Dark Side #3

[kiya]

I may as well keep track of storysessions, yeah?

Not a covered in glory sort of session this one; we lost an NPC and a planet.

(There was nothing we could do about the planet.)


Reminder of dramatis personae:
* 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


At the end of the last session the party was off to Taris to deal with whatever Terrible Thing was going to happen there. We had no more information than that there was a Terrible Thing and that there was a Sith involved. The plan was to have our NPCs work the diplomatic end while we went in undercover.

The plan did not survive meeting with the enemy.

In this case the enemy took the form of the Imperial ambassador*, who contacted our NPCs with "We hear you have an intelligence team with Imperial Knights coming in, why don't they come join us for dinner, I'm having dinner with the Taris defense minister tomorrow."

Nobody was happy about this.

* In this game, which is of course EU and predating the reset which the new movie is set in, we have a lingering rump portion of the Empire which is mostly trying to clean up after events in the original trilogy still, and has reasonably good diplomatic ties with the evolved Alliance. It is more complicated than that, but the fact that we're working mostly for the Empire is not actually as menacing as it sounds.

We assembled the infiltration team, meanwhile: the two requested Imperial Knights, the ex-politico engineer with skill in schmooze official, and my Aurun, who was very much "I don't want to do this."

"You don't have to go."
"I have relevant skills."
"But you don't have to go."
"I have relevant skills."
"So you have to go."
"Yes."
- Aaron and Aurun

So we got a hotel room, picking it out to enhance the playing on the ambassador's ego, with several plays in mind, and Aurun muttered a lot and then went to change, coming out in clothes that basically suited a Twi'lek courtesan. Which got all the party - especially Tereez - giving her funny looks. Well, Tsavor just started snickering. Aurun pointed out that any Twi'lek dressed up nice to go to this sort of party would be taken for a courtesan, and informed Aaron that for their current play he was in charge. And was rather sulky about it all, really. Especially when it was clear various people were checking her out.

Of course, for the party, she put on a bubbleheaded curious persona to try to draw out people and get them talking to her. The ambassador seemed good with talking to Aaron, so she charmed the defense minister. Aaron bugged them both. Tereez got engaged in a complicated game of social-political maneuvering for information disclosures, a game which he knows and hates, and played successfully. Valis rendered himself immune to alcohol and proceeded to set a fine example on getting drunk. I extracted the defense minister's feelings about proper use of defense forces, at which point we learned that the space defenses were mostly mercenaries, and he did not approve. I told him he was quite right [giggle]!

Which meant that eventually the ambassador started waxing enthusiastic about his Palpatine-era sympathies, and he was a Moff, don't you know, and all kinds of posturing about that, and the holoscreens popped up an image of the Jedi temple on Coruscant burning and he commented how hard it was to come up with that image, you know, and everything goes to hell with race mixing, and that man had a lot of good ideas, and a lot of things that had Tereez (half-Bothan Jedi escapee from a Sith academy) at "Can I kill him yet, boss?"

Our boss was getting unhappily drunk.

We collected information, the dinner party got uncomfortable, and ended early, and we went back, and Aurun got a shower. After sort of muttering at Tsavor, "You'd probably say that I wound up with this job because of the Force right?!" because really, your average tramp freighter captain does not have that skillset. The various Jedi were basically at, "... yes? Isn't everything?" She had her nice shower.

While we were out, meanwhile, Tsavor had spent some time meditating and communing with the Force, and detected a Dark Force presence on the planet. Somewhere. It also detected him. Neither of them was sure where the other was.

But, you know, "Darth BlamblamblamMandaloreans" is around here somewhere, so.

The next few days were spent collecting data and combing through it for one portion of the party, and Tsavor playing cat-and-mouse with the Sith. Neither of them was willing to drop their Force cloak enough to make a strong play at locating the other. Tsavor noted that at any point he could "poke it with a sharp stick" but that that would make things move, and we needed to be ready to respond to that when he did.

The investigating of the Sith managed to get the Sith wondering if he needed to stop and deal with the party, move up his timetable, or something else. The investigation of everything else led to us discovering that basically every crime syndicate on the planet had "independently" bribed the police to stay out of the undercity. Which is one of those things that, well. Once you get a critical mass, everyone's got to play to keep up, so at least some of it is independent, but we're betting some of it had strings pulled. We got Imperial intelligence to summon their accountants.

Meanwhile, Aaron recut the spy footage from dinner into an excellent propaganda video to discredit the Moff utterly, between the Palpatine sympathising and anti-non-human bigotry (followed by browsing Twi'lek porn, which Aaron kindly did not mention to Aurun) and handed the recording to Tereez, because it's nice to make presents for your friends.

Tsavor and Tereez went down into the undercity to continue investigation, and discovered that under the layers of rebuilding that happened after the planet was bombed barren in a failed attempt to target Revan four thousand years ago there was basically a thick layer of unpleasant Dark Force energy, self-perpetuating and miserable. Valis immediately worked on coming up with long-term plans to improve conditions there and thus start to drain it off, while the Sith hunting continued.

Eventually we had a breakthrough: Tereez located which building the Sith was in, and roughly the right level, and didn't think that the Sith had spotted him. So we could construct a plan. And that plan was:

- Tsavor pokes the Sith with a stick
- set up Tereez as backup for Tsavor, using his Sith Academy background to try to pass himself off as a Jedi-hunter who spotted the Jedi when he went noisy, to try to take the Sith off-guard
- use the diversion to toss the apartment for information
- once we've determined that the apartment is clear, regroup the party to challenge the Sith and leave the NPCs on cleanup

We implemented the plan. Tsavor started heading down towards the apartment; Tereez set up to follow him, the rest of the party prepped the apartment strike with Aurun in the getaway car. The Sith started moving, after sending out two Force-carried pulses: one "clear out", sent locally, and one "go NOW", sent distance.

Valis spotted one trap; our NPC Aurora spotted the other; we started the apartment inspection. After clearing things out, party moved out to start the Sith hunt, only we get a message from our remote hacker of, "I just lost sensor feed, what's going on?" and then heard behind us the clash of lightsabers.

So: Valis and Aaron run back towards the fight. Aurun brings the getaway car around to the apartment window to be, well, a getaway.

When we got there, we saw: that Aurora was Very Dead, and Elon our medic Jedi was cornered by not one but two Sith. Valis joined the combat and at least evened up the Force user contingent. Chaos ensued, including one of the Sith Force-grabbing Aaron and trying to throw him into Valis, who sidestepped and bounced him into the bedroom outside which the hovercar was waiting. Aurun shot up the wall a bit to clear an escape route.

At which point the bloody Sith jumped onto the car.

One of them got Force-pushed off to plummet to his not-doom-because-Force-users-don't-die-of-plummet, and the other attempted to get into our car using his lightsaber as a large canopener. At which point Aurun sabotaged the vehicle, sent it into a spin, and leaped out of it and into the apartment. As one does.

"Maybe there is a boom in the apartment. Definitely, there is a Sith on the windshield."

We cleared out with a last look at our fallen companion and snagged the car that was supposed to be for the NPC escape, then went to pursue our Sith-hunting team, which had been being led a merry chase by someone who would, once analysed, clearly not take advantages to lose his tail when he could have.

Our boss told us to pull out.

We reported in. On our way back to the base, air raid sirens started going off. We asked what the hell was going on; we got told that there was a meteor shower.

Aurun had a lengthy rant about how meteor showers are actually the diffuse remnants of comet tails which was largely uninteresting to everyone. Then we learned that the damn things had come out of hyperspace.

The Imperial Knights went to command and control; the Vrei crew and Tsavor went to the Vrei to collect space intel.

We scanned a thing coming in, and confirmed it was full of icky Force. We shot it up until it cracked open, and its contents writhed in space for a moment and then vanished. Charming.

The mercenary fleet, upon confirming that there was Vong tech involved, started to flee. We got Aaron (with public speaking and propaganda skills) on the comms to talk some into staying; Aurun backed him up with speaking like a fighter jock to the fighter jocks. We managed to get some of them involved in shooting down the evil space rocks.

We tried to capture an evil space rock, snagging it in a tractor and having Tsavor in his fighter shoot it up. This went messily.

Because the thing decided to use its teleport to get onto the Vrei. It looked like a half-again-human-size skin-and-bones biomechanical dragonet, more or less, with a sharp striking tail and a rather eerie and graceful form of movement. Combat ensued.

Aaron got stabbed by the dragonet, and summoned automated power armour to help, which was not entirely effective. Aurun shot at the thing, dodged its attacks, and was cranky. Karka, our creepy death droid ("fun-sized death star!") floated in, flipped its shit, and started shooting at the dragonet with little concern for things like the possibility of hull breach. Tsavor sent Force stuns at the thing while booking his way back to dock and be backup. Aurun laid down cover fire so Aaron could get out. Aaron got out, after determining that evil biomechanical dragonets really don't like EMP. Tsavor managed to get back onto the ship and charged.

"Is EMP going to mess with your lightsaber?"
"No it won't! Because lightsabers are magic!"
- Aaron's player, the GM

The dragonet teleported behind him, intending to basically materialise its sabretail through him, but learned that this is not terribly effective against Jedi when he sidestepped it, grabbed the tail with his offhand, and severed it.

It fled. Being a creature with some level of sense, apparently. (Though the amount of sense required to have to be afraid of Tsavor is not actually large.)

Tsavor said, "... I have a souvenir!"

We got Aaron down to the medbay, which had fortunately not been affected by the EMP. ("Do I have to fix the medbay? ... I'm going to go fix the medbay before I die." - Aaron) And proceeded to run diagnostics, and discovered that yes, the evil black stuff dripping off the dragonet tail was in fact the infectious agent for space zombies. Greeeeat.

Also, the stabby wound through his chest was not bleeding perhaps as much as we would have expected. Which is alarming, in its way.

So, plan: crazed, critically injured engineer builds a stasis chamber ("I can make a stasis chamber? I have to do everything around here.") and beds down in that while we wait for our medics to come back and see if we can cure the incurable zombie plague. The medics, meanwhile, are involved with the team that's bullying the local officials into evacuating as much population as they can grab rather than just running like hell, as the dragonet-containing stones crash into the world and burrow down to the Dark-saturated layer to hatch.

Karka spent a few minutes ruminating on whether it should vaporise the stasis capsule. Aurun talked it down and said we thought we could cure the disease. Karka expressed doubt as it had never seen that trick work. Aurun eventually tried to get more information out of Karka about what it knew; it was apparently not sure, as it was still "rebuilding memory banks", but it had known that there were Bad Things That Should Be Stopped going on, but not precisely what they were. And it goes berserk at evil space dragonets.

Our team, notified that EMPs damage dragonets, start EMPing the everliving fuck out of all the crash sites and wherever else seems plausible in the hope of slowing things down, but since something like seven thousand of the damn things made it through the defenses, basically world are doom. After rigging an automated EMP cannon system the command staff evacuated.

There was a bit where the defense minister nearly called the Imperial ambassador, at which point he was nudged with, "He was spouting Palpatine nostalgia and anti-Jedi sentiments over dinner and a couple of days later this entire planet is taken over by Sith."
"... commandeer the Moff's ship."

We bash quarantine protocols into the brains of relevant parties and the party reunites, and discovers that the virus is loose on the Vrei, and on the shuttle that docked with us (we think they picked it up from us). However, the party and Elon, our Chiss Jedi healer, do not appear to be succumbing; our systems are fighting it off.

This is not localised to the Vrei; the disease is progressing on the shuttle. Valis has a crazed notion that since the virus is Force-active as well as being a physical virus, maybe he can bitflip its Force alignment and destroy it. Which actually works, and the more he does it successfully the better it works.

The defense minister gets increasingly agitated about not being healed yet. But we did our people, and got Aaron working on a stasis field for the shuttle so that we could take the time to cure those people, and then the engineers out of that shuttle to get the stasis field online, and so on. And then we snagged him out first from the people from stasis.

Which was useful, because around then things started getting politically complicated.

With funny bits. Like the part where the Moff - from a refugee ship that was rather crowded - dialed up the Vrei and got Tsavor on the horn.

"Get me the defense minister! I know he's on the ship!"
"This one must inform you that this is a secure line."
"Get me the defense minister!"
"Please provide this one with valid access codes."
"[spewed racist invective]"
"This one must inform you that this is a secure line. If you do not have valid access codes... [hangs up]"

Also, an Alliance Star Destroyer and a Chiss Star Destroyer turned up. And the Chiss demanded access to the Vrei to confirm that they couldn't do anything useful. They were terribly rude, and had Tereez explaining to them that You Do Not Point Guns At Friendlies in small words. Tsavor idly sat down and started dragging his claws along the metal to make alarming noises at them.

Eventually he got up and peered in one's face.

"What?"
"This one is wondering if you do not have the disease because we have cured it to non-infectious levels or because your sealed suit actually works."
"...."

Aurun caught that and sort of did a little hissing noise, because, well, she's figured out that 'hissing' is Barabel sniggering.

Elon had taken refuge in Aurun's quarters when he said it was probably best for him not to spend a lot of time with the incoming Chiss; it turns out they came from a ship involving his sister. Tereez sought his advice on how to make her stop being an obstructionist jerk; he said quote her chapter and verse out of the regs. So they did that, and it worked. Aurun said, "Family is complicated," and left it at that.

Then a big rock dropped out of hyperspace, got blasted at by star destroyers (without success), and burrowed into the planet. Force investigation suggested that it contained some sort of dragonet broodmother, maybe. Also that the three Sith we knew about had melded with the zombie plague and were directing its actions. Faaaantastic.

"Can I look at your souvenir?"
"Sure."
"Can I take it apart?"
"... if you did that it wouldn't be much of a souvenir, would it?"
- Aaron and Tsavor

Somewhere in there she commented to Tereez and his questioning eyebrow, "I was trained in extracting information from people. I had tried to leave that life behind." "We all seem to be trying to leave lives behind." She rather soberly murmured, "Some of us more permanently than others."

Discussion of why the party and Elon seemed immune to the zombification virus was had. Including throwing out wild theories ("inoculated by the device that protects from detection by space worms" being one of them). One of them was "Force sensitives", which led to Tereez asking Aaron, "Are you a Force sensitive and don't know it?" and then an ensuing conversation of the logical structure of that question. Which had Tereez voicing a personal theory that Aurun was a sensitive - he said a lot of excellent pilots actually are, maybe not good enough to be trained, but good enough for it to be a part of their instincts - and Aurun asked him how one would find out. "There are tests." Valis, meanwhile, pulled a gun suddenly on Aaron, and then gestured at Aurun and said, "She would have dodged."

Eventually we organised to rendezvous with people, as the blockade of the zombified planet was organised. Half hour trip.

We launched into hyperspace, fighters deployed because the Chiss ship was well-equipped with paranoia.

Ten minutes out, we were yanked violently out of hyperspace by an interdictor.

On a Sith ship.

And someone pinged Tereez over the Force with a, "Hi there!"

One of his classmates from the Sith Academy.

His former training partner.

End of session.