How 500 kids fought the droid army for their freedom (fanfiction)

Somewhere on Ringo Vinda, on a snowy plateau among pine trees stands a monument. That monument dates back to the Clone Wars, but unlike what you might think, it isn't a monument to the dead. It tells a story; the story of an event that changed the fate of the whole planet and that happened on that snowy plateau. Let me tell you that story.

The year is 21 BBY, the CIS and the Republic are at war, the galaxy is being torn apart by the Clone Wars. Ringo Vinda has quickly been annexed by the Separatists and iral Trench has locked down the whole planet including the ring orbiting it. The battle is on two separated fronts: the main battlefront was on the ring orbiting the planet, where the iral Trench has set up his command center, and the secondary front is on the planet's surface. You see, It had been a while since the planet was occupied by the CIS and civilians were under tight surveillance. The droid patrols were very common, long distance communications were systematically jammed, a blockade made transportation of off-world goods near-impossible and law enforcers were recruited as a militia to make sure everyone would stay in line. A few months prior, because they were eager to make profits from the population, the CIS had put up a program called the Mandatory Work For The Galaxy, which basically consisted in taking a fraction of the young adult population at random and shipping them off world to serve as unpaid labour. In short, it was basically institutionalized slave trafficking. What did you expect with a name such as Mandatory Work For The Galaxy? Many of the young adults that had the misfortune of being chosen had the same idea: they wanted to disappear instead. However, if you want to disappear, choosing the right place to disappear is key, because if they get caught and a patrol realizes that they were supposed to be shipped, they risk a punishment far worse than being sent off-world for unpaid work, so the stakes for them are pretty high.

The Region of Glair is situated in the northern hemisphere of Ringo Vinda. It borders a tall chain of mountains, it’s very rural and mostly composed of small villages. You see, the rurality and isolation of the Glair region meant that patrols were far less common and that they mostly consisted of local human law enforcers who grew up with local civilians, they know each other and all, so they were much more likely to be lenient. Something very important about the Glair region is that it also hid a shrub.

Not the bushy kind of shrub, the Resistance of Ringo Vinda had a branch called the Secret Legion and the Secret Legion had shrubs, which was the name given to where they arm and train civilians into combatants. The shrubs don't accept everyone, they only take the most able-bodied young men and women. Of course, many youngsters the resistance by conviction, but there are many who ed it simply because they had nowhere else to go. That means that the CIS basically sent a large number of recruits directly into the arms of the Resistance. Many, many shrubs were scattered throughout the planet and the CIS intended to get rid of the shrubs and the resistance as a whole. Now, these recruits trained in the shrubs don't necessarily stay in one place, sometimes they band together because they like each other and they travel and start wandering around the nearby regions.

One of these groups was nicknamed the Loose Corps, mostly formed by 17-19 years old kids. At first, they’ve got a certain brigand feel to them, a group of kids traveling the region, nobody can tell them what to do, you know what it's like. They steal water and food when they need to, they often run into the droid patrols and law enforcement, you see the picture. However, the population likes them because they are tired of the droid army, tired of the oppression, so they them. Sometimes the Loose Corps will sleep in a farmer’s barn or a seller’s storehouse and sometimes they rob stores that collaborate with the CIS. They don't seem to be afraid of anything really so the upper management of the Secret Legion begins to use them for much more dangerous stuff, such as assassination operations on CIS collaborators. Listen, those operations went kind of iffy. On one hand, some straight up look like mafias settling scores, where a few kids just open the door of someone’s house and open fire, punching holes across the whole house. On the other hand, some have just failed because it wasn’t planned well or because they hesitated or panicked, which shouldn't be surprising after all: they are just kids with guns.

One day, the leader of the Loose Corps thinks he has successfully made a law enforcement captain change sides and he gets intelligence that a secret and important material delivery for Resistance has been discovered by the droid army and that they plan to intercept it when it will land. This delivery cannot fall in the hands of the CIS or it would be a severe blow to the Resistance efforts in the region. Therefore, the whole Loose Corps is sent to shut down any sign of the droid army attempting to intercept the delivery. A dozen battle droids show up and they are quickly taken care of. The Loose Corps then gathered around the shuttle carrying the precious cargo when suddenly, a shockwave would shake up everything many kilometers around. The shuttle disappears in a massive fireball, the explosion wiping out everyone in proximity. The few who were far enough away to survive were met with a whole squad of B2 battle droids that were hidden. They could have taken them into custody, but they didn't even bother. The droids opened fire, wiping out what remained of the Corps. A whole group of kids who fought against their people's oppression, all died in a moment. The truth is that the shuttle had long been intercepted and the delivery replaced by a time bomb and the droid army knew what was going to happen. They gave them what looked like an easy fight, killed most of the Corps with a trap and finished the massacre with droids hidden throughout the area.

Maybe they died because they were unlucky, maybe they died because their leader got tricked, but the problem remains that the Resistance is losing. There is an underlying issue which is that they aren't strong enough, they don't have enough men yet and they are seriously under-equipped. Most of the kids who “graduate” the shrubs leave equipped with the blaster their grandfather used to scare tresers off his land or just light pistols for personal defense, they don't have anything that even resembles a weapon of war.

It’s been months since diplomats of Ringo Vindo have been begging the senate to send help or at least weapons to their help the Resistance. So far, their efforts have been in vain. This was until echoes of what happened to the Loose Corps reached the senate. Kids fighting with inadequate weapons for the freedom of their planet being killed like vermin, apparently this was what’s needed to get the senate’s attention. The senate decided that they could send a weapon shipment, but no clonetrooper forces since those were needed elsewhere, notably on the ring of Ringo Vinda where the battle was raging furiously. However, the Jedi council agreed to send master Kim Jall, master Elara Heltyx and her apprentice Nazara Ridge, the protagonists of our story. You may rightfully wonder why I only mention them now. The reason is simple: this story isn't about them, it's about everything around them, the world and the people of Ringo Vinda.

Now, when you're willing to send weapons in enemy territory, the question of where becomes very important. So after several weeks of analysis, the Grand Army of the Republic and the Resistance agree on a certain nice snowy plateau covered in pine trees. Why? Why, of all places, drop these incredibly precious weapons here? They need to parachute weapons in the worst conditions to do so; no GPS or localisation system because the CIS made sure to jam the signal, so they need to navigate by sight above a region that is under curfew, so there's no light, it's completely dark. However… During nights when there's a full moon, if the sky is clear enough, there are things you can see, things that reflect moonlight, like a lake or a plateau completely covered in snow. If you were with the pilot about to fly over the region, you’d say “Right, y’know the Challenger Peak, the highest mountain on Ringo Vinda by far, it will be very easy to find, when you're there, you go straight east and you’ll end up seeing the Alma Lake and you’ll see it ‘cause it’ll reflect the light from the moon. Look to the south of that and there’ll be a massive plateau that'll also be lit up because there’ll be a full moon and it's covered in snow, drop the weapons there.” That's why the Glair Plateau: it's one of these rare places a pilot can find at night without any instruments besides a map and a naked eye.

Now, you may wonder to whom would they possibly give the immense responsibility to get these weapons and it’s the of the Secret Legion themselves who suggested master Kim Jall. Master Jall was born on the planet and had already fought against the CIS on Ringo Vinda very early in the Clone wars, before the planet was fully occupied and he made quite the impression. He was known to be a wonderful tactician and an excellent leader. He remained on the planet for quite a while, long enough that he took part in the training of recruits in different shrubs, notably in the Glair shrub. He actually trained a majority of the of the Loose Corps when they ed the resistance. Master Jall told the council that he alone may not be sufficient to turn the tide of the battle, hence why master Heltyx and her apprentice were sent to help him. Now, when they all arrive, it’s not in a nice shuttle, because it would never have gone past the separatist defenses. They arrive in an escape pod from a Venator approaching the system and leaving immediately. In order to return to the jedi temple, they had to turn the tide of the war planetside with the loads of weapons the Republic was going to send. If the plan failed, the council would plan a rescue mission. The weapon delivery, or the bantha’s birthday as it was codenamed, was scheduled for on the next full moon, 11 days after the three jedi landed. The problem is that they can’t really go up there 11 days early, it’d be very suspicious; there’d be lots of people who’d wonder why there were 300 people on a seemingly random plateau for ten whole days in the middle of winter. But they don’t really have a choice. You see, rumours say that the droid army is getting real fed up with what the Resistance is doing in the Glair region and that they are about to put the whole region under martial law, meaning law enforcement everywhere, blockades everywhere, battle droids asking questions everywhere and it’s kind of hard to go get 20 tons of weapons from a plateau with 200 people if you get stopped every step of the way. So that evening, the three jedi take 200 people with them, some of them were veterans of the early battles before the full occupation, the others were recruits fresh out of the shrub, and all go up on the plateau.

If you think that sounds easy, you’re mistaken. They cannot use any light, or else they would be seen from the city. They need to voluntarily cover themselves in snow so very long range thermal scanners won’t pick up their signature. So you’ve gotta picture 200 people on the side of a mountain, with snow up to their knees, covered in snow in the middle of winter in the complete darkness of the night with just 3 jedi who can trust the force to lead them to the summit. Even when they arrive at the peak, the conditions are terrible, there is enough food nor enough chalets for everybody, the cold is properly insane and they are just kids who, for the most part, know nothing about the mountains. They wait there just shy of a dozen days, no one comes to bug them because no one wants to climb up the mountain in the middle of winter to see if they’re there and standard B1 battle droids don’t exactly tend to work well in this much snow. So after eleven days, the time has come. A blockade runner hired by the republic successfully weaves itself through the blockade, gets in the atmosphere, it comes into sight of everyone on the plateau and… it gets shot out of the sky by a ship that was ing nearby. The blockade runner remained too high in altitude for too long, a long range radar picked it up and a ship was sent to shoot it down. The remains of the ship crashed right besides the city. 8 people were sent to check what remained of the delivery. They came back a few hours later with 20 or so blaster rifles and a few grenades. That was it. The rest had been lost in the crash.

The resistance messaged their representatives at the senate, the senate accepted to send another delivery, but the problem is that a pilot can only come on the full moon. The lunar cycle on Ringo Vinda takes 32 days, so they have to wait a month on the plateau. Staying up there for that long without being spotted is going to be stupidly hard, y’know. A few days later, a group of kids come down from the plateau into the valley to find some food, but in the meantime, martial law has gone through, so the droid patrol are on edge. A patrol saw the kids come down and they opened fire, without the slightest warning. A group of resistants that was a little bit higher up on the plateau hear the shots fired and come down to see what’s going on and they come face to face with a large droid patrol. It’s a large shoot-out that lasts over twenty minutes, the patrol goes back down, but you can’t cover that up. The ship carrying weapons could be explained saying it was the blackmarket or whatever, but now the CIS, the droid patrols, the law enforcement, everyone knows that there are 200 folks with weapons on the Glair plateau.

And this is where the major question comes, should you stay or should you leave? They can’t really stay, if your shrub gets discovered, it’s over. You get raided by a regiment of droids or whatnot. But they can’t exactly leave either. They can’t because it’s been over a year since they’ve been waiting for those weapons who could help in saving their friends and family and their region. It took a while to find the Glair plateau, it would take even longer to find somewhere else, and it would probably never even happen since the senate wasn’t that keen from the get-go. Yet somehow, it’s not entirely hopeless either. What I didn’t tell you is that there are a lot of people who ed our little group on the plateau in the meantime, so the shrub actually stands a chance because there are a shit ton of people on the plateau, meaning they are really hard to force out. This mission made so much noise in the Resistance, it’s the largest delivery of weapons to ever arrive on the planet since the beginning of the war, so there are many people from many different groups who climbed the mountain to the party. Many people, not all of them were of the Resistance. They were 200 people on the first evening; after a few weeks, they were over 650 on the Glair plateau. There are many different species, they have different origins, they don’t all speak galactic basic, yet they all work together perfectly through this hell. They patrol together so that the droids and law enforcement, which now have them completely surrounded, cannot get to the plateau. Despite their very, very dire situation, the morale is great. Maybe because they’ve been dreaming of those weapons for what feels like forever, perhaps because they heard rumours that the Grand Army of the Republic will come to save the day and they just need to hold on for a few more months. It’s largely credited to master Jall as well. He had the qualities required for a good leader to be followed by over 650 people.

At first, there was a certain kind of sympathy between the law enforcement and the resistants. As I told you before, they knew each other, they grew up in the same villages. The plateau had a doctor called Lewis. From time to time, Lewis would go down to the nearby small city of Thorsen to get some medical supplies and the law enforcement would let him go. However, one time, Lewis didn’t stumble upon the law enforcement, instead he met battle droids, who captured him on the spot and sent him to Alma, the largest city in the region. At that moment, it’s likely that the CIS underestimated the number of people on the plateau because master Jall’s response was to send 120 people to siege a police station in Thorsen and take 40 officers hostage. He then ed the tactical droid directly to offer an exchange of 40 hostages in exchange for Lewis. The offer was accepted so the hostages were released. Master Jall and Heltyx and about 30 men wait for Lewis to arrive at the bottom of the mountain. They wait and they are met with a man with only light clothing and a bag who is struggling to walk. He evidently got beat up and tortured, maybe drugged but he is alive. Master Jall and his men come to help the doctor to walk, but master Heltyx senses a very bad feeling. She barely has time to warn everyone before the whole plateau has a sense of déjà vu. The bag explodes and the fireball engulfs seven people, including Master Jall, and five others would be hurt.

Master Jall would be brought back up to the plateau and buried among the pine trees along with the six other diseased. And all this happens the very day before the full moon. What I mean is that the evening of the day of the funeral, they hear the blockade runner ship arrive and the supply drop happens. Tons and tons of weapons are dropped, amply enough to arm multiple shrubs. The problem is that the moment you get the weapons, you need to get rid of them, you’ve gotta distribute them all across the region, across the whole continent and disappear with them, it’s quite dangerous. Unfortunately, the night that the weapons arrive, it begins to snow very hard, so hard that the snow covers the weapons as fast as the Resistance can store them away. It’s a problem because the snow blocks all the routes that allow you to go either up or down the mountain.

Now the truth is that the snow doesn’t matter, the shrub was already long doomed… Nobody on the plateau knows about it yet but it’d been weeks since iral Trench on the planetary ring had decided that the law enforcement had failed to get rid of them and that he’d do it himself. And the night of the very next day, the plateau would face the full wrath of the droid army. iral Trench is sending over 16 000 cold assault battle droids called the 766th division, which are B2s modified specifically for cold and mountainous environments. The difference in strength already wasn’t exactly great, but now, it’s simply ridiculous. If you are a member of the resistance on the plateau, the only way to survive is to run, leave and not fight. But the weapons… if they leave, they leave without the weapons. There are litteral tons of weapons, it’d take days, weeks to move all of that from the top of the plateau and they only maybe have a single day, give or take a few hours. Some people, many actually, simply don't want to leave because it's too frustrating, others also think for a bit and deduct something along the lines of "Think of the Resistance's reputation, the Republic actually sent us something for the first time in months and we're just gonna leave it for the CIS straight away? No way, it'd be better if we die with these weapons… so that the next time a shrub needs help from the senate, they'll get the help." So the hours ed, those who decided to leave did, they carried as many weapons as they could until the plateau counted 500 heads. The nightfall arrived and the drama followed suit.

The 766th division of battle droids surrounded the plateau at the east, south, west and northwest and the law enforcement covered the north. 1 hour after midnight, the combined forces of the CIS make a push on the north through the enclave and through the northwest age. Master Heltyx was the new leader in command and was defending those two fronts while padawan Ridge was assisting the defense of the east and south. On both the north and northwest front, the defenders, who had spent the night in the snow with blankets and heaters, are already ready and so they push the enemy forces back. 2 hours ed midnight, aerial forces of the droid army come to the plateau and bombard the hell out of it. Every chalet, every barrack, every toilet, everything that isn’t a pine tree or snow blows up and burns. An hour es and the law enforcement makes another push through the northwest age with twice the numbers, but the defenders already regrouped after the bombers were gone. Law enforcers lost a great many men and they are forced to fall back. For a few hours, it gets calmer. Since it's winter, the sun rises later, so it’s still very dark, but the inhabitants of the plateau are beginning to believe, to believe that, because they knew the area better, the impossible somehow happened and that 500 kids on a plateau managed to push back 16 000 battle droids and law enforcers.

Suddenly, padawan Ridge comes running from the east to meet her master and brings news from the southeast. The southeast was very poorly defended simply because it wasn’t climbable. The of the Resistance had spent countless hours figuring out every single way to climb up the mountain when they were trying to evade patrols and the southeast just wasn’t a practical option since it was simply too steep. But the southeast is entirely covered in pine trees from the bottom of the mountain all the way to the top, so someone could climb without ever being seen. Well, the 766th division pretended to go up the main ways through the north and northwest as a distraction while about 2 000 snow battle droids had just climbed from the southeast without making noise. Not long after, a defender goes to master Heltyx position and tells her that most of the people who defended the southeast with him are dead and that the droids are coming. At that moment, Elara Heltyx realizes that at any given time, hundreds of battle droids can come from the southeast and shoot everyone in the back. That’s when she said the sentence that would be transmitted to every last member of the resistance on the plateau “Well, we stayed with the weapons until the last possible moment, but I'm not gonna watch my men die when our perimeter's already fallen, it's time to go now.”

At that moment, if you are a defender of the plateau, you’ve got to flee the plateau in the darkness of the night, with the sirens and blaster shots of the droids behind you, while knowing that behind every tree there might be an ambush. But it was too late to leave. They wanted to stay with the weapons until the last second, but trying to flee the mountain when it’s completely surrounded, their odds are strongly stacked against them. Master Heltyx and her padawan split up. The master would take the largest group with her, trying to draw attention and go as far as possible while the padawan would try to protect as many people as possible while they flee in smaller teams. A group of officers would also team up and take a very large group of about 40 people and they would make it as far as Alma, but they would all get gunned down as soon as they arrived. But where it was the absolute worst was Thorsen because it was the biggest village at the bottom of the plateau. Many kids from the plateau came from Thorsen and just tried to go home to hide, except that the droid army was expecting it and were waiting for them. The kids were gunned down in the streets of their town by the tens, closing in on the hundred.

Padawan Ridge successfully managed to find a way out of the perimeter with a group of 5 resistants. She told them to go on without her and went back to find a group of stragglers to show them the way. She found another, led them out and told them the same thing; to go on without her. However, she would later be found at the edge of Thorsen, dead with the third group she was trying to save. Master Heltyx’s group would go pretty far, however, in spite of all the efforts deployed by the master, many of the resistance in her group would fall on the way out of the perimeter. They would cross a river, with freezing water up to their knees for hours without protection. Needless to say that not everyone made it out with all 10 toes at the end. A farmer had hidden a group of 20 in his barn for the night. The farmer would later be found and executed and his barn burned to the ground. The resistance would make a small commemorative plate that says “to the unarmed volunteers without uniform” where the barn was. At this moment, the Resistance came very close to falling apart. The droid took the weapons, the chain of command is in pieces, the survivors are lost, scattered throughout the forests and don’t know what to do. When the sun would rise on the plateau, about 300 of the Glair shrub had perished.

The news on Ringo Vinda relayed the information throughout the planet. Obviously, the news was controlled by the CIS so they said that the droid army and the glorious law enforcers had managed to kick the terrorists out of their plateau. However, the Republic news channels told the story from a different point of view. What they did was to remind people that everyone on the plateau was 19-20 years old, they reminded people that they were pretty much kids originally trying to avoid the Mandatory Work For The Galaxy… They had no training, no experience and that when they arrived somewhere they could make a difference, they stayed and when the droid army arrived, they only escaped when they thought their defenses were broken. But considering that they were a bunch of kids without material in enemy territory, the chances that it would end well weren’t good from the beginning. Basically, even if it was kind of stupid and doomed to fail from the beginning, it just shows that they must’ve really wanted to be free to do it anyway.

But this message from the Republic actually inspires more of the locals to the Resistance against the occupation, it inspires the senate to offer more and supplies to the Resistance and above all, it inspires the survivors. For months, the survivors begin to recover, hearing the Republic news talking about their friends who were killed. Can you imagine the effect that has? The group that hid in the farmer’s barn, they ended up going back to the plateau, but now, they don’t have to defend it anymore. They have been trained for by the veterans on the plateau, they have experience from numerous encounters with the droid patrols, they are pretty well armed because they’d hidden weapons for themselves and they just spent two month being reminded that in order to fight back, ok, you've gotta have the equipment, the organisation, the weapons, that's all really important, but honestly, the only thing you really need is the will to fight back. So they begin to make ambushes, they sabotage supply transports, they blow up law enforcement bureaus, but it’s not just that unit. A few weeks later, we hear that another group did the same on the other side of the chain of mountains, another did it further south, and another and another. They weren’t all on the plateau but they all heard about it. The Resistance movement gains a LOT of traction when spring arrives. The leader of the law enforcement in the Glair region notified the iral Trench that the situation in the region is actually much worse than before the attack on the plateau.

Actually, there are places where the droid army doesn’t dare approach, notably Thorsen, the village at the bottom of the plateau where lots of kids died when trying to escape. The Resistance even considers Thorsen as liberated at the beginning of summer. Now, the battle on the ring surrounding the planet is over. The Republic has killed the iral Trench and now trusts the Resistance who needs weapons again. Where do you think they will ask to drop the supplies? So, in the middle of summer, in broad daylight, 3000 people will climb the plateau without hiding themselves, at master Jall’s tomb to watch bombers of the Republic Army drop more weapons than the region has ever seen. The next day, whole cities across the Glair region begin to surrender themselves to the Resistance. With next to no from the droid army, the corrupted law enforcers know they wouldn’t survive a face off against the Resistance so they simply give up. The clone troopers army has already begun to liberate the planet further south, so you may expect that after all that time of fighting, the survivors of the plateau may not want to risk their life again. They know a professional army is coming and will probably arrive and liberate Alma at any point. It’s the biggest city in the region and it’s a key position in the region. But their family is still there, their friends are still in prison or waiting to be transported and enslaved elsewhere at any time, so what do they do?

That’s why, so many years later, there is a monument on the Glair plateau where master Jall was buried. It’s not a monument to the dead, it’s a monument to the glory of the Resistance. It’s there to remind that when the Grand Army of the Republic arrived in Glair, the opposing forces in Alma had surrendered themselves. It’s there to that the Glair region has liberated itself.

#May4th2025

[Posted on May 17th 2025]

Images are pictures of mountains in the alps, the Rockies or northern Canada mountains. Characters artworks come from SWTOR cinematics or reddit