Saga - OT The Nan-dalorian | Mod Dare Challenge | The Mandalorian, Humor

Title: The Nan-dalorian
Author: Raissa Baiard
Characters: Din Djarin, Grogu, Greef Karga, various OCs
Timeframe: OT, after season 3 of The Mandalorian
Synopsis: Bounty hunting is a complicated profession, but not nearly as complicated as filling in at Nana Antilles’ Happy Times Daycare.

Written for the Mod's Dare Challenge. I received the following dare from @gizkaspice

Spoiler: Dare

A story based on the Mandalorian where Mando keeps picking up weird, random alien babies for some reason and eventually just becomes a nanny as another gig job.

At one point he must absolutely say, "I can't believe I turned my back for one second, and you already set something on fire. You don't even have any arms" and "you spit that other baby out. Now."

Grogu learns some bad habits from these babies.

Mando is either called or compared to a mandarin orange or a mango. At some point, he must wear an apron while baking cookies.

One of the alien babies can be a Non-SW element up to the writer if they would like.

At one point, Greef must go "You tellin’ me you got a bunch of weird babies and a very tiny one lives in your helmet?"

Thanks for the fun dare, @gizkaspice ! I hope you enjoy the results!

Thank you to @Findswoman for beta reading!
----

Bounty hunting was a complicated profession, but Din Djarin had found that fatherhood was exponentially more complex. Caring for Grogu, a diminutive, green foundling of an unknown species who had both limited vocal expression and superhuman Jedi abilities, was a perpetual series of challenges. And to make things even more complicated, there was a serious lack of reliable child care on Nevarro, so he often had to take Grogu along with him on assignments, even when he was pursuing dangerous lowlifes like Dak “Rakghul” Goule, a Black Sun operative who’d crossed the syndicate one too many times.

The Rakghul was known to frequent the Hutt Slime Cantina on the outskirts of Nevarro City; its nondescript pourstone edifice was unprepossessing, but you could never be too careful. You never knew what kind of scum and villainy was lurking inside.

“We’re going in. Remember, stay behind me and keep in cover as much as you can,” Din instructed his small son, who cooed affirmatively. Din kicked the door open, burst into the room, gripping his blasters, and took up a defensive stance…

…in a brightly lit playroom.

There was an enormous play structure modeled after an Ewok village in the middle of the room; climbing ropes and ladders ascended into well-padded “trees” and slides descended from the platforms into a ball pit below the village. Plush creatures from porgs to gorgs peeked out from woven baskets, and a mural of colorful, smiling banthas frolicked across the walls. Behind Din, Grogu let out a delighted squeal and, forgetting everything Din had just told him, made a beeline to the ball pit as fast as his little legs could carry him.

On the far side of the room was a row of wicker-work cribs, and a young woman was bending over one of them. At the sound of her unexpected visitors, she jolted up, and Din could see that she was quite young, a wisp of a girl, just out of her teens—all wide blue eyes and flighty blonde hair. “Oh, wow!” she exclaimed, sounding almost as happy as Grogu, who was now buried up to his ear tips in the balls. “Like, I thought you were never going to get here!”

“Er…” This was not a scenario Din had been prepared for. “”Isn’t this the Hutt Slime Cantina?”

“Uh, no! This is, like, Nana Antilles’s Happy Times Daycare Center. The Hutt Slime closed down three months ago. I’ve been working here since then, and, I haven’t had a day off in like ages so pleeeease tell me you’re from the temp agency!”

“I…no…” Din replied, “…but, I suppose I could help out for a while,” he added when the girl’s lower lip started to tremble and her eyes grew teary. How hard could watching a few kids be for someone who’d reclaimed the Darksaber, defeated Moff Gideon, and helped Bo-Katan Kryze retake Mandalore? Certainly no harder than it would be to extract Grogu from the ball pit and tell him they had to get back to work.

“OMF! You’re like the best!” the girl squealed, clapping her hands. “There’s a datapad on the counter with all the info you need about the younglings. Right now, it’s just Flint, but the others will be coming in soon…”

“Flint?” There didn’t seem to be anyone else there besides the girl.

“Right here in the crib.”

Din peeked into the bed she’d indicated; in it was a lump of gray stone about the size of Grogu. “That’s a rock.”

“Sir!” The girl looked appalled. “Flint is a Vintian. Calling them ‘rocks’ is, like, really insensitive!”

“Uh, I’m…sorry. Sorry, um, Flint…” Was it just his imagination, or did the rock wobble slightly?

“He’s sleeping now…Good thing, too.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “He can be kind of a handful at times. Make sure he doesn’t get a hold of anything flammable, okay?”

Before Din could ask for clarification on this cryptic warning, the girl untied the frilly rainbow-colored apron she was wearing and thrust it into his hands. “You’ll need to wear this; it’s, like, regulations or something. Like, have fun with the kiddos; Nana will be by at 17:00 to close up!” And she skipped out the door without a backward glance.

Grogu popped out of the ball pit babbling and gesturing excitedly.

“Right. Regulations,” Din sighed. He pulled the apron over his helmet, looked down at the (presumably still sleeping) Vintian, and wondered exactly what he’d just gotten himself into.
——-

Soon, the other children began arriving with their parents— a frog-like blue-green Shawda-Ubb with his mossy-colored mother, a Gungan with a toddler who kept tripping on her own ears, a hyperactive Bothan pup whose father was busily tapping away on his datapad, a harried-looking Lepi with a pair of long-eared twins, and a tiny Anzellan with a baby barely as long as Din’s little finger.

The children seemed nonplussed to find an armor-clad bounty hunter instead of their usual caregiver; the parents, however, pelted Din with a barrage of questions.

“Who are you?” squeaked the mother Lepi, her nose twitching nervously. “Where’s Ty’ffani?”

“My name’s Din Djarin, and I’m…a temp.”

The Bothan stopped typing momentarily and looked up from his datapad with a frown. “Are you licensed for child care?”

“I’m …bonded by the guild.”

“Ah, very good.”

“Why yousa wearin’ da tin bucket on yousa head?” The Gungan’s mother eyed Din curiously. She reached out one long finger to touch his helmet; Din deflected it gently but firmly.

“I’m a Mandalorian.”

“Liken da orange?”

“That’s a mandarin.”

“Oranges not wearin da armor…”

“No, not…” Din took a deep breath. It was probably not worth launching a discussion of Mandalorians versus mandarins with the Gungan woman. She didn’t appear to be the sparkiest blaster in the holster. “It’s a religious thing.”

“Ohhhh.” She nodded sagely. “Mesa seein’ now.”

The younglings were climbing the Ewok village play structure and pulling toys out of the baskets as their parents said goodbye, and everything seemed to be going well, until Grogu popped out of the ball pit again and spotted the baby Anzellan, who had somehow already scrambled up to the highest platform on the play structure. Grogu’s eyes lit up and he burbled delightedly.

The Anzellan, however, was less than happy to see Grogu. He let out an ear-piercing squeal. “No! Is the squeezie! Is bad baby! No squeezie, bad baby! Is the no!” And, moving with a speed and agility Din would not have imagined possible for such a tiny creature, he leapt from the platform to Din’s arm and scurried up to his shoulder and neck. Before Din even had a chance to react, the Anzellan crawled under his helmet, then climbed up his hair and took refuge behind his left ear.

It was an odd sensation, ticklish and a little unpleasant, and Din was uncomfortably reminded of old spacer stories of parasites that lodged themselves in hapless explorers’ aural canals and worked their way to the brain. “Come on out of there; younglings aren’t allowed…in the babysitter’s helmet.”

“Is the no! Is the no!” The Anzellan’s piping voice was extra shrill as it echoed in Din’s helmet and directly into his ear.

Din sighed. He might be able to wedge a finger into his helmet, but going in blind ran the risk of accidentally poking the Anzellan and injuring him. Anything else would require removing the helmet and exposing his face. And while the Mines of Mandalore were no longer infested by mutant creatures and robbers now that Bo-Katan had retaken the planet, Din was in no hurry to make another pilgrimage there to be purified. He was just going to have to live with the situation for now.

“All right,” he said, picking up the datapad Ty’ffani had left. “Let’s see…our first order of the day is…’fresher time…”

——

Meet me at the following coordinates ASAP; bring cookie dough.

It was not the strangest message Greef Karga had ever received from his Mando friend, Din Djarin, but he had to admit it piqued his curiosity. So, with an extra-large tub of Billspury Chocolate Chiss cookie dough in hand, he made his way to the former Hutt Slime Cantina.

Inside was a scene of utter chaos: younglings running everywhere, shouting, singing, making noise. “Mando?” he called. “You here?”

Din emerged from the ‘fresher. He was wearing a frilly apron and holding a screaming Lepi toddler under each arm. Neither of them wore pants and a strange smell wafted out from the ’fresher behind them. “Did you bring the cookie dough?” Din demanded.

“Yeah, but what…?”

“No time.” He plopped the Lepi into a pair of cribs, where they continued to wail, and took the dough from Greef. “All right…” Din said, addressing the chaos. “Here’s the deal. All younglings who take a nap for the next”--he looked down at the tub-- “twenty to twenty-five minutes will be rewarded with a fresh chocolate Chiss cookie.”

“Mando, what’s going on here?” Greef asked, following Din to the kitchenette, where he began scooping dough onto a large, flat pan as if his life depended on it. “Don’t tell me one of these ankle-biters is a target?”

“If they were, I could have frozen them in carbonite and saved myself a lot of trouble. No…long story short, I’m temporarily filling in here at Nana Antilles’s Happy Times Daycare.”

“You’re watching all these kids by yourself? How many are there, anyway?”

“There’s the Vintian, the Lepi twins, the Gungan, the Shawda-Ubb, the Bothan…six…plus Grogu…seven. Oh, and the Anzellan in my helmet…that makes eight.”

"You tellin’ me you got a bunch of weird babies and a very tiny one lives in your helmet?"

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.” Din shoved the cookie pan into the oven. “Twenty-minute nap time starts now, boys and girls, so…”

There was a shriek from across the room; in one corner a stack of construction flimsi and art supplies was burning merrily. The young Bothan was dancing frantically around and bleating like a sick goat. “It was Flint! Not me! Not meeeeee!”

Din slammed the oven shut, dashed over to the craft corner and stomped the fire out. "I can't believe I turned my back for one second, and you already set something on fire,” he sighed, picking up a large chunk of stone from the floor. “You don't even have any arms.” Din promptly plopped the rock into a crib; clearly the stress of childcare had taken a toll on him. Or maybe Greef was losing it, too, because he swore he heard the rock giggling.

No sooner had Din averted this crisis than another wail arose. Din and Greef spun around to find that Grogu was making a valiant effort to stuff the struggling Shawda-Ubb into his mouth.

“Din Grogu! You spit that baby out! Now.” He disengaged the blue-green amphibian from his son’s grip, wiped the saliva off of him and set him in the crib farthest from Grogu. “How many times do I have to tell you—we don’t eat other sentients. No matter how much they look like frogs.

“And now the rest of you need to lay down, too.”

The Gungan shook her ears, pudgy hands on her hips. “Okey-day Mister Poodoo-head!” She blew a spectacularly splatter zoochberry, and added, just for good measure, “Poop! Poop, poop, poooooooooop!”

There was a flurry of high-pitched giggles, scatological humor apparently being the apex of preschool comedy, followed by a chorus of zoochberries and exclamations of “Poop!” “Poopy!” “Poodoo!” The loudest zoochberry came from Grogu, who gleefully crowed something that was only half-intelligible.

“Did Grogu just call you ‘Mister Poodoo-head?” Greef asked.

The muffled sound of grinding teeth came from beneath Din’s helmet. “Seventeen hundred cannot come soon enough.”
——

Closing time finally arrived, and, along with it, the eponymous Nana Antilles. Din was mildly surprised to see that, despite the name, she was no fluffy, grandmotherly type. Instead, she was a woman of middle years, with steel gray hair cut in a short, practical style, wearing a smart business tunic and sensible boots. “You’re not actually from the temp agency, are you?” she asked, looking Din over, one eyebrow raised.

“No, ma’am.”

She sighed. “I’m going to have a long talk with Ty’ffani tomorrow. Still, all the younglings accounted for, the building's in one piece…I don’t suppose you’d consider coming back?”

“You’re kidding, right? One kid set the arts and crafts on fire, another was almost eaten…and the ’fresher incident with the Lepi twins…”

“Sounds like a normal day around here,” Nana replied with a laugh. “I’m serious. I pay twenty credits an hour, with an additional five credits per youngling over four younglings. I also offer a very competitive medical and dental package.”

“Thanks, but…Wait, did you say ‘dental’?”
——
Bounty hunting was a complicated profession, and not always a very lucrative one, especially when you had a family to provide for. Sometimes it became necessary to seek outside employment, the kind that the Guild couldn’t offer… Sometimes you did things you never thought you would have done. Things that were strange at times. Things that could get messy, even unpleasant. But you did it for your family.

And for the comprehensive dental benefits.

Din’s secondary commlink buzzed.

“Nan-dalorian Child Care, Din Djarin speaking…”
-----
Notes:
Shawda-Ubb
Lepi
Anzellan

 

TOO HILARIOUS! Only gizkaspice could/would come up with such a zany dare!

 

I LOVED this @Raissa Baiard! First of all I loved how you used the transformation of Nevarro in the TV series to explain how in the galaxy Din found himself in a daycare centre instead of the Hutt Slime Cantina, and it kept getting better from there! The description of the space was not only starwarsy, it was something my wildest dreams are made of in real life, and the description of the kiddos and their parents was just as fantastic, with their specific needs and their idiosyncrasies. I hadn't read the dare yet before I read the story, and I hadn't paid attention to the fact that the Vintian's name is Flint, which should have told me that something was going to happen with him. I also laughed extra-hard when Greef thought he heard the rock giggle

I had a baaaad feeling when Din said "I suppose I could help out for a while" and then thought to himself that looking after a few kids couldn't be more difficult than defeating Moff Gideon or retaking Mandalore. Being a single father to only one kid, he doesn't know that the degree of difficulty increases exponentially with each kid you add, and he had to deal with all of it: the fire, the potty accident, the Anzellan that doesn't want to be held by Grogu, the frog-like baby that Grogu tries to eat... It's all par for the course, and really, the message he sent to Greef is possibly the least zany thing that happened in the course of this day.

And the ending! The Bounty Hunters' Guild may want to improve their medical coverage, or they're going to be losing members to nurseries real fast.

Thanks for sharing this hilarious story; it's a fantastic response to the dare!

 

That was incredibly cute and an amazing response to the challenge.

 

Hilarious response to the dare challenge.
The little one inside his helmet (Star Trek )
And the medical insurances for him if he continues with the job.
Nan-dalorian a perfect title for him

 

So adorable. And we got dialogue from Grogu!

 

This was brilliant. Made sense, funny as hell. Poor Din...

 

I am seriously impressed what you did with this dare given my very peculiar requirements I can't believe you took these prompts and made them into 1) something comprehensible and creative and 2) going beyond and above and incorporating it into the world of Mango Mando so seamlessly.

Where do I even begin?

What a great way to even start the story! The image of Mando thinking he's going in for a dangerous assignment and kicking down the door to a PLAYROOM because the place closed down is just absolutely something out of a Star Wars animated series. It really is the catalyst that sets everything up.

Awwww Din is like a perfect meringue: tough on the outside and soft on the inside

I read this in Pedro Pascal's voice.

What a great diversity of aliens! OMG the Anzellan

Between the Bothan's response to Din and the Gungan mother's confusion between Mandalorian and mandarin orange, I'm dead.

I'm impressed how you took a ridiculously sounding concept and made it into something that could realistically actually happen if an Anzellan actually got into Din's helmet And Din is just okay with it because he has no choice. So very in character.

The way you included this prompt was flawless.

And Flint the Vintian OMG. Now I learnt of another obscure alien in Star Wars. And of COURSE he would set something on fire....somehow

Grogu accidentally trying to eat sentient beings that look like frogs will ever not be funny.

Ah, of course. The golden handcuffs of a competitive medical and dental package

I loved everything about this story. I was curious who would get my dare and you did an excellent job, thank you!

 

This one made me giggle so much, start to finish! The setup for the daycare does sound like a fun time, no wonder Grogu was away and off to the ball pit like a lightning bolt when he saw it. And I really like the explanation for how he ends up babysitting; mistaken identity for a temp agency honestly sounds like the kind of thing that just happens to Din.

Aww! A baaaaaby Vintian! Love how the name is a bit of foreshadowing.

Close enough.

Poor little Anzellan! This little guy was so cute and the explanation for him being in Din's helmet (!) is great.

Sentences you didn't expect to say/hear this morning...

Fantastic closing; it's such a quintessentially Din way of thinking of his new sideline. And it's one that really suits him, pyromaniac Vintian toddlers or no!