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Burrowing Worm

I sent several droids down to the swamps. I was sure the Gunguns were around, and had heard of the invasion. However, they were also excellent at hiding. So good that they were no more than legends amongst the native human population. Looking carefully there was trade between the surface and the Gungun below, and new Nute would bet his left testicle that the surface was using the Gunguns to mine their plasma, at least in part. Nevermind that those were shed and grown back during mating season, and 'bet my left testicle' was a famous Niemidian saying for wagering nothing when your opponent thought you were betting everything.

Meanwhile he had several droids outfitted for high pressure aquatic environments with the onboard factory. New Nute found that he actually enjoyed the designing process of the whole thing. Old Nute had hated it as he had performed a minor stint as R&D director before murdering up the ladder. However, where old Nute had hated the tedious process of designing refurbishing and redesigning, new Nute the process relaxing. It also gave me an appreciation for how crap of a designer Anikan was.

Yes, Anikan Skywalker was a terrible designer. This can be seen with C3P0. As I was thinking of that dreaded droid I realized several things; 1 he had simply cribbed the design off of the holonet, 2 while he might make a decent scrapper engineer he made a terrible... well engineer, he had simply made the droid too spec, and not exceeding them or making them more efficient. Later he would work with R2 to make the droid better, but I had the sneaking suspicion that was more R2 than Anikan. Lastly, even with all of that, it would have been acceptable or even appreciated that he was young and thus forgiven, but he failed on the most important thing, he didn't do it right in the first place.

Every engineer knows you follow the rules and laws of engineers as if bible until you are all about to die either way, at least if you stop following those rules and laws you can feel like your doing something before you die. Which means you aren't ignoring the rules, your creatively interpreting them, fully aware they will come back to punish you when your done, if you survive.

Anikan ignores them constantly. Granted, it works, sort of, but in so many more ways it does not. For example, most protocol droids are made by the Trade Federation. That means, Nute was very familiar with them. And I know that their internals are dirt cheap. Yes, Protocol droids are expensive, but only because of their shiny expensive exterior and because of the copyrights on all of the latest translation software.

When Anikan built C3P0 he likely did 2 things, salvaged an old protocol droid slicing the soft, and copy pasted some of the soft off of the holonet. Salvaging a protocol droid isn't a bad choice and I would probably do the same, but the soft off of the holonet is so full of viruses and malware that the droid was probably a walking advertisement. Actually, this make sense for its whiny personality, it probably had so many conflicting corporate handbooks loaded into its brain that it's more amazing that the droid still functioned. I would know, old Nute made several of them, as well as much of the 'free ware' on the holonet for translation purposes. Obviously this was a money grab for some feel good senate projects, even more for the under the table deals he had made with various parties for the soft. One of course was the Hutts and another was the Zeltron, for completely different reasons.

This did not even go into the hardware issues. Everyone knows you test rng and origin to make sure the system doesn't lock up. Even B1s don't lock up like C3P0, and they were cheap corporate knockoffs thrown together. Their soft is so conflicting that the only way they function is THROUGH the errors and not the soft itself. New Nute wanted to cry into his hands AND shoot some people for that. But it was out of his hands, at least for now.

Finally, the B1s had captured a Gungun child. Not... admittedly how he wanted to start the situation. But neither could beggars be choosers, nor is the situation untenable. Theed was also now surrounded on all sides and the palace was rapidly being taken over. Soon the queen would be captured and then taken away from his grasp, he had plans for that. EXPLOSIONS!

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But first, he gave the Gungun child some hot maka maka, a sweet chocolate like drink that reminded him of hot chocolate, if it was spicy and the flavor palate was all wrong, but close enough for kids, I shrugged. There was some on the ship due to this vessel of war STILL BEING A TRADING VESSEL...

In fact, the reason why there were so few B1s in the assault is because most of the hold of the vessel was still filled with cargo. Of course, at this point the Trade Federation was still in its infancy militarily. But, there were still 33** vessels involved in this blockade. Yet there were only several hundred thousand B1s and some tanks involved in the invasion. The numbers did not add up. Speaking of, I launched several wings of vulture droids to hover over the space ports. Those I had a lot of as the Trade Fed had figured they would need them more since they were... well the TRADE Federation.

Figuring out what was best, for a Gungun child was difficult, it didn't help that sexism was alive and well in the SW universe and I was dealing with a little (?)girl Gungun. So, I inundated her with toys, everything from the latest toy blaster that shot REAL™ blaster bolts, that were actually stun rounds that wouldn't even do more than send a static shock into the target. Made a great fly swatter though, and could kill cheap droids with less protection than even a B1. But I also gave her a new, very frilly dress, a B1 plushie, a B1 action figure, a B1 lunch box... Lots of B1 merch on board to sell how 'assume' the Trade Federations new droid is and why you should by one... or five.

When the Gungun raiding party launched its assualt on the B1s stationed there they were assaulted with the most beutiful beaming smile the Gungun little girl could make. It was truly blinding... for the Gunguns at least. And it lit up her face, till she realized the 'bombas' killed her new friends. Now the raiding party led by the warrior general Roos Tarpals had to explain to the young Gungun that the B1s were in fact the bad guys, that they were the good guys, and that they should leave right now...

Oh, and that she should put down all her merch that her new bad guy friends just gave her and told her to share with her friends so that they could leave faster... it also wasn't water proof.

I of course, was laughing my ass off as I watched. To the point that I was well aware the other Niemidians, and even some of the smarter B1s were avoiding the command room. Good for them, I didn't want them ruining my mood, especially with their stupid and inefficient efficiency reports.

Deciding to do Roos a favor I initiated a holocall. I had been talking with the young girl on and off till the warriors had gotten there, waiting for an adults arrival. So the little girl wasn't surprised when my one meter projection came to life on a nearby holoprojector. The warrior gunguns turned their bombas launchers at me, but the little girl came running, and crying.

I soothed the young girl, and did Roos another favor. I explained that the B1s were not dead, what's that? No, they were in fact sleeping, and before she knew it they would be back up and moving around, with only slight memory issues... I also explained that she should take this micro holoprojector and make sure to give it to the most importantist person she could think of, and not take no for an answer! When they were done with it she would even get the holoprojector as a reward for a super secret super important mission. When she asked "Like a jedi?!" with stars in her eyes it hurt a little, but I agreed that normally I would send a jedi to do it, but even they couldn't be trusted, only her, it worked. The B1s did not extend the cordon around my room when I cackl cough laughed like a mad man by using weaponized children diplomacy.

** so, in images of the invasion of Naboo there are 4 to seven lucrehulks at any time. However, this is only one facing of the planet. If we assume that the other 3 lucrehulks chasing the queen came from nearby facings and the standard is 4 then multiply that by 8 we get 32 lucrehulks in the blockade. I added one more to round them out for a command lucrehulk. Of course it is possible that there were only one or two lucrehulks in those other areas and there were only four over top of Theed, but that is too much brain work. Especially since that means they pulled out the blockade in other areas to prevent the queen from leaving. That is... not impossible, but unlikely because the other reason they did not want the queen to escape is because they did not want news of the invasion itself to spread.

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