Shalx found many things annoying, and, being an Utrom raised in the immigrant community on Cybertron, she deemed herself an expert on what really was annoying versus what wasn't. One obvious example was how Uxils, the only other Utrom in camp after Krang's disappearance, constantly asked her how she was feeling. He always stopped just short of asking her the main question: Why risk space travel when the bulge on the side of her head was about to detach any day now?
If he would just ask that question, she could tell him that it was not any of his business and be done with his pestering her. But no, if she was reading him right, he thought that would be too private. If he really cared about her privacy, he wouldn't just ask how she was all the time. It was so obvious that he cared about her in more than a friendly way.
In addition to being the only two Utrom there, they were of opposite genders and the same age. She knew what he was after and had no intent of letting him take advantage of her condition.
Her condition.
It did always come back to that, and for good reason. She really was stupid enough to try to run away from home, move to Earth on a fake ID, all because she wanted her abusive alcoholic father and distant mother to have no touch on this child when it dislodged. They'd never approve of her letting a male she wasn't married to caress her with his tentacles as had happened, and she knew she couldn't let them raise the result of said caressing.
She had to be strong for the little one developing on the corner of her mantel. The Utrom body was basically a head with tentacles. Unlike egg-laying Cephalopods, the Utrom gave live birth, and an Utrom baby would form near the body's main exit on the side of the head. It would have to break the skin, which all Utrom knew was extremely painful.
The day such a thing approached Shalx was coming nigh, there were no Utrom obstetricians, or any obstetricians for that matter, only a Yautja hunter who had medicinal equipment amongst his things.
She turned from her staring up into the night sky of this bizarre galaxy to see Uxils approach her.
"No!" She yelled at him and he halted.
She was about to begin another sentence when she felt a sharp pain in her head.
Uxils only ran faster, drat him.
"Is it the baby?"
His words already seemed echo-like; the pain was getting to her faster than she had expected. Pressure was steadily increasing on the right side of her head. The baby was coming.
All that Shalx could sense was intense pain. Everything around her slowed, Uxils's screaming became silent, her own tentacles weakened and she began to fall onto her left side. She barely noticed Uxils prop himself against her, or gently guide her to a resting position. Head splitting pain was all her world.
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Shredder stopped by the stream where the Dathomiri moon shone clearest in a tiny pond. He had heard no trilling, so presumably the Yautja wasn't following. At any rate Samedi's archnemesis was Krang, not himself. He was heading after the Sith, the ones who were like him, who could use this "force." However, he would not come as a scrawny Triceraton butler, as his real self, the Trishreddatron. For that he needed to put on his real face: a part metal/part chainmail hood. A metal pan with jagged edges covered his ceratopsian crest, while mail fell around his neck and cheeks. Unlike the helmets of human Shredders, the pan on the Trishreddatron's hood had two holes. He had two natural spikes to fit them and a third spike above his nose, completely eliminating the three-pronged spike piece of his predecessors.
Watching himself in the pond he got his metal grated beak guard and tied its cloth strips behind his neck, hidden under the chainmail.
The Trishreddatron smiled. It was good to be himself again and to see himself reflected back in the water after he had been playing a butler for so long.
Now that he had the mask on he had firmly shifted personas. Putting on his clawed hand, foot, forearm, shin, and shoulder armor over his black cloath clothes was just a matter of getting dressed.
The Trishreddatron paused. He'd never put on his armor because he'd wanted to before. He'd only done it when Krang had wanted him to. No more! That spineless Utrom no longer controlled the Foot!
Shredder raised his head, looked at moon and let out a throaty Triceraton roar….until he remembered that this was the wrong moon. He was in an alien galaxy. Here, the Foot did not exist. The Sith couldn't be his main focus. He had an empire to run back home. Getting off this planet and back to the Milky Way had to been his main focus.
He kicked a piece of dirt and some weeds up as he roared again, this time in frustration. The other members of the camp were doing nothing about the situation! The Sith were the only ones who had access off world. Like it or not, the Trishreddatron had to follow where the Sith led.
He continued on his path until he stumbled over a tree limb, or something and came crashing down.
Shredder cursed and pushed himself up to a kneeling position when he noticed it: the gleam of the moon shown silver on a large but low lying circular object. Shredder fully stood and walked over and examined the object more closely. Not so much a circular object at all, but a joining of many triangular pieces, forming a collapsible door. Not so much the gleam of the moon as the door's own power system. A handful of cables ran out of the rim around the door over what Shredder now noticed was the top of a large hill, before disappearing into the darkness again. Most importantly of all was what Shredder found when he returned to the door. On the lower left edge was a bright green rendition in line of a Quintesson Magistrate's Face of Death.
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The entire camp was gathered around Shalx, Cody noted. Even Rukh's wife was there. A fissure of skin had broken out on Shalx's head; this was where the baby would come through. Uxils was holding her on one side while Samedi had antiseptics ready on the other. After an hour of pushing, a sloshing sound followed by a thud was heard. Samedi held the tiny newborn Utrom in one hand, a small laser scalpel used for hard to remove skin on trophies sufficed for severing the umbilical cord on the baby's back. The baby was covered in biological slime. Only a moment later the placenta, far smaller not just in size but even in proportion to a human placenta, dislodged. The hunter-cum-doctor handed the squirming creature to Uxils while applying burning antiseptics to Shalx. She screamed almost as intensely as while the birthing process was going on. Then their "medic" cloaked and went on his way, not comfortable with what he had seen in order to help her do.
Can't exactly say I blame him, Cody mused. He still should have helped move her back to her tent. Still though, Cody was proud of what this group had managed.
The onlookers gradually disbanded going back to their own tents. Uxils crawled to the ocean and scrubbed the baby with ocean water and his own tentacles. He called out for Cody and asked him to help Shalx back to her tent while he cleaned the baby. Luckily her tent was not that far. Cody returned to meet Uxils halfway on his way back.
"Thank you, for helping, Cody. I doubt she'll be happy to know I bathed the little one."
That puzzled Cody, so he had to ask, "Do you and her not get along or something?"
"Yes, partly for reasons that you will understand, partly for ones that you'll find bizarre at the moment."
Cody chuckled sat down, and said, "Try me."
"I actually need to have a long conversation with you when I put this baby down."
"Take.." Cody was trying to gesture to inquire about the baby's gender.
"She's a girl. I'll take her to her mother while you wait here."
Cody nodded. Uxils was hardly gone for two minutes when Cody heard the young Utrom's voice behind him.
"I didn't think life had any objective meaning when I got here."
Cody turned to look at him. "You control what your life means, whether it's good or bad."
"And who defines 'good' or 'bad'? You?"
Cody knew that much was wrong.
"No, then you could do whatever you want. Society."
"Societies change. Do you think Samedi is a bad Yautja because he refuses to hunt the innocent?"
"No, that's a big step above the typical Yautja."
"Then you consider human society superior to Yautja society?"
"No—," Cody started before he realized he was trapped by his own words.
"I'm talking about values that are immutable, what is really good or bad."
Cody had no answer.
"I believe this universe has a Creator, who has set such values, by virtue of being the Creator."
Cody rolled his eyes.
"I'm familiar with Utrom beliefs."
"I'm not promoting Utrom society. There is plenty wrong with it. What I want to impart to you is that while I was going through withdrawals from the pain killers, I felt things."
Cody wasn't convinced but didn't want to insult Uxils. Uxils could tell.
"It's alright, you don't have to believe me know. One of you will if the other doesn't. You have to know what is to love another to the point of death, even if they do not love you back."
Cody then realized something.
"You're talking about yourself and Shalx."
Uxils smiled.
"Well, that too."
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The alien sun dawned on the alien beach, and as Cody Jones roused himself from sleep he made two major notes: fight the Sith, and ignore the Utrom. He paid no attention to anything Uxils had said last night. He had seen plenty of religious lunatics in his life and this Utrom definitely qualified. All of this was probably based on some hallucination he had during his withdrawals. Similar visions had happened in similar scenarios and said things in total contradiction to what Uxils claimed about the nature of good and evil.
It must be comforting to think that evil is as incorrect as a faulty math problem, Cody mused to himself, but the truth was that they only regarded things as evil because compassion was an important skill in the evolution of community building.
The Quentessions had seemed to have evolved beyond the need for it—Cody stopped himself.
No, compassion was a real thing, Cody knew that instinctively. The Quintessons may be smarter and older than anyone else in the galaxy, and may have achieved virtually immortality through a combination of cloning, brainwave transfer, and cybernetics, but there was no species with higher rates of depression or sadism.
He had already spent too much time letting the Utrom get into his head. What mattered was that compassion was functional. The dysfunctional nature of Quintesson society was proof enough of that, and the most functional thing for the community was getting Muni Patel back from the Sith. Cody would talk to Samedi, their hunter, Quoreal, their warrior, and Rukh, their tracker, after breakfast.
Cody tried to turn his mind to a strategy that would rescue Muni, when a familiar drawled voice shouted to get the whole beach's attention:
"Wake up, everybody! I think I found something that might be helpful!"
Cody stood and turned around to Zed Ram, the runaway Triceraton in full Shredder costume. The survivors were slowly forming a circle around, but now, knowing who he was, few wanted to get too close.
"Have you found something that will help us rescue the boy?" Cody heard Quoreal ask.
"Better still, at least for those from my galaxy."
Cody stopped in his tracks.
"What is it!?" He demanded, before Sanjay Patel could hijack the discussion.
He failed though, as Sanjay stared back at him.
"You don't have any children, Jones! Rescuing my son is the most important thing!"
Sanjay turned to look at Shredder. "What have you found?"
"There are other beings from the Milky Way on Dathomir, being's whose technology might overcome the Sith's force abilities."
Quoreal, scoffed. The Yuuzhan Vong's biotechnology was too much for the Republic, but it failed miserably against the Jedi. Still, they needed allies.
"Last night I found the opening of an operational elevator shaft to a fully powered Quintesson facility."
That confirmed what Cody had been suspecting: the Quintessons had built the wormhole, which meant they had a way back home.
"Are you sure it was Quintesson?"
"It had a green Face of Death insignia. It was Quintesson all right."
Everything was turning out so well, that Cody regretted sending Mirta out. She could be in serious danger.
"Now, where are the Yautja and the human Yautja-pretender? The elevator's locked from the inside so we need to blast our way in."