Chapter 5: Say Friend and Enter

Paz Vizsla using his flight pack to fight the Imps who were attacking Din Djarin and Grogu on Nevarro. Image from The Mandalorian, Season 1, Episode 3, The Sin. Calendar from DateWorks.

Grogu didn’t know a lot about Paz Vizsla. Yes, he’s a Mandalorian. Yes, he’s bigger than a brick privy (he’d heard Bo-Katan say that). He thought he should have been given the Darksaber when Grogu’s dad managed to get it away from Moff Gideon. Oh, and he’d once saved Grogu and his dad from the Imps and bounty hunters on Nevarro. But that was it. 

He didn’t know if Paz Vizsla liked music, ate frogs, or drank Spotchka. He didn’t know if the huge man liked dancing, debate, or wrestling. Could he recite the planetary capitals for the Core Worlds? Did he polish his armor every day? Did he back talk the Armorer? Who knew? Not Grogu.

Why this was important was pretty simple. Paz Vizsla had a famous Mandalorian ancestor and Grogu knew everything anyone could know about Tarre Vizsla. Every Jedi did. That’s how special he had been. You couldn’t study Mandalorian history and culture at the Jedi temple and not learn everything there was to know about the only Mandalorian Jedi. 

Yup, that’s right. Tarre Vizsla, who had been Mand’alor a thousand years earlier, and who had created the Darksaber, had also been raised as a Jedi. As if that wasn’t enough, he’d been of those rare people who had left all sorts of records on both Mandalore and Coruscant that provided future students of the Jedi-Mandalorian conflicts with a guide to understanding what was important to and what motivated Mandalorians. 

Of course, to access those records you needed to know that they existed, that a Mandalorian-Jedi had created them, and that they were never meant to be used to harm either the Jedi Order or the Mandalorians who challenged them so routinely. Grogu wasn’t surprised to find that no one had accessed those records but him. At least the ones on Coruscant. 

He was sure Master Yoda would have had words of wisdom to share about balance in the Force and stuff like that, but really Grogu had just been trying to avoid the cheek pinching librarian and darted down a corridor that he’d never bothered with before and found himself walking through a space filled with all sorts of artifacts the Jedi had collected for millennia. 

Boxes, trays, plinths and shelving units overflowing with artifacts were sort of organized. If you call creating a winding path than only someone the size of Grogu could easily navigate ‘organized’. He suspected, much later, that it was because of this type of organization that he was the person able to find the the small metal box that held the records that Tarre Vizsla had created. Anyone else who even tried to walk through the room would have caused an avalanche of artifacts which they would have had to use the Force to suspend and even then it was going to leave a mark. 

Having seen Din Djarin’s new armor, as compared to the bounty hunter’s old armor, Grogu realized that the box he had found all those years earlier must have been made from beskar. It was shiny in a kind of understated way that didn’t match what he knew about other metals. Even in the dim light of the huge storage space he could tell that it had been created by a highly skilled craftsperson. Of course it was the same size as he was and he was looking at it from about ten centimeters away and had plenty of time to just stand there and appreciate it. Most people hadn’t had that chance since it was built.

There were three indentations on the box and a very fine line separated two of them from the third on a horizontal plane. Grogu put his hand on the indentations and realized that they were handholds, or probably finger holds for a human or a species of a larger size than him. He pulled very gently but nothing happened. Dank Farrik! The box was locked. Now he really wanted to figure out how to open it. 

He wasn’t just curious about the contents. He could sense that something in the box wanted him to open it. But if it was locked, how was he going to do that?

Then he thought he heard a whisper. Really just a wisp of a sound that slipped into his ear and tickled the tiny hairs in it. “Oooo reee vaaa dddd”. Huh? What kind of word had that been? “Ohhh riii vvvv aaa ddd”. Oh ree vad? Grogu didn’t know that word. What language was it? The only word he knew that was even close was ‘Ori’vod’ which was Mando’a for ‘Big Brother’, really big friend or special friend. Oh! 

Softly as he could Grogu whispered ‘Ori’vod’ and hoped his accent was okay. He found Mando’a must easier to speak than Gal Basic, but he still didn’t speak it very often. Almost no one at the Jedi temple spoke it and the few times he had offered up some sort of answer or advice using it, he got all the strange looks and comments about speaking something people understood from his classmates. 

It must have been okay because he heard the slightest sound of a latch being lifted or shifted to one side. He couldn’t tell for certain which it was but something had happened and that was enough. He put his hands in the indentations again and carefully lifted the ‘top’ of the box and found himself staring at an orb, maybe made of crystal, or perhaps a polished gem of some sort. It was dotted with tiny symbols and when he carefully lifted it from the box, it glowed with an internal light and was startled to see the images that where painted on the walls and ceiling all around him. 

At first he thought they were stars, but then he realized that they were something closer to topics. He brushed a finger carefully over the surface and pressed gently on a symbol that reminded him of a fish. The whole display changed and that very, very soft, faint voice was whispering in Mando’a again. He wondered what he could do to change that. He liked Mando’a but he didn’t really have the vocabulary to understand it all that well. Perhaps he could tune into the object using the Force?

As soon as he did that he heard a voice speaking Gal Basic.

“Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Tarre Vizsla, friend. May you learn and reflect on what you have learned.”

Grogu was so surprised at that he almost dropped the orb. Instead he said “naak” and watched the light dim and the orb seemed to shut itself off. He was grateful for that. He carefully replaced it in it’s box, closed the lid and said “naak” again. When he tested the box, it refused to open. He was grateful for that. 

He retraced his path and managed to sneak out of the library and made his way to the cafeteria. Everyone at the temple expected to see him eating with a happy grin on his face. It was the perfect cover for having discovered that amazing artifact and it made all of his future visits to the library far more purposeful. 

One thing he could say about Paz Vizsla, based on what Grogu knew about his ancient relative, always expect the unexpected. You never knew when they were going to save your life or give you a guide to the galaxy. You just had to be patient. Not much of a Mandalorian trait to be honest, but Grogu was also a Jedi and no one ever saw that coming.