[AN] For JediFest Alien April 18 Gift exchange. Prompt : R2-D2 and C-3PO

Threepio was at it again.

"Oh, dear, where could Mistress Leia be?"

If Artoo could, he would have rolled his eyes. Instead he just swiveled his dome around the way organic beings often do to express their disapproval.

"Oh, don't give me that look, Artoo," Threepio said, despite that Artoo never really gave him any sort of 'look'. "This is a very serious matter! She will be late for the lessons again! What would Her Majesty say?

Artoo considered playing his recorded footage from the last time Princess Leia had been caught after trying to ditch her lessons, but then thought the better of it. He did give Threepio a summarized version of it, since the the latter did ask.

"It will be much more severe than that this time," Threepio replied. "Today's lessons were supposed to be more important."

"What is so important about those lessons anyway?" Artoo asked. "They were not teaching anything useful."

"Useful?! Oh, what would an uncultured astromech like you would know."

Well, that was needlessly rude. Artoo may not know anything about royal court protocols, but he knew a lot of useful things. Things that had helped save the day, like how to fix star ship engines in the middle of a firefight, or how to perform the perfect barrel roll and avoid enemy fire. It had saved Threepio himself more times than Artoo cared to count, not that the golden lightning rod would know any of that.

Leaving the flailing protocol droid to continue his search alone, — in his usual, inefficient and loud manner, — Artoo headed for one of the wall interface panels for maintenance droids and plugged in to check on the security grid. The main security computer greeted him with a yellow message.

So apparently the entire palace was on alert for the missing princess.

Again, if Artoo could, he would have sighed at the sheer familiarity of it all.

Now, an average astromech would not even have bothered in the first place. An astromech's duty was in the hangers, fixing starships or aiding fighter pilots in the vacuum of space, unless it was told to do otherwise by the owner. An average droid, if requested, would have reviewed the security footage and quickly be at loss of what to do when it failed to yield any quick answers as they are wont to do.

Artoo was no average droid, and he had served people who could be used as model examples of the exact opposite of 'average'. He had years and years and years of experience and memory files to draw up on, and had his own specialized protocol developed for exactly this sort of situation.

He reviewed the footage while sending out a request to the master server. The server would then amplify the signal to all service droids scattered throughout the palace all the way from the First Hall to the Throne Room. There was almost always a continuous stream of data passing between droids in the palace. While this was mainly for coordination purposes, every now and then the content would be more... arbitrary. Artoo had long since found out that this was often the best sources for information, provided he had the programming needed to parse through all of it in short time, which he did.

It took him less than five minutes to track down the young mistress.

"Artoo-Deetoo, you come here and help me find Mistress Leia this instance!" Threepio cried from the other end of the hall, poking his head around the corner after finally realizing Artoo was no longer with him.

Artoo whistled back a cheerful negative before calculating the shortest route to the location with the highest probability. Then he detached himself and started casually rolling down the opposite direction amidst the chaos.

There were a total of eight guestrooms on level 8 of East Tower, four of which he detected to have life form signals. The first two harbored regular guests, — a snoring overweight Twilek Senator and a nervous human aid from Chandrila. The third one was locked tightly with a sign instructing all personnel not to disturb them, though thermal scan results indicated that there were at least three people inside.

The last one was conspicuously empty, with the signal coming from one of the closets. Its doors promptly flew open as Artoo approached.

"Boo!"

Artoo let out an appropriately startled screech with multiple apparatus jumping out of their sockets. Then he made sure to let his discontent known in no uncertain terms.

Upon realizing that it was her father's droid that found her, Leia's expression turned sour. "I was expecting someone else," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Saving a laser brained princess apparently." Artoo replied, chuckling to himself at the image of an utterly scandalized Threepio that popped up in his HUD. "We should go. Everyone is looking for you."

Leia, of course, did not understand binary. Completely ignoring the astromech, she climbed back into the closet. "There are people whispering in the next room," she said. "I wanna find out what they're talking about."

There was a human phrase for this; 'curiosity killed the tooka', or something. On the other hand, if there were people whispering in an enclosed space, 91.7 percent of the time it ended with trouble. Artoo quickly forwarded a report on the princess' location to the command center. Then he rolled back, training his sensors on the corridor outside to check if anyone else was around.

Everything was quiet.

...Too quiet.

As if to prove his point, a priority alert came through at that exact moment, sent by the security master server to all droid personnel across the network; there was an intruder in the East Tower.

Droids were not supposed to panic, but Artoo had seen and done enough in his mechanical life to not know panic. Certain class of living beings had an extraordinary talent for finding trouble, and Leia had already proven herself in the span of seven years to be one of them. Returning to the closet at once, the blue and white astromech found her with an ear pressed against the wall hard enough that she might as well phase through.

Artoo bumped her back lightly. "There is an intruder alert. We have to go now."

"Shh, be quiet! I can almost hear what they're saying."

Sometimes, — a lot of times, — he really missed the efficiency of working with a partner who could understand binary. Of course, just because someone understood what he was saying didn't always mean they listened, but at least then he could get some satisfaction in insulting them right back.

He tried again, putting in more urgency in his tone. "This place is not safe. We have to move."

"It sounds like they're moving."

There was a small click coming from outside as the next room door opened, followed by hushed footsteps.

"Something doesn't feel right about those people," Leia muttered, mostly to herself. "Stay here, Artoo. I'm going to go check."

Basic programming that every droid came with prevented outright disobedience, but there was nothing that stopped him from overriding stupid orders using loopholes and logical fallacy. He belonged, technically, to Viceroy Bail which meant the Princess' words had little power. Moreover, there was no way Artoo was going to 'stay here' while his human left on their own, not ever again. He waited for all of two seconds before following the princess outside.

Who was showing all the typical signs of little human's outrage.

"They're not here!" she cried, before running towards the lift and smashing its buttons. "But there's nowhere to go!"

Artoo scanned the floor and, sure enough, the three unknown life forms had vanished. He shuffled closer towards Leia with a small whimper.

The lift crawled up — slowly — and its doors opened to spill out two Aldera Royal Guards, Captain Antilles, Viceroy Bail... and Threepio. Artoo greeted them all with a whistle, though Threepio was the only one who acknowledged.

"Artoo-Deetoo, where have you been?" The protocol droid exclaimed as Bail hurried forwards to his daughter. "I was so worried when that alarm went off and you were nowhere to be seen!"

"I found Leia."

"You did?" He searched around frantically before finding Bail and Leia in a tight embrace. "You did! I knew you would succeed."

"Don't sound so surprised."

"Surprised? Why, I have nothing but confidence in you."

Artoo was about to throw back a reply when his scanners caught some movement.

With a startled bleep, he turned around, fixing his photoreceptor at the ventilation shaft above their heads. Something scrabbled at the gratings, catching others attention as well. Captain Antilles raised his stun blaster, mimicked by the other two guards. Artoo extended his shock probe.

The grating shifted again.

"Show yourself!" Antilles shouted.

Another shift, and then—

A round head with two pointed ears poked through the gap underneath and yowled.

"It's a tooka!" Leia exclaimed as the adults around her let out a collective sigh.

Artoo put his probe away, scanning the feline as it hopped down to the floor and scurried away.

No threat detected.

Once the feline was gone, Bail spoke to his captain in a low voice. "Captain Antilles."

"Sir?"

"Please contact Imperial fleet and inform them that it was just a stray tooka that triggered the alarm and there is no need for additional security."

"Do you think they'll accept it?"

"We still have to try."

"I'll get to it right away, sir."

"Papa?" Leia called, winning Bail's attention back.

"Nothing, dear," Bail replied soothingly. "Let's go back. Your mother is worried."

"Well, that was quite enough excitement for one day, don't you think?" Threepio said as Leia was getting a thorough lecture from both her parents.

Artoo didn't answer, — he was busy at the interface panel once again. Droids were not supposed to be programmed to 'get feelings', but something about this debacle didn't quite add up. He called up the log file that recorded all information on emergency alerts, and compared it with the palace's schematics. The initial alarm had gone off at one of the lower floor windows. However, the ventilation shaft that the tooka had come out of had no possible entrance on that side of the building. The probability that the tooka had tripped the alarm was below one percent, and given a tooka's average speed, the time frame was off as well.

He looked at Bail, then at Leia, making the calculations.

Then he replicated the log file, changed the values, and scrambled the original copy, setting it up to be permanently deleted from the server.

He was, after all, nothing but good at his job.