Recusant Successors Chapter 11 (Patreon)

Chapter 11:

Geneva Suggestions Part 2

-

Aayla Secura finished her slice into the exhaust shaft from her hiding place in the maintenance shaft adjacent to it.

It had been days since the battle on that Mandalorean space station, and the hunger was getting to her. Condensation from cooling units for this machine and that was the only thing that kept her burns and cuts from infecting and her from dying of dehydration. But she needed food. She needed it desperately, and the droid command ship was sorely lacking in it, and sneaking onto the transport carrier had born none either. Droids need not eat, who knew?!

She wasn't crazy enough to sneak to the Nemoidian quarters or, dumber still, Dooku's quarters, wherever those were, so she had instead smuggled onto one of the carriers and waited. Deep meditation saved the day, but she was never great at fasting meditation. She was always more of a doer and today, finally, the carrier took flight. They were landing somewhere, somewhere with enemies, who were likely people. And people have food. She'd just have to fight her way to it.

Based on the sound of the flashing of metal on metal and storm of blaster fire she heard from beyond the exhaust pipe, a fight she would have.

And so, through the hole she went, being careful not to touch any of the surrounding metal with bare skin. With her hands wrapped in her robes she scaled down the pipe towards the light and noise, emerging into bright, yellow sunlight... and a storm of spears, blaster fire and arrows.

On instinct, guided by the force, she ignited and raised her lightsaber and blocked... something long and green and made of light but that felt like the force died where it touched.

She screamed and backed away from the hideous feeling, resisting the urge to cut herself off from the force to not feel it anymore.

"My goodness." Came a high pitched, hissing voice that she could instantly tell belonged to an incarnation of the dark side most foul. "Aren't you a delightful little thing to look at. Good reflexes too."

She saw the speaker, and blanched. She knew it was human, or supposed to be, but so twisted by whatever dark side rituals he had resorted to in a pursuit of something foul that he now resembled a Nemoidian crossed with a Trandoshan. Here she was in desperate need and want of a womprat burger facing down an obviously powerful Sith lord.

"I know not what a womp rat burger or Sith Lord is, but one sounds delicious and one flattering. So, thank you." Said the reptilian man.

Oh. He was in her head... That could prove problematic.

“Crucio.” The reptilian man enunciated.

She sidestepped the crimson projectile that seemed to be made of liquefied dark side, and stombed her foot forward. With that one movement of her foot she drew upon the force and pushed all of the debris between them in his general direction.

The man brought his stick down in a chopping motions and the debris flowed around him, like a river parted in two.

She focused on her breathing and cleared her mind. As always, it was like flicking a switch, and she gave her body over to the force. As it flowed through her she pushed it out through her palm, this time directly at the man thing.

“Oooooh! I felt that!” The man said as he slid backwards.

His feet remained firmly planted on the ground even as the force pushed him back with enough kinetic energy to smash a Coruscant air taxi.

“You’re just a treat. En guard.” He said, flicking his stick at her.

The building behind her was ripped up from its foundation like a vegetable plucked from the soil. He hurled it at her from behind. Not that she could see it, with her eyed focused entirely on this dark foe, but she felt and heard all of it.

Keeper her saber pointed directly at the man’s heart, but then the force gave her the strangest order. Show of strength.

She didn’t question it or even think on it. She merely raised her offhand above her head and, with the flick of her wrist, reduced the entire two story building falling towards her into splinters. She dipped dangerously close to the dark side to produce that much chaotic destruction, but it passed over her.

That’s what separated Jedi from Sith. Jedi give themselves over to the force and did as it commanded. Sith twisted it and forced it to there will. If the force commanded her to throw lightning, she was certain she could do it without so much as dipping a toe into the dark side.

As always, the force was right. Like a prey animal puffing itself up before a predator to seem like a larger threat, her display made the man thing reconsider battling her. But that wasn’t fear on his face. The wide, toothy smile and gasp of appreciation told of something different entirely. Something she didn’t like.

She leapt forward, striking at the man as the remains of the building she destroyed rained down on them. When she finally got close enough to strike him with her blade he parried it with that stick he used to concentrate this perverted and strange form of the force. He then made a swing with it as if to remove her head at the neck with a lightsaber of his own. She knew the unseen sorcery in his stick would succeed in the matter, so she ducked and rolled away from the strike, intent on backing away into a defensive posture.

He moved at a speed which belied his emaciated and deformed state and jabbed at her with it as if it were lightsaber of his own. He fell into a dueling style similar to Makashi, and his stick was a match for her lightsaber. It would have boggled her mind if she allowed it to consider the situation.

His jabs and parries were feather-light and bizarrely accurate. Quick yet careful and methodical. When they started to fall into a comfortable rhythm they backed away from one another and circled. Both were reconsidering their approach.

“Amazing!” He tried to goad her. “You’ve maintained perfect eye contact with me this entire time. A warriors stare like the samurai of old. Despite this, not a single thought, emotion or sliver of intent has slipped through your mind. Seldom have I met one so well-trained in defending against the mind arts.”

She had felt his probing this entire time, and felt equally impressed that he had maintained a mental assault throughout the entire battle. If she was skilled in the mind arts, what did that make him?

He finally broke eye contact in that moment to look at something above her before spinning on his heel and… vanishing into thin air with a loud pop. Did he just teleport? Teleportation was supposed to be impossible. It must be some kind of illusion.

She pushed in all directions around her in a circular wave, reducing all of the rubble left standing into dust, but no reptilian man reappeared. He really had vanished.

She finally dared to look up at what had spooked him and blanched.

The sky was alight with the flashes of red and blue from republic and separatist drop ships descending directly onto her location.

She couldn’t decide if this was an improvement or not.

-

Harry, Ron and Hermioen approached the devastated city center of London and the now exposed Diagon Alley.

“Why isn’t the alley hidden anymore?” Ron asked?

“Because the wards were eradicated by the force of the crash a few days back Ron.” Hermione said. “The wards aren’t just designed to protect it from Muggle eyes, but also from a nuclear blast. It succeeded in tanking the latter, but didn’t survive it.”

That made sense. The only other place Harry could imagine storing up enough magical energy to deflect a nuclear explosion, or cosmic impact of an alien spaceship, was Hogwarts and her sister schools. Diagon Alley would take decades of foot traffic from wizard and goblin alike to store up enough residual magic to reinforce its wards.

It was still a blessing as Diagon Alley, Knocturn Alley and Gringottes were still standing and visible from afar. And yet it had never been stranger. Between the strange architecture and spacial manipulations that made the places fit inside of greater London failing

“Noncombatant, leave this area.” An actual robot with the head of a bird ordered them as it marched past them.

Hermione stunned it and it fell to the ground.

“But we are combatants!” She said with a smile at her friends.

“I thought we were specifically instructed not to get involved in combat?” Harry said.

“Yeah but, come on. We’re us.” Ron countered with a shrug.

It was a fair point.

They stepped over the lone robot and towards the light show to rival the aurora borialis. A cloud of dust was rising over Diagon Alley and it was filled with streaks of red and blue. Armies of white and tan clashed, and fell like leaves from the vine to one-another’s fire.

Armies of human vs machine. Harry was still trying not to contemplate why the human soldiers were human.

“Who are the good guys?” Ron asked.

“Well, the robots have openly attacked me before, so I’m partial to helping the humans.” Harry said. “Protego can protect against their explosives, but I haven’t tried against the lasers so cover is best.”

They approached the street which accessed the leaky cauldron, and there they finally got a proper view of the pitched battle.

The Leaky Cauldron was gone. Just gone. It left a gaping hole through which the Alley proper stood visible, guarded by a platoon of those robots and larger, silver ones. The small tan ones fired out of laser pistols, while the larger fired from from duel battles inside of their fists. The latter was admittedly awesome.

The white-clad soldiers were taking cover in the destroyed buildings opposite of the robots. They were outnumbered and outgunned, and that rubble wasn’t holding up against the plasma bolts.

Harry cast a protego as large as he could manage in front of the soldiers, which turned out to be larger than he imagined. It spanned the entire street between the battling forces, and there it proceeded to absorb every bolt of plasma fired at it from both sides of the arena. The white barrier grew red and heated with each bolt it absorbed and Harry could tell the heat and kinetic energy of these weapons was being absorbed into the shield. It surely had an upper limit to its capacity to absorb such, and he wasn’t in the mood to find out what that upper limit was.

He banished the shield towards the group of firing robots. He hadn’t even be sure if a shield charm could be summoned or banished, and suspected if it hadn’t been his the maneuver wouldn’t have worked. Thankfully, it had been.

His super-heated protego, now little more than a wall of crimson plasma, flew towards the hole once known as the Leaky Cauldron. The robots tried to jump out of their way, but their metal bodies did not lend themselves to such acrobatics and his shield smashed into them at the center.

The condensed plasma bolts exploded in an exponentially greater blast than what the original bolts would have allowed. He didn’t have a pen and paper handy, but he was certain the energy of the plasma absorbed alone couldn’t have made up the majority of the resulting blast, one that would have leveled the building had it still been there at all.

He was sure Hermione would do the arithmancy for it later.

“Whoa. I heard Jedi could absorb and redirect blaster fire, but that was ridiculous.” Yelledone of the soldiers who was picking themselves up from the ground.

Harry looked at Hermione.

“I’m guessing Jedi is your word for magic users and blasters are your weapons?” She offered to him as they descended to within earshot of the soldiers.

“What is going here?” Harry asked.

The men stood at attention and saluted.

“Generals!” They greeted.

Three of them approached them while the remaining advanced to where the robots had been earlier. The three approaching removed their helmets before speaking.

They could have been triplets. Another question for later.

“You’re an odd-looking bunch for Jedi. We’ve never heard of black robes, but we won’t ask if you’re one of their hush hush operatives.” The man in the middle said. “We are tasked with capturing Darth Maul before the separatist forces retrieve him. Or else eliminate him.”

He withdrew some kind of device shaped like a doughnut with a disk inside and pressed a button. The devices purpose became clear when a hologram of THE DEVIL appeared in bright blue above it. He looked much less horrific without the red skin and yellow eyes.

So. His name was Darth Maul then? Seemed a little angsty, but appropriate. He was imagining shark teeth underneath those lips for said mauling.

“He is holed up in a large, white building inside of this settlement.” The soldier continued to report to them as if they were people of importance.

Harry shared a look with Hermioneand Ron and they made the ever so slight shrug of confusion to match his own.

“That would be Gringotte’s bank. I would advise against trying to storm it.” Harry told them. “But if you can get me there, I can go inside and negotiate with the goblins. They’re the race of people who operate within said building.”

The three identical men nodded and put their helmets back on. They then marched across the street.

Harry, Ron and Hermione followed them towards the entrance to Diagon Alley. There they met up with the rest of the soldiers as they checked the rubble for threats.

“Oh hey! You missed one.” Said one of the soldiers.

Harry turned to see one of the soldiers standing over a dazed robot, one who was grasping his head in either confusion and distress. It only had one arm with which to do so and no legs. Then, as if in slow motion, the soldier withdrew his blaster, pointed at the unarmed prisoner, and pulled the trigger.

“No!” He heard himself and his friends say just before the blaster bolt flew through the machines head like air.

They had their wands out and pointed at the soldier just a split second too late to stop the war crime, but they cast their spells anyways. Harry didn’t even know what spell he sent at the soldier, but when it combined with Ron and Hermione’s the man crumpled into a human pretzel of snapping bones and armor.

The other soldiers went for their weapons and Harry half-summoned half-banished the entire wall behind the first soldier towards the remaining soldiers. He succeeded in pinning them down and disarming several.

They didn’t take any chances, and stunned the remaining while they were down.

“What the fuck?!” Ron asked aloud. “Even Death Eaters don’t usually do that. They capture alive when they can.”

Harry noted he left out the torture or other wise performed hostage exchanges, but still. Executing an unarmed, mutilated enemy? Who does that?!

“So much for them being more morally evolved than us.” Harry said.

Hermione didn’t seem to register his attempt at humor, she was too busy gaping at the scene before them.

Harry sighed. This was probably what they deserved for just assuming the aliens that looked like them were on the up and up.

Welp! Time to abuse his fame.

He raised his wand to his throat and cast the sonorus charm.

“Attention all wizards and people of earth!” Harry called out. “This is Harry Potter speaking!”

-

Voldemort looked up at the sound of the familiar voice.

“The human aliens are the enemy! Not the robots!” Harry Potter announced to the world.

Voldemort raised an eyebrow. It seemed that great minds really do think alike.

“Well?” Voldemort said, looking between Lucius and Peter. “You heard the young man. Kill these white-clad soldiers.

“What of Harry?” Peter asked. “He is here. Shall we capture him?”

“Leave the boy alone today.” Voldemort ordered, looking down at the unconscious and bound alien. “For now I want to interrogate and… study this powerful, blue creature.”

-

I just don’t understand why this chapter was so difficult to write.

This morning I decided to go nuclear on it. Sat down with a big mug of vodka. A big mug of coffee and a couple vapes and went to war. Everything else I wrote this month didn’t require me to bombard my brain with chemicals to get through it, but this one did. And I still ended up truncating Voldemort’s fight with Aayla.

So, I might be putting this story on Hiatus and removing it from the vote pool unless somebody outright commissions a chapter.