The Original Side

To the robotic droid BD-72, the signal he’d received seemed to be both ‘spatially’ and ‘temporally’ displaced from his current situation. Spatially displaced he could understand and a negative temporal displacement coming from the past he could also accept, however the temporal displacement had a ‘positive vector component’ - meaning it came from the future. An alternative reading of the sensor data, BD-72 theorised, could be that it came from an alternative universe. Either of these scenarios could be registered in his processors factually, though the little BeeDee droid’s artificial intelligence registered alarms for the deviation to logic. In the end, he decided to ignore the alarms and progress as the signal had instructed:

To restructure the N-1 Starfighter (he’d only recently reconstructed).

Within his owner Peli Motto’s hanger, BD-72 was aided by an archaic ArFive unit and two unreliable Pit Droids, though BD-72 had never known any Pit Droids here on Tattoone that were reliable. The ArFive unit was a good companion, an Astromech droid with the designation R5-D4. It occasionally chimed that it had a greater purpose in the galaxy and had had a significant role in the fall of the Empire by aiding another Astromech and Protocol droid achieve their mission, but it all seemed too far-fetched to be logically true. Again, BD-72’s processors would accept it all as factual, though his artificial intelligence circuits accepted it less so.

BD-72 sent a signal over to both Pit Droids and R5-D4 to come and assist. The two Pit Droids were folded into their dormant state and upon receiving their signals both jumped into the air and changed into a more notable bipedal form. BD-72 beamed the schematics of the required changes to the ship’s structure to the other droids. R5-D4 signalled his protest to the changes and the reasoning behind them, but eventually BD-72 told him to shut up and do as was instructed as he was in charge.

The droids pulled apart panels of the ship that had only recently been attached together. They reconfigured components and added struts so that individual subsections could now additionally move and reconfigure the form of the shell of the ship. Watching from a distance was the green baby that the armoured warrior had brought with him. Grogu was the nomenclature that BD-72 understood the little creature had been assigned. Grogu sat in his egg-shaped hovering pram, observing the actions of the droids with an amused and intrigued expression. The armoured warrior had left Grogu here with Peli Motto whilst he went on some mission, which had been agreed with his master, though she herself had suddenly had to leave the hangar for her own activity and instructed the droids to watch over the green baby alien. That was when the signal had been received and the work progressed whilst Peli and the warrior were both absent. Grogu was no difficulty to oversee and indeed offered his own help by lifting larger sections of the ship when it could see the droids having difficulties to manage. How the little alien managed to achieve the lifting, BD-72 wasn’t aware but again his artificial intelligence decided to query it, yet accept it for fact.

Soon the ship was finished and sat in place exactly as it had done prior. From the outside there were zero notable differences in the form- all the changes were within the structure. There was one last instruction from the signal that BD-72 had received and that was to beam the signal itself over to the ship. Once complete, the ship suddenly activated all its internal computer systems and a voice, not unlike the one from the armoured warrior in his helmet, was heard. “Ok, let’s give this thing a spin. Are you coming kid?” The green baby alien smiled excitedly and then jumped out of its hover pram to fly through the air and land in a little socket on the top of the starfighter. A socket, typically used by the Astromech droids, that had been altered previously and had its hatch opened during the flight of the little alien. Grogu nestled into the ship and the hatch closed around it, with the ships two thrusters suddenly igniting and firing the ship out of the hangar and away from Tattoine.

—

In the depth of space, the starfighter spun and turned as it tested its aerodynamics. Again the voice was heard coming from the ship’s onboard computer systems, commenting “Not bad! Not bad at all”. Suddenly a red light on the dashboard started to flash and a klaxon started to sound. The ship, commenting to its sole passenger Grogu, noted, “Proximity alert. Two ships incoming on an intercept trajectory”.

From out of hyperspace the two vessels appeared.

“Vulture droids?” the ship queried. The two vessels had appearances of archaic fighter droids from the time of the Republic. These were automated battle droids that could reconfigure themselves as fighter craft for space battle. However, all battle droids had been deactivated at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire by order of the Emperor himself. How these two Vulture Droids were active was a cause of confusion for the sensors of the N-1 Starfighter. However, the ship didn’t have much time to analyse the discrepancy as the two droid fighters opened fire.

Preempting the attack plan of the droids, the ship skilfully rolled and turned evading the energy blasts from the Vulture Droids and outmanoeuvred their attack strategy. The ship then spun 180 degrees and brought its own front weapons to bear on one of the droid crafts and with multiple blasts of pure blue energy, destroyed the craft from existence.

The second Vulture Droid raised its head from the top of the fighter configuration and looked to the blaze of fire that had once been its companion on the mission. Sensors immediately began to recalculate the strategy and the droid began to spin and turn, it now outmanoeuvring the Naboobian Starfighter.

Despite its own twists and turns and firing multiple blue pulses of energy towards the Vulture Droid, the archaic craft was now successfully evading the N-1 Starfighter, much to the frustration of its passenger Grogu. Grogu let out a little squeal to the ship, which answered by saying, “Ok, new approach but you’ll need to step aside for this bit”. With that, the tail end of the Starfighter including the socket where Grogu was housed, were suddenly jettisoned from the rear of the Starfighter.

As Grogu was communicating his shock, thrusters beneath his socket unit fired and stabilised the little craft’s momentum. Grogu was then able to focus on what was happening with the remains of the Starfighter; Panels began to move and displace revealing the internal mechanisms that the droids had worked on only hours before. With multiple changes and reconfigurations of the ship’s form, where once had been the sleek design of the Naboo Starfighter, now stood a large bipedal robotic being. However, much to Grogu’s delight, the form had a distinct resemblance to its own master that had been supervising and looking after him for the recent year or so, that of the ancient warrior the Mandalorian Din Djarin.

The Mandalorian robotic form reached to his right leg where, as per his human counterpart, a holster housed a small hand-pistol. ‘Small’ being relative to the size of the robot form that now hung in space. With speed, the Mandalorian robot pulled the weapon from the holster and fired directly at the Vulture Droid which had not anticipated any of this sudden change in events and was instantly destroyed. “There, that’s a good test don’t you think?” the silvery-blue mechanoid commented to his small green organic companion. Grogu squeaked an acceptance and smiled at the larger being.

Within the chest panel of the Mandalorian robot and on what remained from the ships flight systems, the proximity alert once more flashed red and sounded an alarm. “Uh oh”, said the robot, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Suddenly, from out of hyperspace a giant spacecraft, an Imperial Star Destroyer no less, emerged. It too had sights on the smaller spacecraft now in a robot form and despite its increase in mass as a bipedal form, the Mandalorian robot was outsized and out weaponed by the large Imperial craft. But, whilst it’s logic circuits noted that the best strategic option was to change form back to the sleek Starfighter mode and head immediately to light speed, the form of the Imperial Star Destroyer started to change shape in front of the two companions. As the Starfighter had previously done, the larger vessel reconfigured its spacecraft form to a bipedal form. This too was a large robot but with two distinctions to the Mandalorian mechanoid. Firstly, in changing shape from a Star Destroyer the ship seemed to reduce in size such that the robot stood within space and, although larger than the Mandalorian, was relatively equal in size.

The other distinction was that the robotic form notably had the visage of a notorious Sith Lord- that of the rumoured deceased Darth Vader. Whilst the Mandalorian robot attempted to make sense of this change in circumstances and what it could mean for the greater galaxy, the Darth Vader mechanoid pulled a small cylinder from its side and lit a huge length of red energy beam. The beam expanded like a red flame and was swung towards the form of the Mandalorian. The smaller robot hastily jumped back, igniting jets on its back to quickly dodge the blade. From its left arm a large circular shield of pure blue energy emerged. The Mandalorian manoeuvred the shield to be between its form and the red blade of energy. The shield worked, rebounding the blade off its surface, though the momentum made both robots bounce backwards.

The Vader robot continued to attack and with each strike of his red energy blade, the Mandalorian ‘bot paried with his energy shield. However, with each attack the smaller robot looked to get weaker and weaker under the strength of the violent strikes of the red blade. Behind the Mandalorian ‘bot, and notably with the silvery-blue form between the Vader robot and itself, the smaller green alien looked on with concern. With each strike it winced in terror as its friend tried to recover.

Then suddenly with a shake of its head and realisation on its face, Grogu closed its eyes and raised its right arm horizontally in front of it, pointing all fingers towards the Vader robot.

As Vader raised his arm to strike a blow with his energy blade, the arm paused mid-stroke as if being pushed back by an invisible force. The head of the Vader ‘bot looked towards his arm, seemingly confused.

As it did so, sections of his robot form started to shake, slide and turn. The robot again started to change form though this time instead of changing to the form of a space-ship, it changed to another bipedal robotic form. A robotic form with a visage akin to the legendary Jedi Anakin Skywalker.

“Thank you!” the Anakin robot said in the direction of Grogu. He then turned his head and addressed the Mandalorian mechanoid, “I cannot hold this form for long as he’ll soon return and take over. But it’ll give me enough time to leap to hyperspace and get away from here. You must go too as he’ll immediately return to these coordinates.”

The Mandalorian robot nodded his head to the Anakin robot in a gesture of gratitude. The metallic voice, a variant of Din Djarin, said, “I won’t pretend to understand what just happened, but we’re eternally grateful,” gesturing to Grogu as he spoke.

The Anakin robot nodded and with some speed changed its form so that side panels that had surrounded it encased itself to create a different ship to that of the original vessel that had first appeared from hyperspace, that of a Jedi star cruiser.

The silver-blue form of the Mandlaroian robot tuned back to Grogu in its socket and scooped the capsule into its metallic hand carefully positioned it on the robot’s back as it too changed shape to become an N-1 Starfighter once more. “That was too close,” came the metallic voice of the real Mandalorian, “let’s get back to Tatooine.”

Its thrusters fired and the ship headed to the sandy surface of the nearby planet. As it landed, Peli Motto walked back into her hanger and saw dust settling underneath the underside of the Naboo Starfighter her droid team had recently renovated. The lid to the droid socket sprung open and Grogu gestured arms wide to be lifted out, which Peli happily obliged. “You been for a ride?” she asked puzzled. At that moment, BD-72 immediately skuttered over to a Pit Droid, gave it a short kick which caused the Pit Droid to sufficiently complain and make a cacophony of robotic noises that caught Peli Motto’s attention and thankfully left her question unanswered.

“You droids!” she said and each beeped a response that had significantly different meanings.

So this was my original planned story for this year’s May the Fourth celebration, though the Mandalorian Transformer never arrived in time. Hence “The Other Side” story which dovetails exactly with this. It’s also a form of follow-up to last year’s “More Machine.. than Man” though how they all fit together will be told another time.

My usual disclaimer: Transformers franchise is ownership of Hasbro / Takara Tomy. Additionally, Star Wars is ownership of Lucasfilm and now Disney. This is purely a piece of fan fiction, for fun (and no profit). All text is my own, images my own. AI image creating technology has been used to create the backgrounds for the Tattooine space hanger.