back to the furry, the white tiger left to accost someone else, and they picked up where they had left off.

“Angela, you really don't need to remind me about everything anymore. I know the schedule."

“Don’t call me Angela when I’m in uniform, please." Sweat was pooling in the tips of her gloves. Angela flexed her hands against it. The moment she let them relax, it pooled again. "It's only been what, a year since I let you walk off and you missed it because you were buying original issues of 'Spider-Girl'?"

"A year and a half. I am ''so'' much better at juggling my hobbies now," he said dryly. "Why, I even remember things that the schedule said and Pike forgot to bring up."

A trooper listening in muttered "You had to bring the Squad Leader into this. Now you're in for it."

Another trooper who'd been a few steps behind got right up besides the taller Vader. She was a snowtrooper, and probably suffering almost as much as Angela in the heat. Despite the helmet speaker and a tired note in her voice, she sounded crisp and alert. "Hey, don't complain. I'm sorry we haven't made an announcement, but we've got a lot more on our plate than you do; ''you'' just have to show up at the right time and place, and we're not here to babysit you. We've been setting things up and working out scheduling conflicts since five in the morning. It's been a long day at the end of a long week already and I'm glad John was there to take over after eleven." The snowtrooper slipped into character and finished, very dryly, "So don't complain about your superiors, my lord. Circumstances tend to be more complicated than they seem."

"Ah," SL-1984 said, briefly assuming character himself. "My apologies, Ma'am. That was merely a breach in my personal discipline. No disrespect was meant." Following along, Angela couldn't help feeling a little surge of goodwill. She loved this group. They argued a lot, and Shanda Pike admittedly could be touchy, but it never got too far. Probably in part because while Michael loved the limelight, he had very little ego or temper.

"I'll overlook it, so long as you don't let it happen again," Pike allowed very seriously. A smile crept into her voice. "You're mixing up your honorifics, by the way. I'm only "ma'am" in the Tusken Raider suit and as Mara."

"Again, my apologies. Sir," he added. Everyone pretended not to notice the slight skip in his amplified voice.

With a nod, the snowtrooper peeled away and dropped back, staying in sight but effectively bowing out of the conversation. In an aside, Angela told her friend that his voice-changer was failing.

“What? Testing, testing... You’re right.” SL-1984 thumped the speaker hidden in his chest box, then removed his helmet, careful of the trailing wires that ran from it down into the rest of the costume. “This thing always gets screwy an hour or so in.”

There was always something just a little bit disturbing about seeing someone in costume but without their helmet on. It didn’t take long to get used to seeing troopers, but with a Vader it ''always'' looked strange. Michael had opted for the ski-hood-under-the-helmet thing that Vaders usually wore. His, naturally, was white. Removing helmets while trooping tended to be frowned on, but everyone in the 501st knew that sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Angela told him, “You really ought to try a pair of Vortex Twos. I’ve never made a Vader-“

Michael left off frowning into the helmet for a moment. “You’re not nearly tall enough to pull it off. You'd have to do the three-fourths scale version. And maybe get body padding.”

“I know. Shut up.” Angela sighed. “I’ve never made a Vader, but I have a helmet, therefore I use a speaker. Vortex. Got it with my tax returns. I know that Hasbro thing is cheap and easy to get, but, well, the downside is quality. Vortex is the best.” She indicated the general location of her own voice amplification unit with a quick gesture. It made her voice audible despite the almost airtight helmet, flattening it out in the process.

“I know, but that’s a bit of an investment. I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. Had to stop working on that Tusken Raider one… I could barely afford to come ''here.'' This will hold for a bit longer. Going to have to try and fake it when it does fail. The iPod with the breathing loop's still good, at least.” Replacing the helmet and straightening it with both hands, he faced her directly. “Any plans?”

“I’m getting out of this costume before I cook.” She flapped her robes in another vain attempt to get some cool air circulating. Under her helmet, a little curl of hair had plastered itself over one eye, sticking to the lid as she blinked. Just about every time she wore a helmet she found herself wishing she'd cut her hair short. Tampa Bay Squadron's other Red Guard kept hers cropped and said it made something of a difference.

SL-1984’s speaker system relayed the sound of his mouth opening, so she cut him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need any help, Micheal. Seriously, if I stay in this any longer I’ll get heatstroke. Every time I get into this thing I regret it, I swear.”

"If you want me to call you Anj, don't call ''me'' Michael." SL-1984 raised his voice to be heard over the shouting match going on between two balding men in spandex. Taking up a standard Vader mannerism with ease that betrayed several movies' worth of casual study, he locked his hands around his belt. “This is why white’s a good color. I’m not sweating half as much as I did in the black sauna suit, so I think I’m good for a while yet. I'd like to see the sights. There are some ''really'' nice costumes this year. Maybe I’ll swing by those set pieces people keep talking about. I heard that they got David and his crew to do the Hutt set again this year, plus Carmen said that Makaze Squad brought in that Death Star made of like a million Legos. I have no idea how they could have got it in the doors.”

People had collected in a chattering knot around someone or something, clogging the way. It was possible to squeeze past, but that just wouldn't do. Angela raised her voice. “Move along, come on now citizens, you can collect in a spare room much more easily than out here. Move along, move along.” The voice amplifier lent her voice a little more kick and made it audible. Despite that, she saw no sign that more than a few people had heard, let alone intended to obey.

Her former pupil, his voice changer having given up entirely, repeated the order with the same intonation, doing his best with the voice. This time, people listened and obeyed, breaking up and dispersing. They’d been clustered around a yellow lab – not a furry, an actual, panting dog that barely seemed disturbed at all by the crowd – wearing one of those novelty pet costumes. It went very nicely with his owner, though Angela wasn’t sure about the meaning of the dog being Batman when the man was Robin.

What she ''was'' sure about was that the kid she’d once sponsored – hardly a kid despite her teasing, she couldn't be more than five or six years older than him - was just ''better'' at some of this than she was. Particularly when it came to giving orders to people neither of them knew. Partly it was because, although she wasn’t shy by anyone’s standards, she didn’t like to stand out overmuch. Hence why her preferred costumes were the Red Guard and obscure ones like AT-AT drivers or Imperial Army Pilots, as they were called, while ''his'' was arguably the most conspicuous costume in the 501st.

A trooper that Angela knew from the squad finally answered the question. “The Lego Death Star? It breaks apart into sections and gets reassembled. We had to get a cart for the pieces, but it's simpler than it looks. Tampa Bay had it one year, but that was before your time. Sir.”

TR-1407 decided to break it off. She really didn’t know where the closest ‘changing room’ was, but she’d been told that they were everywhere, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to find one. The longer she waited, the longer the costume stayed on. “Have fun, guys. I think I’ll get most of this off before I make more plans. Don’t hurt yourself showing off.”

“Don’t forget to put it back on by two thirty. I’ll see you by then if not before, An- Anj.” He and those troopers who hadn't already gone their own ways kept moving in the same direction, and she arbitrarily took a left.

It was pretty close to noon; compared to just an hour ago, the hallway was half empty. The people who had been rushing around trying to get to various things had reached them, apparently. This wasn’t anywhere near the dealer’s room or any of its offshoots, the SIGs were already in progress, and as far as she could remember from the big con schedule the only event going on would be that big awards ceremony.

Angela toyed with the idea of going, but the oppressive heat of her costume decided her. Anything worth seeing would surely keep; she'd been to enough conventions to know that the truly impressive costumes would probably stick around for a bit, both soaking up the praise and trying not to break anything. Getting there in time to see the whole thing wouldn’t be worth the broiling and the probability of being jostled by a crowd. She’d hate to break the forcepike that she was carrying braced against her shoulder; it was easily the most fragile part of the costume, and making it had been a trial.

The heat was like a physical thing trapped against her body. Not for the first time, she wished that she’d worn her officer uniform instead. Fewer layers, and her face, neck, and hands were exposed to the air. But officer getup was just so ''plain'', so ''ordinary'' compared to the Red Guard robes and armor. And somehow it drew more attention, not less. In a weird way, Red Guards could be ignored pretty easily. A perk of being a member of Star Wars's version of the Secret Service, she supposed.

Up ahead it was crowded again; all fursuiters from the look of things. Enough of them were breaking the unwritten rule about staying silent in costume that the group was quite, quite loud, even with the helmet cutting off some of the sound. From the laughter, the movement, and the general tone of conversation, they were having a good time. Having nothing better to do Angela approached them, deciding that if nothing else she might as well find out what if anything was going on.

As she passed within thirty feet of the closest of them she felt something like a chill traveling down her spine, prickling against the bodysuit stuck to her skin. The Red Guard would have brushed it aside as nothing, but for one reason or another she noticed that some of the furries who had been talking or laughing or demonstrating dance moves had stopped, abruptly in some cases. A number of them carried on, oblivious, but several stopped what they were doing.

TR-1407 thought she saw a gray feline's mouth opening far wider than a baklava could allow for. She told herself that it was a trick of the light or a flaw in her visor. That was when the chill became strong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and branching to prickle her arms, the base of her skull, her chest and lower than that, strong enough that she shuddered involuntarily. Her bones started to ache, followed by the rest of her body. There was a moment where she thought ''Heatstroke?'' and started to raise her hands to her helmet.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the world.

== Lead up to Garrett and Steph's TFs==

The density of Star Wars costumes steadily increased as they progressed. The population of the convention was extremely diverse but various factors - the impending themed contests, the large number of rooms providing partitioning, natural human cliquishness - were conspiring to make it clumpy.

''Or maybe word's just getting around about Garrett's costume,'' Steph reflected. The stormtroopers seemed eerily organized for just a bunch of fans who'd happened to show up wearing the same thing.

But to Steph's relief, he wasn't feeling quite so annoyed by the attention Garrett was getting any more. The bunny ears had actually ''helped''. Not in that they were anything particularly interesting themselves, of course; they were nothing at all in comparison to even the simplest of the animal costumes he'd seen on display. No, ironically enough it was a synergistic effect.

A big clunky AT-AT clomping around? Worth a double-take, of course. A big clunky AT-AT clomping around being led by a man in bunny ears? That apparently was worth two double-takes.

A small impromptu honor guard had formed around Garrett, a constantly-renewing cluster of Star Wars fans trailing along to examine the AT-AT's details before being left behind or moving on to other things. But though fewer, the Star Wars fans who were puzzling over Steph were puzzling longer. One of them was even a Darth Vader complete with audible breathing, though in an all-white suit for some reason.

Steph wasn't about to ask. He was already being pelted with far more intricate details of the Star Wars universe than he could possibly take in. "So," the white-armored Vader was musing. "I doubt that the Empire has begun accepting nonhumans into service since my conversion, so you cannot be a pilot. I don't think you have the height for a Gerb or Lepus Carnivorous, but I might be mistaken."

"Uh, no, don't think so," Steph shook his head. ''Lepus Carnivorous? Is he making this up on the spot?'' The only carnivorous rabbit that came to mind was from Monty Python.

"Are you a Kushiban? Be at ease, my mission no longer entails the deaths of Force-Sensitives."

That one sounded less fake, and Steph was about to accept the title if only to have something meaningful to say. But then one of the Storm Troopers turned from peering at the detailing on Garrett's head and said in his best tinny trooper-voice, "My Lord, are you forgetting the Hoojib?"

"I was just getting to that." The chuckle seemed quite out of character for a Darth Vader, and to Steph's relief he seemed to be recognizing how far out of his depth Steph was. "I apologize for my men. When you're obsessed, it's a bit hard to remember that ''not everyone knows or cares.''" That last bit seemed to be aimed at the other fans, who variously shrugged, drew back a little, and hung their helmeted heads in probably-mock shame. "Kushiban and Hoojibs are both rabbitlike creatures, not very large. Kushiban are more like cat-monkey creatures with soft rabbit ears and big squirrely tails; they're about, oh, ''this'' tall standing up -" he bent down to hold his gloved hand a foot and a half above the floor "-but usually walk on all fours. They do a lot of handweaving and tend to be Force-Sensitive; generally they're portrayed with a calm demeanor. By most standards they are considered very, ah, cute."

It was Steph's turn to chuckle. "I'll leave cute to the furries."

"Aww." Garrett rose to his hind legs, surprising Steph by having been paying attention, and took a moment to set one of the forelegs down so he could adjust his headpiece. One of the side-mounted gun turrets had hooked on someone and been pulled askew. "You'd think with all those bunny-based aliens there'd be a more crossover, like with those Caitans we saw earlier."

"Ixnay on the Artrek Stay," Steph warned with a grin. He didn't seriously expect anyone to be offended, there was far too much good-natured mixing of genres and universes going on for that, but the rivalry between those two franchises almost seemed traditional.

"I'm dressed as an AT-AT, I think I'm strong enough in the Star Wars Force for my reputation to survive being revealed as a fancier of catgirls in miniskirt uniforms."

The white Vader nodded, still chuckling. "Certainly. You have no idea how many of our aliens look like cats or bugs or yes, rabbits. Hoojib, for example. They're about ''this'' big-" too small to bend down for, he held out his gloved hands as if cupping a normal-sized bunny in them "-they're mute but telepathic, they eat energy. They look more like rabbits with huge eyes and splayed bird feet. They also have large noses, no visible mouth, and one antenna or feeler on the forehead that they use to drain energy with. A relic of the Marvel comics back in the seventies. Frankly, most of us think the writers were dropping something, but the Hoojib are not quite as implausible as some of the others."

"Weird is good," Steph answered with a nod. ''Hoojib, eh?'' The wheels were spinning quickly in Steph's head; even though he'd never seen pictures of one of those things the description was pretty distinctive. He thought back over some of the stuff he'd glimpsed on the tables they'd passed... "I can pull that off. I'll be right back, you okay Garrett?"

Garrett nodded. "Just tromping around." He had finished his adjustment and was considering whether to go back down on all fours, but as Steph headed off into the bustle he found himself welcoming the excuse to stay upright a while longer. His back wasn't hurting yet, and thanks to the angle of the headpiece he didn't have to hold his neck at a bad angle, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned to the white Vader instead. "So, if it's not a faux pas to ask, did you not have time to paint your outfit before the con?"

SL-1984 chuckled again. "I've got the black getup too. You don't want to know how hot that gets if you don't have real leather. This is a more recent relic of comics, actually. One where the Dark Lord has left the Empire and joined his children, and inexplicably looks ''exactly the same'' except for color. Just as absurd in its way, although I'll give it points for not having talking hedgehogs or superweapons that look like pinball machines. Dark Horse, not Marvel. Star Wars Infinities...? No?"

"No," Garrett said, shaking his head. The headpiece didn't weigh much, but still made the motion ponderous. "Believe it or not, I'm really lost with all this Extended Universe stuff. I just watched the movies and liked the toys." Despite Garrett's demurral it was actually something of an understatement; Star Wars toys were probably the main reason Garrett had become an engineer. The long hours spent playing with his older brother's stash of plastic space ships and robots had put a visceral love of fantastic machinery into Garrett's heart. But he'd never really got into the fictional side of it all, if that made any sense.

"Well, the toys are certainly a major part of the fandom too," SL-1984 agreed. "Collectors have their own subset of obscure encyclopedic knowledge. Wouldn't know what a Hoojib was, perhaps, but they could tell you exactly how rare any given run of a Luke action figure was. But I suspect that you are more inclined towards the tech manuals."

Garrett grinned, hefting the heavy walker forelimb assemblies. "What gave you that idea?"

For his part, Steph wasn't any of those things - he just liked a challenge. And within a minute he was back, another ten dollars poorer and well on the way to meeting his next challenge. He'd found himself a rubber koala nose, best match to his mental image of the description the Vader had given him, and was busily tearing apart a pair of dealie-bobbers as he walked. His only tools were a paper clip, some rubber bands, and MacGuyver innovation. "One second longer..." He finished the work on the addition to the rabbit headband and slipped them back into place, the single spring-loaded antenna bobbing up in the middle between his ears. "Eh? Eh? Hoo da jib?" He spread his arms to display his work.

SL-1984 let out a slightly muffled laugh. His hands moved slightly as if to adjust the new addition, then dropped to hook his thumbs into his belt. "Very nice. Certainly, nobody will mistake you for anything else now. No fan, at any rate."

"Well, that's silly," Garrett evaluated. Steph nodded back, making the antenna bounce but not jarring it loose; the anchor he'd rigged up was holding. ''Excellent.''

"Speaking of silly," Steph said, grinning, "shall we carry on toward the judging room? Despite my progress I doubt my costume's going to win any awards on its own."

"Sounds good." The judging was being staggered over the course of the day to account for the many individual contests that were running - the first winners were almost due for announcement, in fact - but Garrett figured it would be a good idea to get in on his as soon as possible. When dealing with a costume made mostly of cardboard, there was a certain inexorable degradation with use. And besides that, the costume was clunky and heavy. Garrett was looking forward to being out of it for a while.

"In that case I'll bid you adieu. Troops, clear the muster zone!" The Vader slipped back into character and the remaining Storm Troopers did likewise, stepping back in unison as if to let a much larger transport pass through. Garrett obliged them, dropping back down to all fours and resuming his tromp with Steph walking ahead. Steph felt even more ridiculous than before with his extra accessories, but it was a good kind of ridiculous.

It was a strange feeling. So strange that Steph overlooked the other strange feelings at first as they started tingling at the edges of his senses.

Garrett felt it first. He had just started to get back into the gait of an AT-AT when he found himself stumbling slightly, the heavy costume becoming noticeably heavier. Garret paused for a moment, his foreleg supports setting down on the floor below him with a pair of unexpectedly solid clomps.

The cardboard forelegs actually felt ''tight'' on his arms. That was wrong; if anything there should have been too ''much'' play inside them, they wobbled around if he wasn't careful. Garrett tried to let go of the cane handles and tried standing up to pull his hands out of them.

The forelegs stayed firmly and snugly in place, and they were ''heavy''. "Wha..." Garrett choked, his voice coming out low and grating as if by speaking he was using his throat in a way it wasn't intended. The exclamation was accompanied by the faint but noticeable whine of small motors of some sort and Garrett could feel the tension build in his hips as he held the cardboard legs up in front of him.

Cardboard no longer, it seemed - the surface finish had a distinctly metallic luster to it that the gray paint had failed to evoke previously. There was no explaining it; his costume had suddenly become a whole lot ''better''. It was still improving before his eyes, new details resolving and the proportions subtly shifting toward more accurate dimensions.

It was getting heavier. Garrett could feel his hips beginning to fail, the boxy body and outstretched forelegs too much to bear. But Garrett resisted the weight with all his might; he had no idea what was going on and from the frantic hammering of his heart he could tell he was most likely panicking, but even so he somehow ''knew'' deep in his gut that he would be in deep trouble if he fell over. He had to stay up. He ''had'' to...

Garrett's groan came from somewhere inside his chest, the vibration thrumming through his body in new and unfamiliar ways, and after resisting for just seconds he toppled forward to land again on his forelegs for support. The two round footpads slammed solidly down onto the carpeted floor and Garrett felt the impact travel up the metal structure into his shoulders. An alien surge of relief washed through him; ''thank God, I'm stable.'' But it didn't last long against the growing panic. He tried to open his mouth to yell for help and found that he couldn't. ''Oh God, I can't breathe!''

Garrett tried to look up toward Steph, servos in his neck whining in protest at the angle. He caught just a glimpse. Up ahead, Steph was having troubles of his own; his clothing seemed to be disintegrating, white fur bursting up underneath it. Everyone else Garrett caught in that glimpse seemed to be having some outlandish thing happening to them too, too many and too strange for him to process in that split second he had available.

Then Garret's vision cut off as his eyelids fused shut into the smooth, unbroken hull of the underside of the AT-AT's cockpit-head. A moment later vision returned in a kaleidoscopic burst of sensory input; Garrett would have screamed if he'd been able. ''My eyes! Where are my eyes!?'' He could see everywhere at once and couldn't process any of it. He could only stagger ponderously back a step, his limbs moving with unexpected strength and smoothness. ''Whirr''-chrt! ''Whirr''-chrt! It was the best possible replica AT-AT costume in existence now, and Garrett wanted ''out''. But his attempts to shift even the tiniest bit inside the solid metal shell failed, every part stuck solidly and directly to his skin. Fused with it. ''Becoming'' it.

And then the hollowness came. Garrett felt a hole open up inside his gut, swelling inside his abdomen and squeezing his vitals aside. Garrett's vision was disrupted just as it had started to coalesce again, panic flaring more brightly in his mind. ''Oh God Oh God Oh God...'' He could only set his legs and try to hold as steady as possible as the bubble spread up into his chest, up his throat, into his head...

''Ghoooood.'' The thought trailed off in a tumult of strange emotions and sensations. His guts were settling now, the final details pulling into their new configuration. He was empty inside, but what was left was ''solid.'' Strong. Steel. Or something like it, anyway... The hammering of his heart faded away, replaced with the unfamiliar, almost subliminal throb of some sort of power plant.

Vision returned again, more stable this time, but it didn't bring any clarity to the situation. Garrett stood stable on all four legs, round footpads planted firmly on the carpet right where he'd been when the change had first come upon him. But his body was an island of stability in a sea of chaos. All around him people were yelling and running around in terror, many of them no longer human. Garrett turned his head, the motion ponderous and not really necessary given his all-encompassing field of view but psychologically important for keeping his attention focused. ''Where's Steph?'' He didn't know what his friend could do about any of this, but it was a straw of hope to grasp for in the maelstrom.

Thunderous footsteps grabbed his attention. Something was coming, big and round and red-

Too fast. How could something so big move so fast? Garrett barely had time to move before the huge creature brushed past him, slamming against his side as it went. Garret's legs weren't jointed to deal very well with lateral movement and he staggered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced. Whirr, chrt, whirr, chrt, cHRT...

''FALLING!'' Garrett screamed in the form of bolts of light shooting from his chin to blast scorched pockmarks up the wall and ceiling, and slammed to the floor. A table crushed to splinters under him, cushioning what would otherwise have been a tremendously damaging impact, but still jarring. He felt a vestige of pain, which faded the moment it registered, leaving him numb.

Stunned, lying on his side, alone, ''empty''. Garrett wasn't sure if AT-ATs could faint, but he found himself doing a very good imitation of it.

== Steph's post-TF segment==

Steph was trembling and overwhelmed with confusion at what had happened to him, what had happened to everyone around him. But at the same time he felt strangely comforted cradled here by giant white-armored arms, even if he was getting pressed into the hard edge of a chest box, so he managed to keep the fear suppressed below blind panic. He had no idea ''why'' being held like that should have been comforting but for the moment he was willing to just go with it while he tried to straighten out what else had happened.

He hadn't noticed that Garrett wasn't keeping up with him until he'd heard that strange noise of protest. He'd turned around and there it had been, right before his eyes, the gaps between the pieces of Garrett's costume abruptly sealing up as the gray cloth underneath swelled to fill them. As Garrett ''himself'' swelled to fill them. Steph still wasn't sure which had done the changing, Garrett or his costume - was Garrett somehow trapped inside that thing? That had been his first thought, that the costume had somehow been magically replaced with a giant animatronic of fearsome quality.

But then he'd realized what was happening to him, and now he had no idea what was going on. His clothing was disintegrating, falling away into nothingness, and the skin underneath was sprouting a thick white pelt of fur. ''His'' skin, not some costume layered over top. He'd tried pulling on it and felt pain.

Steph wasn't entirely proud of what he'd done next; he'd let out a shriek that was equal parts surprise and alarm, turned away from his friend still struggling inside that developing machine's body, and had tried to run away.

'Tried' being the operative word. It wasn't just his skin that was changing, the size and shape of his entire body was warping. Steph had managed to stagger just a short distance before his shortening legs and enlarging feet tripped him up, sending him stumbling into broad white-caped back of one of the other conventiongoers. The man was ''huge'' - or rather, in hindsight, it was Steph who was shrinking - and absorbed the impact easily.

The man snapped "What?", spinning to confront Steph and reflexively reaching for his lightsabre. It was the white-armored Darth Vader Steph had been speaking with just moments earlier. The Sith Lord's mechanically augmented voice was deeper and more imperious, the armor more fully fleshed out.

Steph's eyes widened in alarm as he found himself craning his neck to look so far up at the man's masked face. "Heee," he gasped breathlessly, his own voice coming out a high-pitched squeak. "Heep!"

It felt like a lot of things were going on, but the biggest was the sense of falling. From increasingly high above SL-1984 watched him unreadably, reaching up to clamp one gloved hand on the opposite wrist, then letting go. Then Steph found himself on all fours, eyes level with a bit of detailing on the man's shiny white shin armor. No, lower than that. He let his joints lock and stood as if frozen.

Giant hands plunged from above and lifted him up out of harm's way just before the huge bulk of the Kool-Aid Man came barreling through the room.

There was a tremendous smash. "OH YEAH!"

"Fall back!" SL-1984 barked.

"Lord Vader!" Someone else nearby exclaimed. Then there was a burst of blaster fire followed by another crash.

Steph couldn't handle it all; he'd simply gone limp and allowed himself to be carried as SL-1984 and the handful of Stormtroopers that had been close at hand retreated from the chaos erupting inside the room. They'd taken up a defensive position in a short hallway just outside, apparently leading to a utility closet of some sort and devoid of any other activity.

It gave them a few minutes' respite and as the shock wore off Steph began to tremble. In the midst of everything that was going on SL-1984 had apparently forgotten that he was holding Steph, but the movement drew his attention back to his immediate surroundings again and he looked down. "So you were a Hoojib after all."

Steph felt his rabbitlike ears lay down flat against his back and the long, flexible tendril that sprouted between them curled tightly in an unfamiliar reflex. ''I never heard of them until just minutes ago!'' Steph tried to object, but he wasn't even able to produce a squeak that time; his mouth no longer seemed to be connected to his trachea and all he could do was let out a small snort.

SL-1984 seemed to get the message well enough anyway, though. "Yes, I suppose that's my fault. Well, what else would you call yourself?" He knelt down and lowered Steph back down, hands wrapped all the way around his ribcage like he was carrying a cat, to deposit him on the floor.

Steph huddled there on all fours, digging the claws on his fingers and toes into the carpet as he looked up in nervous awe at how gigantic everything was. He had a momentary overpowering desire to be picked back up again, he just didn't feel ''safe'' being so small, but he forced it down and tried to focus inward. His body was indeed quite a bit like a bunny's, just as had been described, but with longer fur and long, splayed, birdlike toes on his feet. Frustratingly, his ''hands'' were more like a rabbit's, or maybe a dog's - useless clawed, padded paws with stubby fingers he could barely wriggle independently. There were thumbs, sort of. Maybe dewclaws. They could just about manage grasping, or at least bending far enough that the finger pads met the big pad, but he couldn't stand without them. His face had a blunt, leathery Koala nose, and his tiny mouth was hidden in the fur underneath it. Probing with his surprisingly long tongue, he couldn't even feel any teeth.

He had to admit, he was ''exactly'' like he'd pictured a Hoojib looking like. His vision blurred as his enormous brown eyes started filling with tears.

"Hey, now. Hey." SL-1984 seemed very distracted, bringing one hand up against the side of his helmet and pacing a few steps away to stare intently at nothing visible.

''I didn't want to be here,'' Steph thought miserably to himself. ''I just want to be home.''

"Don't we all," murmured the stormtrooper crouched nearest him. It was a breach of squad discipline, of course, but everyone was too busy with their own troubles to notice. Steph himself wouldn't realize the more important fact that the stormtrooper had actually ''heard'' him until much later on.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus1.jpg]]

Something lithe and feline and clad in ruffles chose that moment to slink past the dead end where the little group held their position. It paused to stare at them with unblinking green eyes, then opened its mouth and hissed furiously. The occupants locked their blaster rifles into position, but one of the troopers, raising an arm to check them, snapped, "Hold your fire! Establish intent, ''then'' act!"

The cat-thing flattened its ears back against its head, looking spooked, then continued on its way at a slightly faster pace.

It was quiet. SL-1984 was the first to move. He pulled off one white glove, exposing a prosthetic hand that gleamed like bronze. It was all but skeletal, sparse of detail with only the transparent synthetic "muscles" keeping it from looking like metal bones. He turned it over before his mask and flexed the fingers gently, then covered it again. "I thought as much," he said in a low rumble, both resigned and keeping what might have been anger under tight control. "Is that how it is? Fine."

"Sir?" The speaker was a trooper with the breather hood, oversuit, and specialized armor of a snowtrooper, the same trooper who had told the others not to shoot. He broke position to stand closer to SL-1984, keeping himself oriented towards the opening to the dead end. "Sir, aren't you - Didn't you switch sides?"

"What? Oh. You, you're Shanda Pike?"

"I - yes, my lord," Pike said, voice firming. In the far distance something bellowed like a foghorn, forcing the trooper to speak louder. "My husband John and I share duties as Squad Leader. He's not here now, sir. I'm the only member of the squad's command staff present."

"Use my designation, Pike. I did leave the Empire, but I am still part of this squad. You're a squad leader, I'm not, that means - damn." SL-1984 went quiet. The constant rhythm of his mechanically-assisted breath was quieter and not as harsh as it was for 'classic' Darth Vader, but it could still be heard, even over the background noise.

"Sir? Something wrong?"

"You're not a ma'am." SL-1984 crossed his arms just underneath his chest box. There was a smile in his artificial voice.

Pike hesitated for several breaths. "Beg pardon?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." SL-1984 chuckled and uncrossed his arms to hook his thumbs into his belt. He was definitely more amused than was appropriate for a man who'd just gone on life support and become a quarter of a century older. "You're a man. You can't keep a wallet in your codpiece anymore. I suppose it makes sense... snowtroopers are specialized stormtroopers, and we don't generally admit women into the trooper academies... Who - yes, everyone in here's a trooper. Ursala, Crystal, Sky - You're all men. No worries, Shad, Jeff, you're men too. Heh. Well, this should make things interesting. Heh. That's... that's actually kind of funny."

"Oh." The snowtrooper waited. The other three had reacted, but a muffled crash from out there had brought them back into position, watching with ready blasters. For a moment, Pike sounded unnaturally calm, as if this was a situation he'd been trained for. "You're right. I hoped you were wrong, sir, but you're right." Another moment passed as SL-1984 crossed his arms again and laughed quietly; one by one every other helmet in the alcove turned towards Pike. Even Steph, huddled pitifully on the floor with his eyes glazed, looked up.

"Fusst you. ''Fusst'' you, you - you ''Sithspawn''. Stop laughing." He stepped forwards, getting into the Vader's faceplate. "''This isn't funny'', Nineteen Eightyfour. This is a ''big'' problem that goes past us, and it's only going to get bigger. And apparently I can't swear. So ''don't laugh.''" The outburst was quiet but unmistakeable. Pike kept his back straight as he added, rather sarcastically, "Sorry, sir. Momentary lapse in personal discipline."

"It won't happen again," SL-1984 agreed in a more serious tone. "Consider it corrected. You're in charge, I suppose. We're going to need a plan..." He trailed off, head coming up as if he'd heard something. "No. Oh, no. ''Hell'' no. How is that even ''possible?''" The white-clad Vader's voice was as low as it could get.

Down on the floor, forgotten until that moment, Steph was mute. Still, he tried. ''What? What is it?'' Pike echoed the sentiment, raising his blaster.

This time, SL-1984 didn't respond to either of them. He stepped forwards, turning his head as if searching. "...I can't let that happen," he said at last, more to himself than anyone else. "I don't even want to think about that. Gravitational pull alone could - and even if it didn't, the superlaser - wrong hands, there aren't even any ''right'' ones - I ''won't'' let that happen."

''Let what happen? What's going on?''

SL-1984 turned the corner at a dead run and was gone. Bitterly Pike muttered, "No way we'll be able to keep up with him. We should have at least synched our comm frequencies. Okay. Let's do that now. Frequency - Aurek Corellia Delta." Almost as one, the troopers switched to the same comm channel. "We can't stay here. First priority is finding the rest of Tampa Bay; once we've done that we can worry about what in the nine hells is going on. I know where my - my husband is, or should be at the moment. We have to start from there."

The snowtrooper continued to speak aloud, nervous energy spilling into his voice. "This is not going to be a blue milk run, boys. We can't afford to waste any time; everyone move fast and don't get distracted. We ''must'' regroup, or we are lost. I'm on point; Shad, you're at the rear. Sing out if something happens to you, even if it looks like we've seen it. We can ''not'' afford to leave anyone behind! Blasters to stun; Ursala, lower the setting on your forcepike. Nothing turns a crowd into a mob faster than a death, and ''don't ask me how I know that''. Let's move out!" Pike headed out at a rapid march, followed by the other five.

In the dead end, Steph hunkered, forgotten.

==Red Guard==

Everything was darkness and confusion and helpless nausea. When the world fell out from under her it took her stomach with it. Gravity meant nothing; she felt as if she was falling, spinning on the worst amusement park ride ever imagined. A timeless period later she tasted blood and realized that she'd bitten the inside of her lip.

And then the world was back, or one very much like it. Struck by the very physical sensation of falling, even though she could feel her boots firmly planted on the floor, Anj instinctively assumed a defensive crouch, opening eyes that she hadn’t remembered closing.

She could see! She could hear! Long ago Anj had gotten used to the way the Red Guard helmet cut her visibility and muffled all sound; it was inevitable, after all. She’d all but stopped noticing. Now, though – now the flattened ovoid of the visor was still there, but a little smaller, and the space around it was no longer dark.

She could see as well and as much as she could when bareheaded, and all sounds were crisp and clear, not muffled in the least. It wasn’t that the helmet was gone; even though it was cool to the touch and non intrusive she could feel it, tight against the contours of her face, pressing against her skin with only a few gaps to let air circulate. But the inside, so close that her eyelashes brushed a smooth surface every time she blinked, was full of light and color and motion. For a moment it was completely disorienting.

Training kicked in as she glanced frantically from one thing to the next. These were the screens in her helmet. They negated the disadvantage of having an enclosed faceplate. The ones on the sides gave her left and right views. This lowest monitor, the short wide one, was her peripheral display. It showed her what was in back. Her aural pickups caught sound and relayed it into her ears in such a way that she could determine the source and how distant it is. They also blunted the effects of sonic weaponry. The analysis calmed her, steadied her, and she could finally pay attention to what she saw in front of her.

It took a moment to realize that these were the same furries who'd been grouped together before. They barely bore any resemblance to any fursuits she had seen, ever – even the best of the best had always looked artificial. Wet, flickering eyes with fully mobile eyelids, subtle facial expressions, a mouth that did more than open and close, pawhands that did not look like gloves, skin that shivered, fur that sprouted from the skin, muscles and tendons moving beneath it, toes that splayed against the ground, tails and ears that moved silently and with purpose – admittedly she wasn't exactly involved with the furry scene, but in all the conventions and events she had ever attended she had never seen a fursuit that still looked real up close. Not when she compared a costume to a real animal. Some things just couldn’t be faked.

Yet the people she saw before her, gasping and touching themselves and looking wildly about… Some were more or less humanlike than others, but one or two looked like nothing less than bipedal wild animals with slightly altered forelimbs and faces. The inarticulate confused things that they said were not in the voices of men or beasts, but a combination of both. They ''breathed'', they ran wet tongues over bestial teeth and ductile lips, they staggered on well-formed legs, their faces and body language reflected shock and disbelief and joy and horror and sudden fear. More than one turned a hybrid face towards the Red Guard.

Training once more came to the fore, and she welcomed it. No one to protect but herself, that was good. She needed to be cautious. They were disorganized and might not mean any harm, but as a whole they looked to be on the verge of blind panic. With her armor on, TR-1407 could probably survive being trampled, but she wouldn't like it. Anj took half a step backwards and stumbled – her feet, her legs seemed bigger and heavier than they should have been, and her center of gravity had shifted. Her balance had changed completely. She compensated even as the realization hit her that something was fundamentally different. The costume was tight, but ''beneath'' it-

Set off, either by her motion or by the low, coughing feline roar uttered by one of them, the furries split. Hooves and paws pounded the carpet as they ran, most of them headed ''away'' from TR-1407, but a gazelle and a zebra sprang past her, giving her a wide berth. She had half turned to stare after them in bewilderment when her spine chilled and she saw something huge and white and blue in one of her helmet screens.

Reacting almost instantly, TR-1407 jerked out of the way, her arms reflexively following through on the motion and swinging the tip of her weighty forcepike into contact with her assailant. It connected solidly, making a tiny crackling noise that was all out of proportion to the effect.

Momentum kept it going, but the enormous white tiger’s leap ended gracelessly as it lost consciousness. It hit the floor with an impact that looked painful and lay limp, flat red tongue sticking out of its fanged, slack mouth. Anj looked from it to the forcepike clasped in her gloved hands.

The stun module mounted on the vibro-edge head at the very tip gleamed dully. Fully extended, the weapon was two meters from the thin tip past the black grip to the weighted base, and it was much, ''much'' heavier than it had been before, maybe seven or eight kilograms - Seven. It was regulation-issue, so it definitely weighed seven kilos - but it felt ''right'' in her hands, sleek and balanced. Perhaps it wasn’t as elegant and deadly as a lightsaber, but here was a weapon that could kill or incapacitate, equally effective in pitched battle or nonlethal crowd control. Set to maximum it could tear through the hull of a starship or take off a man's arm at the shoulder; set to the lower setting and it could knock out a grown Wookiee. Or, apparently, a leaping tiger. That thought brought her back out of contemplation.

“…Yeah. What was that?” Anj’s eyelashes brushed her visor as she blinked. Something weird had happened to the helmet speaker. Normally it just relayed her voice; it distorted it just a little bit, making it slightly tinnier and more mechanical, but that was all. It didn’t ''change'' her voice, not really. It made it a bit less feminine, but it was still recognizable as ''hers''.

But something had happened to that speaker. This wasn’t her voice; this was nothing like it, in fact. The speaker was making her sound like an entirely different person. Why in the Emperor's name-

Focus! Were all local threats neutralized? What about her assailant? Anj moved closer and crouched to examine the white tiger. It was huge, easily three meters from the tip of its tail to its whiskered muzzle. Why meters and not feet? Feh, that wasn't important. At first glance it looked almost exactly like the tranquilized big cats that she'd seen on documentaries, down to the rapid, heavy way its sides heaved as it breathed. The only immediate oddity was the fact that it seemed to be wearing ''clothes'' – something like a tube top and close-fitting boxers, both pale blue.

But another moment showed her that it – no, she, for there was a suggestion of breasts in that tube top – had forepaws that would do poorly for bearing weight. They were long, the fingers well formed with prominent thumbs. Her head also bore hair, short and pattered in the same way as the striped fur, but distinct. No tiger looked like ''that''.

Around her thick neck, too, there was a strap holding a disposable camera…

TR-1407 tensed up as another cold tingle swept up her spine, glancing automatically towards a particular section of wall. Almost immediately that section bowed inwards, breaking with a wild shower of plaster and bricks as something almost spherical burst through, pudgy fists clenched, cubes ricocheting against each other and the interior as red liquid sloshed.

“'''OH YEAHHH!'''”

Apparently she, or the world, had gone mad. Even as the thought flashed through her mind, Anj was acting, one-handedly drawing her blaster rifle - where had that come from, she hadn't brought a blaster trooping today - from where it was holstered beneath her robes and firing.

The blaster bolt - it wasn't supposed to ''work''! - hit a curved, transparent surface that absorbed the energy, heating and deforming slightly. On the inside, bubbles formed at the site and floated rapidly up to the top; barely a second later they had stopped and the melted region had returned to its former unblemished state.

The – whatever it was – adjusted its footing as the three frosted translucent cubes floating inside of it rattled and clinked. Below them the lacquered black indents that served as sketchy facial features - eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a wide smiling mouth, all highly stylized – moved to assume an expression that looked like furious, homicidal joy. Its short arms, placed in relation to its eyes where ears would have been on a humanoid, reached towards the Red Guard, fingers twitching as if to fix around her neck.

Anj fired twice more, with the same minimal result – small parts of the clear surface melted and re-formed, a little of the liquid boiled up without lowering the level within, and the thing displayed anger. It was walking, short legs with their rounded toeless feet looking ridiculous under its bulk, but slowly. She didn't know if it was limited to that speed or it was deliberate. Anj felt another chill on her spine and knew, in a burst of insight, that that didn't matter. It could gather itself and leap hard and fast enough to cover nearly four meters in an eyeblink, breaking through anything in its way. She was almost in range of such a leap.

Still, it couldn't jump several times in succession. If she moved now, she could leave it behind. It looked like – it looked completely impossible. Like a round-bellied pitcher, entirely hollow and complete with flared spout and glass handle, low-set arms and legs stuck on like an afterthought. It was filled, limbs included, with a translucent red liquid - she could see ''through'' it even if the other side was distorted. Somehow Anj thought she’d seen it or something like it before, but just by ''existing'' it was an affront to reality. It couldn’t ''possibly'' stand upright on those small featureless feet, and as for moving! It had no skeletal structure, no visible muscles or joints, it was ''an anthropomorphic pitcher of'' punch, ''how'' could it move?!

TR-1407 shoved her blaster back into its holster on her leg. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and she had no desire to be killed by it. Time to go. Yet something stopped her.

The tiger furry was still out cold. She was only slightly further from the pitcher than Anj was, and the Red Guard had no reason to doubt that the thing was willing to take out its frustration on whatever couldn’t get out of the way.

Even so.... Abruptly TR-1407 recalled her training on Yinchorr, where they had tried to pound stormtrooper training out to make way for something a little different. There'd been the hierarchy of service. Empire above all, Emperor, ranking staff and those she had been assigned to protect, peers and those of lower rank, Imperial citizens, everyone else. For these, she would lay down her life. There was a mantra in that somewhere, so ingrained that it was a part of her, essential enough that she was slow to register that it was completely new.

Yes, the tiger had leaped at her and she had reacted as if under attack, stunning it. And on the scale of people she needed to protect, attackers ranked somewhere below saving herself. However, she had no way to know if that leap really had been an act of aggression. What to do...

Indecision lasted for only a split second. It made no difference if she was or wasn't attacked, that thing's in danger because I put her there. So Anj would get her out. Didn't matter how ridiculous the situation is, she still had a duty. TR-1407 changed her stance, gripped her forcepike in both hands and held it before her in ready position.

If the pitcher thing had been any faster she would have been caught while thinking, but it was forced to shuffle forwards to get within range. She had the feeling that it could only run with any speed if it still had the momentum from a leap. Anj readied herself and thumbed the setting as it tensed to spring.

“'''OH ''YEAHHH!'''''”

Although she’d known this was going to happen, TR-1407 was still surprised at its speed. Barely in time, she dived and rolled under it the instant before it hit. When it landed it did so on three points, splintering the floor underneath it and making everything around tremble with the impact.

Spinning to face it again, Anj swung one-handed and smashed the forcepike's tip into her opponent's body. This time a sharp ''crack!'' rang through the air; as it spun to face her she adjusted her grip and swung the heavy weapon in a high vertical stroke, then again, horizontal, hitting the curved glassy surface ''hard''. The sound was high and sharp, both unpleasant and nearly musical.

There was the tingle again, strong and focused. Acting with it the Red Guard dodged a flailing arm and struck once more, to the left of center, then tried to get some distance between herself and the target, stepping back. Almost immediately she smacked into the wall, hard enough to thump her armor. Damn, her situational awareness had slipped! As she recovered and tried again to pull away she almost fell over her own feet, once more becoming aware that something was ''different''. There'd been a bit of a bounce where no bounce should be, not on a woman. Fortunately her stumble went unnoticed.

The pitcher thing looked at first glance to be unaffected; if it had been made out of durasteel every impact would have left great rents, but its shape was intact and it hadn't stopped moving. On second glance TR-1407 saw the white fractures that were spiderwebbed dramatically across the surface.

She kept her visor pointed squarely at its enraged lacquered eyes, holding her forcepike up in an unvoiced threat.

The indents that appeared to be eyebrows lowered and drew together as it frowned slowly. Across its sketchy features a white fracture, which had started to gradually fill in, lengthened and widened again with a sound that reminded the Red Guard of thin ice on the surface of a pond.

The pitcher thing’s right arm began to leak, red liquid forming drops and pattering down into the carpet. The glass there, thinner than on its curved body, had all but shattered, and repaired itself only slowly. Slowly, the thing’s eyes slid from its arm to Anj’s visor.

“Press me and you’ll be dead,” she warned, not knowing if it could understand her or not, talking slowly and evenly. “I can keep this up faster than you can fix yourself.” Her grammar had gotten a little mangled. The message was obvious nonetheless.

“I can throw a grenade into you and vaporize your contents. I can sweep your legs out from under you and shatter them so you can’t stand. Once I’ve done that, I can smash you into a thousand shards, which I can then scatter.” Even as she said the words, noticing again that the voice saying these words was not hers, she was confident that this was not an empty threat. Interfere with an Imperial Red Guard in the performance of his duty and you’re coming off second-best, she knew.

TR-1407 advanced half a step and brought her forcepike into ready position. The pitcher thing’s eye indents became larger, then smaller again. A sense of rage so strong that it was palpable radiated off of it, but it had sense enough to know a hopeless fight. Still dripping, it shuffled backwards and began to turn ponderously. A moment later, and it bounded away through another wall with a shower of plaster. The Red Guard watched through the hole it left until she was satisfied that it wasn't going to come back.

Hah. Straightening, Anj looked over the comatose tiger once more. Her white-furred flanks had been decorated with a coat of dust and plaster fragments, but the furry had escaped harm.

Now what? The immediate danger was past, but TR-1407 knew better than to assume that things were safe now. The tiger was still out and would likely remain that way for an hour or so. Anj wasn’t going to stay around guarding her. Duty to comrades outweighed duty to strange nonhumans who might have attacked her and weren't even Imperial citizens. Some of her responsibility had been discharged just now, but she knew one way to make a stunned sentient recover faster.

It took a bit of searching - and a moment of staring at her own gloved hands, which appeared to be bigger than she remembered - to find the site where the stun module in her forcepike had hit; the tiger’s fur was thick enough that the little bruised patch of skin was hidden. It was on the furry’s muscular upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Anj closed the tiger’s jaws with an effort, then took a handful of her crimson robes and pressed it against the furry’s nose, plugging the nostrils with the tips of her fingers. She counted slowly to ten and jabbed the bruised patch with the armored knuckles of her free hand, hard. The angle was too awkward for it to be a punch.

Almost immediately the white tiger started to make throaty sounds of complaint, fingers and ears twitching. Anj peeled back a furred eyelid and saw the pupil of the blue eye contract.

That would probably do it. Not willing to be there when the tiger woke up, TR-1407 walked away, almost stumbling on legs that were longer than they should have been. Despite the exertion, Anj's breath had been only slightly quickened. Without that pressure to act, she felt strange. Okay. Okay. Now to find someplace private and try to make sense of all this…

==Steph comes out of hiding==

Steph had been passive until now - almost comatose, for that matter. Events had swept along too rapidly and too outlandishly for him to get much of a grip. But now he realized he couldn't stay that way any longer. The strangely protective presence of the huge armor-clad people was gone. He was just a Hoojib huddled on the floor, and if he didn't get a grip - didn't get ''moving'' - who knew what horrors would catch him?

First there was simply learning how to walk. He was on all fours, but he couldn't crawl - his thighs were short, his knees were far from pronounced, and he couldn't plant his palms on the floor; his wrists didn't bend like that. Instead, when he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. His toes were long enough that he had to turn them outward.

He wobbled and wavered at first, unsure of his limbs like he was a kitten or a puppy or something, or like he'd been on an one of those all-night benders at the end of Finals Week. Still, as he practiced it quickly became easier. The reflexes seemed to be built in - how to stand, how to walk, coordination, the whole deal. That was a mercy, he supposed.

Keeping huddled against the wall for some modicum of concealment Steph crept back up the short hallway to peer out into the room he'd come from.

It was hard to comprehend what he was seeing at first. His senses had been distorted just as much as his body, his perspective something like half a foot off the floor. The scent of smoke in the air was almost buried under the other less identifiable smells Steph's enhanced nose was picking up. His enormous ears were catching more sounds than he knew what to do with, and there was something new and weird with tugging and heat and distant inaudible violin notes... But his vision was still quite clear and comprehensible, at least. Most of the tables had been upended in the rush as people had fled, scattering a lot of junk on the floor.

Excellent. Cover. As soon as the coast seemed relatively clear Steph bounded out across the floor, not quite running and not quite hopping, shelter under the nearest upright table. The space under the tablecloth was still cavernous at his scale, but much better than the soaring vastness of the room outside or even the hallway. He paused there to gather his wits and figure out what he was doing.

He had to get it together. He had to... he needed to find Garrett, before anything else. Easier thought than done, though - he hadn't gone far but the changes to everything had disoriented him. Where was he now? Where had he left his friend?

And would he recognize him when he found him? Steph's ears and antenna perked up, nose twitching nervously, as something large came moving through the room outside his shelter. Larger even than a normal human, heavy footfalls thudding solidly on the thin carpet... Steph would have whimpered had he been able to make any actual sounds. ''Oh God, please don't find me, I don't want to be eaten by a... whatever...''

The footfalls came to an uncertain stop nearby. "Huh?" It rumbled, voice deeply guttural and deeply confused. "No find... what?"

This time Steph ''did'' notice the coincidence between his own thoughts and the creature's words. ''Can he read my mind? Wait, no... am ''I'' telepathic? I don't believe it! But that Vader guy said Hoojibs were telepathic-''

"Who's there?" The big creature bellowed, and for a moment Steph found himself caught in a confusing mental tangle as he tried to stifle the volume of his thinking. His antenna curled and he had to force himself ''not'' to speculate about the appendage's psionic functions for fear of being overheard. It was an impossible task.

Fortunately there were still plenty of other distractions out there, and after only a few seconds the sound of frantic sheep bleating in the distance drew the attention of whatever it was that was standing nearby. "Hah!" it grunted, lumbering off with some new unknown purpose in mind. Steph let out a tiny sigh of relief.

''Okay, so I guess I'm glad I can still communicate somehow... assuming that wasn't all just a coincidence,'' he thought. No one was nearby to confirm it and he gave a snort of derisive amusement. ''God, so much to figure out! Take this one thing at a time. So I turned into a Hoojib. If everyone else has turned into what they were dressed as too...'' He shook his head. It made too little sense, he couldn't get his mind around it.

Would Garrett still be inside that cardboard-turned-metal shell he was wearing? Steph hoped he'd got out of it somehow, but if he hadn't... Cautiously poking his head out from under the tablecloth and peering around to check for danger first, Steph forced himself to dart deeper into the room.

His attention immediately went to a heap of detritus, taller than he was, that had formed against a ragged mass that had been a tabletop mere minutes ago. Some of it had obviously been ''on'' the table, originally - graphic novels were strewn everywhere, many of them burnt. Pages had collected here, and other things as well, probably kicked into place in the rush. Great tufts of fur, bits and pieces of clothing, food scraps that had escaped from trash cans, tablecloths, splintery pieces of other tables - Steph shuffled closer, then thought to wonder why it had drawn his attention. This was not the only pile of trash scattered around the room - there had been several filled trash cans, even this early in the day - and none of ''them'' were all that interesting.

It was like this one was tugging at him - specifically, his antenna. He could feel it sort of warming in response. No, 'tugging' wasn't quite the word - it was almost a smell, but not quite that either. Like... he could almost swear there was a small, cheap violin playing, just one very high continuous note, but he didn't actually hear anything. Something about it was comforting.

Steph snorted. ''Why am I so interested in a pile of trash?'' It wasn't food, that was for sure. There was tons of food in the room, mostly from upended trash cans, and the smell was ''everywhere''; spilled soda and cheap beer, a salad with dressing, corn chips, a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich that was starting to go bad, applesauce, Skittles, an entire box of donuts. And that was just in this room. None of it appealed to him - the smell was just ''there'', like the smoke or the ink on the comic books. His mouth wasn't even watering. He wasn't even sure if he still had salivary glands.

If he was quick about it, it wouldn't hurt to check. Steph climbed gingerly atop the pile, long toes curling to grip at an abandoned canvas bag full of hard objects. The feeling was coming from here. Still uncertain - he felt so ''exposed'' - he scraped at some wet pages that had stuck together.

''There! What's that?'' Something hard, probably plastic, and just a little smaller than his head. Steph sat on his haunches, freeing him to draw whatever it was up. He could grasp and his dewclaws were jointed more or less like thumbs, but the job of wrestling it out took longer than it should have.

Steph's ears quivered. More footsteps! Where was the best place to hide? Taking a step forward - a much more complicated action than it had been when he'd had two legs - he felt his toes flex on the thing. ''Maybe...''

He was going to get caught out in the open if he didn't hide ''now''. Steph hobbled on three legs into the dubious shelter of another table, this one apparently intact, though missing its covering. Edging behind a pile of plastic boxes that had probably once held statuettes, Steph ducked his head under his belly and took a look at his prize, clutched in the wiry toes of his foot. That foot distracted him - earlier, he'd paid much more attention to what had happened to his hands.

His feet were so huge that when he stood in the position that came most naturally the clawed tips of his toes were level with his elbows. They really did look something like bird's feet, covered in slightly wrinkly grayish skin rather than scales or more white fur, though not like any bird he'd seen. More importantly, they were at least somewhat better than his paws at flexing and holding things.

He'd misjudged how far away the footsteps were; that, or the one making the footsteps hadn't moved in a straight line. Now they pounded past, not as heavy as the big creature or even the stormtroopers but very quick. He could hear a girl's voice spouting a steady stream of "OW OW OW get OFF AHH OW" sprinkled with invective, and as she raced past Steph saw a pair of towering stockinged legs pumping. Something smaller and greenish clung to one of them, but they were both gone before he could get a better look.

Not everything was out to get him. Good to know.

The thing that he'd picked up turned out to be a cell phone, the kind that flipped open. It tingled pleasantly and somehow made that high violin note to Steph's antennae, a comforting feeling. He set it down and prized it open with a certain amount of difficulty, knowing that this wasn't helping him find Garrett but telling himself that he'd only be another minute.

The phone was on, and its screen glowed. Not entirely certain about just what he was doing, Steph put his face up so close that the phone's wallpaper blurred out of focus, tilted his head until what had been his chin sank into the fur on his chest, and felt his antennae uncoil, reaching out to touch the keypad, above the part of the phone that the tingling and humming was coming from.

It was a nice feeling. A very nice feeling. Steph closed his eyes and leaned into it for a long moment, sighing almost inaudibly through his nose. He could feel it moving up into his head and body. It was soothing. The violin note held for a few long seconds, then wavered. As that happened the heat lessened.

His eyes snapped open. ''What am I doing? Damn it.'' Steph peeled his head away and heard the phone chirp the low power alert before the screen went black. ''What was that? What was I - didn't the Vader guy say something about eating energy? Damn it, I wish I'd paid more attention.''

He whipped his head around. That ''tugging'', a little like a smell, a little like feeling heat through his antenna, maybe a little like hearing high violin notes, it was back. He could sense something interesting, several somethings, most about as big and with similar high cheap-violin notes, scattered around the room. More phones? Maybe dropped cameras?

For the third time Steph sensed something moving, and close. Still hidden under the table and behind boxes, he pressed himself against the wall. It was moving in a different direction than the other two, and it was - it was ''right on the other side of that wall!''

He shot out from under the table, smacking one gigantic ear against a table leg, and froze against a pile of rags, out in the open. The ceiling yawned high above, he was exposed - but nothing was going to collapse on him.

This turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever it was, it kept moving. He could barely hear its footsteps, and he might not have noticed - now that he was listening, this wasn't the only set of footsteps - but he could sense it as a sort of interesting moving heat and a whole ''orchestra'' playing, getting fainter as it got farther away.

''Wait.'' Steph's ear was stinging. ''How would I know anything about whatever was running except how big it is? Unless'' - His eyes were huge, and when he crossed them above his nose he could sort of see the blurred, doubled shape of that antenna, arcing above his head. ''What, can Hoojibs sense electricity too? Or what, robots? This is just weird.''

Now that he thought about it - there were a lot of other interesting warm things and bowstringed instruments were playing from all sides. Warm wasn't really the word, maybe... maybe ''powered''. Some were small, others larger. Some were moving. It was the same sense, now that he thought about it, that he'd gotten from his rescuer. Same sense as from the phone, but the big things, the moving ones, he could feel through the walls and over a distance. He only 'heard' anything when it was close enough, but the ''powered'' part of the sense could go a lot farther, apparently.

He could feel... Up ahead. Something big, something motionless. Steph wasn't at all sure what direction he'd been going even before he'd literally run into SL-1984, but it seemed like this might be the right way. Hesitantly at first, then with more and more certainty, he followed the antenna.

''There.'' It couldn't be anything else. Even on its side, two right legs sticking out rigidly into open air with only rubble keeping it from lying flat, it loomed up above Steph, head hanging down at a thirty degree angle, resting on what looked like the buckled remains of a chair. The powered sense here was much, ''much'' stronger than anything he'd felt coming from any of the dropped electronics. There was enough power thrumming in it that even from here his antenna was warm, and the note was much deeper than the ones he'd 'heard' before, like a double bass. Or whatever they were called; it had been years since his last music class. He had to fight off the lulling feeling that came with it.

It didn't look remotely human. From Steph's perspective, it took a moment to recognize it as an AT-AT. He moved closer, tentative.

Each round footpad had four thick toe flaps. These were slowly, very slowly, swinging out and in on their hinges. The toe flap articulation was so minimal that they couldn't point straight out. The motion looked aimless.

''Garrett?'' he tried. ''I still don't know if this really works or not... Garrett? Are you in there? Can you hear me?''

Steph shuffled closer. ''What do I do now? I don't know how telepathy works. Or if you could hear it. Or if I even ''have ''it. Or if he's here.'' The AT-AT's boxy head was bigger than his whole body. ''I could probably fit into a shoebox, so that doesn't mean much. God. I probably'' can ''fit into a shoebox.'' The head had a dark horizontal slot running across the very front, like a very narrow visor or something. On either side of it were two bulging domes like flattened compound eyes, each housing a slender pipelike structure. Its chin had two more, slightly larger pipelike things, fixed forwards.

Closer. Steph rose shakily onto his hindquarters, almost pitching over as he overcompensated. His toes splayed against the ground strongly enough that if he kept perfectly still he could almost, ''almost'' stand up, though his ankles started to burn the moment he straightened them and his knees refused to unbend. Ignoring that, he stared into that slot, vertical since the thing was on its side. It was mostly opaque, but he could sort of see... were those chairs? ''A room? No, a cockpit.''

His breath fogged the view and cleared slowly.

''Garrett? It's me. Steph.'' That black slot was reflective enough that from this angle, looking right into it from as high up as he could get without finding something to stand on, he could see himself. Big, ''big'' eyes, barely on this side of being appealing rather than grotesque, huge ears, both long and wide, that flagged behind him but wouldn't stand straight up. A bulbous black nose, the mouth beneath it so small that fur around the edges made it look like a pit, and that antennae, curling like a fern. He hadn't exactly seen himself before.

Steph was distracted enough that he didn't register as the thrumming increased in tempo and the bass note picked up. He almost missed one of the pipes - the medium blasters on the temples - as it swiveled slowly to point directly at him.

==Steph and Garrett==

An alert came on and pinged, setting the other systems into motion.

Something huge and white loomed up against his head, almost touching his command viewport, and he reactivated. The white thing - some kind of animal, details were popping in like graphics on an overworked PC - flinched and fell back, and seemed to shrink as the rest of his vision started loading, quickly from a cold start instead of little by little. There was sound, or something like sound, and words, or something close, but he already had plenty of them, and the ones he had were louder.

There was movement from the white animal, he could see now that it was only very big, not huge, and it suddenly traveled a hundred meters away in a few shuffling steps. It seemed to be clinging to a wall that he was pressed against.

Something was wrong. His vision was still loading, everything that wasn't right in front of his head was still glossy smooth and sparse of detail, but he could see that nothing was at the right angle - oh. Oh. He'd fallen over. That explained why there was nothing under his footpads and no weight on his legs, too. Reorienting, he managed to figure out which way was "up". Vaulting high above him was a ceiling, higher up than the hold of a Star Destroyer should be, and there were walls. They seemed very far apart. Something was wrong with this.

Of course it was wrong! He'd fallen over! He was down, and anyone could climb up to get at a boarding hatch and ''at his crew!'' They must have been stunned by the impact, thrown against his bulkheads -

Alert and evacuate the crew! Why isn't that alarm on yet? Start it now!

Though he didn't have any speakers on his outside, as the prerecorded evacuation message started up internally he saw the white animal perk up, monstrous ears folding, cupping as if funneling sound to its head. If he was judging by how big it was compared to him, and he was, it was at least the size of, of - well, it was almost as big as his head, his ''moveable command section'', part of him said, and it was ''fast'' too, already advancing, covering three meters in a stride -

It was ''big'', it was ''fast'', it was already coming towards him, at any second now it was going to circle past his head and ''get in at his crew!''

'''NO!'''

He wasn't going to let that happen! With a supreme effort, the servos in his neck; his ''flexible armored tunnel''; jerked, pointing the two Taim & Bak MS-1 fire-linked heavy laser cannons at the animal. It froze, stared at him with ridiculously big brown eyes, and there was that almost-sound again, like it was saying his name, but it was still big and fast and a danger to his crew and it ''still'' hadn't moved.

His heavy laser cannons, mounted on either side of his chin, the underside of his moveable command section, were cold. It took a moment to muster the power he needed to warm up the lasers that heated the blaster gas in his cannon energizer. Several seconds passed.

While that was happening, the animal held still. As he fired both in tandem, it twitched out of his sights, and he couldn't re-orient in time. Nothing with legs should have been able to move as fast as it did. When he fired, the beams shot into a stretch of wall, impacting with a minor explosion. Texture popped in, and he saw that he'd left two dramatic black scars with a tiny flame guttering in each. Six seconds later and his heavies had recharged, but he didn't need them again so soon.

The animal was scared off, if only for the moment, and he had some time to catch his brea- no, that wasn't right. To lie helplessly on his side and try to regroup. For the moment, there was no further threat to the crew. Above the heavy laser cannons he had two fire-linked medium repeating blasters, useful for smaller, more agile threats, since they could swivel as needed. All he could do was heat those up, check the gas reserves for them and his heavies, send off a distress signal, and wait.

The signal took barely a second to set up and broadcast. It would, of course, be hours or days or more before anything came of it; that was how that went. He was a very valuable piece of equipment, and depending on the commander and the situation he might or might not be a high priority during a crisis.

Crew was more important than the question of where he was, how he'd gotten there, and how he'd get out of this. Without his crew... He turned his attention to his interior, remembering to watch in case the large animal returned.

Neither of the boarding hatches or any of his four escape hatches, or even the hatch to the vehicle bay, had been opened. He knew that. His atmospheric exchangers and filtration unit - part of the life-support systems built into his interior - were running a steady stream of breathable air through his passenger/troop section and command cockpit. He could feel it luffing across his deck.

A notice came up, that he was stressing the mechanisms in his neck, his ''flexible armored tunnel''. Slowly he lowered his head until it hit something and he was at that same angle he'd activated with. He could feel whatever it was, just barely. Just a sense that it was ''there'', nothing about hardness or softness or texture. This still wasn't good for his servos, but he couldn't do anything about that yet.

There was no movement in his interior. It was as if he didn't have any crew at all. That didn't really make sense, though. How could he be active without a crew? His drive motor shouldn't even be running.

Still nothing. At last, interior cams activated and he got a look at his insides. Both levels of his passenger/troop section were empty, without so much as a cleaning droid poking around. No one was in the maintenance shaft to his motor. There were several speeder bikes racked up like throwing darts back in his rear vehicle bay, and some gear in crates, disarrayed a little by the fall, but nothing that moved on its own. It made him feel vaguely uneasy to see all that.

Only one cam was in his tunnel. More of them were in and around his command cockpit. The seats for pilot and gunner, as well as the larger and more imposing one for the commander, were fixed to his deck, though they were adjustable and currently hanging from their bearings. He saw that very clearly; cams were positioned to fix on the faces of crew in the three essential stations, making it easier for them to send real-time messages or recordings on his holoprojector.

He saw the bulky shapes of the consoles that made up his mainframe. On them, status lights blinked or shone steady, and monitors glowed steadily. These were the displays made for his crew. Who, apparently, wasn't there, not even in the cockpit. That wasn't right. Even standing down, inactive in his berth, there should be at least one technician. And there wasn't so much as a fingerprint on a console or a stretch of flattened upholstery at any of the three essential stations. Like they'd never been touched. Not so much as a speck of dust either. Was he factory-new? Couldn't be. He knew that his hull was scored and dented, cosmetic damage that meant he'd seen action.

This was not good. Bad enough to be helpless on his side waiting for his crew to evacuate and send for backup, which presumably would at some point involve either retrieving him whole or in components or blasting him so that no one else could have him. Worse to be helpless on his side with no crew.

No crew. He'd skirted that phrase, because 'no crew' meant 'empty'. That was meaningless when he was inactive and a protocol breach when he was standing down, but he was live now, systems running, and he couldn't...

[This does not actually fit anywhere. I'll delete it when I'm sure I'm not going to use anything from it. "Autonomy, actualization, psyche emulation identity and personality emulation, records, software analog of organic-brain emotional response, and many others, often very similar."

There was one subroutine housed in one particular console, one last major program in the master computer, that hadn't gone live yet. No. Untrue on both counts. Several subroutines, many or most of them linked so that one could not be active without others. Currently there was only one running at optimum, but all were functioning at one level or another. There was a great deal of overlap among the many, many subsubroutines, and many redundancies, and it was altogether more complex and puzzling than any other set of programs. The console wasn't planned or built by the same mind as the rest of him.

It was unmarked, as far as he could tell, and set apart from the others. It had the normal complement of monitors and status lights, but only a few controls. From the lights, some systems were active, most weren't. He was not entirely sure what, if anything, it did.

Should he start it up now? It couldn't be essential. This would just burn power faster. But why not? He couldn't find any crew, so without autonomy he wasn't going to be able to do anything. Besides, his life support was running with no life to support, his hologram projection pod was live with nothing to receive, and he had readied everything in his drive motor even though he was hardly using it at all, what with being motionless. No crew meant no action, the moment when he'd fired at the large animal notwithstanding. He might as well. Power was rerouted, his drive motor sped up slightly to compensate, and bank after bank of status lights on the last console glowed to life.

Garrett jerked. ''Beep... beep... beep... beep...'' Automatically he reached out to swat at the alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock, and his leg just swung forward and back, smacking against something. He felt the impact dully as it traveled up into his body. It didn't really sound like an alarm clock, it sounded like - ''No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! Stress on flexible armored tunnel! Warning!''

That meant - what that meant was that he was FALLING!

Garrett's legs churned forward and back, but hit rubble, unidentifiable heaps of trash. No. He wasn't falling, he was already down, and he'd figured that out already. He was already down, he remembered the fall and how it had started slow and then became much faster and then he'd hit the ground, and now he was ''on'' the ground, though he could barely feel what was underneath him.

The costume. That was it, that had to be it, the costume was keeping things from touching his skin. Yes. Under it, Garrett could feel things, his nerves hadn't all gone dead. As soon as he got it off, he'd be fine. That emptiness, that sickening hollow space inside, that would wear off. Yes. So would the feeling that he was somehow both stretched and compressed somehow. He just had to get the costume off.

The alarms in his cockpit were getting annoying, and nothing was happening with the evacuation alarm, so he disabled them. Indicators on monitors and bank after bank of status lights updated continuously, but they showed nothing he couldn't sense for himself except, perhaps, why the lights on the mystery console, already blinking in rapid patterns, went mad.

He wasn't breathing! He wasn't breathing! Whatever he used to breathe - diaphragm? Rib muscles? - was missing, his sides were totally rigid and immobile. It didn't hurt, but God, he couldn't breathe!

Garrett shuddered, or tried to. The seats at his three essential command stations readjusted convulsively, his flexible armored tunnel quivered, his medium blasters rocked, and his legs bent slightly where they met his drive motor and at the knee joints, toe flaps flicking up and down. Otherwise he didn't move. Just a costume, he told himself. A costume and maybe some highly illegal combination of substances which would make the University very unhappy. He hadn't knowingly taken anything, but that never made much difference with the staff. At the moment, the thought of Midtral kicking him out wasn't all that bad.

The console displays worked silently, making it much easier for crew to see just what was going on with him. One housed the housekeeping subroutines and displayed temperature and pressure readings, air supply, life support, lighting, and half a dozen other systems, both readings and controls, all for the places where crew would be. Most of that was locked to him, off limits, part of some security measure. More consoles were devoted to other things. Weaponry. Data from sensor arrays, holographic targeting systems, inside cams, impulse terrain sensors. The console for both of his KDY FW62 compact fusion drive systems, all the fiddly details that went with them and his fuel slug tank and blaster cannon energizer. Other consoles too, with purposes of their own. Most of them didn't appear to be connected, but under the deck each was linked by numerous thick cables, to each other and the rest of his body. They were, Garrett knew, what his brain had turned into.

After he took the costume off Midtral would kick him out for substance abuse, the way they also did with people who got weird piercings or large tattoos or got in the paper for suspicious reasons. It was in the college contract; people hated it, but no one had a legal leg to stand on. They would give him time to pick up his stuff and find a motel, and he and Steph could go together to that bar just off campus to complain and rage and drink. Later they could stagger back to the motel, and wake up side by side in the morning with matching hangovers, and both of them could claim to have no memory of the previous night. The first and last time he'd done it, he'd sworn never to do it again, and Steph had clutched his head and said "Never, ''ever'' again". But another all-night bender with his friend sounded a lot better now.

He laughed wildly - and silently except for a burst of static on the internal comms. On the - yes, it was the system the commander used to give orders to the troops, it might as well be an intercom, why not? The static was loudest from the hologram pod, loud enough to fill the cockpit. It was purely internal, with not one speaker on his outside. He didn't have to pause for breath. Static hissed and crackled through his intercom, rising in a snarl of terrible, meaningless sound that went on and on. Who was he kidding? Nothing was coming off, and he was so empty that the noise echoed around his internals. The static died down as he stopped, feeling sick.

Not breathing. This time the realization didn't spark panic. He felt hot and cold at once.

He couldn't get up. Oh, it was easy enough in theory, Garrett knew. Contract abdominal muscles. Prop up on one elbow. Curl knees in along the floor. Turn so that hands and knees are on the ground and body is above. Push off with hands and stand up. Such a pity that he couldn't do that.

Okay, focus, he told himself, trying desperately not to start laughing again. He was on his side, not quite flat. The pocked squares on the ceiling - it was a drop ceiling, part of him noticed - somehow looked ridiculously far distant, same with the walls, though he had no problem making out details. A few hundred meters away - no, that couldn't be right, but several times longer than his body - he saw an abandoned, tapering cylindrical plastic thing partially filled with clear liquid, somehow completely intact. "Aquafina", the label read. It looked like a water bottle. Although it was much smaller than he was and he was looking ''down'' to see it, it still seemed huge. Quite a bit larger than a man, almost the size of a speeder... or, yes, a car. But that couldn't be right.

It dawned on Garrett then that it wasn't that any of these things were too large. No, they were exactly as big as they were supposed to be. It was that ''he'' was too ''small''. He was - he was an AT-AT. The distance from footpad to back was supposed to be at least twenty, twenty-five meters. How many feet was that? Fifty, sixty? If he remembered right, the drop ceiling was supposed to be ten feet up, maybe less. Even if he was standing now, his back would only be halfway to that ceiling, if that. That wasn't right. Maybe it explained the compressed feeling, though.

Movement. The furry white animal was back, and although it was moving very cautiously it still seemed far too quick for something without repulsorlifts. Garrett decided that it was probably the size thing - it seemed as big as a bantha, or... or an elephant. Those weren't supposed to move like this. But the animal was close to the floor and far, far from the ceiling, so it was probably small. Now, he couldn't help noticing that it looked like a combination of various animals. Long haired cat, wading bird, field rabbit, maybe some kind of bug.

It was coming around from Garrett's other side, staying away from his heavies this time. Halfheartedly, he followed it with the swiveling medium repeating blasters on either side of his viewport - or rather, he followed it with one blaster, because the other was pressed by his weight against what looked like a magnified piece of canvas. It didn't seem worth the effort to fire. What was the point? He didn't have any crew to protect. He was ''empty''.

''So'' empty. It was the strangest feeling. A little bit like hunger, a little like cold, slightly nauseating, something like being touch-starved, and a ''lot'' like loneliness so strong that it was crippling. Somehow it was all of those things wrapped up together, with something he had no words for. Continued breathlessness didn't help. ''Empty.''

He tried to shudder again, with the same result as last time. The white animal froze where it stood, the weird curling thing on its head unbending partially.

''Garrett?''

He jerked.

Steph? he said, or tried to say. It came out as purely internal static, like the buzzing hiss of an analog TV on an empty channel. Just like when he'd had that moment of wild laughter earlier.

''Garrett, it's me, Steph. Can you hear me?''

I hear you, I hear you! More static. Was that really Steph? How? What had happened?

''Look, don't try to shoot me again. I don't want - Are you even in there? Somewhere?''

Yes. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you, he tried. Still no words. It was just static on his intercom.

''Look, if you're there, say something.''

I don't think I can, he tried. Static. The creature that said it was Steph had its huge ears cupped around its head again, but Garrett didn't think it was hearing him. The intercom was internal, the hatches were shut. And he was producing static.

He jerked the servos in the armored tunnel that had once been his neck, making his head bob. He had to fight gravity. It wasn't an easy motion, and although he couldn't see it himself, he knew it didn't look smooth.

''Do that again.''

Garrett did. Whatever was between his head and the ground, underneath the too-close canvas, made a weird sort of ''crunch''. He could barely hear it; it seemed soft and far away.

''Okay. Uh, okay. You can't talk, but you can hear me, right?''

A third time, and now he was getting faint complaints. He wasn't designed for this kind of activity, not small repetitive movements. If he kept this up, he'd start damaging the blaster on that side. After a moment, he swung one leg forward and back. A foreleg.

He couldn't see most of his body, but he could see his legs, sticking out rigidly, like he was a flipped card table. There was the joint where each leg met his body. The joint could swing the entire leg forwards and back, and spread the legs a little apart, independently, but the spreading had a very limited range and apparently he couldn't do it lying on his side. His legs were just too heavy; the joints weren't built for this. He had knee joints, and four toe flaps at the end of each leg. And there was some kind of wristlike joint between knee and footpad, where the end of the leg pincered on to the footpad, but he couldn't move it. It was probably like a lizard's wrist; press the hand against something and the arm could move at all kinds of angles, but without something, the ground, a wall, to press against none of those wrist angles were really possible.

''Is that a yes?''

If he'd had eyes, Garrett would have rolled them. As it was, he felt the medium blaster that wasn't pinned twitch. Steph could get like this when he was excited or nervous, chattering inanely and giving off the impression that he wasn't nearly as smart as he was.

He tried talking again, asking, What do you think? Static. Of course. He swung the leg again.

''Okay, yeah. So - I guess I'm telepathic now. Right? My voice is gone, but if you can hear me, what else could it be?''

Garrett lay still, waiting as Steph babbled about what had happened, obviously ''just'' on this side of hysteria. He couldn't blame the little guy - Garrett could feel it pressing in on him, like any minute now he'd burst out in mad static laughter again. And maybe this time he wouldn't stop. But as long as Steph was here, he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

Was this telepathy, then? It was ''like'' hearing Steph's voice, but not quite. He didn't have any sense of where it was coming from. And... no, there wasn't really a sensation of hearing anything. It was like imagining a voice, imagining very strongly. Which raised the question of whether or not he ''was'' imagining it. But that way lay madness.

Eventually, Steph ran down. ''And I'm sorry, I ran away! I shouldn't have. I know.'' Had he? Obviously that was bad, but Garrett wasn't sure that he'd noticed. Not with all this. He wished - well, not like it mattered. Obviously he didn't need to breathe. It just felt like he should.

''Look, I - I should really try and get someone to help you up. I don't want to stay here, it's too open.''

Finally! Garrett staticked and swung forward and back, vigorously enough that he got a stern internal notice about not damaging his legs on obstacles. On the ground, Steph shuffled anxiously, black nose twitching.

''Right. I'll, uh, I'll be right back.'' He took off on all fours. Garrett watched him go. Why was Steph some kind of weird alien rabbit thing? What the hell had ''happened''? There was a way to undo it, right? He hoped there was. He really hoped there was.

He didn't ''want'' to be an AT-AT! He'd never wanted this. A month ago - less than a month ago - this costume hadn't even been a vague idea! He wasn't even a big fan or anything. He didn't want to be a walking beast-shaped tank. He could feel ''air'' blowing through his ''insides''.

He heard faint static crackling out of the intercom, and several bewildered seconds passed before he realized that he was trying to whimper.

==Anj's post-TF segment==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus2.jpg]]

Anj holstered his collapsed forcepike, removed his helmet, pushed his overrobe back over his shoulders like a cape, and stared at the reflection in the mirror, shying away from the eyes. The reflection stared back.

The reflection's face wouldn't turn heads. It was pretty normal, all things considered, no obvious scars or nonhuman colors. There was a certain hardness to it, yes – something in the forehead, the set of the jaw, the chin – but the mouth and the surprised expression saved him from looking too unforgiving. What made it disorienting was the way it was at once strange and familiar. There was a lurching shock like he'd dropped into a hole in the ground, registering that this wasn't some stranger's face. There was a smaller shock of recognition - this was his face. This was him.

“Uh. This is the part of the dream where my teeth fall out or I find out I can fly, right?” Anj winced and saw the reflection do the same. '' I don’t sound anything like me. I don’t even sound like my father.''

“Doesn’t feel like a dream, but how would I know? I guess there's nothing wrong with my voice amplifier. I, uh... Well, this is weird.” It was a very expressive face – the wince hadn’t just been a twitch of the eyelid; there’d also been more than a little reaction in the lips and eyebrows. He looked away.

It made a certain amount of sense, though. After that exchange with the bizarre pitcher-thing he had barely been breathing hard. He'd known something was different, he'd sort of expected this, it wasn't just the - well, the sense that now and again something jostled that shouldn't. Though that had been part of it. “Damn. Well... only men are officially accepted into the Stormtrooper Corps. Only the best stormtroopers can be trained as Red Guards. The screening process - yeah, I don't think a woman would go unnoticed. So yeah.”

He was taller, definitely. Not ''really'' tall, maybe, he could be wrong. When he turned his head and tilted it down it seemed like his shoulders on either side extended out too far, though part of that was the pauldrons. They didn't look bad in the mirror. But - wow, yeah, he was definitely taller. Yes. And his arms were thicker, even aside from the armor. Self-consciously, he flexed his free arm and felt his bicep press into the armor of his lower arm, the vambrace.

Also he was taller. Anj moistened his lips and realized that he was nervous.

For some reason recognizing that made him plant his feet and stand straighter - and yes, taller. Hopefully that would stop surprising him soon, it wasn't like he'd hit his head on the doorjamb or anything. He was nervous - okay, afraid.

Earlier, he'd decided to find an empty bathroom to look at himself in, rather than join the crush of people trying to get out. That had taken a little longer than he'd expected. He might have been dragging his feet a bit, putting it off. He'd known something would happen - maybe he was deluding himself, but it was like there was a wave above him, ready to crash down.

He would have liked to avoid it for a little bit longer. He knew he could. But something inside, almost impossible to make out at first, then louder and clearer to the point where it startled him, said ''No. No. That's not how it goes. Resolve internal crises before they impact performance.''

Anj closed his eyes, then opened them. He started talking, the words forming just before he said them. "I was born in - in Coronet City on Corellia. We moved to Imperial center when I was about three, and lived in a domicile in a shabby-genteel section, on a level that was patrolled enough to keep down the violence." He wanted to stop, this wasn't right - he'd been born in Flagstaff Arizona, they'd moved when he was almost four. "The sun - the sun was visible, there was natural light, but only at high noon. When it rained, and it did that a lot, the water came to us through sluices, and it was never clean." The memory hit him, as strong as any he'd ever had - walking through the marketplace with his mother, ten minutes after a storm had passed overhead, and the water had poured off the awning they ducked under, reflecting rainbows.

"No, that's not right." He made himself stop and shake away the memory of how oily the water was, its smell. His pulse was quickening. "I don't remember Arizona except as bright and red, we just have pictures of the little blue house." There had been holograms of Coronet City in the domicile, projecting on the walls. They weren't the shiny sanitized holos of famous or scenic places that got sold to tourists. His older brother had borrowed a holocam and recorded the scenes himself. "I- we lived in an apartment for a while. It snowed in the winter. First time I'd seen snow, and it made night less dark. It was wetter than I'd thought."

"Smelled a little like tin. Smelled like -" Anj rubbed his face with his gloved free hand, shifting his grip on his helmet with the other. He'd heard more than once that fresh snow smelled like tin, but he couldn't - Oh, Emperor, he remembered the landlord's kid, half a year older and always red-faced, showing up and asking if he'd mind wagering on which of the hired men would be the one to knock down the hawk-bat nest. Why not, he was a Corellian, right? "I, I made friends with a neighbor girl who never stopped telling me and Valerie that the - the show with the puppets was stupid and babyish. I wanted to impress her so I agreed, but I still watched it. Sometimes Valerie told her I was lying..."

This went on for some time, and he kept having the feeling that whatever he was fighting, he was losing. Anj paced, restless, sometimes with uncertainty and other times aggressively. Eventually he forced himself to stop and looked back at the mirror, this time looking into his reflection's eyes. His eyes were wide-open, worried, with irises dark enough that they were hard to distinguish from his pupils. Hadn't they been paler before this? Anj looked away, unsure.

"What happened?" he asked in a low voice, not quite a whisper. "I don't understand. It's like - wait, wait. Am I - am I ''talking'' to myself?" He was. "Emperor's bones," he said, the last two words coming out as a mild oath. He really wasn't in the habit of talking to himself, he knew that for sure. It was probably just to listen to his voice. He'd talked to himself at length right after rigging the voice amp the first time, feeling out how it made him sound. Her sound, at the time. No, wait, he'd done that the first time he'd put on a helmet at the Academy, too. Once he'd quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the the other time he'd read the helmet's instruction manual out loud.

He looked down, saw his hand trembling, and had to clench it into a fist to make it stop. He had to finish this. He just really, really didn't want to, and he wasn't sure what 'this' was or why it scared him. Maybe he could put it off for another minute.

Briskly, Anj used some paper towels to dry the counter where the sinks were, switching off a dribbling faucet at the same time, then set his helmet there and removed his robes, folding them quickly and with mechanical precision.

“Huh.” Despite their irregular shape, he’d folded them into a perfect square, flat and unwrinkled. And why had he bothered wiping down the counter first? Anj dropped his folded robes besides his helmet, deliberately letting a corner hang over the edge of the counter. Immediately he felt the nagging urge to adjust the robes, make them line up precisely, but it wasn’t very strong. Apparently he had a thing for neatness. He hoped it was neatness, and not some kind of cleaning mania.

Looking into the mirror again, Anj glanced over his armor. Red plating, the same crimson as his helmet and robes, with a thick textured bodysuit underneath. The bodysuit - the underarmor - was black, naturally, no sign of the armor weave visible. The plating was fashioned like the contours of a very well-defined muscular body. Better defined then he actually was and a serious display of narcissism, he knew, but ''he'' hadn’t designed the armor.

This was both distressing and a sight he'd seen nearly every day. ''That'' was what he had to finish. He had to get both stories to fit together. He couldn't just pick one - well, he ''could'', it would be easy, he could just be Anj, part of the Stormtrooper Corps since he'd volunteered at fifteen, which was younger than was officially allowed, eventually picked for Red Guard training on Yinchorr. He could pick that, let all the sketchy details fill in and flesh out, and be Anj of the 501st on a planet that was only vaguely familiar to him. The more he thought about that backstory, the more complex it would become. But he knew he shouldn't, he really, ''really'' shouldn't.

"Okay," he said quietly. "The obvious answer is that I was - I ''am'', still, Anj - ''Angela'', and this other stuff is new, but there's no way I can ignore it." He had to figure this out. Anj ran a gloved finger along the raised detailing on his pectorals, stopping as he realized what he was doing. He remembered making the armor with Ursala, one of the other Tampa Bay Red Guards - and he remembered getting it at the end of training, before being shipped off to a new post. Both felt real.

This would take some doing.

Anj paced a little more, then stretched out on the linoleum, resting weight only on his forearms and toes, and kept his abdomen taut, silently counting the seconds as his muscles burned. He couldn't reject it. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing was ever that simple. Still, there had to be something he could do.

Holding "plank" position was easy; even with the weight of the armor, he could stay like that for an hour, no trouble. Anj shifted position, put his palms against the floor, and started to push up and lower himself down in a steady rhythm, breathing easily.

Why one or the other? Why not both? Wouldn't that be ideal?

Could he even do that? Easy enough to ''think'' it, but...

A shredded bit of toilet paper scudded off across the linoleum tiles, blown by his breath, and Anj stopped as he realized that he'd just stretched out and started doing pushups on a bathroom floor. A women's bathroom, admittedly, and therefore not ''too'' awful, but still. He scrambled back to his feet as quickly as if he’d been ordered, and stared for the third time at his reflection.

This time he didn't look away, staring intently into the mirror, ignoring the discomfort, the awkward feeling that really he shouldn't be doing this. Every time he saw himself, it was a little easier.

And now - now, if he pushed away the visceral shock of seeing someone else and the other, smaller shock of recognition, and it did feel like he was pushing them back - now he honestly could tell himself that that face ''was'' familiar. That the nose had once been broken rather spectacularly and had for the most part healed straight. That the hair-fine scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, ''his'' dark eyebrow, was ''not'' from a training incident or an injury he'd picked up on duty, but a remainder of something incredibly stupid he’d done as a teenager. He could remember idly imagining a face like this, going with the fairly vague biography he’d made. Anj thought he'd sketched this face, or one like it, in a notebook.

In fact, to his surprise he looked just a little like his ex. Like Angela’s ex. Anj's ex. It wasn’t a ''major'' resemblance, but it was there, something about the bone structure and the texture of his close-cropped dark hair, though it wasn't curly. Oh, right - he'd been on that faces kick, filling up page after page of head studies. Since this had been when he, as Angela, had been engaged to Scott, and Scott hadn't objected to a little modeling, most of them reflected him somehow.

Anj was oddly relieved to find that there was still an echo of that old pain when he thought about Scott. Things just hadn't worked out between them. They'd left on friendly enough terms, yes, it had been almost two years and it was barely awkward anymore when they ran into each other, but there'd just been too much emotional investment for it to be painless.

It was weird, thinking of Scott when he looked like this, but almost reassuring.

Maybe he could do this after all. "I shouldn't worry about it," Anj told himself. He didn't dislike his voice. "Maybe if I just stop making a problem out of it - mind over matter, right?" There was still a blanket sense of unease, but he wasn't afraid now. He smiled tentatively, mostly to try out how it looked on his face. This didn't have to be bad. He'd - he'd try not to think of it as bad.

There would be time later to strip off every piece of armor and examine everything. For now – well, he ''knew'', but it wouldn’t hurt just to check. Anj found the seam in his underarmor and stretched it open. There was the dance belt thing keeping everything supported, and under it another piece of padded armor, common sense really, a protection that was smaller and not nearly as obvious as the codpiece worn by stormtroopers. And under ''that'' -

He wasn't sure if it was supposed to be - the angle was new, but it looked normal - he hadn't expected - right, well, Scott had been cut, and -

“…Yeah. I definitely went in the wrong refresher. Bathroom. Whatever it's called.” Feeling a little embarrassed, Anj straightened his armor and exhaled firmly. "I don't think I'll do that again for a while." Not that he would have a choice; his bladder had to fill eventually. But it could wait.

"No more periods. Huh. I'm going to have to get new clothes. ''All'' new clothes. It's probably going to be a comprehensive shopping spree." A daunting thought. As Angela, ever since he was a little girl he'd hated shopping for new outfits, since it was ''never'' quick or simple. He'd hated it vocally enough that it had become a family joke. Somehow he doubted that had changed - and, for whatever reason, this was another oddly comforting thought. There was a little pronoun confusion and what could only be called a double set of memories, but Angela and Anj were the same person at heart. He hoped.

He still felt weird, but it was a relief to be sure that whatever else was going on, this was a convention in Florida, and he had walked in as a woman in costume. In Red Guard costume. The furries he’d seen – the same thing had happened to ''them.'' It was safe to assume it had also happened to the people he’d passed on the way ''here'', the ones who’d been rushing for the exits or milling in confusion. Had it happened to everyone? In the world, or locally, or just ''here''?

He’d become a real Red Guard; his forcepike had become a real forcepike, the biography had filled out extensively, and so had... other things. The furries had become actual, living animal people. The image, the dream, had become reality. Although, really, he’d never longed to have more than the image, he’d spent a lot of idle thought on it but never felt that he was ''supposed'' to be a Red Guard, really. And – well, it followed logically that the pitcher man hadn’t been more than the image before, because who could ''possibly'' want to be a pitcher? There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

… What had happened to the rest of the squad? To his friends, to SL-1984? Had this happened to ''them'', too? Anj felt a sharp, unsettling lurch in the pit of his stomach, as all the unease he'd managed to dispell came back in a lump. Why wasn’t he with them? ''How'' could he have thought it was a good idea to leave them in this unfamiliar territory? He had no idea where they were, so why wasn’t he out looking for them?

“Why do I feel so ''guilty'' about this? I don’t know what in the Emperor’s name they’re doing, this isn’t exactly covered in training!” Anj blinked. “Not training. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Going to have to do ''something''.” But what, ''that'' was the question. Where to start? He wasn't entirely sure where ''he'' was, let alone any of the others!

Restless again, Anj made a quick circuit of the bathroom. He’d chosen well; when he’d passed this place early in the day there had been an impressive line, but everyone’s priorities had shifted well before he got here.

All stalls were open, and the bathroom was empty – he wouldn’t have removed his helmet and started talking to himself if it hadn’t been – but it didn’t hurt to check.

He found it rather disheartening when he had trouble reading a piece of graffiti. It was scratched deeply into the side of a stall, in large, relatively neat letters that were easy to distinguish, but it still took longer than he’d have liked before the squiggles resolved into “ADRIAN WAS HERE”. Apparently he now had trouble reading English.

Otherwise, the only thing of note was a pile of clothing just inside the handicapped stall. The shirt at the top of the pile had what looked like a long elastic bandage, ragged at the tip, trailing out of the neck opening. Very gingerly, touching only with the very tips of his gloved fingers, Anj separated and folded the clothes neatly, stacking them together on the linoleum. He told himself as he did it that it was a courtesy. The other end of the bandage was wrapped around a bra left inside the shirt, for some reason that Anj couldn't fathom. Crumpled under those and sitting atop a dusty pair of sandals were short pants with panties inside - and in ''those'' was a winged Maxi pad with just a little blood on it.

Just seeing that made Anj feel incredibly uncomfortable and voyeuristic. If women had a set of bathroom rules, hiding all evidence of periods was one of the big ones. It seemed like that rule had carried over - he was embarrassed for whoever this was, and entirely unwilling to touch it. And yet Anj couldn’t help thinking that if the clothing had simply been removed, it would just be heaped together, underthings on top. This looked like more like the occupant had dematerialized – or shrunk dramatically. Yet it was completely empty, and he hadn't seen any-

''-Wait. '' I ''wouldn't try and approach someone who looked like me, if this happened. And she could've got out earlier, maybe even when I opened the door. I wasn't exactly in a state to notice. Whatever this is about, it's going to stay a mystery. One that I'm glad isn't happening to'' me.

A light sort of twitch traveling up his spine brought Anj out of his thoughts. “Right,” he mused under his breath as he returned to the sink. “Weakly Force-Sensitive, untrained and not good for much more than intuition and a warning. Wrote that in the bio. Inexplicable spinal sensations mean something is happening, and if it's mild like this-“

He could hear it, tinny and faint, coming from his helmet on the counter. It must have tuned in on an active frequency. Without hesitation Anj took it up and settled it over his head, the insides tight against his face. The voice over the com became clear. Female, clear, commanding, and with a bit of an accent that sounded vaguely British - No. Not British. ''Imperial.''

“-ling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, report for instruction, report for instruction, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr. Repeat; this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st-“

Words could not have expressed how Anj’s heart leaped on hearing the officer’s voice. He wasn’t alone! Almost as fast as he could think it, he had gone to the specified frequency.

“This is TR-1407 of Tampa Bay Squadron.” Relief loosened his tongue in spite of training. “And I am ''very'' glad to hear from you! Orders, sir?”

The voice that responded over the comlink wasn’t the same one, although if anything the Imperial accent was stronger; this was a harried-sounding older man. “You may change your mind when you see this, Royal Guard. Get to the rendezvous outside of the structure. We’re on the blacktop rectangle to the southwest.”

== Garrett ==

Nothing was happening. He supposed that there must be commotion going around - he and Steph hadn't been the only ones, right? He'd seen something like that before falling over, right? - but he couldn't hear anything. Literally. It was silent. Now and again he felt what were sort of like faint tremors going up into his body. Maybe he'd gone deaf, at least on the outside. Inside it was different.

Experimentally, he swung a hind leg. It hit something. He swung again, harder. Yes - there ''was'' a sound, but it was so faint! Distant, like it was several rooms away.

Now he charged his heavies, waiting the long seconds until they were good and hot, and fired into the wall. The minor explosion that resulted ''was'' louder, but again - faint and far away. The sound of both heavy cannons charging and going off had been perfectly clear - it was the same oddly high laser ''tcheeer'' shriek he remembered from watching Empire Strikes Back - which he supposed made sense, since the sound could probably travel through him and to whatever worked like ears now.

He couldn't breathe. Garrett would have given a lot right now to be sure if he'd been stuck on an inhale or an exhale - he couldn't tell, it felt like both and neither. Mildly uncomfortable.

There was... something... related to the intercom, somewhere in a console in his cabin, but not as intimately a part of him as the intercom. It was picking up something. Probably had been for a while. A signal? Several signals?

''"-xty-two is down!" "I'm still functional, sir. It knocked me over, that's all." "Get back over here - oh, no, it's coming back, Force preserve us-"''

''"-SAID HOLD YOUR FIRE! Damn you, Thirteen, it's just a bird." "Sorry! Sorry! I couldn't help myself, it just came up so fast." "No harm done. My lord-?" "The Lieutenant was ri-"''

''"-see, I told you, the flashing orange bit is its weak point!" "What, like a videogame? Isn't that awfully convenient?" "Don't give me lip. It keeps doing that swing-and-dodge thing, then you can see the orange bit. Cover me, I'll-"''

He cycled through a handful of channels or frequencies or whatever, listening to voices, until he found ones that seemed vaguely familiar, though they were distorted enough that he couldn't quite figure out where he'd heard them before.

''"-nd telling us where you went in such a hurry, ''sir?'' And how you managed to lose half an arm? I can see the sparks from here." "Pike, you would not believe me if I told you. Count yourself fortunate that I found you, I can proba- ah, more of them. How charming." "Fusst! Can you take them?" "Certainly I could, but saving you is a bigger priority than killing animals. Stay where you are.” "You're going to play at being a ''troop transport?!'' "Yes, if you want to put it that way. Do you have a better idea?"''

Without warning, the voices dissolved into gibberish and white noise, a lot louder. He could sort of make out words in that mess, a panicked babbling. This might not even be the same channel. Alarmed, Garrett shut that part of himself off.

What had that been? What the ''hell'' had that been? What was going on out there?! What had happened?! Beneath the aching emptiness of his insides, along his belly, Garrett's drive motor was running hard and fast. Like he was breathing hard and his heart was racing - except, of course, that they weren't. He was a relatively thin set of rigid metal plates wrapped around air and fuel and a walking apparatus, and even that motor under his belly, the closest thing he had to guts, was riddled with spaces, gaps, hatches for mechanics to get into. All of them so empty.

There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do. Gradually, his drive motor slowed, until once again it was an almost subliminal hum. He lay there, wishing he had eyes to close.

He couldn't breathe. He did have the feeling that he hardly noticed that when he was paying attention to something else. But there wasn't a lot else to even think about.

Nothing continued to happen. Garrett felt that horrible emptiness inside and tried not to laugh or start whimpering again. Something must have happened to Steph. Something had got him, maybe. He'd turned into something else. He'd gotten lost. Or maybe... maybe he'd just run off and abandoned Garrett.

Garrett pushed that last thought away. It wouldn't happen. He wouldn't have been abandoned. Not by Steph. They'd known each other since Orientation, and although they weren't roommates they shared about half of their classes. They'd - Garrett was straight, that one time when they'd both gotten very drunk at the end of Finals Week did ''not'' count, and Steph had said Garrett wasn't his type, but that didn't matter. Steph was still one of Garrett's best friends, the only one who always pitched in when he had some new idea, the one he went to whenever a wasp got into his dorm while his roommate was out. If he had anyone who wouldn't leave him, it was Steph.

Of course, the thought came back. Damn it, he was an ''AT-AT''. He couldn't even talk. Good God. Why ''wouldn't'' Steph just walk away?

And he was so ''empty''. Static hissed softly through his command section and the big troop cabin, falling silent only when he made the intercom stop. Laugh, cry, he wanted to do both and couldn't manage either properly. Damn it, he tried to say. Static.

It made sense, he supposed, that he couldn't speak. Maybe he could - there ''was'' that intercom - but he had no idea how to make words without a throat or vocal chords. He tried again, and managed to chop the burst up. Hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet. Not as noisy or intense as the laughter had been, louder than the whimpering.

''Damn'' it. HISS-quiet-hiss-quiet. Now he could sense the mechanisms in the speakers. They were entirely unfamiliar. How ''did'' radios and speakers of any kind turn signals back into voices, sounds, music? He had no idea. Nothing to do but try.

Garrett was lost for some time, trying to bully his intercom into producing anything that wasn't static. He made progress, if slowly - managing a few vowel sounds, almost drowned by the hiss. Still, he didn't miss the movement outside.

First, there came the bees. When the first few appeared, zigzagging up near the ceiling, he had trouble figuring out what they were. They seemed as big as Thanksgiving turkeys and almost as weighty, dark wings moving in a blur. The first handful were high up and spaced out, moving purposefully from one side of his vision to the other. As time passed more and more bees passed through, sometimes several at a time. Garrett practiced what sounded vaguely like an "ah" and watched them, feeling his drive motor start to speed up again. He didn't like bees all that much.

Soon enough it was a whole ''cloud'' of passing bees, all headed in the same direction. The air was thick with them, along the floor as well as the ceiling, and there were enough that the droning of their collective wings was going up his legs and through his hull into the inside. He could actually hear them. It almost managed to be loud.

Many bees flying low smacked into him - he was surprised to find that he could feel them hitting, the insects were ''strong'' - and crawled up his body before taking off again. He couldn't quite see them doing that, or feel them crawling across his surface, but it was a logical assumption, and that was what the ones on his legs were doing. There were so many bees that he could have hit a few dozen just by swinging a leg, but he didn't dare. He could have fired and taken out a lot more, he really wanted to try it, but that would just make them mad, wouldn't it? They were ''everywhere'', there were ''thousands'' of them. He knew, he ''knew'' that he couldn't be stung, but-

Garret made a very odd sound over his intercom, a combination of a high pure synthetic tone and an "ahhhkssshhksshhh" that quickly devolved into furious static. A bee had crawled onto his viewport, seemingly from nowhere, he could see the segments of its wide-spread legs and the yellow hairs coming off it, and oh God it had a pointy red tonguelike thing gleaming between two mandibles, and agggh, it ''licked'' him, and its two antennae were tapping at him... He couldn't feel it at all, but that didn't help, and even though it was many many times smaller than him it was still a GIANT BEE climbing around-

Bee claws on his hatches! He felt ''that''. They were crawling, oh God how could that tickle ''and'' itch, and he couldn't feel their clawed legs ''around'' the hatches or ''on'' them, but at the edges, where they were sealed shut, ''there'' he felt them, and they were ''everywhere''! He was covered in them. They were going to gouge one of the hatches open and ''get inside!'' His drive motor was picking up, throbbing a pitch that started low and built higher, he couldn't just lie still anymore but he couldn't ''do'' anything-

And then the one on his viewport took off, and there were fewer bees in the air, and he didn't feel claws on his hatches anymore. Barely a minute later and it was back to a thin stream of the things moving across the ceiling. Soon enough there were none.

The silence as his drive motor wound back down again was deafening. Garrett had to wonder if he'd just imagined that. But no - there was a little streak of residue, barely visible, on his viewport. Disgusting. God, he didn't like bees. He'd been pleased about them dying off until he'd found that that just meant more ''wasps'', which were worse, if anything.

How was it, he had to ask himself, that he could essentially see outwards from his skin - no, not skin, more like a hull - but he hadn't been able to see any of the bees crawling on his body? He'd looked down his legs and seen them, and he'd seen the one on his viewport from beneath its six clawed feet. Why none of the others?

Vision as he had it now, interior and exterior, was - well, it wasn't a set of alternating views, nor was it overlaid, and he didn't know how this was working at all. It ''was'' working, at any rate. Everything seemed to be in full color and three dimensions.

Fuel reserves were now at ninety-eight point zero four eight one six percent. Had he been topped up when this - when this started? He didn't know. He hadn't checked it before. Right now he was on standby; powered up and burning fuel, but not going anywhere. Even if he figured out how to shut down a few systems, being active at ''all'' drained the reserves. Slowly, yes, but it was happening, and speeding up his drive motor like he'd been doing only hastened the process, as fuel moved up out of the cylindrical tank and was consumed. Garrett had the sudden thought that he would lie here immobile until he had either drained the last milliliter of fuel or he voluntarily shut himself down. He didn't know what would happen then. It was not a pleasant thought.

== Help ==

Time passed, long enough for Garrett to get too lonely and restless to keep trying to figure out his speakers. He wasn't used to having nothing to do. Usually, if nothing else presented itself, he'd start doodling on stray paper, trying to conceptualize various things he'd heard or thought of over the course of the day. Sometimes he'd get lucky and inspiration would strike. And then of course there would be the breathlessly fast calculation of taking an idea and making it ''work''... He wasn't used to being bored.

It wasn't like he could even hold a pencil, Garrett thought. He moved the toe flaps on one foot - hinge joints, all four of them, no other joints, limited flexibility up or down, he could move them independently, but that made little difference. These feet were made for walking, and that was all they could do. Pretty close to useless.

It didn't help that he was almost painfully aware of all his internal surfaces, and he kept coming back again and again to how utterly empty and alone he was. He couldn't even quite muster up any interest in how the hell his body worked, and it seemed like every few seconds he was reminded that he wasn't breathing, like a tic. This was miserable.

So although he didn't see Steph at the feet of the two people who came into view - wherever he was, he didn't seem to be having great luck - he was so desperate to see someone that he almost didn't mind.

They were incredibly tall, walking on thick pillarlike legs, huge and fleshy. Garrett took several seconds to realize that they were human at all. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around that. Humans didn't get anywhere near that big, and although logically he knew that these probably weren't any larger than normal, they still ''looked'' absolutely enormous. If he had been up on all fours, they would still have been considerably taller than him, though all in all somewhat less massive.

Garrett really only assumed they were human at all by their hands. Meaty, both broad and long, with skin covered with a network of fine grooves, a little puffy. Five unique digits, each placed and sized differently with wrinkled skin on the joints, each tapering, rounded, and tipped with a sort of curved scale. They looked like alien appendages until he saw knuckles and a standing vein in the back of one, and lines in a palm; then, something sort of ''clicked'', and he realized how they looked very much like human hands. Grossly enormous human hands, yes, as long as Steph's body, or almost. Still human.

If they had human hands, they were humans, right? They were just so out-of-scale, looming up cone-shaped, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, that he couldn't quite think of them as people, only pick out things like hands and gigantic sloping feet. It took some bewildered staring before he could even recognize that the fibrous stuff hanging from their bodies was ''clothing''.

Then, he saw past the size and realized that, even if they weren't any bigger than usual, they would still have attracted stares from anyone with eyes. The two had stopped within his sight and were now talking animatedly together. He couldn't hear them at ''all'', Garrett realized unhappily. They weren't loud enough for sound to get into his interior. Maybe if he opened a hatch... okay, how exactly did he do that? It wasn't like moving his head or legs, that was for sure.

The smaller of the two, the top of its - his? - head arrayed with a glinting mass of coarse fibers that might have been hair, Garrett could barely see it from here, had two vast flapping leathery things like wings or sails on either side of its head.

There was something wrong with that one's face, like its nose had melted into a gray wrinkled thing that moved, like a tentacle or a tail. Above that, it had ''four'' eyes. Two were set into its head with a bristling ridge above each, the other two were wide-set, gleaming, and very dark. Maybe this one wasn't human after all. It was twisting around, gesturing, generally looking unsettled.

The taller one, and now Garrett could see that it was ''considerably'' larger, was a little more normal, if he could judge. Its eyes were similar to the closer-set pair on the deformed one's face, and he supposed that the bristly ridges were eyebrows. The skin that wasn't covered by hanging folds of cloth was a very pale, almost chalky color. This one had bent its forelegs... no, arms, they had to be arms... and crossed them one over the other.

In a fit of whimsy, Garret decided to call them Mutant and Big Guy. Why not? It wasn't like they'd overhear him and take offense. He was starting to feel a growing sense of unreality. Being unable to put a couple of humans or almost-humans into perspective was just odd.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't real, after all. It just didn't make enough sense. If he was supposed to be an AT-AT, why could he fit into a room? What was up with that thing that had knocked him over, the red thing that had looked so much like the Kool-Aid Man? And why was a rabbit-bug thing telling him that it was Steph?

Garrett knew that he'd already run through part of this, at least. But the idea that he'd passed out in his cardboard shell from a nasty combination of spray paint fumes and an accidental dose of some illegal substance, and was now having a weird dream of epic proportions was - well, it was comforting. Or maybe he was awake, but hallucinating a wildly distorted version of events.

Mutant and Big Guy seemed to be wrapping up their conversation. Their Easter Island-esque heads were doing much less side-to-side swiveling and much more tilting up and down, and gestures were far less expansive. Abruptly, Garret made up his mind. What did he have to lose, if this was or wasn't a dream?

He swung a leg forwards and back.

Big Guy, moving ridiculously fast, got between Garrett and Mutant, bending its limbs like it was about to leap. Mutant moved, but stopped and backed away when Big Guy opened its mouth and did something with it. Garrett had never learned to lipread. What he could see of lips and mouth moving was weird and creepy, like he'd stumbled into the Uncanny Valley. Was that a matter of scale, or...

No one moved for a long moment, until Garrett finally jerked what used to be his head. Now he was being stared at. He moved his command section to point in their general direction and swung a leg forwards, trying to go for 'pathetic'. It wasn't exactly acting. He wished he could heave a sigh.

Big Guy did something with its mouth again, directing it at either Garrett or Mutant. Mutant crept still further away, the sails on its head flapping. Big Guy turned and followed it, twisting around weirdly to look back at Garrett. They stopped at the very edge of his vision, which apparently didn't extend all that far, to gesture and flap their mouths at each other some more. Eventually they stepped out of view entirely.

Garrett waited. Time passed, he had no idea how much. Long enough that he went back to trying to figure out his intercom. He made a heartening leap of progress when he figured out how to make and adapt the synthesized beep, though at his best he sounded about as clear as a toddler lisping into a poorly-kept drive-through speaker. He could only even do ''that'' if he focused very hard on the syllables and went slowly, true, and what wasn't a hiss came out in a robotic high-toned monotone, but progress was progress. What would he do if - ''when'' - he finally got to the point of speaking clearly and with some inflection?

He could try and recreate his voice. And... and other people's voices. Then he could - what? Reenact campy old TV shows?

It didn't get to that point, thankfully. Garrett thought about counting the seconds and decided against it, not really wanting to measure how long it took, but he only felt the I'm-not-breathing tic four times before Big Guy came back and did - well, did ''something''.

Big Guy had sort of... folded up, Garrett guessed, legs practically folded in on themselves, somehow not falling over despite the awkwardness of the position. It was... no, not sitting, couldn't be sitting, not kneeling either... crouching? Yes, that was it. He couldn't help noticing that its legs were ''considerably'' thicker than either his legs or the armored tunnel that had used to be his neck, and it was crouching ''within'' his legspan, looming up over him. Stretching an arm over his side, and from the little vibration that Garrett vaguely felt in his hull, the probably-human was dragging a hand over-

What the hell? Had it just ''stroked'' him? Now Big Guy's mouth was moving, and damn it, Garrett wished he could just ''say'' that he couldn't hear or understand any of that, say it and actually be heard, anyway -

Why not? ''Just help me up.'' Damn the static, he could do better than that, he'd managed-

They came in from the edge of his vision, walking with startlingly quick, fluid motions, as if moving was easy despite all that bulk. Two, three - no, ''four'' of them, like flexible animated towers fidgeting and breathing and pendulumming effortlessly from one leg-column to another in a walk that seemed at every step to be a barely-averted fall. He saw the flapping sails and knew that one of them was Mutant, but he didn't recognize any of the others at all. One didn't have anything like the pillar-like body structure of the others, carrying most of its mass almost horizontally.

They went from the edge of his vision to looming up over him, and static started to hiss and crackle through Garrett's interior. Too big, too close!

Heat, moisture on his right fore footpad! Weight - slight weight, nothing near the right amount, none on the others, and yes he knew he was already down but that sensation spelled FALLING! Garrett tried to swing his legs, tried on some instinctual impulse to fire. But his legs stayed locked still, toeflaps flicking madly, only one of them hitting anything at all, and the power to all four blasters was being leached away as quickly as he could route it in.

He felt like a heavy soft blanket had been pressed over him. ''Him'', not this half-insensate walker body, he could almost ''feel'' it wrapped over and over. Like it was between him and everything else. He felt his drive motor fight something, grinding alarmingly for a moment, and then slow, winding down as rapidly as it had sped up. Garrett saw now that Big Guy was - was ''gripping a footpad'' in one massive appendage. That was why he'd felt, was still feeling, some sensation there. It wasn't moving to wrench it off, it was just... holding it. Okay, that was weird.

Big Guy, still folded up, was mouthing at the new giants, who were no smaller than before but somehow less threatening, now. Garrett found that he could feel the vibrations of speech, faintly, through the hand on his footpad. He still couldn't understand it, annoyingly enough. Still, he knew for certain now that Big Guy was talking.

Garrett also found that he couldn't move his legs at all, just the toeflaps. Nothing was touching them, and they were working fine, he could feel it, they just couldn't move. Something invisible had a hold of him. Whatever it was, he knew, he knew that if it could slow his drive motor and persuade his legs to still, if he couldn't resist it, it could probably pop his hatches and and bare his interior and take him apart bit by bit. But it wasn't. It was holding him still. Very, very still. He found himself adjusting the seating in his command cockpit just to see if he still could.

He was calm now. Very calm, disassociated even. He had to wonder about that firing reflex. It hadn't been a conscious attempt at all, which was pretty inconvenient - he'd fired earlier to see if he could hear it, yes, but he wasn't quite sure how. Well, no sense worrying, was there? Garrett couldn't seem to muster either concern or a great deal of interest. It could be his drive motor, he supposed. It was running ''very'' slowly now. He knew that he ought to be nervous about that. If the computers in what had been his head were really serving as his brain, they needed to be powered. Not much he could do about that, though, was there?

They were talking over him. The giants. Big Guy, not moving, seemed to be trying to direct the others, who were on his other side, around his back. He couldn't see quite as well from his back-side than from his flank-sides or belly-side, but this was close enough that it didn't matter much.

Garrett watched with mild interest. They were all on two legs; one carried itself horizontally and had inexplicable projections that he guessed were a long S-curved neck and rigid tail. And most of it was coated with branching filaments that could be hair, or maybe feathers. Feathers - yes, on the tail and along the limbs they were shaped like feathers, with central shafts. The rest of it, as far as he could tell, had some kind of overlapping armor made of keratinous scales, most of them smaller than a meter across. Something about it was familiar... pictures... a movie?

Oh! He knew what it was! A feathery dinosaur! Maybe a raptor, he wasn't sure, but definitely a bird-dinosaur. Bigger than any dinosaur ought to be, of course, and from here its proportions looked terribly off, but it was recognizable. The movements of its curved neck and wedge head, small from this perspective, were even faster and more sudden than what he'd seen the others doing.

His eyes went - no, he didn't have eyes, did he? Or the sensation of having them, to roll and flick wetly from one thing to another and blink, that was gone. Weird. His ''attention'' went to the others - he was moderately sure that they were human, or rather, human''like'', just distorted by some quirk of his vision. And by the fact that part of him ''knew'' that he was over twenty meters tall, and no human could so much as see over his footpad without something to stand on. How was it that he could recognize and accept a live dinosaur that looked several times bigger than the T. Rex skeleton at the Chicago Field museum, but not humans at the same scale?

Well, Big Guy's hand - good God, each finger was a slab of meat and bone as thick as the kind of conduit that people could creep through - was still on his footpad, but there were no more vibrations going through it, and after looking around quickly Garrett had to conclude that the others had stopped too. They were ''very'' close. Okay, now they were bending, folding over, now they were touching him, he couldn't feel it but it was a safe assumption... his drive motor kept to the same slow pace, he was still wrapped up tightly, calm and motionless and a little bit distant.

How was this going to work? He wasn't built like an animal - he couldn't be tipped onto his belly, not with legs like these - were they planning to just carry him out? Surely he was too heavy for that. And even though he couldn't see any doorways, he was pretty sure that he couldn't be carried out of one.

Great huge hands, some of them clawed, got under him. He wasn't lying entirely flat, or they wouldn't have been able to do that. Big Guy took the hand that wasn't gripping his footpad and laid it on his side, big pale fingers splayed. That hardly seemed like the thing to do, if he was being lifted! For some reason that struck him as funny, but he didn't quite laugh.

His view ''lurched''. The pocked grid of the ceiling wobbled and seemed to get bigger. Simultaneously the faint sensation along his left side, the dull feeling where his flank lay against whatever he'd fallen on, went away. Garrett didn't have any inner ears now, so a few vaguely confused seconds passed before he realized that they were related, and together meant that he was being lifted up. He really couldn't tell how hard they were working - for that matter, the four of them, including Mutant, were shoulder-to-shoulder at his back, and Big Guy's hands hadn't moved.

He was ''above'' whatever he'd been on, now, and he could see it now, though Garrett still couldn't tell what it was. It looked like maybe four or five meters, but it was probably a lot less, if he was right about not actually being larger than a man. He'd stopped moving. Now what?

Big Guy was talking yet again, and the other giants moved around - two stayed at his back, the dinosaur stood at his vehicle bay, and on his other side Mutant positioned itself so that Garrett's command section was between its arm and its body. Each of them stuck its forearms under him - somehow, he'd kept completely steady during all that, like they hadn't been bearing his weight at all. Now, surrounded on all four sides, he had the sudden bizarre thought that they were planning to use him as a conference table.

Knowing full well that he couldn't be heard, Garrett still found himself trying to ask them what they were doing. Then Big Guy took its hand off of his flank.

Immediately he dipped and rocked, the view shuddering like he was in an earthquake, and by minute unsteady increments his body crept back up and leveled, although he was still tipping legwards and trembling. Garrett felt his drive motor intensify by some tiny increment, only to slow back down. He couldn't seem to worry much. There just wasn't enough power in his system for that.

He noticed, then, that the giants who were not Big Guy were disturbed. Strained, breathing heavily, shoulders hunched, moisture beading on oily skins that were flushing or paling. He couldn't help but wonder how eyes that bulged like that didn't just pop and run down out of their sockets. This took effort, evidently. The dinosaur was a little different, head thrown back on its long neck, mouth open. It had great pointed teeth. From his other flank he saw bent knees and massive far-spread feet.

Big Guy kept one hand steady on Garrett's footpad and reached underneath him with its free hand. There was something in it, something that gleamed. Some kind of tool? Despite the feeling of being under wraps, Garrett's found himself interested. What could that-

A beam of ''solid light'' just ''shot'' out of the thing, and for one long not-quite-panicked moment Garrett didn't see that it was finite, coming to a clearly defined tip, under twelve meters long. And it stayed attached to the emitter, too, not blazing off to burn through things like a turbolaser bolt. The thing was white-cored and blue along the edges, and he had ''no idea'' what it was.

Moving uncannily fast, as usual, Big Guy kept its hand wrapped around the emitter and manipulated the beam, holding it horizontal and passing it down, ''through'' whatever Garrett had been lying on. Smoke or steam curled up and dissipated. When the glowing beam was brought back up - moving quickly, too quickly; what if Big Guy made a mistake? - and moved aside, he saw that the mystery material had been ''cut'', and cleanly. The beam tool was like a propane torch, but big enough to make the body of a cruiseliner and without the facemask and sparks and burning.

There was a bit of new input from his air filters. An increase in... what was that, ozone?

Big Guy kept at it and chopped the stuff into long, somewhat rectangular shapes. Whatever it was Garrett had fallen over onto, part of it was a very solid slab of something weird and porous that smoked very little when cut, at least compared to the woven stuff that he thought was probably cloth.

Then the creature's fingers moved on the tool, and the blue-tinted beam sort of evaporated and was gone. Big Guy started clearing away the cut slabs, barely seeming to touch them - just sort of gesturing and causing them to whisk off. That couldn't be possible, could it?

What ''was'' that beam thing, Garrett had to ask himself. It seemed like something he ought to know, but what was the ''point'' to making a cutting rod half the size of a telephone pole?! Some kind of mining tool maybe? Although that train of thought seemed interesting, and he felt like he was missing something obvious, he had to let it go. Drive motor was a little too sluggish to keep it up.

The debris was more or less cleared, revealing... some kind of bumpy ground covering. Big Guy's free hand, minus the beam tool, came back to Garrett's flank, and by the vibrations said something. Something in his balance shifted, and the four giants straining to hold him up pulled away almost as one. Garrett didn't have to strain to see them as human to read the relief. He was very heavy.

...Which left him rather inexplicably floating in midair. He flicked his toe pads a little. He wasn't going to worry about it, but Big Guy was hardly at an angle to hold him up. Particularly alone. Although this was an odd time to notice it, Garrett saw, now, that there were no fibery hairs coming off Big Guy's domed head - instead, in the skin, there seemed to be bold faded-blue stripes running back over his skull; one really thick one over each eyebrow, a thinner one starting near each ear. Weird.

He was lifting up now, the hand gripping his footpad never faltering. Up... ten meters, thirteen, fifteen... he knew if he were to fall now, from here, at less than his full height, he would be seriously damaged, certainly more than simply falling over. No sense in worrying. Up... Big Guy was standing straight now, arms shifting position, still gripping steadily. It said something, and in response Mutant and one of the others, not the dinosaur, came closer and touched Garrett again, clutching at his hull.

"Ohhhhh..." He was surprised at how clearly the uneasy word came out, but now - now he was being turned, like a turtle flipped on its back, and it made him very uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't have inner ears - even so, he ''felt'' his insides shifting as things went from bulkhead to deck, and it was a weird feeling. It reminded him - and with all this excitement he'd almost managed to forget, too! - that he had no lungs or other organs and there was a great hollow cavity sitting in him, all but empty. Distant feeling or no distant feeling, that was unpleasant.

Still, he was being turned over, increment by increment. He was almost at the standing point now. Big Guy's hand slipped away from his footpad, and he rotated the last few degrees - slowly eased down, and his toeflaps were all sticking outwards as far as they could, and TOUCHDOWN!

He felt it as a sort of ''chunk'' as his weight came down on all four footpads, and something above the kneejoints telescoped slightly. The weird feeling of distance evaporated, and he found that he could move again. His drive motor sped up by some tiny increment. Garrett briefly forgot that he couldn't sigh, and had another weird moment where he tried to breathe but couldn't find the right equipment.

It felt so good to have his footpads on the ground! He pressed his toeflaps into it, feeling its bumpiness and its give, getting the sense that it was slightly uneven but level underneath. He was pretty sure that what looked like a landscape of weird, fibrous alien moss was really carpet. It was a good surface. Solid. Stable. Now he could move. Now he could ''walk.''

Big Guy was talking again, and the assorted weird creatures were backing off, still moving with the kind of fluid speed that made him nervous, but moving ''away'' from him, so he didn't feel crowded. He had to appreciate that. Better to think about this unexpected consideration, and not what life was going to be like if he panicked every time people who were not Big Guy stood next to him.

During a pause Garrett endeavored to bob his head minutely, although he had no idea what was being said. Even if he'd learned to lip-read, even though the giant had his big blocky face tilted downwards, at this angle Big Guy's most prominent features were his chin and the underside of his nose. He was like a tower, the kind they topped with turrets and left to guard cities.

Big Guy said something, very short this time. Garrett head-bobbed again and was either rewarded or chastised by muscles tightening under the maybe-human's skin; he thought it could be a frown. Big Guy leaned down and in close, so that his mouth and nose and eyes filled Garrett's command viewport, and said something else, moving his mouth with slow, deliberate exaggeration. There were some tiny bubbles gleaming in that wet mouth, and a bit of discoloration on at least one of the teeth, and oh God the pores in that pale skin, and the capillaries under it, and the barely-visible clear hairs scattered about - ugh. Whoever said that beauty was skin deep had never looked too close.

Garrett did nothing, vaguely wishing he could blink, and felt his command cockpit get stared through for a second time. Whatever Big Guy was looking for, he probably didn't find it, because he breathed out in a long stream that fogged Garrett's viewport and reared back up to his full height. A big hand came up and very lightly smacked Garrett on the moveable command section - ''thump'' pause lift ''thump'' pause lift, light but enough to get his head to move - and it might have been an attack, some of his systems certainly thought so, but he kind of doubted it.

Something came through with the thumps - or had they been a pat on the head? - a general feel of well-wishing. Damn it, this was frustrating. ''Almost'' communication! What if he tried shooting into the wall, writing something that wa - no, no, bad idea, he'd burn through too much of his fuel and it probably wouldn't even look like a word. And he didn't have anything like enough articulation to scratch letters with his feet.

Big Guy turned and walked away at a speed that still looked ridiculous, a tiny tremor going up Garrett's footpads with each step. He had to have phenomenal shock absorbers in those monster boots; another AT-AT would have had half that stride and more than twice the impact, even on this fibery surface. Very quickly, surprisingly so, the maybe-human was gone, and this time he probably wasn't coming back.

"Dahhhschhhn hhit." Hey, that had practically been comprehensible! Garrett grabbed on to that tidbit of accomplishment, determined to stop moping. He was on all fours now. He could walk, he could get out. He ''would'' get out. Everything else would have to wait.

The convention center as he saw it was a labyrinthine monstrosity built for long-limbed fast-moving giants. He was very vague on exactly where he was or how to get out; by now there probably wasn't anyone to follow. Maybe if he'd been quicker-witted earlier. Ah well. He took a couple of test steps, kicking aside some of the debris he'd been lying on.

Walking was - well, it was different. Taken one way, it was much, ''much'' more deliberate. He had to consciously lift, swing, and plant each footpad in turn, which was a bit complicated since he had four of them and they were all new to him. Not damaged, at least, and he probably had to count that as a stroke of luck, since looking back at when he'd lost his balance and fallen over he wasn't sure how he'd been knocked off his footpads without wrenching them or at least losing toeflaps. Taken the other way, he could set a course, which involved picking a point within his vision and doing something that felt a little like blinking. Or maybe double-clicking. There really wasn't a good human analog. Course-setting was less deliberate and he could set multiple points to reach in turn, but to get around obstacles he had to either cancel the distant set point and make new ones or manually take control, step around things, and let whatever walked him along a course work again.

There was a problem with this. He had a major design flaw - not all of the consoles in and around his cockpit were essential, but even the ones that didn't do something like control his feet or internal temperature used up a lot of power. Particularly one of them - he didn't know what it did, but it was a significant drain. So significant that when he was walking for any serious length of time, either deliberately or along a set course, he had to keep his drive motor at its highest safe output to feed the walking apparatus, the consoles that had something to do with them, "housekeeping" - life support and lighting, which he couldn't seem to shut off - and the mystery console. He wouldn't be able to generate the power to fire his lasers, not on top of all the rest.

Well, from the little he'd seen before being knocked over, he had to conclude that this was a very dangerous place now. He should have had a durasteel hull no thinner than half a meter thick at any point, he should have been close to invincible, but for some reason he was barely larger than a big man, and his hull was perilously thin. Thin enough to let some sound travel through the air into his interior. Although somehow he hadn't been found by anything more lethal than a swarm of bees, he couldn't count on that luck holding. He had to protect himself. And what was the harm in neglecting one mystery console? It couldn't be essential. The thing was connected to the other consoles, but nothing else.

Garrett prepared to move in earnest, and felt more fuel piping into channels deep in his drive system, down in what was left of his guts under the gaping void of his interior. All of his other systems downshifted and fluctuated until they readjusted. He felt his vision fade and surge, so that for a moment the world was made of enormous smooth polygonal shapes, before details popped back in. Some status lights burned brighter, others dimmed to a faint spark or quit entirely.

Things became a lot simpler. In a vague, distant way, Garrett was relieved. All he had to do was make it out. It would be hard, without a crew, but he would do it.

He oriented to the best of his ability, satisfied himself that the ground would continue to support his weight, picked a direction and a course point, and started to walk.

== The Rebel Legion ==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus4.jpg]]

"No, ''I'' am the one asking the questions," the man insisted. He was a bit rumpled and looked - well, he looked pretty distinct, but Steph didn't recognize him. "One more time. What are you and what is your business here?"

''Damn it, apparently I'm a Hoojib! And I'm looking for a friend! Have you seen an AT-AT or not?!'' For his part, Steph was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd gotten a blaster or several aimed at him when he first came close to this group, but they were pointed away now and the edge had come off of his fear, even though now he had an angry man on one side and a suspicious crowd on the other.

A ''lot'' of these people, and there were a lot of people, were armed, he could sense their weapons, and the closer ones had pale violin notes of their own, but there wasn't that building rush of soundlike sensation he'd felt before Garrett had fired that time, and he didn't think it was going to come.

"''Nev''er heard of them," the man said, evidently taking a lot of pleasure in being unhelpful. He made eye contact, but managed to look down his nose while doing so, and Steph couldn't see much of his expression. He would have backed up to try and get more in view, but he was a bit afraid that that would mean being rather far away. "How do I know this isn't a trap? Oy, Rebs! Any of ''you'' heard of a Hoojib?"

The nearest people who were being referred to as 'Rebs', the people who made up the group Steph had approached, denied knowing. From the muttering - he couldn't really pick up on any one speaker - they thought the man was rude, but were preoccupied themselves, mostly listening to some tinny voice he could barely pick up on, but seemed to be coming from a lot of sources. The group was diverse, although even from a distance he'd recognized the orange jumpsuits of a number of X-Wing pilots. That's why he'd tried to go closer. He'd thought they might be willing to help. Apparently not.

"Anyone? ''Anyone''?" The man shook his head in an exaggerated motion. "Guess your ruse isn't working, eh? I don't think anyone but you knows what a Hoojib is. Protip: if you're going to make up a species, pick a better name."

"It's not made up," a woman's voice said, loudly enough for it to carry. People yielded for her, just far enough that she didn't have to turn sideways or push, as she passed to the edge where Steph could actually see her.

She was very tall - everyone seemed tall from Steph's level - but not as tall as a lot of the others. Something about her face was vaguely familiar, though he knew he'd never seen her. It was a sharp face with intense eyes, but pretty enough, he supposed. More striking was the sense of total composure coming off of her, a kind of unshakable confidence or dignity.

The man shook his head again, this time seriously. "This could be a trap. You shouldn't be so trusting."

"If it is, I can handle it. I'm just going to talk. I won't go on any wild chases." They locked eyes over Steph's head, and then the man looked away and sighed.

"Fine. It's your neck on the line, and I'm not getting paid enough to be a nursemaid. I'll be on the perimeter." The man shouldered his rifle, pointedly turned his back, and walked a good distance away. Facing outwards, he took what looked a lot like parade rest, shoulders squared.

Under her breath, the woman said, "Better with us than against us, yes, but I almost wish he hadn't come." She shook her head, faced Steph, and, to his surprise, went down on one knee in front of him. He actually had to keep himself from flinching - she'd just come a whole lot closer very quickly. This way, though, it was much easier to watch her face.

She looked down at him for a long moment, staring hard enough that he had to keep himself from preening nervously. Finally, she told him, "My brother and I worked closely with Spokesmind Plif and his people during the Nagai-Tof war. I know Hoojibs."

He would have protested, but staring up into her eyes, he got a sudden image of what she meant. Smaller, able to fit in her hand, and much more insectile, with bigger, paler eyes, floppier ears, high energy, an entirely different appearance and demeanor. Somehow she'd shown that to him, and he was - well, he was at a loss for words. Crap.

''Uh. Sorry?'' He winced inwardly at how hesitant he'd sounded. ''If I'm not a Hoojib, what am I, then?''

She took pity on him. "There is a chance that you belong to some subspecies. I don't believe that you're part of a trap, anyway. You aren't one of us. What brought you here?"

''Have you seen an AT-AT anywhere? Gray, four-legged, around human-sized? He's my friend.''

She pursed her lips, and even more than earlier he knew that face and couldn't place it. "I haven't, but I've been part of the committee since I called us together. A latecomer or someone on the perimeter may have seen it. Hold on." She stood up, raised her hand - it probably held something, but from down here he couldn't see - to her mouth, and said a long phrase in some foreign language. His ears caught the same phrase coming from a number of other places in the crowd, and after a moment something in her hand gave a very tinny two-syllable response. Steph realized where he'd seen her before.

Oh. ''Oh''. She didn't have the hair buns or the white dress or the metal bikini for that matter, there were a few more lines on her face and she wasn't shouting, but he saw it now.

''You're Princess Leia!''

"''Chief of State'' Leia Organa Solo," someone in the crowd corrected sharply.

"The Chief of State is Mon Mothma," she snapped back, composure slipping. "I'm not-" Leia stopped, closed her eyes, opened them again. "I'm only sort of Leia. Things are complicated. We're all having difficulties." That last sentence came out reluctantly, without the sharp edge of a lot of the things she said.

''That's totally understandable,'' Steph told her. He was finding this pretty surreal. Ridiculous, even. Princess Leia - "sort of" or not, that was who she looked and sounded like - was talking to him, a weird-looking animal, as if this was completely normal.

"We're having some trouble staying together and not fighting," she admitted, then shook her head and looked back at him. "But our issues aren't yours, I'm sure. I know we're far from organized at the moment, but we are the Rebel Legion. Most of us are local, from Ra Kura Base. I am a member of the Royalty/Senatorial Detachment."

''Okay,'' he said. None of that meant anything to him, of course. He had the sense that either these people had named and divided themselves ''very'' quickly, or the fan world was a lot more complicated than he'd thought. Had been. ...Whatever. ''I'm Steph. What were you saying earlier? When you stood up?''

She smiled ruefully. "We're talking in code over the comm, since it's unsecured. It's probably unnecessary, of course, but I think the Legion is hardwired for paranoia. I gave a description of you and relayed your request. Someone should respond. I'll stay with you until then. It's not like I'm missing much."

''Okay,'' he said again. He couldn't think of anything to say and she, despite what she'd said about not missing anything, didn't kneel down again. In fast, she seemed preoccupied, turning away and talking into her hand some more, still in code. He couldn't see her face properly, but it sounded like she was arguing with someone. Steph groomed a little, just for something to do. It was a process involving clawraking and patting down his long white fur, trying to get it arranged right, and was probably instinctual. Steph tried to think of it as the equivalent of brushing down his shirt or trying to flatten his hair, but he knew the obvious parallel was to a cat or a bird preening. They were both grooming behaviors that also got acted out during anxious periods, he knew.

He supposed he was glad that he wasn't licking himself. This was just depressing. Still - still, it had to be worse for Garrett. He had to focus on finding him.

Something caught his attention and he froze in place, twisted sideways with his fingers buried in fur, trying to tell what it was. It was the energy-sense, of course. Now that he'd had some time and all, he knew the sense really wasn't like hearing violins or feeling heat. Steph had interpreted it like that at first, but it was more complicated. He couldn't help but think of how he'd visited a lab partner's blog – had it really been less than a week ago? – and it was full of reviews of things from some company called "Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs", describing one of their products as having coolness and roundness and resonance and shadows, throbbing base notes, and something feral and dangerous lurking beneath. And then she'd told him that these were all ''perfumes'', and she ''had'' to describe them like that, since the right words just didn't exist.

He understood that a lot better now. Energy-sense didn't really map to hearing or touch or anything else, but he really had no other way to describe it.

What he'd sensed... He hadn't gotten a handle on the energy-sense at the time, but he recognized this particular flavor, getting more distinct by the second, even accounting for the crowd, which was larger than he’d thought. Steph strained, feeling his antenna uncoil slightly, until he sensed the notes. There was an entire orchestra's worth playing out there, distinct from the paler notes scattered all throughout the crowd. He knew this one.

He waited a bit longer to make sure. The person was some distance away and there were all these other people in the way, he could barely hear it, but Steph's ears were huge, and he thought he'd recognize that particular timbre of amplified breathing anywhere.

''Hey! Over here!'' Steph shouted, or as close as he could to shouting without a larynx.

The woman who looked like Leia exhaled sharply, her face going absolutely blank and still. "Fantastic," she said darkly, lowering her hand away from her mouth. Several people nearby were muttering unhappily.

Steph was rather taken aback. ''What is it? What's wrong?''

For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to respond. "I hate him," she said at last, biting the words out. "I know that's not right, it's more complicated than that, but I can't forgive him. Not that easily." Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she turned to face someone in the crowd, which seemed downright agitated.

The people, packed together though they were, had let Leia pass unimpeded. For the man who looked like Darth Vader in white, they parted. There was an entire bubble of space around him and the two storm troopers following him.

He had... he had a presence of his own, a sense of composure a little like Leia's. Different, though. Steph couldn't really put a finger on it - whatever senses or mental processes got used to detect how people carried themselves, they weren't as immediate as his energy-sense, which was... he'd been moving away from perceiving it as sound, but there was ''percussion'' here. Drums - several kinds - and cymbals, underneath the rest of it. He pushed that sense away, trying not to get distracted.

Steph wasn't terribly good at gauging distances, especially now that he was the size of a housecat, but even so, the space around the white Vader and his storm troopers seemed a little excessive. Belatedly he smelled something burning.

Last time he'd somehow managed to miss noticing the man's cape. It was massive, seeming to be in mid-billow even when he was still. On the right side, though, it was tattered pretty badly. That was when Steph sensed discordant notes and saw that most of the man's right arm was missing. Whatever had happened, fat blue sparks were falling from it at irregular intervals, sometimes dying before they hit the carpet, sometimes making it smoke until it died or someone stamped it out. That had to be the burning smell.

Without preamble, the woman who looked like Leia said, "Four beings have come to us since you arrived, and you're interested in this one. Why?" Her voice was flat, accusatory.

For his part, the white Vader spoke carefully and with a lot of deliberation, saying, "I encountered a Hoojib before taking leave of my squadron, Leia Organa Solo, and was curious to know if the one you spoke of was the same. Now I see that he is." Steph couldn't read any inflection beyond caution in his voice.

"Hoojibs don't look like that." They were talking about him, but Steph felt like he was listening in on a private conversation. He couldn't be the only one - every eye in the crowd was on the two, he couldn't hear anyone else talking in the immediate vicinity - but he was starting to feel uncomfortable.

"It doesn't matter." The Vader hesitated before telling her, "Think of it as an alternate universe issue."

"Like you, then," she said. Her arms were crossed defensively. Steph looked away, at the stormtroopers. They were big, of course, like everyone else.

"Exactly. You should return to the committee; they need another diplomat. I can take this from here." Maybe if he braced his feet and sat up on his haunches he'd be level with their knees. But he wouldn’t do that. He’d fallen off his back feet once already, stretching up to claw at a door handle.

The farther storm trooper had something dark spattered and smeared on his armor, beading like a liquid. Paint? Oil? Blood? "What are you planning to do, then?"

"I spoke before about contacting the Five-Oh-First. Now may be the best time; we might solve two problems in one stroke."

Leia was silent for long enough that Steph stopped studying the armor to glance back up at her. Her face was still unreadable, at least to him. "Really? Now?"

"Now. If a peace is not established immediately, we will be at odds in the very near future. It will be difficult enough now, because of Tampa Bay Squadron. Organa, none of this is going away, as much as anyone might wish it. I believe I am the best hope for this."

"I've guessed as much. But I don't trust you to do anything alone. We're sending someone with you."

"Good. I trust that I do not need to tell you

[Characters continue to be stubborn but finally do what I want]

Steph looked up at the damage. Oddly enough, there was no charring on the white cloth or armor. They were torn and pitted in places, but not discolored. ''You know that you look terrible, right?''

"I am aware of that, yes. But I've fought with worse. During the second Yevetha incursion-" He stopped himself, paused, and in a slightly different tone said, "Never mind. At any rate, this is nothing. My - Organa said that you were looking for a walker."

Steph told him, trying not to get excited enough to babble, about coming back to find Garrett gone, doubling back to explain that he'd found the walker earlier and left to look for help. Then he had to confirm that by Garrett, yes, he did mean the AT-AT. And his own name was Steph. Steph Midder.

The Vader paused, then told him, "There are a great many names I could go by, but I believe I will stay with my designation. It is Ess Ell One Nine Eight Four. If you don't want to reference Orwell, call me Eightyfour," he said with just a faint trace of amusement.

''Orwell? Oh, right.'' Nineteen Eighty Four. He got it. Designation? What did that mean?

"Midder. Walk with me." Not waiting any longer, he swept past Steph, away from the Rebel crowd. The two storm troopers followed a few steps behind. Taken a bit by surprise, Steph had to scramble to catch up. The man on the perimeter visibly flinched as they passed.

For someone so big, SL-1984's footsteps were surprisingly quiet. He seemed to have incredibly long strides, but his pace was slow enough that Steph could keep up at a fast walk, close enough that if the man's cape hadn't been tattered on this side it would have brushed against him. High above, the broken prosthetic – specifically an exposed wire, part of the broken prosthetic - sparked, sending pleasant tingles down Steph's antenna into his skull.

"We are being shadowed. Organa's doing, I am sure of it."

Steph started to twist around to see, but stopped trying as he realized that trying to see back over his shoulder when walking quickly on four legs was tricky, and he didn't want to make himself look like an idiot. Instead he focused on the energy-sense - past the distinct, complex notes of SL-1984's entire body, past the paler, less distinct notes of the storm troopers, in the background... He had trouble focusing, but yes, there was the high steady note he'd started to associate with blasters, following at a distance. He wasn't sure how far; close enough that he sensed it as a note, probably far enough to be discreet.

But that didn't make sense, did it? ''I thought she was just letting you go.''

SL-1984 inclined his head. "She was, yes. She knows that I will not charge off on my own. Well," he amended, "Not to do this. I will address any crises that I see the need to interfere in, and if I report to anyone beforehand it will be as a courtesy, nothing more. But I have agreed to her terms, and will not go to the Five-Oh-First without an escort. But if it wasn't her who set this watcher - there is more than one Organa."

The notes of SL-1984 didn't really stay constant, not like the notes Steph sensed in blasters or the storm trooper armor. Instead his notes rose and fell and wove together, horns and bowed instruments sometimes competing, sometimes playing as one, sometimes silencing for different instruments, always with the percussion steady in the background, always coming back and repeating this one sequence of specific notes. Snare drums keeping a constant pace underneath it all.

"But these are not your issues."

Notes preceded and shadowed SL-1984’s voice as he told Steph, “The Rebel Legion’s intelligence is not well established as of yet. They have among them too many strong-willed leaders used to too-high positions, and they have had little time to adjust. Even now they are working out a hierarchy, and this occupies the thoughts of nearly everyone there, and this leaves them vulnerable.”

“I would not have hostilities between the Five-Oh-First and the Rebel Legion; even if in one mode they are enemies, in the other they are knit together. What I am working up to proposing, Midder, is this. An Imperial all-terrain transport in perfect miniature, such as you have described, ''has'' been sighted, and I could provide to you the locations and times of these sightings. But enough time has passed that I doubt you will find your Garrett. What I want from you

There was something hypnotic about his voice, or possibly about the complexity and strength of the notes, and Steph had to force himself again and again to pay attention.

SL-1984 fell silent for a long moment, letting Steph focus on the notes.

Energy-sense was sort of more intimate than hearing, somehow reminding him of taste, but the easiest analogies were still music-related. Steph could clearly imagine the members of a massive orchestra playing with furious attention, with a conductor at their center gesturing strongly. Some of them, mostly close together but scattered through the ensemble, had broken instruments which they still tried to play, to poor effect, and there were a lot of empty seats. Maybe – he supposed it was just the opposite of that mental image; energy or music powering the mechanisms or musicians and their instruments. It just so happened that they worked very closely together and responded to one another, so that as Steph spent longer and longer considering it, it seemed more and more to have a melody.

A familiar melody, at that. Almost… surely not, but… the Imperial March?

Couldn’t be. It was slower, for one, not so martial or ''march'' like, different concentrations of instruments. If he kept with the music analogy, it was a complicated song, with layers of harmony, beats and counterbeats, even some vocals, all blending together. There were still snares in the background, though they were mostly drowned out. But that basic tune, those nine notes... Garrett had had John Williams music looping for the past week, and the Imperial March showed up a lot in different ways... it was a leitmotif, wasn't it? Steph found himself wishing he hadn't forgotten practically everything about classical music.

And it seemed to be tapering off, anyway, as if the members of the orchestra were tiring and putting their instruments down.

Steph found that he had slowed to a creep to stay alongside SL-1984, who had begun moving stiffly with less and less surety. He had started favoring his closer leg, and even as Steph watched, he stopped walking altogether to fold in on himself like an old man, and clutch with his remaining arm at or just beneath his chest box. The notes were fading out raggedly, and the fluttering of the snares wasn't obscured now, but even they were fading fast.

The storm troopers started towards him as the quality of his breathing changed entirely, becoming labored.

''What’s wrong?'' Steph asked, or rather tried to ask. It seemed like just as the thought was forming he was shoved back, by a pair of invisible but unyielding hands. They pushed faster than he could back up, at least this suddenly – the world seemed to tumble as he fell entirely off his feet and slid along the carpet, against the grain of his fur. Instinctively he flailed, trying to both regain his feet and claw at the hands, but despite the very solid pressure of them he connected with nothing but air. One hard, rounded fingertip making a dent in the long fur under his collarbones traced quickly upwards, not quite brushing against his throat and then his hastily-closed eye, and stopped at the base of his antenna.

Steph froze in place. The pressure had lessened as it climbed and was feather-light by the time it stopped, but his antenna and especially the bulge in his head at its base were extremely sensitive. Earlier in the day he’d accidentally scratched it with a dewclaw, and it had been agonizing. The pushing hands and the fingertip vanished; he stopped sliding and tentatively picked himself back up, then shook himself off.

Before him, at a far enough distance that he didn't have to crick his neck to see their helmets, the spattered storm trooper went on guard, holding his weapon ready as if expecting an attack, while the other attended to SL-1984.

"Power cells are going dead. I'm losing systems," he said, his voice fainter and pained, getting more so with almost every word. After a moment he added, "I can't hear you. My comm is dead."

The closer storm trooper, the clean one, was visibly anxious. "My lord, if either of us can do anything, if you need to swap with ours-"

"No, no. This suit was not designed with conveniently accessible power cells. They are not supposed to die one after the other like this. Give me a moment." He leaned heavily on the closer trooper as his breathing changed again, becoming strained as well as labored. "Chain reaction. I didn't... aargh. I'll risk it."

Bracing himself, he pulled away from the closer storm trooper to stand on his own and said, "Six twenty-five, step back. Two-eight ninety seven, fire on me."

The closer one backed away; the farther one whipped around to face him. "Sir?!"

SL-1984’s voice was raspy and horrible as, word by word, he got out, “That was an order.”

There was no further delay; the spattered trooper raised his blaster rifle, and taking hardly an eyeblink to aim it he fired it directly at SL-1984. Steph saw the man’s arm snap around to intercept the red bolt during that pause. When it hit, the discharge was momentarily blinding. He sensed a rush of discordant notes rise and squawk and sort of transmute into a burst of wild fiddling, which settled rapidly into something that tasted very like the opening notes of the Imperial March, if the Imperial March could have a taste, all of this happening fast enough that he had to take a moment to sort it out.

SL-1984 was standing tall again, though there was now some charring in the palm of his hand and along his arm, tracing down to the edge of his chest box. His notes were strong and ordered again, but even as Steph felt them the sensation of a finger just barely resting on the base of his antenna returned.

“Don’t leech off of me,” SL-1984 said, and although his amplified voice sounded much the same as it had before, now there was a hint, just a hint, of menace behind it. Already the dramatic mark from the blaster was bleaching white, leaving almost a scar where the material had burned away.

''I didn't know!''

SL-1984 locked his arm behind his back

He didn't like this. But it seemed like the best chance he had.

[Note to self: STOP HAVING THESE DREAMS. Aaaaah.]

==Escaping==

Fuel reserves were at ninety-three point seven nine four five oh. He wasn't burning it at the ideal rate; one of the filters wasn't quite right, so the mixture had some fine particulates which were affecting consumption. It didn't harm his performance too much, not for one mission, but the techs were definitely going to have to take a look at it when he was back in his berth.

He kept all four blasters hot. This was a big expenditure, but without a gunner sitting in one of the pilot chairs he was quite a bit slower, and the couple seconds between registering a threat and being able to fire might make a difference here, where everything was so fast. He'd had some trouble deciding to do that. Eventually he'd just stopped walking for a few minutes, which let power reroute until he could balance the pros and cons.

How long had he been walking? No one had set a timer, he didn't know. A few kilometers. He had no plan for getting out. Random directions all the way. There'd been a thing. Swinging cliff-gate. Door. No, two doors, side by side - double doors, that was it. They'd stopped him for a while, until he'd thought of shooting out the metal thing that kept them closed. After that they had swung open for him. He couldn't recall when that had been.

He was fairly certain that he'd gone in a few circles; he was continuously plotting new courses and had lost track of the old ones. There had been some more ambulating towers, and each time he'd seen one he'd stopped in his tracks to watch them, but they'd ignored him. Good. He was more effective on targets that didn't outmass him or move that damn fast.

Now, finally, it looked like he was getting somewhere! Ahead, at the far range of his vision, more things. Doors. Different surface, clear, yes, glass doors, he couldn't see through them yet but they ''were'' glass. Ground was still good, he didn't detect any major holes or anything that would hide treacherous ground, so he shifted the pace up to maximum, the ground-eating charge that he could only keep up for so long without risking damage.

''Dead end! Stop, stop!'' As he reached the doors he turned and pulled to the side, shedding momentum and not quite presenting his flank. Glass though they were, the doors were closed and all the nonvisual sensors tagged them as yet another unscaleable cliff. Coming to a stop, power rerouting smoothly with hardly a flicker in his vision, he thought that this place was absolutely riddled with these sheer cliffs. They didn't seem natural.

A moment later, and Garrett thought, of ''course'' they didn't seem natural. Good God. They were ''walls''. They kept the ceiling away from the floor, the outside away from the inside. What, had he forgotten somehow? How could he forget about ''walls''?

That was worrying. Still, he couldn't stop for that now. He had to get out. His side-views somehow couldn't see through the glass of the doors; they were just reflective, smooth planes, totally unnatural looking, and it took a few seconds to figure out that the sheets of thinner organic material were probably flyers that had been taped up at eye level - yeah, they were some distance above him, but he could read the writing on the closest one, a billboard-scaled proclamation about staying hydrated and bathing. By backing up and turning awkwardly, footpads thumping and ''chrt!''-ing loudly in his mind's ear, he could see out of his command viewport, and the glass was properly transparent.

Outside, while the nearest bits of paving looked like the kind of job that involved getting regional politicians to cut a ribbon at the end of a dedication ceremony before the thing could be used, everything he took as signs of scale - trees, people, cars - was distant. Within sight, yes, but the distance shrank them, and the sight of humanoids his size or larger seemed like a trick of his eyes or cameras or whatever, rather than the presence of towering fast monsters. For a strange moment of disconnect he could almost believe that the convention had simply moved outside and was going on just fine, maybe a little more disorganized by the move.

Then Garrett made himself look closer, and actually see the scaled-up people, what they looked like beyond not seeming like moving towers. What was unmistakeably a gout of fire shot into the air and fizzled out as the androgynous pretty-boy producing it was interrupted by something with a pair of gigantic bat wings, spreading them incredibly wide and flapping them with what looked like a tremendous gust of wind. To the side, an angry-looking cat furry bandaged a small boy in a whirlwind of linen strips, showing long, pointed teeth as he shouted or snarled at the bat-winged thing. ... Yeah. He was pretty sure most of that didn't happen in a convention that was going on just fine. Come to think of it, he didn't see any balding middle-aged men dressed like their favorite anime girls.

A lot more leggy women dressed as popular anime girls, though.

Garrett thought he had some idea about what had happened. Not how or why, of course. But it was pretty clear that he wasn't the only one.

Maybe it was just as well.

He wasn't breathing. No, of course he wasn't breathing. It was that tic again. Better ignore it.

He checked his fuel reserves. Ninety-three point five oh oh nine two. He was burning it just by standing here. Now Garrett thought he knew what that mystery console was, the one that he had to leave underpowered every time he moved. It was his frontal lobe, or something like that. His engine didn't produce enough power. It was optimized for walking and shooting, and powering the thinking console at the same time was more than the motor could handle. He guessed so, anyway. It would certainly explain why things had gotten so much simpler, and why he'd forgotten about walls. Dismaying thought. He got stupid every time he moved; he might literally be unable to walk and think in abstract concepts at the same time. Or - well, fine, he was fairly sure he could walk and think at least somewhat, but not while keeping his blasters primed.

But he'd paused to decide to heat up his blasters. It looked like whenever he stopped walking he got that console back. Maybe there weren't any ill effects to that. Maybe it only lasted until he had enough power to reroute. Was he stupider now than he'd been when he was lying on his side?

...Okay, that was an idiotic question, Garrett admitted to himself. No way to tell. It was better to just assume that he could trade walking or the ability to shoot first for the ability to think about things that weren't directly related to walking or shooting. He just couldn't have all three at once. Oh God, it was like the crossing-the-river puzzle, he just had to put the fox and the grain in the boat and leave the chicken back on the riverbank. Or something. Hopefully it wouldn't wander off and the boat wouldn't capsize. Because if he didn't think he could get whatever passed for his brain back, he wouldn't do anything at all, would he?

Very suddenly the emptiness hit him again, hard enough that he felt like something had peeled back his plating and bared both levels of his inner structure. He saw his insides, felt that yawning cold void and the irrational fear that always came when he thought about it. Sickening. Empty. Empty, and the plating around it utterly still, as only an inanimate object could be. It had never exactly gone away, he'd just managed not to think about it. Maybe not having thoughts wasn't so bad.

Garrett not-quite-shuddered. Standing up, that meant adjusting his legs enough to make his body rock slightly. He had the tic again.

Well, he wasn't going to get anywhere just standing here. Better get out now, before something got him.

Okay. The doors towered up above him, glass in metal frames that might be aluminum. Remembering when he'd first come in, he was pretty sure that they were pull doors, at least from the outside, and didn't have the kind of latch that needed a turning doorknob or handle. The latch was some kind of one-way deal to keep it from swinging all over the place. At the top of the frame there was some kind of... armature thing connecting frame and door. He'd majored in Engineering, not Architecture, but he thought that it kept the door from swinging out.

From inside, it was a push door. He really couldn't push, though. He wasn't built for that, and he'd probably break something trying. That meant trying to shoot it open and hoping that it wasn't balanced. The armature looked easier.

It was a little too high up to reach with his heavies, not without backing up, so Garrett trained his medium repeating blasters at the metal and fired, bracing against the recoil. He'd kept them hot, so there was no moment of charging.

The sound, muted though it was, wasn't anything like earlier, when he'd fired into a wall to see if he could hear anything. When the smoke or vapor or whatever cleared - yes, a good bit of the armature was gone, and some of the doorjamb past it, and there was a blackened crater in the wall. A tiny flame guttered in the middle of it. The glass near that was in one piece, but browned.

He guessed his blasters were more powerful than he'd thought. It was a good thing he hadn't hit that thing that might have been Steph. Garrett suppressed another shudder at the thought.

The armature was gone, which left the latch. Feeling cautious, Garrett backed up stiffly and deliberately, fighting the urge to clutch his nonexistent stomach with limbs that didn't bend that way as he felt the tic. It was funny how he'd never appreciated being able to do things like ''back up'' without having to think about it. Better to just get on with it. Aim. Fire.

Okay, the latch was gone, but apparently the doors weren't weighted to swing in or out, because they weren't locked in place anymore but they also weren't opening on their own like the last set of doors. Damn!

Looking out through the glass, seeing the pale blue sky through his forward viewport, seeing the walls and ceiling and floor through all his other senses, Garrett fought a sudden wild surge of claustrophobia. This was less a building and more of a tomb, or maybe ''he'' was the tomb, or maybe - God, it didn't matter, he felt sick and hollow and everything inside with him seemed too close.

The tic again. He was beginning to hate that thing. Forget not having the necessary organs, he didn't feel like he'd had the wind knocked out of him or anything like that. He only felt like he had to breathe when the tic hit him and made him remember that he wasn't doing it. It wasn't a good feeling.

Garrett deliberately focused on his interior, trying to ignore the surge of revulsion at all that empty space inside. He had life support systems built around the void, though of course they were for his crew, not him. Some of those were devoted to atmosphere - he had some kind of air recycling unit, but since the relevant sensors reported that the external air was just fine, air was just being sucked into intake scoops and filtered. Those motors, the fans they ran that circulated air around, they were important. He couldn't control them, but they were important. They'd have to do.

It wasn't like breathing could possibly be as good as the tic kept reminding him, he told himself. No one would ever get anything done.

Driven air, filtered and cooled and dehumidified and constantly monitored by the housekeeping console, blew gently through the void. It wasn't tidal at all, but it was moving air, and he let himself imagine that he was taking a deep breath.

Right. Right. There was a kickback every time he fired, and that probably implied that blaster bolts had kinetic energy. This was not how lasers worked. That didn't matter. This would either work or it wouldn't.

''I am not going to be trapped here!'' This time he used his heavies in linked-fire mode. Door on the right, doorframe in the lower left corner. Aim. Fire. The recoil, stronger with his heavies, made his ''flexible armored tunnel'' compress momentarily as his command center jerked back. The bulk of the door had moved a little. This was working! Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Repeat as necessary - stop!

The door opened enough that the wind caught and pushed at it. He wasted no time in setting a course through the opening while nervously watching the doorjam. Most of the way through, the wind must have faltered and the door must have been weighted, because it swung on him. It hit hard enough that he felt the impact through his hull, and although it was jarring and loud and he was forced to very consciously shuffle sideways to keep his balance, there was no pain. Just the feeling that pain should have been there.

But he barely noticed that. It was - God, the world was bright. He reached the point he'd set and stopped. The world was bright. He couldn't see. Gah! This didn't hurt, not quite, and it didn't exactly feel like heat, but it was very unpleasant, it was- God, too bright! Everything was hot light, he couldn't see anything, he was blind! This didn't make sense, it had been fine through the window!

Part of him remembered moving his roommate's plants outside on a sunny, nearly cloudless day, he couldn't remember why, and how the plants had suffered for that. His roommate - oh, God, he couldn't remember his name! Vernon? Jacob? MacKenzie? He was in interior design or cellular biology or something and happened to be utterly forgettable - had told him very patiently that it didn't matter that they'd been tropical plants, there had still been too much light; the dorm room with the lights on was anywhere from fifty to maybe four hundred lux, if the windows were open on a bright day. Direct sunlight on a day like that was somewhere between thirty and one hundred thirty ''thousand'' lux, and the plants had effectively been sunburned. Vernon or Jacob or whatever his name was had gone on to say that direct sunlight was incredibly, exponentially more powerful than indoor lighting, it was just that human eyes adjusted so well that people barely noticed, part of Garrett remembered.

The rest of him was locked in place, frozen, trying not to panic, trying to will the brightness to fade. He wasn't blind, not ''quite', he could sort of sense where the sun was, like it was actively hating him, like his vision was a sense of touch. And his underside, he could vaguely make out his legs and his shadow. But he couldn't see, even when he reluctantly switched to the too-dark internal cams, everything was brightness that felt suspiciously like pain, he couldn't stare out at any of it, he had a ''very'' strong compulsion to tear up defensively, screw his eyes shut, shade them, but ''he couldn't do that'', he couldn't even turn away, ''he didn't have eyes''.

Garrett's motor was working back up out of the near-subliminal hum, getting louder. Too bright! ''Too bright!'' He couldn't - God, too bright! His motor was running, he could move, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn't even go back because the door had shut, and he couldn't ''see''... ''Threat! Threat!''

He backed, sidled, tried to get his command section and his heavies into position, couldn't, it was too high up, aimed his medium repeating blasters, fired. Of course he didn't do any good, he was aiming at the goddamn ''sun'', but he fired anyway, and did it again.

This was useless, he was just burning power, how was his fuel - oh God, ninety two point eight two oh five one that couldn't be good, he was running his motor like he was moving at full tilt blasters blazing and he ''couldn't slow it down'', couldn't see, anything could be out here with him, couldn't move for risk of crashing, too bright, too hot ''threat threat threat'' - was this what going insane felt like?

He managed to make himself stop firing and finally picked up on the terrain sensors in his footpads. The surface was solid. It was stable! Too bright, yes, he couldn't see, yes, this was probably as close to pain as he was going to get, but ''the ground was firm'', damn it!

That helped a little, long enough that he realized that the terrain sensors could substitute for sight. Sort of. It was easier to focus on them without sight getting in the way. Garrett could pick up on sort of a vague outline of the raised hardened surface he was on - sidewalk, right - and where it met the less certain surfaces around it, which was probably the grass. He was still - God, this was insane, he couldn't ''see'', why couldn't he seem to adjust to this, it was just ''daylight'', it was agony, he couldn't stop the static popping in bursts over his intercom and didn't know what kind of vocalization that was supposed to be - but this was something. Like echolocation. Sort of.

It only extended out in an oval maybe, oh, seventy meters long - no, only a few times his body length and he wasn't huge, so it had to be smaller than that. He had to find some shade and he couldn't turn back around, he thought there'd been awnings over the door he'd come in through - hadn't there been? Had that been a different door? - but there weren't here, he had to get moving.

Trees, there'd been trees he'd seen from inside, the kind that got planted around parking lots to shade some of the cars, those had been the closest. He'd gotten partially turned around, but he was pretty sure they were this way, along the pavement. Garrett set course points and hoped.

Terrain-sensing, it turned out, could pick up on people. Sort of. And only if they were the monumentally-scaled ones here - no, no, he had to get it straight, they were probably normal size. He felt them - well, more properly, he felt their footsteps against the ground. The footsteps were shaped vaguely like feet, so some of them were sort of beanlike and others were disks or different shapes, as they hit the ground, some walking or running, some basically holding position. He hadn't given much thought to how much something that breathed shifted its weight when it was just standing in place, and he was a little startled at how bitter the thought was.

It seemed like there were more closer than farther away, which probably just meant that Garrett could sense the heavier things from farther away, and no doubt there were some holding too still for him to sense like this. He kept setting points and walking, he was trying to be calm, but this wasn't sight. God. Even assuming he got to shade, even assuming he was able to communicate somehow, so someone didn't whisk him away and dismantle him as a curiosity, he'd probably end up living in one of those trailers for the disabled and -

Not living. ''This wasn't living.'' Existing, then, until his fuel ran out. It would. He didn't know what was in his tank but he was pretty sure it wasn't something you could get on Earth, and there'd probably be scale issues. And he needed regular maintenance, though he knew nothing was going to be able to get at his engines without taking them apart. Otherwise, he'd... well, he wouldn't last too long without maintenance, he was already having mild engine trouble and it would only get worse. What then?

Maybe it was better not to -

Whoah! Footsteps, closer, ''really damned fast'', okay, unless they changed direction they'd just pass him by-

SCRAPING HIS HULL oh God what was it engines building to fever pitch SCRAPING THE SEAL OF HIS BOARDING HATCH prepping his heavies, heating heating hurry up he could HEAR IT nonononono STOP he fired his heavies without thinking and tried to bring a medium repeater in line but of course the ''thing'' was running now, too fast, where was it it was gone!

"KKKKSSSSHHHT! KKSSSSHHHHHHH," he staticked in alarm, only the static was much longer and had a terrified snarl in it, he was not sure if that was an attempt at cursing but damn it of ''course'' sensing footsteps wasn't the same as sight and he had no idea what the rest of the body was doing and if anything flew he wouldn't know about it at ''all'' he was blind he was deaf good Lord in Heaven there could be another one RIGHT NOW move move movemovemovemove''move''.

And he was walking as fast as he could, almost running, knowing he couldn't keep this up and all discretionary power was in everything ''but'' his not-a-brain but ''that didn't matter'' keep going go go go, SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - REACHED COURSEPOINT, CONTINUE TO NEXT, ''DODGE'' - SET NEW COURSEPOINT.

Later - it felt like much later - he remembered that the settings for the holocams had to be manually told to adjust to major changes in light. One of the pilots, whoever was serving as the gunner, usually hit that switch. He didn't have a gunner, and the horrible wrongness inherent in a phrase like that did not summon one up. He couldn't hit the switch, but he could turn it on, and he did.

Better. The blinding light on all sides tinted, then seemed to dial down and he could see again. Not even any bright afterimages, but then didn't you need retinas for those? He could see. Much better.

...He had a life-form analyzer as part of his sensor package, too. But he needed someone of commander rank to authorize its activation, so even if he'd remembered it back there, it wouldn't have helped.

Funny, something was different, but he couldn't get a reading on it. Maybe if he slowed down, free up more power to route to the smart console - No. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't slow down. He did not want to slow down.

Ahead there was an obstruction in his path, hanging across just above his mobile command center, where it would disastrously scrape the upper edge of his back if he just went under it. Trivial to destroy it. He did. Two heavy shots, two medium, and he cleared the gap with meters to spare, footpads pounding on the rubble. He shouldn't maintain this pace, it was potentially damaging, but that was fine. He didn't slow down.

What had changed - he was under open skies, not one sheer cliff in view. The surface was somewhat different - he'd noticed several surface changes, but glancingly, since it hadn't been important. It was some other material, dark gray, smoother and thinner and not as good a surface since it wasn't up to his weight. But that was fine.

No hyper-fast bipedal towers. Definitely fine.

Another obstruction, the same kind, this one a little smaller and level with his command viewport. He destroyed it, too, and two heavy shots seemed like overkill.

Underfoot, civilian groundcars on wheels, unarmored, brightly colored, swerved wildly to avoid him. He considered shooting them. He considered altering his course to kick at them or - yes, they were small enough to step on, at least some of them. He didn't. One thing to do this - it was a sin, yes, but he'd take that. Another thing, a worse thing, to take them with him.

Part of him twitched. Okay, if the giant towers were humans, what was with this? Bit by bit, he was able to register that ''this'' was a big road with several lanes, those were cars, those were trees, all at a scale of much smaller than him, which felt more natural. There was yet another obstruction ahead, and this time he recognized it. Freeway overpass. Even lower than the other two.

Huh. Well, he wasn't going to slow down to think about it. He was alone, empty, it didn't matter where he went as long as he didn't stop until the end. There was a moment when he was distracted by flying atmospheric craft, some loud enough to hear, but he didn't stop. He kept going. Full tilt, getting to each new course point at his highest speed.

He'd always loved getting caught up in a new idea, the way it took over his life, practically singing under his skin, as immediate as his heartbeat. Only now the heartbeat was gone, and in place of the singing was the jarring music of engines.

There was a kind of terrible joy in this. This was what he was good at, what he was built to do; why ''not'' take pride in it? Even if it ''was'' just destruction for no purpose, no cause, not even anyone telling him either to stop or keep going. He was good at pounding forwards and shooting whatever was in his way. That was all there was to it.

Fuel reserves were at eighty-nine point oh nine one two seven and going down. That was fine. He wasn't stopping, even with no crew and no purpose. Even with so little power going to it, the strange console had some current. He had autonomy. He wasn't stopping.

==Anj Outside==

Outside, it was chaos, pure and simple. Anj hadn’t been in the crowd when ''it'' happened. He’d seen people and creatures of all descriptions fighting to get outside while he’d been looking for a private place. By the time he’d picked up on the broadcast and left the bathroom, most of them had already gone – the halls had hardly been deserted, but the majority had already fled. He could hear them outside, a dull roar formed by thousands of throats. ''Not a happy crowd'', he decided. ''Better than a mob, though. I don't know what I'd do with one of those.''

As he approached the empty frame of a double door - it had once, apparently, held glass, but that was nowhere to be seen - Anj felt the warning tingle and heard what first sounded like another shrieking alarm. In response he sidestepped out of the way, and none too soon. Some kind of very large heronlike bird with pale gold-orange feathers skidded unsteadily around a corner, then powered past him in a lurching run. The moment its wings cleared the doorframe, it launched itself into the air. As it winged upwards and away the Red Guard realized that it was making a high, panicked call that sounded vaguely like screaming.

He glanced back at where the bird had come from and stilled himself. Nothing, not even the warning tingle that was his precognition. Maybe the bird had been fleeing something, maybe it hadn't, but any trouble was slow enough that if he kept moving it wasn't going to bother ''him.''

TR-1407 stepped outside and was struck by what he saw. People, creatures, and stranger things that defied categorization littered the landscape, rushing about, standing and sitting and reclining in a few cases. Some were alone, others in groups. There were some fighting or arguing with each other, others trying to subdue the wild ones, some hightailing it as if the Emperor’s finest were at their heels, some examining themselves frantically, some just sitting back with mouths open as if howling or screaming, though the Red Guard couldn’t pick out individual voices in the collective noise. Almost no one was close to the complex; most people that Anj saw were on the grass.

As he automatically went through a threat assessment, picking out specifics from all the bewildered bystanders, he marveled at the sheer number. He hadn’t thought the Orlando Convention Center could hold so many – yes, it had been crowded, and he hadn’t canvassed the entire place and seen for himself how big it was, but still. It was like a “Where’s Waldo” poster, writ large.

Maybe it wasn't just inside, he thought suddenly. Maybe it was ''everywhere'', and just more obvious here. If the image had become real - well, it had to be more than just the image, or he wouldn't have gotten taller. If little unarticulated thoughts, like ''a forcepike weighs seven kilograms'' and ''Imperials use the metric system for measurements'' had also carried over, what about others? What about the cheater's assumption that ''I will not be caught'', or the youth's that ''I am immortal''?

Still on the instruction frequency, the officer who had told TK-1407 where to go was tersely repeating those instructions to someone else who had reported. ''I need to stay focused. I can speculate later. Need to find my squadron before I do anything else.''

Some of the figures in the crowd looked like security forces – ''no, police, they're called police.'' Police, firefighters, paramedics, what looked like a SWAT team in black, some Animal Control officers, of all things - there were more than a few people that had probably been called in from all across the state, if not country. They clearly were supposed to try and control or at least contain this madness. Just as clearly, they were as confused and uncertain as anyone else, but trying their best to impose order in some form. Anj sympathized. This was not a job he envied.

It was weird – the outsiders looked and ''felt'' somehow a little different from all these others, and not just because ''they'' were all human. Like all of the changed, big and small, were larger-than-life in one way or another. Maybe he was imagining things.

Flickers on his peripherals made TR-1407 tilt his chin up. The sky, a lovely cloudless blue, was barely less crowded than the ground – far, far above something streaked up into the atmosphere, and hardly any closer small military-looking jet planes or fightercraft roared overhead in formation. Even closer there were news helicopters already, sharing airspace with winged things of all description and wingless humanoids who had no visible way of staying aloft.

The Red Guard saw bright costuming and at least one cape fluttering in the wind as fliers swerved around each other or hovered in place. Someone in red and blue tights streaked upwards abruptly at impossible speeds, within seconds ''catching up to the jets'' and paralleling their course, far enough away that the red cape was barely visible. Anj saw this and, incredulous, thought, ''Superheroes? Really?''

There was no denying what they looked like, no matter how improbable the thought was. Anj realized what he was thinking and grinned involuntarily. ''As if I’m perfectly reasonable in comparison. This is insane. So what? The 501st needs me. And reality doesn't care whether or not you believe it.''

With that reminder, he turned. ''Southwest blacktop? Must be that parking lot where we planned to meet. Ah… it’s midday or thereabouts, so by the sun’s position'' that'' way is west, which means south is...'' there. ''Not far.'' Doing his best not to attract any attention, the Red Guard started moving at a lope.

''I don’t know where the closest military outpost is,'' Anj realized. ''Still, with something like this we can probably expect troopships any minute now; orbital reinforcements – No, no,'' no! ''This is Earth! '' Earth! ''Not part of the Empire! There are no orbital reinforcements. No fleets. We might get some part of the Army here, but they don’t have the technology I’m expecting. Rockets, not turbolasers. Helicopters and jets, not troopships, not snubfighters.'' Why did that thought make him uncomfortable?

''I wouldn’t worry about him, even with a sword like that… Watch out for her, she’s dangerous… He’s fine for now, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to push him… she looks like she could do some serious damage, but somehow I don’t think she’ll be a problem… Better not go near that one. Looks like everyone else’s picked up on it too… Emperor’s bones, that thing is huge, but I don’t think it’s up to anything…'' There were a ''lot'' of people to assess, particularly on the run. It niggled at the Red Guard that he was only doing a cursory check of each, but seeing that his options were to ignore everyone, give only the briefest of inspections, or slow down to a crawl to inspect everyone...

''There!'' Anj's heart jumped in his chest. Inexplicably he felt an incredible sense of relief, strong enough that he was almost lightheaded.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the large knot of people standing together on the asphalt were just as confused and disorganized as anyone else. Quieter, perhaps, but still random. An outsider might believe that they had formed into a cluster at random, and that it was chance that explained why they almost all looked like Imperials, mostly troopers.

The outsider would be wrong. Anj's eyes flicked as an indicator sounded and saw that no fewer than ten Imperial frequencies were active. He didn't see anyone lined up in ranks, but training helped him to find the subtle signs that there was organization, purpose, ''order'' in the group, not just the amorphous mixing of the crowd. They were, indeed, bewildered and unsettled just like everyone in or out of the complex. An effort was being made to remedy that.

TR-1407's footsteps hastened. A stormtrooper with the battered armor and single orange pauldron that signified his rank as a sandtrooper squad leader stopped him with a gesture, then nodded. The Red Guard joined the growing mass.

It was startling to check IFF - Identify Friend/Foe - tags on a monitor and see so many designations. Some were familiar, others less so. There were several SL - Sith Lord - indicators scattered about, but Anj didn't see SL-1984, and this was worrying. Other Vaders, yes, and the Red Guard couldn't help boggling a little at the concept of more than one Lord Vader. But none in white, and none with the right designation. What would he have done, anyway?

''Right. I should report in. To whom, though?'' The mass was ''trying'' to order itself, but it had a good ways to go yet. Almost no one with a helmet was speaking "out loud" with their voice amplification units. With the amount of noise that the rest of the crowd was putting out, that was probably just as well. Instead the comm frequencies were abuzz with orders and counterorders, the beginnings of arguments, complaints and others chewing out the complainers. One channel had been set aside for those who had been separated from squadmates. It didn't help that this part of the parking lot was nowhere near clear. Not every space was filled, but there were enough cars and the like to force the group to encircle them.

Where was his squad? Anj scanned again, and again, and didn't find any of them. No. They had to be here. Despite himself he opened the "searching" channel. "Tampa Bay? Tampa Bay Squad, come in! Tampa Bay?"

This particular frequency was filled with similar requests. "Is there anyone else from Georgia Garrison? Please, Georgia Garrison?" "Pacific Outpost, all units report in. Pacific Outpost..." "Michigan Squad, we have two missing from Michigan Squad, please report." "Anyone from Bast Alpha Squad, come in. Did everyone get out okay?" Most of them were representing a particular squad, or garrison, or outpost, and were looking for missing friends. But he heard one or two who had been separated completely, like him. Some got answers; Anj overheard the starts of several reunions, each cutting off as the speakers switched channels. Others didn't.

"Tampa Bay! Come in Tampa Bay Squad!" It didn't make ''sense''. Anj was starting to sweat into the lining of his armor. Where could they be? He hadn't exactly been quick in getting here, he ''couldn't'' be the first from his squad! Where had they all gone? TR-1407 scanned IFF again as the last of his relief evaporated. It made no sense! The three other squadrons of Florida Garrison - Everglades, Makaze, Parjai - were there. There were forty-nine people in Tampa Bay Squadron - not all of them had come to Xanadu, and some might be a little slow in getting here, but he should have heard from ''someone''.

"Tampa Bay Squad? Please come in. Tampa Bay? Is anyone there? Anyone? Tampa Bay!" Anj forced himself to stop before he lost all control of his voice. He could hear someone else pleading, close to tears if not already crying - "Neon City Garrison, ''where are you?'' Please! Damien, Ray, Greg - ''where are you?''"

To his horror, Anj found his throat constricting in panic. Where were they? ''Where was his squad?'' He tried, squeezing his hands into fists and desperately telling himself that they were late, that's all, he tried to keep calm, but it had been a trying day already and he had no orders to follow and ''his squad was missing.'' That was the big thing, the worst thing. He'd lost them, he had failed his oath as a Red Guard and a soldier of the Empire. The feeling was strong enough to make his eyes water. Anj made sure to close his connection and all of his speakers so that none would hear when he lost it. The rest of the 501st had enough distractions.

Something pulled on his robe. Surprised, Anj looked down at the round-topped droid as it retracted its manipulator arm and crooned something wordless at him.

It was a moment for him to blink fiercely and swallow that lump in his throat, and he covered the delay by reactivating a speaker so that his voice could be heard. "Yeah. There is. I - I've lost my squad." The admission almost stuck on the way out. "I don't know where ''any'' of them are."

The droid, an R2-series astromech with highlights in ''pink'', of all colors, whistled and cooed sympathetically.

"Well, no. Not a word. I have no idea where they are." It seemed like the tightness was easing off, becoming less immediate. He welcomed the distraction. "We got separated a while back, and I haven't seen or heard from any of them since. And it's not like we have our own personal frequency, either - it wasn't like we'd have had any use for it." As he realized what he'd just said, Anj smiled humorlessly into his helmet. Of ''course'' there wouldn't have been a use! It had been a game, or something close!

The R2 beeped, imperious. Its single black photoreceptor was steady. Just like that, things were in perspective. Anj might have laughed, if he hadn't still felt so uneasy.

"That's true. My squad is tough. I'm sure they're fine - it's just, they aren't ''here,'' and I don't know how my friends are. I haven't seen them since all ''this'' started, and I'm worried." This was true, and he knew that they had to have run into trouble, or he wouldn't be by himself like this. But - they were tough, and they were smart. If they needed help they would call for it, and they would make it through.

And if they didn't, well... For a moment he had trouble drawing breath. It was a ''terrible'' thought, and sickening enough that he tasted bile and felt his heart pounding in his throat. ''May the Force help their murderers, because nothing less will stop me,'' he swore, meaning every word. Terrible thought. '' Terrible'' thought.

A sharp whistle brought his attention back down to the droid, who chattered up at him. He had to make an effort to look in control and stable for it. He was sure he knew who and what it was. If it ''was'' R2-KT - well, virtually everyone in Star Wars fandom knew that story. In comparison, he had no grounds for complaint.

"I'll be fine. I'm a Red Guard - I work best alone or with only a few people, and it's not like I'm really by myself - I'm surrounded by the 501st." And they were his Legion, the closest to the Empire that he was ever likely to find. How could he despair? "Thanks."

With a final, cheery whistle, the pink R2 swiveled and trundled away. It had some kind of a logo banner, pink on white, on its back, but it slipped out of sight between two troopers and a robed man before he could read it. Less than a minute later, the single terrified member of Neon City Garrison got off the comm.

Anj felt better now. Still a little shaken, but he was functional, and that was what mattered. This still begged the question - ''now'' what? The Red Guard went after the first fresh distraction that presented itself.

There was a flurry of activity at the edges of the gathering. TR-1407 wasn't exactly short, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the helmets of the people around him. Still, he got a flash of someone else in flowing scarlet and something large, yellow, and moving. The Red Guard looked to his nearest neighbor and boosted the output to his speakers, realizing ''how'' he did it only after it was done.

"Do you know what that's about?" The woman in the form-fitting jumpsuit and the hoodless brown cape turned towards him.

She was - well, she was stunning, and Anj found himself glad that his helmet hid his gaze. She had an alertness about her, like she was aware of everything that was going on around her at all times. He couldn't tell what her position was - probably some kind of agent, by the lower-leg guards and nonstandard firearms. The woman had a striking sort of confidence, almost an aura of "I know what I'm doing and I'm proud to be doing it".

It didn't hurt that she really was pretty - her features were too sharp and strong for conventional beauty, but attractive. Red hair, intense green eyes, and under the jumpsuit she was fit and muscular with good shoulders, a far cry from the handful of sultry pin-up style women that Anj had glimpsed before. He hadn't found ''them'' particularly attractive, but -

Anj saw the lightsaber and the IFF-provided designation at roughly the same time. SL-3268, in a clear voice, answered, "There's a car, I'm guessing a Camaro, without a driver that's started moving erratically and making abortive charges at us. One of your fellow Guards is trying to dissuade it. I don't think there'll be a problem." Just as he was hoping she hadn't noticed, the Mara Jade added with a quirk of her lips, "And I'm flattered, but taken."

''She's one of the Emperor's Hands. I'm lucky that she hasn't taken offense.'' That realization effectively took any desire, killed it, and mangled it beyond any recognition. Anj was glad of the helmet hiding his face, and vaguely wished that he could find a hole in the ground in which to crawl into and die. Even with the cooling systems in his armor, he knew he was blushing furiously, hard enough that he felt sunburned. ''Next time, check IFF first.'' He didn't bother wondering how she'd known. Force Sensitivity and all that.

Probably just as well. Anj had no idea what he'd have done. He was on duty anyway; even with nothing immediate going on it would be un-Imperial to get too distracted. Fortunately not every woman was striking in quite that way - prettier, yes, often curvier and not immediately off-limits, but markedly less impressive. Picturing someone like the Mara Jade alongside, say, Scott, was... interesting. But of course there was also the fact that less than an hour ago ''he had been female'' - how, ''how'' could that have slipped his mind? - and feeling attracted to people while male was a tangle he ''really'' didn't want to unravel just yet.

3268's auburn head came up. Anj felt the warning tingle in the instant before a commanding voice came on all frequencies. The IFF code marked the speaker as TK-0210. '''Our Beloved Founder', Albin Johnson,'' Anj realized. ''Well well. There wouldn't be a 501st without him. I'd forgotten that he showed up. His R2 is here, so of course he's here too.''

"Something new has come up. Would everyone please listen to the situation." It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt that it was an order. Within seconds all voice traffic had stopped. The rest of the crowd carried on with the panicking, but here everyone listened as the founder explained an exchange that someone had heard taking place on a frequency that was decidedly not Imperial.

Specifically, it was one of the radio frequencies used by the United States military. The Founder didn't mention exactly what frequency it was, or when anyone had started listening in on it. What had been overheard was a report on something going off Xanadu grounds and following the highway. Something very large. One of the ones reporting said it was "like something out of Star Wars". The physical description exactly matched that of an Imperial Walker, specifically an All Terrain Armored Transport. Or, as the Rebellion and most civilians in the Galaxy called it, an AT-AT.

''This is a ''very'' sudden development.'' If he'd expected anything, TR-1407 would have thought that the Founder would have just summarized what had just happened, tendered some kind of advice or orders. He hadn't expected a fresh problem, particularly one like ''this''.

The gathering was silent barely long enough for the Founder's report to sink in before a member stated that there had ''not'' been a Walker exhibit, followed by other testimonies that confirmed that wherever this had come from, it wasn't 501st. Exactly what had been happening before all ''this'' was muddled, but people were quite adamant that they knew nothing.

Talking into a handheld comm unit so that everyone could hear her, 3268 had another opinion. "Why would it matter whether or not this thing is one of ours? Imperial is Imperial. The question is, what do we do about it? I think it's reasonable to assume that some rogue element has taken control of an assault walker for an unknown reason." Standing fairly close to Anj as she was, he heard the odd duality of the Mara Jade's voice coming simultaneously through his audio pickups and helmet comm.

It would be unacceptable for ''anyone'' - the automatic assumption seemed to be Rebels, smugglers, or saboteurs, although nobody really expected that to be true - to get away with stealing Imperial property, particularly something as gigantic and dangerous as an assault walker, the common consensus was. The damage one could do, particularly in an urban area, was tremendous, even on a civilized planet in the Empire, where units could quickly be dispatched to take it down. Here on Earth, on a day like today...

Anj heard someone unfamiliar speak out. "There was a young man earlier, some sort of student of engineering - I overheard his name, Gary or Garth or something - who wore a walker costume. He might be driving it." Several others remarked with surprise that they remembered something of the sort.

With confidence, Anj added, "It's difficult to pilot a walker without a copilot, but possible. Normally one drives, the other shoots. The automated systems would help compensate."

"He had a friend with him. It's entirely reasonable to think that two pilots can manage without a commander." If it occurred to anyone that maybe this student ''hadn't'' become a pilot, they kept silent.

A plan didn't actually get proposed until after the Founder made another report, one possibly even more alarming than the last. Tanks and military choppers were being dispatched to intercept the rogue walker before it could reach the next city - and if the cryptic military lingo had been translated properly, somewhere near Washington a jet loaded with missiles had just taken off.

Suddenly the entire gathering was moving, setting up a course of action, proposing and vetoing various aspects to the plan. There would have to be a pursuit, it was decided almost instantly. They needed a small number of autonomous agents. Agents who could subdue anyone within the walker without damaging it, agents who could ''control'' the walker, and someone with enough diplomatic acumen to defuse the situation once it was under control. Preferably agents would have at least some proficiency in at least two of the three. Every member of the team would also need to be able to use grappling hooks and high-tension wires to get up there. It would also help to have the tools all stormtroopers carried, including shaped charges, binders, and a Proper Resonator.

The gathering was rapidly polled, and all those with the right skill set were chosen, then evaluated and kept or not. Unsurprisingly, there were no Imperial Army Pilots who could be identified as such by their armor - AT-AT pilot uniforms were far from popular. No one had worn his or hers to Xanadu. However, a number, Anj included, had made the costumes - and somehow that translated into experience in the cockpit.

Anj was questioned and admitted that he'd never earned the license, and was met with a thinly-disguised quiz in the form of a barrage of questions from two others. He passed. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Red Guard and both willing to work with others and well able to subdue someone with minimal damage, meant that he was on the team.

Some others at least as qualified as him weren't, largely because they had trouble cooperating. There had been many Emperor's Hands, some of them Mara Jades, others not, in the initial pickings, but the fact that most of them seemed to strongly resent each other meant that only three were kept. The final selection consisted of eight individuals. These were the Hands, SL-3268 among them, Anj and another two Red Guards, a clonetrooper sergeant, and a single sandtrooper who really seemed to believe that he was Davin Felth, the trooper who had the line "Look, sir, droids" in ''A New Hope''.

At the same time the other half of the pursuit was being organized. Speederbikes were mentioned, but only two, both from a display, could actually be accounted for, and at any rate they might not have done much good. They were incredibly fast and agile, but with only two, they couldn't carry much. Average cars or trucks were considered and rejected in the same breath. It would be too hard to get an operative out of the vehicle and up into the walker, not to mention the fact that a car was a nice big target, if what's-his-name proved both unreasonable and able to use the walker's weaponry and crushing feet. This left motorcycles, a healthy selection of which were at hand. They would have to do.

More polling; TR-1407 was only peripherally aware of it, but at the end of it seven scout troopers and one Mandalorian soldier were chosen to do the driving. From the first report to the final team, only a few minutes of whirlwind activity had passed. The 501st, while not exactly up to optimal yet, was far more organized than it appeared.

The last problem was actually getting the bikes, taken from all across the lot, to ''work''. Five or fewer of them belonged to people within the gathering - and ''none'' of them had the keys on them. Seized by a wild idea, Anj stepped up during the discussion.

"We don't ''need'' keys," he said, coming to the closest one and uncompressing his forcepike. He had no idea what kind of motorcycle this was. He'd never had anything to do with the things. Still, he could find the ignition easily. Lining it and the lethal tip of his weapon up, the Red Guard thumbed a setting and delicately maneuvered the weapon. The thin metal around the keyslot tore and twisted, and the engine coughed to life.

Just as Anj was enjoying a swell of triumph the fickle machine died miserably, exhaust pipe emitting a stream of thick, oily smoke that spread in a cloud around ankle-height. An inhuman blue-skinned officer in white covered his nose as if offended by the fumes, which weren't evident to anyone with a proper, air-filtering helmet.

No one said anything on the comm channels for a long moment. "Okay," he said lamely, again glad of the helmet that hid his face. "I guess we ''do'' need keys. Today of all days, you'd think this would work." It was a mercy that the attention of the gathering shifted off of him then. He hadn't sensed much in the way of condemnation or scorn, and even amusement had been quiet. It was still embarrassing.

The alien officer in white - a Grand Admiral, apparently - ended up getting several technically-proficient people to hotwire the motorcycles. These included one of the Vaders in the gathering, a man seething with so much barely-suppressed rage and malevolent Force energy that Anj caught his breath and adopted a rigid posture. He was fairly frightening, seemingly hanging on to rationality by the thinnest of margins. The Red Guard fervently hoped that his friend hadn't ended up like ''that''. But whatever else could be said about SL-2128, he worked quickly and well, finishing in time to take over from an officer whose work was slower.

Something else came up; Anj picked up only a few of the details, but a squad that hadn't gotten out reported in to say that they were under attack by unfamiliar hostiles. Once again plans were formed and battered about. They had little to do with the walker interception team. It gave him a pang to think that he might be riding away from his squad, if they were in danger, but duty was duty. TR-1407 soon found himself mounted up behind a scout, roaring away on one of the motorcycles.

The locals barely noticed them go by. They had more than enough trouble as it was - nevertheless, Anj felt a slight pang of mixed contempt and sympathy. He let it pass. They could only do their best. The Five Hundred and First was here for when it wasn't enough.

The Founder sent his best wishes after them on an open frequency. His confidence audibly faltered a little. Anj thought he knew at least part of why. "Good Luck" wasn't right, and they were servants of the Empire, so "May the Force Be With You" might not be good either. Even so, "Emperor's Blessings" was just wrong - and, somehow, so was "The Empire will ''always'' strike back", the belief that any setbacks would be met with a more powerful counterattack. In the end, he settled for, "We're counting on you. You won't let us down."

==Camera guy==

[I fangirl over Tank Man. I really do. I love that we don't know who he was, if he's alive or dead, what he said to the driver of the lead tank - everything. ''How'' could he and the rest of the country have failed? The picture gives me chills. I'd link to it in my bank if the inspiration it gives me wasn't of the "feel small, sit still and tremble in awe and existentialness" variety. So I figured I'd bring it up, since the chance of me working it into, well, ''anything'' else are pretty small.

[Did a little research here, but I have to say that the details pertaining to the helicopter and Doug's camera are probably all wrong. I worked with news cameras in high school and already I've forgotten what piece is called what. The Internet failed me - you'd think I was the only one to wonder who shoots traffic reports, with what, and how. :P]

In June of 1989 an American photographer named Jeff Widener crouched on the sixth-floor balcony of a hotel in Beijing. He was covering the infamous government crackdown on protesters, and only the day before, during the massacre, had been concussed and bloodied by a thrown brick. Widener worked at a range of roughly half a mile with a titanium camera featuring a 400-millimeter telephoto lens. Using borrowed film with the wrong f-stop setting, he covered a column of at least seventeen tanks headed for Tiananmen Square being blocked by one man, alone and unarmed, with a shopping bag in each hand.

Widener wasn't the only one to get pictures of this happening. But, purely by chance, his picture spread fastest. It's now one of the most famous photographs on Earth, seen everywhere except the nation where it was taken - where it happens to be banned. It is iconic in every way, and purely by chance. If Widener hadn't heard that soldiers on the ground were forcibly confiscating cameras, if he hadn't met the fellow Westerner living in that room on the sixth story, if that Westerner hadn't had compatible film available or had been unwilling to stuff that film into his underwear and pass angry Chinese soldiers to get it developed - another photographer's shot of "Tank Man", the "Unknown Rebel", would be the world-famous one. But Widener was in the right place, at the right time, in all the right circumstances.

Doug Maines was in the right place at the right time, and in his view the circumstances didn't look too bad either. Specifically, he was in a Eurocopter Ecureuil news chopper, cruising at two thousand feet and circling with nearly three-quarters of a mile between it and that ''thing''. The camera was a modified 24 frame KCK-40, and at any moment he could start broadcasting live to the network.

Normally he and the pilot shot and delivered traffic reports and overflew accident scenes. Today, not too long after finishing the morning rush's report, they'd been ordered into the air again and told to circle around the Orlando Convention Center to cover something that had come up there. As he adjusted the focus, Doug mused that he hadn't thought much of it - last spring, for instance, a school had been evacuated due to a gas leak, and he had recorded and broadcast video of the students streaming out into the tennis courts.

But there'd been so much air traffic above the Convention Center that both Doug and his partner were wary. Every news station within range had sent someone over to cover it, whatever it was, and both of them knew what happened when helicopters collided in midair. They had spotted the thing heading away, and the chopper had changed course to follow it.

He'd studied for years at photography, cinematography, and the graphic arts, but if Doug had learned one thing it was that aiming high didn't always work out. He had become resigned to aiming his camera at reporters and traffic jams, something he'd never have settled for as an ambitious newbie daydreaming about fame and glory. He was no Widener.

Just as well - Doug didn't have the stomach for following revolutions. He felt a trace of amusement at the thought. ''Right place, right time, and no one's filming but me.'' He was recording now, but the network trusted him enough to let him decide for ''himself'' whether and when to broadcast live.

Something about it screamed ''tank'', clearly enough to make Doug think remember the university and Widener's shot of Tank Man. It was boxy and about as long as the largest legal semitrailer truck, maybe sixty feet in all, though much wider. But it had to be five times taller than any of them, mounted on four flat, jointed legs with round feet half the size of its strange, blocky head. The long legs and the head, and the red laser-things that sometimes shot out of that head, reminded Doug of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. Something about crushing Styrofoam cups in a commercial...

Three years of this job reminded him to check before and behind the tank thing. The highway was several lanes broad, which was probably all that saved oncoming cars from being crushed. Many had crashed into each other or run off the road as drivers gaped, and hardly any had actually passed it. The tank thing was fairly slow, no more than fifty miles an hour at most, and so heavy that it damaged the road, leaving a trail of massive craters and cracked, buckled asphalt in its wake, with a few crushed or burning wrecks scattered about and at least one demolished overpass. All of them had been oncoming traffic; right now nothing was going in the same direction as the walking tank.

Wait, that wasn't right. The distance made them tiny, but even without zooming in Doug saw a pack of motorcycles weaving around and breaking the speed limit, gaining quickly on the tank thing. They were going to get stepped on and ruin the shot, he was sure of it. He had to get an establishing moment before the action started, or it wouldn't look right.

Doug swallowed against his heartburn - no time to take an antacid pill now, he didn't want to miss it - and hit the button that would broadcast live. In a situation like this, he didn't have to report. He just had to film. Wide-angle shot first, to show how big the thing was, including a few wrecks to get a sense of the scale... he then zoomed in to catch little details like the rapid, ponderous motion of the legs and the toe flaps flexing against the ground. He very consciously kept his hands, and the camera, steady against the minor shuddering of the helicopter.

This was in time for the motorcycles to catch up, and he noticed that the riders weren't dressed in anything resembling normal biker gear. Heart pounding, Doug focused on them. He'd have thought ''publicity stunt'' if he'd seen people dressed like this anywhere else. All white and red.

Well, this was bound to be interesting.

[More stuff goes here.]
[No, really.]

==Rocket Trooper==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus3.jpg]]

TX-7255, "Barve" to his friends, saluted after a moment's hesitation. He'd been earnestly telling some groundpounder troops that the group was vulnerable from the air when he'd gotten the summons for an on-the-fly mission. He'd answered immediately - of course - but he hadn't expected to be briefed by the Lord Darth Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet.

...Sort of. Barve tended to focus on his jetpack. How to maintain it, fix it, how to fly it with increasingly intuitive controls, aerial tactics, maintaining and fixing his various weapons and practicing with them, tweaking the minor powered exoskeleton built into his armor, practice with different gravities and atmospheres, dabbling in repulsor packs. Combined with his love for comparing different models and modifying the ones he had, looking for perfection, he was never more than vaguely aware of any politicking.

Even so, he thought he'd have heard if the Supreme Commander decided to reverse his color scheme. The man was also missing most of one arm, the stump of which gave off occasional blue sparks, and at least half of his cape was absent. Since the stump hadn't even been capped off, it had to have been removed recently. This fit in with everything else, really. Barve hadn't heard anything concrete about action or details about where he'd been deployed. Everyone here was so disorganized.

A good meter too far away to be at the Supreme Commander's feet was a small, furry alien with big ears and large, alert eyes. Barve split his attention between the two - helmet screens were useful for that - until he was told that he had to carry the alien through the air.

He was surprised enough to blurt, "My Hush-About was modded with elements from the Aratech Screamer." This meant a lot of things, but he knew from experience that only another rocket trooper understood or cared. Even snubfighter jockeys glazed over. "She's a powerful machine. Launch scorches anything that isn't armored, and fur is flammable. My lord." He wasn't supposed to contradict the Supreme Commander, was he? Damn. Well, it wasn't like he'd run into the protocol before.

"I see. One moment." The Dark Lord - light lord? This really didn't make any sense, ''why'' was he in white - turned to the groundpounders for a moment. Barve ignored what they were saying - he wasn't supposed to listen in, and if it was important, they'd tell him - and watched the alien glance from helmet to helmet as the curved antenna on its head quivered. He had to be careful around aliens. You never knew what they would do.

A ground trooper with the type of armor and white fabric oversuit that some of them wore to protect against cold took off his helmet, turned it upside down, and knelt. The alien climbed into the helmet and shifted about as the ground trooper tugged the white cloth on the helmet so that it stood rigid, making a sort of bucket with the alien at the bottom. The trooper stood, holding his helmet by the cloth. Only the alien's ears showed.

"We have a runaway AT-AT bearing [direction]. I need you to take Steph inside it as quickly as - as quickly as is feasible. Get him there alive and conscious." This was the same thing he'd said before being distracted by the launch thing. "I don't know how well he tolerates flight, so you must determine your speed on your own. We will comm ahead and tell the intercept team to be ready. Do not engage hostiles. Do not get killed."

Weird mission. Still, Barve took the helmet from the trooper, locking his fingers in the stiff fabric. The little alien inside shifted its weight and stared up at him. Helmet and alien together were moderately heavy, but still lighter than his DN bolt-caster, still holstered.

A not-quite-voice said, ''Don't drop me. God, this is a bad idea. Please don't drop me''.

The ground trooper said, "Please don't drop him. I want my helmet back later."

"Steph, try not to drain energy. The comm channel is running on an open frequency. You are not to fire on anything. I can't stress that enough."

"Acknowledged." Not like he could even draw a weapon with his hands full.

The Supreme Commander hesitated, then nodded and told him, "Clear skies."

He knew the slang for "good journey?" Well, he knew the Supreme Commander was a damned impressive snubfighter pilot - that knowledge generally fell under politicking, but one of the memories recorded and passed down from his original had been a series of truly superior pilots, Lord Vader being at the top of the list - and snubbie pilots shared a bit of lingo with rocket troopers. ...Besides, now that he thought about it, 'clear skies' was probably the most obvious piece of flyboy slang ever.

Everyone had backed far enough away that even if he had a catastrophic failure and his jetpack exploded, none of them would die. He felt a little scorn at that kind of caution. Yes, jetpacks could explode at launch, ''if'' they weren't properly cared for, but Barve had been at this for five years. That was basically all his life - the Spaarti cylinder didn't count, acclimation had taken maybe two weeks, and since flash memory was pretty basic he'd had eight months of jetpack training - and he'd had plenty of time to get in the habit. Not like natural-borns, with that baggage from growing up all haphazard.

Barve set his stance and brought up flight control, rapidly checking the systems. Everything was green, not that he ever expected otherwise. Take care of your gear, and it will take care of you, the saying went, and no one took better care of a jetpack than TX-7255. He braced the helmet against his chest and as an afterthought shifted his grip so that he pinched the fabric over the alien, covering it. Hopefully it wasn't flammable.

There was enough open space around him, but still, regulations said that if he wasn't taking off in a specifically cleared space or doing a touch-and-go, he had to give a verbal warning. Some rocket troopers used the short "Dusting off!" or the even shorter "Launching!", but Barve liked the traditional phrase, said in one way or another since the first soldiers to take to the air on their own.

"Clear the blast zone!" He tensed, leaped as high as the light exoskeleton built into his armor would take him, and kicked in the rockets.

The first few seconds were always uncertain, as the jets fought gravity and flared, close enough to the ground that they licked the armor on his legs and slagged the spot where he'd been standing. The not-voice protested weakly. But he took care of his jetpack, and she held him steady at the top of the jump. He let her kick in a little harder, and she dragged his heavy flesh and armor up in a tower of sound and fire.

He modulated the thrust when he judged himself high enough and triggered the maneuvering jets on the right side, spinning in a slow, complete circle. This looked like one of those planets which couldn't collectively decide what it wanted to specialize in, so it went for city and wild stuff and farmland all at once. Those weren't as interesting as city worlds, at least not from a jetpack, but it was exponentially better than flying over ocean. He had his bearings now. Buildings, crowds, ground, roads, yep, atmospheric flyers, oh yes, and ''this'' way was North and ''this'' was South, good, and so his course was - that way.

Barve swung his legs and flipped over so his back was to the sky, working with his jetpack to find his balance in that second of freefall, and gave her the gun.

Immediately he was flying proper, losing a little altitude in a shallow dive and regaining it, then leveling off and holding steady. There were some other things in his airspace, but they ignored him, and he did the same. He loved flying fast, the landscape zipping by below him, wind shrieking against his armor and trying to tug things out of his hands, even the alternating sense that he was either weightless or something massive was pressing down on him. His jetpack was loud at her highest speed - since part of her was a Screamer, this was only to be expected - but of course he wasn't going at top speed, or anything all that close to it. He kept slow, almost too slow to fly. By the groaning of the not-voice, he probably didn't dare go any faster.

Pity, really. Even after all this time, even with the conditioning and the stuff they'd done to him in the Spaarti cylinder, his jetpack was fast and strong and agile enough to make him struggle to keep conscious, without vibrating him to pieces in the process. Some people didn't like tasking their g-tolerance; none of ''them'' had his genome. He loved flying. He'd rather die than be one of the groundpounders.

Sometimes, though, he wondered what it would have been like if he'd been sorted into pilot training instead. TIEs might not be as agile, but they went so much faster - and with inertial compensators, they could ''do'' that, make changes in their flightpaths that would kill him uncompensated. If he hadn't been sorted into the rocket trooper corps, then he'd be flying in space, too, and going after bigger targets. His original had been a snubbie pilot. The flash-memories he'd recorded and passed down included one of the joy and pride that came with piloting. Barve didn't really like thinking about that. Done was done, and the Empire wasn't going to let anyone but a ''really'' prime natural-born get retrained. Besides, a ship would mean losing his jetpack. She was his baby.

Okay. Barve scanned the ground. This was probably the right road, and there was some suspiciously regular cracking on the surface ahead, but he didn't see anything yet. He'd been told to watch for footprints in the road and wrecked cars. ...He really should have asked what a car was. Was it the same thing as a groundcar, which he'd seen a lot of here, or something more obscure? It wouldn't be the first time he got tripped up by similar-sounding unrelated words.

The not-voice had kept a lot of quiet, wordlessly unhappy not-sounds, particularly when he gained or lost altitude suddenly. He felt safe in assuming that the not-voice belonged to the alien curled up in the helmet he was carrying, and they were a good sign that it hadn't lost consciousness. Should he talk to it? Why not. It might know. Okay, he'd been told that the groundpounder helmet was on the open frequency, right? This far from all the others, he was picking up very little in the way of transmissions. Barve lowered his comm output so he wouldn't spam anyone.

"You know Basic, right?"

There was a pause, and he wondered if the wind was too loud. There were sound mufflers in ''his'' helmet, and his audio pickups filtered out most irrelevant noise, but helmets tended not to work as well when they weren't connected to armor.

Finally he not-heard it. ''Uh... sort of. It's been a while. I think I've forgotten most of what I picked up. Why?''
The not-voice seemed surprised and a little queasy.

"Oh good. I think you speak it fine," Barve said, adding, "I understand Huttese okay, I ''sort'' of get Bocce, and I know a little Sy Bisti, but I don't know any other languages." Understanding so few was kind of embarrassing, but only Basic and Huttese had been flash-programmed and he never really made a focused effort to study languages, so he thought he was picking them up pretty well. "Though I guess you were talking earlier in Basic, so it wasn't a good question."

''Wait, what? ...Do we even mean the same B.A.S.I.C.? Because I thought you meant the programming language.''

Maybe the alien was addled. "I meant Basic. Official language of the Empire. ''This'' language."

Another pause, this one rather long. ''You know, usually people call it English.''

At the very least, the alien was confused. "No, the Empire calls it Basic. So did the Republic. So does the rest of the galaxy. Basic, Galactic Basic, Galactic Basic Standard... Basic."

''What? You actually think - no, don't antagonize the crazy guy with the jetpack. He could drop you. Then you'll never get there.'' That last part wasn't nearly as clear, and Barve suspected he wasn't supposed to not-hear it. But he could handle being considered crazy, even though he'd had the full Spaarti year and there was really no chance of the madness getting him. After all, he'd seen someone in the depths of the madness, and it was probably worth being cautious, at least at first.

"Anyway, alien, I need to know if 'car', in this case, means little groundbound vehicle or is an acronym for something."

''Maybe he ''does'' think he's - Yeah. It's the vehicle.'' Good, then he was headed in the right direction. There was more cracking on the road now too. The alien paused, then said, ''I'm Steph, by the way. Not 'alien'.''

"I'm TX-7255 from batch three," he said. Wait, natural-borns who weren't troopers didn't usually like going by designations. "Call me Barve."

''Barve?''

"It's a nickname. A barve is a clumsy six-legged meat animal. You only get the prime names like "Firebrand" if you're important." He couldn't enjoy a military flick without getting annoyed at that.

''Right. You don't have any other names?''

"Not that I've heard." Did he want the name of Barve's original? No, he'd surely ask if he did. "You're feeling okay, right? Are your eyes being pushed into your head?" He'd feel like such an idiot if Steph had some kind of delayed reaction to acceleration and passed out.

''A little. It was worse when we took off. Everything went sort of gray at the edges.''

"Yeah? That makes sense." He felt like he couldn't leave it at that, so he added, "Humans tend to tolerate horizontal axis g-forces a lot better than vertical ones. It has to do with how our spines are aligned with the axis and how our blood gets forced around. I don't know what you are, but I'd guess it works the same for you."

''Well, ''that's'' good to know. I'm a Hoojib, I guess.'' More indistinctly, Steph said, ''The guy in orange said I looked all wrong, but Eighty-four told him it didn't matter.''

He was not supposed to listen in; if he overheard anyway, he was supposed to pretend otherwise. "Never heard of you. We're well within standard human tolerance, and I'll keep slow for you if I can, but if something comes up and I have to go evasive, you'll have some trouble. Should that happen, try straining your muscles and remember to breathe short, hard, and often. It could help."

''Thanks. I think. It had better not come to that.''

In places, the road was crossed by roads that passed above it. The ones he'd seen so far had been intact, but one up ahead, getting closer by the second, had been shot out, and the pattern of cracks that passed underneath it could reasonably be called footprints. Checking behind himself - the rearwards display was small and not meant for ground details, so he did this by pulling upright, spinning as he stalled, then correcting himself and falling back into flight position, a set of maneuvers that did not please Steph in the least - Barve saw that the set of buildings that he'd taken off near was still visible, though small in the distance.

If he had no further orders, maybe they'd let him fly back at any speed he wanted. Fuel readings were a little lower than they should have been at this point, even with the extra weight, but nothing too alarming.

At this speed he'd be a few more minutes. This thing had gone pretty far. Flying slowly with absolutely nothing going on - usually, he'd be listening to the other rocket troopers, comparing notes and expectations, maybe trying to outmaneuver them. He was hazy on why he'd been deployed without the rest of his unit. They'd acclimatized together and gone through training at the same time and everything, and he'd never been far apart from them. Being alone was boring.

No, he wasn't quite alone. Small talk. How did that work again? Right. "How are you talking? Nothing's getting to my ears."

''I don't have a vocal tract anymore, so I'm guessing telepathy. Better than nothing, but it's annoying.''

"That's too bad," Barve said. It looked like the burden of conversation was on him. He was the worst in his unit at that, frankly, especially with people who weren't familiar with flight and the mechanics of it, but questions were usually good. "So you're one of those aliens that has a metamorphosis, huh? What were you before?"

There was another pause. Incredulous, Steph said, ''I - but - you - you actually haven't figured it out? What - you don't even remember what happened, do you? Do you have a real name? Do you even know what'' planet '' this is?''

Barve hadn't known it was possible to stutter telepathically, but then, he reminded himself, there were a lot of things he didn't know. "No. Are you going to tell me?"

''Oh Jesus Christ.'' Ah. He didn't think Barve was in danger of the madness, he thought Barve was ''stupid''. Barve briefly considered, oh, accelerating a bit more, perhaps flying a bit less steadily, but dismissed the idea. He had a package or a passenger to deliver.

He wasn't angry, quite, but he had to correct the alien. "Hey. I'm not - yeah, I know everyone says I'm a bit simple. Maybe. Maybe. Most of the time." He got the sense that Steph was about to say something, and he didn't let him, raising his voice. "But I'm plenty smart flying, and if there's a jetpack malfunction a couple klicks above the ground, the smartest being in the Empire, the ''very'' best and brightest, is me. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it's that I don't know. Don't make insinuations like that!"

''Aaah! Oh God, don't drop me. I'm sorry, geeze. It's just really weird that you don't know.''

There were a few men in his unit who could have started on something about ignorance, but he wasn't one of them - as far as lectures went, he only had this and the one about untested new equipment. After a moment, Barve became uncomfortable. He wasn't supposed to be hostile to people who weren't the enemy, even if they ''were'' rude aliens. He'd probably have a few bad sleepcycles if he didn't say something.

"Sorry. It's fine. Just... I'm not stupid, okay? Simple isn't stupid."

''Yeah. Sure. God, this was a bad idea.''

Well, ''that'' hadn't gone well. Pity his unit wasn't here. He could have used a people person, or several.

Anyway, by now he could see the runaway walker. It had come to a stop, right in the middle of the road, and as he flew closer he saw that one of the big hatches in the side, the hatches that groundpounders rappelled out of, was open.

"We're just about here. Hold on." It took a bit of maneuvering. A long shallow dive followed by flipping upright and shedding his momentum, then the tricky process of moving laterally while in the standing position without letting the rockets set fire to the inside of the vehicle, and getting close enough to switch them off and fall to his feet without breaking anything. Nothing he couldn't handle. He made it a point of pride that he hardly ever used his repulsor pod when landing, and he didn't need it this time.

Barve landed hard enough that he was forced to drop to three points, which while visually impressive was just bad form. If his unit had been there, it would not have gone unnoticed, but if the groundpounder who met him had judged his landing, he declined to comment on it. The moment Barve put the helmet down, Steph half climbed, half leapt out and shuddered all over so that his fur stood on end. Then he sat on his haunches and started wiping or patting himself down with his forelegs, a set of motions that reminded Barve both of a nervous animal grooming itself and the thing a lot of people did after a rough ride, when they wanted to make sure everything was in one piece.

He'd have been a little bit insulted by that - hadn't he kept slow? Hadn't he maintained his jetpack well enough that there was virtually no vibration, and flown her well enough that it had been smooth? - but he ''had'' gone off on that upset lecture. And some people just didn't fly well. And even if Steph didn't like hearing it, he was an alien and might or might not tolerate the forces of acceleration that well.

The groundpounder looked from Barve to Steph and back. "You sent us an ''alien''?" he asked over the open channel. "Is he an ambassador or something? I thought the message was that he was a friend or something."

Steph stopped grooming and looked up sharply. ''I ''am'' a friend. And I can hear you, you know, the speaker in the helmet's still on." He waggled an ear in a gesture that was probably sarcastic, but still looked silly.

"Oh, sorry," the groundpounder said. "And I guess you're not really an alien. It's kinda hard to keep things straight. C'mon, we need you in the cockpit." He nodded acknowledgment to Barve and turned, heading towards the fore of the walker. Steph followed, still staggering a little.

Barve picked up the helmet again and took the chance to have a look around. He'd seen the big walkers before, just not from inside. He'd landed on the lower of the two levels. At the fore and the aft they were joined by sets of stairs. Entrance to the tunnel leading to the cockpit was through a locking access hatch on the landing in the fore stairs that locked and sealed behind the groundpounder; the aft stairs had another one that probably led to cargo space. A third hatch was set forewards in the flooring. Maybe it went to engines. Then there were the various external ones like what he'd dropped through. Handholds were built into the ceiling, and there were some weapons racks. That made sense, he guessed. These things ''were'' personnel carriers, though they were better suited for annihilating ground targets.

Maybe the above deck had more, but this one was otherwise empty. Apparently the team who'd gone out here were all in the cockpit, which had to be a tight fit. Before he commed back for further orders, Barve noticed one more thing. Coming from the speakers built into the ceiling was a faint, barely audible hiss of static.

[There. I wrote you. I even put in that damn rant. Now get out of my head.]

Walker Imperial Ranger

2009-07-23T04:35:25Z

Joysweeper: /* The Rebel Legion */

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Xanadu]][[Category:Story]][[Category:Alien]][[Category:Inanimorph]][[Category:Transgender]][[Category:Joysweeper]][[Category:Bryan]]
{{universe|Xanadu}}
{{byline|author=Joysweeper|user=Joysweeper}}

By Joysweeper, with some help from Bryan.

Don't read this story yet :)

It'll be done when it's done. For the record, I intend to finish before Duke Nukem.

Links to some pictures of AT-ATs, for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-hlc.jpg] Close up of chin-mounted heavy laser cannons
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:MCQ-battleofhoth.jpg] Low-angle concept art
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SWRSIIIRSWP.jpg] More concept art(Talk about uneven odds. Luke > everything.)
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:BlizzardForce.jpg] ESB screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Blizzard_2.jpg] Another screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-swrs3rs.jpg] High-angle(sort of) image
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:AT-AT_egvv.jpg] Schematics
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT_height.jpg] Bad bluescreen, but it does convey size pretty well.

Links to some pictures of Red Guards, also for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Guard.png] Red robes and a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos_NEGTC.jpg] Kir Kanos, helmet off, showing the armor. He never uses a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos.jpg] The Emperor's guards aren't just for show.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kanos3.JPG] Kir Kanos showing the armor again. Different look at the belt.

Have to thank [http://community.livejournal.com/brains_in_a_jar/ brains-in-a-jar] for thoughts on a human brain in a very nonhuman mechanical body, and also all kinds of things about static. Also have to thank Robert T. Bakker for writing "The Dinosaur Heresies"; that bit on a lizard's wrist was extremely interesting.

And I found this quote on one of the 501st homepages. It is so ''perfect''. "Some fans are content to collect action figures...other fans want to ''be'' action figures. Nothing professes your fandom quite like building your own detailed costume replica of a classic Star Wars villain, and there's nothing quite like the feeling that comes from bringing the characters of Star Wars into the real world and sharing the magic with others. A truly engaging Star Wars experience only occurs through a convincing appearance. To this end, the 501st constantly strives to improve the quality and accuracy of its member's costumes. Our goal is to appear as if our characters have just stepped off the big screen and into this world." I hope I can find some way to use this ironically. Probably not ''this'' story, but I'm going to have to stow it away.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Hoojib.jpg]]

==Bryan's intro==

"The door, the door!" Steph called out and lunged to intercept the handle swinging in to catch Garrett's back, stopping it just in time to prevent another ding in the cardboard that might be difficult to repair now that they were at the convention itself.

Garrett let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks." He had turned sideways but thanks to the huge boxy hump over his back it didn't make him any narrower and only really served to make it harder to keep track of everything. And with the two giant cardboard constructs mounted over his arms there wasn't really much he could do anyway; his hands were busy just holding the internal braces in place.

Steph grinned and slipped lithely around to join him in the lobby once Garrett had managed to make it inside. "You'd think armor capable of repelling turbolasers could handle a door handle."

Garrett shook his head. His costume was particularly fragile, being both bulky and made primarily out of cardboard, but it had been surprisingly quick and easy to make as a result. "It'll last until judging. Spray a jot of black on any tears and call 'em battle damage, the Rebels must've got a few lucky hits in." The lobby was sparsely populated right now, with just a few folks still lined up at the front desk buying passes to glance in surprise at Garrett's outfit, but Garrett decided it was showtime. He leaned forward and fell into his quadrupedal stance, the big round footpads of his forelimbs clomping to the ground to support him and the headpiece tilting down into the correct orientation.

There were a few appreciative murmurs as the onlookers finally recognized the iconic Imperial walker he was dressed as. Steph gave a little flourish and a bow, as if taking credit for the outfit, and then stepped forward to give Garrett something to follow. They'd considered trying to rig up a periscope of some sort so that Garrett could see forward more easily but they'd run out of time for details like that; it was enough that the AT-AT's legs were able to support him as things were, they'd had to compromise on the costume's proportions a bit just to make it work.

The majority of the work had taken only a single week. Since it only really had to survive for a single day of use ease of construction had been a fair tradeoff. Garrett was like that with all of his projects; a flash of inspiration, a whirlwind of construction, and then once it was finished the itch was satisfied and he would lose interest and let it go. Steph counted it as sheer luck that this time around the inspiration had come when they might make some money off of it. He'd been tight with Garrett for a couple of years now, both of them in the same engineering degree at the nearby University of Midtral, and was the less-imaginative and more-practical of the two.

"Two please," Steph signed in. "Stephen Midder and Garrett Thompson. Just for today." He pointed to identify themselves.

"Registered for any of the contests?" The man behind the desk asked. Garrett nodded silently, the walker-head bobbing almost comically. "Right..." The man shuffled through a list, presumably checking for Garrett's name, and then looked back up once he'd checked it off. "Ten for him, thirty for you."

"Eh? Aww." Steph got out his wallet to pay for the passes. "Should've worn a costume myself." ''Not that I could have got a discount for any costume that cost under twenty dollars, of course.'' But he supposed that wasn't really the point.

The two of them had done some pretty wacky and nerdy things together. The AT-AT costume had blown away everyone at the Halloween party they'd been to on campus just a few nights previous, in fact that had been the primary impetus for building the thing in the first place. But as they proceeded down the hall toward the convention rooms where the main population of conventiongoers were congregating, Steph began wondering if they'd finally reached their level. The variety and creativity of hand-crafted costumes on display was enormous. Still, there wasn't anything quite like the AT-AT costume Garrett wore and it still drew a good share of attention.

Upon entering the first convention room - a dealer's room, from the look of the tables set up along the side walls, but nonetheless full of costume-wearers - they almost immediately encountered someone in a Stormtrooper outfit. It was a perfect replica in every detail, clearly a labor of love, and the person wearing it was dedicated enough to playing the role that he resisted the temptation to drop out of character.

"You're out of uniform, pilot," the trooper commented as he gave Steph a nod of acknowledgment in passing.

Steph was at a loss for a response but Garrett gave a most un-AT-AT-like chuckle. Garrett had been shuffling along behind Stephen on all fours, barely able to see more than the backs of Stephen's heels, and he took the opportunity after the trooper had passed to stand back up again and look around. "Lots of competition."

"Yeah." Steph sighed; the prospect of winning any of the prize money seemed more distant now that he'd seen some of what they were up against. This was just the first room and there was an amazing gargoyle with what looked like pneumatically-operated wings, a really hot fox-girl who had made a masterful blend of both plush fabric and her own natural attributes, and a lizard-man... no, Steph corrected himself, a Gorn. The Gorn's costume was nearly as good as the one from the original Star Trek episode had been. "Still, nothing like an AT-AT, eh?"

"Excuse us, please," A small woman in a jockey costume asked from behind Garrett's cardboard bulk. He shuffled to the side to let her through, leading a man in an amazing horse costume. The thing made him seven feet tall, with a long neck and perfect horse's head, and the hoof-gloves made Steph wonder if he could get down on all fours too.

"Heh. Damn." Garrett shook his head. "Well, thank goodness for categories, eh?"

Steph gave a wry grin. "Yeah. Though I'm feeling a bit under-dressed myself now."

It didn't really matter much since Garrett was the center of attention, as intended; Steph was along just to open doors and do the other things Garrett couldn't manage in that hulking outfit. But as they proceeded through the room Steph found his gaze lingering on some of the costuming wares being sold.

People would stop to stare, take photos, or ask Steph questions about the AT-AT costume. Since he was the one leading the way, with Garrett's face down and concealed under the cardboard headpiece, it was natural that they'd assume he was in charge. But when Garrett reared up to proudly answer the questions they'd immediately switch to ignoring Steph instead. It was quickly beginning to annoy him; though the idea and the design for the AT-AT costume had been Garrett's they'd worked on it together.

"Hang on, Garrett," Steph finally called. They were on their way to the exhibition hall but they were still quite early, they'd left plenty of flex in their schedule to account for difficulties with the costume. "I want to look at some of the stuff they're selling here."

"Stuff?" Garrett got up and looked around.

There weren't any Star Wars branded costume supplies at hand, and if there were they'd probably be too expensive. ''Twenty dollars, eh? I can spend twenty dollars.'' That left mainly just the cheesier costume gear.

After a few minutes of browsing Garrett got back down on all fours and spent a little while tromping back and forth. The arms of the AT-AT costume were quite heavy; in addition to the cardboard shell they had a pair of aluminum canes inside, trimmed short and affixed to the broad metal bucket lids that formed the soles of his "forefeet". Despite the crick he was sure he'd eventually develop in his back it was actually easier moving around like this.

There wasn't as much of an audience in here, though. The people who already had costumes were gravitating off somewhere else and those were the ones he was most interested in impressing with his ingenuity and attention to detail. He wasn't a big Star Wars fan himself but he'd dug up some schematics from a scan of some old Star Wars book. He'd even hung a Luke Skywalker pilot action figure on a string from his underside, mimicking the famous scene from Empire Strikes Back where the proto-Jedi had grappled up on board one after being shot down on Hoth, but he'd lost that particular accessory somewhere during the Halloween party and hadn't bothered looking for a replacement. There didn't seem to be anything like that in this area of the dealer's room...

He tromped over to Steph. "We going to move on?" He prompted.

Steph sighed. The twin goals of 'attention-grabbing' and 'cheap' weren't meshing very well. "Okay, just let me grab something." Something totally incongruous would probably be best. So... "Ah, I'll take that." A pair of fuzzy bunny ears on a headband for just ten bucks. Garrett didn't even look up and Steph grinned; he'd be startled when he did.

They continued onward.

==Joysweeper's pre-TF setup==

On the way they'd called it a "function" as if it'd been some kind of social event, and in a desultory fashion they'd been trying to get donations to the Leukemia Society, but it was far from formal. The Kublai Con attendees were pretty generous – TR-1407, given name “Angela Kincaid”, calling herself “Anj” while in costume - had once heard it said that furry cons generated more money than scifi cons, and Xanadu was a mixture of both.

What had made the effort fun was the “act”. Angela lost count of just how many times she’d heard friends declaring with feigned authority that the 501st Legion was here to keep the peace and maintain order. Essentially they’d just threatened anyone who looked impressive enough, and almost everyone had played along, reacting in fear or challenging the Imperials to a duel.

She’d personally “fought” an armored anthro dragon with a very realistic whipping tail, matching her forcepike with his curved fiberglass sword, and although she’d “lost” she had also had the pleasure of seeing him back down when faced with the blasters of eighteen stormtroopers. Good donation from that one, too, when they'd explained and everything.

The "TR" prefix in front of the number she had picked as her identification - she'd chosen fourteen oh seven - indicated which costume was her favorite. "TK" meant stormtrooper, "TC" was clonetrooper, "SL" was Sith Lord... there were a number of them for the various types. "TR" meant that she favored the Emperor's guards in their red helmets and flowing robes. They were called Red Guards, Royal Guards, and various other combinations of "Red", "Royal", "Imperial", and "Emperor's". Frankly, Angela preferred "Red Guard". The arguments some of her friends got into about nomenclature gave her a headache - fanwank was one thing, and you had to be a little anal to care about a screen-accurate costume, but some people went too far.

She’d heard from one of them that someone had actually caught a pickpocket in the act and had proceeded to instill the fear of the Empire into him, winning a lot of amusement from everyone else in the process, but she hadn’t seen it herself, nor had anyone who told the story. It was probably hyperbole. That didn’t stop the thought from being entertaining.

Now it was over and the group was dispersing. TR-1407 was glad to leave, frankly. The costume, with heavy cloth robes over already-stifling armor, had slowly become hot enough to, as the phrase went, fry fleek eels with, the ice packs had either thawed or hadn't been working in the first place, and no amount of water or robe-flapping could make it entirely tolerable. The bodysuit under the plating under the robes was so drenched with sweat that she'd probably have to peel it off.

Not for the first time she wished that she hadn’t bothered with the tight bodysuit and the armor that went over it. It wasn’t like it would have visibly made a difference. Some Red Guards liked to keep their robes thrown behind their shoulders like a cloak, the better to show off the detailing on their armor. Angela, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone guessing that she was female, and so kept her robes arranged about her body, hiding everything but her hands, her feet, and her helmet. It still would have been far, ''far'' too hot – the helmet was the next thing to airtight, and only the respirator that threaded down to her waist kept her from suffocating – but at least she wouldn’t feel like sparks were smoldering under her robes.

But… no. More than once during the “fight” her robes had swept about, and both before and after they hadn’t exactly hung neatly. She would ''never'' have heard the end of it if she were to come to an event “half-dressed”.

“Remember, there’s a march at three,” she told her friend and former pupil SL-1984 as they left, part of a stream. The majority of Tampa Bay Squad happened to be heading in the same direction. “We meet before two thirty in the southwest parking lot.” Little single-squadron things like the function were fun, but the real thrill was always when the entire 501st, or as much of it as was attending any particular convention, marched together. There was just something about it that felt exhilarating. Like she was part of something bigger than herself.

“I knew that,” he protested, but mildly. “Micheal Porter”, as he was usually known – although he preferred to answer strictly to his designation when in costume – was tall enough, laid-back enough, and attention-loving enough to pull off a White Vader costume. It was exactly what it sounded like – the Darth Vader rig, all in white, sometimes called “Vader Redeemed.” The images that the costume was based off of had appeared for literally two panels at the very end of a comic that wasn’t even canon. Even by 501st standards that was unusual - and the 501st Legion was infamous for being made up of fans who weren't content to simply ''collect'' action figures, they wanted to ''be'' them.

His protest was put on hold briefly as a fairly well-done white tiger furry with an articulated jaw interrupted, waving her pawhands and generally being as relentlessly upbeat as possible. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but gestured and showed off a disposable camera on a strap around her neck enthusiastically enough that it was pretty clear that she wanted pictures.

TR-1407 had never been all that comfortable with being hugged by complete strangers for photographs, but she didn’t have any serious objections to it, and she wasn’t carrying her wallet with her this time, so there was no chance of getting robbed again. Fortunately the tiger was much more interested in SL-1984, and ''he'' was perfectly willing to mug and pose as much as desired, supported by three or four stormtroopers who got beckoned into the shots and played along, rather than shaking their heads and passing by. Maybe it was just that white fur went better with white robes and armor than with red. It was probably more that the kid was naturally showy.

After the Red Guard had obligingly snapped enough pictures and handed the camera back to the furry, the white tiger left to accost someone else, and they picked up where they had left off.

“Angela, you really don't need to remind me about everything anymore. I know the schedule."

“Don’t call me Angela when I’m in uniform, please." Sweat was pooling in the tips of her gloves. Angela flexed her hands against it. The moment she let them relax, it pooled again. "It's only been what, a year since I let you walk off and you missed it because you were buying original issues of 'Spider-Girl'?"

"A year and a half. I am ''so'' much better at juggling my hobbies now," he said dryly. "Why, I even remember things that the schedule said and Pike forgot to bring up."

A trooper listening in muttered "You had to bring the Squad Leader into this. Now you're in for it."

Another trooper who'd been a few steps behind got right up besides the taller Vader. She was a snowtrooper, and probably suffering almost as much as Angela in the heat. Despite the helmet speaker and a tired note in her voice, she sounded crisp and alert. "Hey, don't complain. I'm sorry we haven't made an announcement, but we've got a lot more on our plate than you do; ''you'' just have to show up at the right time and place, and we're not here to babysit you. We've been setting things up and working out scheduling conflicts since five in the morning. It's been a long day at the end of a long week already and I'm glad John was there to take over after eleven." The snowtrooper slipped into character and finished, very dryly, "So don't complain about your superiors, my lord. Circumstances tend to be more complicated than they seem."

"Ah," SL-1984 said, briefly assuming character himself. "My apologies, Ma'am. That was merely a breach in my personal discipline. No disrespect was meant." Following along, Angela couldn't help feeling a little surge of goodwill. She loved this group. They argued a lot, and Shanda Pike admittedly could be touchy, but it never got too far. Probably in part because while Michael loved the limelight, he had very little ego or temper.

"I'll overlook it, so long as you don't let it happen again," Pike allowed very seriously. A smile crept into her voice. "You're mixing up your honorifics, by the way. I'm only "ma'am" in the Tusken Raider suit and as Mara."

"Again, my apologies. Sir," he added. Everyone pretended not to notice the slight skip in his amplified voice.

With a nod, the snowtrooper peeled away and dropped back, staying in sight but effectively bowing out of the conversation. In an aside, Angela told her friend that his voice-changer was failing.

“What? Testing, testing... You’re right.” SL-1984 thumped the speaker hidden in his chest box, then removed his helmet, careful of the trailing wires that ran from it down into the rest of the costume. “This thing always gets screwy an hour or so in.”

There was always something just a little bit disturbing about seeing someone in costume but without their helmet on. It didn’t take long to get used to seeing troopers, but with a Vader it ''always'' looked strange. Michael had opted for the ski-hood-under-the-helmet thing that Vaders usually wore. His, naturally, was white. Removing helmets while trooping tended to be frowned on, but everyone in the 501st knew that sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Angela told him, “You really ought to try a pair of Vortex Twos. I’ve never made a Vader-“

Michael left off frowning into the helmet for a moment. “You’re not nearly tall enough to pull it off. You'd have to do the three-fourths scale version. And maybe get body padding.”

“I know. Shut up.” Angela sighed. “I’ve never made a Vader, but I have a helmet, therefore I use a speaker. Vortex. Got it with my tax returns. I know that Hasbro thing is cheap and easy to get, but, well, the downside is quality. Vortex is the best.” She indicated the general location of her own voice amplification unit with a quick gesture. It made her voice audible despite the almost airtight helmet, flattening it out in the process.

“I know, but that’s a bit of an investment. I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. Had to stop working on that Tusken Raider one… I could barely afford to come ''here.'' This will hold for a bit longer. Going to have to try and fake it when it does fail. The iPod with the breathing loop's still good, at least.” Replacing the helmet and straightening it with both hands, he faced her directly. “Any plans?”

“I’m getting out of this costume before I cook.” She flapped her robes in another vain attempt to get some cool air circulating. Under her helmet, a little curl of hair had plastered itself over one eye, sticking to the lid as she blinked. Just about every time she wore a helmet she found herself wishing she'd cut her hair short. Tampa Bay Squadron's other Red Guard kept hers cropped and said it made something of a difference.

SL-1984’s speaker system relayed the sound of his mouth opening, so she cut him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need any help, Micheal. Seriously, if I stay in this any longer I’ll get heatstroke. Every time I get into this thing I regret it, I swear.”

"If you want me to call you Anj, don't call ''me'' Michael." SL-1984 raised his voice to be heard over the shouting match going on between two balding men in spandex. Taking up a standard Vader mannerism with ease that betrayed several movies' worth of casual study, he locked his hands around his belt. “This is why white’s a good color. I’m not sweating half as much as I did in the black sauna suit, so I think I’m good for a while yet. I'd like to see the sights. There are some ''really'' nice costumes this year. Maybe I’ll swing by those set pieces people keep talking about. I heard that they got David and his crew to do the Hutt set again this year, plus Carmen said that Makaze Squad brought in that Death Star made of like a million Legos. I have no idea how they could have got it in the doors.”

People had collected in a chattering knot around someone or something, clogging the way. It was possible to squeeze past, but that just wouldn't do. Angela raised her voice. “Move along, come on now citizens, you can collect in a spare room much more easily than out here. Move along, move along.” The voice amplifier lent her voice a little more kick and made it audible. Despite that, she saw no sign that more than a few people had heard, let alone intended to obey.

Her former pupil, his voice changer having given up entirely, repeated the order with the same intonation, doing his best with the voice. This time, people listened and obeyed, breaking up and dispersing. They’d been clustered around a yellow lab – not a furry, an actual, panting dog that barely seemed disturbed at all by the crowd – wearing one of those novelty pet costumes. It went very nicely with his owner, though Angela wasn’t sure about the meaning of the dog being Batman when the man was Robin.

What she ''was'' sure about was that the kid she’d once sponsored – hardly a kid despite her teasing, she couldn't be more than five or six years older than him - was just ''better'' at some of this than she was. Particularly when it came to giving orders to people neither of them knew. Partly it was because, although she wasn’t shy by anyone’s standards, she didn’t like to stand out overmuch. Hence why her preferred costumes were the Red Guard and obscure ones like AT-AT drivers or Imperial Army Pilots, as they were called, while ''his'' was arguably the most conspicuous costume in the 501st.

A trooper that Angela knew from the squad finally answered the question. “The Lego Death Star? It breaks apart into sections and gets reassembled. We had to get a cart for the pieces, but it's simpler than it looks. Tampa Bay had it one year, but that was before your time. Sir.”

TR-1407 decided to break it off. She really didn’t know where the closest ‘changing room’ was, but she’d been told that they were everywhere, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to find one. The longer she waited, the longer the costume stayed on. “Have fun, guys. I think I’ll get most of this off before I make more plans. Don’t hurt yourself showing off.”

“Don’t forget to put it back on by two thirty. I’ll see you by then if not before, An- Anj.” He and those troopers who hadn't already gone their own ways kept moving in the same direction, and she arbitrarily took a left.

It was pretty close to noon; compared to just an hour ago, the hallway was half empty. The people who had been rushing around trying to get to various things had reached them, apparently. This wasn’t anywhere near the dealer’s room or any of its offshoots, the SIGs were already in progress, and as far as she could remember from the big con schedule the only event going on would be that big awards ceremony.

Angela toyed with the idea of going, but the oppressive heat of her costume decided her. Anything worth seeing would surely keep; she'd been to enough conventions to know that the truly impressive costumes would probably stick around for a bit, both soaking up the praise and trying not to break anything. Getting there in time to see the whole thing wouldn’t be worth the broiling and the probability of being jostled by a crowd. She’d hate to break the forcepike that she was carrying braced against her shoulder; it was easily the most fragile part of the costume, and making it had been a trial.

The heat was like a physical thing trapped against her body. Not for the first time, she wished that she’d worn her officer uniform instead. Fewer layers, and her face, neck, and hands were exposed to the air. But officer getup was just so ''plain'', so ''ordinary'' compared to the Red Guard robes and armor. And somehow it drew more attention, not less. In a weird way, Red Guards could be ignored pretty easily. A perk of being a member of Star Wars's version of the Secret Service, she supposed.

Up ahead it was crowded again; all fursuiters from the look of things. Enough of them were breaking the unwritten rule about staying silent in costume that the group was quite, quite loud, even with the helmet cutting off some of the sound. From the laughter, the movement, and the general tone of conversation, they were having a good time. Having nothing better to do Angela approached them, deciding that if nothing else she might as well find out what if anything was going on.

As she passed within thirty feet of the closest of them she felt something like a chill traveling down her spine, prickling against the bodysuit stuck to her skin. The Red Guard would have brushed it aside as nothing, but for one reason or another she noticed that some of the furries who had been talking or laughing or demonstrating dance moves had stopped, abruptly in some cases. A number of them carried on, oblivious, but several stopped what they were doing.

TR-1407 thought she saw a gray feline's mouth opening far wider than a baklava could allow for. She told herself that it was a trick of the light or a flaw in her visor. That was when the chill became strong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and branching to prickle her arms, the base of her skull, her chest and lower than that, strong enough that she shuddered involuntarily. Her bones started to ache, followed by the rest of her body. There was a moment where she thought ''Heatstroke?'' and started to raise her hands to her helmet.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the world.

== Lead up to Garrett and Steph's TFs==

The density of Star Wars costumes steadily increased as they progressed. The population of the convention was extremely diverse but various factors - the impending themed contests, the large number of rooms providing partitioning, natural human cliquishness - were conspiring to make it clumpy.

''Or maybe word's just getting around about Garrett's costume,'' Steph reflected. The stormtroopers seemed eerily organized for just a bunch of fans who'd happened to show up wearing the same thing.

But to Steph's relief, he wasn't feeling quite so annoyed by the attention Garrett was getting any more. The bunny ears had actually ''helped''. Not in that they were anything particularly interesting themselves, of course; they were nothing at all in comparison to even the simplest of the animal costumes he'd seen on display. No, ironically enough it was a synergistic effect.

A big clunky AT-AT clomping around? Worth a double-take, of course. A big clunky AT-AT clomping around being led by a man in bunny ears? That apparently was worth two double-takes.

A small impromptu honor guard had formed around Garrett, a constantly-renewing cluster of Star Wars fans trailing along to examine the AT-AT's details before being left behind or moving on to other things. But though fewer, the Star Wars fans who were puzzling over Steph were puzzling longer. One of them was even a Darth Vader complete with audible breathing, though in an all-white suit for some reason.

Steph wasn't about to ask. He was already being pelted with far more intricate details of the Star Wars universe than he could possibly take in. "So," the white-armored Vader was musing. "I doubt that the Empire has begun accepting nonhumans into service since my conversion, so you cannot be a pilot. I don't think you have the height for a Gerb or Lepus Carnivorous, but I might be mistaken."

"Uh, no, don't think so," Steph shook his head. ''Lepus Carnivorous? Is he making this up on the spot?'' The only carnivorous rabbit that came to mind was from Monty Python.

"Are you a Kushiban? Be at ease, my mission no longer entails the deaths of Force-Sensitives."

That one sounded less fake, and Steph was about to accept the title if only to have something meaningful to say. But then one of the Storm Troopers turned from peering at the detailing on Garrett's head and said in his best tinny trooper-voice, "My Lord, are you forgetting the Hoojib?"

"I was just getting to that." The chuckle seemed quite out of character for a Darth Vader, and to Steph's relief he seemed to be recognizing how far out of his depth Steph was. "I apologize for my men. When you're obsessed, it's a bit hard to remember that ''not everyone knows or cares.''" That last bit seemed to be aimed at the other fans, who variously shrugged, drew back a little, and hung their helmeted heads in probably-mock shame. "Kushiban and Hoojibs are both rabbitlike creatures, not very large. Kushiban are more like cat-monkey creatures with soft rabbit ears and big squirrely tails; they're about, oh, ''this'' tall standing up -" he bent down to hold his gloved hand a foot and a half above the floor "-but usually walk on all fours. They do a lot of handweaving and tend to be Force-Sensitive; generally they're portrayed with a calm demeanor. By most standards they are considered very, ah, cute."

It was Steph's turn to chuckle. "I'll leave cute to the furries."

"Aww." Garrett rose to his hind legs, surprising Steph by having been paying attention, and took a moment to set one of the forelegs down so he could adjust his headpiece. One of the side-mounted gun turrets had hooked on someone and been pulled askew. "You'd think with all those bunny-based aliens there'd be a more crossover, like with those Caitans we saw earlier."

"Ixnay on the Artrek Stay," Steph warned with a grin. He didn't seriously expect anyone to be offended, there was far too much good-natured mixing of genres and universes going on for that, but the rivalry between those two franchises almost seemed traditional.

"I'm dressed as an AT-AT, I think I'm strong enough in the Star Wars Force for my reputation to survive being revealed as a fancier of catgirls in miniskirt uniforms."

The white Vader nodded, still chuckling. "Certainly. You have no idea how many of our aliens look like cats or bugs or yes, rabbits. Hoojib, for example. They're about ''this'' big-" too small to bend down for, he held out his gloved hands as if cupping a normal-sized bunny in them "-they're mute but telepathic, they eat energy. They look more like rabbits with huge eyes and splayed bird feet. They also have large noses, no visible mouth, and one antenna or feeler on the forehead that they use to drain energy with. A relic of the Marvel comics back in the seventies. Frankly, most of us think the writers were dropping something, but the Hoojib are not quite as implausible as some of the others."

"Weird is good," Steph answered with a nod. ''Hoojib, eh?'' The wheels were spinning quickly in Steph's head; even though he'd never seen pictures of one of those things the description was pretty distinctive. He thought back over some of the stuff he'd glimpsed on the tables they'd passed... "I can pull that off. I'll be right back, you okay Garrett?"

Garrett nodded. "Just tromping around." He had finished his adjustment and was considering whether to go back down on all fours, but as Steph headed off into the bustle he found himself welcoming the excuse to stay upright a while longer. His back wasn't hurting yet, and thanks to the angle of the headpiece he didn't have to hold his neck at a bad angle, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned to the white Vader instead. "So, if it's not a faux pas to ask, did you not have time to paint your outfit before the con?"

SL-1984 chuckled again. "I've got the black getup too. You don't want to know how hot that gets if you don't have real leather. This is a more recent relic of comics, actually. One where the Dark Lord has left the Empire and joined his children, and inexplicably looks ''exactly the same'' except for color. Just as absurd in its way, although I'll give it points for not having talking hedgehogs or superweapons that look like pinball machines. Dark Horse, not Marvel. Star Wars Infinities...? No?"

"No," Garrett said, shaking his head. The headpiece didn't weigh much, but still made the motion ponderous. "Believe it or not, I'm really lost with all this Extended Universe stuff. I just watched the movies and liked the toys." Despite Garrett's demurral it was actually something of an understatement; Star Wars toys were probably the main reason Garrett had become an engineer. The long hours spent playing with his older brother's stash of plastic space ships and robots had put a visceral love of fantastic machinery into Garrett's heart. But he'd never really got into the fictional side of it all, if that made any sense.

"Well, the toys are certainly a major part of the fandom too," SL-1984 agreed. "Collectors have their own subset of obscure encyclopedic knowledge. Wouldn't know what a Hoojib was, perhaps, but they could tell you exactly how rare any given run of a Luke action figure was. But I suspect that you are more inclined towards the tech manuals."

Garrett grinned, hefting the heavy walker forelimb assemblies. "What gave you that idea?"

For his part, Steph wasn't any of those things - he just liked a challenge. And within a minute he was back, another ten dollars poorer and well on the way to meeting his next challenge. He'd found himself a rubber koala nose, best match to his mental image of the description the Vader had given him, and was busily tearing apart a pair of dealie-bobbers as he walked. His only tools were a paper clip, some rubber bands, and MacGuyver innovation. "One second longer..." He finished the work on the addition to the rabbit headband and slipped them back into place, the single spring-loaded antenna bobbing up in the middle between his ears. "Eh? Eh? Hoo da jib?" He spread his arms to display his work.

SL-1984 let out a slightly muffled laugh. His hands moved slightly as if to adjust the new addition, then dropped to hook his thumbs into his belt. "Very nice. Certainly, nobody will mistake you for anything else now. No fan, at any rate."

"Well, that's silly," Garrett evaluated. Steph nodded back, making the antenna bounce but not jarring it loose; the anchor he'd rigged up was holding. ''Excellent.''

"Speaking of silly," Steph said, grinning, "shall we carry on toward the judging room? Despite my progress I doubt my costume's going to win any awards on its own."

"Sounds good." The judging was being staggered over the course of the day to account for the many individual contests that were running - the first winners were almost due for announcement, in fact - but Garrett figured it would be a good idea to get in on his as soon as possible. When dealing with a costume made mostly of cardboard, there was a certain inexorable degradation with use. And besides that, the costume was clunky and heavy. Garrett was looking forward to being out of it for a while.

"In that case I'll bid you adieu. Troops, clear the muster zone!" The Vader slipped back into character and the remaining Storm Troopers did likewise, stepping back in unison as if to let a much larger transport pass through. Garrett obliged them, dropping back down to all fours and resuming his tromp with Steph walking ahead. Steph felt even more ridiculous than before with his extra accessories, but it was a good kind of ridiculous.

It was a strange feeling. So strange that Steph overlooked the other strange feelings at first as they started tingling at the edges of his senses.

Garrett felt it first. He had just started to get back into the gait of an AT-AT when he found himself stumbling slightly, the heavy costume becoming noticeably heavier. Garret paused for a moment, his foreleg supports setting down on the floor below him with a pair of unexpectedly solid clomps.

The cardboard forelegs actually felt ''tight'' on his arms. That was wrong; if anything there should have been too ''much'' play inside them, they wobbled around if he wasn't careful. Garrett tried to let go of the cane handles and tried standing up to pull his hands out of them.

The forelegs stayed firmly and snugly in place, and they were ''heavy''. "Wha..." Garrett choked, his voice coming out low and grating as if by speaking he was using his throat in a way it wasn't intended. The exclamation was accompanied by the faint but noticeable whine of small motors of some sort and Garrett could feel the tension build in his hips as he held the cardboard legs up in front of him.

Cardboard no longer, it seemed - the surface finish had a distinctly metallic luster to it that the gray paint had failed to evoke previously. There was no explaining it; his costume had suddenly become a whole lot ''better''. It was still improving before his eyes, new details resolving and the proportions subtly shifting toward more accurate dimensions.

It was getting heavier. Garrett could feel his hips beginning to fail, the boxy body and outstretched forelegs too much to bear. But Garrett resisted the weight with all his might; he had no idea what was going on and from the frantic hammering of his heart he could tell he was most likely panicking, but even so he somehow ''knew'' deep in his gut that he would be in deep trouble if he fell over. He had to stay up. He ''had'' to...

Garrett's groan came from somewhere inside his chest, the vibration thrumming through his body in new and unfamiliar ways, and after resisting for just seconds he toppled forward to land again on his forelegs for support. The two round footpads slammed solidly down onto the carpeted floor and Garrett felt the impact travel up the metal structure into his shoulders. An alien surge of relief washed through him; ''thank God, I'm stable.'' But it didn't last long against the growing panic. He tried to open his mouth to yell for help and found that he couldn't. ''Oh God, I can't breathe!''

Garrett tried to look up toward Steph, servos in his neck whining in protest at the angle. He caught just a glimpse. Up ahead, Steph was having troubles of his own; his clothing seemed to be disintegrating, white fur bursting up underneath it. Everyone else Garrett caught in that glimpse seemed to be having some outlandish thing happening to them too, too many and too strange for him to process in that split second he had available.

Then Garret's vision cut off as his eyelids fused shut into the smooth, unbroken hull of the underside of the AT-AT's cockpit-head. A moment later vision returned in a kaleidoscopic burst of sensory input; Garrett would have screamed if he'd been able. ''My eyes! Where are my eyes!?'' He could see everywhere at once and couldn't process any of it. He could only stagger ponderously back a step, his limbs moving with unexpected strength and smoothness. ''Whirr''-chrt! ''Whirr''-chrt! It was the best possible replica AT-AT costume in existence now, and Garrett wanted ''out''. But his attempts to shift even the tiniest bit inside the solid metal shell failed, every part stuck solidly and directly to his skin. Fused with it. ''Becoming'' it.

And then the hollowness came. Garrett felt a hole open up inside his gut, swelling inside his abdomen and squeezing his vitals aside. Garrett's vision was disrupted just as it had started to coalesce again, panic flaring more brightly in his mind. ''Oh God Oh God Oh God...'' He could only set his legs and try to hold as steady as possible as the bubble spread up into his chest, up his throat, into his head...

''Ghoooood.'' The thought trailed off in a tumult of strange emotions and sensations. His guts were settling now, the final details pulling into their new configuration. He was empty inside, but what was left was ''solid.'' Strong. Steel. Or something like it, anyway... The hammering of his heart faded away, replaced with the unfamiliar, almost subliminal throb of some sort of power plant.

Vision returned again, more stable this time, but it didn't bring any clarity to the situation. Garrett stood stable on all four legs, round footpads planted firmly on the carpet right where he'd been when the change had first come upon him. But his body was an island of stability in a sea of chaos. All around him people were yelling and running around in terror, many of them no longer human. Garrett turned his head, the motion ponderous and not really necessary given his all-encompassing field of view but psychologically important for keeping his attention focused. ''Where's Steph?'' He didn't know what his friend could do about any of this, but it was a straw of hope to grasp for in the maelstrom.

Thunderous footsteps grabbed his attention. Something was coming, big and round and red-

Too fast. How could something so big move so fast? Garrett barely had time to move before the huge creature brushed past him, slamming against his side as it went. Garret's legs weren't jointed to deal very well with lateral movement and he staggered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced. Whirr, chrt, whirr, chrt, cHRT...

''FALLING!'' Garrett screamed in the form of bolts of light shooting from his chin to blast scorched pockmarks up the wall and ceiling, and slammed to the floor. A table crushed to splinters under him, cushioning what would otherwise have been a tremendously damaging impact, but still jarring. He felt a vestige of pain, which faded the moment it registered, leaving him numb.

Stunned, lying on his side, alone, ''empty''. Garrett wasn't sure if AT-ATs could faint, but he found himself doing a very good imitation of it.

== Steph's post-TF segment==

Steph was trembling and overwhelmed with confusion at what had happened to him, what had happened to everyone around him. But at the same time he felt strangely comforted cradled here by giant white-armored arms, even if he was getting pressed into the hard edge of a chest box, so he managed to keep the fear suppressed below blind panic. He had no idea ''why'' being held like that should have been comforting but for the moment he was willing to just go with it while he tried to straighten out what else had happened.

He hadn't noticed that Garrett wasn't keeping up with him until he'd heard that strange noise of protest. He'd turned around and there it had been, right before his eyes, the gaps between the pieces of Garrett's costume abruptly sealing up as the gray cloth underneath swelled to fill them. As Garrett ''himself'' swelled to fill them. Steph still wasn't sure which had done the changing, Garrett or his costume - was Garrett somehow trapped inside that thing? That had been his first thought, that the costume had somehow been magically replaced with a giant animatronic of fearsome quality.

But then he'd realized what was happening to him, and now he had no idea what was going on. His clothing was disintegrating, falling away into nothingness, and the skin underneath was sprouting a thick white pelt of fur. ''His'' skin, not some costume layered over top. He'd tried pulling on it and felt pain.

Steph wasn't entirely proud of what he'd done next; he'd let out a shriek that was equal parts surprise and alarm, turned away from his friend still struggling inside that developing machine's body, and had tried to run away.

'Tried' being the operative word. It wasn't just his skin that was changing, the size and shape of his entire body was warping. Steph had managed to stagger just a short distance before his shortening legs and enlarging feet tripped him up, sending him stumbling into broad white-caped back of one of the other conventiongoers. The man was ''huge'' - or rather, in hindsight, it was Steph who was shrinking - and absorbed the impact easily.

The man snapped "What?", spinning to confront Steph and reflexively reaching for his lightsabre. It was the white-armored Darth Vader Steph had been speaking with just moments earlier. The Sith Lord's mechanically augmented voice was deeper and more imperious, the armor more fully fleshed out.

Steph's eyes widened in alarm as he found himself craning his neck to look so far up at the man's masked face. "Heee," he gasped breathlessly, his own voice coming out a high-pitched squeak. "Heep!"

It felt like a lot of things were going on, but the biggest was the sense of falling. From increasingly high above SL-1984 watched him unreadably, reaching up to clamp one gloved hand on the opposite wrist, then letting go. Then Steph found himself on all fours, eyes level with a bit of detailing on the man's shiny white shin armor. No, lower than that. He let his joints lock and stood as if frozen.

Giant hands plunged from above and lifted him up out of harm's way just before the huge bulk of the Kool-Aid Man came barreling through the room.

There was a tremendous smash. "OH YEAH!"

"Fall back!" SL-1984 barked.

"Lord Vader!" Someone else nearby exclaimed. Then there was a burst of blaster fire followed by another crash.

Steph couldn't handle it all; he'd simply gone limp and allowed himself to be carried as SL-1984 and the handful of Stormtroopers that had been close at hand retreated from the chaos erupting inside the room. They'd taken up a defensive position in a short hallway just outside, apparently leading to a utility closet of some sort and devoid of any other activity.

It gave them a few minutes' respite and as the shock wore off Steph began to tremble. In the midst of everything that was going on SL-1984 had apparently forgotten that he was holding Steph, but the movement drew his attention back to his immediate surroundings again and he looked down. "So you were a Hoojib after all."

Steph felt his rabbitlike ears lay down flat against his back and the long, flexible tendril that sprouted between them curled tightly in an unfamiliar reflex. ''I never heard of them until just minutes ago!'' Steph tried to object, but he wasn't even able to produce a squeak that time; his mouth no longer seemed to be connected to his trachea and all he could do was let out a small snort.

SL-1984 seemed to get the message well enough anyway, though. "Yes, I suppose that's my fault. Well, what else would you call yourself?" He knelt down and lowered Steph back down, hands wrapped all the way around his ribcage like he was carrying a cat, to deposit him on the floor.

Steph huddled there on all fours, digging the claws on his fingers and toes into the carpet as he looked up in nervous awe at how gigantic everything was. He had a momentary overpowering desire to be picked back up again, he just didn't feel ''safe'' being so small, but he forced it down and tried to focus inward. His body was indeed quite a bit like a bunny's, just as had been described, but with longer fur and long, splayed, birdlike toes on his feet. Frustratingly, his ''hands'' were more like a rabbit's, or maybe a dog's - useless clawed, padded paws with stubby fingers he could barely wriggle independently. There were thumbs, sort of. Maybe dewclaws. They could just about manage grasping, or at least bending far enough that the finger pads met the big pad, but he couldn't stand without them. His face had a blunt, leathery Koala nose, and his tiny mouth was hidden in the fur underneath it. Probing with his surprisingly long tongue, he couldn't even feel any teeth.

He had to admit, he was ''exactly'' like he'd pictured a Hoojib looking like. His vision blurred as his enormous brown eyes started filling with tears.

"Hey, now. Hey." SL-1984 seemed very distracted, bringing one hand up against the side of his helmet and pacing a few steps away to stare intently at nothing visible.

''I didn't want to be here,'' Steph thought miserably to himself. ''I just want to be home.''

"Don't we all," murmured the stormtrooper crouched nearest him. It was a breach of squad discipline, of course, but everyone was too busy with their own troubles to notice. Steph himself wouldn't realize the more important fact that the stormtrooper had actually ''heard'' him until much later on.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus1.jpg]]

Something lithe and feline and clad in ruffles chose that moment to slink past the dead end where the little group held their position. It paused to stare at them with unblinking green eyes, then opened its mouth and hissed furiously. The occupants locked their blaster rifles into position, but one of the troopers, raising an arm to check them, snapped, "Hold your fire! Establish intent, ''then'' act!"

The cat-thing flattened its ears back against its head, looking spooked, then continued on its way at a slightly faster pace.

It was quiet. SL-1984 was the first to move. He pulled off one white glove, exposing a prosthetic hand that gleamed like bronze. It was all but skeletal, sparse of detail with only the transparent synthetic "muscles" keeping it from looking like metal bones. He turned it over before his mask and flexed the fingers gently, then covered it again. "I thought as much," he said in a low rumble, both resigned and keeping what might have been anger under tight control. "Is that how it is? Fine."

"Sir?" The speaker was a trooper with the breather hood, oversuit, and specialized armor of a snowtrooper, the same trooper who had told the others not to shoot. He broke position to stand closer to SL-1984, keeping himself oriented towards the opening to the dead end. "Sir, aren't you - Didn't you switch sides?"

"What? Oh. You, you're Shanda Pike?"

"I - yes, my lord," Pike said, voice firming. In the far distance something bellowed like a foghorn, forcing the trooper to speak louder. "My husband John and I share duties as Squad Leader. He's not here now, sir. I'm the only member of the squad's command staff present."

"Use my designation, Pike. I did leave the Empire, but I am still part of this squad. You're a squad leader, I'm not, that means - damn." SL-1984 went quiet. The constant rhythm of his mechanically-assisted breath was quieter and not as harsh as it was for 'classic' Darth Vader, but it could still be heard, even over the background noise.

"Sir? Something wrong?"

"You're not a ma'am." SL-1984 crossed his arms just underneath his chest box. There was a smile in his artificial voice.

Pike hesitated for several breaths. "Beg pardon?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." SL-1984 chuckled and uncrossed his arms to hook his thumbs into his belt. He was definitely more amused than was appropriate for a man who'd just gone on life support and become a quarter of a century older. "You're a man. You can't keep a wallet in your codpiece anymore. I suppose it makes sense... snowtroopers are specialized stormtroopers, and we don't generally admit women into the trooper academies... Who - yes, everyone in here's a trooper. Ursala, Crystal, Sky - You're all men. No worries, Shad, Jeff, you're men too. Heh. Well, this should make things interesting. Heh. That's... that's actually kind of funny."

"Oh." The snowtrooper waited. The other three had reacted, but a muffled crash from out there had brought them back into position, watching with ready blasters. For a moment, Pike sounded unnaturally calm, as if this was a situation he'd been trained for. "You're right. I hoped you were wrong, sir, but you're right." Another moment passed as SL-1984 crossed his arms again and laughed quietly; one by one every other helmet in the alcove turned towards Pike. Even Steph, huddled pitifully on the floor with his eyes glazed, looked up.

"Fusst you. ''Fusst'' you, you - you ''Sithspawn''. Stop laughing." He stepped forwards, getting into the Vader's faceplate. "''This isn't funny'', Nineteen Eightyfour. This is a ''big'' problem that goes past us, and it's only going to get bigger. And apparently I can't swear. So ''don't laugh.''" The outburst was quiet but unmistakeable. Pike kept his back straight as he added, rather sarcastically, "Sorry, sir. Momentary lapse in personal discipline."

"It won't happen again," SL-1984 agreed in a more serious tone. "Consider it corrected. You're in charge, I suppose. We're going to need a plan..." He trailed off, head coming up as if he'd heard something. "No. Oh, no. ''Hell'' no. How is that even ''possible?''" The white-clad Vader's voice was as low as it could get.

Down on the floor, forgotten until that moment, Steph was mute. Still, he tried. ''What? What is it?'' Pike echoed the sentiment, raising his blaster.

This time, SL-1984 didn't respond to either of them. He stepped forwards, turning his head as if searching. "...I can't let that happen," he said at last, more to himself than anyone else. "I don't even want to think about that. Gravitational pull alone could - and even if it didn't, the superlaser - wrong hands, there aren't even any ''right'' ones - I ''won't'' let that happen."

''Let what happen? What's going on?''

SL-1984 turned the corner at a dead run and was gone. Bitterly Pike muttered, "No way we'll be able to keep up with him. We should have at least synched our comm frequencies. Okay. Let's do that now. Frequency - Aurek Corellia Delta." Almost as one, the troopers switched to the same comm channel. "We can't stay here. First priority is finding the rest of Tampa Bay; once we've done that we can worry about what in the nine hells is going on. I know where my - my husband is, or should be at the moment. We have to start from there."

The snowtrooper continued to speak aloud, nervous energy spilling into his voice. "This is not going to be a blue milk run, boys. We can't afford to waste any time; everyone move fast and don't get distracted. We ''must'' regroup, or we are lost. I'm on point; Shad, you're at the rear. Sing out if something happens to you, even if it looks like we've seen it. We can ''not'' afford to leave anyone behind! Blasters to stun; Ursala, lower the setting on your forcepike. Nothing turns a crowd into a mob faster than a death, and ''don't ask me how I know that''. Let's move out!" Pike headed out at a rapid march, followed by the other five.

In the dead end, Steph hunkered, forgotten.

==Red Guard==

Everything was darkness and confusion and helpless nausea. When the world fell out from under her it took her stomach with it. Gravity meant nothing; she felt as if she was falling, spinning on the worst amusement park ride ever imagined. A timeless period later she tasted blood and realized that she'd bitten the inside of her lip.

And then the world was back, or one very much like it. Struck by the very physical sensation of falling, even though she could feel her boots firmly planted on the floor, Anj instinctively assumed a defensive crouch, opening eyes that she hadn’t remembered closing.

She could see! She could hear! Long ago Anj had gotten used to the way the Red Guard helmet cut her visibility and muffled all sound; it was inevitable, after all. She’d all but stopped noticing. Now, though – now the flattened ovoid of the visor was still there, but a little smaller, and the space around it was no longer dark.

She could see as well and as much as she could when bareheaded, and all sounds were crisp and clear, not muffled in the least. It wasn’t that the helmet was gone; even though it was cool to the touch and non intrusive she could feel it, tight against the contours of her face, pressing against her skin with only a few gaps to let air circulate. But the inside, so close that her eyelashes brushed a smooth surface every time she blinked, was full of light and color and motion. For a moment it was completely disorienting.

Training kicked in as she glanced frantically from one thing to the next. These were the screens in her helmet. They negated the disadvantage of having an enclosed faceplate. The ones on the sides gave her left and right views. This lowest monitor, the short wide one, was her peripheral display. It showed her what was in back. Her aural pickups caught sound and relayed it into her ears in such a way that she could determine the source and how distant it is. They also blunted the effects of sonic weaponry. The analysis calmed her, steadied her, and she could finally pay attention to what she saw in front of her.

It took a moment to realize that these were the same furries who'd been grouped together before. They barely bore any resemblance to any fursuits she had seen, ever – even the best of the best had always looked artificial. Wet, flickering eyes with fully mobile eyelids, subtle facial expressions, a mouth that did more than open and close, pawhands that did not look like gloves, skin that shivered, fur that sprouted from the skin, muscles and tendons moving beneath it, toes that splayed against the ground, tails and ears that moved silently and with purpose – admittedly she wasn't exactly involved with the furry scene, but in all the conventions and events she had ever attended she had never seen a fursuit that still looked real up close. Not when she compared a costume to a real animal. Some things just couldn’t be faked.

Yet the people she saw before her, gasping and touching themselves and looking wildly about… Some were more or less humanlike than others, but one or two looked like nothing less than bipedal wild animals with slightly altered forelimbs and faces. The inarticulate confused things that they said were not in the voices of men or beasts, but a combination of both. They ''breathed'', they ran wet tongues over bestial teeth and ductile lips, they staggered on well-formed legs, their faces and body language reflected shock and disbelief and joy and horror and sudden fear. More than one turned a hybrid face towards the Red Guard.

Training once more came to the fore, and she welcomed it. No one to protect but herself, that was good. She needed to be cautious. They were disorganized and might not mean any harm, but as a whole they looked to be on the verge of blind panic. With her armor on, TR-1407 could probably survive being trampled, but she wouldn't like it. Anj took half a step backwards and stumbled – her feet, her legs seemed bigger and heavier than they should have been, and her center of gravity had shifted. Her balance had changed completely. She compensated even as the realization hit her that something was fundamentally different. The costume was tight, but ''beneath'' it-

Set off, either by her motion or by the low, coughing feline roar uttered by one of them, the furries split. Hooves and paws pounded the carpet as they ran, most of them headed ''away'' from TR-1407, but a gazelle and a zebra sprang past her, giving her a wide berth. She had half turned to stare after them in bewilderment when her spine chilled and she saw something huge and white and blue in one of her helmet screens.

Reacting almost instantly, TR-1407 jerked out of the way, her arms reflexively following through on the motion and swinging the tip of her weighty forcepike into contact with her assailant. It connected solidly, making a tiny crackling noise that was all out of proportion to the effect.

Momentum kept it going, but the enormous white tiger’s leap ended gracelessly as it lost consciousness. It hit the floor with an impact that looked painful and lay limp, flat red tongue sticking out of its fanged, slack mouth. Anj looked from it to the forcepike clasped in her gloved hands.

The stun module mounted on the vibro-edge head at the very tip gleamed dully. Fully extended, the weapon was two meters from the thin tip past the black grip to the weighted base, and it was much, ''much'' heavier than it had been before, maybe seven or eight kilograms - Seven. It was regulation-issue, so it definitely weighed seven kilos - but it felt ''right'' in her hands, sleek and balanced. Perhaps it wasn’t as elegant and deadly as a lightsaber, but here was a weapon that could kill or incapacitate, equally effective in pitched battle or nonlethal crowd control. Set to maximum it could tear through the hull of a starship or take off a man's arm at the shoulder; set to the lower setting and it could knock out a grown Wookiee. Or, apparently, a leaping tiger. That thought brought her back out of contemplation.

“…Yeah. What was that?” Anj’s eyelashes brushed her visor as she blinked. Something weird had happened to the helmet speaker. Normally it just relayed her voice; it distorted it just a little bit, making it slightly tinnier and more mechanical, but that was all. It didn’t ''change'' her voice, not really. It made it a bit less feminine, but it was still recognizable as ''hers''.

But something had happened to that speaker. This wasn’t her voice; this was nothing like it, in fact. The speaker was making her sound like an entirely different person. Why in the Emperor's name-

Focus! Were all local threats neutralized? What about her assailant? Anj moved closer and crouched to examine the white tiger. It was huge, easily three meters from the tip of its tail to its whiskered muzzle. Why meters and not feet? Feh, that wasn't important. At first glance it looked almost exactly like the tranquilized big cats that she'd seen on documentaries, down to the rapid, heavy way its sides heaved as it breathed. The only immediate oddity was the fact that it seemed to be wearing ''clothes'' – something like a tube top and close-fitting boxers, both pale blue.

But another moment showed her that it – no, she, for there was a suggestion of breasts in that tube top – had forepaws that would do poorly for bearing weight. They were long, the fingers well formed with prominent thumbs. Her head also bore hair, short and pattered in the same way as the striped fur, but distinct. No tiger looked like ''that''.

Around her thick neck, too, there was a strap holding a disposable camera…

TR-1407 tensed up as another cold tingle swept up her spine, glancing automatically towards a particular section of wall. Almost immediately that section bowed inwards, breaking with a wild shower of plaster and bricks as something almost spherical burst through, pudgy fists clenched, cubes ricocheting against each other and the interior as red liquid sloshed.

“'''OH YEAHHH!'''”

Apparently she, or the world, had gone mad. Even as the thought flashed through her mind, Anj was acting, one-handedly drawing her blaster rifle - where had that come from, she hadn't brought a blaster trooping today - from where it was holstered beneath her robes and firing.

The blaster bolt - it wasn't supposed to ''work''! - hit a curved, transparent surface that absorbed the energy, heating and deforming slightly. On the inside, bubbles formed at the site and floated rapidly up to the top; barely a second later they had stopped and the melted region had returned to its former unblemished state.

The – whatever it was – adjusted its footing as the three frosted translucent cubes floating inside of it rattled and clinked. Below them the lacquered black indents that served as sketchy facial features - eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a wide smiling mouth, all highly stylized – moved to assume an expression that looked like furious, homicidal joy. Its short arms, placed in relation to its eyes where ears would have been on a humanoid, reached towards the Red Guard, fingers twitching as if to fix around her neck.

Anj fired twice more, with the same minimal result – small parts of the clear surface melted and re-formed, a little of the liquid boiled up without lowering the level within, and the thing displayed anger. It was walking, short legs with their rounded toeless feet looking ridiculous under its bulk, but slowly. She didn't know if it was limited to that speed or it was deliberate. Anj felt another chill on her spine and knew, in a burst of insight, that that didn't matter. It could gather itself and leap hard and fast enough to cover nearly four meters in an eyeblink, breaking through anything in its way. She was almost in range of such a leap.

Still, it couldn't jump several times in succession. If she moved now, she could leave it behind. It looked like – it looked completely impossible. Like a round-bellied pitcher, entirely hollow and complete with flared spout and glass handle, low-set arms and legs stuck on like an afterthought. It was filled, limbs included, with a translucent red liquid - she could see ''through'' it even if the other side was distorted. Somehow Anj thought she’d seen it or something like it before, but just by ''existing'' it was an affront to reality. It couldn’t ''possibly'' stand upright on those small featureless feet, and as for moving! It had no skeletal structure, no visible muscles or joints, it was ''an anthropomorphic pitcher of'' punch, ''how'' could it move?!

TR-1407 shoved her blaster back into its holster on her leg. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and she had no desire to be killed by it. Time to go. Yet something stopped her.

The tiger furry was still out cold. She was only slightly further from the pitcher than Anj was, and the Red Guard had no reason to doubt that the thing was willing to take out its frustration on whatever couldn’t get out of the way.

Even so.... Abruptly TR-1407 recalled her training on Yinchorr, where they had tried to pound stormtrooper training out to make way for something a little different. There'd been the hierarchy of service. Empire above all, Emperor, ranking staff and those she had been assigned to protect, peers and those of lower rank, Imperial citizens, everyone else. For these, she would lay down her life. There was a mantra in that somewhere, so ingrained that it was a part of her, essential enough that she was slow to register that it was completely new.

Yes, the tiger had leaped at her and she had reacted as if under attack, stunning it. And on the scale of people she needed to protect, attackers ranked somewhere below saving herself. However, she had no way to know if that leap really had been an act of aggression. What to do...

Indecision lasted for only a split second. It made no difference if she was or wasn't attacked, that thing's in danger because I put her there. So Anj would get her out. Didn't matter how ridiculous the situation is, she still had a duty. TR-1407 changed her stance, gripped her forcepike in both hands and held it before her in ready position.

If the pitcher thing had been any faster she would have been caught while thinking, but it was forced to shuffle forwards to get within range. She had the feeling that it could only run with any speed if it still had the momentum from a leap. Anj readied herself and thumbed the setting as it tensed to spring.

“'''OH ''YEAHHH!'''''”

Although she’d known this was going to happen, TR-1407 was still surprised at its speed. Barely in time, she dived and rolled under it the instant before it hit. When it landed it did so on three points, splintering the floor underneath it and making everything around tremble with the impact.

Spinning to face it again, Anj swung one-handed and smashed the forcepike's tip into her opponent's body. This time a sharp ''crack!'' rang through the air; as it spun to face her she adjusted her grip and swung the heavy weapon in a high vertical stroke, then again, horizontal, hitting the curved glassy surface ''hard''. The sound was high and sharp, both unpleasant and nearly musical.

There was the tingle again, strong and focused. Acting with it the Red Guard dodged a flailing arm and struck once more, to the left of center, then tried to get some distance between herself and the target, stepping back. Almost immediately she smacked into the wall, hard enough to thump her armor. Damn, her situational awareness had slipped! As she recovered and tried again to pull away she almost fell over her own feet, once more becoming aware that something was ''different''. There'd been a bit of a bounce where no bounce should be, not on a woman. Fortunately her stumble went unnoticed.

The pitcher thing looked at first glance to be unaffected; if it had been made out of durasteel every impact would have left great rents, but its shape was intact and it hadn't stopped moving. On second glance TR-1407 saw the white fractures that were spiderwebbed dramatically across the surface.

She kept her visor pointed squarely at its enraged lacquered eyes, holding her forcepike up in an unvoiced threat.

The indents that appeared to be eyebrows lowered and drew together as it frowned slowly. Across its sketchy features a white fracture, which had started to gradually fill in, lengthened and widened again with a sound that reminded the Red Guard of thin ice on the surface of a pond.

The pitcher thing’s right arm began to leak, red liquid forming drops and pattering down into the carpet. The glass there, thinner than on its curved body, had all but shattered, and repaired itself only slowly. Slowly, the thing’s eyes slid from its arm to Anj’s visor.

“Press me and you’ll be dead,” she warned, not knowing if it could understand her or not, talking slowly and evenly. “I can keep this up faster than you can fix yourself.” Her grammar had gotten a little mangled. The message was obvious nonetheless.

“I can throw a grenade into you and vaporize your contents. I can sweep your legs out from under you and shatter them so you can’t stand. Once I’ve done that, I can smash you into a thousand shards, which I can then scatter.” Even as she said the words, noticing again that the voice saying these words was not hers, she was confident that this was not an empty threat. Interfere with an Imperial Red Guard in the performance of his duty and you’re coming off second-best, she knew.

TR-1407 advanced half a step and brought her forcepike into ready position. The pitcher thing’s eye indents became larger, then smaller again. A sense of rage so strong that it was palpable radiated off of it, but it had sense enough to know a hopeless fight. Still dripping, it shuffled backwards and began to turn ponderously. A moment later, and it bounded away through another wall with a shower of plaster. The Red Guard watched through the hole it left until she was satisfied that it wasn't going to come back.

Hah. Straightening, Anj looked over the comatose tiger once more. Her white-furred flanks had been decorated with a coat of dust and plaster fragments, but the furry had escaped harm.

Now what? The immediate danger was past, but TR-1407 knew better than to assume that things were safe now. The tiger was still out and would likely remain that way for an hour or so. Anj wasn’t going to stay around guarding her. Duty to comrades outweighed duty to strange nonhumans who might have attacked her and weren't even Imperial citizens. Some of her responsibility had been discharged just now, but she knew one way to make a stunned sentient recover faster.

It took a bit of searching - and a moment of staring at her own gloved hands, which appeared to be bigger than she remembered - to find the site where the stun module in her forcepike had hit; the tiger’s fur was thick enough that the little bruised patch of skin was hidden. It was on the furry’s muscular upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Anj closed the tiger’s jaws with an effort, then took a handful of her crimson robes and pressed it against the furry’s nose, plugging the nostrils with the tips of her fingers. She counted slowly to ten and jabbed the bruised patch with the armored knuckles of her free hand, hard. The angle was too awkward for it to be a punch.

Almost immediately the white tiger started to make throaty sounds of complaint, fingers and ears twitching. Anj peeled back a furred eyelid and saw the pupil of the blue eye contract.

That would probably do it. Not willing to be there when the tiger woke up, TR-1407 walked away, almost stumbling on legs that were longer than they should have been. Despite the exertion, Anj's breath had been only slightly quickened. Without that pressure to act, she felt strange. Okay. Okay. Now to find someplace private and try to make sense of all this…

==Steph comes out of hiding==

Steph had been passive until now - almost comatose, for that matter. Events had swept along too rapidly and too outlandishly for him to get much of a grip. But now he realized he couldn't stay that way any longer. The strangely protective presence of the huge armor-clad people was gone. He was just a Hoojib huddled on the floor, and if he didn't get a grip - didn't get ''moving'' - who knew what horrors would catch him?

First there was simply learning how to walk. He was on all fours, but he couldn't crawl - his thighs were short, his knees were far from pronounced, and he couldn't plant his palms on the floor; his wrists didn't bend like that. Instead, when he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. His toes were long enough that he had to turn them outward.

He wobbled and wavered at first, unsure of his limbs like he was a kitten or a puppy or something, or like he'd been on an one of those all-night benders at the end of Finals Week. Still, as he practiced it quickly became easier. The reflexes seemed to be built in - how to stand, how to walk, coordination, the whole deal. That was a mercy, he supposed.

Keeping huddled against the wall for some modicum of concealment Steph crept back up the short hallway to peer out into the room he'd come from.

It was hard to comprehend what he was seeing at first. His senses had been distorted just as much as his body, his perspective something like half a foot off the floor. The scent of smoke in the air was almost buried under the other less identifiable smells Steph's enhanced nose was picking up. His enormous ears were catching more sounds than he knew what to do with, and there was something new and weird with tugging and heat and distant inaudible violin notes... But his vision was still quite clear and comprehensible, at least. Most of the tables had been upended in the rush as people had fled, scattering a lot of junk on the floor.

Excellent. Cover. As soon as the coast seemed relatively clear Steph bounded out across the floor, not quite running and not quite hopping, shelter under the nearest upright table. The space under the tablecloth was still cavernous at his scale, but much better than the soaring vastness of the room outside or even the hallway. He paused there to gather his wits and figure out what he was doing.

He had to get it together. He had to... he needed to find Garrett, before anything else. Easier thought than done, though - he hadn't gone far but the changes to everything had disoriented him. Where was he now? Where had he left his friend?

And would he recognize him when he found him? Steph's ears and antenna perked up, nose twitching nervously, as something large came moving through the room outside his shelter. Larger even than a normal human, heavy footfalls thudding solidly on the thin carpet... Steph would have whimpered had he been able to make any actual sounds. ''Oh God, please don't find me, I don't want to be eaten by a... whatever...''

The footfalls came to an uncertain stop nearby. "Huh?" It rumbled, voice deeply guttural and deeply confused. "No find... what?"

This time Steph ''did'' notice the coincidence between his own thoughts and the creature's words. ''Can he read my mind? Wait, no... am ''I'' telepathic? I don't believe it! But that Vader guy said Hoojibs were telepathic-''

"Who's there?" The big creature bellowed, and for a moment Steph found himself caught in a confusing mental tangle as he tried to stifle the volume of his thinking. His antenna curled and he had to force himself ''not'' to speculate about the appendage's psionic functions for fear of being overheard. It was an impossible task.

Fortunately there were still plenty of other distractions out there, and after only a few seconds the sound of frantic sheep bleating in the distance drew the attention of whatever it was that was standing nearby. "Hah!" it grunted, lumbering off with some new unknown purpose in mind. Steph let out a tiny sigh of relief.

''Okay, so I guess I'm glad I can still communicate somehow... assuming that wasn't all just a coincidence,'' he thought. No one was nearby to confirm it and he gave a snort of derisive amusement. ''God, so much to figure out! Take this one thing at a time. So I turned into a Hoojib. If everyone else has turned into what they were dressed as too...'' He shook his head. It made too little sense, he couldn't get his mind around it.

Would Garrett still be inside that cardboard-turned-metal shell he was wearing? Steph hoped he'd got out of it somehow, but if he hadn't... Cautiously poking his head out from under the tablecloth and peering around to check for danger first, Steph forced himself to dart deeper into the room.

His attention immediately went to a heap of detritus, taller than he was, that had formed against a ragged mass that had been a tabletop mere minutes ago. Some of it had obviously been ''on'' the table, originally - graphic novels were strewn everywhere, many of them burnt. Pages had collected here, and other things as well, probably kicked into place in the rush. Great tufts of fur, bits and pieces of clothing, food scraps that had escaped from trash cans, tablecloths, splintery pieces of other tables - Steph shuffled closer, then thought to wonder why it had drawn his attention. This was not the only pile of trash scattered around the room - there had been several filled trash cans, even this early in the day - and none of ''them'' were all that interesting.

It was like this one was tugging at him - specifically, his antenna. He could feel it sort of warming in response. No, 'tugging' wasn't quite the word - it was almost a smell, but not quite that either. Like... he could almost swear there was a small, cheap violin playing, just one very high continuous note, but he didn't actually hear anything. Something about it was comforting.

Steph snorted. ''Why am I so interested in a pile of trash?'' It wasn't food, that was for sure. There was tons of food in the room, mostly from upended trash cans, and the smell was ''everywhere''; spilled soda and cheap beer, a salad with dressing, corn chips, a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich that was starting to go bad, applesauce, Skittles, an entire box of donuts. And that was just in this room. None of it appealed to him - the smell was just ''there'', like the smoke or the ink on the comic books. His mouth wasn't even watering. He wasn't even sure if he still had salivary glands.

If he was quick about it, it wouldn't hurt to check. Steph climbed gingerly atop the pile, long toes curling to grip at an abandoned canvas bag full of hard objects. The feeling was coming from here. Still uncertain - he felt so ''exposed'' - he scraped at some wet pages that had stuck together.

''There! What's that?'' Something hard, probably plastic, and just a little smaller than his head. Steph sat on his haunches, freeing him to draw whatever it was up. He could grasp and his dewclaws were jointed more or less like thumbs, but the job of wrestling it out took longer than it should have.

Steph's ears quivered. More footsteps! Where was the best place to hide? Taking a step forward - a much more complicated action than it had been when he'd had two legs - he felt his toes flex on the thing. ''Maybe...''

He was going to get caught out in the open if he didn't hide ''now''. Steph hobbled on three legs into the dubious shelter of another table, this one apparently intact, though missing its covering. Edging behind a pile of plastic boxes that had probably once held statuettes, Steph ducked his head under his belly and took a look at his prize, clutched in the wiry toes of his foot. That foot distracted him - earlier, he'd paid much more attention to what had happened to his hands.

His feet were so huge that when he stood in the position that came most naturally the clawed tips of his toes were level with his elbows. They really did look something like bird's feet, covered in slightly wrinkly grayish skin rather than scales or more white fur, though not like any bird he'd seen. More importantly, they were at least somewhat better than his paws at flexing and holding things.

He'd misjudged how far away the footsteps were; that, or the one making the footsteps hadn't moved in a straight line. Now they pounded past, not as heavy as the big creature or even the stormtroopers but very quick. He could hear a girl's voice spouting a steady stream of "OW OW OW get OFF AHH OW" sprinkled with invective, and as she raced past Steph saw a pair of towering stockinged legs pumping. Something smaller and greenish clung to one of them, but they were both gone before he could get a better look.

Not everything was out to get him. Good to know.

The thing that he'd picked up turned out to be a cell phone, the kind that flipped open. It tingled pleasantly and somehow made that high violin note to Steph's antennae, a comforting feeling. He set it down and prized it open with a certain amount of difficulty, knowing that this wasn't helping him find Garrett but telling himself that he'd only be another minute.

The phone was on, and its screen glowed. Not entirely certain about just what he was doing, Steph put his face up so close that the phone's wallpaper blurred out of focus, tilted his head until what had been his chin sank into the fur on his chest, and felt his antennae uncoil, reaching out to touch the keypad, above the part of the phone that the tingling and humming was coming from.

It was a nice feeling. A very nice feeling. Steph closed his eyes and leaned into it for a long moment, sighing almost inaudibly through his nose. He could feel it moving up into his head and body. It was soothing. The violin note held for a few long seconds, then wavered. As that happened the heat lessened.

His eyes snapped open. ''What am I doing? Damn it.'' Steph peeled his head away and heard the phone chirp the low power alert before the screen went black. ''What was that? What was I - didn't the Vader guy say something about eating energy? Damn it, I wish I'd paid more attention.''

He whipped his head around. That ''tugging'', a little like a smell, a little like feeling heat through his antenna, maybe a little like hearing high violin notes, it was back. He could sense something interesting, several somethings, most about as big and with similar high cheap-violin notes, scattered around the room. More phones? Maybe dropped cameras?

For the third time Steph sensed something moving, and close. Still hidden under the table and behind boxes, he pressed himself against the wall. It was moving in a different direction than the other two, and it was - it was ''right on the other side of that wall!''

He shot out from under the table, smacking one gigantic ear against a table leg, and froze against a pile of rags, out in the open. The ceiling yawned high above, he was exposed - but nothing was going to collapse on him.

This turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever it was, it kept moving. He could barely hear its footsteps, and he might not have noticed - now that he was listening, this wasn't the only set of footsteps - but he could sense it as a sort of interesting moving heat and a whole ''orchestra'' playing, getting fainter as it got farther away.

''Wait.'' Steph's ear was stinging. ''How would I know anything about whatever was running except how big it is? Unless'' - His eyes were huge, and when he crossed them above his nose he could sort of see the blurred, doubled shape of that antenna, arcing above his head. ''What, can Hoojibs sense electricity too? Or what, robots? This is just weird.''

Now that he thought about it - there were a lot of other interesting warm things and bowstringed instruments were playing from all sides. Warm wasn't really the word, maybe... maybe ''powered''. Some were small, others larger. Some were moving. It was the same sense, now that he thought about it, that he'd gotten from his rescuer. Same sense as from the phone, but the big things, the moving ones, he could feel through the walls and over a distance. He only 'heard' anything when it was close enough, but the ''powered'' part of the sense could go a lot farther, apparently.

He could feel... Up ahead. Something big, something motionless. Steph wasn't at all sure what direction he'd been going even before he'd literally run into SL-1984, but it seemed like this might be the right way. Hesitantly at first, then with more and more certainty, he followed the antenna.

''There.'' It couldn't be anything else. Even on its side, two right legs sticking out rigidly into open air with only rubble keeping it from lying flat, it loomed up above Steph, head hanging down at a thirty degree angle, resting on what looked like the buckled remains of a chair. The powered sense here was much, ''much'' stronger than anything he'd felt coming from any of the dropped electronics. There was enough power thrumming in it that even from here his antenna was warm, and the note was much deeper than the ones he'd 'heard' before, like a double bass. Or whatever they were called; it had been years since his last music class. He had to fight off the lulling feeling that came with it.

It didn't look remotely human. From Steph's perspective, it took a moment to recognize it as an AT-AT. He moved closer, tentative.

Each round footpad had four thick toe flaps. These were slowly, very slowly, swinging out and in on their hinges. The toe flap articulation was so minimal that they couldn't point straight out. The motion looked aimless.

''Garrett?'' he tried. ''I still don't know if this really works or not... Garrett? Are you in there? Can you hear me?''

Steph shuffled closer. ''What do I do now? I don't know how telepathy works. Or if you could hear it. Or if I even ''have ''it. Or if he's here.'' The AT-AT's boxy head was bigger than his whole body. ''I could probably fit into a shoebox, so that doesn't mean much. God. I probably'' can ''fit into a shoebox.'' The head had a dark horizontal slot running across the very front, like a very narrow visor or something. On either side of it were two bulging domes like flattened compound eyes, each housing a slender pipelike structure. Its chin had two more, slightly larger pipelike things, fixed forwards.

Closer. Steph rose shakily onto his hindquarters, almost pitching over as he overcompensated. His toes splayed against the ground strongly enough that if he kept perfectly still he could almost, ''almost'' stand up, though his ankles started to burn the moment he straightened them and his knees refused to unbend. Ignoring that, he stared into that slot, vertical since the thing was on its side. It was mostly opaque, but he could sort of see... were those chairs? ''A room? No, a cockpit.''

His breath fogged the view and cleared slowly.

''Garrett? It's me. Steph.'' That black slot was reflective enough that from this angle, looking right into it from as high up as he could get without finding something to stand on, he could see himself. Big, ''big'' eyes, barely on this side of being appealing rather than grotesque, huge ears, both long and wide, that flagged behind him but wouldn't stand straight up. A bulbous black nose, the mouth beneath it so small that fur around the edges made it look like a pit, and that antennae, curling like a fern. He hadn't exactly seen himself before.

Steph was distracted enough that he didn't register as the thrumming increased in tempo and the bass note picked up. He almost missed one of the pipes - the medium blasters on the temples - as it swiveled slowly to point directly at him.

==Steph and Garrett==

An alert came on and pinged, setting the other systems into motion.

Something huge and white loomed up against his head, almost touching his command viewport, and he reactivated. The white thing - some kind of animal, details were popping in like graphics on an overworked PC - flinched and fell back, and seemed to shrink as the rest of his vision started loading, quickly from a cold start instead of little by little. There was sound, or something like sound, and words, or something close, but he already had plenty of them, and the ones he had were louder.

There was movement from the white animal, he could see now that it was only very big, not huge, and it suddenly traveled a hundred meters away in a few shuffling steps. It seemed to be clinging to a wall that he was pressed against.

Something was wrong. His vision was still loading, everything that wasn't right in front of his head was still glossy smooth and sparse of detail, but he could see that nothing was at the right angle - oh. Oh. He'd fallen over. That explained why there was nothing under his footpads and no weight on his legs, too. Reorienting, he managed to figure out which way was "up". Vaulting high above him was a ceiling, higher up than the hold of a Star Destroyer should be, and there were walls. They seemed very far apart. Something was wrong with this.

Of course it was wrong! He'd fallen over! He was down, and anyone could climb up to get at a boarding hatch and ''at his crew!'' They must have been stunned by the impact, thrown against his bulkheads -

Alert and evacuate the crew! Why isn't that alarm on yet? Start it now!

Though he didn't have any speakers on his outside, as the prerecorded evacuation message started up internally he saw the white animal perk up, monstrous ears folding, cupping as if funneling sound to its head. If he was judging by how big it was compared to him, and he was, it was at least the size of, of - well, it was almost as big as his head, his ''moveable command section'', part of him said, and it was ''fast'' too, already advancing, covering three meters in a stride -

It was ''big'', it was ''fast'', it was already coming towards him, at any second now it was going to circle past his head and ''get in at his crew!''

'''NO!'''

He wasn't going to let that happen! With a supreme effort, the servos in his neck; his ''flexible armored tunnel''; jerked, pointing the two Taim & Bak MS-1 fire-linked heavy laser cannons at the animal. It froze, stared at him with ridiculously big brown eyes, and there was that almost-sound again, like it was saying his name, but it was still big and fast and a danger to his crew and it ''still'' hadn't moved.

His heavy laser cannons, mounted on either side of his chin, the underside of his moveable command section, were cold. It took a moment to muster the power he needed to warm up the lasers that heated the blaster gas in his cannon energizer. Several seconds passed.

While that was happening, the animal held still. As he fired both in tandem, it twitched out of his sights, and he couldn't re-orient in time. Nothing with legs should have been able to move as fast as it did. When he fired, the beams shot into a stretch of wall, impacting with a minor explosion. Texture popped in, and he saw that he'd left two dramatic black scars with a tiny flame guttering in each. Six seconds later and his heavies had recharged, but he didn't need them again so soon.

The animal was scared off, if only for the moment, and he had some time to catch his brea- no, that wasn't right. To lie helplessly on his side and try to regroup. For the moment, there was no further threat to the crew. Above the heavy laser cannons he had two fire-linked medium repeating blasters, useful for smaller, more agile threats, since they could swivel as needed. All he could do was heat those up, check the gas reserves for them and his heavies, send off a distress signal, and wait.

The signal took barely a second to set up and broadcast. It would, of course, be hours or days or more before anything came of it; that was how that went. He was a very valuable piece of equipment, and depending on the commander and the situation he might or might not be a high priority during a crisis.

Crew was more important than the question of where he was, how he'd gotten there, and how he'd get out of this. Without his crew... He turned his attention to his interior, remembering to watch in case the large animal returned.

Neither of the boarding hatches or any of his four escape hatches, or even the hatch to the vehicle bay, had been opened. He knew that. His atmospheric exchangers and filtration unit - part of the life-support systems built into his interior - were running a steady stream of breathable air through his passenger/troop section and command cockpit. He could feel it luffing across his deck.

A notice came up, that he was stressing the mechanisms in his neck, his ''flexible armored tunnel''. Slowly he lowered his head until it hit something and he was at that same angle he'd activated with. He could feel whatever it was, just barely. Just a sense that it was ''there'', nothing about hardness or softness or texture. This still wasn't good for his servos, but he couldn't do anything about that yet.

There was no movement in his interior. It was as if he didn't have any crew at all. That didn't really make sense, though. How could he be active without a crew? His drive motor shouldn't even be running.

Still nothing. At last, interior cams activated and he got a look at his insides. Both levels of his passenger/troop section were empty, without so much as a cleaning droid poking around. No one was in the maintenance shaft to his motor. There were several speeder bikes racked up like throwing darts back in his rear vehicle bay, and some gear in crates, disarrayed a little by the fall, but nothing that moved on its own. It made him feel vaguely uneasy to see all that.

Only one cam was in his tunnel. More of them were in and around his command cockpit. The seats for pilot and gunner, as well as the larger and more imposing one for the commander, were fixed to his deck, though they were adjustable and currently hanging from their bearings. He saw that very clearly; cams were positioned to fix on the faces of crew in the three essential stations, making it easier for them to send real-time messages or recordings on his holoprojector.

He saw the bulky shapes of the consoles that made up his mainframe. On them, status lights blinked or shone steady, and monitors glowed steadily. These were the displays made for his crew. Who, apparently, wasn't there, not even in the cockpit. That wasn't right. Even standing down, inactive in his berth, there should be at least one technician. And there wasn't so much as a fingerprint on a console or a stretch of flattened upholstery at any of the three essential stations. Like they'd never been touched. Not so much as a speck of dust either. Was he factory-new? Couldn't be. He knew that his hull was scored and dented, cosmetic damage that meant he'd seen action.

This was not good. Bad enough to be helpless on his side waiting for his crew to evacuate and send for backup, which presumably would at some point involve either retrieving him whole or in components or blasting him so that no one else could have him. Worse to be helpless on his side with no crew.

No crew. He'd skirted that phrase, because 'no crew' meant 'empty'. That was meaningless when he was inactive and a protocol breach when he was standing down, but he was live now, systems running, and he couldn't...

[This does not actually fit anywhere. I'll delete it when I'm sure I'm not going to use anything from it. "Autonomy, actualization, psyche emulation identity and personality emulation, records, software analog of organic-brain emotional response, and many others, often very similar."

There was one subroutine housed in one particular console, one last major program in the master computer, that hadn't gone live yet. No. Untrue on both counts. Several subroutines, many or most of them linked so that one could not be active without others. Currently there was only one running at optimum, but all were functioning at one level or another. There was a great deal of overlap among the many, many subsubroutines, and many redundancies, and it was altogether more complex and puzzling than any other set of programs. The console wasn't planned or built by the same mind as the rest of him.

It was unmarked, as far as he could tell, and set apart from the others. It had the normal complement of monitors and status lights, but only a few controls. From the lights, some systems were active, most weren't. He was not entirely sure what, if anything, it did.

Should he start it up now? It couldn't be essential. This would just burn power faster. But why not? He couldn't find any crew, so without autonomy he wasn't going to be able to do anything. Besides, his life support was running with no life to support, his hologram projection pod was live with nothing to receive, and he had readied everything in his drive motor even though he was hardly using it at all, what with being motionless. No crew meant no action, the moment when he'd fired at the large animal notwithstanding. He might as well. Power was rerouted, his drive motor sped up slightly to compensate, and bank after bank of status lights on the last console glowed to life.

Garrett jerked. ''Beep... beep... beep... beep...'' Automatically he reached out to swat at the alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock, and his leg just swung forward and back, smacking against something. He felt the impact dully as it traveled up into his body. It didn't really sound like an alarm clock, it sounded like - ''No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! Stress on flexible armored tunnel! Warning!''

That meant - what that meant was that he was FALLING!

Garrett's legs churned forward and back, but hit rubble, unidentifiable heaps of trash. No. He wasn't falling, he was already down, and he'd figured that out already. He was already down, he remembered the fall and how it had started slow and then became much faster and then he'd hit the ground, and now he was ''on'' the ground, though he could barely feel what was underneath him.

The costume. That was it, that had to be it, the costume was keeping things from touching his skin. Yes. Under it, Garrett could feel things, his nerves hadn't all gone dead. As soon as he got it off, he'd be fine. That emptiness, that sickening hollow space inside, that would wear off. Yes. So would the feeling that he was somehow both stretched and compressed somehow. He just had to get the costume off.

The alarms in his cockpit were getting annoying, and nothing was happening with the evacuation alarm, so he disabled them. Indicators on monitors and bank after bank of status lights updated continuously, but they showed nothing he couldn't sense for himself except, perhaps, why the lights on the mystery console, already blinking in rapid patterns, went mad.

He wasn't breathing! He wasn't breathing! Whatever he used to breathe - diaphragm? Rib muscles? - was missing, his sides were totally rigid and immobile. It didn't hurt, but God, he couldn't breathe!

Garrett shuddered, or tried to. The seats at his three essential command stations readjusted convulsively, his flexible armored tunnel quivered, his medium blasters rocked, and his legs bent slightly where they met his drive motor and at the knee joints, toe flaps flicking up and down. Otherwise he didn't move. Just a costume, he told himself. A costume and maybe some highly illegal combination of substances which would make the University very unhappy. He hadn't knowingly taken anything, but that never made much difference with the staff. At the moment, the thought of Midtral kicking him out wasn't all that bad.

The console displays worked silently, making it much easier for crew to see just what was going on with him. One housed the housekeeping subroutines and displayed temperature and pressure readings, air supply, life support, lighting, and half a dozen other systems, both readings and controls, all for the places where crew would be. Most of that was locked to him, off limits, part of some security measure. More consoles were devoted to other things. Weaponry. Data from sensor arrays, holographic targeting systems, inside cams, impulse terrain sensors. The console for both of his KDY FW62 compact fusion drive systems, all the fiddly details that went with them and his fuel slug tank and blaster cannon energizer. Other consoles too, with purposes of their own. Most of them didn't appear to be connected, but under the deck each was linked by numerous thick cables, to each other and the rest of his body. They were, Garrett knew, what his brain had turned into.

After he took the costume off Midtral would kick him out for substance abuse, the way they also did with people who got weird piercings or large tattoos or got in the paper for suspicious reasons. It was in the college contract; people hated it, but no one had a legal leg to stand on. They would give him time to pick up his stuff and find a motel, and he and Steph could go together to that bar just off campus to complain and rage and drink. Later they could stagger back to the motel, and wake up side by side in the morning with matching hangovers, and both of them could claim to have no memory of the previous night. The first and last time he'd done it, he'd sworn never to do it again, and Steph had clutched his head and said "Never, ''ever'' again". But another all-night bender with his friend sounded a lot better now.

He laughed wildly - and silently except for a burst of static on the internal comms. On the - yes, it was the system the commander used to give orders to the troops, it might as well be an intercom, why not? The static was loudest from the hologram pod, loud enough to fill the cockpit. It was purely internal, with not one speaker on his outside. He didn't have to pause for breath. Static hissed and crackled through his intercom, rising in a snarl of terrible, meaningless sound that went on and on. Who was he kidding? Nothing was coming off, and he was so empty that the noise echoed around his internals. The static died down as he stopped, feeling sick.

Not breathing. This time the realization didn't spark panic. He felt hot and cold at once.

He couldn't get up. Oh, it was easy enough in theory, Garrett knew. Contract abdominal muscles. Prop up on one elbow. Curl knees in along the floor. Turn so that hands and knees are on the ground and body is above. Push off with hands and stand up. Such a pity that he couldn't do that.

Okay, focus, he told himself, trying desperately not to start laughing again. He was on his side, not quite flat. The pocked squares on the ceiling - it was a drop ceiling, part of him noticed - somehow looked ridiculously far distant, same with the walls, though he had no problem making out details. A few hundred meters away - no, that couldn't be right, but several times longer than his body - he saw an abandoned, tapering cylindrical plastic thing partially filled with clear liquid, somehow completely intact. "Aquafina", the label read. It looked like a water bottle. Although it was much smaller than he was and he was looking ''down'' to see it, it still seemed huge. Quite a bit larger than a man, almost the size of a speeder... or, yes, a car. But that couldn't be right.

It dawned on Garrett then that it wasn't that any of these things were too large. No, they were exactly as big as they were supposed to be. It was that ''he'' was too ''small''. He was - he was an AT-AT. The distance from footpad to back was supposed to be at least twenty, twenty-five meters. How many feet was that? Fifty, sixty? If he remembered right, the drop ceiling was supposed to be ten feet up, maybe less. Even if he was standing now, his back would only be halfway to that ceiling, if that. That wasn't right. Maybe it explained the compressed feeling, though.

Movement. The furry white animal was back, and although it was moving very cautiously it still seemed far too quick for something without repulsorlifts. Garrett decided that it was probably the size thing - it seemed as big as a bantha, or... or an elephant. Those weren't supposed to move like this. But the animal was close to the floor and far, far from the ceiling, so it was probably small. Now, he couldn't help noticing that it looked like a combination of various animals. Long haired cat, wading bird, field rabbit, maybe some kind of bug.

It was coming around from Garrett's other side, staying away from his heavies this time. Halfheartedly, he followed it with the swiveling medium repeating blasters on either side of his viewport - or rather, he followed it with one blaster, because the other was pressed by his weight against what looked like a magnified piece of canvas. It didn't seem worth the effort to fire. What was the point? He didn't have any crew to protect. He was ''empty''.

''So'' empty. It was the strangest feeling. A little bit like hunger, a little like cold, slightly nauseating, something like being touch-starved, and a ''lot'' like loneliness so strong that it was crippling. Somehow it was all of those things wrapped up together, with something he had no words for. Continued breathlessness didn't help. ''Empty.''

He tried to shudder again, with the same result as last time. The white animal froze where it stood, the weird curling thing on its head unbending partially.

''Garrett?''

He jerked.

Steph? he said, or tried to say. It came out as purely internal static, like the buzzing hiss of an analog TV on an empty channel. Just like when he'd had that moment of wild laughter earlier.

''Garrett, it's me, Steph. Can you hear me?''

I hear you, I hear you! More static. Was that really Steph? How? What had happened?

''Look, don't try to shoot me again. I don't want - Are you even in there? Somewhere?''

Yes. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you, he tried. Still no words. It was just static on his intercom.

''Look, if you're there, say something.''

I don't think I can, he tried. Static. The creature that said it was Steph had its huge ears cupped around its head again, but Garrett didn't think it was hearing him. The intercom was internal, the hatches were shut. And he was producing static.

He jerked the servos in the armored tunnel that had once been his neck, making his head bob. He had to fight gravity. It wasn't an easy motion, and although he couldn't see it himself, he knew it didn't look smooth.

''Do that again.''

Garrett did. Whatever was between his head and the ground, underneath the too-close canvas, made a weird sort of ''crunch''. He could barely hear it; it seemed soft and far away.

''Okay. Uh, okay. You can't talk, but you can hear me, right?''

A third time, and now he was getting faint complaints. He wasn't designed for this kind of activity, not small repetitive movements. If he kept this up, he'd start damaging the blaster on that side. After a moment, he swung one leg forward and back. A foreleg.

He couldn't see most of his body, but he could see his legs, sticking out rigidly, like he was a flipped card table. There was the joint where each leg met his body. The joint could swing the entire leg forwards and back, and spread the legs a little apart, independently, but the spreading had a very limited range and apparently he couldn't do it lying on his side. His legs were just too heavy; the joints weren't built for this. He had knee joints, and four toe flaps at the end of each leg. And there was some kind of wristlike joint between knee and footpad, where the end of the leg pincered on to the footpad, but he couldn't move it. It was probably like a lizard's wrist; press the hand against something and the arm could move at all kinds of angles, but without something, the ground, a wall, to press against none of those wrist angles were really possible.

''Is that a yes?''

If he'd had eyes, Garrett would have rolled them. As it was, he felt the medium blaster that wasn't pinned twitch. Steph could get like this when he was excited or nervous, chattering inanely and giving off the impression that he wasn't nearly as smart as he was.

He tried talking again, asking, What do you think? Static. Of course. He swung the leg again.

''Okay, yeah. So - I guess I'm telepathic now. Right? My voice is gone, but if you can hear me, what else could it be?''

Garrett lay still, waiting as Steph babbled about what had happened, obviously ''just'' on this side of hysteria. He couldn't blame the little guy - Garrett could feel it pressing in on him, like any minute now he'd burst out in mad static laughter again. And maybe this time he wouldn't stop. But as long as Steph was here, he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

Was this telepathy, then? It was ''like'' hearing Steph's voice, but not quite. He didn't have any sense of where it was coming from. And... no, there wasn't really a sensation of hearing anything. It was like imagining a voice, imagining very strongly. Which raised the question of whether or not he ''was'' imagining it. But that way lay madness.

Eventually, Steph ran down. ''And I'm sorry, I ran away! I shouldn't have. I know.'' Had he? Obviously that was bad, but Garrett wasn't sure that he'd noticed. Not with all this. He wished - well, not like it mattered. Obviously he didn't need to breathe. It just felt like he should.

''Look, I - I should really try and get someone to help you up. I don't want to stay here, it's too open.''

Finally! Garrett staticked and swung forward and back, vigorously enough that he got a stern internal notice about not damaging his legs on obstacles. On the ground, Steph shuffled anxiously, black nose twitching.

''Right. I'll, uh, I'll be right back.'' He took off on all fours. Garrett watched him go. Why was Steph some kind of weird alien rabbit thing? What the hell had ''happened''? There was a way to undo it, right? He hoped there was. He really hoped there was.

He didn't ''want'' to be an AT-AT! He'd never wanted this. A month ago - less than a month ago - this costume hadn't even been a vague idea! He wasn't even a big fan or anything. He didn't want to be a walking beast-shaped tank. He could feel ''air'' blowing through his ''insides''.

He heard faint static crackling out of the intercom, and several bewildered seconds passed before he realized that he was trying to whimper.

==Anj's post-TF segment==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus2.jpg]]

Anj holstered his collapsed forcepike, removed his helmet, pushed his overrobe back over his shoulders like a cape, and stared at the reflection in the mirror, shying away from the eyes. The reflection stared back.

The reflection's face wouldn't turn heads. It was pretty normal, all things considered, no obvious scars or nonhuman colors. There was a certain hardness to it, yes – something in the forehead, the set of the jaw, the chin – but the mouth and the surprised expression saved him from looking too unforgiving. What made it disorienting was the way it was at once strange and familiar. There was a lurching shock like he'd dropped into a hole in the ground, registering that this wasn't some stranger's face. There was a smaller shock of recognition - this was his face. This was him.

“Uh. This is the part of the dream where my teeth fall out or I find out I can fly, right?” Anj winced and saw the reflection do the same. '' I don’t sound anything like me. I don’t even sound like my father.''

“Doesn’t feel like a dream, but how would I know? I guess there's nothing wrong with my voice amplifier. I, uh... Well, this is weird.” It was a very expressive face – the wince hadn’t just been a twitch of the eyelid; there’d also been more than a little reaction in the lips and eyebrows. He looked away.

It made a certain amount of sense, though. After that exchange with the bizarre pitcher-thing he had barely been breathing hard. He'd known something was different, he'd sort of expected this, it wasn't just the - well, the sense that now and again something jostled that shouldn't. Though that had been part of it. “Damn. Well... only men are officially accepted into the Stormtrooper Corps. Only the best stormtroopers can be trained as Red Guards. The screening process - yeah, I don't think a woman would go unnoticed. So yeah.”

He was taller, definitely. Not ''really'' tall, maybe, he could be wrong. When he turned his head and tilted it down it seemed like his shoulders on either side extended out too far, though part of that was the pauldrons. They didn't look bad in the mirror. But - wow, yeah, he was definitely taller. Yes. And his arms were thicker, even aside from the armor. Self-consciously, he flexed his free arm and felt his bicep press into the armor of his lower arm, the vambrace.

Also he was taller. Anj moistened his lips and realized that he was nervous.

For some reason recognizing that made him plant his feet and stand straighter - and yes, taller. Hopefully that would stop surprising him soon, it wasn't like he'd hit his head on the doorjamb or anything. He was nervous - okay, afraid.

Earlier, he'd decided to find an empty bathroom to look at himself in, rather than join the crush of people trying to get out. That had taken a little longer than he'd expected. He might have been dragging his feet a bit, putting it off. He'd known something would happen - maybe he was deluding himself, but it was like there was a wave above him, ready to crash down.

He would have liked to avoid it for a little bit longer. He knew he could. But something inside, almost impossible to make out at first, then louder and clearer to the point where it startled him, said ''No. No. That's not how it goes. Resolve internal crises before they impact performance.''

Anj closed his eyes, then opened them. He started talking, the words forming just before he said them. "I was born in - in Coronet City on Corellia. We moved to Imperial center when I was about three, and lived in a domicile in a shabby-genteel section, on a level that was patrolled enough to keep down the violence." He wanted to stop, this wasn't right - he'd been born in Flagstaff Arizona, they'd moved when he was almost four. "The sun - the sun was visible, there was natural light, but only at high noon. When it rained, and it did that a lot, the water came to us through sluices, and it was never clean." The memory hit him, as strong as any he'd ever had - walking through the marketplace with his mother, ten minutes after a storm had passed overhead, and the water had poured off the awning they ducked under, reflecting rainbows.

"No, that's not right." He made himself stop and shake away the memory of how oily the water was, its smell. His pulse was quickening. "I don't remember Arizona except as bright and red, we just have pictures of the little blue house." There had been holograms of Coronet City in the domicile, projecting on the walls. They weren't the shiny sanitized holos of famous or scenic places that got sold to tourists. His older brother had borrowed a holocam and recorded the scenes himself. "I- we lived in an apartment for a while. It snowed in the winter. First time I'd seen snow, and it made night less dark. It was wetter than I'd thought."

"Smelled a little like tin. Smelled like -" Anj rubbed his face with his gloved free hand, shifting his grip on his helmet with the other. He'd heard more than once that fresh snow smelled like tin, but he couldn't - Oh, Emperor, he remembered the landlord's kid, half a year older and always red-faced, showing up and asking if he'd mind wagering on which of the hired men would be the one to knock down the hawk-bat nest. Why not, he was a Corellian, right? "I, I made friends with a neighbor girl who never stopped telling me and Valerie that the - the show with the puppets was stupid and babyish. I wanted to impress her so I agreed, but I still watched it. Sometimes Valerie told her I was lying..."

This went on for some time, and he kept having the feeling that whatever he was fighting, he was losing. Anj paced, restless, sometimes with uncertainty and other times aggressively. Eventually he forced himself to stop and looked back at the mirror, this time looking into his reflection's eyes. His eyes were wide-open, worried, with irises dark enough that they were hard to distinguish from his pupils. Hadn't they been paler before this? Anj looked away, unsure.

"What happened?" he asked in a low voice, not quite a whisper. "I don't understand. It's like - wait, wait. Am I - am I ''talking'' to myself?" He was. "Emperor's bones," he said, the last two words coming out as a mild oath. He really wasn't in the habit of talking to himself, he knew that for sure. It was probably just to listen to his voice. He'd talked to himself at length right after rigging the voice amp the first time, feeling out how it made him sound. Her sound, at the time. No, wait, he'd done that the first time he'd put on a helmet at the Academy, too. Once he'd quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the the other time he'd read the helmet's instruction manual out loud.

He looked down, saw his hand trembling, and had to clench it into a fist to make it stop. He had to finish this. He just really, really didn't want to, and he wasn't sure what 'this' was or why it scared him. Maybe he could put it off for another minute.

Briskly, Anj used some paper towels to dry the counter where the sinks were, switching off a dribbling faucet at the same time, then set his helmet there and removed his robes, folding them quickly and with mechanical precision.

“Huh.” Despite their irregular shape, he’d folded them into a perfect square, flat and unwrinkled. And why had he bothered wiping down the counter first? Anj dropped his folded robes besides his helmet, deliberately letting a corner hang over the edge of the counter. Immediately he felt the nagging urge to adjust the robes, make them line up precisely, but it wasn’t very strong. Apparently he had a thing for neatness. He hoped it was neatness, and not some kind of cleaning mania.

Looking into the mirror again, Anj glanced over his armor. Red plating, the same crimson as his helmet and robes, with a thick textured bodysuit underneath. The bodysuit - the underarmor - was black, naturally, no sign of the armor weave visible. The plating was fashioned like the contours of a very well-defined muscular body. Better defined then he actually was and a serious display of narcissism, he knew, but ''he'' hadn’t designed the armor.

This was both distressing and a sight he'd seen nearly every day. ''That'' was what he had to finish. He had to get both stories to fit together. He couldn't just pick one - well, he ''could'', it would be easy, he could just be Anj, part of the Stormtrooper Corps since he'd volunteered at fifteen, which was younger than was officially allowed, eventually picked for Red Guard training on Yinchorr. He could pick that, let all the sketchy details fill in and flesh out, and be Anj of the 501st on a planet that was only vaguely familiar to him. The more he thought about that backstory, the more complex it would become. But he knew he shouldn't, he really, ''really'' shouldn't.

"Okay," he said quietly. "The obvious answer is that I was - I ''am'', still, Anj - ''Angela'', and this other stuff is new, but there's no way I can ignore it." He had to figure this out. Anj ran a gloved finger along the raised detailing on his pectorals, stopping as he realized what he was doing. He remembered making the armor with Ursala, one of the other Tampa Bay Red Guards - and he remembered getting it at the end of training, before being shipped off to a new post. Both felt real.

This would take some doing.

Anj paced a little more, then stretched out on the linoleum, resting weight only on his forearms and toes, and kept his abdomen taut, silently counting the seconds as his muscles burned. He couldn't reject it. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing was ever that simple. Still, there had to be something he could do.

Holding "plank" position was easy; even with the weight of the armor, he could stay like that for an hour, no trouble. Anj shifted position, put his palms against the floor, and started to push up and lower himself down in a steady rhythm, breathing easily.

Why one or the other? Why not both? Wouldn't that be ideal?

Could he even do that? Easy enough to ''think'' it, but...

A shredded bit of toilet paper scudded off across the linoleum tiles, blown by his breath, and Anj stopped as he realized that he'd just stretched out and started doing pushups on a bathroom floor. A women's bathroom, admittedly, and therefore not ''too'' awful, but still. He scrambled back to his feet as quickly as if he’d been ordered, and stared for the third time at his reflection.

This time he didn't look away, staring intently into the mirror, ignoring the discomfort, the awkward feeling that really he shouldn't be doing this. Every time he saw himself, it was a little easier.

And now - now, if he pushed away the visceral shock of seeing someone else and the other, smaller shock of recognition, and it did feel like he was pushing them back - now he honestly could tell himself that that face ''was'' familiar. That the nose had once been broken rather spectacularly and had for the most part healed straight. That the hair-fine scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, ''his'' dark eyebrow, was ''not'' from a training incident or an injury he'd picked up on duty, but a remainder of something incredibly stupid he’d done as a teenager. He could remember idly imagining a face like this, going with the fairly vague biography he’d made. Anj thought he'd sketched this face, or one like it, in a notebook.

In fact, to his surprise he looked just a little like his ex. Like Angela’s ex. Anj's ex. It wasn’t a ''major'' resemblance, but it was there, something about the bone structure and the texture of his close-cropped dark hair, though it wasn't curly. Oh, right - he'd been on that faces kick, filling up page after page of head studies. Since this had been when he, as Angela, had been engaged to Scott, and Scott hadn't objected to a little modeling, most of them reflected him somehow.

Anj was oddly relieved to find that there was still an echo of that old pain when he thought about Scott. Things just hadn't worked out between them. They'd left on friendly enough terms, yes, it had been almost two years and it was barely awkward anymore when they ran into each other, but there'd just been too much emotional investment for it to be painless.

It was weird, thinking of Scott when he looked like this, but almost reassuring.

Maybe he could do this after all. "I shouldn't worry about it," Anj told himself. He didn't dislike his voice. "Maybe if I just stop making a problem out of it - mind over matter, right?" There was still a blanket sense of unease, but he wasn't afraid now. He smiled tentatively, mostly to try out how it looked on his face. This didn't have to be bad. He'd - he'd try not to think of it as bad.

There would be time later to strip off every piece of armor and examine everything. For now – well, he ''knew'', but it wouldn’t hurt just to check. Anj found the seam in his underarmor and stretched it open. There was the dance belt thing keeping everything supported, and under it another piece of padded armor, common sense really, a protection that was smaller and not nearly as obvious as the codpiece worn by stormtroopers. And under ''that'' -

He wasn't sure if it was supposed to be - the angle was new, but it looked normal - he hadn't expected - right, well, Scott had been cut, and -

“…Yeah. I definitely went in the wrong refresher. Bathroom. Whatever it's called.” Feeling a little embarrassed, Anj straightened his armor and exhaled firmly. "I don't think I'll do that again for a while." Not that he would have a choice; his bladder had to fill eventually. But it could wait.

"No more periods. Huh. I'm going to have to get new clothes. ''All'' new clothes. It's probably going to be a comprehensive shopping spree." A daunting thought. As Angela, ever since he was a little girl he'd hated shopping for new outfits, since it was ''never'' quick or simple. He'd hated it vocally enough that it had become a family joke. Somehow he doubted that had changed - and, for whatever reason, this was another oddly comforting thought. There was a little pronoun confusion and what could only be called a double set of memories, but Angela and Anj were the same person at heart. He hoped.

He still felt weird, but it was a relief to be sure that whatever else was going on, this was a convention in Florida, and he had walked in as a woman in costume. In Red Guard costume. The furries he’d seen – the same thing had happened to ''them.'' It was safe to assume it had also happened to the people he’d passed on the way ''here'', the ones who’d been rushing for the exits or milling in confusion. Had it happened to everyone? In the world, or locally, or just ''here''?

He’d become a real Red Guard; his forcepike had become a real forcepike, the biography had filled out extensively, and so had... other things. The furries had become actual, living animal people. The image, the dream, had become reality. Although, really, he’d never longed to have more than the image, he’d spent a lot of idle thought on it but never felt that he was ''supposed'' to be a Red Guard, really. And – well, it followed logically that the pitcher man hadn’t been more than the image before, because who could ''possibly'' want to be a pitcher? There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

… What had happened to the rest of the squad? To his friends, to SL-1984? Had this happened to ''them'', too? Anj felt a sharp, unsettling lurch in the pit of his stomach, as all the unease he'd managed to dispell came back in a lump. Why wasn’t he with them? ''How'' could he have thought it was a good idea to leave them in this unfamiliar territory? He had no idea where they were, so why wasn’t he out looking for them?

“Why do I feel so ''guilty'' about this? I don’t know what in the Emperor’s name they’re doing, this isn’t exactly covered in training!” Anj blinked. “Not training. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Going to have to do ''something''.” But what, ''that'' was the question. Where to start? He wasn't entirely sure where ''he'' was, let alone any of the others!

Restless again, Anj made a quick circuit of the bathroom. He’d chosen well; when he’d passed this place early in the day there had been an impressive line, but everyone’s priorities had shifted well before he got here.

All stalls were open, and the bathroom was empty – he wouldn’t have removed his helmet and started talking to himself if it hadn’t been – but it didn’t hurt to check.

He found it rather disheartening when he had trouble reading a piece of graffiti. It was scratched deeply into the side of a stall, in large, relatively neat letters that were easy to distinguish, but it still took longer than he’d have liked before the squiggles resolved into “ADRIAN WAS HERE”. Apparently he now had trouble reading English.

Otherwise, the only thing of note was a pile of clothing just inside the handicapped stall. The shirt at the top of the pile had what looked like a long elastic bandage, ragged at the tip, trailing out of the neck opening. Very gingerly, touching only with the very tips of his gloved fingers, Anj separated and folded the clothes neatly, stacking them together on the linoleum. He told himself as he did it that it was a courtesy. The other end of the bandage was wrapped around a bra left inside the shirt, for some reason that Anj couldn't fathom. Crumpled under those and sitting atop a dusty pair of sandals were short pants with panties inside - and in ''those'' was a winged Maxi pad with just a little blood on it.

Just seeing that made Anj feel incredibly uncomfortable and voyeuristic. If women had a set of bathroom rules, hiding all evidence of periods was one of the big ones. It seemed like that rule had carried over - he was embarrassed for whoever this was, and entirely unwilling to touch it. And yet Anj couldn’t help thinking that if the clothing had simply been removed, it would just be heaped together, underthings on top. This looked like more like the occupant had dematerialized – or shrunk dramatically. Yet it was completely empty, and he hadn't seen any-

''-Wait. '' I ''wouldn't try and approach someone who looked like me, if this happened. And she could've got out earlier, maybe even when I opened the door. I wasn't exactly in a state to notice. Whatever this is about, it's going to stay a mystery. One that I'm glad isn't happening to'' me.

A light sort of twitch traveling up his spine brought Anj out of his thoughts. “Right,” he mused under his breath as he returned to the sink. “Weakly Force-Sensitive, untrained and not good for much more than intuition and a warning. Wrote that in the bio. Inexplicable spinal sensations mean something is happening, and if it's mild like this-“

He could hear it, tinny and faint, coming from his helmet on the counter. It must have tuned in on an active frequency. Without hesitation Anj took it up and settled it over his head, the insides tight against his face. The voice over the com became clear. Female, clear, commanding, and with a bit of an accent that sounded vaguely British - No. Not British. ''Imperial.''

“-ling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, report for instruction, report for instruction, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr. Repeat; this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st-“

Words could not have expressed how Anj’s heart leaped on hearing the officer’s voice. He wasn’t alone! Almost as fast as he could think it, he had gone to the specified frequency.

“This is TR-1407 of Tampa Bay Squadron.” Relief loosened his tongue in spite of training. “And I am ''very'' glad to hear from you! Orders, sir?”

The voice that responded over the comlink wasn’t the same one, although if anything the Imperial accent was stronger; this was a harried-sounding older man. “You may change your mind when you see this, Royal Guard. Get to the rendezvous outside of the structure. We’re on the blacktop rectangle to the southwest.”

== Garrett ==

Nothing was happening. He supposed that there must be commotion going around - he and Steph hadn't been the only ones, right? He'd seen something like that before falling over, right? - but he couldn't hear anything. Literally. It was silent. Now and again he felt what were sort of like faint tremors going up into his body. Maybe he'd gone deaf, at least on the outside. Inside it was different.

Experimentally, he swung a hind leg. It hit something. He swung again, harder. Yes - there ''was'' a sound, but it was so faint! Distant, like it was several rooms away.

Now he charged his heavies, waiting the long seconds until they were good and hot, and fired into the wall. The minor explosion that resulted ''was'' louder, but again - faint and far away. The sound of both heavy cannons charging and going off had been perfectly clear - it was the same oddly high laser ''tcheeer'' shriek he remembered from watching Empire Strikes Back - which he supposed made sense, since the sound could probably travel through him and to whatever worked like ears now.

He couldn't breathe. Garrett would have given a lot right now to be sure if he'd been stuck on an inhale or an exhale - he couldn't tell, it felt like both and neither. Mildly uncomfortable.

There was... something... related to the intercom, somewhere in a console in his cabin, but not as intimately a part of him as the intercom. It was picking up something. Probably had been for a while. A signal? Several signals?

''"-xty-two is down!" "I'm still functional, sir. It knocked me over, that's all." "Get back over here - oh, no, it's coming back, Force preserve us-"''

''"-SAID HOLD YOUR FIRE! Damn you, Thirteen, it's just a bird." "Sorry! Sorry! I couldn't help myself, it just came up so fast." "No harm done. My lord-?" "The Lieutenant was ri-"''

''"-see, I told you, the flashing orange bit is its weak point!" "What, like a videogame? Isn't that awfully convenient?" "Don't give me lip. It keeps doing that swing-and-dodge thing, then you can see the orange bit. Cover me, I'll-"''

He cycled through a handful of channels or frequencies or whatever, listening to voices, until he found ones that seemed vaguely familiar, though they were distorted enough that he couldn't quite figure out where he'd heard them before.

''"-nd telling us where you went in such a hurry, ''sir?'' And how you managed to lose half an arm? I can see the sparks from here." "Pike, you would not believe me if I told you. Count yourself fortunate that I found you, I can proba- ah, more of them. How charming." "Fusst! Can you take them?" "Certainly I could, but saving you is a bigger priority than killing animals. Stay where you are.” "You're going to play at being a ''troop transport?!'' "Yes, if you want to put it that way. Do you have a better idea?"''

Without warning, the voices dissolved into gibberish and white noise, a lot louder. He could sort of make out words in that mess, a panicked babbling. This might not even be the same channel. Alarmed, Garrett shut that part of himself off.

What had that been? What the ''hell'' had that been? What was going on out there?! What had happened?! Beneath the aching emptiness of his insides, along his belly, Garrett's drive motor was running hard and fast. Like he was breathing hard and his heart was racing - except, of course, that they weren't. He was a relatively thin set of rigid metal plates wrapped around air and fuel and a walking apparatus, and even that motor under his belly, the closest thing he had to guts, was riddled with spaces, gaps, hatches for mechanics to get into. All of them so empty.

There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do. Gradually, his drive motor slowed, until once again it was an almost subliminal hum. He lay there, wishing he had eyes to close.

He couldn't breathe. He did have the feeling that he hardly noticed that when he was paying attention to something else. But there wasn't a lot else to even think about.

Nothing continued to happen. Garrett felt that horrible emptiness inside and tried not to laugh or start whimpering again. Something must have happened to Steph. Something had got him, maybe. He'd turned into something else. He'd gotten lost. Or maybe... maybe he'd just run off and abandoned Garrett.

Garrett pushed that last thought away. It wouldn't happen. He wouldn't have been abandoned. Not by Steph. They'd known each other since Orientation, and although they weren't roommates they shared about half of their classes. They'd - Garrett was straight, that one time when they'd both gotten very drunk at the end of Finals Week did ''not'' count, and Steph had said Garrett wasn't his type, but that didn't matter. Steph was still one of Garrett's best friends, the only one who always pitched in when he had some new idea, the one he went to whenever a wasp got into his dorm while his roommate was out. If he had anyone who wouldn't leave him, it was Steph.

Of course, the thought came back. Damn it, he was an ''AT-AT''. He couldn't even talk. Good God. Why ''wouldn't'' Steph just walk away?

And he was so ''empty''. Static hissed softly through his command section and the big troop cabin, falling silent only when he made the intercom stop. Laugh, cry, he wanted to do both and couldn't manage either properly. Damn it, he tried to say. Static.

It made sense, he supposed, that he couldn't speak. Maybe he could - there ''was'' that intercom - but he had no idea how to make words without a throat or vocal chords. He tried again, and managed to chop the burst up. Hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet. Not as noisy or intense as the laughter had been, louder than the whimpering.

''Damn'' it. HISS-quiet-hiss-quiet. Now he could sense the mechanisms in the speakers. They were entirely unfamiliar. How ''did'' radios and speakers of any kind turn signals back into voices, sounds, music? He had no idea. Nothing to do but try.

Garrett was lost for some time, trying to bully his intercom into producing anything that wasn't static. He made progress, if slowly - managing a few vowel sounds, almost drowned by the hiss. Still, he didn't miss the movement outside.

First, there came the bees. When the first few appeared, zigzagging up near the ceiling, he had trouble figuring out what they were. They seemed as big as Thanksgiving turkeys and almost as weighty, dark wings moving in a blur. The first handful were high up and spaced out, moving purposefully from one side of his vision to the other. As time passed more and more bees passed through, sometimes several at a time. Garrett practiced what sounded vaguely like an "ah" and watched them, feeling his drive motor start to speed up again. He didn't like bees all that much.

Soon enough it was a whole ''cloud'' of passing bees, all headed in the same direction. The air was thick with them, along the floor as well as the ceiling, and there were enough that the droning of their collective wings was going up his legs and through his hull into the inside. He could actually hear them. It almost managed to be loud.

Many bees flying low smacked into him - he was surprised to find that he could feel them hitting, the insects were ''strong'' - and crawled up his body before taking off again. He couldn't quite see them doing that, or feel them crawling across his surface, but it was a logical assumption, and that was what the ones on his legs were doing. There were so many bees that he could have hit a few dozen just by swinging a leg, but he didn't dare. He could have fired and taken out a lot more, he really wanted to try it, but that would just make them mad, wouldn't it? They were ''everywhere'', there were ''thousands'' of them. He knew, he ''knew'' that he couldn't be stung, but-

Garret made a very odd sound over his intercom, a combination of a high pure synthetic tone and an "ahhhkssshhksshhh" that quickly devolved into furious static. A bee had crawled onto his viewport, seemingly from nowhere, he could see the segments of its wide-spread legs and the yellow hairs coming off it, and oh God it had a pointy red tonguelike thing gleaming between two mandibles, and agggh, it ''licked'' him, and its two antennae were tapping at him... He couldn't feel it at all, but that didn't help, and even though it was many many times smaller than him it was still a GIANT BEE climbing around-

Bee claws on his hatches! He felt ''that''. They were crawling, oh God how could that tickle ''and'' itch, and he couldn't feel their clawed legs ''around'' the hatches or ''on'' them, but at the edges, where they were sealed shut, ''there'' he felt them, and they were ''everywhere''! He was covered in them. They were going to gouge one of the hatches open and ''get inside!'' His drive motor was picking up, throbbing a pitch that started low and built higher, he couldn't just lie still anymore but he couldn't ''do'' anything-

And then the one on his viewport took off, and there were fewer bees in the air, and he didn't feel claws on his hatches anymore. Barely a minute later and it was back to a thin stream of the things moving across the ceiling. Soon enough there were none.

The silence as his drive motor wound back down again was deafening. Garrett had to wonder if he'd just imagined that. But no - there was a little streak of residue, barely visible, on his viewport. Disgusting. God, he didn't like bees. He'd been pleased about them dying off until he'd found that that just meant more ''wasps'', which were worse, if anything.

How was it, he had to ask himself, that he could essentially see outwards from his skin - no, not skin, more like a hull - but he hadn't been able to see any of the bees crawling on his body? He'd looked down his legs and seen them, and he'd seen the one on his viewport from beneath its six clawed feet. Why none of the others?

Vision as he had it now, interior and exterior, was - well, it wasn't a set of alternating views, nor was it overlaid, and he didn't know how this was working at all. It ''was'' working, at any rate. Everything seemed to be in full color and three dimensions.

Fuel reserves were now at ninety-eight point zero four eight one six percent. Had he been topped up when this - when this started? He didn't know. He hadn't checked it before. Right now he was on standby; powered up and burning fuel, but not going anywhere. Even if he figured out how to shut down a few systems, being active at ''all'' drained the reserves. Slowly, yes, but it was happening, and speeding up his drive motor like he'd been doing only hastened the process, as fuel moved up out of the cylindrical tank and was consumed. Garrett had the sudden thought that he would lie here immobile until he had either drained the last milliliter of fuel or he voluntarily shut himself down. He didn't know what would happen then. It was not a pleasant thought.

== Help ==

Time passed, long enough for Garrett to get too lonely and restless to keep trying to figure out his speakers. He wasn't used to having nothing to do. Usually, if nothing else presented itself, he'd start doodling on stray paper, trying to conceptualize various things he'd heard or thought of over the course of the day. Sometimes he'd get lucky and inspiration would strike. And then of course there would be the breathlessly fast calculation of taking an idea and making it ''work''... He wasn't used to being bored.

It wasn't like he could even hold a pencil, Garrett thought. He moved the toe flaps on one foot - hinge joints, all four of them, no other joints, limited flexibility up or down, he could move them independently, but that made little difference. These feet were made for walking, and that was all they could do. Pretty close to useless.

It didn't help that he was almost painfully aware of all his internal surfaces, and he kept coming back again and again to how utterly empty and alone he was. He couldn't even quite muster up any interest in how the hell his body worked, and it seemed like every few seconds he was reminded that he wasn't breathing, like a tic. This was miserable.

So although he didn't see Steph at the feet of the two people who came into view - wherever he was, he didn't seem to be having great luck - he was so desperate to see someone that he almost didn't mind.

They were incredibly tall, walking on thick pillarlike legs, huge and fleshy. Garrett took several seconds to realize that they were human at all. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around that. Humans didn't get anywhere near that big, and although logically he knew that these probably weren't any larger than normal, they still ''looked'' absolutely enormous. If he had been up on all fours, they would still have been considerably taller than him, though all in all somewhat less massive.

Garrett really only assumed they were human at all by their hands. Meaty, both broad and long, with skin covered with a network of fine grooves, a little puffy. Five unique digits, each placed and sized differently with wrinkled skin on the joints, each tapering, rounded, and tipped with a sort of curved scale. They looked like alien appendages until he saw knuckles and a standing vein in the back of one, and lines in a palm; then, something sort of ''clicked'', and he realized how they looked very much like human hands. Grossly enormous human hands, yes, as long as Steph's body, or almost. Still human.

If they had human hands, they were humans, right? They were just so out-of-scale, looming up cone-shaped, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, that he couldn't quite think of them as people, only pick out things like hands and gigantic sloping feet. It took some bewildered staring before he could even recognize that the fibrous stuff hanging from their bodies was ''clothing''.

Then, he saw past the size and realized that, even if they weren't any bigger than usual, they would still have attracted stares from anyone with eyes. The two had stopped within his sight and were now talking animatedly together. He couldn't hear them at ''all'', Garrett realized unhappily. They weren't loud enough for sound to get into his interior. Maybe if he opened a hatch... okay, how exactly did he do that? It wasn't like moving his head or legs, that was for sure.

The smaller of the two, the top of its - his? - head arrayed with a glinting mass of coarse fibers that might have been hair, Garrett could barely see it from here, had two vast flapping leathery things like wings or sails on either side of its head.

There was something wrong with that one's face, like its nose had melted into a gray wrinkled thing that moved, like a tentacle or a tail. Above that, it had ''four'' eyes. Two were set into its head with a bristling ridge above each, the other two were wide-set, gleaming, and very dark. Maybe this one wasn't human after all. It was twisting around, gesturing, generally looking unsettled.

The taller one, and now Garrett could see that it was ''considerably'' larger, was a little more normal, if he could judge. Its eyes were similar to the closer-set pair on the deformed one's face, and he supposed that the bristly ridges were eyebrows. The skin that wasn't covered by hanging folds of cloth was a very pale, almost chalky color. This one had bent its forelegs... no, arms, they had to be arms... and crossed them one over the other.

In a fit of whimsy, Garret decided to call them Mutant and Big Guy. Why not? It wasn't like they'd overhear him and take offense. He was starting to feel a growing sense of unreality. Being unable to put a couple of humans or almost-humans into perspective was just odd.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't real, after all. It just didn't make enough sense. If he was supposed to be an AT-AT, why could he fit into a room? What was up with that thing that had knocked him over, the red thing that had looked so much like the Kool-Aid Man? And why was a rabbit-bug thing telling him that it was Steph?

Garrett knew that he'd already run through part of this, at least. But the idea that he'd passed out in his cardboard shell from a nasty combination of spray paint fumes and an accidental dose of some illegal substance, and was now having a weird dream of epic proportions was - well, it was comforting. Or maybe he was awake, but hallucinating a wildly distorted version of events.

Mutant and Big Guy seemed to be wrapping up their conversation. Their Easter Island-esque heads were doing much less side-to-side swiveling and much more tilting up and down, and gestures were far less expansive. Abruptly, Garret made up his mind. What did he have to lose, if this was or wasn't a dream?

He swung a leg forwards and back.

Big Guy, moving ridiculously fast, got between Garrett and Mutant, bending its limbs like it was about to leap. Mutant moved, but stopped and backed away when Big Guy opened its mouth and did something with it. Garrett had never learned to lipread. What he could see of lips and mouth moving was weird and creepy, like he'd stumbled into the Uncanny Valley. Was that a matter of scale, or...

No one moved for a long moment, until Garrett finally jerked what used to be his head. Now he was being stared at. He moved his command section to point in their general direction and swung a leg forwards, trying to go for 'pathetic'. It wasn't exactly acting. He wished he could heave a sigh.

Big Guy did something with its mouth again, directing it at either Garrett or Mutant. Mutant crept still further away, the sails on its head flapping. Big Guy turned and followed it, twisting around weirdly to look back at Garrett. They stopped at the very edge of his vision, which apparently didn't extend all that far, to gesture and flap their mouths at each other some more. Eventually they stepped out of view entirely.

Garrett waited. Time passed, he had no idea how much. Long enough that he went back to trying to figure out his intercom. He made a heartening leap of progress when he figured out how to make and adapt the synthesized beep, though at his best he sounded about as clear as a toddler lisping into a poorly-kept drive-through speaker. He could only even do ''that'' if he focused very hard on the syllables and went slowly, true, and what wasn't a hiss came out in a robotic high-toned monotone, but progress was progress. What would he do if - ''when'' - he finally got to the point of speaking clearly and with some inflection?

He could try and recreate his voice. And... and other people's voices. Then he could - what? Reenact campy old TV shows?

It didn't get to that point, thankfully. Garrett thought about counting the seconds and decided against it, not really wanting to measure how long it took, but he only felt the I'm-not-breathing tic four times before Big Guy came back and did - well, did ''something''.

Big Guy had sort of... folded up, Garrett guessed, legs practically folded in on themselves, somehow not falling over despite the awkwardness of the position. It was... no, not sitting, couldn't be sitting, not kneeling either... crouching? Yes, that was it. He couldn't help noticing that its legs were ''considerably'' thicker than either his legs or the armored tunnel that had used to be his neck, and it was crouching ''within'' his legspan, looming up over him. Stretching an arm over his side, and from the little vibration that Garrett vaguely felt in his hull, the probably-human was dragging a hand over-

What the hell? Had it just ''stroked'' him? Now Big Guy's mouth was moving, and damn it, Garrett wished he could just ''say'' that he couldn't hear or understand any of that, say it and actually be heard, anyway -

Why not? ''Just help me up.'' Damn the static, he could do better than that, he'd managed-

They came in from the edge of his vision, walking with startlingly quick, fluid motions, as if moving was easy despite all that bulk. Two, three - no, ''four'' of them, like flexible animated towers fidgeting and breathing and pendulumming effortlessly from one leg-column to another in a walk that seemed at every step to be a barely-averted fall. He saw the flapping sails and knew that one of them was Mutant, but he didn't recognize any of the others at all. One didn't have anything like the pillar-like body structure of the others, carrying most of its mass almost horizontally.

They went from the edge of his vision to looming up over him, and static started to hiss and crackle through Garrett's interior. Too big, too close!

Heat, moisture on his right fore footpad! Weight - slight weight, nothing near the right amount, none on the others, and yes he knew he was already down but that sensation spelled FALLING! Garrett tried to swing his legs, tried on some instinctual impulse to fire. But his legs stayed locked still, toeflaps flicking madly, only one of them hitting anything at all, and the power to all four blasters was being leached away as quickly as he could route it in.

He felt like a heavy soft blanket had been pressed over him. ''Him'', not this half-insensate walker body, he could almost ''feel'' it wrapped over and over. Like it was between him and everything else. He felt his drive motor fight something, grinding alarmingly for a moment, and then slow, winding down as rapidly as it had sped up. Garrett saw now that Big Guy was - was ''gripping a footpad'' in one massive appendage. That was why he'd felt, was still feeling, some sensation there. It wasn't moving to wrench it off, it was just... holding it. Okay, that was weird.

Big Guy, still folded up, was mouthing at the new giants, who were no smaller than before but somehow less threatening, now. Garrett found that he could feel the vibrations of speech, faintly, through the hand on his footpad. He still couldn't understand it, annoyingly enough. Still, he knew for certain now that Big Guy was talking.

Garrett also found that he couldn't move his legs at all, just the toeflaps. Nothing was touching them, and they were working fine, he could feel it, they just couldn't move. Something invisible had a hold of him. Whatever it was, he knew, he knew that if it could slow his drive motor and persuade his legs to still, if he couldn't resist it, it could probably pop his hatches and and bare his interior and take him apart bit by bit. But it wasn't. It was holding him still. Very, very still. He found himself adjusting the seating in his command cockpit just to see if he still could.

He was calm now. Very calm, disassociated even. He had to wonder about that firing reflex. It hadn't been a conscious attempt at all, which was pretty inconvenient - he'd fired earlier to see if he could hear it, yes, but he wasn't quite sure how. Well, no sense worrying, was there? Garrett couldn't seem to muster either concern or a great deal of interest. It could be his drive motor, he supposed. It was running ''very'' slowly now. He knew that he ought to be nervous about that. If the computers in what had been his head were really serving as his brain, they needed to be powered. Not much he could do about that, though, was there?

They were talking over him. The giants. Big Guy, not moving, seemed to be trying to direct the others, who were on his other side, around his back. He couldn't see quite as well from his back-side than from his flank-sides or belly-side, but this was close enough that it didn't matter much.

Garrett watched with mild interest. They were all on two legs; one carried itself horizontally and had inexplicable projections that he guessed were a long S-curved neck and rigid tail. And most of it was coated with branching filaments that could be hair, or maybe feathers. Feathers - yes, on the tail and along the limbs they were shaped like feathers, with central shafts. The rest of it, as far as he could tell, had some kind of overlapping armor made of keratinous scales, most of them smaller than a meter across. Something about it was familiar... pictures... a movie?

Oh! He knew what it was! A feathery dinosaur! Maybe a raptor, he wasn't sure, but definitely a bird-dinosaur. Bigger than any dinosaur ought to be, of course, and from here its proportions looked terribly off, but it was recognizable. The movements of its curved neck and wedge head, small from this perspective, were even faster and more sudden than what he'd seen the others doing.

His eyes went - no, he didn't have eyes, did he? Or the sensation of having them, to roll and flick wetly from one thing to another and blink, that was gone. Weird. His ''attention'' went to the others - he was moderately sure that they were human, or rather, human''like'', just distorted by some quirk of his vision. And by the fact that part of him ''knew'' that he was over twenty meters tall, and no human could so much as see over his footpad without something to stand on. How was it that he could recognize and accept a live dinosaur that looked several times bigger than the T. Rex skeleton at the Chicago Field museum, but not humans at the same scale?

Well, Big Guy's hand - good God, each finger was a slab of meat and bone as thick as the kind of conduit that people could creep through - was still on his footpad, but there were no more vibrations going through it, and after looking around quickly Garrett had to conclude that the others had stopped too. They were ''very'' close. Okay, now they were bending, folding over, now they were touching him, he couldn't feel it but it was a safe assumption... his drive motor kept to the same slow pace, he was still wrapped up tightly, calm and motionless and a little bit distant.

How was this going to work? He wasn't built like an animal - he couldn't be tipped onto his belly, not with legs like these - were they planning to just carry him out? Surely he was too heavy for that. And even though he couldn't see any doorways, he was pretty sure that he couldn't be carried out of one.

Great huge hands, some of them clawed, got under him. He wasn't lying entirely flat, or they wouldn't have been able to do that. Big Guy took the hand that wasn't gripping his footpad and laid it on his side, big pale fingers splayed. That hardly seemed like the thing to do, if he was being lifted! For some reason that struck him as funny, but he didn't quite laugh.

His view ''lurched''. The pocked grid of the ceiling wobbled and seemed to get bigger. Simultaneously the faint sensation along his left side, the dull feeling where his flank lay against whatever he'd fallen on, went away. Garrett didn't have any inner ears now, so a few vaguely confused seconds passed before he realized that they were related, and together meant that he was being lifted up. He really couldn't tell how hard they were working - for that matter, the four of them, including Mutant, were shoulder-to-shoulder at his back, and Big Guy's hands hadn't moved.

He was ''above'' whatever he'd been on, now, and he could see it now, though Garrett still couldn't tell what it was. It looked like maybe four or five meters, but it was probably a lot less, if he was right about not actually being larger than a man. He'd stopped moving. Now what?

Big Guy was talking yet again, and the other giants moved around - two stayed at his back, the dinosaur stood at his vehicle bay, and on his other side Mutant positioned itself so that Garrett's command section was between its arm and its body. Each of them stuck its forearms under him - somehow, he'd kept completely steady during all that, like they hadn't been bearing his weight at all. Now, surrounded on all four sides, he had the sudden bizarre thought that they were planning to use him as a conference table.

Knowing full well that he couldn't be heard, Garrett still found himself trying to ask them what they were doing. Then Big Guy took its hand off of his flank.

Immediately he dipped and rocked, the view shuddering like he was in an earthquake, and by minute unsteady increments his body crept back up and leveled, although he was still tipping legwards and trembling. Garrett felt his drive motor intensify by some tiny increment, only to slow back down. He couldn't seem to worry much. There just wasn't enough power in his system for that.

He noticed, then, that the giants who were not Big Guy were disturbed. Strained, breathing heavily, shoulders hunched, moisture beading on oily skins that were flushing or paling. He couldn't help but wonder how eyes that bulged like that didn't just pop and run down out of their sockets. This took effort, evidently. The dinosaur was a little different, head thrown back on its long neck, mouth open. It had great pointed teeth. From his other flank he saw bent knees and massive far-spread feet.

Big Guy kept one hand steady on Garrett's footpad and reached underneath him with its free hand. There was something in it, something that gleamed. Some kind of tool? Despite the feeling of being under wraps, Garrett's found himself interested. What could that-

A beam of ''solid light'' just ''shot'' out of the thing, and for one long not-quite-panicked moment Garrett didn't see that it was finite, coming to a clearly defined tip, under twelve meters long. And it stayed attached to the emitter, too, not blazing off to burn through things like a turbolaser bolt. The thing was white-cored and blue along the edges, and he had ''no idea'' what it was.

Moving uncannily fast, as usual, Big Guy kept its hand wrapped around the emitter and manipulated the beam, holding it horizontal and passing it down, ''through'' whatever Garrett had been lying on. Smoke or steam curled up and dissipated. When the glowing beam was brought back up - moving quickly, too quickly; what if Big Guy made a mistake? - and moved aside, he saw that the mystery material had been ''cut'', and cleanly. The beam tool was like a propane torch, but big enough to make the body of a cruiseliner and without the facemask and sparks and burning.

There was a bit of new input from his air filters. An increase in... what was that, ozone?

Big Guy kept at it and chopped the stuff into long, somewhat rectangular shapes. Whatever it was Garrett had fallen over onto, part of it was a very solid slab of something weird and porous that smoked very little when cut, at least compared to the woven stuff that he thought was probably cloth.

Then the creature's fingers moved on the tool, and the blue-tinted beam sort of evaporated and was gone. Big Guy started clearing away the cut slabs, barely seeming to touch them - just sort of gesturing and causing them to whisk off. That couldn't be possible, could it?

What ''was'' that beam thing, Garrett had to ask himself. It seemed like something he ought to know, but what was the ''point'' to making a cutting rod half the size of a telephone pole?! Some kind of mining tool maybe? Although that train of thought seemed interesting, and he felt like he was missing something obvious, he had to let it go. Drive motor was a little too sluggish to keep it up.

The debris was more or less cleared, revealing... some kind of bumpy ground covering. Big Guy's free hand, minus the beam tool, came back to Garrett's flank, and by the vibrations said something. Something in his balance shifted, and the four giants straining to hold him up pulled away almost as one. Garrett didn't have to strain to see them as human to read the relief. He was very heavy.

...Which left him rather inexplicably floating in midair. He flicked his toe pads a little. He wasn't going to worry about it, but Big Guy was hardly at an angle to hold him up. Particularly alone. Although this was an odd time to notice it, Garrett saw, now, that there were no fibery hairs coming off Big Guy's domed head - instead, in the skin, there seemed to be bold faded-blue stripes running back over his skull; one really thick one over each eyebrow, a thinner one starting near each ear. Weird.

He was lifting up now, the hand gripping his footpad never faltering. Up... ten meters, thirteen, fifteen... he knew if he were to fall now, from here, at less than his full height, he would be seriously damaged, certainly more than simply falling over. No sense in worrying. Up... Big Guy was standing straight now, arms shifting position, still gripping steadily. It said something, and in response Mutant and one of the others, not the dinosaur, came closer and touched Garrett again, clutching at his hull.

"Ohhhhh..." He was surprised at how clearly the uneasy word came out, but now - now he was being turned, like a turtle flipped on its back, and it made him very uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't have inner ears - even so, he ''felt'' his insides shifting as things went from bulkhead to deck, and it was a weird feeling. It reminded him - and with all this excitement he'd almost managed to forget, too! - that he had no lungs or other organs and there was a great hollow cavity sitting in him, all but empty. Distant feeling or no distant feeling, that was unpleasant.

Still, he was being turned over, increment by increment. He was almost at the standing point now. Big Guy's hand slipped away from his footpad, and he rotated the last few degrees - slowly eased down, and his toeflaps were all sticking outwards as far as they could, and TOUCHDOWN!

He felt it as a sort of ''chunk'' as his weight came down on all four footpads, and something above the kneejoints telescoped slightly. The weird feeling of distance evaporated, and he found that he could move again. His drive motor sped up by some tiny increment. Garrett briefly forgot that he couldn't sigh, and had another weird moment where he tried to breathe but couldn't find the right equipment.

It felt so good to have his footpads on the ground! He pressed his toeflaps into it, feeling its bumpiness and its give, getting the sense that it was slightly uneven but level underneath. He was pretty sure that what looked like a landscape of weird, fibrous alien moss was really carpet. It was a good surface. Solid. Stable. Now he could move. Now he could ''walk.''

Big Guy was talking again, and the assorted weird creatures were backing off, still moving with the kind of fluid speed that made him nervous, but moving ''away'' from him, so he didn't feel crowded. He had to appreciate that. Better to think about this unexpected consideration, and not what life was going to be like if he panicked every time people who were not Big Guy stood next to him.

During a pause Garrett endeavored to bob his head minutely, although he had no idea what was being said. Even if he'd learned to lip-read, even though the giant had his big blocky face tilted downwards, at this angle Big Guy's most prominent features were his chin and the underside of his nose. He was like a tower, the kind they topped with turrets and left to guard cities.

Big Guy said something, very short this time. Garrett head-bobbed again and was either rewarded or chastised by muscles tightening under the maybe-human's skin; he thought it could be a frown. Big Guy leaned down and in close, so that his mouth and nose and eyes filled Garrett's command viewport, and said something else, moving his mouth with slow, deliberate exaggeration. There were some tiny bubbles gleaming in that wet mouth, and a bit of discoloration on at least one of the teeth, and oh God the pores in that pale skin, and the capillaries under it, and the barely-visible clear hairs scattered about - ugh. Whoever said that beauty was skin deep had never looked too close.

Garrett did nothing, vaguely wishing he could blink, and felt his command cockpit get stared through for a second time. Whatever Big Guy was looking for, he probably didn't find it, because he breathed out in a long stream that fogged Garrett's viewport and reared back up to his full height. A big hand came up and very lightly smacked Garrett on the moveable command section - ''thump'' pause lift ''thump'' pause lift, light but enough to get his head to move - and it might have been an attack, some of his systems certainly thought so, but he kind of doubted it.

Something came through with the thumps - or had they been a pat on the head? - a general feel of well-wishing. Damn it, this was frustrating. ''Almost'' communication! What if he tried shooting into the wall, writing something that wa - no, no, bad idea, he'd burn through too much of his fuel and it probably wouldn't even look like a word. And he didn't have anything like enough articulation to scratch letters with his feet.

Big Guy turned and walked away at a speed that still looked ridiculous, a tiny tremor going up Garrett's footpads with each step. He had to have phenomenal shock absorbers in those monster boots; another AT-AT would have had half that stride and more than twice the impact, even on this fibery surface. Very quickly, surprisingly so, the maybe-human was gone, and this time he probably wasn't coming back.

"Dahhhschhhn hhit." Hey, that had practically been comprehensible! Garrett grabbed on to that tidbit of accomplishment, determined to stop moping. He was on all fours now. He could walk, he could get out. He ''would'' get out. Everything else would have to wait.

The convention center as he saw it was a labyrinthine monstrosity built for long-limbed fast-moving giants. He was very vague on exactly where he was or how to get out; by now there probably wasn't anyone to follow. Maybe if he'd been quicker-witted earlier. Ah well. He took a couple of test steps, kicking aside some of the debris he'd been lying on.

Walking was - well, it was different. Taken one way, it was much, ''much'' more deliberate. He had to consciously lift, swing, and plant each footpad in turn, which was a bit complicated since he had four of them and they were all new to him. Not damaged, at least, and he probably had to count that as a stroke of luck, since looking back at when he'd lost his balance and fallen over he wasn't sure how he'd been knocked off his footpads without wrenching them or at least losing toeflaps. Taken the other way, he could set a course, which involved picking a point within his vision and doing something that felt a little like blinking. Or maybe double-clicking. There really wasn't a good human analog. Course-setting was less deliberate and he could set multiple points to reach in turn, but to get around obstacles he had to either cancel the distant set point and make new ones or manually take control, step around things, and let whatever walked him along a course work again.

There was a problem with this. He had a major design flaw - not all of the consoles in and around his cockpit were essential, but even the ones that didn't do something like control his feet or internal temperature used up a lot of power. Particularly one of them - he didn't know what it did, but it was a significant drain. So significant that when he was walking for any serious length of time, either deliberately or along a set course, he had to keep his drive motor at its highest safe output to feed the walking apparatus, the consoles that had something to do with them, "housekeeping" - life support and lighting, which he couldn't seem to shut off - and the mystery console. He wouldn't be able to generate the power to fire his lasers, not on top of all the rest.

Well, from the little he'd seen before being knocked over, he had to conclude that this was a very dangerous place now. He should have had a durasteel hull no thinner than half a meter thick at any point, he should have been close to invincible, but for some reason he was barely larger than a big man, and his hull was perilously thin. Thin enough to let some sound travel through the air into his interior. Although somehow he hadn't been found by anything more lethal than a swarm of bees, he couldn't count on that luck holding. He had to protect himself. And what was the harm in neglecting one mystery console? It couldn't be essential. The thing was connected to the other consoles, but nothing else.

Garrett prepared to move in earnest, and felt more fuel piping into channels deep in his drive system, down in what was left of his guts under the gaping void of his interior. All of his other systems downshifted and fluctuated until they readjusted. He felt his vision fade and surge, so that for a moment the world was made of enormous smooth polygonal shapes, before details popped back in. Some status lights burned brighter, others dimmed to a faint spark or quit entirely.

Things became a lot simpler. In a vague, distant way, Garrett was relieved. All he had to do was make it out. It would be hard, without a crew, but he would do it.

He oriented to the best of his ability, satisfied himself that the ground would continue to support his weight, picked a direction and a course point, and started to walk.

== The Rebel Legion ==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus4.jpg]]

"No, ''I'' am the one asking the questions," the man insisted. He was a bit rumpled and looked - well, he looked pretty distinct, but Steph didn't recognize him. "One more time. What are you and what is your business here?"

''Damn it, apparently I'm a Hoojib! And I'm looking for a friend! Have you seen an AT-AT or not?!'' For his part, Steph was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd gotten a blaster or several aimed at him when he first came close to this group, but they were pointed away now and the edge had come off of his fear, even though now he had an angry man on one side and a suspicious crowd on the other.

A ''lot'' of these people, and there were a lot of people, were armed, he could sense their weapons, and the closer ones had pale violin notes of their own, but there wasn't that building rush of soundlike sensation he'd felt before Garrett had fired that time, and he didn't think it was going to come.

"''Nev''er heard of them," the man said, evidently taking a lot of pleasure in being unhelpful. He made eye contact, but managed to look down his nose while doing so, and Steph couldn't see much of his expression. He would have backed up to try and get more in view, but he was a bit afraid that that would mean being rather far away. "How do I know this isn't a trap? Oy, Rebs! Any of ''you'' heard of a Hoojib?"

The nearest people who were being referred to as 'Rebs', the people who made up the group Steph had approached, denied knowing. From the muttering - he couldn't really pick up on any one speaker - they thought the man was rude, but were preoccupied themselves, mostly listening to some tinny voice he could barely pick up on, but seemed to be coming from a lot of sources. The group was diverse, although even from a distance he'd recognized the orange jumpsuits of a number of X-Wing pilots. That's why he'd tried to go closer. He'd thought they might be willing to help. Apparently not.

"Anyone? ''Anyone''?" The man shook his head in an exaggerated motion. "Guess your ruse isn't working, eh? I don't think anyone but you knows what a Hoojib is. Protip: if you're going to make up a species, pick a better name."

"It's not made up," a woman's voice said, loudly enough for it to carry. People yielded for her, just far enough that she didn't have to turn sideways or push, as she passed to the edge where Steph could actually see her.

She was very tall - everyone seemed tall from Steph's level - but not as tall as a lot of the others. Something about her face was vaguely familiar, though he knew he'd never seen her. It was a sharp face with intense eyes, but pretty enough, he supposed. More striking was the sense of total composure coming off of her, a kind of unshakable confidence or dignity.

The man shook his head again, this time seriously. "This could be a trap. You shouldn't be so trusting."

"If it is, I can handle it. I'm just going to talk. I won't go on any wild chases." They locked eyes over Steph's head, and then the man looked away and sighed.

"Fine. It's your neck on the line, and I'm not getting paid enough to be a nursemaid. I'll be on the perimeter." The man shouldered his rifle, pointedly turned his back, and walked a good distance away. Facing outwards, he took what looked a lot like parade rest, shoulders squared.

Under her breath, the woman said, "Better with us than against us, yes, but I almost wish he hadn't come." She shook her head, faced Steph, and, to his surprise, went down on one knee in front of him. He actually had to keep himself from flinching - she'd just come a whole lot closer very quickly. This way, though, it was much easier to watch her face.

She looked down at him for a long moment, staring hard enough that he had to keep himself from preening nervously. Finally, she told him, "My brother and I worked closely with Spokesmind Plif and his people during the Nagai-Tof war. I know Hoojibs."

He would have protested, but staring up into her eyes, he got a sudden image of what she meant. Smaller, able to fit in her hand, and much more insectile, with bigger, paler eyes, floppier ears, high energy, an entirely different appearance and demeanor. Somehow she'd shown that to him, and he was - well, he was at a loss for words. Crap.

''Uh. Sorry?'' He winced inwardly at how hesitant he'd sounded. ''If I'm not a Hoojib, what am I, then?''

She took pity on him. "There is a chance that you belong to some subspecies. I don't believe that you're part of a trap, anyway. You aren't one of us. What brought you here?"

''Have you seen an AT-AT anywhere? Gray, four-legged, around human-sized? He's my friend.''

She pursed her lips, and even more than earlier he knew that face and couldn't place it. "I haven't, but I've been part of the committee since I called us together. A latecomer or someone on the perimeter may have seen it. Hold on." She stood up, raised her hand - it probably held something, but from down here he couldn't see - to her mouth, and said a long phrase in some foreign language. His ears caught the same phrase coming from a number of other places in the crowd, and after a moment something in her hand gave a very tinny two-syllable response. Steph realized where he'd seen her before.

Oh. ''Oh''. She didn't have the hair buns or the white dress or the metal bikini for that matter, there were a few more lines on her face and she wasn't shouting, but he saw it now.

''You're Princess Leia!''

"''Chief of State'' Leia Organa Solo," someone in the crowd corrected sharply.

"The Chief of State is Mon Mothma," she snapped back, composure slipping. "I'm not-" Leia stopped, closed her eyes, opened them again. "I'm only sort of Leia. Things are complicated. We're all having difficulties." That last sentence came out reluctantly, without the sharp edge of a lot of the things she said.

''That's totally understandable,'' Steph told her. He was finding this pretty surreal. Ridiculous, even. Princess Leia - "sort of" or not, that was who she looked and sounded like - was talking to him, a weird-looking animal, as if this was completely normal.

"We're having some trouble staying together and not fighting," she admitted, then shook her head and looked back at him. "But our issues aren't yours, I'm sure. I know we're far from organized at the moment, but we are the Rebel Legion. Most of us are local, from Ra Kura Base. I am a member of the Royalty/Senatorial Detachment."

''Okay,'' he said. None of that meant anything to him, of course. He had the sense that either these people had named and divided themselves ''very'' quickly, or the fan world was a lot more complicated than he'd thought. Had been. ...Whatever. ''I'm Steph. What were you saying earlier? When you stood up?''

She smiled ruefully. "We're talking in code over the comm, since it's unsecured. It's probably unnecessary, of course, but I think the Legion is hardwired for paranoia. I gave a description of you and relayed your request. Someone should respond. I'll stay with you until then. It's not like I'm missing much."

''Okay,'' he said again. He couldn't think of anything to say and she, despite what she'd said about not missing anything, didn't kneel down again. In fast, she seemed preoccupied, turning away and talking into her hand some more, still in code. He couldn't see her face properly, but it sounded like she was arguing with someone. Steph groomed a little, just for something to do. It was a process involving clawraking and patting down his long white fur, trying to get it arranged right, and was probably instinctual. Steph tried to think of it as the equivalent of brushing down his shirt or trying to flatten his hair, but he knew the obvious parallel was to a cat or a bird preening. They were both grooming behaviors that also got acted out during anxious periods, he knew.

He supposed he was glad that he wasn't licking himself. This was just depressing. Still - still, it had to be worse for Garrett. He had to focus on finding him.

Something caught his attention and he froze in place, twisted sideways with his fingers buried in fur, trying to tell what it was. It was the energy-sense, of course. Now that he'd had some time and all, he knew the sense really wasn't like hearing violins or feeling heat. Steph had interpreted it like that at first, but it was more complicated. He couldn't help but think of how he'd visited a lab partner's blog – had it really been less than a week ago? – and it was full of reviews of things from some company called "Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs", describing one of their products as having coolness and roundness and resonance and shadows, throbbing base notes, and something feral and dangerous lurking beneath. And then she'd told him that these were all ''perfumes'', and she ''had'' to describe them like that, since the right words just didn't exist.

He understood that a lot better now. Energy-sense didn't really map to hearing or touch or anything else, but he really had no other way to describe it.

What he'd sensed... He hadn't gotten a handle on the energy-sense at the time, but he recognized this particular flavor, getting more distinct by the second, even accounting for the crowd, which was larger than he’d thought. Steph strained, feeling his antenna uncoil slightly, until he sensed the notes. There was an entire orchestra's worth playing out there, distinct from the paler notes scattered all throughout the crowd. He knew this one.

He waited a bit longer to make sure. The person was some distance away and there were all these other people in the way, he could barely hear it, but Steph's ears were huge, and he thought he'd recognize that particular timbre of amplified breathing anywhere.

''Hey! Over here!'' Steph shouted, or as close as he could to shouting without a larynx.

The woman who looked like Leia exhaled sharply, her face going absolutely blank and still. "Fantastic," she said darkly, lowering her hand away from her mouth. Several people nearby were muttering unhappily.

Steph was rather taken aback. ''What is it? What's wrong?''

For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to respond. "I hate him," she said at last, biting the words out. "I know that's not right, it's more complicated than that, but I can't forgive him. Not that easily." Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she turned to face someone in the crowd, which seemed downright agitated.

The people, packed together though they were, had let Leia pass unimpeded. For the man who looked like Darth Vader in white, they parted. There was an entire bubble of space around him and the two storm troopers following him.

He had... he had a presence of his own, a sense of composure a little like Leia's. Different, though. Steph couldn't really put a finger on it - whatever senses or mental processes got used to detect how people carried themselves, they weren't as immediate as his energy-sense, which was... he'd been moving away from perceiving it as sound, but there was ''percussion'' here. Drums - several kinds - and cymbals, underneath the rest of it. He pushed that sense away, trying not to get distracted.

Steph wasn't terribly good at gauging distances, especially now that he was the size of a housecat, but even so, the space around the white Vader and his storm troopers seemed a little excessive. Belatedly he smelled something burning.

Last time he'd somehow managed to miss noticing the man's cape. It was massive, seeming to be in mid-billow even when he was still. On the right side, though, it was tattered pretty badly. That was when Steph sensed discordant notes and saw that most of the man's right arm was missing. Whatever had happened, fat blue sparks were falling from it at irregular intervals, sometimes dying before they hit the carpet, sometimes making it smoke until it died or someone stamped it out. That had to be the burning smell.

Without preamble, the woman who looked like Leia said, "Four beings have come to us since you arrived, and you're interested in this one. Why?" Her voice was flat, accusatory.

For his part, the white Vader spoke carefully and with a lot of deliberation, saying, "I encountered a Hoojib before taking leave of my squadron, Leia Organa Solo, and was curious to know if the one you spoke of was the same. Now I see that he is." Steph couldn't read any inflection beyond caution in his voice.

"Hoojibs don't look like that." They were talking about him, but Steph felt like he was listening in on a private conversation. He couldn't be the only one - every eye in the crowd was on the two, he couldn't hear anyone else talking in the immediate vicinity - but he was starting to feel uncomfortable.

"It doesn't matter." The Vader hesitated before telling her, "Think of it as an alternate universe issue."

"Like you, then," she said. Her arms were crossed defensively. Steph looked away, at the stormtroopers. They were big, of course, like everyone else.

"Exactly. You should return to the committee; they need another diplomat. I can take this from here." Maybe if he braced his feet and sat up on his haunches he'd be level with their knees. But he wouldn’t do that. He’d fallen off his back feet once already, stretching up to claw at a door handle.

The farther storm trooper had something dark spattered and smeared on his armor, beading like a liquid. Paint? Oil? Blood? "What are you planning to do, then?"

"I spoke before about contacting the Five-Oh-First. Now may be the best time; we might solve two problems in one stroke."

Leia was silent for long enough that Steph stopped studying the armor to glance back up at her. Her face was still unreadable, at least to him. "Really? Now?"

"Now. If a peace is not established immediately, we will be at odds in the very near future. It will be difficult enough now, because of Tampa Bay Squadron. Organa, none of this is going away, as much as anyone might wish it. I believe I am the best hope for this."

"I've guessed as much. But I don't trust you to do anything alone. We're sending someone with you."

"Good. I trust that I do not need to tell you

[Characters continue to be stubborn but finally do what I want]

Steph looked up at the damage. Oddly enough, there was no charring on the white cloth or armor. They were torn and pitted in places, but not discolored. ''You know that you look terrible, right?''

"I am aware of that, yes. But I've fought with worse. During the second Yevetha incursion-" He stopped himself, paused, and in a slightly different tone said, "Never mind. At any rate, this is nothing. My - Organa said that you were looking for a walker."

Steph told him, trying not to get excited enough to babble, about coming back to find Garrett gone, doubling back to explain that he'd found the walker earlier and left to look for help. Then he had to confirm that by Garrett, yes, he did mean the AT-AT. And his own name was Steph. Steph Midder.

The Vader paused, then told him, "There are a great many names I could go by, but I believe I will stay with my designation. It is Ess Ell One Nine Eight Four. If you don't want to reference Orwell, call me Eightyfour," he said with just a faint trace of amusement.

''Orwell? Oh, right.'' Nineteen Eighty Four. He got it. Designation? What did that mean?

"Midder. Walk with me." Not waiting any longer, he swept past Steph, away from the Rebel crowd. The two storm troopers followed a few steps behind. Taken a bit by surprise, Steph had to scramble to catch up. The man on the perimeter visibly flinched as they passed.

For someone so big, SL-1984's footsteps were surprisingly quiet. He seemed to have incredibly long strides, but his pace was slow enough that Steph could keep up at a fast walk, close enough that if the man's cape hadn't been tattered on this side it would have brushed against him. High above, the broken prosthetic – specifically an exposed wire, part of the broken prosthetic - sparked, sending pleasant tingles down Steph's antenna into his skull.

"We are being shadowed. Organa's doing, I am sure of it."

Steph started to twist around to see, but stopped trying as he realized that trying to see back over his shoulder when walking quickly on four legs was tricky, and he didn't want to make himself look like an idiot. Instead he focused on the energy-sense - past the distinct, complex notes of SL-1984's entire body, past the paler, less distinct notes of the storm troopers, in the background... He had trouble focusing, but yes, there was the high steady note he'd started to associate with blasters, following at a distance. He wasn't sure how far; close enough that he sensed it as a note, probably far enough to be discreet.

But that didn't make sense, did it? ''I thought she was just letting you go.''

SL-1984 inclined his head. "She was, yes. She knows that I will not charge off on my own. Well," he amended, "Not to do this. I will address any crises that I see the need to interfere in, and if I report to anyone beforehand it will be as a courtesy, nothing more. But I have agreed to her terms, and will not go to the Five-Oh-First without an escort. But if it wasn't her who set this watcher - there is more than one Organa."

The notes of SL-1984 didn't really stay constant, not like the notes Steph sensed in blasters or the storm trooper armor. Instead his notes rose and fell and wove together, horns and bowed instruments sometimes competing, sometimes playing as one, sometimes silencing for different instruments, always with the percussion steady in the background, always coming back and repeating this one sequence of specific notes. Snare drums keeping a constant pace underneath it all.

"But these are not your issues."

Notes preceded and shadowed SL-1984’s voice as he told Steph, “The Rebel Legion’s intelligence is not well established as of yet. They have among them too many strong-willed leaders used to too-high positions, and they have had little time to adjust. Even now they are working out a hierarchy, and this occupies the thoughts of nearly everyone there, and this leaves them vulnerable.”

“I would not have hostilities between the Five-Oh-First and the Rebel Legion; even if in one mode they are enemies, in the other they are knit together. What I am working up to proposing, Midder, is this. An Imperial all-terrain transport in perfect miniature, such as you have described, ''has'' been sighted, and I could provide to you the locations and times of these sightings. But enough time has passed that I doubt you will find your Garrett. What I want from you

There was something hypnotic about his voice, or possibly about the complexity and strength of the notes, and Steph had to force himself again and again to pay attention.

SL-1984 fell silent for a long moment, letting Steph focus on the notes.

Energy-sense was sort of more intimate than hearing, somehow reminding him of taste, but the easiest analogies were still music-related. Steph could clearly imagine the members of a massive orchestra playing with furious attention, with a conductor at their center gesturing strongly. Some of them, mostly close together but scattered through the ensemble, had broken instruments which they still tried to play, to poor effect, and there were a lot of empty seats. Maybe – he supposed it was just the opposite of that mental image; energy or music powering the mechanisms or musicians and their instruments. It just so happened that they worked very closely together and responded to one another, so that as Steph spent longer and longer considering it, it seemed more and more to have a melody.

A familiar melody, at that. Almost… surely not, but… the Imperial March?

Couldn’t be. It was slower, for one, not so martial or ''march'' like, different concentrations of instruments. If he kept with the music analogy, it was a complicated song, with layers of harmony, beats and counterbeats, even some vocals, all blending together. There were still snares in the background, though they were mostly drowned out. But that basic tune, those nine notes... Garrett had had John Williams music looping for the past week, and the Imperial March showed up a lot in different ways... it was a leitmotif, wasn't it? Steph found himself wishing he hadn't forgotten practically everything about classical music.

And it seemed to be tapering off, anyway, as if the members of the orchestra were tiring and putting their instruments down.

Steph found that he had slowed to a creep to stay alongside SL-1984, who had begun moving stiffly with less and less surety. He had started favoring his closer leg, and even as Steph watched, he stopped walking altogether to fold in on himself like an old man, and clutch with his remaining arm at or just beneath his chest box. The notes were fading out raggedly, and the fluttering of the snares wasn't obscured now, but even they were fading fast.

The storm troopers started towards him as the quality of his breathing changed entirely, becoming labored.

''What’s wrong?'' Steph asked, or rather tried to ask. It seemed like just as the thought was forming he was shoved back, by a pair of invisible but unyielding hands. They pushed faster than he could back up, at least this suddenly – the world seemed to tumble as he fell entirely off his feet and slid along the carpet, against the grain of his fur. Instinctively he flailed, trying to both regain his feet and claw at the hands, but despite the very solid pressure of them he connected with nothing but air. One hard, rounded fingertip making a dent in the long fur under his collarbones traced quickly upwards, not quite brushing against his throat and then his hastily-closed eye, and stopped at the base of his antenna.

Steph froze in place. The pressure had lessened as it climbed and was feather-light by the time it stopped, but his antenna and especially the bulge in his head at its base were extremely sensitive. Earlier in the day he’d accidentally scratched it with a dewclaw, and it had been agonizing. The pushing hands and the fingertip vanished; he stopped sliding and tentatively picked himself back up, then shook himself off.

Before him, at a far enough distance that he didn't have to crick his neck to see their helmets, the spattered storm trooper went on guard, holding his weapon ready as if expecting an attack, while the other attended to SL-1984.

"Power cells are going dead. I'm losing systems," he said, his voice fainter and pained, getting more so with almost every word. After a moment he added, "I can't hear you. My comm is dead."

The closer storm trooper, the clean one, was visibly anxious. "My lord, if either of us can do anything, if you need to swap with ours-"

"No, no. This suit was not designed with conveniently accessible power cells. They are not supposed to die one after the other like this. Give me a moment." He leaned heavily on the closer trooper as his breathing changed again, becoming strained as well as labored. "Chain reaction. I didn't... aargh. I'll risk it."

Bracing himself, he pulled away from the closer storm trooper to stand on his own and said, "Six twenty-five, step back. Two-eight ninety seven, fire on me."

The closer one backed away; the farther one whipped around to face him. "Sir?!"

SL-1984’s voice was raspy and horrible as, word by word, he got out, “That was an order.”

There was no further delay; the spattered trooper raised his blaster rifle, and taking hardly an eyeblink to aim it he fired it directly at SL-1984. Steph saw the man’s arm snap around to intercept the red bolt during that pause. When it hit, the discharge was momentarily blinding. He sensed a rush of discordant notes rise and squawk and sort of transmute into a burst of wild fiddling, which settled rapidly into something that tasted very like the opening notes of the Imperial March, if the Imperial March could have a taste, all of this happening fast enough that he had to take a moment to sort it out.

SL-1984 was standing tall again, though there was now some charring in the palm of his hand and along his arm, tracing down to the edge of his chest box. His notes were strong and ordered again, but even as Steph felt them the sensation of a finger just barely resting on the base of his antenna returned.

“Don’t leech off of me,” SL-1984 said, and although his amplified voice sounded much the same as it had before, now there was a hint, just a hint, of menace behind it. Already the dramatic mark from the blaster was bleaching white, leaving almost a scar where the material had burned away.

''I didn't know!''

SL-1984 locked his arm behind his back

He didn't like this. But it seemed like the best chance he had.

[Note to self: STOP HAVING THESE DREAMS. Aaaaah.]

==Escaping==

Fuel reserves were at ninety-three point seven nine four five oh. He wasn't burning it at the ideal rate; one of the filters wasn't quite right, so the mixture had some fine particulates which were affecting consumption. It didn't harm his performance too much, not for one mission, but the techs were definitely going to have to take a look at it when he was back in his berth.

He kept all four blasters hot. This was a big expenditure, but without a gunner sitting in one of the pilot chairs he was quite a bit slower, and the couple seconds between registering a threat and being able to fire might make a difference here, where everything was so fast. He'd had some trouble deciding to do that. Eventually he'd just stopped walking for a few minutes, which let power reroute until he could balance the pros and cons.

How long had he been walking? No one had set a timer, he didn't know. A few kilometers. He had no plan for getting out. Random directions all the way. There'd been a thing. Swinging cliff-gate. Door. No, two doors, side by side - double doors, that was it. They'd stopped him for a while, until he'd thought of shooting out the metal thing that kept them closed. After that they had swung open for him. He couldn't recall when that had been.

He was fairly certain that he'd gone in a few circles; he was continuously plotting new courses with a number of random turns. There had been some more ambulating towers, and each time he'd seen one he'd stopped in his tracks to watch them, but they'd ignored him. Good. He was more effective on targets that didn't outmass him or move that damn fast.

Now, finally, it looked like he was getting somewhere! Ahead, at the far range of his vision, more things. Doors. Different surface, clear, yes, glass doors, he couldn't see through them yet but they ''were'' glass. Ground was still good, he didn't detect any major holes or anything that would hide treacherous ground, so he shifted the pace up to maximum, the ground-eating charge that he could only keep up for so long without risking damage.

''Dead end! Stop, stop!'' As he reached the doors he turned and pulled to the side, shedding momentum and not quite presenting his flank. Glass though they were, the doors were closed and all the nonvisual sensors tagged them as yet another unscaleable cliff. Coming to a stop, power rerouting smoothly with hardly a flicker in his vision, he thought that this place was absolutely riddled with these sheer cliffs. They didn't seem natural.

A moment later, and Garrett thought, of ''course'' they didn't seem natural. Good God. They were ''walls''. They kept the ceiling away from the floor, the outside away from the inside. What, had he forgotten somehow? It was hideously obvious, now that he wasn't walking.

That was worrying. Still, he couldn't stop for that now. He had to get out. His side-views somehow couldn't see through the glass of the doors; they were just reflective, smooth planes, totally unnatural looking, and it took a few seconds to figure out that the sheets of thinner organic material were probably flyers that had been taped up at eye level - yeah, they were some distance above him, but he could read the writing on the closest one, a billboard-scaled proclamation about staying hydrated and bathing. By backing up and turning awkwardly, footpads clomping loudly in his mind's ear, he could see out of his command viewport, and the glass was properly transparent.

Outside, while the nearest bits of paving looked like the kind of job that involved getting regional politicians to cut a ribbon at the end of a dedication ceremony before the thing could be used, everything he took as signs of scale - trees, people, cars - was distant. Within sight, yes, but the distance shrank them, and the sight of humanoids his size or larger seemed like a trick of his eyes or cameras or whatever, rather than the presence of towering fast monsters. For a strange moment of disconnect he could almost believe that the convention had simply moved outside and was going on just fine, maybe a little more disorganized by the move.

Then Garrett made himself look closer, and actually see the scaled-up people, what they looked like beyond not seeming like moving towers. What was unmistakeably a gout of fire shot into the air and fizzled out as the androgynous man producing it was interrupted by something with a pair of gigantic bat wings, spreading them incredibly wide and flapping them with what looked like a tremendous gust of wind. To the side, an angry-looking cat furry bandaged a small boy in a whirlwind of linen strips, showing long, pointed teeth as he shouted or snarled at the bat-winged thing. [Oy, I'm awful at crowd scenes. Gotta come back later.] ... Yeah. He was pretty sure most of that didn't happen in a convention that was going on just fine. Come to think of it, he didn't see any balding middle-aged men dressed like their favorite anime girls.

A lot more leggy women dressed as popular anime girls, though.

Garrett thought he had some idea about what had happened. Not how or why, of course. But it was pretty clear that he wasn't the only one.

Maybe it was just as well.

He wasn't breathing. No, of course he wasn't breathing. It was that tic again. Better ignore it.

He checked his fuel reserves. Ninety-three point five oh oh nine two. He was burning it just by standing here. Now Garrett thought he knew what that mystery console was, the one that he had to leave underpowered every time he moved. It was his frontal lobe, or something like that. His engine didn't produce enough power. It was optimized for walking and shooting, and powering the thinking console at the same time was more than the motor could handle. He guessed so, anyway. It would certainly explain why things had gotten so much simpler, and why he'd forgotten about walls. Dismaying thought. He got stupid every time he moved; he might literally be unable to walk and think in abstract concepts at the same time. Or - well, okay, he was fairly sure he could walk and think at least somewhat, but not while keeping his blasters primed.

Still, he'd paused to decide to heat up his blasters. It looked like whenever he stopped walking he got that console back. Maybe there weren't any ill effects to that. Maybe it only lasted until he had enough power to reroute. Was he stupider now than he'd been when he was lying on his side?

...Okay, that was an idiotic question, Garrett admitted to himself. No way to tell. It was better to just assume that he could trade walking or the ability to shoot first for the ability to think about things that weren't directly related to walking or shooting. He just couldn't have all three at once. Oh God, it was like the crossing-the-river puzzle, he just had to put the fox and the grain in the boat and leave the chicken back on the riverbank. Or something. Hopefully it wouldn't wander off and the boat wouldn't capsize. Because if he didn't think he could get whatever passed for his brain back, he wouldn't do anything at all, would he?

Very suddenly the emptiness hit him again, hard enough that he felt like something had peeled back his plating and bared both levels of his inner structure. He saw his insides, felt that yawning cold void. Sickening. Empty. Empty, and the plating around it utterly still, as only an inanimate object could be. It had never exactly gone away, he'd just managed not to think about it. Maybe not having thoughts wasn't so bad.

Garrett not-quite-shuddered. Standing up, that meant adjusting his legs enough to make his body rock slightly. He had the tic again.

Well, he wasn't going to get anywhere just standing here. Better get out now, before something got him.

Okay. The doors towered up above him, glass in metal frames that might be aluminum. Remembering when he'd first come in, he was pretty sure that they were pull doors, at least from the outside, and didn't have the kind of latch that needed a turning doorknob. The latch was some kind of one-way deal to keep it from swinging all over the place. At the top of the frame there was some kind of... armature thing. He'd majored in Engineering, not Architecture, but he thought that it kept the door from swinging out.

From inside, it was a push door. He really couldn't push, though. He wasn't built for that, and he'd probably break something trying. That meant trying to shoot it open and hoping that it wasn't balanced. The armature looked easier.

It was a little too high up to reach with his heavies, not without backing up, so Garrett trained his medium repeating blasters at the metal and fired, bracing against the recoil. He'd kept them hot, so there was no moment of charging.

The sound, muted though it was, wasn't anything like earlier, when he'd fired into a wall to see if he could hear anything. When the smoke or vapor or whatever cleared - yes, a good bit of the armature was gone, and some of the doorjamb past it, and there was a blackened crater in the wall. A tiny flame guttered in the middle of it. The glass near that was in one piece, but browned.

He guessed his blasters were more powerful than he'd thought. It was a good thing he hadn't hit that thing that might have been Steph. Garrett suppressed another shudder at the thought.

The armature was gone, which left the latch. Feeling cautious, Garrett backed up stiffly and deliberately, fighting the urge to clutch his nonexistent stomach with limbs that didn't bend that way as he felt the tic. Funny how he'd never appreciated being able to do things like back up without having to think about it. He decided to just get on with it. Aim. Fire.

Okay, the latch was gone, but apparently the doors weren't weighted to swing in or out, because they weren't locked in place anymore but they also weren't opening on their own like the last set of doors. Damn!

Looking out through the glass, seeing the pale blue sky through his forward viewport, seeing the walls and ceiling and floor through all his other senses, Garrett fought a sudden wild surge of claustrophobia. This was less a building and more of a tomb, or maybe ''he'' was the tomb, or maybe - God, it didn't matter, he felt sick and hollow and everything inside with him seemed too close.

The tic again. He was beginning to hate that thing. Forget not having the necessary organs, he didn't feel like he'd had the wind knocked out of him or anything like that. He only felt like he had to breathe when the tic hit him and made him remember that he wasn't doing it. It wasn't a good feeling.

Garrett deliberately focused on his interior, although he'd been trying to avoid doing that, since he hated the sight. He had life support systems built around the void, though of course they were for his crew, not him. Some of those were devoted to atmosphere - he had some kind of air recycling unit, but since the relevant sensors reported that the external air was just fine, air was just being sucked into intake scoops and filtered. Those motors, the fans they ran that circulated air around, they were important. He couldn't control them, but they were important. They'd have to do.

It wasn't like breathing could possibly be as good as the tic kept reminding him, he told himself. No one would ever get anything done.

Driven air, filtered and cooled and dehumidified and constantly monitored by the housekeeping console, blew gently through the void. It wasn't tidal at all, but he let himself imagine that he was taking a deep breath.

Right. Right. There was a kickback every time he fired, and that probably implied that blaster bolts had kinetic energy. This was not how lasers worked. That didn't matter. This would either work or it wouldn't.

''I am not going to be trapped here!'' This time he used his heavies in linked-fire mode. Door on the right, doorframe in the lower left corner. Aim. Fire. The recoil, stronger with his heavies, made his ''flexible armored tunnel'' compress momentarily as his command center jerked back. The bulk of the door had moved a little. This was working! Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Repeat as necessary - stop!

The door opened enough that the wind caught and pushed at it. He wasted no time in setting a course through the opening while nervously watching the doorjam. Most of the way through, the wind must have faltered and the door must have been weighted, because it swung on him. It hit hard enough that he felt the impact through his hull, and although it was jarring and loud and he was forced to very consciously shuffle sideways to keep his balance, there was no pain. Just the feeling that pain should have been there.

But he barely noticed that. It was - God, the world was bright. He reached the point he'd set and stopped. The world was bright. He couldn't see. Gah! This didn't hurt, not quite, and it didn't exactly feel like heat, but it was very unpleasant, it was- God, too bright! Everything was hot light, he couldn't see anything, he was blind! This didn't make sense, it had been fine through the window!

Part of him remembered moving his roommate's plants outside on a sunny, nearly cloudless day, he couldn't remember why, and how the plants had suffered for that. His roommate - oh, God, he couldn't remember his name! Justin? Jacob? He was in architecture or something and happened to be utterly forgettable - had told him very patiently that it didn't matter that they'd been tropical plants, there had still been too much light; the dorm room with the lights on was anywhere from fifty to maybe four hundred lux, if the windows were open on a bright day. Direct sunlight on a day like that was somewhere between thirty and one hundred thirty ''thousand'' lux, and the plants had effectively been sunburned. Justin or Jacob or whatever his name was had gone on to say that direct sunlight was incredibly, exponentially more powerful than indoor lighting, it was just that human eyes adjusted so well that people barely noticed.

The rest of him was locked in place, frozen, trying not to panic, trying to will the brightness to fade. He wasn't blind, not ''quite', he could sort of sense where the sun was, like it was actively hating him, like his vision was a sense of touch. And his underside, he could vaguely make out his legs and his shadow. But he couldn't see, even when he switched to the too-dark internal cams, everything was brightness that felt suspiciously like pain, he couldn't stare out at any of it, he had a ''very'' strong compulsion to tear up defensively, screw his eyes shut, shade them, but ''he couldn't do that'', he couldn't even turn away, ''he didn't have eyes''.

Garrett's motor was working back up out of the near-subliminal hum, getting louder. Too bright! ''Too bright!'' He couldn't - God, too bright! His motor was running, he could move, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn't even go back because the door had shut, and he couldn't ''see''... ''Threat! Threat!''

He backed, sidled, tried to get his command section and his heavies into position, couldn't, it was too high up, aimed his medium repeating blasters, fired. Of course he didn't do any good, he was aiming at the goddamn ''sun'', but he fired anyway, and did it again.

This was useless, he was just burning power, how was his fuel - oh God, ninety two point eight two oh five one that couldn't be good, he was running his motor like he was moving at full tilt blasters blazing and he ''couldn't slow it down'', couldn't see, anything could be out here with him, couldn't move for risk of crashing, too bright, too hot ''threat threat threat'' - was this what going insane felt like?

He managed to make himself stop firing and finally picked up on the terrain sensors in his footpads. The surface was solid. It was stable! Too bright, yes, he couldn't see, yes, this was probably as close to pain as he was going to get, but ''the ground was firm'', damn it!

That helped a little, long enough that he realized that the terrain sensors could substitute for sight. Sort of. Garrett could pick up on sort of a vague outline of the raised hardened surface he was on - sidewalk, right - and where it met the less certain surfaces around it, which was probably the grass. He was still - God, this was insane, he couldn't ''see'', why couldn't he seem to adjust to this, it was just ''daylight'', it was agony, he couldn't stop the static popping in bursts over his intercom and didn't know what kind of vocalization that was supposed to be - but this was something. Like echolocation. Sort of.

It only extended out in an oval maybe, oh, seventy meters long - no, only a few times his body length and he wasn't huge, so it had to be smaller than that. He had to find some shade and he couldn't turn back around, he thought there'd been awnings over the door before - hadn't there been? Had that been a different door? - but there weren't here, he had to get moving.

Trees, there'd been trees he'd seen from inside, the kind that got planted around parking lots to shade some of the cars, those had been the closest. He'd gotten partially turned around, but he thought they were this way, along the pavement. Garrett set course points and hoped.

Terrain-sensing, it turned out, could pick up on people. Sort of. And only if they were the monumentally-scaled ones here - no, no, he had to get it straight, they were probably normal size. He felt them - well, more properly, he felt their footsteps against the ground. The footsteps were shaped vaguely like feet, so some of them were sort of beanlike and others were disks or different shapes, as they hit the ground, some walking or running, some probably staying in place. He hadn't given much thought to how much weight got shifted around by something that breathed, and he was a little startled at how bitter the thought was.

It seemed like there were more closer than farther away, which probably just meant that Garrett could sense the heavier things from farther away, and no doubt there were some holding too still for him to sense like this. He kept setting points and walking, he was trying to be calm, but this wasn't sight. God. Even assuming he got to shade, even assuming he was able to communicate somehow, so someone didn't whisk him away and dismantle him, he'd probably end up living in one of those trailers for the disabled and -

Not living. ''This wasn't living.'' Existing, then, until his fuel ran out. It would. He didn't know what was in his tank but he was pretty sure it wasn't something you could get on Earth, and there'd probably be scale problems. And he needed regular maintenance, though he knew nothing was going to be able to get at his engines without taking them apart. Otherwise, he'd [maintenance fail: catch fire? Go critical?] What then?

Maybe it was better not to -

Whoah! Footsteps, closer, ''really damned fast'', okay, unless they changed direction they'd just pass him by-

SCRAPING HIS HULL oh God what was it engines building to fever pitch SCRAPING THE SEAL OF HIS BOARDING HATCH prepping his heavies, heating heating hurry up he could HEAR IT nonononono STOP he fired his heavies without thinking and tried to bring a medium repeater in line but of course the ''thing'' was running now, too fast, where was it it was gone!

"KKKKSSSSHHHT! KKSSSSHHHHHHH," he staticked in alarm, only the static was much longer and had a terrified snarl in it, he was not sure if that was an attempt at cursing but damn it of ''course'' sensing footsteps wasn't the same as sight and he had no idea what the rest of the body was doing and if anything flew he wouldn't know about it at ''all'' he was blind he was deaf good Lord in Heaven there could be another one RIGHT NOW move move movemovemovemove''move''.

And he was walking as fast as he could, almost running, knowing he couldn't keep this up and all discretionary power was in everything ''but'' his not-a-brain but ''that didn't matter'' keep going go go go, SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - REACHED COURSEPOINT, CONTINUE TO NEXT, ''DODGE'' - SET NEW COURSEPOINT.

Later - it felt like much later - he remembered that the settings for the holocams had to be manually told to adjust to major changes in light. One of the pilots, whoever was serving as the gunner, usually hit that switch. He didn't have a gunner, and the horrible wrongness inherent in a phrase like that did not summon one up. He couldn't hit the switch, but he could turn it on, and he did.

Better. The blinding light on all sides tinted, then seemed to dial down and he could see again. Not even any bright afterimages, but then didn't you need retinas for those? He could see. Much better.

Funny, something was different, but he couldn't get a reading on it. Maybe if he slowed down, free up more power to route to the smart console - No. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't slow down. He did not want to slow down.

Ahead there was an obstruction in his path, hanging across just above his mobile command center, where it would disastrously scrape his upper edge if he just went under it. Trivial to destroy it. He did. Two heavy shots, and he cleared the gap with meters to spare, footpads pounding on the rubble. He shouldn't maintain this pace, it was potentially damaging, but that was fine. He didn't slow down.

What had changed - he was under open skies, not one sheer cliff on any side. The surface was somewhat different - he'd noticed several surface changes, but glancingly, since it hadn't been important. It was some other material, dark gray, smoother and thinner and not as good a surface since it was cracking under his weight. But that was fine.

No hyper-fast bipedal towers. Definitely fine.

Another obstruction, the same kind, this one a little smaller and level with his command viewport. He destroyed it, too, and two heavy shots seemed like overkill.

Underfoot, civilian groundcars on wheels, unarmored, brightly colored, swerved wildly to avoid him. He considered shooting them. He considered altering his course to kick at them or - yes, they were small enough to step on, at least some of them. He didn't. One thing to do this - it was a sin, yes, but he'd take that. Another thing, a worse thing, to take them with him.

Part of him twitched. Okay, if the giant towers were humans, what was with this? Bit by bit, this was a road with several lanes, those were cars, those were trees, all at a scale of much smaller than him, which felt more natural. There was yet another obstruction ahead, and this time he recognized it. Freeway overpass. Even lower than the other two.

Huh. Well, he wasn't going to slow down to think about it. He was alone, empty, it didn't matter where he went as long as he didn't stop until the end. There was a moment when he was distracted by flying atmospheric craft, some loud enough to hear, but he didn't stop. He kept going. Full tilt, getting to each new course point at his highest speed.

He'd always loved getting caught up in a new idea, the way it took over his life, practically singing under his skin, as immediate as his heartbeat. Only now the heartbeat was gone, and in place of the singing was the jarring music of engines.

Fuel reserves were at eighty-nine point oh nine one two seven and going down. That was fine. He wasn't stopping, even with no crew and no purpose. Even with so little power going to it, the strange console had some current. He had autonomy.

==Anj Outside==

Outside, it was chaos, pure and simple. Anj hadn’t been in the crowd when ''it'' happened. He’d seen people and creatures of all descriptions fighting to get outside while he’d been looking for a private place. By the time he’d picked up on the broadcast and left the bathroom, most of them had already gone – the halls had hardly been deserted, but the majority had already fled. He could hear them outside, a dull roar formed by thousands of throats. ''Not a happy crowd'', he decided. ''Better than a mob, though. I don't know what I'd do with one of those.''

As he approached the empty frame of a double door - it had once, apparently, held glass, but that was nowhere to be seen - Anj felt the warning tingle and heard what first sounded like another shrieking alarm. In response he sidestepped out of the way, and none too soon. Some kind of very large heronlike bird with pale gold-orange feathers skidded unsteadily around a corner, then powered past him in a lurching run. The moment its wings cleared the doorframe, it launched itself into the air. As it winged upwards and away the Red Guard realized that it was making a high, panicked call that sounded vaguely like screaming.

He glanced back at where the bird had come from and stilled himself. Nothing, not even the warning tingle that was his precognition. Maybe the bird had been fleeing something, maybe it hadn't, but any trouble was slow enough that if he kept moving it wasn't going to bother ''him.''

TR-1407 stepped outside and was struck by what he saw. People, creatures, and stranger things that defied categorization littered the landscape, rushing about, standing and sitting and reclining in a few cases. Some were alone, others in groups. There were some fighting or arguing with each other, others trying to subdue the wild ones, some hightailing it as if the Emperor’s finest were at their heels, some examining themselves frantically, some just sitting back with mouths open as if howling or screaming, though the Red Guard couldn’t pick out individual voices in the collective noise. Almost no one was close to the complex; most people that Anj saw were on the grass.

As he automatically went through a threat assessment, picking out specifics from all the bewildered bystanders, he marveled at the sheer number. He hadn’t thought the Orlando Convention Center could hold so many – yes, it had been crowded, and he hadn’t canvassed the entire place and seen for himself how big it was, but still. It was like a “Where’s Waldo” poster, writ large.

Maybe it wasn't just inside, he thought suddenly. Maybe it was ''everywhere'', and just more obvious here. If the image had become real - well, it had to be more than just the image, or he wouldn't have gotten taller. If little unarticulated thoughts, like ''a forcepike weighs seven kilograms'' and ''Imperials use the metric system for measurements'' had also carried over, what about others? What about the cheater's assumption that ''I will not be caught'', or the youth's that ''I am immortal''?

Still on the instruction frequency, the officer who had told TK-1407 where to go was tersely repeating those instructions to someone else who had reported. ''I need to stay focused. I can speculate later. Need to find my squadron before I do anything else.''

Some of the figures in the crowd looked like security forces – ''no, police, they're called police.'' Police, firefighters, paramedics, what looked like a SWAT team in black, some Animal Control officers, of all things - there were more than a few people that had probably been called in from all across the state, if not country. They clearly were supposed to try and control or at least contain this madness. Just as clearly, they were as confused and uncertain as anyone else, but trying their best to impose order in some form. Anj sympathized. This was not a job he envied.

It was weird – the outsiders looked and ''felt'' somehow a little different from all these others, and not just because ''they'' were all human. Like all of the changed, big and small, were larger-than-life in one way or another. Maybe he was imagining things.

Flickers on his peripherals made TR-1407 tilt his chin up. The sky, a lovely cloudless blue, was barely less crowded than the ground – far, far above something streaked up into the atmosphere, and hardly any closer small military-looking jet planes or fightercraft roared overhead in formation. Even closer there were news helicopters already, sharing airspace with winged things of all description and wingless humanoids who had no visible way of staying aloft.

The Red Guard saw bright costuming and at least one cape fluttering in the wind as fliers swerved around each other or hovered in place. Someone in red and blue tights streaked upwards abruptly at impossible speeds, within seconds ''catching up to the jets'' and paralleling their course, far enough away that the red cape was barely visible. Anj saw this and, incredulous, thought, ''Superheroes? Really?''

There was no denying what they looked like, no matter how improbable the thought was. Anj realized what he was thinking and grinned involuntarily. ''As if I’m perfectly reasonable in comparison. This is insane. So what? The 501st needs me. And reality doesn't care whether or not you believe it.''

With that reminder, he turned. ''Southwest blacktop? Must be that parking lot where we planned to meet. Ah… it’s midday or thereabouts, so by the sun’s position'' that'' way is west, which means south is...'' there. ''Not far.'' Doing his best not to attract any attention, the Red Guard started moving at a lope.

''I don’t know where the closest military outpost is,'' Anj realized. ''Still, with something like this we can probably expect troopships any minute now; orbital reinforcements – No, no,'' no! ''This is Earth! '' Earth! ''Not part of the Empire! There are no orbital reinforcements. No fleets. We might get some part of the Army here, but they don’t have the technology I’m expecting. Rockets, not turbolasers. Helicopters and jets, not troopships, not snubfighters.'' Why did that thought make him uncomfortable?

''I wouldn’t worry about him, even with a sword like that… Watch out for her, she’s dangerous… He’s fine for now, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to push him… she looks like she could do some serious damage, but somehow I don’t think she’ll be a problem… Better not go near that one. Looks like everyone else’s picked up on it too… Emperor’s bones, that thing is huge, but I don’t think it’s up to anything…'' There were a ''lot'' of people to assess, particularly on the run. It niggled at the Red Guard that he was only doing a cursory check of each, but seeing that his options were to ignore everyone, give only the briefest of inspections, or slow down to a crawl to inspect everyone...

''There!'' Anj's heart jumped in his chest. Inexplicably he felt an incredible sense of relief, strong enough that he was almost lightheaded.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the large knot of people standing together on the asphalt were just as confused and disorganized as anyone else. Quieter, perhaps, but still random. An outsider might believe that they had formed into a cluster at random, and that it was chance that explained why they almost all looked like Imperials, mostly troopers.

The outsider would be wrong. Anj's eyes flicked as an indicator sounded and saw that no fewer than ten Imperial frequencies were active. He didn't see anyone lined up in ranks, but training helped him to find the subtle signs that there was organization, purpose, ''order'' in the group, not just the amorphous mixing of the crowd. They were, indeed, bewildered and unsettled just like everyone in or out of the complex. An effort was being made to remedy that.

TR-1407's footsteps hastened. A stormtrooper with the battered armor and single orange pauldron that signified his rank as a sandtrooper squad leader stopped him with a gesture, then nodded. The Red Guard joined the growing mass.

It was startling to check IFF - Identify Friend/Foe - tags on a monitor and see so many designations. Some were familiar, others less so. There were several SL - Sith Lord - indicators scattered about, but Anj didn't see SL-1984, and this was worrying. Other Vaders, yes, and the Red Guard couldn't help boggling a little at the concept of more than one Lord Vader. But none in white, and none with the right designation. What would he have done, anyway?

''Right. I should report in. To whom, though?'' The mass was ''trying'' to order itself, but it had a good ways to go yet. Almost no one with a helmet was speaking "out loud" with their voice amplification units. With the amount of noise that the rest of the crowd was putting out, that was probably just as well. Instead the comm frequencies were abuzz with orders and counterorders, the beginnings of arguments, complaints and others chewing out the complainers. One channel had been set aside for those who had been separated from squadmates. It didn't help that this part of the parking lot was nowhere near clear. Not every space was filled, but there were enough cars and the like to force the group to encircle them.

Where was his squad? Anj scanned again, and again, and didn't find any of them. No. They had to be here. Despite himself he opened the "searching" channel. "Tampa Bay? Tampa Bay Squad, come in! Tampa Bay?"

This particular frequency was filled with similar requests. "Is there anyone else from Georgia Garrison? Please, Georgia Garrison?" "Pacific Outpost, all units report in. Pacific Outpost..." "Michigan Squad, we have two missing from Michigan Squad, please report." "Anyone from Bast Alpha Squad, come in. Did everyone get out okay?" Most of them were representing a particular squad, or garrison, or outpost, and were looking for missing friends. But he heard one or two who had been separated completely, like him. Some got answers; Anj overheard the starts of several reunions, each cutting off as the speakers switched channels. Others didn't.

"Tampa Bay! Come in Tampa Bay Squad!" It didn't make ''sense''. Anj was starting to sweat into the lining of his armor. Where could they be? He hadn't exactly been quick in getting here, he ''couldn't'' be the first from his squad! Where had they all gone? TR-1407 scanned IFF again as the last of his relief evaporated. It made no sense! The three other squadrons of Florida Garrison - Everglades, Makaze, Parjai - were there. There were forty-nine people in Tampa Bay Squadron - not all of them had come to Xanadu, and some might be a little slow in getting here, but he should have heard from ''someone''.

"Tampa Bay Squad? Please come in. Tampa Bay? Is anyone there? Anyone? Tampa Bay!" Anj forced himself to stop before he lost all control of his voice. He could hear someone else pleading, close to tears if not already crying - "Neon City Garrison, ''where are you?'' Please! Damien, Ray, Greg - ''where are you?''"

To his horror, Anj found his throat constricting in panic. Where were they? ''Where was his squad?'' He tried, squeezing his hands into fists and desperately telling himself that they were late, that's all, he tried to keep calm, but it had been a trying day already and he had no orders to follow and ''his squad was missing.'' That was the big thing, the worst thing. He'd lost them, he had failed his oath as a Red Guard and a soldier of the Empire. The feeling was strong enough to make his eyes water. Anj made sure to close his connection and all of his speakers so that none would hear when he lost it. The rest of the 501st had enough distractions.

Something pulled on his robe. Surprised, Anj looked down at the round-topped droid as it retracted its manipulator arm and crooned something wordless at him.

It was a moment for him to blink fiercely and swallow that lump in his throat, and he covered the delay by reactivating a speaker so that his voice could be heard. "Yeah. There is. I - I've lost my squad." The admission almost stuck on the way out. "I don't know where ''any'' of them are."

The droid, an R2-series astromech with highlights in ''pink'', of all colors, whistled and cooed sympathetically.

"Well, no. Not a word. I have no idea where they are." It seemed like the tightness was easing off, becoming less immediate. He welcomed the distraction. "We got separated a while back, and I haven't seen or heard from any of them since. And it's not like we have our own personal frequency, either - it wasn't like we'd have had any use for it." As he realized what he'd just said, Anj smiled humorlessly into his helmet. Of ''course'' there wouldn't have been a use! It had been a game, or something close!

The R2 beeped, imperious. Its single black photoreceptor was steady. Just like that, things were in perspective. Anj might have laughed, if he hadn't still felt so uneasy.

"That's true. My squad is tough. I'm sure they're fine - it's just, they aren't ''here,'' and I don't know how my friends are. I haven't seen them since all ''this'' started, and I'm worried." This was true, and he knew that they had to have run into trouble, or he wouldn't be by himself like this. But - they were tough, and they were smart. If they needed help they would call for it, and they would make it through.

And if they didn't, well... For a moment he had trouble drawing breath. It was a ''terrible'' thought, and sickening enough that he tasted bile and felt his heart pounding in his throat. ''May the Force help their murderers, because nothing less will stop me,'' he swore, meaning every word. Terrible thought. '' Terrible'' thought.

A sharp whistle brought his attention back down to the droid, who chattered up at him. He had to make an effort to look in control and stable for it. He was sure he knew who and what it was. If it ''was'' R2-KT - well, virtually everyone in Star Wars fandom knew that story. In comparison, he had no grounds for complaint.

"I'll be fine. I'm a Red Guard - I work best alone or with only a few people, and it's not like I'm really by myself - I'm surrounded by the 501st." And they were his Legion, the closest to the Empire that he was ever likely to find. How could he despair? "Thanks."

With a final, cheery whistle, the pink R2 swiveled and trundled away. It had some kind of a logo banner, pink on white, on its back, but it slipped out of sight between two troopers and a robed man before he could read it. Less than a minute later, the single terrified member of Neon City Garrison got off the comm.

Anj felt better now. Still a little shaken, but he was functional, and that was what mattered. This still begged the question - ''now'' what? The Red Guard went after the first fresh distraction that presented itself.

There was a flurry of activity at the edges of the gathering. TR-1407 wasn't exactly short, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the helmets of the people around him. Still, he got a flash of someone else in flowing scarlet and something large, yellow, and moving. The Red Guard looked to his nearest neighbor and boosted the output to his speakers, realizing ''how'' he did it only after it was done.

"Do you know what that's about?" The woman in the form-fitting jumpsuit and the hoodless brown cape turned towards him.

She was - well, she was stunning, and Anj found himself glad that his helmet hid his gaze. She had an alertness about her, like she was aware of everything that was going on around her at all times. He couldn't tell what her position was - probably some kind of agent, by the lower-leg guards and nonstandard firearms. The woman had a striking sort of confidence, almost an aura of "I know what I'm doing and I'm proud to be doing it".

It didn't hurt that she really was pretty - her features were too sharp and strong for conventional beauty, but attractive. Red hair, intense green eyes, and under the jumpsuit she was fit and muscular with good shoulders, a far cry from the handful of sultry pin-up style women that Anj had glimpsed before. He hadn't found ''them'' particularly attractive, but -

Anj saw the lightsaber and the IFF-provided designation at roughly the same time. SL-3268, in a clear voice, answered, "There's a car, I'm guessing a Camaro, without a driver that's started moving erratically and making abortive charges at us. One of your fellow Guards is trying to dissuade it. I don't think there'll be a problem." Just as he was hoping she hadn't noticed, the Mara Jade added with a quirk of her lips, "And I'm flattered, but taken."

''She's one of the Emperor's Hands. I'm lucky that she hasn't taken offense.'' That realization effectively took any desire, killed it, and mangled it beyond any recognition. Anj was glad of the helmet hiding his face, and vaguely wished that he could find a hole in the ground in which to crawl into and die. Even with the cooling systems in his armor, he knew he was blushing furiously, hard enough that he felt sunburned. ''Next time, check IFF first.'' He didn't bother wondering how she'd known. Force Sensitivity and all that.

Probably just as well. Anj had no idea what he'd have done. He was on duty anyway; even with nothing immediate going on it would be un-Imperial to get too distracted. Fortunately not every woman was striking in quite that way - prettier, yes, often curvier and not immediately off-limits, but markedly less impressive. Picturing someone like the Mara Jade alongside, say, Scott, was... interesting. But of course there was also the fact that less than an hour ago ''he had been female'' - how, ''how'' could that have slipped his mind? - and feeling attracted to people while male was a tangle he ''really'' didn't want to unravel just yet.

3268's auburn head came up. Anj felt the warning tingle in the instant before a commanding voice came on all frequencies. The IFF code marked the speaker as TK-0210. '''Our Beloved Founder', Albin Johnson,'' Anj realized. ''Well well. There wouldn't be a 501st without him. I'd forgotten that he showed up. His R2 is here, so of course he's here too.''

"Something new has come up. Would everyone please listen to the situation." It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt that it was an order. Within seconds all voice traffic had stopped. The rest of the crowd carried on with the panicking, but here everyone listened as the founder explained an exchange that someone had heard taking place on a frequency that was decidedly not Imperial.

Specifically, it was one of the radio frequencies used by the United States military. The Founder didn't mention exactly what frequency it was, or when anyone had started listening in on it. What had been overheard was a report on something going off Xanadu grounds and following the highway. Something very large. One of the ones reporting said it was "like something out of Star Wars". The physical description exactly matched that of an Imperial Walker, specifically an All Terrain Armored Transport. Or, as the Rebellion and most civilians in the Galaxy called it, an AT-AT.

''This is a ''very'' sudden development.'' If he'd expected anything, TR-1407 would have thought that the Founder would have just summarized what had just happened, tendered some kind of advice or orders. He hadn't expected a fresh problem, particularly one like ''this''.

The gathering was silent barely long enough for the Founder's report to sink in before a member stated that there had ''not'' been a Walker exhibit, followed by other testimonies that confirmed that wherever this had come from, it wasn't 501st. Exactly what had been happening before all ''this'' was muddled, but people were quite adamant that they knew nothing.

Talking into a handheld comm unit so that everyone could hear her, 3268 had another opinion. "Why would it matter whether or not this thing is one of ours? Imperial is Imperial. The question is, what do we do about it? I think it's reasonable to assume that some rogue element has taken control of an assault walker for an unknown reason." Standing fairly close to Anj as she was, he heard the odd duality of the Mara Jade's voice coming simultaneously through his audio pickups and helmet comm.

It would be unacceptable for ''anyone'' - the automatic assumption seemed to be Rebels, smugglers, or saboteurs, although nobody really expected that to be true - to get away with stealing Imperial property, particularly something as gigantic and dangerous as an assault walker, the common consensus was. The damage one could do, particularly in an urban area, was tremendous, even on a civilized planet in the Empire, where units could quickly be dispatched to take it down. Here on Earth, on a day like today...

Anj heard someone unfamiliar speak out. "There was a young man earlier, some sort of student of engineering - I overheard his name, Gary or Garth or something - who wore a walker costume. He might be driving it." Several others remarked with surprise that they remembered something of the sort.

With confidence, Anj added, "It's difficult to pilot a walker without a copilot, but possible. Normally one drives, the other shoots. The automated systems would help compensate."

"He had a friend with him. It's entirely reasonable to think that two pilots can manage without a commander." If it occurred to anyone that maybe this student ''hadn't'' become a pilot, they kept silent.

A plan didn't actually get proposed until after the Founder made another report, one possibly even more alarming than the last. Tanks and military choppers were being dispatched to intercept the rogue walker before it could reach the next city - and if the cryptic military lingo had been translated properly, somewhere near Washington a jet loaded with missiles had just taken off.

Suddenly the entire gathering was moving, setting up a course of action, proposing and vetoing various aspects to the plan. There would have to be a pursuit, it was decided almost instantly. They needed a small number of autonomous agents. Agents who could subdue anyone within the walker without damaging it, agents who could ''control'' the walker, and someone with enough diplomatic acumen to defuse the situation once it was under control. Preferably agents would have at least some proficiency in at least two of the three. Every member of the team would also need to be able to use grappling hooks and high-tension wires to get up there. It would also help to have the tools all stormtroopers carried, including shaped charges, binders, and a Proper Resonator.

The gathering was rapidly polled, and all those with the right skill set were chosen, then evaluated and kept or not. Unsurprisingly, there were no Imperial Army Pilots who could be identified as such by their armor - AT-AT pilot uniforms were far from popular. No one had worn his or hers to Xanadu. However, a number, Anj included, had made the costumes - and somehow that translated into experience in the cockpit.

Anj was questioned and admitted that he'd never earned the license, and was met with a thinly-disguised quiz in the form of a barrage of questions from two others. He passed. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Red Guard and both willing to work with others and well able to subdue someone with minimal damage, meant that he was on the team.

Some others at least as qualified as him weren't, largely because they had trouble cooperating. There had been many Emperor's Hands, some of them Mara Jades, others not, in the initial pickings, but the fact that most of them seemed to strongly resent each other meant that only three were kept. The final selection consisted of eight individuals. These were the Hands, SL-3268 among them, Anj and another two Red Guards, a clonetrooper sergeant, and a single sandtrooper who really seemed to believe that he was Davin Felth, the trooper who had the line "Look, sir, droids" in ''A New Hope''.

At the same time the other half of the pursuit was being organized. Speederbikes were mentioned, but only two, both from a display, could actually be accounted for, and at any rate they might not have done much good. They were incredibly fast and agile, but with only two, they couldn't carry much. Average cars or trucks were considered and rejected in the same breath. It would be too hard to get an operative out of the vehicle and up into the walker, not to mention the fact that a car was a nice big target, if what's-his-name proved both unreasonable and able to use the walker's weaponry and crushing feet. This left motorcycles, a healthy selection of which were at hand. They would have to do.

More polling; TR-1407 was only peripherally aware of it, but at the end of it seven scout troopers and one Mandalorian soldier were chosen to do the driving. From the first report to the final team, only a few minutes of whirlwind activity had passed. The 501st, while not exactly up to optimal yet, was far more organized than it appeared.

The last problem was actually getting the bikes, taken from all across the lot, to ''work''. Five or fewer of them belonged to people within the gathering - and ''none'' of them had the keys on them. Seized by a wild idea, Anj stepped up during the discussion.

"We don't ''need'' keys," he said, coming to the closest one and uncompressing his forcepike. He had no idea what kind of motorcycle this was. He'd never had anything to do with the things. Still, he could find the ignition easily. Lining it and the lethal tip of his weapon up, the Red Guard thumbed a setting and delicately maneuvered the weapon. The thin metal around the keyslot tore and twisted, and the engine coughed to life.

Just as Anj was enjoying a swell of triumph the fickle machine died miserably, exhaust pipe emitting a stream of thick, oily smoke that spread in a cloud around ankle-height. An inhuman blue-skinned officer in white covered his nose as if offended by the fumes, which weren't evident to anyone with a proper, air-filtering helmet.

No one said anything on the comm channels for a long moment. "Okay," he said lamely, again glad of the helmet that hid his face. "I guess we ''do'' need keys. Today of all days, you'd think this would work." It was a mercy that the attention of the gathering shifted off of him then. He hadn't sensed much in the way of condemnation or scorn, and even amusement had been quiet. It was still embarrassing.

The alien officer in white - a Grand Admiral, apparently - ended up getting several technically-proficient people to hotwire the motorcycles. These included one of the Vaders in the gathering, a man seething with so much barely-suppressed rage and malevolent Force energy that Anj caught his breath and adopted a rigid posture. He was fairly frightening, seemingly hanging on to rationality by the thinnest of margins. The Red Guard fervently hoped that his friend hadn't ended up like ''that''. But whatever else could be said about SL-2128, he worked quickly and well, finishing in time to take over from an officer whose work was slower.

Something else came up; Anj picked up only a few of the details, but a squad that hadn't gotten out reported in to say that they were under attack by unfamiliar hostiles. Once again plans were formed and battered about. They had little to do with the walker interception team. It gave him a pang to think that he might be riding away from his squad, if they were in danger, but duty was duty. TR-1407 soon found himself mounted up behind a scout, roaring away on one of the motorcycles.

The locals barely noticed them go by. They had more than enough trouble as it was - nevertheless, Anj felt a slight pang of mixed contempt and sympathy. He let it pass. They could only do their best. The Five Hundred and First was here for when it wasn't enough.

The Founder sent his best wishes after them on an open frequency. His confidence audibly faltered a little. Anj thought he knew at least part of why. "Good Luck" wasn't right, and they were servants of the Empire, so "May the Force Be With You" might not be good either. Even so, "Emperor's Blessings" was just wrong - and, somehow, so was "The Empire will ''always'' strike back", the belief that any setbacks would be met with a more powerful counterattack. In the end, he settled for, "We're counting on you. You won't let us down."

==Camera guy==

[I fangirl over Tank Man. I really do. I love that we don't know who he was, if he's alive or dead, what he said to the driver of the lead tank - everything. ''How'' could he and the rest of the country have failed? The picture gives me chills. I'd link to it in my bank if the inspiration it gives me wasn't of the "feel small, sit still and tremble in awe and existentialness" variety. So I figured I'd bring it up, since the chance of me working it into, well, ''anything'' else are pretty small.

[Did a little research here, but I have to say that the details pertaining to the helicopter and Doug's camera are probably all wrong. I worked with news cameras in high school and already I've forgotten what piece is called what. The Internet failed me - you'd think I was the only one to wonder who shoots traffic reports, with what, and how. :P]

In June of 1989 an American photographer named Jeff Widener crouched on the sixth-floor balcony of a hotel in Beijing. He was covering the infamous government crackdown on protesters, and only the day before, during the massacre, had been concussed and bloodied by a thrown brick. Widener worked at a range of roughly half a mile with a titanium camera featuring a 400-millimeter telephoto lens. Using borrowed film with the wrong f-stop setting, he covered a column of at least seventeen tanks headed for Tiananmen Square being blocked by one man, alone and unarmed, with a shopping bag in each hand.

Widener wasn't the only one to get pictures of this happening. But, purely by chance, his picture spread fastest. It's now one of the most famous photographs on Earth, seen everywhere except the nation where it was taken - where it happens to be banned. It is iconic in every way, and purely by chance. If Widener hadn't heard that soldiers on the ground were forcibly confiscating cameras, if he hadn't met the fellow Westerner living in that room on the sixth story, if that Westerner hadn't had compatible film available or had been unwilling to stuff that film into his underwear and pass angry Chinese soldiers to get it developed - another photographer's shot of "Tank Man", the "Unknown Rebel", would be the world-famous one. But Widener was in the right place, at the right time, in all the right circumstances.

Doug Maines was in the right place at the right time, and in his view the circumstances didn't look too bad either. Specifically, he was in a Eurocopter Ecureuil news chopper, cruising at two thousand feet and circling with nearly three-quarters of a mile between it and that ''thing''. The camera was a modified 24 frame KCK-40, and at any moment he could start broadcasting live to the network.

Normally he and the pilot shot and delivered traffic reports and overflew accident scenes. Today, not too long after finishing the morning rush's report, they'd been ordered into the air again and told to circle around the Orlando Convention Center to cover something that had come up there. As he adjusted the focus, Doug mused that he hadn't thought much of it - last spring, for instance, a school had been evacuated due to a gas leak, and he had recorded and broadcast video of the students streaming out into the tennis courts.

But there'd been so much air traffic above the Convention Center that both Doug and his partner were wary. Every news station within range had sent someone over to cover it, whatever it was, and both of them knew what happened when helicopters collided in midair. They had spotted the thing heading away, and the chopper had changed course to follow it.

He'd studied for years at photography, cinematography, and the graphic arts, but if Doug had learned one thing it was that aiming high didn't always work out. He had become resigned to aiming his camera at reporters and traffic jams, something he'd never have settled for as an ambitious newbie daydreaming about fame and glory. He was no Widener.

Just as well - Doug didn't have the stomach for following revolutions. He felt a trace of amusement at the thought. ''Right place, right time, and no one's filming but me.'' He was recording now, but the network trusted him enough to let him decide for ''himself'' whether and when to broadcast live.

Something about it screamed ''tank'', clearly enough to make Doug think remember the university and Widener's shot of Tank Man. It was boxy and about as long as the largest legal semitrailer truck, maybe sixty feet in all, though much wider. But it had to be five times taller than any of them, mounted on four flat, jointed legs with round feet half the size of its strange, blocky head. The long legs and the head, and the red laser-things that sometimes shot out of that head, reminded Doug of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. Something about crushing Styrofoam cups in a commercial...

Three years of this job reminded him to check before and behind the tank thing. The highway was several lanes broad, which was probably all that saved oncoming cars from being crushed. Many had crashed into each other or run off the road as drivers gaped, and hardly any had actually passed it. The tank thing was fairly slow, no more than fifty miles an hour at most, and so heavy that it damaged the road, leaving a trail of massive craters and cracked, buckled asphalt in its wake, with a few crushed or burning wrecks scattered about and at least one demolished overpass. All of them had been oncoming traffic; right now nothing was going in the same direction as the walking tank.

Wait, that wasn't right. The distance made them tiny, but even without zooming in Doug saw a pack of motorcycles weaving around and breaking the speed limit, gaining quickly on the tank thing. They were going to get stepped on and ruin the shot, he was sure of it. He had to get an establishing moment before the action started, or it wouldn't look right.

Doug swallowed against his heartburn - no time to take an antacid pill now, he didn't want to miss it - and hit the button that would broadcast live. In a situation like this, he didn't have to report. He just had to film. Wide-angle shot first, to show how big the thing was, including a few wrecks to get a sense of the scale... he then zoomed in to catch little details like the rapid, ponderous motion of the legs and the toe flaps flexing against the ground. He very consciously kept his hands, and the camera, steady against the minor shuddering of the helicopter.

This was in time for the motorcycles to catch up, and he noticed that the riders weren't dressed in anything resembling normal biker gear. Heart pounding, Doug focused on them. He'd have thought ''publicity stunt'' if he'd seen people dressed like this anywhere else. All white and red.

Well, this was bound to be interesting.

[More stuff goes here.]
[No, really.]

==Rocket Trooper==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus3.jpg]]

TX-7255, "Barve" to his friends, saluted after a moment's hesitation. He'd been earnestly telling some groundpounder troops that the group was vulnerable from the air when he'd gotten the summons for an on-the-fly mission. He'd answered immediately - of course - but he hadn't expected to be briefed by the Lord Darth Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet.

...Sort of. Barve tended to focus on his jetpack. How to maintain it, fix it, how to fly it with increasingly intuitive controls, aerial tactics, maintaining and fixing his various weapons and practicing with them, tweaking the minor powered exoskeleton built into his armor, practice with different gravities and atmospheres, dabbling in repulsor packs. Combined with his love for comparing different models and modifying the ones he had, looking for perfection, he was never more than vaguely aware of any politicking.

Even so, he thought he'd have heard if the Supreme Commander decided to reverse his color scheme. The man was also missing most of one arm, the stump of which gave off occasional blue sparks, and at least half of his cape was absent. Since the stump hadn't even been capped off, it had to have been removed recently. This fit in with everything else, really. Barve hadn't heard anything concrete about action or details about where he'd been deployed. Everyone here was so disorganized.

A good meter too far away to be at the Supreme Commander's feet was a small, furry alien with big ears and large, alert eyes. Barve split his attention between the two - helmet screens were useful for that - until he was told that he had to carry the alien through the air.

He was surprised enough to blurt, "My Hush-About was modded with elements from the Aratech Screamer." This meant a lot of things, but he knew from experience that only another rocket trooper understood or cared. Even snubfighter jockeys glazed over. "She's a powerful machine. Launch scorches anything that isn't armored, and fur is flammable. My lord." He wasn't supposed to contradict the Supreme Commander, was he? Damn. Well, it wasn't like he'd run into the protocol before.

"I see. One moment." The Dark Lord - light lord? This really didn't make any sense, ''why'' was he in white - turned to the groundpounders for a moment. Barve ignored what they were saying - he wasn't supposed to listen in, and if it was important, they'd tell him - and watched the alien glance from helmet to helmet as the curved antenna on its head quivered. He had to be careful around aliens. You never knew what they would do.

A ground trooper with the type of armor and white fabric oversuit that some of them wore to protect against cold took off his helmet, turned it upside down, and knelt. The alien climbed into the helmet and shifted about as the ground trooper tugged the white cloth on the helmet so that it stood rigid, making a sort of bucket with the alien at the bottom. The trooper stood, holding his helmet by the cloth. Only the alien's ears showed.

"We have a runaway AT-AT bearing [direction]. I need you to take Steph inside it as quickly as - as quickly as is feasible. Get him there alive and conscious." This was the same thing he'd said before being distracted by the launch thing. "I don't know how well he tolerates flight, so you must determine your speed on your own. We will comm ahead and tell the intercept team to be ready. Do not engage hostiles. Do not get killed."

Weird mission. Still, Barve took the helmet from the trooper, locking his fingers in the stiff fabric. The little alien inside shifted its weight and stared up at him. Helmet and alien together were moderately heavy, but still lighter than his DN bolt-caster, still holstered.

A not-quite-voice said, ''Don't drop me. God, this is a bad idea. Please don't drop me''.

The ground trooper said, "Please don't drop him. I want my helmet back later."

"Steph, try not to drain energy. The comm channel is running on an open frequency. You are not to fire on anything. I can't stress that enough."

"Acknowledged." Not like he could even draw a weapon with his hands full.

The Supreme Commander hesitated, then nodded and told him, "Clear skies."

He knew the slang for "good journey?" Well, he knew the Supreme Commander was a damned impressive snubfighter pilot - that knowledge generally fell under politicking, but one of the memories recorded and passed down from his original had been a series of truly superior pilots, Lord Vader being at the top of the list - and snubbie pilots shared a bit of lingo with rocket troopers. ...Besides, now that he thought about it, 'clear skies' was probably the most obvious piece of flyboy slang ever.

Everyone had backed far enough away that even if he had a catastrophic failure and his jetpack exploded, none of them would die. He felt a little scorn at that kind of caution. Yes, jetpacks could explode at launch, ''if'' they weren't properly cared for, but Barve had been at this for five years. That was basically all his life - the Spaarti cylinder didn't count, acclimation had taken maybe two weeks, and since flash memory was pretty basic he'd had eight months of jetpack training - and he'd had plenty of time to get in the habit. Not like natural-borns, with that baggage from growing up all haphazard.

Barve set his stance and brought up flight control, rapidly checking the systems. Everything was green, not that he ever expected otherwise. Take care of your gear, and it will take care of you, the saying went, and no one took better care of a jetpack than TX-7255. He braced the helmet against his chest and as an afterthought shifted his grip so that he pinched the fabric over the alien, covering it. Hopefully it wasn't flammable.

There was enough open space around him, but still, regulations said that if he wasn't taking off in a specifically cleared space or doing a touch-and-go, he had to give a verbal warning. Some rocket troopers used the short "Dusting off!" or the even shorter "Launching!", but Barve liked the traditional phrase, said in one way or another since the first soldiers to take to the air on their own.

"Clear the blast zone!" He tensed, leaped as high as the light exoskeleton built into his armor would take him, and kicked in the rockets.

The first few seconds were always uncertain, as the jets fought gravity and flared, close enough to the ground that they licked the armor on his legs and slagged the spot where he'd been standing. The not-voice protested weakly. But he took care of his jetpack, and she held him steady at the top of the jump. He let her kick in a little harder, and she dragged his heavy flesh and armor up in a tower of sound and fire.

He modulated the thrust when he judged himself high enough and triggered the maneuvering jets on the right side, spinning in a slow, complete circle. This looked like one of those planets which couldn't collectively decide what it wanted to specialize in, so it went for city and wild stuff and farmland all at once. Those weren't as interesting as city worlds, at least not from a jetpack, but it was exponentially better than flying over ocean. He had his bearings now. Buildings, crowds, ground, roads, yep, atmospheric flyers, oh yes, and ''this'' way was North and ''this'' was South, good, and so his course was - that way.

Barve swung his legs and flipped over so his back was to the sky, working with his jetpack to find his balance in that second of freefall, and gave her the gun.

Immediately he was flying proper, losing a little altitude in a shallow dive and regaining it, then leveling off and holding steady. There were some other things in his airspace, but they ignored him, and he did the same. He loved flying fast, the landscape zipping by below him, wind shrieking against his armor and trying to tug things out of his hands, even the alternating sense that he was either weightless or something massive was pressing down on him. His jetpack was loud at her highest speed - since part of her was a Screamer, this was only to be expected - but of course he wasn't going at top speed, or anything all that close to it. He kept slow, almost too slow to fly. By the groaning of the not-voice, he probably didn't dare go any faster.

Pity, really. Even after all this time, even with the conditioning and the stuff they'd done to him in the Spaarti cylinder, his jetpack was fast and strong and agile enough to make him struggle to keep conscious, without vibrating him to pieces in the process. Some people didn't like tasking their g-tolerance; none of ''them'' had his genome. He loved flying. He'd rather die than be one of the groundpounders.

Sometimes, though, he wondered what it would have been like if he'd been sorted into pilot training instead. TIEs might not be as agile, but they went so much faster - and with inertial compensators, they could ''do'' that, make changes in their flightpaths that would kill him uncompensated. If he hadn't been sorted into the rocket trooper corps, then he'd be flying in space, too, and going after bigger targets. His original had been a snubbie pilot. The flash-memories he'd recorded and passed down included one of the joy and pride that came with piloting. Barve didn't really like thinking about that. Done was done, and the Empire wasn't going to let anyone but a ''really'' prime natural-born get retrained. Besides, a ship would mean losing his jetpack. She was his baby.

Okay. Barve scanned the ground. This was probably the right road, and there was some suspiciously regular cracking on the surface ahead, but he didn't see anything yet. He'd been told to watch for footprints in the road and wrecked cars. ...He really should have asked what a car was. Was it the same thing as a groundcar, which he'd seen a lot of here, or something more obscure? It wouldn't be the first time he got tripped up by similar-sounding unrelated words.

The not-voice had kept a lot of quiet, wordlessly unhappy not-sounds, particularly when he gained or lost altitude suddenly. He felt safe in assuming that the not-voice belonged to the alien curled up in the helmet he was carrying, and they were a good sign that it hadn't lost consciousness. Should he talk to it? Why not. It might know. Okay, he'd been told that the groundpounder helmet was on the open frequency, right? This far from all the others, he was picking up very little in the way of transmissions. Barve lowered his comm output so he wouldn't spam anyone.

"You know Basic, right?"

There was a pause, and he wondered if the wind was too loud. There were sound mufflers in ''his'' helmet, and his audio pickups filtered out most irrelevant noise, but helmets tended not to work as well when they weren't connected to armor.

Finally he not-heard it. ''Uh... sort of. It's been a while. I think I've forgotten most of what I picked up. Why?''
The not-voice seemed surprised and a little queasy.

"Oh good. I think you speak it fine," Barve said, adding, "I understand Huttese okay, I ''sort'' of get Bocce, and I know a little Sy Bisti, but I don't know any other languages." Understanding so few was kind of embarrassing, but only Basic and Huttese had been flash-programmed and he never really made a focused effort to study languages, so he thought he was picking them up pretty well. "Though I guess you were talking earlier in Basic, so it wasn't a good question."

''Wait, what? ...Do we even mean the same B.A.S.I.C.? Because I thought you meant the programming language.''

Maybe the alien was addled. "I meant Basic. Official language of the Empire. ''This'' language."

Another pause, this one rather long. ''You know, usually people call it English.''

At the very least, the alien was confused. "No, the Empire calls it Basic. So did the Republic. So does the rest of the galaxy. Basic, Galactic Basic, Galactic Basic Standard... Basic."

''What? You actually think - no, don't antagonize the crazy guy with the jetpack. He could drop you. Then you'll never get there.'' That last part wasn't nearly as clear, and Barve suspected he wasn't supposed to not-hear it. But he could handle being considered crazy, even though he'd had the full Spaarti year and there was really no chance of the madness getting him. After all, he'd seen someone in the depths of the madness, and it was probably worth being cautious, at least at first.

"Anyway, alien, I need to know if 'car', in this case, means little groundbound vehicle or is an acronym for something."

''Maybe he ''does'' think he's - Yeah. It's the vehicle.'' Good, then he was headed in the right direction. There was more cracking on the road now too. The alien paused, then said, ''I'm Steph, by the way. Not 'alien'.''

"I'm TX-7255 from batch three," he said. Wait, natural-borns who weren't troopers didn't usually like going by designations. "Call me Barve."

''Barve?''

"It's a nickname. A barve is a clumsy six-legged meat animal. You only get the prime names like "Firebrand" if you're important." He couldn't enjoy a military flick without getting annoyed at that.

''Right. You don't have any other names?''

"Not that I've heard." Did he want the name of Barve's original? No, he'd surely ask if he did. "You're feeling okay, right? Are your eyes being pushed into your head?" He'd feel like such an idiot if Steph had some kind of delayed reaction to acceleration and passed out.

''A little. It was worse when we took off. Everything went sort of gray at the edges.''

"Yeah? That makes sense." He felt like he couldn't leave it at that, so he added, "Humans tend to tolerate horizontal axis g-forces a lot better than vertical ones. It has to do with how our spines are aligned with the axis and how our blood gets forced around. I don't know what you are, but I'd guess it works the same for you."

''Well, ''that's'' good to know. I'm a Hoojib, I guess.'' More indistinctly, Steph said, ''The guy in orange said I looked all wrong, but Eighty-four told him it didn't matter.''

He was not supposed to listen in; if he overheard anyway, he was supposed to pretend otherwise. "Never heard of you. We're well within standard human tolerance, and I'll keep slow for you if I can, but if something comes up and I have to go evasive, you'll have some trouble. Should that happen, try straining your muscles and remember to breathe short, hard, and often. It could help."

''Thanks. I think. It had better not come to that.''

In places, the road was crossed by roads that passed above it. The ones he'd seen so far had been intact, but one up ahead, getting closer by the second, had been shot out, and the pattern of cracks that passed underneath it could reasonably be called footprints. Checking behind himself - the rearwards display was small and not meant for ground details, so he did this by pulling upright, spinning as he stalled, then correcting himself and falling back into flight position, a set of maneuvers that did not please Steph in the least - Barve saw that the set of buildings that he'd taken off near was still visible, though small in the distance.

If he had no further orders, maybe they'd let him fly back at any speed he wanted. Fuel readings were a little lower than they should have been at this point, even with the extra weight, but nothing too alarming.

At this speed he'd be a few more minutes. This thing had gone pretty far. Flying slowly with absolutely nothing going on - usually, he'd be listening to the other rocket troopers, comparing notes and expectations, maybe trying to outmaneuver them. He was hazy on why he'd been deployed without the rest of his unit. They'd acclimatized together and gone through training at the same time and everything, and he'd never been far apart from them. Being alone was boring.

No, he wasn't quite alone. Small talk. How did that work again? Right. "How are you talking? Nothing's getting to my ears."

''I don't have a vocal tract anymore, so I'm guessing telepathy. Better than nothing, but it's annoying.''

"That's too bad," Barve said. It looked like the burden of conversation was on him. He was the worst in his unit at that, frankly, especially with people who weren't familiar with flight and the mechanics of it, but questions were usually good. "So you're one of those aliens that has a metamorphosis, huh? What were you before?"

There was another pause. Incredulous, Steph said, ''I - but - you - you actually haven't figured it out? What - you don't even remember what happened, do you? Do you have a real name? Do you even know what'' planet '' this is?''

Barve hadn't known it was possible to stutter telepathically, but then, he reminded himself, there were a lot of things he didn't know. "No. Are you going to tell me?"

''Oh Jesus Christ.'' Ah. He didn't think Barve was in danger of the madness, he thought Barve was ''stupid''. Barve briefly considered, oh, accelerating a bit more, perhaps flying a bit less steadily, but dismissed the idea. He had a package or a passenger to deliver.

He wasn't angry, quite, but he had to correct the alien. "Hey. I'm not - yeah, I know everyone says I'm a bit simple. Maybe. Maybe. Most of the time." He got the sense that Steph was about to say something, and he didn't let him, raising his voice. "But I'm plenty smart flying, and if there's a jetpack malfunction a couple klicks above the ground, the smartest being in the Empire, the ''very'' best and brightest, is me. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it's that I don't know. Don't make insinuations like that!"

''Aaah! Oh God, don't drop me. I'm sorry, geeze. It's just really weird that you don't know.''

There were a few men in his unit who could have started on something about ignorance, but he wasn't one of them - as far as lectures went, he only had this and the one about untested new equipment. After a moment, Barve became uncomfortable. He wasn't supposed to be hostile to people who weren't the enemy, even if they ''were'' rude aliens. He'd probably have a few bad sleepcycles if he didn't say something.

"Sorry. It's fine. Just... I'm not stupid, okay? Simple isn't stupid."

''Yeah. Sure. God, this was a bad idea.''

Well, ''that'' hadn't gone well. Pity his unit wasn't here. He could have used a people person, or several.

Anyway, by now he could see the runaway walker. It had come to a stop, right in the middle of the road, and as he flew closer he saw that one of the big hatches in the side, the hatches that groundpounders rappelled out of, was open.

"We're just about here. Hold on." It took a bit of maneuvering. A long shallow dive followed by flipping upright and shedding his momentum, then the tricky process of moving laterally while in the standing position without letting the rockets set fire to the inside of the vehicle, and getting close enough to switch them off and fall to his feet without breaking anything. Nothing he couldn't handle. He made it a point of pride that he hardly ever used his repulsor pod when landing, and he didn't need it this time.

Barve landed hard enough that he was forced to drop to three points, which while visually impressive was just bad form. If his unit had been there, it would not have gone unnoticed, but if the groundpounder who met him had judged his landing, he declined to comment on it. The moment Barve put the helmet down, Steph half climbed, half leapt out and shuddered all over so that his fur stood on end. Then he sat on his haunches and started wiping or patting himself down with his forelegs, a set of motions that reminded Barve both of a nervous animal grooming itself and the thing a lot of people did after a rough ride, when they wanted to make sure everything was in one piece.

He'd have been a little bit insulted by that - hadn't he kept slow? Hadn't he maintained his jetpack well enough that there was virtually no vibration, and flown her well enough that it had been smooth? - but he ''had'' gone off on that upset lecture. And some people just didn't fly well. And even if Steph didn't like hearing it, he was an alien and might or might not tolerate the forces of acceleration that well.

The groundpounder looked from Barve to Steph and back. "You sent us an ''alien''?" he asked over the open channel. "Is he an ambassador or something? I thought the message was that he was a friend or something."

Steph stopped grooming and looked up sharply. ''I ''am'' a friend. And I can hear you, you know, the speaker in the helmet's still on." He waggled an ear in a gesture that was probably sarcastic, but still looked silly.

"Oh, sorry," the groundpounder said. "And I guess you're not really an alien. It's kinda hard to keep things straight. C'mon, we need you in the cockpit." He nodded acknowledgment to Barve and turned, heading towards the fore of the walker. Steph followed, still staggering a little.

Barve picked up the helmet again and took the chance to have a look around. He'd seen the big walkers before, just not from inside. He'd landed on the lower of the two levels. At the fore and the aft they were joined by sets of stairs. Entrance to the tunnel leading to the cockpit was through a locking access hatch on the landing in the fore stairs that locked and sealed behind the groundpounder; the aft stairs had another one that probably led to cargo space. A third hatch was set forewards in the flooring. Maybe it went to engines. Then there were the various external ones like what he'd dropped through. Handholds were built into the ceiling, and there were some weapons racks. That made sense, he guessed. These things ''were'' personnel carriers, though they were better suited for annihilating ground targets.

Maybe the above deck had more, but this one was otherwise empty. Apparently the team who'd gone out here were all in the cockpit, which had to be a tight fit. Before he commed back for further orders, Barve noticed one more thing. Coming from the speakers built into the ceiling was a faint, barely audible hiss of static.

[There. I wrote you. I even put in that damn rant. Now get out of my head.]

Joysweepers Incoherent Idea Bank

2009-07-18T16:51:33Z

Joysweeper:

This is Joy's Idea Bank. It isn't a story. It isn't an article. It is a list, and a list without organization, at that. To get ridiculously metaphorical, this is a garden of story-seeds, fertilized with things that supercharge me with enthusiasm, and populated by aggressive plot gizka. Joysweeper is easy to inspire, but for various reasons can't act on everything. This is a backup - her computer is crashy, and she doesn't want to lose all of these. Why is she typing in third person?

You can look through it, but it isn't for you. By which I don't mean that you can't use bits and pieces of it - I mean that I picked things out for me, and I haven't reformatted it, explained the in-jokes, or anything like that. To go back to the garden metaphor, I haven't hewn a path, and although I know where everything is and what is or isn't pleasing to touch, smell, or eat, you're likely to be lost. Here we have definitions, a couple of links, and some story concepts and fragments. Oh, and I repeatedly express a juvenile love for Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America. Why? Because he is the straightforward, good-natured, usually-confident, idealistic, stoic, goal-driven, responsible leader type. And awesome.

----
Pictures.
[[Image:501stJulia.GIF]]

[[Image:Tranced.JPG]]

"You white?"
...no?
"Black?"
...No.
"Chinese?"
No.
"What are you?"
Human?

One time I laughed so hard I seemed to bruise my chest from the inside.

[http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=4233223 Their conversation was] interrupted by fade-outs and static, but it was a minor miracle that they were able to talk at all, the astronauts and the aquanaut, each in their respective tin cans, crossing their respective voids. They talked about what it was like spending so much time inside their own heads and what they missed about their former lives. They laughed about craving the strangest things: the smell of an orange, a drink with ice cubes clinking in it. But mostly they talked about things only people who have ventured so far from home can know. People say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but the astronauts and the aquanaut knew love isn't a function of how long two things have been apart -- what matters is how far.

"I am given to understand that this establishment provides coffee? Have I heard correctly, or am I mistaken in that belief?"

When I was in my 20s-30s, I hung around with a lot of That Guys. They were members of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), and even though we could all party like it was 1099, the men were chivalrous and respectful of the women. Or else. (First offense of being drunk and disorderly was being tied to a tree. Second - if there was a second, and most guys were too embarrassed for a repeat - was usually unofficial shunning.) The guys also looked out after the younger women, especially if they thought they were getting over their head. It was the safest I ever felt in my life - and you have no idea how funny it can be when a guy is flirting with you and a big Viking comes stomping over, looms over him, and asks, "Milady, is he bothering you and should I make him go away?"

It was wrong. I stopped it. I’m not sorry.

I stopped in a reception area, looked at the night sky from the second story window, and though how strange it was that the world — my world had changed so dramatically — yet the sky looked just the same.

"S-see how easy that was? And now we can start all over again and fix what was wrong and we'll all be one big happy family again and ''everything will be alright you'll see''--"

I've known a few very old cats, and the combination of fragility and vitality is so charismatic and powerful.

Maybe when our outrageous spirit for living has died down a little bit and we slip into that phase of one's life where you start giving up on your dreams and all the amazing things you thought you were going to do, and you just start to panic that you're going to die alone.

That is the essence of love. When you feel it so strongly, and so deeply, that it has the power to draw others into it, and they can live it too, then you know that despite logic, reason, science, religion, or anything else manmade, that love transcends what we are, and who we are, and delivers unto us, something far greater than we ever suspected.

Makes me very, very angry, and very, very tired, and reminds me of the nights I sat alone in my car in parking lots, frantically eating, then running home to throw up because I knew something bad had happened to me but I couldn't say why, or what, and I just needed it to not be happening any longer.

It's heavier than it looks in my hand, whispering dark promises of madness and filth like a digital Necronomicon.

“Who are you?” “I don’t know. I used to know what I was. But now… now I am something else.”

Lawlis

Congratulations, you have made me inhale my drink. My forced evolution to liquid respiration is one step further.

Tyrannical is definitely your color

That face is...'' ugh''... if my remaining biological systems had the ability to vomit, I would be doing so right now.

I guess it's really not that long in the grand scheme of things--it blows my mind a little that it was ONLY two years, it seems like something that happened so long ago, in another country in another language under another sun--but it throws my whole day a little off-kilter when it happens, and I spend the morning grumping around trying to get back.

It is not so easy a thing to come to terms with your once strong body failing on you. If you are 40 possibly you recall a vigor of 18 that's now on vacation and which you miss with creaking fondness. Remember the vigor of 40 when you're pushing your 82nd birthday.

Because the retina is the darkest part of the eye and it moves around, one can sometimes look into the eye of a jumping spider and see it changing color. When it is darkest, you are looking into its retina and the spider is looking straight at you.

I've been working a long time on getting my mental image of my face to line up with my actual face.

It's totally like staring into the sun. And having the sun stare also into you.

I felt like murdering them. All of them.

I don't like WarHammer because the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness (sorry, I like my fantasy/sci fi to have hope in it, I'm weird that way), but really doesn't this all come back to the same crap?

I keep thinking that I ought to become immune to this by now, but every time it gives me a punch in the gut. Hope springs eternal I guess, which is how it can be quashed over and over again.

He was an Imperial officer, and Imperials never gave up. Ever.

True to form for my life, the one in the laundry room decided I was a friend and tried to get me to play, and I had the hardest time convincing her that yes, I wanted her to leave.
Holy f**k, one just WALKED ACROSS THE DINING ROOM SKYLIGHT. Several are crashing around on the porch.
We are under siege. If you don't hear from me, send help; we have been eaten by tiny, deceptively appealing bears.

I'm grateful that you like me enough to greet me with somersaults and tail flips and leaps out of the water, which, since you are the size of trout, makes for a pretty impressive display. But truly, it's not really necessary to slam a quart of water into my face whenever you see me. Honestly, you don't have to worry about my drying out.

[[http://singingnettle.livejournal.com/2008/06/16/]]

Suddenly the diffident and marginally competent Major Tierce who’d served as his military aide for eight months was gone. In his place stood a warrior. Disra had once heard it said that a discerning person could always recognize an Imperial stormtrooper or Royal Guard, whether he stood before you in full armor or lay dying on a sickbed. He’d always discounted such things as childish myths. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

A Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges. Ever. His entire goal in life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. His goal in life, and his desire in death.

The being that I was is gone… the change is complete… But I am incomplete because you have made it so…

What a sweet little girl, plotting how she will eventually wreak bloody revenge on those who wronged her.

This jelly-like 1.5kg mass inside our skulls, containing hundreds of billions of cells which between them form something like a quadrillion connections, is responsible for our every action, emotion and thought.

This is the guy who was still so heavily loaded with shrapnel that he had to carry a doctor's note with him to all public buildings and airports, because he'd set off the metal detectors.

He retreats to an inward space as his body slowly fails him a step before his mind.

I can just imagine some sort of army having one of those radars and going "Sir! We're detecting high amounts of sexual energy!"

Anyway, humans breathe oxygen, one of the most poisonous materials in the universe. It's the same fucking thing that makes FIRE. It fucking kills METALS, and we need it to BREATHE.

I'm actually crying, right now, I'm laughing so hard at that one.

Point- it would be impossible to be insulted if you are able to understand every facet of an action.

Also, we used to use a couple variants on the fortune cookie thing in college: "in bed with whips and chains", and "thus ending the age of wonders". Uh, yeah, we were a bunch of geeks.

So sorry that life usually has consequences for you, pookie, but get over it. You take the responsibility, you take all of it. You don't get to pick and choose the parts you like.

Watch closely as I deftly flip these eggs in a needlessly dramatic fashion... ''WATCH CLOSELY! AS IF YOUR '''LIVES''' DEPEND ON IT!'' For, indeed, if you are as inept as I suspect you are, you would surely '''starve''' were it not for ''these... Very... '''Eggs.'''''

In the foundation of our hearts, none of us sees ourselves as old. Mentally we are all teenagers—teenagers who happen to be trapped in increasingly unreliable bodies.

Rheum is a medical term for the natural mucus discharge from the eyes. It is formed by a combination of mucus consisting of mucin discharged from the cornea or conjunctiva, tears, blood cells, skin cells from the eyelids, and dust.

Kletecka, Dostis

[I spent time going through Ursala Vernon's Livejournal. Many bits are from it.]

I had this nightmare last night.
I dreamed I was a dolphin.
It sucked.

That hard, acrid chemical taste is really quite revolting to me--beer is even worse because it's chemical mixed with rot--and despite my ability to acquire many other tastes, like blue cheese and black coffee, alcohol eludes me.

I'm reading "The Mummy Congress" which is about mummy research. It's riveting. I am riveted. Like...big...steel...neat...rivets...The weird thing about reading while drugged to the gills is that you don't realize how out of it you're getting--you just keep focusing in on the written word until you look up and the world goes whomwhomwhom around you, gray sweeps in at the edges of your vision, and you make some witty observation like "Oooglleeey..." before sliding gently to the floor.

The funny thing about pain, though, is that anticipating pain is bad, and mysterious pain is scary and bad, but just plain jaw-shattering agony from a known source somehow isn't as bad as it could be. There's no anticipation--it hurts as bad now as it will five minutes from now. And there's no fear--I know exactly why it hurts, I know approximately when it'll stop (two days). So in a weird kinda way, it's more bearable than it could be.

First we had laws against illegal things. And that was fine. And then we started having laws against people doing stupid things to themselves, and that was not fine, that was bad, because it meant that common sense no longer held sway, and people could blame their stupidity on something other than themselves. And now we have laws against saving people's lives. And this is pure, profound idiocy.

I wander around snorfling and growling to myself and revisiting the age old truth that you shouldn't cry when lying on your back because your ears fill up with water, which tickles, and stomping snivelling into the bathroom to clean your ears out really ruins the mood of an otherwise perfectly good mope.

"Will this hurt?" "A great deal, yes." “In ways you have never imagined.”

Evolutionary Ingrates http://ursulav.livejournal.com/19596.html#cutid1

That's the one thing about religion I am absolutely not willing to dispense with--much, much better curse words.

I wonder if some people just get a lot angrier than other people--the maddest I've ever gotten, I never hit walls because I'm smart enough to know that hitting the wall will hurt me and cause structural damage to the wall, while not doing anything to affect the cause of the frustration. If I must do something hysterical, I will cry, since it's easy to clean up. But I know plenty of other people who, in a rage, will smack furniture or whatever, who don't seem any dumber than the usual run of people. So I dunno--it's possible that I deal with it better, or I'm repressing it all in something that will eventually erupt in a homicidal explosion. Or it's possible that I simply don't get that mad--I mean, I will display fits of temper where people walk around me on eggshells in terror of what I might say, but I never get into a screaming, blistering rage where I can't control my actions, the way that some people appear to.

Got a date, got a date with 7378

Eight months of sandal wearing means that I now feel like I've got cinderblocks strapped to my ankles. I pick up a foot. Ungh. I set it down. Thunk. I feel absurdly taller, as if I've got those pimpin' platform shoes with goldfish in the heels.

I like packing, as I've said before, but I pretty much hate every other part of moving, and generally spend it in a nerve-frayed state, waiting for Something To Go Wrong. Actually, "I hate moving" isn't descriptive enough. I feel it lacks resonance. How about "Moving gives me the feeling that my chest cavity has been filled up with a number of small furry animals, all of them milling about and climbing on top of each other with their tiny little sharp claws, and--this is the key bit--all screaming in unison."

But I will prevail! Once I can feel my hands again, once more into the breach!

"The Emperor's Embrace" by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

But I still nearly squealed. (I didn't, however. My gravitas is unshakeable. Also, I'd forgotten to breathe, so I didn't have anything to squeal with.)

"You know, I'll never forget..."
*dead silence for at least a minute*
"You'll never forget what?"
"What?"

Possibly I have some unresolved issues.

"Because I knew it would be more fun to listen to you grovel."

One should not lose entire families. It is not the natural state in which people should live.

My friend has had jaw surgery recently and is still on liquid and pureed foods. She has been extremely busy lately and has not had a lot of energy available to figure out how to eat with her jaws held together with rubber bands. I am going to evilly feed her before she sallies forth.

"core dump." Trying to compress into the course of a few hours an expression of who you are, for someone else's benefit, and to receive the same.

I am so exhausted I want to cry.

Snow smells like tin. I'm never sure if I'm a thin skin of transparent cheerfullness stretched over an abyss of grief, or a slightly melancholy tinge on a crazy hysterical joy. I don't know whether I want to laugh or cry or both. Large mammal seeing the end of winter. Deer and bears and for all I know, chickens and frogs probably do it too. It's that sort of feeling. I feel restless, full of some powerful emotion, but either there isn't a word for it, or there's a perfectly good word that I just never thought to apply. And just as this isn't quite the thaw smell, I don't feel quite like that--but the smell brings back those memories of that weird feeling, a sort of reminder, enough to make me a little jittery and generally useless in the studio, unable to concentrate for long enough periods of time.

Stomach acid has a pH of 1.2, which is only slightly higher than battery acid.
One drop of stomach acid will burn through wood, drop to the floor, and burn through the carpet, and if chewing through all that didn't neutralize it, it would burn through the floor below as well. Drinking more than 4 oz of water within 20 minutes of a meal will disturb digestion by diluting the acid, which has a job to do.

It's like having a lover: you can be passionately intense but you don't really know where it's going...and for all the excitement, you know who you come home to.

Felt this terrible fragile happiness.

It's a good thing humans don't speak Bird, or else we probably wouldn't find these bloodthirsty paeans nearly so charming.

As people who have thrown their back out know, it's a weird sensation, it'll almost not hurt for a bit, and then you'll move a millimeter, or it'll just get bored, and everything suddenly seizes up and the world does a kind of breathless wobble-and-flop around you, and for a brief, bright moment there is nothing in the universe but you and the God of Back Pain. That's much worse. A low, perpetual ache is peanuts.

They have little pipes threaded along the edges of the patios, and every few minutes, they release a fine spray of mist. Because the droplets are so fine, and the air so dry, you don't get wet, you just get a wash of coolness across your skin as the droplets evaporate before they quite touch you

Birds are the scions of dinosaurs.

The entry told me that it was often confused for another, similiar owl, called a pulwit, so I was flipping back and forth between entries trying to figure out which one it was, and finally the fact that there was a heated battle going on in the rest of the house, between the last defenders of righteousness and an army of gobliny things, became too distracting and I had to stomp out, owl only tentatively identified, and kick some ass.

Nobody to the front of me
Nobody to the back of me
Nobody to the side of me
There must be nobody here but me..
It's about the two of us
Just the two of us
It's always about just the two of us...

Also, the answer to "Will this hurt?" is not "Maybe a little," it is "Oh, hell, yeah."

Isn't that always the way, though? The agonizing ones don't bruise, even though you feel that much pain bloody well deserves it, and then you get something that looks like the Mark of Cain and you can't remember what the heck happened, maybe the desk gave you a sharp look or something?

I think I need a t-shirt made up that reads, "Because I'm the human. That's why."

It's a luxury to be able to take a stance of nonviolence. Someone has to buy it for you. Sometimes it’s you.

So, I've been having these heart flutters for a few years, and sometimes they're absent for a while, and sometimes they're very frequent and upsetting. And it's possible they're not even my heart...it's possible they're spasms in some other nearby organ; everything's so crowded in the box of your chest and abdomen that it's hard to tell what sensation is coming from what place.

Life isn't infinite and I'm tired of being sad and grieving for my lost self, the one that existed before I got sick. So I'm just not going to do it anymore. I'm done.

The distressing fact is that I often have no color except for purple shadows under my eyes and whatever color I've dyed my hair (currently red), but last night it occurred to me that I looked...''normal''. This might not mean anything to someone who hasn't walked around for several years looking like they were just a few steps above legally dead, but trust me, looking just normal is for me about as exciting as it would be for the average woman to wake up and find that all her cellulite has disappeared overnight.

A truly colorful fall, on the other hand, is like a thunderstorm, or thaw, an almost meteorological event, the sort where you don't know if you're happy or despairing, if you're on the verge of nirvana or a midlife crisis, a state where you actually comprehend "melancholy" as something other than the domain of comsumptive poets. It's not something you get used to quickly. A good fall will leave you wrung out and drained, the way you get when you're sick as a dog, wrapped in a welter of blankets on the couch, trying to find something on TV at 3 AM, and you find Bob Ross or TV evangelists and it's so damn funny and you're so weak that you start laughing and can't stop, and every time somebody said "Praise Jesus!" or "...happy little tree..." it sets you off again.

Because failure is only failure, but not doing it smacks of ''defeat.''

The thought of 200K legal fees if he lost gave him pause, but Mavis, who's intestinal fortitude I have praised before, said "No. They Have Annoyed Me." This is the sort of ground where angels fear to tread.

I recall a show once where several scientists set out to see just how aggressive cottonmouths were. At one point, they were standing around poking the thing with sticks, trying desperately to provoke an attack, and the snake was just "Let me go, let me go, I have no quarrel with any of you, let me go, let me go." They eventually concluded that as long as you don't step on them, and don't try to play with them, you'll probably be fine. This is good advice with any animals, and most artists.

Not that he gets off scott-free on the wax front. The wax is a trifle messy, it sticks to things like, well, ''wax'' and I learned I had not cleaned up thoroughly when the plaintive cry came from the bathroom--"OH MY GOD! ''Why am I welded to the floor?!''"

I go a step further. My shaving is so sporadic, and my skin in such bad condition right now, that I have PATCHES of hair of all different lengths. And I've got too many androgens, so the hair isn't just downy fluff, but dark mean tough wiry stuff that WILL NOT STAY DOWN. Shaving's kind of a pointless exercise for me.
I wear long pants a lot.

You pulled the Catheter out with your toes? well my arms were tied down because I kept pulling out my IV's and chewing through my breathing tubes. Apparently I'm not a Nice Person when you dose me with steroids.

It hurts. As pain goes, it's a bizarre jabbing tingly thing, like a fine gauge wire drifting through my hand. It still hurts, too, and apparently it's not going away for at least a day. Ice helps, but once I remove it, it starts right back up. It is a weird and distracting pain.

Well, twentysome hours after the bite, it's subsided to only hurting when I move my hand, jar my hand, or think about touching my hand. No swelling, and other than a tiny crease, you can barely see where the bite was. So it could be a lot worse. Still, it's rather extraordinary how persistent it is--whang my hand, and it's a bolt of pain almost as intense as the first ten minutes of being bitten. There is a brief sense of the top of your head coming off.

A goldfish can live as long as a human, or longer.

Rocket trooper!

Naturally, the Dark Side/Light Side thing is mostly a non-issue. No survivor of Prof. West's 8 AM philosophy classes, taught by a snarky ex-Jesuit who could convince you that down was up and up was morally indefensible will ever be even mildly interested in the cheap social darwinism of the Sith, particularly not when delivered by an NPC whose metamucil I want to spike with arsenic. And I can be kind and charitable to low-poly models 'til the cows come home, because decades of gaming have hammered into me that no milkrun, however lowly, is below me. We live for milkruns. If I ever made a game, it would be a fantasy quest to deliver a bottle of dragon milk across a continent or something.

odd glasses and a girl
on impulse he opened
his wings and leaped

reason revan and
furiously thinks you are not
supposed to be

evidently i
like things best when they're somewhere
around the middle

what was in the way
he hopped off half spreading
his wings and shoved

Yeah, after the Big Moment, every time a dialog option showed up with some variation on "I don't have to put up with this crap, I'm the Dark Lord of the Sith!" I had to fight off temptation with a stick.

It is unbelievably fun. It is sick and twisted fun.

I’m still not quite sure what I was, but I’m damn sure I was not a derelict who raved to herself on street corners. Let’s have a little dignity here.

I think he may be the most purely ruthless hero I've ever tried to write. It's not that he's a bad guy, exactly, but he's very, very practical and in his world, there are no innocent bystanders and no such thing as collateral damage and absolutely everything is justified. He engages in no soul-searching whatsoever. It's a sort of moral feedback loop--"I have total confidence that I am right, therefore anything I do must be right and justified, because it's me doing it." It dovetails nicely with Rail, who is quite sure some of what she does is reprehensible, but believes firmly that her ends justify the means, because after all, it's her doing it.

Well, this is always what it comes down to in the end, being alone with yourself in the dark.

It's a weird thing to be grateful to one's own creations, and yet, not a bad sensation.

Having another living being around does something to the human brain. We're stronger in the company of other people, as much out of pride, I suspect, as anything more noble.

It's been the longest year of my life, and very nearly the worst. And I kept on going, and I kept being strong. And I kept throwing myself into things, because I thought that strength was inexhaustible.
Guess not.
Live and learn, huh?

I hate being so fragile.

Eventually you stop that queasy "I can't eat..." and start thinking "Man, I could totally go for something with salami about now." Before long panic fades, you think "God, I'm an idiot..." and sanity returns.
Well, for a certain questionable value of sanity. It's me, after all.

One thing I ''did'' know is that there is a point where you shut off. The emotional breaker gets thrown, with an almost audible ''click'', and suddenly you are cold, cold, cold. You are calm. You have never been so calm in your entire life. It is not a healthy calm. It is a bad, bad calm, the hurt calm that radiates out from the belly, the eye of the hurricane, the rattlesnake coiling, the old, cold little voice that comes into your brain saying ''I will take this from here.''
I encountered this before, during the bad bits of my divorce, and what I should have learned then is that when this hits, it has a purpose. The purpose is to give you time to stand up, get your purse, and walk away, time to say "Ah, yes. I see," and hang up the phone. This is the calm that lets you extricate yourself. Do not stay there and hope to remain calm. This is the airstrike your brain calls in to cover your retreat. It is a finite gift. Don't waste it.

I don't feel miraculously better, but I'm not seized with an urge to cry, and I'm not yelling at anybody inside my head, so there's a lot to be said for that.

Sort of like the way Vicodin works--you call still see all the pain, it's just on the other side of that vague grey wall there. It doesn't fix it, exactly, it just puts it at a distance so you can turn your head and say "No, no, we're not going to look at that..." and go on about the day. It cures no pain, it just slaps a restraining order on pain's ass.

More importantly, I feel like ME again. And crimony, you never really appreciate yourself until you're gone.

Have discovered I cannot chew.
Send pudding.

And to think, it took only six years of them seeing me every day for them to decide that I'm not Satan.

[http://singingnettle.livejournal.com/698090.html#cutid1 Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be.] Gods, I love Al Gore’s global warming speech.

Note to the cat: No, the turtles are not going to leap out of their temporary tank and fly through the air like Gamera and clamp themselves onto your nose, as rocks seldom become airborne without a precipitating event. So you can remove your claws from my neck anytime now. And why you think behaving like the result of an unholy alliance between a muffler and a cactus will save you from flying attack turtles anyway, I don't know.

Only problem so far is that I can't kneel or crouch in them. The leather bends fine, but I take a row of spikes in the back of the thigh, and nobody wants that.

I...I feel this strange feeling in my angry, blackened heart. I think it is called....love....

I have to admit that having animals that are so very dependent on us for their environment and whose environment can go toxic in the minute that you're not monitoring it, is getting old.

I am once again stupified by how much damage a small animal on a mission can accomplish.

"I am sitting here at home alone with large portions of my body covered in painted-on latex. ''Damn'' this is sexy. Why have I not ''done'' this before?"

I suspect part of it is that the last few moves I've made have been INCREDIBLY depressing--of the duct-tape-and-sobbing variety--so it's a bit Pavlovian--perhaps my brain now equates moving with despair. But moving into this place was good for me. I threw myself into it like a psychotic, trying to make a place that reflected ME, as part of that whole identity-nesting thing that you always go through after a divorce. You're not entirely sure who you're going to be, so "I am the person who lives HERE," is a pretty good starting point.

Suddenly you become a human thermometer. The metal bits can get really cold, and you feel that.

Will it change the whole world? Oh, probably not. The world is big and it rolls along with fine disregard for most of us. But it'll sure as hell change my corner of it.

A buddy of mine says that I just give off some kind of vibe that says in essence "I'm a very nice, laid-back person, and if you push me too far '''I WILL DESTROY YOU'''." I can't speak to the truth of that, but occasionally, at certain times of the month, I hope it's true.

Kill it with fire. Bring the grenades.

Dreamed I was a stormtrooper at Base, part of Tampa Bay, hit by it and taking Pyms, and desperate to keep anyone from knowing about it. But when I ran out of time, and I didn’t want anyone to know it was me, it was okay. Went around without my armor and talked to people. Part of how I got around involved balloons with strings in strategic places. I talked to Wedge in a cafeteria and was ridiculously happy about this. Because WEDGE! He was polite, but a little unnerved. I don’t think he knew why I was so happy.

"you open your mouth to scream, but you no longer have a throat, let alone a larynx!"

Ooh! ASL-swearing. A motion like clapping once, only with just the fore two fingers extended. Also similar to the rude Brit gesture.

A period of uncertainty led to a night and a day of what might charitably be called soul-searching.
Verdict: Yup, I'm still me. (Not as obvious an outcome as you might think.)

That wasn’t scary. That was a cataclysmic primal force that crawled from the darkest depths of hell to wreak cosmic horror on all humanity.

I told him I believed in him... but did he believe me? And was I right to do so? The Jake I knew would never do something so awful... but he'd lost his memory. Could he have been a different person... before? All I know is, I doubted, and I think he doubted too...

I’m not in a good mood today, what with the whole destruction of everything I’ve ever known.

Clearly we’d not killed him hard enough.

"I have tried so hard to do right."

Remember: If the skirt is poofy and long enough, you can hide a person under there.

sense of community and camaraderie and nostalgia

Belief that life is meaningful, they are saying, seems to require a belief in something like justice. But, well, ''look around''. For this idea of justice to matter in any meaningful sense then there must be more to it than what we see here in this world -- there must be some kind of transcendent justice in the long run, some kind of ultimate balancing of the scales for those wretched who suffered more than they deserved as well as for those wicked who may have inflicted or ignored that suffering.

Aerobatics! Long periods of aerobatics = nausea.

Made me think that being able to get around freely is one of these things you just can't possibly appreciate fully until it's curtailed, and then you realize how awesome it was to have been able to do that without even thinking about it.

Cardiopulmonary bypass

I mean, the freakiest thing my mom did was buy octopus tentacles, stick them down the kitchen sink drain so it looks like Cthulhu was trying to climb out, and stack a bunch of dirty dishes on top.

Sometimes I think my subconscious mind just likes toying with me.

The breaking story of the day was a Canadian politician who was being indicted because he attacked his political rivals with his massive zombie army.

fem(me fat)ale

[http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/04/dont-stop-believin.html If you want] to control your teenager -- if you want to protect him from the big, bad world and to ensure that he never strays from or escapes the sheltering bubble of your religious subculture, that he never encounters any thought or feeling or emotion too big to put into words, too alive to define and categorize and pin down on cardboard -- then you really do need to prevent him from listening to music.
Any music.
And every single one of them meant it. Even if what it was they meant, specifically, was something they'd never be able to put into words.
Music can do this. Even cheesy power ballads. It can take you out of yourself. It can catch you up. It can make you lose your cool.
Music is not easily controlled or contained. Those who believe in controlling and containing every thought and every emotion -- whether hipsters or fundies -- would do best to avoid it altogether.

I've been feeling either a step behind or a step ahead, but generally at a fifteen degree angle to the rest of the world.

An order to put polish on my boots means the whole boot.

There's something kind of sad about people who succeed so completely that they stop existing on the same planet as the rest of us.

[http://naamah-darling.livejournal.com/tag/bpal Scent reviews.]

There are few things more pitiable and terrifying than a rabid ninja.

[http://ursulav.livejournal.com/729088.html Something had locked itself] in my old bedroom because it thought it was me. Some kind of variation on the thing-that-won't-die dreams, I think, except that it was less "really annoying" and more "absolutely horrific." Not even Ben could protect me, and my subconscious, resisting all knowledge of the psychology of cats, had him trying. I even dreamed that I woke up, and went to pet him, and found crusts of scar tissue all along his back, and of course that meant that it was real, and then I was right back in the dream again.

and then there was much panicking and running in circles and flapping of vestigial wings.

I have spent my entire life on a quest for the honey I had once in my youth, a wildflower honey, still in the comb, that tasted like the essence of wildflowers. It was lightweight and fragrant and melted on the tongue, and I would claw my way over the piled bodies of the dead to get more.

I'll match my hokey religion and ancient weapon against your blaster any day.

I actually had to go look up the difference between mania and hypomania -- apparently hypomania means the same emotional state but not as psychotic as true mania. (That is, true mania is a loss of contact with reality, while hypomania leaves intact the bit of your brain that can look at the rest of it and go, "Man, I am acting WEIRD!") No psychosis.

"Somnio ergo caeles" 'I dream, therefore I am divine'.

As Joseph Campbell once said, "Anyone that animals speak to, or offer aid to, wins."

*after "What's the worst that could happen"* "Ooh, did you just feel that? It's like Fate just stood up and said 'ooh ooh I know the answer! Pick me!"

And then there was the time that my husband and I were deep in discussing our Champions tournament on the bus. "It's not enough to murder him," one of us said: "It's got to be messy. When they find him it has to send a message.." As the noise level on the bus dropped, we looked up to find that we suddenly had empty seats around us...

Despite all stresses there is an itchy kind of joy that fills up the back of my skull and the hollow spot under my breastbone. Something to do with spring and love and the belief that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well (as St. Julian is supposed to have said.)

"It's a good life if you don't weaken."

The Lovecraftian citrus would be Buddha's Hand. It's also formally known as Fingered Citron, colloquially "the Cthulhu Fruit" among most varieties of Fandom, and almost invariably "time to call the produce manager over" when trying to check out of the grocery store.

Oooh. Now there's a power! Someone who can hear the soundtrack.

Sometimes you just wanna go "Pay attention, world! Somebody good died!"

"Bonk" by Mary Roach

I still keep doing this randomly. It's not even traumatic so much as just so WEIRD, ya know? I mean...really?

Anyone who talks to me on the phone has known me to utter such phrases as "Get off the ceiling!" and "STOP using the ironing board as a springboard!"

There are random crashing noises wafting up the stairs, as the cats systematically dismantle the house. I fear to go and assess the damage.

"Mad Scientist University" Any game where I can yell "We'll get to the center of the earth using genetically engineered eighty-foot tall lava-sucking mosquitos!" is a good thing.

You wear it so well.

"I have to wear two layers so they can't see the nipple rings."

[http://ursulav.livejournal.com/833150.html]

Close my eyes to look at you.

Very odd, meeting someone you know well in some ways and not at all in others.

She is very bubbly and vivacious and ruffled my hair frequently, which was an interesting experience as people don't generally treat me like I'm cute. Particularly people who have to reach up to ruffle my hair.

Rabbits are cute to look at, but man, I get creeped out looking into their eyes. They're just...they're soulless, or something.

"I had to go through puberty twice, but it was worth it."

Just happens like that.

You’ll never escape me.

we turned off all the lights the other night, and I hear I didn't glow any more than usual

I could have my nose and my upper respiratory passages back any time now. Also my voice. Also my mind. Thankyouverymuch. Life without an immune system is so much fun.

Wow. Look at how much I get done when I don't sleep or eat.

This is the most bizarre virus. We're both tired but can't sleep, and have stomach-aches but are also constantly hungry. I think this virus is doing something with calories. Maybe it's building a particle collider.

There's no need to hog the cookies, 'cuz it's an infinite bag of cookies.

Yes! Just checked the mail and got my company-name registration. I am now something other than merely myself. Just wait. Someday I will rule the universe.

I am rapidly developing the impression that dealing with Israeli bureaucracy is like slamming your head repeatedly into a very slightly padded wall.

Crow is either terminally insane or having a really bad day and wants everyone to share it. Either that, or he is a Norse god really peeved about being imprisoned in the body of a small bird.

Crows with small, roughly triangular gullets attempting to swallow whole saltines: FAIL.

We named her Mystery, Myst for short, because her appearance in our lives was a mystery. And a blessing. And so it remains. As is true, I think, of all love.

Oh, WOW. There goes the mature eagle. If I thought having the juvenile eagle fly toward the house was impressive...oh. my. god. It's like having a deity turn up in your dishwasher, or something.
Why should the sight of a bird move me to tears? It is just a prettily feathered North American vulture, really. In the most blazing white and depthless black.
But oh, such magnificence on wings. This world is too beautiful and we'd better work damned hard to preserve it, because we are not the only beings who matter. it just soared over this megaconsumer development looking supernaturally beautiful and utterly out of place.

No, really. I'm not being sarcastic. I take the little ferry over to the city as a commuting method, but most of the people on it during the summer are tourists, and they're so happy and excited and smiling and taking photos and oohing and aahing over Seattle's considerable natural beauty, over which I am still not jaded after 18 (!!!) years. Then some of them take the little shuttle 'round Alki Point and there's more oohing and aahing when the view opens up to the beach.
I love people loving my city...and even if we move, it'll still always be my city.
But I don't love the tourist who just walked past the house, leaned over the fence, and picked yet another damned rose.

X was very social this past week. Now I'm solidly in control again, and I feel like crap. And weirded out by her actions. I got to jump in here and there, but a lot of it was her.

When bored supervillains don't have heroes to play stupid games with they tend to commit real crimes.

Palmares. Equally important was the complex political organization that these colonies developed, often based at least in part on traditional African practices, with their own kings, military discipline, and internal social stratification. In essence, they constituted nations in exile.

It's about half kendo, half fencing. Strangely, the Jedi never seemed to take advantage of the fact that the lightsaber is effectively bladed 360 degrees around and has no appreciable mass, and only rarely take advantage of the ability to retract and extend the blade at will.

Charivari - a noisy mock serenade (made by banging pans and kettles) to a newly married couple

But humans are pack animals, and it gives us enough sense of community to keep us from going insane.

“Aw c’mon stop complaining, this is fun!”

[http://www.journalfen.net/community/otf_wank/595339.html?thread=48507531#t48507531]

Super Tongan Nassarius. It is a snail. It sounds like a mecha anime.

Photos of it will not develop if taken.

No! I am ''not'' allowed to lust after X!

Avengers v3 56: "Lo, There Shall Come... an Accounting"

Nothing like waking up to find that a part of you died.

My mother learned to gauge how badly I was hurt or how scared I was by how hysterical the laughing was at the time.

Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra

[http://summer-jackel.livejournal.com/tag/writing] "On the third day away from all people, I became silent. It began to happen almost immediately; now, I said nothing, calling my dogs only when needed, with a short whistle or a movement of my hand. Even the written word seemed obtrusive."

"[http://baratron.livejournal.com/597493.html I have] a virtually complete copy of everything I missed. However, the DVR picks up all sounds and seems to favour things like paper rustling, overhead projector whirring, and air conditioning over the human voice, even though I can't imagine anyone wanting to record any of those noises. Despite using both the low cut filter (which is supposed to remove low frequency machine noise) and the playback noise filter, there's still an awful lot of distracting extra sound. And because the playback noise filter cuts out some human voice frequencies along with the noise, the speaker sounds somewhat robotic and some words are inaudible."

"Tell me about Rovac."
"It's a place where the ground's the ground and the sky's the sky. The people there are born of women, some nine months after their parents couple. To live they eat and drink; at the end of living they find they die."

I am a woman, not a pod babies grow in. I'm not the life support system for a womb and ovaries.

[http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=936]

Presume not that I am the thing I was, for I have turned away from what I once was. Oh, it is excellent to have a giant's strength! But it is tyrannous to use it. (PLOT GIZKA. Yay TSSM!)

Informatio-Scope

[http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunnybusiness/53170.html FESTIVAL OF STUPID!]

My name comes from Greek for "rational"! That or it's derived from "Alice", which is derived from French "Adelais" which is in turn derived from old Germanic "Adalheidis", "of nobility". "Alexander" and its derivatives mean "Defender/protector/savior of mankind." ARGH STOP WITH THE PLOT GIZKA.

I had an aunt who believed that the world would end in 1978; Apocalypse and riders and all.

Everyone who knew me before thinks I'm dead.

Leyolet! Why didn't I think of that before?! See, "Level Up", said really quickly and with my weird inflection, sounds like "Leh vyol yup", and at some point I just started using Leyolet. Okay then.

"I've put on enough muscle in my legs that even relaxed-fit pants are painfully tight and cut off my circulation. By texture, it's not fat."

You guys, you guys, I finally discovered what everyone's been saying: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg skilled] dancing is incredibly sexy! Yeah, I know, but I'm slow at figuring these things out. Skilled dancing is awesome. And so is [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cYWfq this!]

Tech bubble, housing bubble, thaumic bubble.

Big face on a big neck.

Many soldiers, when they march into battle, do so with their heads down like they're going into a strong wind, hunkered down to present a smaller profile. Not us. Our heads are high, backs straight, daring the enemy.

Ladarks

Je ne sais quoi. "I don't know what."

Or Xenos. That means "stranger" in Latin.

http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/poetry/TheSpelloftheYukon/chap19.html

DON'T LOOK DOWN.

"[[http://www.journalfen.net/community/otf_wank/609478.html And]] the children were asking, where is the boy who is Jesus Christ? We have seen his controversy in the East and are come to go trick-or-treating with him.
And lo, the boy who is Jesus Christ and his followers went trick-or-treating, and received gifts of Butterfingers, Kit-Kat bars, and M and Ms. Plus some weird old guy who gave them myrrh.
And having been warned by the older kids not to go to Old Lady Murray's house, they got into their parents' cars and returned home by another way."

"He'd lost his home, his family, his past. All that was left to him was his future, one that had then seemed threatening instead of inviting." I love Wedge.

[[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/fun/freestuff/audio/VIXY_AND_TONY_Rich%20Fantasy%20Lives.mp3 Some whispering poem was calling us home, to a place we know never existed.]]

Chris texted from DC that his plane crashed and he was dead, but thought he'd be okay. I wrote back and told him to stay out of the sun.

You have destroyed me utterly.

Do it again.

What's love? This sense of freezing-bitter loss, the pit of anguish whose eyes I can't quite bring myself to fully meet yet, and which I am becoming heartily sick of? Or the way the sunlight catches briefly on a strand of your hair and the world collapses itself into a
breathless and giddy moment of beauty, as piercing and pure-tasting as ice water? The moment in which I catch a breath of your scent by accident and, before I check myself, am moved to bliss?

It's November, and I can feel myself dying again. I'm starting to forget how many times it's been, but then I've never been fantastic with numbers. I wonder what new thing will rise from my compost heap this time?

FDR: "A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest-at the command — of his head."

Siren (ginger, jasmine, vanilla and apricot)

He is a lovely, lovely singer. His acting skills are on par with a certain Captain James "The T Stands For Manwhore, What Do You Mean I Failed Spelling?" Kirk portrayer.

'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia !'

'Be yourself. Everyone else is taken!'

Fainting: "I was walking, and then I was asleep with silent blackness all around me, and then I heard music and people talking and dishes clinking like at a party, and then I woke up and I was sitting in a chair with worried people all around me and my vision was clouded with little silver-edged black sparkles. I felt like I had been asleep for hours, but everyone said it was only a few seconds. I kept asking "Where am I?" but I knew where I was, I just couldn't comprehend what was going on. I felt like I must have traveled some enormous distance, I must have passed out and been unconscious for hours, surely they would have taken me to a hospital, so why would I still be at the doctor's office? It was completely disorienting. Being passed out felt ''just'' like being asleep."

Let me insert a slightly more annoyed rant about what it's like to be a non-traditional bio-female in the army. Judging from what other people say, every female (I think we're still at less than 10% of the total military population) has this same rocky reef to navigate, so my own personal set of grievances is just the way that this institution manifested in my case. I have heard it summed up like this:
- If you don't sleep with any of the army guys, you must be a lesbian.
- If you sleep with one army guy, then you're probably okay, or at least normal.
- If you sleep with more than one army guy, then you're a total slut and deserve no respect.
- (And if you watch enough Powerpoint briefings, bullet points really start to grow on you.)

Dantooine - dorian passion fruit

"Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String"

Breathe easy?! I'm trapped inside a psychopathic corpse! I can't get out!

I am the boomstick.

I have needs now - dirty, horrible needs.

I, for one, think it's pretty awesome that a god-tier space lord with phenomenal cosmic powers can just kick back every so often and have a brew with his dad, talking about all the wicked cool shit he's been doing.

I'm happy, hope you're happy too.

The main difference, I guess, is that the hydraulic “muscles” work more by pushing, while human muscles work by pulling.

Tomorrow starts today.

[http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/6495598.html Dead!]

"And that's why I don't like magic, Captain. 'cos it's ''magic''. You can't ask questions, it's magic. It doesn't explain anything, it's magic. You don't know where it comes from, it's magic! That's what I don't like about magic, it does everything by magic!"

I thought it was a guiding omen, but it screams in the night.

Greek term thauma (marvel)

Technically, Zaktan from Bionicle. When his old boss tried to vaporize him, he was somehow able to pull himself back together as microscopic "protodites". In this new, permanent state, Zaktan can easily avoid attacks by turning into an insect swarm; change the shape of body parts; heal damage by filling the gaps with Protodites; and engulf a foe in an attack that must feel like getting hit with thousands of needles. Zaktan himself calls it a curse however, as his voice now sounds like a crowd speaking; and whenever he wakes up he can feel his body shifting "where there once were tissue and solid metal".

The boss of a level who plans to kill a bunch of civilians to cover his tracks is revealed to be an ex-employee of Stark industries fired for stealing supplies: "My inventions helped make you rich Stark! You never should have fired me!" Tony (Iron Man) "You were stealing pens!"

[lj-cut text = "This is a massive piece of ASM"]
Lots of pictures
[/lj-cut]
But with pointy brackets instead of square brackets.

"Tony is molested by technology" is almost as popular an Iron Man storyline as "Something's wrong with Tony's heart/nervous sytem/etc--again!" Then there's the combination plot of "Tony's armor is killing him, yet he keeps wearing it anyway because he's just that stubborn."

"See, a side-effect of being able to break bricks with my bare hands is that I have a hard time fitting into clothes that are designed for the average woman. My arms are just too big and muscular (and so are my thighs, and my calves…)"

Human brains are 21% of our bodyweight.

"humans are actually very weak for animals their size, due to a difference in muscle protein structures. A typical adult chimpanzee could rip the arms off an Olympic weight lifter." "Chimps have a lot of dense quick-burst muscle, but they can't swim and they have very poor endurance." "Humans have great long-term endurance, though." "Yeah. We're built for chasing gazelles. For miles. Until the damn thing falls over from exhaustion and we beat its head in with whatever's handy. (See Niven's "Folk Tale.") Lions can't do that. They're sprinters." "The average office worker (ie, unfit sod who walks at most a mile a day) can train themselves up within a month to run 4-5 miles in one go, and then you have this thing called a 'marathon'. I don't think anyone even contemplates asking a horse to do that. That's not even counting how long someone can row or cycle for."

Human endurance running ability has been inadequately appreciated because of a failure to recognize that "high speed is not always important," [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041123163757.htm Bramble says.] "What is important is combining reasonable speed with exceptional endurance." Hairless, clawless, and largely weaponless, ancient humans used the unlikely combination of sweatiness and relentlessness to gain the upper hand over their faster, stronger, generally more dangerous animal prey, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman said Thursday (April 12). “Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom,” [http://www.physorg.com/news95954919.html Lieberman said.] [http://barista.media2.org/?p=3080] While animals get rid of excess heat by panting, they can’t pant when they gallop, Lieberman said. That means that to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans didn’t have to run further than the animal could trot and didn’t have to run faster than the animal could gallop. All they had to do is to run faster, for longer periods of time, than the slowest speed at which the animal started to gallop. [http://www.google.com/search?q=persistence+hunting&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS234US234]

I love being human.

[http://joysweeper.livejournal.com/54369.html Another Idea Bank dump].

== Unfinished Story Ideas ==

Title: It's part of the Revan Saga. This part could easily be called "Five Years".
Names: Revan. Elisa Freeman.
Gist: Ask for character. Dark room, eyes very wide, ears very sharp, distracted, blindsided, no v/h, fighting, “Finish me now!”, doesn’t happen. Lingers, lasts. Walks away, Revan’s compensating and on edge(paranoid! Paranoid!), Elisa is d/b and scared, little communication – attempts. Throat vibration, monitoring tongue and lips, no idea w/out sound. Revan can’t read English. Elisa can’t read Aurebesh. War robes, war mask, bogan, intimidation factor up. Make it back to CC, one-sided conversation, healing trance. FIVE YEARS. FIVE YEARS, and Fake Rip Van Winkle it to twenty. No! More! AWESOMESAUCE.

On the Saga: Gwah. Maybe meld them all into one again. And get some things straight. Call her "Elisa Freeman", do this consistently. She's a potter, she is an art major at Midtral, her family is up in Wisconsin, she has a brother named Kris. Her father, Jack, works for American Airlines as a pilot. Yes, this is suspiciously self-insertiony, but I've already come this far.

[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/26/notes102607.DTL The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.] "At least 1,500 miles wide (give or take, could be much larger, no one's quite sure because it's a bit difficult to measure), 30 meters deep, 80 percent plastic, and 100 percent appalling." I wish I could get rid of it for real. Damn.
Oooh. That island of plastic in the Pacific... I bet I could do something with that. Yeah... FMA is popular enough, and even if not, there's sure to be mages or something who could work it out. Why not? Displacement of seawater wouldn't be an issue, not like raising seamounts. Okay! It's settled! A new country, maybe? Hmm. Not just one mass, there would be several "islands", chained together. Propulsion systems. A hospital-type facility on one, for the long-term cases. Yes. Yes! It's good!

Title(tentative): Eh, why not? "Joysweeper". A little narcissism can be fun.
Names: Let's use my real name, shall we?
Gist: Self insertion for the win. Things that I have/could get: wings, ear thingies, contact lenses, Ace bandages, some kind of tail, possibly press-on canines. Forehead horn? I don't know. I could buy one, but... Anyway. Family is in Orlando why? Laborday Weekend, right. Maybe won a discount for Disneyland. I go to the Kublai Con on the second day, dropped off. I see Freeman in her Revan costume, don't have the nerve to go over and talk to her, berate myself about it. Describe the Ignore Her effect, if applicable. Get mopey. It happens in the handicapped stall. Everyone and anyone else leaves. Forehead horn, corner-of-jaw horns. ''Maybe'' backswept horns and spinal ridges, might be a bit much. Bone, smooth, sharp, maybe coated with enamel or something. Scales where appropriate, the foot thing, special wing-arm. Trapped in the bathroom, can't push door. Ceiling looks ''high''. Make something rudimentary out of a bit of bandage, waits until door gets opened - it's Anj, but he doesn't notice - flee. Afraid to fly - the heights thing - get kicked, latch onto a leg. Wingclaws - maybe not normal venom. Maybe that agent I've been thinking of... hmm. It's a thought. Find some kind of ending, okay?

Title(tentative): "Everest". "Because It's There".
Names: Hnn. Let's say - Daniel, Edward, Leah. Maybe don't bother with last names. But if needed - Batey, Alden, Piwarski. College student directories are useful, useful things.

Gist: Everest. VG, werewolf type A, snowtrooper. Probably need a few others. Guides, right? Timeframe, keep it vague. At least a year after, possibly more. First Xanadu people(need to find a name for that) to climb Everest; can say that supers have flown to the top before, but that doesn't count. Supplies get sabotaged. Freak out the guides, make them leave? Howling in the night. Antagonists? Climate is one. Yeti? Ferals? Terrorists, c'mon, you've thought about it. Should have some Xanadu connection. Oooh - Xanadu has caused right-and-left wing antiglobalists to band together, possible Islamic connection - they don't believe that it isn't the result of a secret gov't project. The costumes are thought to be entirely supportive of Jewish conspiracies. Refer to notes. But just because you hate and fear something doesn't mean you won't use it. Hmm. Send Dan down the mountain, hole up Ed and Leah for a while, food running out, power packs get sabotaged/stolen. Storms. Major storms. Drive them out into one. Confrontation. Rescue should come in the denoument, if then.

"8113. You are 8113. That is what you will respond to from this point on. 8113. We need you." Yeah. Leah wants an identity that's more than a designation, more than one of the few female troopers. Yeah. Edward is a secondary. Let's say... mmm... bioluminary tattoos are all the rage after Xanadu, he got bit by a were, couldn't be fully cured - reaction to the tattoo - ended up a type A, which isn't a bad thing. Why? Well, he's always wanted to do it. Were-ing out would make it easier. That's part of it, anyway. Daniel? Exploration. Listen to a lot of LoZ music.

Okay. Daniel... I want him to be mute, but avoid the obvious way to get around it. Hells. I've played versions of LoZ, I know the character never speaks, but everyone knows what he's getting at. Sure! He can say "Hey" and maybe "Whoa" or "C'mon" and one or two others, but is otherwise pretty much wordless. Same with writing and typing, perhaps a few words at most. Okay. No regular telepathy, that wordless form that came up you know where. Portrayed "Dan looked up, blinking, and told them that if they were going to fight they really should get to it already." Yeah, that could work. Get Leah to repeat things back - "No, I'm not cold" and not be aware of it. Happens all the time in Star Wars. Don't make a big deal of it.

Title(tentative): "Shell", perhaps.
Names:… I'm actually thinking first-person for this. Hold off on the names for a while
Gist: Powered armor. I love it, and I need to make this as obvious as possible. Maybe more. Iron Man was great in that regard(and in most others). Soo... We start with my protag waking up and finding that something is wrong. Let's say she(male originally, original character) was killed a week after the Event, body dissolved or something, and brought back in armor. But! The protag is in the armor itself, the ''character'' is wearing it. Refer to notes on AI ghosts. And that bit about the difference between a Stranger and a Palim. She ''could'' be my WBH.

"I was! I'm not anymore."

"After it happens, they all ask each other, 'why didn't somebody act? It could have been so different.' So many times, it's kept from happening. Somebody can't be everywhere, and they don't remember that. Somebody has a lot of hard and thankless work, but somebody has to do it. Guess what? You're somebody too."

"Don't take it so personally. They are what they were made to be. I'm sorry. I forgot. ''You are what you were made to be, too.''" - I ''love'' Nealan of Queenscove and Keladry!

...You know what? If for the self-insertion I'm really going to have... that ... happen, that still leaves my family. And my stuff. You know... could be a total blank who picks my ID up and wonders "Was this mine?" Or could be a Stranger. Could be... could be... NO NO NO NO! I won't! I don't even know where to start! It would be interesting. It would be so ''boss.'' But gaddammit, I can't. Yet. It's out there.
I keep thinking about it! Because it makes ''sense''. Even as a complete and total Stranger who looks at his own previous parents with nary a trace of recognition - the character I have in mind would ''visit anyway'', stay over for a two day period or visit for the holidays(because naturally he would be... busy). The chara I have in mind would feel all guilty if he didn't do that at the ''minimum''. It'd be interesting to speculate how they'd react on all sides. They'd be losing me, but I ''am'' a nerdy money-sink artsy loner who makes a really good sounding board - they'd think, maybe after some convincing, that I'd become the chara I have in mind. I don't think they even know that I like him! And he is - he is a leader, an inspirational archetypal good-guy chara. Who happens to be a soldier, a ridiculous athlete(A mile in just over a minute?!), a baseball fan, an artist, and a big pretty blond man. Wow. This is completely untapped territory! ''Completely!''

...Am I actually considering this? Gaaah!

I'd need some reason why they'd think he was me, instead of just picking up my stuff at random. Oh, I know! On That Day, I'm wearing a Cap-related T-shirt("Cap Was Right", maybe), and there is actually a photo with me in the background or whatever to confirm this. Also, a button on my bag that has that design. Ooooh. I don't think I can actually do this yet... but damn if it's not interesting. Particularly if I waffle on actually having ... that ... happen and it gets cleared up a few weeks after the visit. And hey, it's not like I actually ''have'' to use my folks. It would just be mean if I vanished during the Event and they never got any closure.

DISSOLVED INTO A CLOUD OF BEES. Bees. My God. [/DC reference] I love it. Cloud of bees! Swarm, the Nazi-made-of-bees? [/Marvel reference] Nah. ''Hate'' Nazis. Inspired by, maybe. Human skeleton? Mmm. Maybe. Form a human skeleton made of beeswax? YES! YES! Not regular bees, tougher, something more like certain ants, can link up to pull on the bones like muscles. Utter nonsense! I love it! "As I watched, he stumbled, his skin bunching unnaturally, as if he was instantly being covered in boils - he fell, too fast for me to react, fell flat on his face. As he hit he dissolved, coming apart like a crumbling sandcastle into a swarm of hundreds, thousands of bees. They droned, coalescing into a cloud, and shot off in a stream. I saw his clothes, empty but for a few stragglers struggling out of the folds." Bees. '' Bees.'' I love it.

Y'know... okay, some kind of AIM. One-sided. "Shakennotstirred" for the Bond connection. Can maybe do it
like this. Yeah, this could work. Looks kind of disruptive, but it could work.
"Take off your gloves". Hnn. Can cameo VvD(Hee!). Cargo crates at entrances, put a TR as guard. The schism. Maybe. I don't think they'd be the antagonists, though. Need someone else. Or something. Raise an army? Of what? I love how ridiculously obscure my notes are. If you-who-is-not-Joysweeper is getting any of this, I commend you.

==Links==

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvHbo4hBZBc Has he lost his mind, dare he see or is he blind/ can he walk at all or if he moves will he fall/ Is he live or dead, has he thoughts within his head. We'll just pass him there, why should we even care?]

[http://www.veryfunnyads.com/ads/25502.html] Isn't it beautiful what hands can do?

[http://www.geekologie.com/2008/08/eye_candy_massive_gallery_of_t.php Cosplayers]

["Tony Stark 2.0's Top 5 Positives about no longer possessing an organic human body." http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/5872615.html]

People are strange, when you're a stranger. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b3XxWYBxGo]

Just listen to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUUGVVQjUNk this] again. Next time, though, wait for daybreak.

[http://www.thedevilspanties.com/d/20080409.html] Con costume-bingo card.

[http://joysweeper.livejournal.com/40801.html#cutid1] The quotes I cut to save space.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xkyZ6MbpNc X-Men Meets Wicked.] Catchy.

[http://www.bamkapow.com/bk-feature-why-superman-will-always-suck-1189-p.html Why Superman Will Always Suck.]

[http://community.livejournal.com/wtf_nature/241400.html Terry the Talking Raven.] Interesting. Related are some bits with talking crows who are not nearly as coherent, but Victor the parakeet tops them all by having some degree of meaning in what he says. Talking birds all seem to have a "type".

[http://joysweeper.livejournal.com/38070.html#cutid1]

[http://regender.com/index.html Regender]

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=189QSTKC5no Yuri the Only One For Me]

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCXsDmvvzjw&feature=related Geeks in Love], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWKyAON4md8 Word Disassociation.]

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVjzd320gew]Enthusiastic feline fitness FTW!

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4se7auC-6bo]Cellblock Tango

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK00DMcDygs]. I love the world

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXOa5bWFRKw Birth of Sandman]

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiNGK3y5Ypg Free speech does not equal scientific theory!] This is a good one. Have a little respect for the [http://youtube.com/watch?v=iPuKoEYCs2o "scientific minority".] Exactly what that has to do with inspiring me is unknown. But it gives me happy shivers, so it can't be all bad.

James Gurney's articles on how "character designers have developed clever ways to infuse animals with human personalities." [http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/02/animal-characters-1-anthropomorphic.html] [http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/02/animal-characters-2-humanization.html]
[http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/02/animal-characters-3-near-relations.html] [http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/02/animal-characters-4-animal-morphism.html]

[http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/4685748.html#cutid1] DUDE! YES! AWESOME! FIVE YEARS!

Lots of motivational posters [http://eeknight.livejournal.com/334981.html here]. Verrry interesting. "Tribute to Gary Gygax". Hmm.

[http://joysweeper.livejournal.com/35876.html#cutid1 This] was intended to be part of an epilogue for a story Bryan and I are working on. Then it got long. I had a lot of fun with it, though.

[http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/motivational-posters-for.php?page=1 Motivational posters for supervillains.]

Woo, [http://www.pisoga.com/2007/10/avatar.html episodes of Avatar.] I feel all warm and squirmy inside!

[http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm "Little Brother"]

[http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/5425290.html The Nearness of You.] Love and loss...

==Fangirling.==

"Dude, it's Captain America. He believes in freedom, justice, civil liberties, gay rights, gender equality and yeah, that means punching men and women without discriminating."

[http://bullyscomics.blogspot.com/2007/08/swinging-on-star.html Swinging on a Star]

[http://kalinara.blogspot.com/2008/07/sentinel-of-liberty-5-and-6.html]

[http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/1031360.html]

"Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world - "No, you move.""
--Captain America

[http://www.4thletter.net/2007/07/o-captain-my-captain/] "That’s what Cap stands for. Righting wrongs and being righteous in your life."

"God damn! How'd he do that? I mean he's only a human mutated to the apex of physical perfection with a genius for tactics and battle strategy... oh." - [http://mightygodking.com/index.php/i-dont-need-your-civil-war/ Mightygodking's] "I Don't Need Your Civil War"

[http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/5514155.html#cutid1 "Also- Tony, you] don't think an event of this magnitude is worth some attention, maybe you could start figuring out what's going on- or I guess you could dig through every cell-phone video, security camera footage, and satellite photo possible to find the most heroic and manly shots of Steve, set them up aesthetically above your worktop, and stare at them. I'm sure SHIELD will be able to handle things. That's probably about what they were expecting you to do anyway."

A trimmed-down conversation:
"Steve did a whole bunch of advertising work in the '80's, and he illustrated the Captain America book for Marvel just after that. That's actually my favourite period of Cap. I should probably post some. Steve's private life was just as important as his professional hero life at that point, and they really got into it a lot."
"..He illustrated his own book? I find that very funny, even though I'm sure you mean his in-the-MU book. Was he hired as Steve Rogers to do that?"
"Yup, and he didn't just illustrate it. He told the writers and editors off for making it too violent and out of character. It was as Steve Rogers, with his lovely illustration portfolio, which doubled as a shield case at the time. [...] Like, he walked into work at the Marvel offices to hand in his pages, and reamed out the guys there. It was weird. It was a good job for him too, because eventually he went on one of his periodic "Rediscover America by traveling it all on motorcycle" phases, and he could just mail in his pages."
That is so ''boss''!. I love character-creator conflict. And the idea of a character ''having input on his own book?!'' [http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/5564802.html "RAH RAH" walked out on this one!]

[http://kalinara.blogspot.com/2008/05/miscellaneous-captain-america-thought.html Misc Thought] Oh, wow, intelligent comments! "He's never been a personification of American nationalism -- he's a personification of American IDEALS." "At heart, 616's Captain America is, I think, still a dreamy artist in the body of a greek god."

"It's in Classic-verse #3, when the Avengers are arguing over what movies they need to make Steve watch. The awesome part is that Steve is canonically a Tolkien fan. There's panel somewhere in either volume 1 Cap or volume 1 Avengers where he's mentally listing the greatest cultural accomplishments of the 20th century, and Tolkien's on the list."

It has nothing to do with anything, but it made me laugh. I love scans_daily. ...And I, too, want Steve Rogers. Damn it, come back from the dead already!

"I'm not sure if I want Steve or just his stuff!"
"This is very bad for me as a comic fan. Steve's a wonderful blend of manly and metero. I want all my men to have nice clean homes yet be manly! ;__;"
"We only have one hope! Making comic book characters real and then (scratched out)fight for them!(/scratched out) clone them!"
"Yes! But I get the feeling that I'd be lecture for my less than clean habits. *glances around her dorm room*"
"And really we'd have to be careful because when you really thing about Batman or Superman wouldn't be the best of boyfriends."
"This is why I go for the Marvel boys, they're less scary. But damn, Bats and Supes. Damn."

[http://filingcabinetofthedamned.blogspot.com/2005/10/stealing-from-long-box-or-political.html Get up so I can knock you down!] “We start off with a would-be hero who fights purely enough, only to slowly hit a snare thanks to his beliefs. Then it gets worse as time goes by until he’s responsible for untold damage. Once things look their bleakest, we get the hero we weren’t even sure we were ever going to find. The build up steams and we return to our villain, who has reached almost complete insanity. Things come to a head and we get the coolest fight scene ever with some of my all-time favorite comic lines (“[http://www.4thletter.net/?p=244 Get up so I can knock you down!!]”). And just as the fight comes to an end with a true victor, it goes directly into a strong conclusion.”<- Ooh ooh! Maybe a robot/mecha character for the WBH? Heart beats strongly, pulsing in throat, temples, gums. Stops. "You can't feel yourself breathe. You can't feel your heartbeat. And you can't recognize the man in the mirror"

Joysweeper ''really'' likes Cap. [http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/2828744.html Oh, responsibility!]

Walker Imperial Ranger

2009-06-30T04:20:40Z

Joysweeper:

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Xanadu]][[Category:Story]][[Category:Alien]][[Category:Inanimorph]][[Category:Transgender]][[Category:Joysweeper]][[Category:Bryan]]
{{universe|Xanadu}}
{{byline|author=Joysweeper|user=Joysweeper}}

By Joysweeper, with some help from Bryan.

Don't read this story yet :)

It'll be done when it's done. For the record, I intend to finish before Duke Nukem.

Links to some pictures of AT-ATs, for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-hlc.jpg] Close up of chin-mounted heavy laser cannons
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:MCQ-battleofhoth.jpg] Low-angle concept art
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SWRSIIIRSWP.jpg] More concept art(Talk about uneven odds. Luke > everything.)
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:BlizzardForce.jpg] ESB screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Blizzard_2.jpg] Another screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-swrs3rs.jpg] High-angle(sort of) image
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:AT-AT_egvv.jpg] Schematics
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT_height.jpg] Bad bluescreen, but it does convey size pretty well.

Links to some pictures of Red Guards, also for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Guard.png] Red robes and a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos_NEGTC.jpg] Kir Kanos, helmet off, showing the armor. He never uses a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos.jpg] The Emperor's guards aren't just for show.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kanos3.JPG] Kir Kanos showing the armor again. Different look at the belt.

Have to thank [http://community.livejournal.com/brains_in_a_jar/ brains-in-a-jar] for thoughts on a human brain in a very nonhuman mechanical body, and also all kinds of things about static. Also have to thank Robert T. Bakker for writing "The Dinosaur Heresies"; that bit on a lizard's wrist was extremely interesting.

And I found this quote on one of the 501st homepages. It is so ''perfect''. "Some fans are content to collect action figures...other fans want to ''be'' action figures. Nothing professes your fandom quite like building your own detailed costume replica of a classic Star Wars villain, and there's nothing quite like the feeling that comes from bringing the characters of Star Wars into the real world and sharing the magic with others. A truly engaging Star Wars experience only occurs through a convincing appearance. To this end, the 501st constantly strives to improve the quality and accuracy of its member's costumes. Our goal is to appear as if our characters have just stepped off the big screen and into this world." I hope I can find some way to use this ironically. Probably not ''this'' story, but I'm going to have to stow it away.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Hoojib.jpg]]

==Bryan's intro==

"The door, the door!" Steph called out and lunged to intercept the handle swinging in to catch Garrett's back, stopping it just in time to prevent another ding in the cardboard that might be difficult to repair now that they were at the convention itself.

Garrett let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks." He had turned sideways but thanks to the huge boxy hump over his back it didn't make him any narrower and only really served to make it harder to keep track of everything. And with the two giant cardboard constructs mounted over his arms there wasn't really much he could do anyway; his hands were busy just holding the internal braces in place.

Steph grinned and slipped lithely around to join him in the lobby once Garrett had managed to make it inside. "You'd think armor capable of repelling turbolasers could handle a door handle."

Garrett shook his head. His costume was particularly fragile, being both bulky and made primarily out of cardboard, but it had been surprisingly quick and easy to make as a result. "It'll last until judging. Spray a jot of black on any tears and call 'em battle damage, the Rebels must've got a few lucky hits in." The lobby was sparsely populated right now, with just a few folks still lined up at the front desk buying passes to glance in surprise at Garrett's outfit, but Garrett decided it was showtime. He leaned forward and fell into his quadrupedal stance, the big round footpads of his forelimbs clomping to the ground to support him and the headpiece tilting down into the correct orientation.

There were a few appreciative murmurs as the onlookers finally recognized the iconic Imperial walker he was dressed as. Steph gave a little flourish and a bow, as if taking credit for the outfit, and then stepped forward to give Garrett something to follow. They'd considered trying to rig up a periscope of some sort so that Garrett could see forward more easily but they'd run out of time for details like that; it was enough that the AT-AT's legs were able to support him as things were, they'd had to compromise on the costume's proportions a bit just to make it work.

The majority of the work had taken only a single week. Since it only really had to survive for a single day of use ease of construction had been a fair tradeoff. Garrett was like that with all of his projects; a flash of inspiration, a whirlwind of construction, and then once it was finished the itch was satisfied and he would lose interest and let it go. Steph counted it as sheer luck that this time around the inspiration had come when they might make some money off of it. He'd been tight with Garrett for a couple of years now, both of them in the same engineering degree at the nearby University of Midtral, and was the less-imaginative and more-practical of the two.

"Two please," Steph signed in. "Stephen Midder and Garrett Thompson. Just for today." He pointed to identify themselves.

"Registered for any of the contests?" The man behind the desk asked. Garrett nodded silently, the walker-head bobbing almost comically. "Right..." The man shuffled through a list, presumably checking for Garrett's name, and then looked back up once he'd checked it off. "Ten for him, thirty for you."

"Eh? Aww." Steph got out his wallet to pay for the passes. "Should've worn a costume myself." ''Not that I could have got a discount for any costume that cost under twenty dollars, of course.'' But he supposed that wasn't really the point.

The two of them had done some pretty wacky and nerdy things together. The AT-AT costume had blown away everyone at the Halloween party they'd been to on campus just a few nights previous, in fact that had been the primary impetus for building the thing in the first place. But as they proceeded down the hall toward the convention rooms where the main population of conventiongoers were congregating, Steph began wondering if they'd finally reached their level. The variety and creativity of hand-crafted costumes on display was enormous. Still, there wasn't anything quite like the AT-AT costume Garrett wore and it still drew a good share of attention.

Upon entering the first convention room - a dealer's room, from the look of the tables set up along the side walls, but nonetheless full of costume-wearers - they almost immediately encountered someone in a Stormtrooper outfit. It was a perfect replica in every detail, clearly a labor of love, and the person wearing it was dedicated enough to playing the role that he resisted the temptation to drop out of character.

"You're out of uniform, pilot," the trooper commented as he gave Steph a nod of acknowledgment in passing.

Steph was at a loss for a response but Garrett gave a most un-AT-AT-like chuckle. Garrett had been shuffling along behind Stephen on all fours, barely able to see more than the backs of Stephen's heels, and he took the opportunity after the trooper had passed to stand back up again and look around. "Lots of competition."

"Yeah." Steph sighed; the prospect of winning any of the prize money seemed more distant now that he'd seen some of what they were up against. This was just the first room and there was an amazing gargoyle with what looked like pneumatically-operated wings, a really hot fox-girl who had made a masterful blend of both plush fabric and her own natural attributes, and a lizard-man... no, Steph corrected himself, a Gorn. The Gorn's costume was nearly as good as the one from the original Star Trek episode had been. "Still, nothing like an AT-AT, eh?"

"Excuse us, please," A small woman in a jockey costume asked from behind Garrett's cardboard bulk. He shuffled to the side to let her through, leading a man in an amazing horse costume. The thing made him seven feet tall, with a long neck and perfect horse's head, and the hoof-gloves made Steph wonder if he could get down on all fours too.

"Heh. Damn." Garrett shook his head. "Well, thank goodness for categories, eh?"

Steph gave a wry grin. "Yeah. Though I'm feeling a bit under-dressed myself now."

It didn't really matter much since Garrett was the center of attention, as intended; Steph was along just to open doors and do the other things Garrett couldn't manage in that hulking outfit. But as they proceeded through the room Steph found his gaze lingering on some of the costuming wares being sold.

People would stop to stare, take photos, or ask Steph questions about the AT-AT costume. Since he was the one leading the way, with Garrett's face down and concealed under the cardboard headpiece, it was natural that they'd assume he was in charge. But when Garrett reared up to proudly answer the questions they'd immediately switch to ignoring Steph instead. It was quickly beginning to annoy him; though the idea and the design for the AT-AT costume had been Garrett's they'd worked on it together.

"Hang on, Garrett," Steph finally called. They were on their way to the exhibition hall but they were still quite early, they'd left plenty of flex in their schedule to account for difficulties with the costume. "I want to look at some of the stuff they're selling here."

"Stuff?" Garrett got up and looked around.

There weren't any Star Wars branded costume supplies at hand, and if there were they'd probably be too expensive. ''Twenty dollars, eh? I can spend twenty dollars.'' That left mainly just the cheesier costume gear.

After a few minutes of browsing Garrett got back down on all fours and spent a little while tromping back and forth. The arms of the AT-AT costume were quite heavy; in addition to the cardboard shell they had a pair of aluminum canes inside, trimmed short and affixed to the broad metal bucket lids that formed the soles of his "forefeet". Despite the crick he was sure he'd eventually develop in his back it was actually easier moving around like this.

There wasn't as much of an audience in here, though. The people who already had costumes were gravitating off somewhere else and those were the ones he was most interested in impressing with his ingenuity and attention to detail. He wasn't a big Star Wars fan himself but he'd dug up some schematics from a scan of some old Star Wars book. He'd even hung a Luke Skywalker pilot action figure on a string from his underside, mimicking the famous scene from Empire Strikes Back where the proto-Jedi had grappled up on board one after being shot down on Hoth, but he'd lost that particular accessory somewhere during the Halloween party and hadn't bothered looking for a replacement. There didn't seem to be anything like that in this area of the dealer's room...

He tromped over to Steph. "We going to move on?" He prompted.

Steph sighed. The twin goals of 'attention-grabbing' and 'cheap' weren't meshing very well. "Okay, just let me grab something." Something totally incongruous would probably be best. So... "Ah, I'll take that." A pair of fuzzy bunny ears on a headband for just ten bucks. Garrett didn't even look up and Steph grinned; he'd be startled when he did.

They continued onward.

==Joysweeper's pre-TF setup==

On the way they'd called it a "function" as if it'd been some kind of social event, and in a desultory fashion they'd been trying to get donations to the Leukemia Society, but it was far from formal. The Kublai Con attendees were pretty generous – TR-1407, given name “Angela Kincaid”, calling herself “Anj” while in costume - had once heard it said that furry cons generated more money than scifi cons, and Xanadu was a mixture of both.

What had made the effort fun was the “act”. Angela lost count of just how many times she’d heard friends declaring with feigned authority that the 501st Legion was here to keep the peace and maintain order. Essentially they’d just threatened anyone who looked impressive enough, and almost everyone had played along, reacting in fear or challenging the Imperials to a duel.

She’d personally “fought” an armored anthro dragon with a very realistic whipping tail, matching her forcepike with his curved fiberglass sword, and although she’d “lost” she had also had the pleasure of seeing him back down when faced with the blasters of eighteen stormtroopers. Good donation from that one, too, when they'd explained and everything.

The "TR" prefix in front of the number she had picked as her identification - she'd chosen fourteen oh seven - indicated which costume was her favorite. "TK" meant stormtrooper, "TC" was clonetrooper, "SL" was Sith Lord... there were a number of them for the various types. "TR" meant that she favored the Emperor's guards in their red helmets and flowing robes. They were called Red Guards, Royal Guards, and various other combinations of "Red", "Royal", "Imperial", and "Emperor's". Frankly, Angela preferred "Red Guard". The arguments some of her friends got into about nomenclature gave her a headache - fanwank was one thing, and you had to be a little anal to care about a screen-accurate costume, but some people went too far.

She’d heard from one of them that someone had actually caught a pickpocket in the act and had proceeded to instill the fear of the Empire into him, winning a lot of amusement from everyone else in the process, but she hadn’t seen it herself, nor had anyone who told the story. It was probably hyperbole. That didn’t stop the thought from being entertaining.

Now it was over and the group was dispersing. TR-1407 was glad to leave, frankly. The costume, with heavy cloth robes over already-stifling armor, had slowly become hot enough to, as the phrase went, fry fleek eels with, the ice packs had either thawed or hadn't been working in the first place, and no amount of water or robe-flapping could make it entirely tolerable. The bodysuit under the plating under the robes was so drenched with sweat that she'd probably have to peel it off.

Not for the first time she wished that she hadn’t bothered with the tight bodysuit and the armor that went over it. It wasn’t like it would have visibly made a difference. Some Red Guards liked to keep their robes thrown behind their shoulders like a cloak, the better to show off the detailing on their armor. Angela, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone guessing that she was female, and so kept her robes arranged about her body, hiding everything but her hands, her feet, and her helmet. It still would have been far, ''far'' too hot – the helmet was the next thing to airtight, and only the respirator that threaded down to her waist kept her from suffocating – but at least she wouldn’t feel like sparks were smoldering under her robes.

But… no. More than once during the “fight” her robes had swept about, and both before and after they hadn’t exactly hung neatly. She would ''never'' have heard the end of it if she were to come to an event “half-dressed”.

“Remember, there’s a march at three,” she told her friend and former pupil SL-1984 as they left, part of a stream. The majority of Tampa Bay Squad happened to be heading in the same direction. “We meet before two thirty in the southwest parking lot.” Little single-squadron things like the function were fun, but the real thrill was always when the entire 501st, or as much of it as was attending any particular convention, marched together. There was just something about it that felt exhilarating. Like she was part of something bigger than herself.

“I knew that,” he protested, but mildly. “Micheal Porter”, as he was usually known – although he preferred to answer strictly to his designation when in costume – was tall enough, laid-back enough, and attention-loving enough to pull off a White Vader costume. It was exactly what it sounded like – the Darth Vader rig, all in white, sometimes called “Vader Redeemed.” The images that the costume was based off of had appeared for literally two panels at the very end of a comic that wasn’t even canon. Even by 501st standards that was unusual - and the 501st Legion was infamous for being made up of fans who weren't content to simply ''collect'' action figures, they wanted to ''be'' them.

His protest was put on hold briefly as a fairly well-done white tiger furry with an articulated jaw interrupted, waving her pawhands and generally being as relentlessly upbeat as possible. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but gestured and showed off a disposable camera on a strap around her neck enthusiastically enough that it was pretty clear that she wanted pictures.

TR-1407 had never been all that comfortable with being hugged by complete strangers for photographs, but she didn’t have any serious objections to it, and she wasn’t carrying her wallet with her this time, so there was no chance of getting robbed again. Fortunately the tiger was much more interested in SL-1984, and ''he'' was perfectly willing to mug and pose as much as desired, supported by three or four stormtroopers who got beckoned into the shots and played along, rather than shaking their heads and passing by. Maybe it was just that white fur went better with white robes and armor than with red. It was probably more that the kid was naturally showy.

After the Red Guard had obligingly snapped enough pictures and handed the camera back to the furry, the white tiger left to accost someone else, and they picked up where they had left off.

“Angela, you really don't need to remind me about everything anymore. I know the schedule."

“Don’t call me Angela when I’m in uniform, please." Sweat was pooling in the tips of her gloves. Angela flexed her hands against it. The moment she let them relax, it pooled again. "It's only been what, a year since I let you walk off and you missed it because you were buying original issues of 'Spider-Girl'?"

"A year and a half. I am ''so'' much better at juggling my hobbies now," he said dryly. "Why, I even remember things that the schedule said and Pike forgot to bring up."

A trooper listening in muttered "You had to bring the Squad Leader into this. Now you're in for it."

Another trooper who'd been a few steps behind got right up besides the taller Vader. She was a snowtrooper, and probably suffering almost as much as Angela in the heat. Despite the helmet speaker and a tired note in her voice, she sounded crisp and alert. "Hey, don't complain. I'm sorry we haven't made an announcement, but we've got a lot more on our plate than you do; ''you'' just have to show up at the right time and place, and we're not here to babysit you. We've been setting things up and working out scheduling conflicts since five in the morning. It's been a long day at the end of a long week already and I'm glad John was there to take over after eleven." The snowtrooper slipped into character and finished, very dryly, "So don't complain about your superiors, my lord. Circumstances tend to be more complicated than they seem."

"Ah," SL-1984 said, briefly assuming character himself. "My apologies, Ma'am. That was merely a breach in my personal discipline. No disrespect was meant." Following along, Angela couldn't help feeling a little surge of goodwill. She loved this group. They argued a lot, and Shanda Pike admittedly could be touchy, but it never got too far. Probably in part because while Michael loved the limelight, he had very little ego or temper.

"I'll overlook it, so long as you don't let it happen again," Pike allowed very seriously. A smile crept into her voice. "You're mixing up your honorifics, by the way. I'm only "ma'am" in the Tusken Raider suit and as Mara."

"Again, my apologies. Sir," he added. Everyone pretended not to notice the slight skip in his amplified voice.

With a nod, the snowtrooper peeled away and dropped back, staying in sight but effectively bowing out of the conversation. In an aside, Angela told her friend that his voice-changer was failing.

“What? Testing, testing... You’re right.” SL-1984 thumped the speaker hidden in his chest box, then removed his helmet, careful of the trailing wires that ran from it down into the rest of the costume. “This thing always gets screwy an hour or so in.”

There was always something just a little bit disturbing about seeing someone in costume but without their helmet on. It didn’t take long to get used to seeing troopers, but with a Vader it ''always'' looked strange. Michael had opted for the ski-hood-under-the-helmet thing that Vaders usually wore. His, naturally, was white. Removing helmets while trooping tended to be frowned on, but everyone in the 501st knew that sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Angela told him, “You really ought to try a pair of Vortex Twos. I’ve never made a Vader-“

Michael left off frowning into the helmet for a moment. “You’re not nearly tall enough to pull it off. You'd have to do the three-fourths scale version. And maybe get body padding.”

“I know. Shut up.” Angela sighed. “I’ve never made a Vader, but I have a helmet, therefore I use a speaker. Vortex. Got it with my tax returns. I know that Hasbro thing is cheap and easy to get, but, well, the downside is quality. Vortex is the best.” She indicated the general location of her own voice amplification unit with a quick gesture. It made her voice audible despite the almost airtight helmet, flattening it out in the process.

“I know, but that’s a bit of an investment. I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. Had to stop working on that Tusken Raider one… I could barely afford to come ''here.'' This will hold for a bit longer. Going to have to try and fake it when it does fail. The iPod with the breathing loop's still good, at least.” Replacing the helmet and straightening it with both hands, he faced her directly. “Any plans?”

“I’m getting out of this costume before I cook.” She flapped her robes in another vain attempt to get some cool air circulating. Under her helmet, a little curl of hair had plastered itself over one eye, sticking to the lid as she blinked. Just about every time she wore a helmet she found herself wishing she'd cut her hair short. Tampa Bay Squadron's other Red Guard kept hers cropped and said it made something of a difference.

SL-1984’s speaker system relayed the sound of his mouth opening, so she cut him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need any help, Micheal. Seriously, if I stay in this any longer I’ll get heatstroke. Every time I get into this thing I regret it, I swear.”

"If you want me to call you Anj, don't call ''me'' Michael." SL-1984 raised his voice to be heard over the shouting match going on between two balding men in spandex. Taking up a standard Vader mannerism with ease that betrayed several movies' worth of casual study, he locked his hands around his belt. “This is why white’s a good color. I’m not sweating half as much as I did in the black sauna suit, so I think I’m good for a while yet. I'd like to see the sights. There are some ''really'' nice costumes this year. Maybe I’ll swing by those set pieces people keep talking about. I heard that they got David and his crew to do the Hutt set again this year, plus Carmen said that Makaze Squad brought in that Death Star made of like a million Legos. I have no idea how they could have got it in the doors.”

People had collected in a chattering knot around someone or something, clogging the way. It was possible to squeeze past, but that just wouldn't do. Angela raised her voice. “Move along, come on now citizens, you can collect in a spare room much more easily than out here. Move along, move along.” The voice amplifier lent her voice a little more kick and made it audible. Despite that, she saw no sign that more than a few people had heard, let alone intended to obey.

Her former pupil, his voice changer having given up entirely, repeated the order with the same intonation, doing his best with the voice. This time, people listened and obeyed, breaking up and dispersing. They’d been clustered around a yellow lab – not a furry, an actual, panting dog that barely seemed disturbed at all by the crowd – wearing one of those novelty pet costumes. It went very nicely with his owner, though Angela wasn’t sure about the meaning of the dog being Batman when the man was Robin.

What she ''was'' sure about was that the kid she’d once sponsored – hardly a kid despite her teasing, she couldn't be more than five or six years older than him - was just ''better'' at some of this than she was. Particularly when it came to giving orders to people neither of them knew. Partly it was because, although she wasn’t shy by anyone’s standards, she didn’t like to stand out overmuch. Hence why her preferred costumes were the Red Guard and obscure ones like AT-AT drivers or Imperial Army Pilots, as they were called, while ''his'' was arguably the most conspicuous costume in the 501st.

A trooper that Angela knew from the squad finally answered the question. “The Lego Death Star? It breaks apart into sections and gets reassembled. We had to get a cart for the pieces, but it's simpler than it looks. Tampa Bay had it one year, but that was before your time. Sir.”

TR-1407 decided to break it off. She really didn’t know where the closest ‘changing room’ was, but she’d been told that they were everywhere, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to find one. The longer she waited, the longer the costume stayed on. “Have fun, guys. I think I’ll get most of this off before I make more plans. Don’t hurt yourself showing off.”

“Don’t forget to put it back on by two thirty. I’ll see you by then if not before, An- Anj.” He and those troopers who hadn't already gone their own ways kept moving in the same direction, and she arbitrarily took a left.

It was pretty close to noon; compared to just an hour ago, the hallway was half empty. The people who had been rushing around trying to get to various things had reached them, apparently. This wasn’t anywhere near the dealer’s room or any of its offshoots, the SIGs were already in progress, and as far as she could remember from the big con schedule the only event going on would be that big awards ceremony.

Angela toyed with the idea of going, but the oppressive heat of her costume decided her. Anything worth seeing would surely keep; she'd been to enough conventions to know that the truly impressive costumes would probably stick around for a bit, both soaking up the praise and trying not to break anything. Getting there in time to see the whole thing wouldn’t be worth the broiling and the probability of being jostled by a crowd. She’d hate to break the forcepike that she was carrying braced against her shoulder; it was easily the most fragile part of the costume, and making it had been a trial.

The heat was like a physical thing trapped against her body. Not for the first time, she wished that she’d worn her officer uniform instead. Fewer layers, and her face, neck, and hands were exposed to the air. But officer getup was just so ''plain'', so ''ordinary'' compared to the Red Guard robes and armor. And somehow it drew more attention, not less. In a weird way, Red Guards could be ignored pretty easily. A perk of being a member of Star Wars's version of the Secret Service, she supposed.

Up ahead it was crowded again; all fursuiters from the look of things. Enough of them were breaking the unwritten rule about staying silent in costume that the group was quite, quite loud, even with the helmet cutting off some of the sound. From the laughter, the movement, and the general tone of conversation, they were having a good time. Having nothing better to do Angela approached them, deciding that if nothing else she might as well find out what if anything was going on.

As she passed within thirty feet of the closest of them she felt something like a chill traveling down her spine, prickling against the bodysuit stuck to her skin. The Red Guard would have brushed it aside as nothing, but for one reason or another she noticed that some of the furries who had been talking or laughing or demonstrating dance moves had stopped, abruptly in some cases. A number of them carried on, oblivious, but several stopped what they were doing.

TR-1407 thought she saw a gray feline's mouth opening far wider than a baklava could allow for. She told herself that it was a trick of the light or a flaw in her visor. That was when the chill became strong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and branching to prickle her arms, the base of her skull, her chest and lower than that, strong enough that she shuddered involuntarily. Her bones started to ache, followed by the rest of her body. There was a moment where she thought ''Heatstroke?'' and started to raise her hands to her helmet.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the world.

== Lead up to Garrett and Steph's TFs==

The density of Star Wars costumes steadily increased as they progressed. The population of the convention was extremely diverse but various factors - the impending themed contests, the large number of rooms providing partitioning, natural human cliquishness - were conspiring to make it clumpy.

''Or maybe word's just getting around about Garrett's costume,'' Steph reflected. The stormtroopers seemed eerily organized for just a bunch of fans who'd happened to show up wearing the same thing.

But to Steph's relief, he wasn't feeling quite so annoyed by the attention Garrett was getting any more. The bunny ears had actually ''helped''. Not in that they were anything particularly interesting themselves, of course; they were nothing at all in comparison to even the simplest of the animal costumes he'd seen on display. No, ironically enough it was a synergistic effect.

A big clunky AT-AT clomping around? Worth a double-take, of course. A big clunky AT-AT clomping around being led by a man in bunny ears? That apparently was worth two double-takes.

A small impromptu honor guard had formed around Garrett, a constantly-renewing cluster of Star Wars fans trailing along to examine the AT-AT's details before being left behind or moving on to other things. But though fewer, the Star Wars fans who were puzzling over Steph were puzzling longer. One of them was even a Darth Vader complete with audible breathing, though in an all-white suit for some reason.

Steph wasn't about to ask. He was already being pelted with far more intricate details of the Star Wars universe than he could possibly take in. "So," the white-armored Vader was musing. "I doubt that the Empire has begun accepting nonhumans into service since my conversion, so you cannot be a pilot. I don't think you have the height for a Gerb or Lepus Carnivorous, but I might be mistaken."

"Uh, no, don't think so," Steph shook his head. ''Lepus Carnivorous? Is he making this up on the spot?'' The only carnivorous rabbit that came to mind was from Monty Python.

"Are you a Kushiban? Be at ease, my mission no longer entails the deaths of Force-Sensitives."

That one sounded less fake, and Steph was about to accept the title if only to have something meaningful to say. But then one of the Storm Troopers turned from peering at the detailing on Garrett's head and said in his best tinny trooper-voice, "My Lord, are you forgetting the Hoojib?"

"I was just getting to that." The chuckle seemed quite out of character for a Darth Vader, and to Steph's relief he seemed to be recognizing how far out of his depth Steph was. "I apologize for my men. When you're obsessed, it's a bit hard to remember that ''not everyone knows or cares.''" That last bit seemed to be aimed at the other fans, who variously shrugged, drew back a little, and hung their helmeted heads in probably-mock shame. "Kushiban and Hoojibs are both rabbitlike creatures, not very large. Kushiban are more like cat-monkey creatures with soft rabbit ears and big squirrely tails; they're about, oh, ''this'' tall standing up -" he bent down to hold his gloved hand a foot and a half above the floor "-but usually walk on all fours. They do a lot of handweaving and tend to be Force-Sensitive; generally they're portrayed with a calm demeanor. By most standards they are considered very, ah, cute."

It was Steph's turn to chuckle. "I'll leave cute to the furries."

"Aww." Garrett rose to his hind legs, surprising Steph by having been paying attention, and took a moment to set one of the forelegs down so he could adjust his headpiece. One of the side-mounted gun turrets had hooked on someone and been pulled askew. "You'd think with all those bunny-based aliens there'd be a more crossover, like with those Caitans we saw earlier."

"Ixnay on the Artrek Stay," Steph warned with a grin. He didn't seriously expect anyone to be offended, there was far too much good-natured mixing of genres and universes going on for that, but the rivalry between those two franchises almost seemed traditional.

"I'm dressed as an AT-AT, I think I'm strong enough in the Star Wars Force for my reputation to survive being revealed as a fancier of catgirls in miniskirt uniforms."

The white Vader nodded, still chuckling. "Certainly. You have no idea how many of our aliens look like cats or bugs or yes, rabbits. Hoojib, for example. They're about ''this'' big-" too small to bend down for, he held out his gloved hands as if cupping a normal-sized bunny in them "-they're mute but telepathic, they eat energy. They look more like rabbits with huge eyes and splayed bird feet. They also have large noses, no visible mouth, and one antenna or feeler on the forehead that they use to drain energy with. A relic of the Marvel comics back in the seventies. Frankly, most of us think the writers were dropping something, but the Hoojib are not quite as implausible as some of the others."

"Weird is good," Steph answered with a nod. ''Hoojib, eh?'' The wheels were spinning quickly in Steph's head; even though he'd never seen pictures of one of those things the description was pretty distinctive. He thought back over some of the stuff he'd glimpsed on the tables they'd passed... "I can pull that off. I'll be right back, you okay Garrett?"

Garrett nodded. "Just tromping around." He had finished his adjustment and was considering whether to go back down on all fours, but as Steph headed off into the bustle he found himself welcoming the excuse to stay upright a while longer. His back wasn't hurting yet, and thanks to the angle of the headpiece he didn't have to hold his neck at a bad angle, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned to the white Vader instead. "So, if it's not a faux pas to ask, did you not have time to paint your outfit before the con?"

SL-1984 chuckled again. "I've got the black getup too. You don't want to know how hot that gets if you don't have real leather. This is a more recent relic of comics, actually. One where the Dark Lord has left the Empire and joined his children, and inexplicably looks ''exactly the same'' except for color. Just as absurd in its way, although I'll give it points for not having talking hedgehogs or superweapons that look like pinball machines. Dark Horse, not Marvel. Star Wars Infinities...? No?"

"No," Garrett said, shaking his head. The headpiece didn't weigh much, but still made the motion ponderous. "Believe it or not, I'm really lost with all this Extended Universe stuff. I just watched the movies and liked the toys." Despite Garrett's demurral it was actually something of an understatement; Star Wars toys were probably the main reason Garrett had become an engineer. The long hours spent playing with his older brother's stash of plastic space ships and robots had put a visceral love of fantastic machinery into Garrett's heart. But he'd never really got into the fictional side of it all, if that made any sense.

"Well, the toys are certainly a major part of the fandom too," SL-1984 agreed. "Collectors have their own subset of obscure encyclopedic knowledge. Wouldn't know what a Hoojib was, perhaps, but they could tell you exactly how rare any given run of a Luke action figure was. But I suspect that you are more inclined towards the tech manuals."

Garrett grinned, hefting the heavy walker forelimb assemblies. "What gave you that idea?"

For his part, Steph wasn't any of those things - he just liked a challenge. And within a minute he was back, another ten dollars poorer and well on the way to meeting his next challenge. He'd found himself a rubber koala nose, best match to his mental image of the description the Vader had given him, and was busily tearing apart a pair of dealie-bobbers as he walked. His only tools were a paper clip, some rubber bands, and MacGuyver innovation. "One second longer..." He finished the work on the addition to the rabbit headband and slipped them back into place, the single spring-loaded antenna bobbing up in the middle between his ears. "Eh? Eh? Hoo da jib?" He spread his arms to display his work.

SL-1984 let out a slightly muffled laugh. His hands moved slightly as if to adjust the new addition, then dropped to hook his thumbs into his belt. "Very nice. Certainly, nobody will mistake you for anything else now. No fan, at any rate."

"Well, that's silly," Garrett evaluated. Steph nodded back, making the antenna bounce but not jarring it loose; the anchor he'd rigged up was holding. ''Excellent.''

"Speaking of silly," Steph said, grinning, "shall we carry on toward the judging room? Despite my progress I doubt my costume's going to win any awards on its own."

"Sounds good." The judging was being staggered over the course of the day to account for the many individual contests that were running - the first winners were almost due for announcement, in fact - but Garrett figured it would be a good idea to get in on his as soon as possible. When dealing with a costume made mostly of cardboard, there was a certain inexorable degradation with use. And besides that, the costume was clunky and heavy. Garrett was looking forward to being out of it for a while.

"In that case I'll bid you adieu. Troops, clear the muster zone!" The Vader slipped back into character and the remaining Storm Troopers did likewise, stepping back in unison as if to let a much larger transport pass through. Garrett obliged them, dropping back down to all fours and resuming his tromp with Steph walking ahead. Steph felt even more ridiculous than before with his extra accessories, but it was a good kind of ridiculous.

It was a strange feeling. So strange that Steph overlooked the other strange feelings at first as they started tingling at the edges of his senses.

Garrett felt it first. He had just started to get back into the gait of an AT-AT when he found himself stumbling slightly, the heavy costume becoming noticeably heavier. Garret paused for a moment, his foreleg supports setting down on the floor below him with a pair of unexpectedly solid clomps.

The cardboard forelegs actually felt ''tight'' on his arms. That was wrong; if anything there should have been too ''much'' play inside them, they wobbled around if he wasn't careful. Garrett tried to let go of the cane handles and tried standing up to pull his hands out of them.

The forelegs stayed firmly and snugly in place, and they were ''heavy''. "Wha..." Garrett choked, his voice coming out low and grating as if by speaking he was using his throat in a way it wasn't intended. The exclamation was accompanied by the faint but noticeable whine of small motors of some sort and Garrett could feel the tension build in his hips as he held the cardboard legs up in front of him.

Cardboard no longer, it seemed - the surface finish had a distinctly metallic luster to it that the gray paint had failed to evoke previously. There was no explaining it; his costume had suddenly become a whole lot ''better''. It was still improving before his eyes, new details resolving and the proportions subtly shifting toward more accurate dimensions.

It was getting heavier. Garrett could feel his hips beginning to fail, the boxy body and outstretched forelegs too much to bear. But Garrett resisted the weight with all his might; he had no idea what was going on and from the frantic hammering of his heart he could tell he was most likely panicking, but even so he somehow ''knew'' deep in his gut that he would be in deep trouble if he fell over. He had to stay up. He ''had'' to...

Garrett's groan came from somewhere inside his chest, the vibration thrumming through his body in new and unfamiliar ways, and after resisting for just seconds he toppled forward to land again on his forelegs for support. The two round footpads slammed solidly down onto the carpeted floor and Garrett felt the impact travel up the metal structure into his shoulders. An alien surge of relief washed through him; ''thank God, I'm stable.'' But it didn't last long against the growing panic. He tried to open his mouth to yell for help and found that he couldn't. ''Oh God, I can't breathe!''

Garrett tried to look up toward Steph, servos in his neck whining in protest at the angle. He caught just a glimpse. Up ahead, Steph was having troubles of his own; his clothing seemed to be disintegrating, white fur bursting up underneath it. Everyone else Garrett caught in that glimpse seemed to be having some outlandish thing happening to them too, too many and too strange for him to process in that split second he had available.

Then Garret's vision cut off as his eyelids fused shut into the smooth, unbroken hull of the underside of the AT-AT's cockpit-head. A moment later vision returned in a kaleidoscopic burst of sensory input; Garrett would have screamed if he'd been able. ''My eyes! Where are my eyes!?'' He could see everywhere at once and couldn't process any of it. He could only stagger ponderously back a step, his limbs moving with unexpected strength and smoothness. ''Whirr''-chrt! ''Whirr''-chrt! It was the best possible replica AT-AT costume in existence now, and Garrett wanted ''out''. But his attempts to shift even the tiniest bit inside the solid metal shell failed, every part stuck solidly and directly to his skin. Fused with it. ''Becoming'' it.

And then the hollowness came. Garrett felt a hole open up inside his gut, swelling inside his abdomen and squeezing his vitals aside. Garrett's vision was disrupted just as it had started to coalesce again, panic flaring more brightly in his mind. ''Oh God Oh God Oh God...'' He could only set his legs and try to hold as steady as possible as the bubble spread up into his chest, up his throat, into his head...

''Ghoooood.'' The thought trailed off in a tumult of strange emotions and sensations. His guts were settling now, the final details pulling into their new configuration. He was empty inside, but what was left was ''solid.'' Strong. Steel. Or something like it, anyway... The hammering of his heart faded away, replaced with the unfamiliar, almost subliminal throb of some sort of power plant.

Vision returned again, more stable this time, but it didn't bring any clarity to the situation. Garrett stood stable on all four legs, round footpads planted firmly on the carpet right where he'd been when the change had first come upon him. But his body was an island of stability in a sea of chaos. All around him people were yelling and running around in terror, many of them no longer human. Garrett turned his head, the motion ponderous and not really necessary given his all-encompassing field of view but psychologically important for keeping his attention focused. ''Where's Steph?'' He didn't know what his friend could do about any of this, but it was a straw of hope to grasp for in the maelstrom.

Thunderous footsteps grabbed his attention. Something was coming, big and round and red-

Too fast. How could something so big move so fast? Garrett barely had time to move before the huge creature brushed past him, slamming against his side as it went. Garret's legs weren't jointed to deal very well with lateral movement and he staggered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced. Whirr, chrt, whirr, chrt, cHRT...

''FALLING!'' Garrett screamed in the form of bolts of light shooting from his chin to blast scorched pockmarks up the wall and ceiling, and slammed to the floor. A table crushed to splinters under him, cushioning what would otherwise have been a tremendously damaging impact, but still jarring. He felt a vestige of pain, which faded the moment it registered, leaving him numb.

Stunned, lying on his side, alone, ''empty''. Garrett wasn't sure if AT-ATs could faint, but he found himself doing a very good imitation of it.

== Steph's post-TF segment==

Steph was trembling and overwhelmed with confusion at what had happened to him, what had happened to everyone around him. But at the same time he felt strangely comforted cradled here by giant white-armored arms, even if he was getting pressed into the hard edge of a chest box, so he managed to keep the fear suppressed below blind panic. He had no idea ''why'' being held like that should have been comforting but for the moment he was willing to just go with it while he tried to straighten out what else had happened.

He hadn't noticed that Garrett wasn't keeping up with him until he'd heard that strange noise of protest. He'd turned around and there it had been, right before his eyes, the gaps between the pieces of Garrett's costume abruptly sealing up as the gray cloth underneath swelled to fill them. As Garrett ''himself'' swelled to fill them. Steph still wasn't sure which had done the changing, Garrett or his costume - was Garrett somehow trapped inside that thing? That had been his first thought, that the costume had somehow been magically replaced with a giant animatronic of fearsome quality.

But then he'd realized what was happening to him, and now he had no idea what was going on. His clothing was disintegrating, falling away into nothingness, and the skin underneath was sprouting a thick white pelt of fur. ''His'' skin, not some costume layered over top. He'd tried pulling on it and felt pain.

Steph wasn't entirely proud of what he'd done next; he'd let out a shriek that was equal parts surprise and alarm, turned away from his friend still struggling inside that developing machine's body, and had tried to run away.

'Tried' being the operative word. It wasn't just his skin that was changing, the size and shape of his entire body was warping. Steph had managed to stagger just a short distance before his shortening legs and enlarging feet tripped him up, sending him stumbling into broad white-caped back of one of the other conventiongoers. The man was ''huge'' - or rather, in hindsight, it was Steph who was shrinking - and absorbed the impact easily.

The man snapped "What?", spinning to confront Steph and reflexively reaching for his lightsabre. It was the white-armored Darth Vader Steph had been speaking with just moments earlier. The Sith Lord's mechanically augmented voice was deeper and more imperious, the armor more fully fleshed out.

Steph's eyes widened in alarm as he found himself craning his neck to look so far up at the man's masked face. "Heee," he gasped breathlessly, his own voice coming out a high-pitched squeak. "Heep!"

It felt like a lot of things were going on, but the biggest was the sense of falling. From increasingly high above SL-1984 watched him unreadably, reaching up to clamp one gloved hand on the opposite wrist, then letting go. Then Steph found himself on all fours, eyes level with a bit of detailing on the man's shiny white shin armor. No, lower than that. He let his joints lock and stood as if frozen.

Giant hands plunged from above and lifted him up out of harm's way just before the huge bulk of the Kool-Aid Man came barreling through the room.

There was a tremendous smash. "OH YEAH!"

"Fall back!" SL-1984 barked.

"Lord Vader!" Someone else nearby exclaimed. Then there was a burst of blaster fire followed by another crash.

Steph couldn't handle it all; he'd simply gone limp and allowed himself to be carried as SL-1984 and the handful of Stormtroopers that had been close at hand retreated from the chaos erupting inside the room. They'd taken up a defensive position in a short hallway just outside, apparently leading to a utility closet of some sort and devoid of any other activity.

It gave them a few minutes' respite and as the shock wore off Steph began to tremble. In the midst of everything that was going on SL-1984 had apparently forgotten that he was holding Steph, but the movement drew his attention back to his immediate surroundings again and he looked down. "So you were a Hoojib after all."

Steph felt his rabbitlike ears lay down flat against his back and the long, flexible tendril that sprouted between them curled tightly in an unfamiliar reflex. ''I never heard of them until just minutes ago!'' Steph tried to object, but he wasn't even able to produce a squeak that time; his mouth no longer seemed to be connected to his trachea and all he could do was let out a small snort.

SL-1984 seemed to get the message well enough anyway, though. "Yes, I suppose that's my fault. Well, what else would you call yourself?" He knelt down and lowered Steph back down, hands wrapped all the way around his ribcage like he was carrying a cat, to deposit him on the floor.

Steph huddled there on all fours, digging the claws on his fingers and toes into the carpet as he looked up in nervous awe at how gigantic everything was. He had a momentary overpowering desire to be picked back up again, he just didn't feel ''safe'' being so small, but he forced it down and tried to focus inward. His body was indeed quite a bit like a bunny's, just as had been described, but with longer fur and long, splayed, birdlike toes on his feet. Frustratingly, his ''hands'' were more like a rabbit's, or maybe a dog's - useless clawed, padded paws with stubby fingers he could barely wriggle independently. There were thumbs, sort of. Maybe dewclaws. They could just about manage grasping, or at least bending far enough that the finger pads met the big pad, but he couldn't stand without them. His face had a blunt, leathery Koala nose, and his tiny mouth was hidden in the fur underneath it. Probing with his surprisingly long tongue, he couldn't even feel any teeth.

He had to admit, he was ''exactly'' like he'd pictured a Hoojib looking like. His vision blurred as his enormous brown eyes started filling with tears.

"Hey, now. Hey." SL-1984 seemed very distracted, bringing one hand up against the side of his helmet and pacing a few steps away to stare intently at nothing visible.

''I didn't want to be here,'' Steph thought miserably to himself. ''I just want to be home.''

"Don't we all," murmured the stormtrooper crouched nearest him. It was a breach of squad discipline, of course, but everyone was too busy with their own troubles to notice. Steph himself wouldn't realize the more important fact that the stormtrooper had actually ''heard'' him until much later on.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus1.jpg]]

Something lithe and feline and clad in ruffles chose that moment to slink past the dead end where the little group held their position. It paused to stare at them with unblinking green eyes, then opened its mouth and hissed furiously. The occupants locked their blaster rifles into position, but one of the troopers, raising an arm to check them, snapped, "Hold your fire! Establish intent, ''then'' act!"

The cat-thing flattened its ears back against its head, looking spooked, then continued on its way at a slightly faster pace.

It was quiet. SL-1984 was the first to move. He pulled off one white glove, exposing a prosthetic hand that gleamed like bronze. It was all but skeletal, sparse of detail with only the transparent synthetic "muscles" keeping it from looking like metal bones. He turned it over before his mask and flexed the fingers gently, then covered it again. "I thought as much," he said in a low rumble, both resigned and keeping what might have been anger under tight control. "Is that how it is? Fine."

"Sir?" The speaker was a trooper with the breather hood, oversuit, and specialized armor of a snowtrooper, the same trooper who had told the others not to shoot. He broke position to stand closer to SL-1984, keeping himself oriented towards the opening to the dead end. "Sir, aren't you - Didn't you switch sides?"

"What? Oh. You, you're Shanda Pike?"

"I - yes, my lord," Pike said, voice firming. In the far distance something bellowed like a foghorn, forcing the trooper to speak louder. "My husband John and I share duties as Squad Leader. He's not here now, sir. I'm the only member of the squad's command staff present."

"Use my designation, Pike. I did leave the Empire, but I am still part of this squad. You're a squad leader, I'm not, that means - damn." SL-1984 went quiet. The constant rhythm of his mechanically-assisted breath was quieter and not as harsh as it was for 'classic' Darth Vader, but it could still be heard, even over the background noise.

"Sir? Something wrong?"

"You're not a ma'am." SL-1984 crossed his arms just underneath his chest box. There was a smile in his artificial voice.

Pike hesitated for several breaths. "Beg pardon?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." SL-1984 chuckled and uncrossed his arms to hook his thumbs into his belt. He was definitely more amused than was appropriate for a man who'd just gone on life support and become a quarter of a century older. "You're a man. You can't keep a wallet in your codpiece anymore. I suppose it makes sense... snowtroopers are specialized stormtroopers, and we don't generally admit women into the trooper academies... Who - yes, everyone in here's a trooper. Ursala, Crystal, Sky - You're all men. No worries, Shad, Jeff, you're men too. Heh. Well, this should make things interesting. Heh. That's... that's actually kind of funny."

"Oh." The snowtrooper waited. The other three had reacted, but a muffled crash from out there had brought them back into position, watching with ready blasters. For a moment, Pike sounded unnaturally calm, as if this was a situation he'd been trained for. "You're right. I hoped you were wrong, sir, but you're right." Another moment passed as SL-1984 crossed his arms again and laughed quietly; one by one every other helmet in the alcove turned towards Pike. Even Steph, huddled pitifully on the floor with his eyes glazed, looked up.

"Fusst you. ''Fusst'' you, you - you ''Sithspawn''. Stop laughing." He stepped forwards, getting into the Vader's faceplate. "''This isn't funny'', Nineteen Eightyfour. This is a ''big'' problem that goes past us, and it's only going to get bigger. And apparently I can't swear. So ''don't laugh.''" The outburst was quiet but unmistakeable. Pike kept his back straight as he added, rather sarcastically, "Sorry, sir. Momentary lapse in personal discipline."

"It won't happen again," SL-1984 agreed in a more serious tone. "Consider it corrected. You're in charge, I suppose. We're going to need a plan..." He trailed off, head coming up as if he'd heard something. "No. Oh, no. ''Hell'' no. How is that even ''possible?''" The white-clad Vader's voice was as low as it could get.

Down on the floor, forgotten until that moment, Steph was mute. Still, he tried. ''What? What is it?'' Pike echoed the sentiment, raising his blaster.

This time, SL-1984 didn't respond to either of them. He stepped forwards, turning his head as if searching. "...I can't let that happen," he said at last, more to himself than anyone else. "I don't even want to think about that. Gravitational pull alone could - and even if it didn't, the superlaser - wrong hands, there aren't even any ''right'' ones - I ''won't'' let that happen."

''Let what happen? What's going on?''

SL-1984 turned the corner at a dead run and was gone. Bitterly Pike muttered, "No way we'll be able to keep up with him. We should have at least synched our comm frequencies. Okay. Let's do that now. Frequency - Aurek Corellia Delta." Almost as one, the troopers switched to the same comm channel. "We can't stay here. First priority is finding the rest of Tampa Bay; once we've done that we can worry about what in the nine hells is going on. I know where my - my husband is, or should be at the moment. We have to start from there."

The snowtrooper continued to speak aloud, nervous energy spilling into his voice. "This is not going to be a blue milk run, boys. We can't afford to waste any time; everyone move fast and don't get distracted. We ''must'' regroup, or we are lost. I'm on point; Shad, you're at the rear. Sing out if something happens to you, even if it looks like we've seen it. We can ''not'' afford to leave anyone behind! Blasters to stun; Ursala, lower the setting on your forcepike. Nothing turns a crowd into a mob faster than a death, and ''don't ask me how I know that''. Let's move out!" Pike headed out at a rapid march, followed by the other five.

In the dead end, Steph hunkered, forgotten.

==Red Guard==

Everything was darkness and confusion and helpless nausea. When the world fell out from under her it took her stomach with it. Gravity meant nothing; she felt as if she was falling, spinning on the worst amusement park ride ever imagined. A timeless period later she tasted blood and realized that she'd bitten the inside of her lip.

And then the world was back, or one very much like it. Struck by the very physical sensation of falling, even though she could feel her boots firmly planted on the floor, Anj instinctively assumed a defensive crouch, opening eyes that she hadn’t remembered closing.

She could see! She could hear! Long ago Anj had gotten used to the way the Red Guard helmet cut her visibility and muffled all sound; it was inevitable, after all. She’d all but stopped noticing. Now, though – now the flattened ovoid of the visor was still there, but a little smaller, and the space around it was no longer dark.

She could see as well and as much as she could when bareheaded, and all sounds were crisp and clear, not muffled in the least. It wasn’t that the helmet was gone; even though it was cool to the touch and non intrusive she could feel it, tight against the contours of her face, pressing against her skin with only a few gaps to let air circulate. But the inside, so close that her eyelashes brushed a smooth surface every time she blinked, was full of light and color and motion. For a moment it was completely disorienting.

Training kicked in as she glanced frantically from one thing to the next. These were the screens in her helmet. They negated the disadvantage of having an enclosed faceplate. The ones on the sides gave her left and right views. This lowest monitor, the short wide one, was her peripheral display. It showed her what was in back. Her aural pickups caught sound and relayed it into her ears in such a way that she could determine the source and how distant it is. They also blunted the effects of sonic weaponry. The analysis calmed her, steadied her, and she could finally pay attention to what she saw in front of her.

It took a moment to realize that these were the same furries who'd been grouped together before. They barely bore any resemblance to any fursuits she had seen, ever – even the best of the best had always looked artificial. Wet, flickering eyes with fully mobile eyelids, subtle facial expressions, a mouth that did more than open and close, pawhands that did not look like gloves, skin that shivered, fur that sprouted from the skin, muscles and tendons moving beneath it, toes that splayed against the ground, tails and ears that moved silently and with purpose – admittedly she wasn't exactly involved with the furry scene, but in all the conventions and events she had ever attended she had never seen a fursuit that still looked real up close. Not when she compared a costume to a real animal. Some things just couldn’t be faked.

Yet the people she saw before her, gasping and touching themselves and looking wildly about… Some were more or less humanlike than others, but one or two looked like nothing less than bipedal wild animals with slightly altered forelimbs and faces. The inarticulate confused things that they said were not in the voices of men or beasts, but a combination of both. They ''breathed'', they ran wet tongues over bestial teeth and ductile lips, they staggered on well-formed legs, their faces and body language reflected shock and disbelief and joy and horror and sudden fear. More than one turned a hybrid face towards the Red Guard.

Training once more came to the fore, and she welcomed it. No one to protect but herself, that was good. She needed to be cautious. They were disorganized and might not mean any harm, but as a whole they looked to be on the verge of blind panic. With her armor on, TR-1407 could probably survive being trampled, but she wouldn't like it. Anj took half a step backwards and stumbled – her feet, her legs seemed bigger and heavier than they should have been, and her center of gravity had shifted. Her balance had changed completely. She compensated even as the realization hit her that something was fundamentally different. The costume was tight, but ''beneath'' it-

Set off, either by her motion or by the low, coughing feline roar uttered by one of them, the furries split. Hooves and paws pounded the carpet as they ran, most of them headed ''away'' from TR-1407, but a gazelle and a zebra sprang past her, giving her a wide berth. She had half turned to stare after them in bewilderment when her spine chilled and she saw something huge and white and blue in one of her helmet screens.

Reacting almost instantly, TR-1407 jerked out of the way, her arms reflexively following through on the motion and swinging the tip of her weighty forcepike into contact with her assailant. It connected solidly, making a tiny crackling noise that was all out of proportion to the effect.

Momentum kept it going, but the enormous white tiger’s leap ended gracelessly as it lost consciousness. It hit the floor with an impact that looked painful and lay limp, flat red tongue sticking out of its fanged, slack mouth. Anj looked from it to the forcepike clasped in her gloved hands.

The stun module mounted on the vibro-edge head at the very tip gleamed dully. Fully extended, the weapon was two meters from the thin tip past the black grip to the weighted base, and it was much, ''much'' heavier than it had been before, maybe seven or eight kilograms - Seven. It was regulation-issue, so it definitely weighed seven kilos - but it felt ''right'' in her hands, sleek and balanced. Perhaps it wasn’t as elegant and deadly as a lightsaber, but here was a weapon that could kill or incapacitate, equally effective in pitched battle or nonlethal crowd control. Set to maximum it could tear through the hull of a starship or take off a man's arm at the shoulder; set to the lower setting and it could knock out a grown Wookiee. Or, apparently, a leaping tiger. That thought brought her back out of contemplation.

“…Yeah. What was that?” Anj’s eyelashes brushed her visor as she blinked. Something weird had happened to the helmet speaker. Normally it just relayed her voice; it distorted it just a little bit, making it slightly tinnier and more mechanical, but that was all. It didn’t ''change'' her voice, not really. It made it a bit less feminine, but it was still recognizable as ''hers''.

But something had happened to that speaker. This wasn’t her voice; this was nothing like it, in fact. The speaker was making her sound like an entirely different person. Why in the Emperor's name-

Focus! Were all local threats neutralized? What about her assailant? Anj moved closer and crouched to examine the white tiger. It was huge, easily three meters from the tip of its tail to its whiskered muzzle. Why meters and not feet? Feh, that wasn't important. At first glance it looked almost exactly like the tranquilized big cats that she'd seen on documentaries, down to the rapid, heavy way its sides heaved as it breathed. The only immediate oddity was the fact that it seemed to be wearing ''clothes'' – something like a tube top and close-fitting boxers, both pale blue.

But another moment showed her that it – no, she, for there was a suggestion of breasts in that tube top – had forepaws that would do poorly for bearing weight. They were long, the fingers well formed with prominent thumbs. Her head also bore hair, short and pattered in the same way as the striped fur, but distinct. No tiger looked like ''that''.

Around her thick neck, too, there was a strap holding a disposable camera…

TR-1407 tensed up as another cold tingle swept up her spine, glancing automatically towards a particular section of wall. Almost immediately that section bowed inwards, breaking with a wild shower of plaster and bricks as something almost spherical burst through, pudgy fists clenched, cubes ricocheting against each other and the interior as red liquid sloshed.

“'''OH YEAHHH!'''”

Apparently she, or the world, had gone mad. Even as the thought flashed through her mind, Anj was acting, one-handedly drawing her blaster rifle - where had that come from, she hadn't brought a blaster trooping today - from where it was holstered beneath her robes and firing.

The blaster bolt - it wasn't supposed to ''work''! - hit a curved, transparent surface that absorbed the energy, heating and deforming slightly. On the inside, bubbles formed at the site and floated rapidly up to the top; barely a second later they had stopped and the melted region had returned to its former unblemished state.

The – whatever it was – adjusted its footing as the three frosted translucent cubes floating inside of it rattled and clinked. Below them the lacquered black indents that served as sketchy facial features - eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a wide smiling mouth, all highly stylized – moved to assume an expression that looked like furious, homicidal joy. Its short arms, placed in relation to its eyes where ears would have been on a humanoid, reached towards the Red Guard, fingers twitching as if to fix around her neck.

Anj fired twice more, with the same minimal result – small parts of the clear surface melted and re-formed, a little of the liquid boiled up without lowering the level within, and the thing displayed anger. It was walking, short legs with their rounded toeless feet looking ridiculous under its bulk, but slowly. She didn't know if it was limited to that speed or it was deliberate. Anj felt another chill on her spine and knew, in a burst of insight, that that didn't matter. It could gather itself and leap hard and fast enough to cover nearly four meters in an eyeblink, breaking through anything in its way. She was almost in range of such a leap.

Still, it couldn't jump several times in succession. If she moved now, she could leave it behind. It looked like – it looked completely impossible. Like a round-bellied pitcher, entirely hollow and complete with flared spout and glass handle, low-set arms and legs stuck on like an afterthought. It was filled, limbs included, with a translucent red liquid - she could see ''through'' it even if the other side was distorted. Somehow Anj thought she’d seen it or something like it before, but just by ''existing'' it was an affront to reality. It couldn’t ''possibly'' stand upright on those small featureless feet, and as for moving! It had no skeletal structure, no visible muscles or joints, it was ''an anthropomorphic pitcher of'' punch, ''how'' could it move?!

TR-1407 shoved her blaster back into its holster on her leg. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and she had no desire to be killed by it. Time to go. Yet something stopped her.

The tiger furry was still out cold. She was only slightly further from the pitcher than Anj was, and the Red Guard had no reason to doubt that the thing was willing to take out its frustration on whatever couldn’t get out of the way.

Even so.... Abruptly TR-1407 recalled her training on Yinchorr, where they had tried to pound stormtrooper training out to make way for something a little different. There'd been the hierarchy of service. Empire above all, Emperor, ranking staff and those she had been assigned to protect, peers and those of lower rank, Imperial citizens, everyone else. For these, she would lay down her life. There was a mantra in that somewhere, so ingrained that it was a part of her, essential enough that she was slow to register that it was completely new.

Yes, the tiger had leaped at her and she had reacted as if under attack, stunning it. And on the scale of people she needed to protect, attackers ranked somewhere below saving herself. However, she had no way to know if that leap really had been an act of aggression. What to do...

Indecision lasted for only a split second. It made no difference if she was or wasn't attacked, that thing's in danger because I put her there. So Anj would get her out. Didn't matter how ridiculous the situation is, she still had a duty. TR-1407 changed her stance, gripped her forcepike in both hands and held it before her in ready position.

If the pitcher thing had been any faster she would have been caught while thinking, but it was forced to shuffle forwards to get within range. She had the feeling that it could only run with any speed if it still had the momentum from a leap. Anj readied herself and thumbed the setting as it tensed to spring.

“'''OH ''YEAHHH!'''''”

Although she’d known this was going to happen, TR-1407 was still surprised at its speed. Barely in time, she dived and rolled under it the instant before it hit. When it landed it did so on three points, splintering the floor underneath it and making everything around tremble with the impact.

Spinning to face it again, Anj swung one-handed and smashed the forcepike's tip into her opponent's body. This time a sharp ''crack!'' rang through the air; as it spun to face her she adjusted her grip and swung the heavy weapon in a high vertical stroke, then again, horizontal, hitting the curved glassy surface ''hard''. The sound was high and sharp, both unpleasant and nearly musical.

There was the tingle again, strong and focused. Acting with it the Red Guard dodged a flailing arm and struck once more, to the left of center, then tried to get some distance between herself and the target, stepping back. Almost immediately she smacked into the wall, hard enough to thump her armor. Damn, her situational awareness had slipped! As she recovered and tried again to pull away she almost fell over her own feet, once more becoming aware that something was ''different''. There'd been a bit of a bounce where no bounce should be, not on a woman. Fortunately her stumble went unnoticed.

The pitcher thing looked at first glance to be unaffected; if it had been made out of durasteel every impact would have left great rents, but its shape was intact and it hadn't stopped moving. On second glance TR-1407 saw the white fractures that were spiderwebbed dramatically across the surface.

She kept her visor pointed squarely at its enraged lacquered eyes, holding her forcepike up in an unvoiced threat.

The indents that appeared to be eyebrows lowered and drew together as it frowned slowly. Across its sketchy features a white fracture, which had started to gradually fill in, lengthened and widened again with a sound that reminded the Red Guard of thin ice on the surface of a pond.

The pitcher thing’s right arm began to leak, red liquid forming drops and pattering down into the carpet. The glass there, thinner than on its curved body, had all but shattered, and repaired itself only slowly. Slowly, the thing’s eyes slid from its arm to Anj’s visor.

“Press me and you’ll be dead,” she warned, not knowing if it could understand her or not, talking slowly and evenly. “I can keep this up faster than you can fix yourself.” Her grammar had gotten a little mangled. The message was obvious nonetheless.

“I can throw a grenade into you and vaporize your contents. I can sweep your legs out from under you and shatter them so you can’t stand. Once I’ve done that, I can smash you into a thousand shards, which I can then scatter.” Even as she said the words, noticing again that the voice saying these words was not hers, she was confident that this was not an empty threat. Interfere with an Imperial Red Guard in the performance of his duty and you’re coming off second-best, she knew.

TR-1407 advanced half a step and brought her forcepike into ready position. The pitcher thing’s eye indents became larger, then smaller again. A sense of rage so strong that it was palpable radiated off of it, but it had sense enough to know a hopeless fight. Still dripping, it shuffled backwards and began to turn ponderously. A moment later, and it bounded away through another wall with a shower of plaster. The Red Guard watched through the hole it left until she was satisfied that it wasn't going to come back.

Hah. Straightening, Anj looked over the comatose tiger once more. Her white-furred flanks had been decorated with a coat of dust and plaster fragments, but the furry had escaped harm.

Now what? The immediate danger was past, but TR-1407 knew better than to assume that things were safe now. The tiger was still out and would likely remain that way for an hour or so. Anj wasn’t going to stay around guarding her. Duty to comrades outweighed duty to strange nonhumans who might have attacked her and weren't even Imperial citizens. Some of her responsibility had been discharged just now, but she knew one way to make a stunned sentient recover faster.

It took a bit of searching - and a moment of staring at her own gloved hands, which appeared to be bigger than she remembered - to find the site where the stun module in her forcepike had hit; the tiger’s fur was thick enough that the little bruised patch of skin was hidden. It was on the furry’s muscular upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Anj closed the tiger’s jaws with an effort, then took a handful of her crimson robes and pressed it against the furry’s nose, plugging the nostrils with the tips of her fingers. She counted slowly to ten and jabbed the bruised patch with the armored knuckles of her free hand, hard. The angle was too awkward for it to be a punch.

Almost immediately the white tiger started to make throaty sounds of complaint, fingers and ears twitching. Anj peeled back a furred eyelid and saw the pupil of the blue eye contract.

That would probably do it. Not willing to be there when the tiger woke up, TR-1407 walked away, almost stumbling on legs that were longer than they should have been. Despite the exertion, Anj's breath had been only slightly quickened. Without that pressure to act, she felt strange. Okay. Okay. Now to find someplace private and try to make sense of all this…

==Steph comes out of hiding==

Steph had been passive until now - almost comatose, for that matter. Events had swept along too rapidly and too outlandishly for him to get much of a grip. But now he realized he couldn't stay that way any longer. The strangely protective presence of the huge armor-clad people was gone. He was just a Hoojib huddled on the floor, and if he didn't get a grip - didn't get ''moving'' - who knew what horrors would catch him?

First there was simply learning how to walk. He was on all fours, but he couldn't crawl - his thighs were short, his knees were far from pronounced, and he couldn't plant his palms on the floor; his wrists didn't bend like that. Instead, when he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. His toes were long enough that he had to turn them outward.

He wobbled and wavered at first, unsure of his limbs like he was a kitten or a puppy or something, or like he'd been on an one of those all-night benders at the end of Finals Week. Still, as he practiced it quickly became easier. The reflexes seemed to be built in - how to stand, how to walk, coordination, the whole deal. That was a mercy, he supposed.

Keeping huddled against the wall for some modicum of concealment Steph crept back up the short hallway to peer out into the room he'd come from.

It was hard to comprehend what he was seeing at first. His senses had been distorted just as much as his body, his perspective something like half a foot off the floor. The scent of smoke in the air was almost buried under the other less identifiable smells Steph's enhanced nose was picking up. His enormous ears were catching more sounds than he knew what to do with, and there was something new and weird with tugging and heat and distant inaudible violin notes... But his vision was still quite clear and comprehensible, at least. Most of the tables had been upended in the rush as people had fled, scattering a lot of junk on the floor.

Excellent. Cover. As soon as the coast seemed relatively clear Steph bounded out across the floor, not quite running and not quite hopping, shelter under the nearest upright table. The space under the tablecloth was still cavernous at his scale, but much better than the soaring vastness of the room outside or even the hallway. He paused there to gather his wits and figure out what he was doing.

He had to get it together. He had to... he needed to find Garrett, before anything else. Easier thought than done, though - he hadn't gone far but the changes to everything had disoriented him. Where was he now? Where had he left his friend?

And would he recognize him when he found him? Steph's ears and antenna perked up, nose twitching nervously, as something large came moving through the room outside his shelter. Larger even than a normal human, heavy footfalls thudding solidly on the thin carpet... Steph would have whimpered had he been able to make any actual sounds. ''Oh God, please don't find me, I don't want to be eaten by a... whatever...''

The footfalls came to an uncertain stop nearby. "Huh?" It rumbled, voice deeply guttural and deeply confused. "No find... what?"

This time Steph ''did'' notice the coincidence between his own thoughts and the creature's words. ''Can he read my mind? Wait, no... am ''I'' telepathic? I don't believe it! But that Vader guy said Hoojibs were telepathic-''

"Who's there?" The big creature bellowed, and for a moment Steph found himself caught in a confusing mental tangle as he tried to stifle the volume of his thinking. His antenna curled and he had to force himself ''not'' to speculate about the appendage's psionic functions for fear of being overheard. It was an impossible task.

Fortunately there were still plenty of other distractions out there, and after only a few seconds the sound of frantic sheep bleating in the distance drew the attention of whatever it was that was standing nearby. "Hah!" it grunted, lumbering off with some new unknown purpose in mind. Steph let out a tiny sigh of relief.

''Okay, so I guess I'm glad I can still communicate somehow... assuming that wasn't all just a coincidence,'' he thought. No one was nearby to confirm it and he gave a snort of derisive amusement. ''God, so much to figure out! Take this one thing at a time. So I turned into a Hoojib. If everyone else has turned into what they were dressed as too...'' He shook his head. It made too little sense, he couldn't get his mind around it.

Would Garrett still be inside that cardboard-turned-metal shell he was wearing? Steph hoped he'd got out of it somehow, but if he hadn't... Cautiously poking his head out from under the tablecloth and peering around to check for danger first, Steph forced himself to dart deeper into the room.

His attention immediately went to a heap of detritus, taller than he was, that had formed against a ragged mass that had been a tabletop mere minutes ago. Some of it had obviously been ''on'' the table, originally - graphic novels were strewn everywhere, many of them burnt. Pages had collected here, and other things as well, probably kicked into place in the rush. Great tufts of fur, bits and pieces of clothing, food scraps that had escaped from trash cans, tablecloths, splintery pieces of other tables - Steph shuffled closer, then thought to wonder why it had drawn his attention. This was not the only pile of trash scattered around the room - there had been several filled trash cans, even this early in the day - and none of ''them'' were all that interesting.

It was like this one was tugging at him - specifically, his antenna. He could feel it sort of warming in response. No, 'tugging' wasn't quite the word - it was almost a smell, but not quite that either. Like... he could almost swear there was a small, cheap violin playing, just one very high continuous note, but he didn't actually hear anything. Something about it was comforting.

Steph snorted. ''Why am I so interested in a pile of trash?'' It wasn't food, that was for sure. There was tons of food in the room, mostly from upended trash cans, and the smell was ''everywhere''; spilled soda and cheap beer, a salad with dressing, corn chips, a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich that was starting to go bad, applesauce, Skittles, an entire box of donuts. And that was just in this room. None of it appealed to him - the smell was just ''there'', like the smoke or the ink on the comic books. His mouth wasn't even watering. He wasn't even sure if he still had salivary glands.

If he was quick about it, it wouldn't hurt to check. Steph climbed gingerly atop the pile, long toes curling to grip at an abandoned canvas bag full of hard objects. The feeling was coming from here. Still uncertain - he felt so ''exposed'' - he scraped at some wet pages that had stuck together.

''There! What's that?'' Something hard, probably plastic, and just a little smaller than his head. Steph sat on his haunches, freeing him to draw whatever it was up. He could grasp and his dewclaws were jointed more or less like thumbs, but the job of wrestling it out took longer than it should have.

Steph's ears quivered. More footsteps! Where was the best place to hide? Taking a step forward - a much more complicated action than it had been when he'd had two legs - he felt his toes flex on the thing. ''Maybe...''

He was going to get caught out in the open if he didn't hide ''now''. Steph hobbled on three legs into the dubious shelter of another table, this one apparently intact, though missing its covering. Edging behind a pile of plastic boxes that had probably once held statuettes, Steph ducked his head under his belly and took a look at his prize, clutched in the wiry toes of his foot. That foot distracted him - earlier, he'd paid much more attention to what had happened to his hands.

His feet were so huge that when he stood in the position that came most naturally the clawed tips of his toes were level with his elbows. They really did look something like bird's feet, covered in slightly wrinkly grayish skin rather than scales or more white fur, though not like any bird he'd seen. More importantly, they were at least somewhat better than his paws at flexing and holding things.

He'd misjudged how far away the footsteps were; that, or the one making the footsteps hadn't moved in a straight line. Now they pounded past, not as heavy as the big creature or even the stormtroopers but very quick. He could hear a girl's voice spouting a steady stream of "OW OW OW get OFF AHH OW" sprinkled with invective, and as she raced past Steph saw a pair of towering stockinged legs pumping. Something smaller and greenish clung to one of them, but they were both gone before he could get a better look.

Not everything was out to get him. Good to know.

The thing that he'd picked up turned out to be a cell phone, the kind that flipped open. It tingled pleasantly and somehow made that high violin note to Steph's antennae, a comforting feeling. He set it down and prized it open with a certain amount of difficulty, knowing that this wasn't helping him find Garrett but telling himself that he'd only be another minute.

The phone was on, and its screen glowed. Not entirely certain about just what he was doing, Steph put his face up so close that the phone's wallpaper blurred out of focus, tilted his head until what had been his chin sank into the fur on his chest, and felt his antennae uncoil, reaching out to touch the keypad, above the part of the phone that the tingling and humming was coming from.

It was a nice feeling. A very nice feeling. Steph closed his eyes and leaned into it for a long moment, sighing almost inaudibly through his nose. He could feel it moving up into his head and body. It was soothing. The violin note held for a few long seconds, then wavered. As that happened the heat lessened.

His eyes snapped open. ''What am I doing? Damn it.'' Steph peeled his head away and heard the phone chirp the low power alert before the screen went black. ''What was that? What was I - didn't the Vader guy say something about eating energy? Damn it, I wish I'd paid more attention.''

He whipped his head around. That ''tugging'', a little like a smell, a little like feeling heat through his antenna, maybe a little like hearing high violin notes, it was back. He could sense something interesting, several somethings, most about as big and with similar high cheap-violin notes, scattered around the room. More phones? Maybe dropped cameras?

For the third time Steph sensed something moving, and close. Still hidden under the table and behind boxes, he pressed himself against the wall. It was moving in a different direction than the other two, and it was - it was ''right on the other side of that wall!''

He shot out from under the table, smacking one gigantic ear against a table leg, and froze against a pile of rags, out in the open. The ceiling yawned high above, he was exposed - but nothing was going to collapse on him.

This turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever it was, it kept moving. He could barely hear its footsteps, and he might not have noticed - now that he was listening, this wasn't the only set of footsteps - but he could sense it as a sort of interesting moving heat and a whole ''orchestra'' playing, getting fainter as it got farther away.

''Wait.'' Steph's ear was stinging. ''How would I know anything about whatever was running except how big it is? Unless'' - His eyes were huge, and when he crossed them above his nose he could sort of see the blurred, doubled shape of that antenna, arcing above his head. ''What, can Hoojibs sense electricity too? Or what, robots? This is just weird.''

Now that he thought about it - there were a lot of other interesting warm things and bowstringed instruments were playing from all sides. Warm wasn't really the word, maybe... maybe ''powered''. Some were small, others larger. Some were moving. It was the same sense, now that he thought about it, that he'd gotten from his rescuer. Same sense as from the phone, but the big things, the moving ones, he could feel through the walls and over a distance. He only 'heard' anything when it was close enough, but the ''powered'' part of the sense could go a lot farther, apparently.

He could feel... Up ahead. Something big, something motionless. Steph wasn't at all sure what direction he'd been going even before he'd literally run into SL-1984, but it seemed like this might be the right way. Hesitantly at first, then with more and more certainty, he followed the antenna.

''There.'' It couldn't be anything else. Even on its side, two right legs sticking out rigidly into open air with only rubble keeping it from lying flat, it loomed up above Steph, head hanging down at a thirty degree angle, resting on what looked like the buckled remains of a chair. The powered sense here was much, ''much'' stronger than anything he'd felt coming from any of the dropped electronics. There was enough power thrumming in it that even from here his antenna was warm, and the note was much deeper than the ones he'd 'heard' before, like a double bass. Or whatever they were called; it had been years since his last music class. He had to fight off the lulling feeling that came with it.

It didn't look remotely human. From Steph's perspective, it took a moment to recognize it as an AT-AT. He moved closer, tentative.

Each round footpad had four thick toe flaps. These were slowly, very slowly, swinging out and in on their hinges. The toe flap articulation was so minimal that they couldn't point straight out. The motion looked aimless.

''Garrett?'' he tried. ''I still don't know if this really works or not... Garrett? Are you in there? Can you hear me?''

Steph shuffled closer. ''What do I do now? I don't know how telepathy works. Or if you could hear it. Or if I even ''have ''it. Or if he's here.'' The AT-AT's boxy head was bigger than his whole body. ''I could probably fit into a shoebox, so that doesn't mean much. God. I probably'' can ''fit into a shoebox.'' The head had a dark horizontal slot running across the very front, like a very narrow visor or something. On either side of it were two bulging domes like flattened compound eyes, each housing a slender pipelike structure. Its chin had two more, slightly larger pipelike things, fixed forwards.

Closer. Steph rose shakily onto his hindquarters, almost pitching over as he overcompensated. His toes splayed against the ground strongly enough that if he kept perfectly still he could almost, ''almost'' stand up, though his ankles started to burn the moment he straightened them and his knees refused to unbend. Ignoring that, he stared into that slot, vertical since the thing was on its side. It was mostly opaque, but he could sort of see... were those chairs? ''A room? No, a cockpit.''

His breath fogged the view and cleared slowly.

''Garrett? It's me. Steph.'' That black slot was reflective enough that from this angle, looking right into it from as high up as he could get without finding something to stand on, he could see himself. Big, ''big'' eyes, barely on this side of being appealing rather than grotesque, huge ears, both long and wide, that flagged behind him but wouldn't stand straight up. A bulbous black nose, the mouth beneath it so small that fur around the edges made it look like a pit, and that antennae, curling like a fern. He hadn't exactly seen himself before.

Steph was distracted enough that he didn't register as the thrumming increased in tempo and the bass note picked up. He almost missed one of the pipes - the medium blasters on the temples - as it swiveled slowly to point directly at him.

==Steph and Garrett==

An alert came on and pinged, setting the other systems into motion.

Something huge and white loomed up against his head, almost touching his command viewport, and he reactivated. The white thing - some kind of animal, details were popping in like graphics on an overworked PC - flinched and fell back, and seemed to shrink as the rest of his vision started loading, quickly from a cold start instead of little by little. There was sound, or something like sound, and words, or something close, but he already had plenty of them, and the ones he had were louder.

There was movement from the white animal, he could see now that it was only very big, not huge, and it suddenly traveled a hundred meters away in a few shuffling steps. It seemed to be clinging to a wall that he was pressed against.

Something was wrong. His vision was still loading, everything that wasn't right in front of his head was still glossy smooth and sparse of detail, but he could see that nothing was at the right angle - oh. Oh. He'd fallen over. That explained why there was nothing under his footpads and no weight on his legs, too. Reorienting, he managed to figure out which way was "up". Vaulting high above him was a ceiling, higher up than the hold of a Star Destroyer should be, and there were walls. They seemed very far apart. Something was wrong with this.

Of course it was wrong! He'd fallen over! He was down, and anyone could climb up to get at a boarding hatch and ''at his crew!'' They must have been stunned by the impact, thrown against his bulkheads -

Alert and evacuate the crew! Why isn't that alarm on yet? Start it now!

Though he didn't have any speakers on his outside, as the prerecorded evacuation message started up internally he saw the white animal perk up, monstrous ears folding, cupping as if funneling sound to its head. If he was judging by how big it was compared to him, and he was, it was at least the size of, of - well, it was almost as big as his head, his ''moveable command section'', part of him said, and it was ''fast'' too, already advancing, covering three meters in a stride -

It was ''big'', it was ''fast'', it was already coming towards him, at any second now it was going to circle past his head and ''get in at his crew!''

'''NO!'''

He wasn't going to let that happen! With a supreme effort, the servos in his neck; his ''flexible armored tunnel''; jerked, pointing the two Taim & Bak MS-1 fire-linked heavy laser cannons at the animal. It froze, stared at him with ridiculously big brown eyes, and there was that almost-sound again, like it was saying his name, but it was still big and fast and a danger to his crew and it ''still'' hadn't moved.

His heavy laser cannons, mounted on either side of his chin, the underside of his moveable command section, were cold. It took a moment to muster the power he needed to warm up the lasers that heated the blaster gas in his cannon energizer. Several seconds passed.

While that was happening, the animal held still. As he fired both in tandem, it twitched out of his sights, and he couldn't re-orient in time. Nothing with legs should have been able to move as fast as it did. When he fired, the beams shot into a stretch of wall, impacting with a minor explosion. Texture popped in, and he saw that he'd left two dramatic black scars with a tiny flame guttering in each. Six seconds later and his heavies had recharged, but he didn't need them again so soon.

The animal was scared off, if only for the moment, and he had some time to catch his brea- no, that wasn't right. To lie helplessly on his side and try to regroup. For the moment, there was no further threat to the crew. Above the heavy laser cannons he had two fire-linked medium repeating blasters, useful for smaller, more agile threats, since they could swivel as needed. All he could do was heat those up, check the gas reserves for them and his heavies, send off a distress signal, and wait.

The signal took barely a second to set up and broadcast. It would, of course, be hours or days or more before anything came of it; that was how that went. He was a very valuable piece of equipment, and depending on the commander and the situation he might or might not be a high priority during a crisis.

Crew was more important than the question of where he was, how he'd gotten there, and how he'd get out of this. Without his crew... He turned his attention to his interior, remembering to watch in case the large animal returned.

Neither of the boarding hatches or any of his four escape hatches, or even the hatch to the vehicle bay, had been opened. He knew that. His atmospheric exchangers and filtration unit - part of the life-support systems built into his interior - were running a steady stream of breathable air through his passenger/troop section and command cockpit. He could feel it luffing across his deck.

A notice came up, that he was stressing the mechanisms in his neck, his ''flexible armored tunnel''. Slowly he lowered his head until it hit something and he was at that same angle he'd activated with. He could feel whatever it was, just barely. Just a sense that it was ''there'', nothing about hardness or softness or texture. This still wasn't good for his servos, but he couldn't do anything about that yet.

There was no movement in his interior. It was as if he didn't have any crew at all. That didn't really make sense, though. How could he be active without a crew? His drive motor shouldn't even be running.

Still nothing. At last, interior cams activated and he got a look at his insides. Both levels of his passenger/troop section were empty, without so much as a cleaning droid poking around. No one was in the maintenance shaft to his motor. There were several speeder bikes racked up like throwing darts back in his rear vehicle bay, and some gear in crates, disarrayed a little by the fall, but nothing that moved on its own. It made him feel vaguely uneasy to see all that.

Only one cam was in his tunnel. More of them were in and around his command cockpit. The seats for pilot and gunner, as well as the larger and more imposing one for the commander, were fixed to his deck, though they were adjustable and currently hanging from their bearings. He saw that very clearly; cams were positioned to fix on the faces of crew in the three essential stations, making it easier for them to send real-time messages or recordings on his holoprojector.

He saw the bulky shapes of the consoles that made up his mainframe. On them, status lights blinked or shone steady, and monitors glowed steadily. These were the displays made for his crew. Who, apparently, wasn't there, not even in the cockpit. That wasn't right. Even standing down, inactive in his berth, there should be at least one technician. And there wasn't so much as a fingerprint on a console or a stretch of flattened upholstery at any of the three essential stations. Like they'd never been touched. Not so much as a speck of dust either. Was he factory-new? Couldn't be. He knew that his hull was scored and dented, cosmetic damage that meant he'd seen action.

This was not good. Bad enough to be helpless on his side waiting for his crew to evacuate and send for backup, which presumably would at some point involve either retrieving him whole or in components or blasting him so that no one else could have him. Worse to be helpless on his side with no crew.

No crew. He'd skirted that phrase, because 'no crew' meant 'empty'. That was meaningless when he was inactive and a protocol breach when he was standing down, but he was live now, systems running, and he couldn't...

[This does not actually fit anywhere. I'll delete it when I'm sure I'm not going to use anything from it. "Autonomy, actualization, psyche emulation identity and personality emulation, records, software analog of organic-brain emotional response, and many others, often very similar."

There was one subroutine housed in one particular console, one last major program in the master computer, that hadn't gone live yet. No. Untrue on both counts. Several subroutines, many or most of them linked so that one could not be active without others. Currently there was only one running at optimum, but all were functioning at one level or another. There was a great deal of overlap among the many, many subsubroutines, and many redundancies, and it was altogether more complex and puzzling than any other set of programs. The console wasn't planned or built by the same mind as the rest of him.

It was unmarked, as far as he could tell, and set apart from the others. It had the normal complement of monitors and status lights, but only a few controls. From the lights, some systems were active, most weren't. He was not entirely sure what, if anything, it did.

Should he start it up now? It couldn't be essential. This would just burn power faster. But why not? He couldn't find any crew, so without autonomy he wasn't going to be able to do anything. Besides, his life support was running with no life to support, his hologram projection pod was live with nothing to receive, and he had readied everything in his drive motor even though he was hardly using it at all, what with being motionless. No crew meant no action, the moment when he'd fired at the large animal notwithstanding. He might as well. Power was rerouted, his drive motor sped up slightly to compensate, and bank after bank of status lights on the last console glowed to life.

Garrett jerked. ''Beep... beep... beep... beep...'' Automatically he reached out to swat at the alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock, and his leg just swung forward and back, smacking against something. He felt the impact dully as it traveled up into his body. It didn't really sound like an alarm clock, it sounded like - ''No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! Stress on flexible armored tunnel! Warning!''

That meant - what that meant was that he was FALLING!

Garrett's legs churned forward and back, but hit rubble, unidentifiable heaps of trash. No. He wasn't falling, he was already down, and he'd figured that out already. He was already down, he remembered the fall and how it had started slow and then became much faster and then he'd hit the ground, and now he was ''on'' the ground, though he could barely feel what was underneath him.

The costume. That was it, that had to be it, the costume was keeping things from touching his skin. Yes. Under it, Garrett could feel things, his nerves hadn't all gone dead. As soon as he got it off, he'd be fine. That emptiness, that sickening hollow space inside, that would wear off. Yes. So would the feeling that he was somehow both stretched and compressed somehow. He just had to get the costume off.

The alarms in his cockpit were getting annoying, and nothing was happening with the evacuation alarm, so he disabled them. Indicators on monitors and bank after bank of status lights updated continuously, but they showed nothing he couldn't sense for himself except, perhaps, why the lights on the mystery console, already blinking in rapid patterns, went mad.

He wasn't breathing! He wasn't breathing! Whatever he used to breathe - diaphragm? Rib muscles? - was missing, his sides were totally rigid and immobile. It didn't hurt, but God, he couldn't breathe!

Garrett shuddered, or tried to. The seats at his three essential command stations readjusted convulsively, his flexible armored tunnel quivered, his medium blasters rocked, and his legs bent slightly where they met his drive motor and at the knee joints, toe flaps flicking up and down. Otherwise he didn't move. Just a costume, he told himself. A costume and maybe some highly illegal combination of substances which would make the University very unhappy. He hadn't knowingly taken anything, but that never made much difference with the staff. At the moment, the thought of Midtral kicking him out wasn't all that bad.

The console displays worked silently, making it much easier for crew to see just what was going on with him. One housed the housekeeping subroutines and displayed temperature and pressure readings, air supply, life support, lighting, and half a dozen other systems, both readings and controls, all for the places where crew would be. Most of that was locked to him, off limits, part of some security measure. More consoles were devoted to other things. Weaponry. Data from sensor arrays, holographic targeting systems, inside cams, impulse terrain sensors. The console for both of his KDY FW62 compact fusion drive systems, all the fiddly details that went with them and his fuel slug tank and blaster cannon energizer. Other consoles too, with purposes of their own. Most of them didn't appear to be connected, but under the deck each was linked by numerous thick cables, to each other and the rest of his body. They were, Garrett knew, what his brain had turned into.

After he took the costume off Midtral would kick him out for substance abuse, the way they also did with people who got weird piercings or large tattoos or got in the paper for suspicious reasons. It was in the college contract; people hated it, but no one had a legal leg to stand on. They would give him time to pick up his stuff and find a motel, and he and Steph could go together to that bar just off campus to complain and rage and drink. Later they could stagger back to the motel, and wake up side by side in the morning with matching hangovers, and both of them could claim to have no memory of the previous night. The first and last time he'd done it, he'd sworn never to do it again, and Steph had clutched his head and said "Never, ''ever'' again". But another all-night bender with his friend sounded a lot better now.

He laughed wildly - and silently except for a burst of static on the internal comms. On the - yes, it was the system the commander used to give orders to the troops, it might as well be an intercom, why not? The static was loudest from the hologram pod, loud enough to fill the cockpit. It was purely internal, with not one speaker on his outside. He didn't have to pause for breath. Static hissed and crackled through his intercom, rising in a snarl of terrible, meaningless sound that went on and on. Who was he kidding? Nothing was coming off, and he was so empty that the noise echoed around his internals. The static died down as he stopped, feeling sick.

Not breathing. This time the realization didn't spark panic. He felt hot and cold at once.

He couldn't get up. Oh, it was easy enough in theory, Garrett knew. Contract abdominal muscles. Prop up on one elbow. Curl knees in along the floor. Turn so that hands and knees are on the ground and body is above. Push off with hands and stand up. Such a pity that he couldn't do that.

Okay, focus, he told himself, trying desperately not to start laughing again. He was on his side, not quite flat. The pocked squares on the ceiling - it was a drop ceiling, part of him noticed - somehow looked ridiculously far distant, same with the walls, though he had no problem making out details. A few hundred meters away - no, that couldn't be right, but several times longer than his body - he saw an abandoned, tapering cylindrical plastic thing partially filled with clear liquid, somehow completely intact. "Aquafina", the label read. It looked like a water bottle. Although it was much smaller than he was and he was looking ''down'' to see it, it still seemed huge. Quite a bit larger than a man, almost the size of a speeder... or, yes, a car. But that couldn't be right.

It dawned on Garrett then that it wasn't that any of these things were too large. No, they were exactly as big as they were supposed to be. It was that ''he'' was too ''small''. He was - he was an AT-AT. The distance from footpad to back was supposed to be at least twenty, twenty-five meters. How many feet was that? Fifty, sixty? If he remembered right, the drop ceiling was supposed to be ten feet up, maybe less. Even if he was standing now, his back would only be halfway to that ceiling, if that. That wasn't right. Maybe it explained the compressed feeling, though.

Movement. The furry white animal was back, and although it was moving very cautiously it still seemed far too quick for something without repulsorlifts. Garrett decided that it was probably the size thing - it seemed as big as a bantha, or... or an elephant. Those weren't supposed to move like this. But the animal was close to the floor and far, far from the ceiling, so it was probably small. Now, he couldn't help noticing that it looked like a combination of various animals. Long haired cat, wading bird, field rabbit, maybe some kind of bug.

It was coming around from Garrett's other side, staying away from his heavies this time. Halfheartedly, he followed it with the swiveling medium repeating blasters on either side of his viewport - or rather, he followed it with one blaster, because the other was pressed by his weight against what looked like a magnified piece of canvas. It didn't seem worth the effort to fire. What was the point? He didn't have any crew to protect. He was ''empty''.

''So'' empty. It was the strangest feeling. A little bit like hunger, a little like cold, slightly nauseating, something like being touch-starved, and a ''lot'' like loneliness so strong that it was crippling. Somehow it was all of those things wrapped up together, with something he had no words for. Continued breathlessness didn't help. ''Empty.''

He tried to shudder again, with the same result as last time. The white animal froze where it stood, the weird curling thing on its head unbending partially.

''Garrett?''

He jerked.

Steph? he said, or tried to say. It came out as purely internal static, like the buzzing hiss of an analog TV on an empty channel. Just like when he'd had that moment of wild laughter earlier.

''Garrett, it's me, Steph. Can you hear me?''

I hear you, I hear you! More static. Was that really Steph? How? What had happened?

''Look, don't try to shoot me again. I don't want - Are you even in there? Somewhere?''

Yes. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you, he tried. Still no words. It was just static on his intercom.

''Look, if you're there, say something.''

I don't think I can, he tried. Static. The creature that said it was Steph had its huge ears cupped around its head again, but Garrett didn't think it was hearing him. The intercom was internal, the hatches were shut. And he was producing static.

He jerked the servos in the armored tunnel that had once been his neck, making his head bob. He had to fight gravity. It wasn't an easy motion, and although he couldn't see it himself, he knew it didn't look smooth.

''Do that again.''

Garrett did. Whatever was between his head and the ground, underneath the too-close canvas, made a weird sort of ''crunch''. He could barely hear it; it seemed soft and far away.

''Okay. Uh, okay. You can't talk, but you can hear me, right?''

A third time, and now he was getting faint complaints. He wasn't designed for this kind of activity, not small repetitive movements. If he kept this up, he'd start damaging the blaster on that side. After a moment, he swung one leg forward and back. A foreleg.

He couldn't see most of his body, but he could see his legs, sticking out rigidly, like he was a flipped card table. There was the joint where each leg met his body. The joint could swing the entire leg forwards and back, and spread the legs a little apart, independently, but the spreading had a very limited range and apparently he couldn't do it lying on his side. His legs were just too heavy; the joints weren't built for this. He had knee joints, and four toe flaps at the end of each leg. And there was some kind of wristlike joint between knee and footpad, where the end of the leg pincered on to the footpad, but he couldn't move it. It was probably like a lizard's wrist; press the hand against something and the arm could move at all kinds of angles, but without something, the ground, a wall, to press against none of those wrist angles were really possible.

''Is that a yes?''

If he'd had eyes, Garrett would have rolled them. As it was, he felt the medium blaster that wasn't pinned twitch. Steph could get like this when he was excited or nervous, chattering inanely and giving off the impression that he wasn't nearly as smart as he was.

He tried talking again, asking, What do you think? Static. Of course. He swung the leg again.

''Okay, yeah. So - I guess I'm telepathic now. Right? My voice is gone, but if you can hear me, what else could it be?''

Garrett lay still, waiting as Steph babbled about what had happened, obviously ''just'' on this side of hysteria. He couldn't blame the little guy - Garrett could feel it pressing in on him, like any minute now he'd burst out in mad static laughter again. And maybe this time he wouldn't stop. But as long as Steph was here, he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

Was this telepathy, then? It was ''like'' hearing Steph's voice, but not quite. He didn't have any sense of where it was coming from. And... no, there wasn't really a sensation of hearing anything. It was like imagining a voice, imagining very strongly. Which raised the question of whether or not he ''was'' imagining it. But that way lay madness.

Eventually, Steph ran down. ''And I'm sorry, I ran away! I shouldn't have. I know.'' Had he? Obviously that was bad, but Garrett wasn't sure that he'd noticed. Not with all this. He wished - well, not like it mattered. Obviously he didn't need to breathe. It just felt like he should.

''Look, I - I should really try and get someone to help you up. I don't want to stay here, it's too open.''

Finally! Garrett staticked and swung forward and back, vigorously enough that he got a stern internal notice about not damaging his legs on obstacles. On the ground, Steph shuffled anxiously, black nose twitching.

''Right. I'll, uh, I'll be right back.'' He took off on all fours. Garrett watched him go. Why was Steph some kind of weird alien rabbit thing? What the hell had ''happened''? There was a way to undo it, right? He hoped there was. He really hoped there was.

He didn't ''want'' to be an AT-AT! He'd never wanted this. A month ago - less than a month ago - this costume hadn't even been a vague idea! He wasn't even a big fan or anything. He didn't want to be a walking beast-shaped tank. He could feel ''air'' blowing through his ''insides''.

He heard faint static crackling out of the intercom, and several bewildered seconds passed before he realized that he was trying to whimper.

==Anj's post-TF segment==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus2.jpg]]

Anj holstered his collapsed forcepike, removed his helmet, pushed his overrobe back over his shoulders like a cape, and stared at the reflection in the mirror, shying away from the eyes. The reflection stared back.

The reflection's face wouldn't turn heads. It was pretty normal, all things considered, no obvious scars or nonhuman colors. There was a certain hardness to it, yes – something in the forehead, the set of the jaw, the chin – but the mouth and the surprised expression saved him from looking too unforgiving. What made it disorienting was the way it was at once strange and familiar. There was a lurching shock like he'd dropped into a hole in the ground, registering that this wasn't some stranger's face. There was a smaller shock of recognition - this was his face. This was him.

“Uh. This is the part of the dream where my teeth fall out or I find out I can fly, right?” Anj winced and saw the reflection do the same. '' I don’t sound anything like me. I don’t even sound like my father.''

“Doesn’t feel like a dream, but how would I know? I guess there's nothing wrong with my voice amplifier. I, uh... Well, this is weird.” It was a very expressive face – the wince hadn’t just been a twitch of the eyelid; there’d also been more than a little reaction in the lips and eyebrows. He looked away.

It made a certain amount of sense, though. After that exchange with the bizarre pitcher-thing he had barely been breathing hard. He'd known something was different, he'd sort of expected this, it wasn't just the - well, the sense that now and again something jostled that shouldn't. Though that had been part of it. “Damn. Well... only men are officially accepted into the Stormtrooper Corps. Only the best stormtroopers can be trained as Red Guards. The screening process - yeah, I don't think a woman would go unnoticed. So yeah.”

He was taller, definitely. Not ''really'' tall, maybe, he could be wrong. When he turned his head and tilted it down it seemed like his shoulders on either side extended out too far, though part of that was the pauldrons. They didn't look bad in the mirror. But - wow, yeah, he was definitely taller. Yes. And his arms were thicker, even aside from the armor. Self-consciously, he flexed his free arm and felt his bicep press into the armor of his lower arm, the vambrace.

Also he was taller. Anj moistened his lips and realized that he was nervous.

For some reason recognizing that made him plant his feet and stand straighter - and yes, taller. Hopefully that would stop surprising him soon, it wasn't like he'd hit his head on the doorjamb or anything. He was nervous - okay, afraid.

Earlier, he'd decided to find an empty bathroom to look at himself in, rather than join the crush of people trying to get out. That had taken a little longer than he'd expected. He might have been dragging his feet a bit, putting it off. He'd known something would happen - maybe he was deluding himself, but it was like there was a wave above him, ready to crash down.

He would have liked to avoid it for a little bit longer. He knew he could. But something inside, almost impossible to make out at first, then louder and clearer to the point where it startled him, said ''No. No. That's not how it goes. Resolve internal crises before they impact performance.''

Anj closed his eyes, then opened them. He started talking, the words forming just before he said them. "I was born in - in Coronet City on Corellia. We moved to Imperial center when I was about three, and lived in a domicile in a shabby-genteel section, on a level that was patrolled enough to keep down the violence." He wanted to stop, this wasn't right - he'd been born in Flagstaff Arizona, they'd moved when he was almost four. "The sun - the sun was visible, there was natural light, but only at high noon. When it rained, and it did that a lot, the water came to us through sluices, and it was never clean." The memory hit him, as strong as any he'd ever had - walking through the marketplace with his mother, ten minutes after a storm had passed overhead, and the water had poured off the awning they ducked under, reflecting rainbows.

"No, that's not right." He made himself stop and shake away the memory of how oily the water was, its smell. His pulse was quickening. "I don't remember Arizona except as bright and red, we just have pictures of the little blue house." There had been holograms of Coronet City in the domicile, projecting on the walls. They weren't the shiny sanitized holos of famous or scenic places that got sold to tourists. His older brother had borrowed a holocam and recorded the scenes himself. "I- we lived in an apartment for a while. It snowed in the winter. First time I'd seen snow, and it made night less dark. It was wetter than I'd thought."

"Smelled a little like tin. Smelled like -" Anj rubbed his face with his gloved free hand, shifting his grip on his helmet with the other. He'd heard more than once that fresh snow smelled like tin, but he couldn't - Oh, Emperor, he remembered the landlord's kid, half a year older and always red-faced, showing up and asking if he'd mind wagering on which of the hired men would be the one to knock down the hawk-bat nest. Why not, he was a Corellian, right? "I, I made friends with a neighbor girl who never stopped telling me and Valerie that the - the show with the puppets was stupid and babyish. I wanted to impress her so I agreed, but I still watched it. Sometimes Valerie told her I was lying..."

This went on for some time, and he kept having the feeling that whatever he was fighting, he was losing. Anj paced, restless, sometimes with uncertainty and other times aggressively. Eventually he forced himself to stop and looked back at the mirror, this time looking into his reflection's eyes. His eyes were wide-open, worried, with irises dark enough that they were hard to distinguish from his pupils. Hadn't they been paler before this? Anj looked away, unsure.

"What happened?" he asked in a low voice, not quite a whisper. "I don't understand. It's like - wait, wait. Am I - am I ''talking'' to myself?" He was. "Emperor's bones," he said, the last two words coming out as a mild oath. He really wasn't in the habit of talking to himself, he knew that for sure. It was probably just to listen to his voice. He'd talked to himself at length right after rigging the voice amp the first time, feeling out how it made him sound. Her sound, at the time. No, wait, he'd done that the first time he'd put on a helmet at the Academy, too. Once he'd quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the the other time he'd read the helmet's instruction manual out loud.

He looked down, saw his hand trembling, and had to clench it into a fist to make it stop. He had to finish this. He just really, really didn't want to, and he wasn't sure what 'this' was or why it scared him. Maybe he could put it off for another minute.

Briskly, Anj used some paper towels to dry the counter where the sinks were, switching off a dribbling faucet at the same time, then set his helmet there and removed his robes, folding them quickly and with mechanical precision.

“Huh.” Despite their irregular shape, he’d folded them into a perfect square, flat and unwrinkled. And why had he bothered wiping down the counter first? Anj dropped his folded robes besides his helmet, deliberately letting a corner hang over the edge of the counter. Immediately he felt the nagging urge to adjust the robes, make them line up precisely, but it wasn’t very strong. Apparently he had a thing for neatness. He hoped it was neatness, and not some kind of cleaning mania.

Looking into the mirror again, Anj glanced over his armor. Red plating, the same crimson as his helmet and robes, with a thick textured bodysuit underneath. The bodysuit - the underarmor - was black, naturally, no sign of the armor weave visible. The plating was fashioned like the contours of a very well-defined muscular body. Better defined then he actually was and a serious display of narcissism, he knew, but ''he'' hadn’t designed the armor.

This was both distressing and a sight he'd seen nearly every day. ''That'' was what he had to finish. He had to get both stories to fit together. He couldn't just pick one - well, he ''could'', it would be easy, he could just be Anj, part of the Stormtrooper Corps since he'd volunteered at fifteen, which was younger than was officially allowed, eventually picked for Red Guard training on Yinchorr. He could pick that, let all the sketchy details fill in and flesh out, and be Anj of the 501st on a planet that was only vaguely familiar to him. The more he thought about that backstory, the more complex it would become. But he knew he shouldn't, he really, ''really'' shouldn't.

"Okay," he said quietly. "The obvious answer is that I was - I ''am'', still, Anj - ''Angela'', and this other stuff is new, but there's no way I can ignore it." He had to figure this out. Anj ran a gloved finger along the raised detailing on his pectorals, stopping as he realized what he was doing. He remembered making the armor with Ursala, one of the other Tampa Bay Red Guards - and he remembered getting it at the end of training, before being shipped off to a new post. Both felt real.

This would take some doing.

Anj paced a little more, then stretched out on the linoleum, resting weight only on his forearms and toes, and kept his abdomen taut, silently counting the seconds as his muscles burned. He couldn't reject it. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing was ever that simple. Still, there had to be something he could do.

Holding "plank" position was easy; even with the weight of the armor, he could stay like that for an hour, no trouble. Anj shifted position, put his palms against the floor, and started to push up and lower himself down in a steady rhythm, breathing easily.

Why one or the other? Why not both? Wouldn't that be ideal?

Could he even do that? Easy enough to ''think'' it, but...

A shredded bit of toilet paper scudded off across the linoleum tiles, blown by his breath, and Anj stopped as he realized that he'd just stretched out and started doing pushups on a bathroom floor. A women's bathroom, admittedly, and therefore not ''too'' awful, but still. He scrambled back to his feet as quickly as if he’d been ordered, and stared for the third time at his reflection.

This time he didn't look away, staring intently into the mirror, ignoring the discomfort, the awkward feeling that really he shouldn't be doing this. Every time he saw himself, it was a little easier.

And now - now, if he pushed away the visceral shock of seeing someone else and the other, smaller shock of recognition, and it did feel like he was pushing them back - now he honestly could tell himself that that face ''was'' familiar. That the nose had once been broken rather spectacularly and had for the most part healed straight. That the hair-fine scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, ''his'' dark eyebrow, was ''not'' from a training incident or an injury he'd picked up on duty, but a remainder of something incredibly stupid he’d done as a teenager. He could remember idly imagining a face like this, going with the fairly vague biography he’d made. Anj thought he'd sketched this face, or one like it, in a notebook.

In fact, to his surprise he looked just a little like his ex. Like Angela’s ex. Anj's ex. It wasn’t a ''major'' resemblance, but it was there, something about the bone structure and the texture of his close-cropped dark hair, though it wasn't curly. Oh, right - he'd been on that faces kick, filling up page after page of head studies. Since this had been when he, as Angela, had been engaged to Scott, and Scott hadn't objected to a little modeling, most of them reflected him somehow.

Anj was oddly relieved to find that there was still an echo of that old pain when he thought about Scott. Things just hadn't worked out between them. They'd left on friendly enough terms, yes, it had been almost two years and it was barely awkward anymore when they ran into each other, but there'd just been too much emotional investment for it to be painless.

It was weird, thinking of Scott when he looked like this, but almost reassuring.

Maybe he could do this after all. "I shouldn't worry about it," Anj told himself. He didn't dislike his voice. "Maybe if I just stop making a problem out of it - mind over matter, right?" There was still a blanket sense of unease, but he wasn't afraid now. He smiled tentatively, mostly to try out how it looked on his face. This didn't have to be bad. He'd - he'd try not to think of it as bad.

There would be time later to strip off every piece of armor and examine everything. For now – well, he ''knew'', but it wouldn’t hurt just to check. Anj found the seam in his underarmor and stretched it open. There was the dance belt thing keeping everything supported, and under it another piece of padded armor, common sense really, a protection that was smaller and not nearly as obvious as the codpiece worn by stormtroopers. And under ''that'' -

He wasn't sure if it was supposed to be - the angle was new, but it looked normal - he hadn't expected - right, well, Scott had been cut, and -

“…Yeah. I definitely went in the wrong refresher. Bathroom. Whatever it's called.” Feeling a little embarrassed, Anj straightened his armor and exhaled firmly. "I don't think I'll do that again for a while." Not that he would have a choice; his bladder had to fill eventually. But it could wait.

"No more periods. Huh. I'm going to have to get new clothes. ''All'' new clothes. It's probably going to be a comprehensive shopping spree." A daunting thought. As Angela, ever since he was a little girl he'd hated shopping for new outfits, since it was ''never'' quick or simple. He'd hated it vocally enough that it had become a family joke. Somehow he doubted that had changed - and, for whatever reason, this was another oddly comforting thought. There was a little pronoun confusion and what could only be called a double set of memories, but Angela and Anj were the same person at heart. He hoped.

He still felt weird, but it was a relief to be sure that whatever else was going on, this was a convention in Florida, and he had walked in as a woman in costume. In Red Guard costume. The furries he’d seen – the same thing had happened to ''them.'' It was safe to assume it had also happened to the people he’d passed on the way ''here'', the ones who’d been rushing for the exits or milling in confusion. Had it happened to everyone? In the world, or locally, or just ''here''?

He’d become a real Red Guard; his forcepike had become a real forcepike, the biography had filled out extensively, and so had... other things. The furries had become actual, living animal people. The image, the dream, had become reality. Although, really, he’d never longed to have more than the image, he’d spent a lot of idle thought on it but never felt that he was ''supposed'' to be a Red Guard, really. And – well, it followed logically that the pitcher man hadn’t been more than the image before, because who could ''possibly'' want to be a pitcher? There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

… What had happened to the rest of the squad? To his friends, to SL-1984? Had this happened to ''them'', too? Anj felt a sharp, unsettling lurch in the pit of his stomach, as all the unease he'd managed to dispell came back in a lump. Why wasn’t he with them? ''How'' could he have thought it was a good idea to leave them in this unfamiliar territory? He had no idea where they were, so why wasn’t he out looking for them?

“Why do I feel so ''guilty'' about this? I don’t know what in the Emperor’s name they’re doing, this isn’t exactly covered in training!” Anj blinked. “Not training. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Going to have to do ''something''.” But what, ''that'' was the question. Where to start? He wasn't entirely sure where ''he'' was, let alone any of the others!

Restless again, Anj made a quick circuit of the bathroom. He’d chosen well; when he’d passed this place early in the day there had been an impressive line, but everyone’s priorities had shifted well before he got here.

All stalls were open, and the bathroom was empty – he wouldn’t have removed his helmet and started talking to himself if it hadn’t been – but it didn’t hurt to check.

He found it rather disheartening when he had trouble reading a piece of graffiti. It was scratched deeply into the side of a stall, in large, relatively neat letters that were easy to distinguish, but it still took longer than he’d have liked before the squiggles resolved into “ADRIAN WAS HERE”. Apparently he now had trouble reading English.

Otherwise, the only thing of note was a pile of clothing just inside the handicapped stall. The shirt at the top of the pile had what looked like a long elastic bandage, ragged at the tip, trailing out of the neck opening. Very gingerly, touching only with the very tips of his gloved fingers, Anj separated and folded the clothes neatly, stacking them together on the linoleum. He told himself as he did it that it was a courtesy. The other end of the bandage was wrapped around a bra left inside the shirt, for some reason that Anj couldn't fathom. Crumpled under those and sitting atop a dusty pair of sandals were short pants with panties inside - and in ''those'' was a winged Maxi pad with just a little blood on it.

Just seeing that made Anj feel incredibly uncomfortable and voyeuristic. If women had a set of bathroom rules, hiding all evidence of periods was one of the big ones. It seemed like that rule had carried over - he was embarrassed for whoever this was, and entirely unwilling to touch it. And yet Anj couldn’t help thinking that if the clothing had simply been removed, it would just be heaped together, underthings on top. This looked like more like the occupant had dematerialized – or shrunk dramatically. Yet it was completely empty, and he hadn't seen any-

''-Wait. '' I ''wouldn't try and approach someone who looked like me, if this happened. And she could've got out earlier, maybe even when I opened the door. I wasn't exactly in a state to notice. Whatever this is about, it's going to stay a mystery. One that I'm glad isn't happening to'' me.

A light sort of twitch traveling up his spine brought Anj out of his thoughts. “Right,” he mused under his breath as he returned to the sink. “Weakly Force-Sensitive, untrained and not good for much more than intuition and a warning. Wrote that in the bio. Inexplicable spinal sensations mean something is happening, and if it's mild like this-“

He could hear it, tinny and faint, coming from his helmet on the counter. It must have tuned in on an active frequency. Without hesitation Anj took it up and settled it over his head, the insides tight against his face. The voice over the com became clear. Female, clear, commanding, and with a bit of an accent that sounded vaguely British - No. Not British. ''Imperial.''

“-ling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, report for instruction, report for instruction, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr. Repeat; this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st-“

Words could not have expressed how Anj’s heart leaped on hearing the officer’s voice. He wasn’t alone! Almost as fast as he could think it, he had gone to the specified frequency.

“This is TR-1407 of Tampa Bay Squadron.” Relief loosened his tongue in spite of training. “And I am ''very'' glad to hear from you! Orders, sir?”

The voice that responded over the comlink wasn’t the same one, although if anything the Imperial accent was stronger; this was a harried-sounding older man. “You may change your mind when you see this, Royal Guard. Get to the rendezvous outside of the structure. We’re on the blacktop rectangle to the southwest.”

== Garrett ==

Nothing was happening. He supposed that there must be commotion going around - he and Steph hadn't been the only ones, right? He'd seen something like that before falling over, right? - but he couldn't hear anything. Literally. It was silent. Now and again he felt what were sort of like faint tremors going up into his body. Maybe he'd gone deaf, at least on the outside. Inside it was different.

Experimentally, he swung a hind leg. It hit something. He swung again, harder. Yes - there ''was'' a sound, but it was so faint! Distant, like it was several rooms away.

Now he charged his heavies, waiting the long seconds until they were good and hot, and fired into the wall. The minor explosion that resulted ''was'' louder, but again - faint and far away. The sound of both heavy cannons charging and going off had been perfectly clear - it was the same oddly high laser ''tcheeer'' shriek he remembered from watching Empire Strikes Back - which he supposed made sense, since the sound could probably travel through him and to whatever worked like ears now.

He couldn't breathe. Garrett would have given a lot right now to be sure if he'd been stuck on an inhale or an exhale - he couldn't tell, it felt like both and neither. Mildly uncomfortable.

There was... something... related to the intercom, somewhere in a console in his cabin, but not as intimately a part of him as the intercom. It was picking up something. Probably had been for a while. A signal? Several signals?

''"-xty-two is down!" "I'm still functional, sir. It knocked me over, that's all." "Get back over here - oh, no, it's coming back, Force preserve us-"''

''"-SAID HOLD YOUR FIRE! Damn you, Thirteen, it's just a bird." "Sorry! Sorry! I couldn't help myself, it just came up so fast." "No harm done. My lord-?" "The Lieutenant was ri-"''

''"-see, I told you, the flashing orange bit is its weak point!" "What, like a videogame? Isn't that awfully convenient?" "Don't give me lip. It keeps doing that swing-and-dodge thing, then you can see the orange bit. Cover me, I'll-"''

He cycled through a handful of channels or frequencies or whatever, listening to voices, until he found ones that seemed vaguely familiar, though they were distorted enough that he couldn't quite figure out where he'd heard them before.

''"-nd telling us where you went in such a hurry, ''sir?'' And how you managed to lose half an arm? I can see the sparks from here." "Pike, you would not believe me if I told you. Count yourself fortunate that I found you, I can proba- ah, more of them. How charming." "Fusst! Can you take them?" "Certainly I could, but saving you is a bigger priority than killing animals. Stay where you are.” "You're going to play at being a ''troop transport?!'' "Yes, if you want to put it that way. Do you have a better idea?"''

Without warning, the voices dissolved into gibberish and white noise, a lot louder. He could sort of make out words in that mess, a panicked babbling. This might not even be the same channel. Alarmed, Garrett shut that part of himself off.

What had that been? What the ''hell'' had that been? What was going on out there?! What had happened?! Beneath the aching emptiness of his insides, along his belly, Garrett's drive motor was running hard and fast. Like he was breathing hard and his heart was racing - except, of course, that they weren't. He was a relatively thin set of rigid metal plates wrapped around air and fuel and a walking apparatus, and even that motor under his belly, the closest thing he had to guts, was riddled with spaces, gaps, hatches for mechanics to get into. All of them so empty.

There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do. Gradually, his drive motor slowed, until once again it was an almost subliminal hum. He lay there, wishing he had eyes to close.

He couldn't breathe. He did have the feeling that he hardly noticed that when he was paying attention to something else. But there wasn't a lot else to even think about.

Nothing continued to happen. Garrett felt that horrible emptiness inside and tried not to laugh or start whimpering again. Something must have happened to Steph. Something had got him, maybe. He'd turned into something else. He'd gotten lost. Or maybe... maybe he'd just run off and abandoned Garrett.

Garrett pushed that last thought away. It wouldn't happen. He wouldn't have been abandoned. Not by Steph. They'd known each other since Orientation, and although they weren't roommates they shared about half of their classes. They'd - Garrett was straight, that one time when they'd both gotten very drunk at the end of Finals Week did ''not'' count, and Steph had said Garrett wasn't his type, but that didn't matter. Steph was still one of Garrett's best friends, the only one who always pitched in when he had some new idea, the one he went to whenever a wasp got into his dorm while his roommate was out. If he had anyone who wouldn't leave him, it was Steph.

Of course, the thought came back. Damn it, he was an ''AT-AT''. He couldn't even talk. Good God. Why ''wouldn't'' Steph just walk away?

And he was so ''empty''. Static hissed softly through his command section and the big troop cabin, falling silent only when he made the intercom stop. Laugh, cry, he wanted to do both and couldn't manage either properly. Damn it, he tried to say. Static.

It made sense, he supposed, that he couldn't speak. Maybe he could - there ''was'' that intercom - but he had no idea how to make words without a throat or vocal chords. He tried again, and managed to chop the burst up. Hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet. Not as noisy or intense as the laughter had been, louder than the whimpering.

''Damn'' it. HISS-quiet-hiss-quiet. Now he could sense the mechanisms in the speakers. They were entirely unfamiliar. How ''did'' radios and speakers of any kind turn signals back into voices, sounds, music? He had no idea. Nothing to do but try.

Garrett was lost for some time, trying to bully his intercom into producing anything that wasn't static. He made progress, if slowly - managing a few vowel sounds, almost drowned by the hiss. Still, he didn't miss the movement outside.

First, there came the bees. When the first few appeared, zigzagging up near the ceiling, he had trouble figuring out what they were. They seemed as big as Thanksgiving turkeys and almost as weighty, dark wings moving in a blur. The first handful were high up and spaced out, moving purposefully from one side of his vision to the other. As time passed more and more bees passed through, sometimes several at a time. Garrett practiced what sounded vaguely like an "ah" and watched them, feeling his drive motor start to speed up again. He didn't like bees all that much.

Soon enough it was a whole ''cloud'' of passing bees, all headed in the same direction. The air was thick with them, along the floor as well as the ceiling, and there were enough that the droning of their collective wings was going up his legs and through his hull into the inside. He could actually hear them. It almost managed to be loud.

Many bees flying low smacked into him - he was surprised to find that he could feel them hitting, the insects were ''strong'' - and crawled up his body before taking off again. He couldn't quite see them doing that, or feel them crawling across his surface, but it was a logical assumption, and that was what the ones on his legs were doing. There were so many bees that he could have hit a few dozen just by swinging a leg, but he didn't dare. He could have fired and taken out a lot more, he really wanted to try it, but that would just make them mad, wouldn't it? They were ''everywhere'', there were ''thousands'' of them. He knew, he ''knew'' that he couldn't be stung, but-

Garret made a very odd sound over his intercom, a combination of a high pure synthetic tone and an "ahhhkssshhksshhh" that quickly devolved into furious static. A bee had crawled onto his viewport, seemingly from nowhere, he could see the segments of its wide-spread legs and the yellow hairs coming off it, and oh God it had a pointy red tonguelike thing gleaming between two mandibles, and agggh, it ''licked'' him, and its two antennae were tapping at him... He couldn't feel it at all, but that didn't help, and even though it was many many times smaller than him it was still a GIANT BEE climbing around-

Bee claws on his hatches! He felt ''that''. They were crawling, oh God how could that tickle ''and'' itch, and he couldn't feel their clawed legs ''around'' the hatches or ''on'' them, but at the edges, where they were sealed shut, ''there'' he felt them, and they were ''everywhere''! He was covered in them. They were going to gouge one of the hatches open and ''get inside!'' His drive motor was picking up, throbbing a pitch that started low and built higher, he couldn't just lie still anymore but he couldn't ''do'' anything-

And then the one on his viewport took off, and there were fewer bees in the air, and he didn't feel claws on his hatches anymore. Barely a minute later and it was back to a thin stream of the things moving across the ceiling. Soon enough there were none.

The silence as his drive motor wound back down again was deafening. Garrett had to wonder if he'd just imagined that. But no - there was a little streak of residue, barely visible, on his viewport. Disgusting. God, he didn't like bees. He'd been pleased about them dying off until he'd found that that just meant more ''wasps'', which were worse, if anything.

How was it, he had to ask himself, that he could essentially see outwards from his skin - no, not skin, more like a hull - but he hadn't been able to see any of the bees crawling on his body? He'd looked down his legs and seen them, and he'd seen the one on his viewport from beneath its six clawed feet. Why none of the others?

Vision as he had it now, interior and exterior, was - well, it wasn't a set of alternating views, nor was it overlaid, and he didn't know how this was working at all. It ''was'' working, at any rate. Everything seemed to be in full color and three dimensions.

Fuel reserves were now at ninety-eight point zero four eight one six percent. Had he been topped up when this - when this started? He didn't know. He hadn't checked it before. Right now he was on standby; powered up and burning fuel, but not going anywhere. Even if he figured out how to shut down a few systems, being active at ''all'' drained the reserves. Slowly, yes, but it was happening, and speeding up his drive motor like he'd been doing only hastened the process, as fuel moved up out of the cylindrical tank and was consumed. Garrett had the sudden thought that he would lie here immobile until he had either drained the last milliliter of fuel or he voluntarily shut himself down. He didn't know what would happen then. It was not a pleasant thought.

== Help ==

Time passed, long enough for Garrett to get too lonely and restless to keep trying to figure out his speakers. He wasn't used to having nothing to do. Usually, if nothing else presented itself, he'd start doodling on stray paper, trying to conceptualize various things he'd heard or thought of over the course of the day. Sometimes he'd get lucky and inspiration would strike. And then of course there would be the breathlessly fast calculation of taking an idea and making it ''work''... He wasn't used to being bored.

It wasn't like he could even hold a pencil, Garrett thought. He moved the toe flaps on one foot - hinge joints, all four of them, no other joints, limited flexibility up or down, he could move them independently, but that made little difference. These feet were made for walking, and that was all they could do. Pretty close to useless.

It didn't help that he was almost painfully aware of all his internal surfaces, and he kept coming back again and again to how utterly empty and alone he was. He couldn't even quite muster up any interest in how the hell his body worked, and it seemed like every few seconds he was reminded that he wasn't breathing, like a tic. This was miserable.

So although he didn't see Steph at the feet of the two people who came into view - wherever he was, he didn't seem to be having great luck - he was so desperate to see someone that he almost didn't mind.

They were incredibly tall, walking on thick pillarlike legs, huge and fleshy. Garrett took several seconds to realize that they were human at all. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around that. Humans didn't get anywhere near that big, and although logically he knew that these probably weren't any larger than normal, they still ''looked'' absolutely enormous. If he had been up on all fours, they would still have been considerably taller than him, though all in all somewhat less massive.

Garrett really only assumed they were human at all by their hands. Meaty, both broad and long, with skin covered with a network of fine grooves, a little puffy. Five unique digits, each placed and sized differently with wrinkled skin on the joints, each tapering, rounded, and tipped with a sort of curved scale. They looked like alien appendages until he saw knuckles and a standing vein in the back of one, and lines in a palm; then, something sort of ''clicked'', and he realized how they looked very much like human hands. Grossly enormous human hands, yes, as long as Steph's body, or almost. Still human.

If they had human hands, they were humans, right? They were just so out-of-scale, looming up cone-shaped, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, that he couldn't quite think of them as people, only pick out things like hands and gigantic sloping feet. It took some bewildered staring before he could even recognize that the fibrous stuff hanging from their bodies was ''clothing''.

Then, he saw past the size and realized that, even if they weren't any bigger than usual, they would still have attracted stares from anyone with eyes. The two had stopped within his sight and were now talking animatedly together. He couldn't hear them at ''all'', Garrett realized unhappily. They weren't loud enough for sound to get into his interior. Maybe if he opened a hatch... okay, how exactly did he do that? It wasn't like moving his head or legs, that was for sure.

The smaller of the two, the top of its - his? - head arrayed with a glinting mass of coarse fibers that might have been hair, Garrett could barely see it from here, had two vast flapping leathery things like wings or sails on either side of its head.

There was something wrong with that one's face, like its nose had melted into a gray wrinkled thing that moved, like a tentacle or a tail. Above that, it had ''four'' eyes. Two were set into its head with a bristling ridge above each, the other two were wide-set, gleaming, and very dark. Maybe this one wasn't human after all. It was twisting around, gesturing, generally looking unsettled.

The taller one, and now Garrett could see that it was ''considerably'' larger, was a little more normal, if he could judge. Its eyes were similar to the closer-set pair on the deformed one's face, and he supposed that the bristly ridges were eyebrows. The skin that wasn't covered by hanging folds of cloth was a very pale, almost chalky color. This one had bent its forelegs... no, arms, they had to be arms... and crossed them one over the other.

In a fit of whimsy, Garret decided to call them Mutant and Big Guy. Why not? It wasn't like they'd overhear him and take offense. He was starting to feel a growing sense of unreality. Being unable to put a couple of humans or almost-humans into perspective was just odd.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't real, after all. It just didn't make enough sense. If he was supposed to be an AT-AT, why could he fit into a room? What was up with that thing that had knocked him over, the red thing that had looked so much like the Kool-Aid Man? And why was a rabbit-bug thing telling him that it was Steph?

Garrett knew that he'd already run through part of this, at least. But the idea that he'd passed out in his cardboard shell from a nasty combination of spray paint fumes and an accidental dose of some illegal substance, and was now having a weird dream of epic proportions was - well, it was comforting. Or maybe he was awake, but hallucinating a wildly distorted version of events.

Mutant and Big Guy seemed to be wrapping up their conversation. Their Easter Island-esque heads were doing much less side-to-side swiveling and much more tilting up and down, and gestures were far less expansive. Abruptly, Garret made up his mind. What did he have to lose, if this was or wasn't a dream?

He swung a leg forwards and back.

Big Guy, moving ridiculously fast, got between Garrett and Mutant, bending its limbs like it was about to leap. Mutant moved, but stopped and backed away when Big Guy opened its mouth and did something with it. Garrett had never learned to lipread. What he could see of lips and mouth moving was weird and creepy, like he'd stumbled into the Uncanny Valley. Was that a matter of scale, or...

No one moved for a long moment, until Garrett finally jerked what used to be his head. Now he was being stared at. He moved his command section to point in their general direction and swung a leg forwards, trying to go for 'pathetic'. It wasn't exactly acting. He wished he could heave a sigh.

Big Guy did something with its mouth again, directing it at either Garrett or Mutant. Mutant crept still further away, the sails on its head flapping. Big Guy turned and followed it, twisting around weirdly to look back at Garrett. They stopped at the very edge of his vision, which apparently didn't extend all that far, to gesture and flap their mouths at each other some more. Eventually they stepped out of view entirely.

Garrett waited. Time passed, he had no idea how much. Long enough that he went back to trying to figure out his intercom. He made a heartening leap of progress when he figured out how to make and adapt the synthesized beep, though at his best he sounded about as clear as a toddler lisping into a poorly-kept drive-through speaker. He could only even do ''that'' if he focused very hard on the syllables and went slowly, true, and what wasn't a hiss came out in a robotic high-toned monotone, but progress was progress. What would he do if - ''when'' - he finally got to the point of speaking clearly and with some inflection?

He could try and recreate his voice. And... and other people's voices. Then he could - what? Reenact campy old TV shows?

It didn't get to that point, thankfully. Garrett thought about counting the seconds and decided against it, not really wanting to measure how long it took, but he only felt the I'm-not-breathing tic four times before Big Guy came back and did - well, did ''something''.

Big Guy had sort of... folded up, Garrett guessed, legs practically folded in on themselves, somehow not falling over despite the awkwardness of the position. It was... no, not sitting, couldn't be sitting, not kneeling either... crouching? Yes, that was it. He couldn't help noticing that its legs were ''considerably'' thicker than either his legs or the armored tunnel that had used to be his neck, and it was crouching ''within'' his legspan, looming up over him. Stretching an arm over his side, and from the little vibration that Garrett vaguely felt in his hull, the probably-human was dragging a hand over-

What the hell? Had it just ''stroked'' him? Now Big Guy's mouth was moving, and damn it, Garrett wished he could just ''say'' that he couldn't hear or understand any of that, say it and actually be heard, anyway -

Why not? ''Just help me up.'' Damn the static, he could do better than that, he'd managed-

They came in from the edge of his vision, walking with startlingly quick, fluid motions, as if moving was easy despite all that bulk. Two, three - no, ''four'' of them, like flexible animated towers fidgeting and breathing and pendulumming effortlessly from one leg-column to another in a walk that seemed at every step to be a barely-averted fall. He saw the flapping sails and knew that one of them was Mutant, but he didn't recognize any of the others at all. One didn't have anything like the pillar-like body structure of the others, carrying most of its mass almost horizontally.

They went from the edge of his vision to looming up over him, and static started to hiss and crackle through Garrett's interior. Too big, too close!

Heat, moisture on his right fore footpad! Weight - slight weight, nothing near the right amount, none on the others, and yes he knew he was already down but that sensation spelled FALLING! Garrett tried to swing his legs, tried on some instinctual impulse to fire. But his legs stayed locked still, toeflaps flicking madly, only one of them hitting anything at all, and the power to all four blasters was being leached away as quickly as he could route it in.

He felt like a heavy soft blanket had been pressed over him. ''Him'', not this half-insensate walker body, he could almost ''feel'' it wrapped over and over. Like it was between him and everything else. He felt his drive motor fight something, grinding alarmingly for a moment, and then slow, winding down as rapidly as it had sped up. Garrett saw now that Big Guy was - was ''gripping a footpad'' in one massive appendage. That was why he'd felt, was still feeling, some sensation there. It wasn't moving to wrench it off, it was just... holding it. Okay, that was weird.

Big Guy, still folded up, was mouthing at the new giants, who were no smaller than before but somehow less threatening, now. Garrett found that he could feel the vibrations of speech, faintly, through the hand on his footpad. He still couldn't understand it, annoyingly enough. Still, he knew for certain now that Big Guy was talking.

Garrett also found that he couldn't move his legs at all, just the toeflaps. Nothing was touching them, and they were working fine, he could feel it, they just couldn't move. Something invisible had a hold of him. Whatever it was, he knew, he knew that if it could slow his drive motor and persuade his legs to still, if he couldn't resist it, it could probably pop his hatches and and bare his interior and take him apart bit by bit. But it wasn't. It was holding him still. Very, very still. He found himself adjusting the seating in his command cockpit just to see if he still could.

He was calm now. Very calm, disassociated even. He had to wonder about that firing reflex. It hadn't been a conscious attempt at all, which was pretty inconvenient - he'd fired earlier to see if he could hear it, yes, but he wasn't quite sure how. Well, no sense worrying, was there? Garrett couldn't seem to muster either concern or a great deal of interest. It could be his drive motor, he supposed. It was running ''very'' slowly now. He knew that he ought to be nervous about that. If the computers in what had been his head were really serving as his brain, they needed to be powered. Not much he could do about that, though, was there?

They were talking over him. The giants. Big Guy, not moving, seemed to be trying to direct the others, who were on his other side, around his back. He couldn't see quite as well from his back-side than from his flank-sides or belly-side, but this was close enough that it didn't matter much.

Garrett watched with mild interest. They were all on two legs; one carried itself horizontally and had inexplicable projections that he guessed were a long S-curved neck and rigid tail. And most of it was coated with branching filaments that could be hair, or maybe feathers. Feathers - yes, on the tail and along the limbs they were shaped like feathers, with central shafts. The rest of it, as far as he could tell, had some kind of overlapping armor made of keratinous scales, most of them smaller than a meter across. Something about it was familiar... pictures... a movie?

Oh! He knew what it was! A feathery dinosaur! Maybe a raptor, he wasn't sure, but definitely a bird-dinosaur. Bigger than any dinosaur ought to be, of course, and from here its proportions looked terribly off, but it was recognizable. The movements of its curved neck and wedge head, small from this perspective, were even faster and more sudden than what he'd seen the others doing.

His eyes went - no, he didn't have eyes, did he? Or the sensation of having them, to roll and flick wetly from one thing to another and blink, that was gone. Weird. His ''attention'' went to the others - he was moderately sure that they were human, or rather, human''like'', just distorted by some quirk of his vision. And by the fact that part of him ''knew'' that he was over twenty meters tall, and no human could so much as see over his footpad without something to stand on. How was it that he could recognize and accept a live dinosaur that looked several times bigger than the T. Rex skeleton at the Chicago Field museum, but not humans at the same scale?

Well, Big Guy's hand - good God, each finger was a slab of meat and bone as thick as the kind of conduit that people could creep through - was still on his footpad, but there were no more vibrations going through it, and after looking around quickly Garrett had to conclude that the others had stopped too. They were ''very'' close. Okay, now they were bending, folding over, now they were touching him, he couldn't feel it but it was a safe assumption... his drive motor kept to the same slow pace, he was still wrapped up tightly, calm and motionless and a little bit distant.

How was this going to work? He wasn't built like an animal - he couldn't be tipped onto his belly, not with legs like these - were they planning to just carry him out? Surely he was too heavy for that. And even though he couldn't see any doorways, he was pretty sure that he couldn't be carried out of one.

Great huge hands, some of them clawed, got under him. He wasn't lying entirely flat, or they wouldn't have been able to do that. Big Guy took the hand that wasn't gripping his footpad and laid it on his side, big pale fingers splayed. That hardly seemed like the thing to do, if he was being lifted! For some reason that struck him as funny, but he didn't quite laugh.

His view ''lurched''. The pocked grid of the ceiling wobbled and seemed to get bigger. Simultaneously the faint sensation along his left side, the dull feeling where his flank lay against whatever he'd fallen on, went away. Garrett didn't have any inner ears now, so a few vaguely confused seconds passed before he realized that they were related, and together meant that he was being lifted up. He really couldn't tell how hard they were working - for that matter, the four of them, including Mutant, were shoulder-to-shoulder at his back, and Big Guy's hands hadn't moved.

He was ''above'' whatever he'd been on, now, and he could see it now, though Garrett still couldn't tell what it was. It looked like maybe four or five meters, but it was probably a lot less, if he was right about not actually being larger than a man. He'd stopped moving. Now what?

Big Guy was talking yet again, and the other giants moved around - two stayed at his back, the dinosaur stood at his vehicle bay, and on his other side Mutant positioned itself so that Garrett's command section was between its arm and its body. Each of them stuck its forearms under him - somehow, he'd kept completely steady during all that, like they hadn't been bearing his weight at all. Now, surrounded on all four sides, he had the sudden bizarre thought that they were planning to use him as a conference table.

Knowing full well that he couldn't be heard, Garrett still found himself trying to ask them what they were doing. Then Big Guy took its hand off of his flank.

Immediately he dipped and rocked, the view shuddering like he was in an earthquake, and by minute unsteady increments his body crept back up and leveled, although he was still tipping legwards and trembling. Garrett felt his drive motor intensify by some tiny increment, only to slow back down. He couldn't seem to worry much. There just wasn't enough power in his system for that.

He noticed, then, that the giants who were not Big Guy were disturbed. Strained, breathing heavily, shoulders hunched, moisture beading on oily skins that were flushing or paling. He couldn't help but wonder how eyes that bulged like that didn't just pop and run down out of their sockets. This took effort, evidently. The dinosaur was a little different, head thrown back on its long neck, mouth open. It had great pointed teeth. From his other flank he saw bent knees and massive far-spread feet.

Big Guy kept one hand steady on Garrett's footpad and reached underneath him with its free hand. There was something in it, something that gleamed. Some kind of tool? Despite the feeling of being under wraps, Garrett's found himself interested. What could that-

A beam of ''solid light'' just ''shot'' out of the thing, and for one long not-quite-panicked moment Garrett didn't see that it was finite, coming to a clearly defined tip, under twelve meters long. And it stayed attached to the emitter, too, not blazing off to burn through things like a turbolaser bolt. The thing was white-cored and blue along the edges, and he had ''no idea'' what it was.

Moving uncannily fast, as usual, Big Guy kept its hand wrapped around the emitter and manipulated the beam, holding it horizontal and passing it down, ''through'' whatever Garrett had been lying on. Smoke or steam curled up and dissipated. When the glowing beam was brought back up - moving quickly, too quickly; what if Big Guy made a mistake? - and moved aside, he saw that the mystery material had been ''cut'', and cleanly. The beam tool was like a propane torch, but big enough to make the body of a cruiseliner and without the facemask and sparks and burning.

There was a bit of new input from his air filters. An increase in... what was that, ozone?

Big Guy kept at it and chopped the stuff into long, somewhat rectangular shapes. Whatever it was Garrett had fallen over onto, part of it was a very solid slab of something weird and porous that smoked very little when cut, at least compared to the woven stuff that he thought was probably cloth.

Then the creature's fingers moved on the tool, and the blue-tinted beam sort of evaporated and was gone. Big Guy started clearing away the cut slabs, barely seeming to touch them - just sort of gesturing and causing them to whisk off. That couldn't be possible, could it?

What ''was'' that beam thing, Garrett had to ask himself. It seemed like something he ought to know, but what was the ''point'' to making a cutting rod half the size of a telephone pole?! Some kind of mining tool maybe? Although that train of thought seemed interesting, and he felt like he was missing something obvious, he had to let it go. Drive motor was a little too sluggish to keep it up.

The debris was more or less cleared, revealing... some kind of bumpy ground covering. Big Guy's free hand, minus the beam tool, came back to Garrett's flank, and by the vibrations said something. Something in his balance shifted, and the four giants straining to hold him up pulled away almost as one. Garrett didn't have to strain to see them as human to read the relief. He was very heavy.

...Which left him rather inexplicably floating in midair. He flicked his toe pads a little. He wasn't going to worry about it, but Big Guy was hardly at an angle to hold him up. Particularly alone. Although this was an odd time to notice it, Garrett saw, now, that there were no fibery hairs coming off Big Guy's domed head - instead, in the skin, there seemed to be bold faded-blue stripes running back over his skull; one really thick one over each eyebrow, a thinner one starting near each ear. Weird.

He was lifting up now, the hand gripping his footpad never faltering. Up... ten meters, thirteen, fifteen... he knew if he were to fall now, from here, at less than his full height, he would be seriously damaged, certainly more than simply falling over. No sense in worrying. Up... Big Guy was standing straight now, arms shifting position, still gripping steadily. It said something, and in response Mutant and one of the others, not the dinosaur, came closer and touched Garrett again, clutching at his hull.

"Ohhhhh..." He was surprised at how clearly the uneasy word came out, but now - now he was being turned, like a turtle flipped on its back, and it made him very uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't have inner ears - even so, he ''felt'' his insides shifting as things went from bulkhead to deck, and it was a weird feeling. It reminded him - and with all this excitement he'd almost managed to forget, too! - that he had no lungs or other organs and there was a great hollow cavity sitting in him, all but empty. Distant feeling or no distant feeling, that was unpleasant.

Still, he was being turned over, increment by increment. He was almost at the standing point now. Big Guy's hand slipped away from his footpad, and he rotated the last few degrees - slowly eased down, and his toeflaps were all sticking outwards as far as they could, and TOUCHDOWN!

He felt it as a sort of ''chunk'' as his weight came down on all four footpads, and something above the kneejoints telescoped slightly. The weird feeling of distance evaporated, and he found that he could move again. His drive motor sped up by some tiny increment. Garrett briefly forgot that he couldn't sigh, and had another weird moment where he tried to breathe but couldn't find the right equipment.

It felt so good to have his footpads on the ground! He pressed his toeflaps into it, feeling its bumpiness and its give, getting the sense that it was slightly uneven but level underneath. He was pretty sure that what looked like a landscape of weird, fibrous alien moss was really carpet. It was a good surface. Solid. Stable. Now he could move. Now he could ''walk.''

Big Guy was talking again, and the assorted weird creatures were backing off, still moving with the kind of fluid speed that made him nervous, but moving ''away'' from him, so he didn't feel crowded. He had to appreciate that. Better to think about this unexpected consideration, and not what life was going to be like if he panicked every time people who were not Big Guy stood next to him.

During a pause Garrett endeavored to bob his head minutely, although he had no idea what was being said. Even if he'd learned to lip-read, even though the giant had his big blocky face tilted downwards, at this angle Big Guy's most prominent features were his chin and the underside of his nose. He was like a tower, the kind they topped with turrets and left to guard cities.

Big Guy said something, very short this time. Garrett head-bobbed again and was either rewarded or chastised by muscles tightening under the maybe-human's skin; he thought it could be a frown. Big Guy leaned down and in close, so that his mouth and nose and eyes filled Garrett's command viewport, and said something else, moving his mouth with slow, deliberate exaggeration. There were some tiny bubbles gleaming in that wet mouth, and a bit of discoloration on at least one of the teeth, and oh God the pores in that pale skin, and the capillaries under it, and the barely-visible clear hairs scattered about - ugh. Whoever said that beauty was skin deep had never looked too close.

Garrett did nothing, vaguely wishing he could blink, and felt his command cockpit get stared through for a second time. Whatever Big Guy was looking for, he probably didn't find it, because he breathed out in a long stream that fogged Garrett's viewport and reared back up to his full height. A big hand came up and very lightly smacked Garrett on the moveable command section - ''thump'' pause lift ''thump'' pause lift, light but enough to get his head to move - and it might have been an attack, some of his systems certainly thought so, but he kind of doubted it.

Something came through with the thumps - or had they been a pat on the head? - a general feel of well-wishing. Damn it, this was frustrating. ''Almost'' communication! What if he tried shooting into the wall, writing something that wa - no, no, bad idea, he'd burn through too much of his fuel and it probably wouldn't even look like a word. And he didn't have anything like enough articulation to scratch letters with his feet.

Big Guy turned and walked away at a speed that still looked ridiculous, a tiny tremor going up Garrett's footpads with each step. He had to have phenomenal shock absorbers in those monster boots; another AT-AT would have had half that stride and more than twice the impact, even on this fibery surface. Very quickly, surprisingly so, the maybe-human was gone, and this time he probably wasn't coming back.

"Dahhhschhhn hhit." Hey, that had practically been comprehensible! Garrett grabbed on to that tidbit of accomplishment, determined to stop moping. He was on all fours now. He could walk, he could get out. He ''would'' get out. Everything else would have to wait.

The convention center as he saw it was a labyrinthine monstrosity built for long-limbed fast-moving giants. He was very vague on exactly where he was or how to get out; by now there probably wasn't anyone to follow. Maybe if he'd been quicker-witted earlier. Ah well. He took a couple of test steps, kicking aside some of the debris he'd been lying on.

Walking was - well, it was different. Taken one way, it was much, ''much'' more deliberate. He had to consciously lift, swing, and plant each footpad in turn, which was a bit complicated since he had four of them and they were all new to him. Not damaged, at least, and he probably had to count that as a stroke of luck, since looking back at when he'd lost his balance and fallen over he wasn't sure how he'd been knocked off his footpads without wrenching them or at least losing toeflaps. Taken the other way, he could set a course, which involved picking a point within his vision and doing something that felt a little like blinking. Or maybe double-clicking. There really wasn't a good human analog. Course-setting was less deliberate and he could set multiple points to reach in turn, but to get around obstacles he had to either cancel the distant set point and make new ones or manually take control, step around things, and let whatever walked him along a course work again.

There was a problem with this. He had a major design flaw - not all of the consoles in and around his cockpit were essential, but even the ones that didn't do something like control his feet or internal temperature used up a lot of power. Particularly one of them - he didn't know what it did, but it was a significant drain. So significant that when he was walking for any serious length of time, either deliberately or along a set course, he had to keep his drive motor at its highest safe output to feed the walking apparatus, the consoles that had something to do with them, "housekeeping" - life support and lighting, which he couldn't seem to shut off - and the mystery console. He wouldn't be able to generate the power to fire his lasers, not on top of all the rest.

Well, from the little he'd seen before being knocked over, he had to conclude that this was a very dangerous place now. He should have had a durasteel hull no thinner than half a meter thick at any point, he should have been close to invincible, but for some reason he was barely larger than a big man, and his hull was perilously thin. Thin enough to let some sound travel through the air into his interior. Although somehow he hadn't been found by anything more lethal than a swarm of bees, he couldn't count on that luck holding. He had to protect himself. And what was the harm in neglecting one mystery console? It couldn't be essential. The thing was connected to the other consoles, but nothing else.

Garrett prepared to move in earnest, and felt more fuel piping into channels deep in his drive system, down in what was left of his guts under the gaping void of his interior. All of his other systems downshifted and fluctuated until they readjusted. He felt his vision fade and surge, so that for a moment the world was made of enormous smooth polygonal shapes, before details popped back in. Some status lights burned brighter, others dimmed to a faint spark or quit entirely.

Things became a lot simpler. In a vague, distant way, Garrett was relieved. All he had to do was make it out. It would be hard, without a crew, but he would do it.

He oriented to the best of his ability, satisfied himself that the ground would continue to support his weight, picked a direction and a course point, and started to walk.

== The Rebel Legion ==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus4.jpg]]

"No, ''I'' am the one asking the questions," the man insisted. He was a bit rumpled and looked - well, he looked pretty distinct, but Steph didn't recognize him. "One more time. What are you and what is your business here?"

''Damn it, apparently I'm a Hoojib! And I'm looking for a friend! Have you seen an AT-AT or not?!'' For his part, Steph was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd gotten a blaster or several aimed at him when he first came close to this group, but they were pointed away now and the edge had come off of his fear, even though now he had an angry man on one side and a suspicious crowd on the other.

A ''lot'' of these people, and there were a lot of people, were armed, he could sense their weapons, and the closer ones had violin notes of their own, but there wasn't that building rush of soundlike sensation he'd felt before Garrett had fired that time, and he didn't think it was going to come.

"''Nev''er heard of them," the man said, evidently taking a lot of pleasure in being unhelpful. He made eye contact, but managed to look down his nose while doing so, and Steph couldn't see much of his expression. He would have backed up to try and get more in view, but he was a bit afraid that that would mean being rather far away. "How do I know this isn't a trap? Oy, Rebs! Any of ''you'' heard of a Hoojib?"

The nearest people who were being referred to as 'Rebs', the people who made up the group Steph had approached, denied knowing. From the muttering - he couldn't really pick up on any one speaker - they thought the man was rude, but were preoccupied themselves, mostly listening to some tinny voice he could barely pick up on, but seemed to be coming from a lot of sources. The group was diverse, although even from a distance he'd recognized the orange jumpsuits of a number of X-Wing pilots. That's why he'd tried to go closer. He'd thought they might be willing to help. Apparently not.

"Anyone? ''Anyone''?" The man shook his head in an exaggerated motion. "Guess your ruse isn't working, eh? I don't think anyone but you knows what a Hoojib is. Protip: if you're going to make up a species, pick a better name."

"It's not made up," a woman's voice said, loudly enough for it to carry. People yielded for her, just far enough that she didn't have to turn sideways or push, as she passed to the edge where Steph could actually see her.

She was tall - everyone seemed tall from Steph's level - but not as tall as a lot of the others. Something about her face was vaguely familiar, though he knew he'd never seen her. It was a sharp face with intense eyes, but pretty enough, he supposed. More striking was the sense of total composure coming off of her, a kind of unshakable confidence or dignity.

The man shook his head again, this time seriously. "This could be a trap. You shouldn't be so trusting."

"If it is, I can handle it. I'm just going to talk. I won't go on any wild chases." They locked eyes over Steph's head, and then the man looked away and sighed.

"That's how you want it? Fine. I'll be on the perimeter." The man shouldered his rifle, pointedly turned his back, and walked a good distance away. Facing outwards, he took what looked a lot like parade rest, shoulders squared.

Under her breath, the woman said, "Better with us than against us, yes, but I almost wish he hadn't come." She shook her head, faced Steph, and, to his surprise, went down on one knee in front of him. He actually had to keep himself from flinching - she'd just come a whole lot closer very quickly. This way, though, it was much easier to watch her face.

She looked down at him for a long moment, staring hard enough that he had to keep himself from preening nervously. Finally, she told him, "My brother and I worked closely with Spokesmind Plif and his people during the Nagai-Tof war. I know Hoojibs."

He would have protested, but staring up into her eyes, he got a sudden image of what she meant. Smaller, able to fit in her hand, and much more insectile, with bigger, paler eyes, floppier ears, high energy, an entirely different appearance and demeanor. Somehow she'd shown that to him, and he was - well, he was at a loss for words. Crap.

''Uh. Sorry?'' He winced inwardly at how hesitant he'd sounded. ''If I'm not a Hoojib, what am I, then?''

She took pity on him. "There is a chance that you belong to some subspecies. I don't believe that you're part of a trap, anyway. You aren't one of us. What brought you here?"

''Have you seen an AT-AT anywhere? Gray, four-legged, around human-sized? He's my friend.''

She pursed her lips, and even more than earlier he knew that face and couldn't place it. "I haven't, but I've been part of the committee since I called us together. A latecomer or someone on the perimeter may have seen it. Hold on." She stood up, raised her hand - it probably held something, but from down here he couldn't see - to her mouth, and said a long phrase in some foreign language. His ears caught the same phrase coming from a number of other places in the crowd, and after a moment something in her hand gave a very tinny two-syllable response. Steph realized where he'd seen her before.

Oh. ''Oh''. She didn't have the hair buns or the white dress or the metal bikini for that matter, and she wasn't shouting, but he saw it now, and it was pretty obvious.

''You're Princess Leia!''

"''Chief of State'' Leia Organa Solo," someone in the crowd corrected sharply.

"The Chief of State is Mon Mothma," she snapped back, composure slipping. "I'm not -" Leia stopped, closed her eyes, opened them again. "I'm only sort of Leia. Things are complicated. We're all having difficulties." That last sentence came out reluctantly, without the sharp edge of a lot of the things she said.

''That's totally understandable,'' Steph told her. He was finding this pretty surreal. Ridiculous, even. Princess Leia - "sort of" or not, that was who she looked and sounded like - was talking to him, a weird-looking animal, as if this was completely normal.

"We're having some trouble staying together and not fighting," she admitted, then shook her head and looked back at him. "But our issues aren't yours, I'm sure. I know we're far from organized at the moment, but we are the Rebel Legion. Most of us are local, from Ra Kura Base. I am a member of the Royalty/Senatorial Detachment."

''Okay,'' he said. None of that meant anything to him, of course. He had the sense that either these people had named and divided themselves ''very'' quickly, or the fan world was a lot more complicated than he'd thought. ''I'm Steph. What were you saying earlier? When you stood up?''

She smiled ruefully. "We're talking in code over the comm, since it's unsecured. It's probably unnecessary, of course, but I think the Legion is hardwired for paranoia. I gave a description of you and relayed your request. Someone should respond. I'll stay with you until then. It's not like I'm missing much."

''Okay,'' he said again. He couldn't think of anything to say and she, despite what she'd said about not missing anything, seemed preoccupied, turning away and talking into her hand again. He couldn't see her face properly, but it sounded like she was arguing with someone. Steph groomed a little, just for something to do. It was a process involving clawraking and patting down his long white fur, trying to get it arranged right, and was probably instinctual. Steph knew the obvious parallel was to a cat or a bird preening, but honestly it reminded him more of brushing down his shirt or trying to flatten his hair, things he'd done when he was nervous. And human.

He supposed he was glad that he wasn't licking himself. This was just depressing. Still - still, it had to be worse for Garrett. He had to focus on finding him.

Something caught his attention and he froze in place, twisted sideways with his fingers buried in fur, trying to tell what it was. It was the energy-sense, of course. Now that he'd had some time and all, he knew the sense really wasn't like hearing violins or feeling heat. Steph had interpreted it like that at first, but it was more complicated. He couldn't help but think of how he'd visited a lab partner's blog, and it was full of reviews of things from some company called "Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs", describing things as having coolness and roundness and resonance, throbbing base notes, and something feral and dangerous lurking beneath. And then she'd told him that these were all ''perfumes'', and she ''had'' to describe them like that, since the right words just didn't exist.

He understood that a lot better now. Energy-sense didn't really map to hearing or touch, but he really had no other way to describe it.

What he'd sensed... He hadn't gotten a handle on the energy-sense at the time, but he recognized this particular flavor, somewhere out in the crowd, which was rather bigger than he'd thought at first, and getting more distinct by the second. Steph strained, feeling his antenna uncoil slightly, until he sensed the notes. There was an entire orchestra's worth playing out there, distinct from the smaller notes scattered all throughout the crowd. He knew this one.

He waited a bit longer to make sure. The person was some distance away and masked by the crowd, he could barely hear it, but Steph's ears were huge, and he thought he'd recognize that particular timbre of amplified breathing anywhere.

''Hey! Over here!'' Steph shouted, or as close as he could to shouting without a larynx.

The woman who looked like Leia exhaled sharply, her face going absolutely blank and still. "Fantastic," she said darkly, lowering her hand away from her mouth. Several people in the crowd were muttering unhappily.

Steph was rather taken aback. ''What is it? What's wrong?''

For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to respond. "I hate him. I know that's not right, it's more complicated than that, but I can't forgive him. Not that easily." She bit each word out, took a deep shuddering breath, and turned to face someone in the crowd, which seemed downright agitated.

The people, packed together though they were, had let Leia pass unimpeded. For the man who looked like Darth Vader in white, they parted. There was an entire bubble of space around him and the two storm troopers following him. Steph wasn't terribly good at gauging distances, especially now that he was the size of a housecat, but even so, it seemed a little excessive. He smelled something burning.

Last time he'd somehow managed to miss noticing the man's cape. It was huge, and seemed to be in mid-billow even when he was still. On the right side, though, it was tattered pretty badly. That was when Steph sensed discordant notes and saw that most of the man's right arm was missing. Whatever had happened, fat blue sparks were falling from it at irregular intervals, sometimes dying before they hit the carpet, sometimes making it smoke until it died or someone stamped it out. That was the burning smell.

Without preamble, the woman who looked like Leia said, "You're interested in this one. Why?" Her voice was flat and icy.

"I encountered a Hoojib before taking leave of my squadron, Leia Organa Solo, and was curious to know if the one you spoke of was the same. I see that he is." For his part, the white Vader spoke slowly and very carefully. Steph couldn't read any inflection into his voice.

"Hoojibs don't look like that." They were talking about him, but Steph felt like he was listening in on a private conversation. He couldn't be the only one - every eye in the crowd was on the two - but he was becoming uncomfortable.

"It doesn't matter." The Vader hesitated before telling her, "Think of it as an alternate universe issue."

"Like you, then," she said. Her arms were crossed defensively.

"Exactly. You should return to the committee; they need another diplomat. I can take this from here."

"I've fought with worse. During the second Yevetha incursion-" He stopped himself, paused, and in a slightly different tone said, "Never mind. At any rate, this is nothing. My - Organa said that you were looking for a walker."

Trying not to ramble or babble, Steph told him about coming back to find Garrett gone, doubling back to explain that he'd found the walker earlier and left to look for help. Then he had to confirm that by Garrett, yes, he did mean the AT-AT. And his own name was Steph.

The Vader paused, then told him, "There are a great many names I could go by, but I believe I will stay with my designation. It is Ess Ell One Nine Eight Four. If you don't want to reference Orwell, call me Eightyfour," he said with just a faint trace of amusement.

For someone so big, SL-1984's footsteps were surprisingly quiet.

life-form analyzer.

==Escaping==

Fuel reserves were at ninety-three point seven nine four five oh. He wasn't burning it at the ideal rate; one of the filters wasn't quite right, so the mixture had some fine particulates which were affecting consumption. It didn't harm his performance too much, not for one mission, but the techs were definitely going to have to take a look at it when he was back in his berth.

He kept all four blasters hot. This was a big expenditure, but without a gunner sitting in one of the pilot chairs he was quite a bit slower, and the couple seconds between registering a threat and being able to fire might make a difference here, where everything was so fast. He'd had some trouble deciding to do that. Eventually he'd just stopped walking for a few minutes, which let power reroute until he could balance the pros and cons.

How long had he been walking? No one had set a timer, he didn't know. A few kilometers. He had no plan for getting out. Random directions all the way. There'd been a thing. Swinging cliff-gate. Door. No, two doors, side by side - double doors, that was it. They'd stopped him for a while, until he'd thought of shooting out the metal thing that kept them closed. After that they had swung open for him. He couldn't recall when that had been.

He was fairly certain that he'd gone in a few circles; he was continuously plotting new courses with a number of random turns. There had been some more ambulating towers, and each time he'd seen one he'd stopped in his tracks to watch them, but they'd ignored him. Good. He was more effective on targets that didn't outmass him or move that damn fast.

Now, finally, it looked like he was getting somewhere! Ahead, at the far range of his vision, more things. Doors. Different surface, clear, yes, glass doors, he couldn't see through them yet but they ''were'' glass. Ground was still good, he didn't detect any major holes or anything that would hide treacherous ground, so he shifted the pace up to maximum, the ground-eating charge that he could only keep up for so long without risking damage.

''Dead end! Stop, stop!'' As he reached the doors he turned and pulled to the side, shedding momentum and not quite presenting his flank. Glass though they were, the doors were closed and all the nonvisual sensors tagged them as yet another unscaleable cliff. Coming to a stop, power rerouting smoothly with hardly a flicker in his vision, he thought that this place was absolutely riddled with these sheer cliffs. They didn't seem natural.

A moment later, and Garrett thought, of ''course'' they didn't seem natural. Good God. They were ''walls''. They kept the ceiling away from the floor, the outside away from the inside. What, had he forgotten somehow? It was hideously obvious, now that he wasn't walking.

That was worrying. Still, he couldn't stop for that now. He had to get out. His side-views somehow couldn't see through the glass of the doors; they were just reflective, smooth planes, totally unnatural looking, and it took a few seconds to figure out that the sheets of thinner organic material were probably flyers that had been taped up at eye level - yeah, they were some distance above him, but he could read the writing on the closest one, a billboard-scaled proclamation about staying hydrated and bathing. By backing up and turning awkwardly, footpads clomping loudly in his mind's ear, he could see out of his command viewport, and the glass was properly transparent.

Outside, while the nearest bits of paving looked like the kind of job that involved getting regional politicians to cut a ribbon at the end of a dedication ceremony before the thing could be used, everything he took as signs of scale - trees, people, cars - was distant. Within sight, yes, but the distance shrank them, and the sight of humanoids his size or larger seemed like a trick of his eyes or cameras or whatever, rather than the presence of towering fast monsters. For a strange moment of disconnect he could almost believe that the convention had simply moved outside and was going on just fine, maybe a little more disorganized by the move.

Then Garrett made himself look closer, and actually see the scaled-up people, what they looked like beyond not seeming like moving towers. What was unmistakeably a gout of fire shot into the air and fizzled out as the androgynous man producing it was interrupted by something with a pair of gigantic bat wings, spreading them incredibly wide and flapping them with what looked like a tremendous gust of wind. To the side, an angry-looking cat furry bandaged a small boy in a whirlwind of linen strips, showing long, pointed teeth as he shouted or snarled at the bat-winged thing. [Oy, I'm awful at crowd scenes. Gotta come back later.] ... Yeah. He was pretty sure most of that didn't happen in a convention that was going on just fine. Come to think of it, he didn't see any balding middle-aged men dressed like their favorite anime girls.

A lot more leggy women dressed as popular anime girls, though.

Garrett thought he had some idea about what had happened. Not how or why, of course. But it was pretty clear that he wasn't the only one.

Maybe it was just as well.

He wasn't breathing. No, of course he wasn't breathing. It was that tic again. Better ignore it.

He checked his fuel reserves. Ninety-three point five oh oh nine two. He was burning it just by standing here. Now Garrett thought he knew what that mystery console was, the one that he had to leave underpowered every time he moved. It was his frontal lobe, or something like that. His engine didn't produce enough power. It was optimized for walking and shooting, and powering the thinking console at the same time was more than the motor could handle. He guessed so, anyway. It would certainly explain why things had gotten so much simpler, and why he'd forgotten about walls. Dismaying thought. He got stupid every time he moved; he might literally be unable to walk and think in abstract concepts at the same time. Or - well, okay, he was fairly sure he could walk and think at least somewhat, but not while keeping his blasters primed.

Still, he'd paused to decide to heat up his blasters. It looked like whenever he stopped walking he got that console back. Maybe there weren't any ill effects to that. Maybe it only lasted until he had enough power to reroute. Was he stupider now than he'd been when he was lying on his side?

...Okay, that was an idiotic question, Garrett admitted to himself. No way to tell. It was better to just assume that he could trade walking or the ability to shoot first for the ability to think about things that weren't directly related to walking or shooting. He just couldn't have all three at once. Oh God, it was like the crossing-the-river puzzle, he just had to put the fox and the grain in the boat and leave the chicken back on the riverbank. Or something. Hopefully it wouldn't wander off and the boat wouldn't capsize. Because if he didn't think he could get whatever passed for his brain back, he wouldn't do anything at all, would he?

Very suddenly the emptiness hit him again, hard enough that he felt like something had peeled back his plating and bared both levels of his inner structure. He saw his insides, felt that yawning cold void. Sickening. Empty. Empty, and the plating around it utterly still, as only an inanimate object could be. It had never exactly gone away, he'd just managed not to think about it. Maybe not having thoughts wasn't so bad.

Garrett not-quite-shuddered. Standing up, that meant adjusting his legs enough to make his body rock slightly. He had the tic again.

Well, he wasn't going to get anywhere just standing here. Better get out now, before something got him.

Okay. The doors towered up above him, glass in metal frames that might be aluminum. Remembering when he'd first come in, he was pretty sure that they were pull doors, at least from the outside, and didn't have the kind of latch that needed a turning doorknob. The latch was some kind of one-way deal to keep it from swinging all over the place. At the top of the frame there was some kind of... armature thing. He'd majored in Engineering, not Architecture, but he thought that it kept the door from swinging out.

From inside, it was a push door. He really couldn't push, though. He wasn't built for that, and he'd probably break something trying. That meant trying to shoot it open and hoping that it wasn't balanced. The armature looked easier.

It was a little too high up to reach with his heavies, not without backing up, so Garrett trained his medium repeating blasters at the metal and fired, bracing against the recoil. He'd kept them hot, so there was no moment of charging.

The sound, muted though it was, wasn't anything like earlier, when he'd fired into a wall to see if he could hear anything. When the smoke or vapor or whatever cleared - yes, a good bit of the armature was gone, and some of the doorjamb past it, and there was a blackened crater in the wall. A tiny flame guttered in the middle of it. The glass near that was in one piece, but browned.

He guessed his blasters were more powerful than he'd thought. It was a good thing he hadn't hit that thing that might have been Steph. Garrett suppressed another shudder at the thought.

The armature was gone, which left the latch. Feeling cautious, Garrett backed up stiffly and deliberately, fighting the urge to clutch his nonexistent stomach with limbs that didn't bend that way as he felt the tic. Funny how he'd never appreciated being able to do things like back up without having to think about it. He decided to just get on with it. Aim. Fire.

Okay, the latch was gone, but apparently the doors weren't weighted to swing in or out, because they weren't locked in place anymore but they also weren't opening on their own like the last set of doors. Damn!

Looking out through the glass, seeing the pale blue sky through his forward viewport, seeing the walls and ceiling and floor through all his other senses, Garrett fought a sudden wild surge of claustrophobia. This was less a building and more of a tomb, or maybe ''he'' was the tomb, or maybe - God, it didn't matter, he felt sick and hollow and everything inside with him seemed too close.

The tic again. He was beginning to hate that thing. Forget not having the necessary organs, he didn't feel like he'd had the wind knocked out of him or anything like that. He only felt like he had to breathe when the tic hit him and made him remember that he wasn't doing it. It wasn't a good feeling.

Garrett deliberately focused on his interior, although he'd been trying to avoid doing that, since he hated the sight. He had life support systems built around the void, though of course they were for his crew, not him. Some of those were devoted to atmosphere - he had some kind of air recycling unit, but since the relevant sensors reported that the external air was just fine, air was just being sucked into intake scoops and filtered. Those motors, the fans they ran that circulated air around, they were important. He couldn't control them, but they were important. They'd have to do.

It wasn't like breathing could possibly be as good as the tic kept reminding him, he told himself. No one would ever get anything done.

Driven air, filtered and cooled and dehumidified and constantly monitored by the housekeeping console, blew gently through the void. It wasn't tidal at all, but he let himself imagine that he was taking a deep breath.

Right. Right. There was a kickback every time he fired, and that probably implied that blaster bolts had kinetic energy. This was not how lasers worked. That didn't matter. This would either work or it wouldn't.

''I am not going to be trapped here!'' This time he used his heavies in linked-fire mode. Door on the right, doorframe in the lower left corner. Aim. Fire. The recoil, stronger with his heavies, made his ''flexible armored tunnel'' compress momentarily as his command center jerked back. The bulk of the door had moved a little. This was working! Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Repeat as necessary - stop!

The door opened enough that the wind caught and pushed at it. He wasted no time in setting a course through the opening while nervously watching the doorjam. Most of the way through, the wind must have faltered and the door must have been weighted, because it swung on him. It hit hard enough that he felt the impact through his hull, and although it was jarring and loud and he was forced to very consciously shuffle sideways to keep his balance, there was no pain. Just the feeling that pain should have been there.

But he barely noticed that. It was - God, the world was bright. He reached the point he'd set and stopped. The world was bright. He couldn't see. Gah! This didn't hurt, not quite, and it didn't exactly feel like heat, but it was very unpleasant, it was- God, too bright! Everything was hot light, he couldn't see anything, he was blind! This didn't make sense, it had been fine through the window!

Part of him remembered moving his roommate's plants outside on a sunny, nearly cloudless day, he couldn't remember why, and how the plants had suffered for that. His roommate - oh, God, he couldn't remember his name! Justin? Jacob? He was in architecture or something and happened to be utterly forgettable - had told him very patiently that it didn't matter that they'd been tropical plants, there had still been too much light; the dorm room with the lights on was anywhere from fifty to maybe four hundred lux, if the windows were open on a bright day. Direct sunlight on a day like that was somewhere between thirty and one hundred thirty ''thousand'' lux, and the plants had effectively been sunburned. Justin or Jacob or whatever his name was had gone on to say that direct sunlight was incredibly, exponentially more powerful than indoor lighting, it was just that human eyes adjusted so well that people barely noticed.

The rest of him was locked in place, frozen, trying not to panic, trying to will the brightness to fade. He wasn't blind, not ''quite', he could sort of sense where the sun was, like it was actively hating him, like his vision was a sense of touch. And his underside, he could vaguely make out his legs and his shadow. But he couldn't see, even when he switched to the too-dark internal cams, everything was brightness that felt suspiciously like pain, he couldn't stare out at any of it, he had a ''very'' strong compulsion to tear up defensively, screw his eyes shut, shade them, but ''he couldn't do that'', he couldn't even turn away, ''he didn't have eyes''.

Garrett's motor was working back up out of the near-subliminal hum, getting louder. Too bright! ''Too bright!'' He couldn't - God, too bright! His motor was running, he could move, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn't even go back because the door had shut, and he couldn't ''see''... ''Threat! Threat!''

He backed, sidled, tried to get his command section and his heavies into position, couldn't, it was too high up, aimed his medium repeating blasters, fired. Of course he didn't do any good, he was aiming at the goddamn ''sun'', but he fired anyway, and did it again.

This was useless, he was just burning power, how was his fuel - oh God, ninety two point eight two oh five one that couldn't be good, he was running his motor like he was moving at full tilt blasters blazing and he ''couldn't slow it down'', couldn't see, anything could be out here with him, couldn't move for risk of crashing, too bright, too hot ''threat threat threat'' - was this what going insane felt like?

He managed to make himself stop firing and finally picked up on the terrain sensors in his footpads. The surface was solid. It was stable! Too bright, yes, he couldn't see, yes, this was probably as close to pain as he was going to get, but ''the ground was firm'', damn it!

That helped a little, long enough that he realized that the terrain sensors could substitute for sight. Sort of. Garrett could pick up on sort of a vague outline of the raised hardened surface he was on - sidewalk, right - and where it met the less certain surfaces around it, which was probably the grass. He was still - God, this was insane, he couldn't ''see'', why couldn't he seem to adjust to this, it was just ''daylight'', it was agony, he couldn't stop the static popping in bursts over his intercom and didn't know what kind of vocalization that was supposed to be - but this was something. Like echolocation. Sort of.

It only extended out in an oval maybe, oh, seventy meters long - no, only a few times his body length and he wasn't huge, so it had to be smaller than that. He had to find some shade and he couldn't turn back around, he thought there'd been awnings over the door before - hadn't there been? Had that been a different door? - but there weren't here, he had to get moving.

Trees, there'd been trees he'd seen from inside, the kind that got planted around parking lots to shade some of the cars, those had been the closest. He'd gotten partially turned around, but he thought they were this way, along the pavement. Garrett set course points and hoped.

Terrain-sensing, it turned out, could pick up on people. Sort of. And only if they were the monumentally-scaled ones here - no, no, he had to get it straight, they were probably normal size. He felt them - well, more properly, he felt their footsteps against the ground. The footsteps were shaped vaguely like feet, so some of them were sort of beanlike and others were disks or different shapes, as they hit the ground, some walking or running, some probably staying in place. He hadn't given much thought to how much weight got shifted around by something that breathed, and he was a little startled at how bitter the thought was.

It seemed like there were more closer than farther away, which probably just meant that Garrett could sense the heavier things from farther away, and no doubt there were some holding too still for him to sense like this. He kept setting points and walking, he was trying to be calm, but this wasn't sight. God. Even assuming he got to shade, even assuming he was able to communicate somehow, so someone didn't whisk him away and dismantle him, he'd probably end up living in one of those trailers for the disabled and -

Not living. ''This wasn't living.'' Existing, then, until his fuel ran out. It would. He didn't know what was in his tank but he was pretty sure it wasn't something you could get on Earth, and there'd probably be scale problems. And he needed regular maintenance, though he knew nothing was going to be able to get at his engines without taking them apart. Otherwise, he'd [maintenance fail: catch fire? Go critical?] What then?

Maybe it was better not to -

Whoah! Footsteps, closer, ''really damned fast'', okay, unless they changed direction they'd just pass him by-

SCRAPING HIS HULL oh God what was it engines building to fever pitch SCRAPING THE SEAL OF HIS BOARDING HATCH prepping his heavies, heating heating hurry up he could HEAR IT nonononono STOP he fired his heavies without thinking and tried to bring a medium repeater in line but of course the ''thing'' was running now, too fast, where was it it was gone!

"KKKKSSSSHHHT! KKSSSSHHHHHHH," he staticked in alarm, only the static was much longer and had a terrified snarl in it, he was not sure if that was an attempt at cursing but damn it of ''course'' sensing footsteps wasn't the same as sight and he had no idea what the rest of the body was doing and if anything flew he wouldn't know about it at ''all'' he was blind he was deaf good Lord in Heaven there could be another one RIGHT NOW move move movemovemovemove''move''.

And he was walking as fast as he could, almost running, knowing he couldn't keep this up and all discretionary power was in everything ''but'' his not-a-brain but ''that didn't matter'' keep going go go go, SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - REACHED COURSEPOINT, CONTINUE TO NEXT, ''DODGE'' - SET NEW COURSEPOINT.

Later - it felt like much later - he remembered that the settings for the holocams had to be manually told to adjust to major changes in light. One of the pilots, whoever was serving as the gunner, usually hit that switch. He didn't have a gunner, and the horrible wrongness inherent in a phrase like that did not summon one up. He couldn't hit the switch, but he could turn it on, and he did.

Better. The blinding light on all sides tinted, then seemed to dial down and he could see again. Not even any bright afterimages, but then didn't you need retinas for those? He could see. Much better.

Funny, something was different, but he couldn't get a reading on it. Maybe if he slowed down, free up more power to route to the smart console - No. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't slow down. He did not want to slow down.

Ahead there was an obstruction in his path, hanging across just above his mobile command center, where it would disastrously scrape his upper edge if he just went under it. Trivial to destroy it. He did. Two heavy shots, and he cleared the gap with meters to spare, footpads pounding on the rubble. He shouldn't maintain this pace, it was potentially damaging, but that was fine. He didn't slow down.

What had changed - he was under open skies, not one sheer cliff on any side. The surface was somewhat different - he'd noticed several surface changes, but glancingly, since it hadn't been important. It was some other material, dark gray, smoother and thinner and not as good a surface since it was cracking under his weight. But that was fine.

No hyper-fast bipedal towers. Definitely fine.

Another obstruction, the same kind, this one a little smaller and level with his command viewport. He destroyed it, too, and two heavy shots seemed like overkill.

Underfoot, civilian groundcars on wheels, unarmored, brightly colored, swerved wildly to avoid him. He considered shooting them. He considered altering his course to kick at them or - yes, they were small enough to step on, at least some of them. He didn't. One thing to do this - it was a sin, yes, but he'd take that. Another thing, a worse thing, to take them with him.

Part of him twitched. Okay, if the giant towers were humans, what was with this? Bit by bit, this was a road with several lanes, those were cars, those were trees, all at a scale of much smaller than him, which felt more natural. There was yet another obstruction ahead, and this time he recognized it. Freeway overpass. Even lower than the other two.

Huh. Well, he wasn't going to slow down to think about it. He was alone, empty, it didn't matter where he went as long as he didn't stop until the end. There was a moment when he was distracted by flying atmospheric craft, some loud enough to hear, but he didn't stop. He kept going. Full tilt, getting to each new course point at his highest speed.

He'd always loved getting caught up in a new idea, the way it took over his life, practically singing under his skin, as immediate as his heartbeat. Only now the heartbeat was gone, and in place of the singing was the jarring music of engines.

Fuel reserves were at eighty-nine point oh nine one two seven and going down. That was fine. He wasn't stopping, even with no crew and no purpose. Even with so little power going to it, the strange console had some current. He had autonomy.

==Anj Outside==

Outside, it was chaos, pure and simple. Anj hadn’t been in the crowd when ''it'' happened. He’d seen people and creatures of all descriptions fighting to get outside while he’d been looking for a private place. By the time he’d picked up on the broadcast and left the bathroom, most of them had already gone – the halls had hardly been deserted, but the majority had already fled. He could hear them outside, a dull roar formed by thousands of throats. ''Not a happy crowd'', he decided. ''Better than a mob, though. I don't know what I'd do with one of those.''

As he approached the empty frame of a double door - it had once, apparently, held glass, but that was nowhere to be seen - Anj felt the warning tingle and heard what first sounded like another shrieking alarm. In response he sidestepped out of the way, and none too soon. Some kind of very large heronlike bird with pale gold-orange feathers skidded unsteadily around a corner, then powered past him in a lurching run. The moment its wings cleared the doorframe, it launched itself into the air. As it winged upwards and away the Red Guard realized that it was making a high, panicked call that sounded vaguely like screaming.

He glanced back at where the bird had come from and stilled himself. Nothing, not even the warning tingle that was his precognition. Maybe the bird had been fleeing something, maybe it hadn't, but any trouble was slow enough that if he kept moving it wasn't going to bother ''him.''

TR-1407 stepped outside and was struck by what he saw. People, creatures, and stranger things that defied categorization littered the landscape, rushing about, standing and sitting and reclining in a few cases. Some were alone, others in groups. There were some fighting or arguing with each other, others trying to subdue the wild ones, some hightailing it as if the Emperor’s finest were at their heels, some examining themselves frantically, some just sitting back with mouths open as if howling or screaming, though the Red Guard couldn’t pick out individual voices in the collective noise. Almost no one was close to the complex; most people that Anj saw were on the grass.

As he automatically went through a threat assessment, picking out specifics from all the bewildered bystanders, he marveled at the sheer number. He hadn’t thought the Orlando Convention Center could hold so many – yes, it had been crowded, and he hadn’t canvassed the entire place and seen for himself how big it was, but still. It was like a “Where’s Waldo” poster, writ large.

Maybe it wasn't just inside, he thought suddenly. Maybe it was ''everywhere'', and just more obvious here. If the image had become real - well, it had to be more than just the image, or he wouldn't have gotten taller. If little unarticulated thoughts, like ''a forcepike weighs seven kilograms'' and ''Imperials use the metric system for measurements'' had also carried over, what about others? What about the cheater's assumption that ''I will not be caught'', or the youth's that ''I am immortal''?

Still on the instruction frequency, the officer who had told TK-1407 where to go was tersely repeating those instructions to someone else who had reported. ''I need to stay focused. I can speculate later. Need to find my squadron before I do anything else.''

Some of the figures in the crowd looked like security forces – ''no, police, they're called police.'' Police, firefighters, paramedics, what looked like a SWAT team in black, some Animal Control officers, of all things - there were more than a few people that had probably been called in from all across the state, if not country. They clearly were supposed to try and control or at least contain this madness. Just as clearly, they were as confused and uncertain as anyone else, but trying their best to impose order in some form. Anj sympathized. This was not a job he envied.

It was weird – the outsiders looked and ''felt'' somehow a little different from all these others, and not just because ''they'' were all human. Like all of the changed, big and small, were larger-than-life in one way or another. Maybe he was imagining things.

Flickers on his peripherals made TR-1407 tilt his chin up. The sky, a lovely cloudless blue, was barely less crowded than the ground – far, far above something streaked up into the atmosphere, and hardly any closer small military-looking jet planes or fightercraft roared overhead in formation. Even closer there were news helicopters already, sharing airspace with winged things of all description and wingless humanoids who had no visible way of staying aloft.

The Red Guard saw bright costuming and at least one cape fluttering in the wind as fliers swerved around each other or hovered in place. Someone in red and blue tights streaked upwards abruptly at impossible speeds, within seconds ''catching up to the jets'' and paralleling their course, far enough away that the red cape was barely visible. Anj saw this and, incredulous, thought, ''Superheroes? Really?''

There was no denying what they looked like, no matter how improbable the thought was. Anj realized what he was thinking and grinned involuntarily. ''As if I’m perfectly reasonable in comparison. This is insane. So what? The 501st needs me. And reality doesn't care whether or not you believe it.''

With that reminder, he turned. ''Southwest blacktop? Must be that parking lot where we planned to meet. Ah… it’s midday or thereabouts, so by the sun’s position'' that'' way is west, which means south is...'' there. ''Not far.'' Doing his best not to attract any attention, the Red Guard started moving at a lope.

''I don’t know where the closest military outpost is,'' Anj realized. ''Still, with something like this we can probably expect troopships any minute now; orbital reinforcements – No, no,'' no! ''This is Earth! '' Earth! ''Not part of the Empire! There are no orbital reinforcements. No fleets. We might get some part of the Army here, but they don’t have the technology I’m expecting. Rockets, not turbolasers. Helicopters and jets, not troopships, not snubfighters.'' Why did that thought make him uncomfortable?

''I wouldn’t worry about him, even with a sword like that… Watch out for her, she’s dangerous… He’s fine for now, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to push him… she looks like she could do some serious damage, but somehow I don’t think she’ll be a problem… Better not go near that one. Looks like everyone else’s picked up on it too… Emperor’s bones, that thing is huge, but I don’t think it’s up to anything…'' There were a ''lot'' of people to assess, particularly on the run. It niggled at the Red Guard that he was only doing a cursory check of each, but seeing that his options were to ignore everyone, give only the briefest of inspections, or slow down to a crawl to inspect everyone...

''There!'' Anj's heart jumped in his chest. Inexplicably he felt an incredible sense of relief, strong enough that he was almost lightheaded.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the large knot of people standing together on the asphalt were just as confused and disorganized as anyone else. Quieter, perhaps, but still random. An outsider might believe that they had formed into a cluster at random, and that it was chance that explained why they almost all looked like Imperials, mostly troopers.

The outsider would be wrong. Anj's eyes flicked as an indicator sounded and saw that no fewer than ten Imperial frequencies were active. He didn't see anyone lined up in ranks, but training helped him to find the subtle signs that there was organization, purpose, ''order'' in the group, not just the amorphous mixing of the crowd. They were, indeed, bewildered and unsettled just like everyone in or out of the complex. An effort was being made to remedy that.

TR-1407's footsteps hastened. A stormtrooper with the battered armor and single orange pauldron that signified his rank as a sandtrooper squad leader stopped him with a gesture, then nodded. The Red Guard joined the growing mass.

It was startling to check IFF - Identify Friend/Foe - tags on a monitor and see so many designations. Some were familiar, others less so. There were several SL - Sith Lord - indicators scattered about, but Anj didn't see SL-1984, and this was worrying. Other Vaders, yes, and the Red Guard couldn't help boggling a little at the concept of more than one Lord Vader. But none in white, and none with the right designation. What would he have done, anyway?

''Right. I should report in. To whom, though?'' The mass was ''trying'' to order itself, but it had a good ways to go yet. Almost no one with a helmet was speaking "out loud" with their voice amplification units. With the amount of noise that the rest of the crowd was putting out, that was probably just as well. Instead the comm frequencies were abuzz with orders and counterorders, the beginnings of arguments, complaints and others chewing out the complainers. One channel had been set aside for those who had been separated from squadmates. It didn't help that this part of the parking lot was nowhere near clear. Not every space was filled, but there were enough cars and the like to force the group to encircle them.

Where was his squad? Anj scanned again, and again, and didn't find any of them. No. They had to be here. Despite himself he opened the "searching" channel. "Tampa Bay? Tampa Bay Squad, come in! Tampa Bay?"

This particular frequency was filled with similar requests. "Is there anyone else from Georgia Garrison? Please, Georgia Garrison?" "Pacific Outpost, all units report in. Pacific Outpost..." "Michigan Squad, we have two missing from Michigan Squad, please report." "Anyone from Bast Alpha Squad, come in. Did everyone get out okay?" Most of them were representing a particular squad, or garrison, or outpost, and were looking for missing friends. But he heard one or two who had been separated completely, like him. Some got answers; Anj overheard the starts of several reunions, each cutting off as the speakers switched channels. Others didn't.

"Tampa Bay! Come in Tampa Bay Squad!" It didn't make ''sense''. Anj was starting to sweat into the lining of his armor. Where could they be? He hadn't exactly been quick in getting here, he ''couldn't'' be the first from his squad! Where had they all gone? TR-1407 scanned IFF again as the last of his relief evaporated. It made no sense! The three other squadrons of Florida Garrison - Everglades, Makaze, Parjai - were there. There were forty-nine people in Tampa Bay Squadron - not all of them had come to Xanadu, and some might be a little slow in getting here, but he should have heard from ''someone''.

"Tampa Bay Squad? Please come in. Tampa Bay? Is anyone there? Anyone? Tampa Bay!" Anj forced himself to stop before he lost all control of his voice. He could hear someone else pleading, close to tears if not already crying - "Neon City Garrison, ''where are you?'' Please! Damien, Ray, Greg - ''where are you?''"

To his horror, Anj found his throat constricting in panic. Where were they? ''Where was his squad?'' He tried, squeezing his hands into fists and desperately telling himself that they were late, that's all, he tried to keep calm, but it had been a trying day already and he had no orders to follow and ''his squad was missing.'' That was the big thing, the worst thing. He'd lost them, he had failed his oath as a Red Guard and a soldier of the Empire. The feeling was strong enough to make his eyes water. Anj made sure to close his connection and all of his speakers so that none would hear when he lost it. The rest of the 501st had enough distractions.

Something pulled on his robe. Surprised, Anj looked down at the round-topped droid as it retracted its manipulator arm and crooned something wordless at him.

It was a moment for him to blink fiercely and swallow that lump in his throat, and he covered the delay by reactivating a speaker so that his voice could be heard. "Yeah. There is. I - I've lost my squad." The admission almost stuck on the way out. "I don't know where ''any'' of them are."

The droid, an R2-series astromech with highlights in ''pink'', of all colors, whistled and cooed sympathetically.

"Well, no. Not a word. I have no idea where they are." It seemed like the tightness was easing off, becoming less immediate. He welcomed the distraction. "We got separated a while back, and I haven't seen or heard from any of them since. And it's not like we have our own personal frequency, either - it wasn't like we'd have had any use for it." As he realized what he'd just said, Anj smiled humorlessly into his helmet. Of ''course'' there wouldn't have been a use! It had been a game, or something close!

The R2 beeped, imperious. Its single black photoreceptor was steady. Just like that, things were in perspective. Anj might have laughed, if he hadn't still felt so uneasy.

"That's true. My squad is tough. I'm sure they're fine - it's just, they aren't ''here,'' and I don't know how my friends are. I haven't seen them since all ''this'' started, and I'm worried." This was true, and he knew that they had to have run into trouble, or he wouldn't be by himself like this. But - they were tough, and they were smart. If they needed help they would call for it, and they would make it through.

And if they didn't, well... For a moment he had trouble drawing breath. It was a ''terrible'' thought, and sickening enough that he tasted bile and felt his heart pounding in his throat. ''May the Force help their murderers, because nothing less will stop me,'' he swore, meaning every word. Terrible thought. '' Terrible'' thought.

A sharp whistle brought his attention back down to the droid, who chattered up at him. He had to make an effort to look in control and stable for it. He was sure he knew who and what it was. If it ''was'' R2-KT - well, virtually everyone in Star Wars fandom knew that story. In comparison, he had no grounds for complaint.

"I'll be fine. I'm a Red Guard - I work best alone or with only a few people, and it's not like I'm really by myself - I'm surrounded by the 501st." And they were his Legion, the closest to the Empire that he was ever likely to find. How could he despair? "Thanks."

With a final, cheery whistle, the pink R2 swiveled and trundled away. It had some kind of a logo banner, pink on white, on its back, but it slipped out of sight between two troopers and a robed man before he could read it. Less than a minute later, the single terrified member of Neon City Garrison got off the comm.

Anj felt better now. Still a little shaken, but he was functional, and that was what mattered. This still begged the question - ''now'' what? The Red Guard went after the first fresh distraction that presented itself.

There was a flurry of activity at the edges of the gathering. TR-1407 wasn't exactly short, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the helmets of the people around him. Still, he got a flash of someone else in flowing scarlet and something large, yellow, and moving. The Red Guard looked to his nearest neighbor and boosted the output to his speakers, realizing ''how'' he did it only after it was done.

"Do you know what that's about?" The woman in the form-fitting jumpsuit and the hoodless brown cape turned towards him.

She was - well, she was stunning, and Anj found himself glad that his helmet hid his gaze. She had an alertness about her, like she was aware of everything that was going on around her at all times. He couldn't tell what her position was - probably some kind of agent, by the lower-leg guards and nonstandard firearms. The woman had a striking sort of confidence, almost an aura of "I know what I'm doing and I'm proud to be doing it".

It didn't hurt that she really was pretty - her features were too sharp and strong for conventional beauty, but attractive. Red hair, intense green eyes, and under the jumpsuit she was fit and muscular with good shoulders, a far cry from the handful of sultry pin-up style women that Anj had glimpsed before. He hadn't found ''them'' particularly attractive, but -

Anj saw the lightsaber and the IFF-provided designation at roughly the same time. SL-3268, in a clear voice, answered, "There's a car, I'm guessing a Camaro, without a driver that's started moving erratically and making abortive charges at us. One of your fellow Guards is trying to dissuade it. I don't think there'll be a problem." Just as he was hoping she hadn't noticed, the Mara Jade added with a quirk of her lips, "And I'm flattered, but taken."

''She's one of the Emperor's Hands. I'm lucky that she hasn't taken offense.'' That realization effectively took any desire, killed it, and mangled it beyond any recognition. Anj was glad of the helmet hiding his face, and vaguely wished that he could find a hole in the ground in which to crawl into and die. Even with the cooling systems in his armor, he knew he was blushing furiously, hard enough that he felt sunburned. ''Next time, check IFF first.'' He didn't bother wondering how she'd known. Force Sensitivity and all that.

Probably just as well. Anj had no idea what he'd have done. He was on duty anyway; even with nothing immediate going on it would be un-Imperial to get too distracted. Fortunately not every woman was striking in quite that way - prettier, yes, often curvier and not immediately off-limits, but markedly less impressive. Picturing someone like the Mara Jade alongside, say, Scott, was... interesting. But of course there was also the fact that less than an hour ago ''he had been female'' - how, ''how'' could that have slipped his mind? - and feeling attracted to people while male was a tangle he ''really'' didn't want to unravel just yet.

3268's auburn head came up. Anj felt the warning tingle in the instant before a commanding voice came on all frequencies. The IFF code marked the speaker as TK-0210. '''Our Beloved Founder', Albin Johnson,'' Anj realized. ''Well well. There wouldn't be a 501st without him. I'd forgotten that he showed up. His R2 is here, so of course he's here too.''

"Something new has come up. Would everyone please listen to the situation." It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt that it was an order. Within seconds all voice traffic had stopped. The rest of the crowd carried on with the panicking, but here everyone listened as the founder explained an exchange that someone had heard taking place on a frequency that was decidedly not Imperial.

Specifically, it was one of the radio frequencies used by the United States military. The Founder didn't mention exactly what frequency it was, or when anyone had started listening in on it. What had been overheard was a report on something going off Xanadu grounds and following the highway. Something very large. One of the ones reporting said it was "like something out of Star Wars". The physical description exactly matched that of an Imperial Walker, specifically an All Terrain Armored Transport. Or, as the Rebellion and most civilians in the Galaxy called it, an AT-AT.

''This is a ''very'' sudden development.'' If he'd expected anything, TR-1407 would have thought that the Founder would have just summarized what had just happened, tendered some kind of advice or orders. He hadn't expected a fresh problem, particularly one like ''this''.

The gathering was silent barely long enough for the Founder's report to sink in before a member stated that there had ''not'' been a Walker exhibit, followed by other testimonies that confirmed that wherever this had come from, it wasn't 501st. Exactly what had been happening before all ''this'' was muddled, but people were quite adamant that they knew nothing.

Talking into a handheld comm unit so that everyone could hear her, 3268 had another opinion. "Why would it matter whether or not this thing is one of ours? Imperial is Imperial. The question is, what do we do about it? I think it's reasonable to assume that some rogue element has taken control of an assault walker for an unknown reason." Standing fairly close to Anj as she was, he heard the odd duality of the Mara Jade's voice coming simultaneously through his audio pickups and helmet comm.

It would be unacceptable for ''anyone'' - the automatic assumption seemed to be Rebels, smugglers, or saboteurs, although nobody really expected that to be true - to get away with stealing Imperial property, particularly something as gigantic and dangerous as an assault walker, the common consensus was. The damage one could do, particularly in an urban area, was tremendous, even on a civilized planet in the Empire, where units could quickly be dispatched to take it down. Here on Earth, on a day like today...

Anj heard someone unfamiliar speak out. "There was a young man earlier, some sort of student of engineering - I overheard his name, Gary or Garth or something - who wore a walker costume. He might be driving it." Several others remarked with surprise that they remembered something of the sort.

With confidence, Anj added, "It's difficult to pilot a walker without a copilot, but possible. Normally one drives, the other shoots. The automated systems would help compensate."

"He had a friend with him. It's entirely reasonable to think that two pilots can manage without a commander." If it occurred to anyone that maybe this student ''hadn't'' become a pilot, they kept silent.

A plan didn't actually get proposed until after the Founder made another report, one possibly even more alarming than the last. Tanks and military choppers were being dispatched to intercept the rogue walker before it could reach the next city - and if the cryptic military lingo had been translated properly, somewhere near Washington a jet loaded with missiles had just taken off.

Suddenly the entire gathering was moving, setting up a course of action, proposing and vetoing various aspects to the plan. There would have to be a pursuit, it was decided almost instantly. They needed a small number of autonomous agents. Agents who could subdue anyone within the walker without damaging it, agents who could ''control'' the walker, and someone with enough diplomatic acumen to defuse the situation once it was under control. Preferably agents would have at least some proficiency in at least two of the three. Every member of the team would also need to be able to use grappling hooks and high-tension wires to get up there. It would also help to have the tools all stormtroopers carried, including shaped charges, binders, and a Proper Resonator.

The gathering was rapidly polled, and all those with the right skill set were chosen, then evaluated and kept or not. Unsurprisingly, there were no Imperial Army Pilots who could be identified as such by their armor - AT-AT pilot uniforms were far from popular. No one had worn his or hers to Xanadu. However, a number, Anj included, had made the costumes - and somehow that translated into experience in the cockpit.

Anj was questioned and admitted that he'd never earned the license, and was met with a thinly-disguised quiz in the form of a barrage of questions from two others. He passed. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Red Guard and both willing to work with others and well able to subdue someone with minimal damage, meant that he was on the team.

Some others at least as qualified as him weren't, largely because they had trouble cooperating. There had been many Emperor's Hands, some of them Mara Jades, others not, in the initial pickings, but the fact that most of them seemed to strongly resent each other meant that only three were kept. The final selection consisted of eight individuals. These were the Hands, SL-3268 among them, Anj and another two Red Guards, a clonetrooper sergeant, and a single sandtrooper who really seemed to believe that he was Davin Felth, the trooper who had the line "Look, sir, droids" in ''A New Hope''.

At the same time the other half of the pursuit was being organized. Speederbikes were mentioned, but only two, both from a display, could actually be accounted for, and at any rate they might not have done much good. They were incredibly fast and agile, but with only two, they couldn't carry much. Average cars or trucks were considered and rejected in the same breath. It would be too hard to get an operative out of the vehicle and up into the walker, not to mention the fact that a car was a nice big target, if what's-his-name proved both unreasonable and able to use the walker's weaponry and crushing feet. This left motorcycles, a healthy selection of which were at hand. They would have to do.

More polling; TR-1407 was only peripherally aware of it, but at the end of it seven scout troopers and one Mandalorian soldier were chosen to do the driving. From the first report to the final team, only a few minutes of whirlwind activity had passed. The 501st, while not exactly up to optimal yet, was far more organized than it appeared.

The last problem was actually getting the bikes, taken from all across the lot, to ''work''. Five or fewer of them belonged to people within the gathering - and ''none'' of them had the keys on them. Seized by a wild idea, Anj stepped up during the discussion.

"We don't ''need'' keys," he said, coming to the closest one and uncompressing his forcepike. He had no idea what kind of motorcycle this was. He'd never had anything to do with the things. Still, he could find the ignition easily. Lining it and the lethal tip of his weapon up, the Red Guard thumbed a setting and delicately maneuvered the weapon. The thin metal around the keyslot tore and twisted, and the engine coughed to life.

Just as Anj was enjoying a swell of triumph the fickle machine died miserably, exhaust pipe emitting a stream of thick, oily smoke that spread in a cloud around ankle-height. An inhuman blue-skinned officer in white covered his nose as if offended by the fumes, which weren't evident to anyone with a proper, air-filtering helmet.

No one said anything on the comm channels for a long moment. "Okay," he said lamely, again glad of the helmet that hid his face. "I guess we ''do'' need keys. Today of all days, you'd think this would work." It was a mercy that the attention of the gathering shifted off of him then. He hadn't sensed much in the way of condemnation or scorn, and even amusement had been quiet. It was still embarrassing.

The alien officer in white - a Grand Admiral, apparently - ended up getting several technically-proficient people to hotwire the motorcycles. These included one of the Vaders in the gathering, a man seething with so much barely-suppressed rage and malevolent Force energy that Anj caught his breath and adopted a rigid posture. He was fairly frightening, seemingly hanging on to rationality by the thinnest of margins. The Red Guard fervently hoped that his friend hadn't ended up like ''that''. But whatever else could be said about SL-2128, he worked quickly and well, finishing in time to take over from an officer whose work was slower.

Something else came up; Anj picked up only a few of the details, but a squad that hadn't gotten out reported in to say that they were under attack by unfamiliar hostiles. Once again plans were formed and battered about. They had little to do with the walker interception team. It gave him a pang to think that he might be riding away from his squad, if they were in danger, but duty was duty. TR-1407 soon found himself mounted up behind a scout, roaring away on one of the motorcycles.

The locals barely noticed them go by. They had more than enough trouble as it was - nevertheless, Anj felt a slight pang of mixed contempt and sympathy. He let it pass. They could only do their best. The Five Hundred and First was here for when it wasn't enough.

The Founder sent his best wishes after them on an open frequency. His confidence audibly faltered a little. Anj thought he knew at least part of why. "Good Luck" wasn't right, and they were servants of the Empire, so "May the Force Be With You" might not be good either. Even so, "Emperor's Blessings" was just wrong - and, somehow, so was "The Empire will ''always'' strike back", the belief that any setbacks would be met with a more powerful counterattack. In the end, he settled for, "We're counting on you. You won't let us down."

==Camera guy==

[I fangirl over Tank Man. I really do. I love that we don't know who he was, if he's alive or dead, what he said to the driver of the lead tank - everything. ''How'' could he and the rest of the country have failed? The picture gives me chills. I'd link to it in my bank if the inspiration it gives me wasn't of the "feel small, sit still and tremble in awe and existentialness" variety. So I figured I'd bring it up, since the chance of me working it into, well, ''anything'' else are pretty small.

[Did a little research here, but I have to say that the details pertaining to the helicopter and Doug's camera are probably all wrong. I worked with news cameras in high school and already I've forgotten what piece is called what. The Internet failed me - you'd think I was the only one to wonder who shoots traffic reports, with what, and how. :P]

In June of 1989 an American photographer named Jeff Widener crouched on the sixth-floor balcony of a hotel in Beijing. He was covering the infamous government crackdown on protesters, and only the day before, during the massacre, had been concussed and bloodied by a thrown brick. Widener worked at a range of roughly half a mile with a titanium camera featuring a 400-millimeter telephoto lens. Using borrowed film with the wrong f-stop setting, he covered a column of at least seventeen tanks headed for Tiananmen Square being blocked by one man, alone and unarmed, with a shopping bag in each hand.

Widener wasn't the only one to get pictures of this happening. But, purely by chance, his picture spread fastest. It's now one of the most famous photographs on Earth, seen everywhere except the nation where it was taken - where it happens to be banned. It is iconic in every way, and purely by chance. If Widener hadn't heard that soldiers on the ground were forcibly confiscating cameras, if he hadn't met the fellow Westerner living in that room on the sixth story, if that Westerner hadn't had compatible film available or had been unwilling to stuff that film into his underwear and pass angry Chinese soldiers to get it developed - another photographer's shot of "Tank Man", the "Unknown Rebel", would be the world-famous one. But Widener was in the right place, at the right time, in all the right circumstances.

Doug Maines was in the right place at the right time, and in his view the circumstances didn't look too bad either. Specifically, he was in a Eurocopter Ecureuil news chopper, cruising at two thousand feet and circling with nearly three-quarters of a mile between it and that ''thing''. The camera was a modified 24 frame KCK-40, and at any moment he could start broadcasting live to the network.

Normally he and the pilot shot and delivered traffic reports and overflew accident scenes. Today, not too long after finishing the morning rush's report, they'd been ordered into the air again and told to circle around the Orlando Convention Center to cover something that had come up there. As he adjusted the focus, Doug mused that he hadn't thought much of it - last spring, for instance, a school had been evacuated due to a gas leak, and he had recorded and broadcast video of the students streaming out into the tennis courts.

But there'd been so much air traffic above the Convention Center that both Doug and his partner were wary. Every news station within range had sent someone over to cover it, whatever it was, and both of them knew what happened when helicopters collided in midair. They had spotted the thing heading away, and the chopper had changed course to follow it.

He'd studied for years at photography, cinematography, and the graphic arts, but if Doug had learned one thing it was that aiming high didn't always work out. He had become resigned to aiming his camera at reporters and traffic jams, something he'd never have settled for as an ambitious newbie daydreaming about fame and glory. He was no Widener.

Just as well - Doug didn't have the stomach for following revolutions. He felt a trace of amusement at the thought. ''Right place, right time, and no one's filming but me.'' He was recording now, but the network trusted him enough to let him decide for ''himself'' whether and when to broadcast live.

Something about it screamed ''tank'', clearly enough to make Doug think remember the university and Widener's shot of Tank Man. It was boxy and about as long as the largest legal semitrailer truck, maybe sixty feet in all, though much wider. But it had to be five times taller than any of them, mounted on four flat, jointed legs with round feet half the size of its strange, blocky head. The long legs and the head, and the red laser-things that sometimes shot out of that head, reminded Doug of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. Something about crushing Styrofoam cups in a commercial...

Three years of this job reminded him to check before and behind the tank thing. The highway was several lanes broad, which was probably all that saved oncoming cars from being crushed. Many had crashed into each other or run off the road as drivers gaped, and hardly any had actually passed it. The tank thing was fairly slow, no more than fifty miles an hour at most, and so heavy that it damaged the road, leaving a trail of massive craters and cracked, buckled asphalt in its wake, with a few crushed or burning wrecks scattered about and at least one demolished overpass. All of them had been oncoming traffic; right now nothing was going in the same direction as the walking tank.

Wait, that wasn't right. The distance made them tiny, but even without zooming in Doug saw a pack of motorcycles weaving around and breaking the speed limit, gaining quickly on the tank thing. They were going to get stepped on and ruin the shot, he was sure of it. He had to get an establishing moment before the action started, or it wouldn't look right.

Doug swallowed against his heartburn - no time to take an antacid pill now, he didn't want to miss it - and hit the button that would broadcast live. In a situation like this, he didn't have to report. He just had to film. Wide-angle shot first, to show how big the thing was, including a few wrecks to get a sense of the scale... he then zoomed in to catch little details like the rapid, ponderous motion of the legs and the toe flaps flexing against the ground. He very consciously kept his hands, and the camera, steady against the minor shuddering of the helicopter.

This was in time for the motorcycles to catch up, and he noticed that the riders weren't dressed in anything resembling normal biker gear. Heart pounding, Doug focused on them. He'd have thought ''publicity stunt'' if he'd seen people dressed like this anywhere else. All white and red.

Well, this was bound to be interesting.

[More stuff goes here.]
[No, really.]

==Rocket Trooper==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus3.jpg]]

TX-7255, "Barve" to his friends, saluted after a moment's hesitation. He'd been earnestly telling some groundpounder troops that the group was vulnerable from the air when he'd gotten the summons for an on-the-fly mission. He'd answered immediately - of course - but he hadn't expected to be briefed by the Lord Darth Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet.

...Sort of. Barve tended to focus on his jetpack. How to maintain it, fix it, how to fly it with increasingly intuitive controls, aerial tactics, maintaining and fixing his various weapons and practicing with them, tweaking the minor powered exoskeleton built into his armor, practice with different gravities and atmospheres, dabbling in repulsor packs. Combined with his love for comparing different models and modifying the ones he had, looking for perfection, he was never more than vaguely aware of any politicking.

Even so, he thought he'd have heard if the Supreme Commander decided to reverse his color scheme. The man was also missing most of one arm, the stump of which gave off occasional blue sparks, and at least half of his cape was absent. Since the stump hadn't even been capped off, it had to have been removed recently. This fit in with everything else, really. Barve hadn't heard anything concrete about action or details about where he'd been deployed. Everyone here was so disorganized.

A good meter too far away to be at the Supreme Commander's feet was a small, furry alien with big ears and large, alert eyes. Barve split his attention between the two - helmet screens were useful for that - until he was told that he had to carry the alien through the air.

He was surprised enough to blurt, "My Hush-About was modded with elements from the Aratech Screamer." This meant a lot of things, but he knew from experience that only another rocket trooper understood or cared. Even snubfighter jockeys glazed over. "She's a powerful machine. Launch scorches anything that isn't armored, and fur is flammable. My lord." He wasn't supposed to contradict the Supreme Commander, was he? Damn. Well, it wasn't like he'd run into the protocol before.

"I see. One moment." The Dark Lord - light lord? This really didn't make any sense, ''why'' was he in white - turned to the groundpounders for a moment. Barve ignored what they were saying - he wasn't supposed to listen in, and if it was important, they'd tell him - and watched the alien glance from helmet to helmet as the curved antenna on its head quivered. He had to be careful around aliens. You never knew what they would do.

A ground trooper with the type of armor and white fabric oversuit that some of them wore to protect against cold took off his helmet, turned it upside down, and knelt. The alien climbed into the helmet and shifted about as the ground trooper tugged the white cloth on the helmet so that it stood rigid, making a sort of bucket with the alien at the bottom. The trooper stood, holding his helmet by the cloth. Only the alien's ears showed.

"We have a runaway AT-AT bearing [direction]. I need you to take Steph inside it as quickly as - as quickly as is feasible. Get him there alive and conscious." This was the same thing he'd said before being distracted by the launch thing. "I don't know how well he tolerates flight, so you must determine your speed on your own. We will comm ahead and tell the intercept team to be ready. Do not engage hostiles. Do not get killed."

Weird mission. Still, Barve took the helmet from the trooper, locking his fingers in the stiff fabric. The little alien inside shifted its weight and stared up at him. Helmet and alien together were moderately heavy, but still lighter than his DN bolt-caster, still holstered.

A not-quite-voice said, ''Don't drop me. God, this is a bad idea. Please don't drop me''.

The ground trooper said, "Please don't drop him. I want my helmet back later."

"Steph, try not to drain energy. The comm channel is running on an open frequency. You are not to fire on anything. I can't stress that enough."

"Acknowledged." Not like he could even draw a weapon with his hands full.

The Supreme Commander hesitated, then nodded and told him, "Clear skies."

He knew the slang for "good journey?" Well, he knew the Supreme Commander was a damned impressive snubfighter pilot - that knowledge generally fell under politicking, but one of the memories recorded and passed down from his original had been a series of truly superior pilots, Lord Vader being at the top of the list - and snubbie pilots shared a bit of lingo with rocket troopers. ...Besides, now that he thought about it, 'clear skies' was probably the most obvious piece of flyboy slang ever.

Everyone had backed far enough away that even if he had a catastrophic failure and his jetpack exploded, none of them would die. He felt a little scorn at that kind of caution. Yes, jetpacks could explode at launch, ''if'' they weren't properly cared for, but Barve had been at this for five years. That was basically all his life - the Spaarti cylinder didn't count, acclimation had taken maybe two weeks, and since flash memory was pretty basic he'd had eight months of jetpack training - and he'd had plenty of time to get in the habit. Not like natural-borns, with that baggage from growing up all haphazard.

Barve set his stance and brought up flight control, rapidly checking the systems. Everything was green, not that he ever expected otherwise. Take care of your gear, and it will take care of you, the saying went, and no one took better care of a jetpack than TX-7255. He braced the helmet against his chest and as an afterthought shifted his grip so that he pinched the fabric over the alien, covering it. Hopefully it wasn't flammable.

There was enough open space around him, but still, regulations said that if he wasn't taking off in a specifically cleared space or doing a touch-and-go, he had to give a verbal warning. Some rocket troopers used the short "Dusting off!" or the even shorter "Launching!", but Barve liked the traditional phrase, said in one way or another since the first soldiers to take to the air on their own.

"Clear the blast zone!" He tensed, leaped as high as the light exoskeleton built into his armor would take him, and kicked in the rockets.

The first few seconds were always uncertain, as the jets fought gravity and flared, close enough to the ground that they licked the armor on his legs and slagged the spot where he'd been standing. The not-voice protested weakly. But he took care of his jetpack, and she held him steady at the top of the jump. He let her kick in a little harder, and she dragged his heavy flesh and armor up in a tower of sound and fire.

He modulated the thrust when he judged himself high enough and triggered the maneuvering jets on the right side, spinning in a slow, complete circle. This looked like one of those planets which couldn't collectively decide what it wanted to specialize in, so it went for city and wild stuff and farmland all at once. Those weren't as interesting as city worlds, at least not from a jetpack, but it was exponentially better than flying over ocean. He had his bearings now. Buildings, crowds, ground, roads, yep, atmospheric flyers, oh yes, and ''this'' way was North and ''this'' was South, good, and so his course was - that way.

Barve swung his legs and flipped over so his back was to the sky, working with his jetpack to find his balance in that second of freefall, and gave her the gun.

Immediately he was flying proper, losing a little altitude in a shallow dive and regaining it, then leveling off and holding steady. There were some other things in his airspace, but they ignored him, and he did the same. He loved flying fast, the landscape zipping by below him, wind shrieking against his armor and trying to tug things out of his hands, even the alternating sense that he was either weightless or something massive was pressing down on him. His jetpack was loud at her highest speed - since part of her was a Screamer, this was only to be expected - but of course he wasn't going at top speed, or anything all that close to it. He kept slow, almost too slow to fly. By the groaning of the not-voice, he probably didn't dare go any faster.

Pity, really. Even after all this time, even with the conditioning and the stuff they'd done to him in the Spaarti cylinder, his jetpack was fast and strong and agile enough to make him struggle to keep conscious, without vibrating him to pieces in the process. Some people didn't like tasking their g-tolerance; none of ''them'' had his genome. He loved flying. He'd rather die than be one of the groundpounders.

Sometimes, though, he wondered what it would have been like if he'd been sorted into pilot training instead. TIEs might not be as agile, but they went so much faster - and with inertial compensators, they could ''do'' that, make changes in their flightpaths that would kill him uncompensated. If he hadn't been sorted into the rocket trooper corps, then he'd be flying in space, too, and going after bigger targets. His original had been a snubbie pilot. The flash-memories he'd recorded and passed down included one of the joy and pride that came with piloting. Barve didn't really like thinking about that. Done was done, and the Empire wasn't going to let anyone but a ''really'' prime natural-born get retrained. Besides, a ship would mean losing his jetpack. She was his baby.

Okay. Barve scanned the ground. This was probably the right road, and there was some suspiciously regular cracking on the surface ahead, but he didn't see anything yet. He'd been told to watch for footprints in the road and wrecked cars. ...He really should have asked what a car was. Was it the same thing as a groundcar, which he'd seen a lot of here, or something more obscure? It wouldn't be the first time he got tripped up by similar-sounding unrelated words.

The not-voice had kept a lot of quiet, wordlessly unhappy not-sounds, particularly when he gained or lost altitude suddenly. He felt safe in assuming that the not-voice belonged to the alien curled up in the helmet he was carrying, and they were a good sign that it hadn't lost consciousness. Should he talk to it? Why not. It might know. Okay, he'd been told that the groundpounder helmet was on the open frequency, right? This far from all the others, he was picking up very little in the way of transmissions. Barve lowered his comm output so he wouldn't spam anyone.

"You know Basic, right?"

There was a pause, and he wondered if the wind was too loud. There were sound mufflers in ''his'' helmet, and his audio pickups filtered out most irrelevant noise, but helmets tended not to work as well when they weren't connected to armor.

Finally he not-heard it. ''Uh... sort of. It's been a while. I think I've forgotten most of what I picked up. Why?''
The not-voice seemed surprised and a little queasy.

"Oh good. I think you speak it fine," Barve said, adding, "I understand Huttese okay, I ''sort'' of get Bocce, and I know a little Sy Bisti, but I don't know any other languages." Understanding so few was kind of embarrassing, but only Basic and Huttese had been flash-programmed and he never really made a focused effort to study languages, so he thought he was picking them up pretty well. "Though I guess you were talking earlier in Basic, so it wasn't a good question."

''Wait, what? ...Do we even mean the same B.A.S.I.C.? Because I thought you meant the programming language.''

Maybe the alien was addled. "I meant Basic. Official language of the Empire. ''This'' language."

Another pause, this one rather long. ''You know, usually people call it English.''

At the very least, the alien was confused. "No, the Empire calls it Basic. So did the Republic. So does the rest of the galaxy. Basic, Galactic Basic, Galactic Basic Standard... Basic."

''What? You actually think - no, don't antagonize the crazy guy with the jetpack. He could drop you. Then you'll never get there.'' That last part wasn't nearly as clear, and Barve suspected he wasn't supposed to not-hear it. But he could handle being considered crazy, even though he'd had the full Spaarti year and there was really no chance of the madness getting him. After all, he'd seen someone in the depths of the madness, and it was probably worth being cautious, at least at first.

"Anyway, alien, I need to know if 'car', in this case, means little groundbound vehicle or is an acronym for something."

''Maybe he ''does'' think he's - Yeah. It's the vehicle.'' Good, then he was headed in the right direction. There was more cracking on the road now too. The alien paused, then said, ''I'm Steph, by the way. Not 'alien'.''

"I'm TX-7255 from batch three," he said. Wait, natural-borns who weren't troopers didn't usually like going by designations. "Call me Barve."

''Barve?''

"It's a nickname. A barve is a clumsy six-legged meat animal. You only get the prime names like "Firebrand" if you're important." He couldn't enjoy a military flick without getting annoyed at that.

''Right. You don't have any other names?''

"Not that I've heard." Did he want the name of Barve's original? No, he'd surely ask if he did. "You're feeling okay, right? Are your eyes being pushed into your head?" He'd feel like such an idiot if Steph had some kind of delayed reaction to acceleration and passed out.

''A little. It was worse when we took off. Everything went sort of gray at the edges.''

"Yeah? That makes sense." He felt like he couldn't leave it at that, so he added, "Humans tend to tolerate horizontal axis g-forces a lot better than vertical ones. It has to do with how our spines are aligned with the axis and how our blood gets forced around. I don't know what you are, but I'd guess it works the same for you."

''Well, ''that's'' good to know. I'm a Hoojib, I guess.'' More indistinctly, Steph said, ''The guy in orange said I looked all wrong, but Eighty-four told him it didn't matter.''

He was not supposed to listen in; if he overheard anyway, he was supposed to pretend otherwise. "Never heard of you. We're well within standard human tolerance, and I'll keep slow for you if I can, but if something comes up and I have to go evasive, you'll have some trouble. Should that happen, try straining your muscles and remember to breathe short, hard, and often. It could help."

''Thanks. I think. It had better not come to that.''

In places, the road was crossed by roads that passed above it. The ones he'd seen so far had been intact, but one up ahead, getting closer by the second, had been shot out, and the pattern of cracks that passed underneath it could reasonably be called footprints. Checking behind himself - the rearwards display was small and not meant for ground details, so he did this by pulling upright, spinning as he stalled, then correcting himself and falling back into flight position, a set of maneuvers that did not please Steph in the least - Barve saw that the set of buildings that he'd taken off near was still visible, though small in the distance.

If he had no further orders, maybe they'd let him fly back at any speed he wanted. Fuel readings were a little lower than they should have been at this point, even with the extra weight, but nothing too alarming.

At this speed he'd be a few more minutes. This thing had gone pretty far. Flying slowly with absolutely nothing going on - usually, he'd be listening to the other rocket troopers, comparing notes and expectations, maybe trying to outmaneuver them. He was hazy on why he'd been deployed without the rest of his unit. They'd acclimatized together and gone through training at the same time and everything, and he'd never been far apart from them. Being alone was boring.

No, he wasn't quite alone. Small talk. How did that work again? Right. "How are you talking? Nothing's getting to my ears."

''I don't have a vocal tract anymore, so I'm guessing telepathy. Better than nothing, but it's annoying.''

"That's too bad," Barve said. It looked like the burden of conversation was on him. He was the worst in his unit at that, frankly, especially with people who weren't familiar with flight and the mechanics of it, but questions were usually good. "So you're one of those aliens that has a metamorphosis, huh? What were you before?"

There was another pause. Incredulous, Steph said, ''I - but - you - you actually haven't figured it out? What - you don't even remember what happened, do you? Do you have a real name? Do you even know what'' planet '' this is?''

Barve hadn't known it was possible to stutter telepathically, but then, he reminded himself, there were a lot of things he didn't know. "No. Are you going to tell me?"

''Oh Jesus Christ.'' Ah. He didn't think Barve was in danger of the madness, he thought Barve was ''stupid''. Barve briefly considered, oh, accelerating a bit more, perhaps flying a bit less steadily, but dismissed the idea. He had a package or a passenger to deliver.

He wasn't angry, quite, but he had to correct the alien. "Hey. I'm not - yeah, I know everyone says I'm a bit simple. Maybe. Maybe. Most of the time." He got the sense that Steph was about to say something, and he didn't let him, raising his voice. "But I'm plenty smart flying, and if there's a jetpack malfunction a couple klicks above the ground, the smartest being in the Empire, the ''very'' best and brightest, is me. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it's that I don't know. Don't make insinuations like that!"

''Aaah! Oh God, don't drop me. I'm sorry, geeze. It's just really weird that you don't know.''

There were a few men in his unit who could have started on something about ignorance, but he wasn't one of them - as far as lectures went, he only had this and the one about untested new equipment. After a moment, Barve became uncomfortable. He wasn't supposed to be hostile to people who weren't the enemy, even if they ''were'' rude aliens. He'd probably have a few bad sleepcycles if he didn't say something.

"Sorry. It's fine. Just... I'm not stupid, okay? Simple isn't stupid."

''Yeah. Sure. God, this was a bad idea.''

Well, ''that'' hadn't gone well. Pity his unit wasn't here. He could have used a people person, or several.

Anyway, by now he could see the runaway walker. It had come to a stop, right in the middle of the road, and as he flew closer he saw that one of the big hatches in the side, the hatches that groundpounders rappelled out of, was open.

"We're just about here. Hold on." It took a bit of maneuvering. A long shallow dive followed by flipping upright and shedding his momentum, then the tricky process of moving laterally while in the standing position without letting the rockets set fire to the inside of the vehicle, and getting close enough to switch them off and fall to his feet without breaking anything. Nothing he couldn't handle. He made it a point of pride that he hardly ever used his repulsor pod when landing, and he didn't need it this time.

Barve landed hard enough that he was forced to drop to three points, which while visually impressive was just bad form. If his unit had been there, it would not have gone unnoticed, but if the groundpounder who met him had judged his landing, he declined to comment on it. The moment Barve put the helmet down, Steph half climbed, half leapt out and shuddered all over so that his fur stood on end. Then he sat on his haunches and started wiping or patting himself down with his forelegs, a set of motions that reminded Barve both of a nervous animal grooming itself and the thing a lot of people did after a rough ride, when they wanted to make sure everything was in one piece.

He'd have been a little bit insulted by that - hadn't he kept slow? Hadn't he maintained his jetpack well enough that there was virtually no vibration, and flown her well enough that it had been smooth? - but he ''had'' gone off on that upset lecture. And some people just didn't fly well. And even if Steph didn't like hearing it, he was an alien and might or might not tolerate the forces of acceleration that well.

The groundpounder looked from Barve to Steph and back. "You sent us an ''alien''?" he asked over the open channel. "Is he an ambassador or something? I thought the message was that he was a friend or something."

Steph stopped grooming and looked up sharply. ''I ''am'' a friend. And I can hear you, you know, the speaker in the helmet's still on." He waggled an ear in a gesture that was probably sarcastic, but still looked silly.

"Oh, sorry," the groundpounder said. "And I guess you're not really an alien. It's kinda hard to keep things straight. C'mon, we need you in the cockpit." He nodded acknowledgment to Barve and turned, heading towards the fore of the walker. Steph followed, still staggering a little.

Barve picked up the helmet again and took the chance to have a look around. He'd seen the big walkers before, just not from inside. He'd landed on the lower of the two levels. At the fore and the aft they were joined by sets of stairs. Entrance to the tunnel leading to the cockpit was through a locking access hatch on the landing in the fore stairs that locked and sealed behind the groundpounder; the aft stairs had another one that probably led to cargo space. A third hatch was set forewards in the flooring. Maybe it went to engines. Then there were the various external ones like what he'd dropped through. Handholds were built into the ceiling, and there were some weapons racks. That made sense, he guessed. These things ''were'' personnel carriers, though they were better suited for annihilating ground targets.

Maybe the above deck had more, but this one was otherwise empty. Apparently the team who'd gone out here were all in the cockpit, which had to be a tight fit. Before he commed back for further orders, Barve noticed one more thing. Coming from the speakers built into the ceiling was a faint, barely audible hiss of static.

[There. I wrote you. I even put in that damn rant. Now get out of my head.]

User talk:Joysweeper

2009-06-27T23:21:17Z

Joysweeper:

==Welcome==

Welcome aboard! We'll be helping you out with story formatting and such. --[[User:JonBuck|Buck]] 23:45, 23 September 2007 (EDT)

Yep. While I'm not very active here I do take the time to troll the collection from time to time and update "[[ShadowWolfs Pack|ShadowWolf's Pack]]". Seeing this story is your first, I will be certain to read it and see if it is a fit for one of the sections of that list. —[[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 00:51, 24 September 2007 (EDT)

Ah! Thanks, guys! Much appreciated. --[[User:Joysweeper|Joysweeper]] 25 September 2007 (EDT)

If you own the copyright on that image, or can get permission from whoever does, we can upload it onto Shifti and you can display it directly in your page. Just so's you know. [[User:Bryan|Bryan]] 00:52, 30 September 2007 (EDT)

Hmm. I did draw it, and when my Internet connection fouled up I spent some more time retooling it. It's probably done now. [[http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/1724/altjoysweeperov5.png]] Yeah, I'd like it if this was directly displayed. [[User:Joysweeper|Joysweeper]] 2 October 2007 (EDT)

==Comment from Oberon==

Hello there. Joysweeper it's Oberon here. I've completed my first Xanadu story and am working on my second one though I have yet to post the beginnings of that tale on the site. [[User:Oberon|Oberon]] 14:48 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Hello there I guess that I have to change a few things with my story, but I will pass on one note, as is noted in the Star Wars Wiki the R9 Series of Astromechs are notorious for self enhancement. Gett'ad is a member of that series R9-Q7 is his serial number. He simply wasn't happy with his method of communication so he installed a new vocabulator that gave him the ability to speak in Basic, Mando'a, and Shyriiwook. He has also installed a set of anti-grav thrusters because he wants to be able to get out of his fighter by himself. As for R2, he can get out of the Eta-2 on his own as was demonstrated in RotS. Other than that I will endeavor to edit things to make them a little more coherent and fitting of the type of man that he really is. [[User:Oberon|Oberon]] 15:46, 20 October 2007 (MDT)

Hello there again, sorry for monopolizing your time on here. I just finished a major series of edits to The Mandalorian. If you want to leave more notes I would be happy to pay attention to them. If you want you can E-mail me at mk.ewing2553@gmail.com and we can set up an instant messenger so that we can talk more on the sequels to this story. Otherwise Udesii! ner'vod. [[User:Oberon|Oberon]] 21:02, 21 October 2007 (MTD)

Su'cuy Joysweeper I'm back and I've managed to finish my second Xanadu story with my Mando Jetii Peiter Skirata. I hope that you don't mind giving me a few pointers with this story. Any hints would be very much appreciated. Udesii! Ner'vod. [[User:Oberon|Oberon]] 15:24, 29 October 2007 (MTB)

==Template:My stories==

Hi, just thought I should drop a note here since I imagine most authors won't be regularly checking [[Help:Templates]] for updates. I've finally added a template that I should have created long ago, a tag to put on userpages to facilitate linking to your personal story category; [[Template:My stories]]. If you want, just stick this code at the top of your userpage to create a standardized little box with a direct link in it: <nowiki>{{my stories}}</nowiki>. [[User:Bryan|Bryan]] 22:26, 18 January 2008 (EST)

==Eep! I overlooked an old request==

I just noticed your request to upload that image above. If you're still interested, and the "upload file" link isn't working for you for some reason, let me know and I'll do it. [[User:Bryan|Bryan]] 22:28, 18 January 2008 (EST)

Upload file link? I checked it out, but the image liked to from this page is bmp, whatever that means. It doesn't like bmp. I'd appreciate it, Bryan. Thanks! --[[User:Joysweeper|Joysweeper]] 23:25, 18 January 2008 (EST)

:Ah, I see. I'll convert it over to PNG, which is a more widely-supported image format and that won't cause any reduction in quality. [[User:Bryan|Bryan]] 00:49, 19 January 2008 (EST)

:Odd, it was already in PNG format. Anyway, it's uploaded now; [[:Image:Altjoysweeperov5.png]]. For information on how to insert an image into a page and format it the way you want it formatted, see [[Help:Images]]. [[User:Bryan|Bryan]] 00:53, 19 January 2008 (EST)

== Happy Birthday! ==

I see your age has increased by one year. Happy birthday, Joysweeper! [[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 17:46, 25 May 2008 (EDT)

Thank you! :D --[[User:Joysweeper|Joysweeper]] 12:15, 26 May 2008 (EDT)

== Fun Links ? ==

[http://tweedlebop.com/index.php?/illustration/star-wars-abc/ Star Wars ABC's] - you heard me. That's write, an illustrator created images to teach the Star Wars alphabet. Thought of you when I found this. -- [[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 00:04, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

: Huh. Thanks! I heart Aurebesh. --[[User:Joysweeper|Joysweeper]] 04:23, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Another fun link [http://io9.com/5302691/for-the-clones-the-empires-imperial-service-organization IO9 - About the I.S.O.] Aint the Imperial Service Organization grand ? :P -- [[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 23:23, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

: Innnnteresting. Very, very interesting. Definitely going to have to think about that. --[[User:Joysweeper|Joysweeper]] 23:21, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Walker Imperial Ranger

2009-06-25T22:34:18Z

Joysweeper: /* Steph comes out of hiding */

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Xanadu]][[Category:Story]][[Category:Alien]][[Category:Inanimorph]][[Category:Transgender]][[Category:Joysweeper]][[Category:Bryan]]
{{universe|Xanadu}}
{{byline|author=Joysweeper|user=Joysweeper}}

By Joysweeper, with some help from Bryan.

Don't read this story yet :)

It'll be done when it's done. For the record, I intend to finish before Duke Nukem.

Links to some pictures of AT-ATs, for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-hlc.jpg] Close up of chin-mounted heavy laser cannons
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:MCQ-battleofhoth.jpg] Low-angle concept art
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SWRSIIIRSWP.jpg] More concept art(Talk about uneven odds. Luke > everything.)
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:BlizzardForce.jpg] ESB screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Blizzard_2.jpg] Another screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-swrs3rs.jpg] High-angle(sort of) image
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:AT-AT_egvv.jpg] Schematics
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT_height.jpg] Bad bluescreen, but it does convey size pretty well.

Links to some pictures of Red Guards, also for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Guard.png] Red robes and a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos_NEGTC.jpg] Kir Kanos, helmet off, showing the armor. He never uses a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos.jpg] The Emperor's guards aren't just for show.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kanos3.JPG] Kir Kanos showing the armor again. Different look at the belt.

Have to thank [http://community.livejournal.com/brains_in_a_jar/ brains-in-a-jar] for thoughts on a human brain in a very nonhuman mechanical body, and also all kinds of things about static. Also have to thank Robert T. Bakker for writing "The Dinosaur Heresies"; that bit on a lizard's wrist was extremely interesting.

And I found this quote on one of the 501st homepages. It is so ''perfect''. "Some fans are content to collect action figures...other fans want to ''be'' action figures. Nothing professes your fandom quite like building your own detailed costume replica of a classic Star Wars villain, and there's nothing quite like the feeling that comes from bringing the characters of Star Wars into the real world and sharing the magic with others. A truly engaging Star Wars experience only occurs through a convincing appearance. To this end, the 501st constantly strives to improve the quality and accuracy of its member's costumes. Our goal is to appear as if our characters have just stepped off the big screen and into this world." I hope I can find some way to use this ironically. Probably not ''this'' story, but I'm going to have to stow it away.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Hoojib.jpg]]

==Bryan's intro==

"The door, the door!" Steph called out and lunged to intercept the handle swinging in to catch Garrett's back, stopping it just in time to prevent another ding in the cardboard that might be difficult to repair now that they were at the convention itself.

Garrett let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks." He had turned sideways but thanks to the huge boxy hump over his back it didn't make him any narrower and only really served to make it harder to keep track of everything. And with the two giant cardboard constructs mounted over his arms there wasn't really much he could do anyway; his hands were busy just holding the internal braces in place.

Steph grinned and slipped lithely around to join him in the lobby once Garrett had managed to make it inside. "You'd think armor capable of repelling turbolasers could handle a door handle."

Garrett shook his head. His costume was particularly fragile, being both bulky and made primarily out of cardboard, but it had been surprisingly quick and easy to make as a result. "It'll last until judging. Spray a jot of black on any tears and call 'em battle damage, the Rebels must've got a few lucky hits in." The lobby was sparsely populated right now, with just a few folks still lined up at the front desk buying passes to glance in surprise at Garrett's outfit, but Garrett decided it was showtime. He leaned forward and fell into his quadrupedal stance, the big round footpads of his forelimbs clomping to the ground to support him and the headpiece tilting down into the correct orientation.

There were a few appreciative murmurs as the onlookers finally recognized the iconic Imperial walker he was dressed as. Steph gave a little flourish and a bow, as if taking credit for the outfit, and then stepped forward to give Garrett something to follow. They'd considered trying to rig up a periscope of some sort so that Garrett could see forward more easily but they'd run out of time for details like that; it was enough that the AT-AT's legs were able to support him as things were, they'd had to compromise on the costume's proportions a bit just to make it work.

The majority of the work had taken only a single week. Since it only really had to survive for a single day of use ease of construction had been a fair tradeoff. Garrett was like that with all of his projects; a flash of inspiration, a whirlwind of construction, and then once it was finished the itch was satisfied and he would lose interest and let it go. Steph counted it as sheer luck that this time around the inspiration had come when they might make some money off of it. He'd been tight with Garrett for a couple of years now, both of them in the same engineering degree at the nearby University of Midtral, and was the less-imaginative and more-practical of the two.

"Two please," Steph signed in. "Stephen Midder and Garrett Thompson. Just for today." He pointed to identify themselves.

"Registered for any of the contests?" The man behind the desk asked. Garrett nodded silently, the walker-head bobbing almost comically. "Right..." The man shuffled through a list, presumably checking for Garrett's name, and then looked back up once he'd checked it off. "Ten for him, thirty for you."

"Eh? Aww." Steph got out his wallet to pay for the passes. "Should've worn a costume myself." ''Not that I could have got a discount for any costume that cost under twenty dollars, of course.'' But he supposed that wasn't really the point.

The two of them had done some pretty wacky and nerdy things together. The AT-AT costume had blown away everyone at the Halloween party they'd been to on campus just a few nights previous, in fact that had been the primary impetus for building the thing in the first place. But as they proceeded down the hall toward the convention rooms where the main population of conventiongoers were congregating, Steph began wondering if they'd finally reached their level. The variety and creativity of hand-crafted costumes on display was enormous. Still, there wasn't anything quite like the AT-AT costume Garrett wore and it still drew a good share of attention.

Upon entering the first convention room - a dealer's room, from the look of the tables set up along the side walls, but nonetheless full of costume-wearers - they almost immediately encountered someone in a Stormtrooper outfit. It was a perfect replica in every detail, clearly a labor of love, and the person wearing it was dedicated enough to playing the role that he resisted the temptation to drop out of character.

"You're out of uniform, pilot," the trooper commented as he gave Steph a nod of acknowledgment in passing.

Steph was at a loss for a response but Garrett gave a most un-AT-AT-like chuckle. Garrett had been shuffling along behind Stephen on all fours, barely able to see more than the backs of Stephen's heels, and he took the opportunity after the trooper had passed to stand back up again and look around. "Lots of competition."

"Yeah." Steph sighed; the prospect of winning any of the prize money seemed more distant now that he'd seen some of what they were up against. This was just the first room and there was an amazing gargoyle with what looked like pneumatically-operated wings, a really hot fox-girl who had made a masterful blend of both plush fabric and her own natural attributes, and a lizard-man... no, Steph corrected himself, a Gorn. The Gorn's costume was nearly as good as the one from the original Star Trek episode had been. "Still, nothing like an AT-AT, eh?"

"Excuse us, please," A small woman in a jockey costume asked from behind Garrett's cardboard bulk. He shuffled to the side to let her through, leading a man in an amazing horse costume. The thing made him seven feet tall, with a long neck and perfect horse's head, and the hoof-gloves made Steph wonder if he could get down on all fours too.

"Heh. Damn." Garrett shook his head. "Well, thank goodness for categories, eh?"

Steph gave a wry grin. "Yeah. Though I'm feeling a bit under-dressed myself now."

It didn't really matter much since Garrett was the center of attention, as intended; Steph was along just to open doors and do the other things Garrett couldn't manage in that hulking outfit. But as they proceeded through the room Steph found his gaze lingering on some of the costuming wares being sold.

People would stop to stare, take photos, or ask Steph questions about the AT-AT costume. Since he was the one leading the way, with Garrett's face down and concealed under the cardboard headpiece, it was natural that they'd assume he was in charge. But when Garrett reared up to proudly answer the questions they'd immediately switch to ignoring Steph instead. It was quickly beginning to annoy him; though the idea and the design for the AT-AT costume had been Garrett's they'd worked on it together.

"Hang on, Garrett," Steph finally called. They were on their way to the exhibition hall but they were still quite early, they'd left plenty of flex in their schedule to account for difficulties with the costume. "I want to look at some of the stuff they're selling here."

"Stuff?" Garrett got up and looked around.

There weren't any Star Wars branded costume supplies at hand, and if there were they'd probably be too expensive. ''Twenty dollars, eh? I can spend twenty dollars.'' That left mainly just the cheesier costume gear.

After a few minutes of browsing Garrett got back down on all fours and spent a little while tromping back and forth. The arms of the AT-AT costume were quite heavy; in addition to the cardboard shell they had a pair of aluminum canes inside, trimmed short and affixed to the broad metal bucket lids that formed the soles of his "forefeet". Despite the crick he was sure he'd eventually develop in his back it was actually easier moving around like this.

There wasn't as much of an audience in here, though. The people who already had costumes were gravitating off somewhere else and those were the ones he was most interested in impressing with his ingenuity and attention to detail. He wasn't a big Star Wars fan himself but he'd dug up some schematics from a scan of some old Star Wars book. He'd even hung a Luke Skywalker pilot action figure on a string from his underside, mimicking the famous scene from Empire Strikes Back where the proto-Jedi had grappled up on board one after being shot down on Hoth, but he'd lost that particular accessory somewhere during the Halloween party and hadn't bothered looking for a replacement. There didn't seem to be anything like that in this area of the dealer's room...

He tromped over to Steph. "We going to move on?" He prompted.

Steph sighed. The twin goals of 'attention-grabbing' and 'cheap' weren't meshing very well. "Okay, just let me grab something." Something totally incongruous would probably be best. So... "Ah, I'll take that." A pair of fuzzy bunny ears on a headband for just ten bucks. Garrett didn't even look up and Steph grinned; he'd be startled when he did.

They continued onward.

==Joysweeper's pre-TF setup==

On the way they'd called it a "function" as if it'd been some kind of social event, and in a desultory fashion they'd been trying to get donations to the Leukemia Society, but it was far from formal. The Kublai Con attendees were pretty generous – TR-1407, given name “Angela Kincaid”, calling herself “Anj” while in costume - had once heard it said that furry cons generated more money than scifi cons, and Xanadu was a mixture of both.

What had made the effort fun was the “act”. Angela lost count of just how many times she’d heard friends declaring with feigned authority that the 501st Legion was here to keep the peace and maintain order. Essentially they’d just threatened anyone who looked impressive enough, and almost everyone had played along, reacting in fear or challenging the Imperials to a duel.

She’d personally “fought” an armored anthro dragon with a very realistic whipping tail, matching her forcepike with his curved fiberglass sword, and although she’d “lost” she had also had the pleasure of seeing him back down when faced with the blasters of eighteen stormtroopers. Good donation from that one, too, when they'd explained and everything.

The "TR" prefix in front of the number she had picked as her identification - she'd chosen fourteen oh seven - indicated which costume was her favorite. "TK" meant stormtrooper, "TC" was clonetrooper, "SL" was Sith Lord... there were a number of them for the various types. "TR" meant that she favored the Emperor's guards in their red helmets and flowing robes. They were called Red Guards, Royal Guards, and various other combinations of "Red", "Royal", "Imperial", and "Emperor's". Frankly, Angela preferred "Red Guard". The arguments some of her friends got into about nomenclature gave her a headache - fanwank was one thing, and you had to be a little anal to care about a screen-accurate costume, but some people went too far.

She’d heard from one of them that someone had actually caught a pickpocket in the act and had proceeded to instill the fear of the Empire into him, winning a lot of amusement from everyone else in the process, but she hadn’t seen it herself, nor had anyone who told the story. It was probably hyperbole. That didn’t stop the thought from being entertaining.

Now it was over and the group was dispersing. TR-1407 was glad to leave, frankly. The costume, with heavy cloth robes over already-stifling armor, had slowly become hot enough to, as the phrase went, fry fleek eels with, the ice packs had either thawed or hadn't been working in the first place, and no amount of water or robe-flapping could make it entirely tolerable. The bodysuit under the plating under the robes was so drenched with sweat that she'd probably have to peel it off.

Not for the first time she wished that she hadn’t bothered with the tight bodysuit and the armor that went over it. It wasn’t like it would have visibly made a difference. Some Red Guards liked to keep their robes thrown behind their shoulders like a cloak, the better to show off the detailing on their armor. Angela, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone guessing that she was female, and so kept her robes arranged about her body, hiding everything but her hands, her feet, and her helmet. It still would have been far, ''far'' too hot – the helmet was the next thing to airtight, and only the respirator that threaded down to her waist kept her from suffocating – but at least she wouldn’t feel like sparks were smoldering under her robes.

But… no. More than once during the “fight” her robes had swept about, and both before and after they hadn’t exactly hung neatly. She would ''never'' have heard the end of it if she were to come to an event “half-dressed”.

“Remember, there’s a march at three,” she told her friend and former pupil SL-1984 as they left, part of a stream. The majority of Tampa Bay Squad happened to be heading in the same direction. “We meet before two thirty in the southwest parking lot.” Little single-squadron things like the function were fun, but the real thrill was always when the entire 501st, or as much of it as was attending any particular convention, marched together. There was just something about it that felt exhilarating. Like she was part of something bigger than herself.

“I knew that,” he protested, but mildly. “Micheal Porter”, as he was usually known – although he preferred to answer strictly to his designation when in costume – was tall enough, laid-back enough, and attention-loving enough to pull off a White Vader costume. It was exactly what it sounded like – the Darth Vader rig, all in white, sometimes called “Vader Redeemed.” The images that the costume was based off of had appeared for literally two panels at the very end of a comic that wasn’t even canon. Even by 501st standards that was unusual - and the 501st Legion was infamous for being made up of fans who weren't content to simply ''collect'' action figures, they wanted to ''be'' them.

His protest was put on hold briefly as a fairly well-done white tiger furry with an articulated jaw interrupted, waving her pawhands and generally being as relentlessly upbeat as possible. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but gestured and showed off a disposable camera on a strap around her neck enthusiastically enough that it was pretty clear that she wanted pictures.

TR-1407 had never been all that comfortable with being hugged by complete strangers for photographs, but she didn’t have any serious objections to it, and she wasn’t carrying her wallet with her this time, so there was no chance of getting robbed again. Fortunately the tiger was much more interested in SL-1984, and ''he'' was perfectly willing to mug and pose as much as desired, supported by three or four stormtroopers who got beckoned into the shots and played along, rather than shaking their heads and passing by. Maybe it was just that white fur went better with white robes and armor than with red. It was probably more that the kid was naturally showy.

After the Red Guard had obligingly snapped enough pictures and handed the camera back to the furry, the white tiger left to accost someone else, and they picked up where they had left off.

“Angela, you really don't need to remind me about everything anymore. I know the schedule."

“Don’t call me Angela when I’m in uniform, please." Sweat was pooling in the tips of her gloves. Angela flexed her hands against it. The moment she let them relax, it pooled again. "It's only been what, a year since I let you walk off and you missed it because you were buying original issues of 'Spider-Girl'?"

"A year and a half. I am ''so'' much better at juggling my hobbies now," he said dryly. "Why, I even remember things that the schedule said and Pike forgot to bring up."

A trooper listening in muttered "You had to bring the Squad Leader into this. Now you're in for it."

Another trooper who'd been a few steps behind got right up besides the taller Vader. She was a snowtrooper, and probably suffering almost as much as Angela in the heat. Despite the helmet speaker and a tired note in her voice, she sounded crisp and alert. "Hey, don't complain. I'm sorry we haven't made an announcement, but we've got a lot more on our plate than you do; ''you'' just have to show up at the right time and place, and we're not here to babysit you. We've been setting things up and working out scheduling conflicts since five in the morning. It's been a long day at the end of a long week already and I'm glad John was there to take over after eleven." The snowtrooper slipped into character and finished, very dryly, "So don't complain about your superiors, my lord. Circumstances tend to be more complicated than they seem."

"Ah," SL-1984 said, briefly assuming character himself. "My apologies, Ma'am. That was merely a breach in my personal discipline. No disrespect was meant." Following along, Angela couldn't help feeling a little surge of goodwill. She loved this group. They argued a lot, and Shanda Pike admittedly could be touchy, but it never got too far. Probably in part because while Michael loved the limelight, he had very little ego or temper.

"I'll overlook it, so long as you don't let it happen again," Pike allowed very seriously. A smile crept into her voice. "You're mixing up your honorifics, by the way. I'm only "ma'am" in the Tusken Raider suit and as Mara."

"Again, my apologies. Sir," he added. Everyone pretended not to notice the slight skip in his amplified voice.

With a nod, the snowtrooper peeled away and dropped back, staying in sight but effectively bowing out of the conversation. In an aside, Angela told her friend that his voice-changer was failing.

“What? Testing, testing... You’re right.” SL-1984 thumped the speaker hidden in his chest box, then removed his helmet, careful of the trailing wires that ran from it down into the rest of the costume. “This thing always gets screwy an hour or so in.”

There was always something just a little bit disturbing about seeing someone in costume but without their helmet on. It didn’t take long to get used to seeing troopers, but with a Vader it ''always'' looked strange. Michael had opted for the ski-hood-under-the-helmet thing that Vaders usually wore. His, naturally, was white. Removing helmets while trooping tended to be frowned on, but everyone in the 501st knew that sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Angela told him, “You really ought to try a pair of Vortex Twos. I’ve never made a Vader-“

Michael left off frowning into the helmet for a moment. “You’re not nearly tall enough to pull it off. You'd have to do the three-fourths scale version. And maybe get body padding.”

“I know. Shut up.” Angela sighed. “I’ve never made a Vader, but I have a helmet, therefore I use a speaker. Vortex. Got it with my tax returns. I know that Hasbro thing is cheap and easy to get, but, well, the downside is quality. Vortex is the best.” She indicated the general location of her own voice amplification unit with a quick gesture. It made her voice audible despite the almost airtight helmet, flattening it out in the process.

“I know, but that’s a bit of an investment. I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. Had to stop working on that Tusken Raider one… I could barely afford to come ''here.'' This will hold for a bit longer. Going to have to try and fake it when it does fail. The iPod with the breathing loop's still good, at least.” Replacing the helmet and straightening it with both hands, he faced her directly. “Any plans?”

“I’m getting out of this costume before I cook.” She flapped her robes in another vain attempt to get some cool air circulating. Under her helmet, a little curl of hair had plastered itself over one eye, sticking to the lid as she blinked. Just about every time she wore a helmet she found herself wishing she'd cut her hair short. Tampa Bay Squadron's other Red Guard kept hers cropped and said it made something of a difference.

SL-1984’s speaker system relayed the sound of his mouth opening, so she cut him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need any help, Micheal. Seriously, if I stay in this any longer I’ll get heatstroke. Every time I get into this thing I regret it, I swear.”

"If you want me to call you Anj, don't call ''me'' Michael." SL-1984 raised his voice to be heard over the shouting match going on between two balding men in spandex. Taking up a standard Vader mannerism with ease that betrayed several movies' worth of casual study, he locked his hands around his belt. “This is why white’s a good color. I’m not sweating half as much as I did in the black sauna suit, so I think I’m good for a while yet. I'd like to see the sights. There are some ''really'' nice costumes this year. Maybe I’ll swing by those set pieces people keep talking about. I heard that they got David and his crew to do the Hutt set again this year, plus Carmen said that Makaze Squad brought in that Death Star made of like a million Legos. I have no idea how they could have got it in the doors.”

People had collected in a chattering knot around someone or something, clogging the way. It was possible to squeeze past, but that just wouldn't do. Angela raised her voice. “Move along, come on now citizens, you can collect in a spare room much more easily than out here. Move along, move along.” The voice amplifier lent her voice a little more kick and made it audible. Despite that, she saw no sign that more than a few people had heard, let alone intended to obey.

Her former pupil, his voice changer having given up entirely, repeated the order with the same intonation, doing his best with the voice. This time, people listened and obeyed, breaking up and dispersing. They’d been clustered around a yellow lab – not a furry, an actual, panting dog that barely seemed disturbed at all by the crowd – wearing one of those novelty pet costumes. It went very nicely with his owner, though Angela wasn’t sure about the meaning of the dog being Batman when the man was Robin.

What she ''was'' sure about was that the kid she’d once sponsored – hardly a kid despite her teasing, she couldn't be more than five or six years older than him - was just ''better'' at some of this than she was. Particularly when it came to giving orders to people neither of them knew. Partly it was because, although she wasn’t shy by anyone’s standards, she didn’t like to stand out overmuch. Hence why her preferred costumes were the Red Guard and obscure ones like AT-AT drivers or Imperial Army Pilots, as they were called, while ''his'' was arguably the most conspicuous costume in the 501st.

A trooper that Angela knew from the squad finally answered the question. “The Lego Death Star? It breaks apart into sections and gets reassembled. We had to get a cart for the pieces, but it's simpler than it looks. Tampa Bay had it one year, but that was before your time. Sir.”

TR-1407 decided to break it off. She really didn’t know where the closest ‘changing room’ was, but she’d been told that they were everywhere, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to find one. The longer she waited, the longer the costume stayed on. “Have fun, guys. I think I’ll get most of this off before I make more plans. Don’t hurt yourself showing off.”

“Don’t forget to put it back on by two thirty. I’ll see you by then if not before, An- Anj.” He and those troopers who hadn't already gone their own ways kept moving in the same direction, and she arbitrarily took a left.

It was pretty close to noon; compared to just an hour ago, the hallway was half empty. The people who had been rushing around trying to get to various things had reached them, apparently. This wasn’t anywhere near the dealer’s room or any of its offshoots, the SIGs were already in progress, and as far as she could remember from the big con schedule the only event going on would be that big awards ceremony.

Angela toyed with the idea of going, but the oppressive heat of her costume decided her. Anything worth seeing would surely keep; she'd been to enough conventions to know that the truly impressive costumes would probably stick around for a bit, both soaking up the praise and trying not to break anything. Getting there in time to see the whole thing wouldn’t be worth the broiling and the probability of being jostled by a crowd. She’d hate to break the forcepike that she was carrying braced against her shoulder; it was easily the most fragile part of the costume, and making it had been a trial.

The heat was like a physical thing trapped against her body. Not for the first time, she wished that she’d worn her officer uniform instead. Fewer layers, and her face, neck, and hands were exposed to the air. But officer getup was just so ''plain'', so ''ordinary'' compared to the Red Guard robes and armor. And somehow it drew more attention, not less. In a weird way, Red Guards could be ignored pretty easily. A perk of being a member of Star Wars's version of the Secret Service, she supposed.

Up ahead it was crowded again; all fursuiters from the look of things. Enough of them were breaking the unwritten rule about staying silent in costume that the group was quite, quite loud, even with the helmet cutting off some of the sound. From the laughter, the movement, and the general tone of conversation, they were having a good time. Having nothing better to do Angela approached them, deciding that if nothing else she might as well find out what if anything was going on.

As she passed within thirty feet of the closest of them she felt something like a chill traveling down her spine, prickling against the bodysuit stuck to her skin. The Red Guard would have brushed it aside as nothing, but for one reason or another she noticed that some of the furries who had been talking or laughing or demonstrating dance moves had stopped, abruptly in some cases. A number of them carried on, oblivious, but several stopped what they were doing.

TR-1407 thought she saw a gray feline's mouth opening far wider than a baklava could allow for. She told herself that it was a trick of the light or a flaw in her visor. That was when the chill became strong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and branching to prickle her arms, the base of her skull, her chest and lower than that, strong enough that she shuddered involuntarily. Her bones started to ache, followed by the rest of her body. There was a moment where she thought ''Heatstroke?'' and started to raise her hands to her helmet.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the world.

== Lead up to Garrett and Steph's TFs==

The density of Star Wars costumes steadily increased as they progressed. The population of the convention was extremely diverse but various factors - the impending themed contests, the large number of rooms providing partitioning, natural human cliquishness - were conspiring to make it clumpy.

''Or maybe word's just getting around about Garrett's costume,'' Steph reflected. The stormtroopers seemed eerily organized for just a bunch of fans who'd happened to show up wearing the same thing.

But to Steph's relief, he wasn't feeling quite so annoyed by the attention Garrett was getting any more. The bunny ears had actually ''helped''. Not in that they were anything particularly interesting themselves, of course; they were nothing at all in comparison to even the simplest of the animal costumes he'd seen on display. No, ironically enough it was a synergistic effect.

A big clunky AT-AT clomping around? Worth a double-take, of course. A big clunky AT-AT clomping around being led by a man in bunny ears? That apparently was worth two double-takes.

A small impromptu honor guard had formed around Garrett, a constantly-renewing cluster of Star Wars fans trailing along to examine the AT-AT's details before being left behind or moving on to other things. But though fewer, the Star Wars fans who were puzzling over Steph were puzzling longer. One of them was even a Darth Vader complete with audible breathing, though in an all-white suit for some reason.

Steph wasn't about to ask. He was already being pelted with far more intricate details of the Star Wars universe than he could possibly take in. "So," the white-armored Vader was musing. "I doubt that the Empire has begun accepting nonhumans into service since my conversion, so you cannot be a pilot. I don't think you have the height for a Gerb or Lepus Carnivorous, but I might be mistaken."

"Uh, no, don't think so," Steph shook his head. ''Lepus Carnivorous? Is he making this up on the spot?'' The only carnivorous rabbit that came to mind was from Monty Python.

"Are you a Kushiban? Be at ease, my mission no longer entails the deaths of Force-Sensitives."

That one sounded less fake, and Steph was about to accept the title if only to have something meaningful to say. But then one of the Storm Troopers turned from peering at the detailing on Garrett's head and said in his best tinny trooper-voice, "My Lord, are you forgetting the Hoojib?"

"I was just getting to that." The chuckle seemed quite out of character for a Darth Vader, and to Steph's relief he seemed to be recognizing how far out of his depth Steph was. "I apologize for my men. When you're obsessed, it's a bit hard to remember that ''not everyone knows or cares.''" That last bit seemed to be aimed at the other fans, who variously shrugged, drew back a little, and hung their helmeted heads in probably-mock shame. "Kushiban and Hoojibs are both rabbitlike creatures, not very large. Kushiban are more like cat-monkey creatures with soft rabbit ears and big squirrely tails; they're about, oh, ''this'' tall standing up -" he bent down to hold his gloved hand a foot and a half above the floor "-but usually walk on all fours. They do a lot of handweaving and tend to be Force-Sensitive; generally they're portrayed with a calm demeanor. By most standards they are considered very, ah, cute."

It was Steph's turn to chuckle. "I'll leave cute to the furries."

"Aww." Garrett rose to his hind legs, surprising Steph by having been paying attention, and took a moment to set one of the forelegs down so he could adjust his headpiece. One of the side-mounted gun turrets had hooked on someone and been pulled askew. "You'd think with all those bunny-based aliens there'd be a more crossover, like with those Caitans we saw earlier."

"Ixnay on the Artrek Stay," Steph warned with a grin. He didn't seriously expect anyone to be offended, there was far too much good-natured mixing of genres and universes going on for that, but the rivalry between those two franchises almost seemed traditional.

"I'm dressed as an AT-AT, I think I'm strong enough in the Star Wars Force for my reputation to survive being revealed as a fancier of catgirls in miniskirt uniforms."

The white Vader nodded, still chuckling. "Certainly. You have no idea how many of our aliens look like cats or bugs or yes, rabbits. Hoojib, for example. They're about ''this'' big-" too small to bend down for, he held out his gloved hands as if cupping a normal-sized bunny in them "-they're mute but telepathic, they eat energy. They look more like rabbits with huge eyes and splayed bird feet. They also have large noses, no visible mouth, and one antenna or feeler on the forehead that they use to drain energy with. A relic of the Marvel comics back in the seventies. Frankly, most of us think the writers were dropping something, but the Hoojib are not quite as implausible as some of the others."

"Weird is good," Steph answered with a nod. ''Hoojib, eh?'' The wheels were spinning quickly in Steph's head; even though he'd never seen pictures of one of those things the description was pretty distinctive. He thought back over some of the stuff he'd glimpsed on the tables they'd passed... "I can pull that off. I'll be right back, you okay Garrett?"

Garrett nodded. "Just tromping around." He had finished his adjustment and was considering whether to go back down on all fours, but as Steph headed off into the bustle he found himself welcoming the excuse to stay upright a while longer. His back wasn't hurting yet, and thanks to the angle of the headpiece he didn't have to hold his neck at a bad angle, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned to the white Vader instead. "So, if it's not a faux pas to ask, did you not have time to paint your outfit before the con?"

SL-1984 chuckled again. "I've got the black getup too. You don't want to know how hot that gets if you don't have real leather. This is a more recent relic of comics, actually. One where the Dark Lord has left the Empire and joined his children, and inexplicably looks ''exactly the same'' except for color. Just as absurd in its way, although I'll give it points for not having talking hedgehogs or superweapons that look like pinball machines. Dark Horse, not Marvel. Star Wars Infinities...? No?"

"No," Garrett said, shaking his head. The headpiece didn't weigh much, but still made the motion ponderous. "Believe it or not, I'm really lost with all this Extended Universe stuff. I just watched the movies and liked the toys." Despite Garrett's demurral it was actually something of an understatement; Star Wars toys were probably the main reason Garrett had become an engineer. The long hours spent playing with his older brother's stash of plastic space ships and robots had put a visceral love of fantastic machinery into Garrett's heart. But he'd never really got into the fictional side of it all, if that made any sense.

"Well, the toys are certainly a major part of the fandom too," SL-1984 agreed. "Collectors have their own subset of obscure encyclopedic knowledge. Wouldn't know what a Hoojib was, perhaps, but they could tell you exactly how rare any given run of a Luke action figure was. But I suspect that you are more inclined towards the tech manuals."

Garrett grinned, hefting the heavy walker forelimb assemblies. "What gave you that idea?"

For his part, Steph wasn't any of those things - he just liked a challenge. And within a minute he was back, another ten dollars poorer and well on the way to meeting his next challenge. He'd found himself a rubber koala nose, best match to his mental image of the description the Vader had given him, and was busily tearing apart a pair of dealie-bobbers as he walked. His only tools were a paper clip, some rubber bands, and MacGuyver innovation. "One second longer..." He finished the work on the addition to the rabbit headband and slipped them back into place, the single spring-loaded antenna bobbing up in the middle between his ears. "Eh? Eh? Hoo da jib?" He spread his arms to display his work.

SL-1984 let out a slightly muffled laugh. His hands moved slightly as if to adjust the new addition, then dropped to hook his thumbs into his belt. "Very nice. Certainly, nobody will mistake you for anything else now. No fan, at any rate."

"Well, that's silly," Garrett evaluated. Steph nodded back, making the antenna bounce but not jarring it loose; the anchor he'd rigged up was holding. ''Excellent.''

"Speaking of silly," Steph said, grinning, "shall we carry on toward the judging room? Despite my progress I doubt my costume's going to win any awards on its own."

"Sounds good." The judging was being staggered over the course of the day to account for the many individual contests that were running - the first winners were almost due for announcement, in fact - but Garrett figured it would be a good idea to get in on his as soon as possible. When dealing with a costume made mostly of cardboard, there was a certain inexorable degradation with use. And besides that, the costume was clunky and heavy. Garrett was looking forward to being out of it for a while.

"In that case I'll bid you adieu. Troops, clear the muster zone!" The Vader slipped back into character and the remaining Storm Troopers did likewise, stepping back in unison as if to let a much larger transport pass through. Garrett obliged them, dropping back down to all fours and resuming his tromp with Steph walking ahead. Steph felt even more ridiculous than before with his extra accessories, but it was a good kind of ridiculous.

It was a strange feeling. So strange that Steph overlooked the other strange feelings at first as they started tingling at the edges of his senses.

Garrett felt it first. He had just started to get back into the gait of an AT-AT when he found himself stumbling slightly, the heavy costume becoming noticeably heavier. Garret paused for a moment, his foreleg supports setting down on the floor below him with a pair of unexpectedly solid clomps.

The cardboard forelegs actually felt ''tight'' on his arms. That was wrong; if anything there should have been too ''much'' play inside them, they wobbled around if he wasn't careful. Garrett tried to let go of the cane handles and tried standing up to pull his hands out of them.

The forelegs stayed firmly and snugly in place, and they were ''heavy''. "Wha..." Garrett choked, his voice coming out low and grating as if by speaking he was using his throat in a way it wasn't intended. The exclamation was accompanied by the faint but noticeable whine of small motors of some sort and Garrett could feel the tension build in his hips as he held the cardboard legs up in front of him.

Cardboard no longer, it seemed - the surface finish had a distinctly metallic luster to it that the gray paint had failed to evoke previously. There was no explaining it; his costume had suddenly become a whole lot ''better''. It was still improving before his eyes, new details resolving and the proportions subtly shifting toward more accurate dimensions.

It was getting heavier. Garrett could feel his hips beginning to fail, the boxy body and outstretched forelegs too much to bear. But Garrett resisted the weight with all his might; he had no idea what was going on and from the frantic hammering of his heart he could tell he was most likely panicking, but even so he somehow ''knew'' deep in his gut that he would be in deep trouble if he fell over. He had to stay up. He ''had'' to...

Garrett's groan came from somewhere inside his chest, the vibration thrumming through his body in new and unfamiliar ways, and after resisting for just seconds he toppled forward to land again on his forelegs for support. The two round footpads slammed solidly down onto the carpeted floor and Garrett felt the impact travel up the metal structure into his shoulders. An alien surge of relief washed through him; ''thank God, I'm stable.'' But it didn't last long against the growing panic. He tried to open his mouth to yell for help and found that he couldn't. ''Oh God, I can't breathe!''

Garrett tried to look up toward Steph, servos in his neck whining in protest at the angle. He caught just a glimpse. Up ahead, Steph was having troubles of his own; his clothing seemed to be disintegrating, white fur bursting up underneath it. Everyone else Garrett caught in that glimpse seemed to be having some outlandish thing happening to them too, too many and too strange for him to process in that split second he had available.

Then Garret's vision cut off as his eyelids fused shut into the smooth, unbroken hull of the underside of the AT-AT's cockpit-head. A moment later vision returned in a kaleidoscopic burst of sensory input; Garrett would have screamed if he'd been able. ''My eyes! Where are my eyes!?'' He could see everywhere at once and couldn't process any of it. He could only stagger ponderously back a step, his limbs moving with unexpected strength and smoothness. ''Whirr''-chrt! ''Whirr''-chrt! It was the best possible replica AT-AT costume in existence now, and Garrett wanted ''out''. But his attempts to shift even the tiniest bit inside the solid metal shell failed, every part stuck solidly and directly to his skin. Fused with it. ''Becoming'' it.

And then the hollowness came. Garrett felt a hole open up inside his gut, swelling inside his abdomen and squeezing his vitals aside. Garrett's vision was disrupted just as it had started to coalesce again, panic flaring more brightly in his mind. ''Oh God Oh God Oh God...'' He could only set his legs and try to hold as steady as possible as the bubble spread up into his chest, up his throat, into his head...

''Ghoooood.'' The thought trailed off in a tumult of strange emotions and sensations. His guts were settling now, the final details pulling into their new configuration. He was empty inside, but what was left was ''solid.'' Strong. Steel. Or something like it, anyway... The hammering of his heart faded away, replaced with the unfamiliar, almost subliminal throb of some sort of power plant.

Vision returned again, more stable this time, but it didn't bring any clarity to the situation. Garrett stood stable on all four legs, round footpads planted firmly on the carpet right where he'd been when the change had first come upon him. But his body was an island of stability in a sea of chaos. All around him people were yelling and running around in terror, many of them no longer human. Garrett turned his head, the motion ponderous and not really necessary given his all-encompassing field of view but psychologically important for keeping his attention focused. ''Where's Steph?'' He didn't know what his friend could do about any of this, but it was a straw of hope to grasp for in the maelstrom.

Thunderous footsteps grabbed his attention. Something was coming, big and round and red-

Too fast. How could something so big move so fast? Garrett barely had time to move before the huge creature brushed past him, slamming against his side as it went. Garret's legs weren't jointed to deal very well with lateral movement and he staggered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced. Whirr, chrt, whirr, chrt, cHRT...

''FALLING!'' Garrett screamed in the form of bolts of light shooting from his chin to blast scorched pockmarks up the wall and ceiling, and slammed to the floor. A table crushed to splinters under him, cushioning what would otherwise have been a tremendously damaging impact, but still jarring. He felt a vestige of pain, which faded the moment it registered, leaving him numb.

Stunned, lying on his side, alone, ''empty''. Garrett wasn't sure if AT-ATs could faint, but he found himself doing a very good imitation of it.

== Steph's post-TF segment==

Steph was trembling and overwhelmed with confusion at what had happened to him, what had happened to everyone around him. But at the same time he felt strangely comforted cradled here by giant white-armored arms, even if he was getting pressed into the hard edge of a chest box, so he managed to keep the fear suppressed below blind panic. He had no idea ''why'' being held like that should have been comforting but for the moment he was willing to just go with it while he tried to straighten out what else had happened.

He hadn't noticed that Garrett wasn't keeping up with him until he'd heard that strange noise of protest. He'd turned around and there it had been, right before his eyes, the gaps between the pieces of Garrett's costume abruptly sealing up as the gray cloth underneath swelled to fill them. As Garrett ''himself'' swelled to fill them. Steph still wasn't sure which had done the changing, Garrett or his costume - was Garrett somehow trapped inside that thing? That had been his first thought, that the costume had somehow been magically replaced with a giant animatronic of fearsome quality.

But then he'd realized what was happening to him, and now he had no idea what was going on. His clothing was disintegrating, falling away into nothingness, and the skin underneath was sprouting a thick white pelt of fur. ''His'' skin, not some costume layered over top. He'd tried pulling on it and felt pain.

Steph wasn't entirely proud of what he'd done next; he'd let out a shriek that was equal parts surprise and alarm, turned away from his friend still struggling inside that developing machine's body, and had tried to run away.

'Tried' being the operative word. It wasn't just his skin that was changing, the size and shape of his entire body was warping. Steph had managed to stagger just a short distance before his shortening legs and enlarging feet tripped him up, sending him stumbling into broad white-caped back of one of the other conventiongoers. The man was ''huge'' - or rather, in hindsight, it was Steph who was shrinking - and absorbed the impact easily.

The man snapped "What?", spinning to confront Steph and reflexively reaching for his lightsabre. It was the white-armored Darth Vader Steph had been speaking with just moments earlier. The Sith Lord's mechanically augmented voice was deeper and more imperious, the armor more fully fleshed out.

Steph's eyes widened in alarm as he found himself craning his neck to look so far up at the man's masked face. "Heee," he gasped breathlessly, his own voice coming out a high-pitched squeak. "Heep!"

It felt like a lot of things were going on, but the biggest was the sense of falling. From increasingly high above SL-1984 watched him unreadably, reaching up to clamp one gloved hand on the opposite wrist, then letting go. Then Steph found himself on all fours, eyes level with a bit of detailing on the man's shiny white shin armor. No, lower than that. He let his joints lock and stood as if frozen.

Giant hands plunged from above and lifted him up out of harm's way just before the huge bulk of the Kool-Aid Man came barreling through the room.

There was a tremendous smash. "OH YEAH!"

"Fall back!" SL-1984 barked.

"Lord Vader!" Someone else nearby exclaimed. Then there was a burst of blaster fire followed by another crash.

Steph couldn't handle it all; he'd simply gone limp and allowed himself to be carried as SL-1984 and the handful of Stormtroopers that had been close at hand retreated from the chaos erupting inside the room. They'd taken up a defensive position in a short hallway just outside, apparently leading to a utility closet of some sort and devoid of any other activity.

It gave them a few minutes' respite and as the shock wore off Steph began to tremble. In the midst of everything that was going on SL-1984 had apparently forgotten that he was holding Steph, but the movement drew his attention back to his immediate surroundings again and he looked down. "So you were a Hoojib after all."

Steph felt his rabbitlike ears lay down flat against his back and the long, flexible tendril that sprouted between them curled tightly in an unfamiliar reflex. ''I never heard of them until just minutes ago!'' Steph tried to object, but he wasn't even able to produce a squeak that time; his mouth no longer seemed to be connected to his trachea and all he could do was let out a small snort.

SL-1984 seemed to get the message well enough anyway, though. "Yes, I suppose that's my fault. Well, what else would you call yourself?" He knelt down and lowered Steph back down, hands wrapped all the way around his ribcage like he was carrying a cat, to deposit him on the floor.

Steph huddled there on all fours, digging the claws on his fingers and toes into the carpet as he looked up in nervous awe at how gigantic everything was. He had a momentary overpowering desire to be picked back up again, he just didn't feel ''safe'' being so small, but he forced it down and tried to focus inward. His body was indeed quite a bit like a bunny's, just as had been described, but with longer fur and long, splayed, birdlike toes on his feet. Frustratingly, his ''hands'' were more like a rabbit's, or maybe a dog's - useless clawed, padded paws with stubby fingers he could barely wriggle independently. There were thumbs, sort of. Maybe dewclaws. They could just about manage grasping, or at least bending far enough that the finger pads met the big pad, but he couldn't stand without them. His face had a blunt, leathery Koala nose, and his tiny mouth was hidden in the fur underneath it. Probing with his surprisingly long tongue, he couldn't even feel any teeth.

He had to admit, he was ''exactly'' like he'd pictured a Hoojib looking like. His vision blurred as his enormous brown eyes started filling with tears.

"Hey, now. Hey." SL-1984 seemed very distracted, bringing one hand up against the side of his helmet and pacing a few steps away to stare intently at nothing visible.

''I didn't want to be here,'' Steph thought miserably to himself. ''I just want to be home.''

"Don't we all," murmured the stormtrooper crouched nearest him. It was a breach of squad discipline, of course, but everyone was too busy with their own troubles to notice. Steph himself wouldn't realize the more important fact that the stormtrooper had actually ''heard'' him until much later on.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus1.jpg]]

Something lithe and feline and clad in ruffles chose that moment to slink past the dead end where the little group held their position. It paused to stare at them with unblinking green eyes, then opened its mouth and hissed furiously. The occupants locked their blaster rifles into position, but one of the troopers, raising an arm to check them, snapped, "Hold your fire! Establish intent, ''then'' act!"

The cat-thing flattened its ears back against its head, looking spooked, then continued on its way at a slightly faster pace.

It was quiet. SL-1984 was the first to move. He pulled off one white glove, exposing a prosthetic hand that gleamed like bronze. It was all but skeletal, sparse of detail with only the transparent synthetic "muscles" keeping it from looking like metal bones. He turned it over before his mask and flexed the fingers gently, then covered it again. "I thought as much," he said in a low rumble, both resigned and keeping what might have been anger under tight control. "Is that how it is? Fine."

"Sir?" The speaker was a trooper with the breather hood, oversuit, and specialized armor of a snowtrooper, the same trooper who had told the others not to shoot. He broke position to stand closer to SL-1984, keeping himself oriented towards the opening to the dead end. "Sir, aren't you - Didn't you switch sides?"

"What? Oh. You, you're Shanda Pike?"

"I - yes, my lord," Pike said, voice firming. In the far distance something bellowed like a foghorn, forcing the trooper to speak louder. "My husband John and I share duties as Squad Leader. He's not here now, sir. I'm the only member of the squad's command staff present."

"Use my designation, Pike. I did leave the Empire, but I am still part of this squad. You're a squad leader, I'm not, that means - damn." SL-1984 went quiet. The constant rhythm of his mechanically-assisted breath was quieter and not as harsh as it was for 'classic' Darth Vader, but it could still be heard, even over the background noise.

"Sir? Something wrong?"

"You're not a ma'am." SL-1984 crossed his arms just underneath his chest box. There was a smile in his artificial voice.

Pike hesitated for several breaths. "Beg pardon?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." SL-1984 chuckled and uncrossed his arms to hook his thumbs into his belt. He was definitely more amused than was appropriate for a man who'd just gone on life support and become a quarter of a century older. "You're a man. You can't keep a wallet in your codpiece anymore. I suppose it makes sense... snowtroopers are specialized stormtroopers, and we don't generally admit women into the trooper academies... Who - yes, everyone in here's a trooper. Ursala, Crystal, Sky - You're all men. No worries, Shad, Jeff, you're men too. Heh. Well, this should make things interesting. Heh. That's... that's actually kind of funny."

"Oh." The snowtrooper waited. The other three had reacted, but a muffled crash from out there had brought them back into position, watching with ready blasters. For a moment, Pike sounded unnaturally calm, as if this was a situation he'd been trained for. "You're right. I hoped you were wrong, sir, but you're right." Another moment passed as SL-1984 crossed his arms again and laughed quietly; one by one every other helmet in the alcove turned towards Pike. Even Steph, huddled pitifully on the floor with his eyes glazed, looked up.

"Fusst you. ''Fusst'' you, you - you ''Sithspawn''. Stop laughing." He stepped forwards, getting into the Vader's faceplate. "''This isn't funny'', Nineteen Eightyfour. This is a ''big'' problem that goes past us, and it's only going to get bigger. And apparently I can't swear. So ''don't laugh.''" The outburst was quiet but unmistakeable. Pike kept his back straight as he added, rather sarcastically, "Sorry, sir. Momentary lapse in personal discipline."

"It won't happen again," SL-1984 agreed in a more serious tone. "Consider it corrected. You're in charge, I suppose. We're going to need a plan..." He trailed off, head coming up as if he'd heard something. "No. Oh, no. ''Hell'' no. How is that even ''possible?''" The white-clad Vader's voice was as low as it could get.

Down on the floor, forgotten until that moment, Steph was mute. Still, he tried. ''What? What is it?'' Pike echoed the sentiment, raising his blaster.

This time, SL-1984 didn't respond to either of them. He stepped forwards, turning his head as if searching. "...I can't let that happen," he said at last, more to himself than anyone else. "I don't even want to think about that. Gravitational pull alone could - and even if it didn't, the superlaser - wrong hands, there aren't even any ''right'' ones - I ''won't'' let that happen."

''Let what happen? What's going on?''

SL-1984 turned the corner at a dead run and was gone. Bitterly Pike muttered, "No way we'll be able to keep up with him. We should have at least synched our comm frequencies. Okay. Let's do that now. Frequency - Aurek Corellia Delta." Almost as one, the troopers switched to the same comm channel. "We can't stay here. First priority is finding the rest of Tampa Bay; once we've done that we can worry about what in the nine hells is going on. I know where my - my husband is, or should be at the moment. We have to start from there."

The snowtrooper continued to speak aloud, nervous energy spilling into his voice. "This is not going to be a blue milk run, boys. We can't afford to waste any time; everyone move fast and don't get distracted. We ''must'' regroup, or we are lost. I'm on point; Shad, you're at the rear. Sing out if something happens to you, even if it looks like we've seen it. We can ''not'' afford to leave anyone behind! Blasters to stun; Ursala, lower the setting on your forcepike. Nothing turns a crowd into a mob faster than a death, and ''don't ask me how I know that''. Let's move out!" Pike headed out at a rapid march, followed by the other five.

In the dead end, Steph hunkered, forgotten.

==Red Guard==

Everything was darkness and confusion and helpless nausea. When the world fell out from under her it took her stomach with it. Gravity meant nothing; she felt as if she was falling, spinning on the worst amusement park ride ever imagined. A timeless period later she tasted blood and realized that she'd bitten the inside of her lip.

And then the world was back, or one very much like it. Struck by the very physical sensation of falling, even though she could feel her boots firmly planted on the floor, Anj instinctively assumed a defensive crouch, opening eyes that she hadn’t remembered closing.

She could see! She could hear! Long ago Anj had gotten used to the way the Red Guard helmet cut her visibility and muffled all sound; it was inevitable, after all. She’d all but stopped noticing. Now, though – now the flattened ovoid of the visor was still there, but a little smaller, and the space around it was no longer dark.

She could see as well and as much as she could when bareheaded, and all sounds were crisp and clear, not muffled in the least. It wasn’t that the helmet was gone; even though it was cool to the touch and non intrusive she could feel it, tight against the contours of her face, pressing against her skin with only a few gaps to let air circulate. But the inside, so close that her eyelashes brushed a smooth surface every time she blinked, was full of light and color and motion. For a moment it was completely disorienting.

Training kicked in as she glanced frantically from one thing to the next. These were the screens in her helmet. They negated the disadvantage of having an enclosed faceplate. The ones on the sides gave her left and right views. This lowest monitor, the short wide one, was her peripheral display. It showed her what was in back. Her aural pickups caught sound and relayed it into her ears in such a way that she could determine the source and how distant it is. They also blunted the effects of sonic weaponry. The analysis calmed her, steadied her, and she could finally pay attention to what she saw in front of her.

It took a moment to realize that these were the same furries who'd been grouped together before. They barely bore any resemblance to any fursuits she had seen, ever – even the best of the best had always looked artificial. Wet, flickering eyes with fully mobile eyelids, subtle facial expressions, a mouth that did more than open and close, pawhands that did not look like gloves, skin that shivered, fur that sprouted from the skin, muscles and tendons moving beneath it, toes that splayed against the ground, tails and ears that moved silently and with purpose – admittedly she wasn't exactly involved with the furry scene, but in all the conventions and events she had ever attended she had never seen a fursuit that still looked real up close. Not when she compared a costume to a real animal. Some things just couldn’t be faked.

Yet the people she saw before her, gasping and touching themselves and looking wildly about… Some were more or less humanlike than others, but one or two looked like nothing less than bipedal wild animals with slightly altered forelimbs and faces. The inarticulate confused things that they said were not in the voices of men or beasts, but a combination of both. They ''breathed'', they ran wet tongues over bestial teeth and ductile lips, they staggered on well-formed legs, their faces and body language reflected shock and disbelief and joy and horror and sudden fear. More than one turned a hybrid face towards the Red Guard.

Training once more came to the fore, and she welcomed it. No one to protect but herself, that was good. She needed to be cautious. They were disorganized and might not mean any harm, but as a whole they looked to be on the verge of blind panic. With her armor on, TR-1407 could probably survive being trampled, but she wouldn't like it. Anj took half a step backwards and stumbled – her feet, her legs seemed bigger and heavier than they should have been, and her center of gravity had shifted. Her balance had changed completely. She compensated even as the realization hit her that something was fundamentally different. The costume was tight, but ''beneath'' it-

Set off, either by her motion or by the low, coughing feline roar uttered by one of them, the furries split. Hooves and paws pounded the carpet as they ran, most of them headed ''away'' from TR-1407, but a gazelle and a zebra sprang past her, giving her a wide berth. She had half turned to stare after them in bewilderment when her spine chilled and she saw something huge and white and blue in one of her helmet screens.

Reacting almost instantly, TR-1407 jerked out of the way, her arms reflexively following through on the motion and swinging the tip of her weighty forcepike into contact with her assailant. It connected solidly, making a tiny crackling noise that was all out of proportion to the effect.

Momentum kept it going, but the enormous white tiger’s leap ended gracelessly as it lost consciousness. It hit the floor with an impact that looked painful and lay limp, flat red tongue sticking out of its fanged, slack mouth. Anj looked from it to the forcepike clasped in her gloved hands.

The stun module mounted on the vibro-edge head at the very tip gleamed dully. Fully extended, the weapon was two meters from the thin tip past the black grip to the weighted base, and it was much, ''much'' heavier than it had been before, maybe seven or eight kilograms - Seven. It was regulation-issue, so it definitely weighed seven kilos - but it felt ''right'' in her hands, sleek and balanced. Perhaps it wasn’t as elegant and deadly as a lightsaber, but here was a weapon that could kill or incapacitate, equally effective in pitched battle or nonlethal crowd control. Set to maximum it could tear through the hull of a starship or take off a man's arm at the shoulder; set to the lower setting and it could knock out a grown Wookiee. Or, apparently, a leaping tiger. That thought brought her back out of contemplation.

“…Yeah. What was that?” Anj’s eyelashes brushed her visor as she blinked. Something weird had happened to the helmet speaker. Normally it just relayed her voice; it distorted it just a little bit, making it slightly tinnier and more mechanical, but that was all. It didn’t ''change'' her voice, not really. It made it a bit less feminine, but it was still recognizable as ''hers''.

But something had happened to that speaker. This wasn’t her voice; this was nothing like it, in fact. The speaker was making her sound like an entirely different person. Why in the Emperor's name-

Focus! Were all local threats neutralized? What about her assailant? Anj moved closer and crouched to examine the white tiger. It was huge, easily three meters from the tip of its tail to its whiskered muzzle. Why meters and not feet? Feh, that wasn't important. At first glance it looked almost exactly like the tranquilized big cats that she'd seen on documentaries, down to the rapid, heavy way its sides heaved as it breathed. The only immediate oddity was the fact that it seemed to be wearing ''clothes'' – something like a tube top and close-fitting boxers, both pale blue.

But another moment showed her that it – no, she, for there was a suggestion of breasts in that tube top – had forepaws that would do poorly for bearing weight. They were long, the fingers well formed with prominent thumbs. Her head also bore hair, short and pattered in the same way as the striped fur, but distinct. No tiger looked like ''that''.

Around her thick neck, too, there was a strap holding a disposable camera…

TR-1407 tensed up as another cold tingle swept up her spine, glancing automatically towards a particular section of wall. Almost immediately that section bowed inwards, breaking with a wild shower of plaster and bricks as something almost spherical burst through, pudgy fists clenched, cubes ricocheting against each other and the interior as red liquid sloshed.

“'''OH YEAHHH!'''”

Apparently she, or the world, had gone mad. Even as the thought flashed through her mind, Anj was acting, one-handedly drawing her blaster rifle - where had that come from, she hadn't brought a blaster trooping today - from where it was holstered beneath her robes and firing.

The blaster bolt - it wasn't supposed to ''work''! - hit a curved, transparent surface that absorbed the energy, heating and deforming slightly. On the inside, bubbles formed at the site and floated rapidly up to the top; barely a second later they had stopped and the melted region had returned to its former unblemished state.

The – whatever it was – adjusted its footing as the three frosted translucent cubes floating inside of it rattled and clinked. Below them the lacquered black indents that served as sketchy facial features - eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a wide smiling mouth, all highly stylized – moved to assume an expression that looked like furious, homicidal joy. Its short arms, placed in relation to its eyes where ears would have been on a humanoid, reached towards the Red Guard, fingers twitching as if to fix around her neck.

Anj fired twice more, with the same minimal result – small parts of the clear surface melted and re-formed, a little of the liquid boiled up without lowering the level within, and the thing displayed anger. It was walking, short legs with their rounded toeless feet looking ridiculous under its bulk, but slowly. She didn't know if it was limited to that speed or it was deliberate. Anj felt another chill on her spine and knew, in a burst of insight, that that didn't matter. It could gather itself and leap hard and fast enough to cover nearly four meters in an eyeblink, breaking through anything in its way. She was almost in range of such a leap.

Still, it couldn't jump several times in succession. If she moved now, she could leave it behind. It looked like – it looked completely impossible. Like a round-bellied pitcher, entirely hollow and complete with flared spout and glass handle, low-set arms and legs stuck on like an afterthought. It was filled, limbs included, with a translucent red liquid - she could see ''through'' it even if the other side was distorted. Somehow Anj thought she’d seen it or something like it before, but just by ''existing'' it was an affront to reality. It couldn’t ''possibly'' stand upright on those small featureless feet, and as for moving! It had no skeletal structure, no visible muscles or joints, it was ''an anthropomorphic pitcher of'' punch, ''how'' could it move?!

TR-1407 shoved her blaster back into its holster on her leg. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and she had no desire to be killed by it. Time to go. Yet something stopped her.

The tiger furry was still out cold. She was only slightly further from the pitcher than Anj was, and the Red Guard had no reason to doubt that the thing was willing to take out its frustration on whatever couldn’t get out of the way.

Even so.... Abruptly TR-1407 recalled her training on Yinchorr, where they had tried to pound stormtrooper training out to make way for something a little different. There'd been the hierarchy of service. Empire above all, Emperor, ranking staff and those she had been assigned to protect, peers and those of lower rank, Imperial citizens, everyone else. For these, she would lay down her life. There was a mantra in that somewhere, so ingrained that it was a part of her, essential enough that she was slow to register that it was completely new.

Yes, the tiger had leaped at her and she had reacted as if under attack, stunning it. And on the scale of people she needed to protect, attackers ranked somewhere below saving herself. However, she had no way to know if that leap really had been an act of aggression. What to do...

Indecision lasted for only a split second. It made no difference if she was or wasn't attacked, that thing's in danger because I put her there. So Anj would get her out. Didn't matter how ridiculous the situation is, she still had a duty. TR-1407 changed her stance, gripped her forcepike in both hands and held it before her in ready position.

If the pitcher thing had been any faster she would have been caught while thinking, but it was forced to shuffle forwards to get within range. She had the feeling that it could only run with any speed if it still had the momentum from a leap. Anj readied herself and thumbed the setting as it tensed to spring.

“'''OH ''YEAHHH!'''''”

Although she’d known this was going to happen, TR-1407 was still surprised at its speed. Barely in time, she dived and rolled under it the instant before it hit. When it landed it did so on three points, splintering the floor underneath it and making everything around tremble with the impact.

Spinning to face it again, Anj swung one-handed and smashed the forcepike's tip into her opponent's body. This time a sharp ''crack!'' rang through the air; as it spun to face her she adjusted her grip and swung the heavy weapon in a high vertical stroke, then again, horizontal, hitting the curved glassy surface ''hard''. The sound was high and sharp, both unpleasant and nearly musical.

There was the tingle again, strong and focused. Acting with it the Red Guard dodged a flailing arm and struck once more, to the left of center, then tried to get some distance between herself and the target, stepping back. Almost immediately she smacked into the wall, hard enough to thump her armor. Damn, her situational awareness had slipped! As she recovered and tried again to pull away she almost fell over her own feet, once more becoming aware that something was ''different''. There'd been a bit of a bounce where no bounce should be, not on a woman. Fortunately her stumble went unnoticed.

The pitcher thing looked at first glance to be unaffected; if it had been made out of durasteel every impact would have left great rents, but its shape was intact and it hadn't stopped moving. On second glance TR-1407 saw the white fractures that were spiderwebbed dramatically across the surface.

She kept her visor pointed squarely at its enraged lacquered eyes, holding her forcepike up in an unvoiced threat.

The indents that appeared to be eyebrows lowered and drew together as it frowned slowly. Across its sketchy features a white fracture, which had started to gradually fill in, lengthened and widened again with a sound that reminded the Red Guard of thin ice on the surface of a pond.

The pitcher thing’s right arm began to leak, red liquid forming drops and pattering down into the carpet. The glass there, thinner than on its curved body, had all but shattered, and repaired itself only slowly. Slowly, the thing’s eyes slid from its arm to Anj’s visor.

“Press me and you’ll be dead,” she warned, not knowing if it could understand her or not, talking slowly and evenly. “I can keep this up faster than you can fix yourself.” Her grammar had gotten a little mangled. The message was obvious nonetheless.

“I can throw a grenade into you and vaporize your contents. I can sweep your legs out from under you and shatter them so you can’t stand. Once I’ve done that, I can smash you into a thousand shards, which I can then scatter.” Even as she said the words, noticing again that the voice saying these words was not hers, she was confident that this was not an empty threat. Interfere with an Imperial Red Guard in the performance of his duty and you’re coming off second-best, she knew.

TR-1407 advanced half a step and brought her forcepike into ready position. The pitcher thing’s eye indents became larger, then smaller again. A sense of rage so strong that it was palpable radiated off of it, but it had sense enough to know a hopeless fight. Still dripping, it shuffled backwards and began to turn ponderously. A moment later, and it bounded away through another wall with a shower of plaster. The Red Guard watched through the hole it left until she was satisfied that it wasn't going to come back.

Hah. Straightening, Anj looked over the comatose tiger once more. Her white-furred flanks had been decorated with a coat of dust and plaster fragments, but the furry had escaped harm.

Now what? The immediate danger was past, but TR-1407 knew better than to assume that things were safe now. The tiger was still out and would likely remain that way for an hour or so. Anj wasn’t going to stay around guarding her. Duty to comrades outweighed duty to strange nonhumans who might have attacked her and weren't even Imperial citizens. Some of her responsibility had been discharged just now, but she knew one way to make a stunned sentient recover faster.

It took a bit of searching - and a moment of staring at her own gloved hands, which appeared to be bigger than she remembered - to find the site where the stun module in her forcepike had hit; the tiger’s fur was thick enough that the little bruised patch of skin was hidden. It was on the furry’s muscular upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Anj closed the tiger’s jaws with an effort, then took a handful of her crimson robes and pressed it against the furry’s nose, plugging the nostrils with the tips of her fingers. She counted slowly to ten and jabbed the bruised patch with the armored knuckles of her free hand, hard. The angle was too awkward for it to be a punch.

Almost immediately the white tiger started to make throaty sounds of complaint, fingers and ears twitching. Anj peeled back a furred eyelid and saw the pupil of the blue eye contract.

That would probably do it. Not willing to be there when the tiger woke up, TR-1407 walked away, almost stumbling on legs that were longer than they should have been. Despite the exertion, Anj's breath had been only slightly quickened. Without that pressure to act, she felt strange. Okay. Okay. Now to find someplace private and try to make sense of all this…

==Steph comes out of hiding==

Steph had been passive until now - almost comatose, for that matter. Events had swept along too rapidly and too outlandishly for him to get much of a grip. But now he realized he couldn't stay that way any longer. The strangely protective presence of the huge armor-clad people was gone. He was just a Hoojib huddled on the floor, and if he didn't get a grip - didn't get ''moving'' - who knew what horrors would catch him?

First there was simply learning how to walk. He was on all fours, but he couldn't crawl - his thighs were short, his knees were far from pronounced, and he couldn't plant his palms on the floor; his wrists didn't bend like that. Instead, when he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. His toes were long enough that he had to turn them outward.

He wobbled and wavered at first, unsure of his limbs like he was a kitten or a puppy or something, or like he'd been on an one of those all-night benders at the end of Finals Week. Still, as he practiced it quickly became easier. The reflexes seemed to be built in - how to stand, how to walk, coordination, the whole deal. That was a mercy, he supposed.

Keeping huddled against the wall for some modicum of concealment Steph crept back up the short hallway to peer out into the room he'd come from.

It was hard to comprehend what he was seeing at first. His senses had been distorted just as much as his body, his perspective something like half a foot off the floor. The scent of smoke in the air was almost buried under the other less identifiable smells Steph's enhanced nose was picking up. His enormous ears were catching more sounds than he knew what to do with, and there was something new and weird with tugging and heat and distant inaudible violin notes... But his vision was still quite clear and comprehensible, at least. Most of the tables had been upended in the rush as people had fled, scattering a lot of junk on the floor.

Excellent. Cover. As soon as the coast seemed relatively clear Steph bounded out across the floor, not quite running and not quite hopping, shelter under the nearest upright table. The space under the tablecloth was still cavernous at his scale, but much better than the soaring vastness of the room outside or even the hallway. He paused there to gather his wits and figure out what he was doing.

He had to get it together. He had to... he needed to find Garrett, before anything else. Easier thought than done, though - he hadn't gone far but the changes to everything had disoriented him. Where was he now? Where had he left his friend?

And would he recognize him when he found him? Steph's ears and antenna perked up, nose twitching nervously, as something large came moving through the room outside his shelter. Larger even than a normal human, heavy footfalls thudding solidly on the thin carpet... Steph would have whimpered had he been able to make any actual sounds. ''Oh God, please don't find me, I don't want to be eaten by a... whatever...''

The footfalls came to an uncertain stop nearby. "Huh?" It rumbled, voice deeply guttural and deeply confused. "No find... what?"

This time Steph ''did'' notice the coincidence between his own thoughts and the creature's words. ''Can he read my mind? Wait, no... am ''I'' telepathic? I don't believe it! But that Vader guy said Hoojibs were telepathic-''

"Who's there?" The big creature bellowed, and for a moment Steph found himself caught in a confusing mental tangle as he tried to stifle the volume of his thinking. His antenna curled and he had to force himself ''not'' to speculate about the appendage's psionic functions for fear of being overheard. It was an impossible task.

Fortunately there were still plenty of other distractions out there, and after only a few seconds the sound of frantic sheep bleating in the distance drew the attention of whatever it was that was standing nearby. "Hah!" it grunted, lumbering off with some new unknown purpose in mind. Steph let out a tiny sigh of relief.

''Okay, so I guess I'm glad I can still communicate somehow... assuming that wasn't all just a coincidence,'' he thought. No one was nearby to confirm it and he gave a snort of derisive amusement. ''God, so much to figure out! Take this one thing at a time. So I turned into a Hoojib. If everyone else has turned into what they were dressed as too...'' He shook his head. It made too little sense, he couldn't get his mind around it.

Would Garrett still be inside that cardboard-turned-metal shell he was wearing? Steph hoped he'd got out of it somehow, but if he hadn't... Cautiously poking his head out from under the tablecloth and peering around to check for danger first, Steph forced himself to dart deeper into the room.

His attention immediately went to a heap of detritus, taller than he was, that had formed against a ragged mass that had been a tabletop mere minutes ago. Some of it had obviously been ''on'' the table, originally - graphic novels were strewn everywhere, many of them burnt. Pages had collected here, and other things as well, probably kicked into place in the rush. Great tufts of fur, bits and pieces of clothing, food scraps that had escaped from trash cans, tablecloths, splintery pieces of other tables - Steph shuffled closer, then thought to wonder why it had drawn his attention. This was not the only pile of trash scattered around the room - there had been several filled trash cans, even this early in the day - and none of ''them'' were all that interesting.

It was like this one was tugging at him - specifically, his antenna. He could feel it sort of warming in response. No, 'tugging' wasn't quite the word - it was almost a smell, but not quite that either. Like... he could almost swear there was a small, cheap violin playing, just one very high continuous note, but he didn't actually hear anything. Something about it was comforting.

Steph snorted. ''Why am I so interested in a pile of trash?'' It wasn't food, that was for sure. There was tons of food in the room, mostly from upended trash cans, and the smell was ''everywhere''; spilled soda and cheap beer, a salad with dressing, corn chips, a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich that was starting to go bad, applesauce, Skittles, an entire box of donuts. And that was just in this room. None of it appealed to him - the smell was just ''there'', like the smoke or the ink on the comic books. His mouth wasn't even watering. He wasn't even sure if he still had salivary glands.

If he was quick about it, it wouldn't hurt to check. Steph climbed gingerly atop the pile, long toes curling to grip at an abandoned canvas bag full of hard objects. The feeling was coming from here. Still uncertain - he felt so ''exposed'' - he scraped at some wet pages that had stuck together.

''There! What's that?'' Something hard, probably plastic, and just a little smaller than his head. Steph sat on his haunches, freeing him to draw whatever it was up. He could grasp and his dewclaws were jointed more or less like thumbs, but the job of wrestling it out took longer than it should have.

Steph's ears quivered. More footsteps! Where was the best place to hide? Taking a step forward - a much more complicated action than it had been when he'd had two legs - he felt his toes flex on the thing. ''Maybe...''

He was going to get caught out in the open if he didn't hide ''now''. Steph hobbled on three legs into the dubious shelter of another table, this one apparently intact, though missing its covering. Edging behind a pile of plastic boxes that had probably once held statuettes, Steph ducked his head under his belly and took a look at his prize, clutched in the wiry toes of his foot. That foot distracted him - earlier, he'd paid much more attention to what had happened to his hands.

His feet were so huge that when he stood in the position that came most naturally the clawed tips of his toes were level with his elbows. They really did look something like bird's feet, covered in slightly wrinkly grayish skin rather than scales or more white fur, though not like any bird he'd seen. More importantly, they were at least somewhat better than his paws at flexing and holding things.

He'd misjudged how far away the footsteps were; that, or the one making the footsteps hadn't moved in a straight line. Now they pounded past, not as heavy as the big creature or even the stormtroopers but very quick. He could hear a girl's voice spouting a steady stream of "OW OW OW get OFF AHH OW" sprinkled with invective, and as she raced past Steph saw a pair of towering stockinged legs pumping. Something smaller and greenish clung to one of them, but they were both gone before he could get a better look.

Not everything was out to get him. Good to know.

The thing that he'd picked up turned out to be a cell phone, the kind that flipped open. It tingled pleasantly and somehow made that high violin note to Steph's antennae, a comforting feeling. He set it down and prized it open with a certain amount of difficulty, knowing that this wasn't helping him find Garrett but telling himself that he'd only be another minute.

The phone was on, and its screen glowed. Not entirely certain about just what he was doing, Steph put his face up so close that the phone's wallpaper blurred out of focus, tilted his head until what had been his chin sank into the fur on his chest, and felt his antennae uncoil, reaching out to touch the keypad, above the part of the phone that the tingling and humming was coming from.

It was a nice feeling. A very nice feeling. Steph closed his eyes and leaned into it for a long moment, sighing almost inaudibly through his nose. He could feel it moving up into his head and body. It was soothing. The violin note held for a few long seconds, then wavered. As that happened the heat lessened.

His eyes snapped open. ''What am I doing? Damn it.'' Steph peeled his head away and heard the phone chirp the low power alert before the screen went black. ''What was that? What was I - didn't the Vader guy say something about eating energy? Damn it, I wish I'd paid more attention.''

He whipped his head around. That ''tugging'', a little like a smell, a little like feeling heat through his antenna, maybe a little like hearing high violin notes, it was back. He could sense something interesting, several somethings, most about as big and with similar high cheap-violin notes, scattered around the room. More phones? Maybe dropped cameras?

For the third time Steph sensed something moving, and close. Still hidden under the table and behind boxes, he pressed himself against the wall. It was moving in a different direction than the other two, and it was - it was ''right on the other side of that wall!''

He shot out from under the table, smacking one gigantic ear against a table leg, and froze against a pile of rags, out in the open. The ceiling yawned high above, he was exposed - but nothing was going to collapse on him.

This turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever it was, it kept moving. He could barely hear its footsteps, and he might not have noticed - now that he was listening, this wasn't the only set of footsteps - but he could sense it as a sort of interesting moving heat and a whole ''orchestra'' playing, getting fainter as it got farther away.

''Wait.'' Steph's ear was stinging. ''How would I know anything about whatever was running except how big it is? Unless'' - His eyes were huge, and when he crossed them above his nose he could sort of see the blurred, doubled shape of that antenna, arcing above his head. ''What, can Hoojibs sense electricity too? Or what, robots? This is just weird.''

Now that he thought about it - there were a lot of other interesting warm things and bowstringed instruments were playing from all sides. Warm wasn't really the word, maybe... maybe ''powered''. Some were small, others larger. Some were moving. It was the same sense, now that he thought about it, that he'd gotten from his rescuer. Same sense as from the phone, but the big things, the moving ones, he could feel through the walls and over a distance. He only 'heard' anything when it was close enough, but the ''powered'' part of the sense could go a lot farther, apparently.

He could feel... Up ahead. Something big, something motionless. Steph wasn't at all sure what direction he'd been going even before he'd literally run into SL-1984, but it seemed like this might be the right way. Hesitantly at first, then with more and more certainty, he followed the antenna.

''There.'' It couldn't be anything else. Even on its side, two right legs sticking out rigidly into open air with only rubble keeping it from lying flat, it loomed up above Steph, head hanging down at a thirty degree angle, resting on what looked like the buckled remains of a chair. The powered sense here was much, ''much'' stronger than anything he'd felt coming from any of the dropped electronics. There was enough power thrumming in it that even from here his antenna was warm, and the note was much deeper than the ones he'd 'heard' before, like a double bass. Or whatever they were called; it had been years since his last music class. He had to fight off the lulling feeling that came with it.

It didn't look remotely human. From Steph's perspective, it took a moment to recognize it as an AT-AT. He moved closer, tentative.

Each round footpad had four thick toe flaps. These were slowly, very slowly, swinging out and in on their hinges. The toe flap articulation was so minimal that they couldn't point straight out. The motion looked aimless.

''Garrett?'' he tried. ''I still don't know if this really works or not... Garrett? Are you in there? Can you hear me?''

Steph shuffled closer. ''What do I do now? I don't know how telepathy works. Or if you could hear it. Or if I even ''have ''it. Or if he's here.'' The AT-AT's boxy head was bigger than his whole body. ''I could probably fit into a shoebox, so that doesn't mean much. God. I probably'' can ''fit into a shoebox.'' The head had a dark horizontal slot running across the very front, like a very narrow visor or something. On either side of it were two bulging domes like flattened compound eyes, each housing a slender pipelike structure. Its chin had two more, slightly larger pipelike things, fixed forwards.

Closer. Steph rose shakily onto his hindquarters, almost pitching over as he overcompensated. His toes splayed against the ground strongly enough that if he kept perfectly still he could almost, ''almost'' stand up, though his ankles started to burn the moment he straightened them and his knees refused to unbend. Ignoring that, he stared into that slot, vertical since the thing was on its side. It was mostly opaque, but he could sort of see... were those chairs? ''A room? No, a cockpit.''

His breath fogged the view and cleared slowly.

''Garrett? It's me. Steph.'' That black slot was reflective enough that from this angle, looking right into it from as high up as he could get without finding something to stand on, he could see himself. Big, ''big'' eyes, barely on this side of being appealing rather than grotesque, huge ears, both long and wide, that flagged behind him but wouldn't stand straight up. A bulbous black nose, the mouth beneath it so small that fur around the edges made it look like a pit, and that antennae, curling like a fern. He hadn't exactly seen himself before.

Steph was distracted enough that he didn't register as the thrumming increased in tempo and the bass note picked up. He almost missed one of the pipes - the medium blasters on the temples - as it swiveled slowly to point directly at him.

==Steph and Garrett==

An alert came on and pinged, setting the other systems into motion.

Something huge and white loomed up against his head, almost touching his command viewport, and he reactivated. The white thing - some kind of animal, details were popping in like graphics on an overworked PC - flinched and fell back, and seemed to shrink as the rest of his vision started loading, quickly from a cold start instead of little by little. There was sound, or something like sound, and words, or something close, but he already had plenty of them, and the ones he had were louder.

There was movement from the white animal, he could see now that it was only very big, not huge, and it suddenly traveled a hundred meters away in a few shuffling steps. It seemed to be clinging to a wall that he was pressed against.

Something was wrong. His vision was still loading, everything that wasn't right in front of his head was still glossy smooth and sparse of detail, but he could see that nothing was at the right angle - oh. Oh. He'd fallen over. That explained why there was nothing under his footpads and no weight on his legs, too. Reorienting, he managed to figure out which way was "up". Vaulting high above him was a ceiling, higher up than the hold of a Star Destroyer should be, and there were walls. They seemed very far apart. Something was wrong with this.

Of course it was wrong! He'd fallen over! He was down, and anyone could climb up to get at a boarding hatch and ''at his crew!'' They must have been stunned by the impact, thrown against his bulkheads -

Alert and evacuate the crew! Why isn't that alarm on yet? Start it now!

Though he didn't have any speakers on his outside, as the prerecorded evacuation message started up internally he saw the white animal perk up, monstrous ears folding, cupping as if funneling sound to its head. If he was judging by how big it was compared to him, and he was, it was at least the size of, of - well, it was almost as big as his head, his ''moveable command section'', part of him said, and it was ''fast'' too, already advancing, covering three meters in a stride -

It was ''big'', it was ''fast'', it was already coming towards him, at any second now it was going to circle past his head and ''get in at his crew!''

'''NO!'''

He wasn't going to let that happen! With a supreme effort, the servos in his neck; his ''flexible armored tunnel''; jerked, pointing the two Taim & Bak MS-1 fire-linked heavy laser cannons at the animal. It froze, stared at him with ridiculously big brown eyes, and there was that almost-sound again, like it was saying his name, but it was still big and fast and a danger to his crew and it ''still'' hadn't moved.

His heavy laser cannons, mounted on either side of his chin, the underside of his moveable command section, were cold. It took a moment to muster the power he needed to warm up the lasers that heated the blaster gas in his cannon energizer. Several seconds passed.

While that was happening, the animal held still. As he fired both in tandem, it twitched out of his sights, and he couldn't re-orient in time. Nothing with legs should have been able to move as fast as it did. When he fired, the beams shot into a stretch of wall, impacting with a minor explosion. Texture popped in, and he saw that he'd left two dramatic black scars with a tiny flame guttering in each. Six seconds later and his heavies had recharged, but he didn't need them again so soon.

The animal was scared off, if only for the moment, and he had some time to catch his brea- no, that wasn't right. To lie helplessly on his side and try to regroup. For the moment, there was no further threat to the crew. Above the heavy laser cannons he had two fire-linked medium repeating blasters, useful for smaller, more agile threats, since they could swivel as needed. All he could do was heat those up, check the gas reserves for them and his heavies, send off a distress signal, and wait.

The signal took barely a second to set up and broadcast. It would, of course, be hours or days or more before anything came of it; that was how that went. He was a very valuable piece of equipment, and depending on the commander and the situation he might or might not be a high priority during a crisis.

Crew was more important than the question of where he was, how he'd gotten there, and how he'd get out of this. Without his crew... He turned his attention to his interior, remembering to watch in case the large animal returned.

Neither of the boarding hatches or any of his four escape hatches, or even the hatch to the vehicle bay, had been opened. He knew that. His atmospheric exchangers and filtration unit - part of the life-support systems built into his interior - were running a steady stream of breathable air through his passenger/troop section and command cockpit. He could feel it luffing across his deck.

A notice came up, that he was stressing the mechanisms in his neck, his ''flexible armored tunnel''. Slowly he lowered his head until it hit something and he was at that same angle he'd activated with. He could feel whatever it was, just barely. Just a sense that it was ''there'', nothing about hardness or softness or texture. This still wasn't good for his servos, but he couldn't do anything about that yet.

There was no movement in his interior. It was as if he didn't have any crew at all. That didn't really make sense, though. How could he be active without a crew? His drive motor shouldn't even be running.

Still nothing. At last, interior cams activated and he got a look at his insides. Both levels of his passenger/troop section were empty, without so much as a cleaning droid poking around. No one was in the maintenance shaft to his motor. There were several speeder bikes racked up like throwing darts back in his rear vehicle bay, and some gear in crates, disarrayed a little by the fall, but nothing that moved on its own. It made him feel vaguely uneasy to see all that.

Only one cam was in his tunnel. More of them were in and around his command cockpit. The seats for pilot and gunner, as well as the larger and more imposing one for the commander, were fixed to his deck, though they were adjustable and currently hanging from their bearings. He saw that very clearly; cams were positioned to fix on the faces of crew in the three essential stations, making it easier for them to send real-time messages or recordings on his holoprojector.

He saw the bulky shapes of the consoles that made up his mainframe. On them, status lights blinked or shone steady, and monitors glowed steadily. These were the displays made for his crew. Who, apparently, wasn't there, not even in the cockpit. That wasn't right. Even standing down, inactive in his berth, there should be at least one technician. And there wasn't so much as a fingerprint on a console or a stretch of flattened upholstery at any of the three essential stations. Like they'd never been touched. Not so much as a speck of dust either. Was he factory-new? Couldn't be. He knew that his hull was scored and dented, cosmetic damage that meant he'd seen action.

This was not good. Bad enough to be helpless on his side waiting for his crew to evacuate and send for backup, which presumably would at some point involve either retrieving him whole or in components or blasting him so that no one else could have him. Worse to be helpless on his side with no crew.

No crew. He'd skirted that phrase, because 'no crew' meant 'empty'. That was meaningless when he was inactive and a protocol breach when he was standing down, but he was live now, systems running, and he couldn't...

[This does not actually fit anywhere. I'll delete it when I'm sure I'm not going to use anything from it. "Autonomy, actualization, psyche emulation identity and personality emulation, records, software analog of organic-brain emotional response, and many others, often very similar."

There was one subroutine housed in one particular console, one last major program in the master computer, that hadn't gone live yet. No. Untrue on both counts. Several subroutines, many or most of them linked so that one could not be active without others. Currently there was only one running at optimum, but all were functioning at one level or another. There was a great deal of overlap among the many, many subsubroutines, and many redundancies, and it was altogether more complex and puzzling than any other set of programs. The console wasn't planned or built by the same mind as the rest of him.

It was unmarked, as far as he could tell, and set apart from the others. It had the normal complement of monitors and status lights, but only a few controls. From the lights, some systems were active, most weren't. He was not entirely sure what, if anything, it did.

Should he start it up now? It couldn't be essential. This would just burn power faster. But why not? He couldn't find any crew, so without autonomy he wasn't going to be able to do anything. Besides, his life support was running with no life to support, his hologram projection pod was live with nothing to receive, and he had readied everything in his drive motor even though he was hardly using it at all, what with being motionless. No crew meant no action, the moment when he'd fired at the large animal notwithstanding. He might as well. Power was rerouted, his drive motor sped up slightly to compensate, and bank after bank of status lights on the last console glowed to life.

Garrett jerked. ''Beep... beep... beep... beep...'' Automatically he reached out to swat at the alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock, and his leg just swung forward and back, smacking against something. He felt the impact dully as it traveled up into his body. It didn't really sound like an alarm clock, it sounded like - ''No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! Stress on flexible armored tunnel! Warning!''

That meant - what that meant was that he was FALLING!

Garrett's legs churned forward and back, but hit rubble, unidentifiable heaps of trash. No. He wasn't falling, he was already down, and he'd figured that out already. He was already down, he remembered the fall and how it had started slow and then became much faster and then he'd hit the ground, and now he was ''on'' the ground, though he could barely feel what was underneath him.

The costume. That was it, that had to be it, the costume was keeping things from touching his skin. Yes. Under it, Garrett could feel things, his nerves hadn't all gone dead. As soon as he got it off, he'd be fine. That emptiness, that sickening hollow space inside, that would wear off. Yes. So would the feeling that he was somehow both stretched and compressed somehow. He just had to get the costume off.

The alarms in his cockpit were getting annoying, and nothing was happening with the evacuation alarm, so he disabled them. Indicators on monitors and bank after bank of status lights updated continuously, but they showed nothing he couldn't sense for himself except, perhaps, why the lights on the mystery console, already blinking in rapid patterns, went mad.

He wasn't breathing! He wasn't breathing! Whatever he used to breathe - diaphragm? Rib muscles? - was missing, his sides were totally rigid and immobile. It didn't hurt, but God, he couldn't breathe!

Garrett shuddered, or tried to. The seats at his three essential command stations readjusted convulsively, his flexible armored tunnel quivered, his medium blasters rocked, and his legs bent slightly where they met his drive motor and at the knee joints, toe flaps flicking up and down. Otherwise he didn't move. Just a costume, he told himself. A costume and maybe some highly illegal combination of substances which would make the University very unhappy. He hadn't knowingly taken anything, but that never made much difference with the staff. At the moment, the thought of Midtral kicking him out wasn't all that bad.

The console displays worked silently, making it much easier for crew to see just what was going on with him. One housed the housekeeping subroutines and displayed temperature and pressure readings, air supply, life support, lighting, and half a dozen other systems, both readings and controls, all for the places where crew would be. Most of that was locked to him, off limits, part of some security measure. More consoles were devoted to other things. Weaponry. Data from sensor arrays, holographic targeting systems, inside cams, impulse terrain sensors. The console for both of his KDY FW62 compact fusion drive systems, all the fiddly details that went with them and his fuel slug tank and blaster cannon energizer. Other consoles too, with purposes of their own. Most of them didn't appear to be connected, but under the deck each was linked by numerous thick cables, to each other and the rest of his body. They were, Garrett knew, what his brain had turned into.

After he took the costume off Midtral would kick him out for substance abuse, the way they also did with people who got weird piercings or large tattoos or got in the paper for suspicious reasons. It was in the college contract; people hated it, but no one had a legal leg to stand on. They would give him time to pick up his stuff and find a motel, and he and Steph could go together to that bar just off campus to complain and rage and drink. Later they could stagger back to the motel, and wake up side by side in the morning with matching hangovers, and both of them could claim to have no memory of the previous night. The first and last time he'd done it, he'd sworn never to do it again, and Steph had clutched his head and said "Never, ''ever'' again". But another all-night bender with his friend sounded a lot better now.

He laughed wildly - and silently except for a burst of static on the internal comms. On the - yes, it was the system the commander used to give orders to the troops, it might as well be an intercom, why not? The static was loudest from the hologram pod, loud enough to fill the cockpit. It was purely internal, with not one speaker on his outside. He didn't have to pause for breath. Static hissed and crackled through his intercom, rising in a snarl of terrible, meaningless sound that went on and on. Who was he kidding? Nothing was coming off, and he was so empty that the noise echoed around his internals. The static died down as he stopped, feeling sick.

Not breathing. This time the realization didn't spark panic. He felt hot and cold at once.

He couldn't get up. Oh, it was easy enough in theory, Garrett knew. Contract abdominal muscles. Prop up on one elbow. Curl knees in along the floor. Turn so that hands and knees are on the ground and body is above. Push off with hands and stand up. Such a pity that he couldn't do that.

Okay, focus, he told himself, trying desperately not to start laughing again. He was on his side, not quite flat. The pocked squares on the ceiling - it was a drop ceiling, part of him noticed - somehow looked ridiculously far distant, same with the walls, though he had no problem making out details. A few hundred meters away - no, that couldn't be right, but several times longer than his body - he saw an abandoned, tapering cylindrical plastic thing partially filled with clear liquid, somehow completely intact. "Aquafina", the label read. It looked like a water bottle. Although it was much smaller than he was and he was looking ''down'' to see it, it still seemed huge. Quite a bit larger than a man, almost the size of a speeder... or, yes, a car. But that couldn't be right.

It dawned on Garrett then that it wasn't that any of these things were too large. No, they were exactly as big as they were supposed to be. It was that ''he'' was too ''small''. He was - he was an AT-AT. The distance from footpad to back was supposed to be at least twenty, twenty-five meters. How many feet was that? Fifty, sixty? If he remembered right, the drop ceiling was supposed to be ten feet up, maybe less. Even if he was standing now, his back would only be halfway to that ceiling, if that. That wasn't right. Maybe it explained the compressed feeling, though.

Movement. The furry white animal was back, and although it was moving very cautiously it still seemed far too quick for something without repulsorlifts. Garrett decided that it was probably the size thing - it seemed as big as a bantha, or... or an elephant. Those weren't supposed to move like this. But the animal was close to the floor and far, far from the ceiling, so it was probably small. Now, he couldn't help noticing that it looked like a combination of various animals. Long haired cat, wading bird, field rabbit, maybe some kind of bug.

It was coming around from Garrett's other side, staying away from his heavies this time. Halfheartedly, he followed it with the swiveling medium repeating blasters on either side of his viewport - or rather, he followed it with one blaster, because the other was pressed by his weight against what looked like a magnified piece of canvas. It didn't seem worth the effort to fire. What was the point? He didn't have any crew to protect. He was ''empty''.

''So'' empty. It was the strangest feeling. A little bit like hunger, a little like cold, slightly nauseating, something like being touch-starved, and a ''lot'' like loneliness so strong that it was crippling. Somehow it was all of those things wrapped up together, with something he had no words for. Continued breathlessness didn't help. ''Empty.''

He tried to shudder again, with the same result as last time. The white animal froze where it stood, the weird curling thing on its head unbending partially.

''Garrett?''

He jerked.

Steph? he said, or tried to say. It came out as purely internal static, like the buzzing hiss of an analog TV on an empty channel. Just like when he'd had that moment of wild laughter earlier.

''Garrett, it's me, Steph. Can you hear me?''

I hear you, I hear you! More static. Was that really Steph? How? What had happened?

''Look, don't try to shoot me again. I don't want - Are you even in there? Somewhere?''

Yes. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you, he tried. Still no words. It was just static on his intercom.

''Look, if you're there, say something.''

I don't think I can, he tried. Static. The creature that said it was Steph had its huge ears cupped around its head again, but Garrett didn't think it was hearing him. The intercom was internal, the hatches were shut. And he was producing static.

He jerked the servos in the armored tunnel that had once been his neck, making his head bob. He had to fight gravity. It wasn't an easy motion, and although he couldn't see it himself, he knew it didn't look smooth.

''Do that again.''

Garrett did. Whatever was between his head and the ground, underneath the too-close canvas, made a weird sort of ''crunch''. He could barely hear it; it seemed soft and far away.

''Okay. Uh, okay. You can't talk, but you can hear me, right?''

A third time, and now he was getting faint complaints. He wasn't designed for this kind of activity, not small repetitive movements. If he kept this up, he'd start damaging the blaster on that side. After a moment, he swung one leg forward and back. A foreleg.

He couldn't see most of his body, but he could see his legs, sticking out rigidly, like he was a flipped card table. There was the joint where each leg met his body. The joint could swing the entire leg forwards and back, and spread the legs a little apart, independently, but the spreading had a very limited range and apparently he couldn't do it lying on his side. His legs were just too heavy; the joints weren't built for this. He had knee joints, and four toe flaps at the end of each leg. And there was some kind of wristlike joint between knee and footpad, where the end of the leg pincered on to the footpad, but he couldn't move it. It was probably like a lizard's wrist; press the hand against something and the arm could move at all kinds of angles, but without something, the ground, a wall, to press against none of those wrist angles were really possible.

''Is that a yes?''

If he'd had eyes, Garrett would have rolled them. As it was, he felt the medium blaster that wasn't pinned twitch. Steph could get like this when he was excited or nervous, chattering inanely and giving off the impression that he wasn't nearly as smart as he was.

He tried talking again, asking, What do you think? Static. Of course. He swung the leg again.

''Okay, yeah. So - I guess I'm telepathic now. Right? My voice is gone, but if you can hear me, what else could it be?''

Garrett lay still, waiting as Steph babbled about what had happened, obviously ''just'' on this side of hysteria. He couldn't blame the little guy - Garrett could feel it pressing in on him, like any minute now he'd burst out in mad static laughter again. And maybe this time he wouldn't stop. But as long as Steph was here, he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

Was this telepathy, then? It was ''like'' hearing Steph's voice, but not quite. He didn't have any sense of where it was coming from. And... no, there wasn't really a sensation of hearing anything. It was like imagining a voice, imagining very strongly. Which raised the question of whether or not he ''was'' imagining it. But that way lay madness.

Eventually, Steph ran down. ''And I'm sorry, I ran away! I shouldn't have. I know.'' Had he? Obviously that was bad, but Garrett wasn't sure that he'd noticed. Not with all this. He wished - well, not like it mattered. Obviously he didn't need to breathe. It just felt like he should.

''Look, I - I should really try and get someone to help you up. I don't want to stay here, it's too open.''

Finally! Garrett staticked and swung forward and back, vigorously enough that he got a stern internal notice about not damaging his legs on obstacles. On the ground, Steph shuffled anxiously, black nose twitching.

''Right. I'll, uh, I'll be right back.'' He took off on all fours. Garrett watched him go. Why was Steph some kind of weird alien rabbit thing? What the hell had ''happened''? There was a way to undo it, right? He hoped there was. He really hoped there was.

He didn't ''want'' to be an AT-AT! He'd never wanted this. A month ago - less than a month ago - this costume hadn't even been a vague idea! He wasn't even a big fan or anything. He didn't want to be a walking beast-shaped tank. He could feel ''air'' blowing through his ''insides''.

He heard faint static crackling out of the intercom, and several bewildered seconds passed before he realized that he was trying to whimper.

==Anj's post-TF segment==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus2.jpg]]

Anj holstered his collapsed forcepike, removed his helmet, pushed his overrobe back over his shoulders like a cape, and stared at the reflection in the mirror, shying away from the eyes. The reflection stared back.

The reflection's face wouldn't turn heads. It was pretty normal, all things considered, no obvious scars or nonhuman colors. There was a certain hardness to it, yes – something in the forehead, the set of the jaw, the chin – but the mouth and the surprised expression saved him from looking too unforgiving. What made it disorienting was the way it was at once strange and familiar. There was a lurching shock like he'd dropped into a hole in the ground, registering that this wasn't some stranger's face. There was a smaller shock of recognition - this was his face. This was him.

“Uh. This is the part of the dream where my teeth fall out or I find out I can fly, right?” Anj winced and saw the reflection do the same. '' I don’t sound anything like me. I don’t even sound like my father.''

“Doesn’t feel like a dream, but how would I know? I guess there's nothing wrong with my voice amplifier. I, uh... Well, this is weird.” It was a very expressive face – the wince hadn’t just been a twitch of the eyelid; there’d also been more than a little reaction in the lips and eyebrows. He looked away.

It made a certain amount of sense, though. After that exchange with the bizarre pitcher-thing he had barely been breathing hard. He'd known something was different, he'd sort of expected this, it wasn't just the - well, the sense that now and again something jostled that shouldn't. Though that had been part of it. “Damn. Well... only men are officially accepted into the Stormtrooper Corps. Only the best stormtroopers can be trained as Red Guards. The screening process - yeah, I don't think a woman would go unnoticed. So yeah.”

He was taller, definitely. Not ''really'' tall, maybe, he could be wrong. When he turned his head and tilted it down it seemed like his shoulders on either side extended out too far, though part of that was the pauldrons. They didn't look bad in the mirror. But - wow, yeah, he was definitely taller. Yes. And his arms were thicker, even aside from the armor. Self-consciously, he flexed his free arm and felt his bicep press into the armor of his lower arm, the vambrace.

Also he was taller. Anj moistened his lips and realized that he was nervous.

For some reason recognizing that made him plant his feet and stand straighter - and yes, taller. Hopefully that would stop surprising him soon, it wasn't like he'd hit his head on the doorjamb or anything. He was nervous - okay, afraid.

Earlier, he'd decided to find an empty bathroom to look at himself in, rather than join the crush of people trying to get out. That had taken a little longer than he'd expected. He might have been dragging his feet a bit, putting it off. He'd known something would happen - maybe he was deluding himself, but it was like there was a wave above him, ready to crash down.

He would have liked to avoid it for a little bit longer. He knew he could. But something inside, almost impossible to make out at first, then louder and clearer to the point where it startled him, said ''No. No. That's not how it goes. Resolve internal crises before they impact performance.''

Anj closed his eyes, then opened them. He started talking, the words forming just before he said them. "I was born in - in Coronet City on Corellia. We moved to Imperial center when I was about three, and lived in a domicile in a shabby-genteel section, on a level that was patrolled enough to keep down the violence." He wanted to stop, this wasn't right - he'd been born in Flagstaff Arizona, they'd moved when he was almost four. "The sun - the sun was visible, there was natural light, but only at high noon. When it rained, and it did that a lot, the water came to us through sluices, and it was never clean." The memory hit him, as strong as any he'd ever had - walking through the marketplace with his mother, ten minutes after a storm had passed overhead, and the water had poured off the awning they ducked under, reflecting rainbows.

"No, that's not right." He made himself stop and shake away the memory of how oily the water was, its smell. His pulse was quickening. "I don't remember Arizona except as bright and red, we just have pictures of the little blue house." There had been holograms of Coronet City in the domicile, projecting on the walls. They weren't the shiny sanitized holos of famous or scenic places that got sold to tourists. His older brother had borrowed a holocam and recorded the scenes himself. "I- we lived in an apartment for a while. It snowed in the winter. First time I'd seen snow, and it made night less dark. It was wetter than I'd thought."

"Smelled a little like tin. Smelled like -" Anj rubbed his face with his gloved free hand, shifting his grip on his helmet with the other. He'd heard more than once that fresh snow smelled like tin, but he couldn't - Oh, Emperor, he remembered the landlord's kid, half a year older and always red-faced, showing up and asking if he'd mind wagering on which of the hired men would be the one to knock down the hawk-bat nest. Why not, he was a Corellian, right? "I, I made friends with a neighbor girl who never stopped telling me and Valerie that the - the show with the puppets was stupid and babyish. I wanted to impress her so I agreed, but I still watched it. Sometimes Valerie told her I was lying..."

This went on for some time, and he kept having the feeling that whatever he was fighting, he was losing. Anj paced, restless, sometimes with uncertainty and other times aggressively. Eventually he forced himself to stop and looked back at the mirror, this time looking into his reflection's eyes. His eyes were wide-open, worried, with irises dark enough that they were hard to distinguish from his pupils. Hadn't they been paler before this? Anj looked away, unsure.

"What happened?" he asked in a low voice, not quite a whisper. "I don't understand. It's like - wait, wait. Am I - am I ''talking'' to myself?" He was. "Emperor's bones," he said, the last two words coming out as a mild oath. He really wasn't in the habit of talking to himself, he knew that for sure. It was probably just to listen to his voice. He'd talked to himself at length right after rigging the voice amp the first time, feeling out how it made him sound. Her sound, at the time. No, wait, he'd done that the first time he'd put on a helmet at the Academy, too. Once he'd quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the the other time he'd read the helmet's instruction manual out loud.

He looked down, saw his hand trembling, and had to clench it into a fist to make it stop. He had to finish this. He just really, really didn't want to, and he wasn't sure what 'this' was or why it scared him. Maybe he could put it off for another minute.

Briskly, Anj used some paper towels to dry the counter where the sinks were, switching off a dribbling faucet at the same time, then set his helmet there and removed his robes, folding them quickly and with mechanical precision.

“Huh.” Despite their irregular shape, he’d folded them into a perfect square, flat and unwrinkled. And why had he bothered wiping down the counter first? Anj dropped his folded robes besides his helmet, deliberately letting a corner hang over the edge of the counter. Immediately he felt the nagging urge to adjust the robes, make them line up precisely, but it wasn’t very strong. Apparently he had a thing for neatness. He hoped it was neatness, and not some kind of cleaning mania.

Looking into the mirror again, Anj glanced over his armor. Red plating, the same crimson as his helmet and robes, with a thick textured bodysuit underneath. The bodysuit - the underarmor - was black, naturally, no sign of the armor weave visible. The plating was fashioned like the contours of a very well-defined muscular body. Better defined then he actually was and a serious display of narcissism, he knew, but ''he'' hadn’t designed the armor.

This was both distressing and a sight he'd seen nearly every day. ''That'' was what he had to finish. He had to get both stories to fit together. He couldn't just pick one - well, he ''could'', it would be easy, he could just be Anj, part of the Stormtrooper Corps since he'd volunteered at fifteen, which was younger than was officially allowed, eventually picked for Red Guard training on Yinchorr. He could pick that, let all the sketchy details fill in and flesh out, and be Anj of the 501st on a planet that was only vaguely familiar to him. The more he thought about that backstory, the more complex it would become. But he knew he shouldn't, he really, ''really'' shouldn't.

"Okay," he said quietly. "The obvious answer is that I was - I ''am'', still, Anj - ''Angela'', and this other stuff is new, but there's no way I can ignore it." He had to figure this out. Anj ran a gloved finger along the raised detailing on his pectorals, stopping as he realized what he was doing. He remembered making the armor with Ursala, one of the other Tampa Bay Red Guards - and he remembered getting it at the end of training, before being shipped off to a new post. Both felt real.

This would take some doing.

Anj paced a little more, then stretched out on the linoleum, resting weight only on his forearms and toes, and kept his abdomen taut, silently counting the seconds as his muscles burned. He couldn't reject it. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing was ever that simple. Still, there had to be something he could do.

Holding "plank" position was easy; even with the weight of the armor, he could stay like that for an hour, no trouble. Anj shifted position, put his palms against the floor, and started to push up and lower himself down in a steady rhythm, breathing easily.

Why one or the other? Why not both? Wouldn't that be ideal?

Could he even do that? Easy enough to ''think'' it, but...

A shredded bit of toilet paper scudded off across the linoleum tiles, blown by his breath, and Anj stopped as he realized that he'd just stretched out and started doing pushups on a bathroom floor. A women's bathroom, admittedly, and therefore not ''too'' awful, but still. He scrambled back to his feet as quickly as if he’d been ordered, and stared for the third time at his reflection.

This time he didn't look away, staring intently into the mirror, ignoring the discomfort, the awkward feeling that really he shouldn't be doing this. Every time he saw himself, it was a little easier.

And now - now, if he pushed away the visceral shock of seeing someone else and the other, smaller shock of recognition, and it did feel like he was pushing them back - now he honestly could tell himself that that face ''was'' familiar. That the nose had once been broken rather spectacularly and had for the most part healed straight. That the hair-fine scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, ''his'' dark eyebrow, was ''not'' from a training incident or an injury he'd picked up on duty, but a remainder of something incredibly stupid he’d done as a teenager. He could remember idly imagining a face like this, going with the fairly vague biography he’d made. Anj thought he'd sketched this face, or one like it, in a notebook.

In fact, to his surprise he looked just a little like his ex. Like Angela’s ex. Anj's ex. It wasn’t a ''major'' resemblance, but it was there, something about the bone structure and the texture of his close-cropped dark hair, though it wasn't curly. Oh, right - he'd been on that faces kick, filling up page after page of head studies. Since this had been when he, as Angela, had been engaged to Scott, and Scott hadn't objected to a little modeling, most of them reflected him somehow.

Anj was oddly relieved to find that there was still an echo of that old pain when he thought about Scott. Things just hadn't worked out between them. They'd left on friendly enough terms, yes, it had been almost two years and it was barely awkward anymore when they ran into each other, but there'd just been too much emotional investment for it to be painless.

It was weird, thinking of Scott when he looked like this, but almost reassuring.

Maybe he could do this after all. "I shouldn't worry about it," Anj told himself. He didn't dislike his voice. "Maybe if I just stop making a problem out of it - mind over matter, right?" There was still a blanket sense of unease, but he wasn't afraid now. He smiled tentatively, mostly to try out how it looked on his face. This didn't have to be bad. He'd - he'd try not to think of it as bad.

There would be time later to strip off every piece of armor and examine everything. For now – well, he ''knew'', but it wouldn’t hurt just to check. Anj found the seam in his underarmor and stretched it open. There was the dance belt thing keeping everything supported, and under it another piece of padded armor, common sense really, a protection that was smaller and not nearly as obvious as the codpiece worn by stormtroopers. And under ''that'' -

He wasn't sure if it was supposed to be - the angle was new, but it looked normal - he hadn't expected - right, well, Scott had been cut, and -

“…Yeah. I definitely went in the wrong refresher. Bathroom. Whatever it's called.” Feeling a little embarrassed, Anj straightened his armor and exhaled firmly. "I don't think I'll do that again for a while." Not that he would have a choice; his bladder had to fill eventually. But it could wait.

"No more periods. Huh. I'm going to have to get new clothes. ''All'' new clothes. It's probably going to be a comprehensive shopping spree." A daunting thought. As Angela, ever since he was a little girl he'd hated shopping for new outfits, since it was ''never'' quick or simple. He'd hated it vocally enough that it had become a family joke. Somehow he doubted that had changed - and, for whatever reason, this was another oddly comforting thought. There was a little pronoun confusion and what could only be called a double set of memories, but Angela and Anj were the same person at heart. He hoped.

He still felt weird, but it was a relief to be sure that whatever else was going on, this was a convention in Florida, and he had walked in as a woman in costume. In Red Guard costume. The furries he’d seen – the same thing had happened to ''them.'' It was safe to assume it had also happened to the people he’d passed on the way ''here'', the ones who’d been rushing for the exits or milling in confusion. Had it happened to everyone? In the world, or locally, or just ''here''?

He’d become a real Red Guard; his forcepike had become a real forcepike, the biography had filled out extensively, and so had... other things. The furries had become actual, living animal people. The image, the dream, had become reality. Although, really, he’d never longed to have more than the image, he’d spent a lot of idle thought on it but never felt that he was ''supposed'' to be a Red Guard, really. And – well, it followed logically that the pitcher man hadn’t been more than the image before, because who could ''possibly'' want to be a pitcher? There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

… What had happened to the rest of the squad? To his friends, to SL-1984? Had this happened to ''them'', too? Anj felt a sharp, unsettling lurch in the pit of his stomach, as all the unease he'd managed to dispell came back in a lump. Why wasn’t he with them? ''How'' could he have thought it was a good idea to leave them in this unfamiliar territory? He had no idea where they were, so why wasn’t he out looking for them?

“Why do I feel so ''guilty'' about this? I don’t know what in the Emperor’s name they’re doing, this isn’t exactly covered in training!” Anj blinked. “Not training. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Going to have to do ''something''.” But what, ''that'' was the question. Where to start? He wasn't entirely sure where ''he'' was, let alone any of the others!

Restless again, Anj made a quick circuit of the bathroom. He’d chosen well; when he’d passed this place early in the day there had been an impressive line, but everyone’s priorities had shifted well before he got here.

All stalls were open, and the bathroom was empty – he wouldn’t have removed his helmet and started talking to himself if it hadn’t been – but it didn’t hurt to check.

He found it rather disheartening when he had trouble reading a piece of graffiti. It was scratched deeply into the side of a stall, in large, relatively neat letters that were easy to distinguish, but it still took longer than he’d have liked before the squiggles resolved into “ADRIAN WAS HERE”. Apparently he now had trouble reading English.

Otherwise, the only thing of note was a pile of clothing just inside the handicapped stall. The shirt at the top of the pile had what looked like a long elastic bandage, ragged at the tip, trailing out of the neck opening. Very gingerly, touching only with the very tips of his gloved fingers, Anj separated and folded the clothes neatly, stacking them together on the linoleum. He told himself as he did it that it was a courtesy. The other end of the bandage was wrapped around a bra left inside the shirt, for some reason that Anj couldn't fathom. Crumpled under those and sitting atop a dusty pair of sandals were short pants with panties inside - and in ''those'' was a winged Maxi pad with just a little blood on it.

Just seeing that made Anj feel incredibly uncomfortable and voyeuristic. If women had a set of bathroom rules, hiding all evidence of periods was one of the big ones. It seemed like that rule had carried over - he was embarrassed for whoever this was, and entirely unwilling to touch it. And yet Anj couldn’t help thinking that if the clothing had simply been removed, it would just be heaped together, underthings on top. This looked like more like the occupant had dematerialized – or shrunk dramatically. Yet it was completely empty, and he hadn't seen any-

''-Wait. '' I ''wouldn't try and approach someone who looked like me, if this happened. And she could've got out earlier, maybe even when I opened the door. I wasn't exactly in a state to notice. Whatever this is about, it's going to stay a mystery. One that I'm glad isn't happening to'' me.

A light sort of twitch traveling up his spine brought Anj out of his thoughts. “Right,” he mused under his breath as he returned to the sink. “Weakly Force-Sensitive, untrained and not good for much more than intuition and a warning. Wrote that in the bio. Inexplicable spinal sensations mean something is happening, and if it's mild like this-“

He could hear it, tinny and faint, coming from his helmet on the counter. It must have tuned in on an active frequency. Without hesitation Anj took it up and settled it over his head, the insides tight against his face. The voice over the com became clear. Female, clear, commanding, and with a bit of an accent that sounded vaguely British - No. Not British. ''Imperial.''

“-ling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, report for instruction, report for instruction, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr. Repeat; this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st-“

Words could not have expressed how Anj’s heart leaped on hearing the officer’s voice. He wasn’t alone! Almost as fast as he could think it, he had gone to the specified frequency.

“This is TR-1407 of Tampa Bay Squadron.” Relief loosened his tongue in spite of training. “And I am ''very'' glad to hear from you! Orders, sir?”

The voice that responded over the comlink wasn’t the same one, although if anything the Imperial accent was stronger; this was a harried-sounding older man. “You may change your mind when you see this, Royal Guard. Get to the rendezvous outside of the structure. We’re on the blacktop rectangle to the southwest.”

== Garrett ==

Nothing was happening. He supposed that there must be commotion going around - he and Steph hadn't been the only ones, right? He'd seen something like that before falling over, right? - but he couldn't hear anything. Literally. It was silent. Now and again he felt what were sort of like faint tremors going up into his body. Maybe he'd gone deaf, at least on the outside. Inside it was different.

Experimentally, he swung a hind leg. It hit something. He swung again, harder. Yes - there ''was'' a sound, but it was so faint! Distant, like it was several rooms away.

Now he charged his heavies, waiting the long seconds until they were good and hot, and fired into the wall. The minor explosion that resulted ''was'' louder, but again - faint and far away. The sound of both heavy cannons charging and going off had been perfectly clear - it was the same oddly high laser ''tcheeer'' shriek he remembered from watching Empire Strikes Back - which he supposed made sense, since the sound could probably travel through him and to whatever worked like ears now.

He couldn't breathe. Garrett would have given a lot right now to be sure if he'd been stuck on an inhale or an exhale - he couldn't tell, it felt like both and neither. Mildly uncomfortable.

There was... something... related to the intercom, somewhere in a console in his cabin, but not as intimately a part of him as the intercom. It was picking up something. Probably had been for a while. A signal? Several signals?

''"-xty-two is down!" "I'm still functional, sir. It knocked me over, that's all." "Get back over here - oh, no, it's coming back, Force preserve us-"''

''"-SAID HOLD YOUR FIRE! Damn you, Thirteen, it's just a bird." "Sorry! Sorry! I couldn't help myself, it just came up so fast." "No harm done. My lord-?" "The Lieutenant was ri-"''

''"-see, I told you, the flashing orange bit is its weak point!" "What, like a videogame? Isn't that awfully convenient?" "Don't give me lip. It keeps doing that swing-and-dodge thing, then you can see the orange bit. Cover me, I'll-"''

He cycled through a handful of channels or frequencies or whatever, listening to voices, until he found ones that seemed vaguely familiar, though they were distorted enough that he couldn't quite figure out where he'd heard them before.

''"-nd telling us where you went in such a hurry, ''sir?'' And how you managed to lose half an arm? I can see the sparks from here." "Pike, you would not believe me if I told you. Count yourself fortunate that I found you, I can proba- ah, more of them. How charming." "Fusst! Can you take them?" "Certainly I could, but saving you is a bigger priority than killing animals. Stay where you are.” "You're going to play at being a ''troop transport?!'' "Yes, if you want to put it that way. Do you have a better idea?"''

Without warning, the voices dissolved into gibberish and white noise, a lot louder. He could sort of make out words in that mess, a panicked babbling. This might not even be the same channel. Alarmed, Garrett shut that part of himself off.

What had that been? What the ''hell'' had that been? What was going on out there?! What had happened?! Beneath the aching emptiness of his insides, along his belly, Garrett's drive motor was running hard and fast. Like he was breathing hard and his heart was racing - except, of course, that they weren't. He was a relatively thin set of rigid metal plates wrapped around air and fuel and a walking apparatus, and even that motor under his belly, the closest thing he had to guts, was riddled with spaces, gaps, hatches for mechanics to get into. All of them so empty.

There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do. Gradually, his drive motor slowed, until once again it was an almost subliminal hum. He lay there, wishing he had eyes to close.

He couldn't breathe. He did have the feeling that he hardly noticed that when he was paying attention to something else. But there wasn't a lot else to even think about.

Nothing continued to happen. Garrett felt that horrible emptiness inside and tried not to laugh or start whimpering again. Something must have happened to Steph. Something had got him, maybe. He'd turned into something else. He'd gotten lost. Or maybe... maybe he'd just run off and abandoned Garrett.

Garrett pushed that last thought away. It wouldn't happen. He wouldn't have been abandoned. Not by Steph. They'd known each other since Orientation, and although they weren't roommates they shared about half of their classes. They'd - Garrett was straight, that one time when they'd both gotten very drunk at the end of Finals Week did ''not'' count, and Steph had said Garrett wasn't his type, but that didn't matter. Steph was still one of Garrett's best friends, the only one who always pitched in when he had some new idea, the one he went to whenever a wasp got into his dorm while his roommate was out. If he had anyone who wouldn't leave him, it was Steph.

Of course, the thought came back. Damn it, he was an ''AT-AT''. He couldn't even talk. Good God. Why ''wouldn't'' Steph just walk away?

And he was so ''empty''. Static hissed softly through his command section and the big troop cabin, falling silent only when he made the intercom stop. Laugh, cry, he wanted to do both and couldn't manage either properly. Damn it, he tried to say. Static.

It made sense, he supposed, that he couldn't speak. Maybe he could - there ''was'' that intercom - but he had no idea how to make words without a throat or vocal chords. He tried again, and managed to chop the burst up. Hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet. Not as noisy or intense as the laughter had been, louder than the whimpering.

''Damn'' it. HISS-quiet-hiss-quiet. Now he could sense the mechanisms in the speakers. They were entirely unfamiliar. How ''did'' radios and speakers of any kind turn signals back into voices, sounds, music? He had no idea. Nothing to do but try.

Garrett was lost for some time, trying to bully his intercom into producing anything that wasn't static. He made progress, if slowly - managing a few vowel sounds, almost drowned by the hiss. Still, he didn't miss the movement outside.

First, there came the bees. When the first few appeared, zigzagging up near the ceiling, he had trouble figuring out what they were. They seemed as big as Thanksgiving turkeys and almost as weighty, dark wings moving in a blur. The first handful were high up and spaced out, moving purposefully from one side of his vision to the other. As time passed more and more bees passed through, sometimes several at a time. Garrett practiced what sounded vaguely like an "ah" and watched them, feeling his drive motor start to speed up again. He didn't like bees all that much.

Soon enough it was a whole ''cloud'' of passing bees, all headed in the same direction. The air was thick with them, along the floor as well as the ceiling, and there were enough that the droning of their collective wings was going up his legs and through his hull into the inside. He could actually hear them. It almost managed to be loud.

Many bees flying low smacked into him - he was surprised to find that he could feel them hitting, the insects were ''strong'' - and crawled up his body before taking off again. He couldn't quite see them doing that, or feel them crawling across his surface, but it was a logical assumption, and that was what the ones on his legs were doing. There were so many bees that he could have hit a few dozen just by swinging a leg, but he didn't dare. He could have fired and taken out a lot more, he really wanted to try it, but that would just make them mad, wouldn't it? They were ''everywhere'', there were ''thousands'' of them. He knew, he ''knew'' that he couldn't be stung, but-

Garret made a very odd sound over his intercom, a combination of a high pure synthetic tone and an "ahhhkssshhksshhh" that quickly devolved into furious static. A bee had crawled onto his viewport, seemingly from nowhere, he could see the segments of its wide-spread legs and the yellow hairs coming off it, and oh God it had a pointy red tonguelike thing gleaming between two mandibles, and agggh, it ''licked'' him, and its two antennae were tapping at him... He couldn't feel it at all, but that didn't help, and even though it was many many times smaller than him it was still a GIANT BEE climbing around-

Bee claws on his hatches! He felt ''that''. They were crawling, oh God how could that tickle ''and'' itch, and he couldn't feel their clawed legs ''around'' the hatches or ''on'' them, but at the edges, where they were sealed shut, ''there'' he felt them, and they were ''everywhere''! He was covered in them. They were going to gouge one of the hatches open and ''get inside!'' His drive motor was picking up, throbbing a pitch that started low and built higher, he couldn't just lie still anymore but he couldn't ''do'' anything-

And then the one on his viewport took off, and there were fewer bees in the air, and he didn't feel claws on his hatches anymore. Barely a minute later and it was back to a thin stream of the things moving across the ceiling. Soon enough there were none.

The silence as his drive motor wound back down again was deafening. Garrett had to wonder if he'd just imagined that. But no - there was a little streak of residue, barely visible, on his viewport. Disgusting. God, he didn't like bees. He'd been pleased about them dying off until he'd found that that just meant more ''wasps'', which were worse, if anything.

How was it, he had to ask himself, that he could essentially see outwards from his skin - no, not skin, more like a hull - but he hadn't been able to see any of the bees crawling on his body? He'd looked down his legs and seen them, and he'd seen the one on his viewport from beneath its six clawed feet. Why none of the others?

Vision as he had it now, interior and exterior, was - well, it wasn't a set of alternating views, nor was it overlaid, and he didn't know how this was working at all. It ''was'' working, at any rate. Everything seemed to be in full color and three dimensions.

Fuel reserves were now at ninety-eight point zero four eight one six percent. Had he been topped up when this - when this started? He didn't know. He hadn't checked it before. Right now he was on standby; powered up and burning fuel, but not going anywhere. Even if he figured out how to shut down a few systems, being active at ''all'' drained the reserves. Slowly, yes, but it was happening, and speeding up his drive motor like he'd been doing only hastened the process, as fuel moved up out of the cylindrical tank and was consumed. Garrett had the sudden thought that he would lie here immobile until he had either drained the last milliliter of fuel or he voluntarily shut himself down. He didn't know what would happen then. It was not a pleasant thought.

== Help ==

Time passed, long enough for Garrett to get too lonely and restless to keep trying to figure out his speakers. He wasn't used to having nothing to do. Usually, if nothing else presented itself, he'd start doodling on stray paper, trying to conceptualize various things he'd heard or thought of over the course of the day. Sometimes he'd get lucky and inspiration would strike. And then of course there would be the breathlessly fast calculation of taking an idea and making it ''work''... He wasn't used to being bored.

It wasn't like he could even hold a pencil, Garrett thought. He moved the toe flaps on one foot - hinge joints, all four of them, no other joints, limited flexibility up or down, he could move them independently, but that made little difference. These feet were made for walking, and that was all they could do. Pretty close to useless.

It didn't help that he was almost painfully aware of all his internal surfaces, and he kept coming back again and again to how utterly empty and alone he was. He couldn't even quite muster up any interest in how the hell his body worked, and it seemed like every few seconds he was reminded that he wasn't breathing, like a tic. This was miserable.

So although he didn't see Steph at the feet of the two people who came into view - wherever he was, he didn't seem to be having great luck - he was so desperate to see someone that he almost didn't mind.

They were incredibly tall, walking on thick pillarlike legs, huge and fleshy. Garrett took several seconds to realize that they were human at all. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around that. Humans didn't get anywhere near that big, and although logically he knew that these probably weren't any larger than normal, they still ''looked'' absolutely enormous. If he had been up on all fours, they would still have been considerably taller than him, though all in all somewhat less massive.

Garrett really only assumed they were human at all by their hands. Meaty, both broad and long, with skin covered with a network of fine grooves, a little puffy. Five unique digits, each placed and sized differently with wrinkled skin on the joints, each tapering, rounded, and tipped with a sort of curved scale. They looked like alien appendages until he saw knuckles and a standing vein in the back of one, and lines in a palm; then, something sort of ''clicked'', and he realized how they looked very much like human hands. Grossly enormous human hands, yes, as long as Steph's body, or almost. Still human.

If they had human hands, they were humans, right? They were just so out-of-scale, looming up cone-shaped, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, that he couldn't quite think of them as people, only pick out things like hands and gigantic sloping feet. It took some bewildered staring before he could even recognize that the fibrous stuff hanging from their bodies was ''clothing''.

Then, he saw past the size and realized that, even if they weren't any bigger than usual, they would still have attracted stares from anyone with eyes. The two had stopped within his sight and were now talking animatedly together. He couldn't hear them at ''all'', Garrett realized unhappily. They weren't loud enough for sound to get into his interior. Maybe if he opened a hatch... okay, how exactly did he do that? It wasn't like moving his head or legs, that was for sure.

The smaller of the two, the top of its - his? - head arrayed with a glinting mass of coarse fibers that might have been hair, Garrett could barely see it from here, had two vast flapping leathery things like wings or sails on either side of its head.

There was something wrong with that one's face, like its nose had melted into a gray wrinkled thing that moved, like a tentacle or a tail. Above that, it had ''four'' eyes. Two were set into its head with a bristling ridge above each, the other two were wide-set, gleaming, and very dark. Maybe this one wasn't human after all. It was twisting around, gesturing, generally looking unsettled.

The taller one, and now Garrett could see that it was ''considerably'' larger, was a little more normal, if he could judge. Its eyes were similar to the closer-set pair on the deformed one's face, and he supposed that the bristly ridges were eyebrows. The skin that wasn't covered by hanging folds of cloth was a very pale, almost chalky color. This one had bent its forelegs... no, arms, they had to be arms... and crossed them one over the other.

In a fit of whimsy, Garret decided to call them Mutant and Big Guy. Why not? It wasn't like they'd overhear him and take offense. He was starting to feel a growing sense of unreality. Being unable to put a couple of humans or almost-humans into perspective was just odd.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't real, after all. It just didn't make enough sense. If he was supposed to be an AT-AT, why could he fit into a room? What was up with that thing that had knocked him over, the red thing that had looked so much like the Kool-Aid Man? And why was a rabbit-bug thing telling him that it was Steph?

Garrett knew that he'd already run through part of this, at least. But the idea that he'd passed out in his cardboard shell from a nasty combination of spray paint fumes and an accidental dose of some illegal substance, and was now having a weird dream of epic proportions was - well, it was comforting. Or maybe he was awake, but hallucinating a wildly distorted version of events.

Mutant and Big Guy seemed to be wrapping up their conversation. Their Easter Island-esque heads were doing much less side-to-side swiveling and much more tilting up and down, and gestures were far less expansive. Abruptly, Garret made up his mind. What did he have to lose, if this was or wasn't a dream?

He swung a leg forwards and back.

Big Guy, moving ridiculously fast, got between Garrett and Mutant, bending its limbs like it was about to leap. Mutant moved, but stopped and backed away when Big Guy opened its mouth and did something with it. Garrett had never learned to lipread. What he could see of lips and mouth moving was weird and creepy, like he'd stumbled into the Uncanny Valley. Was that a matter of scale, or...

No one moved for a long moment, until Garrett finally jerked what used to be his head. Now he was being stared at. He moved his command section to point in their general direction and swung a leg forwards, trying to go for 'pathetic'. It wasn't exactly acting. He wished he could heave a sigh.

Big Guy did something with its mouth again, directing it at either Garrett or Mutant. Mutant crept still further away, the sails on its head flapping. Big Guy turned and followed it, twisting around weirdly to look back at Garrett. They stopped at the very edge of his vision, which apparently didn't extend all that far, to gesture and flap their mouths at each other some more. Eventually they stepped out of view entirely.

Garrett waited. Time passed, he had no idea how much. Long enough that he went back to trying to figure out his intercom. He made a heartening leap of progress when he figured out how to make and adapt the synthesized beep, though at his best he sounded about as clear as a toddler lisping into a poorly-kept drive-through speaker. He could only even do ''that'' if he focused very hard on the syllables and went slowly, true, and what wasn't a hiss came out in a robotic high-toned monotone, but progress was progress. What would he do if - ''when'' - he finally got to the point of speaking clearly and with some inflection?

He could try and recreate his voice. And... and other people's voices. Then he could - what? Reenact campy old TV shows?

It didn't get to that point, thankfully. Garrett thought about counting the seconds and decided against it, not really wanting to measure how long it took, but he only felt the I'm-not-breathing tic four times before Big Guy came back and did - well, did ''something''.

Big Guy had sort of... folded up, Garrett guessed, legs practically folded in on themselves, somehow not falling over despite the awkwardness of the position. It was... no, not sitting, couldn't be sitting, not kneeling either... crouching? Yes, that was it. He couldn't help noticing that its legs were ''considerably'' thicker than either his legs or the armored tunnel that had used to be his neck, and it was crouching ''within'' his legspan, looming up over him. Stretching an arm over his side, and from the little vibration that Garrett vaguely felt in his hull, the probably-human was dragging a hand over-

What the hell? Had it just ''stroked'' him? Now Big Guy's mouth was moving, and damn it, Garrett wished he could just ''say'' that he couldn't hear or understand any of that, say it and actually be heard, anyway -

Why not? ''Just help me up.'' Damn the static, he could do better than that, he'd managed-

They came in from the edge of his vision, walking with startlingly quick, fluid motions, as if moving was easy despite all that bulk. Two, three - no, ''four'' of them, like flexible animated towers fidgeting and breathing and pendulumming effortlessly from one leg-column to another in a walk that seemed at every step to be a barely-averted fall. He saw the flapping sails and knew that one of them was Mutant, but he didn't recognize any of the others at all. One didn't have anything like the pillar-like body structure of the others, carrying most of its mass almost horizontally.

They went from the edge of his vision to looming up over him, and static started to hiss and crackle through Garrett's interior. Too big, too close!

Heat, moisture on his right fore footpad! Weight - slight weight, nothing near the right amount, none on the others, and yes he knew he was already down but that sensation spelled FALLING! Garrett tried to swing his legs, tried on some instinctual impulse to fire. But his legs stayed locked still, toeflaps flicking madly, only one of them hitting anything at all, and the power to all four blasters was being leached away as quickly as he could route it in.

He felt like a heavy soft blanket had been pressed over him. ''Him'', not this half-insensate walker body, he could almost ''feel'' it wrapped over and over. Like it was between him and everything else. He felt his drive motor fight something, grinding alarmingly for a moment, and then slow, winding down as rapidly as it had sped up. Garrett saw now that Big Guy was - was ''gripping a footpad'' in one massive appendage. That was why he'd felt, was still feeling, some sensation there. It wasn't moving to wrench it off, it was just... holding it. Okay, that was weird.

Big Guy, still folded up, was mouthing at the new giants, who were no smaller than before but somehow less threatening, now. Garrett found that he could feel the vibrations of speech, faintly, through the hand on his footpad. He still couldn't understand it, annoyingly enough. Still, he knew for certain now that Big Guy was talking.

Garrett also found that he couldn't move his legs at all, just the toeflaps. Nothing was touching them, and they were working fine, he could feel it, they just couldn't move. Something invisible had a hold of him. Whatever it was, he knew, he knew that if it could slow his drive motor and persuade his legs to still, if he couldn't resist it, it could probably pop his hatches and and bare his interior and take him apart bit by bit. But it wasn't. It was holding him still. Very, very still. He found himself adjusting the seating in his command cockpit just to see if he still could.

He was calm now. Very calm, disassociated even. He had to wonder about that firing reflex. It hadn't been a conscious attempt at all, which was pretty inconvenient - he'd fired earlier to see if he could hear it, yes, but he wasn't quite sure how. Well, no sense worrying, was there? Garrett couldn't seem to muster either concern or a great deal of interest. It could be his drive motor, he supposed. It was running ''very'' slowly now. He knew that he ought to be nervous about that. If the computers in what had been his head were really serving as his brain, they needed to be powered. Not much he could do about that, though, was there?

They were talking over him. The giants. Big Guy, not moving, seemed to be trying to direct the others, who were on his other side, around his back. He couldn't see quite as well from his back-side than from his flank-sides or belly-side, but this was close enough that it didn't matter much.

Garrett watched with mild interest. They were all on two legs; one carried itself horizontally and had inexplicable projections that he guessed were a long S-curved neck and rigid tail. And most of it was coated with branching filaments that could be hair, or maybe feathers. Feathers - yes, on the tail and along the limbs they were shaped like feathers, with central shafts. The rest of it, as far as he could tell, had some kind of overlapping armor made of keratinous scales, most of them smaller than a meter across. Something about it was familiar... pictures... a movie?

Oh! He knew what it was! A feathery dinosaur! Maybe a raptor, he wasn't sure, but definitely a bird-dinosaur. Bigger than any dinosaur ought to be, of course, and from here its proportions looked terribly off, but it was recognizable. The movements of its curved neck and wedge head, small from this perspective, were even faster and more sudden than what he'd seen the others doing.

His eyes went - no, he didn't have eyes, did he? Or the sensation of having them, to roll and flick wetly from one thing to another and blink, that was gone. Weird. His ''attention'' went to the others - he was moderately sure that they were human, or rather, human''like'', just distorted by some quirk of his vision. And by the fact that part of him ''knew'' that he was over twenty meters tall, and no human could so much as see over his footpad without something to stand on. How was it that he could recognize and accept a live dinosaur that looked several times bigger than the T. Rex skeleton at the Chicago Field museum, but not humans at the same scale?

Well, Big Guy's hand - good God, each finger was a slab of meat and bone as thick as the kind of conduit that people could creep through - was still on his footpad, but there were no more vibrations going through it, and after looking around quickly Garrett had to conclude that the others had stopped too. They were ''very'' close. Okay, now they were bending, folding over, now they were touching him, he couldn't feel it but it was a safe assumption... his drive motor kept to the same slow pace, he was still wrapped up tightly, calm and motionless and a little bit distant.

How was this going to work? He wasn't built like an animal - he couldn't be tipped onto his belly, not with legs like these - were they planning to just carry him out? Surely he was too heavy for that. And even though he couldn't see any doorways, he was pretty sure that he couldn't be carried out of one.

Great huge hands, some of them clawed, got under him. He wasn't lying entirely flat, or they wouldn't have been able to do that. Big Guy took the hand that wasn't gripping his footpad and laid it on his side, big pale fingers splayed. That hardly seemed like the thing to do, if he was being lifted! For some reason that struck him as funny, but he didn't quite laugh.

His view ''lurched''. The pocked grid of the ceiling wobbled and seemed to get bigger. Simultaneously the faint sensation along his left side, the dull feeling where his flank lay against whatever he'd fallen on, went away. Garrett didn't have any inner ears now, so a few vaguely confused seconds passed before he realized that they were related, and together meant that he was being lifted up. He really couldn't tell how hard they were working - for that matter, the four of them, including Mutant, were shoulder-to-shoulder at his back, and Big Guy's hands hadn't moved.

He was ''above'' whatever he'd been on, now, and he could see it now, though Garrett still couldn't tell what it was. It looked like maybe four or five meters, but it was probably a lot less, if he was right about not actually being larger than a man. He'd stopped moving. Now what?

Big Guy was talking yet again, and the other giants moved around - two stayed at his back, the dinosaur stood at his vehicle bay, and on his other side Mutant positioned itself so that Garrett's command section was between its arm and its body. Each of them stuck its forearms under him - somehow, he'd kept completely steady during all that, like they hadn't been bearing his weight at all. Now, surrounded on all four sides, he had the sudden bizarre thought that they were planning to use him as a conference table.

Knowing full well that he couldn't be heard, Garrett still found himself trying to ask them what they were doing. Then Big Guy took its hand off of his flank.

Immediately he dipped and rocked, the view shuddering like he was in an earthquake, and by minute unsteady increments his body crept back up and leveled, although he was still tipping legwards and trembling. Garrett felt his drive motor intensify by some tiny increment, only to slow back down. He couldn't seem to worry much. There just wasn't enough power in his system for that.

He noticed, then, that the giants who were not Big Guy were disturbed. Strained, breathing heavily, shoulders hunched, moisture beading on oily skins that were flushing or paling. He couldn't help but wonder how eyes that bulged like that didn't just pop and run down out of their sockets. This took effort, evidently. The dinosaur was a little different, head thrown back on its long neck, mouth open. It had great pointed teeth. From his other flank he saw bent knees and massive far-spread feet.

Big Guy kept one hand steady on Garrett's footpad and reached underneath him with its free hand. There was something in it, something that gleamed. Some kind of tool? Despite the feeling of being under wraps, Garrett's found himself interested. What could that-

A beam of ''solid light'' just ''shot'' out of the thing, and for one long not-quite-panicked moment Garrett didn't see that it was finite, coming to a clearly defined tip, under twelve meters long. And it stayed attached to the emitter, too, not blazing off to burn through things like a turbolaser bolt. The thing was white-cored and blue along the edges, and he had ''no idea'' what it was.

Moving uncannily fast, as usual, Big Guy kept its hand wrapped around the emitter and manipulated the beam, holding it horizontal and passing it down, ''through'' whatever Garrett had been lying on. Smoke or steam curled up and dissipated. When the glowing beam was brought back up - moving quickly, too quickly; what if Big Guy made a mistake? - and moved aside, he saw that the mystery material had been ''cut'', and cleanly. The beam tool was like a propane torch, but big enough to make the body of a cruiseliner and without the facemask and sparks and burning.

There was a bit of new input from his air filters. An increase in... what was that, ozone?

Big Guy kept at it and chopped the stuff into long, somewhat rectangular shapes. Whatever it was Garrett had fallen over onto, part of it was a very solid slab of something weird and porous that smoked very little when cut, at least compared to the woven stuff that he thought was probably cloth.

Then the creature's fingers moved on the tool, and the blue-tinted beam sort of evaporated and was gone. Big Guy started clearing away the cut slabs, barely seeming to touch them - just sort of gesturing and causing them to whisk off. That couldn't be possible, could it?

What ''was'' that beam thing, Garrett had to ask himself. It seemed like something he ought to know, but what was the ''point'' to making a cutting rod half the size of a telephone pole?! Some kind of mining tool maybe? Although that train of thought seemed interesting, and he felt like he was missing something obvious, he had to let it go. Drive motor was a little too sluggish to keep it up.

The debris was more or less cleared, revealing... some kind of bumpy ground covering. Big Guy's free hand, minus the beam tool, came back to Garrett's flank, and by the vibrations said something. Something in his balance shifted, and the four giants straining to hold him up pulled away almost as one. Garrett didn't have to strain to see them as human to read the relief. He was very heavy.

...Which left him rather inexplicably floating in midair. He flicked his toe pads a little. He wasn't going to worry about it, but Big Guy was hardly at an angle to hold him up. Particularly alone. Although this was an odd time to notice it, Garrett saw, now, that there were no fibery hairs coming off Big Guy's domed head - instead, in the skin, there seemed to be bold faded-blue stripes running back over his skull; one really thick one over each eyebrow, a thinner one starting near each ear. Weird.

He was lifting up now, the hand gripping his footpad never faltering. Up... ten meters, thirteen, fifteen... he knew if he were to fall now, from here, at less than his full height, he would be seriously damaged, certainly more than simply falling over. No sense in worrying. Up... Big Guy was standing straight now, arms shifting position, still gripping steadily. It said something, and in response Mutant and one of the others, not the dinosaur, came closer and touched Garrett again, clutching at his hull.

"Ohhhhh..." He was surprised at how clearly the uneasy word came out, but now - now he was being turned, like a turtle flipped on its back, and it made him very uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't have inner ears - even so, he ''felt'' his insides shifting as things went from bulkhead to deck, and it was a weird feeling. It reminded him - and with all this excitement he'd almost managed to forget, too! - that he had no lungs or other organs and there was a great hollow cavity sitting in him, all but empty. Distant feeling or no distant feeling, that was unpleasant.

Still, he was being turned over, increment by increment. He was almost at the standing point now. Big Guy's hand slipped away from his footpad, and he rotated the last few degrees - slowly eased down, and his toeflaps were all sticking outwards as far as they could, and TOUCHDOWN!

He felt it as a sort of ''chunk'' as his weight came down on all four footpads, and something above the kneejoints telescoped slightly. The weird feeling of distance evaporated, and he found that he could move again. His drive motor sped up by some tiny increment. Garrett briefly forgot that he couldn't sigh, and had another weird moment where he tried to breathe but couldn't find the right equipment.

It felt so good to have his footpads on the ground! He pressed his toeflaps into it, feeling its bumpiness and its give, getting the sense that it was slightly uneven but level underneath. He was pretty sure that what looked like a landscape of weird, fibrous alien moss was really carpet. It was a good surface. Solid. Stable. Now he could move. Now he could ''walk.''

Big Guy was talking again, and the assorted weird creatures were backing off, still moving with the kind of fluid speed that made him nervous, but moving ''away'' from him, so he didn't feel crowded. He had to appreciate that. Better to think about this unexpected consideration, and not what life was going to be like if he panicked every time people who were not Big Guy stood next to him.

During a pause Garrett endeavored to bob his head minutely, although he had no idea what was being said. Even if he'd learned to lip-read, even though the giant had his big blocky face tilted downwards, at this angle Big Guy's most prominent features were his chin and the underside of his nose. He was like a tower, the kind they topped with turrets and left to guard cities.

Big Guy said something, very short this time. Garrett head-bobbed again and was either rewarded or chastised by muscles tightening under the maybe-human's skin; he thought it could be a frown. Big Guy leaned down and in close, so that his mouth and nose and eyes filled Garrett's command viewport, and said something else, moving his mouth with slow, deliberate exaggeration. There were some tiny bubbles gleaming in that wet mouth, and a bit of discoloration on at least one of the teeth, and oh God the pores in that pale skin, and the capillaries under it, and the barely-visible clear hairs scattered about - ugh. Whoever said that beauty was skin deep had never looked too close.

Garrett did nothing, vaguely wishing he could blink, and felt his command cockpit get stared through for a second time. Whatever Big Guy was looking for, he probably didn't find it, because he breathed out in a long stream that fogged Garrett's viewport and reared back up to his full height. A big hand came up and very lightly smacked Garrett on the moveable command section - ''thump'' pause lift ''thump'' pause lift, light but enough to get his head to move - and it might have been an attack, some of his systems certainly thought so, but he kind of doubted it.

Something came through with the thumps - or had they been a pat on the head? - a general feel of well-wishing. Damn it, this was frustrating. ''Almost'' communication! What if he tried shooting into the wall, writing something that wa - no, no, bad idea, he'd burn through too much of his fuel and it probably wouldn't even look like a word. And he didn't have anything like enough articulation to scratch letters with his feet.

Big Guy turned and walked away at a speed that still looked ridiculous, a tiny tremor going up Garrett's footpads with each step. He had to have phenomenal shock absorbers in those monster boots; another AT-AT would have had half that stride and more than twice the impact, even on this fibery surface. Very quickly, surprisingly so, the maybe-human was gone, and this time he probably wasn't coming back.

"Dahhhschhhn hhit." Hey, that had practically been comprehensible! Garrett grabbed on to that tidbit of accomplishment, determined to stop moping. He was on all fours now. He could walk, he could get out. He ''would'' get out. Everything else would have to wait.

The convention center as he saw it was a labyrinthine monstrosity built for long-limbed fast-moving giants. He was very vague on exactly where he was or how to get out; by now there probably wasn't anyone to follow. Maybe if he'd been quicker-witted earlier. Ah well. He took a couple of test steps, kicking aside some of the debris he'd been lying on.

Walking was - well, it was different. Taken one way, it was much, ''much'' more deliberate. He had to consciously lift, swing, and plant each footpad in turn, which was a bit complicated since he had four of them and they were all new to him. Not damaged, at least, and he probably had to count that as a stroke of luck, since looking back at when he'd lost his balance and fallen over he wasn't sure how he'd been knocked off his footpads without wrenching them or at least losing toeflaps. Taken the other way, he could set a course, which involved picking a point within his vision and doing something that felt a little like blinking. Or maybe double-clicking. There really wasn't a good human analog. Course-setting was less deliberate and he could set multiple points to reach in turn, but to get around obstacles he had to either cancel the distant set point and make new ones or manually take control, step around things, and let whatever walked him along a course work again.

There was a problem with this. He had a major design flaw - not all of the consoles in and around his cockpit were essential, but even the ones that didn't do something like control his feet or internal temperature used up a lot of power. Particularly one of them - he didn't know what it did, but it was a significant drain. So significant that when he was walking for any serious length of time, either deliberately or along a set course, he had to keep his drive motor at its highest safe output to feed the walking apparatus, the consoles that had something to do with them, "housekeeping" - life support and lighting, which he couldn't seem to shut off - and the mystery console. He wouldn't be able to generate the power to fire his lasers, not on top of all the rest.

Well, from the little he'd seen before being knocked over, he had to conclude that this was a very dangerous place now. He should have had a durasteel hull no thinner than half a meter thick at any point, he should have been close to invincible, but for some reason he was barely larger than a big man, and his hull was perilously thin. Thin enough to let some sound travel through the air into his interior. Although somehow he hadn't been found by anything more lethal than a swarm of bees, he couldn't count on that luck holding. He had to protect himself. And what was the harm in neglecting one mystery console? It couldn't be essential. The thing was connected to the other consoles, but nothing else.

Garrett prepared to move in earnest, and felt more fuel piping into channels deep in his drive system, down in what was left of his guts under the gaping void of his interior. All of his other systems downshifted and fluctuated until they readjusted. He felt his vision fade and surge, so that for a moment the world was made of enormous smooth polygonal shapes, before details popped back in. Some status lights burned brighter, others dimmed to a faint spark or quit entirely.

Things became a lot simpler. In a vague, distant way, Garrett was relieved. All he had to do was make it out. It would be hard, without a crew, but he would do it.

He oriented to the best of his ability, satisfied himself that the ground would continue to support his weight, picked a direction and a course point, and started to walk.

== Placeholder Title ==

Steph had, at least, managed to keep from getting lost again, despite the size of the place. It helped that the place wasn't crowded anymore. Most of the ... well, ''beings'' was a vague term, but he supposed he had to use it. Most of the ones who hadn't gone outside were in here on quests of their own, and while some were inclined to listen when he talked to them, and some would probably have helped if they could, well, he was on his own.

... He wasn't actually sure what he'd need, besides a few strong and ''mobile'' humanoids. Mobile was important; he felt ''hideously'' sorry for Zach, who'd been sympathetic in turn, but there was no way the tree-man was going to be able to walk this far in a reasonable amount of time. What else - he might also need a lever. A pulley or several could be useful, but he doubted he could get one set up in place.

Unfortunately that turned out to be moot. He'd doubled back to check on Garrett, and Garrett had been gone.

He sat down - sitting might not have been the right word; he automatically sat like a cat did, sort of in a crouch with his long toes flexed against the ground and his paws together in front of him - next to where the walker had been, a little stunned. Damn. This was the right place, burned pits in the walls and everything, but no walker, and the place where he'd been lying had been cleared, some of the rubbish rearranged.

Bitterly, Steph wondered what had happened when he'd been away. ''Someone'' must have hauled Garrett off. Steph knew, it had been pretty obvious, that there was no conceivable way a walker could get back on its feet. Someone else must have come along, and probably taken Garrett by force.

That was the only explanation, right? Otherwise Garrett would still be here or close enough for Steph to sense. If that had really been Garrett. There'd been no way to know. The AT-AT had certainly heard Steph and responded, but for all he knew Garrett had been somewhere else entirely.

Maybe if he hadn't spent so much time talking to Zach. Or if he'd gone the other way as soon as he'd smelled smoke, or he'd ignored the guys in the raincoats. Maybe if he'd doubled back and checked a few times. More than once he'd gone in this general direction long enough to sense Garrett's humming engine, but he hadn't come close enough to see. He'd rationalized that he would just have been telling Garrett that he'd failed and then leaving again.

What was he going to do now? He hadn't thought past getting to Garrett and helping him. Steph didn't want to think past that.

He realized that as he'd been sitting he'd unthinkingly twisted around and started sort of patting and clawraking the long white fur sprouting from his sides. One hand was still braced on the ground holding him up, the other was trying to get his fur back in order. He stopped as soon as this registered and held still for a moment, one arm still crooked up awkwardly.

Steph could have gone without all this. He could have been himself with a pair of bunny ears, he thought glumly. With a little difficulty, he flexed the hand at his side, trying to make a fist and failing. Even if he hadn't had claws and puffy black pads on each digit and one big metacarpal pad, his fingers didn't bend far enough to curl around so the tips dug into his palms. Or what passed as palms. He didn't even really have them. There wasn't even the bulge of knucklebones through skin.

Giving a nearly-soundless nasal sigh, he pinched a number of long white hairs between finger pads and the big metacarpal one, tucking his dewclaw over both, and pulled one last time. His skin pulled with it. That hurt, all right - he felt the antenna on his forehead react, coiling more tightly. Steph let go and reluctantly went back to patting at his fur. He recognized the motions now as grooming or preening of some kind, like a cat or a bird but also a lot like how he'd used to reflexively brush down his shirt or touch his face when he was nervous. He supposed it was good that he wasn't licking himself. It was something to do.

Maybe he could get someone to give him a little cane, so he could hobble on it. Steph snorted, then reconsidered. That might actually be a good idea. That way he'd be able to bring one hand up into play - his feet had those very long toes, but frankly they weren't in a position to do much. Maybe something he could rest his elbows on to get upright, like a walker.

Walker. Garrett. What was he doing? Even if he had no idea where to go, he had to try. Just - wow, this was discouraging. Better get moving.

When he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. He was getting used to that, though the part of him that remembered crawling heavily on hands and knees always made him want to adjust his stance.

Yeah. Yeah, better get moving.

[transition. Possibly cut the previous, sum up briefly in next]

"No, I am the one asking the questions," the man insisted angrily. He had a vest and looked rumpled, and from a distance he'd looked a lot like Han Solo, but up close he was clearly someone else. "One more time! What are you and what is your business here!"

''Damn it, apparently I'm a Hoojib! And I'm looking for a friend! Have you seen an AT-AT or not?!'' For his part, Steph was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd gotten a blaster or several aimed at him when he came close to this group, but it was pointed away now and no one was actually shouting.

"''Nev''er heard of them," the man said, evidently taking a lot of pleasure in being unhelpful. "How do I know this isn't a trap? Oy, Rebs! Any of ''you'' heard of a Hoojib?"

The people who were being referred to as 'Rebs', the people who made up the group Steph had approached, denied knowing. They seemed to be eyeing this man with dislike, yet for whatever reason were listenting in anyway. The group was diverse, although even from a distance he'd recognized the orange jumpsuits of a number of X-Wing pilots. That's why he'd tried to go closer. He'd thought they might be willing to help. Apparently not.

"Anyone? ''Anyone''?" The man shook his head in an exaggerated motion. "Guess your ruse isn't working, is it? I don't think anyone but you knows what a Hoojib is. Protip: if you're going to make up a species, pick a better name."

"It's not made up," a woman's voice said, loudly enough for it to carry. People yielded for her, just far enough that she didn't have to push, as she passed to the edge where Steph could actually see her.

She was tall - everyone seemed tall from Steph's level - but not as tall as a lot of the others. Something about her face was vaguely familiar, though he knew he'd never seen her. It was a sharp face with intense eyes, but pretty enough, he supposed.

The man shook his head again, this time seriously. "This is a trap. You know it's a trap."

"If it is, I can handle it. I'm just going to talk." They shared a long glance over Steph's head, and then the man looked away and sighed.

"That's how you want it? Fine."

She looked down on him, staring hard enough that he had to keep himself from preening nervously. "My brother and I worked closely with Spokesmind Plif and his people during the Nagai-Tof war. I know Hoojibs. While it's certainly possible that you belong to some distinct subspecies, you bear only minor resemblance to the ones I have known."

He would have protested, but staring up into her eyes, he got a sudden image of what she meant. Smaller, and much more insectile, with bigger, paler eyes, floppier ears, an entirely different appearance and demeanor. Somehow she'd shown that to him, and he was - well, he was at a loss for words.

''Uh. Sorry?''

Oh. ''Oh''. She didn't have the hair buns or the white dress or the metal bikini for that matter, and she wasn't shouting

''You're Princess Leia!''

"''Chief of State'' Leia Organa Solo," someone out of his field of view grated, maybe one of the pilots.

''Hey! Help me!'' Steph shouted, or as close as he could to shouting without a larynx.

"I've fought with worse. During the second Yevetha incursion-" He stopped himself, paused, and in a slightly different tone said, "Never mind. At any rate, this is nothing."

life-form analyzer.

==Escaping==

Fuel reserves were at ninety-three point seven nine four five oh. He wasn't burning it at the ideal rate; one of the filters wasn't quite right, so the mixture had some fine particulates which were affecting consumption. It didn't harm his performance too much, not for one mission, but the techs were definitely going to have to take a look at it when he was back in his berth.

He kept all four blasters hot. This was a big expenditure, but without a gunner sitting in one of the pilot chairs he was quite a bit slower, and the couple seconds between registering a threat and being able to fire might make a difference here, where everything was so fast. He'd had some trouble deciding to do that. Eventually he'd just stopped walking for a few minutes, which let power reroute until he could balance the pros and cons.

How long had he been walking? No one had set a timer, he didn't know. A few kilometers. He had no plan for getting out. Random directions all the way. There'd been a thing. Swinging cliff-gate. Door. No, two doors, side by side - double doors, that was it. They'd stopped him for a while, until he'd thought of shooting out the metal thing that kept them closed. After that they had swung open for him. He couldn't recall when that had been.

He was fairly certain that he'd gone in a few circles; he was continuously plotting new courses with a number of random turns. There had been some more ambulating towers, and each time he'd seen one he'd stopped in his tracks to watch them, but they'd ignored him. Good. He was more effective on targets that didn't outmass him or move that damn fast.

Now, finally, it looked like he was getting somewhere! Ahead, at the far range of his vision, more things. Doors. Different surface, clear, yes, glass doors, he couldn't see through them yet but they ''were'' glass. Ground was still good, he didn't detect any major holes or anything that would hide treacherous ground, so he shifted the pace up to maximum, the ground-eating charge that he could only keep up for so long without risking damage.

''Dead end! Stop, stop!'' As he reached the doors he turned and pulled to the side, shedding momentum and not quite presenting his flank. Glass though they were, the doors were closed and all the nonvisual sensors tagged them as yet another unscaleable cliff. Coming to a stop, power rerouting smoothly with hardly a flicker in his vision, he thought that this place was absolutely riddled with these sheer cliffs. They didn't seem natural.

A moment later, and Garrett thought, of ''course'' they didn't seem natural. Good God. They were ''walls''. They kept the ceiling away from the floor, the outside away from the inside. What, had he forgotten somehow? It was hideously obvious, now that he wasn't walking.

That was worrying. Still, he couldn't stop for that now. He had to get out. His side-views somehow couldn't see through the glass of the doors; they were just reflective, smooth planes, totally unnatural looking, and it took a few seconds to figure out that the sheets of thinner organic material were probably flyers that had been taped up at eye level - yeah, they were some distance above him, but he could read the writing on the closest one, a billboard-scaled proclamation about staying hydrated and bathing. By backing up and turning awkwardly, footpads clomping loudly in his mind's ear, he could see out of his command viewport, and the glass was properly transparent.

Outside, while the nearest bits of paving looked like the kind of job that involved getting regional politicians to cut a ribbon at the end of a dedication ceremony before the thing could be used, everything he took as signs of scale - trees, people, cars - was distant. Within sight, yes, but the distance shrank them, and the sight of humanoids his size or larger seemed like a trick of his eyes or cameras or whatever, rather than the presence of towering fast monsters. For a strange moment of disconnect he could almost believe that the convention had simply moved outside and was going on just fine, maybe a little more disorganized by the move.

Then Garrett made himself look closer, and actually see the scaled-up people, what they looked like beyond not seeming like moving towers. What was unmistakeably a gout of fire shot into the air and fizzled out as the androgynous man producing it was interrupted by something with a pair of gigantic bat wings, spreading them incredibly wide and flapping them with what looked like a tremendous gust of wind. To the side, an angry-looking cat furry bandaged a small boy in a whirlwind of linen strips, showing long, pointed teeth as he shouted or snarled at the bat-winged thing. [Oy, I'm awful at crowd scenes. Gotta come back later.] ... Yeah. He was pretty sure most of that didn't happen in a convention that was going on just fine. Come to think of it, he didn't see any balding middle-aged men dressed like their favorite anime girls.

A lot more leggy women dressed as popular anime girls, though.

Garrett thought he had some idea about what had happened. Not how or why, of course. But it was pretty clear that he wasn't the only one.

Maybe it was just as well.

He wasn't breathing. No, of course he wasn't breathing. It was that tic again. Better ignore it.

He checked his fuel reserves. Ninety-three point five oh oh nine two. He was burning it just by standing here. Now Garrett thought he knew what that mystery console was, the one that he had to leave underpowered every time he moved. It was his frontal lobe, or something like that. His engine didn't produce enough power. It was optimized for walking and shooting, and powering the thinking console at the same time was more than the motor could handle. He guessed so, anyway. It would certainly explain why things had gotten so much simpler, and why he'd forgotten about walls. Dismaying thought. He got stupid every time he moved; he might literally be unable to walk and think in abstract concepts at the same time. Or - well, okay, he was fairly sure he could walk and think at least somewhat, but not while keeping his blasters primed.

Still, he'd paused to decide to heat up his blasters. It looked like whenever he stopped walking he got that console back. Maybe there weren't any ill effects to that. Maybe it only lasted until he had enough power to reroute. Was he stupider now than he'd been when he was lying on his side?

...Okay, that was an idiotic question, Garrett admitted to himself. No way to tell. It was better to just assume that he could trade walking or the ability to shoot first for the ability to think about things that weren't directly related to walking or shooting. He just couldn't have all three at once. Oh God, it was like the crossing-the-river puzzle, he just had to put the fox and the grain in the boat and leave the chicken back on the riverbank. Or something. Hopefully it wouldn't wander off and the boat wouldn't capsize. Because if he didn't think he could get whatever passed for his brain back, he wouldn't do anything at all, would he?

Very suddenly the emptiness hit him again, hard enough that he felt like something had peeled back his plating and bared both levels of his inner structure. He saw his insides, felt that yawning cold void. Sickening. Empty. Empty, and the plating around it utterly still, as only an inanimate object could be. It had never exactly gone away, he'd just managed not to think about it. Maybe not having thoughts wasn't so bad.

Garrett not-quite-shuddered. Standing up, that meant adjusting his legs enough to make his body rock slightly. He had the tic again.

Well, he wasn't going to get anywhere just standing here. Better get out now, before something got him.

Okay. The doors towered up above him, glass in metal frames that might be aluminum. Remembering when he'd first come in, he was pretty sure that they were pull doors, at least from the outside, and didn't have the kind of latch that needed a turning doorknob. The latch was some kind of one-way deal to keep it from swinging all over the place. At the top of the frame there was some kind of... armature thing. He'd majored in Engineering, not Architecture, but he thought that it kept the door from swinging out.

From inside, it was a push door. He really couldn't push, though. He wasn't built for that, and he'd probably break something trying. That meant trying to shoot it open and hoping that it wasn't balanced. The armature looked easier.

It was a little too high up to reach with his heavies, not without backing up, so Garrett trained his medium repeating blasters at the metal and fired, bracing against the recoil. He'd kept them hot, so there was no moment of charging.

The sound, muted though it was, wasn't anything like earlier, when he'd fired into a wall to see if he could hear anything. When the smoke or vapor or whatever cleared - yes, a good bit of the armature was gone, and some of the doorjamb past it, and there was a blackened crater in the wall. A tiny flame guttered in the middle of it. The glass near that was in one piece, but browned.

He guessed his blasters were more powerful than he'd thought. It was a good thing he hadn't hit that thing that might have been Steph. Garrett suppressed another shudder at the thought.

The armature was gone, which left the latch. Feeling cautious, Garrett backed up stiffly and deliberately, fighting the urge to clutch his nonexistent stomach with limbs that didn't bend that way as he felt the tic. Funny how he'd never appreciated being able to do things like back up without having to think about it. He decided to just get on with it. Aim. Fire.

Okay, the latch was gone, but apparently the doors weren't weighted to swing in or out, because they weren't locked in place anymore but they also weren't opening on their own like the last set of doors. Damn!

Looking out through the glass, seeing the pale blue sky through his forward viewport, seeing the walls and ceiling and floor through all his other senses, Garrett fought a sudden wild surge of claustrophobia. This was less a building and more of a tomb, or maybe ''he'' was the tomb, or maybe - God, it didn't matter, he felt sick and hollow and everything inside with him seemed too close.

The tic again. He was beginning to hate that thing. Forget not having the necessary organs, he didn't feel like he'd had the wind knocked out of him or anything like that. He only felt like he had to breathe when the tic hit him and made him remember that he wasn't doing it. It wasn't a good feeling.

Garrett deliberately focused on his interior, although he'd been trying to avoid doing that, since he hated the sight. He had life support systems built around the void, though of course they were for his crew, not him. Some of those were devoted to atmosphere - he had some kind of air recycling unit, but since the relevant sensors reported that the external air was just fine, air was just being sucked into intake scoops and filtered. Those motors, the fans they ran that circulated air around, they were important. He couldn't control them, but they were important. They'd have to do.

It wasn't like breathing could possibly be as good as the tic kept reminding him, he told himself. No one would ever get anything done.

Driven air, filtered and cooled and dehumidified and constantly monitored by the housekeeping console, blew gently through the void. It wasn't tidal at all, but he let himself imagine that he was taking a deep breath.

Right. Right. There was a kickback every time he fired, and that probably implied that blaster bolts had kinetic energy. This was not how lasers worked. That didn't matter. This would either work or it wouldn't.

''I am not going to be trapped here!'' This time he used his heavies in linked-fire mode. Door on the right, doorframe in the lower left corner. Aim. Fire. The recoil, stronger with his heavies, made his ''flexible armored tunnel'' compress momentarily as his command center jerked back. The bulk of the door had moved a little. This was working! Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Repeat as necessary - stop!

The door opened enough that the wind caught and pushed at it. He wasted no time in setting a course through the opening while nervously watching the doorjam. Most of the way through, the wind must have faltered and the door must have been weighted, because it swung on him. It hit hard enough that he felt the impact through his hull, and although it was jarring and loud and he was forced to very consciously shuffle sideways to keep his balance, there was no pain. Just the feeling that pain should have been there.

But he barely noticed that. It was - God, the world was bright. He reached the point he'd set and stopped. The world was bright. He couldn't see. Gah! This didn't hurt, not quite, and it didn't exactly feel like heat, but it was very unpleasant, it was- God, too bright! Everything was hot light, he couldn't see anything, he was blind! This didn't make sense, it had been fine through the window!

Part of him remembered moving his roommate's plants outside on a sunny, nearly cloudless day, he couldn't remember why, and how the plants had suffered for that. His roommate - oh, God, he couldn't remember his name! Justin? Jacob? He was in architecture or something and happened to be utterly forgettable - had told him very patiently that it didn't matter that they'd been tropical plants, there had still been too much light; the dorm room with the lights on was anywhere from fifty to maybe four hundred lux, if the windows were open on a bright day. Direct sunlight on a day like that was somewhere between thirty and one hundred thirty ''thousand'' lux, and the plants had effectively been sunburned. Justin or Jacob or whatever his name was had gone on to say that direct sunlight was incredibly, exponentially more powerful than indoor lighting, it was just that human eyes adjusted so well that people barely noticed.

The rest of him was locked in place, frozen, trying not to panic, trying to will the brightness to fade. He wasn't blind, not ''quite', he could sort of sense where the sun was, like it was actively hating him, like his vision was a sense of touch. And his underside, he could vaguely make out his legs and his shadow. But he couldn't see, even when he switched to the too-dark internal cams, everything was brightness that felt suspiciously like pain, he couldn't stare out at any of it, he had a ''very'' strong compulsion to tear up defensively, screw his eyes shut, shade them, but ''he couldn't do that'', he couldn't even turn away, ''he didn't have eyes''.

Garrett's motor was working back up out of the near-subliminal hum, getting louder. Too bright! ''Too bright!'' He couldn't - God, too bright! His motor was running, he could move, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn't even go back because the door had shut, and he couldn't ''see''... ''Threat! Threat!''

He backed, sidled, tried to get his command section and his heavies into position, couldn't, it was too high up, aimed his medium repeating blasters, fired. Of course he didn't do any good, he was aiming at the goddamn ''sun'', but he fired anyway, and did it again.

This was useless, he was just burning power, how was his fuel - oh God, ninety two point eight two oh five one that couldn't be good, he was running his motor like he was moving at full tilt blasters blazing and he ''couldn't slow it down'', couldn't see, anything could be out here with him, couldn't move for risk of crashing, too bright, too hot ''threat threat threat'' - was this what going insane felt like?

He managed to make himself stop firing and finally picked up on the terrain sensors in his footpads. The surface was solid. It was stable! Too bright, yes, he couldn't see, yes, this was probably as close to pain as he was going to get, but ''the ground was firm'', damn it!

That helped a little, long enough that he realized that the terrain sensors could substitute for sight. Sort of. Garrett could pick up on sort of a vague outline of the raised hardened surface he was on - sidewalk, right - and where it met the less certain surfaces around it, which was probably the grass. He was still - God, this was insane, he couldn't ''see'', why couldn't he seem to adjust to this, it was just ''daylight'', it was agony, he couldn't stop the static popping in bursts over his intercom and didn't know what kind of vocalization that was supposed to be - but this was something. Like echolocation. Sort of.

It only extended out in an oval maybe, oh, seventy meters long - no, only a few times his body length and he wasn't huge, so it had to be smaller than that. He had to find some shade and he couldn't turn back around, he thought there'd been awnings over the door before - hadn't there been? Had that been a different door? - but there weren't here, he had to get moving.

Trees, there'd been trees he'd seen from inside, the kind that got planted around parking lots to shade some of the cars, those had been the closest. He'd gotten partially turned around, but he thought they were this way, along the pavement. Garrett set course points and hoped.

Terrain-sensing, it turned out, could pick up on people. Sort of. And only if they were the monumentally-scaled ones here - no, no, he had to get it straight, they were probably normal size. He felt them - well, more properly, he felt their footsteps against the ground. The footsteps were shaped vaguely like feet, so some of them were sort of beanlike and others were disks or different shapes, as they hit the ground, some walking or running, some probably staying in place. He hadn't given much thought to how much weight got shifted around by something that breathed, and he was a little startled at how bitter the thought was.

It seemed like there were more closer than farther away, which probably just meant that Garrett could sense the heavier things from farther away, and no doubt there were some holding too still for him to sense like this. He kept setting points and walking, he was trying to be calm, but this wasn't sight. God. Even assuming he got to shade, even assuming he was able to communicate somehow, so someone didn't whisk him away and dismantle him, he'd probably end up living in one of those trailers for the disabled and -

Not living. ''This wasn't living.'' Existing, then, until his fuel ran out. It would. He didn't know what was in his tank but he was pretty sure it wasn't something you could get on Earth, and there'd probably be scale problems. And he needed regular maintenance, though he knew nothing was going to be able to get at his engines without taking them apart. Otherwise, he'd [maintenance fail: catch fire? Go critical?] What then?

Maybe it was better not to -

Whoah! Footsteps, closer, ''really damned fast'', okay, unless they changed direction they'd just pass him by-

SCRAPING HIS HULL oh God what was it engines building to fever pitch SCRAPING THE SEAL OF HIS BOARDING HATCH prepping his heavies, heating heating hurry up he could HEAR IT nonononono STOP he fired his heavies without thinking and tried to bring a medium repeater in line but of course the ''thing'' was running now, too fast, where was it it was gone!

"KKKKSSSSHHHT! KKSSSSHHHHHHH," he staticked in alarm, only the static was much longer and had a terrified snarl in it, he was not sure if that was an attempt at cursing but damn it of ''course'' sensing footsteps wasn't the same as sight and he had no idea what the rest of the body was doing and if anything flew he wouldn't know about it at ''all'' he was blind he was deaf good Lord in Heaven there could be another one RIGHT NOW move move movemovemovemove''move''.

And he was walking as fast as he could, almost running, knowing he couldn't keep this up and all discretionary power was in everything ''but'' his not-a-brain but ''that didn't matter'' keep going go go go, SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - REACHED COURSEPOINT, CONTINUE TO NEXT, ''DODGE'' - SET NEW COURSEPOINT.

Later - it felt like much later - he remembered that the settings for the holocams had to be manually told to adjust to major changes in light. One of the pilots, whoever was serving as the gunner, usually hit that switch. He didn't have a gunner, and the horrible wrongness inherent in a phrase like that did not summon one up. He couldn't hit the switch, but he could turn it on, and he did.

Better. The blinding light on all sides tinted, then seemed to dial down and he could see again. Not even any bright afterimages, but then didn't you need retinas for those? He could see. Much better.

Funny, something was different, but he couldn't get a reading on it. Maybe if he slowed down, free up more power to route to the smart console - No. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't slow down. He did not want to slow down.

Ahead there was an obstruction in his path, hanging across just above his mobile command center, where it would disastrously scrape his upper edge if he just went under it. Trivial to destroy it. He did. Two heavy shots, and he cleared the gap with meters to spare, footpads pounding on the rubble. He shouldn't maintain this pace, it was potentially damaging, but that was fine. He didn't slow down.

What had changed - he was under open skies, not one sheer cliff on any side. The surface was somewhat different - he'd noticed several surface changes, but glancingly, since it hadn't been important. It was some other material, dark gray, smoother and thinner and not as good a surface since it was cracking under his weight. But that was fine.

No hyper-fast bipedal towers. Definitely fine.

Another obstruction, the same kind, this one a little smaller and level with his command viewport. He destroyed it, too, and two heavy shots seemed like overkill.

Underfoot, civilian groundcars on wheels, unarmored, brightly colored, swerved wildly to avoid him. He considered shooting them. He considered altering his course to kick at them or - yes, they were small enough to step on, at least some of them. He didn't. One thing to do this - it was a sin, yes, but he'd take that. Another thing, a worse thing, to take them with him.

Part of him twitched. Okay, if the giant towers were humans, what was with this? Bit by bit, this was a road with several lanes, those were cars, those were trees, all at a scale of much smaller than him, which felt more natural. There was yet another obstruction ahead, and this time he recognized it. Freeway overpass. Even lower than the other two.

Huh. Well, he wasn't going to slow down to think about it. He was alone, empty, it didn't matter where he went as long as he didn't stop until the end. There was a moment when he was distracted by flying atmospheric craft, some loud enough to hear, but he didn't stop. He kept going. Full tilt, getting to each new course point at his highest speed.

He'd always loved getting caught up in a new idea, the way it took over his life, practically singing under his skin, as immediate as his heartbeat. Only now the heartbeat was gone, and in place of the singing was the jarring music of engines.

Fuel reserves were at eighty-nine point oh nine one two seven and going down. That was fine. He wasn't stopping, even with no crew and no purpose. Even with so little power going to it, the strange console had some current. He had autonomy.

==Anj Outside==

Outside, it was chaos, pure and simple. Anj hadn’t been in the crowd when ''it'' happened. He’d seen people and creatures of all descriptions fighting to get outside while he’d been looking for a private place. By the time he’d picked up on the broadcast and left the bathroom, most of them had already gone – the halls had hardly been deserted, but the majority had already fled. He could hear them outside, a dull roar formed by thousands of throats. ''Not a happy crowd'', he decided. ''Better than a mob, though. I don't know what I'd do with one of those.''

As he approached the empty frame of a double door - it had once, apparently, held glass, but that was nowhere to be seen - Anj felt the warning tingle and heard what first sounded like another shrieking alarm. In response he sidestepped out of the way, and none too soon. Some kind of very large heronlike bird with pale gold-orange feathers skidded unsteadily around a corner, then powered past him in a lurching run. The moment its wings cleared the doorframe, it launched itself into the air. As it winged upwards and away the Red Guard realized that it was making a high, panicked call that sounded vaguely like screaming.

He glanced back at where the bird had come from and stilled himself. Nothing, not even the warning tingle that was his precognition. Maybe the bird had been fleeing something, maybe it hadn't, but any trouble was slow enough that if he kept moving it wasn't going to bother ''him.''

TR-1407 stepped outside and was struck by what he saw. People, creatures, and stranger things that defied categorization littered the landscape, rushing about, standing and sitting and reclining in a few cases. Some were alone, others in groups. There were some fighting or arguing with each other, others trying to subdue the wild ones, some hightailing it as if the Emperor’s finest were at their heels, some examining themselves frantically, some just sitting back with mouths open as if howling or screaming, though the Red Guard couldn’t pick out individual voices in the collective noise. Almost no one was close to the complex; most people that Anj saw were on the grass.

As he automatically went through a threat assessment, picking out specifics from all the bewildered bystanders, he marveled at the sheer number. He hadn’t thought the Orlando Convention Center could hold so many – yes, it had been crowded, and he hadn’t canvassed the entire place and seen for himself how big it was, but still. It was like a “Where’s Waldo” poster, writ large.

Maybe it wasn't just inside, he thought suddenly. Maybe it was ''everywhere'', and just more obvious here. If the image had become real - well, it had to be more than just the image, or he wouldn't have gotten taller. If little unarticulated thoughts, like ''a forcepike weighs seven kilograms'' and ''Imperials use the metric system for measurements'' had also carried over, what about others? What about the cheater's assumption that ''I will not be caught'', or the youth's that ''I am immortal''?

Still on the instruction frequency, the officer who had told TK-1407 where to go was tersely repeating those instructions to someone else who had reported. ''I need to stay focused. I can speculate later. Need to find my squadron before I do anything else.''

Some of the figures in the crowd looked like security forces – ''no, police, they're called police.'' Police, firefighters, paramedics, what looked like a SWAT team in black, some Animal Control officers, of all things - there were more than a few people that had probably been called in from all across the state, if not country. They clearly were supposed to try and control or at least contain this madness. Just as clearly, they were as confused and uncertain as anyone else, but trying their best to impose order in some form. Anj sympathized. This was not a job he envied.

It was weird – the outsiders looked and ''felt'' somehow a little different from all these others, and not just because ''they'' were all human. Like all of the changed, big and small, were larger-than-life in one way or another. Maybe he was imagining things.

Flickers on his peripherals made TR-1407 tilt his chin up. The sky, a lovely cloudless blue, was barely less crowded than the ground – far, far above something streaked up into the atmosphere, and hardly any closer small military-looking jet planes or fightercraft roared overhead in formation. Even closer there were news helicopters already, sharing airspace with winged things of all description and wingless humanoids who had no visible way of staying aloft.

The Red Guard saw bright costuming and at least one cape fluttering in the wind as fliers swerved around each other or hovered in place. Someone in red and blue tights streaked upwards abruptly at impossible speeds, within seconds ''catching up to the jets'' and paralleling their course, far enough away that the red cape was barely visible. Anj saw this and, incredulous, thought, ''Superheroes? Really?''

There was no denying what they looked like, no matter how improbable the thought was. Anj realized what he was thinking and grinned involuntarily. ''As if I’m perfectly reasonable in comparison. This is insane. So what? The 501st needs me. And reality doesn't care whether or not you believe it.''

With that reminder, he turned. ''Southwest blacktop? Must be that parking lot where we planned to meet. Ah… it’s midday or thereabouts, so by the sun’s position'' that'' way is west, which means south is...'' there. ''Not far.'' Doing his best not to attract any attention, the Red Guard started moving at a lope.

''I don’t know where the closest military outpost is,'' Anj realized. ''Still, with something like this we can probably expect troopships any minute now; orbital reinforcements – No, no,'' no! ''This is Earth! '' Earth! ''Not part of the Empire! There are no orbital reinforcements. No fleets. We might get some part of the Army here, but they don’t have the technology I’m expecting. Rockets, not turbolasers. Helicopters and jets, not troopships, not snubfighters.'' Why did that thought make him uncomfortable?

''I wouldn’t worry about him, even with a sword like that… Watch out for her, she’s dangerous… He’s fine for now, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to push him… she looks like she could do some serious damage, but somehow I don’t think she’ll be a problem… Better not go near that one. Looks like everyone else’s picked up on it too… Emperor’s bones, that thing is huge, but I don’t think it’s up to anything…'' There were a ''lot'' of people to assess, particularly on the run. It niggled at the Red Guard that he was only doing a cursory check of each, but seeing that his options were to ignore everyone, give only the briefest of inspections, or slow down to a crawl to inspect everyone...

''There!'' Anj's heart jumped in his chest. Inexplicably he felt an incredible sense of relief, strong enough that he was almost lightheaded.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the large knot of people standing together on the asphalt were just as confused and disorganized as anyone else. Quieter, perhaps, but still random. An outsider might believe that they had formed into a cluster at random, and that it was chance that explained why they almost all looked like Imperials, mostly troopers.

The outsider would be wrong. Anj's eyes flicked as an indicator sounded and saw that no fewer than ten Imperial frequencies were active. He didn't see anyone lined up in ranks, but training helped him to find the subtle signs that there was organization, purpose, ''order'' in the group, not just the amorphous mixing of the crowd. They were, indeed, bewildered and unsettled just like everyone in or out of the complex. An effort was being made to remedy that.

TR-1407's footsteps hastened. A stormtrooper with the battered armor and single orange pauldron that signified his rank as a sandtrooper squad leader stopped him with a gesture, then nodded. The Red Guard joined the growing mass.

It was startling to check IFF - Identify Friend/Foe - tags on a monitor and see so many designations. Some were familiar, others less so. There were several SL - Sith Lord - indicators scattered about, but Anj didn't see SL-1984, and this was worrying. Other Vaders, yes, and the Red Guard couldn't help boggling a little at the concept of more than one Lord Vader. But none in white, and none with the right designation. What would he have done, anyway?

''Right. I should report in. To whom, though?'' The mass was ''trying'' to order itself, but it had a good ways to go yet. Almost no one with a helmet was speaking "out loud" with their voice amplification units. With the amount of noise that the rest of the crowd was putting out, that was probably just as well. Instead the comm frequencies were abuzz with orders and counterorders, the beginnings of arguments, complaints and others chewing out the complainers. One channel had been set aside for those who had been separated from squadmates. It didn't help that this part of the parking lot was nowhere near clear. Not every space was filled, but there were enough cars and the like to force the group to encircle them.

Where was his squad? Anj scanned again, and again, and didn't find any of them. No. They had to be here. Despite himself he opened the "searching" channel. "Tampa Bay? Tampa Bay Squad, come in! Tampa Bay?"

This particular frequency was filled with similar requests. "Is there anyone else from Georgia Garrison? Please, Georgia Garrison?" "Pacific Outpost, all units report in. Pacific Outpost..." "Michigan Squad, we have two missing from Michigan Squad, please report." "Anyone from Bast Alpha Squad, come in. Did everyone get out okay?" Most of them were representing a particular squad, or garrison, or outpost, and were looking for missing friends. But he heard one or two who had been separated completely, like him. Some got answers; Anj overheard the starts of several reunions, each cutting off as the speakers switched channels. Others didn't.

"Tampa Bay! Come in Tampa Bay Squad!" It didn't make ''sense''. Anj was starting to sweat into the lining of his armor. Where could they be? He hadn't exactly been quick in getting here, he ''couldn't'' be the first from his squad! Where had they all gone? TR-1407 scanned IFF again as the last of his relief evaporated. It made no sense! The three other squadrons of Florida Garrison - Everglades, Makaze, Parjai - were there. There were forty-nine people in Tampa Bay Squadron - not all of them had come to Xanadu, and some might be a little slow in getting here, but he should have heard from ''someone''.

"Tampa Bay Squad? Please come in. Tampa Bay? Is anyone there? Anyone? Tampa Bay!" Anj forced himself to stop before he lost all control of his voice. He could hear someone else pleading, close to tears if not already crying - "Neon City Garrison, ''where are you?'' Please! Damien, Ray, Greg - ''where are you?''"

To his horror, Anj found his throat constricting in panic. Where were they? ''Where was his squad?'' He tried, squeezing his hands into fists and desperately telling himself that they were late, that's all, he tried to keep calm, but it had been a trying day already and he had no orders to follow and ''his squad was missing.'' That was the big thing, the worst thing. He'd lost them, he had failed his oath as a Red Guard and a soldier of the Empire. The feeling was strong enough to make his eyes water. Anj made sure to close his connection and all of his speakers so that none would hear when he lost it. The rest of the 501st had enough distractions.

Something pulled on his robe. Surprised, Anj looked down at the round-topped droid as it retracted its manipulator arm and crooned something wordless at him.

It was a moment for him to blink fiercely and swallow that lump in his throat, and he covered the delay by reactivating a speaker so that his voice could be heard. "Yeah. There is. I - I've lost my squad." The admission almost stuck on the way out. "I don't know where ''any'' of them are."

The droid, an R2-series astromech with highlights in ''pink'', of all colors, whistled and cooed sympathetically.

"Well, no. Not a word. I have no idea where they are." It seemed like the tightness was easing off, becoming less immediate. He welcomed the distraction. "We got separated a while back, and I haven't seen or heard from any of them since. And it's not like we have our own personal frequency, either - it wasn't like we'd have had any use for it." As he realized what he'd just said, Anj smiled humorlessly into his helmet. Of ''course'' there wouldn't have been a use! It had been a game, or something close!

The R2 beeped, imperious. Its single black photoreceptor was steady. Just like that, things were in perspective. Anj might have laughed, if he hadn't still felt so uneasy.

"That's true. My squad is tough. I'm sure they're fine - it's just, they aren't ''here,'' and I don't know how my friends are. I haven't seen them since all ''this'' started, and I'm worried." This was true, and he knew that they had to have run into trouble, or he wouldn't be by himself like this. But - they were tough, and they were smart. If they needed help they would call for it, and they would make it through.

And if they didn't, well... For a moment he had trouble drawing breath. It was a ''terrible'' thought, and sickening enough that he tasted bile and felt his heart pounding in his throat. ''May the Force help their murderers, because nothing less will stop me,'' he swore, meaning every word. Terrible thought. '' Terrible'' thought.

A sharp whistle brought his attention back down to the droid, who chattered up at him. He had to make an effort to look in control and stable for it. He was sure he knew who and what it was. If it ''was'' R2-KT - well, virtually everyone in Star Wars fandom knew that story. In comparison, he had no grounds for complaint.

"I'll be fine. I'm a Red Guard - I work best alone or with only a few people, and it's not like I'm really by myself - I'm surrounded by the 501st." And they were his Legion, the closest to the Empire that he was ever likely to find. How could he despair? "Thanks."

With a final, cheery whistle, the pink R2 swiveled and trundled away. It had some kind of a logo banner, pink on white, on its back, but it slipped out of sight between two troopers and a robed man before he could read it. Less than a minute later, the single terrified member of Neon City Garrison got off the comm.

Anj felt better now. Still a little shaken, but he was functional, and that was what mattered. This still begged the question - ''now'' what? The Red Guard went after the first fresh distraction that presented itself.

There was a flurry of activity at the edges of the gathering. TR-1407 wasn't exactly short, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the helmets of the people around him. Still, he got a flash of someone else in flowing scarlet and something large, yellow, and moving. The Red Guard looked to his nearest neighbor and boosted the output to his speakers, realizing ''how'' he did it only after it was done.

"Do you know what that's about?" The woman in the form-fitting jumpsuit and the hoodless brown cape turned towards him.

She was - well, she was stunning, and Anj found himself glad that his helmet hid his gaze. She had an alertness about her, like she was aware of everything that was going on around her at all times. He couldn't tell what her position was - probably some kind of agent, by the lower-leg guards and nonstandard firearms. The woman had a striking sort of confidence, almost an aura of "I know what I'm doing and I'm proud to be doing it".

It didn't hurt that she really was pretty - her features were too sharp and strong for conventional beauty, but attractive. Red hair, intense green eyes, and under the jumpsuit she was fit and muscular with good shoulders, a far cry from the handful of sultry pin-up style women that Anj had glimpsed before. He hadn't found ''them'' particularly attractive, but -

Anj saw the lightsaber and the IFF-provided designation at roughly the same time. SL-3268, in a clear voice, answered, "There's a car, I'm guessing a Camaro, without a driver that's started moving erratically and making abortive charges at us. One of your fellow Guards is trying to dissuade it. I don't think there'll be a problem." Just as he was hoping she hadn't noticed, the Mara Jade added with a quirk of her lips, "And I'm flattered, but taken."

''She's one of the Emperor's Hands. I'm lucky that she hasn't taken offense.'' That realization effectively took any desire, killed it, and mangled it beyond any recognition. Anj was glad of the helmet hiding his face, and vaguely wished that he could find a hole in the ground in which to crawl into and die. Even with the cooling systems in his armor, he knew he was blushing furiously, hard enough that he felt sunburned. ''Next time, check IFF first.'' He didn't bother wondering how she'd known. Force Sensitivity and all that.

Probably just as well. Anj had no idea what he'd have done. He was on duty anyway; even with nothing immediate going on it would be un-Imperial to get too distracted. Fortunately not every woman was striking in quite that way - prettier, yes, often curvier and not immediately off-limits, but markedly less impressive. Picturing someone like the Mara Jade alongside, say, Scott, was... interesting. But of course there was also the fact that less than an hour ago ''he had been female'' - how, ''how'' could that have slipped his mind? - and feeling attracted to people while male was a tangle he ''really'' didn't want to unravel just yet.

3268's auburn head came up. Anj felt the warning tingle in the instant before a commanding voice came on all frequencies. The IFF code marked the speaker as TK-0210. '''Our Beloved Founder', Albin Johnson,'' Anj realized. ''Well well. There wouldn't be a 501st without him. I'd forgotten that he showed up. His R2 is here, so of course he's here too.''

"Something new has come up. Would everyone please listen to the situation." It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt that it was an order. Within seconds all voice traffic had stopped. The rest of the crowd carried on with the panicking, but here everyone listened as the founder explained an exchange that someone had heard taking place on a frequency that was decidedly not Imperial.

Specifically, it was one of the radio frequencies used by the United States military. The Founder didn't mention exactly what frequency it was, or when anyone had started listening in on it. What had been overheard was a report on something going off Xanadu grounds and following the highway. Something very large. One of the ones reporting said it was "like something out of Star Wars". The physical description exactly matched that of an Imperial Walker, specifically an All Terrain Armored Transport. Or, as the Rebellion and most civilians in the Galaxy called it, an AT-AT.

''This is a ''very'' sudden development.'' If he'd expected anything, TR-1407 would have thought that the Founder would have just summarized what had just happened, tendered some kind of advice or orders. He hadn't expected a fresh problem, particularly one like ''this''.

The gathering was silent barely long enough for the Founder's report to sink in before a member stated that there had ''not'' been a Walker exhibit, followed by other testimonies that confirmed that wherever this had come from, it wasn't 501st. Exactly what had been happening before all ''this'' was muddled, but people were quite adamant that they knew nothing.

Talking into a handheld comm unit so that everyone could hear her, 3268 had another opinion. "Why would it matter whether or not this thing is one of ours? Imperial is Imperial. The question is, what do we do about it? I think it's reasonable to assume that some rogue element has taken control of an assault walker for an unknown reason." Standing fairly close to Anj as she was, he heard the odd duality of the Mara Jade's voice coming simultaneously through his audio pickups and helmet comm.

It would be unacceptable for ''anyone'' - the automatic assumption seemed to be Rebels, smugglers, or saboteurs, although nobody really expected that to be true - to get away with stealing Imperial property, particularly something as gigantic and dangerous as an assault walker, the common consensus was. The damage one could do, particularly in an urban area, was tremendous, even on a civilized planet in the Empire, where units could quickly be dispatched to take it down. Here on Earth, on a day like today...

Anj heard someone unfamiliar speak out. "There was a young man earlier, some sort of student of engineering - I overheard his name, Gary or Garth or something - who wore a walker costume. He might be driving it." Several others remarked with surprise that they remembered something of the sort.

With confidence, Anj added, "It's difficult to pilot a walker without a copilot, but possible. Normally one drives, the other shoots. The automated systems would help compensate."

"He had a friend with him. It's entirely reasonable to think that two pilots can manage without a commander." If it occurred to anyone that maybe this student ''hadn't'' become a pilot, they kept silent.

A plan didn't actually get proposed until after the Founder made another report, one possibly even more alarming than the last. Tanks and military choppers were being dispatched to intercept the rogue walker before it could reach the next city - and if the cryptic military lingo had been translated properly, somewhere near Washington a jet loaded with missiles had just taken off.

Suddenly the entire gathering was moving, setting up a course of action, proposing and vetoing various aspects to the plan. There would have to be a pursuit, it was decided almost instantly. They needed a small number of autonomous agents. Agents who could subdue anyone within the walker without damaging it, agents who could ''control'' the walker, and someone with enough diplomatic acumen to defuse the situation once it was under control. Preferably agents would have at least some proficiency in at least two of the three. Every member of the team would also need to be able to use grappling hooks and high-tension wires to get up there. It would also help to have the tools all stormtroopers carried, including shaped charges, binders, and a Proper Resonator.

The gathering was rapidly polled, and all those with the right skill set were chosen, then evaluated and kept or not. Unsurprisingly, there were no Imperial Army Pilots who could be identified as such by their armor - AT-AT pilot uniforms were far from popular. No one had worn his or hers to Xanadu. However, a number, Anj included, had made the costumes - and somehow that translated into experience in the cockpit.

Anj was questioned and admitted that he'd never earned the license, and was met with a thinly-disguised quiz in the form of a barrage of questions from two others. He passed. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Red Guard and both willing to work with others and well able to subdue someone with minimal damage, meant that he was on the team.

Some others at least as qualified as him weren't, largely because they had trouble cooperating. There had been many Emperor's Hands, some of them Mara Jades, others not, in the initial pickings, but the fact that most of them seemed to strongly resent each other meant that only three were kept. The final selection consisted of eight individuals. These were the Hands, SL-3268 among them, Anj and another two Red Guards, a clonetrooper sergeant, and a single sandtrooper who really seemed to believe that he was Davin Felth, the trooper who had the line "Look, sir, droids" in ''A New Hope''.

At the same time the other half of the pursuit was being organized. Speederbikes were mentioned, but only two, both from a display, could actually be accounted for, and at any rate they might not have done much good. They were incredibly fast and agile, but with only two, they couldn't carry much. Average cars or trucks were considered and rejected in the same breath. It would be too hard to get an operative out of the vehicle and up into the walker, not to mention the fact that a car was a nice big target, if what's-his-name proved both unreasonable and able to use the walker's weaponry and crushing feet. This left motorcycles, a healthy selection of which were at hand. They would have to do.

More polling; TR-1407 was only peripherally aware of it, but at the end of it seven scout troopers and one Mandalorian soldier were chosen to do the driving. From the first report to the final team, only a few minutes of whirlwind activity had passed. The 501st, while not exactly up to optimal yet, was far more organized than it appeared.

The last problem was actually getting the bikes, taken from all across the lot, to ''work''. Five or fewer of them belonged to people within the gathering - and ''none'' of them had the keys on them. Seized by a wild idea, Anj stepped up during the discussion.

"We don't ''need'' keys," he said, coming to the closest one and uncompressing his forcepike. He had no idea what kind of motorcycle this was. He'd never had anything to do with the things. Still, he could find the ignition easily. Lining it and the lethal tip of his weapon up, the Red Guard thumbed a setting and delicately maneuvered the weapon. The thin metal around the keyslot tore and twisted, and the engine coughed to life.

Just as Anj was enjoying a swell of triumph the fickle machine died miserably, exhaust pipe emitting a stream of thick, oily smoke that spread in a cloud around ankle-height. An inhuman blue-skinned officer in white covered his nose as if offended by the fumes, which weren't evident to anyone with a proper, air-filtering helmet.

No one said anything on the comm channels for a long moment. "Okay," he said lamely, again glad of the helmet that hid his face. "I guess we ''do'' need keys. Today of all days, you'd think this would work." It was a mercy that the attention of the gathering shifted off of him then. He hadn't sensed much in the way of condemnation or scorn, and even amusement had been quiet. It was still embarrassing.

The alien officer in white - a Grand Admiral, apparently - ended up getting several technically-proficient people to hotwire the motorcycles. These included one of the Vaders in the gathering, a man seething with so much barely-suppressed rage and malevolent Force energy that Anj caught his breath and adopted a rigid posture. He was fairly frightening, seemingly hanging on to rationality by the thinnest of margins. The Red Guard fervently hoped that his friend hadn't ended up like ''that''. But whatever else could be said about SL-2128, he worked quickly and well, finishing in time to take over from an officer whose work was slower.

Something else came up; Anj picked up only a few of the details, but a squad that hadn't gotten out reported in to say that they were under attack by unfamiliar hostiles. Once again plans were formed and battered about. They had little to do with the walker interception team. It gave him a pang to think that he might be riding away from his squad, if they were in danger, but duty was duty. TR-1407 soon found himself mounted up behind a scout, roaring away on one of the motorcycles.

The locals barely noticed them go by. They had more than enough trouble as it was - nevertheless, Anj felt a slight pang of mixed contempt and sympathy. He let it pass. They could only do their best. The Five Hundred and First was here for when it wasn't enough.

The Founder sent his best wishes after them on an open frequency. His confidence audibly faltered a little. Anj thought he knew at least part of why. "Good Luck" wasn't right, and they were servants of the Empire, so "May the Force Be With You" might not be good either. Even so, "Emperor's Blessings" was just wrong - and, somehow, so was "The Empire will ''always'' strike back", the belief that any setbacks would be met with a more powerful counterattack. In the end, he settled for, "We're counting on you. You won't let us down."

==Camera guy==

[I fangirl over Tank Man. I really do. I love that we don't know who he was, if he's alive or dead, what he said to the driver of the lead tank - everything. ''How'' could he and the rest of the country have failed? The picture gives me chills. I'd link to it in my bank if the inspiration it gives me wasn't of the "feel small, sit still and tremble in awe and existentialness" variety. So I figured I'd bring it up, since the chance of me working it into, well, ''anything'' else are pretty small.

[Did a little research here, but I have to say that the details pertaining to the helicopter and Doug's camera are probably all wrong. I worked with news cameras in high school and already I've forgotten what piece is called what. The Internet failed me - you'd think I was the only one to wonder who shoots traffic reports, with what, and how. :P]

In June of 1989 an American photographer named Jeff Widener crouched on the sixth-floor balcony of a hotel in Beijing. He was covering the infamous government crackdown on protesters, and only the day before, during the massacre, had been concussed and bloodied by a thrown brick. Widener worked at a range of roughly half a mile with a titanium camera featuring a 400-millimeter telephoto lens. Using borrowed film with the wrong f-stop setting, he covered a column of at least seventeen tanks headed for Tiananmen Square being blocked by one man, alone and unarmed, with a shopping bag in each hand.

Widener wasn't the only one to get pictures of this happening. But, purely by chance, his picture spread fastest. It's now one of the most famous photographs on Earth, seen everywhere except the nation where it was taken - where it happens to be banned. It is iconic in every way, and purely by chance. If Widener hadn't heard that soldiers on the ground were forcibly confiscating cameras, if he hadn't met the fellow Westerner living in that room on the sixth story, if that Westerner hadn't had compatible film available or had been unwilling to stuff that film into his underwear and pass angry Chinese soldiers to get it developed - another photographer's shot of "Tank Man", the "Unknown Rebel", would be the world-famous one. But Widener was in the right place, at the right time, in all the right circumstances.

Doug Maines was in the right place at the right time, and in his view the circumstances didn't look too bad either. Specifically, he was in a Eurocopter Ecureuil news chopper, cruising at two thousand feet and circling with nearly three-quarters of a mile between it and that ''thing''. The camera was a modified 24 frame KCK-40, and at any moment he could start broadcasting live to the network.

Normally he and the pilot shot and delivered traffic reports and overflew accident scenes. Today, not too long after finishing the morning rush's report, they'd been ordered into the air again and told to circle around the Orlando Convention Center to cover something that had come up there. As he adjusted the focus, Doug mused that he hadn't thought much of it - last spring, for instance, a school had been evacuated due to a gas leak, and he had recorded and broadcast video of the students streaming out into the tennis courts.

But there'd been so much air traffic above the Convention Center that both Doug and his partner were wary. Every news station within range had sent someone over to cover it, whatever it was, and both of them knew what happened when helicopters collided in midair. They had spotted the thing heading away, and the chopper had changed course to follow it.

He'd studied for years at photography, cinematography, and the graphic arts, but if Doug had learned one thing it was that aiming high didn't always work out. He had become resigned to aiming his camera at reporters and traffic jams, something he'd never have settled for as an ambitious newbie daydreaming about fame and glory. He was no Widener.

Just as well - Doug didn't have the stomach for following revolutions. He felt a trace of amusement at the thought. ''Right place, right time, and no one's filming but me.'' He was recording now, but the network trusted him enough to let him decide for ''himself'' whether and when to broadcast live.

Something about it screamed ''tank'', clearly enough to make Doug think remember the university and Widener's shot of Tank Man. It was boxy and about as long as the largest legal semitrailer truck, maybe sixty feet in all, though much wider. But it had to be five times taller than any of them, mounted on four flat, jointed legs with round feet half the size of its strange, blocky head. The long legs and the head, and the red laser-things that sometimes shot out of that head, reminded Doug of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. Something about crushing Styrofoam cups in a commercial...

Three years of this job reminded him to check before and behind the tank thing. The highway was several lanes broad, which was probably all that saved oncoming cars from being crushed. Many had crashed into each other or run off the road as drivers gaped, and hardly any had actually passed it. The tank thing was fairly slow, no more than fifty miles an hour at most, and so heavy that it damaged the road, leaving a trail of massive craters and cracked, buckled asphalt in its wake, with a few crushed or burning wrecks scattered about and at least one demolished overpass. All of them had been oncoming traffic; right now nothing was going in the same direction as the walking tank.

Wait, that wasn't right. The distance made them tiny, but even without zooming in Doug saw a pack of motorcycles weaving around and breaking the speed limit, gaining quickly on the tank thing. They were going to get stepped on and ruin the shot, he was sure of it. He had to get an establishing moment before the action started, or it wouldn't look right.

Doug swallowed against his heartburn - no time to take an antacid pill now, he didn't want to miss it - and hit the button that would broadcast live. In a situation like this, he didn't have to report. He just had to film. Wide-angle shot first, to show how big the thing was, including a few wrecks to get a sense of the scale... he then zoomed in to catch little details like the rapid, ponderous motion of the legs and the toe flaps flexing against the ground. He very consciously kept his hands, and the camera, steady against the minor shuddering of the helicopter.

This was in time for the motorcycles to catch up, and he noticed that the riders weren't dressed in anything resembling normal biker gear. Heart pounding, Doug focused on them. He'd have thought ''publicity stunt'' if he'd seen people dressed like this anywhere else. All white and red.

Well, this was bound to be interesting.

[More stuff goes here.]
[No, really.]

==Rocket Trooper==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus3.jpg]]

TX-7255, "Barve" to his friends, saluted after a moment's hesitation. He'd been earnestly telling some groundpounder troops that the group was vulnerable from the air when he'd gotten the summons for an on-the-fly mission. He'd answered immediately - of course - but he hadn't expected to be briefed by the Lord Darth Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet.

...Sort of. Barve tended to focus on his jetpack. How to maintain it, fix it, how to fly it with increasingly intuitive controls, aerial tactics, maintaining and fixing his various weapons and practicing with them, tweaking the minor powered exoskeleton built into his armor, practice with different gravities and atmospheres, dabbling in repulsor packs. Combined with his love for comparing different models and modifying the ones he had, looking for perfection, he was never more than vaguely aware of any politicking.

Even so, he thought he'd have heard if the Supreme Commander decided to reverse his color scheme. The man was also missing most of one arm, the stump of which gave off occasional blue sparks, and at least half of his cape was absent. Since the stump hadn't even been capped off, it had to have been removed recently. This fit in with everything else, really. Barve hadn't heard anything concrete about action or details about where he'd been deployed. Everyone here was so disorganized.

A good meter too far away to be at the Supreme Commander's feet was a small, furry alien with big ears and large, alert eyes. Barve split his attention between the two - helmet screens were useful for that - until he was told that he had to carry the alien through the air.

He was surprised enough to blurt, "My Hush-About was modded with elements from the Aratech Screamer." This meant a lot of things, but he knew from experience that only another rocket trooper understood or cared. Even snubfighter jockeys glazed over. "She's a powerful machine. Launch scorches anything that isn't armored, and fur is flammable. My lord." He wasn't supposed to contradict the Supreme Commander, was he? Damn. Well, it wasn't like he'd run into the protocol before.

"I see. One moment." The Dark Lord - light lord? This really didn't make any sense, ''why'' was he in white - turned to the groundpounders for a moment. Barve ignored what they were saying - he wasn't supposed to listen in, and if it was important, they'd tell him - and watched the alien glance from helmet to helmet as the curved antenna on its head quivered. He had to be careful around aliens. You never knew what they would do.

A ground trooper with the type of armor and white fabric oversuit that some of them wore to protect against cold took off his helmet, turned it upside down, and knelt. The alien climbed into the helmet and shifted about as the ground trooper tugged the white cloth on the helmet so that it stood rigid, making a sort of bucket with the alien at the bottom. The trooper stood, holding his helmet by the cloth. Only the alien's ears showed.

"We have a runaway AT-AT bearing [direction]. I need you to take Steph inside it as quickly as - as quickly as is feasible. Get him there alive and conscious." This was the same thing he'd said before being distracted by the launch thing. "I don't know how well he tolerates flight, so you must determine your speed on your own. We will comm ahead and tell the intercept team to be ready. Do not engage hostiles. Do not get killed."

Weird mission. Still, Barve took the helmet from the trooper, locking his fingers in the stiff fabric. The little alien inside shifted its weight and stared up at him. Helmet and alien together were moderately heavy, but still lighter than his DN bolt-caster, still holstered.

A not-quite-voice said, ''Don't drop me. God, this is a bad idea. Please don't drop me''.

The ground trooper said, "Please don't drop him. I want my helmet back later."

"Steph, try not to drain energy. The comm channel is running on an open frequency. You are not to fire on anything. I can't stress that enough."

"Acknowledged." Not like he could even draw a weapon with his hands full.

The Supreme Commander hesitated, then nodded and told him, "Clear skies."

He knew the slang for "good journey?" Well, he knew the Supreme Commander was a damned impressive snubfighter pilot - that knowledge generally fell under politicking, but one of the memories recorded and passed down from his original had been a series of truly superior pilots, Lord Vader being at the top of the list - and snubbie pilots shared a bit of lingo with rocket troopers. ...Besides, now that he thought about it, 'clear skies' was probably the most obvious piece of flyboy slang ever.

Everyone had backed far enough away that even if he had a catastrophic failure and his jetpack exploded, none of them would die. He felt a little scorn at that kind of caution. Yes, jetpacks could explode at launch, ''if'' they weren't properly cared for, but Barve had been at this for five years. That was basically all his life - the Spaarti cylinder didn't count, acclimation had taken maybe two weeks, and since flash memory was pretty basic he'd had eight months of jetpack training - and he'd had plenty of time to get in the habit. Not like natural-borns, with that baggage from growing up all haphazard.

Barve set his stance and brought up flight control, rapidly checking the systems. Everything was green, not that he ever expected otherwise. Take care of your gear, and it will take care of you, the saying went, and no one took better care of a jetpack than TX-7255. He braced the helmet against his chest and as an afterthought shifted his grip so that he pinched the fabric over the alien, covering it. Hopefully it wasn't flammable.

There was enough open space around him, but still, regulations said that if he wasn't taking off in a specifically cleared space or doing a touch-and-go, he had to give a verbal warning. Some rocket troopers used the short "Dusting off!" or the even shorter "Launching!", but Barve liked the traditional phrase, said in one way or another since the first soldiers to take to the air on their own.

"Clear the blast zone!" He tensed, leaped as high as the light exoskeleton built into his armor would take him, and kicked in the rockets.

The first few seconds were always uncertain, as the jets fought gravity and flared, close enough to the ground that they licked the armor on his legs and slagged the spot where he'd been standing. The not-voice protested weakly. But he took care of his jetpack, and she held him steady at the top of the jump. He let her kick in a little harder, and she dragged his heavy flesh and armor up in a tower of sound and fire.

He modulated the thrust when he judged himself high enough and triggered the maneuvering jets on the right side, spinning in a slow, complete circle. This looked like one of those planets which couldn't collectively decide what it wanted to specialize in, so it went for city and wild stuff and farmland all at once. Those weren't as interesting as city worlds, at least not from a jetpack, but it was exponentially better than flying over ocean. He had his bearings now. Buildings, crowds, ground, roads, yep, atmospheric flyers, oh yes, and ''this'' way was North and ''this'' was South, good, and so his course was - that way.

Barve swung his legs and flipped over so his back was to the sky, working with his jetpack to find his balance in that second of freefall, and gave her the gun.

Immediately he was flying proper, losing a little altitude in a shallow dive and regaining it, then leveling off and holding steady. There were some other things in his airspace, but they ignored him, and he did the same. He loved flying fast, the landscape zipping by below him, wind shrieking against his armor and trying to tug things out of his hands, even the alternating sense that he was either weightless or something massive was pressing down on him. His jetpack was loud at her highest speed - since part of her was a Screamer, this was only to be expected - but of course he wasn't going at top speed, or anything all that close to it. He kept slow, almost too slow to fly. By the groaning of the not-voice, he probably didn't dare go any faster.

Pity, really. Even after all this time, even with the conditioning and the stuff they'd done to him in the Spaarti cylinder, his jetpack was fast and strong and agile enough to make him struggle to keep conscious, without vibrating him to pieces in the process. Some people didn't like tasking their g-tolerance; none of ''them'' had his genome. He loved flying. He'd rather die than be one of the groundpounders.

Sometimes, though, he wondered what it would have been like if he'd been sorted into pilot training instead. TIEs might not be as agile, but they went so much faster - and with inertial compensators, they could ''do'' that, make changes in their flightpaths that would kill him uncompensated. If he hadn't been sorted into the rocket trooper corps, then he'd be flying in space, too, and going after bigger targets. His original had been a snubbie pilot. The flash-memories he'd recorded and passed down included one of the joy and pride that came with piloting. Barve didn't really like thinking about that. Done was done, and the Empire wasn't going to let anyone but a ''really'' prime natural-born get retrained. Besides, a ship would mean losing his jetpack. She was his baby.

Okay. Barve scanned the ground. This was probably the right road, and there was some suspiciously regular cracking on the surface ahead, but he didn't see anything yet. He'd been told to watch for footprints in the road and wrecked cars. ...He really should have asked what a car was. Was it the same thing as a groundcar, which he'd seen a lot of here, or something more obscure? It wouldn't be the first time he got tripped up by similar-sounding unrelated words.

The not-voice had kept a lot of quiet, wordlessly unhappy not-sounds, particularly when he gained or lost altitude suddenly. He felt safe in assuming that the not-voice belonged to the alien curled up in the helmet he was carrying, and they were a good sign that it hadn't lost consciousness. Should he talk to it? Why not. It might know. Okay, he'd been told that the groundpounder helmet was on the open frequency, right? This far from all the others, he was picking up very little in the way of transmissions. Barve lowered his comm output so he wouldn't spam anyone.

"You know Basic, right?"

There was a pause, and he wondered if the wind was too loud. There were sound mufflers in ''his'' helmet, and his audio pickups filtered out most irrelevant noise, but helmets tended not to work as well when they weren't connected to armor.

Finally he not-heard it. ''Uh... sort of. It's been a while. I think I've forgotten most of what I picked up. Why?''
The not-voice seemed surprised and a little queasy.

"Oh good. I think you speak it fine," Barve said, adding, "I understand Huttese okay, I ''sort'' of get Bocce, and I know a little Sy Bisti, but I don't know any other languages." Understanding so few was kind of embarrassing, but only Basic and Huttese had been flash-programmed and he never really made a focused effort to study languages, so he thought he was picking them up pretty well. "Though I guess you were talking earlier in Basic, so it wasn't a good question."

''Wait, what? ...Do we even mean the same B.A.S.I.C.? Because I thought you meant the programming language.''

Maybe the alien was addled. "I meant Basic. Official language of the Empire. ''This'' language."

Another pause, this one rather long. ''You know, usually people call it English.''

At the very least, the alien was confused. "No, the Empire calls it Basic. So did the Republic. So does the rest of the galaxy. Basic, Galactic Basic, Galactic Basic Standard... Basic."

''What? You actually think - no, don't antagonize the crazy guy with the jetpack. He could drop you. Then you'll never get there.'' That last part wasn't nearly as clear, and Barve suspected he wasn't supposed to not-hear it. But he could handle being considered crazy, even though he'd had the full Spaarti year and there was really no chance of the madness getting him. After all, he'd seen someone in the depths of the madness, and it was probably worth being cautious, at least at first.

"Anyway, alien, I need to know if 'car', in this case, means little groundbound vehicle or is an acronym for something."

''Maybe he ''does'' think he's - Yeah. It's the vehicle.'' Good, then he was headed in the right direction. There was more cracking on the road now too. The alien paused, then said, ''I'm Steph, by the way. Not 'alien'.''

"I'm TX-7255 from batch three," he said. Wait, natural-borns who weren't troopers didn't usually like going by designations. "Call me Barve."

''Barve?''

"It's a nickname. A barve is a clumsy six-legged meat animal. You only get the prime names like "Firebrand" if you're important." He couldn't enjoy a military flick without getting annoyed at that.

''Right. You don't have any other names?''

"Not that I've heard." Did he want the name of Barve's original? No, he'd surely ask if he did. "You're feeling okay, right? Are your eyes being pushed into your head?" He'd feel like such an idiot if Steph had some kind of delayed reaction to acceleration and passed out.

''A little. It was worse when we took off. Everything went sort of gray at the edges.''

"Yeah? That makes sense." He felt like he couldn't leave it at that, so he added, "Humans tend to tolerate horizontal axis g-forces a lot better than vertical ones. It has to do with how our spines are aligned with the axis and how our blood gets forced around. I don't know what you are, but I'd guess it works the same for you."

''Well, ''that's'' good to know. I'm a Hoojib, I guess.'' More indistinctly, Steph said, ''The guy in orange said I looked all wrong, but Eighty-four told him it didn't matter.''

He was not supposed to listen in; if he overheard anyway, he was supposed to pretend otherwise. "Never heard of you. We're well within standard human tolerance, and I'll keep slow for you if I can, but if something comes up and I have to go evasive, you'll have some trouble. Should that happen, try straining your muscles and remember to breathe short, hard, and often. It could help."

''Thanks. I think. It had better not come to that.''

In places, the road was crossed by roads that passed above it. The ones he'd seen so far had been intact, but one up ahead, getting closer by the second, had been shot out, and the pattern of cracks that passed underneath it could reasonably be called footprints. Checking behind himself - the rearwards display was small and not meant for ground details, so he did this by pulling upright, spinning as he stalled, then correcting himself and falling back into flight position, a set of maneuvers that did not please Steph in the least - Barve saw that the set of buildings that he'd taken off near was still visible, though small in the distance.

If he had no further orders, maybe they'd let him fly back at any speed he wanted. Fuel readings were a little lower than they should have been at this point, even with the extra weight, but nothing too alarming.

At this speed he'd be a few more minutes. This thing had gone pretty far. Flying slowly with absolutely nothing going on - usually, he'd be listening to the other rocket troopers, comparing notes and expectations, maybe trying to outmaneuver them. He was hazy on why he'd been deployed without the rest of his unit. They'd acclimatized together and gone through training at the same time and everything, and he'd never been far apart from them. Being alone was boring.

No, he wasn't quite alone. Small talk. How did that work again? Right. "How are you talking? Nothing's getting to my ears."

''I don't have a vocal tract anymore, so I'm guessing telepathy. Better than nothing, but it's annoying.''

"That's too bad," Barve said. It looked like the burden of conversation was on him. He was the worst in his unit at that, frankly, especially with people who weren't familiar with flight and the mechanics of it, but questions were usually good. "So you're one of those aliens that has a metamorphosis, huh? What were you before?"

There was another pause. Incredulous, Steph said, ''I - but - you - you actually haven't figured it out? What - you don't even remember what happened, do you? Do you have a real name? Do you even know what'' planet '' this is?''

Barve hadn't known it was possible to stutter telepathically, but then, he reminded himself, there were a lot of things he didn't know. "No. Are you going to tell me?"

''Oh Jesus Christ.'' Ah. He didn't think Barve was in danger of the madness, he thought Barve was ''stupid''. Barve briefly considered, oh, accelerating a bit more, perhaps flying a bit less steadily, but dismissed the idea. He had a package or a passenger to deliver.

He wasn't angry, quite, but he had to correct the alien. "Hey. I'm not - yeah, I know everyone says I'm a bit simple. Maybe. Maybe. Most of the time." He got the sense that Steph was about to say something, and he didn't let him, raising his voice. "But I'm plenty smart flying, and if there's a jetpack malfunction a couple klicks above the ground, the smartest being in the Empire, the ''very'' best and brightest, is me. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it's that I don't know. Don't make insinuations like that!"

''Aaah! Oh God, don't drop me. I'm sorry, geeze. It's just really weird that you don't know.''

There were a few men in his unit who could have started on something about ignorance, but he wasn't one of them - as far as lectures went, he only had this and the one about untested new equipment. After a moment, Barve became uncomfortable. He wasn't supposed to be hostile to people who weren't the enemy, even if they ''were'' rude aliens. He'd probably have a few bad sleepcycles if he didn't say something.

"Sorry. It's fine. Just... I'm not stupid, okay? Simple isn't stupid."

''Yeah. Sure. God, this was a bad idea.''

Well, ''that'' hadn't gone well. Pity his unit wasn't here. He could have used a people person, or several.

Anyway, by now he could see the runaway walker. It had come to a stop, right in the middle of the road, and as he flew closer he saw that one of the big hatches in the side, the hatches that groundpounders rappelled out of, was open.

"We're just about here. Hold on." It took a bit of maneuvering. A long shallow dive followed by flipping upright and shedding his momentum, then the tricky process of moving laterally while in the standing position without letting the rockets set fire to the inside of the vehicle, and getting close enough to switch them off and fall to his feet without breaking anything. Nothing he couldn't handle. He made it a point of pride that he hardly ever used his repulsor pod when landing, and he didn't need it this time.

Barve landed hard enough that he was forced to drop to three points, which while visually impressive was just bad form. If his unit had been there, it would not have gone unnoticed, but if the groundpounder who met him had judged his landing, he declined to comment on it. The moment Barve put the helmet down, Steph half climbed, half leapt out and shuddered all over so that his fur stood on end. Then he sat on his haunches and started wiping or patting himself down with his forelegs, a set of motions that reminded Barve both of a nervous animal grooming itself and the thing a lot of people did after a rough ride, when they wanted to make sure everything was in one piece.

He'd have been a little bit insulted by that - hadn't he kept slow? Hadn't he maintained his jetpack well enough that there was virtually no vibration, and flown her well enough that it had been smooth? - but he ''had'' gone off on that upset lecture. And some people just didn't fly well. And even if Steph didn't like hearing it, he was an alien and might or might not tolerate the forces of acceleration that well.

The groundpounder looked from Barve to Steph and back. "You sent us an ''alien''?" he asked over the open channel. "Is he an ambassador or something? I thought the message was that he was a friend or something."

Steph stopped grooming and looked up sharply. ''I ''am'' a friend. And I can hear you, you know, the speaker in the helmet's still on." He waggled an ear in a gesture that was probably sarcastic, but still looked silly.

"Oh, sorry," the groundpounder said. "And I guess you're not really an alien. It's kinda hard to keep things straight. C'mon, we need you in the cockpit." He nodded acknowledgment to Barve and turned, heading towards the fore of the walker. Steph followed, still staggering a little.

Barve picked up the helmet again and took the chance to have a look around. He'd seen the big walkers before, just not from inside. He'd landed on the lower of the two levels. At the fore and the aft they were joined by sets of stairs. Entrance to the tunnel leading to the cockpit was through a locking access hatch on the landing in the fore stairs that locked and sealed behind the groundpounder; the aft stairs had another one that probably led to cargo space. A third hatch was set forewards in the flooring. Maybe it went to engines. Then there were the various external ones like what he'd dropped through. Handholds were built into the ceiling, and there were some weapons racks. That made sense, he guessed. These things ''were'' personnel carriers, though they were better suited for annihilating ground targets.

Maybe the above deck had more, but this one was otherwise empty. Apparently the team who'd gone out here were all in the cockpit, which had to be a tight fit. Before he commed back for further orders, Barve noticed one more thing. Coming from the speakers built into the ceiling was a faint, barely audible hiss of static.

[There. I wrote you. I even put in that damn rant. Now get out of my head.]

File:Illus4.jpg

2009-06-25T21:10:37Z

Joysweeper: I had so much trouble with this one. I'm not schizophrenic and no, I don't literally believe in a "muse" who argues with me. But there are characters that I am reminded of constantly, ones which develop backstories and fiddly details easily, and there a

I had so much trouble with this one. I'm not schizophrenic and no, I don't literally believe in a "muse" who argues with me. But there are characters that I am reminded of constantly, ones which develop backstories and fiddly details easily, and there are a lot that I imagine talking to. This happens most when I'm not in position to write or draw.

Picture a lot of arguing about details and who I used as photoreference, because I imagine SL-1984 to be a horrible art critic. And supremely unhelpful.

Walker Imperial Ranger

2009-06-17T22:51:29Z

Joysweeper:

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Xanadu]][[Category:Story]][[Category:Alien]][[Category:Inanimorph]][[Category:Transgender]][[Category:Joysweeper]][[Category:Bryan]]
{{universe|Xanadu}}
{{byline|author=Joysweeper|user=Joysweeper}}

By Joysweeper, with some help from Bryan.

Don't read this story yet :)

It'll be done when it's done. For the record, I intend to finish before Duke Nukem.

Links to some pictures of AT-ATs, for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-hlc.jpg] Close up of chin-mounted heavy laser cannons
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:MCQ-battleofhoth.jpg] Low-angle concept art
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SWRSIIIRSWP.jpg] More concept art(Talk about uneven odds. Luke > everything.)
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:BlizzardForce.jpg] ESB screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Blizzard_2.jpg] Another screenshot
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT-swrs3rs.jpg] High-angle(sort of) image
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:AT-AT_egvv.jpg] Schematics
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:ATAT_height.jpg] Bad bluescreen, but it does convey size pretty well.

Links to some pictures of Red Guards, also for reference: [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Guard.png] Red robes and a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos_NEGTC.jpg] Kir Kanos, helmet off, showing the armor. He never uses a forcepike.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kir_Kanos.jpg] The Emperor's guards aren't just for show.
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Kanos3.JPG] Kir Kanos showing the armor again. Different look at the belt.

Have to thank [http://community.livejournal.com/brains_in_a_jar/ brains-in-a-jar] for thoughts on a human brain in a very nonhuman mechanical body, and also all kinds of things about static. Also have to thank Robert T. Bakker for writing "The Dinosaur Heresies"; that bit on a lizard's wrist was extremely interesting.

And I found this quote on one of the 501st homepages. It is so ''perfect''. "Some fans are content to collect action figures...other fans want to ''be'' action figures. Nothing professes your fandom quite like building your own detailed costume replica of a classic Star Wars villain, and there's nothing quite like the feeling that comes from bringing the characters of Star Wars into the real world and sharing the magic with others. A truly engaging Star Wars experience only occurs through a convincing appearance. To this end, the 501st constantly strives to improve the quality and accuracy of its member's costumes. Our goal is to appear as if our characters have just stepped off the big screen and into this world." I hope I can find some way to use this ironically. Probably not ''this'' story, but I'm going to have to stow it away.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Hoojib.jpg]]

==Bryan's intro==

"The door, the door!" Steph called out and lunged to intercept the handle swinging in to catch Garrett's back, stopping it just in time to prevent another ding in the cardboard that might be difficult to repair now that they were at the convention itself.

Garrett let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks." He had turned sideways but thanks to the huge boxy hump over his back it didn't make him any narrower and only really served to make it harder to keep track of everything. And with the two giant cardboard constructs mounted over his arms there wasn't really much he could do anyway; his hands were busy just holding the internal braces in place.

Steph grinned and slipped lithely around to join him in the lobby once Garrett had managed to make it inside. "You'd think armor capable of repelling turbolasers could handle a door handle."

Garrett shook his head. His costume was particularly fragile, being both bulky and made primarily out of cardboard, but it had been surprisingly quick and easy to make as a result. "It'll last until judging. Spray a jot of black on any tears and call 'em battle damage, the Rebels must've got a few lucky hits in." The lobby was sparsely populated right now, with just a few folks still lined up at the front desk buying passes to glance in surprise at Garrett's outfit, but Garrett decided it was showtime. He leaned forward and fell into his quadrupedal stance, the big round footpads of his forelimbs clomping to the ground to support him and the headpiece tilting down into the correct orientation.

There were a few appreciative murmurs as the onlookers finally recognized the iconic Imperial walker he was dressed as. Steph gave a little flourish and a bow, as if taking credit for the outfit, and then stepped forward to give Garrett something to follow. They'd considered trying to rig up a periscope of some sort so that Garrett could see forward more easily but they'd run out of time for details like that; it was enough that the AT-AT's legs were able to support him as things were, they'd had to compromise on the costume's proportions a bit just to make it work.

The majority of the work had taken only a single week. Since it only really had to survive for a single day of use ease of construction had been a fair tradeoff. Garrett was like that with all of his projects; a flash of inspiration, a whirlwind of construction, and then once it was finished the itch was satisfied and he would lose interest and let it go. Steph counted it as sheer luck that this time around the inspiration had come when they might make some money off of it. He'd been tight with Garrett for a couple of years now, both of them in the same engineering degree at the nearby University of Midtral, and was the less-imaginative and more-practical of the two.

"Two please," Steph signed in. "Stephen Midder and Garrett Thompson. Just for today." He pointed to identify themselves.

"Registered for any of the contests?" The man behind the desk asked. Garrett nodded silently, the walker-head bobbing almost comically. "Right..." The man shuffled through a list, presumably checking for Garrett's name, and then looked back up once he'd checked it off. "Ten for him, thirty for you."

"Eh? Aww." Steph got out his wallet to pay for the passes. "Should've worn a costume myself." ''Not that I could have got a discount for any costume that cost under twenty dollars, of course.'' But he supposed that wasn't really the point.

The two of them had done some pretty wacky and nerdy things together. The AT-AT costume had blown away everyone at the Halloween party they'd been to on campus just a few nights previous, in fact that had been the primary impetus for building the thing in the first place. But as they proceeded down the hall toward the convention rooms where the main population of conventiongoers were congregating, Steph began wondering if they'd finally reached their level. The variety and creativity of hand-crafted costumes on display was enormous. Still, there wasn't anything quite like the AT-AT costume Garrett wore and it still drew a good share of attention.

Upon entering the first convention room - a dealer's room, from the look of the tables set up along the side walls, but nonetheless full of costume-wearers - they almost immediately encountered someone in a Stormtrooper outfit. It was a perfect replica in every detail, clearly a labor of love, and the person wearing it was dedicated enough to playing the role that he resisted the temptation to drop out of character.

"You're out of uniform, pilot," the trooper commented as he gave Steph a nod of acknowledgment in passing.

Steph was at a loss for a response but Garrett gave a most un-AT-AT-like chuckle. Garrett had been shuffling along behind Stephen on all fours, barely able to see more than the backs of Stephen's heels, and he took the opportunity after the trooper had passed to stand back up again and look around. "Lots of competition."

"Yeah." Steph sighed; the prospect of winning any of the prize money seemed more distant now that he'd seen some of what they were up against. This was just the first room and there was an amazing gargoyle with what looked like pneumatically-operated wings, a really hot fox-girl who had made a masterful blend of both plush fabric and her own natural attributes, and a lizard-man... no, Steph corrected himself, a Gorn. The Gorn's costume was nearly as good as the one from the original Star Trek episode had been. "Still, nothing like an AT-AT, eh?"

"Excuse us, please," A small woman in a jockey costume asked from behind Garrett's cardboard bulk. He shuffled to the side to let her through, leading a man in an amazing horse costume. The thing made him seven feet tall, with a long neck and perfect horse's head, and the hoof-gloves made Steph wonder if he could get down on all fours too.

"Heh. Damn." Garrett shook his head. "Well, thank goodness for categories, eh?"

Steph gave a wry grin. "Yeah. Though I'm feeling a bit under-dressed myself now."

It didn't really matter much since Garrett was the center of attention, as intended; Steph was along just to open doors and do the other things Garrett couldn't manage in that hulking outfit. But as they proceeded through the room Steph found his gaze lingering on some of the costuming wares being sold.

People would stop to stare, take photos, or ask Steph questions about the AT-AT costume. Since he was the one leading the way, with Garrett's face down and concealed under the cardboard headpiece, it was natural that they'd assume he was in charge. But when Garrett reared up to proudly answer the questions they'd immediately switch to ignoring Steph instead. It was quickly beginning to annoy him; though the idea and the design for the AT-AT costume had been Garrett's they'd worked on it together.

"Hang on, Garrett," Steph finally called. They were on their way to the exhibition hall but they were still quite early, they'd left plenty of flex in their schedule to account for difficulties with the costume. "I want to look at some of the stuff they're selling here."

"Stuff?" Garrett got up and looked around.

There weren't any Star Wars branded costume supplies at hand, and if there were they'd probably be too expensive. ''Twenty dollars, eh? I can spend twenty dollars.'' That left mainly just the cheesier costume gear.

After a few minutes of browsing Garrett got back down on all fours and spent a little while tromping back and forth. The arms of the AT-AT costume were quite heavy; in addition to the cardboard shell they had a pair of aluminum canes inside, trimmed short and affixed to the broad metal bucket lids that formed the soles of his "forefeet". Despite the crick he was sure he'd eventually develop in his back it was actually easier moving around like this.

There wasn't as much of an audience in here, though. The people who already had costumes were gravitating off somewhere else and those were the ones he was most interested in impressing with his ingenuity and attention to detail. He wasn't a big Star Wars fan himself but he'd dug up some schematics from a scan of some old Star Wars book. He'd even hung a Luke Skywalker pilot action figure on a string from his underside, mimicking the famous scene from Empire Strikes Back where the proto-Jedi had grappled up on board one after being shot down on Hoth, but he'd lost that particular accessory somewhere during the Halloween party and hadn't bothered looking for a replacement. There didn't seem to be anything like that in this area of the dealer's room...

He tromped over to Steph. "We going to move on?" He prompted.

Steph sighed. The twin goals of 'attention-grabbing' and 'cheap' weren't meshing very well. "Okay, just let me grab something." Something totally incongruous would probably be best. So... "Ah, I'll take that." A pair of fuzzy bunny ears on a headband for just ten bucks. Garrett didn't even look up and Steph grinned; he'd be startled when he did.

They continued onward.

==Joysweeper's pre-TF setup==

On the way they'd called it a "function" as if it'd been some kind of social event, and in a desultory fashion they'd been trying to get donations to the Leukemia Society, but it was far from formal. The Kublai Con attendees were pretty generous – TR-1407, given name “Angela Kincaid”, calling herself “Anj” while in costume - had once heard it said that furry cons generated more money than scifi cons, and Xanadu was a mixture of both.

What had made the effort fun was the “act”. Angela lost count of just how many times she’d heard friends declaring with feigned authority that the 501st Legion was here to keep the peace and maintain order. Essentially they’d just threatened anyone who looked impressive enough, and almost everyone had played along, reacting in fear or challenging the Imperials to a duel.

She’d personally “fought” an armored anthro dragon with a very realistic whipping tail, matching her forcepike with his curved fiberglass sword, and although she’d “lost” she had also had the pleasure of seeing him back down when faced with the blasters of eighteen stormtroopers. Good donation from that one, too, when they'd explained and everything.

The "TR" prefix in front of the number she had picked as her identification - she'd chosen fourteen oh seven - indicated which costume was her favorite. "TK" meant stormtrooper, "TC" was clonetrooper, "SL" was Sith Lord... there were a number of them for the various types. "TR" meant that she favored the Emperor's guards in their red helmets and flowing robes. They were called Red Guards, Royal Guards, and various other combinations of "Red", "Royal", "Imperial", and "Emperor's". Frankly, Angela preferred "Red Guard". The arguments some of her friends got into about nomenclature gave her a headache - fanwank was one thing, and you had to be a little anal to care about a screen-accurate costume, but some people went too far.

She’d heard from one of them that someone had actually caught a pickpocket in the act and had proceeded to instill the fear of the Empire into him, winning a lot of amusement from everyone else in the process, but she hadn’t seen it herself, nor had anyone who told the story. It was probably hyperbole. That didn’t stop the thought from being entertaining.

Now it was over and the group was dispersing. TR-1407 was glad to leave, frankly. The costume, with heavy cloth robes over already-stifling armor, had slowly become hot enough to, as the phrase went, fry fleek eels with, the ice packs had either thawed or hadn't been working in the first place, and no amount of water or robe-flapping could make it entirely tolerable. The bodysuit under the plating under the robes was so drenched with sweat that she'd probably have to peel it off.

Not for the first time she wished that she hadn’t bothered with the tight bodysuit and the armor that went over it. It wasn’t like it would have visibly made a difference. Some Red Guards liked to keep their robes thrown behind their shoulders like a cloak, the better to show off the detailing on their armor. Angela, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone guessing that she was female, and so kept her robes arranged about her body, hiding everything but her hands, her feet, and her helmet. It still would have been far, ''far'' too hot – the helmet was the next thing to airtight, and only the respirator that threaded down to her waist kept her from suffocating – but at least she wouldn’t feel like sparks were smoldering under her robes.

But… no. More than once during the “fight” her robes had swept about, and both before and after they hadn’t exactly hung neatly. She would ''never'' have heard the end of it if she were to come to an event “half-dressed”.

“Remember, there’s a march at three,” she told her friend and former pupil SL-1984 as they left, part of a stream. The majority of Tampa Bay Squad happened to be heading in the same direction. “We meet before two thirty in the southwest parking lot.” Little single-squadron things like the function were fun, but the real thrill was always when the entire 501st, or as much of it as was attending any particular convention, marched together. There was just something about it that felt exhilarating. Like she was part of something bigger than herself.

“I knew that,” he protested, but mildly. “Micheal Porter”, as he was usually known – although he preferred to answer strictly to his designation when in costume – was tall enough, laid-back enough, and attention-loving enough to pull off a White Vader costume. It was exactly what it sounded like – the Darth Vader rig, all in white, sometimes called “Vader Redeemed.” The images that the costume was based off of had appeared for literally two panels at the very end of a comic that wasn’t even canon. Even by 501st standards that was unusual - and the 501st Legion was infamous for being made up of fans who weren't content to simply ''collect'' action figures, they wanted to ''be'' them.

His protest was put on hold briefly as a fairly well-done white tiger furry with an articulated jaw interrupted, waving her pawhands and generally being as relentlessly upbeat as possible. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but gestured and showed off a disposable camera on a strap around her neck enthusiastically enough that it was pretty clear that she wanted pictures.

TR-1407 had never been all that comfortable with being hugged by complete strangers for photographs, but she didn’t have any serious objections to it, and she wasn’t carrying her wallet with her this time, so there was no chance of getting robbed again. Fortunately the tiger was much more interested in SL-1984, and ''he'' was perfectly willing to mug and pose as much as desired, supported by three or four stormtroopers who got beckoned into the shots and played along, rather than shaking their heads and passing by. Maybe it was just that white fur went better with white robes and armor than with red. It was probably more that the kid was naturally showy.

After the Red Guard had obligingly snapped enough pictures and handed the camera back to the furry, the white tiger left to accost someone else, and they picked up where they had left off.

“Angela, you really don't need to remind me about everything anymore. I know the schedule."

“Don’t call me Angela when I’m in uniform, please." Sweat was pooling in the tips of her gloves. Angela flexed her hands against it. The moment she let them relax, it pooled again. "It's only been what, a year since I let you walk off and you missed it because you were buying original issues of 'Spider-Girl'?"

"A year and a half. I am ''so'' much better at juggling my hobbies now," he said dryly. "Why, I even remember things that the schedule said and Pike forgot to bring up."

A trooper listening in muttered "You had to bring the Squad Leader into this. Now you're in for it."

Another trooper who'd been a few steps behind got right up besides the taller Vader. She was a snowtrooper, and probably suffering almost as much as Angela in the heat. Despite the helmet speaker and a tired note in her voice, she sounded crisp and alert. "Hey, don't complain. I'm sorry we haven't made an announcement, but we've got a lot more on our plate than you do; ''you'' just have to show up at the right time and place, and we're not here to babysit you. We've been setting things up and working out scheduling conflicts since five in the morning. It's been a long day at the end of a long week already and I'm glad John was there to take over after eleven." The snowtrooper slipped into character and finished, very dryly, "So don't complain about your superiors, my lord. Circumstances tend to be more complicated than they seem."

"Ah," SL-1984 said, briefly assuming character himself. "My apologies, Ma'am. That was merely a breach in my personal discipline. No disrespect was meant." Following along, Angela couldn't help feeling a little surge of goodwill. She loved this group. They argued a lot, and Shanda Pike admittedly could be touchy, but it never got too far. Probably in part because while Michael loved the limelight, he had very little ego or temper.

"I'll overlook it, so long as you don't let it happen again," Pike allowed very seriously. A smile crept into her voice. "You're mixing up your honorifics, by the way. I'm only "ma'am" in the Tusken Raider suit and as Mara."

"Again, my apologies. Sir," he added. Everyone pretended not to notice the slight skip in his amplified voice.

With a nod, the snowtrooper peeled away and dropped back, staying in sight but effectively bowing out of the conversation. In an aside, Angela told her friend that his voice-changer was failing.

“What? Testing, testing... You’re right.” SL-1984 thumped the speaker hidden in his chest box, then removed his helmet, careful of the trailing wires that ran from it down into the rest of the costume. “This thing always gets screwy an hour or so in.”

There was always something just a little bit disturbing about seeing someone in costume but without their helmet on. It didn’t take long to get used to seeing troopers, but with a Vader it ''always'' looked strange. Michael had opted for the ski-hood-under-the-helmet thing that Vaders usually wore. His, naturally, was white. Removing helmets while trooping tended to be frowned on, but everyone in the 501st knew that sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Angela told him, “You really ought to try a pair of Vortex Twos. I’ve never made a Vader-“

Michael left off frowning into the helmet for a moment. “You’re not nearly tall enough to pull it off. You'd have to do the three-fourths scale version. And maybe get body padding.”

“I know. Shut up.” Angela sighed. “I’ve never made a Vader, but I have a helmet, therefore I use a speaker. Vortex. Got it with my tax returns. I know that Hasbro thing is cheap and easy to get, but, well, the downside is quality. Vortex is the best.” She indicated the general location of her own voice amplification unit with a quick gesture. It made her voice audible despite the almost airtight helmet, flattening it out in the process.

“I know, but that’s a bit of an investment. I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. Had to stop working on that Tusken Raider one… I could barely afford to come ''here.'' This will hold for a bit longer. Going to have to try and fake it when it does fail. The iPod with the breathing loop's still good, at least.” Replacing the helmet and straightening it with both hands, he faced her directly. “Any plans?”

“I’m getting out of this costume before I cook.” She flapped her robes in another vain attempt to get some cool air circulating. Under her helmet, a little curl of hair had plastered itself over one eye, sticking to the lid as she blinked. Just about every time she wore a helmet she found herself wishing she'd cut her hair short. Tampa Bay Squadron's other Red Guard kept hers cropped and said it made something of a difference.

SL-1984’s speaker system relayed the sound of his mouth opening, so she cut him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need any help, Micheal. Seriously, if I stay in this any longer I’ll get heatstroke. Every time I get into this thing I regret it, I swear.”

"If you want me to call you Anj, don't call ''me'' Michael." SL-1984 raised his voice to be heard over the shouting match going on between two balding men in spandex. Taking up a standard Vader mannerism with ease that betrayed several movies' worth of casual study, he locked his hands around his belt. “This is why white’s a good color. I’m not sweating half as much as I did in the black sauna suit, so I think I’m good for a while yet. I'd like to see the sights. There are some ''really'' nice costumes this year. Maybe I’ll swing by those set pieces people keep talking about. I heard that they got David and his crew to do the Hutt set again this year, plus Carmen said that Makaze Squad brought in that Death Star made of like a million Legos. I have no idea how they could have got it in the doors.”

People had collected in a chattering knot around someone or something, clogging the way. It was possible to squeeze past, but that just wouldn't do. Angela raised her voice. “Move along, come on now citizens, you can collect in a spare room much more easily than out here. Move along, move along.” The voice amplifier lent her voice a little more kick and made it audible. Despite that, she saw no sign that more than a few people had heard, let alone intended to obey.

Her former pupil, his voice changer having given up entirely, repeated the order with the same intonation, doing his best with the voice. This time, people listened and obeyed, breaking up and dispersing. They’d been clustered around a yellow lab – not a furry, an actual, panting dog that barely seemed disturbed at all by the crowd – wearing one of those novelty pet costumes. It went very nicely with his owner, though Angela wasn’t sure about the meaning of the dog being Batman when the man was Robin.

What she ''was'' sure about was that the kid she’d once sponsored – hardly a kid despite her teasing, she couldn't be more than five or six years older than him - was just ''better'' at some of this than she was. Particularly when it came to giving orders to people neither of them knew. Partly it was because, although she wasn’t shy by anyone’s standards, she didn’t like to stand out overmuch. Hence why her preferred costumes were the Red Guard and obscure ones like AT-AT drivers or Imperial Army Pilots, as they were called, while ''his'' was arguably the most conspicuous costume in the 501st.

A trooper that Angela knew from the squad finally answered the question. “The Lego Death Star? It breaks apart into sections and gets reassembled. We had to get a cart for the pieces, but it's simpler than it looks. Tampa Bay had it one year, but that was before your time. Sir.”

TR-1407 decided to break it off. She really didn’t know where the closest ‘changing room’ was, but she’d been told that they were everywhere, so it probably wouldn’t take too long to find one. The longer she waited, the longer the costume stayed on. “Have fun, guys. I think I’ll get most of this off before I make more plans. Don’t hurt yourself showing off.”

“Don’t forget to put it back on by two thirty. I’ll see you by then if not before, An- Anj.” He and those troopers who hadn't already gone their own ways kept moving in the same direction, and she arbitrarily took a left.

It was pretty close to noon; compared to just an hour ago, the hallway was half empty. The people who had been rushing around trying to get to various things had reached them, apparently. This wasn’t anywhere near the dealer’s room or any of its offshoots, the SIGs were already in progress, and as far as she could remember from the big con schedule the only event going on would be that big awards ceremony.

Angela toyed with the idea of going, but the oppressive heat of her costume decided her. Anything worth seeing would surely keep; she'd been to enough conventions to know that the truly impressive costumes would probably stick around for a bit, both soaking up the praise and trying not to break anything. Getting there in time to see the whole thing wouldn’t be worth the broiling and the probability of being jostled by a crowd. She’d hate to break the forcepike that she was carrying braced against her shoulder; it was easily the most fragile part of the costume, and making it had been a trial.

The heat was like a physical thing trapped against her body. Not for the first time, she wished that she’d worn her officer uniform instead. Fewer layers, and her face, neck, and hands were exposed to the air. But officer getup was just so ''plain'', so ''ordinary'' compared to the Red Guard robes and armor. And somehow it drew more attention, not less. In a weird way, Red Guards could be ignored pretty easily. A perk of being a member of Star Wars's version of the Secret Service, she supposed.

Up ahead it was crowded again; all fursuiters from the look of things. Enough of them were breaking the unwritten rule about staying silent in costume that the group was quite, quite loud, even with the helmet cutting off some of the sound. From the laughter, the movement, and the general tone of conversation, they were having a good time. Having nothing better to do Angela approached them, deciding that if nothing else she might as well find out what if anything was going on.

As she passed within thirty feet of the closest of them she felt something like a chill traveling down her spine, prickling against the bodysuit stuck to her skin. The Red Guard would have brushed it aside as nothing, but for one reason or another she noticed that some of the furries who had been talking or laughing or demonstrating dance moves had stopped, abruptly in some cases. A number of them carried on, oblivious, but several stopped what they were doing.

TR-1407 thought she saw a gray feline's mouth opening far wider than a baklava could allow for. She told herself that it was a trick of the light or a flaw in her visor. That was when the chill became strong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and branching to prickle her arms, the base of her skull, her chest and lower than that, strong enough that she shuddered involuntarily. Her bones started to ache, followed by the rest of her body. There was a moment where she thought ''Heatstroke?'' and started to raise her hands to her helmet.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the world.

== Lead up to Garrett and Steph's TFs==

The density of Star Wars costumes steadily increased as they progressed. The population of the convention was extremely diverse but various factors - the impending themed contests, the large number of rooms providing partitioning, natural human cliquishness - were conspiring to make it clumpy.

''Or maybe word's just getting around about Garrett's costume,'' Steph reflected. The stormtroopers seemed eerily organized for just a bunch of fans who'd happened to show up wearing the same thing.

But to Steph's relief, he wasn't feeling quite so annoyed by the attention Garrett was getting any more. The bunny ears had actually ''helped''. Not in that they were anything particularly interesting themselves, of course; they were nothing at all in comparison to even the simplest of the animal costumes he'd seen on display. No, ironically enough it was a synergistic effect.

A big clunky AT-AT clomping around? Worth a double-take, of course. A big clunky AT-AT clomping around being led by a man in bunny ears? That apparently was worth two double-takes.

A small impromptu honor guard had formed around Garrett, a constantly-renewing cluster of Star Wars fans trailing along to examine the AT-AT's details before being left behind or moving on to other things. But though fewer, the Star Wars fans who were puzzling over Steph were puzzling longer. One of them was even a Darth Vader complete with audible breathing, though in an all-white suit for some reason.

Steph wasn't about to ask. He was already being pelted with far more intricate details of the Star Wars universe than he could possibly take in. "So," the white-armored Vader was musing. "I doubt that the Empire has begun accepting nonhumans into service since my conversion, so you cannot be a pilot. I don't think you have the height for a Gerb or Lepus Carnivorous, but I might be mistaken."

"Uh, no, don't think so," Steph shook his head. ''Lepus Carnivorous? Is he making this up on the spot?'' The only carnivorous rabbit that came to mind was from Monty Python.

"Are you a Kushiban? Be at ease, my mission no longer entails the deaths of Force-Sensitives."

That one sounded less fake, and Steph was about to accept the title if only to have something meaningful to say. But then one of the Storm Troopers turned from peering at the detailing on Garrett's head and said in his best tinny trooper-voice, "My Lord, are you forgetting the Hoojib?"

"I was just getting to that." The chuckle seemed quite out of character for a Darth Vader, and to Steph's relief he seemed to be recognizing how far out of his depth Steph was. "I apologize for my men. When you're obsessed, it's a bit hard to remember that ''not everyone knows or cares.''" That last bit seemed to be aimed at the other fans, who variously shrugged, drew back a little, and hung their helmeted heads in probably-mock shame. "Kushiban and Hoojibs are both rabbitlike creatures, not very large. Kushiban are more like cat-monkey creatures with soft rabbit ears and big squirrely tails; they're about, oh, ''this'' tall standing up -" he bent down to hold his gloved hand a foot and a half above the floor "-but usually walk on all fours. They do a lot of handweaving and tend to be Force-Sensitive; generally they're portrayed with a calm demeanor. By most standards they are considered very, ah, cute."

It was Steph's turn to chuckle. "I'll leave cute to the furries."

"Aww." Garrett rose to his hind legs, surprising Steph by having been paying attention, and took a moment to set one of the forelegs down so he could adjust his headpiece. One of the side-mounted gun turrets had hooked on someone and been pulled askew. "You'd think with all those bunny-based aliens there'd be a more crossover, like with those Caitans we saw earlier."

"Ixnay on the Artrek Stay," Steph warned with a grin. He didn't seriously expect anyone to be offended, there was far too much good-natured mixing of genres and universes going on for that, but the rivalry between those two franchises almost seemed traditional.

"I'm dressed as an AT-AT, I think I'm strong enough in the Star Wars Force for my reputation to survive being revealed as a fancier of catgirls in miniskirt uniforms."

The white Vader nodded, still chuckling. "Certainly. You have no idea how many of our aliens look like cats or bugs or yes, rabbits. Hoojib, for example. They're about ''this'' big-" too small to bend down for, he held out his gloved hands as if cupping a normal-sized bunny in them "-they're mute but telepathic, they eat energy. They look more like rabbits with huge eyes and splayed bird feet. They also have large noses, no visible mouth, and one antenna or feeler on the forehead that they use to drain energy with. A relic of the Marvel comics back in the seventies. Frankly, most of us think the writers were dropping something, but the Hoojib are not quite as implausible as some of the others."

"Weird is good," Steph answered with a nod. ''Hoojib, eh?'' The wheels were spinning quickly in Steph's head; even though he'd never seen pictures of one of those things the description was pretty distinctive. He thought back over some of the stuff he'd glimpsed on the tables they'd passed... "I can pull that off. I'll be right back, you okay Garrett?"

Garrett nodded. "Just tromping around." He had finished his adjustment and was considering whether to go back down on all fours, but as Steph headed off into the bustle he found himself welcoming the excuse to stay upright a while longer. His back wasn't hurting yet, and thanks to the angle of the headpiece he didn't have to hold his neck at a bad angle, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned to the white Vader instead. "So, if it's not a faux pas to ask, did you not have time to paint your outfit before the con?"

SL-1984 chuckled again. "I've got the black getup too. You don't want to know how hot that gets if you don't have real leather. This is a more recent relic of comics, actually. One where the Dark Lord has left the Empire and joined his children, and inexplicably looks ''exactly the same'' except for color. Just as absurd in its way, although I'll give it points for not having talking hedgehogs or superweapons that look like pinball machines. Dark Horse, not Marvel. Star Wars Infinities...? No?"

"No," Garrett said, shaking his head. The headpiece didn't weigh much, but still made the motion ponderous. "Believe it or not, I'm really lost with all this Extended Universe stuff. I just watched the movies and liked the toys." Despite Garrett's demurral it was actually something of an understatement; Star Wars toys were probably the main reason Garrett had become an engineer. The long hours spent playing with his older brother's stash of plastic space ships and robots had put a visceral love of fantastic machinery into Garrett's heart. But he'd never really got into the fictional side of it all, if that made any sense.

"Well, the toys are certainly a major part of the fandom too," SL-1984 agreed. "Collectors have their own subset of obscure encyclopedic knowledge. Wouldn't know what a Hoojib was, perhaps, but they could tell you exactly how rare any given run of a Luke action figure was. But I suspect that you are more inclined towards the tech manuals."

Garrett grinned, hefting the heavy walker forelimb assemblies. "What gave you that idea?"

For his part, Steph wasn't any of those things - he just liked a challenge. And within a minute he was back, another ten dollars poorer and well on the way to meeting his next challenge. He'd found himself a rubber koala nose, best match to his mental image of the description the Vader had given him, and was busily tearing apart a pair of dealie-bobbers as he walked. His only tools were a paper clip, some rubber bands, and MacGuyver innovation. "One second longer..." He finished the work on the addition to the rabbit headband and slipped them back into place, the single spring-loaded antenna bobbing up in the middle between his ears. "Eh? Eh? Hoo da jib?" He spread his arms to display his work.

SL-1984 let out a slightly muffled laugh. His hands moved slightly as if to adjust the new addition, then dropped to hook his thumbs into his belt. "Very nice. Certainly, nobody will mistake you for anything else now. No fan, at any rate."

"Well, that's silly," Garrett evaluated. Steph nodded back, making the antenna bounce but not jarring it loose; the anchor he'd rigged up was holding. ''Excellent.''

"Speaking of silly," Steph said, grinning, "shall we carry on toward the judging room? Despite my progress I doubt my costume's going to win any awards on its own."

"Sounds good." The judging was being staggered over the course of the day to account for the many individual contests that were running - the first winners were almost due for announcement, in fact - but Garrett figured it would be a good idea to get in on his as soon as possible. When dealing with a costume made mostly of cardboard, there was a certain inexorable degradation with use. And besides that, the costume was clunky and heavy. Garrett was looking forward to being out of it for a while.

"In that case I'll bid you adieu. Troops, clear the muster zone!" The Vader slipped back into character and the remaining Storm Troopers did likewise, stepping back in unison as if to let a much larger transport pass through. Garrett obliged them, dropping back down to all fours and resuming his tromp with Steph walking ahead. Steph felt even more ridiculous than before with his extra accessories, but it was a good kind of ridiculous.

It was a strange feeling. So strange that Steph overlooked the other strange feelings at first as they started tingling at the edges of his senses.

Garrett felt it first. He had just started to get back into the gait of an AT-AT when he found himself stumbling slightly, the heavy costume becoming noticeably heavier. Garret paused for a moment, his foreleg supports setting down on the floor below him with a pair of unexpectedly solid clomps.

The cardboard forelegs actually felt ''tight'' on his arms. That was wrong; if anything there should have been too ''much'' play inside them, they wobbled around if he wasn't careful. Garrett tried to let go of the cane handles and tried standing up to pull his hands out of them.

The forelegs stayed firmly and snugly in place, and they were ''heavy''. "Wha..." Garrett choked, his voice coming out low and grating as if by speaking he was using his throat in a way it wasn't intended. The exclamation was accompanied by the faint but noticeable whine of small motors of some sort and Garrett could feel the tension build in his hips as he held the cardboard legs up in front of him.

Cardboard no longer, it seemed - the surface finish had a distinctly metallic luster to it that the gray paint had failed to evoke previously. There was no explaining it; his costume had suddenly become a whole lot ''better''. It was still improving before his eyes, new details resolving and the proportions subtly shifting toward more accurate dimensions.

It was getting heavier. Garrett could feel his hips beginning to fail, the boxy body and outstretched forelegs too much to bear. But Garrett resisted the weight with all his might; he had no idea what was going on and from the frantic hammering of his heart he could tell he was most likely panicking, but even so he somehow ''knew'' deep in his gut that he would be in deep trouble if he fell over. He had to stay up. He ''had'' to...

Garrett's groan came from somewhere inside his chest, the vibration thrumming through his body in new and unfamiliar ways, and after resisting for just seconds he toppled forward to land again on his forelegs for support. The two round footpads slammed solidly down onto the carpeted floor and Garrett felt the impact travel up the metal structure into his shoulders. An alien surge of relief washed through him; ''thank God, I'm stable.'' But it didn't last long against the growing panic. He tried to open his mouth to yell for help and found that he couldn't. ''Oh God, I can't breathe!''

Garrett tried to look up toward Steph, servos in his neck whining in protest at the angle. He caught just a glimpse. Up ahead, Steph was having troubles of his own; his clothing seemed to be disintegrating, white fur bursting up underneath it. Everyone else Garrett caught in that glimpse seemed to be having some outlandish thing happening to them too, too many and too strange for him to process in that split second he had available.

Then Garret's vision cut off as his eyelids fused shut into the smooth, unbroken hull of the underside of the AT-AT's cockpit-head. A moment later vision returned in a kaleidoscopic burst of sensory input; Garrett would have screamed if he'd been able. ''My eyes! Where are my eyes!?'' He could see everywhere at once and couldn't process any of it. He could only stagger ponderously back a step, his limbs moving with unexpected strength and smoothness. ''Whirr''-chrt! ''Whirr''-chrt! It was the best possible replica AT-AT costume in existence now, and Garrett wanted ''out''. But his attempts to shift even the tiniest bit inside the solid metal shell failed, every part stuck solidly and directly to his skin. Fused with it. ''Becoming'' it.

And then the hollowness came. Garrett felt a hole open up inside his gut, swelling inside his abdomen and squeezing his vitals aside. Garrett's vision was disrupted just as it had started to coalesce again, panic flaring more brightly in his mind. ''Oh God Oh God Oh God...'' He could only set his legs and try to hold as steady as possible as the bubble spread up into his chest, up his throat, into his head...

''Ghoooood.'' The thought trailed off in a tumult of strange emotions and sensations. His guts were settling now, the final details pulling into their new configuration. He was empty inside, but what was left was ''solid.'' Strong. Steel. Or something like it, anyway... The hammering of his heart faded away, replaced with the unfamiliar, almost subliminal throb of some sort of power plant.

Vision returned again, more stable this time, but it didn't bring any clarity to the situation. Garrett stood stable on all four legs, round footpads planted firmly on the carpet right where he'd been when the change had first come upon him. But his body was an island of stability in a sea of chaos. All around him people were yelling and running around in terror, many of them no longer human. Garrett turned his head, the motion ponderous and not really necessary given his all-encompassing field of view but psychologically important for keeping his attention focused. ''Where's Steph?'' He didn't know what his friend could do about any of this, but it was a straw of hope to grasp for in the maelstrom.

Thunderous footsteps grabbed his attention. Something was coming, big and round and red-

Too fast. How could something so big move so fast? Garrett barely had time to move before the huge creature brushed past him, slamming against his side as it went. Garret's legs weren't jointed to deal very well with lateral movement and he staggered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced. Whirr, chrt, whirr, chrt, cHRT...

''FALLING!'' Garrett screamed in the form of bolts of light shooting from his chin to blast scorched pockmarks up the wall and ceiling, and slammed to the floor. A table crushed to splinters under him, cushioning what would otherwise have been a tremendously damaging impact, but still jarring. He felt a vestige of pain, which faded the moment it registered, leaving him numb.

Stunned, lying on his side, alone, ''empty''. Garrett wasn't sure if AT-ATs could faint, but he found himself doing a very good imitation of it.

== Steph's post-TF segment==

Steph was trembling and overwhelmed with confusion at what had happened to him, what had happened to everyone around him. But at the same time he felt strangely comforted cradled here by giant white-armored arms, even if he was getting pressed into the hard edge of a chest box, so he managed to keep the fear suppressed below blind panic. He had no idea ''why'' being held like that should have been comforting but for the moment he was willing to just go with it while he tried to straighten out what else had happened.

He hadn't noticed that Garrett wasn't keeping up with him until he'd heard that strange noise of protest. He'd turned around and there it had been, right before his eyes, the gaps between the pieces of Garrett's costume abruptly sealing up as the gray cloth underneath swelled to fill them. As Garrett ''himself'' swelled to fill them. Steph still wasn't sure which had done the changing, Garrett or his costume - was Garrett somehow trapped inside that thing? That had been his first thought, that the costume had somehow been magically replaced with a giant animatronic of fearsome quality.

But then he'd realized what was happening to him, and now he had no idea what was going on. His clothing was disintegrating, falling away into nothingness, and the skin underneath was sprouting a thick white pelt of fur. ''His'' skin, not some costume layered over top. He'd tried pulling on it and felt pain.

Steph wasn't entirely proud of what he'd done next; he'd let out a shriek that was equal parts surprise and alarm, turned away from his friend still struggling inside that developing machine's body, and had tried to run away.

'Tried' being the operative word. It wasn't just his skin that was changing, the size and shape of his entire body was warping. Steph had managed to stagger just a short distance before his shortening legs and enlarging feet tripped him up, sending him stumbling into broad white-caped back of one of the other conventiongoers. The man was ''huge'' - or rather, in hindsight, it was Steph who was shrinking - and absorbed the impact easily.

The man snapped "What?", spinning to confront Steph and reflexively reaching for his lightsabre. It was the white-armored Darth Vader Steph had been speaking with just moments earlier. The Sith Lord's mechanically augmented voice was deeper and more imperious, the armor more fully fleshed out.

Steph's eyes widened in alarm as he found himself craning his neck to look so far up at the man's masked face. "Heee," he gasped breathlessly, his own voice coming out a high-pitched squeak. "Heep!"

It felt like a lot of things were going on, but the biggest was the sense of falling. From increasingly high above SL-1984 watched him unreadably, reaching up to clamp one gloved hand on the opposite wrist, then letting go. Then Steph found himself on all fours, eyes level with a bit of detailing on the man's shiny white shin armor. No, lower than that. He let his joints lock and stood as if frozen.

Giant hands plunged from above and lifted him up out of harm's way just before the huge bulk of the Kool-Aid Man came barreling through the room.

There was a tremendous smash. "OH YEAH!"

"Fall back!" SL-1984 barked.

"Lord Vader!" Someone else nearby exclaimed. Then there was a burst of blaster fire followed by another crash.

Steph couldn't handle it all; he'd simply gone limp and allowed himself to be carried as SL-1984 and the handful of Stormtroopers that had been close at hand retreated from the chaos erupting inside the room. They'd taken up a defensive position in a short hallway just outside, apparently leading to a utility closet of some sort and devoid of any other activity.

It gave them a few minutes' respite and as the shock wore off Steph began to tremble. In the midst of everything that was going on SL-1984 had apparently forgotten that he was holding Steph, but the movement drew his attention back to his immediate surroundings again and he looked down. "So you were a Hoojib after all."

Steph felt his rabbitlike ears lay down flat against his back and the long, flexible tendril that sprouted between them curled tightly in an unfamiliar reflex. ''I never heard of them until just minutes ago!'' Steph tried to object, but he wasn't even able to produce a squeak that time; his mouth no longer seemed to be connected to his trachea and all he could do was let out a small snort.

SL-1984 seemed to get the message well enough anyway, though. "Yes, I suppose that's my fault. Well, what else would you call yourself?" He knelt down and lowered Steph back down, hands wrapped all the way around his ribcage like he was carrying a cat, to deposit him on the floor.

Steph huddled there on all fours, digging the claws on his fingers and toes into the carpet as he looked up in nervous awe at how gigantic everything was. He had a momentary overpowering desire to be picked back up again, he just didn't feel ''safe'' being so small, but he forced it down and tried to focus inward. His body was indeed quite a bit like a bunny's, just as had been described, but with longer fur and long, splayed, birdlike toes on his feet. Frustratingly, his ''hands'' were more like a rabbit's, or maybe a dog's - useless clawed, padded paws with stubby fingers he could barely wriggle independently. There were thumbs, sort of. Maybe dewclaws. They could just about manage grasping, or at least bending far enough that the finger pads met the big pad, but he couldn't stand without them. His face had a blunt, leathery Koala nose, and his tiny mouth was hidden in the fur underneath it. Probing with his surprisingly long tongue, he couldn't even feel any teeth.

He had to admit, he was ''exactly'' like he'd pictured a Hoojib looking like. His vision blurred as his enormous brown eyes started filling with tears.

"Hey, now. Hey." SL-1984 seemed very distracted, bringing one hand up against the side of his helmet and pacing a few steps away to stare intently at nothing visible.

''I didn't want to be here,'' Steph thought miserably to himself. ''I just want to be home.''

"Don't we all," murmured the stormtrooper crouched nearest him. It was a breach of squad discipline, of course, but everyone was too busy with their own troubles to notice. Steph himself wouldn't realize the more important fact that the stormtrooper had actually ''heard'' him until much later on.

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus1.jpg]]

Something lithe and feline and clad in ruffles chose that moment to slink past the dead end where the little group held their position. It paused to stare at them with unblinking green eyes, then opened its mouth and hissed furiously. The occupants locked their blaster rifles into position, but one of the troopers, raising an arm to check them, snapped, "Hold your fire! Establish intent, ''then'' act!"

The cat-thing flattened its ears back against its head, looking spooked, then continued on its way at a slightly faster pace.

It was quiet. SL-1984 was the first to move. He pulled off one white glove, exposing a prosthetic hand that gleamed like bronze. It was all but skeletal, sparse of detail with only the transparent synthetic "muscles" keeping it from looking like metal bones. He turned it over before his mask and flexed the fingers gently, then covered it again. "I thought as much," he said in a low rumble, both resigned and keeping what might have been anger under tight control. "Is that how it is? Fine."

"Sir?" The speaker was a trooper with the breather hood, oversuit, and specialized armor of a snowtrooper, the same trooper who had told the others not to shoot. He broke position to stand closer to SL-1984, keeping himself oriented towards the opening to the dead end. "Sir, aren't you - Didn't you switch sides?"

"What? Oh. You, you're Shanda Pike?"

"I - yes, my lord," Pike said, voice firming. In the far distance something bellowed like a foghorn, forcing the trooper to speak louder. "My husband John and I share duties as Squad Leader. He's not here now, sir. I'm the only member of the squad's command staff present."

"Use my designation, Pike. I did leave the Empire, but I am still part of this squad. You're a squad leader, I'm not, that means - damn." SL-1984 went quiet. The constant rhythm of his mechanically-assisted breath was quieter and not as harsh as it was for 'classic' Darth Vader, but it could still be heard, even over the background noise.

"Sir? Something wrong?"

"You're not a ma'am." SL-1984 crossed his arms just underneath his chest box. There was a smile in his artificial voice.

Pike hesitated for several breaths. "Beg pardon?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." SL-1984 chuckled and uncrossed his arms to hook his thumbs into his belt. He was definitely more amused than was appropriate for a man who'd just gone on life support and become a quarter of a century older. "You're a man. You can't keep a wallet in your codpiece anymore. I suppose it makes sense... snowtroopers are specialized stormtroopers, and we don't generally admit women into the trooper academies... Who - yes, everyone in here's a trooper. Ursala, Crystal, Sky - You're all men. No worries, Shad, Jeff, you're men too. Heh. Well, this should make things interesting. Heh. That's... that's actually kind of funny."

"Oh." The snowtrooper waited. The other three had reacted, but a muffled crash from out there had brought them back into position, watching with ready blasters. For a moment, Pike sounded unnaturally calm, as if this was a situation he'd been trained for. "You're right. I hoped you were wrong, sir, but you're right." Another moment passed as SL-1984 crossed his arms again and laughed quietly; one by one every other helmet in the alcove turned towards Pike. Even Steph, huddled pitifully on the floor with his eyes glazed, looked up.

"Fusst you. ''Fusst'' you, you - you ''Sithspawn''. Stop laughing." He stepped forwards, getting into the Vader's faceplate. "''This isn't funny'', Nineteen Eightyfour. This is a ''big'' problem that goes past us, and it's only going to get bigger. And apparently I can't swear. So ''don't laugh.''" The outburst was quiet but unmistakeable. Pike kept his back straight as he added, rather sarcastically, "Sorry, sir. Momentary lapse in personal discipline."

"It won't happen again," SL-1984 agreed in a more serious tone. "Consider it corrected. You're in charge, I suppose. We're going to need a plan..." He trailed off, head coming up as if he'd heard something. "No. Oh, no. ''Hell'' no. How is that even ''possible?''" The white-clad Vader's voice was as low as it could get.

Down on the floor, forgotten until that moment, Steph was mute. Still, he tried. ''What? What is it?'' Pike echoed the sentiment, raising his blaster.

This time, SL-1984 didn't respond to either of them. He stepped forwards, turning his head as if searching. "...I can't let that happen," he said at last, more to himself than anyone else. "I don't even want to think about that. Gravitational pull alone could - and even if it didn't, the superlaser - wrong hands, there aren't even any ''right'' ones - I ''won't'' let that happen."

''Let what happen? What's going on?''

SL-1984 turned the corner at a dead run and was gone. Bitterly Pike muttered, "No way we'll be able to keep up with him. We should have at least synched our comm frequencies. Okay. Let's do that now. Frequency - Aurek Corellia Delta." Almost as one, the troopers switched to the same comm channel. "We can't stay here. First priority is finding the rest of Tampa Bay; once we've done that we can worry about what in the nine hells is going on. I know where my - my husband is, or should be at the moment. We have to start from there."

The snowtrooper continued to speak aloud, nervous energy spilling into his voice. "This is not going to be a blue milk run, boys. We can't afford to waste any time; everyone move fast and don't get distracted. We ''must'' regroup, or we are lost. I'm on point; Shad, you're at the rear. Sing out if something happens to you, even if it looks like we've seen it. We can ''not'' afford to leave anyone behind! Blasters to stun; Ursala, lower the setting on your forcepike. Nothing turns a crowd into a mob faster than a death, and ''don't ask me how I know that''. Let's move out!" Pike headed out at a rapid march, followed by the other five.

In the dead end, Steph hunkered, forgotten.

==Red Guard==

Everything was darkness and confusion and helpless nausea. When the world fell out from under her it took her stomach with it. Gravity meant nothing; she felt as if she was falling, spinning on the worst amusement park ride ever imagined. A timeless period later she tasted blood and realized that she'd bitten the inside of her lip.

And then the world was back, or one very much like it. Struck by the very physical sensation of falling, even though she could feel her boots firmly planted on the floor, Anj instinctively assumed a defensive crouch, opening eyes that she hadn’t remembered closing.

She could see! She could hear! Long ago Anj had gotten used to the way the Red Guard helmet cut her visibility and muffled all sound; it was inevitable, after all. She’d all but stopped noticing. Now, though – now the flattened ovoid of the visor was still there, but a little smaller, and the space around it was no longer dark.

She could see as well and as much as she could when bareheaded, and all sounds were crisp and clear, not muffled in the least. It wasn’t that the helmet was gone; even though it was cool to the touch and non intrusive she could feel it, tight against the contours of her face, pressing against her skin with only a few gaps to let air circulate. But the inside, so close that her eyelashes brushed a smooth surface every time she blinked, was full of light and color and motion. For a moment it was completely disorienting.

Training kicked in as she glanced frantically from one thing to the next. These were the screens in her helmet. They negated the disadvantage of having an enclosed faceplate. The ones on the sides gave her left and right views. This lowest monitor, the short wide one, was her peripheral display. It showed her what was in back. Her aural pickups caught sound and relayed it into her ears in such a way that she could determine the source and how distant it is. They also blunted the effects of sonic weaponry. The analysis calmed her, steadied her, and she could finally pay attention to what she saw in front of her.

It took a moment to realize that these were the same furries who'd been grouped together before. They barely bore any resemblance to any fursuits she had seen, ever – even the best of the best had always looked artificial. Wet, flickering eyes with fully mobile eyelids, subtle facial expressions, a mouth that did more than open and close, pawhands that did not look like gloves, skin that shivered, fur that sprouted from the skin, muscles and tendons moving beneath it, toes that splayed against the ground, tails and ears that moved silently and with purpose – admittedly she wasn't exactly involved with the furry scene, but in all the conventions and events she had ever attended she had never seen a fursuit that still looked real up close. Not when she compared a costume to a real animal. Some things just couldn’t be faked.

Yet the people she saw before her, gasping and touching themselves and looking wildly about… Some were more or less humanlike than others, but one or two looked like nothing less than bipedal wild animals with slightly altered forelimbs and faces. The inarticulate confused things that they said were not in the voices of men or beasts, but a combination of both. They ''breathed'', they ran wet tongues over bestial teeth and ductile lips, they staggered on well-formed legs, their faces and body language reflected shock and disbelief and joy and horror and sudden fear. More than one turned a hybrid face towards the Red Guard.

Training once more came to the fore, and she welcomed it. No one to protect but herself, that was good. She needed to be cautious. They were disorganized and might not mean any harm, but as a whole they looked to be on the verge of blind panic. With her armor on, TR-1407 could probably survive being trampled, but she wouldn't like it. Anj took half a step backwards and stumbled – her feet, her legs seemed bigger and heavier than they should have been, and her center of gravity had shifted. Her balance had changed completely. She compensated even as the realization hit her that something was fundamentally different. The costume was tight, but ''beneath'' it-

Set off, either by her motion or by the low, coughing feline roar uttered by one of them, the furries split. Hooves and paws pounded the carpet as they ran, most of them headed ''away'' from TR-1407, but a gazelle and a zebra sprang past her, giving her a wide berth. She had half turned to stare after them in bewilderment when her spine chilled and she saw something huge and white and blue in one of her helmet screens.

Reacting almost instantly, TR-1407 jerked out of the way, her arms reflexively following through on the motion and swinging the tip of her weighty forcepike into contact with her assailant. It connected solidly, making a tiny crackling noise that was all out of proportion to the effect.

Momentum kept it going, but the enormous white tiger’s leap ended gracelessly as it lost consciousness. It hit the floor with an impact that looked painful and lay limp, flat red tongue sticking out of its fanged, slack mouth. Anj looked from it to the forcepike clasped in her gloved hands.

The stun module mounted on the vibro-edge head at the very tip gleamed dully. Fully extended, the weapon was two meters from the thin tip past the black grip to the weighted base, and it was much, ''much'' heavier than it had been before, maybe seven or eight kilograms - Seven. It was regulation-issue, so it definitely weighed seven kilos - but it felt ''right'' in her hands, sleek and balanced. Perhaps it wasn’t as elegant and deadly as a lightsaber, but here was a weapon that could kill or incapacitate, equally effective in pitched battle or nonlethal crowd control. Set to maximum it could tear through the hull of a starship or take off a man's arm at the shoulder; set to the lower setting and it could knock out a grown Wookiee. Or, apparently, a leaping tiger. That thought brought her back out of contemplation.

“…Yeah. What was that?” Anj’s eyelashes brushed her visor as she blinked. Something weird had happened to the helmet speaker. Normally it just relayed her voice; it distorted it just a little bit, making it slightly tinnier and more mechanical, but that was all. It didn’t ''change'' her voice, not really. It made it a bit less feminine, but it was still recognizable as ''hers''.

But something had happened to that speaker. This wasn’t her voice; this was nothing like it, in fact. The speaker was making her sound like an entirely different person. Why in the Emperor's name-

Focus! Were all local threats neutralized? What about her assailant? Anj moved closer and crouched to examine the white tiger. It was huge, easily three meters from the tip of its tail to its whiskered muzzle. Why meters and not feet? Feh, that wasn't important. At first glance it looked almost exactly like the tranquilized big cats that she'd seen on documentaries, down to the rapid, heavy way its sides heaved as it breathed. The only immediate oddity was the fact that it seemed to be wearing ''clothes'' – something like a tube top and close-fitting boxers, both pale blue.

But another moment showed her that it – no, she, for there was a suggestion of breasts in that tube top – had forepaws that would do poorly for bearing weight. They were long, the fingers well formed with prominent thumbs. Her head also bore hair, short and pattered in the same way as the striped fur, but distinct. No tiger looked like ''that''.

Around her thick neck, too, there was a strap holding a disposable camera…

TR-1407 tensed up as another cold tingle swept up her spine, glancing automatically towards a particular section of wall. Almost immediately that section bowed inwards, breaking with a wild shower of plaster and bricks as something almost spherical burst through, pudgy fists clenched, cubes ricocheting against each other and the interior as red liquid sloshed.

“'''OH YEAHHH!'''”

Apparently she, or the world, had gone mad. Even as the thought flashed through her mind, Anj was acting, one-handedly drawing her blaster rifle - where had that come from, she hadn't brought a blaster trooping today - from where it was holstered beneath her robes and firing.

The blaster bolt - it wasn't supposed to ''work''! - hit a curved, transparent surface that absorbed the energy, heating and deforming slightly. On the inside, bubbles formed at the site and floated rapidly up to the top; barely a second later they had stopped and the melted region had returned to its former unblemished state.

The – whatever it was – adjusted its footing as the three frosted translucent cubes floating inside of it rattled and clinked. Below them the lacquered black indents that served as sketchy facial features - eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a wide smiling mouth, all highly stylized – moved to assume an expression that looked like furious, homicidal joy. Its short arms, placed in relation to its eyes where ears would have been on a humanoid, reached towards the Red Guard, fingers twitching as if to fix around her neck.

Anj fired twice more, with the same minimal result – small parts of the clear surface melted and re-formed, a little of the liquid boiled up without lowering the level within, and the thing displayed anger. It was walking, short legs with their rounded toeless feet looking ridiculous under its bulk, but slowly. She didn't know if it was limited to that speed or it was deliberate. Anj felt another chill on her spine and knew, in a burst of insight, that that didn't matter. It could gather itself and leap hard and fast enough to cover nearly four meters in an eyeblink, breaking through anything in its way. She was almost in range of such a leap.

Still, it couldn't jump several times in succession. If she moved now, she could leave it behind. It looked like – it looked completely impossible. Like a round-bellied pitcher, entirely hollow and complete with flared spout and glass handle, low-set arms and legs stuck on like an afterthought. It was filled, limbs included, with a translucent red liquid - she could see ''through'' it even if the other side was distorted. Somehow Anj thought she’d seen it or something like it before, but just by ''existing'' it was an affront to reality. It couldn’t ''possibly'' stand upright on those small featureless feet, and as for moving! It had no skeletal structure, no visible muscles or joints, it was ''an anthropomorphic pitcher of'' punch, ''how'' could it move?!

TR-1407 shoved her blaster back into its holster on her leg. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and she had no desire to be killed by it. Time to go. Yet something stopped her.

The tiger furry was still out cold. She was only slightly further from the pitcher than Anj was, and the Red Guard had no reason to doubt that the thing was willing to take out its frustration on whatever couldn’t get out of the way.

Even so.... Abruptly TR-1407 recalled her training on Yinchorr, where they had tried to pound stormtrooper training out to make way for something a little different. There'd been the hierarchy of service. Empire above all, Emperor, ranking staff and those she had been assigned to protect, peers and those of lower rank, Imperial citizens, everyone else. For these, she would lay down her life. There was a mantra in that somewhere, so ingrained that it was a part of her, essential enough that she was slow to register that it was completely new.

Yes, the tiger had leaped at her and she had reacted as if under attack, stunning it. And on the scale of people she needed to protect, attackers ranked somewhere below saving herself. However, she had no way to know if that leap really had been an act of aggression. What to do...

Indecision lasted for only a split second. It made no difference if she was or wasn't attacked, that thing's in danger because I put her there. So Anj would get her out. Didn't matter how ridiculous the situation is, she still had a duty. TR-1407 changed her stance, gripped her forcepike in both hands and held it before her in ready position.

If the pitcher thing had been any faster she would have been caught while thinking, but it was forced to shuffle forwards to get within range. She had the feeling that it could only run with any speed if it still had the momentum from a leap. Anj readied herself and thumbed the setting as it tensed to spring.

“'''OH ''YEAHHH!'''''”

Although she’d known this was going to happen, TR-1407 was still surprised at its speed. Barely in time, she dived and rolled under it the instant before it hit. When it landed it did so on three points, splintering the floor underneath it and making everything around tremble with the impact.

Spinning to face it again, Anj swung one-handed and smashed the forcepike's tip into her opponent's body. This time a sharp ''crack!'' rang through the air; as it spun to face her she adjusted her grip and swung the heavy weapon in a high vertical stroke, then again, horizontal, hitting the curved glassy surface ''hard''. The sound was high and sharp, both unpleasant and nearly musical.

There was the tingle again, strong and focused. Acting with it the Red Guard dodged a flailing arm and struck once more, to the left of center, then tried to get some distance between herself and the target, stepping back. Almost immediately she smacked into the wall, hard enough to thump her armor. Damn, her situational awareness had slipped! As she recovered and tried again to pull away she almost fell over her own feet, once more becoming aware that something was ''different''. There'd been a bit of a bounce where no bounce should be, not on a woman. Fortunately her stumble went unnoticed.

The pitcher thing looked at first glance to be unaffected; if it had been made out of durasteel every impact would have left great rents, but its shape was intact and it hadn't stopped moving. On second glance TR-1407 saw the white fractures that were spiderwebbed dramatically across the surface.

She kept her visor pointed squarely at its enraged lacquered eyes, holding her forcepike up in an unvoiced threat.

The indents that appeared to be eyebrows lowered and drew together as it frowned slowly. Across its sketchy features a white fracture, which had started to gradually fill in, lengthened and widened again with a sound that reminded the Red Guard of thin ice on the surface of a pond.

The pitcher thing’s right arm began to leak, red liquid forming drops and pattering down into the carpet. The glass there, thinner than on its curved body, had all but shattered, and repaired itself only slowly. Slowly, the thing’s eyes slid from its arm to Anj’s visor.

“Press me and you’ll be dead,” she warned, not knowing if it could understand her or not, talking slowly and evenly. “I can keep this up faster than you can fix yourself.” Her grammar had gotten a little mangled. The message was obvious nonetheless.

“I can throw a grenade into you and vaporize your contents. I can sweep your legs out from under you and shatter them so you can’t stand. Once I’ve done that, I can smash you into a thousand shards, which I can then scatter.” Even as she said the words, noticing again that the voice saying these words was not hers, she was confident that this was not an empty threat. Interfere with an Imperial Red Guard in the performance of his duty and you’re coming off second-best, she knew.

TR-1407 advanced half a step and brought her forcepike into ready position. The pitcher thing’s eye indents became larger, then smaller again. A sense of rage so strong that it was palpable radiated off of it, but it had sense enough to know a hopeless fight. Still dripping, it shuffled backwards and began to turn ponderously. A moment later, and it bounded away through another wall with a shower of plaster. The Red Guard watched through the hole it left until she was satisfied that it wasn't going to come back.

Hah. Straightening, Anj looked over the comatose tiger once more. Her white-furred flanks had been decorated with a coat of dust and plaster fragments, but the furry had escaped harm.

Now what? The immediate danger was past, but TR-1407 knew better than to assume that things were safe now. The tiger was still out and would likely remain that way for an hour or so. Anj wasn’t going to stay around guarding her. Duty to comrades outweighed duty to strange nonhumans who might have attacked her and weren't even Imperial citizens. Some of her responsibility had been discharged just now, but she knew one way to make a stunned sentient recover faster.

It took a bit of searching - and a moment of staring at her own gloved hands, which appeared to be bigger than she remembered - to find the site where the stun module in her forcepike had hit; the tiger’s fur was thick enough that the little bruised patch of skin was hidden. It was on the furry’s muscular upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Anj closed the tiger’s jaws with an effort, then took a handful of her crimson robes and pressed it against the furry’s nose, plugging the nostrils with the tips of her fingers. She counted slowly to ten and jabbed the bruised patch with the armored knuckles of her free hand, hard. The angle was too awkward for it to be a punch.

Almost immediately the white tiger started to make throaty sounds of complaint, fingers and ears twitching. Anj peeled back a furred eyelid and saw the pupil of the blue eye contract.

That would probably do it. Not willing to be there when the tiger woke up, TR-1407 walked away, almost stumbling on legs that were longer than they should have been. Despite the exertion, Anj's breath had been only slightly quickened. Without that pressure to act, she felt strange. Okay. Okay. Now to find someplace private and try to make sense of all this…

==Steph comes out of hiding==

Steph had been passive until now - almost comatose, for that matter. Events had swept along too rapidly and too outlandishly for him to get much of a grip. But now he realized he couldn't stay that way any longer. The strangely protective presence of the huge armor-clad people was gone. He was just a Hoojib huddled on the floor, and if he didn't get a grip - didn't get ''moving'' - who knew what horrors would catch him?

First there was simply learning how to walk. He wobbled and wavered on his altered limbs, looking for all the world like a drunk bunny staggering fresh from a bender at a Midtral bar. But the reflexes were embedded somewhere in his shrunken Hoojib brain and they came out quickly once he started using them. Keeping huddled against the wall for some modicum of concealment Steph crept back up the short hallway to peer out into the room he'd come from.

It was hard to comprehend what he was seeing at first. His senses had been distorted just as much as his body, his perspective just a few inches of the floor. The scent of smoke in the air was almost buried under the other less identifiable smells Steph's enhanced nose was picking up. His enormous ears were catching more sounds than he knew what to do with, and there was an even weirder sense he couldn't even put into words... But his vision was still quite clear and comprehensible, at least. Most of the tables had been upended in the rush as people had fled, scattering a lot of junk on the floor.

''Excellent,'' he thought to himself. ''Cover.'' As soon as the coast seemed relatively clear Steph bounded out across the floor, not quite running and not quite hopping, shelter under the nearest upright table. The space under the tablecloth was still cavernous at his scale, but much better than the soaring vastness of the room outside or even the hallway. He paused there to gather his wits and figure out what he was doing.

''Get it together, Steph. First thing to do, find Garrett.'' It would be easier thought than done, though - he hadn't gone far but the changes to everything had disoriented him. Where had he left his friend?

And would he recognize him when he found him? Steph's ears and antenna perked up, nose twitching nervously, as something large came moving through the room outside his shelter. Larger even than a normal human, heavy footfalls thudding solidly on the thin carpet... Steph would have whimpered had he been able to make any actual sounds. ''Oh God, please don't find me, I don't want to be eaten by a... whatever...''

The footfalls came to an uncertain stop nearby. "Huh?" It rumbled, voice deeply guttural and deeply confused. "No find... what?"

This time Steph ''did'' notice the coincidence between his own thoughts and the creature's words. ''Can he read my mind? Wait, no... am ''I'' telepathic? I don't believe it! But that Vader guy said Hoojibs were telepathic-''

"Who's there?" The big creature bellowed, and for a moment Steph found himself caught in a confusing mental tangle as he tried to stifle the volume of his thinking. His antenna curled and he had to force himself ''not'' to speculate about the appendage's psionic functions for fear of being overheard. It was an impossible task.

Fortunately there were still plenty of other distractions out there, and after only a few seconds the sound of frantic sheep bleating in the distance drew the attention of whatever it was that was standing nearby. "Hah!" it grunted, lumbering off with some new unknown purpose in mind. Steph let out a tiny sigh of relief.

''Okay, so I guess I'm glad I can still communicate somehow... assuming that wasn't all just a coincidence,'' he thought. No one was nearby to confirm it and he gave a snort of derisive amusement. ''God, so much to figure out! Take this one thing at a time. So I turned into a Hoojib. If everyone else has turned into what they were dressed as too...'' He shook his head. It made too little sense, he couldn't get his mind around it.

Would Garrett still be inside that cardboard-turned-metal shell he was wearing? Steph hoped he'd got out of it somehow, but if he hadn't... Cautiously poking his head out from under the tablecloth and peering around to check for danger first, Steph forced himself to dart deeper into the room.

His attention immediately went to a heap of detritus, taller than he was, that had formed against a ragged mass that had been a tabletop mere minutes ago. Some of it had obviously been ''on'' the table, originally - graphic novels were strewn everywhere, many of them burnt. Pages had collected here, and other things as well, probably kicked into place in the rush. Great tufts of fur, bits and pieces of clothing, food scraps that had escaped from trash cans, tablecloths, splintery pieces of other tables - Steph shuffled closer, then thought to wonder why it had drawn his attention. This was not the only pile of trash scattered around the room - there had been several filled trash cans, even this early in the day - and none of ''them'' were all that interesting.

It was like this one was tugging at him - specifically, his antenna. He could feel it sort of warming in response. No, 'tugging' wasn't quite the word - it was almost a smell, but not quite that either. Something about it was comforting.

Steph snorted. ''Why am I so interested in a pile of trash?'' It wasn't food, that was for sure. There was tons of food in the room, mostly from upended trash cans, and the smell was ''everywhere''; spilled soda and cheap beer, a salad with dressing, corn chips, a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich that was starting to go bad, applesauce, Skittles, an entire box of donuts. And that was just in this room. None of it appealed to him - the smell was just ''there'', like the ink on the comic books. His mouth wasn't even watering. He wasn't even sure if he still had salivary glands.

If he was quick about it, it wouldn't hurt to check. Steph climbed gingerly atop the pile, long toes curling to grip at an abandoned canvas bag full of hard objects. The feeling was coming from here. Still uncertain - he felt so ''exposed'' - he scraped at some wet pages that had stuck together.

''There! What's that?'' Something hard, probably plastic, and just a little smaller than his head. Steph sat on his haunches, freeing him to draw whatever it was up. His hands - his ''paws'' - did grasp but were frustratingly stiff and insensitive, making the job take longer than it should have.

Steph's ears quivered. More footsteps approaching! Where was the best place to hide? Taking a step forward - a much more complicated action than it had been when he'd had two legs - he felt his toes flex on the thing. ''Maybe...''

He was going to get caught out in the open if he didn't hide ''now''. Steph hobbled on three legs into the dubious shelter of another table, this one apparently intact, though missing its covering. Edging behind a pile of plastic boxes that had probably once held statuettes, Steph ducked his head under his belly and took a look at his prize, clutched in the wiry toes of his foot. That foot distracted him - earlier, he'd paid much more attention to what had happened to his hands.

His feet were so huge that when he stood in the position that came most naturally the clawed tips of his toes were level with his elbows. They really did look something like bird's feet, covered in slightly wrinkly grayish skin rather than scales or more white fur, though not like any bird he'd seen. More importantly, they were at least somewhat better than his paws at flexing and holding things.

He'd misjudged how far away the footsteps were; that, or the one making the footsteps hadn't moved in a straight line. Now they pounded past, not as heavy as the big creature or even the stormtroopers but very quick. He could hear a girl's voice spouting a steady stream of "OW OW OW get OFF AHH OW" sprinkled with invective, and as she raced past Steph saw a pair of towering stockinged legs pumping. Something smaller and greenish clung to one of them, but they were both gone before he could get a better look.

Not everything was out to get him. Good to know.

The thing that he'd picked up turned out to be a cell phone, the kind that flipped open. It tingled and sort of thrummed pleasantly to Steph's antennae, a comforting feeling. He set it down and wrestled it open with a certain amount of difficulty, knowing that this wasn't helping him find Garrett but telling himself that he'd only be another minute.

The phone was on, and its screen glowed. Not entirely certain about just what he was doing, Steph put his face up so close that the phone's wallpaper blurred out of focus and felt his antennae uncoil completely to touch the screen.

It was a nice feeling. A very nice feeling. Steph closed his eyes and leaned into it for a long moment, sighing almost inaudibly through his nose. He could feel it moving up into his head and body. It felt ''good''.

His eyes snapped open. ''What am I doing? Damn it.'' Steph peeled his head away and heard the phone chirp the low power alert before the screen went black. ''What was that? What was I - didn't the Vader guy say something about eating energy? Damn it, I wish I'd paid more attention.''

He whipped his head around. That ''tugging'', a little like a smell, a little like feeling heat through his antenna, it was back. He could sense something interesting, several somethings, most about as big and as interesting, scattered around the room. More phones? Maybe dropped cameras?

For the third time Steph sensed something moving, and close. Still hidden under the table and behind boxes, he pressed himself against the wall. It was moving in a different direction than the other two, and it was - it was ''right on the other side of that wall!''

He shot out from under the table, smacking one gigantic ear against a table leg, and froze against a pile of rags, out in the open. The ceiling yawned high above, he was exposed - but nothing was going to collapse on him.

This turned out to be unnecessary. Whatever it was, it kept moving. He could barely hear its footsteps, and he might not have noticed - now that he was listening, this wasn't the only set of footsteps - but he could sense it as a sort of interesting moving heat.

''Wait.'' Steph's ear was stinging. ''How would I know anything about whatever was running except how big it is? Unless'' - His eyes were huge, and when he crossed them above his nose he could sort of see the blurred, doubled shape of that antenna, arcing above his head. ''What, can Hoojibs sense electricity too? Or what, robots? This is just weird.''

Now that he thought about it - there were a lot of other interesting warm things. Warm wasn't really the word, maybe... maybe ''powered''. Some were small, others larger. Some were moving. It was the same sense, now that he thought about it, that he'd gotten from his rescuer. Same sense as from the phone, but the big things, the moving ones, he could feel through the walls and over a distance.

He could feel... Up ahead. Something big, something motionless. Steph wasn't at all sure what direction he'd been going even before he'd literally run into SL-1984, but it seemed like this might be the right way. Hesitantly at first, then with more and more certainty, he followed the antenna.

''There.'' It couldn't be anything else. Even on its side, two right legs sticking out rigidly into open air with only rubble keeping it from lying flat, it loomed up above Steph, head hanging down at a thirty degree angle, resting on what looked like the buckled remains of a chair. The powered sense here was much, ''much'' stronger than anything he'd felt coming from any of the dropped electronics. There was enough power thrumming in it that even from here his antenna was warm. He had to fight off the lulling feeling that came with it.

It didn't look remotely human. From Steph's perspective, it took a moment to recognize it as an AT-AT. He moved closer, tentative.

Each round footpad had four thick toe flaps. These were slowly, very slowly, swinging out and in on their hinges. The toe flap articulation was so minimal that they couldn't point straight out. The motion looked aimless.

''Garrett?'' he tried. ''I still don't know if this really works or not... Garrett? Are you in there? Can you hear me?''

Steph shuffled closer. ''What do I do now? I don't know how telepathy works. Or if you could hear it. Or if I even ''have ''it. Or if he's here.'' The AT-AT's boxy head was bigger than his whole body. ''I could probably fit into a shoebox, so that doesn't mean much. God. I probably'' can ''fit into a shoebox.'' The head had a dark horizontal slot running across the very front, like a very narrow visor or something. On either side of it were two bulging domes like flattened compound eyes, each housing a slender pipelike structure. Its chin had two more, slightly larger pipelike things, fixed forwards.

Closer. Steph rose shakily onto his hindquarters, almost pitching over as he overcompensated. His toes splayed against the ground strongly enough that if he kept perfectly still he could almost, ''almost'' stand up, though his ankles started to burn the moment he straightened them and his knees refused to unbend. Ignoring that, he stared into that slot, vertical since the thing was on its side. It was mostly opaque, but he could sort of see... were those chairs? ''A room? No, a cockpit.''

His breath fogged the view and cleared slowly.

''Garrett? It's me. Steph.'' That black slot was reflective enough that from this angle, looking right into it from as high up as he could get without finding something to stand on, he could see himself. Big, ''big'' eyes, barely on this side of being appealing rather than grotesque, huge ears, both long and wide, that flagged behind him but wouldn't stand straight up. A bulbous black nose, the mouth beneath it so small that fur around the edges made it look like a pit, and that antennae, curling like a fern. He hadn't exactly seen himself before.

Steph was distracted enough that he didn't register as the thrumming increased in tempo. He almost missed one of the pipes - the medium blasters on the temples - as it swiveled slowly to point directly at him.

==Steph and Garrett==

An alert came on and pinged, setting the other systems into motion.

Something huge and white loomed up against his head, almost touching his command viewport, and he reactivated. The white thing - some kind of animal, details were popping in like graphics on an overworked PC - flinched and fell back, and seemed to shrink as the rest of his vision started loading, quickly from a cold start instead of little by little. There was sound, or something like sound, and words, or something close, but he already had plenty of them, and the ones he had were louder.

There was movement from the white animal, he could see now that it was only very big, not huge, and it suddenly traveled a hundred meters away in a few shuffling steps. It seemed to be clinging to a wall that he was pressed against.

Something was wrong. His vision was still loading, everything that wasn't right in front of his head was still glossy smooth and sparse of detail, but he could see that nothing was at the right angle - oh. Oh. He'd fallen over. That explained why there was nothing under his footpads and no weight on his legs, too. Reorienting, he managed to figure out which way was "up". Vaulting high above him was a ceiling, higher up than the hold of a Star Destroyer should be, and there were walls. They seemed very far apart. Something was wrong with this.

Of course it was wrong! He'd fallen over! He was down, and anyone could climb up to get at a boarding hatch and ''at his crew!'' They must have been stunned by the impact, thrown against his bulkheads -

Alert and evacuate the crew! Why isn't that alarm on yet? Start it now!

Though he didn't have any speakers on his outside, as the prerecorded evacuation message started up internally he saw the white animal perk up, monstrous ears folding, cupping as if funneling sound to its head. If he was judging by how big it was compared to him, and he was, it was at least the size of, of - well, it was almost as big as his head, his ''moveable command section'', part of him said, and it was ''fast'' too, already advancing, covering three meters in a stride -

It was ''big'', it was ''fast'', it was already coming towards him, at any second now it was going to circle past his head and ''get in at his crew!''

'''NO!'''

He wasn't going to let that happen! With a supreme effort, the servos in his neck; his ''flexible armored tunnel''; jerked, pointing the two Taim & Bak MS-1 fire-linked heavy laser cannons at the animal. It froze, stared at him with ridiculously big brown eyes, and there was that almost-sound again, like it was saying his name, but it was still big and fast and a danger to his crew and it ''still'' hadn't moved.

His heavy laser cannons, mounted on either side of his chin, the underside of his moveable command section, were cold. It took a moment to muster the power he needed to warm up the lasers that heated the blaster gas in his cannon energizer. Several seconds passed.

While that was happening, the animal held still. As he fired both in tandem, it twitched out of his sights, and he couldn't re-orient in time. Nothing with legs should have been able to move as fast as it did. When he fired, the beams shot into a stretch of wall, impacting with a minor explosion. Texture popped in, and he saw that he'd left two dramatic black scars with a tiny flame guttering in each. Six seconds later and his heavies had recharged, but he didn't need them again so soon.

The animal was scared off, if only for the moment, and he had some time to catch his brea- no, that wasn't right. To lie helplessly on his side and try to regroup. For the moment, there was no further threat to the crew. Above the heavy laser cannons he had two fire-linked medium repeating blasters, useful for smaller, more agile threats, since they could swivel as needed. All he could do was heat those up, check the gas reserves for them and his heavies, send off a distress signal, and wait.

The signal took barely a second to set up and broadcast. It would, of course, be hours or days or more before anything came of it; that was how that went. He was a very valuable piece of equipment, and depending on the commander and the situation he might or might not be a high priority during a crisis.

Crew was more important than the question of where he was, how he'd gotten there, and how he'd get out of this. Without his crew... He turned his attention to his interior, remembering to watch in case the large animal returned.

Neither of the boarding hatches or any of his four escape hatches, or even the hatch to the vehicle bay, had been opened. He knew that. His atmospheric exchangers and filtration unit - part of the life-support systems built into his interior - were running a steady stream of breathable air through his passenger/troop section and command cockpit. He could feel it luffing across his deck.

A notice came up, that he was stressing the mechanisms in his neck, his ''flexible armored tunnel''. Slowly he lowered his head until it hit something and he was at that same angle he'd activated with. He could feel whatever it was, just barely. Just a sense that it was ''there'', nothing about hardness or softness or texture. This still wasn't good for his servos, but he couldn't do anything about that yet.

There was no movement in his interior. It was as if he didn't have any crew at all. That didn't really make sense, though. How could he be active without a crew? His drive motor shouldn't even be running.

Still nothing. At last, interior cams activated and he got a look at his insides. Both levels of his passenger/troop section were empty, without so much as a cleaning droid poking around. No one was in the maintenance shaft to his motor. There were several speeder bikes racked up like throwing darts back in his rear vehicle bay, and some gear in crates, disarrayed a little by the fall, but nothing that moved on its own. It made him feel vaguely uneasy to see all that.

Only one cam was in his tunnel. More of them were in and around his command cockpit. The seats for pilot and gunner, as well as the larger and more imposing one for the commander, were fixed to his deck, though they were adjustable and currently hanging from their bearings. He saw that very clearly; cams were positioned to fix on the faces of crew in the three essential stations, making it easier for them to send real-time messages or recordings on his holoprojector.

He saw the bulky shapes of the consoles that made up his mainframe. On them, status lights blinked or shone steady, and monitors glowed steadily. These were the displays made for his crew. Who, apparently, wasn't there, not even in the cockpit. That wasn't right. Even standing down, inactive in his berth, there should be at least one technician. And there wasn't so much as a fingerprint on a console or a stretch of flattened upholstery at any of the three essential stations. Like they'd never been touched. Not so much as a speck of dust either. Was he factory-new? Couldn't be. He knew that his hull was scored and dented, cosmetic damage that meant he'd seen action.

This was not good. Bad enough to be helpless on his side waiting for his crew to evacuate and send for backup, which presumably would at some point involve either retrieving him whole or in components or blasting him so that no one else could have him. Worse to be helpless on his side with no crew.

No crew. He'd skirted that phrase, because 'no crew' meant 'empty'. That was meaningless when he was inactive and a protocol breach when he was standing down, but he was live now, systems running, and he couldn't...

[This does not actually fit anywhere. I'll delete it when I'm sure I'm not going to use anything from it. "Autonomy, actualization, psyche emulation identity and personality emulation, records, software analog of organic-brain emotional response, and many others, often very similar."

There was one subroutine housed in one particular console, one last major program in the master computer, that hadn't gone live yet. No. Untrue on both counts. Several subroutines, many or most of them linked so that one could not be active without others. Currently there was only one running at optimum, but all were functioning at one level or another. There was a great deal of overlap among the many, many subsubroutines, and many redundancies, and it was altogether more complex and puzzling than any other set of programs. The console wasn't planned or built by the same mind as the rest of him.

It was unmarked, as far as he could tell, and set apart from the others. It had the normal complement of monitors and status lights, but only a few controls. From the lights, some systems were active, most weren't. He was not entirely sure what, if anything, it did.

Should he start it up now? It couldn't be essential. This would just burn power faster. But why not? He couldn't find any crew, so without autonomy he wasn't going to be able to do anything. Besides, his life support was running with no life to support, his hologram projection pod was live with nothing to receive, and he had readied everything in his drive motor even though he was hardly using it at all, what with being motionless. No crew meant no action, the moment when he'd fired at the large animal notwithstanding. He might as well. Power was rerouted, his drive motor sped up slightly to compensate, and bank after bank of status lights on the last console glowed to life.

Garrett jerked. ''Beep... beep... beep... beep...'' Automatically he reached out to swat at the alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock, and his leg just swung forward and back, smacking against something. He felt the impact dully as it traveled up into his body. It didn't really sound like an alarm clock, it sounded like - ''No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No contact on impulse terrain sensors. Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! No weight on knee joints! Warning! Stress on flexible armored tunnel! Warning!''

That meant - what that meant was that he was FALLING!

Garrett's legs churned forward and back, but hit rubble, unidentifiable heaps of trash. No. He wasn't falling, he was already down, and he'd figured that out already. He was already down, he remembered the fall and how it had started slow and then became much faster and then he'd hit the ground, and now he was ''on'' the ground, though he could barely feel what was underneath him.

The costume. That was it, that had to be it, the costume was keeping things from touching his skin. Yes. Under it, Garrett could feel things, his nerves hadn't all gone dead. As soon as he got it off, he'd be fine. That emptiness, that sickening hollow space inside, that would wear off. Yes. So would the feeling that he was somehow both stretched and compressed somehow. He just had to get the costume off.

The alarms in his cockpit were getting annoying, and nothing was happening with the evacuation alarm, so he disabled them. Indicators on monitors and bank after bank of status lights updated continuously, but they showed nothing he couldn't sense for himself except, perhaps, why the lights on the mystery console, already blinking in rapid patterns, went mad.

He wasn't breathing! He wasn't breathing! Whatever he used to breathe - diaphragm? Rib muscles? - was missing, his sides were totally rigid and immobile. It didn't hurt, but God, he couldn't breathe!

Garrett shuddered, or tried to. The seats at his three essential command stations readjusted convulsively, his flexible armored tunnel quivered, his medium blasters rocked, and his legs bent slightly where they met his drive motor and at the knee joints, toe flaps flicking up and down. Otherwise he didn't move. Just a costume, he told himself. A costume and maybe some highly illegal combination of substances which would make the University very unhappy. He hadn't knowingly taken anything, but that never made much difference with the staff. At the moment, the thought of Midtral kicking him out wasn't all that bad.

The console displays worked silently, making it much easier for crew to see just what was going on with him. One housed the housekeeping subroutines and displayed temperature and pressure readings, air supply, life support, lighting, and half a dozen other systems, both readings and controls, all for the places where crew would be. Most of that was locked to him, off limits, part of some security measure. More consoles were devoted to other things. Weaponry. Data from sensor arrays, holographic targeting systems, inside cams, impulse terrain sensors. The console for both of his KDY FW62 compact fusion drive systems, all the fiddly details that went with them and his fuel slug tank and blaster cannon energizer. Other consoles too, with purposes of their own. Most of them didn't appear to be connected, but under the deck each was linked by numerous thick cables, to each other and the rest of his body. They were, Garrett knew, what his brain had turned into.

After he took the costume off Midtral would kick him out for substance abuse, the way they also did with people who got weird piercings or large tattoos or got in the paper for suspicious reasons. It was in the college contract; people hated it, but no one had a legal leg to stand on. They would give him time to pick up his stuff and find a motel, and he and Steph could go together to that bar just off campus to complain and rage and drink. Later they could stagger back to the motel, and wake up side by side in the morning with matching hangovers, and both of them could claim to have no memory of the previous night. The first and last time he'd done it, he'd sworn never to do it again, and Steph had clutched his head and said "Never, ''ever'' again". But another all-night bender with his friend sounded a lot better now.

He laughed wildly - and silently except for a burst of static on the internal comms. On the - yes, it was the system the commander used to give orders to the troops, it might as well be an intercom, why not? The static was loudest from the hologram pod, loud enough to fill the cockpit. It was purely internal, with not one speaker on his outside. He didn't have to pause for breath. Static hissed and crackled through his intercom, rising in a snarl of terrible, meaningless sound that went on and on. Who was he kidding? Nothing was coming off, and he was so empty that the noise echoed around his internals. The static died down as he stopped, feeling sick.

Not breathing. This time the realization didn't spark panic. He felt hot and cold at once.

He couldn't get up. Oh, it was easy enough in theory, Garrett knew. Contract abdominal muscles. Prop up on one elbow. Curl knees in along the floor. Turn so that hands and knees are on the ground and body is above. Push off with hands and stand up. Such a pity that he couldn't do that.

Okay, focus, he told himself, trying desperately not to start laughing again. He was on his side, not quite flat. The pocked squares on the ceiling - it was a drop ceiling, part of him noticed - somehow looked ridiculously far distant, same with the walls, though he had no problem making out details. A few hundred meters away - no, that couldn't be right, but several times longer than his body - he saw an abandoned, tapering cylindrical plastic thing partially filled with clear liquid, somehow completely intact. "Aquafina", the label read. It looked like a water bottle. Although it was much smaller than he was and he was looking ''down'' to see it, it still seemed huge. Quite a bit larger than a man, almost the size of a speeder... or, yes, a car. But that couldn't be right.

It dawned on Garrett then that it wasn't that any of these things were too large. No, they were exactly as big as they were supposed to be. It was that ''he'' was too ''small''. He was - he was an AT-AT. The distance from footpad to back was supposed to be at least twenty, twenty-five meters. How many feet was that? Fifty, sixty? If he remembered right, the drop ceiling was supposed to be ten feet up, maybe less. Even if he was standing now, his back would only be halfway to that ceiling, if that. That wasn't right. Maybe it explained the compressed feeling, though.

Movement. The furry white animal was back, and although it was moving very cautiously it still seemed far too quick for something without repulsorlifts. Garrett decided that it was probably the size thing - it seemed as big as a bantha, or... or an elephant. Those weren't supposed to move like this. But the animal was close to the floor and far, far from the ceiling, so it was probably small. Now, he couldn't help noticing that it looked like a combination of various animals. Long haired cat, wading bird, field rabbit, maybe some kind of bug.

It was coming around from Garrett's other side, staying away from his heavies this time. Halfheartedly, he followed it with the swiveling medium repeating blasters on either side of his viewport - or rather, he followed it with one blaster, because the other was pressed by his weight against what looked like a magnified piece of canvas. It didn't seem worth the effort to fire. What was the point? He didn't have any crew to protect. He was ''empty''.

''So'' empty. It was the strangest feeling. A little bit like hunger, a little like cold, slightly nauseating, something like being touch-starved, and a ''lot'' like loneliness so strong that it was crippling. Somehow it was all of those things wrapped up together, with something he had no words for. Continued breathlessness didn't help. ''Empty.''

He tried to shudder again, with the same result as last time. The white animal froze where it stood, the weird curling thing on its head unbending partially.

''Garrett?''

He jerked.

Steph? he said, or tried to say. It came out as purely internal static, like the buzzing hiss of an analog TV on an empty channel. Just like when he'd had that moment of wild laughter earlier.

''Garrett, it's me, Steph. Can you hear me?''

I hear you, I hear you! More static. Was that really Steph? How? What had happened?

''Look, don't try to shoot me again. I don't want - Are you even in there? Somewhere?''

Yes. Yes, I'm here and I can hear you, he tried. Still no words. It was just static on his intercom.

''Look, if you're there, say something.''

I don't think I can, he tried. Static. The creature that said it was Steph had its huge ears cupped around its head again, but Garrett didn't think it was hearing him. The intercom was internal, the hatches were shut. And he was producing static.

He jerked the servos in the armored tunnel that had once been his neck, making his head bob. He had to fight gravity. It wasn't an easy motion, and although he couldn't see it himself, he knew it didn't look smooth.

''Do that again.''

Garrett did. Whatever was between his head and the ground, underneath the too-close canvas, made a weird sort of ''crunch''. He could barely hear it; it seemed soft and far away.

''Okay. Uh, okay. You can't talk, but you can hear me, right?''

A third time, and now he was getting faint complaints. He wasn't designed for this kind of activity, not small repetitive movements. If he kept this up, he'd start damaging the blaster on that side. After a moment, he swung one leg forward and back. A foreleg.

He couldn't see most of his body, but he could see his legs, sticking out rigidly, like he was a flipped card table. There was the joint where each leg met his body. The joint could swing the entire leg forwards and back, and spread the legs a little apart, independently, but the spreading had a very limited range and apparently he couldn't do it lying on his side. His legs were just too heavy; the joints weren't built for this. He had knee joints, and four toe flaps at the end of each leg. And there was some kind of wristlike joint between knee and footpad, where the end of the leg pincered on to the footpad, but he couldn't move it. It was probably like a lizard's wrist; press the hand against something and the arm could move at all kinds of angles, but without something, the ground, a wall, to press against none of those wrist angles were really possible.

''Is that a yes?''

If he'd had eyes, Garrett would have rolled them. As it was, he felt the medium blaster that wasn't pinned twitch. Steph could get like this when he was excited or nervous, chattering inanely and giving off the impression that he wasn't nearly as smart as he was.

He tried talking again, asking, What do you think? Static. Of course. He swung the leg again.

''Okay, yeah. So - I guess I'm telepathic now. Right? My voice is gone, but if you can hear me, what else could it be?''

Garrett lay still, waiting as Steph babbled about what had happened, obviously ''just'' on this side of hysteria. He couldn't blame the little guy - Garrett could feel it pressing in on him, like any minute now he'd burst out in mad static laughter again. And maybe this time he wouldn't stop. But as long as Steph was here, he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

Was this telepathy, then? It was ''like'' hearing Steph's voice, but not quite. He didn't have any sense of where it was coming from. And... no, there wasn't really a sensation of hearing anything. It was like imagining a voice, imagining very strongly. Which raised the question of whether or not he ''was'' imagining it. But that way lay madness.

Eventually, Steph ran down. ''And I'm sorry, I ran away! I shouldn't have. I know.'' Had he? Obviously that was bad, but Garrett wasn't sure that he'd noticed. Not with all this. He wished - well, not like it mattered. Obviously he didn't need to breathe. It just felt like he should.

''Look, I - I should really try and get someone to help you up. I don't want to stay here, it's too open.''

Finally! Garrett staticked and swung forward and back, vigorously enough that he got a stern internal notice about not damaging his legs on obstacles. On the ground, Steph shuffled anxiously, black nose twitching.

''Right. I'll, uh, I'll be right back.'' He took off on all fours. Garrett watched him go. Why was Steph some kind of weird alien rabbit thing? What the hell had ''happened''? There was a way to undo it, right? He hoped there was. He really hoped there was.

He didn't ''want'' to be an AT-AT! He'd never wanted this. A month ago - less than a month ago - this costume hadn't even been a vague idea! He wasn't even a big fan or anything. He didn't want to be a walking beast-shaped tank. He could feel ''air'' blowing through his ''insides''.

He heard faint static crackling out of the intercom, and several bewildered seconds passed before he realized that he was trying to whimper.

==Anj's post-TF segment==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus2.jpg]]

Anj holstered his collapsed forcepike, removed his helmet, pushed his overrobe back over his shoulders like a cape, and stared at the reflection in the mirror, shying away from the eyes. The reflection stared back.

The reflection's face wouldn't turn heads. It was pretty normal, all things considered, no obvious scars or nonhuman colors. There was a certain hardness to it, yes – something in the forehead, the set of the jaw, the chin – but the mouth and the surprised expression saved him from looking too unforgiving. What made it disorienting was the way it was at once strange and familiar. There was a lurching shock like he'd dropped into a hole in the ground, registering that this wasn't some stranger's face. There was a smaller shock of recognition - this was his face. This was him.

“Uh. This is the part of the dream where my teeth fall out or I find out I can fly, right?” Anj winced and saw the reflection do the same. '' I don’t sound anything like me. I don’t even sound like my father.''

“Doesn’t feel like a dream, but how would I know? I guess there's nothing wrong with my voice amplifier. I, uh... Well, this is weird.” It was a very expressive face – the wince hadn’t just been a twitch of the eyelid; there’d also been more than a little reaction in the lips and eyebrows. He looked away.

It made a certain amount of sense, though. After that exchange with the bizarre pitcher-thing he had barely been breathing hard. He'd known something was different, he'd sort of expected this, it wasn't just the - well, the sense that now and again something jostled that shouldn't. Though that had been part of it. “Damn. Well... only men are officially accepted into the Stormtrooper Corps. Only the best stormtroopers can be trained as Red Guards. The screening process - yeah, I don't think a woman would go unnoticed. So yeah.”

He was taller, definitely. Not ''really'' tall, maybe, he could be wrong. When he turned his head and tilted it down it seemed like his shoulders on either side extended out too far, though part of that was the pauldrons. They didn't look bad in the mirror. But - wow, yeah, he was definitely taller. Yes. And his arms were thicker, even aside from the armor. Self-consciously, he flexed his free arm and felt his bicep press into the armor of his lower arm, the vambrace.

Also he was taller. Anj moistened his lips and realized that he was nervous.

For some reason recognizing that made him plant his feet and stand straighter - and yes, taller. Hopefully that would stop surprising him soon, it wasn't like he'd hit his head on the doorjamb or anything. He was nervous - okay, afraid.

Earlier, he'd decided to find an empty bathroom to look at himself in, rather than join the crush of people trying to get out. That had taken a little longer than he'd expected. He might have been dragging his feet a bit, putting it off. He'd known something would happen - maybe he was deluding himself, but it was like there was a wave above him, ready to crash down.

He would have liked to avoid it for a little bit longer. He knew he could. But something inside, almost impossible to make out at first, then louder and clearer to the point where it startled him, said ''No. No. That's not how it goes. Resolve internal crises before they impact performance.''

Anj closed his eyes, then opened them. He started talking, the words forming just before he said them. "I was born in - in Coronet City on Corellia. We moved to Imperial center when I was about three, and lived in a domicile in a shabby-genteel section, on a level that was patrolled enough to keep down the violence." He wanted to stop, this wasn't right - he'd been born in Flagstaff Arizona, they'd moved when he was almost four. "The sun - the sun was visible, there was natural light, but only at high noon. When it rained, and it did that a lot, the water came to us through sluices, and it was never clean." The memory hit him, as strong as any he'd ever had - walking through the marketplace with his mother, ten minutes after a storm had passed overhead, and the water had poured off the awning they ducked under, reflecting rainbows.

"No, that's not right." He made himself stop and shake away the memory of how oily the water was, its smell. His pulse was quickening. "I don't remember Arizona except as bright and red, we just have pictures of the little blue house." There had been holograms of Coronet City in the domicile, projecting on the walls. They weren't the shiny sanitized holos of famous or scenic places that got sold to tourists. His older brother had borrowed a holocam and recorded the scenes himself. "I- we lived in an apartment for a while. It snowed in the winter. First time I'd seen snow, and it made night less dark. It was wetter than I'd thought."

"Smelled a little like tin. Smelled like -" Anj rubbed his face with his gloved free hand, shifting his grip on his helmet with the other. He'd heard more than once that fresh snow smelled like tin, but he couldn't - Oh, Emperor, he remembered the landlord's kid, half a year older and always red-faced, showing up and asking if he'd mind wagering on which of the hired men would be the one to knock down the hawk-bat nest. Why not, he was a Corellian, right? "I, I made friends with a neighbor girl who never stopped telling me and Valerie that the - the show with the puppets was stupid and babyish. I wanted to impress her so I agreed, but I still watched it. Sometimes Valerie told her I was lying..."

This went on for some time, and he kept having the feeling that whatever he was fighting, he was losing. Anj paced, restless, sometimes with uncertainty and other times aggressively. Eventually he forced himself to stop and looked back at the mirror, this time looking into his reflection's eyes. His eyes were wide-open, worried, with irises dark enough that they were hard to distinguish from his pupils. Hadn't they been paler before this? Anj looked away, unsure.

"What happened?" he asked in a low voice, not quite a whisper. "I don't understand. It's like - wait, wait. Am I - am I ''talking'' to myself?" He was. "Emperor's bones," he said, the last two words coming out as a mild oath. He really wasn't in the habit of talking to himself, he knew that for sure. It was probably just to listen to his voice. He'd talked to himself at length right after rigging the voice amp the first time, feeling out how it made him sound. Her sound, at the time. No, wait, he'd done that the first time he'd put on a helmet at the Academy, too. Once he'd quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the the other time he'd read the helmet's instruction manual out loud.

He looked down, saw his hand trembling, and had to clench it into a fist to make it stop. He had to finish this. He just really, really didn't want to, and he wasn't sure what 'this' was or why it scared him. Maybe he could put it off for another minute.

Briskly, Anj used some paper towels to dry the counter where the sinks were, switching off a dribbling faucet at the same time, then set his helmet there and removed his robes, folding them quickly and with mechanical precision.

“Huh.” Despite their irregular shape, he’d folded them into a perfect square, flat and unwrinkled. And why had he bothered wiping down the counter first? Anj dropped his folded robes besides his helmet, deliberately letting a corner hang over the edge of the counter. Immediately he felt the nagging urge to adjust the robes, make them line up precisely, but it wasn’t very strong. Apparently he had a thing for neatness. He hoped it was neatness, and not some kind of cleaning mania.

Looking into the mirror again, Anj glanced over his armor. Red plating, the same crimson as his helmet and robes, with a thick textured bodysuit underneath. The bodysuit - the underarmor - was black, naturally, no sign of the armor weave visible. The plating was fashioned like the contours of a very well-defined muscular body. Better defined then he actually was and a serious display of narcissism, he knew, but ''he'' hadn’t designed the armor.

This was both distressing and a sight he'd seen nearly every day. ''That'' was what he had to finish. He had to get both stories to fit together. He couldn't just pick one - well, he ''could'', it would be easy, he could just be Anj, part of the Stormtrooper Corps since he'd volunteered at fifteen, which was younger than was officially allowed, eventually picked for Red Guard training on Yinchorr. He could pick that, let all the sketchy details fill in and flesh out, and be Anj of the 501st on a planet that was only vaguely familiar to him. The more he thought about that backstory, the more complex it would become. But he knew he shouldn't, he really, ''really'' shouldn't.

"Okay," he said quietly. "The obvious answer is that I was - I ''am'', still, Anj - ''Angela'', and this other stuff is new, but there's no way I can ignore it." He had to figure this out. Anj ran a gloved finger along the raised detailing on his pectorals, stopping as he realized what he was doing. He remembered making the armor with Ursala, one of the other Tampa Bay Red Guards - and he remembered getting it at the end of training, before being shipped off to a new post. Both felt real.

This would take some doing.

Anj paced a little more, then stretched out on the linoleum, resting weight only on his forearms and toes, and kept his abdomen taut, silently counting the seconds as his muscles burned. He couldn't reject it. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing was ever that simple. Still, there had to be something he could do.

Holding "plank" position was easy; even with the weight of the armor, he could stay like that for an hour, no trouble. Anj shifted position, put his palms against the floor, and started to push up and lower himself down in a steady rhythm, breathing easily.

Why one or the other? Why not both? Wouldn't that be ideal?

Could he even do that? Easy enough to ''think'' it, but...

A shredded bit of toilet paper scudded off across the linoleum tiles, blown by his breath, and Anj stopped as he realized that he'd just stretched out and started doing pushups on a bathroom floor. A women's bathroom, admittedly, and therefore not ''too'' awful, but still. He scrambled back to his feet as quickly as if he’d been ordered, and stared for the third time at his reflection.

This time he didn't look away, staring intently into the mirror, ignoring the discomfort, the awkward feeling that really he shouldn't be doing this. Every time he saw himself, it was a little easier.

And now - now, if he pushed away the visceral shock of seeing someone else and the other, smaller shock of recognition, and it did feel like he was pushing them back - now he honestly could tell himself that that face ''was'' familiar. That the nose had once been broken rather spectacularly and had for the most part healed straight. That the hair-fine scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, ''his'' dark eyebrow, was ''not'' from a training incident or an injury he'd picked up on duty, but a remainder of something incredibly stupid he’d done as a teenager. He could remember idly imagining a face like this, going with the fairly vague biography he’d made. Anj thought he'd sketched this face, or one like it, in a notebook.

In fact, to his surprise he looked just a little like his ex. Like Angela’s ex. Anj's ex. It wasn’t a ''major'' resemblance, but it was there, something about the bone structure and the texture of his close-cropped dark hair, though it wasn't curly. Oh, right - he'd been on that faces kick, filling up page after page of head studies. Since this had been when he, as Angela, had been engaged to Scott, and Scott hadn't objected to a little modeling, most of them reflected him somehow.

Anj was oddly relieved to find that there was still an echo of that old pain when he thought about Scott. Things just hadn't worked out between them. They'd left on friendly enough terms, yes, it had been almost two years and it was barely awkward anymore when they ran into each other, but there'd just been too much emotional investment for it to be painless.

It was weird, thinking of Scott when he looked like this, but almost reassuring.

Maybe he could do this after all. "I shouldn't worry about it," Anj told himself. He didn't dislike his voice. "Maybe if I just stop making a problem out of it - mind over matter, right?" There was still a blanket sense of unease, but he wasn't afraid now. He smiled tentatively, mostly to try out how it looked on his face. This didn't have to be bad. He'd - he'd try not to think of it as bad.

There would be time later to strip off every piece of armor and examine everything. For now – well, he ''knew'', but it wouldn’t hurt just to check. Anj found the seam in his underarmor and stretched it open. There was the dance belt thing keeping everything supported, and under it another piece of padded armor, common sense really, a protection that was smaller and not nearly as obvious as the codpiece worn by stormtroopers. And under ''that'' -

He wasn't sure if it was supposed to be - the angle was new, but it looked normal - he hadn't expected - right, well, Scott had been cut, and -

“…Yeah. I definitely went in the wrong refresher. Bathroom. Whatever it's called.” Feeling a little embarrassed, Anj straightened his armor and exhaled firmly. "I don't think I'll do that again for a while." Not that he would have a choice; his bladder had to fill eventually. But it could wait.

"No more periods. Huh. I'm going to have to get new clothes. ''All'' new clothes. It's probably going to be a comprehensive shopping spree." A daunting thought. As Angela, ever since he was a little girl he'd hated shopping for new outfits, since it was ''never'' quick or simple. He'd hated it vocally enough that it had become a family joke. Somehow he doubted that had changed - and, for whatever reason, this was another oddly comforting thought. There was a little pronoun confusion and what could only be called a double set of memories, but Angela and Anj were the same person at heart. He hoped.

He still felt weird, but it was a relief to be sure that whatever else was going on, this was a convention in Florida, and he had walked in as a woman in costume. In Red Guard costume. The furries he’d seen – the same thing had happened to ''them.'' It was safe to assume it had also happened to the people he’d passed on the way ''here'', the ones who’d been rushing for the exits or milling in confusion. Had it happened to everyone? In the world, or locally, or just ''here''?

He’d become a real Red Guard; his forcepike had become a real forcepike, the biography had filled out extensively, and so had... other things. The furries had become actual, living animal people. The image, the dream, had become reality. Although, really, he’d never longed to have more than the image, he’d spent a lot of idle thought on it but never felt that he was ''supposed'' to be a Red Guard, really. And – well, it followed logically that the pitcher man hadn’t been more than the image before, because who could ''possibly'' want to be a pitcher? There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

… What had happened to the rest of the squad? To his friends, to SL-1984? Had this happened to ''them'', too? Anj felt a sharp, unsettling lurch in the pit of his stomach, as all the unease he'd managed to dispell came back in a lump. Why wasn’t he with them? ''How'' could he have thought it was a good idea to leave them in this unfamiliar territory? He had no idea where they were, so why wasn’t he out looking for them?

“Why do I feel so ''guilty'' about this? I don’t know what in the Emperor’s name they’re doing, this isn’t exactly covered in training!” Anj blinked. “Not training. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Going to have to do ''something''.” But what, ''that'' was the question. Where to start? He wasn't entirely sure where ''he'' was, let alone any of the others!

Restless again, Anj made a quick circuit of the bathroom. He’d chosen well; when he’d passed this place early in the day there had been an impressive line, but everyone’s priorities had shifted well before he got here.

All stalls were open, and the bathroom was empty – he wouldn’t have removed his helmet and started talking to himself if it hadn’t been – but it didn’t hurt to check.

He found it rather disheartening when he had trouble reading a piece of graffiti. It was scratched deeply into the side of a stall, in large, relatively neat letters that were easy to distinguish, but it still took longer than he’d have liked before the squiggles resolved into “ADRIAN WAS HERE”. Apparently he now had trouble reading English.

Otherwise, the only thing of note was a pile of clothing just inside the handicapped stall. The shirt at the top of the pile had what looked like a long elastic bandage, ragged at the tip, trailing out of the neck opening. Very gingerly, touching only with the very tips of his gloved fingers, Anj separated and folded the clothes neatly, stacking them together on the linoleum. He told himself as he did it that it was a courtesy. The other end of the bandage was wrapped around a bra left inside the shirt, for some reason that Anj couldn't fathom. Crumpled under those and sitting atop a dusty pair of sandals were short pants with panties inside - and in ''those'' was a winged Maxi pad with just a little blood on it.

Just seeing that made Anj feel incredibly uncomfortable and voyeuristic. If women had a set of bathroom rules, hiding all evidence of periods was one of the big ones. It seemed like that rule had carried over - he was embarrassed for whoever this was, and entirely unwilling to touch it. And yet Anj couldn’t help thinking that if the clothing had simply been removed, it would just be heaped together, underthings on top. This looked like more like the occupant had dematerialized – or shrunk dramatically. Yet it was completely empty, and he hadn't seen any-

''-Wait. '' I ''wouldn't try and approach someone who looked like me, if this happened. And she could've got out earlier, maybe even when I opened the door. I wasn't exactly in a state to notice. Whatever this is about, it's going to stay a mystery. One that I'm glad isn't happening to'' me.

A light sort of twitch traveling up his spine brought Anj out of his thoughts. “Right,” he mused under his breath as he returned to the sink. “Weakly Force-Sensitive, untrained and not good for much more than intuition and a warning. Wrote that in the bio. Inexplicable spinal sensations mean something is happening, and if it's mild like this-“

He could hear it, tinny and faint, coming from his helmet on the counter. It must have tuned in on an active frequency. Without hesitation Anj took it up and settled it over his head, the insides tight against his face. The voice over the com became clear. Female, clear, commanding, and with a bit of an accent that sounded vaguely British - No. Not British. ''Imperial.''

“-ling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st, report for instruction, report for instruction, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr, set to Imperial frequency Ithor Naboo Gammorr. Repeat; this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, this is ID-4102 of Makaze Squadron, calling all Imperial units in or out of the 501st-“

Words could not have expressed how Anj’s heart leaped on hearing the officer’s voice. He wasn’t alone! Almost as fast as he could think it, he had gone to the specified frequency.

“This is TR-1407 of Tampa Bay Squadron.” Relief loosened his tongue in spite of training. “And I am ''very'' glad to hear from you! Orders, sir?”

The voice that responded over the comlink wasn’t the same one, although if anything the Imperial accent was stronger; this was a harried-sounding older man. “You may change your mind when you see this, Royal Guard. Get to the rendezvous outside of the structure. We’re on the blacktop rectangle to the southwest.”

== Garrett ==

Nothing was happening. He supposed that there must be commotion going around - he and Steph hadn't been the only ones, right? He'd seen something like that before falling over, right? - but he couldn't hear anything. Literally. It was silent. Now and again he felt what were sort of like faint tremors going up into his body. Maybe he'd gone deaf, at least on the outside. Inside it was different.

Experimentally, he swung a hind leg. It hit something. He swung again, harder. Yes - there ''was'' a sound, but it was so faint! Distant, like it was several rooms away.

Now he charged his heavies, waiting the long seconds until they were good and hot, and fired into the wall. The minor explosion that resulted ''was'' louder, but again - faint and far away. The sound of both heavy cannons charging and going off had been perfectly clear - it was the same oddly high laser ''tcheeer'' shriek he remembered from watching Empire Strikes Back - which he supposed made sense, since the sound could probably travel through him and to whatever worked like ears now.

He couldn't breathe. Garrett would have given a lot right now to be sure if he'd been stuck on an inhale or an exhale - he couldn't tell, it felt like both and neither. Mildly uncomfortable.

There was... something... related to the intercom, somewhere in a console in his cabin, but not as intimately a part of him as the intercom. It was picking up something. Probably had been for a while. A signal? Several signals?

''"-xty-two is down!" "I'm still functional, sir. It knocked me over, that's all." "Get back over here - oh, no, it's coming back, Force preserve us-"''

''"-SAID HOLD YOUR FIRE! Damn you, Thirteen, it's just a bird." "Sorry! Sorry! I couldn't help myself, it just came up so fast." "No harm done. My lord-?" "The Lieutenant was ri-"''

''"-see, I told you, the flashing orange bit is its weak point!" "What, like a videogame? Isn't that awfully convenient?" "Don't give me lip. It keeps doing that swing-and-dodge thing, then you can see the orange bit. Cover me, I'll-"''

He cycled through a handful of channels or frequencies or whatever, listening to voices, until he found ones that seemed vaguely familiar, though they were distorted enough that he couldn't quite figure out where he'd heard them before.

''"-nd telling us where you went in such a hurry, ''sir?'' And how you managed to lose half an arm? I can see the sparks from here." "Pike, you would not believe me if I told you. Count yourself fortunate that I found you, I can proba- ah, more of them. How charming." "Fusst! Can you take them?" "Certainly I could, but saving you is a bigger priority than killing animals. Stay where you are.” "You're going to play at being a ''troop transport?!'' "Yes, if you want to put it that way. Do you have a better idea?"''

Without warning, the voices dissolved into gibberish and white noise, a lot louder. He could sort of make out words in that mess, a panicked babbling. This might not even be the same channel. Alarmed, Garrett shut that part of himself off.

What had that been? What the ''hell'' had that been? What was going on out there?! What had happened?! Beneath the aching emptiness of his insides, along his belly, Garrett's drive motor was running hard and fast. Like he was breathing hard and his heart was racing - except, of course, that they weren't. He was a relatively thin set of rigid metal plates wrapped around air and fuel and a walking apparatus, and even that motor under his belly, the closest thing he had to guts, was riddled with spaces, gaps, hatches for mechanics to get into. All of them so empty.

There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do. Gradually, his drive motor slowed, until once again it was an almost subliminal hum. He lay there, wishing he had eyes to close.

He couldn't breathe. He did have the feeling that he hardly noticed that when he was paying attention to something else. But there wasn't a lot else to even think about.

Nothing continued to happen. Garrett felt that horrible emptiness inside and tried not to laugh or start whimpering again. Something must have happened to Steph. Something had got him, maybe. He'd turned into something else. He'd gotten lost. Or maybe... maybe he'd just run off and abandoned Garrett.

Garrett pushed that last thought away. It wouldn't happen. He wouldn't have been abandoned. Not by Steph. They'd known each other since Orientation, and although they weren't roommates they shared about half of their classes. They'd - Garrett was straight, that one time when they'd both gotten very drunk at the end of Finals Week did ''not'' count, and Steph had said Garrett wasn't his type, but that didn't matter. Steph was still one of Garrett's best friends, the only one who always pitched in when he had some new idea, the one he went to whenever a wasp got into his dorm while his roommate was out. If he had anyone who wouldn't leave him, it was Steph.

Of course, the thought came back. Damn it, he was an ''AT-AT''. He couldn't even talk. Good God. Why ''wouldn't'' Steph just walk away?

And he was so ''empty''. Static hissed softly through his command section and the big troop cabin, falling silent only when he made the intercom stop. Laugh, cry, he wanted to do both and couldn't manage either properly. Damn it, he tried to say. Static.

It made sense, he supposed, that he couldn't speak. Maybe he could - there ''was'' that intercom - but he had no idea how to make words without a throat or vocal chords. He tried again, and managed to chop the burst up. Hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet. Not as noisy or intense as the laughter had been, louder than the whimpering.

''Damn'' it. HISS-quiet-hiss-quiet. Now he could sense the mechanisms in the speakers. They were entirely unfamiliar. How ''did'' radios and speakers of any kind turn signals back into voices, sounds, music? He had no idea. Nothing to do but try.

Garrett was lost for some time, trying to bully his intercom into producing anything that wasn't static. He made progress, if slowly - managing a few vowel sounds, almost drowned by the hiss. Still, he didn't miss the movement outside.

First, there came the bees. When the first few appeared, zigzagging up near the ceiling, he had trouble figuring out what they were. They seemed as big as Thanksgiving turkeys and almost as weighty, dark wings moving in a blur. The first handful were high up and spaced out, moving purposefully from one side of his vision to the other. As time passed more and more bees passed through, sometimes several at a time. Garrett practiced what sounded vaguely like an "ah" and watched them, feeling his drive motor start to speed up again. He didn't like bees all that much.

Soon enough it was a whole ''cloud'' of passing bees, all headed in the same direction. The air was thick with them, along the floor as well as the ceiling, and there were enough that the droning of their collective wings was going up his legs and through his hull into the inside. He could actually hear them. It almost managed to be loud.

Many bees flying low smacked into him - he was surprised to find that he could feel them hitting, the insects were ''strong'' - and crawled up his body before taking off again. He couldn't quite see them doing that, or feel them crawling across his surface, but it was a logical assumption, and that was what the ones on his legs were doing. There were so many bees that he could have hit a few dozen just by swinging a leg, but he didn't dare. He could have fired and taken out a lot more, he really wanted to try it, but that would just make them mad, wouldn't it? They were ''everywhere'', there were ''thousands'' of them. He knew, he ''knew'' that he couldn't be stung, but-

Garret made a very odd sound over his intercom, a combination of a high pure synthetic tone and an "ahhhkssshhksshhh" that quickly devolved into furious static. A bee had crawled onto his viewport, seemingly from nowhere, he could see the segments of its wide-spread legs and the yellow hairs coming off it, and oh God it had a pointy red tonguelike thing gleaming between two mandibles, and agggh, it ''licked'' him, and its two antennae were tapping at him... He couldn't feel it at all, but that didn't help, and even though it was many many times smaller than him it was still a GIANT BEE climbing around-

Bee claws on his hatches! He felt ''that''. They were crawling, oh God how could that tickle ''and'' itch, and he couldn't feel their clawed legs ''around'' the hatches or ''on'' them, but at the edges, where they were sealed shut, ''there'' he felt them, and they were ''everywhere''! He was covered in them. They were going to gouge one of the hatches open and ''get inside!'' His drive motor was picking up, throbbing a pitch that started low and built higher, he couldn't just lie still anymore but he couldn't ''do'' anything-

And then the one on his viewport took off, and there were fewer bees in the air, and he didn't feel claws on his hatches anymore. Barely a minute later and it was back to a thin stream of the things moving across the ceiling. Soon enough there were none.

The silence as his drive motor wound back down again was deafening. Garrett had to wonder if he'd just imagined that. But no - there was a little streak of residue, barely visible, on his viewport. Disgusting. God, he didn't like bees. He'd been pleased about them dying off until he'd found that that just meant more ''wasps'', which were worse, if anything.

How was it, he had to ask himself, that he could essentially see outwards from his skin - no, not skin, more like a hull - but he hadn't been able to see any of the bees crawling on his body? He'd looked down his legs and seen them, and he'd seen the one on his viewport from beneath its six clawed feet. Why none of the others?

Vision as he had it now, interior and exterior, was - well, it wasn't a set of alternating views, nor was it overlaid, and he didn't know how this was working at all. It ''was'' working, at any rate. Everything seemed to be in full color and three dimensions.

Fuel reserves were now at ninety-eight point zero four eight one six percent. Had he been topped up when this - when this started? He didn't know. He hadn't checked it before. Right now he was on standby; powered up and burning fuel, but not going anywhere. Even if he figured out how to shut down a few systems, being active at ''all'' drained the reserves. Slowly, yes, but it was happening, and speeding up his drive motor like he'd been doing only hastened the process, as fuel moved up out of the cylindrical tank and was consumed. Garrett had the sudden thought that he would lie here immobile until he had either drained the last milliliter of fuel or he voluntarily shut himself down. He didn't know what would happen then. It was not a pleasant thought.

== Help ==

Time passed, long enough for Garrett to get too lonely and restless to keep trying to figure out his speakers. He wasn't used to having nothing to do. Usually, if nothing else presented itself, he'd start doodling on stray paper, trying to conceptualize various things he'd heard or thought of over the course of the day. Sometimes he'd get lucky and inspiration would strike. And then of course there would be the breathlessly fast calculation of taking an idea and making it ''work''... He wasn't used to being bored.

It wasn't like he could even hold a pencil, Garrett thought. He moved the toe flaps on one foot - hinge joints, all four of them, no other joints, limited flexibility up or down, he could move them independently, but that made little difference. These feet were made for walking, and that was all they could do. Pretty close to useless.

It didn't help that he was almost painfully aware of all his internal surfaces, and he kept coming back again and again to how utterly empty and alone he was. He couldn't even quite muster up any interest in how the hell his body worked, and it seemed like every few seconds he was reminded that he wasn't breathing, like a tic. This was miserable.

So although he didn't see Steph at the feet of the two people who came into view - wherever he was, he didn't seem to be having great luck - he was so desperate to see someone that he almost didn't mind.

They were incredibly tall, walking on thick pillarlike legs, huge and fleshy. Garrett took several seconds to realize that they were human at all. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around that. Humans didn't get anywhere near that big, and although logically he knew that these probably weren't any larger than normal, they still ''looked'' absolutely enormous. If he had been up on all fours, they would still have been considerably taller than him, though all in all somewhat less massive.

Garrett really only assumed they were human at all by their hands. Meaty, both broad and long, with skin covered with a network of fine grooves, a little puffy. Five unique digits, each placed and sized differently with wrinkled skin on the joints, each tapering, rounded, and tipped with a sort of curved scale. They looked like alien appendages until he saw knuckles and a standing vein in the back of one, and lines in a palm; then, something sort of ''clicked'', and he realized how they looked very much like human hands. Grossly enormous human hands, yes, as long as Steph's body, or almost. Still human.

If they had human hands, they were humans, right? They were just so out-of-scale, looming up cone-shaped, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, that he couldn't quite think of them as people, only pick out things like hands and gigantic sloping feet. It took some bewildered staring before he could even recognize that the fibrous stuff hanging from their bodies was ''clothing''.

Then, he saw past the size and realized that, even if they weren't any bigger than usual, they would still have attracted stares from anyone with eyes. The two had stopped within his sight and were now talking animatedly together. He couldn't hear them at ''all'', Garrett realized unhappily. They weren't loud enough for sound to get into his interior. Maybe if he opened a hatch... okay, how exactly did he do that? It wasn't like moving his head or legs, that was for sure.

The smaller of the two, the top of its - his? - head arrayed with a glinting mass of coarse fibers that might have been hair, Garrett could barely see it from here, had two vast flapping leathery things like wings or sails on either side of its head.

There was something wrong with that one's face, like its nose had melted into a gray wrinkled thing that moved, like a tentacle or a tail. Above that, it had ''four'' eyes. Two were set into its head with a bristling ridge above each, the other two were wide-set, gleaming, and very dark. Maybe this one wasn't human after all. It was twisting around, gesturing, generally looking unsettled.

The taller one, and now Garrett could see that it was ''considerably'' larger, was a little more normal, if he could judge. Its eyes were similar to the closer-set pair on the deformed one's face, and he supposed that the bristly ridges were eyebrows. The skin that wasn't covered by hanging folds of cloth was a very pale, almost chalky color. This one had bent its forelegs... no, arms, they had to be arms... and crossed them one over the other.

In a fit of whimsy, Garret decided to call them Mutant and Big Guy. Why not? It wasn't like they'd overhear him and take offense. He was starting to feel a growing sense of unreality. Being unable to put a couple of humans or almost-humans into perspective was just odd.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't real, after all. It just didn't make enough sense. If he was supposed to be an AT-AT, why could he fit into a room? What was up with that thing that had knocked him over, the red thing that had looked so much like the Kool-Aid Man? And why was a rabbit-bug thing telling him that it was Steph?

Garrett knew that he'd already run through part of this, at least. But the idea that he'd passed out in his cardboard shell from a nasty combination of spray paint fumes and an accidental dose of some illegal substance, and was now having a weird dream of epic proportions was - well, it was comforting. Or maybe he was awake, but hallucinating a wildly distorted version of events.

Mutant and Big Guy seemed to be wrapping up their conversation. Their Easter Island-esque heads were doing much less side-to-side swiveling and much more tilting up and down, and gestures were far less expansive. Abruptly, Garret made up his mind. What did he have to lose, if this was or wasn't a dream?

He swung a leg forwards and back.

Big Guy, moving ridiculously fast, got between Garrett and Mutant, bending its limbs like it was about to leap. Mutant moved, but stopped and backed away when Big Guy opened its mouth and did something with it. Garrett had never learned to lipread. What he could see of lips and mouth moving was weird and creepy, like he'd stumbled into the Uncanny Valley. Was that a matter of scale, or...

No one moved for a long moment, until Garrett finally jerked what used to be his head. Now he was being stared at. He moved his command section to point in their general direction and swung a leg forwards, trying to go for 'pathetic'. It wasn't exactly acting. He wished he could heave a sigh.

Big Guy did something with its mouth again, directing it at either Garrett or Mutant. Mutant crept still further away, the sails on its head flapping. Big Guy turned and followed it, twisting around weirdly to look back at Garrett. They stopped at the very edge of his vision, which apparently didn't extend all that far, to gesture and flap their mouths at each other some more. Eventually they stepped out of view entirely.

Garrett waited. Time passed, he had no idea how much. Long enough that he went back to trying to figure out his intercom. He made a heartening leap of progress when he figured out how to make and adapt the synthesized beep, though at his best he sounded about as clear as a toddler lisping into a poorly-kept drive-through speaker. He could only even do ''that'' if he focused very hard on the syllables and went slowly, true, and what wasn't a hiss came out in a robotic high-toned monotone, but progress was progress. What would he do if - ''when'' - he finally got to the point of speaking clearly and with some inflection?

He could try and recreate his voice. And... and other people's voices. Then he could - what? Reenact campy old TV shows?

It didn't get to that point, thankfully. Garrett thought about counting the seconds and decided against it, not really wanting to measure how long it took, but he only felt the I'm-not-breathing tic four times before Big Guy came back and did - well, did ''something''.

Big Guy had sort of... folded up, Garrett guessed, legs practically folded in on themselves, somehow not falling over despite the awkwardness of the position. It was... no, not sitting, couldn't be sitting, not kneeling either... crouching? Yes, that was it. He couldn't help noticing that its legs were ''considerably'' thicker than either his legs or the armored tunnel that had used to be his neck, and it was crouching ''within'' his legspan, looming up over him. Stretching an arm over his side, and from the little vibration that Garrett vaguely felt in his hull, the probably-human was dragging a hand over-

What the hell? Had it just ''stroked'' him? Now Big Guy's mouth was moving, and damn it, Garrett wished he could just ''say'' that he couldn't hear or understand any of that, say it and actually be heard, anyway -

Why not? ''Just help me up.'' Damn the static, he could do better than that, he'd managed-

They came in from the edge of his vision, walking with startlingly quick, fluid motions, as if moving was easy despite all that bulk. Two, three - no, ''four'' of them, like flexible animated towers fidgeting and breathing and pendulumming effortlessly from one leg-column to another in a walk that seemed at every step to be a barely-averted fall. He saw the flapping sails and knew that one of them was Mutant, but he didn't recognize any of the others at all. One didn't have anything like the pillar-like body structure of the others, carrying most of its mass almost horizontally.

They went from the edge of his vision to looming up over him, and static started to hiss and crackle through Garrett's interior. Too big, too close!

Heat, moisture on his right fore footpad! Weight - slight weight, nothing near the right amount, none on the others, and yes he knew he was already down but that sensation spelled FALLING! Garrett tried to swing his legs, tried on some instinctual impulse to fire. But his legs stayed locked still, toeflaps flicking madly, only one of them hitting anything at all, and the power to all four blasters was being leached away as quickly as he could route it in.

He felt like a heavy soft blanket had been pressed over him. ''Him'', not this half-insensate walker body, he could almost ''feel'' it wrapped over and over. Like it was between him and everything else. He felt his drive motor fight something, grinding alarmingly for a moment, and then slow, winding down as rapidly as it had sped up. Garrett saw now that Big Guy was - was ''gripping a footpad'' in one massive appendage. That was why he'd felt, was still feeling, some sensation there. It wasn't moving to wrench it off, it was just... holding it. Okay, that was weird.

Big Guy, still folded up, was mouthing at the new giants, who were no smaller than before but somehow less threatening, now. Garrett found that he could feel the vibrations of speech, faintly, through the hand on his footpad. He still couldn't understand it, annoyingly enough. Still, he knew for certain now that Big Guy was talking.

Garrett also found that he couldn't move his legs at all, just the toeflaps. Nothing was touching them, and they were working fine, he could feel it, they just couldn't move. Something invisible had a hold of him. Whatever it was, he knew, he knew that if it could slow his drive motor and persuade his legs to still, if he couldn't resist it, it could probably pop his hatches and and bare his interior and take him apart bit by bit. But it wasn't. It was holding him still. Very, very still. He found himself adjusting the seating in his command cockpit just to see if he still could.

He was calm now. Very calm, disassociated even. He had to wonder about that firing reflex. It hadn't been a conscious attempt at all, which was pretty inconvenient - he'd fired earlier to see if he could hear it, yes, but he wasn't quite sure how. Well, no sense worrying, was there? Garrett couldn't seem to muster either concern or a great deal of interest. It could be his drive motor, he supposed. It was running ''very'' slowly now. He knew that he ought to be nervous about that. If the computers in what had been his head were really serving as his brain, they needed to be powered. Not much he could do about that, though, was there?

They were talking over him. The giants. Big Guy, not moving, seemed to be trying to direct the others, who were on his other side, around his back. He couldn't see quite as well from his back-side than from his flank-sides or belly-side, but this was close enough that it didn't matter much.

Garrett watched with mild interest. They were all on two legs; one carried itself horizontally and had inexplicable projections that he guessed were a long S-curved neck and rigid tail. And most of it was coated with branching filaments that could be hair, or maybe feathers. Feathers - yes, on the tail and along the limbs they were shaped like feathers, with central shafts. The rest of it, as far as he could tell, had some kind of overlapping armor made of keratinous scales, most of them smaller than a meter across. Something about it was familiar... pictures... a movie?

Oh! He knew what it was! A feathery dinosaur! Maybe a raptor, he wasn't sure, but definitely a bird-dinosaur. Bigger than any dinosaur ought to be, of course, and from here its proportions looked terribly off, but it was recognizable. The movements of its curved neck and wedge head, small from this perspective, were even faster and more sudden than what he'd seen the others doing.

His eyes went - no, he didn't have eyes, did he? Or the sensation of having them, to roll and flick wetly from one thing to another and blink, that was gone. Weird. His ''attention'' went to the others - he was moderately sure that they were human, or rather, human''like'', just distorted by some quirk of his vision. And by the fact that part of him ''knew'' that he was over twenty meters tall, and no human could so much as see over his footpad without something to stand on. How was it that he could recognize and accept a live dinosaur that looked several times bigger than the T. Rex skeleton at the Chicago Field museum, but not humans at the same scale?

Well, Big Guy's hand - good God, each finger was a slab of meat and bone as thick as the kind of conduit that people could creep through - was still on his footpad, but there were no more vibrations going through it, and after looking around quickly Garrett had to conclude that the others had stopped too. They were ''very'' close. Okay, now they were bending, folding over, now they were touching him, he couldn't feel it but it was a safe assumption... his drive motor kept to the same slow pace, he was still wrapped up tightly, calm and motionless and a little bit distant.

How was this going to work? He wasn't built like an animal - he couldn't be tipped onto his belly, not with legs like these - were they planning to just carry him out? Surely he was too heavy for that. And even though he couldn't see any doorways, he was pretty sure that he couldn't be carried out of one.

Great huge hands, some of them clawed, got under him. He wasn't lying entirely flat, or they wouldn't have been able to do that. Big Guy took the hand that wasn't gripping his footpad and laid it on his side, big pale fingers splayed. That hardly seemed like the thing to do, if he was being lifted! For some reason that struck him as funny, but he didn't quite laugh.

His view ''lurched''. The pocked grid of the ceiling wobbled and seemed to get bigger. Simultaneously the faint sensation along his left side, the dull feeling where his flank lay against whatever he'd fallen on, went away. Garrett didn't have any inner ears now, so a few vaguely confused seconds passed before he realized that they were related, and together meant that he was being lifted up. He really couldn't tell how hard they were working - for that matter, the four of them, including Mutant, were shoulder-to-shoulder at his back, and Big Guy's hands hadn't moved.

He was ''above'' whatever he'd been on, now, and he could see it now, though Garrett still couldn't tell what it was. It looked like maybe four or five meters, but it was probably a lot less, if he was right about not actually being larger than a man. He'd stopped moving. Now what?

Big Guy was talking yet again, and the other giants moved around - two stayed at his back, the dinosaur stood at his vehicle bay, and on his other side Mutant positioned itself so that Garrett's command section was between its arm and its body. Each of them stuck its forearms under him - somehow, he'd kept completely steady during all that, like they hadn't been bearing his weight at all. Now, surrounded on all four sides, he had the sudden bizarre thought that they were planning to use him as a conference table.

Knowing full well that he couldn't be heard, Garrett still found himself trying to ask them what they were doing. Then Big Guy took its hand off of his flank.

Immediately he dipped and rocked, the view shuddering like he was in an earthquake, and by minute unsteady increments his body crept back up and leveled, although he was still tipping legwards and trembling. Garrett felt his drive motor intensify by some tiny increment, only to slow back down. He couldn't seem to worry much. There just wasn't enough power in his system for that.

He noticed, then, that the giants who were not Big Guy were disturbed. Strained, breathing heavily, shoulders hunched, moisture beading on oily skins that were flushing or paling. He couldn't help but wonder how eyes that bulged like that didn't just pop and run down out of their sockets. This took effort, evidently. The dinosaur was a little different, head thrown back on its long neck, mouth open. It had great pointed teeth. From his other flank he saw bent knees and massive far-spread feet.

Big Guy kept one hand steady on Garrett's footpad and reached underneath him with its free hand. There was something in it, something that gleamed. Some kind of tool? Despite the feeling of being under wraps, Garrett's found himself interested. What could that-

A beam of ''solid light'' just ''shot'' out of the thing, and for one long not-quite-panicked moment Garrett didn't see that it was finite, coming to a clearly defined tip, under twelve meters long. And it stayed attached to the emitter, too, not blazing off to burn through things like a turbolaser bolt. The thing was white-cored and blue along the edges, and he had ''no idea'' what it was.

Moving uncannily fast, as usual, Big Guy kept its hand wrapped around the emitter and manipulated the beam, holding it horizontal and passing it down, ''through'' whatever Garrett had been lying on. Smoke or steam curled up and dissipated. When the glowing beam was brought back up - moving quickly, too quickly; what if Big Guy made a mistake? - and moved aside, he saw that the mystery material had been ''cut'', and cleanly. The beam tool was like a propane torch, but big enough to make the body of a cruiseliner and without the facemask and sparks and burning.

There was a bit of new input from his air filters. An increase in... what was that, ozone?

Big Guy kept at it and chopped the stuff into long, somewhat rectangular shapes. Whatever it was Garrett had fallen over onto, part of it was a very solid slab of something weird and porous that smoked very little when cut, at least compared to the woven stuff that he thought was probably cloth.

Then the creature's fingers moved on the tool, and the blue-tinted beam sort of evaporated and was gone. Big Guy started clearing away the cut slabs, barely seeming to touch them - just sort of gesturing and causing them to whisk off. That couldn't be possible, could it?

What ''was'' that beam thing, Garrett had to ask himself. It seemed like something he ought to know, but what was the ''point'' to making a cutting rod half the size of a telephone pole?! Some kind of mining tool maybe? Although that train of thought seemed interesting, and he felt like he was missing something obvious, he had to let it go. Drive motor was a little too sluggish to keep it up.

The debris was more or less cleared, revealing... some kind of bumpy ground covering. Big Guy's free hand, minus the beam tool, came back to Garrett's flank, and by the vibrations said something. Something in his balance shifted, and the four giants straining to hold him up pulled away almost as one. Garrett didn't have to strain to see them as human to read the relief. He was very heavy.

...Which left him rather inexplicably floating in midair. He flicked his toe pads a little. He wasn't going to worry about it, but Big Guy was hardly at an angle to hold him up. Particularly alone. Although this was an odd time to notice it, Garrett saw, now, that there were no fibery hairs coming off Big Guy's domed head - instead, in the skin, there seemed to be bold faded-blue stripes running back over his skull; one really thick one over each eyebrow, a thinner one starting near each ear. Weird.

He was lifting up now, the hand gripping his footpad never faltering. Up... ten meters, thirteen, fifteen... he knew if he were to fall now, from here, at less than his full height, he would be seriously damaged, certainly more than simply falling over. No sense in worrying. Up... Big Guy was standing straight now, arms shifting position, still gripping steadily. It said something, and in response Mutant and one of the others, not the dinosaur, came closer and touched Garrett again, clutching at his hull.

"Ohhhhh..." He was surprised at how clearly the uneasy word came out, but now - now he was being turned, like a turtle flipped on its back, and it made him very uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't have inner ears - even so, he ''felt'' his insides shifting as things went from bulkhead to deck, and it was a weird feeling. It reminded him - and with all this excitement he'd almost managed to forget, too! - that he had no lungs or other organs and there was a great hollow cavity sitting in him, all but empty. Distant feeling or no distant feeling, that was unpleasant.

Still, he was being turned over, increment by increment. He was almost at the standing point now. Big Guy's hand slipped away from his footpad, and he rotated the last few degrees - slowly eased down, and his toeflaps were all sticking outwards as far as they could, and TOUCHDOWN!

He felt it as a sort of ''chunk'' as his weight came down on all four footpads, and something above the kneejoints telescoped slightly. The weird feeling of distance evaporated, and he found that he could move again. His drive motor sped up by some tiny increment. Garrett briefly forgot that he couldn't sigh, and had another weird moment where he tried to breathe but couldn't find the right equipment.

It felt so good to have his footpads on the ground! He pressed his toeflaps into it, feeling its bumpiness and its give, getting the sense that it was slightly uneven but level underneath. He was pretty sure that what looked like a landscape of weird, fibrous alien moss was really carpet. It was a good surface. Solid. Stable. Now he could move. Now he could ''walk.''

Big Guy was talking again, and the assorted weird creatures were backing off, still moving with the kind of fluid speed that made him nervous, but moving ''away'' from him, so he didn't feel crowded. He had to appreciate that. Better to think about this unexpected consideration, and not what life was going to be like if he panicked every time people who were not Big Guy stood next to him.

During a pause Garrett endeavored to bob his head minutely, although he had no idea what was being said. Even if he'd learned to lip-read, even though the giant had his big blocky face tilted downwards, at this angle Big Guy's most prominent features were his chin and the underside of his nose. He was like a tower, the kind they topped with turrets and left to guard cities.

Big Guy said something, very short this time. Garrett head-bobbed again and was either rewarded or chastised by muscles tightening under the maybe-human's skin; he thought it could be a frown. Big Guy leaned down and in close, so that his mouth and nose and eyes filled Garrett's command viewport, and said something else, moving his mouth with slow, deliberate exaggeration. There were some tiny bubbles gleaming in that wet mouth, and a bit of discoloration on at least one of the teeth, and oh God the pores in that pale skin, and the capillaries under it, and the barely-visible clear hairs scattered about - ugh. Whoever said that beauty was skin deep had never looked too close.

Garrett did nothing, vaguely wishing he could blink, and felt his command cockpit get stared through for a second time. Whatever Big Guy was looking for, he probably didn't find it, because he breathed out in a long stream that fogged Garrett's viewport and reared back up to his full height. A big hand came up and very lightly smacked Garrett on the moveable command section - ''thump'' pause lift ''thump'' pause lift, light but enough to get his head to move - and it might have been an attack, some of his systems certainly thought so, but he kind of doubted it.

Something came through with the thumps - or had they been a pat on the head? - a general feel of well-wishing. Damn it, this was frustrating. ''Almost'' communication! What if he tried shooting into the wall, writing something that wa - no, no, bad idea, he'd burn through too much of his fuel and it probably wouldn't even look like a word. And he didn't have anything like enough articulation to scratch letters with his feet.

Big Guy turned and walked away at a speed that still looked ridiculous, a tiny tremor going up Garrett's footpads with each step. He had to have phenomenal shock absorbers in those monster boots; another AT-AT would have had half that stride and more than twice the impact, even on this fibery surface. Very quickly, surprisingly so, the maybe-human was gone, and this time he probably wasn't coming back.

"Dahhhschhhn hhit." Hey, that had practically been comprehensible! Garrett grabbed on to that tidbit of accomplishment, determined to stop moping. He was on all fours now. He could walk, he could get out. He ''would'' get out. Everything else would have to wait.

The convention center as he saw it was a labyrinthine monstrosity built for long-limbed fast-moving giants. He was very vague on exactly where he was or how to get out; by now there probably wasn't anyone to follow. Maybe if he'd been quicker-witted earlier. Ah well. He took a couple of test steps, kicking aside some of the debris he'd been lying on.

Walking was - well, it was different. Taken one way, it was much, ''much'' more deliberate. He had to consciously lift, swing, and plant each footpad in turn, which was a bit complicated since he had four of them and they were all new to him. Not damaged, at least, and he probably had to count that as a stroke of luck, since looking back at when he'd lost his balance and fallen over he wasn't sure how he'd been knocked off his footpads without wrenching them or at least losing toeflaps. Taken the other way, he could set a course, which involved picking a point within his vision and doing something that felt a little like blinking. Or maybe double-clicking. There really wasn't a good human analog. Course-setting was less deliberate and he could set multiple points to reach in turn, but to get around obstacles he had to either cancel the distant set point and make new ones or manually take control, step around things, and let whatever walked him along a course work again.

There was a problem with this. He had a major design flaw - not all of the consoles in and around his cockpit were essential, but even the ones that didn't do something like control his feet or internal temperature used up a lot of power. Particularly one of them - he didn't know what it did, but it was a significant drain. So significant that when he was walking for any serious length of time, either deliberately or along a set course, he had to keep his drive motor at its highest safe output to feed the walking apparatus, the consoles that had something to do with them, "housekeeping" - life support and lighting, which he couldn't seem to shut off - and the mystery console. He wouldn't be able to generate the power to fire his lasers, not on top of all the rest.

Well, from the little he'd seen before being knocked over, he had to conclude that this was a very dangerous place now. He should have had a durasteel hull no thinner than half a meter thick at any point, he should have been close to invincible, but for some reason he was barely larger than a big man, and his hull was perilously thin. Thin enough to let some sound travel through the air into his interior. Although somehow he hadn't been found by anything more lethal than a swarm of bees, he couldn't count on that luck holding. He had to protect himself. And what was the harm in neglecting one mystery console? It couldn't be essential. The thing was connected to the other consoles, but nothing else.

Garrett prepared to move in earnest, and felt more fuel piping into channels deep in his drive system, down in what was left of his guts under the gaping void of his interior. All of his other systems downshifted and fluctuated until they readjusted. He felt his vision fade and surge, so that for a moment the world was made of enormous smooth polygonal shapes, before details popped back in. Some status lights burned brighter, others dimmed to a faint spark or quit entirely.

Things became a lot simpler. In a vague, distant way, Garrett was relieved. All he had to do was make it out. It would be hard, without a crew, but he would do it.

He oriented to the best of his ability, satisfied himself that the ground would continue to support his weight, picked a direction and a course point, and started to walk.

== Placeholder Title ==

Steph had, at least, managed to keep from getting lost again, despite the size of the place. It helped that the place wasn't crowded anymore. Most of the ... well, ''beings'' was a vague term, but he supposed he had to use it. Most of the ones who hadn't gone outside were in here on quests of their own, and while some were inclined to listen when he talked to them, and some would probably have helped if they could, well, he was on his own.

... He wasn't actually sure what he'd need, besides a few strong and ''mobile'' humanoids. Mobile was important; he felt ''hideously'' sorry for Zach, who'd been sympathetic in turn, but there was no way the tree-man was going to be able to walk this far in a reasonable amount of time. What else - he might also need a lever. A pulley or several could be useful, but he doubted he could get one set up in place.

Unfortunately that turned out to be moot. He'd doubled back to check on Garrett, and Garrett had been gone.

He sat down - sitting might not have been the right word; he automatically sat like a cat did, sort of in a crouch with his long toes flexed against the ground and his paws together in front of him - next to where the walker had been, a little stunned. Damn. This was the right place, burned pits in the walls and everything, but no walker, and the place where he'd been lying had been cleared, some of the rubbish rearranged.

Bitterly, Steph wondered what had happened when he'd been away. ''Someone'' must have hauled Garrett off. Steph knew, it had been pretty obvious, that there was no conceivable way a walker could get back on its feet. Someone else must have come along, and probably taken Garrett by force.

That was the only explanation, right? Otherwise Garrett would still be here or close enough for Steph to sense. If that had really been Garrett. There'd been no way to know. The AT-AT had certainly heard Steph and responded, but for all he knew Garrett had been somewhere else entirely.

Maybe if he hadn't spent so much time talking to Zach. Or if he'd gone the other way as soon as he'd smelled smoke, or he'd ignored the guys in the raincoats. Maybe if he'd doubled back and checked a few times. More than once he'd gone in this general direction long enough to sense Garrett's humming engine, but he hadn't come close enough to see. He'd rationalized that he would just have been telling Garrett that he'd failed and then leaving again.

What was he going to do now? He hadn't thought past getting to Garrett and helping him. Steph didn't want to think past that.

He realized that as he'd been sitting he'd unthinkingly twisted around and started sort of patting and clawraking the long white fur sprouting from his sides. One hand was still braced on the ground holding him up, the other was trying to get his fur back in order. He stopped as soon as this registered and held still for a moment, one arm still crooked up awkwardly.

Steph could have gone without all this. He could have been himself with a pair of bunny ears, he thought glumly. With a little difficulty, he flexed the hand at his side, trying to make a fist and failing. Even if he hadn't had claws and puffy black pads on each digit and one big metacarpal pad, his fingers didn't bend far enough to curl around so the tips dug into his palms. Or what passed as palms. He didn't even really have them. There wasn't even the bulge of knucklebones through skin.

Giving a nearly-soundless nasal sigh, he pinched a number of long white hairs between finger pads and the big metacarpal one, tucking his dewclaw over both, and pulled one last time. His skin pulled with it. That hurt, all right - he felt the antenna on his forehead react, coiling more tightly. Steph let go and reluctantly went back to patting at his fur. He recognized the motions now as grooming or preening of some kind, like a cat or a bird but also a lot like how he'd used to reflexively brush down his shirt or touch his face when he was nervous. He supposed it was good that he wasn't licking himself. It was something to do.

Maybe he could get someone to give him a little cane, so he could hobble on it. Steph snorted, then reconsidered. That might actually be a good idea. That way he'd be able to bring one hand up into play - his feet had those very long toes, but frankly they weren't in a position to do much. Maybe something he could rest his elbows on to get upright, like a walker.

Walker. Garrett. What was he doing? Even if he had no idea where to go, he had to try. Just - wow, this was discouraging. Better get moving.

When he stood his weight was on those pads on his fingers and at the front of what had been his hands; his wrists were clear off the floor, his dewclaws just barely not touching it. He was getting used to that, though the part of him that remembered crawling heavily on hands and knees always made him want to adjust his stance.

Yeah. Yeah, better get moving.

[transition. Possibly cut the previous, sum up briefly in next]

"No, I am the one asking the questions," the man insisted angrily. He had a vest and looked rumpled, and from a distance he'd looked a lot like Han Solo, but up close he was clearly someone else. "One more time! What are you and what is your business here!"

''Damn it, apparently I'm a Hoojib! And I'm looking for a friend! Have you seen an AT-AT or not?!'' For his part, Steph was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd gotten a blaster or several aimed at him when he came close to this group, but it was pointed away now and no one was actually shouting.

"''Nev''er heard of them," the man said, evidently taking a lot of pleasure in being unhelpful. "How do I know this isn't a trap? Oy, Rebs! Any of ''you'' heard of a Hoojib?"

The people who were being referred to as 'Rebs', the people who made up the group Steph had approached, denied knowing. They seemed to be eyeing this man with dislike, yet for whatever reason were listenting in anyway. The group was diverse, although even from a distance he'd recognized the orange jumpsuits of a number of X-Wing pilots. That's why he'd tried to go closer. He'd thought they might be willing to help. Apparently not.

"Anyone? ''Anyone''?" The man shook his head in an exaggerated motion. "Guess your ruse isn't working, is it? I don't think anyone but you knows what a Hoojib is. Protip: if you're going to make up a species, pick a better name."

"It's not made up," a woman's voice said, loudly enough for it to carry. People yielded for her, just far enough that she didn't have to push, as she passed to the edge where Steph could actually see her.

She was tall - everyone seemed tall from Steph's level - but not as tall as a lot of the others. Something about her face was vaguely familiar, though he knew he'd never seen her. It was a sharp face with intense eyes, but pretty enough, he supposed.

The man shook his head again, this time seriously. "This is a trap. You know it's a trap."

"If it is, I can handle it. I'm just going to talk." They shared a long glance over Steph's head, and then the man looked away and sighed.

"That's how you want it? Fine."

She looked down on him, staring hard enough that he had to keep himself from preening nervously. "My brother and I worked closely with Spokesmind Plif and his people during the Nagai-Tof war. I know Hoojibs. While it's certainly possible that you belong to some distinct subspecies, you bear only minor resemblance to the ones I have known."

He would have protested, but staring up into her eyes, he got a sudden image of what she meant. Smaller, and much more insectile, with bigger, paler eyes, floppier ears, an entirely different appearance and demeanor. Somehow she'd shown that to him, and he was - well, he was at a loss for words.

''Uh. Sorry?''

Oh. ''Oh''. She didn't have the hair buns or the white dress or the metal bikini for that matter, and she wasn't shouting

''You're Princess Leia!''

"''Chief of State'' Leia Organa Solo," someone out of his field of view grated, maybe one of the pilots.

''Hey! Help me!'' Steph shouted, or as close as he could to shouting without a larynx.

"I've fought with worse. During the second Yevetha incursion-" He stopped himself, paused, and in a slightly different tone said, "Never mind. At any rate, this is nothing."

life-form analyzer.

==Escaping==

Fuel reserves were at ninety-three point seven nine four five oh. He wasn't burning it at the ideal rate; one of the filters wasn't quite right, so the mixture had some fine particulates which were affecting consumption. It didn't harm his performance too much, not for one mission, but the techs were definitely going to have to take a look at it when he was back in his berth.

He kept all four blasters hot. This was a big expenditure, but without a gunner sitting in one of the pilot chairs he was quite a bit slower, and the couple seconds between registering a threat and being able to fire might make a difference here, where everything was so fast. He'd had some trouble deciding to do that. Eventually he'd just stopped walking for a few minutes, which let power reroute until he could balance the pros and cons.

How long had he been walking? No one had set a timer, he didn't know. A few kilometers. He had no plan for getting out. Random directions all the way. There'd been a thing. Swinging cliff-gate. Door. No, two doors, side by side - double doors, that was it. They'd stopped him for a while, until he'd thought of shooting out the metal thing that kept them closed. After that they had swung open for him. He couldn't recall when that had been.

He was fairly certain that he'd gone in a few circles; he was continuously plotting new courses with a number of random turns. There had been some more ambulating towers, and each time he'd seen one he'd stopped in his tracks to watch them, but they'd ignored him. Good. He was more effective on targets that didn't outmass him or move that damn fast.

Now, finally, it looked like he was getting somewhere! Ahead, at the far range of his vision, more things. Doors. Different surface, clear, yes, glass doors, he couldn't see through them yet but they ''were'' glass. Ground was still good, he didn't detect any major holes or anything that would hide treacherous ground, so he shifted the pace up to maximum, the ground-eating charge that he could only keep up for so long without risking damage.

''Dead end! Stop, stop!'' As he reached the doors he turned and pulled to the side, shedding momentum and not quite presenting his flank. Glass though they were, the doors were closed and all the nonvisual sensors tagged them as yet another unscaleable cliff. Coming to a stop, power rerouting smoothly with hardly a flicker in his vision, he thought that this place was absolutely riddled with these sheer cliffs. They didn't seem natural.

A moment later, and Garrett thought, of ''course'' they didn't seem natural. Good God. They were ''walls''. They kept the ceiling away from the floor, the outside away from the inside. What, had he forgotten somehow? It was hideously obvious, now that he wasn't walking.

That was worrying. Still, he couldn't stop for that now. He had to get out. His side-views somehow couldn't see through the glass of the doors; they were just reflective, smooth planes, totally unnatural looking, and it took a few seconds to figure out that the sheets of thinner organic material were probably flyers that had been taped up at eye level - yeah, they were some distance above him, but he could read the writing on the closest one, a billboard-scaled proclamation about staying hydrated and bathing. By backing up and turning awkwardly, footpads clomping loudly in his mind's ear, he could see out of his command viewport, and the glass was properly transparent.

Outside, while the nearest bits of paving looked like the kind of job that involved getting regional politicians to cut a ribbon at the end of a dedication ceremony before the thing could be used, everything he took as signs of scale - trees, people, cars - was distant. Within sight, yes, but the distance shrank them, and the sight of humanoids his size or larger seemed like a trick of his eyes or cameras or whatever, rather than the presence of towering fast monsters. For a strange moment of disconnect he could almost believe that the convention had simply moved outside and was going on just fine, maybe a little more disorganized by the move.

Then Garrett made himself look closer, and actually see the scaled-up people, what they looked like beyond not seeming like moving towers. What was unmistakeably a gout of fire shot into the air and fizzled out as the androgynous man producing it was interrupted by something with a pair of gigantic bat wings, spreading them incredibly wide and flapping them with what looked like a tremendous gust of wind. To the side, an angry-looking cat furry bandaged a small boy in a whirlwind of linen strips, showing long, pointed teeth as he shouted or snarled at the bat-winged thing. [Oy, I'm awful at crowd scenes. Gotta come back later.] ... Yeah. He was pretty sure most of that didn't happen in a convention that was going on just fine. Come to think of it, he didn't see any balding middle-aged men dressed like their favorite anime girls.

A lot more leggy women dressed as popular anime girls, though.

Garrett thought he had some idea about what had happened. Not how or why, of course. But it was pretty clear that he wasn't the only one.

Maybe it was just as well.

He wasn't breathing. No, of course he wasn't breathing. It was that tic again. Better ignore it.

He checked his fuel reserves. Ninety-three point five oh oh nine two. He was burning it just by standing here. Now Garrett thought he knew what that mystery console was, the one that he had to leave underpowered every time he moved. It was his frontal lobe, or something like that. His engine didn't produce enough power. It was optimized for walking and shooting, and powering the thinking console at the same time was more than the motor could handle. He guessed so, anyway. It would certainly explain why things had gotten so much simpler, and why he'd forgotten about walls. Dismaying thought. He got stupid every time he moved; he might literally be unable to walk and think in abstract concepts at the same time. Or - well, okay, he was fairly sure he could walk and think at least somewhat, but not while keeping his blasters primed.

Still, he'd paused to decide to heat up his blasters. It looked like whenever he stopped walking he got that console back. Maybe there weren't any ill effects to that. Maybe it only lasted until he had enough power to reroute. Was he stupider now than he'd been when he was lying on his side?

...Okay, that was an idiotic question, Garrett admitted to himself. No way to tell. It was better to just assume that he could trade walking or the ability to shoot first for the ability to think about things that weren't directly related to walking or shooting. He just couldn't have all three at once. Oh God, it was like the crossing-the-river puzzle, he just had to put the fox and the grain in the boat and leave the chicken back on the riverbank. Or something. Hopefully it wouldn't wander off and the boat wouldn't capsize. Because if he didn't think he could get whatever passed for his brain back, he wouldn't do anything at all, would he?

Very suddenly the emptiness hit him again, hard enough that he felt like something had peeled back his plating and bared both levels of his inner structure. He saw his insides, felt that yawning cold void. Sickening. Empty. Empty, and the plating around it utterly still, as only an inanimate object could be. It had never exactly gone away, he'd just managed not to think about it. Maybe not having thoughts wasn't so bad.

Garrett not-quite-shuddered. Standing up, that meant adjusting his legs enough to make his body rock slightly. He had the tic again.

Well, he wasn't going to get anywhere just standing here. Better get out now, before something got him.

Okay. The doors towered up above him, glass in metal frames that might be aluminum. Remembering when he'd first come in, he was pretty sure that they were pull doors, at least from the outside, and didn't have the kind of latch that needed a turning doorknob. The latch was some kind of one-way deal to keep it from swinging all over the place. At the top of the frame there was some kind of... armature thing. He'd majored in Engineering, not Architecture, but he thought that it kept the door from swinging out.

From inside, it was a push door. He really couldn't push, though. He wasn't built for that, and he'd probably break something trying. That meant trying to shoot it open and hoping that it wasn't balanced. The armature looked easier.

It was a little too high up to reach with his heavies, not without backing up, so Garrett trained his medium repeating blasters at the metal and fired, bracing against the recoil. He'd kept them hot, so there was no moment of charging.

The sound, muted though it was, wasn't anything like earlier, when he'd fired into a wall to see if he could hear anything. When the smoke or vapor or whatever cleared - yes, a good bit of the armature was gone, and some of the doorjamb past it, and there was a blackened crater in the wall. A tiny flame guttered in the middle of it. The glass near that was in one piece, but browned.

He guessed his blasters were more powerful than he'd thought. It was a good thing he hadn't hit that thing that might have been Steph. Garrett suppressed another shudder at the thought.

The armature was gone, which left the latch. Feeling cautious, Garrett backed up stiffly and deliberately, fighting the urge to clutch his nonexistent stomach with limbs that didn't bend that way as he felt the tic. Funny how he'd never appreciated being able to do things like back up without having to think about it. He decided to just get on with it. Aim. Fire.

Okay, the latch was gone, but apparently the doors weren't weighted to swing in or out, because they weren't locked in place anymore but they also weren't opening on their own like the last set of doors. Damn!

Looking out through the glass, seeing the pale blue sky through his forward viewport, seeing the walls and ceiling and floor through all his other senses, Garrett fought a sudden wild surge of claustrophobia. This was less a building and more of a tomb, or maybe ''he'' was the tomb, or maybe - God, it didn't matter, he felt sick and hollow and everything inside with him seemed too close.

The tic again. He was beginning to hate that thing. Forget not having the necessary organs, he didn't feel like he'd had the wind knocked out of him or anything like that. He only felt like he had to breathe when the tic hit him and made him remember that he wasn't doing it. It wasn't a good feeling.

Garrett deliberately focused on his interior, although he'd been trying to avoid doing that, since he hated the sight. He had life support systems built around the void, though of course they were for his crew, not him. Some of those were devoted to atmosphere - he had some kind of air recycling unit, but since the relevant sensors reported that the external air was just fine, air was just being sucked into intake scoops and filtered. Those motors, the fans they ran that circulated air around, they were important. He couldn't control them, but they were important. They'd have to do.

It wasn't like breathing could possibly be as good as the tic kept reminding him, he told himself. No one would ever get anything done.

Driven air, filtered and cooled and dehumidified and constantly monitored by the housekeeping console, blew gently through the void. It wasn't tidal at all, but he let himself imagine that he was taking a deep breath.

Right. Right. There was a kickback every time he fired, and that probably implied that blaster bolts had kinetic energy. This was not how lasers worked. That didn't matter. This would either work or it wouldn't.

''I am not going to be trapped here!'' This time he used his heavies in linked-fire mode. Door on the right, doorframe in the lower left corner. Aim. Fire. The recoil, stronger with his heavies, made his ''flexible armored tunnel'' compress momentarily as his command center jerked back. The bulk of the door had moved a little. This was working! Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Aim higher. Fire. Repeat as necessary - stop!

The door opened enough that the wind caught and pushed at it. He wasted no time in setting a course through the opening while nervously watching the doorjam. Most of the way through, the wind must have faltered and the door must have been weighted, because it swung on him. It hit hard enough that he felt the impact through his hull, and although it was jarring and loud and he was forced to very consciously shuffle sideways to keep his balance, there was no pain. Just the feeling that pain should have been there.

But he barely noticed that. It was - God, the world was bright. He reached the point he'd set and stopped. The world was bright. He couldn't see. Gah! This didn't hurt, not quite, and it didn't exactly feel like heat, but it was very unpleasant, it was- God, too bright! Everything was hot light, he couldn't see anything, he was blind! This didn't make sense, it had been fine through the window!

Part of him remembered moving his roommate's plants outside on a sunny, nearly cloudless day, he couldn't remember why, and how the plants had suffered for that. His roommate - oh, God, he couldn't remember his name! Justin? Jacob? He was in architecture or something and happened to be utterly forgettable - had told him very patiently that it didn't matter that they'd been tropical plants, there had still been too much light; the dorm room with the lights on was anywhere from fifty to maybe four hundred lux, if the windows were open on a bright day. Direct sunlight on a day like that was somewhere between thirty and one hundred thirty ''thousand'' lux, and the plants had effectively been sunburned. Justin or Jacob or whatever his name was had gone on to say that direct sunlight was incredibly, exponentially more powerful than indoor lighting, it was just that human eyes adjusted so well that people barely noticed.

The rest of him was locked in place, frozen, trying not to panic, trying to will the brightness to fade. He wasn't blind, not ''quite', he could sort of sense where the sun was, like it was actively hating him, like his vision was a sense of touch. And his underside, he could vaguely make out his legs and his shadow. But he couldn't see, even when he switched to the too-dark internal cams, everything was brightness that felt suspiciously like pain, he couldn't stare out at any of it, he had a ''very'' strong compulsion to tear up defensively, screw his eyes shut, shade them, but ''he couldn't do that'', he couldn't even turn away, ''he didn't have eyes''.

Garrett's motor was working back up out of the near-subliminal hum, getting louder. Too bright! ''Too bright!'' He couldn't - God, too bright! His motor was running, he could move, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn't even go back because the door had shut, and he couldn't ''see''... ''Threat! Threat!''

He backed, sidled, tried to get his command section and his heavies into position, couldn't, it was too high up, aimed his medium repeating blasters, fired. Of course he didn't do any good, he was aiming at the goddamn ''sun'', but he fired anyway, and did it again.

This was useless, he was just burning power, how was his fuel - oh God, ninety two point eight two oh five one that couldn't be good, he was running his motor like he was moving at full tilt blasters blazing and he ''couldn't slow it down'', couldn't see, anything could be out here with him, couldn't move for risk of crashing, too bright, too hot ''threat threat threat'' - was this what going insane felt like?

He managed to make himself stop firing and finally picked up on the terrain sensors in his footpads. The surface was solid. It was stable! Too bright, yes, he couldn't see, yes, this was probably as close to pain as he was going to get, but ''the ground was firm'', damn it!

That helped a little, long enough that he realized that the terrain sensors could substitute for sight. Sort of. Garrett could pick up on sort of a vague outline of the raised hardened surface he was on - sidewalk, right - and where it met the less certain surfaces around it, which was probably the grass. He was still - God, this was insane, he couldn't ''see'', why couldn't he seem to adjust to this, it was just ''daylight'', it was agony, he couldn't stop the static popping in bursts over his intercom and didn't know what kind of vocalization that was supposed to be - but this was something. Like echolocation. Sort of.

It only extended out in an oval maybe, oh, seventy meters long - no, only a few times his body length and he wasn't huge, so it had to be smaller than that. He had to find some shade and he couldn't turn back around, he thought there'd been awnings over the door before - hadn't there been? Had that been a different door? - but there weren't here, he had to get moving.

Trees, there'd been trees he'd seen from inside, the kind that got planted around parking lots to shade some of the cars, those had been the closest. He'd gotten partially turned around, but he thought they were this way, along the pavement. Garrett set course points and hoped.

Terrain-sensing, it turned out, could pick up on people. Sort of. And only if they were the monumentally-scaled ones here - no, no, he had to get it straight, they were probably normal size. He felt them - well, more properly, he felt their footsteps against the ground. The footsteps were shaped vaguely like feet, so some of them were sort of beanlike and others were disks or different shapes, as they hit the ground, some walking or running, some probably staying in place. He hadn't given much thought to how much weight got shifted around by something that breathed, and he was a little startled at how bitter the thought was.

It seemed like there were more closer than farther away, which probably just meant that Garrett could sense the heavier things from farther away, and no doubt there were some holding too still for him to sense like this. He kept setting points and walking, he was trying to be calm, but this wasn't sight. God. Even assuming he got to shade, even assuming he was able to communicate somehow, so someone didn't whisk him away and dismantle him, he'd probably end up living in one of those trailers for the disabled and -

Not living. ''This wasn't living.'' Existing, then, until his fuel ran out. It would. He didn't know what was in his tank but he was pretty sure it wasn't something you could get on Earth, and there'd probably be scale problems. And he needed regular maintenance, though he knew nothing was going to be able to get at his engines without taking them apart. Otherwise, he'd [maintenance fail: catch fire? Go critical?] What then?

Maybe it was better not to -

Whoah! Footsteps, closer, ''really damned fast'', okay, unless they changed direction they'd just pass him by-

SCRAPING HIS HULL oh God what was it engines building to fever pitch SCRAPING THE SEAL OF HIS BOARDING HATCH prepping his heavies, heating heating hurry up he could HEAR IT nonononono STOP he fired his heavies without thinking and tried to bring a medium repeater in line but of course the ''thing'' was running now, too fast, where was it it was gone!

"KKKKSSSSHHHT! KKSSSSHHHHHHH," he staticked in alarm, only the static was much longer and had a terrified snarl in it, he was not sure if that was an attempt at cursing but damn it of ''course'' sensing footsteps wasn't the same as sight and he had no idea what the rest of the body was doing and if anything flew he wouldn't know about it at ''all'' he was blind he was deaf good Lord in Heaven there could be another one RIGHT NOW move move movemovemovemove''move''.

And he was walking as fast as he could, almost running, knowing he couldn't keep this up and all discretionary power was in everything ''but'' his not-a-brain but ''that didn't matter'' keep going go go go, SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - SET NEW COURSEPOINT - REACHED COURSEPOINT, CONTINUE TO NEXT, ''DODGE'' - SET NEW COURSEPOINT.

Later - it felt like much later - he remembered that the settings for the holocams had to be manually told to adjust to major changes in light. One of the pilots, whoever was serving as the gunner, usually hit that switch. He didn't have a gunner, and the horrible wrongness inherent in a phrase like that did not summon one up. He couldn't hit the switch, but he could turn it on, and he did.

Better. The blinding light on all sides tinted, then seemed to dial down and he could see again. Not even any bright afterimages, but then didn't you need retinas for those? He could see. Much better.

Funny, something was different, but he couldn't get a reading on it. Maybe if he slowed down, free up more power to route to the smart console - No. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't slow down. He did not want to slow down.

Ahead there was an obstruction in his path, hanging across just above his mobile command center, where it would disastrously scrape his upper edge if he just went under it. Trivial to destroy it. He did. Two heavy shots, and he cleared the gap with meters to spare, footpads pounding on the rubble. He shouldn't maintain this pace, it was potentially damaging, but that was fine. He didn't slow down.

What had changed - he was under open skies, not one sheer cliff on any side. The surface was somewhat different - he'd noticed several surface changes, but glancingly, since it hadn't been important. It was some other material, dark gray, smoother and thinner and not as good a surface since it was cracking under his weight. But that was fine.

No hyper-fast bipedal towers. Definitely fine.

Another obstruction, the same kind, this one a little smaller and level with his command viewport. He destroyed it, too, and two heavy shots seemed like overkill.

Underfoot, civilian groundcars on wheels, unarmored, brightly colored, swerved wildly to avoid him. He considered shooting them. He considered altering his course to kick at them or - yes, they were small enough to step on, at least some of them. He didn't. One thing to do this - it was a sin, yes, but he'd take that. Another thing, a worse thing, to take them with him.

Part of him twitched. Okay, if the giant towers were humans, what was with this? Bit by bit, this was a road with several lanes, those were cars, those were trees, all at a scale of much smaller than him, which felt more natural. There was yet another obstruction ahead, and this time he recognized it. Freeway overpass. Even lower than the other two.

Huh. Well, he wasn't going to slow down to think about it. He was alone, empty, it didn't matter where he went as long as he didn't stop until the end. There was a moment when he was distracted by flying atmospheric craft, some loud enough to hear, but he didn't stop. He kept going. Full tilt, getting to each new course point at his highest speed.

He'd always loved getting caught up in a new idea, the way it took over his life, practically singing under his skin, as immediate as his heartbeat. Only now the heartbeat was gone, and in place of the singing was the jarring music of engines.

Fuel reserves were at eighty-nine point oh nine one two seven and going down. That was fine. He wasn't stopping, even with no crew and no purpose. Even with so little power going to it, the strange console had some current. He had autonomy.

==Anj Outside==

Outside, it was chaos, pure and simple. Anj hadn’t been in the crowd when ''it'' happened. He’d seen people and creatures of all descriptions fighting to get outside while he’d been looking for a private place. By the time he’d picked up on the broadcast and left the bathroom, most of them had already gone – the halls had hardly been deserted, but the majority had already fled. He could hear them outside, a dull roar formed by thousands of throats. ''Not a happy crowd'', he decided. ''Better than a mob, though. I don't know what I'd do with one of those.''

As he approached the empty frame of a double door - it had once, apparently, held glass, but that was nowhere to be seen - Anj felt the warning tingle and heard what first sounded like another shrieking alarm. In response he sidestepped out of the way, and none too soon. Some kind of very large heronlike bird with pale gold-orange feathers skidded unsteadily around a corner, then powered past him in a lurching run. The moment its wings cleared the doorframe, it launched itself into the air. As it winged upwards and away the Red Guard realized that it was making a high, panicked call that sounded vaguely like screaming.

He glanced back at where the bird had come from and stilled himself. Nothing, not even the warning tingle that was his precognition. Maybe the bird had been fleeing something, maybe it hadn't, but any trouble was slow enough that if he kept moving it wasn't going to bother ''him.''

TR-1407 stepped outside and was struck by what he saw. People, creatures, and stranger things that defied categorization littered the landscape, rushing about, standing and sitting and reclining in a few cases. Some were alone, others in groups. There were some fighting or arguing with each other, others trying to subdue the wild ones, some hightailing it as if the Emperor’s finest were at their heels, some examining themselves frantically, some just sitting back with mouths open as if howling or screaming, though the Red Guard couldn’t pick out individual voices in the collective noise. Almost no one was close to the complex; most people that Anj saw were on the grass.

As he automatically went through a threat assessment, picking out specifics from all the bewildered bystanders, he marveled at the sheer number. He hadn’t thought the Orlando Convention Center could hold so many – yes, it had been crowded, and he hadn’t canvassed the entire place and seen for himself how big it was, but still. It was like a “Where’s Waldo” poster, writ large.

Maybe it wasn't just inside, he thought suddenly. Maybe it was ''everywhere'', and just more obvious here. If the image had become real - well, it had to be more than just the image, or he wouldn't have gotten taller. If little unarticulated thoughts, like ''a forcepike weighs seven kilograms'' and ''Imperials use the metric system for measurements'' had also carried over, what about others? What about the cheater's assumption that ''I will not be caught'', or the youth's that ''I am immortal''?

Still on the instruction frequency, the officer who had told TK-1407 where to go was tersely repeating those instructions to someone else who had reported. ''I need to stay focused. I can speculate later. Need to find my squadron before I do anything else.''

Some of the figures in the crowd looked like security forces – ''no, police, they're called police.'' Police, firefighters, paramedics, what looked like a SWAT team in black, some Animal Control officers, of all things - there were more than a few people that had probably been called in from all across the state, if not country. They clearly were supposed to try and control or at least contain this madness. Just as clearly, they were as confused and uncertain as anyone else, but trying their best to impose order in some form. Anj sympathized. This was not a job he envied.

It was weird – the outsiders looked and ''felt'' somehow a little different from all these others, and not just because ''they'' were all human. Like all of the changed, big and small, were larger-than-life in one way or another. Maybe he was imagining things.

Flickers on his peripherals made TR-1407 tilt his chin up. The sky, a lovely cloudless blue, was barely less crowded than the ground – far, far above something streaked up into the atmosphere, and hardly any closer small military-looking jet planes or fightercraft roared overhead in formation. Even closer there were news helicopters already, sharing airspace with winged things of all description and wingless humanoids who had no visible way of staying aloft.

The Red Guard saw bright costuming and at least one cape fluttering in the wind as fliers swerved around each other or hovered in place. Someone in red and blue tights streaked upwards abruptly at impossible speeds, within seconds ''catching up to the jets'' and paralleling their course, far enough away that the red cape was barely visible. Anj saw this and, incredulous, thought, ''Superheroes? Really?''

There was no denying what they looked like, no matter how improbable the thought was. Anj realized what he was thinking and grinned involuntarily. ''As if I’m perfectly reasonable in comparison. This is insane. So what? The 501st needs me. And reality doesn't care whether or not you believe it.''

With that reminder, he turned. ''Southwest blacktop? Must be that parking lot where we planned to meet. Ah… it’s midday or thereabouts, so by the sun’s position'' that'' way is west, which means south is...'' there. ''Not far.'' Doing his best not to attract any attention, the Red Guard started moving at a lope.

''I don’t know where the closest military outpost is,'' Anj realized. ''Still, with something like this we can probably expect troopships any minute now; orbital reinforcements – No, no,'' no! ''This is Earth! '' Earth! ''Not part of the Empire! There are no orbital reinforcements. No fleets. We might get some part of the Army here, but they don’t have the technology I’m expecting. Rockets, not turbolasers. Helicopters and jets, not troopships, not snubfighters.'' Why did that thought make him uncomfortable?

''I wouldn’t worry about him, even with a sword like that… Watch out for her, she’s dangerous… He’s fine for now, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to push him… she looks like she could do some serious damage, but somehow I don’t think she’ll be a problem… Better not go near that one. Looks like everyone else’s picked up on it too… Emperor’s bones, that thing is huge, but I don’t think it’s up to anything…'' There were a ''lot'' of people to assess, particularly on the run. It niggled at the Red Guard that he was only doing a cursory check of each, but seeing that his options were to ignore everyone, give only the briefest of inspections, or slow down to a crawl to inspect everyone...

''There!'' Anj's heart jumped in his chest. Inexplicably he felt an incredible sense of relief, strong enough that he was almost lightheaded.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the large knot of people standing together on the asphalt were just as confused and disorganized as anyone else. Quieter, perhaps, but still random. An outsider might believe that they had formed into a cluster at random, and that it was chance that explained why they almost all looked like Imperials, mostly troopers.

The outsider would be wrong. Anj's eyes flicked as an indicator sounded and saw that no fewer than ten Imperial frequencies were active. He didn't see anyone lined up in ranks, but training helped him to find the subtle signs that there was organization, purpose, ''order'' in the group, not just the amorphous mixing of the crowd. They were, indeed, bewildered and unsettled just like everyone in or out of the complex. An effort was being made to remedy that.

TR-1407's footsteps hastened. A stormtrooper with the battered armor and single orange pauldron that signified his rank as a sandtrooper squad leader stopped him with a gesture, then nodded. The Red Guard joined the growing mass.

It was startling to check IFF - Identify Friend/Foe - tags on a monitor and see so many designations. Some were familiar, others less so. There were several SL - Sith Lord - indicators scattered about, but Anj didn't see SL-1984, and this was worrying. Other Vaders, yes, and the Red Guard couldn't help boggling a little at the concept of more than one Lord Vader. But none in white, and none with the right designation. What would he have done, anyway?

''Right. I should report in. To whom, though?'' The mass was ''trying'' to order itself, but it had a good ways to go yet. Almost no one with a helmet was speaking "out loud" with their voice amplification units. With the amount of noise that the rest of the crowd was putting out, that was probably just as well. Instead the comm frequencies were abuzz with orders and counterorders, the beginnings of arguments, complaints and others chewing out the complainers. One channel had been set aside for those who had been separated from squadmates. It didn't help that this part of the parking lot was nowhere near clear. Not every space was filled, but there were enough cars and the like to force the group to encircle them.

Where was his squad? Anj scanned again, and again, and didn't find any of them. No. They had to be here. Despite himself he opened the "searching" channel. "Tampa Bay? Tampa Bay Squad, come in! Tampa Bay?"

This particular frequency was filled with similar requests. "Is there anyone else from Georgia Garrison? Please, Georgia Garrison?" "Pacific Outpost, all units report in. Pacific Outpost..." "Michigan Squad, we have two missing from Michigan Squad, please report." "Anyone from Bast Alpha Squad, come in. Did everyone get out okay?" Most of them were representing a particular squad, or garrison, or outpost, and were looking for missing friends. But he heard one or two who had been separated completely, like him. Some got answers; Anj overheard the starts of several reunions, each cutting off as the speakers switched channels. Others didn't.

"Tampa Bay! Come in Tampa Bay Squad!" It didn't make ''sense''. Anj was starting to sweat into the lining of his armor. Where could they be? He hadn't exactly been quick in getting here, he ''couldn't'' be the first from his squad! Where had they all gone? TR-1407 scanned IFF again as the last of his relief evaporated. It made no sense! The three other squadrons of Florida Garrison - Everglades, Makaze, Parjai - were there. There were forty-nine people in Tampa Bay Squadron - not all of them had come to Xanadu, and some might be a little slow in getting here, but he should have heard from ''someone''.

"Tampa Bay Squad? Please come in. Tampa Bay? Is anyone there? Anyone? Tampa Bay!" Anj forced himself to stop before he lost all control of his voice. He could hear someone else pleading, close to tears if not already crying - "Neon City Garrison, ''where are you?'' Please! Damien, Ray, Greg - ''where are you?''"

To his horror, Anj found his throat constricting in panic. Where were they? ''Where was his squad?'' He tried, squeezing his hands into fists and desperately telling himself that they were late, that's all, he tried to keep calm, but it had been a trying day already and he had no orders to follow and ''his squad was missing.'' That was the big thing, the worst thing. He'd lost them, he had failed his oath as a Red Guard and a soldier of the Empire. The feeling was strong enough to make his eyes water. Anj made sure to close his connection and all of his speakers so that none would hear when he lost it. The rest of the 501st had enough distractions.

Something pulled on his robe. Surprised, Anj looked down at the round-topped droid as it retracted its manipulator arm and crooned something wordless at him.

It was a moment for him to blink fiercely and swallow that lump in his throat, and he covered the delay by reactivating a speaker so that his voice could be heard. "Yeah. There is. I - I've lost my squad." The admission almost stuck on the way out. "I don't know where ''any'' of them are."

The droid, an R2-series astromech with highlights in ''pink'', of all colors, whistled and cooed sympathetically.

"Well, no. Not a word. I have no idea where they are." It seemed like the tightness was easing off, becoming less immediate. He welcomed the distraction. "We got separated a while back, and I haven't seen or heard from any of them since. And it's not like we have our own personal frequency, either - it wasn't like we'd have had any use for it." As he realized what he'd just said, Anj smiled humorlessly into his helmet. Of ''course'' there wouldn't have been a use! It had been a game, or something close!

The R2 beeped, imperious. Its single black photoreceptor was steady. Just like that, things were in perspective. Anj might have laughed, if he hadn't still felt so uneasy.

"That's true. My squad is tough. I'm sure they're fine - it's just, they aren't ''here,'' and I don't know how my friends are. I haven't seen them since all ''this'' started, and I'm worried." This was true, and he knew that they had to have run into trouble, or he wouldn't be by himself like this. But - they were tough, and they were smart. If they needed help they would call for it, and they would make it through.

And if they didn't, well... For a moment he had trouble drawing breath. It was a ''terrible'' thought, and sickening enough that he tasted bile and felt his heart pounding in his throat. ''May the Force help their murderers, because nothing less will stop me,'' he swore, meaning every word. Terrible thought. '' Terrible'' thought.

A sharp whistle brought his attention back down to the droid, who chattered up at him. He had to make an effort to look in control and stable for it. He was sure he knew who and what it was. If it ''was'' R2-KT - well, virtually everyone in Star Wars fandom knew that story. In comparison, he had no grounds for complaint.

"I'll be fine. I'm a Red Guard - I work best alone or with only a few people, and it's not like I'm really by myself - I'm surrounded by the 501st." And they were his Legion, the closest to the Empire that he was ever likely to find. How could he despair? "Thanks."

With a final, cheery whistle, the pink R2 swiveled and trundled away. It had some kind of a logo banner, pink on white, on its back, but it slipped out of sight between two troopers and a robed man before he could read it. Less than a minute later, the single terrified member of Neon City Garrison got off the comm.

Anj felt better now. Still a little shaken, but he was functional, and that was what mattered. This still begged the question - ''now'' what? The Red Guard went after the first fresh distraction that presented itself.

There was a flurry of activity at the edges of the gathering. TR-1407 wasn't exactly short, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the helmets of the people around him. Still, he got a flash of someone else in flowing scarlet and something large, yellow, and moving. The Red Guard looked to his nearest neighbor and boosted the output to his speakers, realizing ''how'' he did it only after it was done.

"Do you know what that's about?" The woman in the form-fitting jumpsuit and the hoodless brown cape turned towards him.

She was - well, she was stunning, and Anj found himself glad that his helmet hid his gaze. She had an alertness about her, like she was aware of everything that was going on around her at all times. He couldn't tell what her position was - probably some kind of agent, by the lower-leg guards and nonstandard firearms. The woman had a striking sort of confidence, almost an aura of "I know what I'm doing and I'm proud to be doing it".

It didn't hurt that she really was pretty - her features were too sharp and strong for conventional beauty, but attractive. Red hair, intense green eyes, and under the jumpsuit she was fit and muscular with good shoulders, a far cry from the handful of sultry pin-up style women that Anj had glimpsed before. He hadn't found ''them'' particularly attractive, but -

Anj saw the lightsaber and the IFF-provided designation at roughly the same time. SL-3268, in a clear voice, answered, "There's a car, I'm guessing a Camaro, without a driver that's started moving erratically and making abortive charges at us. One of your fellow Guards is trying to dissuade it. I don't think there'll be a problem." Just as he was hoping she hadn't noticed, the Mara Jade added with a quirk of her lips, "And I'm flattered, but taken."

''She's one of the Emperor's Hands. I'm lucky that she hasn't taken offense.'' That realization effectively took any desire, killed it, and mangled it beyond any recognition. Anj was glad of the helmet hiding his face, and vaguely wished that he could find a hole in the ground in which to crawl into and die. Even with the cooling systems in his armor, he knew he was blushing furiously, hard enough that he felt sunburned. ''Next time, check IFF first.'' He didn't bother wondering how she'd known. Force Sensitivity and all that.

Probably just as well. Anj had no idea what he'd have done. He was on duty anyway; even with nothing immediate going on it would be un-Imperial to get too distracted. Fortunately not every woman was striking in quite that way - prettier, yes, often curvier and not immediately off-limits, but markedly less impressive. Picturing someone like the Mara Jade alongside, say, Scott, was... interesting. But of course there was also the fact that less than an hour ago ''he had been female'' - how, ''how'' could that have slipped his mind? - and feeling attracted to people while male was a tangle he ''really'' didn't want to unravel just yet.

3268's auburn head came up. Anj felt the warning tingle in the instant before a commanding voice came on all frequencies. The IFF code marked the speaker as TK-0210. '''Our Beloved Founder', Albin Johnson,'' Anj realized. ''Well well. There wouldn't be a 501st without him. I'd forgotten that he showed up. His R2 is here, so of course he's here too.''

"Something new has come up. Would everyone please listen to the situation." It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt that it was an order. Within seconds all voice traffic had stopped. The rest of the crowd carried on with the panicking, but here everyone listened as the founder explained an exchange that someone had heard taking place on a frequency that was decidedly not Imperial.

Specifically, it was one of the radio frequencies used by the United States military. The Founder didn't mention exactly what frequency it was, or when anyone had started listening in on it. What had been overheard was a report on something going off Xanadu grounds and following the highway. Something very large. One of the ones reporting said it was "like something out of Star Wars". The physical description exactly matched that of an Imperial Walker, specifically an All Terrain Armored Transport. Or, as the Rebellion and most civilians in the Galaxy called it, an AT-AT.

''This is a ''very'' sudden development.'' If he'd expected anything, TR-1407 would have thought that the Founder would have just summarized what had just happened, tendered some kind of advice or orders. He hadn't expected a fresh problem, particularly one like ''this''.

The gathering was silent barely long enough for the Founder's report to sink in before a member stated that there had ''not'' been a Walker exhibit, followed by other testimonies that confirmed that wherever this had come from, it wasn't 501st. Exactly what had been happening before all ''this'' was muddled, but people were quite adamant that they knew nothing.

Talking into a handheld comm unit so that everyone could hear her, 3268 had another opinion. "Why would it matter whether or not this thing is one of ours? Imperial is Imperial. The question is, what do we do about it? I think it's reasonable to assume that some rogue element has taken control of an assault walker for an unknown reason." Standing fairly close to Anj as she was, he heard the odd duality of the Mara Jade's voice coming simultaneously through his audio pickups and helmet comm.

It would be unacceptable for ''anyone'' - the automatic assumption seemed to be Rebels, smugglers, or saboteurs, although nobody really expected that to be true - to get away with stealing Imperial property, particularly something as gigantic and dangerous as an assault walker, the common consensus was. The damage one could do, particularly in an urban area, was tremendous, even on a civilized planet in the Empire, where units could quickly be dispatched to take it down. Here on Earth, on a day like today...

Anj heard someone unfamiliar speak out. "There was a young man earlier, some sort of student of engineering - I overheard his name, Gary or Garth or something - who wore a walker costume. He might be driving it." Several others remarked with surprise that they remembered something of the sort.

With confidence, Anj added, "It's difficult to pilot a walker without a copilot, but possible. Normally one drives, the other shoots. The automated systems would help compensate."

"He had a friend with him. It's entirely reasonable to think that two pilots can manage without a commander." If it occurred to anyone that maybe this student ''hadn't'' become a pilot, they kept silent.

A plan didn't actually get proposed until after the Founder made another report, one possibly even more alarming than the last. Tanks and military choppers were being dispatched to intercept the rogue walker before it could reach the next city - and if the cryptic military lingo had been translated properly, somewhere near Washington a jet loaded with missiles had just taken off.

Suddenly the entire gathering was moving, setting up a course of action, proposing and vetoing various aspects to the plan. There would have to be a pursuit, it was decided almost instantly. They needed a small number of autonomous agents. Agents who could subdue anyone within the walker without damaging it, agents who could ''control'' the walker, and someone with enough diplomatic acumen to defuse the situation once it was under control. Preferably agents would have at least some proficiency in at least two of the three. Every member of the team would also need to be able to use grappling hooks and high-tension wires to get up there. It would also help to have the tools all stormtroopers carried, including shaped charges, binders, and a Proper Resonator.

The gathering was rapidly polled, and all those with the right skill set were chosen, then evaluated and kept or not. Unsurprisingly, there were no Imperial Army Pilots who could be identified as such by their armor - AT-AT pilot uniforms were far from popular. No one had worn his or hers to Xanadu. However, a number, Anj included, had made the costumes - and somehow that translated into experience in the cockpit.

Anj was questioned and admitted that he'd never earned the license, and was met with a thinly-disguised quiz in the form of a barrage of questions from two others. He passed. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Red Guard and both willing to work with others and well able to subdue someone with minimal damage, meant that he was on the team.

Some others at least as qualified as him weren't, largely because they had trouble cooperating. There had been many Emperor's Hands, some of them Mara Jades, others not, in the initial pickings, but the fact that most of them seemed to strongly resent each other meant that only three were kept. The final selection consisted of eight individuals. These were the Hands, SL-3268 among them, Anj and another two Red Guards, a clonetrooper sergeant, and a single sandtrooper who really seemed to believe that he was Davin Felth, the trooper who had the line "Look, sir, droids" in ''A New Hope''.

At the same time the other half of the pursuit was being organized. Speederbikes were mentioned, but only two, both from a display, could actually be accounted for, and at any rate they might not have done much good. They were incredibly fast and agile, but with only two, they couldn't carry much. Average cars or trucks were considered and rejected in the same breath. It would be too hard to get an operative out of the vehicle and up into the walker, not to mention the fact that a car was a nice big target, if what's-his-name proved both unreasonable and able to use the walker's weaponry and crushing feet. This left motorcycles, a healthy selection of which were at hand. They would have to do.

More polling; TR-1407 was only peripherally aware of it, but at the end of it seven scout troopers and one Mandalorian soldier were chosen to do the driving. From the first report to the final team, only a few minutes of whirlwind activity had passed. The 501st, while not exactly up to optimal yet, was far more organized than it appeared.

The last problem was actually getting the bikes, taken from all across the lot, to ''work''. Five or fewer of them belonged to people within the gathering - and ''none'' of them had the keys on them. Seized by a wild idea, Anj stepped up during the discussion.

"We don't ''need'' keys," he said, coming to the closest one and uncompressing his forcepike. He had no idea what kind of motorcycle this was. He'd never had anything to do with the things. Still, he could find the ignition easily. Lining it and the lethal tip of his weapon up, the Red Guard thumbed a setting and delicately maneuvered the weapon. The thin metal around the keyslot tore and twisted, and the engine coughed to life.

Just as Anj was enjoying a swell of triumph the fickle machine died miserably, exhaust pipe emitting a stream of thick, oily smoke that spread in a cloud around ankle-height. An inhuman blue-skinned officer in white covered his nose as if offended by the fumes, which weren't evident to anyone with a proper, air-filtering helmet.

No one said anything on the comm channels for a long moment. "Okay," he said lamely, again glad of the helmet that hid his face. "I guess we ''do'' need keys. Today of all days, you'd think this would work." It was a mercy that the attention of the gathering shifted off of him then. He hadn't sensed much in the way of condemnation or scorn, and even amusement had been quiet. It was still embarrassing.

The alien officer in white - a Grand Admiral, apparently - ended up getting several technically-proficient people to hotwire the motorcycles. These included one of the Vaders in the gathering, a man seething with so much barely-suppressed rage and malevolent Force energy that Anj caught his breath and adopted a rigid posture. He was fairly frightening, seemingly hanging on to rationality by the thinnest of margins. The Red Guard fervently hoped that his friend hadn't ended up like ''that''. But whatever else could be said about SL-2128, he worked quickly and well, finishing in time to take over from an officer whose work was slower.

Something else came up; Anj picked up only a few of the details, but a squad that hadn't gotten out reported in to say that they were under attack by unfamiliar hostiles. Once again plans were formed and battered about. They had little to do with the walker interception team. It gave him a pang to think that he might be riding away from his squad, if they were in danger, but duty was duty. TR-1407 soon found himself mounted up behind a scout, roaring away on one of the motorcycles.

The locals barely noticed them go by. They had more than enough trouble as it was - nevertheless, Anj felt a slight pang of mixed contempt and sympathy. He let it pass. They could only do their best. The Five Hundred and First was here for when it wasn't enough.

The Founder sent his best wishes after them on an open frequency. His confidence audibly faltered a little. Anj thought he knew at least part of why. "Good Luck" wasn't right, and they were servants of the Empire, so "May the Force Be With You" might not be good either. Even so, "Emperor's Blessings" was just wrong - and, somehow, so was "The Empire will ''always'' strike back", the belief that any setbacks would be met with a more powerful counterattack. In the end, he settled for, "We're counting on you. You won't let us down."

==Camera guy==

[I fangirl over Tank Man. I really do. I love that we don't know who he was, if he's alive or dead, what he said to the driver of the lead tank - everything. ''How'' could he and the rest of the country have failed? The picture gives me chills. I'd link to it in my bank if the inspiration it gives me wasn't of the "feel small, sit still and tremble in awe and existentialness" variety. So I figured I'd bring it up, since the chance of me working it into, well, ''anything'' else are pretty small.

[Did a little research here, but I have to say that the details pertaining to the helicopter and Doug's camera are probably all wrong. I worked with news cameras in high school and already I've forgotten what piece is called what. The Internet failed me - you'd think I was the only one to wonder who shoots traffic reports, with what, and how. :P]

In June of 1989 an American photographer named Jeff Widener crouched on the sixth-floor balcony of a hotel in Beijing. He was covering the infamous government crackdown on protesters, and only the day before, during the massacre, had been concussed and bloodied by a thrown brick. Widener worked at a range of roughly half a mile with a titanium camera featuring a 400-millimeter telephoto lens. Using borrowed film with the wrong f-stop setting, he covered a column of at least seventeen tanks headed for Tiananmen Square being blocked by one man, alone and unarmed, with a shopping bag in each hand.

Widener wasn't the only one to get pictures of this happening. But, purely by chance, his picture spread fastest. It's now one of the most famous photographs on Earth, seen everywhere except the nation where it was taken - where it happens to be banned. It is iconic in every way, and purely by chance. If Widener hadn't heard that soldiers on the ground were forcibly confiscating cameras, if he hadn't met the fellow Westerner living in that room on the sixth story, if that Westerner hadn't had compatible film available or had been unwilling to stuff that film into his underwear and pass angry Chinese soldiers to get it developed - another photographer's shot of "Tank Man", the "Unknown Rebel", would be the world-famous one. But Widener was in the right place, at the right time, in all the right circumstances.

Doug Maines was in the right place at the right time, and in his view the circumstances didn't look too bad either. Specifically, he was in a Eurocopter Ecureuil news chopper, cruising at two thousand feet and circling with nearly three-quarters of a mile between it and that ''thing''. The camera was a modified 24 frame KCK-40, and at any moment he could start broadcasting live to the network.

Normally he and the pilot shot and delivered traffic reports and overflew accident scenes. Today, not too long after finishing the morning rush's report, they'd been ordered into the air again and told to circle around the Orlando Convention Center to cover something that had come up there. As he adjusted the focus, Doug mused that he hadn't thought much of it - last spring, for instance, a school had been evacuated due to a gas leak, and he had recorded and broadcast video of the students streaming out into the tennis courts.

But there'd been so much air traffic above the Convention Center that both Doug and his partner were wary. Every news station within range had sent someone over to cover it, whatever it was, and both of them knew what happened when helicopters collided in midair. They had spotted the thing heading away, and the chopper had changed course to follow it.

He'd studied for years at photography, cinematography, and the graphic arts, but if Doug had learned one thing it was that aiming high didn't always work out. He had become resigned to aiming his camera at reporters and traffic jams, something he'd never have settled for as an ambitious newbie daydreaming about fame and glory. He was no Widener.

Just as well - Doug didn't have the stomach for following revolutions. He felt a trace of amusement at the thought. ''Right place, right time, and no one's filming but me.'' He was recording now, but the network trusted him enough to let him decide for ''himself'' whether and when to broadcast live.

Something about it screamed ''tank'', clearly enough to make Doug think remember the university and Widener's shot of Tank Man. It was boxy and about as long as the largest legal semitrailer truck, maybe sixty feet in all, though much wider. But it had to be five times taller than any of them, mounted on four flat, jointed legs with round feet half the size of its strange, blocky head. The long legs and the head, and the red laser-things that sometimes shot out of that head, reminded Doug of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. Something about crushing Styrofoam cups in a commercial...

Three years of this job reminded him to check before and behind the tank thing. The highway was several lanes broad, which was probably all that saved oncoming cars from being crushed. Many had crashed into each other or run off the road as drivers gaped, and hardly any had actually passed it. The tank thing was fairly slow, no more than fifty miles an hour at most, and so heavy that it damaged the road, leaving a trail of massive craters and cracked, buckled asphalt in its wake, with a few crushed or burning wrecks scattered about and at least one demolished overpass. All of them had been oncoming traffic; right now nothing was going in the same direction as the walking tank.

Wait, that wasn't right. The distance made them tiny, but even without zooming in Doug saw a pack of motorcycles weaving around and breaking the speed limit, gaining quickly on the tank thing. They were going to get stepped on and ruin the shot, he was sure of it. He had to get an establishing moment before the action started, or it wouldn't look right.

Doug swallowed against his heartburn - no time to take an antacid pill now, he didn't want to miss it - and hit the button that would broadcast live. In a situation like this, he didn't have to report. He just had to film. Wide-angle shot first, to show how big the thing was, including a few wrecks to get a sense of the scale... he then zoomed in to catch little details like the rapid, ponderous motion of the legs and the toe flaps flexing against the ground. He very consciously kept his hands, and the camera, steady against the minor shuddering of the helicopter.

This was in time for the motorcycles to catch up, and he noticed that the riders weren't dressed in anything resembling normal biker gear. Heart pounding, Doug focused on them. He'd have thought ''publicity stunt'' if he'd seen people dressed like this anywhere else. All white and red.

Well, this was bound to be interesting.

[More stuff goes here.]
[No, really.]

==Rocket Trooper==

[[Image:Joysweeper--Illus3.jpg]]

TX-7255, "Barve" to his friends, saluted after a moment's hesitation. He'd been earnestly telling some groundpounder troops that the group was vulnerable from the air when he'd gotten the summons for an on-the-fly mission. He'd answered immediately - of course - but he hadn't expected to be briefed by the Lord Darth Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet.

...Sort of. Barve tended to focus on his jetpack. How to maintain it, fix it, how to fly it with increasingly intuitive controls, aerial tactics, maintaining and fixing his various weapons and practicing with them, tweaking the minor powered exoskeleton built into his armor, practice with different gravities and atmospheres, dabbling in repulsor packs. Combined with his love for comparing different models and modifying the ones he had, looking for perfection, he was never more than vaguely aware of any politicking.

Even so, he thought he'd have heard if the Supreme Commander decided to reverse his color scheme. The man was also missing most of one arm, the stump of which gave off occasional blue sparks, and at least half of his cape was absent. Since the stump hadn't even been capped off, it had to have been removed recently. This fit in with everything else, really. Barve hadn't heard anything concrete about action or details about where he'd been deployed. Everyone here was so disorganized.

A good meter too far away to be at the Supreme Commander's feet was a small, furry alien with big ears and large, alert eyes. Barve split his attention between the two - helmet screens were useful for that - until he was told that he had to carry the alien through the air.

He was surprised enough to blurt, "My Hush-About was modded with elements from the Aratech Screamer." This meant a lot of things, but he knew from experience that only another rocket trooper understood or cared. Even snubfighter jockeys glazed over. "She's a powerful machine. Launch scorches anything that isn't armored, and fur is flammable. My lord." He wasn't supposed to contradict the Supreme Commander, was he? Damn. Well, it wasn't like he'd run into the protocol before.

"I see. One moment." The Dark Lord - light lord? This really didn't make any sense, ''why'' was he in white - turned to the groundpounders for a moment. Barve ignored what they were saying - he wasn't supposed to listen in, and if it was important, they'd tell him - and watched the alien glance from helmet to helmet as the curved antenna on its head quivered. He had to be careful around aliens. You never knew what they would do.

A ground trooper with the type of armor and white fabric oversuit that some of them wore to protect against cold took off his helmet, turned it upside down, and knelt. The alien climbed into the helmet and shifted about as the ground trooper tugged the white cloth on the helmet so that it stood rigid, making a sort of bucket with the alien at the bottom. The trooper stood, holding his helmet by the cloth. Only the alien's ears showed.

"We have a runaway AT-AT bearing [direction]. I need you to take Steph inside it as quickly as - as quickly as is feasible. Get him there alive and conscious." This was the same thing he'd said before being distracted by the launch thing. "I don't know how well he tolerates flight, so you must determine your speed on your own. We will comm ahead and tell the intercept team to be ready. Do not engage hostiles. Do not get killed."

Weird mission. Still, Barve took the helmet from the trooper, locking his fingers in the stiff fabric. The little alien inside shifted its weight and stared up at him. Helmet and alien together were moderately heavy, but still lighter than his DN bolt-caster, still holstered.

A not-quite-voice said, ''Don't drop me. God, this is a bad idea. Please don't drop me''.

The ground trooper said, "Please don't drop him. I want my helmet back later."

"Steph, try not to drain energy. The comm channel is running on an open frequency. You are not to fire on anything. I can't stress that enough."

"Acknowledged." Not like he could even draw a weapon with his hands full.

The Supreme Commander hesitated, then nodded and told him, "Clear skies."

He knew the slang for "good journey?" Well, he knew the Supreme Commander was a damned impressive snubfighter pilot - that knowledge generally fell under politicking, but one of the memories recorded and passed down from his original had been a series of truly superior pilots, Lord Vader being at the top of the list - and snubbie pilots shared a bit of lingo with rocket troopers. ...Besides, now that he thought about it, 'clear skies' was probably the most obvious piece of flyboy slang ever.

Everyone had backed far enough away that even if he had a catastrophic failure and his jetpack exploded, none of them would die. He felt a little scorn at that kind of caution. Yes, jetpacks could explode at launch, ''if'' they weren't properly cared for, but Barve had been at this for five years. That was basically all his life - the Spaarti cylinder didn't count, acclimation had taken maybe two weeks, and since flash memory was pretty basic he'd had eight months of jetpack training - and he'd had plenty of time to get in the habit. Not like natural-borns, with that baggage from growing up all haphazard.

Barve set his stance and brought up flight control, rapidly checking the systems. Everything was green, not that he ever expected otherwise. Take care of your gear, and it will take care of you, the saying went, and no one took better care of a jetpack than TX-7255. He braced the helmet against his chest and as an afterthought shifted his grip so that he pinched the fabric over the alien, covering it. Hopefully it wasn't flammable.

There was enough open space around him, but still, regulations said that if he wasn't taking off in a specifically cleared space or doing a touch-and-go, he had to give a verbal warning. Some rocket troopers used the short "Dusting off!" or the even shorter "Launching!", but Barve liked the traditional phrase, said in one way or another since the first soldiers to take to the air on their own.

"Clear the blast zone!" He tensed, leaped as high as the light exoskeleton built into his armor would take him, and kicked in the rockets.

The first few seconds were always uncertain, as the jets fought gravity and flared, close enough to the ground that they licked the armor on his legs and slagged the spot where he'd been standing. The not-voice protested weakly. But he took care of his jetpack, and she held him steady at the top of the jump. He let her kick in a little harder, and she dragged his heavy flesh and armor up in a tower of sound and fire.

He modulated the thrust when he judged himself high enough and triggered the maneuvering jets on the right side, spinning in a slow, complete circle. This looked like one of those planets which couldn't collectively decide what it wanted to specialize in, so it went for city and wild stuff and farmland all at once. Those weren't as interesting as city worlds, at least not from a jetpack, but it was exponentially better than flying over ocean. He had his bearings now. Buildings, crowds, ground, roads, yep, atmospheric flyers, oh yes, and ''this'' way was North and ''this'' was South, good, and so his course was - that way.

Barve swung his legs and flipped over so his back was to the sky, working with his jetpack to find his balance in that second of freefall, and gave her the gun.

Immediately he was flying proper, losing a little altitude in a shallow dive and regaining it, then leveling off and holding steady. There were some other things in his airspace, but they ignored him, and he did the same. He loved flying fast, the landscape zipping by below him, wind shrieking against his armor and trying to tug things out of his hands, even the alternating sense that he was either weightless or something massive was pressing down on him. His jetpack was loud at her highest speed - since part of her was a Screamer, this was only to be expected - but of course he wasn't going at top speed, or anything all that close to it. He kept slow, almost too slow to fly. By the groaning of the not-voice, he probably didn't dare go any faster.

Pity, really. Even after all this time, even with the conditioning and the stuff they'd done to him in the Spaarti cylinder, his jetpack was fast and strong and agile enough to make him struggle to keep conscious, without vibrating him to pieces in the process. Some people didn't like tasking their g-tolerance; none of ''them'' had his genome. He loved flying. He'd rather die than be one of the groundpounders.

Sometimes, though, he wondered what it would have been like if he'd been sorted into pilot training instead. TIEs might not be as agile, but they went so much faster - and with inertial compensators, they could ''do'' that, make changes in their flightpaths that would kill him uncompensated. If he hadn't been sorted into the rocket trooper corps, then he'd be flying in space, too, and going after bigger targets. His original had been a snubbie pilot. The flash-memories he'd recorded and passed down included one of the joy and pride that came with piloting. Barve didn't really like thinking about that. Done was done, and the Empire wasn't going to let anyone but a ''really'' prime natural-born get retrained. Besides, a ship would mean losing his jetpack. She was his baby.

Okay. Barve scanned the ground. This was probably the right road, and there was some suspiciously regular cracking on the surface ahead, but he didn't see anything yet. He'd been told to watch for footprints in the road and wrecked cars. ...He really should have asked what a car was. Was it the same thing as a groundcar, which he'd seen a lot of here, or something more obscure? It wouldn't be the first time he got tripped up by similar-sounding unrelated words.

The not-voice had kept a lot of quiet, wordlessly unhappy not-sounds, particularly when he gained or lost altitude suddenly. He felt safe in assuming that the not-voice belonged to the alien curled up in the helmet he was carrying, and they were a good sign that it hadn't lost consciousness. Should he talk to it? Why not. It might know. Okay, he'd been told that the groundpounder helmet was on the open frequency, right? This far from all the others, he was picking up very little in the way of transmissions. Barve lowered his comm output so he wouldn't spam anyone.

"You know Basic, right?"

There was a pause, and he wondered if the wind was too loud. There were sound mufflers in ''his'' helmet, and his audio pickups filtered out most irrelevant noise, but helmets tended not to work as well when they weren't connected to armor.

Finally he not-heard it. ''Uh... sort of. It's been a while. I think I've forgotten most of what I picked up. Why?''
The not-voice seemed surprised and a little queasy.

"Oh good. I think you speak it fine," Barve said, adding, "I understand Huttese okay, I ''sort'' of get Bocce, and I know a little Sy Bisti, but I don't know any other languages." Understanding so few was kind of embarrassing, but only Basic and Huttese had been flash-programmed and he never really made a focused effort to study languages, so he thought he was picking them up pretty well. "Though I guess you were talking earlier in Basic, so it wasn't a good question."

''Wait, what? ...Do we even mean the same B.A.S.I.C.? Because I thought you meant the programming language.''

Maybe the alien was addled. "I meant Basic. Official language of the Empire. ''This'' language."

Another pause, this one rather long. ''You know, usually people call it English.''

At the very least, the alien was confused. "No, the Empire calls it Basic. So did the Republic. So does the rest of the galaxy. Basic, Galactic Basic, Galactic Basic Standard... Basic."

''What? You actually think - no, don't antagonize the crazy guy with the jetpack. He could drop you. Then you'll never get there.'' That last part wasn't nearly as clear, and Barve suspected he wasn't supposed to not-hear it. But he could handle being considered crazy, even though he'd had the full Spaarti year and there was really no chance of the madness getting him. After all, he'd seen someone in the depths of the madness, and it was probably worth being cautious, at least at first.

"Anyway, alien, I need to know if 'car', in this case, means little groundbound vehicle or is an acronym for something."

''Maybe he ''does'' think he's - Yeah. It's the vehicle.'' Good, then he was headed in the right direction. There was more cracking on the road now too. The alien paused, then said, ''I'm Steph, by the way. Not 'alien'.''

"I'm TX-7255 from batch three," he said. Wait, natural-borns who weren't troopers didn't usually like going by designations. "Call me Barve."

''Barve?''

"It's a nickname. A barve is a clumsy six-legged meat animal. You only get the prime names like "Firebrand" if you're important." He couldn't enjoy a military flick without getting annoyed at that.

''Right. You don't have any other names?''

"Not that I've heard." Did he want the name of Barve's original? No, he'd surely ask if he did. "You're feeling okay, right? Are your eyes being pushed into your head?" He'd feel like such an idiot if Steph had some kind of delayed reaction to acceleration and passed out.

''A little. It was worse when we took off. Everything went sort of gray at the edges.''

"Yeah? That makes sense." He felt like he couldn't leave it at that, so he added, "Humans tend to tolerate horizontal axis g-forces a lot better than vertical ones. It has to do with how our spines are aligned with the axis and how our blood gets forced around. I don't know what you are, but I'd guess it works the same for you."

''Well, ''that's'' good to know. I'm a Hoojib, I guess.'' More indistinctly, Steph said, ''The guy in orange said I looked all wrong, but Eighty-four told him it didn't matter.''

He was not supposed to listen in; if he overheard anyway, he was supposed to pretend otherwise. "Never heard of you. We're well within standard human tolerance, and I'll keep slow for you if I can, but if something comes up and I have to go evasive, you'll have some trouble. Should that happen, try straining your muscles and remember to breathe short, hard, and often. It could help."

''Thanks. I think. It had better not come to that.''

In places, the road was crossed by roads that passed above it. The ones he'd seen so far had been intact, but one up ahead, getting closer by the second, had been shot out, and the pattern of cracks that passed underneath it could reasonably be called footprints. Checking behind himself - the rearwards display was small and not meant for ground details, so he did this by pulling upright, spinning as he stalled, then correcting himself and falling back into flight position, a set of maneuvers that did not please Steph in the least - Barve saw that the set of buildings that he'd taken off near was still visible, though small in the distance.

If he had no further orders, maybe they'd let him fly back at any speed he wanted. Fuel readings were a little lower than they should have been at this point, even with the extra weight, but nothing too alarming.

At this speed he'd be a few more minutes. This thing had gone pretty far. Flying slowly with absolutely nothing going on - usually, he'd be listening to the other rocket troopers, comparing notes and expectations, maybe trying to outmaneuver them. He was hazy on why he'd been deployed without the rest of his unit. They'd acclimatized together and gone through training at the same time and everything, and he'd never been far apart from them. Being alone was boring.

No, he wasn't quite alone. Small talk. How did that work again? Right. "How are you talking? Nothing's getting to my ears."

''I don't have a vocal tract anymore, so I'm guessing telepathy. Better than nothing, but it's annoying.''

"That's too bad," Barve said. It looked like the burden of conversation was on him. He was the worst in his unit at that, frankly, especially with people who weren't familiar with flight and the mechanics of it, but questions were usually good. "So you're one of those aliens that has a metamorphosis, huh? What were you before?"

There was another pause. Incredulous, Steph said, ''I - but - you - you actually haven't figured it out? What - you don't even remember what happened, do you? Do you have a real name? Do you even know what'' planet '' this is?''

Barve hadn't known it was possible to stutter telepathically, but then, he reminded himself, there were a lot of things he didn't know. "No. Are you going to tell me?"

''Oh Jesus Christ.'' Ah. He didn't think Barve was in danger of the madness, he thought Barve was ''stupid''. Barve briefly considered, oh, accelerating a bit more, perhaps flying a bit less steadily, but dismissed the idea. He had a package or a passenger to deliver.

He wasn't angry, quite, but he had to correct the alien. "Hey. I'm not - yeah, I know everyone says I'm a bit simple. Maybe. Maybe. Most of the time." He got the sense that Steph was about to say something, and he didn't let him, raising his voice. "But I'm plenty smart flying, and if there's a jetpack malfunction a couple klicks above the ground, the smartest being in the Empire, the ''very'' best and brightest, is me. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, it's that I don't know. Don't make insinuations like that!"

''Aaah! Oh God, don't drop me. I'm sorry, geeze. It's just really weird that you don't know.''

There were a few men in his unit who could have started on something about ignorance, but he wasn't one of them - as far as lectures went, he only had this and the one about untested new equipment. After a moment, Barve became uncomfortable. He wasn't supposed to be hostile to people who weren't the enemy, even if they ''were'' rude aliens. He'd probably have a few bad sleepcycles if he didn't say something.

"Sorry. It's fine. Just... I'm not stupid, okay? Simple isn't stupid."

''Yeah. Sure. God, this was a bad idea.''

Well, ''that'' hadn't gone well. Pity his unit wasn't here. He could have used a people person, or several.

Anyway, by now he could see the runaway walker. It had come to a stop, right in the middle of the road, and as he flew closer he saw that one of the big hatches in the side, the hatches that groundpounders rappelled out of, was open.

"We're just about here. Hold on." It took a bit of maneuvering. A long shallow dive followed by flipping upright and shedding his momentum, then the tricky process of moving laterally while in the standing position without letting the rockets set fire to the inside of the vehicle, and getting close enough to switch them off and fall to his feet without breaking anything. Nothing he couldn't handle. He made it a point of pride that he hardly ever used his repulsor pod when landing, and he didn't need it this time.

Barve landed hard enough that he was forced to drop to three points, which while visually impressive was just bad form. If his unit had been there, it would not have gone unnoticed, but if the groundpounder who met him had judged his landing, he declined to comment on it. The moment Barve put the helmet down, Steph half climbed, half leapt out and shuddered all over so that his fur stood on end. Then he sat on his haunches and started wiping or patting himself down with his forelegs, a set of motions that reminded Barve both of a nervous animal grooming itself and the thing a lot of people did after a rough ride, when they wanted to make sure everything was in one piece.

He'd have been a little bit insulted by that - hadn't he kept slow? Hadn't he maintained his jetpack well enough that there was virtually no vibration, and flown her well enough that it had been smooth? - but he ''had'' gone off on that upset lecture. And some people just didn't fly well. And even if Steph didn't like hearing it, he was an alien and might or might not tolerate the forces of acceleration that well.

The groundpounder looked from Barve to Steph and back. "You sent us an ''alien''?" he asked over the open channel. "Is he an ambassador or something? I thought the message was that he was a friend or something."

Steph stopped grooming and looked up sharply. ''I ''am'' a friend. And I can hear you, you know, the speaker in the helmet's still on." He waggled an ear in a gesture that was probably sarcastic, but still looked silly.

"Oh, sorry," the groundpounder said. "And I guess you're not really an alien. It's kinda hard to keep things straight. C'mon, we need you in the cockpit." He nodded acknowledgment to Barve and turned, heading towards the fore of the walker. Steph followed, still staggering a little.

Barve picked up the helmet again and took the chance to have a look around. He'd seen the big walkers before, just not from inside. He'd landed on the lower of the two levels. At the fore and the aft they were joined by sets of stairs. Entrance to the tunnel leading to the cockpit was through a locking access hatch on the landing in the fore stairs that locked and sealed behind the groundpounder; the aft stairs had another one that probably led to cargo space. A third hatch was set forewards in the flooring. Maybe it went to engines. Then there were the various external ones like what he'd dropped through. Handholds were built into the ceiling, and there were some weapons racks. That made sense, he guessed. These things ''were'' personnel carriers, though they were better suited for annihilating ground targets.

Maybe the above deck had more, but this one was otherwise empty. Apparently the team who'd gone out here were all in the cockpit, which had to be a tight fit. Before he commed back for further orders, Barve noticed one more thing. Coming from the speakers built into the ceiling was a faint, barely audible hiss of static.

[There. I wrote you. I even put in that damn rant. Now get out of my head.]