#gator posts

have a bit of worship the ashes <3

Doc Tani appeared like a sleek-furred ghost beside him, having leapt the eight-odd-feet from a standstill. She settled on her haunches like she’d been born to perch on a bombed-out wall, lit deathstick pinched between her carnassials. “Pretty sunset. Get a good look, I guess, before Kadgalaar lands.”

The good doctor took a drag, then offered the smoke to him. Jaster filled his lungs.

“She’s going to burn this planet down,” Tani continued upon reclaiming her deathstick.

“I’m close enough to burning it myself,” Jaster admitted, staring out at the ruins and the spectacular light show above. “This is some shit.”

“You’re not listening to me.” She twisted to face him, leaned a degree into his space. “You’re not clan-bound, with a dedicated Armorer, right?” He wasn’t; he’d been just one more clanless hopeful when he’d joined the Journeyman Protectors. In later years Ardanna had sponsored him and served House Mereel such as it was, but she’d been very clear that she wasn’t his Clan Armorer, to take his part and throw elbows on his behalf when push came to shove. Jango’s Armorer certainly had little time for the man who’d gotten a branch of their Clan wiped out.

Tani mrred. “I don’t know how closely you’ve worked with armorers before, real metal-singers, but they’re fucked in the head. All of them. Comes with the territory.” Her tasseled ears danced with the force of her head-shake. “Arlanov’la specifically is hot and cold between the best and worst goran alive. There’s kids involved, so she’s going to try and make Hammerborn look like a two-legged strill by comparison. A drunk two-legged strill.” 

Tani stubbed out her deathstick and immediately lit another. That was the problem with those novelty sorts; the less objectionable the taste, the shorter the burn.

“How many weapons and explosives are we packing, plus whatever’s already here? How much metal fixings in the Young’s tunnels? Kriff, how much ore in the bedrock?” It was, Jaster knew, the Concordian Armorers’ collective hold on the planet’s beskar ore that held it more-or-less together, kept the magnetic fields flowing, kept the atmosphere from being stripped off in minutes.

“You got yourself a battlefield armorer, Mereel. I hope you’re prepared for what that entails.”

“Why d’you know so much? About this armorer?”

“Before I met Mij, we were engaged.” Tani answered his wince with a humorless twitch of her whiskers. “So this is going to be fun. And by ‘this is going to be fun’ I obviously mean ‘this is the nightmare scenario.’

the field of applied linguistics

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