Grinding my Nib

“I could tell by your awkward pose,” Padme replied, with a smile. “And the way the thing you’re trying to hide is almost as big as you are.”

“Aww…” Jar Jar said, then sighed and turned around. “Mesa got yousa some new guard animals!”

Sure enough, the thing Jar Jar had been carrying was a pet carrier, containing two sleepy-looking canines which each looked like they weighed about twenty pounds.

“Theysa still little!” Jar Jar declared. “Mesa accompanied some gungs on a big journey to a planet with lotsa weird plants, theysa had plenty of metal in theirsa trunks. And some of these guys got hurt, an’ the big ones are bombad nasty! But the little ones seemed nice to mesa, and they didn’t have parents no more, and… mesa thought… it’d be nice?”

The gungan’s voice got more nervous with every word as he got to the end of his explanation, and Padme looked at the canines before turning back to Jar Jar.

He was doing better puppy eyes than the actual canines.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll try them out here in the office suite, but if they become too difficult to manage we’ll have to sort out another home for them.”

“Okey-dokey!” Jar Jar said, nodding firmly.

He followed her into the suite, putting down the carrier on the floor, then opened it and took out one of the canines.

Despite his words about the adults being nasty, this one certainly seemed more sleepy than anything, yawning and flicking a short tail before padding over to the nearest couch and inspecting it.

Then it jumped up onto the couch, turned around in a circle, and sat.

“It’s a good thing we have plenty of chairs,” Padme chuckled. “Do you know what they eat?”

“Theysa liked fish,” Jar Jar provided. “An’ Tarpals helped mesa train them in house!”

That took a moment for Padme to parse, and she offered her hand to the other canine to sniff.

It made a sort of buzzing noise, tail waving, and Padme frowned.

“...what’s up with their tails?” she asked. “That doesn’t look natural.”

“Mesa thinks… they got hurt in the fightin’?” Jar Jar said, uncertainly. “Mesa is not sure, though.”

“Well, we’ll see how they work out,” Padme declared. “I’m sure training some feral predators from an unknown world will be a nice respite from dealing with the Senate.”

Some hours later, Padme was most of the way through the data work, and one of the young canines was snoozing next to her chair.

She wasn’t really sure if they were just sleepy or actively nocturnal, and if the latter was true then there might be a more serious problem keeping them occupied. But Jar Jar had certainly seemed proud of himself, and if she was going to reject the little creatures she wanted to have a solid reason at the very least.

Then the canine next to her rolled upright, and began growling. A similar growl came from elsewhere in the office, and Padme frowned.

“Captain Typho?” she asked, reaching for her comlink. “Is there anything wrong?”

“Nothing at the moment, Senator,” the captain of her security services replied. “The Chancellor’s just arriving for his meeting. I’ve cleared him already.”

The door to the office opened a moment later, and Chancellor Palpatine stepped through.

“Senator, I’m glad to-” he began, and both canines’ claws skittered against the floor of the office as they lunged. The sudden burst of speed completely caught Padme by surprise, while Jar Jar let out a yelp of pain that suggested he’d just been used as a launchpad.

“Stop!” Padme tried to order, even knowing there was no way the canines would respond to her voice instructions this early – knowing that only tone of voice could possibly stop them from attacking the Chancellor.

It didn’t.

One of them tried to bite Palpatine’s knees off, the other sprang towards his hand, and the Chancellor waved his arm to fling the one who’d attacked his hand against a window-

-Padme stared.

He’d done it without actually touching the canine? Was he a Jedi?

The second canine bounced off the window, rolled and pounced again, this time going for the Chancellor’s throat, and his hand dipped into his robes before bringing out a lightsaber. It flashed ruby-red as he swung it – only for the first canine to bite his wrist extremely hard, forcing the ‘saber to drop from suddenly-nerveless fingers.

“Get off me, you pests!” Palpatine shouted, his voice full of an anger Padme had never heard from him before, and lightning fizzed out to strike one of the canines. It actually endured being struck by lightning quite well, and a second afterwards the other one tore Palpatine’s throat out.

The Chancellor collapsed, looking quite surprised, and both canines abruptly stopped attacking and began wagging their tails.

Then, while Padme was still staring, the Chancellor exploded.

“...must have been a Sith,” Mace Windu said. “It’s the only explanation.”

He glanced at the pair of somewhat battered canines, trying extremely hard to escape from their carrier and savage him. “These little animals must react strongly to the Force.”

“Mesa had no idea!” Jar Jar said, trying extremely hard to hold on to the carrier. “Mesa did not mean for this to happen!”

“You exposed a Sith by accident?” Mace asked, sounding amused.

Padme was thinking hard.

“The other Sith, the one that Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan fought,” she said. “He was working with the Trade Federation, wasn’t he? During the Naboo crisis, he was on Tatooine and then he was blocking us…”

“I see the direction of your thoughts,” Mace replied. “If the whole Naboo crisis was caused by the Sith, then the goal may never have been about your planet at all. The goal may have been to raise Palpatine to the position of Chancellor, through sympathy for your planet’s plight.”