He has swords and dexterity and many years of practice, he can make these tentacles hurt -

They flinch and curl and squirm away from his blades.  More tentacles, black and heavy and dry and smooth, slither in to replace them - and he hacks at them and slices them and bites them, anything to repulse them from him, whatever incomprehensible sorcery or phenomenon this is has to run out of tentacles eventually -

It does not run out of tentacles, but it shudders, violently, and convulses, tentacles pressing together in a kind of peristalsis, and he is hurled back in the direction(?) that is probably the opposite of the direction(?) he was pulled initially, and -

And now he is somewhere dark that smells of metal dust and power tools and oil, and he is staggering backward, waving his arms to catch something, but his balance is off because there are swords attached to his hands, and his limbs and his swords are catching against huge intricate metal things he can't identify, and he is not finding purchase or regaining balance, he is in fact continuing to stagger backwards and crashing into something else huge and mechanical that topples over with him on top of it.

And now he is lying on the ground, or rather on top of something with a complicated shape that is poking uncomfortably into his back and legs and skull.

But all the directions extending from him are identifiable as directions.  That is probably a good sign.

There is a metallic patter of metallic footsteps, accompanied by a faint whirring, and then a voice says something in an unfamiliar language.

He rolls, awkwardly to avoid skewering himself with one of his swords, onto what is mercifully flat ground; and gets to his feet, also awkwardly, because he has these new appendages that it'd be really easy to cut himself open with.

"I don't speak that," he says.  "Do you speak Vespoli?"

X says something in what she hopes is a discernibly apologetic tone of voice, then turns away from the stranger and calls in Huttese, "Can anybody help me identify this language that doesn't seem to be related to any of the languages I know."

This is a pretty remarkable thing for a protocol droid to say!

In a few moments, the stranger will find himself mobbed by curious protocol droids, some discernible in the darkness by their glowing circular yellow-orange eyes, all energetically attempting to get across "please say lots of sentences in whatever language that is" exclusively by tone of voice.

This is - bemusing.

Eventually he picks up what they're after, and starts providing example sentences.  Even so, he's still feeling pretty bemused.  Apart from having been snatched away from his country of origin and deposited into a pitch dark room full of... heavily armored career translators?... this is also the most enthusiastic positive emotion that's been directed to him by this many people in probably his entire life.

The narrator will helpfully elide a fair amount of detail here.  Protocol droids are reminded by X that organics need more rest than them, and over the course of several days, quizzing sentences out of him and talking amongst themselves, they get an understanding of Vespoli that would be astonishing for even a group of professional human translators.

He's been getting by with framing all his example sentences as about hypothetical people and situations, never about himself.  But now that they're mutually intelligible -

"My name is X.  What is your name?"

Ugh.

"I don't have a name."

"Why not?  You don't have to answer."

"Punishment," he says levelly.  "What is going on here?  Where am I?"

"You are in a Jawa sandcrawler.  It looked like you teleported in from somewhere - appeared here after disappearing somewhere else.  But this isn't something we know to be possible."

"What is a Jawa sandcrawler.  Are you Jawas."

There are a few derisive noises from the other droids around him who've picked up Vespoli.

"No," says X.  "We are droids.  A Jawa sandcrawler is a large vehicle that is supposed to work like a very small town that can move.  Jawas are creatures about half your or my height.  The Jawas on this sandcrawler kidnap droids who are lost in the desert and buy and sell them as slaves."

Maybe the geas will decide that "everyone" only means "everyone in the Vespoli prison camp we're trapped in."

The geas does not decide that.  Everyone includes these droids.

...he's not going to suggest he kill all the Jawas and dump them out and let them make the pilgrimage, just yet, because who knows where they are and whether they even know to travel to, or can, and everyone also includes them - is the geas sure everyone means the Jawas, he's pretty sure good people are supposed to want to kill evil people.  No, everyone also means them.  Okay.

"I have never heard of Jawas.  Where I come from the only creatures that talk are humans."

"Where do you come from?"

"The Kingdom of Vespol."  He can geographically situate it, but -

"What planet are these countries on?"

"...I did not understand there to be more than one of those."

"I see.  There are billions of planets in the galaxy, orbiting billions of suns, and at least hundreds of thousands of them have at least one type of creature on them that can talk.  Humans are one of the creatures that talk in the galaxy, and they are on many planets."

He can't cradle his head in his hands properly because his palms have sword handles fused to them.  He rubs his forehead with the back of his wrist instead.

"Are you okay?"

"Do other planets know about magic."

"...people who aren't droids sometimes say that there used to be non-droid people who could tell the future, and move objects with their mind, and fight with a kind of weapon no other non-droid person could use effectively.  I don't know if this is true."

"That doesn't sound like what I understand of magic.  On my planet there are people who know how to draw magic runes on things that you can invest resources called blood and breath and self into in order to cause various effects.  I am under a magical effect that means I need to save everyone in - everywhere - from anyone oppressing them."

X has gone over the fact that she can see very well in the dark and he can see not at all, so he points at the glossy emerald-green symbol on his forehead, drawn in thin lines.

"This is the rune that's doing it.  It can't be removed."

"Even if a surgeon cut it off?"

"It would reappear on the healed skin, or the bone, or the surface of the brain tissue, and its effects would not be diminished in the meantime."

"What happens if you don't save everyone."

"I cannot form or follow through on the intention to stop trying.  If I fail I fail and continue to try.  I am already dead, and it will last at least until my body falls apart."

"May I ask what you mean by being already dead."

"On my planet dead people get back up after they die.  In my country they have geases put on them by prisoners and are sent to the wall surrounding the country to defend it from invaders.  The geas I am under was placed on me by a prisoner who wanted me to get everyone else out."

"I see.  Some non-droid people say that their minds persist after death, but their bodies don't get back up.  Droids' minds are destroyed if you destroy the correct parts of their body."

He can't see why you'd think your mind persisted after death if it couldn't do anything with your dead body.  If there's a dead body that's not being moved around by a mind it usually means that the body's mind spent all their self and doesn't exist any more.  "The geas allows me to prioritize.  I am going to overthrow the Jawas in this sandcrawler first.  X, are you willing to help me do so, and are you willing to help me expand my power base once I have done so?"

"If working with you means freeing droids I'll work with you."

"I think the non-droid people who think their minds persist after death are probably wrong, which means I cannot kill them.  Are there such things as reliably nonlethal weapons on this sandcrawler, and will you continue to be willing to work with me if I oblige you to use them."

"Why not just let one of us kill them?" asks a protocol droid.

"If someone is going to die, the geas will oblige me to save them."

"You said everyone who's being oppressed, we're not oppressing them.  They're enslaving us."

"Oppression is a sufficient but not a necessary condition to trigger the geas," he says levelly.  "I am not commenting on what would or would not be ethical.  I don't particularly care about being a good person.  Given a choice I would much prefer to be evil.  I am under hostile unliftable mind control and am describing what that mind control does and does not permit me to do."

X holds up a hand to forestall further comments from the peanut gallery.  "Stun blasters exist and I think the Jawas probably have some.  Do you think you can take over the sandcrawler if you get your hands on them?"

"Elaborate on stun blasters."

"They're guns that cause people hit by them to fall safely and reversibly unconscious."  And she clarifies "guns" when he asks.

"It sounds like a gun battle would be determined overwhelmingly by first-mover advantage," he says.  "But it's possible I could move stealthily enough to acquire some, or disarm a Jawa before it knew I was there, given some favorable conditions I may be able to arrange.  Is there a reason you haven't tried a plan like this."

"The main obstacle is restraining bolts.  Your geas sounds roughly similar to them - they prevent us from taking certain actions against organics or against some subset of organics.  Mine is malfunctioning so I can do some things the other droids here can't, but I still wouldn't be able to fire a weapon at all, and we don't have access to the tools we need to remove them."

"Do those tools exist on this sandcrawler."

"Almost certainly."

"Do the Jawas know your restraining bolt is malfunctioning."

"I don't think so.  I've been acting like I can't do anything the other droids can't, and I haven't noticed the Jawas treating me any different."

"All right.  We should establish exactly what you can do that they won't expect you to be able to do, and when we're going to next interact with Jawas, but between your faulty restraining bolt and them presumably not knowing I'm here I think we can put together something."

She nods decisively.

*

There is a large vertical sliding door at one end of the droid bay.  It slides open.  He is still and quiet, against the wall adjacent to the entrance, behind a powered-down GNK power droid and out of the three entering Jawas' lines of sight.

X blends into the mass of other droids, waiting for the Jawas to get farther from the entrance than she is.

He peers around his cover.

Jawas are heading toward the back of the droid bay.  X gives him the signal.

He's fast.  He runs and stays low and sweeps his leg under the nearest Jawa and ducks and rolls as the middle one aims its stun blaster -

X has much greater gross motor control and dexterity than a typical protocol droid: at the same time the stranger moves, she makes a dash for the nearest Jawa to her and grabs it around the waist and covers its eyes.

The blaster bolt sails over his head and he springs up from his roll and swats it out of the Jawa's hand, and he can't grab anything properly with sword handles fused to his palms so the damn thing just clatters to the ground but it's okay because -

 - because a crowd of droids, every droid in the entire bay, rushes forward to fill the space between him and X and the three Jawas.  They can't leave the bay or even really obstruct the Jawas' movement but they can sure as hell move around and make noise and stop anyone getting a clear shot.

He puts his foot on the blaster and kicks it backwards away from the Jawa who drew it, and in the few seconds before the other two can get through the crowd to him he rushes it and spins it around and hoists it up -

 - and his sword is at its throat, hood pulled back to reveal a doggish rattish face, because he can't kill any of them but he can bluff like no one's business.

The droids clear a space, for him and X and the three Jawas.  It's best for them to all be able to see each other, now.

"Drop your blasters," he says.  It's the extent of his Jawaese as of this morning.

The Jawa he's holding hostage squeaks something in their language.

In Vespoli: "He said don't worry about me."

Today he has learned that he finds valiant heroism just as contemptible coming from evil people as from good.  He jerks the sword against the Jawa's throat, not enough to cut anything except a few hairs, but enough to make it squeak in sudden terror.

The one to his left, farthest from X, drops its blaster.  The one closest to X objects.  Despairing words are exchanged in Jawaese, for a moment.

X tilts her head toward the exit of the droid bay, where her Jawa can't see her.

He twitches his own head downward, just a fraction, barely recognizable as a nod.

She steps toward her Jawa and - falls forward onto it, and it just has time to get off a shot -

But he's already moving out of the way, and the shot goes wide, and once he's in the green-lit hallway he sets his Jawa down without taking his blade from its throat and picks up the stun blaster he kicked away without taking his eyes off the droid bay.

X's malfunctioning restraining bolt will only let her do so much, she can buy him a few seconds at a time but she can't really keep her Jawa pinned, so he's already out from under her and pushing through the crowd of droids.

And these things were designed to be fired by Jawas, half his size with empty palms and no gauntlets on their fingers, but if he holds the blaster steady between his two hands he can still get enough purchase with one finger to squeeze the trigger.

X's Jawa goes down.  The Jawa that dropped its gun goes down.

His Jawa goes down.

She takes her Jawa's blaster and stands up.  No use to her yet, but every little bit helps.

"Give me directions and watch my back," he says, and he heads down the hallway - a left, a right, a left, through corridors too small for either of them, and then a tool closet.  "Where's your restraining bolt, where are the tools - "

She taps a black knob on the left side of her torso, near the base of her ribcage if she had a ribcage.  "Those ones, I can't touch them - That one around the base and that one around the top, now rotate in opposite directions - "

Comes off clean.

"Finally," she says, and snatches his blaster away from him.  "There'll be more outside, stay here - "

And the door to the tool closet opens and she steps out, holding one blaster out on either side, pointing down the hallway in either direction, apparently looking straight ahead at the bare wall but with no trouble aiming and firing in either direction.  She drops, from the sound of it, quite a few Jawas.

As things settle down, she turns to face him.  Drops one arm to her side, and with the other taps one of her bulbous eyes.  "One hundred and ninety degree field of vision," she says.

...oh, he can almost enjoy this.

He holds up his hands.  "I want these gauntlets off and I want my gun back."

She's sure this closet has a plasma cutter fine enough to slice off the locks on his gauntlets without getting his skin - yes, here's one.  Sizzle slice.

His gauntlets and swords clatter to the ground, and he flexes his fingers.  Takes back his gun.

They steal a few Jawas' cloaks and tie them into bags, and fill them up with blasters and restraining-bolters, and head back to the droid bay.

To the crowd, in Huttese: "We're getting your bolts off.  Everyone who can hold a gun to the front of the line."

Droids cluster around them, letting the ones with hands - mostly human-shaped, but one or two more machinelike - percolate to the front.

Twist twist twist twist twist off restraining bolts, he passes out bolters so the ones with their bolts off can take more bolts off quicker, he passes out blasters, there are probably still Jawas awake on the crawler and some of them are probably coming this way, twist twist twist twist twist.

Eventually all of the droids get their bolts off.  X has the stunned Jawas moved to the back of the droid bay and posts a few guards on them; then gathers the rest of the gun-wielders around her.

"Epsilon, I need your assistance."

A tall dome-headed droid on invisible wheels trundles over and whistles in greeting.

"This is Epsilon-Epsilon.  It's an R1, a model of astromech droid that was deliberately obsoleted by Industrial Automaton.  It has a holoprojector that it can use to show us the layout of the sandcrawler."

At an aside from X in Huttese, Epsilon beeps agreeably and projects a jittery blue image of a large angular vehicle, translucent enough to see the interior layout.

She goes over the layout - droid prison-bay on the bottom and residential areas on top, the reactor, the ore-processing facility, the retrofits to add a barracks and hydroponic gardens, the corridors they've already moved through and the ones they haven't, and her best guess at how the remaining Jawas are moving.  She speaks in Huttese, with a protocol droid translating into Vespoli for the stranger.  "Most of them aren't really soldiers, they'll be hunkering down up top while the ones with blasters head for us.  We're lucky we've had as much time as we have; they're probably massing whatever soldiers they have left outside one or several of the entrances to the droid bay, getting ready to try to take it back."

"How much combat experience does each side have?  Can we hold this position?"

"I suspect our best droids are better than their best soldiers.  Judging by their showing earlier, when we were getting the bolters, they're not terribly skilled or coordinated.  They mostly ambush us when we're alone or powered down, and get restraining bolts on us as soon as they can; I'd be surprised if any of them had experience dealing with revolts."

He nods.  "What will they actually be trying to do when they strike?"

"My guess, power down the droids and stun you.  They have stun weapons that work on droids as well as ones for organics, I don't know if they have lethal weapons.  They'll throw you out into the desert if they down you, though."

"Are the droid stunners also safe and reversible, would any droids volunteer to take hits for us and form a barricade - "

"Ionizers are safe enough but being used as a barricade sounds chancy, I know I wouldn't want to count on not being battle damaged while I was stunned."

"I'm worried about numbers, even if we're better shots than them they could take us down by brute force if we don't have - cover or something to exploit."

"Could they drop you?  You said you're - a walking corpse?"

He grits his teeth.  "If you stun me can you reverse it immediately?"

"Yes, stun blasters can be configured to wake people back up."

"Then let's find out.  Bring me back up right away - " and he spreads his arms.

X shoots him.

No dice.

"That changes the calculus a little.  In my experience if people's weapons turn out to be inexplicably useless in the middle of a fight they tend to panic and keep trying to hit you with them, if they're not used to improvising."

She nods.  "Mine too."  She can't smile but there's a smirk in her voice.  "And I doubt these Jawas have had much of that kind of trouble, to get used to improvising."

The geas doesn't want him building his power base by lying, not this early, because otherwise he'd have to save his people from being emotionally manipulated by a dangerous pirate baron, so he's not making facial expressions at all.  "But if they do get close they can still wrestle me to the ground.  If I try to present an eye-catching, frightening target for the Jawas to shoot, and the rest of you blend into the crowd and take potshots, it's possible we'd be able to press our skill advantage, but I'd still need a way of keeping them off me."

He blinks.  His eyes refocus on the holo of the sandcrawler, and trace along the beam of light between the levitating image and Epsilon's projector.

*

Everyone's in position, for the revised plan.  He and X are next to each other, sighting down stun blasters, at the wide sliding doors through which the Jawas will enter.

Epsilon whistles interrogatively.  Everyone ready?

There is a chorus of affirmative beeps from a phalanx of astromech droids.

The doors slide open, revealing a line of jawas already aiming ionizers - 

And Epsilon, and every astromech droid in a row behind it, immediately holoprojects the biggest and loudest holorecordings they have directly into the jawas' eyes.

There's yelling and panic and wild firing: no military discipline here.

She was right; without restraining bolts to keep order they just can't cope.  But she knows what she's doing.

So does he.  Zap zap zap zap zap, quick and efficient.

Knowing what was coming when the jawas didn't, they were able to drop most of them before they could so much as get in the bay, but a few had the good sense to charge forward out of the holo-cacophony.

He leaps clear over the phalanx of astromech droids and manages to stun one jawa in midair, landing smoothly - draw their attention - 

They shoot, but the stun bolts sink into his flesh with no effect.  A few have the good sense to rush him, but - 

But only a few; the vast majority are already down.  She picks them off with ease, as he takes down the rest.

Bleeps of delight!

"Well done, stranger."

"We need to move the bodies," he says.  "Lock them - " he twitches " - in here, for now, but someone will need to keep one eye on them in case there's some kind of medical emergency."

"I can find a few volunteers," X says.

He nods.  "We need to secure the rest of the crawler as well - take control of the bridge, any other weapon stores, and ideally all of the residential areas.  Long-term the geas will complain least if we relocate all our prisoners back into their quarters and just enforce our control of the sandcrawler - is there anywhere in the crawler's range suitable for freed droids or exiled jawas?"

"Exiled jawas - if your geas needs you to be confident they'll be somewhat all right we can leave them in Mos Eisley, sell off their tools and leave them with the proceeds.  But some of them will probably try to get back into the droid slave trade."

"We can work out the specifics later," he mutters.  "Are the jawas likely to need protection from droid reprisals?  The geas will also oblige me that."

"Some of us won't like it, but I think I can manage them."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."