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Arrival2,072 words
The Native2,616 words

Arrival

The Razor Crest hung in the void of space, motionless. The two dorsal engines had cooled and gone dark, with only the memory of heat remaining behind. The ocean of stars was serene, unbroken by any movement.

In the cockpit, Din Djarin came to his senses slowly. The first thing he registered was the litany of bruises and aches across his body. As a Mandalorian, he was used to such things, but no one enjoyed waking up feeling like they’d lost a fight with a rancor. With a groan, Din leveraged himself into a seated position.

The emergency lights in the Razor Crest were on, Din noted blearily. The ship had lost power then, either temporarily or...well, if the onboard generator was fried, they were likely dead if there wasn’t a planet nearby. Him and the kid would…

The kid.

Scrambling to his feet, Din cast his gaze around wildly for the tiny green foundling that he still didn’t have a name for. Not seeing the baby immediately, Din cursed quietly, and reached for his gauntlet. With a few flicks of his finger, he’d turned on his bio-scanner.

There he was. It must have tumbled down into the lower section of the ship when...whatever had happened, had happened. He didn’t have time to piece together his memories right now.

It only took him a few seconds to jump into the hold and sweep the child up. With carefully controlled panic, the Mandalorian looked the child over with his bio-scanner, flipping through to his other scanner settings to thoroughly check him for injuries.

The child was alive, and in stable health. He let out a slow breath. The kid was unconscious, and likely would be for a while longer if the bruise on his green noggin was any indication, but he would live. He was a tough little womp rat, he’d make it through.

Just to be on the safe side though, Din brought out his medkit and gave the kid a bacta patch on the contusion. And then he carried the small bundle in his arms back up into the cockpit and set him down in his pram. A pity the child had been wandering around outside of it when they had jumped to lightspeed.

And with that thought, the Mandalorian cast his mind back. That’s right...they’d been found by an Imp. Not even a week off of Navarro and more Imperials had found them. Annoying kriffing bastards, the lot of them. He wasn’t sure whether or not this was Moff Gideon’s Remnant, or another Imperial; the TIE pilots hadn’t seemed keen on answering his questions. Not that he’d have let them answer when he could just shoot them.

The Razor Crest had taken some bad hits. With the power currently down, Din wasn’t able to check on the status of the ship, but he remembered warnings popping up onscreen telling him that the hyperdrive navigation computer had been damaged. Experienced spacers could work out the same equations that the nav computer...given time. Time that the Imp’s hadn’t given him.

So, Din had made a choice that was potentially suicidal. He’d made a blind jump.

If Paz had been in the Crest with him, he’d have probably called Din insane before smacking him upside the head. No one made blind jumps, especially not on the edge of the Unknown Regions. Space was only mostly empty after all, and the chances that he could’ve been sucked into a black hole or ground into space dust by a stray asteroid were high.
Honestly, the chances were probably very high, but hell, they were still alive, so his gamble had worked. And that was enough for Din. He’d leave the calculations of just how insane his stunt had been to droids. He was a more practical man.
So, he knew how they’d arrived at their destination. Where exactly they were in relation to the rest of the galaxy could wait until they had power again.

Checking on the child one last time (just to be safe, the little one could have stopped breathing or something), Din started about the business of getting his ship working again.

. . .

Twilight Sparkle stifled a yawn. While she deeply enjoyed gazing through her telescope, she couldn’t deny that it did wreak havoc on her sleep schedule. Normally the fact that something wrecked any of her schedules would be reason enough to stop doing that thing, but then again, stargazing was science. And science was on the short list of things she was willing to drop her schedules for. Other entries on the list were Magic, her friends, Princess Celestia (HIGHEST PRIORITY!!!), and her family. And maybe a new Daring Do book, if it was especially good.

Realizing she’d let her thoughts drift away, Twilight shook her head. She’d go to bed in another twenty minutes or so, first she needed to finish recording her observations. Bucephalus was at its brightest point in two hundred years, and she wanted to make sure she got the most out of this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Behind Twilight, Spike let out a particularly loud snore, startling Twilight. He was curled up around a leatherbound copy of ‘City of Stars: Canterlot’s Guide to the Cosmos’ by Neighl Degrass Tyson, a small line of drool stretching out of his mouth.

“Oh Spike.” Twilight said fondly. A purple corona enveloped Spike as she picked him up, untangling him from the book and settling him into his bed. She took a brief moment to pat him on the head, and then she returned to her telescope.
“Just a few more minutes…”

. . .

The generator on the Razor Crest let out a low whine as it powered on, the Mandalorian letting out a satisfied breath at seeing it working again. Two of the compression coils had been knocked out of alignment by their rough journey through hyperspace and had needed to be fixed.

With the ship having power again, Din returned to the cockpit and began looking the Crest’s screens over. Aside from the nav computer, there was also an air leak to worry about, in a place near the rear that he couldn’t easily access from the interior of the ship, not without ripping out parts of the hyperdrive. ILuckily, it wasn’t an immediate concern, as long as he landed within the next 24 hours. He could maybe risk the vacuum of space to patch it from the outside if he had no other option, his helmet could be made airtight with a little jury rigging and he had an oxygen tank lying around.

But, if there was a planet nearby, that wouldn’t be necessary. Din flicked over to the local system scanners.

Ah, excellent. There was a planet, and it was close to them. Extremely close, in fact. The gravity shadow must have been what had pulled them out of hyperspace. As he looked over the display, Din silently thanked the ancestors of Mandalore. While he wasn’t picking up much technology (if there was any on the planet at all), the planet was a garden world, with lush green vegetation and blue oceans, the atmosphere’s chemical makeup nearly identical to that of Sorgan, and a sight better than Navarro or Coruscant. They’d be fine there.

With a gentle hand, Din fired up the engines, wincing slightly as the left one sputtered. However, after a moment it lit up as it was meant to, and the Razor Crest began moving towards the planet below.

. . .

Twilight blinked her eyes slowly as she yawned for what felt like the thousandth time that night. She turned to look at the notebook that she’d been writing in, absently running through everything she’d written down. Satisfied, she turned her attention to a nearby clock, and winced.

“3 o’clock in the morning. Yeah...I think I’m done for the night.”

Stifling yet another yawn, the purple librarian pony began packing away her tools of the trade, carefully organizing everything so that it was just so. Being tired was no excuse for being sloppy.

Finally, with everything squared away, Twilight tilted her head up to take one last look at the sky. Overhead, she saw a small silver light move across the sky. A meteor, most likely. Twilight smiled.

“Oh, I’ll have to thank Princess Luna for that when I see her next, that was a nice touch. Well anyways. Good night.”

As Twilight settled down into her bed after saying goodnight to no one in particular, the silver ‘meteor’ grew larger and larger in the night sky.

. . .

Din set the Razor Crest down in a clearing among a dense forest. His sensors had showed him that there was a town ten klicks away from his landing site that he planned to scope out after he finished patching the leak. Hopefully the locals wouldn’t try to kill him on sight; out in the Unknown Regions, you never really knew what you were getting into. He’d heard the stories from spacers and fellow Mandalorians about what horrors lurked out beyond the Outer Rim. Space Wraiths, shapeshifters, soul sucking parasites and more. Despite its welcoming appearance, the planet could be lousy with them, for all he knew.

If that was the case, Din would face them as a Mandalorian would, with weapons ready and waiting to spill blood. He reached for his rifle and slung it onto his back, checking to make sure he had his blaster tucked away into his holster and that his gauntlets were ready. The flamethrower had sufficient fuel, the grapple line was wound up tightly, and the whistling birds in were prepped and waiting. His vibroblade was fully functional, no visible deformities on the blade or odd sounds indicating a misalignment.

Finally, Din checked his jetpack, seeing that it too had sufficient fuel and was operational. While he was still unfamiliar with it (he hadn’t put in any more practice since Navarro) he’d rather have it than not have it. Flight could be very useful, after all.
With the inventory of his gear out of the way, the Mandalorian checked on the child, and seeing that it was still sleeping, began going about the process of repairing his ship, starting with the air leak.

. . .

Five hours later, Din clambered down from the left dorsal engine, cracking his neck as he went. The sun had risen hours ago, which he was thankful for, as it made the work easier.

He wasn’t a mechanic by any means, but he knew enough to maintain the Crest, and he’d picked up some things from Kuiil. The leak was patched, the engine was running properly again, and the nav computer...well, to be perfectly honest the nav computer was beyond his ability to fix. Hopefully he’d be able to find someone on planet who could help him with that. If not.well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. Now that he was out in the middle of the Unknown Regions with no idea where he was, he couldn’t run the equations without the nav computer no matter how much time he spent on them, so he’d either fix the nav computer with help, or he’d be stuck here.

Din banished that thought from his mind as the ramp on the ship lowered, revealing a small green baby standing there, staring at him. Behind his helmet, Din smiled.

“Feeling better?”

The child looked at him with those enormous, soulful brown eyes of his and cooed.

“I’d glad. We had a pretty rough trip getting here.”

The trill that the child let out had a questioning lilt to it.

“No idea where here is. We blind jumped away from those Imps because we had no other choice. But I got the Crest fixed, for the most part. And there’s a town not too far from here. Want to tag along?”

The child walked forwards towards the Mandalorian and held up his hands above his head. Din huffed softly and picked him up without a word, setting him on his shoulder so that his hands were free. With a push of a button, the child’s pram floated out of the ship to hover alongside him in case the little one didn’t want to walk or be carried, or if they were attacked and he needed to be stored somewhere safely.

The ramp of the ship closed up behind them as the two set out through the forest towards the town.

Author's Note:

So this is my first story on Fimfiction. My first MLP fic as well. I've mostly stuck to posting on FF.net and Spacebattles, but after watching the Mandalorian, I couldn't get this out of my head.

I hope y'all enjoy it. No idea how long my inspiration will last, it comes and goes as it pleases.

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