Work Text:
To: *ALL SERVING VODE*
Subject: Wanted: four workers willing to learn to train Servince Mastiffs.
Body Text: The Coruscant Guard Department for Training Service Mastiffs is hiring! If you have any experience with animals or would like the opportunity to work in our Service Mastiff department, please send your Resume and one reference from a former commanding officer to Nallie in the Dept for TSM at [email protected] by end of Zhellday. Lt Hound will begin interviews the following Primeday. Any vod is eligible to qualify for an interview, regardless of former serving battalion assignment; although vode with previous animal handling experience may be considered first.
Hound picked up the clipboard holding the flimsi list from his desk and gave a pensive hum as he looked down the list of interviews. It was going to be a long day.
He sat down at his desk and logged onto his datapad.
A knock on the open door had him looking up from the screen.
“Gottcha a cup of caf, Hound,” Whistle smiled at him, showing off his missing central incisor. The hole where one of his front teeth used to be made a whistling sound when he talked or took too heavy of a breath. Hound had always assumed that was how he'd gotten his name, until he'd attended the last Corrie Guard talent night. Whistle had whistled the entire first act of the Arkanian Opera “Hollandaisesås”. Hound wasn't a fan of opera music, but the music had been hauntingly beautiful.
“Thanks Whistle,” Hound smiled roughly up at him, accepting the hot cup with a sigh of relief.
“First interview in 10 minutes,” Whistle told him, a soft hissing whistle coming through on the man's esses.
Hound nodded, “I'll head over there in a minute. Will you be feeding me all the participants?”
Whistle nodded. “Nallie is on front desk, getting them in order right now. Got almost all ten applicants that were scheduled for this morning already here, waiting.” Whistle headed for the door, “see you in there.”
Hound nodded and took a sip from the large, steaming cup of caf. His eyes watered at how hot the liquid was and how horrible it tasted. Break room caf in the Coruscant Guard HQ building always tasted like piss. And yet, he still drank the swill every day, regardless. He needed the caffeine too much.
Especially today.
Today was the first day of a week-long interview process. He had a feeling it was going to be long and arduous. So he would probably be mainlining this horrible mud water, despite the taste.
When the war had ended, things had changed. The Coruscant Guards had taken on quadruple it's manpower from the now retired clone army, and crime on Coruscant had taken a huge downturn as a result of the new, inflated police force.
With Coruscant’s streets much safer, more opportunities had opened up for expansion on the different services the CoruGuards were allowed to offer.
One of those services was Hound's department: training service Mastiffs to work alongside their various branches. Hound was spectacularly good with animals, especially Mastiffs, and somehow he'd gotten caught up in the mess of creating and supervising the original program to train the animals.
The department had originally tried to use Strills for their program, but they couldn't find enough breeders outside of Mandalore that were able to provide them with Strills. And the Mandalorians were hesitant to supply them, and that didn't even consider that the Mandalorians unable to supply enough pups besides.
Despite the change, the first round of service Mastiffs had been a huge success, and the six animals he, Whistle, Nallie and Patience had trained together were doing well in various integrated CoruGuard and Animal units.
But Commanders Fox, Cody, Gree and Wolffe – who had taken over joint leadership of the Corrie Guards together – had asked Hound to immediately expand his services by at least three times for the next round of training. This meant he needed to hire at least four new men to work in his department.
And while Hound was glad his program was turning out to be such a success, he really hated dealing with people... even if those people were brothers.
Give him an animal and he'd happily work with them. Give him a brother to train to work with animals and he had no idea what he was doing. He felt generally uncomfortable around vode outside of his own batch: he just didn’t know how to handle them.
So Hound was about to walk into these interviews knowing they were going to be awful. To add insult to injury, so many vode had applied that he would have to interview almost 30 times the amount of people he needed to hire. He didn’t know how he was going to get through this.
To Hound's absolute shock, the first five interviews went smoothly and were placidly boring. They even went quite quickly. He carefully went through the list of questions he and Patience had come up with, and each brother sat across the table from him and calmly answered.
He’d begun to think that maybe this wouldn’t be so hard after all.
It wasn't until the sixth interview that Hound's day went straight to hell.
The first two candidates had been two brothers from the 91st Reconnaissance Corps formerly under Commander Ponds and Master Windu. The third had been a Corrie Guard internal applicant from another branch, and the fourth and fifth had been from the 41st Elite Corps under Commander Gree and Master Unduli.
But the sixth through tenth interviews that morning were all men from the 501st who had served under Captain Rex and General Skywalker.
Hound had heard stories about that battalion, especially about how insane General Skywalker’s leadership had been. And if the stories were even remotely true, then he was worried about the next five interviews.
Hound came back from his 'fresher and caf-break with a new, steaming cup of caf, and a renewed feeling that he could do this. So what if there were rumors about the 501st; who knew if they were true, and even if they were, who was to say the Vode from that Battalion would be like that.
He walked back into the interview room, only to be surprised that the applicant was already inside, waiting for him. Most of the other interviewees had been led in by Whistle and introduced to him. Whistle would then give Hound a nod or shake of the head, giving his own opinion on how well he thought the applicant might fit in, from how they acted while waiting in line. Someone who worked with the animals in their program had to have a lot of patience and would spend a lot of time waiting in between Mastiff training sessions and caring for the animal’s needs.
“Oh, you're here already.” Hound frowned. He tried not to let the unexpected arrival get to him, instead going around the table to find his seat.
“Yeah sorry,” the interviewee said, “Just wanted to get away from the others for a bit,” he tilted his head towards the door, indicating the other brothers outside who were waiting for their turn.
Hound tilted his head in acquiescence and indicated for the man to take a seat across from him.
Hound didn't know it yet, but this interview was about to set a precedent for all of the rest of the 501st interviews.
“So, Fives, is it?” Hound looked down at his clipboard list, as the other brother took a seat. “Why do you want to join the Department for Training Service Mastiffs?”
“Is that the name of this department?” Fives asked incredulously. “You know, you really should come up with a better name than that,” Fives sprawled back over the top of his chair, his right elbow cocked up on the back edge so he was sitting half to the side. “What about D.O.G.S., Department of Greater Service Animals?”
What was a ‘dogs’ and what did that have to do with training Mastiffs? Hound furrowed his brow. Even if that wasn't a dumb name, he would really rather the other man answer the question and not try to side-step it. “Please just answer the question.”
Fives frowned, reaching his left thumb up to scratch the edge of his neat goatee. “Well, I suppose I want to join this department because the Jedi are looking to place unemployed vode with Jedi Generals going out into the field. And well, I'm tired of getting yeeted off cliffs.” Fives paused for a brief second. “There's hazard pay in this job in the case you're accidentally yeeted, right? There really should have been for the 501st. There was this time that Captain Rex was yeeted off a four klick drop! This separatist holdout was going to blow, mind you, but I still think that was uncalled for. He wasn’t even warned in advance! Rex told me he had flashbacks for months! And then there was the time Commander Tano tried to save me from a clanka' tank and yeeted me 50 steps to the side! I saw my life flash before my—”
Hound gritted his teeth as Fives continued on with his tangent.
Struggles to focus on the task at hand, Hound wrote on his 'pad.
“And how would you describe your ability to work under pressure?” Hound asked his second question to the next interviewee.
“Well I'd say I'm pretty damn good,” Kix leaned back in his seat, looking confident. “This one time I had a trooper bleeding out on my operating table, he was missing half his liver from shrapnel and I was worried I was going to have to amputate an arm that was burnt and filled with even more shrapnel. But I kept my cool. I just took the most pressing problem one at a time until the kid was well enough to survive.” Kix smiled in smug satisfaction and leaned forward to continue on with more detail. “After stemming the internal bleeding using clamps and giving the kid a transfusion, I had to check on the vitality of his liver by opening him up along the...”
Hound froze. He stared at the other man, his mouth falling open unattractively at the level of medical detail he wished he wasn't hearing. It took him a minute to shake himself out of his own stupor.
“Wait, you're a medic?” Hound interrupted a rather graphic description of an infected wound that Kix had had to irrigate, on the trooper's arm. “Why aren't you applying to work with the temple healers then?” Hound asked, confused. “I heard most of the medics were working with them.”
“Have you ever tried to give a Jedi youngling a booster shot?” Kix spread his arms, looking incredulous, his voice getting louder with each word. “All big eyes and tears and a lot of guilt. I don’t want to deal with that! Don't even get me started about trying to get an injured adult Jedi to stay in bed,” Kix sighed as if the entire galaxy was against him. “They're like lemmings running towards a cliff: no self-preservation instinct even after they've been hurt.”
Hound echoed Kix’s sigh for a much different reason. How was this interview even worse than Fives's?
Responds with hostility to questions about his former profession, Hound wrote on his 'pad.
“Do you work well under close supervision?” Hound asked the third candidate from the 501st.
“Well,” the other trooper paused, his demeanor quiet and contained. Hound tried not to stare at the scars on the other man's neck when the man turned shyly away to avoid eye contact. “While I was under Separatist supervision I was brainwashed, sedated and hooked up to a giant machine so the Separatist army could use my brain to devise battle strategies to use against my brothers, for almost an entire year. They forced me to help murder hundreds of our brothers... So maybe I'm not so great at that,” Echo said quietly. The man leaned back in his seat, showing he was done with the topic. Well at least he wasn't as verbose as Fives or Kix.
Hound covered his eyes with his hand. “Alright. Well, thank you for your honesty.”
Easily manipulated by others, Hound wrote on his 'pad.
“Can you tell me of a time when you had a conflict? And how you were able to resolve it?” Hound asked the fourth interviewee.
“Well, there was that time I accidentally murdered Jedi General Tiplar,” Tup looked at him from across the table with wide-eyes. “My chip went off prematurely,” Tup tapped the scar on his temple, the same scar that all of the vode sported. “General Skywalker accompanied me and Lieutenant Fives to Tipoca City and they were able to extract my chip before it killed me.” Tup sighed dreamily, “Then they uncovered the existence of the chips and saved us all. That's a pretty big conflict, right? So I guess you could say Fives and the General helped me resolve it!” Tup grinned crookedly.
Hound banged his head hard against his palm in frustration.
Possible brain damage from the chip and thinks the actions of others are his own, Hound wrote on his 'pad, once his head had stopped ringing.
Hound wasn't exactly happy with the answers he'd gotten from the previous four interviewees. So for the last one he started with an easier question. He hoped at least easier questions could be answered quickly so that Hound could finish this interview faster. Hound just wanted this morning to be over.
“Do you like animals?” Hound wearily asked the fifth and final applicant from the 501st.
“Are Genosians considered animals?” Jesse asked thoughtfully, resting a hand on his chin and invoking an expression of deep thought. “I guess we called them bugs when we were on that planet, not animals. And I definitely didn’t like them. But if those don’t count, I dunno if I've actually met that many animals. The few bits of wildlife we encountered while on deployment almost always tried to kill us. Though to be fair, the same goes for most sentients we met on deployment.”
Jesse frowned up at the ceiling before continuing, “I mean if we're just talking about people in general, I don't like them very much. So the same must go for animals. Well, except for Kix, I like him but he's an animal when he's hungry. Like this one time—”
Hound sank down in his seat, he was on the edge of defeated tears.
Confused about the difference between sentients and animals, Hound wrote on his 'pad and then pushed the device away from him.
“Hound,” Whistle popped his head in the door.
Hound was feeling more than a little overwhelmed by the interviewees by this point. But at least the first batch was over, right?
“There's a vod out here who got his application in late, he wants to know if you'll see him right now.” Whistle had an odd look on his face. “I gotta say, he's pretty qualified to help take over a lot of the administration you have to do, if you're interested in him.”
Hound sighed tiredly. He hated administration, so he might as well see the vod even if he felt like he was about to fall apart. If Whistle thought the vod was good, he probably was. And on the bright side, Hound wouldn't mind talking to at least one vod who wasn’t from the nonsensical bunch of weirdos that was the 501st. “Alright, send him in. Also, do you have a copy of his application?”
“It's right here.” Whistle opened the door and stepped closer to the table to hand Hound a 'pad. “You can go in, sir.” Whistle said to someone outside the room as he left.
“Thanks trooper!” the other vod said cheerfully.
Hound looked up from the application he'd been trying to skim and his eyes widened in shock.
“Captain Rex?” Hound asked in surprise.
Captain Rex smiled handsomely and sat down in the chair across from him. “The one and only.”
“I—” Hound felt a little tongue tied. He'd heard a lot about this man and his exploits, not even including all the horrifying stories he'd heard today. The man was as much of a legend as Commanders Fox, Cody or Wolffe, and Hound was glad he'd never had to directly meet any of those men. He didn’t appreciate feeling so starstruck.
“Just treat me like all the rest of the applicants,” Rex waved his hand magnanimously.
“But you'd be reporting directly to me... so wouldn't you have to take a demotion to work here?” Hound asked, confused. Hound was only a second-class lieutenant.
Rex shrugged, still smiling pleasantly.
“Alright,” Hound said uneasily. “Why do you want to join the Department for Training Service Mastiffs?”
“Your work sounds rewarding,” Captain Rex started, and Hound smiled, pleased by that answer.
Hound picked up his stylus, ready to write that down in his interview notes, but then Rex continued.
“And I would really like to just stop hearing Cody complain — all the time — about General Kenobi going out into the field without him now. I'm working directly under Cody right now, and he's just the most grueling of taskmasters, even now that the war is over! Can you believe that man? Yesterday he made me investigate Kenobi's quarters while the man was away and then write a six-page report on the condition of them and what was in the man's fridge! He's like some kind of worried den mother mixed with a deranged stalker!”
Hound had thought his torment had ended. But he should have expected that the man in charge of these hooligans would be just as bad as the rest of them.
“Don't even get me started on how—” Rex continued to rant.
Hound prayed to gods he didn't believe, that this would be over soon.
Disrespectful to commanding officers, Hound wrote on his 'pad, unsure of how else to phrase this application rejection.
Hound heaved a sigh of relief as Captain Rex finally left the room. At least that was over and he could have his lunch.
The afternoon should be a lot easier. They should all be boring interviews just like the first five. They were all brothers from the 212th, who had worked under the well-respected Marshall Commander Cody and High Jedi General Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Hound could really do with a break from all the horrific tales about General Skywalker, Commander Tano and Captain Rex. Really, he should have guessed. He'd heard all sorts of rumors about the command team for the 501st. But the 212th had an excellent reputation, so hopefully the afternoon would go much smoother.
Hound didn't know how wrong he was. If anything the 212th was an even more chaotic bunch than the troopers from the 501st, only they were much more subtle and reserved in their chaos.
Hound had no idea how much more worse his day was about to get.