There is a scratch mark on the floor of the Council chambers that Mace has never noticed before. Not a deep one, mind, quite shallow. This matters because it’s making the white-hot pulse of agony stabbing through his eyeballs ebb momentarily. Then, he chances a glance upwards at the fidgeting Knight in front of them, and it returns in full force.
Huh, he’s never seen Oppo Rancisis’ face turn that colour before.
“Hmm”, Master Yoda hums, deep and scratchy. His expression is unreadable even to Mace beyond a baseline gremlinness, and the force with which he grips the edges of his seat is making his bones creak. Master of the Order you should become, they said. Follow the calling of the Force, you should. A fulfilling purpose, it will be. Mace is going to hunt the little goblin for sport when this is all over, and he’s going to laugh the whole time.
“Show us the livestream again, could you, Knight Parvo?” Yoda asks. Mace bursts a capillary, he’s pretty sure, and so does poor Knight Parvo, whose orange Mon Cala skin tips all the way into blood red with stress. “Most unusual, this is.”
“Absolutely not!”, Ki Adi intervenes before Mace has to, thank the Force for little mercies. Plo Koon’s tusks tremble slightly with either suppressed laughter or abject horror, maybe both, and Stass Allie has her head in her hands. “The holo stills should be enough”, Ki Adi proceeds to add, and Mace has to reconsider all feelings of grace he just felt towards his fellow Councillor.
He never wants to watch Yoda zoom in on someone’s abs again. Or Depa raise her eyebrows at the curve of thighs bent over the dripping front of a speeder.
“Speeder Wash For Our Troops”, his former padawan reads out loud from a still of what has to be hundreds of the things gathered in the public senate parking lot. “Fund Our Boys And Get A Wet Seeing-To!” The series of images features dozens of Coruscant Guard troopers in various stages of unkitted, gleaming and shining with soap suds and water. The fact that the whole thing is also massive shatterpoint after massive shatterpoint is, quite frankly, insulting.
“Well hello- oh dear”, Obi-Wan’s blue form crackles to life in his chair, followed by several sounds of choking that are definitely not him. Good, Mace thinks acidly. If he has to deal with this, then so does kriffing Skywalker. “I’m sorry, why am I looking at Commander Thorn using a washrag like a lasso on top of a speeder?”
“Oh, the Guard’s little fundraising project”, Bail Organa says, as he steps into the Council chambers. Normally, Mace likes the man well enough. Now, he just smiles and adds on, “I’ve already donated, in mine and Breha’s name. Remotely, of course.”
“The Guard’s fundraising speeder wash?”, Obi-Wan repeats, edges of his holo form flickering with what Mace suspects is Skywalker very unsubtly trying to edge in. Force, but the man really is horrible at any and all stealth, like kissing his secret wife in an open arena in front of his Master. “And they are fundraising for…?”
“GAR budget allocations have to come from somewhere”, Organa shrugs. “And with the tide of public opinion turning, they’ve been tending towards cuts. The Guard feels them more keenly than any other sector - they’ve been reduced from half to quarter rations, and medical supplies have not made more than a token appearance in the last draft. The Chancellor has cancelled three consecutive meetings on the matter, and thus it was agreed that a more hands-on approach was needed. Any surplus will go into the Army fund.”
“Surely it can’t be that dire”, Oppo protests, a slightly less concerning shade of purple now. Senator Organa shrugs again, jostling the smattering of cracks slowly building around his person in a way that makes Mace wince quietly. “It’s all publicly available data, Masters.”
It really can be that dire, as it turns out. And quarter rations is only scratching the surface of how dire, considering the Guard has apparently never had access to bacta in all their posting, and also includes requisitioning forms available to the Senate for reconditionings and decommissionings, two words Mace has only heard Ponds whispers amidst shuddering in the early days of the war before Shaak Ti went off and just about tore some throats out over it.
“Alright”, he concedes, rubbing at his temples. “Fair enough, we have failed to tackle a massive blind spot in the Guard’s well being. There is no Jedi assigned to Coruscant, and that’s an oversight on our behalf. But how in the everloving kriff did this get past the Chancellor and Commander Fox?!”
Who have both signed, black on white. Bail Organa smiles cryptically. “Well, if you scroll a bit past that one image, up to the industrial speeder in the back - Commander Fox is currently having credits stuffed into his codpiece in the back, I believe.”
“HE’S WHAT IN THE WHAT NOW”, Commander Cody screeches through the speaker of Obi-Wan’s holo image, and Mace has to summon every bit of Jedi-serenity he possesses in his body to keep from dropkicking a cackling Yoda through the chamber windows.
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ghouls have fur and toe beans
that means they probably clean the spaces in between their toes like cats do
ghouls groom themselves and each other to bond and for comfort
that means there will be hair balls
can you imagine you're a sibling sneaking through the ministry at night and hear the typical cat hacking sound only to see swiss on all fours on the ground, his body doing the 🦗🦟🦗🦟🦗 , dry heaving and hurling up a huge hair ball
after that he just scurries off and you're left in the dark hallway with a hairball the size of a golf ball
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headcanon that the moment mulder realized he was down bad was the first time he ever heard scully laugh rly rly hard. like, full belly laugh, hands clutching her stomach, tears down her face laugh. it took him entirely by surprise, bc while she's very funny and has a good sense of humor, she usually sort of just chuckles or snorts. it's hard to even get a single giggle out of her sometimes (he has come to rly cherish that night in the cemetery during their first case when he later learned that she's not usually so unrestrained.) the laughing fit that made him realize he was down bad was probably entirely at his expense, and he didn't even care. if anything, he was proud that something he did -- even if that something was just being an idiot -- made her laugh like that. after awhile she calmed down and caught her breath, and they went on with their day, except mulder now had this new knowledge (exciting and terrifying in equal measure) that he was falling in love with her. he thought about it all day, and that night, during his regularly scheduled bout of insomnia, he mentally added to his list of priorities -- of which included things such as "find samantha" and "learn the truth" -- "make scully laugh again"
and that's still one of his top priorities to this day 😌
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i always find it kind of endearing when canadians are like 'its going to rain really really hard there's going to be a heavy rainstorm tomorrow so be careful' and i get excited because i love heavy rain (←malaysian) then the rainstorm comes and it is fairly heavy but there's no thunder or lightning booming 2 feet away from my house and the rain never falls so hard it sounds like all the walls and roof are going to collapse and the 'crazy heavy rainstorm' is just a nice soothing rainy day and not the kind of tropical thunderstorm that makes you understand why people would pray to gods who control the weather..
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