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“Betté Steadhart, Ninth Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”
0 reviewsThis is fifteen random but chronological moments from the life of Betté Steadhart, who is, quite literally, the ninth handmaiden in the third training class of potential handmaidens chosen from am...
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“Betté Steadhart, Ninth Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”
01.) Ward: She’s technically a ward of the state: the awful lightning-struck fire that claimed her parents and older sister’s family – including her sister’s husband, parents by marriage, and newly born baby son, sparing Betté only because she was spending the night at a friend’s house – occurred when she was twelve, which is technically old enough for her to be considered an extremely young adult and so not suitable for fostering or adoption, but she was nevertheless taken in by her best friend’s family, and so she’s essentially an Alcroft in everything but name.
02.) Believe: Amilla is a good, kind, warm-hearted person, but she just doesn’t care too much about people she does not know from her own everyday life, and so she cannot believe that Betté wants to risk her neck working as a handmaiden for some politician she doesn’t even know, when she could so easily go into politics on her own merit, instead, but Betté wants to make a difference for the whole of the planet, if she can, and not just the residents of the city of Vis, and so she finally manages to convince her, after a lot of generally (unfortunately) less than calmly or diplomatically worded back and forth debate, that she can do more good for more people by working behind the scenes in the royal court.
03.) Announcement: She waits to submit her application to the program until after Amilla has become promised to her longtime sweetheart, Darvis Kolan, and they’ve had their announcement party, but no longer than that, and she is not surprised when she is accepted and offered a place in with the later half of the third class of handmaiden trainees.
04.) Pass: She’s a slender, pretty brunette of about fifteen years of age with dark brown eyes and a slightly ovoid yet somewhat heart-shaped face, and she knows she could pass as the Queen, in one of those insanely elaborate costumes and traditional white mask-like makeup, if she had to, but honestly she would just as soon not have to (being much more interested in helping Amidala to “clarify” her thoughts about policy and new laws and trade issues various humanitarian and sentientarian works than in essentially learning how to perfect the playing of dress-up and being called on to impersonate the Queen during various, possibly dangerous public and semi-public appearances), and so she’s quite glad to see that an apparent decoy and even a replacement decoy (if something should happen to the first one) have already been singled out from their class for that kind of extra training.
05.) Extraordinary: The Queen is an extraordinary young woman, someone with so much personal power of presence and charisma that walking into her presence for the first time is rather akin to walking headlong into a brick wall, only in a good way instead of a bad way, if that makes any kind of sense, and, the first time she hears that the other handmaiden trainees have taken to referring to Amidala as a living flame of a woman, she seizes upon the description eagerly, so she’ll have a way to try to explain the sheer power of the Queen’s presence to Amilla (later telling her that Amidala’s personality has such a strong impact on those she encounters that it can be felt physically, and that most individuals compare meeting the Queen for the first time to the sensation of being struck, though the emotions produced are not those associated with fear, for the words most often used to describe the Queen’s presence assert a combination of fiercely bright intelligence and lovingly warm compassion so great as to produce what one handmaiden trainee – in a phrase later known to billions – deemed “a living flame of a woman,” with the fire in question being not that of the destructive devourer, but rather that of the beacon, the guide, the warm and life-giving illuminator . . . ).
06.) Surname: The surname of the girl who’s been chosen from their training class to be the Queen’s actual decoys nags and nags and nags at her, teasing the edges of her memory, until it finally occurs to her that the name is familiar because it matches that of a name from a news story that her foster mother had evidently followed closely enough and cared sufficiently about to keep some newspaper clippings and even a few holovids for, keepsakes that she had later discovered as a child, and she remembers that the story was about the girl’s mother . . . and abruptly realizes why it must be that Dormé sometimes seems so leery of closeness with others, given her status as the possible issue of her mother’s violent rape and attempted murder.
07.) Curiosity: She feels rather badly for Dormé right up until the moment they get to Varykino and the girl abruptly becomes essentially as knowledgeable and as adept in virtually every subject they are being taught as their instructors seem to be, at which point she stops feeling pity and starts feeling more curiosity over the presence of someone so obviously talented deciding to join the ranks of the handmaidens of the Queen instead of going out and running for a position like Princess of Theed, so that she might, perhaps, eventually become Queen herself, after Amidala.
08.) Miserable: She is in fairly good shape because she loves the water and has always been an excellent swimmer and she has the good fortune to naturally be a good shot, both with most blasters and old-fashioned projectile weapons, but she’s not a very good dancer, she’s frightened of weapons with edges sharp enough to cut, and she lacks a great deal of actual physical strength, in terms of sheer muscle mass, so she is miserable half the time at Varykino and too exhausted to even really dwell overly much on why it is that they’re being taken back to the Palace so soon.
09.) Invasion: In retrospect, everybody seems to have known that something awful was going to happen, but no one seems to have guessed (with the possible exception, perhaps, of some of the cowardly and black-hearted traitors who went over to their enemy’s side as soon as their droid armies landed and began seizing control of Theed itself) that what was going to happen would involve an actual (and unfortunately successful) invasion of their world by the Trade Federation’s droid forces, and everything is such a confusion of danger and running and dodging blaster bolts and trying to get the extremely young Princess of Theed and the various decoys of their Queen to some place of safety while their Queen is off the Goddess alone only knows where or with whom – trying to find a way off planet, so she can get to Coruscant and report on the Trade Federation’s unlawful actions – that it takes a good long while for the true depth of the evil that’s been visited upon the peoples of Naboo to really sink in, and, fortunately, most of them are of such a nature that it is sheer righteous fury and concern for the people, for what the Trade Federation has done, that wins out over terror or the apathy of feeling their position to be hopeless, when there is time and safety enough to begin to process what has happened.
10.) Occupation: The Queen is gone for eighteen and a half days, spread out over twenty: in the approximately twenty-five days of occupation of Naboo by the Trade Federation, she learns how to do things and she performs tasks that she never would have imagined herself to be able to do, even after her time at Varykino, and she is so amazed at herself and so proud of herself that she almost manages to forget, sometimes, how incredibly dangerous the process of gaining such knowledge and ability ends up being.
11.) Mission: There’s a slightly younger girl from her original training class who went on several missions with her, during the occupation, and with whom she got on fairly friendly terms, and this girl, Emmé Harwood, has a mouth that is positively made for kissing, but she seems entirely oblivious of her own charms, so Betté decides to make it a personal mission to let Emmé know about them, beyond any doubt, and, eventually, when hinting doesn’t seem to work, she finally gives in and goes for the direct approach – grab and kiss – with most favorable results.
12.) Retire: Amilla wants her to retire when the Queen’s first term is up (whether she decides to run for a second one or not) and move back out to Vis, find a man to settle down with, and raise babies who can grow up to marry Amilla’s babies, and she just doesn’t have the heart to try to explain to her virtual sister just why this is not at all likely to ever happen, but she’s careful to let Emmé know that the main reason is that she loves her far too much to ever leave her.
13.) Attrition: The attrition rate is killing them: they can’t get enough new handmaidens trained up quickly enough in schools of ten to keep up with the steady losses that they’re suffering every handful or so of weeks (essentially like clockwork), and so the decision is made (against the Queen’s wishes, but it’s made, nonetheless, because it has to be) to increase the size of the training classes to twenty and to combine and recombine survivors by talent and rank into new groups within the overall coterie after every new attack.
14.) Bad: She has a bad feeling about the trip the Queen has scheduled to visit the colony and spice mines on Ohma-D’un from the moment she first hearts about it: the journey to and from the Water Moon simply provides too many chances for attack or for sabotage or for something bad to happen because something has simply accidentally gone wrong.
15.) Thought: When the bounty hunter hurls the cannister at them like a detonator, her first thought is that it must be an explosive, so she hurls herself forward and down onto the device without a second thought, and it isn’t until her lungs start to burn and her skin begins to blister that the fact that it is a gas bomb rater than an explosive one registers, by which time it is already far too late for much of anything, save for a rather grimly satisfied thought that at least her body should keep most of the poison gas from reaching anyone else in the party . . .
01.) Ward: She’s technically a ward of the state: the awful lightning-struck fire that claimed her parents and older sister’s family – including her sister’s husband, parents by marriage, and newly born baby son, sparing Betté only because she was spending the night at a friend’s house – occurred when she was twelve, which is technically old enough for her to be considered an extremely young adult and so not suitable for fostering or adoption, but she was nevertheless taken in by her best friend’s family, and so she’s essentially an Alcroft in everything but name.
02.) Believe: Amilla is a good, kind, warm-hearted person, but she just doesn’t care too much about people she does not know from her own everyday life, and so she cannot believe that Betté wants to risk her neck working as a handmaiden for some politician she doesn’t even know, when she could so easily go into politics on her own merit, instead, but Betté wants to make a difference for the whole of the planet, if she can, and not just the residents of the city of Vis, and so she finally manages to convince her, after a lot of generally (unfortunately) less than calmly or diplomatically worded back and forth debate, that she can do more good for more people by working behind the scenes in the royal court.
03.) Announcement: She waits to submit her application to the program until after Amilla has become promised to her longtime sweetheart, Darvis Kolan, and they’ve had their announcement party, but no longer than that, and she is not surprised when she is accepted and offered a place in with the later half of the third class of handmaiden trainees.
04.) Pass: She’s a slender, pretty brunette of about fifteen years of age with dark brown eyes and a slightly ovoid yet somewhat heart-shaped face, and she knows she could pass as the Queen, in one of those insanely elaborate costumes and traditional white mask-like makeup, if she had to, but honestly she would just as soon not have to (being much more interested in helping Amidala to “clarify” her thoughts about policy and new laws and trade issues various humanitarian and sentientarian works than in essentially learning how to perfect the playing of dress-up and being called on to impersonate the Queen during various, possibly dangerous public and semi-public appearances), and so she’s quite glad to see that an apparent decoy and even a replacement decoy (if something should happen to the first one) have already been singled out from their class for that kind of extra training.
05.) Extraordinary: The Queen is an extraordinary young woman, someone with so much personal power of presence and charisma that walking into her presence for the first time is rather akin to walking headlong into a brick wall, only in a good way instead of a bad way, if that makes any kind of sense, and, the first time she hears that the other handmaiden trainees have taken to referring to Amidala as a living flame of a woman, she seizes upon the description eagerly, so she’ll have a way to try to explain the sheer power of the Queen’s presence to Amilla (later telling her that Amidala’s personality has such a strong impact on those she encounters that it can be felt physically, and that most individuals compare meeting the Queen for the first time to the sensation of being struck, though the emotions produced are not those associated with fear, for the words most often used to describe the Queen’s presence assert a combination of fiercely bright intelligence and lovingly warm compassion so great as to produce what one handmaiden trainee – in a phrase later known to billions – deemed “a living flame of a woman,” with the fire in question being not that of the destructive devourer, but rather that of the beacon, the guide, the warm and life-giving illuminator . . . ).
06.) Surname: The surname of the girl who’s been chosen from their training class to be the Queen’s actual decoys nags and nags and nags at her, teasing the edges of her memory, until it finally occurs to her that the name is familiar because it matches that of a name from a news story that her foster mother had evidently followed closely enough and cared sufficiently about to keep some newspaper clippings and even a few holovids for, keepsakes that she had later discovered as a child, and she remembers that the story was about the girl’s mother . . . and abruptly realizes why it must be that Dormé sometimes seems so leery of closeness with others, given her status as the possible issue of her mother’s violent rape and attempted murder.
07.) Curiosity: She feels rather badly for Dormé right up until the moment they get to Varykino and the girl abruptly becomes essentially as knowledgeable and as adept in virtually every subject they are being taught as their instructors seem to be, at which point she stops feeling pity and starts feeling more curiosity over the presence of someone so obviously talented deciding to join the ranks of the handmaidens of the Queen instead of going out and running for a position like Princess of Theed, so that she might, perhaps, eventually become Queen herself, after Amidala.
08.) Miserable: She is in fairly good shape because she loves the water and has always been an excellent swimmer and she has the good fortune to naturally be a good shot, both with most blasters and old-fashioned projectile weapons, but she’s not a very good dancer, she’s frightened of weapons with edges sharp enough to cut, and she lacks a great deal of actual physical strength, in terms of sheer muscle mass, so she is miserable half the time at Varykino and too exhausted to even really dwell overly much on why it is that they’re being taken back to the Palace so soon.
09.) Invasion: In retrospect, everybody seems to have known that something awful was going to happen, but no one seems to have guessed (with the possible exception, perhaps, of some of the cowardly and black-hearted traitors who went over to their enemy’s side as soon as their droid armies landed and began seizing control of Theed itself) that what was going to happen would involve an actual (and unfortunately successful) invasion of their world by the Trade Federation’s droid forces, and everything is such a confusion of danger and running and dodging blaster bolts and trying to get the extremely young Princess of Theed and the various decoys of their Queen to some place of safety while their Queen is off the Goddess alone only knows where or with whom – trying to find a way off planet, so she can get to Coruscant and report on the Trade Federation’s unlawful actions – that it takes a good long while for the true depth of the evil that’s been visited upon the peoples of Naboo to really sink in, and, fortunately, most of them are of such a nature that it is sheer righteous fury and concern for the people, for what the Trade Federation has done, that wins out over terror or the apathy of feeling their position to be hopeless, when there is time and safety enough to begin to process what has happened.
10.) Occupation: The Queen is gone for eighteen and a half days, spread out over twenty: in the approximately twenty-five days of occupation of Naboo by the Trade Federation, she learns how to do things and she performs tasks that she never would have imagined herself to be able to do, even after her time at Varykino, and she is so amazed at herself and so proud of herself that she almost manages to forget, sometimes, how incredibly dangerous the process of gaining such knowledge and ability ends up being.
11.) Mission: There’s a slightly younger girl from her original training class who went on several missions with her, during the occupation, and with whom she got on fairly friendly terms, and this girl, Emmé Harwood, has a mouth that is positively made for kissing, but she seems entirely oblivious of her own charms, so Betté decides to make it a personal mission to let Emmé know about them, beyond any doubt, and, eventually, when hinting doesn’t seem to work, she finally gives in and goes for the direct approach – grab and kiss – with most favorable results.
12.) Retire: Amilla wants her to retire when the Queen’s first term is up (whether she decides to run for a second one or not) and move back out to Vis, find a man to settle down with, and raise babies who can grow up to marry Amilla’s babies, and she just doesn’t have the heart to try to explain to her virtual sister just why this is not at all likely to ever happen, but she’s careful to let Emmé know that the main reason is that she loves her far too much to ever leave her.
13.) Attrition: The attrition rate is killing them: they can’t get enough new handmaidens trained up quickly enough in schools of ten to keep up with the steady losses that they’re suffering every handful or so of weeks (essentially like clockwork), and so the decision is made (against the Queen’s wishes, but it’s made, nonetheless, because it has to be) to increase the size of the training classes to twenty and to combine and recombine survivors by talent and rank into new groups within the overall coterie after every new attack.
14.) Bad: She has a bad feeling about the trip the Queen has scheduled to visit the colony and spice mines on Ohma-D’un from the moment she first hearts about it: the journey to and from the Water Moon simply provides too many chances for attack or for sabotage or for something bad to happen because something has simply accidentally gone wrong.
15.) Thought: When the bounty hunter hurls the cannister at them like a detonator, her first thought is that it must be an explosive, so she hurls herself forward and down onto the device without a second thought, and it isn’t until her lungs start to burn and her skin begins to blister that the fact that it is a gas bomb rater than an explosive one registers, by which time it is already far too late for much of anything, save for a rather grimly satisfied thought that at least her body should keep most of the poison gas from reaching anyone else in the party . . .
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