Aldanias
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
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Well either that or random Stalker happens and he goes all Kratos on the Droids
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A Healing Hand (Warframe x Star Wars SI)
- Thread starter HarakoniWarhawk
- Start date
spartansneverdie312
We can all use a little sleep
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...I know this wont happen, but a man can dream. Just imagine the sheer panic of facing an invincible, invisible, unstoppable murder machine leaving death and destruction in his wake as it speaks in a long forgotten tongue. Poor Jedi will be whammied by the sheer hatred in his heart.
Elite_Noob
Getting sticky.
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Lol imagine the seppie general coming over to her to gloat about killing her clone daddy and she loses it and voids a eidolon into existence on top of them
Chapter Seven
HarakoniWarhawk
I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.
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Spoilers for Jade Shadows ho!
Music for the chapter is from Samuel Kim (The Clones Theme)
A long time ago, in a solar system far, far away, there lived a clone.
He was a generic example of his gene line, possessing nothing that made him stand out from his brothers.
But then death found him, and it took a miracle in the form of a tiny blue-haired girl-child to save the clone from an ignoble end.
Gifted a second chance at life and powers beyond mortal ken, he took it upon himself to protect the child from threats within and without to the very limits of his soul.
Even when events conspired to tear him away from his sworn charge, the clone refused to be defeated and stood head and shoulders above his brothers.
But not as some ur-clone superior to all. No, this loyal clone took from his charge's example and lifted his gene kin to his level. Most never reached those heights, yet the attempt made the formerly indistinguishable gene line one of heroes great and small.
Heh, listen to me ramble on like Vor when he's had one too many rotguts.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, even by the Void's nonsensical standards, we're more alike than there's any right to be.
And honestly? I'd have loved to sit down with you and have a chat about our respective handfulls... But I'm only an echo of that lucky clone who received a second chance to live.
Good luck, Brother Buir.
...
The next time you see Mara, please tell her 'Kaz says, "Don't do anything I wouldn't, Little Spitfire."' Your Mara might not be wholly mine, but they're close enough to be sisters.
She'll understand.
It's time for you to get on your feet, Trooper. Your war ain't over yet.
"Three, two, one, heave!"
On Jax's orders, Legs and CT-1170 hauled on the slab of duracrete with a yell and succeeded in lifting the half-a-ton block up several centimetres. Waiting for the gap, Jax yanked the pair of blackened boots out from under the quivering slab, causing Buir's unmoving body to pop out like a cork. Not a moment too soon, the massive block hit the floor with a tremendous bang that didn't entirely drown out the lifting trooper's exhausted sighs.
"I think I pulled something," CT-1170 squeaked, both hands pressing into the small of his back as he turned to the medic. "How..."
For the second time in what was only fifteen minutes, going by his HUD's chrono, Jax was tossed off his feet with a grunt as his nominally expired patient jerked upright with a shout. Throwing an accusatory glare at a shirking Legs, the frustrated medic left his standing brothers to their confusion and narrowly managed to stay crouched near Buir. One hells of a nasty crack split the other clone's breastplate down the centre, to say nothing of the multiple burnt holes from blaster bolts. By all rights, Buir should be deader than poor Lumpy, yet Jax's medscanner -working perfectly fine on Legs and CT-1170- stubbornly refused to display anything except a clean bill of health.
"Buir," Jax opinioned amidst the catastrophic devastation of a close-range explosion. "I'm never going to sign off on your death receipt until I've got your corpse in front of me and literally dead."
The guilty as-feth trooper cocked his head like a confused Akk hound. "But I'm not dead?"
Groaning through his clenched teeth, Jax turned to his understandably alive brothers and spread his hands in an imploring, unspoken request for help.
Both of the unhelpful idiots shrugged.
"Alright, fine, you're not dead yet."
Standing with a somewhat falsified grumble, Jax gave Buir a hand up and took stock of the wall of rubble blocking their path. Every few seconds, a scattering of chunks would tumble down from the collapsed ceiling and kick up more dust for the already choked atmosphere. To be blunt, it was a steaming pile of osik that Jax knew the four clones had no hope of clearing. Which was somewhat sobering when the rest of their brothers and Mara'ika were on the far side... hopefully. Stars, the aggressively clingy kid had grown on him at some point, hadn't she?
"What're we going to do?" Legs voiced the single question dominating their minds.
Plastoid rattled as Buir snagged a dropped pistol from the floor and shook the worst of the duracrete dust off it. Popping and reinserting the battery cell, the seemingly immortal trooper was in the midst of finding an intact holster for the sidearm when he pivoted to one side and aimed straight at Jax. A hissing plasma bolt snapped by close enough to fizzle the HUD on that side and blew the head off the dust-covered commando droid sneaking up on the distracted clones. Pulling the hand off his chestplate where he'd reflexively grabbed his racing heart, the medic was genuinely too stunned by the sight of the sparking battle droid to rightfully complain about Buir flagging him.
"You could have hit me!"
Alright, not that distracted.
Sauntering over in a piss-poor attempt to appear unrattled, Legs awkwardly clapped the fuming medic on the shoulder, moving a little stiffy on his left leg.
"Take the luck when you get it, Doc," he commiserated. "Me? I'd rather be rattled than sucking air through holes in my back."
"Didn't need that mental image, Legs, so thanks a lot for nothing," CT-1170 snapped back, sounding rattled despite his sarcastic quip.
"Hey, I'm only trying to keep morale up!"
"Yeah? Then why aren't you named Joker 'cause your attempts are a kriffing joke!"
"Enough!"
Blowing a divot in the ceiling with his blaster as a violent bit of audial punctuation, Buir's cracked visor glared down Legs and CT-1170 until the bickering troopers bowed their heads and settled down. Stomping over to the smoking commando droid, he pilfered the machine's stripped-down E-5 rifle and a vibrosword from its back. Under his brother's bemused stares, Buir cannibalised his empty ammo belt and a length of flexible power cord from under a collapsed office desk as an impromptu strap for the sword to hand over his back. Legs and CT-1170 made a bunch of impressed noises, but Jax finally understood something neither of his brothers realised when Buir went through a quick series of motions with the vibrosword before holstering it.
CT-5581 was a line trooper, not an ARC or one of the rumoured Alpha survivors the younger brothers like to whisper about during meal times. So how in the Vode's name was Buir running through a sword drill with practised movements as a shiny?
As if summoned by the thought, the impossible clone looked at Jax and beckoned him over. "C'mon, we've got a princess to save."
Jax looked at CT-1170 and Legs for support, received more shrugs and gave up wondering with a shrug and a sigh before clambering over the rubble after Buir. With luck, CT-5581 might even know where the annoying tooka kitten was.
Beaker, Jolly, Trumpet, Nibbles and Duum himself.
Five troopers from an escort of eleven arrived at the militia storage bunker under fire from multiple elevated assailants. Wrenching the last smoke grenade from his webbing, Duum joined Trumpet and Beaker in lobbing the canisters along the dangerously exposed secondary transitway. Knowing the road itself was clear right up to the ramp leading to the discrete armoured checkpoint, the Commander counted to three and didn't cheer when roiling clouds of red, blue and white smoke exploded from the mismatched canisters. Ducking to avoid a buzzing crimson bolt that narrowly avoided his head, Duum glanced around at his remaining brothers behind the ornamental planter and the unconscious ad'ika in Jolly's arms.
"One final effort, Vode," Duum snarled through the thunder in his blood as the smoke crept closer to their cover. "Wait for it, wait for it..."
Waiting for the gaseous tendrils to crawl towards them was an almost physically painful experience that the tense officer quashed with a lifetime's training and brutal pragmatism. The sensor-masking smoke grenades would be worse than useless if they ran across open ground to enter the intangible cover. So Duum held his breath with a pained grimace and began counting from one until the blue tendrils caressed the white-knuckled edges of his gauntlets.
"GO!"
Running into the multicoloured fog bank felt like diving underwater without his armour to protect him. Duum's sight reduced to near zero, sounds became muffled and distant, and he relied on dead reckoning and simple luck to sprint across the road without eating a clanker's blaster bolt. Faster than he imagined, the surprised officer felt his ribs creak as he smashed into a human-sized door in the narrow bubble of clear air at the bottom of the entrance ramp. As the first, the following seconds stretched out to gut-churning years in Duum's head as he waited for his brother to arrive.
Trumpet barrelled out of the smog, nursing a smoking pauldron as he narrowly twisted aside to avoid his commanding officer. Wasting no time, the injured clone pawed along the immense blast door and squeezed himself into the alcove the militia indicated contained the entrance scanner.
Fifty seconds of coverage on the smoke grenades, half that in windy conditions. Twenty seconds down and... Jolly sprinted into view as a hazy spectre, realised he was moving too fast to halt and shifted to hit the blast door with an armoured shoulder and disquieting crunch. Duum was there instantly, holstering his pistols and taking Mara off their hands while Jolly reared back and drove his total body weight against the duranium barrier, dislocated shoulder first. Warily eyeing the slightly less opaque smoke clouds, the worried officer ensured one hand constantly stroking the little tooka's head in the vain hope she woke up sooner rather than later.
"C'mon, boys, we got this far..." Duum prayed for any sign of Nibbles and Beaker.
"I got it!"
Alerted by the cry, Duum turned just as two limping outlines stumbled into view through the rapidly dissipating smog. Unable to assist, he used a hand sign to order Jolly to run over to the missing troopers and hurried towards the opening human-sized blast door. Belatedly at the threshold, Duum awkwardly halted and allowed Trumpet to light his bucket's headlamps and take the lead, unburdened as the lightly wounded trooper was by an armful of a thirty-pound child. When Trumpet made it ten feet inside without being shot, the senior officer and his precious charge ducked through the half-open door and beheld rows upon rows of silent doonium statues.
No, not statues.
He distantly heard and acknowledged Jolly assisting a cursing Nibbles and Beaker inside before the door shut with a bone-shaking clang at their back, sealing the five clones and their charge inside a mechanical tomb.
"Are those kriffing Hulks?!"
Nobody knew who had spoken, but the question was pertinent as Duum played his headlamps over the nearest robotic giant in nervous fascination. Balmorran Arms SD-6 Hulk Infantry Droids, his flash-training provided with a soft prod, 3.5m tall armoured juggernauts mounting as much firepower as a small starship and easily capable of shooting such down. The Commander's gaze lingered on the twin E-Web blaster cannons on each shoulder and the long-barreled ion guns on swivel mounts, shuddering as he imagined the carnage such weapons would deliver onto the clones's flesh if the droids woke up.
Mercifully, the company-strength force of autonomous turrets remained in their storage rows with barely enough space to squeeze through the machines and no hope of seeing the bunker's rear.
"The locals must have sealed them up when the war kicked off," Duum voiced, unaware of Mara stirring in his arms. "Imagine what these things could've done to the clankers when they landed."
A wet-sounding cough from Nibbles' slumped body killed that line of thought in favour of brotherly worry. Again, he missed the faint air intake as the child in his arms slowly returned to her senses.
"How is he?"
Trumpet looked up from where he was trying to get the wounded clone's breastplate off. "I... I don't know, Sir. Bad? The best I can do, ugh," Nibbles' breastplate pulled away with a wet pop and a small puddle of blood from the bubbling wreckage of his perforated torso. "Osik!"
A dreadful silence lingered as the clones took in the extent of their brother's injuries, occasionally broken by a bubbling wheeze from Nibbles.
In the end, it was Duum's horrified freezing as he tried and failed to come up with a plan to save his fellow clone that allowed Mara to wriggle out of his grip. Quick as a greased mynock, the blue-haired girl ignored the trooper's frantic calls and vanished between the legs of a Hulk droid. Duum gazed at his empty hands in stupified confusion at where she'd gone before he noticed the green motes floating in Mara's path, ethereal crystals of jade light tracing the kid's path into the dark, droid-filled bunker complex.
"Mara! Come back!" Teeth grit, Duum turned to Jolly. "Trooper, you're in charge. Don't let the clankers in, and especially don't let Nibbles die!"
"Yes, Sir!"
Glad to be so low on equipment that he was already stripped down, the Commander took off after the hunting trail, weaving under and around the quiescent Hulks. It was slow and painful going for a man of 6' in the heaviest infantry armour worn on the modern battlefield compared to a child just over half his height wearing no armour beyond an envirosuit. And yet, every bruised limb and disorientating whack on a protruding mechanical part only served to make Duum more determined to stick to the Jade light. Ever deeper, the Commander forged along the ethereal trail in search of the missing ad'ika, his path a maze of trunk-like legs, lowered weapon arms and enormous crushing gauntlets that required navigating around and thus losing time.
"Mara?! Mara, where are you, ad?"
His words echoed strangely in the storage bunker, the heavier sounds echoing distantly while the sharper noises rebounded off duranium hulls right back into Duum's ears. Perversely, in the increasingly battered clone's mind, the glittering intangible gem lights marking Mara's path remained stubbornly just out of reach. No matter how often Duum hit his head or squeezed around a Hulk's legs, the trail's end always remained a hand's length away from the officer's outstretched fingers.
"Mara?! Mara?!"
Only vaguely recalling how many rows of automated mobile turrets he'd struggled through, Duum wasn't prepared to force his armoured body between a Hulk's legs and stagger into an inexplicably present barrier of bright green glowing something. Understandably, the cumulative costs of the fighting escape, and the painful trek through the forest of metal juggernauts meant the officer floundered when he threw a hand out to stop from running into the blinding wall. So when his palm met nothing substantial enough to halt him -as if light could achieve that- Commander Duum fell through the jade light with a cry.
And collapsed into the arms of a brother?
White, familiar plastoid clattered off Duum's battle-damaged plates as their owner chuckled, the amusement familiar to his ears yet bearing a queer undertone that set his teeth on edge. Shaking off the disorientation clouding his brain, Duum's eyes widened as he followed the brother's arms up to the shoulders and head, not believing the truth it was attempting to tell him even as he saw the crooked nose broken by a training accident as a young trooper.
Duum's doppelganger grinned at him with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear.
Literally.
"Surprised to see yourself in the warped mirror, Commander?" The burning embers replacing Duum's eyes crinkled as the dark copy winked. "You're lucky the Kiddo loves you and your identical brothers so much, you know that?"
"Huh?"
The doppelganger rolled their burning eyes. "Ugh, I can't believe I'm doing this to help save a bunch of walking meat muppets that make ghouls look bright and chipper."
Before Duum could do more than scowl at the contextless insult -and it was an insult, he knew it- his copy spun the Commander so he could gasp and reach out a hand.
"'Ad'ika!"
The shout rolled off Mara's back like so much water, unnoticed by the tiny slip of a tooka kitten as she sleepily walked toward a kneeling figure composed of a perplexing blend of armour, fleshy-looking white feathers and inexplicable and somewhat tacky golden accents and baubles. Eyes closed yet moving confidently in her sleep, Mara ignored Duum's shouted cries to come back to a halt in front of the living armour and abruptly halted before entering arm's reach of the massive creature thing. Without the girl's movements drawing the Commander's singular focus, he finally noticed what he could only describe as a gold-framed cage holding a gas-filled sphere of enormous size dominating the unnerving organic armour's midriff.
"W-What is that thing?" He rasped in bafflement, watching the creepy flesh feathers woefully fail at hiding even a quarter of the globe from sight. "Why is Mara... How'd she... Where is..."
"Blah, blah, blah, lemme cut this short, Test-Tube Baby."
Silencing Duum with a hand over his mouth, the doppelganger's voice dripped with an odd mixture of condescension and fondness.
"Reverse order. Teeny tiny Void pocket located two seconds ago and fifteen local dimensions counterclockwise of the local black hole cluster whirlpool of hate and megalomania. She's a Tenno. Also, because she's a Tenno, frustrating little shits are great at breaking the rules of causality over their knees." An audible smirk crossed the creature's unseen face. "As for the ridiculously gravid "angel" over there, that's a Warframe. Conduit, Guardian and Babysitter rolled into one disgusting nanite flesh puppet golem coated in far too much gold, ugh. It was meant to greet Mara when she got dumped here, but that sanctimonious fleshlight known as the Light Side thought I was trying to breach into this universe." It scoffed. "Stupid bitch deserves all the headaches that are coming her way."
"Were you trying to breach into this universe?" Duum felt obliged to ask, even if the question was nigh impossible to wrap his head around.
In what was rapidly becoming an annoying pattern, the doppelganger snorted.
"Well, duh. What did the self-absorbed wannabe deity think a Tenno was?"
"Doesn't that sort of make this your..."
"Oh, would you look at that! It's bonding time!"
Blatant deflection aside, Duum's eyebrows climbed into his buzzcut hairline as Mara stirred from her unnatural slumber, gave an adorable wee gasp upon seeing the 'Warframe' towering over her, and immediately hugged the abomination of flesh and armour. Violet and Jade light gathered around the connection figures until the Commander had to avert his eyes lest he be blinded by the incredible radiance. The doppelganger hissed when their hand slipped off Duum's mouth, yet there was no relief to be found.
"Oops, I nearly forgot to wipe this memory. Sorry, slightly less funny Test-Tube Baby, but no freebies from this Wally."
Then, there was the laughter of an irritating shard of an eldritch being, and Commander Duum forgot everything after he entered the Jade light.
"Owwwwwwwwww."
Another phantom contraction hit me like a stun prod to the gut as the three jostling emerald-green spheres bounced around the glowing thunderdome of Jade's glass womb thingy.
Fucked if I know what to call the crystal-clear, not-glass framed and held in place by excessively golden filigreed bars that made the Jade Warframe look pregnant. I'd literally only played the quest before this shit went down, but I'm pretty fucking certain that the game version of her didn't have the glowing belly the size of a medicine ball with three occupants that I had! Energetic and exhaustingly active, I rolled with six phantom contractions in as many seconds when the spheres hit the sides before splaying my fingers across a small patch of the incredibly clear dome.
Just like that, the trio of troublemakers stopped moving with a faintly-detectable sense of contentment and safety.
Sweet Sol Invictus, how many puppies did I kick in my last life to wake up as Jade's even more pregnant twin sister? Not that this theoretical sister existed, but I sure looked and, most importantly, felt about ready to pop at any fucking moment.
"Hi?"
I glanced through subdermal sensor arrays at the blue-haired girl held close to my breast, using my massively gravid faux pregnant belly as a seat. Her baby-faced features were awfully familiar for reasons that presently evaded me. Jade green eyes? Check. Six missing teeth, including a front tooth? Check. Metallic blue hair cut to the nape of her neck despite it being floor length this morning when I was sleeping in Jax's...
HOLD ON A FETHING MOMENT!
"Mara?" Synthetic yet husky, my vocaliser's voice carried a perpetual hint of maternal exhaustion. "What's the first thing you can remember?"
Looking no younger than six, maybe seven at a stretch, Mara's adorable face scrunched up in deep thought, which I felt every part of through our bond. Low-key enough to have missed it, what with the dodgems going on inside my huge Void baby bump and all, this had to be the link every Tenno and their Warframe shared. There literally wasn't any other explanation as to why I was undeniably Bigger Jade, and I was privy to the somewhat muddled thoughts going on behind Mara's somewhat glazed emerald eyes.
Geez, was I this absent-minded around Buir and Senator Organa... My feathers rustled around me as I mistakenly accepted Mara's memories as my own.
Or were they also mine?
...
Fuck, my brain hurts.
"I saw clones be shoth by the evil roboths," Mara snuggled tight against my bust as she whispered her way through those painful memories. "I... I ran away thoo a thafe plathe." I began stroking her back in comforting circles as a shudder wracked my young self. "Thaw Thee Thee all dead and... and thhen he thaved me."
Looking back on it with a Warframe's mind and a whole truck full of lost maturity, it was a bloody miracle Mara escaped and resurrected Buir's corpse without hurting herself.
I stifled a grunt as my unwelcome hitchhikers suddenly bounced against the crystal, urgently rubbing circles across the clear surface until the emerald sphere stopped stirring up the gasses inside. Stupid fucking phantom contractions were going to be the death of me, swear to..."
"You okay?"
"I'm fine, Kitten," the white lie slipped out before I stopped it.
Proving beyond a doubt that our bond wasn't a straight two-way memory sharing, Mara's pouty face lightened as her internal suspicion shifted to innocent belief. She trusted me with her soul, as I did with her, enough to believe a lie meant to protect her.
Without eyes to screw shut and both hands engaged, I flared my head feathers and mentally smiled as Mara made this most delightful oohing noise I'd ever heard.
Okay, Jade, one last thing to lock the proof down. "What about before that, Honey? Do you remember anything else?"
Her negative shake was immediate and backed with a complete absence of anything before waking up on Christophsis. But when I went to speak, Mara surprised me by lifting a tiny, pudgy hand and laying it on my cheek.
"You keep ith safe," she declared with all the imperious confidence a child her age could achieve. "I'm small me, and you're big me!"
Could it be that simple?
We shared the exact same memories of waking up on Christophsis up until entering the Jade light in the bunker, yet here I was with the memories of my old life in the shape and existence of a Warframe. All my fanfics had the Tenno and Warframe having two distinct souls that joined to create a composite when bonded, after all.
Yet the longer I studied Mara's innocent face and the window to the young soul behind it, the more I couldn't dismiss her words as false.
Were we one soul split in two? Mara as the Tenno child half, and me as the Warframe adult half?
Able only to bite the golden rod permanently inserted into Jade's mouth, I bit it to hide the pained grunts of struggling upright as an enormously gravid Warframe. Finding myself surrounded by eagerly flared feathers of white exteriors and pure jade insides, I looked about the area and found Commander Duum joining me in the land of the upright.
He looked much shorter up here compared to Mara's memories of looking up at the officer. Feeling the pinch of time, I risked a contraction to lift a hand to my mouth and cough into it.
"Ahem."
I stared down the barrel of a quick-drawn blaster for a dangerous second before Duum noticed Mara shyly waving at him from my arms.
"Commander Mara? Who are..."
Striding towards the oddly short clone, I demurely extended a hand, and we both pretended that the crystal dome of my gravid midriff hadn't nearly reached the clone before my hand did.
"You can call me Jade, Commander Duum," I huskily greeted the senior officer before inclining my chin toward Mara. "And this is my Tenno daughter, Mara."
"She's big me!"
Luckily, Duum tuned out my child self's rambling and made a show of looking me up and down.
"What are you, Miss Jade?"
I instinctively covered my mouth to giggle, unable to stop the sultry inflexion this vocaliser forced my voice into.
"Why, Commander, I'm Jade, she who delivers judgement with purifying light."
One soul in two bodies now.
Smol Mara is the kid half, Thiccccc Jade is the adult half.
Gotta go to work now, so bye and enjoy!
Music for the chapter is from Samuel Kim (The Clones Theme)
A long time ago, in a solar system far, far away, there lived a clone.
He was a generic example of his gene line, possessing nothing that made him stand out from his brothers.
But then death found him, and it took a miracle in the form of a tiny blue-haired girl-child to save the clone from an ignoble end.
Gifted a second chance at life and powers beyond mortal ken, he took it upon himself to protect the child from threats within and without to the very limits of his soul.
Even when events conspired to tear him away from his sworn charge, the clone refused to be defeated and stood head and shoulders above his brothers.
But not as some ur-clone superior to all. No, this loyal clone took from his charge's example and lifted his gene kin to his level. Most never reached those heights, yet the attempt made the formerly indistinguishable gene line one of heroes great and small.
Heh, listen to me ramble on like Vor when he's had one too many rotguts.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, even by the Void's nonsensical standards, we're more alike than there's any right to be.
And honestly? I'd have loved to sit down with you and have a chat about our respective handfulls... But I'm only an echo of that lucky clone who received a second chance to live.
Good luck, Brother Buir.
...
The next time you see Mara, please tell her 'Kaz says, "Don't do anything I wouldn't, Little Spitfire."' Your Mara might not be wholly mine, but they're close enough to be sisters.
She'll understand.
It's time for you to get on your feet, Trooper. Your war ain't over yet.
"Three, two, one, heave!"
On Jax's orders, Legs and CT-1170 hauled on the slab of duracrete with a yell and succeeded in lifting the half-a-ton block up several centimetres. Waiting for the gap, Jax yanked the pair of blackened boots out from under the quivering slab, causing Buir's unmoving body to pop out like a cork. Not a moment too soon, the massive block hit the floor with a tremendous bang that didn't entirely drown out the lifting trooper's exhausted sighs.
"I think I pulled something," CT-1170 squeaked, both hands pressing into the small of his back as he turned to the medic. "How..."
For the second time in what was only fifteen minutes, going by his HUD's chrono, Jax was tossed off his feet with a grunt as his nominally expired patient jerked upright with a shout. Throwing an accusatory glare at a shirking Legs, the frustrated medic left his standing brothers to their confusion and narrowly managed to stay crouched near Buir. One hells of a nasty crack split the other clone's breastplate down the centre, to say nothing of the multiple burnt holes from blaster bolts. By all rights, Buir should be deader than poor Lumpy, yet Jax's medscanner -working perfectly fine on Legs and CT-1170- stubbornly refused to display anything except a clean bill of health.
"Buir," Jax opinioned amidst the catastrophic devastation of a close-range explosion. "I'm never going to sign off on your death receipt until I've got your corpse in front of me and literally dead."
The guilty as-feth trooper cocked his head like a confused Akk hound. "But I'm not dead?"
Groaning through his clenched teeth, Jax turned to his understandably alive brothers and spread his hands in an imploring, unspoken request for help.
Both of the unhelpful idiots shrugged.
"Alright, fine, you're not dead yet."
Standing with a somewhat falsified grumble, Jax gave Buir a hand up and took stock of the wall of rubble blocking their path. Every few seconds, a scattering of chunks would tumble down from the collapsed ceiling and kick up more dust for the already choked atmosphere. To be blunt, it was a steaming pile of osik that Jax knew the four clones had no hope of clearing. Which was somewhat sobering when the rest of their brothers and Mara'ika were on the far side... hopefully. Stars, the aggressively clingy kid had grown on him at some point, hadn't she?
"What're we going to do?" Legs voiced the single question dominating their minds.
Plastoid rattled as Buir snagged a dropped pistol from the floor and shook the worst of the duracrete dust off it. Popping and reinserting the battery cell, the seemingly immortal trooper was in the midst of finding an intact holster for the sidearm when he pivoted to one side and aimed straight at Jax. A hissing plasma bolt snapped by close enough to fizzle the HUD on that side and blew the head off the dust-covered commando droid sneaking up on the distracted clones. Pulling the hand off his chestplate where he'd reflexively grabbed his racing heart, the medic was genuinely too stunned by the sight of the sparking battle droid to rightfully complain about Buir flagging him.
"You could have hit me!"
Alright, not that distracted.
Sauntering over in a piss-poor attempt to appear unrattled, Legs awkwardly clapped the fuming medic on the shoulder, moving a little stiffy on his left leg.
"Take the luck when you get it, Doc," he commiserated. "Me? I'd rather be rattled than sucking air through holes in my back."
"Didn't need that mental image, Legs, so thanks a lot for nothing," CT-1170 snapped back, sounding rattled despite his sarcastic quip.
"Hey, I'm only trying to keep morale up!"
"Yeah? Then why aren't you named Joker 'cause your attempts are a kriffing joke!"
"Enough!"
Blowing a divot in the ceiling with his blaster as a violent bit of audial punctuation, Buir's cracked visor glared down Legs and CT-1170 until the bickering troopers bowed their heads and settled down. Stomping over to the smoking commando droid, he pilfered the machine's stripped-down E-5 rifle and a vibrosword from its back. Under his brother's bemused stares, Buir cannibalised his empty ammo belt and a length of flexible power cord from under a collapsed office desk as an impromptu strap for the sword to hand over his back. Legs and CT-1170 made a bunch of impressed noises, but Jax finally understood something neither of his brothers realised when Buir went through a quick series of motions with the vibrosword before holstering it.
CT-5581 was a line trooper, not an ARC or one of the rumoured Alpha survivors the younger brothers like to whisper about during meal times. So how in the Vode's name was Buir running through a sword drill with practised movements as a shiny?
As if summoned by the thought, the impossible clone looked at Jax and beckoned him over. "C'mon, we've got a princess to save."
Jax looked at CT-1170 and Legs for support, received more shrugs and gave up wondering with a shrug and a sigh before clambering over the rubble after Buir. With luck, CT-5581 might even know where the annoying tooka kitten was.
Beaker, Jolly, Trumpet, Nibbles and Duum himself.
Five troopers from an escort of eleven arrived at the militia storage bunker under fire from multiple elevated assailants. Wrenching the last smoke grenade from his webbing, Duum joined Trumpet and Beaker in lobbing the canisters along the dangerously exposed secondary transitway. Knowing the road itself was clear right up to the ramp leading to the discrete armoured checkpoint, the Commander counted to three and didn't cheer when roiling clouds of red, blue and white smoke exploded from the mismatched canisters. Ducking to avoid a buzzing crimson bolt that narrowly avoided his head, Duum glanced around at his remaining brothers behind the ornamental planter and the unconscious ad'ika in Jolly's arms.
"One final effort, Vode," Duum snarled through the thunder in his blood as the smoke crept closer to their cover. "Wait for it, wait for it..."
Waiting for the gaseous tendrils to crawl towards them was an almost physically painful experience that the tense officer quashed with a lifetime's training and brutal pragmatism. The sensor-masking smoke grenades would be worse than useless if they ran across open ground to enter the intangible cover. So Duum held his breath with a pained grimace and began counting from one until the blue tendrils caressed the white-knuckled edges of his gauntlets.
"GO!"
Running into the multicoloured fog bank felt like diving underwater without his armour to protect him. Duum's sight reduced to near zero, sounds became muffled and distant, and he relied on dead reckoning and simple luck to sprint across the road without eating a clanker's blaster bolt. Faster than he imagined, the surprised officer felt his ribs creak as he smashed into a human-sized door in the narrow bubble of clear air at the bottom of the entrance ramp. As the first, the following seconds stretched out to gut-churning years in Duum's head as he waited for his brother to arrive.
Trumpet barrelled out of the smog, nursing a smoking pauldron as he narrowly twisted aside to avoid his commanding officer. Wasting no time, the injured clone pawed along the immense blast door and squeezed himself into the alcove the militia indicated contained the entrance scanner.
Fifty seconds of coverage on the smoke grenades, half that in windy conditions. Twenty seconds down and... Jolly sprinted into view as a hazy spectre, realised he was moving too fast to halt and shifted to hit the blast door with an armoured shoulder and disquieting crunch. Duum was there instantly, holstering his pistols and taking Mara off their hands while Jolly reared back and drove his total body weight against the duranium barrier, dislocated shoulder first. Warily eyeing the slightly less opaque smoke clouds, the worried officer ensured one hand constantly stroking the little tooka's head in the vain hope she woke up sooner rather than later.
"C'mon, boys, we got this far..." Duum prayed for any sign of Nibbles and Beaker.
"I got it!"
Alerted by the cry, Duum turned just as two limping outlines stumbled into view through the rapidly dissipating smog. Unable to assist, he used a hand sign to order Jolly to run over to the missing troopers and hurried towards the opening human-sized blast door. Belatedly at the threshold, Duum awkwardly halted and allowed Trumpet to light his bucket's headlamps and take the lead, unburdened as the lightly wounded trooper was by an armful of a thirty-pound child. When Trumpet made it ten feet inside without being shot, the senior officer and his precious charge ducked through the half-open door and beheld rows upon rows of silent doonium statues.
No, not statues.
He distantly heard and acknowledged Jolly assisting a cursing Nibbles and Beaker inside before the door shut with a bone-shaking clang at their back, sealing the five clones and their charge inside a mechanical tomb.
"Are those kriffing Hulks?!"
Nobody knew who had spoken, but the question was pertinent as Duum played his headlamps over the nearest robotic giant in nervous fascination. Balmorran Arms SD-6 Hulk Infantry Droids, his flash-training provided with a soft prod, 3.5m tall armoured juggernauts mounting as much firepower as a small starship and easily capable of shooting such down. The Commander's gaze lingered on the twin E-Web blaster cannons on each shoulder and the long-barreled ion guns on swivel mounts, shuddering as he imagined the carnage such weapons would deliver onto the clones's flesh if the droids woke up.
Mercifully, the company-strength force of autonomous turrets remained in their storage rows with barely enough space to squeeze through the machines and no hope of seeing the bunker's rear.
"The locals must have sealed them up when the war kicked off," Duum voiced, unaware of Mara stirring in his arms. "Imagine what these things could've done to the clankers when they landed."
A wet-sounding cough from Nibbles' slumped body killed that line of thought in favour of brotherly worry. Again, he missed the faint air intake as the child in his arms slowly returned to her senses.
"How is he?"
Trumpet looked up from where he was trying to get the wounded clone's breastplate off. "I... I don't know, Sir. Bad? The best I can do, ugh," Nibbles' breastplate pulled away with a wet pop and a small puddle of blood from the bubbling wreckage of his perforated torso. "Osik!"
A dreadful silence lingered as the clones took in the extent of their brother's injuries, occasionally broken by a bubbling wheeze from Nibbles.
In the end, it was Duum's horrified freezing as he tried and failed to come up with a plan to save his fellow clone that allowed Mara to wriggle out of his grip. Quick as a greased mynock, the blue-haired girl ignored the trooper's frantic calls and vanished between the legs of a Hulk droid. Duum gazed at his empty hands in stupified confusion at where she'd gone before he noticed the green motes floating in Mara's path, ethereal crystals of jade light tracing the kid's path into the dark, droid-filled bunker complex.
"Mara! Come back!" Teeth grit, Duum turned to Jolly. "Trooper, you're in charge. Don't let the clankers in, and especially don't let Nibbles die!"
"Yes, Sir!"
Glad to be so low on equipment that he was already stripped down, the Commander took off after the hunting trail, weaving under and around the quiescent Hulks. It was slow and painful going for a man of 6' in the heaviest infantry armour worn on the modern battlefield compared to a child just over half his height wearing no armour beyond an envirosuit. And yet, every bruised limb and disorientating whack on a protruding mechanical part only served to make Duum more determined to stick to the Jade light. Ever deeper, the Commander forged along the ethereal trail in search of the missing ad'ika, his path a maze of trunk-like legs, lowered weapon arms and enormous crushing gauntlets that required navigating around and thus losing time.
"Mara?! Mara, where are you, ad?"
His words echoed strangely in the storage bunker, the heavier sounds echoing distantly while the sharper noises rebounded off duranium hulls right back into Duum's ears. Perversely, in the increasingly battered clone's mind, the glittering intangible gem lights marking Mara's path remained stubbornly just out of reach. No matter how often Duum hit his head or squeezed around a Hulk's legs, the trail's end always remained a hand's length away from the officer's outstretched fingers.
"Mara?! Mara?!"
Only vaguely recalling how many rows of automated mobile turrets he'd struggled through, Duum wasn't prepared to force his armoured body between a Hulk's legs and stagger into an inexplicably present barrier of bright green glowing something. Understandably, the cumulative costs of the fighting escape, and the painful trek through the forest of metal juggernauts meant the officer floundered when he threw a hand out to stop from running into the blinding wall. So when his palm met nothing substantial enough to halt him -as if light could achieve that- Commander Duum fell through the jade light with a cry.
And collapsed into the arms of a brother?
White, familiar plastoid clattered off Duum's battle-damaged plates as their owner chuckled, the amusement familiar to his ears yet bearing a queer undertone that set his teeth on edge. Shaking off the disorientation clouding his brain, Duum's eyes widened as he followed the brother's arms up to the shoulders and head, not believing the truth it was attempting to tell him even as he saw the crooked nose broken by a training accident as a young trooper.
Duum's doppelganger grinned at him with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear.
Literally.
"Surprised to see yourself in the warped mirror, Commander?" The burning embers replacing Duum's eyes crinkled as the dark copy winked. "You're lucky the Kiddo loves you and your identical brothers so much, you know that?"
"Huh?"
The doppelganger rolled their burning eyes. "Ugh, I can't believe I'm doing this to help save a bunch of walking meat muppets that make ghouls look bright and chipper."
Before Duum could do more than scowl at the contextless insult -and it was an insult, he knew it- his copy spun the Commander so he could gasp and reach out a hand.
"'Ad'ika!"
The shout rolled off Mara's back like so much water, unnoticed by the tiny slip of a tooka kitten as she sleepily walked toward a kneeling figure composed of a perplexing blend of armour, fleshy-looking white feathers and inexplicable and somewhat tacky golden accents and baubles. Eyes closed yet moving confidently in her sleep, Mara ignored Duum's shouted cries to come back to a halt in front of the living armour and abruptly halted before entering arm's reach of the massive creature thing. Without the girl's movements drawing the Commander's singular focus, he finally noticed what he could only describe as a gold-framed cage holding a gas-filled sphere of enormous size dominating the unnerving organic armour's midriff.
"W-What is that thing?" He rasped in bafflement, watching the creepy flesh feathers woefully fail at hiding even a quarter of the globe from sight. "Why is Mara... How'd she... Where is..."
"Blah, blah, blah, lemme cut this short, Test-Tube Baby."
Silencing Duum with a hand over his mouth, the doppelganger's voice dripped with an odd mixture of condescension and fondness.
"Reverse order. Teeny tiny Void pocket located two seconds ago and fifteen local dimensions counterclockwise of the local black hole cluster whirlpool of hate and megalomania. She's a Tenno. Also, because she's a Tenno, frustrating little shits are great at breaking the rules of causality over their knees." An audible smirk crossed the creature's unseen face. "As for the ridiculously gravid "angel" over there, that's a Warframe. Conduit, Guardian and Babysitter rolled into one disgusting nanite flesh puppet golem coated in far too much gold, ugh. It was meant to greet Mara when she got dumped here, but that sanctimonious fleshlight known as the Light Side thought I was trying to breach into this universe." It scoffed. "Stupid bitch deserves all the headaches that are coming her way."
"Were you trying to breach into this universe?" Duum felt obliged to ask, even if the question was nigh impossible to wrap his head around.
In what was rapidly becoming an annoying pattern, the doppelganger snorted.
"Well, duh. What did the self-absorbed wannabe deity think a Tenno was?"
"Doesn't that sort of make this your..."
"Oh, would you look at that! It's bonding time!"
Blatant deflection aside, Duum's eyebrows climbed into his buzzcut hairline as Mara stirred from her unnatural slumber, gave an adorable wee gasp upon seeing the 'Warframe' towering over her, and immediately hugged the abomination of flesh and armour. Violet and Jade light gathered around the connection figures until the Commander had to avert his eyes lest he be blinded by the incredible radiance. The doppelganger hissed when their hand slipped off Duum's mouth, yet there was no relief to be found.
"Oops, I nearly forgot to wipe this memory. Sorry, slightly less funny Test-Tube Baby, but no freebies from this Wally."
Then, there was the laughter of an irritating shard of an eldritch being, and Commander Duum forgot everything after he entered the Jade light.
"Owwwwwwwwww."
Another phantom contraction hit me like a stun prod to the gut as the three jostling emerald-green spheres bounced around the glowing thunderdome of Jade's glass womb thingy.
Fucked if I know what to call the crystal-clear, not-glass framed and held in place by excessively golden filigreed bars that made the Jade Warframe look pregnant. I'd literally only played the quest before this shit went down, but I'm pretty fucking certain that the game version of her didn't have the glowing belly the size of a medicine ball with three occupants that I had! Energetic and exhaustingly active, I rolled with six phantom contractions in as many seconds when the spheres hit the sides before splaying my fingers across a small patch of the incredibly clear dome.
Just like that, the trio of troublemakers stopped moving with a faintly-detectable sense of contentment and safety.
Sweet Sol Invictus, how many puppies did I kick in my last life to wake up as Jade's even more pregnant twin sister? Not that this theoretical sister existed, but I sure looked and, most importantly, felt about ready to pop at any fucking moment.
"Hi?"
I glanced through subdermal sensor arrays at the blue-haired girl held close to my breast, using my massively gravid faux pregnant belly as a seat. Her baby-faced features were awfully familiar for reasons that presently evaded me. Jade green eyes? Check. Six missing teeth, including a front tooth? Check. Metallic blue hair cut to the nape of her neck despite it being floor length this morning when I was sleeping in Jax's...
HOLD ON A FETHING MOMENT!
"Mara?" Synthetic yet husky, my vocaliser's voice carried a perpetual hint of maternal exhaustion. "What's the first thing you can remember?"
Looking no younger than six, maybe seven at a stretch, Mara's adorable face scrunched up in deep thought, which I felt every part of through our bond. Low-key enough to have missed it, what with the dodgems going on inside my huge Void baby bump and all, this had to be the link every Tenno and their Warframe shared. There literally wasn't any other explanation as to why I was undeniably Bigger Jade, and I was privy to the somewhat muddled thoughts going on behind Mara's somewhat glazed emerald eyes.
Geez, was I this absent-minded around Buir and Senator Organa... My feathers rustled around me as I mistakenly accepted Mara's memories as my own.
Or were they also mine?
...
Fuck, my brain hurts.
"I saw clones be shoth by the evil roboths," Mara snuggled tight against my bust as she whispered her way through those painful memories. "I... I ran away thoo a thafe plathe." I began stroking her back in comforting circles as a shudder wracked my young self. "Thaw Thee Thee all dead and... and thhen he thaved me."
Looking back on it with a Warframe's mind and a whole truck full of lost maturity, it was a bloody miracle Mara escaped and resurrected Buir's corpse without hurting herself.
I stifled a grunt as my unwelcome hitchhikers suddenly bounced against the crystal, urgently rubbing circles across the clear surface until the emerald sphere stopped stirring up the gasses inside. Stupid fucking phantom contractions were going to be the death of me, swear to..."
"You okay?"
"I'm fine, Kitten," the white lie slipped out before I stopped it.
Proving beyond a doubt that our bond wasn't a straight two-way memory sharing, Mara's pouty face lightened as her internal suspicion shifted to innocent belief. She trusted me with her soul, as I did with her, enough to believe a lie meant to protect her.
Without eyes to screw shut and both hands engaged, I flared my head feathers and mentally smiled as Mara made this most delightful oohing noise I'd ever heard.
Okay, Jade, one last thing to lock the proof down. "What about before that, Honey? Do you remember anything else?"
Her negative shake was immediate and backed with a complete absence of anything before waking up on Christophsis. But when I went to speak, Mara surprised me by lifting a tiny, pudgy hand and laying it on my cheek.
"You keep ith safe," she declared with all the imperious confidence a child her age could achieve. "I'm small me, and you're big me!"
Could it be that simple?
We shared the exact same memories of waking up on Christophsis up until entering the Jade light in the bunker, yet here I was with the memories of my old life in the shape and existence of a Warframe. All my fanfics had the Tenno and Warframe having two distinct souls that joined to create a composite when bonded, after all.
Yet the longer I studied Mara's innocent face and the window to the young soul behind it, the more I couldn't dismiss her words as false.
Were we one soul split in two? Mara as the Tenno child half, and me as the Warframe adult half?
Able only to bite the golden rod permanently inserted into Jade's mouth, I bit it to hide the pained grunts of struggling upright as an enormously gravid Warframe. Finding myself surrounded by eagerly flared feathers of white exteriors and pure jade insides, I looked about the area and found Commander Duum joining me in the land of the upright.
He looked much shorter up here compared to Mara's memories of looking up at the officer. Feeling the pinch of time, I risked a contraction to lift a hand to my mouth and cough into it.
"Ahem."
I stared down the barrel of a quick-drawn blaster for a dangerous second before Duum noticed Mara shyly waving at him from my arms.
"Commander Mara? Who are..."
Striding towards the oddly short clone, I demurely extended a hand, and we both pretended that the crystal dome of my gravid midriff hadn't nearly reached the clone before my hand did.
"You can call me Jade, Commander Duum," I huskily greeted the senior officer before inclining my chin toward Mara. "And this is my Tenno daughter, Mara."
"She's big me!"
Luckily, Duum tuned out my child self's rambling and made a show of looking me up and down.
"What are you, Miss Jade?"
I instinctively covered my mouth to giggle, unable to stop the sultry inflexion this vocaliser forced my voice into.
"Why, Commander, I'm Jade, she who delivers judgement with purifying light."
One soul in two bodies now.
Smol Mara is the kid half, Thiccccc Jade is the adult half.
Gotta go to work now, so bye and enjoy!
KonahrikYol
Local basement dweller
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Yay, the chapters are all caught up. So now I can send messages again and be a nuisance.
\_( '^' )_/
\_( '^' )_/
Megagnura
Know what you're doing yet?
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There is of course the best way to get around the jedi rule of non attachment which is to not be a jedi.
Xenobiologist
Know what you're doing yet?
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I had a thought earlier today. If/when Jade becomes more well-known, how will people react to her? Seeing how angels are a known thing in Star Wars, albeit something seen more as a legend/spacer's tale.
Elite_Noob
Getting sticky.
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I think jade looks weird especially when one of her animations has her caressing her belly. is she gonna give birth and make the belly bump go away, it's kinda a please shoot the obviously vulnerable area when in combat
HarakoniWarhawk
I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.
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New Quest had a pregnant Warframe.
BP we got as a reward was pregnant too, but more as an imprint of Jade before she died.
Lemme get what she looks like in game and what her ref here will be.
Jade in game.
Jade ref for fic by MuskoviumDraws
Elite_Noob
Getting sticky.
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SkinnyP
In need of a hug
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New Quest had a pregnant Warframe.
BP we got as a reward was pregnant too, but more as an imprint of Jade before she died.
Lemme get what she looks like in game and what her ref here will be.
Jade in game.
Jade ref for fic by MuskoviumDraws
Thx for clearing that up for me. Any particular reason why you went with a turbo pregnant version? Will it be explained in the fic or is it a purely aesthetic change?
HarakoniWarhawk
I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.
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Explained in the next couple of chapters.
Muse jumped onto horny that also had a story explanation. She'll not keep the turbo pregnant size for long, can promise that.
Aldanias
Not too sore, are you?
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Brand new one and well.....let's just say that her Weapons are a counterpart to her husband's and she was made into a Warframe while Pregnant
Well assuming that it's yours, you decided to make her look a bit like a Prime and forgot to do the color thing to Evensong's arrows
and Stalker's now basically Kratos Circa. GoW 4 and RagnarokJade literally just came out
Babyframe?
Apollyon_io
Know what you're doing yet?
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Damn that's sad.
HarakoniWarhawk
I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.
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I've got a lewd snippet in my snippet thread with a Jade that's turbo pregnant-sized if that's your thing.
Chapter Eight.
HarakoniWarhawk
I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.
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FIRST NEW CHAPTER IN THE STORY THREAD, WHOOOO!
Music for the chapter is from Stan Bush (Dare)
Things were going rather well, given the present circumstances.
On command, another salvo of laser cannon and LTL fire erupted from the turrets and barbettes surrounding the Invincible's bridge trench. Admiral Trench immensely enjoyed the strobing crimson waves bathing the bridge and his six eyes in rubescent illumination. True, the continued failure to detect and defeat the Republican's latest cloaking technology demonstrator was a mild caustic irritant to the Harch's mood. Yet, every failed interception was a boon for intelligence, as Tl-99's top-heavy chassis crunched the numbers with the occasional errant twitch or thrumming buzz.
The tactical droid sirred as the slowest of the gunnery units finished their fire patterns. "All available information on the cloaked vessel and their observed flight characteristics assures their destruction with a 97.122% probability." Tl-99's flat monotone betrayed none of the frustration such a statement engendered. "Conclusion: Republican stealth craft is being piloted by a Jedi."
"As was my prediction," Trench commiserated, idly gesturing with his command baton for the bridge crew to fire another salvo. "Has there been any response to my open transmission?"
"None, Admiral."
Trench's six arms languidly shrugged before the upper two pairs interlaced their hands across his torso. His solid crimson eyes, however, were not relaxed. They tracked the stealth ship's probable locational arc with a hunter's intensity, anticipating the Jedi's next move.
"And the republic fleet?"
Dedicated to their own isolated repeater, the holographic globe of Leesis, Christophsis' primary moon, bore a crown of crimson wedges in polar orbit. Telescopes and more conventional sensor arrays provided a reasonable enough fabrication of the enemy's intentions, though such was never infallible when the Jedi were involved.
At Trench's side, Tl-99's photoreceptors momentarily dimmed. "78.1% chance that they are engaging in what repairs can be affected outside a spacedock. The probability of intercepting and destroying the hostile fleet before they escape to hyperspace is only 3.774%, with a margin of error of..."
The Harch officer raised his middle left hand. "Then it is well that I do not presume to break orbit. Doing so would only open us up to isolation and destruction as our fleet is spread out too far from mutual support." Unexpectedly, Trench chuckled and beckoned the tactical droid closer. "We shall catch the stealth ship in good time. Prepare tracking torpedos for firing and have the thermal shields cycled," he ordered the bridge crew, then side-eyed his droid companion. "What of our little diversion on the surface?"
With two entire squadrons of Munificent-class heavy frigates in orbit, a third of which still retained their as-built electronic warfare suites, it'd been farcical to eavesdrop on Count Dooku and General Loathsom's communications. From there, it'd been a logical choice to eliminate a valuable resource Trench and the Retail Caucus had no ability to capture, lest it fall into the Corporate Alliance's hands. Tl-99 had slipped a few additional orders to the commando droids through discrete back channels and, by all accounts, had thinned the target's escort considerably.
Another salvo fruitlessly attempted that most simplistic pattern of destroying a hard-to-hit starship, grid square removal.
"General Loathsom's tactical droid is growing increasingly suspicious of the commando's falsified reports, Admiral. I predict another twentieth of a rotation before my backdoor is discovered and your involvement becomes known to Loathsom."
Trench stroked his left chelicera. "Hmm... Very well, this sideshow has grown stale. Activate the bunker's droids and order them to engage all organic targets..."
"Admiral, we've locked onto the republic ship's magnetic signature!"
The Harch broke off his conversation and bellowed. "Fire the tracking missiles!"
Four blazing streaks erupted from concealed magnetic launchers, two to each side of the bridge, and rapidly consumed the distance between them and the cloaked vessel. Chittering contentedly, Trench leant back in his chair with a proud air and beckoned Tl-99 closer with his baton.
"Soon, General Loathsom will be sent back to Raxus Secundus in disgrace, and I shall command the orbitals and all of Christophsis. Was the signal sent?"
Tl-99 buzzed. "My communication was interrupted mid-transmission, but I calculate a 96% chance it was received."
"Very well."
The Harch narrowed his eyes as the projected location of the stealth ship transformed into an active sensor plot at the behest of a brilliant plume of energised ions. A split-second freeze infected the B1s at their stations as the republican vessel and the green icons denoting the tracking missiles raced toward the Invincible and the Separatist flotilla.
"Uh, Admiral," the droid at sensors jerkily turned to Trench. "The republic ship dropped its cloak and increased speed in our direction."
Ignoring the lamentably dull automaton, the Harch admiral's suspicious six-eyed glare lingered on the rapidly fluctuating sensor picture before rearing back with an alarmed hiss.
"Raise the thermal shields!"
"Thermal shields are still charging, Admiral!"
Doomed long before he'd known it, Admiral Trench could only exist as an observer to his final seconds of life as the Jedi-piloted stealth corvette raced across his flagship's hull toward the bridge. The droid crew had enough time to flinch as the needle-shaped craft raced overhead before the magnetic tracking missiles locked onto the vessel crashed into the transparisteel viewport and detonated.
A clap of thunder and flames were the last things Trench saw before the boiling inferno consumed him and Tl-99.
Kneeling with palpable difficulty, the so-called Jade ignored the clone's wary gazes and stances to lay a slim, armoured hand on Nibbles' cold cheek. Her uncomfortably flesh-like feathers rustled and flared out from her torso and head, exposing glossy metallic green internals to the serene jade light emitting from the Warframe's swollen midriff.
Against Duum's wishes, Commander Mara stood at Jade's side. "Can you helth him?" She whimpered, reddened eyes locked onto the deceased trooper in a pool of his own blood. "I mith him..."
"I know, Kitten. Trust me, I know."
"We tried, Commander," Beaker's morose self-loathing disguised which Commander he meant. "Maybe if Jax was here, but we had a couple of compresses and a tourniquet for that," he jerkily motioned to the gory ruin of his brother's torso.
"And none can ask more of you, trooper," Jade began, only for a bone-shaking hum to permeate the bunker.
Instantly, the clones turned outward from their charge, weapons at the ready and headlamps panning over the rows and rows of shut-down Hulk units. Duum's pistols felt somewhat inadequate facing down his chosen mobile turret, yet what choice did he have? Catching Beaker slamming his bucket on in the corner of an eye, Duum heard the trooper's voice join the reduced squad net as each man sounded off their present lack of targets. Nobody dared move with the humming vibrating their bones and internal organs, not when some sixth sense told the soldiers that something was deeply, terribly wrong within the bunker.
Four units down and two rows in, a Hulk sluggishly rose to its full height, twined photoreceptors lighting up with a steadily brightening cyan and red light.
"Hulks! They're waking up!" Trumpet shouted.
Between one blink and the next, Trumpet's fading warning died with the screams of the damned piped directly into Duum's ears for a split second. Reeling as the cacophony drove an ice spike into his brain, the Commander made to wrench his helmet off... and the noise ceased. Panting, he wavered on unsteady feet for the ringing to fade, only for a bubble of green energy to envelop him and the other troopers. Relief arrived on the wings of a divine choir, unseen hands teasing the audio-induced agony from Duum's body until he stood blinking in subdued and delayed shock at its absence.
The pain might have vanished, but duranium thundered and crashed as three activated Hulks turned malevolent optics on the unprepared and underarmed clones.
Training kicked in, and Duum's initial volley spanged off his chosen target's thick torso plating with all the effect of a spitball. Coruscating cyan streams of ionised plasma lashed out at the other autonomous turrets as the officer backed up and expected to order Commander Mara to run and hide. Below the hum of what he now recognised as powering fusion reactors came the far more familiar electric whine of charging power capacitors.
"Commander, you need to...!"
Once, twice, thrice, a luminous arrow cracked past Duum's visor at supersonic velocity and buried itself in the awakened Hulks' blackened but undamaged torso. Lowering an ornate, curving bow nearly as tall as she was, Jade's head feathers flared as she stared down the glowing barrels of the droid's heavy anti-vehicle weapons. With no sign of Mara, Duum prayed to whoever might be listening that the tooka kitten had taken the Warframe's advice and fired a last brace of shots before the trio of Hulks opened fire. Blaring in droid-speak, the mobile turrets erupted in a multi-coloured light show of vibrant streamers from six E-Webs and globular actinic blobs from the ion rifles.
The incoming fire unerringly impacted the four clones at this point-blank range with nowhere to run.
Having squeezed his eyes shut at the last second, Duum's expected cessation of existence felt oddly like being hit with water balloons filled with warm water. Sure, he rocked back on his feet from the impacts, but recovery was purely reflexive and left the blank emptiness of his mind spinning in ever-increasing circles. A blurt of droid-speak convinced the Commander to open his eyes and behold the Hulk droids facing each other and exchanging rapid-fire verbal communications. Still not entirely convinced this wasn't the afterlife where he didn't get vaporised by anti-vehicle cannons, Duum experimentally fired a shot at the nearest droid's back.
The pistol bolt left a dull mark on the unpainted duranium with the expected pop of expanding air as the plasma heated the surrounding atmosphere.
"Okay, so I'm not dead," Trumpet's bewildered declaration met understanding silence from his brothers. "This is the afterlife, isn't it?"
"Not quite, Trooper."
Moving with a fluid grace far beyond the exhausted waddle Duum had seen from the Warframe, Jade practically glided across the bunker floor to stand at the front of the defensive cordon. Ethereal whispers accompanied her oddly weightless steps that barely reached the clone's ears, dying down when she dismissed the bow into the ether and summoned a massive scythe. The two-headed melee weapon looked to weigh a damn lot, yet the gravid Warframe twirled the scythe in the air before her as if it weighed as much as a lightsaber. Alerted by the swirling movement, the Hulks's chatter abruptly ended before the lumbering automatons turned as one to face their new foe with glowing weapon barrels.
Jade looked back over her shoulder. "Mara's safe."
Perplexing, but that didn't hold a candle to the abrupt hyper-violence of Jade dashing toward the Hulks and floating through the heavy barrage with only the shimmering outline of a figure-hugging shield to denote she'd been hit. Despite being a foot taller and considerably heavier than a clone, the Warframe lunged at the closest bipedal turret with speed befitting a Jedi and lashed out with her scythe. Entering low on the right hip joint, the lengthy handle allowed Jade to bisect the Hulk from hip to the joint bearing the righthand ion rifle with one impossibly smooth motion. Duum's composure snapped as ravenous corrosive liquid erupted from the impossibly clean cut and ate away at the duranium automaton before it'd even collapsed in two pieces.
Duum wandered over to his clustered brothers for emotional support while Jade contemptuously demolished the second Hulk removed limb by removed limb. Surrounded by his genekin, the officer's thoughts remained unvoiced as their white and golden angelic saviour defied several laws of physics to erupt in a blaze of emerald light so that her downward stroke could cut the final rogue Hulk in half.
From above.
Both halves of the acid-eaten droid smashed down on either side of Jade as she serenely floated down with her extended feathers surrounding her like a shining disk of light. Touching the floor toes first, Duum caught a barely audible gasp from the Warframe before the ethereal glow faded away, and she laid a hand on her midsection. The scythe, perpetrator of unfathomable violence for a weapon that wasn't a lightsaber, vanished with a flurry of green motes, thus allowing the burdened and undeniably alien Warframe to offer Duum a very shallow bow.
Given her size, even that much surprised the Commander, who reciprocated with a curt nod and a questioning look he hoped would be interpreted appropriately. It wasn't that he was apprehensive to question what'd occurred -alright, perhaps a little bit- so much as the lingering concern for Mara's continued absence and the remaining Hulks. Duum pursed his chapped lips, holstering his useless pistols and allowing himself a steadying breath.
"Is Mara still safe?" His voice rebounded strangely amidst the crackles and sparking of the wrecked Hulks, making Duum hate the audible indecision in his own tone. "Is she..."
It took Jade a few seconds of confused head-tilting before she gasped and desperately pulled the hand off her prominent belly. Head feathers fanning, the tall alien couldn't shake her head quickly enough.
"No, no, no, no, no!"
Visibly struggling not to follow her instincts and rub circles across her midriff, Jade's slim hands curled and twitched with an aborted need that convinced Duum far better than any explanation could.
"Mara's powers allow her access to abilities many would consider unnatural and eldritch," Jade explained in the hurried tone of a woman speaking without a filter. "Her, mine, our bond is one such power, Commander. She's not in there," she briefly glanced downward. "I really don't know how to explain things without sounding insane and/or like I'm dumbing it down too much. Mara's with me, not in me!"
"It's Jeti osik, ain't it?"
Jolly took his brother's silent condemnation for breaking the conversational back-and-forth with the unconcerned shrug of an unbothered trooper.
"Way I see it, Sir, Ma'am, I trust the rotund angel lady when she says the Commander's safe," Seeing that he was unopposed, Jolly rambled on. "The Longnecks never bothered to teach us about anything close to what the Princess can do, so what's so wrong with her and Miss Jade being even more weird?"
Breathing loud enough to be picked up over the squad net, the clone finally discovered some embarrassment and rubbed the back of his neck.
"What? I was just saying what we're all thinking..."
"He's out of line, Commander," Beaker stood up for his brother. "But he's right as far as we're concerned until the battle's over."
Damn them all, but they're right, Duum admitted to himself. Wanting to rub the growing ache on his head and too stubborn to remove his helmet in a combat zone, the aggrieved officer groaned in the privacy of his bucket and bowed his head. He knew his subordinates would easily translate the body language as only another clone could. Duum ran a gauntlet over his visor one last time before pushing his irritation deep into a pit and sealing the lid with professionalism.
Only then did he look around and meet everyone's eyes -and eye equivalent, in Jade's case-.
"Okay."
Stoked with far too much frantic energy to stand still, Duum started pacing a loose circuit around an invisible perimeter, not once taking his gaze away from a silently observing Jade.
"We're low on ammo, presumably surrounded by most of the droid army and are down one... one... one combatant," it took divine effort not to glance at Nibbles' corpse. "Make that four clones and one Jeti angel against the better part of..." Duum noticed the aforementioned angel holding up a hand. "What?"
She waggled her raised arm, bringing the clone's attention to the diamond-bladed dagger inexplicably now tied to the underside of his wrist. No, Duum corrected himself with a squint, a sizeable dagger connected to Jade's wrist.
"Let me guess, another Jeti thing?"
"Yesn't."
Dumm wasn't amused, and his glare at the Warframe indicated as such.
Jade's response was to drift over to the nearest powered-down Hulk, stand on her tippy-toes with a strained grunt as she manoeuvred around her own body, and plunge the wrist dagger into the droid's maintenance port. Nothing happened except for a few errant twitches of the blade before the white, green and gold Warframe pulled it free with an airy giggle and a pirouetting flourish for her confused audience.
"Watch and learn, Boys~."
The Hulk at Jade's unguarded back rumbled to mechanical life with the actinic glare of ethereal green optics, wholly unlike the rogue units. Straightening under the wary eyes and guns of the remaining troopers, the bipedal slab of cannons, duranium, and massive claws leaned forward to peer at the Warframe at its feet and blare a question in droid-speak.
Without looking, Jade reached back and fondly petted the war droid's piston-like thigh like a massive, incredibly dangerous pet dog.
Despite expecting to die to the selfsame Hulks not ten minutes ago, Duum's victorious grin exposed far more teeth than anything friendly deserved. A good thing then that his smile was a bloodthirsty one resurrected by the implications behind Jade's unexpected stunt and the palpable air of smugness hanging around the flesh machine angel's narrow shoulders.
"How many of those can you hack?" Duum dared not risk another word.
Dipping into an unfamiliar stance, which he would much later discover was known as a curtsey, Jade spread her arms wide to be mimicked by the subverted Hulk a second later.
"Why, Commander, all of them."
"...you understand these orders?"
B1-887's three-digit hand banged against their skull-like head. "Roger Roger!"
TJ-55's miniature hologram briefly studied the OOM command droid before nodding and cutting the connection.
"What a glitch-helm," B1-887 muttered before picking up their megaphone. "Come out with your hands up, Republic Dogs! We've got you surrounded!"
Six platoons of AATs, several clusters of spider droids, and enough regular battle droids to fill the road in both directions for a hundred feet surrounded the sealed militia bunker. Notably absent were the commando droids initially holding the skyscrapers flanking the roadway, the assassins being ordered away by TJ-55 the moment B1-887's troops arrived. Glad to be rid of the creepy BX models, the OOM groaned when the bunker door remained shut despite their super-convincing orders to open it up.
"Ugh."
Turning the megaphone over, -887 discovered a switch that made the voice amplifier crackle and squeal. Feeling too ashamed to admit they'd forgotten to turn it on, the yellow-painted B1 officer pretended that never happened.
"REPUBLIC DOGS, WE HAVE YOU..."
THUNK
"Uhhh."
THUNK
"Aghhhhhh!"
THUNK
"All units, aim at those doors!"
Far too late to matter, the bunker door finished unbolting and began creeping upwards on recessed rails, allowing a blinding pulse of jade light to spill out and blind the droid's sensors.
B1-887 threw a hand over their photoreceptors as the commercial-grade optics were dazzled by the unnatural glow to the point the command droid was still seeing the emerald light in their processor. However, their audial sensors had zero issues discerning the strut-shaking footfalls of a great many somethings marching in lockstep. Panicking, -887 banged and clattered as they fell back inside their command AAT and blindly fumbled with the gunner's sight until the static quit blocking their vision.
Putting an optic to the sight, the OOM regretted it. "We're doomed!"
An incandescent irregular blob of emerald light stood outside the unsealed bunker, burning so bright even the tank's hardened optics struggled to discern anything detectable. Reflecting the miniature star's hue, four clones emerged from the gloom and took up firing stances alongside their light ball, pathetically underequipped to deal with the OOM's force.
Unfortunately, they weren't alone.
Implacable, undaunted and, most importantly, operational, Hulk Infantry Droid after Hulk Infantry Droid opened fire on the stunned CIS forces the moment they exited the bunker. Unholy acid-green optics burned with the fury of a thousand stars from each lumbering giant as they blundered their way into the light. Clumsy though they were, there wasn't anything wrong, as B1-887 found out when the ionic rifles spat disabling bolts at the hapless AATs and the arm-mounted E-Webs scythed through the blinded B1s and B2s. Explosions rocked the Separatist force as tanks, and the light spider droids were focused down with mechanical precision as the most significant threats.
Thrown against the wall as the AAT beside him detonated with the blue-tinged flare of a breached reactor, the panicking OOM model tried dragging the heavy laser cannon onto a target, any target.
A supersonic arrow flew true from the jade light right down the AAT's main gun and buried itself in the capacitor bank beside B1-887's head.
"Uh oh."
Physically unable to have facial expressions, the droid's black photoreceptors gleamed with the sparkling energy erupting from the damaged mechanism before the entire assembly exploded in their face.
Leaderless and blinded, the subverted Hulk droids shattered their weaker opponents into smaller and smaller groups until the final cluster of B2s was crushed beneath grasping battle claws. Its task fulfilled satisfactorly; the emerald glow faded to reveal Jade as she ceased floating and returned to walking like her impressed escorts. Radiating pure smugness from every feather, golden ornament and metallic green embellishment, the angelic Warframe pointed at something in the smoke-streaked sky.
"Am I good, or am I good?"
Too professional by far to flip the smug angel off as she deserved, Commander Duum rolled his eyes behind his visor and ignored Jade.
Though no larger than a fingernail at this distance, the burning wreck of a Lucrehulk battleship was as welcome a sight as any for Duum's morale and soul. Somehow, the Open Circle fleet had managed to enter orbit and was currently engaged in beating the scrap out of the clanker blockade.
"Trust a Jeti angel to be full of herself," Duum muttered with more than a little fondness.
"I heard that!"
Y'know this is a fan of my Muse's when she gives me 3.7k words in one sitting.
As for the arrow fuckery, Jade's bow, Evensong, has an effect where enemies hit with it will suffer from 100% reduced damage.
The weapons still work, they just don't do anything. It's pretty bonkers fun.
Music for the chapter is from Stan Bush (Dare)
Things were going rather well, given the present circumstances.
On command, another salvo of laser cannon and LTL fire erupted from the turrets and barbettes surrounding the Invincible's bridge trench. Admiral Trench immensely enjoyed the strobing crimson waves bathing the bridge and his six eyes in rubescent illumination. True, the continued failure to detect and defeat the Republican's latest cloaking technology demonstrator was a mild caustic irritant to the Harch's mood. Yet, every failed interception was a boon for intelligence, as Tl-99's top-heavy chassis crunched the numbers with the occasional errant twitch or thrumming buzz.
The tactical droid sirred as the slowest of the gunnery units finished their fire patterns. "All available information on the cloaked vessel and their observed flight characteristics assures their destruction with a 97.122% probability." Tl-99's flat monotone betrayed none of the frustration such a statement engendered. "Conclusion: Republican stealth craft is being piloted by a Jedi."
"As was my prediction," Trench commiserated, idly gesturing with his command baton for the bridge crew to fire another salvo. "Has there been any response to my open transmission?"
"None, Admiral."
Trench's six arms languidly shrugged before the upper two pairs interlaced their hands across his torso. His solid crimson eyes, however, were not relaxed. They tracked the stealth ship's probable locational arc with a hunter's intensity, anticipating the Jedi's next move.
"And the republic fleet?"
Dedicated to their own isolated repeater, the holographic globe of Leesis, Christophsis' primary moon, bore a crown of crimson wedges in polar orbit. Telescopes and more conventional sensor arrays provided a reasonable enough fabrication of the enemy's intentions, though such was never infallible when the Jedi were involved.
At Trench's side, Tl-99's photoreceptors momentarily dimmed. "78.1% chance that they are engaging in what repairs can be affected outside a spacedock. The probability of intercepting and destroying the hostile fleet before they escape to hyperspace is only 3.774%, with a margin of error of..."
The Harch officer raised his middle left hand. "Then it is well that I do not presume to break orbit. Doing so would only open us up to isolation and destruction as our fleet is spread out too far from mutual support." Unexpectedly, Trench chuckled and beckoned the tactical droid closer. "We shall catch the stealth ship in good time. Prepare tracking torpedos for firing and have the thermal shields cycled," he ordered the bridge crew, then side-eyed his droid companion. "What of our little diversion on the surface?"
With two entire squadrons of Munificent-class heavy frigates in orbit, a third of which still retained their as-built electronic warfare suites, it'd been farcical to eavesdrop on Count Dooku and General Loathsom's communications. From there, it'd been a logical choice to eliminate a valuable resource Trench and the Retail Caucus had no ability to capture, lest it fall into the Corporate Alliance's hands. Tl-99 had slipped a few additional orders to the commando droids through discrete back channels and, by all accounts, had thinned the target's escort considerably.
Another salvo fruitlessly attempted that most simplistic pattern of destroying a hard-to-hit starship, grid square removal.
"General Loathsom's tactical droid is growing increasingly suspicious of the commando's falsified reports, Admiral. I predict another twentieth of a rotation before my backdoor is discovered and your involvement becomes known to Loathsom."
Trench stroked his left chelicera. "Hmm... Very well, this sideshow has grown stale. Activate the bunker's droids and order them to engage all organic targets..."
"Admiral, we've locked onto the republic ship's magnetic signature!"
The Harch broke off his conversation and bellowed. "Fire the tracking missiles!"
Four blazing streaks erupted from concealed magnetic launchers, two to each side of the bridge, and rapidly consumed the distance between them and the cloaked vessel. Chittering contentedly, Trench leant back in his chair with a proud air and beckoned Tl-99 closer with his baton.
"Soon, General Loathsom will be sent back to Raxus Secundus in disgrace, and I shall command the orbitals and all of Christophsis. Was the signal sent?"
Tl-99 buzzed. "My communication was interrupted mid-transmission, but I calculate a 96% chance it was received."
"Very well."
The Harch narrowed his eyes as the projected location of the stealth ship transformed into an active sensor plot at the behest of a brilliant plume of energised ions. A split-second freeze infected the B1s at their stations as the republican vessel and the green icons denoting the tracking missiles raced toward the Invincible and the Separatist flotilla.
"Uh, Admiral," the droid at sensors jerkily turned to Trench. "The republic ship dropped its cloak and increased speed in our direction."
Ignoring the lamentably dull automaton, the Harch admiral's suspicious six-eyed glare lingered on the rapidly fluctuating sensor picture before rearing back with an alarmed hiss.
"Raise the thermal shields!"
"Thermal shields are still charging, Admiral!"
Doomed long before he'd known it, Admiral Trench could only exist as an observer to his final seconds of life as the Jedi-piloted stealth corvette raced across his flagship's hull toward the bridge. The droid crew had enough time to flinch as the needle-shaped craft raced overhead before the magnetic tracking missiles locked onto the vessel crashed into the transparisteel viewport and detonated.
A clap of thunder and flames were the last things Trench saw before the boiling inferno consumed him and Tl-99.
Kneeling with palpable difficulty, the so-called Jade ignored the clone's wary gazes and stances to lay a slim, armoured hand on Nibbles' cold cheek. Her uncomfortably flesh-like feathers rustled and flared out from her torso and head, exposing glossy metallic green internals to the serene jade light emitting from the Warframe's swollen midriff.
Against Duum's wishes, Commander Mara stood at Jade's side. "Can you helth him?" She whimpered, reddened eyes locked onto the deceased trooper in a pool of his own blood. "I mith him..."
"I know, Kitten. Trust me, I know."
"We tried, Commander," Beaker's morose self-loathing disguised which Commander he meant. "Maybe if Jax was here, but we had a couple of compresses and a tourniquet for that," he jerkily motioned to the gory ruin of his brother's torso.
"And none can ask more of you, trooper," Jade began, only for a bone-shaking hum to permeate the bunker.
Instantly, the clones turned outward from their charge, weapons at the ready and headlamps panning over the rows and rows of shut-down Hulk units. Duum's pistols felt somewhat inadequate facing down his chosen mobile turret, yet what choice did he have? Catching Beaker slamming his bucket on in the corner of an eye, Duum heard the trooper's voice join the reduced squad net as each man sounded off their present lack of targets. Nobody dared move with the humming vibrating their bones and internal organs, not when some sixth sense told the soldiers that something was deeply, terribly wrong within the bunker.
Four units down and two rows in, a Hulk sluggishly rose to its full height, twined photoreceptors lighting up with a steadily brightening cyan and red light.
"Hulks! They're waking up!" Trumpet shouted.
Between one blink and the next, Trumpet's fading warning died with the screams of the damned piped directly into Duum's ears for a split second. Reeling as the cacophony drove an ice spike into his brain, the Commander made to wrench his helmet off... and the noise ceased. Panting, he wavered on unsteady feet for the ringing to fade, only for a bubble of green energy to envelop him and the other troopers. Relief arrived on the wings of a divine choir, unseen hands teasing the audio-induced agony from Duum's body until he stood blinking in subdued and delayed shock at its absence.
The pain might have vanished, but duranium thundered and crashed as three activated Hulks turned malevolent optics on the unprepared and underarmed clones.
Training kicked in, and Duum's initial volley spanged off his chosen target's thick torso plating with all the effect of a spitball. Coruscating cyan streams of ionised plasma lashed out at the other autonomous turrets as the officer backed up and expected to order Commander Mara to run and hide. Below the hum of what he now recognised as powering fusion reactors came the far more familiar electric whine of charging power capacitors.
"Commander, you need to...!"
Once, twice, thrice, a luminous arrow cracked past Duum's visor at supersonic velocity and buried itself in the awakened Hulks' blackened but undamaged torso. Lowering an ornate, curving bow nearly as tall as she was, Jade's head feathers flared as she stared down the glowing barrels of the droid's heavy anti-vehicle weapons. With no sign of Mara, Duum prayed to whoever might be listening that the tooka kitten had taken the Warframe's advice and fired a last brace of shots before the trio of Hulks opened fire. Blaring in droid-speak, the mobile turrets erupted in a multi-coloured light show of vibrant streamers from six E-Webs and globular actinic blobs from the ion rifles.
The incoming fire unerringly impacted the four clones at this point-blank range with nowhere to run.
Having squeezed his eyes shut at the last second, Duum's expected cessation of existence felt oddly like being hit with water balloons filled with warm water. Sure, he rocked back on his feet from the impacts, but recovery was purely reflexive and left the blank emptiness of his mind spinning in ever-increasing circles. A blurt of droid-speak convinced the Commander to open his eyes and behold the Hulk droids facing each other and exchanging rapid-fire verbal communications. Still not entirely convinced this wasn't the afterlife where he didn't get vaporised by anti-vehicle cannons, Duum experimentally fired a shot at the nearest droid's back.
The pistol bolt left a dull mark on the unpainted duranium with the expected pop of expanding air as the plasma heated the surrounding atmosphere.
"Okay, so I'm not dead," Trumpet's bewildered declaration met understanding silence from his brothers. "This is the afterlife, isn't it?"
"Not quite, Trooper."
Moving with a fluid grace far beyond the exhausted waddle Duum had seen from the Warframe, Jade practically glided across the bunker floor to stand at the front of the defensive cordon. Ethereal whispers accompanied her oddly weightless steps that barely reached the clone's ears, dying down when she dismissed the bow into the ether and summoned a massive scythe. The two-headed melee weapon looked to weigh a damn lot, yet the gravid Warframe twirled the scythe in the air before her as if it weighed as much as a lightsaber. Alerted by the swirling movement, the Hulks's chatter abruptly ended before the lumbering automatons turned as one to face their new foe with glowing weapon barrels.
Jade looked back over her shoulder. "Mara's safe."
Perplexing, but that didn't hold a candle to the abrupt hyper-violence of Jade dashing toward the Hulks and floating through the heavy barrage with only the shimmering outline of a figure-hugging shield to denote she'd been hit. Despite being a foot taller and considerably heavier than a clone, the Warframe lunged at the closest bipedal turret with speed befitting a Jedi and lashed out with her scythe. Entering low on the right hip joint, the lengthy handle allowed Jade to bisect the Hulk from hip to the joint bearing the righthand ion rifle with one impossibly smooth motion. Duum's composure snapped as ravenous corrosive liquid erupted from the impossibly clean cut and ate away at the duranium automaton before it'd even collapsed in two pieces.
Duum wandered over to his clustered brothers for emotional support while Jade contemptuously demolished the second Hulk removed limb by removed limb. Surrounded by his genekin, the officer's thoughts remained unvoiced as their white and golden angelic saviour defied several laws of physics to erupt in a blaze of emerald light so that her downward stroke could cut the final rogue Hulk in half.
From above.
Both halves of the acid-eaten droid smashed down on either side of Jade as she serenely floated down with her extended feathers surrounding her like a shining disk of light. Touching the floor toes first, Duum caught a barely audible gasp from the Warframe before the ethereal glow faded away, and she laid a hand on her midsection. The scythe, perpetrator of unfathomable violence for a weapon that wasn't a lightsaber, vanished with a flurry of green motes, thus allowing the burdened and undeniably alien Warframe to offer Duum a very shallow bow.
Given her size, even that much surprised the Commander, who reciprocated with a curt nod and a questioning look he hoped would be interpreted appropriately. It wasn't that he was apprehensive to question what'd occurred -alright, perhaps a little bit- so much as the lingering concern for Mara's continued absence and the remaining Hulks. Duum pursed his chapped lips, holstering his useless pistols and allowing himself a steadying breath.
"Is Mara still safe?" His voice rebounded strangely amidst the crackles and sparking of the wrecked Hulks, making Duum hate the audible indecision in his own tone. "Is she..."
It took Jade a few seconds of confused head-tilting before she gasped and desperately pulled the hand off her prominent belly. Head feathers fanning, the tall alien couldn't shake her head quickly enough.
"No, no, no, no, no!"
Visibly struggling not to follow her instincts and rub circles across her midriff, Jade's slim hands curled and twitched with an aborted need that convinced Duum far better than any explanation could.
"Mara's powers allow her access to abilities many would consider unnatural and eldritch," Jade explained in the hurried tone of a woman speaking without a filter. "Her, mine, our bond is one such power, Commander. She's not in there," she briefly glanced downward. "I really don't know how to explain things without sounding insane and/or like I'm dumbing it down too much. Mara's with me, not in me!"
"It's Jeti osik, ain't it?"
Jolly took his brother's silent condemnation for breaking the conversational back-and-forth with the unconcerned shrug of an unbothered trooper.
"Way I see it, Sir, Ma'am, I trust the rotund angel lady when she says the Commander's safe," Seeing that he was unopposed, Jolly rambled on. "The Longnecks never bothered to teach us about anything close to what the Princess can do, so what's so wrong with her and Miss Jade being even more weird?"
Breathing loud enough to be picked up over the squad net, the clone finally discovered some embarrassment and rubbed the back of his neck.
"What? I was just saying what we're all thinking..."
"He's out of line, Commander," Beaker stood up for his brother. "But he's right as far as we're concerned until the battle's over."
Damn them all, but they're right, Duum admitted to himself. Wanting to rub the growing ache on his head and too stubborn to remove his helmet in a combat zone, the aggrieved officer groaned in the privacy of his bucket and bowed his head. He knew his subordinates would easily translate the body language as only another clone could. Duum ran a gauntlet over his visor one last time before pushing his irritation deep into a pit and sealing the lid with professionalism.
Only then did he look around and meet everyone's eyes -and eye equivalent, in Jade's case-.
"Okay."
Stoked with far too much frantic energy to stand still, Duum started pacing a loose circuit around an invisible perimeter, not once taking his gaze away from a silently observing Jade.
"We're low on ammo, presumably surrounded by most of the droid army and are down one... one... one combatant," it took divine effort not to glance at Nibbles' corpse. "Make that four clones and one Jeti angel against the better part of..." Duum noticed the aforementioned angel holding up a hand. "What?"
She waggled her raised arm, bringing the clone's attention to the diamond-bladed dagger inexplicably now tied to the underside of his wrist. No, Duum corrected himself with a squint, a sizeable dagger connected to Jade's wrist.
"Let me guess, another Jeti thing?"
"Yesn't."
Dumm wasn't amused, and his glare at the Warframe indicated as such.
Jade's response was to drift over to the nearest powered-down Hulk, stand on her tippy-toes with a strained grunt as she manoeuvred around her own body, and plunge the wrist dagger into the droid's maintenance port. Nothing happened except for a few errant twitches of the blade before the white, green and gold Warframe pulled it free with an airy giggle and a pirouetting flourish for her confused audience.
"Watch and learn, Boys~."
The Hulk at Jade's unguarded back rumbled to mechanical life with the actinic glare of ethereal green optics, wholly unlike the rogue units. Straightening under the wary eyes and guns of the remaining troopers, the bipedal slab of cannons, duranium, and massive claws leaned forward to peer at the Warframe at its feet and blare a question in droid-speak.
Without looking, Jade reached back and fondly petted the war droid's piston-like thigh like a massive, incredibly dangerous pet dog.
Despite expecting to die to the selfsame Hulks not ten minutes ago, Duum's victorious grin exposed far more teeth than anything friendly deserved. A good thing then that his smile was a bloodthirsty one resurrected by the implications behind Jade's unexpected stunt and the palpable air of smugness hanging around the flesh machine angel's narrow shoulders.
"How many of those can you hack?" Duum dared not risk another word.
Dipping into an unfamiliar stance, which he would much later discover was known as a curtsey, Jade spread her arms wide to be mimicked by the subverted Hulk a second later.
"Why, Commander, all of them."
"...you understand these orders?"
B1-887's three-digit hand banged against their skull-like head. "Roger Roger!"
TJ-55's miniature hologram briefly studied the OOM command droid before nodding and cutting the connection.
"What a glitch-helm," B1-887 muttered before picking up their megaphone. "Come out with your hands up, Republic Dogs! We've got you surrounded!"
Six platoons of AATs, several clusters of spider droids, and enough regular battle droids to fill the road in both directions for a hundred feet surrounded the sealed militia bunker. Notably absent were the commando droids initially holding the skyscrapers flanking the roadway, the assassins being ordered away by TJ-55 the moment B1-887's troops arrived. Glad to be rid of the creepy BX models, the OOM groaned when the bunker door remained shut despite their super-convincing orders to open it up.
"Ugh."
Turning the megaphone over, -887 discovered a switch that made the voice amplifier crackle and squeal. Feeling too ashamed to admit they'd forgotten to turn it on, the yellow-painted B1 officer pretended that never happened.
"REPUBLIC DOGS, WE HAVE YOU..."
THUNK
"Uhhh."
THUNK
"Aghhhhhh!"
THUNK
"All units, aim at those doors!"
Far too late to matter, the bunker door finished unbolting and began creeping upwards on recessed rails, allowing a blinding pulse of jade light to spill out and blind the droid's sensors.
B1-887 threw a hand over their photoreceptors as the commercial-grade optics were dazzled by the unnatural glow to the point the command droid was still seeing the emerald light in their processor. However, their audial sensors had zero issues discerning the strut-shaking footfalls of a great many somethings marching in lockstep. Panicking, -887 banged and clattered as they fell back inside their command AAT and blindly fumbled with the gunner's sight until the static quit blocking their vision.
Putting an optic to the sight, the OOM regretted it. "We're doomed!"
An incandescent irregular blob of emerald light stood outside the unsealed bunker, burning so bright even the tank's hardened optics struggled to discern anything detectable. Reflecting the miniature star's hue, four clones emerged from the gloom and took up firing stances alongside their light ball, pathetically underequipped to deal with the OOM's force.
Unfortunately, they weren't alone.
Implacable, undaunted and, most importantly, operational, Hulk Infantry Droid after Hulk Infantry Droid opened fire on the stunned CIS forces the moment they exited the bunker. Unholy acid-green optics burned with the fury of a thousand stars from each lumbering giant as they blundered their way into the light. Clumsy though they were, there wasn't anything wrong, as B1-887 found out when the ionic rifles spat disabling bolts at the hapless AATs and the arm-mounted E-Webs scythed through the blinded B1s and B2s. Explosions rocked the Separatist force as tanks, and the light spider droids were focused down with mechanical precision as the most significant threats.
Thrown against the wall as the AAT beside him detonated with the blue-tinged flare of a breached reactor, the panicking OOM model tried dragging the heavy laser cannon onto a target, any target.
A supersonic arrow flew true from the jade light right down the AAT's main gun and buried itself in the capacitor bank beside B1-887's head.
"Uh oh."
Physically unable to have facial expressions, the droid's black photoreceptors gleamed with the sparkling energy erupting from the damaged mechanism before the entire assembly exploded in their face.
Leaderless and blinded, the subverted Hulk droids shattered their weaker opponents into smaller and smaller groups until the final cluster of B2s was crushed beneath grasping battle claws. Its task fulfilled satisfactorly; the emerald glow faded to reveal Jade as she ceased floating and returned to walking like her impressed escorts. Radiating pure smugness from every feather, golden ornament and metallic green embellishment, the angelic Warframe pointed at something in the smoke-streaked sky.
"Am I good, or am I good?"
Too professional by far to flip the smug angel off as she deserved, Commander Duum rolled his eyes behind his visor and ignored Jade.
Though no larger than a fingernail at this distance, the burning wreck of a Lucrehulk battleship was as welcome a sight as any for Duum's morale and soul. Somehow, the Open Circle fleet had managed to enter orbit and was currently engaged in beating the scrap out of the clanker blockade.
"Trust a Jeti angel to be full of herself," Duum muttered with more than a little fondness.
"I heard that!"
Y'know this is a fan of my Muse's when she gives me 3.7k words in one sitting.
As for the arrow fuckery, Jade's bow, Evensong, has an effect where enemies hit with it will suffer from 100% reduced damage.
The weapons still work, they just don't do anything. It's pretty bonkers fun.
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Night_stalker
Friendly neighborhood sarcastic pervert
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I'm proud of the suggestion I made about the Hulks.
Also I was half expecting my other suggestion about the General using a "gift" from the Navy to help clean the bunker, to be used.
Also I was half expecting my other suggestion about the General using a "gift" from the Navy to help clean the bunker, to be used.
KonahrikYol
Local basement dweller
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I wonder if any of the droids "glassed" due to the proximity of void energy. Maybe the republic should "clean" up the area to prevent the separatist from studying the phenomenon. (Read: palpatine wants a new weapon and powers, and he wanted it yesterday.)
Apollyon_io
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If your talking about the drifter one, then that was too body horror to enjoy tbh.I've got a lewd snippet in my snippet thread with a Jade that's turbo pregnant-sized if that's your thing.
Yacov
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Would it make a lightsaber limp, or just splash against whatever it "sliced" like water from a faucet?
Elite_Noob
Getting sticky.
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I wonder how much she can abuse that bow like if she shot the death star as it was trying to blow up a planet would it just become a overly expensive lazer pointer lol
HarakoniWarhawk
I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.
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Glassing wouldn't occur as they're unrelated processes, but the entire bunker is pretty much contaminated with Void energy now.
Make of that what you will.
Ah, fair enough, that's my bad.
It makes a *bonk* sound when it hits someone.
Elite_Noob
Getting sticky.
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Also that sounds like a pseudo conceptual effect anything hit no longer does damage more void fuckery no doubt but if someone is poisoned could she make a paper cut with a arrow on them to temporarily stop the poison? What about infection or blood loss, they still losing blood but it's not killing them. On a grenade about to go off? Honestly depends on how much conceptual fuckery is involved how it's interpreted and how creative she gets. Hyldryn is still space mommy just because jade is pregnant cannot convince me otherwise.
Endymion2314
Making the rounds.
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Of the flying Warframes, you have Titania (Fast swarm of deadly little Dolls), Hildryn (The Attack Helicopter), and now DE has added Jade (BUFF coming to Erase a Grid Square).
Smile and Wait for the Flash.
Smile and Wait for the Flash.
KonahrikYol
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Maybe organize it mentally. Like: Jade is a mom, and she is the mother hen of the group. Hyldryn is a mommy, and is the dom of the group.
Edit: wait isn't Hyldryn a guy! The Kentucky fried f###!
Edit 2: nevermind, I checked. She's just a beefcake. False alarm.
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UndeadLord22
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What Warframe we looking at rn?
eveakane
I'm definitely a Hooman
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Warframe is literally named Jade, a preggers robot waifu who has a similar loadout to the Stalker.
UndeadLord22
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