GEONOSIS SYSTEM, GEONOSIS
STALGASIN HIVE, XHAL'S WORKSHOP
Xhal should have been sitting down, rubbing his forehead, trying to comprehend the exact speed with which things were happening. Xhal had gone from having very rarely, if ever, leaving his homeworld of Duro to being held captive on Charros IV for two years, to being stranded on Gammor, to being picked up from that cesspool and thrown onto Geonosis with the addendum of being given a job designing droids for a Confederacy. It wasn't as if there were very many options available to him. Everyone he had ever known on Duro thought he was dead. Any money he had in the bank and all of his belongings were shafted to his parents. He couldn't bring himself to care terribly. He never talked to them much these days anyway.
What he was hung up on was that he had murdered another sapient being.
Some folks in the Galaxy ran about killing people without second thought, but Xhal was no warrior. He was, for all intents and purposes, a nerd. The Sith Lord who got axed, or incinerated as the case may be, certainly had it coming. He had kidnapped a great number of people like Xhal and forced them to work on some kind of ridiculous superweapon. If he didn't kill the Sith Lord like he had, then none of them would have escaped. Or could they have? But what then? The Sith Lord certainly would have come after them, or killed them, or just kidnapped more scientists to visit the same cruelty upon them. Rationally, yes, the Sith Lord needed to die. And that was discounting all the other likely wrongs he'd comitted in his life.
So why did he still feel bad about it? Xhal considered himself a rational man. The Sith Lord deserved what was coming to him. Maybe this was just a temporary thing. These guilty feelings would go away on their own, right? Xhal had stopped feeling guilty about sabotaging an aggravating student's science project in his fifth year of primary school by a month after the fact. Same thing, right?
Whatever the case, Xhal's prescription for his nagging conscience was to bury himself in his work. The workshop he had been assigned to looked radically different than when it had been first given to him. This was often how Xhal worked- the workshop starts out clean, he starts a project, it turns into a wasteland, he finishes the project, he cleans his workshop. It was a never-ending cycle, but one could always judge the complexity of the project Xhal was engaged in by just how messy the workshop was.
This first time around, it looked as though a tornado of Godly proportions ripped through a Jawa's yard sale. Droid parts and tools were littered across workbenches in piles, alongside other various knickknacks. There were also a number of gutted, deactivated droids littered about. Chief among them were the Fire Support Drone from Corulag Security Services and the Droideka from Baktoid. These things had served the basis of the design schematics currently displayed on one of the workshop's several holo-boards. This was going to be his first design for the Confederacy, so it would need to be perfect. Powerful, shielded, multi-purpose, intelligent... An excellent, well-rounded droid.
So obviously it would need to be named after him.
A Geonosian hurried in, carrying a container of EnhanceScan General-Purpose Scanners under one arm and a clipboard in the other. No sooner had it set the container down did it shove the clipboard into Xhal's chest. The Duros muttered a thank you and returned the clipboard. The Geonosian did not bother itself to respond and, its purpose here finished, promptly left. Xhal sighed, wandering back over to the holo-board to make a few more adjustments.
STALGASIN HIVE, XHAL'S WORKSHOP
Xhal should have been sitting down, rubbing his forehead, trying to comprehend the exact speed with which things were happening. Xhal had gone from having very rarely, if ever, leaving his homeworld of Duro to being held captive on Charros IV for two years, to being stranded on Gammor, to being picked up from that cesspool and thrown onto Geonosis with the addendum of being given a job designing droids for a Confederacy. It wasn't as if there were very many options available to him. Everyone he had ever known on Duro thought he was dead. Any money he had in the bank and all of his belongings were shafted to his parents. He couldn't bring himself to care terribly. He never talked to them much these days anyway.
What he was hung up on was that he had murdered another sapient being.
Some folks in the Galaxy ran about killing people without second thought, but Xhal was no warrior. He was, for all intents and purposes, a nerd. The Sith Lord who got axed, or incinerated as the case may be, certainly had it coming. He had kidnapped a great number of people like Xhal and forced them to work on some kind of ridiculous superweapon. If he didn't kill the Sith Lord like he had, then none of them would have escaped. Or could they have? But what then? The Sith Lord certainly would have come after them, or killed them, or just kidnapped more scientists to visit the same cruelty upon them. Rationally, yes, the Sith Lord needed to die. And that was discounting all the other likely wrongs he'd comitted in his life.
So why did he still feel bad about it? Xhal considered himself a rational man. The Sith Lord deserved what was coming to him. Maybe this was just a temporary thing. These guilty feelings would go away on their own, right? Xhal had stopped feeling guilty about sabotaging an aggravating student's science project in his fifth year of primary school by a month after the fact. Same thing, right?
Whatever the case, Xhal's prescription for his nagging conscience was to bury himself in his work. The workshop he had been assigned to looked radically different than when it had been first given to him. This was often how Xhal worked- the workshop starts out clean, he starts a project, it turns into a wasteland, he finishes the project, he cleans his workshop. It was a never-ending cycle, but one could always judge the complexity of the project Xhal was engaged in by just how messy the workshop was.
This first time around, it looked as though a tornado of Godly proportions ripped through a Jawa's yard sale. Droid parts and tools were littered across workbenches in piles, alongside other various knickknacks. There were also a number of gutted, deactivated droids littered about. Chief among them were the Fire Support Drone from Corulag Security Services and the Droideka from Baktoid. These things had served the basis of the design schematics currently displayed on one of the workshop's several holo-boards. This was going to be his first design for the Confederacy, so it would need to be perfect. Powerful, shielded, multi-purpose, intelligent... An excellent, well-rounded droid.
So obviously it would need to be named after him.
A Geonosian hurried in, carrying a container of EnhanceScan General-Purpose Scanners under one arm and a clipboard in the other. No sooner had it set the container down did it shove the clipboard into Xhal's chest. The Duros muttered a thank you and returned the clipboard. The Geonosian did not bother itself to respond and, its purpose here finished, promptly left. Xhal sighed, wandering back over to the holo-board to make a few more adjustments.
