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I am in a Star Wars universe game. I wrote this up because we played down a player this weekend and it would be good to let him know what happened, and I realised after the fact that it would also be good to have a thorough record of what we did when we pick up again after the midwinter holidays, so.
And then I thought that it would be amusing to post it here, since my previous game session summaries have been considered droll.
The game is set some sixty years after the original movie trilogy, thirty years after the Yuuzhan Vong war. If that latter thing means nothing to you, me too! Though I have done research to catch myself up, a little.
We have three Force users in the party: one schismatic Jedi and two Imperial Knights. They are a task force put together to deal with a crisis; because this is an undercover op, a tramp freighter was hired for transport and additional stuff, containing the other two PCs. Thus:
The party was assembled to deal with pirate attacks. Specifically, there was a gang of very alarming pirates who would sweep into a system, overwhelm all defenses, and mysteriously abduct every living humanoid soul present, leaving no survivors and no witnesses. The Alliance had gotten information from a mole indicating where attacks were going to happen, but if they parked ships there to prevent the attacks, the pirates hit a different system instead.
So we had information about where the next attack was happening, and picked up a useful cargo to bring in (including some things that were technically contraband, to help us collect intel by getting us into the underbelly of the location), and went there; attempts to come in quietly were thwarted by someone recognising Selik immediately, and taking us all out for drinks. However, that facilitated the trading and the making friends.
The plan was established to let the pirate attack happen, track the swarm with as many methods as we could muster, and infiltrate the fleet as a 'captured' ship if possible. The number of methods we managed to come up with bordered on the ridiculous, and ranged from 'make friends with people so they can be tracked through the force', 'plant tracking devices on multiple pirate ships', all the way to 'make a self-assembling nanobot tracking device that would survive EMP and conceal its parts in the toes of a large number of steeltoed workboots, so it will assemble itself when the population is imprisoned on an enemy ship'.
It turned out that Selik had been a survivor of a previous pirate attack, because he has a Mysterious Alien Device collection, and one of them did somethng Mysterious and Alien but which seemed to defeat whatever method that the bad guys were using to locate Everyone On This Planet. We investigated the device in a variety of ways, and then Tereez managed to wake it up briefly. He was asked what it did, and he revealed that he had been raised in a Sith Academy and he had tried to be as evil as he could manage at it. There was drama in which Tsavor was not sure what to make of this at all. (It is, however, well-known in certain circles that when this guy turned up in friendly space he was very "There are Dark Jedi! Lots of them!" and he is a bit of a laughingstock over it. One of our NPCs in the task force had mocked him over it thoroughly and tediously.)
So the Mysterious Alien Device appeared to detect and block Dark Force usage in some way. Which doesn't reassure anyone about what the pirates are up to.
So. We were in-system. Carefully shut down the ship and the droid we had on rent-to-own because we knew a massive EMP was going to be coming in to disable everything for the pirates. And the M.A.D. whirred to life. And all the Force-sensitive folks noticed that it seemed like something Dark was swimming around in space around us for a bit, and then the pirates came through.
There was chaos; a squad of pirates tried to take the Vrei, and were very startled that there were a) people on board and b) that they were Jedi. We passed ourselves off successfully as a commandeered ship and joined the fleet.
Many of the tracking methods worked, including the crazy boot-related one. (Plan M, in which Hardison dies, was the one where we let someone get captured and try to infiltrate that way; this was not implemented because it seemed like a terrible idea.)
We transmitted a bunch of data on a secure channel to our task force, which was alarmed. And we jumped with the pirate fleet, and found ourselves near the belt of a system that reeked of Dark Side energy, with, among other things, a Vong battleship and an obviously dying Vong worldship which had inexplicably got a tech-based shipyard built into the side of it, something actual Vong would consider a total abomination.
We managed to infiltrate one of the pirate capital ships intending to confuse its targeting systems to skew the battle that was about to happen more towards our side, and encountered a Very Alarming Droid, that looked like a Palpatine-Era Imperial Torture Droid, spoke no languages we were familiar with, but which turned out to be the mole that had been sending info about the pirate attacks. With the droid's help we hacked the ship, got back to the Vrei, and were told to go see if any of the heat signatures on the dying worldship were rescuable, as presumably they were the abducted people.
We popped into our zippy dropship and started off, taking a little incidental fire from the battleship on the way.
So:
When we left off, we were ducking around the dying worldship to stop taking heavy fire and to see if any of the captives were recoverable. We landed on the tech-based portion of the monstrosity and sent out a little swarm of bugs to start mapping and providing early warning, since Tsavor's senses indicated that there were Vong on the ship. Aaron stayed on the dropship to coordinate communication and run the bugs, especially once it got clear that further into the worldship there was some sort of EM interference going on that required some management. (In his free time, Tereez suggested that he make a large bomb, suitable for blowing the power plant on the monstrosity.)
Tereez hacked the computer in the tech portion and we started collecting what information we could; Aurun suggested that while we weren't getting much useful information, we got the shipping manifests and determined that mostly what got stored here was spare parts for repair of pirate ships, some of which the bugs were finding in adjacent bits of the techzone. We also found food shipments coming in, but far insufficient for the number of heat signatures we'd been sent to investigate, and the worldship was certainly not in a condition to be supplying more.
The combat-capable portions of the party started to infiltrate the monstrosity, which was roughly like creeping around inside a large alien turkey leftovers which has been in the fridge too long and was thus going kind of slimy. This started out creepy and only got worse. Also it smelled the sort of terrible that made everyone glad for environmentally sealed armour. At one point, a squad of Vong elites ran past us (we managed to dodge because of warning from the bug infiltrators) and we counterambushed them because we weren't sure if they were going to wind up in the tech portion of the monstrosity and thus threaten Aaron. Combat ensued, various people were flogged with angry snakes but only took armor damage, Tsavor beheaded one of them and Valis took samples. The remains were removed to make it less obvious they'd been dispatched with mostly lightsabers, but we could not clean up the grenade blast.
Investigation continued; we eventually found a hallway through of creepy statues of emaciated Vong all arranged in a standard ritualised position, each of them individual, so we are not sure if they were mummies or commemorative statues but regardless they were probably connected to specific Vong. At least one of them showed signs of the same degenerative pus that was oozing all over the inside of the monstrosity. We were charmed by the decor.
Somewhere around here some pirate ships were heading in towards the worldship, so Aaron took the dropship and the fighters and started sneaking around on the outside trying not to get noticed when they came into the bay. Everyone was appropriately nervous about this.
We heard unpleasant muttering and investigated it, and found a crazy priest of some sort in a room full of repetetive religious inscriptions involving an unknown Vong god. After applying sneak attack damage, we took video references of all the religious kipple in the room, hid the body, and boobytrapped the area because there was a huge squad of Vong rampaging around in the area and we wanted to make sure that when they raised the alarm they would be appropriately damaged.
More sneaking about got us to the first of the chambers with potential prisoners inside. Outside of it there were two Vong guards, who were having an argument over whether or not it would be more fun to open the door and 'flood the area'. It was unclear whether this was 'gas the prisoners with something terrible' or what. We killed the guards and studied the door. Valis attempted to clairvoyance to the other side of it and mostly got "It is really creepy in there, and you are blinded by the Dark." Mama may have told us not to look into the eyes of the sun, but since we knew that was where the fun is, we worked out a way to puncture a hole in the door and slip a camera through, which worked just fine except that doing it made the door open instead.
The room was a large chamber full of zombies. We did what one does when confronted with large chambers full of zombies: applied grenades, chopped up and blasted the ones that got close, applied telekinetic pushback, and so on, as appropriate to skillset, while Valis built a retaining wall out of construction foam and dismembered zombies. Once the wall was completed, he took a sample of the black ooze that came out of dead zombies, and then we were alarmed to discover that the zombies were beating a hole in the wall, and there were sounds of more zombies on the loose, so we elected to depart with as much efficiency as we could muster. Efficiency included leaving a large proximity-triggered bomb in the corridor behind us for when the zombies arrived there.
Aaron indicated it was safe enough to bring the ships back in and thus did so, and exeunt omnes (pursued by a zombie horde). Or that was the theory. The practice was rather interrupted by the space equivalent of a helicopter gunship with an anti-tank gun which was blasting up the bay as we arrived. We were glad we had put slap patches on the armour damage after being beaten with snakes when the damn thing took down the forcefield and depressurised the area.
After some resulting flailing panic, the scene was thus: various lighter weight ships, the mysterious creepy droid, and Valis venting into space, the party scrambling into ships and launching, and a stray fighter distracting the assault shuttle so that we could clear out (piloted by our Chiss healer Jedi friend, as it turned out). Valis proceeded to Force-push himself onto the enemy shuttle and start demonstrating how well he slices and dices; the creepy droid elected to blast a whole in the enemy ship; Tereez went to blow the power plant on the tech portion once everyone was clear; Aurun bumped Aaron out of the controls on the dropship so we could depart. The enemy shuttle was driven to being out of control and no longer our problem; the creepy droid was collected; Valis reclaimed his fighter; everyone booked it back to the Vrei Ki'ala. Somewhere along the line Valis and Tsavor teamed up to Use The Force and helped our capital ship deal with a ramming attempt from the doomed Vong battleship.
After a comedy of errors in communication we managed to convey BIOHAZARD BLOW THAT SHIT UP AND THEN BLOW UP THE DEBRIS to the allied forces, who commenced blowing shit up accordingly. Tsavor and possibly others went tootling around in fighters to see if the Dark Side auras needed to be more specifically shot up. Aurun checked on our prisoners, who were still alive. We notified people who needed to be notified, parked the Vrei in the Valiant for appropriate repairs and downtime, and entered hyperspace.
This was not expected to be as interesting as it was. While we were in hyperspace, the mysterious shield-you-from-the-Dark-Side device woke up; we called up to the bridge to warn of an impending *something*; as we were finishing the call, alarms went off demanding security teams to medbay and the brig. Various people went everywhere to figure out what the fuck was going on. The prisoners were all dead, rather messily, one much more messily than others because he was in an MRI tube at the time. However, being in the MRI tube meant that we learned that what was killing the prisoners was, in fact, "the worms", which appear to be extraplanar space piranha or something - they phase in, chew up the insides of the victim, and phase out again. Everyone was appropriately alarmed.
Tsavor and Aurun, on the bridge, applied moral support, analysis skills, and intimidation to the process of cross-analysing the sensor logs for the event, which included EM interference, some interesting gravitics, and whatever happened with the MRI. Aurun very vehement about matching timestamps and seeing what patterns emerged; Tsavor hissed a lot, which many people found motivating. (At this point, the party is starting to clue in that his hissing is not a threat response so much as sniggering. The fact that other bipeds find it threatening, mind, is something he also finds funny.)
There was much arguing over What It All Meant, and then there was a sudden announcement that we were having an Official Meeting with the head of the Imperial Knights. Who certain people had asked for a meeting with before but this was clearly not that, given apparent priority interrupt. He wanted to know if we had any clue that the worldship was full of zombies before we got there, because apparently knowledge of zombies is Highly Classified and related to a Darth Vader research project based on information from Palpatine's master whose name I have forgotten. We got information about zombies, much of it continuingly creepy.
Having obtained much creepy information, we picked up a new mission: go to Nar Shaddaa (I think) in pursuit of information about someone who would know more about the creepiness, who had vanished some time ago, but was seen making contact with a Twi'lek there. We loaded up appropriate cargo and pocket money for bribes, Aurora wanted to come along because she had relevant contacts, and went off; Tsavor was not best pleased by the locale, which has its ironies given subsequent events.
Meanwhile, Aaron has established some level of communication with our friendly creepy death droid, enough to get something of a name out of it; said name is very long and confusing, and it was suggested we come up with some shorter designation. Tereez suggested "Karka", which means "lucky", and this cracked Aurun up, and she seconded it cheerfully (given that the name of her ship is 'Lucky Heaven', she found it thematic). Once again, Aaron stayed on the Vrei to coordinate things (and that is after all his habit in trading runs anyway), and we went into our cover identities as Twi'lek Trader And The Heavily Armed Goons On Staff. Karka remained with Aaron, though it was suggested that it be modified with some sort of camo net so it could look like something other than a Terrifying Death Machine, but really, having a Death Droid handy when potentially taking in shipments on Nar Shaddaa is for the best. (I believe we also have the astromech from the Empire now in place as permanent crew, from something [the GM] said, so. Aurun is taking cues from Aaron on how to relate to the electronic crew, for the record.)
We sold our cargo, we put out lines on acquiring new cargo (in this case "what are the current designer drugs on the market" and "fresh meat from food animals from the Barabel homeworld, if we can find any"), and we hatched a plan to go to a local law enforcement site that Aurora knew was plausibly bribeable in order to get information on the Twi'lek we were looking for. There was rather a lot of security on the streets, including droids.
On the way there, a police station exploded, and the local explosion of blinky bulletin boards proceeded to broadcast a message from that familiar masked rabble-rouser about how the local police were corrupt and had now paid for their crimes against the people. Nobody was terribly surprised by the revelation that the local police were corrupt; everyone in the vicinity, including us, found it worthwhile to Be Somewhere Else. We carefully went the other way, found a hotel, and hung out eating terrible takeout while Tereez hacked the traffic camera system to run a facematch and see if we could locate our target.
We managed to locate some information from two days ago, indicating he had a flat in the five hundred somethingth floor of a skyscraper in the ass-end of town, so we rented a car and went to have a little chat.
Unfortunately, someone else had a little chat with him first: a squad of Mandaloreans. They, upon exiting the apartment, decided to shoot first and negotiate later, and a firefight ensued. Tsavor demonstrated extensive capability to swear in Mandalorean. Four of them mysteriously died due to malfunctioning jetpacks, though one malfunction was at least comprehensible: a Barabel leapt into space, planted an axe in the thing, and leapt back onto the balcony. Several small missiles were launched, causing destruction mostly to the local architecture. A flamethrower was deployed, leading Tereez to leap off the edge of the balcony and swing from the rail which, when Aurun caught that over the meld, she thought was a fantastic idea, and thus duplicated. (Aaron was not there, but is perhaps not as surprised by her doing something that stupid as others in the party, given what he saw her doing occasionally when they met.) A minigun was deployed; Valis soaked up most of a round of fire on his shield, nearly overloading it, and then Tsavor lightsabered the gun so we wouldn't have to deal with any more of that nonsense, revealing himself as a Jedi. (The only thing more intimidating than a charging Barabel would be a charging Barabel Jedi.)
At which point the Mandalorean squad leader came out and said "There's a fusion mine at the base of the building. We leave and you have five minutes to solve that problem, or it blows now." We had some careful negotiations of parameters, power armor guy with the broken minigun was left behind as a hostage against their good behaviour, and Tereez jumped off the five hundred sixth floor of the apartment building because he knows how to defuse bombs. The remaining Mandaloreans took some fire from another building on their way out and scattered, presumably because everyone knows a squad of fleeing Mandaloreans has been up to no good. Once the bomb was defused, power armour guy was released on the condition that he handed over his power armour, so now we have power armour to poke at, repair, or otherwise investigate.
We then proceeded to investigate the apartment (Valis taking a brief side trip to heal the fellow next door who was injured in one of the missile strikes that missed us). As expected, the person we were hoping to talk to was decidedly and incurably not in a condition to be talked to. Aurora indicated at some length that she dislikes Mandaloreans. While some of us tossed the apartment for information, Valis scanned the remains and determined that our would-be friend was only mostly Twi'lek. Investigation followed that creeped Aurun out a bit, so she continued vehemently tossing the apartment; we discovered loose change and a whole bunch of cobbled-together assassin's gear. The computer was fried by an EM pulse but Tereez, once he got back up from the basement, managed to snag basically a flash drive. Something Vong-derived was found inside the body, so the remains were put in Jedi stasis for future investigation.
As we were finishing up the investigations, the Neighborhood Watch turned up to talk to Tsavor ("the Jedi and his friends"), because after shooting up some Mandaloreans he wanted to know more about the other people who were shooting up the Mandaloreans. We were offered an invitation to go talk with a friend who was interested in Mandalorean-shooters, and we figured this might lead us to intel; Aurora went to get the car to take the body and the power armour back to the Vrei, only to discover that it had been stolen, presumably by the Mandalorean we let go. So she stole a different car, and the rest of us went to talk to the Neighborhood Watch's friend.
Who ran a nightclub, apparently, and turned out to be a reasonably athletic young Hutt who Disapproved of squalor and wished for the world to be a better place. She thought it was an interesting coincidence that we and the Mandaloreans turned up to chat with him at the same time; Tsavor indicated that there are no coincidences, only the Force. (Perhaps the Force could have gotten us there ten minutes sooner, huh?) We chatted for a bit about related topics, and she informed us that our late would-be contact was an escapee from a Hutt breeding program for slave supersoldiers. We got the location of the planet he escaped from, and gave her some drop locations for getting intel to the Alliance, and promised we would notify Tsavor's many friends that there was a Hutt currently in possession of decency. She mentioned that our late nonacquaintance had asked if she had a secure way to get information to the Alliance, but she did not, and he had not told her what he knew because it was too dangerous. Mutter, grumble, swear.
We made sure we had enough cargo purchased and loaded to not look suspiciously empty upon departure, and headed back to rendezvous with the NPC half of the team. Upon investigating the flash drive we determined that it was the beginning of a video diary entry that went something like, "I still can't figure out where [the guy we were hoping he would be able to help us track down] went, and we only have two weeks left before Something Horrible goes down on Taris. I know that Darth *BLAMBLAMBLAM INVADING MANDALOREANS*." Very reassuring. Though Tereez's reaction to the 'Darth' bit is to quietly radiate "I fucking TOLD YOU SO, and I may have ALSO MENTIONED IT ONCE OR TWICE" on all wavelengths.
It was determined that the entire team would go to Taris - which is Vehemently Independent From All Larger Powers Damnit - to try to figure out what Something Horrible was, with the NPCs as a diplomatic prong and the PCs as an undercover investigation. The hacker NPC is displeased to be removed from his comfort zone. Nobody much cares.
That is where we ended.
And then I thought that it would be amusing to post it here, since my previous game session summaries have been considered droll.
The game is set some sixty years after the original movie trilogy, thirty years after the Yuuzhan Vong war. If that latter thing means nothing to you, me too! Though I have done research to catch myself up, a little.
We have three Force users in the party: one schismatic Jedi and two Imperial Knights. They are a task force put together to deal with a crisis; because this is an undercover op, a tramp freighter was hired for transport and additional stuff, containing the other two PCs. Thus:
- Aurun'ijaro, called Aurun, captain and owner of the Vrei Ki'ala: a vivid green Twi'lek, personality type "smart Gryffindor", worked her way up from nothing, childhood background not general knowledge
- Aaron Selik, Human, former semi-famous rabble-rousing advocate of all planets remaining independent of entangling empires and alliances, current mad gadgeteer and engineer on the Vrei
- Tereez, half-Bothan senior Imperial Knight, infiltration specialist with a commando background
- Valis, who has a last name I've forgotten, Human junior Imperial Knight, party healer, Jedi history nerd, and alarmingly overinterested in Yuuzhang Vong tech
- Tsavor, Barabel Jedi, kidnapped when young from his homeworld and made into a slave gladiator on, I believe, Nar Shaddaa
Aaron Selik's player was not able to make this session.
The party was assembled to deal with pirate attacks. Specifically, there was a gang of very alarming pirates who would sweep into a system, overwhelm all defenses, and mysteriously abduct every living humanoid soul present, leaving no survivors and no witnesses. The Alliance had gotten information from a mole indicating where attacks were going to happen, but if they parked ships there to prevent the attacks, the pirates hit a different system instead.
So we had information about where the next attack was happening, and picked up a useful cargo to bring in (including some things that were technically contraband, to help us collect intel by getting us into the underbelly of the location), and went there; attempts to come in quietly were thwarted by someone recognising Selik immediately, and taking us all out for drinks. However, that facilitated the trading and the making friends.
The plan was established to let the pirate attack happen, track the swarm with as many methods as we could muster, and infiltrate the fleet as a 'captured' ship if possible. The number of methods we managed to come up with bordered on the ridiculous, and ranged from 'make friends with people so they can be tracked through the force', 'plant tracking devices on multiple pirate ships', all the way to 'make a self-assembling nanobot tracking device that would survive EMP and conceal its parts in the toes of a large number of steeltoed workboots, so it will assemble itself when the population is imprisoned on an enemy ship'.
It turned out that Selik had been a survivor of a previous pirate attack, because he has a Mysterious Alien Device collection, and one of them did somethng Mysterious and Alien but which seemed to defeat whatever method that the bad guys were using to locate Everyone On This Planet. We investigated the device in a variety of ways, and then Tereez managed to wake it up briefly. He was asked what it did, and he revealed that he had been raised in a Sith Academy and he had tried to be as evil as he could manage at it. There was drama in which Tsavor was not sure what to make of this at all. (It is, however, well-known in certain circles that when this guy turned up in friendly space he was very "There are Dark Jedi! Lots of them!" and he is a bit of a laughingstock over it. One of our NPCs in the task force had mocked him over it thoroughly and tediously.)
So the Mysterious Alien Device appeared to detect and block Dark Force usage in some way. Which doesn't reassure anyone about what the pirates are up to.
So. We were in-system. Carefully shut down the ship and the droid we had on rent-to-own because we knew a massive EMP was going to be coming in to disable everything for the pirates. And the M.A.D. whirred to life. And all the Force-sensitive folks noticed that it seemed like something Dark was swimming around in space around us for a bit, and then the pirates came through.
There was chaos; a squad of pirates tried to take the Vrei, and were very startled that there were a) people on board and b) that they were Jedi. We passed ourselves off successfully as a commandeered ship and joined the fleet.
Many of the tracking methods worked, including the crazy boot-related one. (Plan M, in which Hardison dies, was the one where we let someone get captured and try to infiltrate that way; this was not implemented because it seemed like a terrible idea.)
We transmitted a bunch of data on a secure channel to our task force, which was alarmed. And we jumped with the pirate fleet, and found ourselves near the belt of a system that reeked of Dark Side energy, with, among other things, a Vong battleship and an obviously dying Vong worldship which had inexplicably got a tech-based shipyard built into the side of it, something actual Vong would consider a total abomination.
We managed to infiltrate one of the pirate capital ships intending to confuse its targeting systems to skew the battle that was about to happen more towards our side, and encountered a Very Alarming Droid, that looked like a Palpatine-Era Imperial Torture Droid, spoke no languages we were familiar with, but which turned out to be the mole that had been sending info about the pirate attacks. With the droid's help we hacked the ship, got back to the Vrei, and were told to go see if any of the heat signatures on the dying worldship were rescuable, as presumably they were the abducted people.
We popped into our zippy dropship and started off, taking a little incidental fire from the battleship on the way.
So:
When we left off, we were ducking around the dying worldship to stop taking heavy fire and to see if any of the captives were recoverable. We landed on the tech-based portion of the monstrosity and sent out a little swarm of bugs to start mapping and providing early warning, since Tsavor's senses indicated that there were Vong on the ship. Aaron stayed on the dropship to coordinate communication and run the bugs, especially once it got clear that further into the worldship there was some sort of EM interference going on that required some management. (In his free time, Tereez suggested that he make a large bomb, suitable for blowing the power plant on the monstrosity.)
Tereez hacked the computer in the tech portion and we started collecting what information we could; Aurun suggested that while we weren't getting much useful information, we got the shipping manifests and determined that mostly what got stored here was spare parts for repair of pirate ships, some of which the bugs were finding in adjacent bits of the techzone. We also found food shipments coming in, but far insufficient for the number of heat signatures we'd been sent to investigate, and the worldship was certainly not in a condition to be supplying more.
The combat-capable portions of the party started to infiltrate the monstrosity, which was roughly like creeping around inside a large alien turkey leftovers which has been in the fridge too long and was thus going kind of slimy. This started out creepy and only got worse. Also it smelled the sort of terrible that made everyone glad for environmentally sealed armour. At one point, a squad of Vong elites ran past us (we managed to dodge because of warning from the bug infiltrators) and we counterambushed them because we weren't sure if they were going to wind up in the tech portion of the monstrosity and thus threaten Aaron. Combat ensued, various people were flogged with angry snakes but only took armor damage, Tsavor beheaded one of them and Valis took samples. The remains were removed to make it less obvious they'd been dispatched with mostly lightsabers, but we could not clean up the grenade blast.
Investigation continued; we eventually found a hallway through of creepy statues of emaciated Vong all arranged in a standard ritualised position, each of them individual, so we are not sure if they were mummies or commemorative statues but regardless they were probably connected to specific Vong. At least one of them showed signs of the same degenerative pus that was oozing all over the inside of the monstrosity. We were charmed by the decor.
Somewhere around here some pirate ships were heading in towards the worldship, so Aaron took the dropship and the fighters and started sneaking around on the outside trying not to get noticed when they came into the bay. Everyone was appropriately nervous about this.
We heard unpleasant muttering and investigated it, and found a crazy priest of some sort in a room full of repetetive religious inscriptions involving an unknown Vong god. After applying sneak attack damage, we took video references of all the religious kipple in the room, hid the body, and boobytrapped the area because there was a huge squad of Vong rampaging around in the area and we wanted to make sure that when they raised the alarm they would be appropriately damaged.
More sneaking about got us to the first of the chambers with potential prisoners inside. Outside of it there were two Vong guards, who were having an argument over whether or not it would be more fun to open the door and 'flood the area'. It was unclear whether this was 'gas the prisoners with something terrible' or what. We killed the guards and studied the door. Valis attempted to clairvoyance to the other side of it and mostly got "It is really creepy in there, and you are blinded by the Dark." Mama may have told us not to look into the eyes of the sun, but since we knew that was where the fun is, we worked out a way to puncture a hole in the door and slip a camera through, which worked just fine except that doing it made the door open instead.
The room was a large chamber full of zombies. We did what one does when confronted with large chambers full of zombies: applied grenades, chopped up and blasted the ones that got close, applied telekinetic pushback, and so on, as appropriate to skillset, while Valis built a retaining wall out of construction foam and dismembered zombies. Once the wall was completed, he took a sample of the black ooze that came out of dead zombies, and then we were alarmed to discover that the zombies were beating a hole in the wall, and there were sounds of more zombies on the loose, so we elected to depart with as much efficiency as we could muster. Efficiency included leaving a large proximity-triggered bomb in the corridor behind us for when the zombies arrived there.
Aaron indicated it was safe enough to bring the ships back in and thus did so, and exeunt omnes (pursued by a zombie horde). Or that was the theory. The practice was rather interrupted by the space equivalent of a helicopter gunship with an anti-tank gun which was blasting up the bay as we arrived. We were glad we had put slap patches on the armour damage after being beaten with snakes when the damn thing took down the forcefield and depressurised the area.
After some resulting flailing panic, the scene was thus: various lighter weight ships, the mysterious creepy droid, and Valis venting into space, the party scrambling into ships and launching, and a stray fighter distracting the assault shuttle so that we could clear out (piloted by our Chiss healer Jedi friend, as it turned out). Valis proceeded to Force-push himself onto the enemy shuttle and start demonstrating how well he slices and dices; the creepy droid elected to blast a whole in the enemy ship; Tereez went to blow the power plant on the tech portion once everyone was clear; Aurun bumped Aaron out of the controls on the dropship so we could depart. The enemy shuttle was driven to being out of control and no longer our problem; the creepy droid was collected; Valis reclaimed his fighter; everyone booked it back to the Vrei Ki'ala. Somewhere along the line Valis and Tsavor teamed up to Use The Force and helped our capital ship deal with a ramming attempt from the doomed Vong battleship.
After a comedy of errors in communication we managed to convey BIOHAZARD BLOW THAT SHIT UP AND THEN BLOW UP THE DEBRIS to the allied forces, who commenced blowing shit up accordingly. Tsavor and possibly others went tootling around in fighters to see if the Dark Side auras needed to be more specifically shot up. Aurun checked on our prisoners, who were still alive. We notified people who needed to be notified, parked the Vrei in the Valiant for appropriate repairs and downtime, and entered hyperspace.
This was not expected to be as interesting as it was. While we were in hyperspace, the mysterious shield-you-from-the-Dark-Side device woke up; we called up to the bridge to warn of an impending *something*; as we were finishing the call, alarms went off demanding security teams to medbay and the brig. Various people went everywhere to figure out what the fuck was going on. The prisoners were all dead, rather messily, one much more messily than others because he was in an MRI tube at the time. However, being in the MRI tube meant that we learned that what was killing the prisoners was, in fact, "the worms", which appear to be extraplanar space piranha or something - they phase in, chew up the insides of the victim, and phase out again. Everyone was appropriately alarmed.
Tsavor and Aurun, on the bridge, applied moral support, analysis skills, and intimidation to the process of cross-analysing the sensor logs for the event, which included EM interference, some interesting gravitics, and whatever happened with the MRI. Aurun very vehement about matching timestamps and seeing what patterns emerged; Tsavor hissed a lot, which many people found motivating. (At this point, the party is starting to clue in that his hissing is not a threat response so much as sniggering. The fact that other bipeds find it threatening, mind, is something he also finds funny.)
There was much arguing over What It All Meant, and then there was a sudden announcement that we were having an Official Meeting with the head of the Imperial Knights. Who certain people had asked for a meeting with before but this was clearly not that, given apparent priority interrupt. He wanted to know if we had any clue that the worldship was full of zombies before we got there, because apparently knowledge of zombies is Highly Classified and related to a Darth Vader research project based on information from Palpatine's master whose name I have forgotten. We got information about zombies, much of it continuingly creepy.
Having obtained much creepy information, we picked up a new mission: go to Nar Shaddaa (I think) in pursuit of information about someone who would know more about the creepiness, who had vanished some time ago, but was seen making contact with a Twi'lek there. We loaded up appropriate cargo and pocket money for bribes, Aurora wanted to come along because she had relevant contacts, and went off; Tsavor was not best pleased by the locale, which has its ironies given subsequent events.
Meanwhile, Aaron has established some level of communication with our friendly creepy death droid, enough to get something of a name out of it; said name is very long and confusing, and it was suggested we come up with some shorter designation. Tereez suggested "Karka", which means "lucky", and this cracked Aurun up, and she seconded it cheerfully (given that the name of her ship is 'Lucky Heaven', she found it thematic). Once again, Aaron stayed on the Vrei to coordinate things (and that is after all his habit in trading runs anyway), and we went into our cover identities as Twi'lek Trader And The Heavily Armed Goons On Staff. Karka remained with Aaron, though it was suggested that it be modified with some sort of camo net so it could look like something other than a Terrifying Death Machine, but really, having a Death Droid handy when potentially taking in shipments on Nar Shaddaa is for the best. (I believe we also have the astromech from the Empire now in place as permanent crew, from something [the GM] said, so. Aurun is taking cues from Aaron on how to relate to the electronic crew, for the record.)
We sold our cargo, we put out lines on acquiring new cargo (in this case "what are the current designer drugs on the market" and "fresh meat from food animals from the Barabel homeworld, if we can find any"), and we hatched a plan to go to a local law enforcement site that Aurora knew was plausibly bribeable in order to get information on the Twi'lek we were looking for. There was rather a lot of security on the streets, including droids.
On the way there, a police station exploded, and the local explosion of blinky bulletin boards proceeded to broadcast a message from that familiar masked rabble-rouser about how the local police were corrupt and had now paid for their crimes against the people. Nobody was terribly surprised by the revelation that the local police were corrupt; everyone in the vicinity, including us, found it worthwhile to Be Somewhere Else. We carefully went the other way, found a hotel, and hung out eating terrible takeout while Tereez hacked the traffic camera system to run a facematch and see if we could locate our target.
We managed to locate some information from two days ago, indicating he had a flat in the five hundred somethingth floor of a skyscraper in the ass-end of town, so we rented a car and went to have a little chat.
Unfortunately, someone else had a little chat with him first: a squad of Mandaloreans. They, upon exiting the apartment, decided to shoot first and negotiate later, and a firefight ensued. Tsavor demonstrated extensive capability to swear in Mandalorean. Four of them mysteriously died due to malfunctioning jetpacks, though one malfunction was at least comprehensible: a Barabel leapt into space, planted an axe in the thing, and leapt back onto the balcony. Several small missiles were launched, causing destruction mostly to the local architecture. A flamethrower was deployed, leading Tereez to leap off the edge of the balcony and swing from the rail which, when Aurun caught that over the meld, she thought was a fantastic idea, and thus duplicated. (Aaron was not there, but is perhaps not as surprised by her doing something that stupid as others in the party, given what he saw her doing occasionally when they met.) A minigun was deployed; Valis soaked up most of a round of fire on his shield, nearly overloading it, and then Tsavor lightsabered the gun so we wouldn't have to deal with any more of that nonsense, revealing himself as a Jedi. (The only thing more intimidating than a charging Barabel would be a charging Barabel Jedi.)
At which point the Mandalorean squad leader came out and said "There's a fusion mine at the base of the building. We leave and you have five minutes to solve that problem, or it blows now." We had some careful negotiations of parameters, power armor guy with the broken minigun was left behind as a hostage against their good behaviour, and Tereez jumped off the five hundred sixth floor of the apartment building because he knows how to defuse bombs. The remaining Mandaloreans took some fire from another building on their way out and scattered, presumably because everyone knows a squad of fleeing Mandaloreans has been up to no good. Once the bomb was defused, power armour guy was released on the condition that he handed over his power armour, so now we have power armour to poke at, repair, or otherwise investigate.
We then proceeded to investigate the apartment (Valis taking a brief side trip to heal the fellow next door who was injured in one of the missile strikes that missed us). As expected, the person we were hoping to talk to was decidedly and incurably not in a condition to be talked to. Aurora indicated at some length that she dislikes Mandaloreans. While some of us tossed the apartment for information, Valis scanned the remains and determined that our would-be friend was only mostly Twi'lek. Investigation followed that creeped Aurun out a bit, so she continued vehemently tossing the apartment; we discovered loose change and a whole bunch of cobbled-together assassin's gear. The computer was fried by an EM pulse but Tereez, once he got back up from the basement, managed to snag basically a flash drive. Something Vong-derived was found inside the body, so the remains were put in Jedi stasis for future investigation.
As we were finishing up the investigations, the Neighborhood Watch turned up to talk to Tsavor ("the Jedi and his friends"), because after shooting up some Mandaloreans he wanted to know more about the other people who were shooting up the Mandaloreans. We were offered an invitation to go talk with a friend who was interested in Mandalorean-shooters, and we figured this might lead us to intel; Aurora went to get the car to take the body and the power armour back to the Vrei, only to discover that it had been stolen, presumably by the Mandalorean we let go. So she stole a different car, and the rest of us went to talk to the Neighborhood Watch's friend.
Who ran a nightclub, apparently, and turned out to be a reasonably athletic young Hutt who Disapproved of squalor and wished for the world to be a better place. She thought it was an interesting coincidence that we and the Mandaloreans turned up to chat with him at the same time; Tsavor indicated that there are no coincidences, only the Force. (Perhaps the Force could have gotten us there ten minutes sooner, huh?) We chatted for a bit about related topics, and she informed us that our late would-be contact was an escapee from a Hutt breeding program for slave supersoldiers. We got the location of the planet he escaped from, and gave her some drop locations for getting intel to the Alliance, and promised we would notify Tsavor's many friends that there was a Hutt currently in possession of decency. She mentioned that our late nonacquaintance had asked if she had a secure way to get information to the Alliance, but she did not, and he had not told her what he knew because it was too dangerous. Mutter, grumble, swear.
We made sure we had enough cargo purchased and loaded to not look suspiciously empty upon departure, and headed back to rendezvous with the NPC half of the team. Upon investigating the flash drive we determined that it was the beginning of a video diary entry that went something like, "I still can't figure out where [the guy we were hoping he would be able to help us track down] went, and we only have two weeks left before Something Horrible goes down on Taris. I know that Darth *BLAMBLAMBLAM INVADING MANDALOREANS*." Very reassuring. Though Tereez's reaction to the 'Darth' bit is to quietly radiate "I fucking TOLD YOU SO, and I may have ALSO MENTIONED IT ONCE OR TWICE" on all wavelengths.
It was determined that the entire team would go to Taris - which is Vehemently Independent From All Larger Powers Damnit - to try to figure out what Something Horrible was, with the NPCs as a diplomatic prong and the PCs as an undercover investigation. The hacker NPC is displeased to be removed from his comfort zone. Nobody much cares.
That is where we ended.
