#i think there are three different droids i invented in this chap actually (so far lmao) but these little guys are my favourite

[daisychainsandbowties]

"...inventing new types of star wars droids..."

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Sneak peak🥺 (unless it would be spoilers)

^_^ of course you can have a sneak peek!! i wanted to post one anyways so this is quite convenient 😌

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The ship sat, looking like a stranger dressed all in black. A clamp held it down against the deck and every part of it had been buffed to a shine so that it appeared as a dark coin among the off-white masses of transports and starfighters and ungainly freighters packed around it. Beatrice approached it cautiously, wondering whether Lilith had set alarms, if the wings would suddenly erupt with a dozen flesh mines. She’d seen it happen before on Outer Rim worlds, where laws were very palpably invented, when they existed at all.

It was something she’d never forget, watching a woman creep up towards an unguarded ship with a toolbelt slung over one shoulder; how she moved and how it felt to Beatrice, standing two berths away. She sensed the intention before she ever saw the woman – a chorus of want sliding over her shoulders in gossamer folds. She’d been rubbing her thumb against the paint job on their ugly, beautiful starship. Trying to look busy when a sourceless voice came and whispered to her of theft, bright as a polished blade.

She turned, found the mingled sense of rightness and wrongness, and stood with a strange apprehension curling in her gut. Picked the woman out clean from the crowd as she broke through it, as she put one foot past the chalk markings on the ground.

Beatrice dreaded what would happen next only absently; she was caught thinking only that the woman was extremely pretty. Blue tinge to her skin, black hair long and tangled about her shoulders. A surefootedness to her, like she’d walked in all sorts of places, like she’d never been afraid. Her hands had callouses and her shoulders were broad and muscular and Beatrice, in contrast, had spent months feeling small.

And then, like the curtains parting at the opera, a dozen bright balls spilled out from inside the wings of the ship and the woman shrieked even before they touched her, even before they burrowed into her skin and sat there as she collapsed and wheezed and drummed her heels on the ground. Dockers and passengers and assorted spacers scattered from around her, leaving an area of clearance that felt rehearsed, familiar. Something they’d all witnessed before.

“Look away,” her Master told her, appearing from nowhere to put a hand on Beatrice’s shoulder.

She didn’t look away – couldn’t – as the woman raised a shaking hand to her chest, begging for someone anyone please to help her. Fingers digging hard into Beatrice’s shoulder as she stepped forward, already reaching for the Force energies, rehearsing the invisible gestures that would tear all the invading mines out of the woman’s flesh. Primed to run up through the shower of blood it would cause – that rotten liberation of metal from skin - so that she could put her hands down and heal.

“You can’t.” Arms wrapped around her, tamping down on her power like a hand over a hand over a candle’s flame. “They’ll find us, Beatrice. They’ll find the kids.” She meant the younglings hiding in the belly of their ship. The little hands that took crackers and canteens from Beatrice in the early mornings, the small robed bodies she rocked to sleep at night.

They were going to save them, take them far away where the Empire would never find them, but that meant hopping from planet to planet, through warzones in their silly sub-light freighter. Taking tows from ships with hyperdrive, but never far enough. Never away, if that was a place they could go to, anymore.

The Empire was spreading like a hand through the black of space.

We’re going to save them, Beatrice thought, still, and she let go of her power because saving the younglings meant many things. Hungry nights aboard the ship because their credits could not stretch far in the new economy, the shattered body of galactic order most people could not feel slipping from beneath them.

That day, it meant standing with her Master’s arms around her as a woman erupted into a cloud of blood and shredded blue skin.

Would Lilith do that? Her ship had a respectful circle of cleared space around it, a few scattered tool-trays floating uncertainly, some of them doing bored loop-de-loops, magnetised surfaces stuck with wrenches and fuse-guns and screwdrivers.

Her stomach turned at the sight of the cross-slot screwdriver, so alike the one Crimson had pierced through her forearm, but she turned away, took a reckless step closer to the ship. She could die like that, Beatrice supposed, heels drumming out a song on the floor, but there was another part of her – a surefooted part of her – that did not foresee death.

She reached out slowly, ignoring the lightning-bolts of pain that flickered through her arm as she raised it. The tips of her fingers touched cold metal, and nothing happened.

She stroked at the outer curve of the wing, knees bumping up against the low-hanging laser canons. It seemed to hum against the pads of her fingers, and Beatrice was just looking around, trying to spot an engineer or a ship tech who could help her get inside the ship, when the humming intensified.

Her body twitched away from the wing – it was still by and large more concerned with itself than she was, still clinging loosely to self-preservation – but nothing leapt out to eat her. The ship lit up along the sides, a gentle glow that washed over her shoes, picking out the now-dried blood on one sole. Red, of course, spreading after a moment along the wings as webbing, bright and then dim again.

It was a welcome, Beatrice realised. The ship knew her. Someone – Lilith, who else? – had taught it to recognise her.

Beatrice didn’t know how to feel about that so she felt nothing. She ran her hands numbly back along the wing, feeling for the handholds that would let her clamber up towards the cockpit. Her fingers slotted smoothly into them, but she was weak, still, and though there were plenty of ships custom-fitted for those missing arms or legs, those who could not walk or lift themselves by their hands alone; this ship belonged to Lilith. No doubt she propelled herself up onto the wing with a frisson of Force.

Mortal, small, cold, Beatrice looked around instead for a stepladder droid. She’d watched them careen underfoot plenty of times, engineers stepping onto them lazily and then off the other side, carried a scant few feet. She could sense very dimly – not through the Force but through her odd affinity with unspeaking creatures – how happy it made the droids to be useful, to be an encumbrance, to be anything at all.

The space around her was empty, though, and she felt a dread gathering in her chest at the thought of asking one of the living breathing speaking looking-at-her ship-techs to help her up, but then her eyes alighted on the tool-tray droids. They sat listlessly, three of them, holding various arrays of tools no one would dare to use because they belonged to Lilith.

Beatrice patted the wing of the ship once before stepping away. The tool-trays flattened out their bodies as she approached. She got the sense from them of outstretched hands, eager to be held. There were tiny light-receptors fitted into the corners of the trays – so they could see her or at least perceive her in some sense. She stopped a pace away as they formed a neat arc around her, jostling each other to be the closest without crowding her.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice caught in her throat with disuse, but the droids didn’t seem to mind. They inched toward her, and Beatrice obligingly put out a hand to run her fingers over their slippery-smooth bodies. She made sure to pay equal attention to all of them even as urgency prickled the back of her neck, coordinates and one-word messages repeating in her mind.

She took her hand back, set it against her chest awkwardly, feeling altogether too formal as she looked at each droid in turn. “I was wondering if I could enlist your aid?”

Cymbal-clashes of eagerness flew at her, and the droids lost all sense of decorum as they jostled close. She’d been having fits of claustrophobia lately, even in wide spaces, but Beatrice didn’t mind them as they butted up against her ribs, though she held her elbow carefully aloft from their blunt sides. They seemed to her like a shoal of fish gathered around an interesting plastic bottle on the ocean floor.

She turned slightly, pointed towards Lilith’s ship. “Do you think you could help me get up on top of that?”