Thank you so much to everyone who submitted! Starting July 26th, you can choose any of these prompts for each day that you want to do, create a fanwork, and tag it #ndtechweek2026/@ me. These prompts are a “grab bag”, meaning that you can do whichever ones you want on whatever day you want. Event rules can be found here. Prompts are below the cut.
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summary: The galaxy moves on after Order 66, but some things cannot be rebuilt from what remains.
warnings/tags: POST ORDER 66, ANGST, Grief and Loss, Distress, Dark Themes, Trauma Responses, Dissociation, Existential Dread etc.
word count: 3k
author's note: i decided to empty my drafts from ten months ago and here we are :)
masterlist | previous | next
Morning arrives the same way it always has.
It does not care about wars.
It does not care about governments collapsing, heroes becoming criminals, or entire civilizations waking up beneath the shadow of something they do not yet understand. It simply arrives, slow and reluctant, dragging itself across the horizon of Ord Mantell with the same exhausted inevitability as everything else on this world. The sun pushes weakly through layers of rust-colored clouds, staining the sky in shades of orange, brown, and sickly red. Freighters descend through the polluted atmosphere, their engines screaming against skies that have not known purity in generations. Their hulls shake violently as they fight against the wind, against gravity, against the endless punishment of a planet that seems determined to destroy anything that tries to land upon it.
Cargo cranes groan beneath impossible weight.
Massive machines built to move mountains strain against stacks of salvaged metal, broken starship components, and forgotten technology dragged from battlefields that no longer appear on any official map. Their mechanical joints grind and complain as they lift pieces of history that nobody wants to remember. Scrap dealers shout over the noise, voices rough from years spent breathing chemical fumes and dust. They argue over the value of dead machines, convinced that every broken thing still has one last purpose if someone is desperate enough to find it.
And on Ord Mantell, everyone is desperate.
The air tastes of iron filings, fuel exhaust, stale rain, and something metallic that never quite leaves the tongue. It clings to everything—the walls, the streets, the clothes of workers returning home after another twelve-hour shift, the skin of children who have never known a different smell. Rain falls occasionally, but it does not clean anything. It only spreads the grime around, turning streets into reflective pools of oil, dirt, and chemical residue. The planet wears its pollution like another layer of armor.
Ord Mantell has always been a world of leftovers.
Leftover wars.
Conflicts fought by people who are now nothing more than names in forgotten reports. Battles that ended years ago but still leave scars across the planet's surface. Weapons buried beneath fields. Ships resting in deserts. Old military bases slowly being swallowed by dust and neglect. The galaxy moves forward, but Ord Mantell remains surrounded by the pieces of everything it left behind.
Leftover people.
Smugglers.
Refugees.
Mercenaries.
Leftover dreams.
Promises of better lives.
Plans that never happened.
From the outside, Cid's establishment is forgettable by design.
That is intentional.
Places that attract attention rarely survive long on worlds like Ord Mantell. Being memorable means being noticed, and being noticed means becoming someone's problem. Cid understands that better than most. The building does not advertise itself as anything important. It does not pretend to be elegant. It does not promise safety, comfort, or belonging.
It simply exists.
A faded sign buzzes erratically above reinforced durasteel doors scarred by blaster impacts no one ever bothered repairing. The letters flicker unevenly, some lights failing completely while others flash too brightly, giving the entrance the appearance of something barely alive. Neon reflections tremble across puddles outside, mixing with oil stains and years of accumulated neglect. The walls around the entrance are covered with scratches, dents, and marks left behind by people who passed through without caring whether the place survived them.
Somewhere nearby, a cooling unit rattles with the determination of an old man refusing to die.
Every few seconds it makes a noise that suggests the entire system is moments away from collapsing.
It never does.
Not completely.
It keeps struggling. Keeps working. Keeps proving that even broken things can continue if they are forced to.
Maybe that is why it belongs here.
Inside, nothing is clean.
Nothing is supposed to be.
Cleanliness is a luxury for people who have the credits, time, and security to care about appearances. Cid's establishment has none of those things. It exists for the people who have nowhere else to go—the ones who need a place where nobody asks too many questions and nobody remembers too many details.
The tables wobble.
Some lean slightly to one side no matter how carefully they are adjusted. Others carry permanent scars from years of fists, knives, spilled drinks, and desperate negotiations. The wood-like surfaces have been repaired so many times that the original material beneath the patches is probably long gone. Every table has a history, though nobody bothers writing it down.
The chairs have survived more fistfights than conversations.
Some have missing pieces.
Some have been welded back together. The walls remember every blaster bolt that missed.
Every argument that became something worse.
Every person who walked through the doors angry, desperate, drunk, or afraid.
The marks are covered occasionally, but never properly removed. New paint simply sits on top of old damage, creating layers of forgotten incidents stacked over one another. The building carries its past openly, because hiding scars has never been a priority on Ord Mantell.
The air hangs thick with smoke from cheap spice, spilled lum, machine grease carried in on workers' boots, and the sour scent of beings who have nowhere else to be.
The workers who finished their shifts and needed somewhere to spend the last few credits they earned.
The people running from something. The people searching for something. The people who simply needed four walls around them for a few hours before returning to whatever waited outside.
Voices overlap into meaningless static.
Arguments in Basic. Laughter in Huttese. Fragments of conversations in languages you have never bothered identifying.
You learned a long time ago that knowing too much about strangers was dangerous. Every person who walks through those doors carries something with them. A secret. A debt. A history. A reason they do not want to be found.
Life continues.
Even after the universe decides it no longer deserves to.
You wipe glasses behind the counter.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The motion becomes automatic.
A clean wet rag.
Circular movements.
A glass placed back onto the shelf.
Another glass waiting.
There was comfort in repetition.
Not happiness. Not really. Happiness was too bright a word, too alive. It belonged to people who still expected things from the future.
This was something smaller. Something quieter. Something that did not ask to be felt too deeply.
It was the comfort of knowing exactly what came next. The comfort of a world reduced to simple motions: wake, breathe, move, survive. The comfort of footsteps worn into familiar paths, of hands performing tasks without needing to remember why they started.
Routine did not ask questions. And neither did you.
Cid made sure of it.
She had shoved a stained apron into your hands without bothering to learn whether it fit. The fabric smelled faintly of old drinks, cleaning chemicals, and years of people who had worn it before you. It was not offered as a welcome.
It was handed over like another piece of equipment.
Something necessary.
Something replaceable.
"Questions get people shot," she continued. "Curiosity gets me investigated. Neither helps business."
Then she looked you over.
Just once.
It wasn't the kind of look people gave people. There was no curiosity. No warmth. No attempt to understand who you were beneath the bruises and the dirt.
It was the look of someone appraising scrap pulled from the wreckage.
Her gaze lingered on your hands. Your shoulders. The way you stood. The way you carried your weight.
Checking for damage.
Measuring what still worked and probably deciding whether you were worth keeping.
Apparently, you were. Barely.
She jerked her head toward the room behind her and stated the most important:
"If someone's paying, serve 'em."
A beat of silence settled between you.
"If someone's cheating, ignore it unless they're cheating me."
Then, almost as an afterthought—
"If someone's bleeding..."
She shrugged. Not uncaring. Just practical, in the way people became after watching too much suffering to bother reacting to every drop of it.
"...try not to get it on the furniture."
No warnings.
No instructions about what to do when someone threatened you.
Cid calls you slow.
Calls you gloomy.
Calls you dead weight whenever business is bad, and lucky whenever business is good.
Her opinion of you rises and falls with the day's profits, as predictable as the register counting credits at closing. If the books are healthy, you're useful. If they're not, somehow it's your fault.
You've stopped trying to keep up.
Cid is the worst employer you've ever had. (She would probably take that as praise.)
"Compassion doesn't pay the bills," she says whenever someone complains. "Profit does."
Profit keeps the lights on.
Keeps the doors open.
That is the most irritating part.
It would be easier to hate her if she were wrong. Easier to dismiss every sharp word and every corner she cut if the bar wasn't still standing because of them. But the lights stay on. The shelves stay stocked. The doors open again the next morning.
Somehow, against all reason, her way works.
She pays late.
She underpays when she remembers.
She acts as though wages are a favor instead of an obligation.
She has never once thanked you.
Not for the extra shifts. Not for staying after closing to mop blood off the floor because someone started a fight over a card game. Not for covering the bar while she disappeared on business she insisted wasn't your business.
Gratitude, in Cid's mind, is another expense.
One she has no intention of paying.
And yet...
You have a bed.
The mattress sags in the middle, worn down by years of people too tired to complain. If you sleep too close to the center, you wake with an ache running the length of your spine. If you sleep too close to the edge, the frame threatens to dump you onto the floor.
The springs protest every time you move, groaning loud enough that you've learned to roll over slowly, as though careful movements might spare both the mattress and yourself.
One corner of the room smells faintly of mildew. It clings stubbornly to the walls, surviving every bucket of cleaning solution, every rag, every attempt to scrub the dampness away. Eventually, you stop noticing it. Mostly.
The room is too small.
You can cross it in six steps. Seven if you're tired.
The walls are too thin.
At night, they become little more than suggestions. Arguments drift through them. Laughter follows. Someone is always repairing something. Someone is always breaking something. Freighters rumble overhead, engines growling through the floor until the glass rattles in its frame. Machinery hums somewhere beneath the building, never quite falling silent, as if the station itself refuses to sleep.
Quiet doesn't exist here.
But some of it is yours.
Not forever. Probably not even for very long. Cid would throw you out the moment you became more trouble than you were worth. You know that as surely as you know your own name.
But tonight, the key is in your pocket. The door locks from the inside. There is a blanket folded at the foot of the bed, a cup on the nightstand, and a place where you can leave your boots without worrying they'll be gone by morning.
It is enough.
There is always leftover food.
Never fresh. Never particularly good. Whatever didn't sell, whatever the regulars pushed aside, whatever Cid decided was still edible enough to avoid wasting credits. Thin stew. Stale bread. Rice stretched with whatever vegetables were cheapest that week.
It fills your stomach. It quiets the hunger.
More importantly, it promises there will be something again tomorrow.
Most nights, no one tries to kill you.
That, by itself, is remarkable.
On the Outer Rim, a quiet night is less a guarantee than an accident. Blaster fire is as ordinary as bad weather. People disappear between sunset and sunrise, and by morning no one asks where they went. There is always another bounty, another grudge, another desperate soul willing to trade someone else's life for one more day of their own.
Most nights, none of it reaches you.
By the standards of the Outer Rim...
You are fortunate.
The realization disgusts you more than poverty ever could.
Because being grateful for survival feels too close to admitting survival is all you deserve.
And somewhere deep down, beneath exhaustion and routine and everything you have forced yourself not to remember...
You know that is not true.
You didn't deserve to survive.
*******
The front door slides open.
The shift is subtle enough that someone unfamiliar with places like this might never notice it. Nobody gasps. Nobody stands. Nobody announces the newcomers. Instead, voices lower by instinct. A laugh dies halfway through. Chairs stop scraping against the floor. Even the background noise seems to pull inward, becoming tighter, more careful.
Clone troopers.
Four of them.
They move together without appearing to think about it, their steps measured, even, almost perfectly synchronized despite the absence of battlefield urgency. White armor gleams beneath the dim overhead lights, polished until every scar and edge catches the glow of flickering neon. Fresh black undersuits show between plates of spotless plastoid. Their DC-15 carbines hang comfortably at their sides, neither gripped nor neglected, carried with the unconscious familiarity of men who have spent their entire lives wearing them.
There is nothing rushed about the inspection.
Nothing aggressive.
Nothing openly threatening.
Which somehow makes it worse.
You immediately lower your eyes before they can find yours.
You do not think about doing it.
Your body simply remembers what caution feels like before your mind has time to catch up. Your attention returns to the glass in your hands as though it has suddenly become the most important object in the galaxy.
Your hands never stop working.
Around you, everyone performs the same ritual.
A Rodian suddenly becomes fascinated with his drink. He studies the amber liquid as though searching for answers hidden beneath its surface, his fingers tightening slightly around the glass.
Two gamblers discover extraordinary importance in their cards. The hand they have been holding for several minutes suddenly demands complete concentration. Neither looks toward the entrance. Neither speaks.
Someone in the corner ends their conversation halfway through a sentence.
The unfinished words simply disappear.
They order drinks. You serve them without meeting their eyes for longer than necessary.
Their voices are calm.
Ordinary conversation.
Ordinary soldiers.
Except nothing about them is ordinary anymore.
They laugh over bad caf and worse rations. Complain about sore feet. Argue over leave that will probably never come. One elbows another over some joke you don't quite catch, and for a heartbeat they look impossibly young beneath the white armor.
They are only men.
That is the strangest thing.
A week ago they were heroes. Protectors.
They stood beside Jedi on battlefields that should have swallowed them whole, holding impossible lines against impossible odds because retreat meant someone else would die. They crossed burning worlds and frozen moons and cities reduced to rubble, marching into places no sane person would willingly go.
Entire systems celebrated their victories.
Civilians lined the streets when gunships thundered overhead. Children waved until their arms ached, hoping someone inside would wave back. Vendors sold cheap toy helmets and plastic DC-15s. Holo-programs turned famous clone commanders into larger-than-life heroes, and children imagined themselves beneath gleaming white plastoid, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Republic's finest.
They wanted to be this brave when they grew up.
Generals trusted them with impossible battles because impossible battles were the ones clones somehow survived.
Not always alive.
But always fighting.
Always dragging wounded brothers home, even under fire. Always holding the line a few minutes longer because the civilians hadn't evacuated yet. Always volunteering for missions everyone understood were suicide because someone had to go.
They buried their dead when they could.
They carried them when they couldn't.
Their courage became legend long before the war was over. Stories spread faster than troop transports—of impossible last stands, impossible rescues, impossible victories carved out by men who had been told since birth they were expendable.
A week ago, children pointed at clone armor with admiration. Parents smiled, people stepped aside to let them pass.
They were the Republic's soldiers. Its defenders. Its sons.
Then the Chancellor spoke.
Seven words.
And somehow an entire galaxy decided it had always been afraid of the men it had spent three years calling heroes.
You wonder whether they remember. Not the orders, those they carry out with mechanical precision.
You wonder about everything else.
Whether somewhere beneath conditioning and perfect obedience, there is still a part of them that notices what has been taken. Whether memories still exist behind those expressionless helmets, hidden in places even the Empire cannot reach. Whether they ever wake with the fading echo of a dream they cannot explain, a hand already reaching for someone who isn't there before the habit dies beneath the weight of discipline. Whether names still linger in the quiet corners of their minds, where orders cannot quite follow.
Whether they hesitate—just for an instant—before remembering they are not supposed to.
You don't wonder for long.
Wondering gets people noticed.
The troopers finish their drinks.
Conversation fades as chairs scrape across the floor. One by one, they stand, collecting helmets from beneath the table with the practiced ease of men who have done it a thousand times.
The room shifts around the sound of armor. Plastoid clicks against plastoid. Utility belts settle into place. Gloves are pulled tight.
Time to go.
One of them reaches into a belt pouch and pulls out a handful of Imperial credits.
He doesn't count them and doesn't even look. The coins spill onto the counter with a muted metallic clatter, rolling in lazy circles before settling against your hand.
He nudges the small pile toward you.
"Keep the change." The words are automatic. Polite in the way habit survives even when everything else has been stripped away.
As though nothing has happened.
As though the galaxy did not wake up different six days ago.
As though billions of lives were not rewritten by a single sentence.
As though Jedi had not become fugitives overnight.
As though senators had not watched democracy die beneath applause.
As though entire armies had not changed allegiance without firing a shot.
As though history itself had not turned inside out.
You look down at the credits.
Then back up at him.
His helmet is tucked beneath one arm. His face is ordinary—tired eyes, stubble already returning despite regulations, a scar disappearing beneath his hairline. He could be anyone.
For a heartbeat, you wonder if he remembers saying those same words in another life.
In a different cantina. After a different war.
Laughing with brothers who are now dead, missing, or standing in identical armor somewhere else in the Empire, pretending not to know one another.
The thought comes and goes before it can become anything more.
He waits.
You pocket the credits.
"Thank you," you say. For what, you still debate.
Thank you for fighting when I couldn't?
No, it sounds pathetic. You are pathetic.
Then he picks up his helmet, turns, and rejoins the others.
The door hisses open.
White armor disappears into the crowd outside.
The credits remain on your palm for another moment, warm from his hand. You close your fingers around them.
Life continues.
Freighters unload cargo. Mechanics repair ships that should have been scrapped decades ago. Bounty hunters collect contracts. Children chase one another through narrow alleyways, laughing loudly enough to convince themselves the world is still safe. Shopkeepers open their doors. Workers begin another shift.
Someone falls in love.
Someone dies.
Someone disappears without anyone asking why.
Somewhere, countless names are being added to Imperial databases. Somewhere else, countless are being erased.
The Empire is only a week old.
Already it feels eternal.
As though it has always existed.
As though remembering anything different requires effort most people can no longer afford.
It is astonishing how quickly survival becomes indistinguishable from living.
Perhaps, you tell yourself, that's the Empire's greatest victory.
when i need to lock in and do a technical write up at my engineering job i just pretend i'm writing dialogue for a tech bad batch fanfic and the words just flow so naturally to me
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Just a quick heads-up: you have five more days left to submit prompts, so if there is one that you really want to see added, feel free to submit it now!
did i mention i got my tech pop figure signed by dee bradley baker AND he wrote my favorite quote in all of star wars? i'll be riding this high till the day i die.
