I thought I would issue two chapters at once. You might be surprised at which Legends characters show up.
Arkinnea looked as beautiful as advertised, Ezra thought. As the Ghost entered the atmosphere, he saw vast forests, grasslands, and great lakes connected by rivers. The ship and the Specters onboard had been given an alias that would be airtight for the duration: Kanan and Hera were now married couple Kurz and Yvette Sorens from Alsakan. Alsakan was a gargantuan ecumenopolis that long ago had been a founding member of the Republic, though unlike Coruscant, there was a massive eastern continent that had never been heavily urbanized, instead being used for agriculture. In the distant past, it had competed with Coruscant for domination of the Republic for over ten thousand years. Five hundred years ago, it had been the final destination for a Twi'lek refugee convoy fleeing the latest in a long line of famines and hardships that Ryloth was liable to suffer from. Since then, it actually had more Twi'leks living on it than their ancestral homeworld. Given this fact, Twi'lek-Human couples were rather common there, and it was decided it would make for the perfect cover. Kurz was a personal damages lawyer and Yvette was an insurance investigator. Ezra and Sabine (who had washed the dye out of her hair to better blend in) were their adopted children from a closed adoption and Dawn was still their daughter by birth. Zeb was a guard who owed a life debt to Kurz after rescuing him from an uncharted world in the Inner Rim and was being brought along as their friend. After they landed, they each put on their new civilian clothes in order to better blend in.
Tiberius Benoit had just finished donning his Stormtrooper armor. Normally, the Major would be wearing his dress uniform, but today he was on patrol detail. According to Stormtrooper regulations, he would have to go on patrol no less than once a month in order to set an example for the lower ranks. Benoit took pride in how he always scored high when it came to readiness and marksmanship. Unlike those fools who went to the army or navy academies, Benoit had gone to Carida, the shining academy for all volunteer Stormtroopers. Cloning was still practiced but it was vastly scaled down from before. Benoit was a man in his early thirties who worked out quite regularly. He always focused on preserving and spreading Imperial order, having been decorated for bravery many times, having fought his way through many battle fields before being assigned to Arkinnea. A place he was rather annoyed with.
After a scandal resulted in the disbanding of the local militia in the first year of the Empire's reign, the Imperial garrison had entirely taken the place of local security forces. Unfortunately, since then, most of the garrison had gotten rather lax in its duties. A pattern he had seen far too often on places where Stormtroopers and other Imperial soldiers had either joined or outright replaced local law enforcement. Many of his contemporaries, young and old, had taken to hip firing instead of actual aiming. Many of them had also become rather bored with no serious challenges, with their days often amounting to stopping public drunkenness or reckless driving. Benoit had been determined to whip them into shape when he first got here but both the enlisted and the officers had dismissed him as a hardass to be laughed at when he wasn't around. If things didn't change, he would put in for a transfer to keep himself from going crazy.
But for now, his job was to look at this landed VCX freighter. What he saw come out was quite surprising. First, there was a clean cut human male, and in a t-shirt who looked to be in his late twenties to early thirties with an old astromech droid by his side, but they were the most normal of the lot. With him was a green Twi'lek woman in a blue long sleeved shirt accompanied by a child of the same species and sex holding her hand. Upon closer inspection, the child had what appeared to be freckles with one of her head tails sprouting a purple blotch. It seemed that this man had fathered a child with an alien. Looking over at the others, he saw two teenagers, one a boy and one a girl. While they looked human at first glance, there were several noticeable differences they had. The boy had dark blue hair down to the roots, implying that it wasn't just hair dye. The girl had almost golden skin, similar to the Mirialans. And accompanying them was a Lasat, an ugly, purple alien beast that looked like a shaved Wookiee.
"Present your cards into the scanner," Benoit said pointing toward the receptacle.
"Of course, lieutenant," the man said as he and the woman inserted their cards. It read them as a married couple from Alsakan, the Lasat their bodyguard, the child their daughter, and the teenagers of questionable origin their foster children.
"You know, Mr. Sorens, we don't often see interspecies couples here," he said with barely concealed disdain. Under his chestplate, the stormtrooper major had two tatoos. The first was a diseased man with the words NEVER FORGET splashed across him on Benoit's chest. The second was on his back with the words REMEMBER HUMBARINE. Tiberius's father, a freighter pilot, had always mistrusted alien races and had gotten angrier when a Rodian with less promise had been promoted ahead of him. But his mother, the kindly doctor she always was, thought they were to be befriended. Unfortunately, his father was ultimately proven right when Tiberius was fourteen years old. On that day, the aliens had united against the Republic and attacked. At first everyone thought it was just a war for resources or ideology but that would change. During the war, Tiberius was with his mother on Loedorvia in the Weemell sector. She was working as a doctor at a refugee camp when Trench, the disgusting Harch warlord, came to that sector. He bombed every planet in that sector he could reach with Brainrot plague Type E, the only variant of the disease which only infects humans. Tiberius was locked in quarantine by his mother with what supplies she could stuff in there with him but kept herself outside so he wouldn't have to share. Soon she, like 95% of the other humans in the Weemell sector, were infected. Everyone who was infected soon had to endure confusion, hallucinations, memory loss, blindness, and finally death. The only reason he had survived at all was because Anakin Skywalker and his blue striped clone troopers had gone to the affected worlds to search for survivors. For this rescue mission and countless battles he had won, Skywalker had been dubbed the Hero With No Fear by HoloNet news, and he ultimately avenged Trench's victims by killing the arachnid admiral above Anaxes. When it was revealed the other Jedi had murdered Skywalker for protecting then-chancellor Palpatine, Tiberius and countless others had wept. Shortly after being rescued, Tiberius had received another bombshell: General Grievous, the hideous Kaleesh cyborg, had taken his fleet to Humbarine and decimated its defenses. He then proceeded to bomb Benoit's homeworld for the next three hours while his fighters shot down any ships that tried to escape. The resulting firestorm was so intense that the skyscrapers themselves had melted into twisted heaps. Tiberius's father died along with the other 500 billion people on the planet and even now, almost twenty years later, Humbarine hadn't been resettled. With this and other such atrocities, Tiberius accepted reality: the clone wars were not a war between governments, but between the races of humans and aliens. As such, he was disgusted at Bana Breemu, the senator for Humbarine, attempting to force a peace with the Separatists and teaming up with aliens in the senate building to do it. He was therefore unsurprised to learn she had been implicated in a terrorist plot before being killed by Darth Vader, the Emperor's Executor. While aliens had allied with the Republic during the war, they had tended to be quite treacherous, as shown by the defection of the Umbarans, the treachery of the Rodians, and how the Skakoans, Neimoidians, and Muuns played both sides for profit. Horrifying species like the Karkarodons and Xi Char had aligned with the Separatists out of greed, as had the brutish cousins of the Harch, the Aqualish. The insectoid race known as the Colicoids had supplied Destroyer Droids in return for live sentients for them to eat, usually these poor souls were the poor and homeless residents of various Separatist worlds and planets they invaded. The other insectoid droidsmiths of the Confederacy, the Geonosians, had been just as terrifying. Before the war, they had a habit of forcing captives to fight in their gladiator matches when they weren't selling weapons and droids to the Neimoidians and others. After the first battle of the war, they proliferated themselves to many worlds. They would use parasitical brain worms to enslave outsiders to their hive minds centered in their queens in order to build themselves new hives and foundries on the planets they invaded. In addition, races that were supposedly loyal turned out to be anything but. The Quarren senator had joined the Separatists when his ties to slaver rings had been exposed to escape prosecution. He had brought the offshoot Quarren colony Pammant with him to build massive Separatist warships and while the Quarren of the homeworld Mon Cala had stayed loyal, they had ultimately defected to the Separatists when promised control of the planet. While they had returned to the Republic, it was because the Karkarodons had been promised ownership of the planet for joining the Separatists. The Calamari themselves had initially stayed with the Republic but they soon betrayed the Empire, necessitating their subjugation. The Wookiees had also claimed loyalty during the war but had also proved themselves unworthy of trust soon after, and as such became the first world to suffer Lord Vader's wrath. While the Near Humans like the Twi'leks, Togrutas, and Pantorans had been largely loyal, Tiberius learned it was better to be paranoid than trusting. And with the actions of the Ryloth terrorists and others in recent years, that paranoia had been proven right.
"There is nothing wrong with such a relationship," the tourist said. Benoit had an urge to agree with him but that inclination quickly passed.
"It might be legal but that doesn't make it a good idea," he continued. "But hey, if you want to risk being the victim of the second Ryloth Ripper, fine. Enjoy your stay on Arkinnea." He then opened the door for the family and their guard. After they left, he secured the hanger and continued on his patrol. Late in the day, a thought entered his mind: after the Lasat aggression toward Imperial shipping, their homeworld had been invaded, with many of their species killed and many more taken to labor facilities as punishment. As a result, they had become a rather rare species. Maybe he should look up Rebel cells that had Lasat in their ranks. Hopefully, he would hear back from Imperial Intelligence sooner rather than later.
I thought I should explain Humanocentrism as well as how it became so popular under the Empire. Tiberius Benoit would be played by Byung Hung Lee, for those asking what he looks like. I based the Brainrot Plague's effects off of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. The poisoning of the Weemell sector and the Destruction of Humbarine were first mentioned in the Revenge Of The Sith Incredible Cross Sections book. I decided to have Trench do the poisoning while Grievous did the slagging. The other things Benoit mentioned, they were publicized by Republic and later Imperial propaganda. Some of it was exaggerated or outright fabricated but all of it was publicized in order to justify the Empire's policies and create a feeling of how everyone else was out to get them. This would be combined with how the Separatists were engineered to be as unsympathetic as possible in the hopes of discrediting future rebels. Benoit will get a redemption of sorts but he won't entirely get past his xenophobia. I hope you all enjoy this chapter.
Author's notes:
In my mind, the Imperial citizenry are taught that the Clone Wars were engineered by the Jedi to take over the universe after killing what Jedi wouldn't go along with it. And Alsakan? I envision it as being halfway between the USA and Singapore. More Twi'leks there than on Ryloth is a reference to how there are more Irish Americans than Irish Nationals. Finally, don't worry, I will get to Ahsoka's mission and how things are going with her son.