#34: Possessed helmet
It was a dark and stormy night. Actually, it was 1300 hours in the afternoon, but everyone was asleep because of planet time zone differences. The Ghost had exited hyperspace a few hours prior, and the crew was dozing in their cabins, desperately catching up on their sleep after being awake for an excruciating thirty-six hours straight. Not a being was stirring, not even an astromech.
Well, except for two mischievous teenagers.
Sabine and Ezra, although exhausted, could not fall asleep after the battle, perhaps because they were haunted by the death they had seen, or perhaps they were still on adrenaline. Either way, they were wide awake, and quite bored, on a virtually empty ship. Naturally, they decided to wreak havoc on the calm state of said ship and annoy their crewmates with chaos. The two youngest Spectres had assembled themselves in Sabine's cabin, since Zeb was asleep and snoring in the one he shared with Ezra.
"Now, what should we do?" Sabine wondered aloud, tapping her chin with a pencil.
"We could paint Zeb pink again," Ezra suggested.
"No, I'm out of pink paint, and I don't want Hera to force us to spend the rest of the day scrubbing the paint out of his bunk," Sabine rejected his idea. "We could put ketchup in the soap dispenser or replace Kanan's shaving cream with whipped cream."
"No, we need an immediate reaction, not something we'll have to wait until they wake up for," Ezra reasoned. "Besides, it's my shaving cream too!"
Sabine raised an eyebrow. "You shave? You're, like, twelve!"
"Twelve?" Ezra exclaimed, throwing his hands into the air. "I'm almost seventeen!"
Sabine glanced up at him, then at the family portrait she had painted a while back, which depicted Ezra flailing around as his fifteen-year-old self. "Huh. Same difference." She began chewing on the end of her pencil.
Ezra narrowed his eyes, but dropped the subject. "Ew, why are you eating that pencil? That's gross!"
"You're gross!"
"Am not!"
"Are so!"
"Am not!"
"Are so!"
"Am not!"
"Are so!"
Their argument paused as Ezra's eyes landed on one of Sabine's paintings: a stormtrooper helmet with a red x over it. "Hey, we could use one of my stormtrooper helmets. I think your list had some ideas about pranking people."
"Good idea," Sabine agreed and began rummaging through her desk drawers. "I have another copy in here, somewhere…" Finally, she located the elusive scrap of flimsy and found the number she was looking for.
#34: Possessed helmet- Place a helmet over a holovid, so it will look like it has flashing blue eyes. Prank people with it. ("Hey guys, I'd like you to meet my friend, Bob." *uses the Force to bring possessed floating head into room*)
Sabine and Ezra looked at each other and grinned twin grins of evil.
l-o-l (-o-) l-o-l
Twenty minutes later, the teenagers were lying in the ventilation shafts above Ezra and Zeb's cabin, accompanied by six holoprojectors and remotes, Hera's voice distortion device, some smoke grenades, speakers, and Sabine's datapad, which contained recordings of creepy sound effects. They scrutinized Zeb for a while to make sure he was asleep, then put their plan into action.
Ezra levitated Sabine's smoke grenades into the room and set them quietly on the floor. The holoprojectors and voice distorter soon followed, instead floating into six of the stormtrooper helmets stacked unassumingly in the corner.
"Three, two, one," Sabine whispered, and pressed the button to detonate the smoke grenades, which went off with a crack. Red smoke shot out from the small metal sphere and filled the room. Ezra levitated the holo-filled helmets towards Zeb in a pyramid formation as Sabine began playing her creepy sound effects through the speakers and turning on the holoprojectors with the remote controls. Blue lights began flashing from out the bottom of the helmets and through the eye holes. Zeb turned in his sleep, disturbed by the bright lights. Sabine grinned evilly and tapped her datapad, and a chorus of menacing cackles filled the room.
"Wha—? Huh?" Zeb mumbled, blinking sleepily. "Wha's goin' on?" The helmets continued to advance towards the still-sluggish Lasat, who rubbed his eyes in confusion.
"Wooooooooo! We have come to eat your soul!" Ezra said creepily into the voice distorter, then buried his face in his arms in an attempt to stifle his laughter. Sabine tapped her datapad again, and the sounds of thunder echoed off the metal walls. Zeb jumped, startled, then swung a large paw towards the floating helmets, but they floated away, just out of reach. "What kind of sorcery is this?" He reached for his bo-rifle, but Sabine detonated another smoke grenade before he could shoot the helmets. Another tap to the datapad, and the fearsome roar of a rancor was added to the cacophony. Ezra changed the settings on the voice distortion device and began chanting "Death, death, death, death," which echoed in a myriad of ghoulish voices, followed by a series of eerie laughs from the datapad.
Zeb growled, furious and confused, and dove for the floating helmets, which were now bobbing up and down in a bizarre pattern. He missed, and instead landed on another one of Sabine's smoke grenades, which detonated in his face. The enraged Lasat, now covered in red powder, began attacking everything within reach, his fists colliding with the walls, floor, and his bunk, but never the helmets. For the grand finale, Sabine pressed the thunder sound effect one last time, and Ezra reached out with the Force, levitated the glass of water on the table beside the bunks, and upended it onto Zeb's head. The Lasat yelped in surprise as the frigid water shocked him out of his sleep-induced confusion, and the thought suddenly occurred to him that perhaps these strange happenings were being brought about by an outside source.
"Sabine! Ezra! You nerf herding laserbrains!" he growled, looking up on Ezra's bunk, then under his own. He kicked over Ezra's pyramid of extra helmets, which, until then, had somehow remained intact throughout the ordeal. "Where are they?"
"Go, go, go, go, go!" Sabine hissed at Ezra as they army crawled their way through the vents at a Hutt's pace. Since they had both been facing the vent, Ezra had to shuffle backwards, so he began pelting his infinite supply of helmets at Zeb with the Force to buy them some time. The resulting screeches could be heard throughout the ship. Ezra started to laugh but ended up banging his head on the top of the ventilation shaft. The pranksters froze. Unfortunately, it was too late; the Lasat's sharp hearing had picked up on the sound.
"I heard that! I know you're up there!" Zeb hollered, pounding on the vent he could not fit into. Realizing the futility of his actions, he quickly devised a new plan. The Lasat sprang into action, sprinting down the hall to the 'fresher, where he grabbed a few choice items. He then entered Sabine's cabin, which he assumed was the mischievous teenagers' destination.
Up in the vents, they reached a three-way intersection, where the vents had more space, so they were able to crawl on their hands and knees. Ezra managed to turn around so he wouldn't have to crawl backwards, and they were able to progress faster.
"How much farther?" Sabine hollered; they had abandoned all hopes of secrecy for speed some time ago.
"We're almost there!" Ezra replied. "I can see a light around the corner, literally!" He could also hear a strange spraying noise from ahead of them, but he disregarded it and continued on. Suddenly, as they rounded the corner, he saw a giant pile of shaving cream surrounding the vent into Sabine's cabin. "Wait! Stop!" he shouted to Sabine, but it was too late. She collided into him, and he faceplanted into the shaving cream. Ezra squawked and spat it out.
"What's going on?" Sabine demanded.
"Zeb blocked the entrance with shaving cream, and now it's all over my face and in my hair!" he practically wailed. They heard their crewmate's chuckles from below them, followed by the whoosh of the door as he exited the room.
"Can you go around it?"
"No, it's everywhere! Back up!" They began shuffling backwards, this time going even slower than before. After an undetermined but seemingly infinite amount of time, they reached the vent above Ezra and Zeb's cabin.
"Haar'chak!" Sabine shouted, as her socks became coated in toothpaste. "There's toothpaste everywhere! I told you we should have worn shoes!"
"No, he would have heard our every move with those clunky boots of yours!"
"Whatever, let's just go to the common room!" They inched forwards again, then turned a corner to see the heavenly, phenomenal, overwhelmingly remarkable sight of a ventilation opening that was not covered in various toiletry products.
They dropped into the room with a sigh of relief, only to inhale a gasp of panic.
This was not the common room.
It was Kanan and Hera's cabin.
The Jedi and the twi'lek captain, still in their clothes from after the long battle, had fallen asleep in each other's arms on the bottom bunk after Hera had carefully bandaged the wound on Kanan's shoulder and he had done the same to her lek. Surprisingly, Kanan wasn't even drooling, and they seemed content in their gross romanticness.
Ezra opened his mouth, probably to utter a squawk of horror over their unintended destination, but Sabine shushed him. "Shut up and run, you di'kut!" she whispered frantically, making a dash for the door. In her haste, she did not realize that the cabin's inhabitants had locked the door, so it would not open automatically. She collided with the metal at full speed and yelped in pain.
"You shut up! You'll wake them!" Ezra hissed. He hurried over to the door's control panel. Since it was the captain's cabin, there was an assortment buttons with letters that were apparently for a password. After trying "C1-10P," "Ghost," "Spectres," and "Kanan," none of which worked, he pounded the buttons with his fist. "Open! Open! Open!" he commanded the door.
Disregarding her lack of shoes, Sabine kicked the door forcefully, which had absolutely no effect on it besides a footprint of toothpaste left on the metal. It did, however, have a rather painful effect on her foot, and the resulting collision between said foot and the door produced an awful pounding noise, which startled the sleeping Spectres into consciousness quite abruptly.
"What is going on here?" Hera demanded. The two teenagers stared up at her, their eyes filled with terror.
"Uh…Zeb, he, uh, trapped us in the vents," Sabine stuttered. "We thought this was the common room!"
"Just let us out, please!" Ezra begged, his face still covered in shaving cream. She narrowed her eyes, but wordlessly strode to the door controls and pressed the "open" button.
The two youngest Spectres continued staring at her in shock. "Oh," said Ezra obliviously. "I knew that." They then proceeded to flee from the room as fast as humanly possible.
When the arrived in the safety of the common room, Sabine breathed a sigh of relief. "Wow, we actually got away with it!" However, her assessment way quite incorrect.
Ezra, Sabine, and Zeb spent the entirety of the next day scrubbing toothpaste, shaving cream, and red powder off every surface in Zeb and Ezra's cabin and the ventilation shafts, while Chopper warbled his mechanical laughs psychotically in the background and Hera and Kanan looked on in cruel satisfaction.
They did not get away with it.
Author's Note: Thank you to Guest for suggesting this chapter. Please give feedback so I can improve my writing! Also, if you choose a favorite use out of the list of helmet uses in a review, I will write a chapter based on it. The next chapter will be on #19, followed by #36. Thank you for reading!