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“Etté Zirach, Sixth Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”
0 reviewsThis is fifteen random but chronological moments from the life of Etté Zirach, who is, quite literally, the sixth handmaiden in the third training class of potential handmaidens chosen from among ...
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“Etté Zirach, Sixth Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”
01.) Family: She is one of the few true foundlings of Naboo, taken at (or just after, according to the Healer who examined her soon after she was found and who went on to become her private family Healer) birth and literally left on the doorstep of a somewhat minor (if well-heeled) noble family in Theed with nothing but a basket and blanket pinned with a note containing her name and the legend “half Corellian” on it, and, though, the family felt obliged to take her in and she has never wanted for any worldly goods, she has also never felt truly completely welcome or at home in the Nhaven household, either, and so she is extremely glad when a chance finally comes for her to get out of there that does not involve selling herself into marriage with some brainless dolt of a younger son of some “suitable” noble family (which is, as she has constantly been told, as high a station as she dare aspire to, in life) or else running away like some ridiculous teenaged heroine in a romance novel.
02.) Prospects: The Nhavens do their best to keep her from applying for the position (as they aren’t quite sure that they approve of this passionately outspoken new Queen or of the propriety of having a noble daughter – even a foundling such as herself – serving as a handmaiden for a girl from a family that apparently used to farm their own vegetables, up in the mountains), but she wears them down by pointing out how much better her prospects might be, after serving in the royal court, and they finally give her permission to apply after wrangling a promise out of her to be on the watch for any suitors suitable for her youngest, as yet unpromised and unmarried (being not quite eleven and a half) foster sister, Lehari Nhaven, and to send word to them about any such eligible bachelors and even to do her best to arrange a meeting with the family for any prospective matches she and Mother deem to be a truly wonderful potential catch.
03.) Hesitate: Lehari (who is as close to her as a real sister and quite nearly as rebellious and unhappy in the family as she is) is the only one she will miss at all, but Etté knows her own worth, knows that she is meant for more and for better than the end that her so-called family has in mind for her, and so she doesn’t hesitate for very long before submitting her application for the handmaiden training program, soothing her conscience by promising herself she will figure out a way to get her little sister out of that family that doesn’t involve letting their mother marry Lehari off to the highest, most properly connected bidder.
04.) Dangerous: She looks rather as if someone took a model of the Queen, stretched her out just a little, painted her skin a light, dusky caramel, made her curves a bit more obviously voluptuous, and then breathed life into her, and Etté knows that this will make her more likely to be called upon for the more dangerous decoy duties than others of the handmaidens are likely to be, but she is brave, and she knows that she is clever enough and quick enough to be able to defend herself ably, if only given a chance, so she doesn’t mind the possibility of extra danger too terribly much, and hopes only that she will be able to acquit herself well, if called upon to protect the Queen in such a way.
05.) Accepted: She’s missed the cut-off date for the first two training classes and is cutting it close to that of the third, so she’s not too surprised or disappointed to find herself accepted into the second half of the third class.
06.) Magnificence: The Queen is . . . is . . . words absolutely fail to describe her magnificence, and the thought that this is someone she can adore with her whole being and feel worthy of dying for is one that she holds close to her heart
07.) Home: She’s never thought of herself as the kind of foolish creature prone to inexplicable crushes, and yet, in the day and a half she is at the Palace, waiting for her training class to finish gathering so they can be taken to their place of instruction, she finds herself all but falling in love with three separate people, and it’s a little bit disconcerting to realize how easily and how happily she could make herself a permanent home here, so long as she has her sworn lady and Dormé and Aideé all close by her.
08.) Survive: She is intelligent, an accomplished dancer, a graceful rider of gualamas able to successfully fly a twirrl on even the roughest of twirrling hunts and even capable of hitting and taking down a waterfowl on the wing with a single shot from either a blaster or an old-fashioned pistol nine times out of ten; yet, she lacks the endurance and physical discipline that Dormé and Aideé have in spades, and, if it were not for Dormé’s careful encouragement and Aideé’s open admiration of her perseverance, she is not sure she would be able to survive this punishingly hard crash course in defensive and offensive weaponry and tactics.
09.) Safety: She doesn’t need to be sensitive to the flows of the Force to know that some kind of awful confrontation between the Trade Federation and her planet is brewing, and so she quiets her conscience by getting the Nhaven family out of Theed and into the country – supposedly for a vacation at one of the Barakis family summer villas (an arrangement she and Aideé managed to set up, between the two of them, with a bit of help from her foster sister, Lehari, and from Aideé’s brother, Kason), but in actuality to get them somewhere they will be able to safely hide – thus killing two birds with one stone, by providing her foster family with a place of safety, in case the Trade Federation does something unconscionably stupid (like attacking the planet), and by giving her little sister a way out of her family and into a clan that will allow her to be herself, whether she wishes to join the Barakis family by impressing them enough to get them to issue her a formal invitation of fosterage among them (something that will not be difficult to arrange, given how well Lehari gets on with Aideé’s adoptive family) or by eventually handfasting that wonderfully funny and smart young Kason (who can make Lehari laugh like no one else).
10.) Back: She was at the Palace for just over a day and a half before they left for Varykino, arriving early in the evening, and they are there for no much longer, having give full days of training before being abruptly told (at breakfast on the sixth day) that they are going back to the Palace and will be departing at the tenth hour.
11.) Doom: She knows something is wrong even before the alarms begin to blare, and that sickening sense of impending doom swells and swells and swells until it finally explodes with a square collision with a blaster bolt she keeps from hitting Dormé by deliberately placing herself between the girl and the traitor wielding the weapon.
12.) Sensation: She surfaces from darkness slowly, to the strange sensation of feeling no physical pain but of having a strangely bitter medicinal taste coating the whole of her throat and tongue, to find that twenty-seven days have passed since her wounding (and that there were those who thought she would die of either fever or sepsis, no matter how much bacta they used on her), Aideé has been slain, the Queen has outsmarted and defeated the Trade Federation (droid armies and all), Sabé Dahn has been appointed interim Senator (not only for Naboo but the whole of the Chommell Sector) in Palpatine’s place due to a Amidala instigating a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum and Palpatine being elected Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic in his stead and the people of Naboo uniting behind a rather righteously indignant Horace Vancil to unilaterally vote to refuse to allow the patently prejudiced against non-humans Janus Greejatus of Chommell Minor to represent them in the Galactic Senate, Dormé has been made the Queen’s new primary decoy (specifically chosen for this duty by Sabé), and that she (Etté, that is) will likely never regain the full use of her left arm again because her wound was too deep and left so long virtually untreated that there was irreparable muscle loss and damage.
13.) Reassignment: The Queen would retire her “honorably” if Etté would let her, but Etté will not hear of it, half useless left arm or not, and it is Sabé who finally arrives at a compromise they can all live with, inviting Etté to accept an invitation for reassignment to the ranks of instructors for the new handmaidens as a combination teacher of riding, dancing, and protocol.
14.) Retire: The Nhaven family wants her to retire so that she can parlay her notoriety as a loyal handmaiden wounded during the occupation of Naboo into a good marriage, and she is so incredibly insulted by the notion that she finally loses her temper and threatens to sever all ties with them, if they don’t drop the subject immediately and for good.
15.) Deadly: The Nhavens don’t have to live long with the social stigma of having a partially crippled daughter working for the Queen: a year, seven months, and ten days after her acceptance of the teaching post, she stumbles upon one of the newest handmaiden trainees as she’s trying to poison the Lake House Retreat’s water supply, and, though she is quick to act and as deadly a shot as ever, it cannot quite save her from being mortally wounded by a foe prepared to act with deadly force when she is not particularly expecting to have to deal with any such threat.
01.) Family: She is one of the few true foundlings of Naboo, taken at (or just after, according to the Healer who examined her soon after she was found and who went on to become her private family Healer) birth and literally left on the doorstep of a somewhat minor (if well-heeled) noble family in Theed with nothing but a basket and blanket pinned with a note containing her name and the legend “half Corellian” on it, and, though, the family felt obliged to take her in and she has never wanted for any worldly goods, she has also never felt truly completely welcome or at home in the Nhaven household, either, and so she is extremely glad when a chance finally comes for her to get out of there that does not involve selling herself into marriage with some brainless dolt of a younger son of some “suitable” noble family (which is, as she has constantly been told, as high a station as she dare aspire to, in life) or else running away like some ridiculous teenaged heroine in a romance novel.
02.) Prospects: The Nhavens do their best to keep her from applying for the position (as they aren’t quite sure that they approve of this passionately outspoken new Queen or of the propriety of having a noble daughter – even a foundling such as herself – serving as a handmaiden for a girl from a family that apparently used to farm their own vegetables, up in the mountains), but she wears them down by pointing out how much better her prospects might be, after serving in the royal court, and they finally give her permission to apply after wrangling a promise out of her to be on the watch for any suitors suitable for her youngest, as yet unpromised and unmarried (being not quite eleven and a half) foster sister, Lehari Nhaven, and to send word to them about any such eligible bachelors and even to do her best to arrange a meeting with the family for any prospective matches she and Mother deem to be a truly wonderful potential catch.
03.) Hesitate: Lehari (who is as close to her as a real sister and quite nearly as rebellious and unhappy in the family as she is) is the only one she will miss at all, but Etté knows her own worth, knows that she is meant for more and for better than the end that her so-called family has in mind for her, and so she doesn’t hesitate for very long before submitting her application for the handmaiden training program, soothing her conscience by promising herself she will figure out a way to get her little sister out of that family that doesn’t involve letting their mother marry Lehari off to the highest, most properly connected bidder.
04.) Dangerous: She looks rather as if someone took a model of the Queen, stretched her out just a little, painted her skin a light, dusky caramel, made her curves a bit more obviously voluptuous, and then breathed life into her, and Etté knows that this will make her more likely to be called upon for the more dangerous decoy duties than others of the handmaidens are likely to be, but she is brave, and she knows that she is clever enough and quick enough to be able to defend herself ably, if only given a chance, so she doesn’t mind the possibility of extra danger too terribly much, and hopes only that she will be able to acquit herself well, if called upon to protect the Queen in such a way.
05.) Accepted: She’s missed the cut-off date for the first two training classes and is cutting it close to that of the third, so she’s not too surprised or disappointed to find herself accepted into the second half of the third class.
06.) Magnificence: The Queen is . . . is . . . words absolutely fail to describe her magnificence, and the thought that this is someone she can adore with her whole being and feel worthy of dying for is one that she holds close to her heart
07.) Home: She’s never thought of herself as the kind of foolish creature prone to inexplicable crushes, and yet, in the day and a half she is at the Palace, waiting for her training class to finish gathering so they can be taken to their place of instruction, she finds herself all but falling in love with three separate people, and it’s a little bit disconcerting to realize how easily and how happily she could make herself a permanent home here, so long as she has her sworn lady and Dormé and Aideé all close by her.
08.) Survive: She is intelligent, an accomplished dancer, a graceful rider of gualamas able to successfully fly a twirrl on even the roughest of twirrling hunts and even capable of hitting and taking down a waterfowl on the wing with a single shot from either a blaster or an old-fashioned pistol nine times out of ten; yet, she lacks the endurance and physical discipline that Dormé and Aideé have in spades, and, if it were not for Dormé’s careful encouragement and Aideé’s open admiration of her perseverance, she is not sure she would be able to survive this punishingly hard crash course in defensive and offensive weaponry and tactics.
09.) Safety: She doesn’t need to be sensitive to the flows of the Force to know that some kind of awful confrontation between the Trade Federation and her planet is brewing, and so she quiets her conscience by getting the Nhaven family out of Theed and into the country – supposedly for a vacation at one of the Barakis family summer villas (an arrangement she and Aideé managed to set up, between the two of them, with a bit of help from her foster sister, Lehari, and from Aideé’s brother, Kason), but in actuality to get them somewhere they will be able to safely hide – thus killing two birds with one stone, by providing her foster family with a place of safety, in case the Trade Federation does something unconscionably stupid (like attacking the planet), and by giving her little sister a way out of her family and into a clan that will allow her to be herself, whether she wishes to join the Barakis family by impressing them enough to get them to issue her a formal invitation of fosterage among them (something that will not be difficult to arrange, given how well Lehari gets on with Aideé’s adoptive family) or by eventually handfasting that wonderfully funny and smart young Kason (who can make Lehari laugh like no one else).
10.) Back: She was at the Palace for just over a day and a half before they left for Varykino, arriving early in the evening, and they are there for no much longer, having give full days of training before being abruptly told (at breakfast on the sixth day) that they are going back to the Palace and will be departing at the tenth hour.
11.) Doom: She knows something is wrong even before the alarms begin to blare, and that sickening sense of impending doom swells and swells and swells until it finally explodes with a square collision with a blaster bolt she keeps from hitting Dormé by deliberately placing herself between the girl and the traitor wielding the weapon.
12.) Sensation: She surfaces from darkness slowly, to the strange sensation of feeling no physical pain but of having a strangely bitter medicinal taste coating the whole of her throat and tongue, to find that twenty-seven days have passed since her wounding (and that there were those who thought she would die of either fever or sepsis, no matter how much bacta they used on her), Aideé has been slain, the Queen has outsmarted and defeated the Trade Federation (droid armies and all), Sabé Dahn has been appointed interim Senator (not only for Naboo but the whole of the Chommell Sector) in Palpatine’s place due to a Amidala instigating a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum and Palpatine being elected Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic in his stead and the people of Naboo uniting behind a rather righteously indignant Horace Vancil to unilaterally vote to refuse to allow the patently prejudiced against non-humans Janus Greejatus of Chommell Minor to represent them in the Galactic Senate, Dormé has been made the Queen’s new primary decoy (specifically chosen for this duty by Sabé), and that she (Etté, that is) will likely never regain the full use of her left arm again because her wound was too deep and left so long virtually untreated that there was irreparable muscle loss and damage.
13.) Reassignment: The Queen would retire her “honorably” if Etté would let her, but Etté will not hear of it, half useless left arm or not, and it is Sabé who finally arrives at a compromise they can all live with, inviting Etté to accept an invitation for reassignment to the ranks of instructors for the new handmaidens as a combination teacher of riding, dancing, and protocol.
14.) Retire: The Nhaven family wants her to retire so that she can parlay her notoriety as a loyal handmaiden wounded during the occupation of Naboo into a good marriage, and she is so incredibly insulted by the notion that she finally loses her temper and threatens to sever all ties with them, if they don’t drop the subject immediately and for good.
15.) Deadly: The Nhavens don’t have to live long with the social stigma of having a partially crippled daughter working for the Queen: a year, seven months, and ten days after her acceptance of the teaching post, she stumbles upon one of the newest handmaiden trainees as she’s trying to poison the Lake House Retreat’s water supply, and, though she is quick to act and as deadly a shot as ever, it cannot quite save her from being mortally wounded by a foe prepared to act with deadly force when she is not particularly expecting to have to deal with any such threat.
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