Okay But So One Of The Clone Empire AUs (AU Where The Clones Take Charge Of The Republic, Usually From

Okay but so one of the Clone Empire AUs (AU where the clones take charge of the republic, usually from the seat of Mandalore and take over the galaxy but keep the Jedi but sorta… like pets??? But spoiled pets, not like the senate kept them) but told from the POV of the Jedi being currently kept inside the temple. They’re not really allowed out of the temple, NOT because they’ll run, but because the clones are paranoid af of them getting hurt (90% of the reason the clones took over was cause they were horrified at the senate treating THEIR Jedi like that) but they’re letting certain senators stay to help pick up the pieces of the galaxy (Anakin is in a pretty bad depression in the temple because Padme is allowed to leave to go to the senate but he isn’t allowed to leave without escorts and usually Rex basically putting a child leash on him and it’s giving him some bad feelings about it all) and the Jedi being nervous about it all.

Thing is. The force is CONSTANTLY telling them this is the correct thing to do. They’re supposed to give control to the clones. Clone empire will save the galaxy. But also, they’ve started talking in Dai Bendu around the temple almost constantly, shiftily walking away when the clones come over to talk to them if they’re in groups, just nervous stuff, like skittish cats.

Cody had to get Alpha 17 to come by to talk to Obi-Wan and Anakin before either of them would stop hiding in Obi-Wan’s apartments all day. Obi-Wan hasn’t cuddled with Cody in a month and that’s VERY concerning. Not that they’re together, it’s just that Obi-Wan likes using Cody as a bed and Cody is addicted to seeing Obi-Wan sleep for once. Alpha had to come by like a concerned dad and gently coax them out of hiding and back to being regular temple inhabitants.

Rex, in a move of desperation, drags them off to the temple salon (beauty, not tea in this case, the temple does and should function as it’s own city which means food and clothing production as well as other things like that) and makes them both get massaged till they’re purring piles of Jedi Goop and is pleased with his babysitting duties. A new haircut and getting rid of tension does wonders. They’re fairly normal after that. Obi-Wan goes back to teaching an Alderaanian poetry class (and supervising kiddo art classes) and Anakin is building a new security system that he’ll integrate soon, and Rex is smug to have gotten them the most normal so far.

The Jedi are skittish tookas who want to hide after this blow to their safety and lifestyles, but the newly instated council (which involves doubling the numbers so the clones can discuss the changes and how things will work with the Jedi) is working on a way to get them back to their true calling: peace keeping.

Basically, the clones start their own empire and use a very firm hand on the Jedi to get them to stop being attack dogs and start accepting love and help now. They are never forced to go on a mission with less than 20 clones from then on.

Bly and Aayla get married in the Room of a Thousand Fountains and Quinlan was delighted to give his baby girl away. Here, take her, she’s very annoying. Obi-Wan and Anakin finally get into a long awaited fight about how Ani got married but never invited his master and Obi-Wan is still hurting from it. Rude. Yoda is terrorizing the frog population with Initiate Grogu. Yaddle has more class than those idiots. Qui-Gon’s force ghost shows up and Fives is the only clone in the room that can see him and won’t stop staring at him with big dumb tooka eyes and Qui-Gon is gonna make him shit his pants he just knows it. Rex and Cody are trying to placate their idiot Jetii (Ahsoka was dragged back to the temple and dropped in Anakin’s lap and it was the most normal he’d been in years and they are inseparable now but Ahsoka ain’t getting in the middle of that lmao) with cuddles and hair pets. Padme is throwing up in a bush because she doesn’t know she’s pregnant and this is the start of a lovely bought of forever sickness. Ugh. Anakin and Obi-Wan finally settle their differences when the clones decide they’ll have another ceremony next month for Ani and Padme. Fox is drunk and dosing on a bed of flowers with a fully grown nexu guarding him, having decided he’s his cub now. That’ll be an interesting relationship. Alpha finally picks Obi-Wan up under his armpits like a cat and says if he can’t stop being grumpy it’ll be naptime. It’s very annoying. One of Bly’s troopers shows up with his foundling he got on Concordia when they were raiding a Death Watch camp, named Din, who has managed to catch Grogu and is cuddling and kissing him into submission. Grogu is delighted, and has found his soulmate.

a thing a human did

It had been… Nine months, since we took a human in our crew. I knew what they looked like and how they behaved, but that was mostly from the manual and stories from some friends. All the normal things everyone knows. They had destroyed their world once, rebuilt it, and now dedicated their entire existence to… Stop that from happenning again. And also everything they do, have and make is either extremely useful or the most horrifying thing one could ever heard of. Just the basics.

Isa was the human’s name. A marine biologist. Our ship was one of the first ones to be made for life-keeping. Our job is to ensure that planets would still have life after the humans did their thing, a risky and complicated job, but an important one.

I had expected Isa to be small. Humans were small, from what I’ve known, but somehow that one was bigger and bulkier than me. Not as big as some others, but everyone was surprised, especially when she decided to cover her teeth in order to not scare us. She spoke in a soft tone and did everything with such delicacy we forgot how humans were.

And then, she reminded us of that.

First, she took in a seed and tried to make it grow. She would try to sing to it from time to time. I thought she was going to… To do that thing. When humans use their voices and things just start to grow out of nowhere. But, thank { }, that didn’t happen. She just kept talking to it for hours. I don’t know why she would try to communicate with it, and I was too afraid to ask.

Second, she would carry everything we deemed to be too heavy and couldn’t be carried by Ki. Some heavy things. I had to remind myself human sweat wasn’t poisonous to my species multiple times. I don’t know why, but I had to. Especially when Isa got sick and continued to work even when she was sneezing and producing muckus. That was disgusting. But then, once again, some humans would collapse before they dared to admit they had to rest.

And… And third thing. Yes. The third thing. I like her a lot, she’s my friend, but that was before we became close. Isa would collect random things to “preserve” them, and she would say those fancy words to try to classify creatures that were for no practical use. We would get to them sooner or later, but we had to have priorities. She didn’t seem to have these. She would just name and name and name everything, and somehow she remembered it all. And when one of the species became extinct once again, she would cry and write it down to remember. She would… Make them graves. I thought it was religious, but it wasn’t.

I would feel sad for them too. For the lost ones. I helped Isa with her graves, and I was the one to tell the others of who we had failed that time, and sometimes I would have to lie down and rest because it was too much. But not to the point of tears. Not to the point of my own body breaking itself down out of heartbreak and sadness. Isa got sick because of the ones we lost, and we had to care for her. I had to write things down for her so she wouldn’t try to work until she had passed out. I learned to take care of humans because of her heartbreaks with fish.

And then we… We lost too much. Sometimes we would lose some species, but not an entire planet. We were glad no deadly bacteria got to us, but we were all heartbroken. That thing ate an entire planet, and we couldn’t do anything.

Isa was the most affected. She… Vanished. Not literally, but she retreated to her own lab for weeks. We tried to keep her safe, to keep her healthy, but it was hard when we had to deal with our own failure.

One night I decided to stay awake. And then I decided to check on Isa, because she wasn’t coming to her “dinners” anymore. I did what the humans would do: Knocked on her door and waited for a response, but Isa wasn’t responding and I was worried, so I entered anyways.

She… She was trembling, but holding a thing. I asked her what was it, and she whispered for me to come closer. I did, and she asked me to hold it.

Of course, I didn’t know what to do, but I held that thing. It was mucky and wet and soft and, honestly, very disgusting, but… But I looked at Isa, and I was going to ask her what that was, but she was crying. That’s- that’s another thing humans do. They cry, and I knew they did, but that was the first time it looked so raw. I… For a moment, I thought that was blood. I had forgotten what human blood looked like, but then I remembered and I got even more scared. I was afraid of what Isa would do. Because an upset human is a problem for everyone.

But, but she just, she just looked at me. Looked at me with her face covered in those tears that multiple species were using for medicine, and pointed at that thing that was in my hands, and I knew that I shouldn’t have asked but I did it anyways. “What is this?”, and looked at that thing in my hands.

“It came from the seed”, she whispered to me. “It opened up after i fed it with the red devouring”.

“You fed that seed with a plague?”

“Listen to it”.

I did what she had asked me to. I listened to that thing. You know what it sounds like. It whispers things without words. It has something beating, and something singing, and another, last and quiet thing, growing.

What she said to me next is something I will never forget, because she was sobbing but smiling. It was a raw cry of hope.

“It’s the heartbeat of a planet”.

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painted-daisy-l0l

2 years ago

today is not my birthday

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painted-daisy-l0l

2 years ago

Keep the Jedi Out of It

With input from @atagotiak (Tia), @gelpenss (Gel), and @thisarenotarealblog (Doc).

Standard initial premise: Clones take over the Republic after Fox kills Palpatine.

Fun AU Twist: in order to keep people from trying to fuck over the Jedi, and also as a backup because they trust the Jedi to at least try to save them after the initial hubbub goes down, and also as a bit of a vindication for those who don’t like their Jedi… the clones arrest all the Jedi and just keep them in the brigs etc. until they figure out how to break the news to the galaxy that Palpatine was a bigger problem than previously anticipated.

“Why did the Jedi not stop you?” “Great question! We arrested them.” “…all of them?” “Yes.” “On what grounds?” “On ‘they would have stopped us from killing the Chancellor’ grounds.”

“The Jedi couldn’t stop you from arresting them?” “We just kind of told them ‘here, hold this’ and then put the force cuffs on. It was really easy, actually, they trust us way too much, it’s kinda scary. A few of them passed out without the Force to keep them awake and the medics got pissed they hadn’t been sleeping.” “…you’re saying you did this for their own good?” “No, we did it so we could kill the Chancellor.”

Keep reading

i spent way too long on this story

The only human in our crew - one of our mechanics, Jedd - had seemed happy enough. He was respectful, clearly always trying to watch his smiles when he was with us, although his laughter was, according to him, uncontrollable. It took the crew a while to get used to the fact that the human made loud yelling noises and bared his teeth when he found something extremely amusing. Humans, though, made good mechanics - their combination of dexterity and strength meant that they could handle a wider range of potential issues than almost any other known race.

And, like all humans, he was brave, strong, and sometimes did things most people would consider unwise. Sometimes we would find him working on the hull while the ship was under countdown for launch. He would frequently add cosmetic improvements wherever he deemed necessary about the ship, hoarding junk materials in his quarters which would only reappear months later as part of a new project. Occasionally he would even improve existing machinery or electronics, which, strangely enough, he would forget how to use soon after installation - often, he would leave sticky slips of paper on the machine in question with instructions written in his native human language to remind himself how to use the new upgrade.

He was the “extroverted” type of human, as far as anyone could tell. The symptoms were obvious: he did not spend much time in his quarters besides the third of the day spent in energy-recharging stasis, and he often invited members of the crew to talk with him while he worked rather than only engaging with them at mealtimes or downtime. In fact, he seemed to like it better this way, since he knew that his toothy smiles wouldn’t be seen if his head was buried in the mechanics of the ship. He didn’t seem to find it at all difficult, either - the human ability to perform several high-focus tasks at once is astounding.

But when the Federation requirements were updated and advised all Class-OO ships to have a biological generalists, our captain conducted interviews and hired a human named Stella. The regulations were put in place after a series of unrelated incidents involving accidental deaths caused by medicines that disrupted the functions of certain species. A biological generalist, with a wide knowledge of the internal biologies of nearly all of the Intergalactic Species, would be able to effectively advise the resident doctor on what was safest for the crew.

Stella was much like Jedd, in a way. She enjoyed spending time with the crew in the downtime space, telling jokes and stories about her childhood on Earth or her time in school. She was unusually brightly colored for a human, but she assured us that it was an artificial, cosmetic alteration, and that humans did not grow hair that was as blue as hers. She was extremely intelligent, also, and had an impressive memory for a human. Unlike Jedd, who often forgot the names of his crew members, Stella explained that she possessed what the humans called a “photographic memory,” where she simply had a much larger memory storage capacity than most other humans.

After a human week or two, one of us noted that Jedd had been lingering around the medbay much more than usual. We all rushed to ask him whether he was in pain or in danger - by that point, we had all heard the stories of humans cursed by their own constitution, suffering for days or weeks after exposure to toxins before finally dying. Jedd calmed us, saying that he wasn’t in any danger. He simply enjoyed talking to the other resident member of his species. They became friends very quickly, and we noticed Jedd seemed somehow even happier than his usual happy self, but in a different kind of way.

Jedd and Stella originated from separate human countries, but, improbably, spoke the same native human tongue. They told us that to each of them, the other had a distinctive accent which told them where they were from, but none of us could notice the difference except in a small number of words. It was remarkable, however, how much more comfortable they seemed when speaking it; they never seemed to stumble over their words or misplace syllables in the signature human style of speaking the Federation language. The two would speak to each other in their human language in the downtime space, often increasing in volume as the conversation continued and the humans became more and more enthusiastic until they both laughed uproariously. Occasionally, they had a conversation with a different undertone, where Jedd would shrink into himself strangely as he spoke and Stella would reach for his hand, grasping it in hers in a motion that was clearly a form of affection.

One day before we were set to land on Tlaapon, one of us injured in the medbay noticed an odd exchange between Jedd and Stella. Jedd had been covering Stella’s eyes in a very hostile motion, although her body language indicated that she was relaxed. Upon freeing her vision, Jedd showed Stella the new regulation caffeine dispenser he had installed in the medbay for easy access to the brain-altering drug. While deadly to almost thirty percent of the Intergalactic Species and a carefully regulated form of medicated therapy among most of the other seventy, humans are able to use caffeine as a mild performance booster, and even have the constitution to withstand daily doses for years or even decades on end.

However, when Stella saw this, she did something strange: she pressed her mouth to his cheek, and they both smiled at each other. This was not one of the human behaviors known by the crew, and so it was only later, when we consulted the guidebook, that it was revealed that it was an act that signaled a human’s feeling of romantic attraction. And, most importantly, the lack of screaming or other human displays of displeasure indicated that the feeling of attraction was most likely mutual! This was cause for great rejoicing, as humans are usually very selective with their life-partners, and a human life-partner bond often mutually improves emotional state and well-being in general.

After only a few months on the ship, we noticed the signs of attraction beginning to increase in frequency. They would often walk together holding hands, and began to show each other their previously isolated realms of interest; Jedd loved to tell us about how he was teaching Stella how the engines worked, while, unbeknownst to him, Stella would excitedly tell us all she had learned from him the very same day. They would often demonstrate their affection via the exchange of shiny or colorful objects, which all humans love. Jedd made Stella bracelets or rings out of polished bronze and silver, and Stella would select vibrant flowering plants from the greenhouse and meticulously arrange them in a wrap of paper before gifting them to Jedd with one of their toothy human smiles.

One day, Stella sent a hidden message to a number of the crew. It was soon to be Jedd’s day of birth, and it was human tradition to conduct a celebration commemorating the survival of another human year wherein the human in question recieved gifts and the partygoers indulged in sweetfoods. She wanted to prepare the festivities in secret, however - yet another strange human tradition. However, she knew the human culture best, and so we followed her instructions, awaking before the shift change and spending much time making the downtime area as blindingly colorful as possible. Colorful strips of paper on the walls, colorful banners with traditional phrases, colorful cloths over all the tables, where Stella placed a traditional human sweetfood. The most prevalent color was yellow, as Stella explained it was Jedd’s favorite color, which confused us. How could one color be preferred over any other? They were all just wavelengths of light - but perhaps it was another human oddity.

Stella then instructed us to hide and burst out yelling when Jedd arrived, but our camouflaging skills were not on par with that of the humans. After seeing us hidden, Stella laughed, saying that we “looked like elephants hiding behind streetlamps” (none of us knew what that meant), and then decided that it would be acceptable for us to simply wait for his arrival normally.

When Jedd saw the preparations – the banner, the wall papers, the sweetfood, and the shiny, paper-wrapped box that Stella proudly held out for him – he breathed loudly, a look of shock on his face. We were momentarily worried that he was frightened or overwhelmed by the amount of color (as many of us were), but to our relief, he and Stella embraced. Jedd then spoke to her in their human tongue - as he said it, his face became unusually red. We all knew this was a symptom of human embarrassment or shame, but Jedd rarely displayed it, and so whatever he was saying must have been special in some way; perhaps another element of the festivities? To our surprise, Stella made a very high-pitched sound in response to his words and initiated the human mouth-press of affection! We all bobbed and whistled in delight as Jedd and Stella translated: Jedd had asked Stella to enter the life-partner trial period with him, and she had accepted! It truly was a joyous day!

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painted-daisy-l0l

4 months ago