Resurgence of the Jedi: Mace Unleashed

When I was a kid, I read an awful lot. My homelife... wasn't great. Reading was an escape. Got into a bunch of different series, among them, the Star Wars Expanded Universe (was fortunate enough to randomly start with Timothy Zhan's Dark Force Rising Trilogy.). This is before Disney bought Star Wars and decanonized the whole kit and caboodle. Anyway, before this, I always wanted to contribute to the the SWEU (as well as Dragonlance, the Honorverse, the complicated mess of Trek, etc, etc. I was an naively optimistic kid.). 

However, many of the various plot threads I wanted to explore were undone by the Disney acquisition. Not to mention, not sure if I would want to be associated with Disney at this point even if I could miraculously land an offer. Regardless, this was all simmering on the back burner until someone released an unauthorized Batman game last year. This made me realize I could do something similar under fair use and likely submit it to a comp. I could also pursue whatever plot points I like.

So, now I want to write a game that takes place after the Mandalorian, but before the first of the sequel films, probably roughly 15 years after Return of the Jedi. The main character will be Mace Windu. WAIT! Hear me out! The last we see Windu, he's fried by Palps, gets his hand chopped off, and then he's tossed out of the window of the Supreme Chancellor's office, presumably fairly high up. Jedi, however, are like cockroaches. I imagine he survived the fall (Jackson himself asked Lucas if he was alive, to which Lucas said, sure, why not.). We do know he's dead by the time of the last sequel film, because his voice is included amongst the force ghosts at the end of the film. So, we have a window here.

Windu, too weak to resist, and nearly dead, is found clinging to building ledge by droid security. Clone troopers are brought up to arrest him. Remember, immediately after being yeeted, Order 66 hadn't been enacted yet, so clone troopers scooping up the Jedi would be expected. 

Palps then decided to take a trophy and froze him in Carbonite while he was still unconscious in the hospital. As one of his treasured possessions, he would have been in a personal trophy room similar to Fortress Inquisitorius on board the second Death Star.

As the throne room survived basically intact as seen in the sequel trilogy, Windu would have survived as well, as being encased in carbonite would have protected him from the explosion and atmospheric reentry. Scavengers would have ransacked Palps’ trophy room pronto, and I could see Mace Windu being sold as a curiosity in a black market, no one recognizing his significance because Jedi were half forgotten by then as evidenced by Han's attitude in A New Hope.

The best part of this is that sometime after the Battle of Endor, Mace could awaken, emotionally and psychologically seconds after being betrayed by Anakin. This also neatly explains his absense during the original trilogy or the decades leading up to it and fits in well with Palps sick twisted sense of humor. His ego would see Windu as the ultimate trophy; the symbol of the moment he truly triumphed over the Jedi. After Windu is betrayed and Anakin has truly chosen sides in that climatic moment, everything else is downhill from there. Also, keeping a living Windu basically on ice might be of value to his force-sensitive cloning initiative at some point in the future, so I could see him intentionally not simply killing Windu out of hand.

Anyway, he would be the protagonist basically time-jumped 38 years into the future, with the shock of discovering not only Order 66, but the fall of the Republic, the Rise of the Empire, the Fall of the Empire, and the Rise of the New Republic all in what appeared to be a moment to Windu. He would also know precious few people who were still alive at this point.

Canonically, in the Star Wars universe, droids are controlled with a harsh yoke. There had been unsuccessful galaxy-wide droid uprisings in the past, so even the Separatists had fail-safes to protect themselves from their own droid army. Importantly, droids weren't allowed to self-replicate. They were produced in tightly controlled factory worlds, the fall of which spelled the end of the clone wars.

At the end of Episode 3, Anakin slaughters the Separatist leadership on Mustafar. They couldn't have seen this coming and whatever contingency plans they made for themselves were left incomplete.

However, I would counter that they, one, certainly had individual contingency plans, and two, were very desperate at this point. I'd like to play with one or more of the Separatist leaders creating a Von Neumann style probe with instructions to find a desolate, resource rich world far into the Unknown regions, set up shop, create factories, and then mass produce droids, ships, munitions, and every other necessity of war autonomously until they received follow-up orders. This was a huge no-no as far as droids go, but the Separatists had their backs to the wall, and some weren't willing to concede the fight.

The problem is, this probe is fired off... and later that same day Anakin arrives and kills everyone. The probe follows its instructions and seeks out a dead system packed with mineral wealth and plentiful solar energy. They set up shop and start building up for the second phase of the Clone Wars, but the follow-up orders never arrive.

A mortal or biological entity would have given up after so much radio silence, but not a droid, not this droid. It had orders and it would follow them.

So, for 38 years after the fall of the Republic, deep in the Unknown Regions, in an area awash in deadly cosmic and solar radiation and other hazards to biological life, the droid mined, and smelted, and refined, and built. Asteroids, and then comets, then entire planets were all systematically disassembled for their constituent parts. A vast armada of millions of ships and untold quadrillions of droids lie in cold vaccum storage, and the manufacturing droids momentarily fell silent.

4 years, 3 months, 27 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes, and 15.76 seconds after arriving and there was finally nothing left to work with. Everything had been disassembled, all useful material had been starlifted from the stellar primary... and yet no further orders had been received.

So, the droid in charge did the only thing it could, the only thing its programming would allow. It continued with its original orders and moved on to the next star system.

By the time Mace Windu has been revived, several dozen star systems had been stripped bare and a military force beyond any prior reckoning, beyond any prior contemplation, had been quietly assembled and carefully stored in mint condition, all waiting for their next order.

I haven't figured out the plot beyond this point, but Mace Windu with old and new allies, has a final climatic clash with the droids of a war that ostensibly ended decades prior for everyone else, but felt all too recent and real for Windu.

The game would be from the viewpoint of Mace Windu immediately after being tossed from that window up to losing consciousness at the feet of clone troopers, who he would have still trusted at that point. His next conscious thought would be alarm at being blind and unsure where he was upon being thawed.

This is probably all wasted on anyone who isn't familiar with Star Wars, but there it is.