#Sabine Carbon

[sparkplug02]

Like… you didn’t specify where “here” was and then you left her unsupervised. What did you expect?

Ahsoka Episode 1 Spoilers

I’m sorry, but Ahsoka needs to remember who she is and who she was when she was a Padawan, because she should have seen Sabine’s “I’m gonna do something you directly told me not to do” coming.

[sillysybilsden]

To Janus. To Jupiter. To the Roman gods.

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𝐓𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬

I. Introduction

II. Gods

III. Mythology

IV. Calendar

V. Ritual

VI. Epilogue

VII. Resources

🪔

𝐈. 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Hey there everyone! This is Sybil (fka Clever Crow). As a Roman polytheist, “Roman polytheism is just a carbon-copy of Greek polytheism” is something I hear on a weekly basis. Whether on YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest or, heck, even academic resources, there seems to be a widespread belief that these two religions are identical. Today, I want to focus on this piece of misinformation and try to debunk it by using historical evidence and examples.

Just a small disclaimer: I will be discussing this topic from a hard polytheistic and revivalist point of view. Soft polytheism is absolutely valid, but in this case it might not be of use when highlighting differences between gods.

Also, I want to thank the following people: Cristina, Mystix, @spiritual-entries and @camssecretcave . They made sure that all information provided here is factual and reliable, and I will be forever grateful to them for their help.

🪔

𝐈𝐈. 𝐆𝐨𝐝𝐬

“Are the Greek and Roman pantheons one and the same?” This is the first question we will attempt at answering within this chapter. To do so, we must introduce a very important concept in Roman religion: interpretatio romana. Before that, though, let me provide you with some historical context.

Ever since the founding of Rome in 753 BCE, Romans were exposed to influences from other Italic peoples: Sabines, Etruscans, Volsci and so on. Because of that, we can indeed say that there has never been a 100% “native” Roman religion.

We can nonetheless differentiate two “phases” of Roman polytheism: pre-hellenisation polytheism and post-hellenisation polytheism (“hellenisation” being the process that merged Greek and Roman cultures and religions during the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE). For simplicity’s sake, in this post we are going to compare the pre-hellenisation version of Roman religion and Hellenism.

Back to interpretatio: what is it? To put it simply, it is the comparison of two different pantheons (which is used to find matches between the gods). It was used so that, when describing other populations’ religions, one could just name a more familiar, local deity instead of fully describing a foreign one (which, obviously, would take much more time). Just imagine being a Roman historian and having to discuss Greek religion: instead of saying “Ares is a god of war, battle and courage”, you could just say “Ares is like our Mars”.

Does that mean that these gods were seen as identical? Absolutely not! Actually, this shows us that Roman gods were a thing long before Greek gods started being adopted in the pantheon (which is the reason why a god like Janus does not have a Greek counterpart).

Sticking with the same example we have used before, we can say that Mars was already Mars before he was equated to Ares. And, because of that, at a closer look, the two are extremely different: while Ares is blood-driven, Mars shows a much calmer nature; contrarily to Ares, Mars has some pretty important ties to royalty (his son being Romulus-Quirinus) and agriculture; while Ares has a relationship with Aphrodite, Mars is married to Nerio; and so on. It is only after hellenisation that these two (as well as all of the other gods) started merging into one single Greco-Roman figure.

As I said before, though, this does not mean that Rome was against syncretism. Quite the contrary, actually: whenever Romans ran into a deity who could be of use to them and did not have a counterpart in their pantheon, they would consider adopting them. This is the reason why Apollo was worshiped by both societies (Romans adopted him in 431 BCE in order to fight a pestilence; his Greek nature never went unacknowledged: for him, ritus graecus was performed).

Fun fact: interpretatio was not only directed to Greece. Roman priests tried to include the prophet Jesus Christ into the Roman pantheon. He was described to them as “a god of love”, so they used interpretatio to connect him to Venus.

🪔

𝐈𝐈𝐈. 𝐌𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲

As I said before, during hellenisation Greek and Roman gods started merging. As a consequence, so did their mythologies…

Actually, no, scratch that: except for a few exceptions, Roman gods did not have a mythology to begin with. Mythology that is Roman in origin revolves around men, not deities (and that is the reason why it is also referred to as “mythic history”, as the protagonists are pseudo-historical figures). Myths in Ancient Rome were used as exempla, examples to teach teens and men how they should behave in a virtuous way.

For example, one of the most famous figures from Roman mythology is Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Republic: he was intelligent (he tricked the cruel king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus into sparing his life), loyal (he never deserted the Romans) and strong-willed (he took the matters into his own hands and kicked out of Rome the cruel king), and every Roman had to aspire to be like him.

In Greece, on the other hand, myths had the task of explaining why something happens. Why do we have a colder season and a warmer one? That is because Persephone comes back from and goes to the Underworld. How do we know how to use fire? Prometheus gave it to men. How did the hyacinth, the flower, get its name? It comes from Apollo’s lover Hyacinth. On top of that, Greek mythology revolves a lot more around deities than the Roman one (which is the reason why there is a pretty intricate divine family tree in Hellenism).

With this in mind, we can say that, with hellenisation, the Roman gods received myths and genealogies (as well as iconographies, in some cases) of their own for the first time ever. However, these myths and these genealogies were not altered to better fit the deity.

This is the reason why Nerio, Mars’ original wife, was forgotten in favor of Venus (Aphrodite’s Roman counterpart). This is why Saturn, an extremely benevolent agricultural deity, started being depicted as a cruel entity devouring his children (yes: I am looking at you, Goya). And this is also why Minerva, who used to have nothing to do with Medusa, started to be seen as she-who-cursed-Medusa (now I am looking at you, Ovid).

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𝐈𝐕. 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐫

Calendars were of extreme importance in polytheistic societies. After all, they were deeply intertwined with their religious mentality… which is the reason why we are briefly going to discuss this matter in this blog.

When it comes to Ancient Greece, the calendar we have the most evidence on is the Athenian one (which, because of this, has become the most widely used in modern Hellenic polytheistic communities). It is lunisolar (keep this in mind!). When it comes to Ancient Rome, on the other hand, we have quite some evidence on three different calendars that modern Roman polytheists can choose from: a lunar one, a lunisolar one and a solar one (the latter happens to be the calendar still in use today).

One similarity that needs to be addressed is the one between Noumenia and Kalends (both being a celebration of the first day of the month). In the Roman version, however, we would also have to add Nones and Ides as recurring monthly festivities.

Another similarity that many seem to highlight is the one between Kronia and Saturnalia, two festivities where abundance is celebrated (as well as, respectively, Kronos and Saturn, who later merged) and the Golden Age is remembered. However! Kronia is celebrated during the Summer, roughly during the Summer solstice; Saturnalia is celebrated during Wintertime, roughly during the Winter solstice. It might not seem like a big difference at first, but it is if we consider this: during Kronia, the harvest is celebrated while it is happening, while the mature crops are being collected; during Saturnalia, the harvest that has already happened during the past Summer is celebrated, as well as the one that is to come.

Last but not least, let us highlight a Roman-only peculiarity. Back in Ancient Roman times, every day had a “quality": they could either be faustus or nefastus (as well as a lot more nuances which we will not be taking into account here). They were of great importance on a religious level, as nefastus days could bring bad luck to a practitioner if they were to take big decisions. Something similar also happened with dies religiosi, during which it was forbidden to go to work (or do anything that was not a life-or-death matter).

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𝐕. 𝐑𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥

Now that we have discussed the more “theological” matters, such as the nature of the gods, myths and festivities, we can briefly talk about the more practical side of things.

Let us start with an all-time favorite: veiling. Nowadays, a lot of pagans (no matter their path or their gender) veil for a variety of reasons: protection, modesty or devotion. And that is, no doubt, valid. Historically speaking, though, things kind of different. While both in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome veils were used by women in order to express their modesty, in Italy they were also mandatory whenever performing rituals (for women and men alike).

Another big difference resides in the views of these two societies over divination. When we think of “divination” and “Ancient Greece”, one of the first things that comes to our minds is probably the Oracle of Delphi (and rightly so!). This figure was said to be able to channel the messages of the gods, and they did so by going into a trance-like state.

In Rome, this practice was seen as unreliable (even though, surprisingly, there are a couple of instances where Romans have asked the Oracle for guidance), as the only reliable forms of divination were those that could be performed when completely conscious (augury, haruspicy, etc). Dreams, too, were seen as an untrustworthy form of communication by Romans.

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𝐕𝐈. 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞

There is something we still need to address: if these two cultures, societies, religions were so different, why do so many people believe otherwise?

Well, the answer can be found in 19th century’s anthropological and religious studies. Back then, scholars used to be very fond of the comparative approach (which is a “strategy where characteristics or parts are compared across different research situations to identify differences or similarities”, according to www.sciencedirect.com) and the Indo-European theory.

Too focused on stressing the similarities between Greeks and Romans, intellectuals “forgot” to highlight the differences. Even though nowadays, academically, these hypotheses have been marked as outdated, they are still ever-so widespread.

I hope that this blog will contribute to debunking this piece of misinformation. And I hope that I managed to introduce you, reader, to Roman polytheism… Not just a carbon-copy of Hellenism!

Sybil

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𝐕𝐈𝐈. 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐬

The majority of my knowledge on Greek religion comes from “Archeologia greca” by Enzo Lippolis and Giorgio Rocco and theoi.com, as well as some high school classes dedicated to Hellenic mythology.

The following resources talk specifically about this post's subject:

Roman vs. Greek religion (YouTube)

Greek mythology: A second masterpost (Tumblr)

You can check out my full list of resources on Roman polytheism here.

🪔 Check out this post on Amino as well! 🪔

[writing-fanics]

what if like y/n also sacrificed herself along with ezra..

y’all can already figure out where I’m going with this (gotta write this quickly working on essay)

sabine finds them and reunited with them, during their small conversations she notices a pair of two tiny legs hiding behind y/n. a tiny head peeked from behind his mother to only hide back behind her again.

it’s okay his mother whispered

he hesitates and reveals himself he’s a carbon copy of ezra, clinging to y/n’s hip.

Sabine mouth drop when seeing the four year old. he’s nervous and shy and jumps when Sabine says hi.

Y/n says that he’s really shy.

it honestly sounds so cute especially if y/n and ezra name their son after kanan and gave their son sabines last name wren as his middle name and his last name is Bridger

I should write this

[kalevalakryze]

The Seeds We Sow

The fic + art collaboration Art completed by @mirandemia for the @ahsokaevents Wildflowers collab! Find it on AO3!

Sabine Wren + Ahsoka Tano The soil was warm under her hands; Freshly turned and clumpy where she uncovered it from the ashen tones of the earth. “Life finds a way.” Ahsoka had told her upon setting out on this task. The water source wasn’t too far away, a still pool with sediment floating in the murky water. 

“We can get this cleaned up, can’t we Asha?” She called to the howler, snuffling through a patch of stubbornly prevailing grass nearby. She did not receive any response from the peculiar creature, though it was nice to have her to bounce ideas off of. 

The Noti had given her the scraps from an older trawler, dragged each time they moved to limit waste, carrying broken vaporators, gears, and even old power packs to blasters that must have been acquired from Thrawn’s troopers. At least she didn’t need to lug it too much further than their current campsite to get it near the water supply.  “Let’s see what we can do,” The Mandalorian talked aloud, boots crunching over the crumbling outer layer of the planet’s crust. 

First, Sabine grabbed old pipes from blown cooling systems, using her hands to dig out four long rows in the dirt, exposing nutrient-rich soil to the sunlight above. “Bet you guys missed the sun just as much as I do,” She chuckled warmly to a squirming lifeform. “You kinda look like an exogorth. Can I call you Exo?” The pad of her thumb brushed along the sliminess of the creature's side, laughing warmly to herself when it squiggled away. “Alright, Exo. I’m sorry I gotta move you, but hey, you keep pests away from my seeds, and this can be a mutually beneficial arrangement, got it?” 

The creature was set inside of a pile of upturned dirt, where it happily burrowed itself to be rid of the humanoid that dared interrupt its rest. 

Building the irrigation system was nothing new to Sabine Wren; In fact, it was something she understood almost as well as mixing her explosive paints. Back when rebel holdouts needed crops, she was often the one counted on to help them get started, and it was always something that helped her feel useful. 

A Mandalorian could destroy, and conquer, and a million other destructive things, but she was put in this Galaxy for more than that. She created, and saved, she strived every day for as long as she could remember to embrace her Mandalorian heritage, to be everything her ancestors could have wanted, and then some. 

It was through her continued work every day that she honored the patron of her House, Tarre Vizsla, it was through her dedication to her people that honored her Clan and the lives they’d once lived, and it was her determination that honored the Rebellion she’d spent so long fighting for. Everything she did was for her family, and right now? That family was found in Ahsoka and the Noti. 

Her purification system was simple in design, and it required the sacrifice of a power pack from her blaster to generate enough of a spark to keep the miniature solar array working. She could return with a new source for it one day, for when the sun grew dim and the gears needed to turn. For now, the blaster she’d painted in the blues of reliability and royalty was dismantled under a caring hand and slotted into the home of the system. 

Clean water trickled slowly with a quiet whir of machinery, sucking the water through and filtering out sediment as it pushed along the rows of water she’d dug out. “Hey, we did it,” She called to Asha, now dozing lazily in her interesting patch of grass. “Thanks,” She laughed, bubbling like the carbonation in The Outlander Club’s specialty beverage, warmed by the lull of a punk tongue hanging lazily past yellowed canines. 

With dampened soil, Sabine was able to meticulously lay each seed; They were from her Galaxy, so there was no telling if they would take to their new home, but she had hope, and she’d learned long ago just how far a little hope could stretch. Then, the compost that had been saved up was spread evenly over the rows, pressed in lightly to allow for the sprouts to push past without much resistance, though would not risk being washed away when the drought on this side of the planet would end at last. 

“You’ve done well,” Ahsoka’s voice was warm; Lighter than she was used to, over the course of her previous apprenticeship, that is. 

“Yeah? You think so?” The Mandalorian questioned genuinely from her spot knelt in the dirt, mud caked her armor and her flight suit, and streaks painted her face and dirtied her hair. The purple-haired woman turned her head to watch as Ahsoka dismounted her howler, allowing it to trundle to Asha’s lazy form. “I do,” The hand on her shoulder was warm. Sabine allowed the offered strength to rise from her knelt position. “Lunch is ready back at camp, you look like you could use it,” The jab was light, bouncing off her armor with a light chuckle. 

“You’re tellin’ me… Think everything will be safe here?” 

Ahsoka’s gaze turned to the horizon, searching. When she shook her head in the affirmative, Sabine’s shoulders relaxed. “Do you think they’re okay…” She questioned after a moment. 

It didn’t take a genius to understand who she was asking after. “Shin will be alright, I’m sure of it. Baylan… worries me, he’s treading a dangerous path, one we will have to follow, sooner than later.” 

As the Master and Apprentice rode their howlers the short distance back to camp, Sabine’s fingers threaded through the thick, dark wool of Asha’s neck. “Thanks,” 

Ahsoka’s head bowed towards her. She could have kept the thoughts to herself, as she’d once had. But even Ahsoka Tano learned when it was time to truly be more than the people who’d trained you. Where Obi-Wan and Anakin may have kept themselves quiet, she was determined to break the cycle.  Shin Hati

Communication with the bandits was slow. Truly, Shin had heard of droids learning and adapting better than this sorry lot. All she received from them were grunts, either of indignation, or approval, she could only tell after they’d begun moving, either to follow her orders or to blatantly ignore them. 

The most recent act of ignorance from the clan found Shin stubbornly figuring out ways to feed them all. They’d seemed unbothered by the prospect that they could go hungry, as if they could pillage their way across Peridea; and maybe they could have, if not for the Jedi and Sabine protecting their favorite victims now. Shin knew better than to allow themselves to march into that camp, she knew what the Torguta and Mandalorian were capable of. 

Chasing away the nomads that had settled in this desolate canyon had been simple, natural, even. The moment they saw a blood-orange blade on the horizon, and saw the sun glinting off the worn paint of her bandit’s heads, most were intelligent enough to turn tail. It had even stocked them up with enough supplies to last until… well… Until what, Shin wasn’t sure yet, but they’d be damned if they didn’t figure it out soon. 

There was a water source nearby, old, rickety purifiers ran as they refilled the jugs as fast as her men could deplete them. They also noticed a raised bed of soil, something she didn’t see often in the wastes like this. There were no seeds nearby, though she could see plants sprouting from a host nearby. 

Eyes as dreary as their landscape peered around the supplies that had been left. This was new, but they had always been a resourceful student. If taking lives was so natural, then surely they would be able to sustain it, especially in the most non-sentient way life existed.

The soil had been freshly turned, Shin learned as their fingers delved into the raised garden bed. The travelers had been planning on making this place their home for the season as well. No matter, it was Shin’s people who were victorious in the end, and they would reap the profits of prior labors… and Shin’s own. 

Dirt spilled into the many tears in their gloves, worn from the months of use and with no true materials to repair them. The pebbles were harsh, though their skin was learning to grow harsher. Eventually, the tanned gorraslug material was set aside, resting precariously on a wooden support, allowing them to dig deeper, pushing grime up under their fingernails as they worked to bury the remains of the food supply. 

Plasto pails sat near the purifiers, and it was just Shin’s luck that the first pail they filled with water would crack under the unforgiving weight as it was filled to the brim. “Karabast!” They growled at the remains of the bucket, water soaking their boots and turning the ground at their feet into sloshing mud. 

The Force, a fickle ally, refused to answer their call in their growing frustrations; Even as they attempted to channel their annoyance into the pressure of water, thin plasto, and the space they wanted to create between it and the ground. 

Huffing and puffing, Shin found themselves resorting to other means; A spear was sent between the weak metal handles of the pail, allowing her the leverage to lift it, keeping it balanced on her shoulder with minimal spillage as she lugged it to the beds, cursing the whole way. 

By the time each sprout had a home in the dirt, Shin’s hands, tunic, and face were streaked with mud, sweat cutting tracks through the grime as they sat back against a boulder to admire their work. A bandit passed by them, Shin watched with narrowed eyes as they paused at her work. 

No words were spoken between them as they turned back to look at the filthy blonde, though Shin had felt the understanding in the nod of their head. A dented canteen was removed from their hip and passed nonchalantly to her on their way back to sorting through their treasures of the raid. 

The sinking of the sun was met with a wet nose sniffling at long-dry boots, a dirty white howler in search of food. With her fingers carding through the soft fur at its neck, Shin rose at last, acquiescent to find the poor beast something to eat, and with a rumbling of her own stomach, something for herself as well. 

Ezra Bridger Krownest had always been cold, but if there was anything Ezra Bridger had learned in his short experiences with Clan Wren, it was the planet's unique ability to nurture all kinds of life. 

This was why, as the Ghost touched down on a desolate surface, and no gruff voices came over their comms to demand clearance, Ezra felt the loss of those unique lives as distinctly as he had. The Jedi paused in the entryway, boot hovering just over the ramp. “Ezra?” Hera called, a gloved hand coming to rest on his shoulder. 

A deep breath and a warm smile recentered him as he used the familiar touch on his shoulder to ground himself. “I’m alright… It’s just hard not to notice…” 

Hera’s head dipped in understanding; She hadn’t made the venture yet, had been waiting on Sabine’s word to visit with the heir, the day had never come, until Ezra voiced his desire to do something for her family. “We’ll be right here with you,” She promised, glancing away from Ezra to peek down at Jacen, bundled up and standing by her side, with Chopper rolling just behind them once they began walking. 

The Wren stronghold was dark and untouched, mountains of snow coated the roof, while dangerous icicles hung dangerously along the large transparisteel windows. “Do you think it’ll grow here?” Jacen asked as the toe of his boot caught on a  patch of slippery ice. . 

“Yeah, ‘course,” Ezra mused out loud as he knelt near one of the windows. Peering through the dust, he could see the inside of the throne room, dark and desolate, with cobwebs hanging across each surface. The light that managed to cut through the grime still found a way to cast across the painting of the Matriarch of Clan Wren, lighting yellow and grey armor up in an effect that made them glow gold and silver. 

“Do you remember how it went?” Ezra questioned, unblinking from his sight against the glass, catching the barest reflection of his own eyes back at him. 

“Never did manage Mando’a,” Hera admitted, lowering herself into the snow beside him, allowing Jacen to tuck himself against her once more as she settled. He’d known Ursa, though Hera doubted he would have much memories of them, not with the separate wars they found themselves fighting as Sabine focused on finding Ezra. 

“Basic should be fine… It’s the memory that counts, right?” He tried to keep his tone light, tried to keep the calmness steady, though the emptiness seemed to echo the way his words caught around the tightness in his throat. Addam’s apple bobbing, he nodded his head towards the snow, beginning the process of clearing away the piles to the frozen earth underneath. 

They did not have every name of every warrior lost, and Ezra found himself regretting this, too naive and headstrong, too worried about the fight than the lives of the people he’d fought beside. He would return, when the seasons changed, when Sabine came out. She could tell them their names, and they would plant flowers for them as well, as a family again. 

The ground was frozen and solid, though after a while of digging and chipping away, he’d been successful in clearing three small holes. “Vormur can grow through anything,” He assured himself as he retrieved a small duracrete container, filled to the brim with dirt from Lothal, soft enough to cover the tops and hopefully prevent them from freezing over. “They’re Mandalorian, you know” A foreboding gaze was sent to the portain through the windows before he dropped a seed in each hole. Hera stayed silent, for him, for Sabine and Ahsoka, and for Clan Wren itself. 

“Jace, you wanna cover this up, for aunt ‘bine?” He offered, leaning back as he cleared his throat, hiding a sniffle as he wiped the rough nylon material of his sleeve under his nose. Small knees shuffled through the dirt as the boy inched closer, mittens sweeping through the uncovered dirt to start brushing it to the small array of flowers. “These smell really nice,” He commented as he worked, taking a big sniff as the dirt began to settle. “Aunt Sabine will really like this when she comes back-” The young Force-Sensitive boy paused then, fingers curling in his mittens as his brows drew together. “If she ever comes back…. Here, i mean.” He was quick to correct; No one aired their thoughts about the possibility of Sabine and Ahsoka’s return, not when Ezra himself had been gone so long. 

“Well, when she hears about all our hard work… I’m sure she will,” Hera’s hand brushed over Jacen’s head, pulling the wool hat on his head askew. Final preparations were made to keep the flowers healthy and strong from the climate. Just as the sun began to crest the mountains, pink and golden light splashing across the grey landscape of the frozen lake. Before they could leave, the Rebels settled back in one last time, peering through dust covered windows at the haunting silhouette of the Countess of Krownest one last time. “Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum, Clan Wren.” Their Mando’a was rough and heavily accented, but the words seemed to release some of the weight on their shoulders, allowing them to return to their new war with a lighter conscience. 

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

Travertine Technologies, a Colorado-based climate tech company, is building a multi-million dollar demonstration plant alongside a metals refining facility near Rochester, New York. The plant will recycle discarded gypsum to make sulfuric acid while removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

For the project, Travertine is partnering with Sabin Metal Corp., a precious metals refiner and recycler. Travertine’s new demo plant will take gypsum — a mineral that can be used in anything from fertilizer to building materials — that is sitting near Sabin’s facility and turn it into sulfuric acid using the carbon dioxide it traps through direct air capture. Travertine will then sell the sulfuric acid to Sabin to use in its metallurgical processing.

When she founded the company in 2022, Travertine CEO Laura Lammers initially planned to build a low-cost, scalable, and permanent method for trapping carbon dioxide. But in talking with lithium miners, she realized waste from the industry could be used to permanently store the greenhouse gas, she told Canary Media.

That proposition is particularly interesting in that it could simultaneously serve to recycle waste from the mining industry and remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

But Travertine’s 50 foot by 50 foot demo plant will be capable of removing only 45 tons of carbon dioxide a year on a net basis, according to Owen Cadwalader, the startup’s chief operations officer. That’s a minuscule amount compared both to what some other direct air capture facilities are able to remove and the amount that a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says must be removed from the atmosphere to fight global warming.

“​Because of the scale of global sulfuric acid use, our process has economical gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) potential while simultaneously eliminating industrial sulfate waste,” Lammers said in a statement announcing the company’s new demo plant. Lammers said her goal is for the company to have a plant capable of capturing half a million tons of carbon dioxide a year within a decade.

Travertine has $10.7 million in funding to pay for the project, including $7.5 million in venture debt financing from Builders Vision and $3.2 million in grant funding from the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority, according to a news release.

[tarisilmarwen]

Rebels Rewatch: "The Holocrons of Fate"

In which things get Force Weird and Maul is the actual worst.

Full disclaimer in the name of honesty, I still think Maul's "resurrection" in TCW was stupid. It will never not be stupid.

That being said, I'm glad they decided, "Well, let's actually do something interesting with him." once they had him.

Making him into a Sisyphean/Tantalus-figure--always reaching, never grasping--adds a layer of depth and tragedy to him. No matter how hard he tries, Maul will never gain what he seeks. When it's within his grasp, he will inevitably self-sabotage or have it slip away from him.

We meet him at a time in his life when he's just lost everything, again. He finds new purpose and motivation in the form of Ezra Bridger figuratively falling into his lap--here's someone to carry on his legacy, that he can mold and teach--but in his eagerness to have him, he irreparably damages any chance the boy would have had to learn from him willingly.

But like Sisyphus pushing at that rock, like Tantalus reaching for the grapes above him, he cannot stop trying.

Probably fitting that his question to the holocrons is an answer to the inevitable existential dread of his own existence.

But I'm getting waaaaaay ahead of myself, he hasn't even shown his ugly face yet.

Instead we drop in on Kanan and Ezra, on a CR90, presumably coming back from a mission they headed up. Ezra's asking after the holocron again, still not quite over his obsessive addiction to it, still hyper-focusing on it as the only good thing that could have possibly come out of the mess at Malachor.

"But if not to get the Sith holocron, why did Master Yoda send us to Malachor?" That's a good question. *stares at writers*

Kanan offers up the idea that is was for "a chance to destroy the Sith." Sure we'll go with that.

Their conversation is interrupted by them coming to their destination, a rendezvous point with another Rebel ship.

Thaaaaaaaaaat Maul has almost completely murderized. This scene is one of the ones that does a really good job subtly showing off Kanan's blindness. Ezra offers commentary for Kanan's benefit throughout, Kanan has a hand out to feel, he mentions the carbon scoring smell and inclines his ear towards the sounds coming from behind a door.

The only survivor can only gasp out about a "red blade... after you." ("you" being very specifically Ezra) and that the Ghost was in danger.

Right so I'd just like to emphasize, for the fandom's sake, Maul murdered an entire Rebel ship looking for Ezra.

Kanan and Ezra assume, naturally, that "red blade" means there's a new Inquisitor after them and rush to contact the Ghost. Whereupon they discover that it's Maul who's threatening them now.

And ooooooh Ezra's piiiiiiiiissed.

"No... I betrayed your friends, but I would have remained loyal to you." *rubs eyes* That's... There's not a significant emotional distinction there for Ezra, you know that right, Maul? Of course you don't.

Back when fandom was Absolutely Certain that Maul was going to successfully abduct Ezra in "Twilight of the Apprentice" there were theories flying around that Sabine would have to ply her Mandalorian connections in order to get information about where he might be hiding, since we knew by then her family had ties to Death Watch. Things didn't happen that way, obviously, but it was still nice to get a nod towards that connection.

Maul proceeds to be the world's worst houseguest, forcing Hera to take him on a "tour" of the ship while he comments snarkily about each room.

Like you have room to talk mister Lived In Literal Garbage For Years.

Anyway this tour seems to be mostly a ruse to look for Kanan's holocron, and Maul very creepily and uncomfortably pulls the information out of Hera's head. (Possibly along with Kanan's real name??? It was never actually elaborated on how Maul knows "Caleb Dume", but it would make the most sense he skimmed it from Hera, to throw her defenses off guard for his stronger mind probe.)

You leave mom alone you cockroach.

I know this is serious but boy I would have LOVED to hear the conversation Kanan and Ezra must have had with Sato when they got back.

"Hey we need to borrow a speeder to go out into the desert past the sensor beacon fence where all the spiders are to visit a giant weird Force Moose and retrieve a Sith Soul Jar because a creepy spike-horned Dark Side nutcase kidnapped everyone else on our crew."

I'm just picturing Sato throwing up his hands all, "Just take whatever you need."

Also amusing: the idea of Ezra trying to describe the Bendu to Kanan later.

I absolutely dig this idea of holocrons creating a Force Convergence powerful enough to grant visions. I'm always in favor of Jedi artifacts being just a little bit weird with the Force. I mean, kyber crystals sing and hum to Jedi, lightsabers are a living extension of the Force moving through them, their temples carry thousands of years of emotions and feelings sticking to the walls, why shouldn't their holocrons be able to join with Sith holocrons to make an oracle?

The Bendu says he's neutral but he's also clearly set up this little test in order to help heal the rift between Kanan and Ezra (and he gives a fond little smile when he can sense their reconciliation).

"Why take his weapon?" "He's got to learn to solve problems without it." *WEEPS IN FINALE FEELINGS REMEMBERING THAT EZRA LEFT HIS LIGHTSABER BEHIND AND RELIED ONLY ON HIS UNIQUE FORCE ABILITY TO CONNECT IN ORDER TO SAVE EVERYONE*

Lol @ Maul trying to blunt force the Jedi holocron open. My dude. My guy. You were the one to point out that Sith holocrons can only be opened by a Sith or one who thinks like them. Follows that Jedi holocrons might operate on the same principle? Maybe?

Not sure what the point is of getting to the engine room quietly given the racket y'all made literally a second ago.

This is actually a new part of the ship we haven't seen before now. It's accessed both by a grate in the floor under the main central ladder and the door at the very back of the cargo hold.

And this is a really clever idea with magnetizing the hold, remembering that Maul's legs are metal. They almost pull off their own rescue here.

Bastard.

Sans his lightsaber, Ezra reaches for his blaster holster instead. Except I think that's empty too, I looked but I didn't see it equipped.

Kanan senses his panic and distress from outside and follows in. This scene reminds me a little bit of when Vision!Kanan showed up in "Path of the Jedi". Not sure why, just kind of does.

Ezra instinctively moves to shield Kanan from the krykna, aww.

Ugh this return to that timid, self-protective pose. :( We haven't seen Ezra shield himself like that in ages and it makes him look so much smaller.

Kanan tells Ezra everything Ezra's been desperate to hear for six months:

It wasn't your fault.

I never blamed you.

Forgive yourself.

<333333333

Haven't talked about the music much but this is a nice rendition of Ezra's theme here for this heartwarming moment.

Ah noooooope I like the krykna EVEN LESS now, wtf is this it's creepy.

Ezra nervous little glances as the krykna uncurl. <3

Ezra passing Kanan's mask into his hand. <3

Bendu's "Once a secret is known, it cannot be unknown." was a lot more ominous in the trailers, ngl.

Kanan showing a remarkable amount of trust in Ezra, leaving the decision on whether to open up the Sith holocron or not up to him. Ezra looks trepidaciously at it a moment and then decides not to, passing it back to Kanan.

(And then he never touched the Dark Side again lol.)

I can't even be mad that Ezra got the first blind joke in. At least he beat Maul to the punch.

Hhggngnghhh I hate him so much this rat bastard trash man. He immediately takes advantage of Kanan's blindness to lead him to an airlock and tries to space him.

EZRA WASN'T EVEN OUT OF SIGHT LONGER THAN A MINUTE OR TWO, MAUL, CAN YOU NOT?!

You actually can survive the void of space very briefly. You have about 15 seconds before you pass out, possibly more if you exhale first.

Uggggggggghhhh this scene makes my skin crawl, Maul is literally fresh off his second attempt to murder Kanan and orders the droids to kill the rest and Ezra is standing there completely unaware of the danger he's in or what Maul's done.

Maul bald-face lies to him and tells him his friends are fine. Just imagining the horror of what would have happened if Kanan hadn't made it back inside, how Ezra would have emerged from the holocron vision only to learn the awful truth that Maul had killed everyone he loved, that he was alone, alone with a deranged murderer who had decided he was his apprentice...

*shudder*

As they prepare to join the holocrons, it's interesting to note that Ezra's wish is a bit Dark Side tinted--he wants the answer on how to destroy the Sith--while Maul's is Light--the vaguely described "hope". Hope for what it's not clear at first. Hope for meaning? Hope for purpose? Hope for another chance to fix what he considers the point at which things went wrong? Commentary from behind the scenes has said that Maul's motivation for revenge against Obi-Wan is primarily rooted in his fixation on his failure at Naboo. "If I can just kill this guy, the person who was there when everything went wrong, it will make it all better."

I think, given that Maul had become self-consciously legacy-minded, thinking about the future he planned to create with Ezra at his side, he turned his mind backwards to unfinished business from the past, messes he still had to clean up, in order to move forward.

And that's why he manipulates the holocron vision to show him Obi-Wan's fate.

This sequence is really pretty.

The music cue that accompanies this moment is not overly bombastic, but rather sly, mysterious, and eerie, high vocals mingling with strings to create an odd balance.

The resignation on Sabine, Hera, and Zeb's faces when the droids point their weapons. :(

Hera's elation when she hears Kanan there. :D The very worried Spacefamily books it to Ezra of course.

Maul doesn't see anything from the vision at first, "Only oblivion!" he says, because the path he's on can only lead him there and urges Ezra to "Go deeper!" It just occurred to me that he's basically doing what his old master Palpatine would try to do in Season Four--piggybacking off Ezra's connection and using him as a conduit to achieve what he wants. He pushes Ezra to look harder because he can't see anything himself.

The brighter burst of blinding light could have just been an effect of Maul and Ezra sinking deeper into the vision but also I like to think Maul manipulated the convergence to try to keep the others away because it swells up right when we hear Hera calling for Ezra.

This bit is so cool, the Force is so loud and present in the room that Kanan's blindness doesn't matter, he can physically see through it even with his ruined eyes. Hera's voice distorts and fades as if it's coming across a large distance even though Kanan only goes a couple steps away. The orchestra rouses with full strings and chorus. The negative film effect makes Kanan, Ezra, and Maul look like celestial figures of pure energy.

THE WAY THIS IS BOTH (LITERALLY) ABOUT THE TWIN SUNS OF TATOOINE AND (FIGURATIVELY) ABOUT LUKE AND LEIA, THE CHILDREN OF THE CHOSEN ONE AND THE TWO MOST KEY PLAYERS IN THE ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION OF THE SITH.

THE WAY ALL THREE OF THEM--LUKE, LEIA, AND EZRA--ARE NARRATIVE "CHOSEN ONES" WITHOUT BEING THE IN-TEXT CHOSEN ONE, HOW THE FORCE STILL PUTS THEM IN KEY PLACES IN ORDER TO BRING ABOUT THE FULFILLMENT OF THE PROPHECY.

THE PATH TO LIRA SAN WILL BE DECIDED BY THE FATE OF THE THREE.

Ezra ultimately trusts Kanan and looks away just before Maul can discern where, exactly, Obi-Wan is. The severed connection explodes outwards, throwing them all across the room, and the holocrons are shattered.

Maul's cackling and crazed body language as he stumbles out to escape make it seem like the knowledge that Obi-Wan's alive has actually driven him insane. It's quite disconcerting.

The Spacefamily surrounding Ezra worriedly. <3 You have to wonder if Kanan is fearing a repeat of Ezra's collapse back in "Gathering Forces", if perhaps for a moment he's a bit too still here.

Oh look the two Most Important People in Ezra's life and narrative journey!

The way Kanan keeps his hand on Ezra's shoulder until the very end. <333333

With a few minor nitpicks (mostly that a few of the mysteries aren't well explained or answered, see Maul's knowledge of Kanan's real name) this is a pretty solid episode, a worthy follow-up to the premiere. We continue to settle Ezra's Dark Side temptations, burying them mostly for good in this episode, though the lingering effects it had on him emotionally will continue well into his characterization, motives, and arc down the line.

Maul is an awful bastard in this and such a good villain. :) He's so much more confident and assured of himself, clear-headed and calculating. 0 for 2 on successfully kidnapping Ezra but his menace will still pervade and influence a lot of Ezra's decisions this season.

I'll talk more about the overall effects and purpose of the holocron arc when we come to its end in "Twin Suns" but for now I'll just enjoy this episode once again, it's great.

[autumnwoodsdreamer]

Shadows Dancing on the Walls

Chapter Two: The Countess

Summary: Sabine’s morning, a kitchen incident, conversations, and much introspection

Rating: General

Words: 7520

Characters: Sabine Wren, Kanan Jarrus, Hera & Jacen Syndulla, Depa (OC), Chopper, Din & Grogu Djarin, Ezra Bridger

Relationships: Din & Ezra, Din & Grogu, Din/Sabine, Kanan/Hera

[Read on ao3]

I am a foreigner longing for a home that’s mine

But I don’t speak the language

And I can’t read the signs

No I can’t read the signs

. . . . .

The helmet on the floor gleamed in pure silver, every last trace of white and cadmium yellow abolished. The remains of the viewfinder stalk, the shards of the Y-visor, all the burnt-out and half-disintegrated innards—the electronics, wires, sensors, modulator, padding and lining—lay on a low table nearby, clustered close together as if rallying support from their bruised and battered kin.

The helmet stood alone, gutted and skinned.

Gone was the paint.

Gone was the carbon scoring.

Gone was every vestige of identity and history.

The only thing that could not be pulled out or washed off were the twin crests gently swooping up from the brow to adorn the crown.

Her mother told her the plumes were added to her helmet upon her coronation: a unique feature designed and bestowed upon her to announce her new station.

Sabine remembered the event; she had been just old enough to begin holding onto memories.

She remembered music. She remembered the beat of drums. She remembered unified voices. She remembered her mother’s dress: as silver as beskar, as sparkling and ethereal as Krownest’s first snow, as elegant as ever Sabine would see and never again.

She didn’t know if she remembered the ceremony so much or if the images scrolling through her mind were built from those fragments of memory and supplemented by secondhand descriptions from her elders. The facts were that someone respected in their clan returned her mother’s helmet to her, reforged and repainted, and the whole clan cheered.

The rest of her armour followed, though Ursa oversaw its forging personally and no great occasion accompanied the reception and addition of each piece. She melted down her cuisses and formed them into faulds. She softened the shape of her cuirass and reformatted her collar guards. And she stripped the mottled blue and grey scheme—the mark of her allegiance to Death Watch and the Nite Owls—and restored her Wren crest and colours.

Bright yellows, proud silvers and pure whites, molded into abstract feather designs.

She maintained those colours for the rest of her life, meticulously painting over every scratch and scuff of wear and tear.

She would have been mortified to see it as it had been when Hera presented it to Sabine, all scorched and scarred. For years, it had hung like a macabre trophy in Moff Gideon’s stateroom.

It’s good that it made its way back to you, Din had said and Sabine couldn’t argue with that because, yes, it was good; it wasn’t right for this beskar—for any beskar—to remain in the possession of those who hunted their people.

But it was so much more than just beskar.

It was a helmet.

It was the helmet of the Countess of Clan Wren.

It was her mother’s helmet.

For the last two or so hours, Sabine had been cleaning and stripping it bare and trying all the while to make peace with it, to accept it, grieve it, and let it be what it was.

An heirloom.

A crown.

A memory.

But her mind distracted her at every turn and she couldn’t entirely blame her haphazard, derailed thoughts on the fact she had decided to tackle this task in the dark pre-dawn hours.

She sat with her back to her unkempt bed and her knees tucked under her chin. Her back was tired of all this, of hunching and sitting on the tiled floor without support; her arms were cold where she had pushed her sleeves up to keep them out the way while working with the paint-stripper, and her head was stuck in that strange silent well of noise.

For months, she had avoided this task, even going so far as to purposely leave the helmet behind in the tower when they left for the Wild Space expedition. Now, carried by an insomniac whim, it was done.

It was done.

And she didn’t know what to do with the shell.

She could restore it—that was her first inclination.

She could melt it down into new armour—a noble rebirth.

She could leave it as it was.

Restoring it was the right thing to do but she couldn’t see much of a point in it—she had no intention of donning it; it would just end up adorning another wall.

Melting it down and reforging it would give it a new life, and it was within her rights to choose a transformed fate for it. But neither she nor Din needed any new armour, and while Grogu was a foundling, he hadn’t begun training yet—traditionally, a Mandalorian only received beskar upon commencement of their training and that didn’t start until they were well past infancy.

It seemed the helmet was destined to remain as it was, most likely headed for another noncommittal burial back in the tower

Sabine sighed.

She heard Kanan and Hera’s snores coming muffled down the hall and through her closed door. They were perfectly in sync, even in sleep.

She heard seabirds wake down on the shore and call out, only then noticing the sunrise pouring young, timid light between the slats of her blinds, tossing faint, growing embers on the helmet’s bare face.

She heard Depa’s little trills and babbles begin. It had been her wailing and screaming three hours earlier which woke Sabine in the first place but, as was custom, the terrors that plagued the little one at night had vanished with the sun and she was now, as she would be for most of the day, the world’s happiest, most agreeable baby.

That was it; the day began.

As Jacen’s door whooshed open and his light but unnecessarily rushed steps bolted down the hall, Sabine rose. She returned the helmet to its box for safekeeping while the refresher door opened and closed and the pipes clanged as water rushed through them.

After a beat, another door whooshed open and softer, more measured steps entered the hall, the weight and gait identifying Kanan. Depa’s bubbly but unintelligible chattering grew then faded, Kanan’s low, idle replies braiding with her little voice as the pair journeyed downstairs.

Sabine waited until she heard the pipes close and the drain settle before gathering her things and making to take her turn in the refresher.

Jacen raced past her in the hallway: still in pyjamas, green hair sticking up wild, eyes bright and alive. “Morning, Bean!” he chirped, but didn’t stop.

“Mornin’, Squishy,” Sabine returned, finding it impossible not to smile as he flew like a torpedo down the stairs, just a blur of bright colours.

She showered, dressed, and pinned her hair up in no great affair.

She emptied the bursting laundry hamper into a mesh bag, pulled the strings taut, hauled it out the refresher and sent it tumbling down the stairs ahead of her. It rolled, heavy and misshapen, and came to land wonkily on the tiles of the entrance hall, rolling to a drunken stop near the front door. She followed after it at a much more demure pace.

The downstairs hall held entrances to a study, a dining room, a smaller refresher, and then the conjoined kitchen and living room. The laundry was more or less a converted closet glued to the kitchen.

It wasn’t a big house but neither was it small; it was just the right size that the five of them (plus Chopper) strained but didn’t tear the seams. Sabine liked it that way—the Wren Stronghold on Krownest was a marvel of Mandalorian architecture but her small family got lost in the rooms and hallways, vast and copious as they were; and then, at the Imperial Academy, she and her classmates fit too perfectly, too precisely in the dorms and classrooms, filling space in the most hollow, perfunctory manner.

(Neither of those places existed today; not in anything but ruins and memories.)

Life in this house, though stationary and void of battle, was, in spirit, like life aboard the Ghost.

Jacen’s mile-a-minute chattering collided with the sound of cereal rattling in a bowl. Kanan’s contributions to the conversation—one word for every forty Jacen crammed in—carried softer and deeper, his tone still addled with sleep but warm and engaged, nonetheless. As Sabine retrieved the laundry bag and hefted it up, Jacen said something that brought out a rumble of a chuckle from his father.

She came through, the unmistakable smell of fish greeting her far too enthusiastically (it hadn’t yet become an aroma so familiar as to evade attention, even after two months’ worth of smelling the stuff daily).

Kanan stood at the counter, one arm employed holding Depa, his free hand busy stirring a bowl of heated fish paste, tendrils of steam flowing upwards and catching the sunrise flooding in through the windows dominating the wall facing the sea.

Jacen sat at the counter, filling (overfilling) his bowl with cereal, pouring in milk then struggling to stir the mass, little blue and brown ball-bearings escaping with every turn of the spoon.

Chopper was present, too, but still “asleep”—i.e. in standby mode, still docked in his charging station like a lazy Loth-cat.

“Hera sleeping in today?” Sabine asked.

“Rough night with the little one,” Kanan answered, his voice soft and somber as he hiked Depa up a notch on his hip.

“I’ll take her from you once I get this load started.”

Before Sabine slipped into the laundry room, she caught Kanan’s head shake. “Don’t worry; she’s fine.”

And she was.

She had a comfortable perch there in Kanan’s hold, her head resting on his shoulder, no doubt enjoying the lull of his heartbeat and the sound and feel of his voice. Sabine had memories of something similar: a much younger, much smaller version of herself held in her own father’s embrace, listening to once upon a time’s about their people and their traditions and their kings and soldiers and poets, all as lost as that embrace would one day be to her.

Depa twisted around as Sabine passed by, big black eyes locking on the bright pink mesh bag she carried.

“Nothing fun in here for you, Depa,” she told her.

“It’s just stinky clothes,” Jacen pitched in, scrunching his nose and putting silly emphasis on “stinky” to prompt a laugh from his little sister. When she offered one timid giggle, he repeated the word, exaggerating tone and expression until she was in a chuckling fit.

Sabine made quick work of starting the wash load, the routine mindless but satisfactory in its own way. As the water rushed to fill the machine and the smell of laundry soap permeated the air, she returned to the kitchen.

Like most houses dwelling along the water’s edge, this one touted an ample spread of glass along the side of the house facing the sea. Sunrise streamed in through the windows and sliding door, partially diffused through the curtains. Kanan hadn’t bothered to open them all; he didn’t need the light, so whatever had been opened had most likely been Jacen’s doing.

Sabine went to open the rest of the curtains, passing Chopper. He came online as she passed him, grumbling when she pulled back the curtains and brought the full golden rush of daylight into the space.

“It’s too early for this,” he moaned, unfurling his spindly arms and rubbing at his optics the way an organic being would rub the sleep out of their eyes—an absolutely unnecessary action for a droid. “Someone turn the sun off.”

“You don’t have to get up,” Sabine reminded him.

Chopper forced out a heavy, weary sigh that dragged his stout mechanical body down. “Too late for that.”

Sabine shook her head but let the droid be in his token misery.

“Air’s getting cold,” Kanan remarked, unseeing eyes flitting and blinking, face aimed towards the windows, painted in the mellow, warm sunlight while his one free hand scooped a spoonful of fish paste and brought it near Depa, leaving her to latch onto his hand and guide the spoon the rest of the way to her mouth.

Sabine hummed an idle agreement as she gazed out at the water, the surface changing colour to keep up with the sky. Subconsciously, she had her arms wrapped around her though the chill wasn’t all that unpleasant to her.

From their house, they had a panoramic view of the estuary, the eastern hills, and, to the north, the open sea and a bridge for speeders and pedestrians to cross from one shore to the other without having to go the long way through the city itself. Stepping outside and looking to the south, one would see the skyscraper skyline, but from inside the house, the city didn’t exist, just the water, the bridge, and the houses scattered over the hills.

Having lived on Lothal for over a decade—sporadically at times but still more often present than absent—the components that made up the view held no novelty to Sabine, but the angle, the perspective, and, to some degree, the situation had breathed rejuvenation into it.

There were also some new, unexplored things out there…

“Any visitors?” Kanan prompted, and Sabine didn’t have to turn around to see the crack of a smirk—she could hear it.

She breathed out a note of a laugh. “None today.”

“Good. They always tramp sand in and I just swept yesterday,” he grouched without any true bitterness.

Sabine’s gaze drifted and landed on the little dock bobbing in the middle of the estuary, seemingly unattached but securely, reliably anchored in place.

Din and Ezra’s little early morning ritual of jogging and swimming out to the dock together was endearing. Sabine was glad they had instituted it, even more glad that they had stuck to it.

The brothers long unknown to one another had struck their bond in a flash and a part of her had feared that something which started so easily, so quickly would not last—her strongest bonds with others had had tenuous beginnings, a fact she had misconstrued as a pattern to follow. But, as it had turned out, she needn’t have worried: as dissimilar as Din and Ezra were, they understood each other well, sometimes on a level that confounded everyone else.

Some mornings, she had woken early enough to spot them on the opposite shoreline; a good handful of times, they had covered the rest of the distance and come over.

Sabine couldn’t see them now, though she did scour the sea and the shore. There was no formality to the visits, no guarantee for their regularity, but still a part of her sank when she realized they wouldn’t be coming over today.

But like Kanan said, it was getting cold—they may have decided to let their routine hibernate.

“Uh, Dad?” Jacen piped up, a note of concern in his voice.

Sabine whipped around, musing banished and worry shooting high in the split second before she registered the situation.

Kanan had paused feeding Depa to fill the caf machine. He filled the tank with water and scooped spoonfuls of grounds into the machine.

Unfortunately, it was not only caf grounds going into the machine.

Three small bottles of spices floated in the air, wobbling as if held by an invisible, weak, unskilled hand. They tipped over and more spilled than sprinkled their vibrant contents into the tub of grounds.

Sabine’s gaze snapped to Depa.

She had her concentration trained on the spice bottles, one chubby little hand out to guide them like the conductor in an orchestra. She cooed, softly, contently, innocently, fascination and engagement bright in her glossy eyes.

“Depa, sweetie, can I have those?” Sabine asked, pitching her tone gentle and high, the way one just did with babies, and creeping closer with careful steps. Her first instinct was to gasp, her second was to tell her to stop, her third was to run over, but Sabine had lived long enough with Force-sensitives—one of which she had already gone through the tumultuous baby and toddler stage with—to know that startling them was just a plain bad idea.

She didn’t startle Depa.

But she did distract her.

And that was just as bad.

The moment Depa switched her gaze to Sabine, her control on the bottles fractured. In the same instant, Kanan clued in that something he couldn’t see was happening; just as he got the first syllable of a question out, the spice bottles dropped.

But they didn’t hit the floor or the counter.

They fell but then caught themselves, resuming their hovering just mere inches off the countertop. They hung there a moment, not wobbling at all, then they righted themselves and set down in a neat cluster.

Sabine breathed out in a rush and clapped a hand on Jacen’s shoulder. “Nice save,” she praised, her heart beating too fast.

“What’s going on?” Kanan asked, frowning deeply.

“Depa picked the spices up and was pouring them into the caf,” Jacen explained. “Didn’t you sense it, Dad?”

“No. I didn’t.” Kanan shook his head and then the frown melted away and he chuffed. “She’s sneaky,” he said, sounding impressed and proud.

Depa, for her part, just looked around and blinked, hairless brow pinched, not upset but not sure what was going on either.

Sabine came around the counter and surveyed the damage. Grainy powder of three different, distinct colours littered the area of the counter around the tub of caf grounds but the majority of the spices had made it to the grounds themselves, mixed in by Kanan’s oblivious scooping.

“I think this is my fault, actually,” she admitted as she inspected the spice bottles.

“How come?” Jacen asked.

“I made the caf yesterday. And, after I made everyone else’s, I made mine.”

“And you added spices,” Kanan concluded.

“I had Depa with me. And I showed her the different ones and let her try a pinch of ground sweet bark mixed with sugar.” Sabine held the pale brown spice bottle up and jiggled it to corroborate her story; Depa, being the shameless criminal that she apparently was, leaned over and reached for it, making a grabbing hand motion.

Kanan sighed. “How bad is it?” he asked, a bracing wince in his voice.

“Well… I won’t mind it, but you and Hera may not like it so much.”

“And we don’t have a new one?”

“That was the new one.”

Kanan shook his head again. “Depa, darling, I’m proud of you,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Your abilities and control are developing beautifully. But,” he held up a finger which would have come across more stern had she not squealed and grabbed it with her chubby hands, “messing with your dad’s caf—especially the first cup of the morning—is a capital offence.

“And Jacen?” He lifted his head to address the boy, his smile warming, his tone turning a little more serious. “Thank you. That really was a good save.”

The trip to the Azadis’ house was neither long nor complicated.

The most direct route was to cross the channel, but if one had no desire to get wet, they could carve a path along the lane to the main road, follow over the bridge, veer right down the first fork in the road and continue until they reached the house in the middle of the slanted street.

It was a quick drive; it was a much nicer walk.

Sabine set out at that point in the morning when the sun had climbed high enough to erase all shadow. It had found its energy at last and now shed so much warmth, the wintery warnings from the dawn hour were but an unbelievable memory.

Speeders whipped past in a truncated stream. It was the time of day when most people were already where they needed to be; the majority of the vehicles coming and going belonged to travelling professions: plumbers, repairmen, builders, cleaners, couriers—all those things that kept houses running, neighbourhoods spinning, and the world working like clockwork.

But there were others, too.

A powder pink speeder ambled along, fifteen notches slower than everyone else, a gaggle of chattering old ladies piled into the cab.

A bulky people-mover marched on down the road, a petite young woman at the wheel, two babies in padded seats in the row behind her.

A vehicle comprised of rust and flaking paint rattled along, a laid-back Xexto singing loudly with the radio, two arms casually resting out the window, one arm folded behind his head, one hand on the jury-rigged yoke.

It was nice to think she herself was one of them: just another citizen of Lothal—a long story, a lived life, but no greater and no lesser than her neighbour.

On the bridge, in the dips of the sounds of the passing speeders, the water below breathed and lapped. Seabirds nattered amongst themselves, their activity at a lull in this period between breakfast and lunch. As Sabine reached the street, a quiet embroidered with little scraps of ordinary noise from the houses fell over the scene.

Someone had a radio on.

Someone had friends over.

Someone had a very vocal Loth-cat.

And someone was talking.

She heard the deep but soft voice from a house over. Too far for words, it was like a mellow bass beat with calm strums on strings.

She came closer. At the point where she could hear him but not see him, she paused.

“It’s a retrofit. See? It wasn’t originally made with this part, and it can continue working without it, but it will work much better with it. So we’re adding it on. Retrofitting.”

A spluttering chitter replied, trying to mimic the polysyllabic word.

“Close enough,” Din said, a note of praise in the tossed out phrase, a shift in the volume of the tailend of the words painting him turning and walking a short way away.

Sabine continued her approach, not bothering to quieten the sound of her boots on the stone driveway.

Two green ears flicked up as a little head whipped around, so fast it seemed the little body clad in dungarees would go tumbling. But he remained where he was: sitting in the middle of a table coated in machine bits and pieces.

“Mah-ya!” he exclaimed, bright as the sun.

“Su’cuygar, ad’ika,” Sabine greeted him, a laugh threading through her voice.

Stationed in front of a bench set against the garage wall, Din raised and turned his head when Grogu spoke, the lines at the corner of his eyes drawing deeper when his gaze fell on her.

There was a smile but not a word, not immediately. His gaze shifted and something crossed his expression for a split second, there then gone in the same heartbeat, too subtle, too quick to be read.

Sabine came and set her satchel on a clear-ish spot on the table by Grogu. He glanced at it with an intrigued twitch of his ears but he didn’t touch it.

Though he and Depa seemed to be in the same life stage, they were parsecs apart when it came to maturity. Sabine had laughed the first time Din told her Grogu’s true age; while the idea of him being so much older than them both was a difficult concept to grasp, it was impossible to deny: there was a deep understanding in the little one’s gaze, a thoughtful measure to all his actions that only time and experience could install.

You couldn’t leave Depa sitting alone on a table—especially not one littered with nuts and bolts. The worst Grogu might do was play with things (if bored enough), but he knew better than to stick inedible items in his mouth and he was perfectly capable of climbing down himself.

And that was the thing: he could be somewhere else. He could leave, could wander back inside the house, find a toy, find a game, find someone unoccupied to entertain him. But he didn’t.

Where he was was where he wanted to be: by his father.

“Does he have you fetching spanners and holding lights for him again?” Sabine asked the kid, theatrically leaning down and cupping her hand around her mouth as if to keep the words between them.

Grogu giggled, picking up on her teasing tone. He pointed to Din, then he pinched his fingers together and tapped his temples as if something were coming out of his mind, then he pat his chest and motioned to something on the table near him, concerted chittering accompanying his signing.

“Oh, he’s teaching you, huh?” Sabine translated, scanning the table until she deciphered what looked like the guts of a very old speederbike engine strewn all over. (“Strewn” was a crude and ill-fitting adjective: Din’s set-up was achingly meticulous and neat, understandable and logical… but, much like the rest of his life, there was just so much going on that it looked, at first glance, like utter chaos).

“He’s a good student,” Din said, sounding just a tad defensive, as if she had somehow insinuated that his kid wasn’t smart enough to grasp the finer points of mechanical engineering.

“Yeah, but he weighs about as much as a meiloorun.” Sabine held her open hands out to Grogu; when he lifted his arms, she scooped him up and brought him in close so she could nuzzle him, forehead to forehead. “And he’s only fifty years old! Have a heart, buir.”

“Fifty-one.”

Sabine jerked her head up. “Pardon?”

Din shrugged, his attention aimed down as he rifled through a tray of bolts to find a match for the one already in his hand. He didn’t say anything right away but a little tick of his jaw assured he would, once he got the words together in his own mind.

“It’s… been about a year. Since I found him.” Another shrug and a tip of his head to his shoulder. “He was fifty then, so he should be fifty-one now.”

He said it in that soft but unadorned way of his, so easy to dismiss, so easy to read as indifferent and casual. But Sabine knew his true indifference and she knew when something meant so much more to him than he could put into words.

“Well, how about that,” Sabine said to Grogu. “A whole year of adventures together. I should’ve brought a cake.”

“What did you bring?” Ezra asked, appearing in the doorway linking the garage to the house.

“A gift.” Sabine nodded to her satchel in direction and permission.

“Ooh!” Ezra crooned, rubbing his hands together. “Sabine brought us a gift. Bet it’s gonna be so cool,” he mumble-sang and bobbed his head, his smile cracking into a grin when Grogu trilled along with the impromptu tune.

Din continued trying to find the bolt but his focus was not on the task. He twisted around, his hand searching the tray on autopilot while he watched Ezra open the satchel and pull out an item stowed without festivity in a plain brown flimsi bag.

He turfed the bag over and caught the contents, his curiosity and intrigue evaporating as a tub of caf grounds fell into his waiting hand.

“It’s caf,” he said, flatly.

“Yup.”

His eyes flicked up and locked on her with the most unimpressed expression. “This isn’t a gift, Sabine. This is groceries.”

“Ezra!” Din chided.

“It’s not even a full tub.” Ezra shook the caf, producing a fine rattling sound. “You gave us a half-finished tub?”

“Technically, it’s not half-finished. I have the rest at home.”

Ezra frowned. His blatant disappointment, she knew, was a joke, but his confusion was not. It was exactly the response she had hoped for, and she had had her fun, so she decided to let up and put him out of his puzzlement.

“Depa poured some spices into the caf this morning without Kanan noticing,” she explained. “It was either painstakingly try to remove the spices and salvage the caf, or just accept it, even out the ratios, and enjoy some interesting caf. It’s actually pretty good.”

“Thank you,” Din said, rushing to get it in before Ezra opened his mouth. He bowed his head in a nod. “That’s very kind of you to share.”

“Yeah. Thanks for giving us half of your spiked caf.”

“You don’t even drink caf,” Din reminded him.

“I do!”

“Three drops of caf under a cup of milk and honey doesn’t count.”

Ezra gasped dramatically and splayed a hand over his chest. “Oh, I’m sorry, I was not informed you had joined the ranks of the caf police. Do you make arrests as well, Officer Djarin?”

Din shook his head in a long-suffering manner and turned back to the tray as if to return to the task he had been distracted from, but Sabine caught his small smile.

“Alright, well, the kid and I will go put the groceries away,” Ezra declared, coming over to take Grogu from Sabine. “And you two can, I don’t know, discuss the weather or whatever it is you do when we’re out of earshot,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He retreated into the house, his voice fading as he chattered on: “Change in season makes for fascinating subject matter, though. You can talk about how cold it is for at least eight minutes if you get creative.”

Quiet ebbed in, the suggested conversation topic mutually ignored.

Din continued his work. He had finally found the bolts he had been searching for but he abandoned them on a spare patch of the counter, moving over to what looked like a toaster, upturned and half dismantled, parked on a stretch of counter deeper in the garage.

To the untrained eye, it looked like avoidance, but Sabine had learned the basic shades of him; he just needed a break, a bridge between one phase and another, a moment to shift gears. She had seen him stand in the thick of some of the most intense situations a man could face and not waver, she had seen him fight and fall and get up for the next round immediately, but when it came to these things—to conversation, to close, quiet, vulnerable moments with another person—uncertainty tainted everything he said and did.

“Your hair is up,” he remarked in a way not unlike how he said it had been a year since he found Grogu.

Self-consciously, Sabine touched the simple twisted bun as if confirming it was still there. “Yeah. It’s long enough for it now,” she said, her gaze flitting over the table, her mind cataloguing and naming nothing.

“It’s nice,” he said. “I like the, um…” he motioned to the back of his own head, roughly miming the action of fixing a bun in place with the accuracy of one who had never done any such thing.

“Clip,” Sabine supplied and added, without premeditation: “it was my mother’s.”

“Oh.” It was just a small word but his tone shifted drastically, from awkwardly trying to formulate a compliment to deeply sympathetic.

She reached back and undid the simple clasp, letting her hair escape. It only just reached her shoulders but it was the longest she had let it grow since she was a teenager—it was also the longest she had let it go without recolouring, her natural brown bleeding down through the violet in a way she didn’t dislike. She turned the clip over in her palm and when she held it out to show him, he left what he was doing without hesitation and came over.

“It’s beskar,” she told him as she gave it to him to look at more closely. He held it gingerly, as if it weren’t made of the most indestructible element known to the galaxy, tilting it delicately to let the light trace its feather design, outlined in yellow and grey. “My great-grandmother crafted it and it’s floated around since. My mother gave it to me before I left.”

She remembered the moment, clear and sharp.

The collected clans were gathering around Kryze, talk of better days filling the air. Sabine slipped away, quietly—with her duty fulfilled and her contribution complete, it was time to leave the picture and return to the family that still needed her.

But her silent, unseen exit was not to be.

Her family noticed and followed.

The preceding months hadn’t been the easiest, but they had finally laid their grievances to rest and rebuilt their bonds; their farewell this time carried far more emotion than her previous departure for the academy.

Her brother gave a bow of his head, told her she had done a great service to their people, but he glanced over her shoulder at the Kom’rk, the tilt of his chin and the hard flint in his eyes betraying his disagreement with her choice to leave.

(Ezra and Zeb would’ve teased her, then turned somber and sincere, finding something simple but profound and sweet to say before hugging her tight; even when they didn’t agree with her, they still believed in her.)

Her father embraced her, encouraged her to keep improving her art, and said he was proud of her without quite committing to saying it.

(Kanan did and said all that, too, but it was… different, coming from him. Warm, unreserved, humble—his praise came clumsily at times but never with the fear it would somehow depreciate his own works and accomplishments.)

And her mother. She had much to say; Sabine saw it all on her face. They understood each other then better than they ever had before; they knew they were mirror and reflection, thunder roar and echo, paint and painting, but still they stood on opposite sides of a great divide. She said little, but she made what she gave count when she slipped the clip out of her hair and handed it to Sabine.

(Hera would’ve said more, would’ve made it clear what she meant the gift to symbolize, not left Sabine to wonder eternally whether it was just a token, an heirloom, a mea culpa, or if it stood in the place of a more profound statement.)

“It’s the Wren crest,” she explained, presently.

Din frowned. “I thought the… the bird was your crest,” he said, gesturing vaguely to his chest where, on her cuirass, the starbird resided.

“The feather is the original. I would’ve inherited it but, when I left, I forfeited my claim to it and made my own.”

(If her mother just wanted to give her a parting gift, she could have given her anything. Why this? Why specifically this? Sabine’s hair at the time was chopped above her chin; she had no use for a hair clip. But it was beskar, it carried the Wren colours and their ancient crest, and it had belonged to so many in their family already. Did it mark her as accepted? Was it her mother’s way of reinstating her firstborn status?)

Din followed the curve of the barbs with the calloused pad of his thumb and gave a small nod, letting her know he heard her. “Are you going to keep it?” he asked as he handed it back to her. “The crest, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, gathering and twisting her hair back up, holding it with one hand while she retrieved the clip and then fixed it back in place. “There’s no one else to carry it now, so I probably should.”

(Somewhere in the middle of her answer, she realized it wasn’t merely the clip or the crest she was referring to. Had he asked about her mother’s helmet, she would’ve given the same answer.)

(But was it right? Was it fitting for her to carry these things on—the name and the crest of her family, the helmet of her mother, the remains of the entire Wren clan—when they had not been explicitly bequeathed to her?)

(Was it right to refuse when she was the last one they belonged to?)

She cut her answer there and left it before it split open and spilled things a bright day hour like this couldn’t accommodate.

The topic burned out, they fell silent.

But Din didn’t move away. He drifted back a small step, just enough to half-sit on the edge of the table, his posture open, his expression still engaged.

Sabine tensed up.

She had a crystal clear notion of what was coming.

They had talked about it—directly and indirectly—a handful of times. She had sparked the very first conversation, igniting it brazenly, motivated by the part of her that was serious and forthright, but fuelled and fanned by the other part of her that just liked playing with matches.

But once she knew what they were in, she needed to know what they were in for, she just hadn’t expected…

She hadn’t expected him to be so sure, so ready to vow.

He was more ready than she was.

The irony made her laugh (privately, silently; she would never wound him by laughing in his face about something that meant so much). All the time she had known him, she had had him coloured as the cautious one, the reserved one, the one who wouldn’t take a shot he didn’t believe would hit true, the one who wouldn’t make uncertain deals, the one who tiptoed into the water and clung to the shallows until diving further became absolutely necessary. But his caution was not indecisiveness—once he was sure of a target, he shot; once he understood the mutual cost of a deal, he sealed it; once he trusted the water, he dove in.

Cara had once intimated to Sabine that she suspected Din was, once upon a time, a reckless sort, but he had long outgrown it by the time either of them met him. Sometimes, in the stories of his past, Sabine glimpsed that reckless version of him, but anyone could see he had taken his lessons and left the idiot far behind, keeping just the change, the memories and the scars.

Right there, in their first talk about the shift that had occurred between them, Sabine could tell he was certain.

And maybe she was, too; maybe she wasn’t—right in that moment, she couldn’t tell, couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t decide because all she could think of was the last time she had been there.

Just once before, she had looked into the eyes of a man who was sure he loved her.

Just once before, she had been asked to stay and change her name.

And she had panicked.

She said no… along with some other things she later regretted, things she didn’t even realize she thought, things she couldn’t believe she felt, things she was surprised he didn’t, to this day, hold against her because, had roles been reversed, she wouldn’t have forgiven him so easily.

So this time she did what she hadn’t the first time: she asked him to wait.

Not in so many words, not directly.

Cowardly, she reminded him they had only really just got back from Wild Space, and everything was in a state of flux; they shouldn’t go around changing more things, not when the others needed to settle.

And he agreed, just like she knew he would, and it took her weeks to get over the guilt of using his sense of duty and his care for his family so manipulatively. But get over it she did and every day since had been wonderful.

It was nice being quietly in love.

Not silent, not secretive, not clandestine; neither of them were the kind of people to be overtly affectionate, but neither were they staid.

Still, she knew this routine—this day-in, day-out rhythm they kept stealing and wearing like delusional thieves—had become a disguise for procastination and they couldn’t keep it up. They couldn’t stand in the middle of the road forever; they had to pick a path eventually.

But she didn’t think she could do it this morning.

Thankfully, he didn’t hurry to speak.

He stayed there, gathering courage, connecting words, purposely trying not to occupy himself with something else though he had no shortage of options.

Sabine looked around at the variety of projects in various stages of repair, refurbishment or repurposing decorating the Azadis’ modest garage, the space utilized in the most efficient, economical manner possible but only just managing not to burst (as it was, Ryder’s speeder had already been evicted to buy more floor space).

“You should start your own business,” she commented, idly. Though she said it to regain control, she wasn’t joking: she had seen so many broken things come through here, had helped with a fair few, and she had seen him resurrect more than a few things she would have written off as scrap.

He had a gift.

In the corner of her eye, she saw Din follow her gaze, his expression pinching. “I suppose,” he said in an airy, perfunctory way—responding just for the sake of responding.

“But that’s… not what you want to do.”

For a long beat, he gave no reply, no confirmation or contradiction, leaving the sounds of the get-together down the street and the radio blaring in a neighbour’s kitchen to pad his silence. He ducked his head, his gaze realigning with the table’s edge as he smoothed his thumb over a random nick in the surface.

“I don’t know what I want to do,” he admitted at last. “I’ve been… working on it for the past two months but I can’t…” His mouth pulled and he shook his head. “I can’t go back to what I was. I can’t—I don’t want to go back to bounty hunting. But it’s all I’ve ever done… for the Tribe,” he added, his voice growing small and trailing off.

Sabine came beside him, half-sitting on the table, their gazes watching the quiet street together. She leaned to the side and nudged his arm with hers, prompting and assuring.

“Cara called, an hour ago,” he divulged. As much as it seemed like a diversion, Sabine got the sense she just had to wait for the connection. He drew a measured breath and tried, subtly, to ease his shoulders out of the rigidity they had locked into. “They’ve got the go-ahead for the Morak mission.”

“Okay,” Sabine said. “That’s… we knew that was coming.”

Mayfeld had offered up a bounty of Imperial secrets but with an interesting price: that the New Republic green-light a strike on the rhydonium factory on Morak and that he be a part of the team sent in to do it, along with Cara, Din, and Sabine.

In her own correspondence with the marshal, Sabine had learned that the request was going through—sluggishly, but steadily. The New Republic wanted all Imperial remnant bases cleared out but an indiscriminate air strike without an investigation and confirmation was dangerous; they wanted to do it, but they also wanted to do it smart.

Sabine knew what Morak meant to Din, she knew that returning there wouldn’t be easy for him, but she didn’t think it was quite that that was bothering him.

As if in response to something, he tipped his head to the side and turned with the gesture, redirecting his attention to the engine parts he had been busy with when she first arrived.

Half-heartedly, he fiddled with what looked like a modified fuel-injector, turning it over and over as if searching for the piece he needed to work on next. When he couldn’t find it (or he conceded his mind wasn’t on the task enough to handle it), he sighed, deep and gruff, and put it down.

“She… also said Greef has some ships lined up for me. She said—she said they’re good; they could help us when we go searching for the Tribe.”

Sabine leaned forward to get past his covert attempt to hide his face. “That’s what you had planned to do.”

“Yeah. I know,” he said, making every effort not to look at her.

They lapsed into silence and it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the previous bouts—this wasn’t what he had wanted to talk about and she knew it.

For a while, they stayed as they were: beside each other, the world continuing on, daylight and day noise all around.

She drifted closer and let her head fall on his shoulder. When it landed, he turned his hand open and closed it softly over hers—different shapes, different shades, but it was hard to say who had more callouses and scars.

“Can we fly? Tonight?” Din asked, voice quiet but close, gentle and seeking but not timid, not afraid.

Sabine breathed out, relief lifting something in her chest. “The fields?”

“‘Course. Where else?”

“Could fly over the water.”

“You don’t like the water.”

“But you do. And I don’t like to go in the water, but it’s still beautiful.”

“The fields,” Din said, turning his head and pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

. . . . .

Author’s Note

In my research, I learned that Nautolans start out as tadpoles. Apparently. And they hatch from eggs. But they do grow quickly to match human babies in proportions with arms and legs. However, they tend to spend their infancy mostly in water as their arms and legs are much weaker than a human’s at that stage—hence why I put a pool in Kanan and Hera’s yard. (I only checked this all out *after* I created Depa but, thankfully, it doesn’t contradict anything already written… I just now have to continue living my life as if I don’t know Jedi Master Kit Fisto started out as a tadpole, likely not much different than the Frog couple’s babies…)

Recently rewatched Spiderverse and… yeah… Kanan and Depa are Peter and baby Mayday. (Also, the whole Jarrus-Syndulla family really makes me think of the Parker family in the Spider-Girl comics. Disabled dad… big age-gap between the kids… baby using their powers for baby shenanigans… you see the vision)

Regarding Sabine’s previous proposal, I actually did slip a (very, very obscure) hint of it way back in Anchors. I’m happy to spill (and I will) but I am also slightly evil and I want to see if anyone caught onto my scheming 🧡

. . . . .

🎶 chapter playlist 🎶

Yellow — Coldplay

Stones Inside Your Shoes — Paper Aeroplanes

Give Up the Ghost — LPX

Wonderland — CHVRCHES

you’d never know — BLÜ EYES

Twenty-Eight — Taylor Acorn

Gray — Taylor Acorn

White Houses — Vanessa Carlton

Built This House — Cassadee Pope

Early Morning Coffee Cups — Jaimi Faulkner

Coffee How You Like It — Kezia Gill

As If — Sara Evans

Fire Works — Jordana Bryant

I’m Asking Her to Stay — Sherwood

Lady Gray — Ingram Hill

Paper Cups — Watershed

One Foot Down — Peter Bradley Adams

. . . . .

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[rachelsshowerthoughts]

So you know how some fics have like "Andre Sugar" in the tags to indicate he'll not be portrayed as the bastard he is in S1/3?

I came up with an alternative type of tag, "Character X Cinnamon" with it basically being:

If this character is so good you are giving them some sin to spice things up. But if they are too evil you are adding a little bit of 'sweetness' without forgetting what they are.

In this context, an Audrey cinnamon fic would be like... she stumbles on a conversation Chloe is having with Andre trying to get comfort & advice on impressing Audrey & the mix of how that interaction looks and what Andre says.

IE stuff that makes it quite clear he's done nothing to disabuse Chloe of the notion Audrey just needs to be impressed to love her when frankly Audrey just does not fucking 'want' to parent & made that clear many times over.

Well it leaves her a little... Off, it feels a little too familiar, and a little too scummy for her to just write it off as Andre's usual neediness and simpering explanations and excuses for anything that creating problems in his life.

Cue, this is just an idea it could go many way, pulling Sabine aside at the fashion show either day 1 or 2 and being like.

"Your family's mundane. Tell me, does Andre's relationship with Chloe seem normal to you?" "...." "That silence does not fill me with confidence, unless you misunderstood." "I understood you fine, I was just thinking. But no, it does come off a little unseemly." "Dammit all." "Why are you bringing this up so suddenly, did you just notice?" "Obviously, why else would I be bringing it up this moment, use your head." "I can see where Chloe got her charming personality from." "I didn't raise her, if she's like me its... Ugh, because Andre probably wanted her that way, or is that assuming things? I don't know when children start thinking for themselves." ".... You should speak to Madame Bustier, her teacher, she might be of more help." Audrey's head tipped back in a beleaguered groan.

Basically Audrey's still fucking awful but she has like a handful of barely coherent & even contradictory standards for what she deems acceptable. Andre being a raising his daughter to be Audrey's carbon copy but one that 'needs' him & encouraging her to appeal to a woman he knows will reject her happens to tick such a box.

So she's going to have to do something about it, but she A, has zero idea what she's doing, B, fucking HATES doing it and C, is still by and large otherwise the worst (tm)

Like such a story would not end in Audrey being all, "Oh I actually want to be a mother & make up for lost time."

But more like, "I made a stupid decision having a child when I didn't want one & have neither the heart nor capabilities to parent. But I will do the right thing here; I am gonna be real bitter about it though."

This spin on Audrey would sort of rely on taking her abuse as mostly just her being indifferent to Chloe in a "I did not want to be a parent" way and so she treats her like everyone else. IE like shit.

As opposed to her having any other kind of motive or reasons for said behavior or there being more to said abusive behavior than what was seen. Which is very easy to conclude by just watching and musing but isn't like, overtly canon.

I feel like I am making this come off as more lighthearted than intended, but that's more a reflection of Audrey's like... Vibe? Sort of like how everything's more somber and clinical from Gabriel's perspective even if its a crack comedy story.

Audrey's perpetually proud, unsatisfied and irritable with little desire to empathize or wallow in any negative emotions that aren't anger or satisfaction born or breaking something. She might be better-ish at the end of such a story but she'd not do a 180 like Andre's shown to do in such fics.

Part of what would be good for Chloe in it is getting that sense of why her mothers like that, that Audrey being shitty isn't on her, and eventually kind of untethering Audrey from "mom" to just, "A woman". So she can seek out connections with people who can and will actually give her what she needs in a paternal relationship.

So, first, sorry this one took me so long to respond to, I've been sick for a few days, and swinging between "coherent" and "what time is it? Sleep, I guess"!

I do like the idea, and think it’s fairly funny, but . . . I'll be honest, I tried to imagine Audrey doing this and just. My brain was like "Error 404, File not found". I COULD NOT imagine Audrey Bourgeois doing this, or being like this. Like, at all. It would not compute in my head. The only way I could think about this idea working was to try and apply it to a different character, then smack it Audrey's name on it.

(Which, again, I'm currently kind of sick, so it could be that - though my friend Mimi started cackling at the fact someone suggested Audrey being in anyway even REMOTELY decent and I basically bluescreened)

If I was doing this, I think I would have some definite character growth for Audrey. Like you say, she still doesn’t become a "good" person. She doesn’t miraculously want to be a mom, or realize that she really DOES love Chloé. But I'd have her grow a bit as a character, to at the very least, treat everyone a little less shitty. Like, she's still blunt, and kind of a bitch, but she becomes a less toxic person overall. She learns how to communicate with other people, figures out how to . . . . I was going to say, "stop insulting everyone", but maybe "be less insulting" is more believable. She isn’t ever going to be "mom" or even "mom-adjacent", but she learns to stop penalizing Chloé for not living up to her impossible standards. She figures out how to interact at least neutrally with Chloé, who, whether she likes it or not, she's responsible for.

Chloé, meanwhile, yeah, should learn to disconnect "Audrey Bourgeois" from the idea of "Mom", which, I'm not sure about how easy that would be. It's definitely going to suck. But, and I'm not sure about this, I feel like Audrey and Chloé should at least develop a rapport. A comfortable way to interact with each other. Cause, at least until Chloé is eighteen, Audrey is partially responsible for her. I'm not saying Audrey has to be loving mom, or that Chloé needs to be "mini-Audrey", but they do need a healthy way to communicate. I think the end result should be something like "distant aunt". Like, you're family, you'll help each other out if you need it, you'll send a wedding invite, and occasionally update each other, but you aren’t super close, and you don’t talk much.

Though, for any of this, I think Audrey would need to divorce André and take custody of Chloé. Like, she doesn’t particularly CARE about being married to André - it’s a status thing, security, and Audrey can deal with him. But Cholé can't (that's the point of all this) so Audrey would need to get Chloé away from him, make sure he doesn’t have any legal say in Chloé at all. And that would be a hell of a headache for all involved.

(Somehow, during this, Hawk Moth's identity comes out. Audrey is left to question how SHE is somehow being a better parent than Gabriel, because my god, the bar is SO LOW, it is literally an INCH off the ground, yet somehow he isn’t clearing it.)

though, afterward, I can see Audrey setting Chloé up with her own place in Paris, with either a paid live-in bodyguard, or regular check-ins or something. Hell, have her move in with Marinette or something, and Audrey sends an allowance. Like, I don’t see Chloé actually wanting to permanently leave Paris, Audrey doesn’t want to stay (she has work), so they figure out some arrangement that lets her stay in Paris.

[whatwewrotepodcast]

Pride and Prejudice in Space

Chapter 3: Theo

The Hedera warehouse stuck out amongst its neighbours. Not only was it one of the largest, but its façade was covered, floor to ceiling, with crawling ivy. Fresh and green and real.  In a station where having a single plot plant in your living quarters meant you were in the top 20% of the socio-economic ladder, having an entire wall covered in leaves was definitely a statement. Almost as much as the statement of hiring private security to guard it. Rounding the corner and seeing the explosion of variegated green and white leaves always struck Theo unexpectedly. It was like taking a deep breath for the first time in months.

Theo walked into foyer, approaching the front desk. A young red-haired woman sat behind the full height, pristine white desk. She looked up with a pleasant smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, a winning customer service smile hiding a mild disinterest.

“Hello sir, welcome to the Hedera Warehouse. How can I help you today?” she asked, the script rolling off her tongue for what was probably the hundredth time that day. Theo took out his ID reader and handed it to her.

“Theo Wolfe. I have an appointment with Henna,” he said. The woman took his reader and scanned it, glancing at the details that popped up. She handed it back to him with another smile.

“Thank you, Captain Wolfe. Come with me, please,” she said, getting to her feet and stepping out from behind the desk. Standing she was barely taller than the desk she sat behind and she trotted with quick tiny steps in front of him. Theo made the conscious effort of walking a little slower as she lead him through the corridors and into a small, but comfortable office. The ceiling was low and the lights set to a dim yellow, rather than the bright fluorescence of the hallway. There was a wooden desk in the back corner, unusual in a station where almost everything was made of carbon fibres and tech steel. The chair behind it was currently empty.

“Take a seat, Captain Wolfe. Ms Sabine will be with you shortly,” the receptionist gestured to the small white armchairs opposite the desk, and bobbed her head once before disappearing out of the office, closing the door behind her. Theo didn’t move to take a seat straight away.

Pan had done an impressive job to get them a meeting on the same day. He was all charm and smiles, where Theo was not so easy with people. He was still new to the art of contracts and jobs, but with a little more training, Theo was sure Pan would be a very good face of their operations. Normally he would have brought Pan with him so he could watch and learn. But Henna could be difficult, and Pan wasn’t too far off when he’d said there was history between them.  Though perhaps not the history Pan was insinuating.

A number of years back, one of Henna’s ships had been commandeered when news that rebels were moving on Genesis reached Alliance ears. It was one of the biggest organised attacks the Alliance had ever seen, with word they’d received help all the way from the Volans system in attempt to override the Alliance’s hold on Andromeda.

The ship in question had been on its way back to Genesis, laden with fresh supplies. Food, water and all sorts of creature comforts. Naturally his officers had helped themselves to the supplies during the subsequent battle, which the Alliance had won very easily.

At the end, Theo had returned Henna’s ship to her, with less than half the supplies, and considerable damage to the freighter to boot. He had done his best to compensate her, but the Alliance had pulled on a plethora of strings and funding was hard to come by. In the end, he’d managed to get her a credit with one of the Alliance Affiliated mechanics to repair the ship, and had reimbursed her for what supplies the soldiers had taken. It was probably barely enough to make cost of the supplies, a mere fraction of what she would have been able to sell it for once in the Hedera warehouse. Obviously Henna hadn’t been best pleased with this treatment, and her relationship with the Alliance had been rocky ever since. The fact that she had agreed to take this meeting with him was interesting and it could easily go either way.

Ten minutes passed before the door to the office finally opened again, and a tall woman entered. She wore a tightly fitted, high necked white dress that came down to her knees. Its crisp brightness was a stark contrast to her dark skin. She looked over Theo with shrewd hazel eyes, moving past him to stand behind her desk. She cut an impressive figure, almost reaching Theo’s height. Her hair was buzzed short, accentuating her ears and the large diamond earrings that hung from her lobes.

“Captain Wolfe. It’s been a while since you darkened my door step,” she said her accent clipped in the tones of Ketalla, an older planet in the inner rim of Andromeda, rich in resources and conveniently close to several nearby stations. It was a common stop over for many flights, which meant its trade business was booming. Theo approached the deck, nodding his head respectfully to her.

“A pleasure to see you, Henna,” he said. Henna looked down her aquiline nose at him, her thin lips all but disappearing as she pressed them together.

“I understand you retired from the Alliance? Can’t imagine they were too pleased to let such a…. celebrated captain like you go,” she said, gesturing for him to take a seat. Theo didn’t react to the deliberate pause before the word ‘celebrated’, waiting for her to take her seat before sitting down himself.

“It might not have been the most amicable of departures,” he admitted. Normally he would never dare say such a thing. The circumstances around his leaving were complicated and it was dangerous to even entertain the idea of letting the truth out to disturb the rumours surrounding it. But he knew that Henna would be more likely to work with him if she thought there was no love lost between him and the Alliance. Henna arched a thick black brow at him, taking the bait.

“Is that so? Well,” she said, leaning forward in her chair and resting her pointed chin in her hand, her eyes examining him like she might examine the condition of her precious cargo. “I have to say, you never seemed to fit the part, in my opinion. Every now and then I glimpsed a conscience in you. Most unbecoming for an Alliance captain,” she snorted. Theo’s brow twitched up a fraction, wondering if that meant that she might be willing to work with him after all.

“Best not to spread the word of what you saw. I have a reputation to uphold,” he replied, earning a startled laugh from Henna, her thin lips giving way to a surprisingly wide, toothy smile.

“Indeed, you do, Captain Wolfe,” she chuckled, sitting back in her chair as she regarded him. “So, you heard about my salvage contract then, did you?” she said, cutting straight to business. Theo let out his breath in relief, and nodded.

“Yes. I heard you were looking for a skilled pilot to take it. And struggling to find one,” he said. Henna pulled a face, tilting her head from side to side.

“Yes, and no,” she said. “A skilled pilot is a must. But this is Genesis. Most pilots here have a basic level of skill. And if they don’t have the skill they insist that they do, then they will likely perish and they will no longer be my concern. What I’m really struggling with is a pilot that I can trust.” Theo resisted the urge to grimace. Trust was a big ask. Henna might consider working with him in a simple business deal. It was obvious he was working on building a reputation of a freelance freighter, and it would do him no good to double cross clients. But expecting Henna to jump straight in to hire him for a high risk job? Less likely.

“Trust is hard to come by, these days,” he said, meeting her gaze evenly. Henna’s hazel eyes met his and she let the silence hang between them for a moment.

“Yes, it is,” she agreed, considering him. “I cannot give you this contract, Captain Wolfe. You are a liability I cannot afford to risk.” Theo took a deep breath in, grinding his teeth together for a moment. His first instinct was anger, of course. To come all this way to be denied so absolutely. But then, that was curious in itself. Why would she accept a meeting with him, only to tell him no? Henna was a good business woman, and she knew that time was money. She wouldn’t waste time on a pointless meeting.

“I understand,” he said slowly. “We have not yet worked together in this capacity. Perhaps we can start smaller. Trust is to be earned, is it not?” he said, arching a brow at her. Henna smiled, shifting to one side in her chair and crossing her long legs underneath the table.

“Exactly,” she said, looking deeply satisfied with his response. “I have some smaller contracts. Simple freight to and from my trade port in Haden 2. There should be a delivery coming from Citrion.” Theo knew the station. Haden 2 was relatively new and very small. Smaller than Sequi even. It was mostly a service station. A place to stop, refuel, and move on. Most workers there were fly in/fly out, because it was not the kind of station people wanted to live their whole lives on. He was glad she was not asking him to fly directly to Citrion. Even if Onyx manage to fix the Idalia’s main problems, he wasn’t sure she could handle a trip into atmo just yet.

“I know the place. In the interest of full disclosure, is this contract time sensitive? My ship is currently undergoing some routine maintenance, but I’m told it could be a couple of weeks before she’s ready,” he said. Henna arched a brow, her lips pressing back into a thin line, but then she sighed and waved her hand dismissively.

“I can arrange a change in time. Perhaps it would give me an opportunity to combine another undertaking,” she said. Theo nodded, hiding his surprise that she seemed so eager to work with him as to be willing to change her plans to suit him.

“I’m grateful for your flexibility,” he said, nodding his head to her. She smiled back at him, looking down her nose at him again.

“I’m sure you are. Stop by reception on your way out. Rebek will give you the details. Let me know when you’re ready to fly out,” she said. Theo recognised a dismiss when he saw one, and he got to his feet as she did, nodding.

“I look forward to earning your trust,” he said, one brow flicking up. Henna smiled in response, amused, and walked across to the door to open it for him.

“I look forward to seeing you try.” She smirked.

The Spiral wasn’t exactly the height of society. It was a simple bar with cheap liquor and the sort of clientele that didn’t eaves drop on your conversations, so long as you didn’t eaves drop on theirs. The drinks were strong, the bolts holding the furniture to the floor even stronger. It was getting later in the evening, so the regulars had begun to shuffle in to quench their thirst. Theo looked over the crowd until he spotted Pan. He was standing by the bar, chatting animatedly to a small group of people. By the look of their dirty overalls they were dockworkers who hadn’t paused to get changed before coming in to blow whatever they’d earnt that day. Ever the social butterfly, Pan would have charmed the overalls off each and every one of them, given the chance, with his easy smile and his dark hair, expertly styled making him seem that fraction of an inch taller.

Theo was no such butterfly, and when he caught Pan’s eye he made a short gesture with his hand then went to find a table back in the corner. He put his jacket over the seat opposite, saving it for when Pan decided to join him, and scrolled through the screen on the table to order himself and Pan a drink. He was tempted to order a meal as well, but he didn’t feel like risking possible food poisoning.

 While he waited, he took out his handheld and located the file the receptionist at Hedera had given him. A shipping manifest, general details on the expected flight path and who to expect at the other end. It all seemed straight forward and legit. And yet he couldn’t help but wonder why he’d gotten the contract. Henna was a smart woman. She was the sort of woman who would play the long game. The kind of game that most people didn’t even know they were playing till it was too late. Was that what was happening here? What plans did she have for Theo? And would they benefit the pair of them, or only herself. There was only one way to find out, he supposed. But he’d be going in with both eyes wide open for now.

After a half hour or so, Pan slide into the chair Theo had saved him, still grinning from whatever conversation he had just left. Ever the extrovert, he was positively buzzing from his interaction with the dockies. Theo didn’t mind. Networking was Pan’s strength, and it would no doubt work in their favour.

“So? Did you score a contract? Or anything else for that matter?” Pan waggled his eyes brows as he sat down, picking up his drink to hide his grin. Theo shot him a dry look.

“Sort of. She didn’t give us the contract I went there to discuss. But she gave us another smaller one instead,” he said. Pan pulled a face, sipping at his drink.

“A smaller one?” he repeated, sounding disappointed. Theo nodded.

“With the promise of more work, should it all go according to plan,” he added. Pan made a soft sound and nodded.

“Oh, well that’s not so bad, I suppose,” he said with a shrug. “Oh, I was just chatting to those dockies, yeah? They’re saying Linex got wiped out by a rogue asteroid coming into Genesis. So his contract with Eagle Cargo might be up for grabs.” The corner of Theo’s mouth twitched up a little as he looked across at Pan. They’d barely been working for a minute, and he had taken to it like a duck to water. He couldn’t help but feel a little proud of him.

“Good work. Perhaps tomorrow we should pay Eagle a visit then. See if he has anything out Haden 2 way,” he said, finishing the dregs of his drink as his phone buzzed in his pocket. It was the estimate from the mechanic.

With a sigh he opened the attachment and scrolled through it slowly. New thruster, shield generator, hydraulic system. It was all mostly what he’d expected. It wasn’t until he’d scrolled to the bottom of the document that he saw it, tacked right on at the very end.

Asshole tax – 2% surcharge.

Thunder rumbled in his ears as he stared down at it, his fury welling up inside him, threatening to choke him. Really? After all the insults they’d slung at him? The eye rolls, the snide comments, the jabs. They dare charge him for being an asshole?

“Theo? What’s wrong?” Pan’s voice sounded tinny and faded and it was all he could do to slide the phone to him. Pan took it from him, looking down at it, confused. He saw the moment Pan realised what he’d been looking it by the way his brows shot up.

“Well, that tax will send most of Genesis broke in the blink of an eye.” He laughed, though cut it short at the look on Theo’s face.

Theo had resisted the urge to storm over to Rathbone’s that night and demand an explanation. It was late, no doubt they’d closed the shop and gone home. And approaching conflict whilst in the midst of fury was never constructive. So he’d slept on it. Or rather, he’d lain awake in the uncomfortable cots that were somehow smaller than the bunks in the Idalia and stewed on it.

He was not surprised that Onyx was angry. The trial hadn’t been pleasant, for anyone involved. A starship damaged, two lives lost and countless more injured to the point of needing treatment for the rest of their lives. The Alliance, understandably, had wanted answers. He knew that Onyx hadn’t sabotaged the ship on purpose, which had been the Alliance’s first charge. While he hadn’t known Onyx personally back then, he knew the Alliance’s propensity to assume that everyone was out to get them. He’d ordered a second opinion be obtained from a third party mechanic. He’d had his officers investigate the circumstances surrounding the incident. He’d had multiple officers question Onyx. The reports had all come back clear. An accident. A terrible, life-ending accident, but an accident all the same. Naturally the Alliance would then have grounds to terminate the work order they had with them. Given who strong the Alliance presence was here in Genesis, he respected the fact that they had probably had had difficulty in finding work since then. He knew the feeling. Unlike Onyx, he knew who to blame, and who were just innocent bystanders.

For some reason, this asshole tax bothered him far more than any of the insults they’d slung at his face. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Was it just the last straw? Or was it something more? Was he angry? Or guilty?

With a short sigh, he sat up, tossing aside the scratchy blanket. Across the room Pan stirred from where he was sprawled in his cot, feet dangling over the ends. Pan had found the whole thing amusing, he’d known. But Theo couldn’t see the humour in it. He ran his hands over his head, the strange feeling of the slightly longer hair tickling his fingers. The energy in his chest was growing stronger with each racing thought, and he knew they weren’t about to go away. With another glance at Pan, whose mouth was open slightly in the depth of slumber, he picked up his shoes and jacket and quietly left the room.

There was a gym not far from the Spiral. The simulated gravity on the stations were better than what ships could generate, but it was still a far cry from the real thing. Those who lived on the station often didn’t bother grav-training. Why would they need to prepare when they had no intentions of leaving? But Alliance soldiers had to be prepared. The next mission could be a wildcard, and the last thing you wanted was to wind up planet side, struggling to carry the weight of your own limbs.

The gym was mostly empty. The station simulated day and night cycles, but reality was, a lot of people kept their body on their own clock. A couple of Alliance officers were training together in the simulated weights section. They looked young, fresh. They didn’t recognise him, but he stayed clear of them none the less. He made his way to the grav runners upstairs, feeling the anticipation knot in his chest and burn through the muscles of his legs. How long had it been since he’d truly stretched his legs?

He stepped into the grav runner and locked it down behind him, waiting while the generator kicked in and he felt his weight begin to pull downwards, grounding him in every sense. The console in front of him let out a cheery chime and lit up. He set his parameters and began his training, losing himself in the pounding of his heart and feet.

The door to Rathbone’s was open, but there was no one at the desk. He waited there for a moment, expecting Onyx to appear in a slew of fresh insults. There was no bell or button to press to alert them to his presence, but he did spy the button they had pressed to open the door to the hangar bay. He could see the bay was pressurised by the light above the door, so he leaned over the desk and pressed the button, letting himself through the door.

As he descended the metal staircase he could hear a lot of banging and clanking and a great deal of cursing coming from somewhere beneath the Idalia. It was good to know he wasn’t the only one they liked verbally assault. He found them on a raised platform, lying on their back, elbow deep in the belly of the ship. Their indigo hair had been swept back, by a greasy hand judging by the stains on their forehead, and their overalls sported fresh oil stains. Clearly they’d been at work for some time, despite the fact he had not yet sent them creds.

“Well fuck you, too, you misbred piece of recycler scum,” they were muttering, bashing the wrench against what he assumed would be the recycler. No doubt Pan would approve of their methods. They rolled to the side, reaching for another tool beside them, when they spotted him.

“Oh, what’re you doing here bootlicker?” they asked, cocking a brow. Theo gritted his teeth, trying to keep the fury he’d just spent hours running off from bubbling to the surface once more. He came to a halt at the base of the platform, placing his hands behind his back.

“I have a query in regards to your quote,” he said, watching them carefully. Onyx grunted, picking up the wrench again and turning their attention back to the recycler.

“It was an estimate only, but do carry on?” They corrected him. Theo tilted his head a little. Semantics, given what he was concerned about, but he accepted the correction none-the-less.

“Fine. However, I noted something called an ‘asshole’ tax on the estimate,” he continued, watching them carefully. No conflict was ever resolved by running in, guns blazing, and so he had promised himself he would give them every opportunity to resolve it. They paused for a moment, but then he heard them chuckle, and Theo’s hands clenched into fists behind his back.

“Ay, forgot about that,” they said, sounding amused. They grunted as the wrench slipped again and swore. “Fucking fuckstick,” they snapped, then gave it up for the time being and pushed themselves out from the bowels of the Idalia, rolling over to lean over the edge on the platform, looking down at him, their hair flopping forward over their brow. Theo looked back at them, one brow lifted, waiting for them to continue, waiting for an apology, an explanation, even, anything.

“Put it this way pal, it’s your fault ain’t no one wants to sell me parts, no one will work for me, and it’s just my lonesome ass here prying space junk outta your air purifier. So consider your asshole tax paying for my trouble,” they said, tilting their head to the side with enough attitude to make Theo’s anger threaten to rear its head once more.

“I fail to see how that is a fault of mine,” he said, keeping his tone cool, despite having to force the words out through clenched teeth. Onyx’s brows disappeared up behind their hair. Blaming the Alliance for what happened he could understand, though in reality they had no one to blame for their mistake but themselves.

“Ay? Well that just makes it worse, huh? Maybe I should make it 3%. Look grunt, you wantcha ship fixed or not?” They asked, sounding more like a challenge than a question.

“I do. But I don’t care for unethical charges based on subjective opinions of ones… ‘faults’,” he paused to glance around the hangar bay pointedly. “And it looks to me like you can’t afford to be particularly picky with your customers,” he added. A low blow, perhaps, but if this was how they wanted to play the game, then they’d have to be able to take what they dished out. He was rewarded by an incredulous look on Onyx’s face.

“An’ it looks to me like you can’t afford to be picky with your mechanics, dick. Any how, yer capacitors are off, so you ain’t getting this boat outta here without a tow,” they said.

“There are few mechanics that will work with this ship, true. But there are others,” he said, his tone clipped. Others that would have a crack at it, anyway. Others that may not be as good as Onyx, but that would get the job done enough to get him to another station to find a better one, perhaps. “And they will likely trade fairly, without the scathing inditement based on petty grudges hidden into their billing in order to extort more money from their clients,” he said, heat leaking into his words despite himself. He saw Onyx’s knuckles whiten around the wrench in their grasp and he briefly wondered if they were going to throw it at him.

“So lemme ask you something then, Pal. Why, if there’re all these mechanics around willing to work on this rust bucket, would you bring it to me?” They asked. Theo met their gaze squarely, not shying away from their contempt.

“Because I have seen your work prior and have found it, on the whole, satisfactory. Though your attitude leaves more than enough to be desired, I was willing to overlook that for the sake of my confidence in your results,” he answered, every word grinding their way out past his teeth.

“Oh, satisfactory, is it? What a fuckin endorsement,” they snapped, sweeping their hair back only for it to immediately flop forward again. “You’re fuckin’ lucky I didn’t shove this wrench where the sun ain’t never shone the second you walked through that door, shitkicker.” Theo blinked up at them, abruptly realising that this wasn’t worth it.

“My point exactly,” he said slowly, turning on his heel and heading back for the metal stair case. “Invoice me for the work you have done. Sans the tax. A tow will be here with in the day,” he added over his shoulder. They were silent as he made it almost the whole way up the stair case, and he resisted the urge to turn back to check the look on their face as he called their bluff.

“You won’t find anyone better,” they said as he reached the door that lead back to the shop front. Theo paused a moment before turning back to them.

“You’re probably right. I never doubted your work, Rathbone. Your lack of decorum is what troubles me. If you were having trouble sourcing parts, a respectable business owner might approach the client with a surcharge, and that would be well with reason. This,” he paused to hold up his reader, the holo sheet of their estimate springing up from his palm. “is just childish. And I don’t have the time nor energy to deal with you,” he finished honestly. He waited, giving them one last chance to back down, to make amends. Instead all he got was a cocked brow and a dirty smirk,

“Ay then. Ya know the cost. When you’re drifting in full vac cause your thruster’s well fucked, think of me,” they blew him a kiss. “You know where to find me.” Theo took a deep breath, looking over them for a moment. Working with someone like this was exhausting and pointless. They clearly couldn’t see past their own nose, and weren’t interested in even feigning civility for the sake of a good transaction. So he turned and headed out. As the door to the hangar closed behind him, he heard a loud clang and a string of expletives follow him out. He fought back against that uncomfortable feeling in his chest and closed his eyes, taking a second to breathe for a moment. Where was he going to find a tow, and how much was it going to cost him? And more importantly, where was he going to have it towed to?

[fancy-a-dance-brigadier]

⛅️🌧️🌩️☔️ (hey it's concerto for a rainy day! :D)

Concerto for a rainy day hell yeah!! Anyway, thank you so much for the ask, and I’m sorry that it took me a little while to get to it.

🌤️Share your favorite piece of dialogue from your WIP.

Here’s a brief conversation between Padmé and Qui-Gon from the Jedi Padmé AU!

“We can say a proper goodbye to Anakin, if it would comfort you. I know you consider him a friend.”

Padmé shook her head. “I wish I didn��t.”

“Because it hurts you to see him in pain?”

She hesitated, and she sighed out a gentle breath in an attempt to stem the tide of her tears. “Because if he wasn’t my friend, leaving him behind wouldn’t hurt so much.”

🌧️Share something angsty from your WIP.

Just to prove that I am actually writing fics that aren’t the Jedi Padmé AU, here’s a little extract from a Wolfwren oneshot I’ve been working on:

“If you bleed,” the girl began, lost in the mist of her own mind. “I cannot contain you.”

“What?” She was too tired to comprehend it, and the girl’s words mixed and melded into confusion. She could not help but chuckle in her light-headed delirium. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I want to be the only one,” she growled - and she thrusted forward, her face almost pressing against Sabine’s, breathing heavily into her air. “I want to be the only one who knows how to hurt you. I want to be the only one who knows the truth of how you died tonight.”

🌩️ Share something funny/cracky from your WIP.

I don’t know if I actually have anything for this one 🙈 If I eventually write anything cracky you’ll be the first to know about it!!!

☔Is there a fic concept you have that you'd like to just explain and share because you're not sure you'll ever write it? If so, what is it?

Ooh this is a good question! And be prepared because my answer is somewhat long 😅

I have vaguely entertained the idea of writing a T’Poshi Carbon Creek AU, where T’Pol comes to earth during the 50s/60s/whichever decade that episode was set and has to live undercover while slowly falling in love with Hoshi. Knowing me, I’d probably rope in the other characters from ENT too, because you know how much I love an AU with too many subplots 😂

Another one is the Voyager/DS9 crew swap AU, which is an idea I very much enjoy! I’ve had an outline of the ‘DS9 does Caretaker’ fic collecting dust in my draft for ages, and there’s also a partially complete ‘Voyager does Emissary’ outline lying around somewhere too. But it’s an AU with a lot of scope and would require a lot of different fics to tell the story fully, and since I’ve already lowkey committed to rewriting the entirety of Star Wars, it might be a bit too much to pursue seriously. But who knows! Maybe once I get the Star Trek brain rot again I’ll finish that ‘Emissary’ outline and start writing it.

Lastly, I have in fact been percolating a Star Wars Blade Runner AU, but it’s so vague and unformed in my brain that I don’t have too much to say about it at this stage. But I’m also hesitant to write this one because, like, Blade Runner is just so perfect. I almost don’t want to touch it in case I cheapen it somehow, if that makes sense??

(There are also a few that I’ve already discussed with you in DMs, like the ‘My favourite Star Trek characters get traumatised in the Mirrorverse’ AU and the Padmé lives AU, but I won’t bore you too much by repeating what I’ve already said in DMs!)

[reasonsforhope]

More details below. This is thrilling, thanks for posting, OP.

"“You have a constitutional right to fight for life-sustaining climate policy and you have mobilized our people in this case,” Josh Green, the Hawaii governor, told the 13 young plantiffs in the case, saying he hoped the settlement would inspire similar action across the country...

“This is an extraordinary, unprecedented victory for the youth plaintiffs,” Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told the Guardian.

While Hawaii has long embraced a progressive climate change agenda, with 2045 as a target year for decarbonization, the new settlement is “as big a deal as everyone said it is”, said Denise Antolini, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Hawaii Law School, who has followed climate change litigation for decades.

“It’s written down, it’s enforceable, and that makes all in the difference in the world between a promise and actual implementation,” Antolini said...

The plaintiffs, most of whom are Indigenous, alleged that by contributing to the climate crisis, the state hastened the “decline and disappearance of Hawaii’s natural and cultural heritage”. When the case was filed, the plantiffs were between the ages of nine and 18...

Officials said the legal settlement brings together activists with all three branches of the state’s government to focus on meeting climate change goals, including mobilizing the judicial branch. The court will oversee the settlement agreement through 2045 or until the state reaches its zero emission goals, Rodgers said.

“We have extremely tough goals to hit by 2045 and this is going to make sure we move forward much faster,” Ed Sniffen, the head of the state’s transportation department said at a press conference...

State officials often claim Hawaii is a climate leader. In 2015, it became the first US state to require its electric utilities to zero out its power sector emissions by 2045 – a tall order in a state that has historically obtained most of its energy from oil and coal.

The state legislature has also passed a goal of decarbonizing the transportation sector. And Hawaii’s 2050 sustainability plan calls to make all state vehicles carbon free by 2035.

But the state has moved in the wrong direction. Between 2020 and 2021, carbon emissions in Hawaii increased by more than 16%. The plaintiffs say Hawaii’s department of transportation has missed every interim benchmark to reduce its planet-warming emissions since 2008. And per capita, Hawaii emits more carbon than 85% of countries on Earth, attorneys wrote in the 2022 lawsuit."

-via The Guardian, June 20, 2024

Under what legal experts called a “historic” settlement, announced on Thursday, Hawaii officials will release a roadmap “to fully decarbonize the state’s transportation systems, taking all actions necessary to achieve zero emissions no later than 2045 for ground transportation, sea and inter-island air transportation”, Andrea Rodgers, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said at a press conference with the governor.

[starboundmagician]

and now, all my vast error OCs poorly yet accurately summarized through incorrect quotes

The_Principal: Remember the plan Zephyr- Zephyr: fuck t♄e plan! I am t♄e plan! The_Principal: All-mother give my strength

Zarock: >(IF YOU EVER DISRESPECT ME AGAIN I WILL EAT YOUR SHOWER CURTAINS MATE) Generic Raver #213: I… Have glass d00rs? Zarock: >(WELL CRUNCHITY MUNCHITY THEN BITCH, DO YOU THINK THAT'S GONNA STOP ME???)

Malmar *on his 15th can of coffee*: +Business casual? When has business ever been casual?+O

Vivian: i guess im just too toug}{ to cry. Zephyr: vivy lazt nig♄t i zaw you crying over zlit♄er beaztz Vivian *tearing up*: but t}{ey don't }{ave any arms!!!!!

Necron: † The idea of consuming two conflicting things that promise to do the opposite of each other has always been hilarious to me. There's a liquid shot-based sleep aid called 6 Hour Sleep and as soon as I saw it I immediately imagined mixing it and a 5 Hour Energy together for a 1 hour nap. † Hexera: mix nyquil and dayquil ⸸o crea⸸e quil. Oricka: what does quil do? :confusion: Hexera: all ⸸he ⸸ime. all ⸸he ⸸ime. forevermore fool.

Kassey: What d()es a skelet()n call his cl()sest h()mie? Kassey: His verteBRUH! Oricka: Is that because homies always have each others backs? :haha: Kassey: Y()u. I like y()u.

Vevera *walking up to investigate at a dead body*: (Tick) Ok first of all, big mood. (Tock)

The_Principal: For whatever reason, you suddenly gain godlike powers of control over the universe. What's the first thing you do? 4 sweep old Pomcee: }II straiight up get riid of all carbon{ The_Principal: ...Carbon. the chemical element upon which all lifeforms are based? 4 sweep old Pomcee: }that's the biitch{

Sabine: [-o-] THE SOAR BEAST HAS LEFT THE NEST Mahiri: ZZzt roger that. alerting the agents over. ZZzt Sabine: [--o] CAN YOU NOT

Sestro: ∞Thanks to Duolingo I can ask people if they are a horse but can't tell people what my name is in French. Zazire: ����sk me if i'm 🜂 fucking horse i d🜂re you. Sestro: ∞Tu es un cheval? Zazire: n🜂y. Sestro: ∞... Oh you AllMotherFUCKER!

Marady: ♆e're friends, right? Sova: (...Normally, I'd say yes, without hesitation. But I feel like this is heading somewhere. and I'm not sure I like where) Marady: Okay because ♆hat I'm bout do is gonna test that.

[survivingcollegeonefanficatatime]

Chemistry -- star was insanity.

get ready because here we go.

Sabine is smart as hell, she has a fundamental understanding of chemistry, math, engineering, and several other subjects. She was making weapons for the empire as a teenager, and she was good at it. Yeah it sucks but it also shows that she’s incredibly smart. Besides the fact that I do NOT believe you can make explosives (at least not the kind she makes) without some understanding of how chemistry works. Sabine is immensely book smart and you cannot convince me otherwise. 

She can probably balance a chemical equation better than I ever could. 

I have already established that Latin exists in this verse. (see previous pure insanity fic) and finally: yes there are some details from “every day gets brighter” but you do NOT need to read that fic to get this one, the only detail that matters is that Ezra has a ear cuff that’s attached to a ribbon that functions as a padawan braid. He wears it when in private but it’s also easy to take off to hide from the empire. 

*there are 118 named elements as of right now, I rounded up to 120 for this fic because its a science fantasy series and I wanted to leave some wiggle room for fictional elements, I’m not sure if I should count beskar as an element, the wiki says it’s an alloy, and I’ve seen at least 1 source that says it’s just a really high carbon steel alloy which… makes me incredibly curious about the lightsaber resistant properties of carbon. I’ve also seen it referred to as Iron. if it’s an alloy can it be artificially reproduced? I mean I’d imagine that it’s naturally formed on mandalore, but

Ok, ok, concept: what if Beskar is an alloy that’s really hard to reproduce, it’s a very high carbon steel (iron and carbon) but it’s unique because it forms naturally, and instead of only being mined the natural strains of Beskar were eventually reverse engineered and there’s like old myths about figures coming own and teaching the Mandalorian how to produce beskar. It would also be fun to imagine that any especially high-carbon steel can have lightsaber-resistant properties and that this is a HEAVILY guarded secret. It also means some ships' hulls are harder to cut though than others, depending on how much carbon was put in. 

Anyways this is a super compelling idea but I'm not sure if I like it or if I’m leaving it as “beskar is an element” lol. 

“What is this place?” Ezra asked, the crew had been resting on one of their common Lothal stops for a few weeks, and Sabine had disappeared for practically half that time. She’d finally invited Ezra to come with her, and he found an old rundown and abandoned farmhouse absolutely filled to the brim with various bottles and containers.

“It's my lab I guess.” Sabine replied, her voice was casual in a way that felt forced. Ezra thought he could feel an edge of awareness leak off her, but he still wasn’t very good at understanding the emotions he’d taste in the air. 

“Lab? Oh! It’s where you make paints, right?” he asked, Sabine nodded. Ezra hesitated for a few moments, he let his eyes trace over all the containers. Sabine moved to grab a small metal thing from a shelf, she pulled out a long rubber tube.

“Yeah, paints, explosives, stuff like that. Can you pass me the spark lighter?” she pointed to a shelf full of nicknacks. 

“I’m not sure what that is.” Ezra admitted, Sabine squinted at him. 

“It’s uh, it’s a metal loop with a cap on it, it makes sparks so I can light the burner or.. Whatever else I need to light, I guess.” she admitted “I’m not exactly doing this in the most efficient way but… it’ll work for now.” 

Ezra nodded, “so uh, what exactly are you making?”

“Black powder.” 

“And that involves fire?” Ezra asked as he shuffled through the shelf he’d been directed too. 

“Yeah, I need charcoal for it, so… burning ya know?” 

“Yeah….” Ezra trailed off.

“You have no clue.”

“I have no clue, but uh maybe you could teach me? About all of this I mean, it seems cool and it’d be useful, in case you ever need help.” 

“You don’t need to justify it to me, if you want to learn I can teach you, but we should probably start with the fundamentals.” Sabine laughed, as she watched Ezra dig through the shelf, he held out the spark lighter triumphantly

“The fundamentals?” Ezra asked

“Yeah, chemistry, engineering, stuff like that.” Sabine snatched the spark lighter from Ezra’s hands, she gestured for Ezra to follow. 

“I- uh, I’m-” Ezra stumbled along behind her, that sounded like a lot of stuff he didn’t have any background in. 

“Don’t worry, it’s not that hard when you get a feel for it, but you need to understand the basics of chemistry before you move on to actually making explosives, half of what I do is chemistry, the other half is engineering, it depends on what I’m making.” Sabine made her way over to a metal container surrounded by a tube. She attached the rubber tube she’d grabbed to it and hooked up the metal thing. 

“I’m not sure, can’t you just teach me to make the stuff?” Ezra asked, visibly hesitant.

“Put your helmet on.” Sabine ordered, Ezra obayed without hesitation, and Sabine turned a nozzle, then she held out the spark lighter and squeezed the handle near the area around the container. The air around the container caught flame. 

“It’d be far too dangerous to try to mess with everything without understanding what it’s doing, no, if you want to learn you’ve gotta learn all of it.” she gestured to the burning container beside her. “Come on this has to run for a few hours, let’s go over some of the basics.” 

“I don’t really know how much of any of this you're familiar with, so ask questions if you're not sure, ok?” was the first thing Sabine said, they were a short distance away from the fire, and both had taken their helmets off. 

Ezra laughed nervously “yeah uh I sort of stopped getting any formal education when I was seven and I don’t really remember much of what I was taught so…” he trailed off. Sabine shrugged. 

“Chemistry is both fairly simple and incredibly complex, it’s the study of matter and its properties, matter is stuff basically, pretty much everything is made of matter, anyways chemistry is fundamental to understanding almost all science fields, because it’s goal is to understand the way things work.” Sabine started Ezra nodded 

“That makes sense, I think I remember some of that, there are states of matter right, solid, liquid, gass? Like how water can be all of those.” he gestured to the air

“Yeah, and mater is made of atoms, which you can think of as the building blocks of the univeriverse, each atom is a specific element, and those atoms can join to form molecules, which can join to form a compound and then a mixture, you go from the most basic to the most complex. There are also more than three states of matter, like plasma and aqueous solutions, and a few others but they’re not really relevant right now, so don’t worry about it. You know what an element is right?”

“Yeah, an element is uh, I’m not sure how to explain it, it’s one thing, like oh! The atmosphere is made of a bunch of elements, but humanoids need oxygen especially to breathe properly.” 

“Yeah, perfect, and air is a good example of a mixture, there are types of matter, and we can divide them into homogenous, heterogenous, single elements, and compounds. It’s fairly easy to keep track of what’s what. An element is a pure substance with only one type of atom, and a compound has more than one type of atom, whereas a homogeneous substance has a uniform composition throughout. You can tell this because the prefix homo is Latin, and it means ‘same’ or ‘alike’ . Honestly, knowing Latin is quite useful when it comes to the sciences.”

“Oh great, another language to learn.” Ezra laughed, “I’ll put it on the list.”

“You have a list?” Sabine asked, Ezra flushed.

“I’m uh, I’m trying to get Kanan to teach me Dai Bendu, and Hera’s teaching me binary, I mean I wouldn’t complain if you, or Hera, or Zeb wanted to teach me your languages, but I know you’re pretty privet and Zeb doesn't seem to be interested in teaching it, and I havn’t brought it up to Hera yet. So..” 

“Oh, I’m pretty good with languages, I do know some Ryl, I’m not fluent, but we could learn together.” she shook her head “anyways, there are about 120* named elements, but only five elements make up the majority of most planets' crusts, and only three elements make up the majority of most humanoid bodies. Those elements are hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, but there’s a handful of elements that are the most common for life, and you can remember them based on the acronym CHNOPS, which stands for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,  phosphorus, and sulfur. Oxygen is super important for most humonids as it’s got the highest concentration in the body.” Sabine took a breath and waited for Ezra to nod before she continued. 

“Everything has properties, these are traits inherit to something, a physical property can be observed without changing a substance, like color, oder, density melting or boiling point, and a chemical property can only be observed when a substance is changed so burning, which is different than melting because one is a chemical change and one isn’t. There are also intensive properties which are independent of the amount of substance, a gram of gold is going to have the same density as a kilogram, even if it has a different mass. Mass in this case is extensive. And substances can change, physical changes don’t change the composition, whereas chemical changes result in new substances.”

“That would be the difference between burning and melting again, right?” Ezra asked. Sabine nodded. 

“You can separate mixtures based on filtration, distillation or chromatography, filtration is as simple as it sounds, you can use a physical barrier to separate things, distillation involves using the boiling points of different substances to separate them and chromatography separates substances based on how well they adhere to solids. Heads up, we’re going to get into numbers now. Most things in chemistry are quantitative, so they have numbers attached”

Ezra groaned but nodded along.

“And now we get into units, SI units, or scientific imperial units are the basis for all science, I don’t think they were always called imperial units but even decades old papers use those units and refer to them as SI, I’m not sure what the original name was, I’ll have to ask Kanan if he knows some time. Anyways there are a lot of SI units, length is in meters, mass is in kilograms, temperature is in kelvin, time is in seconds, substances are measured in moles, currents are measured in amperes, and brightness is measured in candela, volume is often in cubic centimeters or liters, the good thing about SI units is they use prefixes, it’s a lot to remember but it can tell you how much of something is without needing to remember unit conversions. I’ll send you the chat I use for my calculations later.” 

“You still use a chart?” Ezra asked

“It depends, it’s a lot to remember, there’s no shame in needing to write something down, I don’t need it that often but it’s useful when I need it. Anyways, Density, here’s an equation you need to know. Density is mass divided by volume, it’s one of a handful of equations that can be made into a triangle.” Sabine pulled out one of her paints and moved down to the wall of the building she was using as a lab. She drew a large triangle, then divided it into three sections. The top was a single section and the bottom held two segments, in the top she painted an M and then in the bottom she drew a D on the left and a V on the right. “You cover the letter that represents what you want to do, if I want volume I cover the v and I’m left with Mass over density, if I want density I’m left with mass over volume, and if I want mass I get density multiplied by volume. Does that make sense?”

Ezra made a face “I never thought I’d be glad Hera and Kanan insisted on teaching me math when I first joined the crew.” 

“It comes in handy a lot more often than you’d expect.” Sabine confirmed, she grimaced at the reminder. Ezra had struggled though simple addition when he’d joined, and struggled with any amount of multiplication, it had just been another thing he’d had to learn to keep up with the rest of the crew. He still had trouble with division, but he’d been better at it than anyone expected. 

“Back to numbers, there are exact numbers which are given by definition, for example the ghost crew has six spectors, that’s an exact amount, but a lot of measurement tools are inexact or subject to user error, so weight, temperature, and a few other things are inexact. Exactness is definition or an exact count. Most measurements are rough approximations and that’s fine, the goal is to have a very low margin of error. This comes down to accuracy and precision, precision is a measure of how closely individual measurements agree with each other, and accuracy is how close individual measurements line up to what’s correct.” Sabine made a face then she smiled. She pulled out another of her paints and drew three targets on the wall. She took a step back and fired six shots into the same spot off to the corner of a target.

“I was nowhere near the center of the target, so my accuracy was poor, but all the shots were near each other, so my precision was high.” 

Ezra nodded, Sabine moved to the next target and sent off a series of shots, none hit anywhere near the center.

“That’s low accuracy and low precision, right?” Sabine nodded and stepped to the final target, where she hit every shot dead-center.

“High accuracy, high precision?” Ezra asked, “can you have high accuracy and low precision?” 

“No, because if you have high accuracy you’re already close to the target value.” As a demonstration Sabine moved back to the low/low target and sent a bolt directly into the center of the target. “If I wanted to have low precision I'd need my next shot to be nowhere near my first.” she took a breath and fired into the outside corner. “But that’s not accurate, so I can’t do that, if it’s accurate it comes with a certain level of precision already.”

“That makes sense.” Ezra nodded 

“And onto everyone's least favorite part, significant figures, these are important to scientific notation and I hate them. I understand why they’re used in theory. It's important not to overstate the accuracy of any answer we come to, especially when doing things in a lab environment. But they’re incredibly annoying. So here are the rules. All nonzero digits are significant, zeros between nonzero digits are significant, zeros at the start of a number are never significant, zeros at the end of a number are significant only if that number has a decimal point.”

Sabine took a step back and pulled out one of the paint pens she carried. She drew a series of numbers: 23, 50, 005, 24.056, 0.001, 12024, 1000, 5603, and 0.004603. Then she handed Ezra the pen and gestured to the wall.

“Which digits are significant?” she asked Ezra, groaning but approached the wall. 

“You’re just doing this to torture me.” he replied as he underlined both digits in the 23 “zeros at the end of numbers arn’t significant unless there’s a decimal point, right? So that means only the five here are significant?” he pointed to the 50, Sabine nodded, Ezra underlined the five, he did the same for the five in 005, then underlined all of 24.056, “and this has a decimal point.” he gestured to 0.001 “but zeros before the number starts aren't significant, so that doesn't count, and the next number has a zero sandwiched so it is significant.” He underlined only the one in 0.001 and the whole of 12024, then again only the one in 1000 and the whole of 5602, finally he underlined only the 4 right in the final number.

“Yeah, perfect. It’s not hard, it's just annoying to maintain. Especially when we get into doing math with sig figs.” Sabine groaned “don’t get me started on stoichiometry with sig figs, I swear…. Anyways, that’s for later, when you're doing addition or subtraction the answers are rounded to the least significant decimal, when you do multiplication or division you round your answers to the same number of digits as the measurement with the fewest number of significant figures. You should pay attention to the sig figs throughout but only round at the end of the equation.” Sabine wrinkled her nose but continued “so when you add, you line up your decimal place, and if you have 12.1 and 1.2353 you’d round your answer to one decimal place. If you're doing multiplication it’s not about decimals, it’s about the overall number of sig figs, so for 12.1 and 1.2353 you’d round to three sig figs.” 

“That seems… confusing.” Ezra admitted

“Yeah it’s not the best, but practice helps, just sort of keep it in the back of your mind, I’m not an imperial instructor, I won’t judge you if you want to leave your answers unrounded until you need to round it for whatever reason. Anyways we're moving onto another confusing topic, or at least it can be, dimensional analysis is going to be the basis for stokeomery. It’s how we convert one measurement to another. It uses ratios. If you have a measurement in imperial units but want to translate a paper written in the old republic or something using whatever unit of measurement is most common on whatever planet you're from, it’s very useful. I had to use it a lot to translate the Mandalorian standard measurement system, mand’tar* to imperial units. So if you see a lot of conversions on my notes that’s why.” Sabine snatched her paint-pen back from Ezra.

“Let’s say we have 115 mand’tar pounds, and we want to get it to imperial grams, we can draw 115 lb/1 and then multiply it by 453.6 g/1lb, this is because the conversion factor from mand’tar points to imperial grams is 154.6/1” she drew the question on the wall. 

“You’re going to run out of room on that wall.” Ezra said, Sabine shrugged 

“I can paint over it,” she explained. “Besides, it’s time to go over atomic theory, so Dalton’s atomic theory states that each element is made of small particles, all atoms of a given element are identical but atoms of one element are different than every other element, you cannot change an atom of one element into a different element, and following the laws of conservation you cannot create nor destroy atoms in chemical reactions, finally compounds are formed when atoms of more than one element combined, and the same compound always has the same ratios involved. Make sense?”

“Who’s Dalton?” Ezra asked.

“I’m not actually sure, I think we’ve just been calling the theory Dalton’s theory for so long no one actually bothered to write down who he is, I presume he’s some scientist who developed all this stuff long before interplanetary travel was even imagined.”

“That long ago? Really? It’s hard to imagine that there was ever a time like that.” 

“I know, but it had to have existed, it’s not like we could have made any type of starship fuel without understanding chemistry. So I guess there had to be something before we could travel the stars, I wonder what that was like.” 

Ezra shrugged “seems lonely, only one planet, only one species, no way of knowing what’s going on with the rest of the galaxy, but maybe it was better that way?” Ezra fiddled with the ribbon braid that hung from his ear. “I mean there’d be no empire, right?”

“Maybe” Sabine agreed “but there might be planetary empires, and planetary wars, I doubt even the confines of a single planet could make everyone get along, but that’s not really important right now. We’re focusing on the smaller particles that make up atoms, so Dalton whoever he was was wrong, there are smaller particles, the atom has a nucleus that has protons and neutrons, and there’s an electron cloud outside the nucleus. There were a bunch of prehistoric theories of how atoms work, they’re interesting but I don’t think they’re super necessary. It is interesting to see what ancient people thought of atoms. But the important part is that we eventually found that atoms are made of 90% air, with a nucleus and smaller particles. We can prove this by shooting alpha particles at some gold foil and looking at the patterns it makes. Anyways, protons have a positive charge, electrons have a negative charge, and neutrons are neutral.”

Ezra squinted “are electrons and neutrons backwards, it seems like neutrons should be negative because of the nu sound.”

“I can see that, but think neutral, not negative, protons are easy because they’re positive, and electrons you can remember because they cause electricity. Didn’t Kanan say something about force lighting, I wonder if that’s just using whatever magic you use to mess with electrons, that would make sense, but I also wouldn’t put it past the force to just… break the fundamental laws of reality.” Sabine made a face “you and Kanan break the law of conservation of energy on a daily basis” 

“I didn’t expect you of all people to care about that sort of thing.” Ezra said. Sabine made another face.

“It’s not that I care, it’s just… it’s impossible to plan around, chemistry is reliable, I know what reacts with what, I can plan for what to do if something goes wrong, and there are rules to it. I’m not one to like rules, but I like knowing what I’m getting into. I didn’t know what I was getting into with the imperial academy, I didn’t know what I was getting into when I-” she sighed “it’s just that I like knowing how things work. I can’t know that when it comes to your mystic nonsense, it just works because… it does…” Sabine shrugged “maybe we’ll see if the force can break any other fundamental rules of the universe later, that would be fun. Kanan says all things are possible with the force, I wonder if you could make some of my reactions more efficient.” 

“Maybe!” Ezra chimed 

“Anyways, protons are neutrons that have basically the same mass, we use a relative mass to describe them because it’s still an impossibly small number, but compared to an electron it’s a lot. Electrons technically have a mass but we don’t really take them into account when running calculations because it’s a lot to deal with. The atomic number determines which element an atom is. All atoms are determined by how many protons they have in their nucleus. This is why the number of electrons and neutrons can change for the same atom, but protons will not. It’s also why you can’t just change one element to another, it’s about protons. A neutral atom will have the same number of protons and electrons. The mass number is the number of protons plus neutrons. And you can find the number of neutrons by subtracting the atomic number from the mass number. An element with a different number of neutrons is called an isotope. Some isotopes appear naturally, and can be used to do things like radioactive dating. Some isotopes just aren't very stable. We use the average weight of elements, which is the isotope mass multiplied by the percent natural abundance, this can change depending on the planet or region of the galaxy, that’s why it’s always important to get a local periodic table** I’ve got one inside, it’s for Lothal, since we’re here most often we’ll just use that one.” she glanced over to the still burning fire. “Watch that for a second, I'm going to get it. I’ll show you how to do some quick isotope mass calculations.” 

Sabine disappeared into the tiny farmhouse and returned with a flimsi-poster she pinned to the wall. It was torn at the edges, there were flecks of color decorating the large sheet, and a few edges showed signs of having been burnt at one point. 

“Alright so let's say lothal has two naturally occurring gallium isotopes, one is 71Ga with an isotopic mass of 70.924750, and it has an abundance of 39.892% we need to find the other mass.” she took a breath and gestured to Ezra who blinked back at her.

“I’ll be honest I have no idea where to start.” he admitted

“Well, all precents must add up to 100, so we can subtract 39.892 from 100.” 

Ezra spent a few moments counting on his fingers before lighting up. “Oh! That’s 60.108 percent right? And it’s a percentage so it’d be 0.60108?” 

“Yeah, exactly, and we can get the atomic mass unit from the local periodic table.” Sabine pointed to the poster shed retrieved. Ezra examined it for several moments before he announced 

“69.723!”

“Exactly, so 69.723 amu = 70.9247 times 0.3989” she drew out the question on the wall, “pluss the unknown, multiplied by 0.60108. Then we just solve for the unknown.” she passed the pen to Ezra 

The blue-haired padawan started, uncomprehendingly at the numbers, Sabine knew he could do the equation, she’d seen him run though simple algebra with Hera and Kanan enough to know he understood the concept. Still, he hesitated. Then, a little nervously he wrote out 69.723 =28.293 + Unknown * 0.60108 then hesitated again. He counted a few times on his fingers before grimacing. 

“I’m not sure I can do that in my head…” he admitted “or at least, not in any reasonable amount of time.” Sabine cursed to herself and rushed back into the building, she returned with a small device. 

“Sorry, I forgot here” she shoved a solegot*** in his hands he flushed and quickly started tapping away at the device, he wrote down more numbers as he went. 

“The mass is 68.925, right? Do I need to worry about significant figures?” 

“A number from the periodic table is exact, and exact numbers don’t really worry about sig figs, but I’d round to 3 decimal places, that's sort of the default.” Ezra nodded at Sabine’s explanation but he still seemed a little flustered. He heals the soul and gets just a touch too close to his chest. 

“Now that we have the local periodic table here we should go over it. All periodic tables are organized in the same way, that’s based on the atomic number, which increases left to right. The elements are also arranged in periods which are horizontal rows, and groups which are vertical columns.”

“Chemistry seems like a lot to memorize…” Ezra grimaced. Sabine nodded

“Unfortunately, but there ARE ways to make it easier, you can remember groups because each vertical column is an element with similar properties, so we group elements. It’s easier to remember when you keep in mind that group 18 is all noble gasses, so they all have similar properties, if you just remember that the noble gasses are a group, then you remember groups are vertical, and if groups are vertical periods are horizontal.” 

“I’m not sure that helped but I’ll do my best!” Ezra replied 

“There are several groups, the alkali metals, the alkaline earth**** metals, chalcogens, halogens, and noble gasses, we don’t really need to remember all of them right now, but it’s good to know that they exist. Metals are all on the left side of the table, and they’re often shiny, head conducting and most are solid with few exceptions. Nonmetals are on the right side although they include hydrogen, they can be solids, liquids or gasses at room temperature. And some things are metalloids.” Sabine pointed to the periodic table, which had been color coated, she gestured to a dark line that separated boron and Aluminum and continued down in a stair step pattern. “This stair step helps you remember what’s a metalloid, starting with Boron, and then including all things that touch the line except aluminum, Polonium, and Astatine, these are metalloids. Sometimes they’re like metals and sometimes they’re like nonmetals.” Ezra nodded and Sabine continued “there are seven elements that are naturally diatomic, which means they naturally occur in groups of two. Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine, and Iodine. It’s fairly easy to remember which ones are diatomic, you start at element with the atomic number 7, Nitrogen, and then draw a 7 sape on the table, moving to include Oxygen, Fluorine, and then down Chlorine, Bromine and Iodine. You know when to stop moving right because the noble gasses are not diatomic. And it ends at the same spot the metalloids end. Since this is only six elements you have to remember to include hydrogen.” 

“This is so much information Sabine.” Ezra groaned “I Don’t know if I’ll be able to remember it all.”

“I understand that, I studied this for years, Ezra, and I still need to double check half my equations, and I still stumble over naming my polyatomics. It’s a lot, and it's very dense, don’t worry if you don’t get it right away, we can go over it again. For now let’s move onto empirical and molecular formulas. An empirical formula is the lowest whole-number ratio of atoms of each element in a compound where a molecular formula is the real full formula. So CH would be empirical, but C6H6 is the real formula.” 

“Why is that necessary?”

“Honestly it's sometimes good to know the simplest form of the ratios,” Ezra nodded. “ions are charged atoms, so when electrons move they can make charges happen. A cation is positive, and an anion is negative.”

“Are actions positive because loath-cats are good?” Ezra asked, Sabine blinked

“You know what, yes, that’s why they’re positive, that’s a good way to remember it.” Ezra pumped his fist in excitement. “Anyways a cation is formed when you lose an electron, remember that electrons are negative, so when you lose an electron, you get more positive, and when you gain an electron you get more negative.”

“That makes sense, sorta like when a chopper comes into the room the whole room gets more annoyed.”

“If that helps you remember it then we’ll go with that. Metals tend to lose electrons whereas nonmetals tend to gain them. We can look at our chart to see what the charge of something is. The first two groups have a positive one and two charge respectively, then after the transition metals, it goes positive three, four and then negative three, two, one, and finally zero, this is with the exception of the metalloids and the bottom period only on the right-hand side” 

“Remember when I said significant figures were my least favorite part of this? I lied, it’s actually naming polyatomics. A polyatomic means many atoms. And Ion just means ‘has a charge’ so these are charged groups of mutable atoms. For example ammonium which is NH4+ or Sulfate SO4 2-” Sabine sighed deeply. “Let’s start with ionic compounds, these are a combination of a metal and a nonmetal, you can typically find the charge of the nonmetal and only the empirical formulas are written. Here let me show you, it’s easier that way.” Sabine pulled out her pen again, she wrote Mg2+ on the wall along with N3- “fto write this together you need to cross the charges. So it will become Mg3N2, you need to look at your local periodic table to determine the charges of a lot of elements. If it’s not in an empirical form, you need to divide it by the greatest common factor.” Sabine took a deep breath, she grimaced, and continued

“Ionic compounds are metals and nonmetals, molecular compounds are nonmetals and nonmetals, and acids are Hydrogen and an anion, Hydrogen is one proton, so it’s often referred to as just a proton, so if I say ‘proton’ and mean it as a single thing, it’s just hydrogen. When it comes to naming ionic compounds you write the name of the cation, if it can have more than one possible charge you use numerals in parentheses s Iron with a charge of two would be Iron (II), if it’s a polyatomic cation it will end in -ium, if the anion is an element change its ending to ide, if the anion is polyatomic just write the name of the polyatomic. When it comes to covalent or molecular compounds you need to know the prefixes, they’re all latin so keep that in mind, one through ten is mono, di, tri, tetra, penta, hexa, hepta, octa, nona, deca, if the first element is on its own you don’t include mono, the name of the element farther to the left in the table, or lower in the same group is typically written first. Does any of that make sense?”

“Um, a little?” Ezra asked, visibly hesitant, “can you show me what you mean?”

“Oh, yeah, CO2 is carbon dioxide, it ends in ide because it’s the second element, and it’s not a polyatomic, CCl4 is carbon tetrachloride, if the prefix ends with a or o and the name of the element begins with a voel the two successive vowels are typically changed into one, to be honest this is so much easier in mando’a since we already combine words a lot, we just simplify the process a lot.” Sabine shook her head and muttered a few chemical names to herself. “Anyways if you have PbCl2 it would be Lead (II) Chloride, transition metals MUST state the changes using numerals. Ionic compounds are metal and the nonmetal and ide, transition metals are the metal, the numeral and the non metal with ide at the end. Metals and polyatomics are metal and the polyatomic, so potassium nitride and if it’s a cationic polyatomic and a nonmetal it’s the polyatomic and nonmetal ending in ide, so ammonium iodide. Now we’re onto acids, which involves a lot of the previous information, as I said it’s an anion and a proton, if the anion ends in ide, so if it’s a single element then you write it as hydro element ic acid, so hydrochloric acid, which is HCl, if you see a proton in front then it’s probably an acid. If the anion ends in ate, which typically means it has oxygen in it, so chlorate is ClO3 and perchlorate is ClO4, those two are confusing but you can remember them because perchlorate indicates that it’s the highest oxidation state and in a lot of cases that just means 4, anyways those are element -ic acids, so chloric acid HClO3 or perchloric acid HClO4, finally if it ends in ite, which are polyatomics, like Chlorite ClO2 wic admittedly brakes the ate rule but still it’s good to know, then its ous acid, so Chlorous acid HClO2. We’re going to use an oversimplified definition of an acid for now, and it’s a compound which has one or more H+ ions and is bound to an anion. We might go back and modify this definition in the future but I’m just trying to give you the basics for now.” 

“Wait, do I need to remember all the names of all the elements?” Ezra asked “and what about polyatomics?”

Sabine grimaced “if this were a course in the imperial academy yes, you’d need to remember all of them. I have them all memorized, and I still have the list of polyatomics I was made to remember memorized, but for the most part you can figure out what it means remembering the rules I taught you, and it’s not like cheat sheets don’t exist, there’s no shame in using them.”

“It sure feels like there is. It takes longer”

“So what? You have your own skillset and I have mine, who cares that it takes you a little longer to do math, or that you have to check a cheat sheet, it doesn't bother me, don’t let it bother you.” she took a deep breath “I only have a few more things I want to go over today, then we can turn that fire off and see what we get out of it.” 

“Alright, sounds good,” Ezra replied. 

“We’re going over stoichiometry, which is basically just the conversion factor stuff we did earlier. It's a way to convert numbers from one unit to another. It's based on the law of conservation of mass, the one thing I don’t think your force breaks.*****” Ezra laughed “Even if it did, it doesn't matter right now”

“Yeah laugh it up, we’re talking about chemical equations, once again we’re sticking to an introductory level here so we just use an arrow to show which direction the equation is going, there are starting materials, or reactants on the left, and ending materials or products on the right, and you use addition to demonstrate mutable starting or ending materials. Chemical equations have to be balanced, I used to love doing this at the academy, it was fun.” Sabine then flushed, realizing what she’d just said. She didn't wait for Ezra to respond, and instead charged forward. “Ok, we have to have the amount of elements on one side of the equation match the amount on the other side, otherwise it breaks the law of conservation of mass. If you have CH4 on one side, that means you have one Carbon and 4 Hydrogen, you need to have one carbon and 4 hydrogen on the other side of the equation, this can get complicated if you are dealing with mutable polyatomics.” Sabne wrote out an equation on the wall, leaving ample space between each part of the equation _H2(g) + _O2(g) → _H2O(l) “let’s ballance this, on the left there are two Hydrogen and two oxygen, on the right there’s two hydrogen but only two oxygen, so if we want to have the same amount of oxygen on both sides, how many water molecules should there be?”

“Um, two? But then there’s not going to be enough Hydrogen?” 

“Exactly! So in that case we need two H2 molecules, the equation will end up as 2H2(g) + 1O2(g) → 2H2O (l)” Sabine explained as she drew out the numbers into the quotations. 

“Oh, hey what are those symbols you’re adding, in the parenthesis.”

“Those are the states of matter, the g means gas, and the l is liquid. We’ll also talk about aqueous, which means it’s something dissolved in water. Remember that water is considered a universal solvent. We can divide a lot of stuff into whether or not it can be dissolved in water. There are a few types of chemical reactions, combination reactions which as you can guess is just a combination, decomposition which is the reverse, and combustion reactions which is burning and always involves something plus diatomic oxygen which dissolves into water and carbon dioxide” 

“That means carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen have to be reactants right?” Ezra asked

“Yeah” Sabine agreed, “we’ve got to get into more of the math now, a formula weight is the sum of the atomic weights of all the atoms in a chemical formula, you need to check the periodic table for this, for sodium the formula weight is the atomic weight because it’s just one element but for water you need the weight of hydrogen times two and the weight of oxygen, when you add that together you get the formula weight. This will be useful for even more math later.”

“Oh joy, more math” Ezra groaned

“Were you expecting this much math when you asked me to teach you how I make explosives?” Sabine asked.

“Honestly, no, but I feel like I should have seen this coming.” Ezra said honestly, Sabine laughed. 

“We’re moving onto percent composition” Sabine said, and Ezra groaned, he had a lot of trouble with percentages when Hera and Kanan had started teaching him. “A precinct is just a part over a whole, so in this case the percent of an element is the number of atoms you have multiplied by the mass of the atom, over the formula weight of the compound multiplied by 100, so if we take glucose which is C6H12O6 and we want to find the percent of carbon, we multiply six by 12 Amu, to get 72 and then divide that by 180 amu and multiply it by 100 to get the percent which is 40% now if you want to find out how many molecules are in something we need Avogadro’s number, Avogadro is another prehistoric scientist, they determined that one mol is the amount of particles found in exactly 12 g of C-12, basically theres 6.02 x 10^23 atoms or molecules in one mol, this is also directly related to the atomic mass, for example one mol of H is 1.0079 amu which you can find in the periodic table. Molar mass, which we’ve been doing in atomic mass units, is also written as grams per mol, the formula weight is the same as the molar mass, so we’re going to be looking at the periodic table a lot. We can use this number to convert between grams moles and formula units. If you have grams of a substance use stoichiometry and the molar mass to convert it to moles, if you want to get to formula units you have to use avogadro’s number. If you have three grams of copper and want to know how many atoms you have we can do this.” Sabine searched for a blank spot of wall before she began writing, 3 g Cu x 1 Mol Cu/63.546 g Cu x 6.02 x 10^23 atoms Cu/ 1 mol = 2.84 x 10 ^22 atoms Cu, which we need to round, because the smallest amount of sig figs here was the 3 we end up with 3 x 10^22 atoms Cu.” Sabine tapped the drawing and Ezra stared at it for several moments before nodding. 

“We can also do something similar to determine the empirical formula, pay attention because this can get complicated. If we have an empirical formula we can assume there's a 100 gram sample, this isn’t necessarily true in practice, but for empirical formulas it’s a safe assumption to make, don’t make the same assumption for molecules. If we havE NO composed of 61.31% carbon, 5.14% hydrogen, 10.21% nitrogen and 23.33% oxygen, we can use that to find the empirical formula” Sabine wrote out the information on the wall. “First because it's empirical, assume the sample is 100 g, that instantly means all the percentages are simply weights in grams, which makes the equation much easier to use. Now you have to convert them into moles, if you remember going from grams to moles involves the atomic mass units or g/mols, this means you can multiply 61.31 g C by 1 mol C/12.01 g C and do the same to all the other elements 5.14 g H x 1/1.0079 g H, 10.21 g N x 1/14.01 g N, 23.33 g O x 1/16.00 g O, that will give you the moles of each element, then look for the smallest number of 5.105 mol C, 5.09 mol H, 0.7288 mol N, and 1.456 mol O, nitrogen is the smallest, decide all the mol numbers by that to find the ratio, so 5.105/0.7288 and so on.” Sabine passed the pen to Ezra, who took it and started tapping at his solegot

 “um, is it 7.005, 6.98, 1, and 1.99?” he asked

“Yes, but for this you have to round so it would be C7H7N1O2” Sabine explained, “in the case where you can't round because it’s exactly in the middle, you need to multiply it by a whole number to get the correct number. Now, we can also use this to determine a molecular formula, a molecular formula is a mutable of the number of atoms in an empirical formula, if you know the empirical formula and know the molar mass for the compass you can find the molecular formula by finding the mutable you need to get the right number. If the empirical formula is CH and it has a molar mass of 78 g/mol you can take the mass of CH, which is 13 and divide the correct mass of 79 by 13 to get six and then you multiply the equation by six to get C6H6” Sabine took a breath, she’d gone over a lot of information, there was still quite a bit to go, but they were getting to the end of the day. 

“Alright, we can also use ratios to compare different materials, this uses the chemical equation and something called mol ratios, if you have grams of one substance, and you want to convert it to moles use the molar mass, if you want to know how many moles of a different substance you get, you use the coefficients form the balanced equation, if you want to get to grams of the different substance use the molar mass again. If you want to find a percent yield which again as a percent is just a part over a whole, you need to find the theoretical yield, which is the maximum amount of product that can be made, that said the actual yield is often a little smaller because there is no perfection, to find this you divide the actual yield by the theoretical yield and multiply by 100, this also leads to limiting reactants which is the reactant present in the smallest stoichiometric amount, it’s what you run out of first, so let's say we have an abundance of one thing, we can use the ratio to determine how much we can produce. This is the last thing I want to talk about today so let’s go over it real quick and then we’ll be done. If we have CaCO3 + 2HCl → CaCl2 + CO2 + H2O” Sabine drew out the equation on the wall “which you’ll notice is a combustion reaction, we can find out how many grams of calcium chloride will be produced when 32.0 CaCO2 is combined with 11.0 g of HCl.” she began to draw out the equations,

 32.0 g CaCO3 x 1 mol CaCO3/100.08 g CaCO3 x 1 mol CaCl2/1 mol CaCO3 x 110.9 g CaCl2/1 mol CaCl2 = 35.5 g CaCl2 

11.0 g HCl x 1mol HCl/36.45 g HCl x 1 mol CaCl2/2 mol HCl x 110.9 g CaCl2/1 mol CaCl2 = 16.7 g CaCl 2.

“With that in mind we know that the 11.0 g HCl is the limiter because it makes less CaCl2,” Sabine explained. “Now, let’s go deal with that fire”

“Oh thank the force.” Ezra exclaimed. 

*Mand’tar: a word I just made up, a combination of mando (mandalorian shorter) and soletar (count) the literal translation would be Mandalorian count. 

Anyone else find great mumsnet from the fact that “imperial units” is the metric system in this fic, also yes, I am using american imperial units for mand’tar please laugh at me puting the american measurement system on the “guns/weapons are a part of our culture”, chaos and reckless Mandalorians. 

(Did you know some states are issuing ammunition vending machines that use AI fatal recognition to sell bullets? Please please please please get me out of this fucking contry) 

Did I just imply Americans are the natural enemy of the jedi??? 

**seriously imagen how much of a nightmare learning science would be when you need to think about the different percent abundances on different planets, or intergalactic genetics. Thank god they’re on a lothal run and I can just pretend the earth periodic table works. 

*** solegot is a counting machine, its translation in the mando’a dictionary says “computer” but I’m translating it to calculator. In this case I think mando'a tendency towards blunt definitions means they use the same word for computer as they do for calculator. 

**** earth as in dirt, there is no earth in star wars (as far as I know) 

Does anyone wanna come up with the names of polyatomics in mando’a? I do not but it’d be insane and super funny to do that. 

*****The force absolootly breaks the law of conservation of mass.

[moneymakesmoneynow]

5 Easy Facts About Rightmove company values Described

Rob Sabin, director at Miles & Barr, suggests “An in-human being valuation allows the estate agent to see the property’s issue, and obtain a experience for your Room and measurement with the rooms.

Rightmove earnings rise as estate brokers fork out far more to shift households in downturn on whatsapp (opens in a completely new window)

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Landlord regulation pro Tessa Shepperson explains the legislation at the rear of letting a company lease your household property for the use of their staff members or visitors. 

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Sometimes it pays to not Consider major when choosing a company automobile. In spite of everything, most business enterprise users only vacation 1-up, whilst the more compact you motor the much less it’s likely to cost, meaning lessen BiK expenditures.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

The Origin of Life on Earth

Sabine Hossenfelder

What do we know about the origins of life? From the formation of the solar system to microbes evolving into bipedal mammals with opposable thumbs, today we will look over the four major theories about how life began.

___________________________

comments:

I first read At Home In The Universe like 15-20 years ago, and thought Kaufman's ideas were pretty revolutionary back then. Very exciting to hear that there has since been a significant amount of experimental evidence supporting his theories.

Reminds me of that one Carl Sagan quote "we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution"

Thanks for the excellent video. As a chemist I agree with the idea that life can form spontaneously from a mix of the right molecules. Since we know that chemistry is the same everywhere in the universe (it is a product of physics after all), I also think that life will have the same basis everywhere. I think that silicon-based life is not a thing either, simply by seeing its chemistry (and molecular weight), it is not comparable in versatility to carbon.

[autumnwoodsdreamer]

Seeing as tomorrow’s the last Bad Batch premiere day (I ain’t ready for it, man; I don’t think I can do this…) I figured I’d share a WiP snippet today 😉

So here’s a piece of the next chapter of Shadows Dancing on the Walls, featuring Sabine finally dealing with her mother’s helmet (I didn’t forget about it!)

The helmet on the floor gleamed in pure silver, every last trace of white and cadmium yellow abolished. The remains of the viewfinder stalk, the shards of the Y-visor, all the burnt-out electronics, fried wires, half-disintegrated padding and faded lining lay on a low table nearby, clustering close together as if rallying support from their bruised and battered kin.

The helmet stood, gutted and skinned.

Gone was the paint.

Gone was the carbon scoring.

Gone was every vestige of identity and history.

The only thing that could not be pulled out or washed off were the twin crests gently swooping up from the brow to adorn the crown.

Her mother told her the plumes were added to her helmet upon her coronation.

Sabine remembered the event; she had been just old enough to begin holding onto memories.

She remembered music. She remembered the beat of drums. She remembered unified voices. She remembered her mother’s dress: as silver as beskar, as sparkling and ethereal as Krownest’s first snow, as elegant as ever Sabine would see and never again.

She didn’t know if she remembered the ceremony so much or if the images scrolling through her mind were built from those fragments of memory and supplemented by secondhand descriptions from her elders. The facts were that someone respected in their clan returned her mother’s helmet to her, reforged and repainted, and the whole clan cheered.

The rest of her armour followed, though Ursa oversaw its forging personally and no great occasion accompanied the reception and addition of each piece. She melted down her cuisses and formed them into faulds. She softened the shape of her cuirass and reformatted her collar guards. And she stripped the mottled blue and grey scheme—the mark of her allegiance to Death Watch and the Nite Owls—and restored her Wren crest and colours.

Bright yellows, proud silvers and pure whites, molded into abstract feather designs.

She kept those colours for the rest of her life, meticulously painting over every scratch and scuff of wear and tear.

She would have been mortified to see it as it had been when Hera presented it to Sabine, all scorched and scarred. For years, it had hung like a macabre trophy in Moff Gideon’s stateroom.

It’s good that it made its way back to you, Din had said and Sabine couldn’t argue with that because, yes, it was good; it wasn’t right for this beskar—for any beskar—to remain in the possession of those who hunted their people.

But it was so much more than just beskar.

It was a helmet.

It was the helmet of the Countess of Clan Wren.

It was her mother’s helmet.

For the last two or so hours, Sabine had been cleaning and stripping it bare and trying all the while to make peace with it, to accept it, grieve it, and let it be what it was.

An heirloom.

A crown.

A memory.