Saga - Legends The Pipecleaner (2024 Q1 OC Challenge)

Title: The Pipecleaner
Author: Mechalich
Timeframe: 1 BBY
Characters: ľpśũ-Ċhōnďru Řĥodôś aka Carra (OC)*
Genre: Action, Science Fiction
Keywords: Coruscant Underworld, Rogue Droids, Gree
Summary: Swept up in battle against rogue droids, a soldier encounters an unseen power of the underworld.
Notes: This story was written for the Q1 2024 OC Challenge. Carra is an OC created for Research Notes: The Aquarium, in which she will play a fairly prominent role. This story takes place prior to her appearance there.
*- Character portrait is AI-generated using Stable Diffusion XL


The Pipecleaner
ľpśũ crouched behind the pillar, turned, took a bead on the advancing silvery hoard, and fired. Red bolts screamed out from her blaster rifle, coring one armored shell after another, triggering fiery explosions and arcing electrical discharges. Other bolts joined in, filling the hallway with crimson energy and piled debris. The stink of ozone threatened to overwhelm helmet filters and smoke obscured all visibility.

Persistent clanking echoes revealed to all observers that this barrage had not halted the enemy advance. Firing blind now, the militia targeted based on corridor path analysis and bursts of illumination triggered by the impact of high-energy particles against armor plating. Weapons fired as fast as they could cycle, until the end of their barrels glowed red. Spent power packs clanked against the floor and the air grew uncomfortably warm. Mist and puddles boiled away to steam, further deflecting sight.

In the chaos, weapons – all too often produced cheaply by underground arms dealers or scavenged from decades-old battlefields – began to fail. Curses joined the cacophony of combat as useless blasters dropped from clenched hands or, worse, burst apart in the faces of their wielders. These losses, combined with ammunition expenditure, slowly but terrifyingly reduced the rate of fire directed toward the foe.

Through it all, the sound of clanking feet persisted. Bereft of fear, lacking any programming to feel pain, and subordinated to a singular directive to purge all organic life from their senses, the horde of rogue droids clattered forward atop the bodies of their shattered comrades.

They also returned fire. The machines, a horrible medley of skeletal-seemingly humanoid designs forged in a rainbow of rust-tinged alloys, possessed hands intended to grasp repair tools just as organic maintenance workers might. These were now turned to the wielding of weapons. Though not designed for combat and lacking proper aiming software, they could nonetheless point and shoot the weaponry they’d collected from the dead. Once enough bolts were launched in the same direction even cover and armor no longer served to prevent some from randomly finding their way to flesh.

Crouched low as her knees and back would allow, ľpśũ followed the directions on her HUD. Burst fire, switch, burst and switch, over and over. Shrapnel from the death throes of shattered mechanisms clattered against her armor, but the modified clone trooper plating had been designed for just this sort of conflict and held firm. Systematically, she held and fired, chewing a cone of destruction through the tangle of twisted metal limbs, coils, and motors. Though shockingly humanoid when glimpsed as a whole, they revealed themselves as pure mechanism once reduced to shattered parts.

Not enough. Not nearly enough. There were thousands of rogue machines and mere dozens of defenders. No matter the advantages of their carefully chosen chokepoint, the firepower supremacy of their modern weapons and armor opposed to centuries-old droids, or the steadfast valor of their volunteer contingent; that gap in numbers could not be overcome. No level of losses would turn the machine tide from its advance.

Inevitably, it was the organics who broke first.

“We’re being overrun. Scatter!” The order seared against the skull, helmet com clarity cutting razor swift through the din. “Break off and regroup at rendezvous point Besh. Break! Break!”

This order could not be resisted. Even if it were wrong, if they could somehow hold, they would not. Given the chance at flight, courage failed. ľpśũ knew this, and so upon hearing those words fired one final time, rolled left, and turned and ran. She picked the nearest of the tangled, mist-filled, and puddle-laced maintenance alleys. Scrambling low and hard, she ducked and dashed through the gaps in heavy pumping machinery. Their endless gulp and pulse chorus derived from liquid motion through the pipes behind drowned out beneath metallic drumming as the clanking horde charged.

One hundred paces, duck into cover, turn, fire, assess, flee, then repeat. Patterns beaten into her through countless hours of training. Up stairways, across catwalks, vaulting over pipes, squeezing through long-disabled security doors, onward she fled. Deeper and deeper into the incomprehensible pulsating heart of The Pumps. Blasts splattered against bulkheads, gratings, and pipes as the droids unleashed reckless errant fire in their pursuit. The unceasing cadence of their metal-on-metal tread and brief glimpses stolen down the barrel of her rifle sufficed to reinforce the knowledge that there were too many, far too many, to fight.

Only through flight, through escape, could she survive.

Breathe! ľpśũ shouted inside her mind as her muscles burned and limbs stiffened. Breathe you mist-blind idiot! You’re not in water. This isn’t a dive. Your muscles need aid. Fight those instincts and breathe. Prove that you’re smarter than these abyss-black clankers!

Forcing her lungs to work in the darkness of failing overhead lighting took every fraction of control she could summon. The entirety of her will was driven into battle against the bone-deep instincts that screamed that battle meant a dive, and to inhale during a dive was death. Land, she was on land, or at least a section of the underworld filled with ambient atmosphere and not water. She had to breathe! Or time would run out.

Each breath, each miserable motion of ribs, diaphragm, and lungs, warred against the totality of her endocrine system. It demanded reserves of discipline dredged out of desperate darkness and despair, but they came. Each inhalation gave her the strength to run another twenty strides, to turn another corner, to sustain hope of losing the droids in the maze.

Great reservoirs rose up on all sides as she dashed through the endless pipework; water walled away, bubbling and sluicing as pumps the size of starships sent it up and down the enclosed ark of the underworld. Their churn howled with torrential force, industrial rapids raging to drown out all the transient sounds of the tiny struggle between organic and droid. Mere mortals struggling between the toes of machine gods.

The droids had been designed to maintain those pumps and through that work provide life-sustaining clean water to billions. Now they threatened the opposite. Feeling the crushing weight of those lives, ľpśũ made herself breathe, and she ran.

Until the path expired.

The current accessible piping cluster came to an abrupt halt at a wall comprised of solid durasteel and hosting a four-meter-wide overflow intake grate. Numerous other pipe terminus ports, some sealed, some connected to valves, some open, filled the walls and floors. A single glance backward revealed that the droids were still coming.

When diving blind into a cave, take the largest opening. So went the ancient advice. That way it was less likely to close and leave you stuck with no way out. Of course, this advice was only offered after the much better-known admonition: never dive blind into a cave.

Lacking any other option, ľpśũ shot away the spill grating even as she gulped down air. Willful hyperventilation, an action now completely in tune with her primeval impulses. Instincts recognized the coming dive and flooded her blood with precious oxygen. Despite having no idea where these pipes might lead, her confidence in leaving the droids behind within their bowels soared as she squared her shoulders and charged into the blackness beyond.

She’d like to see these machines keep pace with a diving Gigartine.

The massive intake pipe bent almost immediately, twisting vertical and dropping her four meters through the air before the plunge carried her into a pool of lightless liquid. Helmet lamps activated but had no time to reveal more than discolored wall lining before a monstrously strong current induced into the fluid sucked her down at shocking speed.

Sound carried fast and far in water. Even as riptide forces propelled her descent, ľpśũ heard the splashing of droid bodies breaching the surface above. Pursuit continued.

The mighty current, created by indomitable hidden machinery, could not be fought. It tugged and tumbled her mercilessly, slinging her through a series of disorienting twists and turns so fast she repeatedly bounced against the walls at speed. Armor plating reduced would be broken bones to bruises, but it took every bit of military composure she possessed just to retain her grip on her blaster. On and on it went, for long minutes counted out in the slow merciless record of her HUD timer projected before her eyes.

Ten minutes and thirty-six seconds later, she stopped. The crushing grip of the current vanished, and dense liquid swiftly eliminated all momentum. Neutrally buoyant due to biology and suit configuration, she floated in the flow, suspended in the middle of a vast space.

Light surrounded her, provided by aging wall panels some distance away. As her eyes adjusted, she realized she remained inside a pipe, one oriented perpendicular to the pull of gravity and at least one hundred meters in diameter. It stretched onward, along compass points she recognized as east and west, seemingly forever.

A moment of recognition revealed that she’d been dumped into one of the main water transport conduits of The Pumps, huge planet-encircling pipes that shifted water across the entire underworld in rates measured in cubic kilometers per second.

Turning her head to investigate a strange shadow playing across the edge of her helmet’s optical field, she discovered that she was not alone.

Her mouth fell open. Every other muscle in her body locked up. Her heartbeat slowed to single digit beats per minute.

A machine filled the pipe, a thing from beyond her nightmares. It had a spiral-form central core, glossy-tinged nacred metal easily twenty meters in diameter. This, divided into segments some sixty meters in length, extended through the pipe seemingly endlessly. It did not stretch merely as far as she could see, but as far as the range-finding targeting scope built into her rifle could detect. Kilometers and kilometers of spinal distance, a machine that snaked out to a length matching the greatest of Star Dreadnaughts. The joining band binding together each segment sprouted a ring of sixty tentacles, each of them dozens of meters in length, a solid meter in diameter, and sprouting a bizarre, eye-bleeding collection of twitching terminal appendages. Slowly, these tendrils wafted through the water, easily reaching all the way to the great pipe’s walls, glowing and pulsing through complex chaotic light sequences in a wide range of neon-tinted colors.

Though nothing visual could be observed at the haze-distorted ends of those endless appendages, the energy discharged by their actions could be felt, palpably. Energy, vibration, electricity, and some unnamed exotic radiation that quivered against the inner ear penetrated unimpeded through her armor and pulsed through ľpśũ’s tissues. Her stomach twisted and knotted. Every hair on her body stood on end.

In the middle of this discovery, the pursuing droids arrived.

Dumped chaotically out of the infill pipe, their metallic-body puppet bodies spread wide throughout the open space of the great conduit. Thrashing and twisting in unnatural ways, they struggled to make their bodies advance in an environment they’d never been designed to operate within. Formed of dense metal composites, they did not float as the Gigartine did, but desperately jerked and thrashed as gravity pulled them down to the pipe’s lower surface. Hundreds of misplaced rogues, all swarming after a single piece of prey.

One, adjusting its visual scanning faster than the others, raised a blaster and fired at the white-and-red armored organic it had pursued for so long.

ľpśũ, overwhelmed by the impossible behemoth above her head, spun sideways in the water column at the very last moment, reflexes kicking in barely in time. With the giant present, all impetus to return fire evaporated.

A single ruby bolt burned past. It missed the armored soldier by mere centimeters. Continuing through the fluid, it splashed against one of the slowly cycling tentacles.

There was not the slightest appearance of damage from this discharge.

Bright light exploded through the pipe, blue-white and eye-searing, the merciless flood of xenon-fluorescence. “Purification reduced past white parallel.” A voice, speaking strangely accented and paced Basic, deep as stone and precision articulated as opera, thundered from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The words pounded through Gigartine tissues. ľpśũ’s bones ached with each syllable. She had to squeeze her eyes shut lest the sonic impact risk bursting them.

“Red nonagon.” The overwhelming, crushing, audio intoned. Before this demonstration of dominance even the rogue droids froze. “Operator response lost. Green acute. Engage restoration sequence. Purple shift. Implementation.”

A flash of yellow blossomed across ľpśũ’s retinas. Every nerve in her body fired at once as the sun dawned behind her eyelids. She tasted sugar and sour, intermingled, all down her throat.

Desperately, she forced her eyes open.

The rogue droids were gone. Not even a speck of plastoid remained. It was as if they’d never existed.

A lengthy tentacle, bearing a softly glowing red fixture the phased and shifted continually as it rippled in her sight, had bent around and now floated in front of her face.

“Unidentified bisector detected,” the impossible machine’s voice rang through the pipe, vibrating to the rhythm of the underworld itself. “Blue level. Interlocution engaged. Orange convex.”

Red light suddenly changed to blue, and the universe moved.

ľpśũ lost all sensation, reality lost to blank black.

Within a fraction of a second, her consciousness shuddered back into awareness and sanity, with no memory of what lay between.

She was not in the pipe anymore. She was not, in fact, in water at all.

Instead, she lay in a heap in a small room packed with moldy boxes labeled as cleaning supplies. A standard access door, marked only by a poster-sized sheet of scratched flimsy bearing a maintenance log, stood in front of her. Pale yellow overhead illumination, underworld standard, clicked on as she turned her head.

Stumbling and grunting her body back into motion despite overwhelmed nerves and disoriented muscle fibers, she managed to slowly stand up and push the door access button.

It opened to reveal a modest industrial space filled with computer consoles, server stacks, and electrical feeder conduits. A steady thumping sound vibrated through the floors. Aging droids slowly moved about, examining various consoles and wall panels.

A bog-standard pump monitoring station, instantly recognizable. There was even a unit number emblazoned high on the wall in faded red signaling font. Beneath that was a sector and level designation. Reading those off, she realized that she was eight meters above, and four hundred kilometers east, of where the battle had begun.

For a long time, minutes maybe, she simply stood in the doorway, too stunned to move, as the droids went about their business.

It took the crackle of her helmet com to bring her back to herself. “Carra, you copy?” This much more ordinary voice, utilizing the false name she always gave to those who struggled with the tonality of Gigartine appellations, belonged to the militia lieutenant. “We lost track of your signature there for a while. Do you copy?”

“Yes sir,” military training offered a welcome backdrop to overwhelmed reason. “I copy. Status is nominal. I’m uninjured. All pursuing units were destroyed.” That was good news and felt helpful to offer. “But there was, ah, an accident. I got swept into the piping system and have been, ah, displaced out of the combat zone.” Simple words, jargon to disguise the truth. A truth, she realized immediately, she would never tell anyone else. “Proceeding to rendezvous now sir, but I’m going to be a bit late.”

“Copy that,” the lieutenant replied. “Well, if all the pursuing droids are gone, that’s a big win. Just check in when you get here.”

“Understood,” the connection closed. It was a victory, she supposed. Hundreds of rogue droids annihilated at a stroke. A pity she could never properly credit the real actor keeping the pipes clean.

Some things in the Coruscant Underworld were best left forgotten.

Notes
The Gigartine language involves a tremendous amount of tonal and emphasis variation, intended to provide clarity underwater, which creates certain complications. ľpśũ's full name is ľpśũ-Ċhōnďru Řĥodôś. This is obviously rather difficult for most speakers of Basic to handle and so she goes by Carra.

Gigartines are physiologically optimized for diving, rather like seals. This gives them tremendous athletic burst, but makes sustained aerobic activity very difficult.

The Pipecleaner is, as players of SWTOR hopefully recognized, a Gree creation. Gree machines utilize color+geometry combinations extensively in speech. What any of these bizarre declarations mean is rather unclear. SWTOR is also quite clear in that certain Gree mechanisms can induce teleportation, so the abilities displayed here may be considered canonical.

 

I love your new OC and like to see her again in the Coruscant underworld

 

Okay, so I only pulled one line, because if I hadn't stopped myself I would have taken twenty, just as examples of how beautiful your descriptions are and how much I love them. I love the world building and the way you've made it all flow so perfectly without making anything feel like it's only being given lip service. The story itself is also artfully done and I quickly found myself drawn to ľpśũ-Ċhōnďru Řĥodôś - althoguh I'm not sure exactly how she's going to explain what she's been through to her comrades, let alone her commander.

 

Carra's fun, and her genesis is found in the power of stable diffusion to spew out something that wasn't what I wanted at all - the prompt that created her portrait included 'red-skinned' which she very much isn't - but was still awesome. AI is weird like that.

Thanks. Admittedly with regard to the world-building I'm borrowing a lot, but that's the beauty of fanfiction. Why are there hundreds of murderous rogue droids attacking? The story doesn't explain this at all, but it doesn't have to because this is such a clearly established thing that happens in an environment like the Coruscant Underworld that no exposition is required. Oh, and she probably won't explain these circumstances much, which is the advantage of being part of a militia that doesn't get called up to active duty a lot. This story is technically a prequel, and Carra is working as a freelance bodyguard in Research Notes: the Aquarium.

Thank you. And regarding the Gree, they are absolutely a Lovecraftian thing. I mean just look at these guys. Also, they have the ability to summon extradimensional elder gods (SWTOR gets craaaazy). As such, Gree Machine speak is creepy. Here's a compilation of the voice lines belonging to Operator IX, a raid boss Gree system, to provide some idea.

 

Seconding everyone on the coolness of the Gree "pipecleaner"! It's definitely fascinating to think of what could be on Coruscant when approaching it the way that you have, with it not being just layer upon layer of increasingly impoverished city-ness but a complex web of artificial worlds-within-worlds that doesn't always work as you'd first expect. And it's awesome to see more of ľpśũ! The details of her diving-adapted biology and how it affects her strategies here are really nifty.

 

What a story! Your writing is so vivid and lucid, I was compelled into your world as I read. That detail 'Though shockingly humanoid when glimpsed as a whole, they revealed themselves as pure mechanism once reduced to shattered parts.' was reminiscent of Luke fighting the Vader phantom in the cave, so quintessentially Star Wars. Very lean writing, nothing felt superfluous and out of place, and for that it conjured imagery throughout. You're clearly a very talented writer!

 

I had a quick look at this story when you first posted it and I liked what I saw, but now that I've read the diary to which this is a companion piece I like it even better! First of all, because I enjoyed seeing Carra kicking ass (yes, I know, her name isn't Carra, but I can't manage "pronouncing" her real name even in writing). In Research Notes Jio tells us a lot about her martial prowess, but we don't see her in action, and this story complemented what we see of her character elsewhere really nicely. However – and I realise that I'm repeating here something I've said elsewhere, but it bears repeating – your worldbuilding once again steals the show, and in this, the titular pipecleaner is only one of the many elements that I found amazing. The description of the various locales Carra goes through, the details of Gigartine physiology that you insert seamlessly in the text, and most importantly the creepy rogue droids paint such a vivid picture of the Coruscant Underworld, and the pipecleaner isn't the only thing that is best left forgotten when all sorts of old contraptions have taken on a life of their own to the point that they seek to conquer territory!