![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It was one of our players' birthday today, so I made cookies.
Which meant I spent a chunk of the afternoon chortling to myself because "Come to Dark Side. We have cookies."
Last session, we framed the Sith for killing murderball.
Dramatis Personae remain:
* Aurun, hotshot ship captain, ex-assassin, full of complicated feels about field training as a Jedi (link is to my monthly column on Patheos, from March)
* Aaron Selig, demagogue ship's engineer, mad gadgeteer, pessimist
* Tereez, half-Bothan senior Imperial Knight, ex-Sith infiltration specialist
* Valis, junior Imperial Knight, healing and body mod specialist
* Tsavor, also called Hissy, Barabel ex-gladiator
NPC:
* Elon, increasingly traumatised Chiss Jedi healer with a complicated past
Things that need to be covered to make this session make sense:
1) The Oniama was a passenger vessel on a routine trip that came down with a sudden horrible disease; 90+% of the people on board died. The survivors all manifested Force ability afterwards. Our healer friend Elon was one of those survivors.
2) There was another outbreak of the same disease, apparently, on the ship Laraden. Survivors were evacuated to Jedi protection on the Alliance medical ship Ishikarra. The Alliance issued a capture order for all the survivors for some unknown reason - but presumably wanting to hush things up somehow - and the Ishikarra was on the run, hiding, and had managed to ask for amnesty and protection from the Empire, which it had been granted. We set our hacker NPC teammate on trying to track them.
3) The research for the zombie-making virus had been done on a ship called the Vector, which was lost. There were very few survivors, but a few prisoners and others escaped. Among those survivors? A man named Han Solo, who has Left Galactic Society due to life-related trauma in the Expanded Universe version of the SWverse.
4) The evidence we have is that the disease outbreaks that cause Force powers are a response to the zombie virus, and some people theorise that it is a rival Sith group opposing the zombie end of things, since Force sensitivity provides some level of immunity to zombification. The mortality rate still not great.
5) Meanwhile, the Imperials got tipped off by allies in the Alliance that there is information suppression going on, with a basic, "Don't trust us with informationb ecause we don't know who's going to misuse it" sort of message. Fantastic. Jedi to be used as mediators, because Alliance agents who are trying to figure out WTF keep turning up dead.
So. The information we had about Han was that there was a bar on the planet where we killed murderball that he hung out in, and that he had had minimal cosmetic surgery to foil automated security cameras casually. So we decided that we would go check up on that while we were there, as that was the sensible thing, before running off to deal with any of the other galactic fires.
So Team One (Tsavor and Valis) infiltrated the cantina. One of the televisions in the bar had a commentary about how there had been a disruption of the Huttball game, but it was dealt with handily by security forces, etc., etc., and the general mood of the place was mocking derision, as they were sure they were being lied to, though not in what way.
Meanwhile, in the street we observed casual police brutality, which included droids obliterating a family on the street who may or may not have had a member who had committed some kind of offense against a local corporation. Life on Nar Shaddaa continues terrible.
(We had a lengthy political digression while setting up about the moral quandaries involved in the Anonymous (they call themselves "the Resistance") blowing the shit out of the infrastructure of a corporate-controlled system, and whether the likely innocent death toll was worth the getting the corporate control out, whether or not there was a state of war between the corporation and the rest of humanity, the nature of when being forced into making certain choices turns one into someone who makes those choices of their own will, social indoctrination and the capacity to see how to choose other things, corporate indenture, whether or not blowing up the infrastructure will lead to people actually being free to make better choices, and so on.)
(Aurun feeling very thinky about her life choices of late, so "You chose differently" mostly got her sort of ranty about how she was in a position where she was raised in a way that didn't actually have the infrastructure to remove those choices from her in the first place, but where she was keenly aware of not having it. "My mother tried to give me the blinkers, but she didn't have the infrastructure.")
Han was spotted at the card table. Team Two (Elon and Aaron) moved in and collected information, which included watching someone accuse him of cheating, and him snarking back, "Yeah, so're you, I'm just better at it than you are," which appeared to defuse the situation.
Team Three (Tereez and Aurun) moved in, to try to get in on the table. We got glared off, circled around and figured out which bartender was the gatekeeper. He made it clear that it wasn't the sort of game where newbies came around all that much, which led to a, "But I was in here last week!" mind trick moment. "Oh. Oh, right. No starting fistfights before 18:00." "No problem. What time is it?" "... nine." (It was the sort of place where, y'know, nobody sees daylight anyway, soooo.)
Eventually a spot at the table opened up, and Tereez took the chair, engaging in the time-honored technique of trying to lose to the guy he wanted to talk to, while Aurun draped over the back of the chair being Twi'leki arm candy who looks like she'd cut you if you caused a problem. (It was a rough bar. Also, she will totally cut you if you cause a problem. There was a side conversation about open carrying weapons and what's communicated by being seen carrying knives and I commented that mine aren't... visible....)
People were grumpy. Tereez nudged the conversation around to why they were grumpy and there was a lot of ranting about police brutality and terrorist Anonymous and the Hutts. And there was 'heard the Hutts got a setback' referring to the murderball game, and there was shrugging and 'there's always another Hutt' and so on. Han got visibly displeased at the ongoing politics discussion, and eventually threw in his chips and started to leave.
"My cousin said it was Sith who did the murderball thing...." dropped in Tereez, which got 1) Han stopping to stare at him for a moment before moving to move out quietly and 2) someone saying that it was good to hear about Sith kicking around because hey, things were better under Palpatine, which led to an immediate "What, are you some kind of Empire loyalist?" and a "WELL YEAH" and shots fired and, well, the bar brawl was still going when we left.
Even though Tsavor stood up and bellowed, "IT'S NOT SIX YET, PUT IT AWAY," before going back to drinking.
We tracked Han to a long-term flophouse hotel and swapped up teams, with Selig and Valis going in to make contact as they wouldn't be obviously the people who were slightly to blame for the card game getting ruined by politics and incidental gunfire. They rented a room in the flophouse for two days, said they wouldn't cause trouble and were eyerollingly disbelieved, were told not to get vomit on anything or there would be additional fees, and got sent on their way, at which point they went to the floor where we knew Han was.
And discovered that most of the floor was run by a brothel. "Whatcha want? I got...." And there was a long list of species suggested. Valis rolled with it, and tried to get Selig to put in an opinion on his favorite species of prostitute, which mostly made him make a large number of lovely awkward faces and appear uncomfortable. "I got droids! Not my thing, but hey, I don't judge!" suggested the burly madam (who I believe was male, but really he was more a madam than a pimp anyway). Valis finally said, "I think we'll go for 'Surprise me!'" at which point the guy running the place rolled his eyes, said "Surprise me will be a hundred", tacked on a surcharge for us getting a room near the one we wanted to investigate, and sent them off.
A few minutes later, a Barabel knocked on the door. "You said surprise me. Surprise!" she said. At which point people blinked, called down to Tsavor on the principle that hey, he doesn't get to talk to other Barabel much, and he might be able to tell whether or not she was voluntarily in this position and would be inclined to assist if she were not. "Surprise!" the party said, and Valis went to bang on Han's door.
"Whaddayawant." "We want to talk." "Go 'way." "We'll make it worth your while!" "I doubt it." "... wanna bet?"
And there was a long sort of silence, the sort of silence in which someone said the exact right thing.
The door opened, with a groggy and unhappy sort of Han there. Who was rather anxious about what we wanted to talk about. And tensed up again at the word "Sith," with an, "You were in the bar. I was having an okay morning."
They got permission to haul in the rest of the party, with a grumpy, "There's more of you?" and then we explained we wanted to talk about the Vector. Which was apparently a relief, as opposed to other reasons this universe's Han might have to talk about Sith, many of which are rather more personally traumatising.
We convinced him to give us the information about where the Vector wound up, promised him we wouldn't tell anyone where he was, and cleared out. Aurun said, "I'm not going to say what these Jedi would because fuck the Force, but... clear flying." "... yeah." Aurun is still working through her Feelings.
We packed ourselves up, checked in with base, got the news that our hacker had tracked down the Ishikarra to Mon Calamari where they had temporary haven, and headed off their to get them our interdiction escape field so we could get them to Imperial space. And so we bopped off there with usual cover, and tightbeamed over a 'we are your escort team to help you get the fuck out of here' message.
We were not greeted as liberators. We were greeted by a heavily armed assault squad who relaxed suddenly when they saw who we were, and that we were not infiltrators. And apparently there was a sense of 'we were reviewing routes and one of the Jedi had a bad feeling about them, so we were staying here, but our welcome might run out....'
Our Imperials said '... you know, we have a bad feeling about staying here....'
The back routes that we had were more options. Aaron went down to the engine room to get the anti-interdictor up and running. Valis and Elon went to the medical areas to check on the survivors and lend a hand. Tereez, Tsavor, and Aurun went up to the bridge to talk to people about things, and we got the ship under way.
Tightbeam signal from our hacker: "weird comm traffic, here...." And there was a freighter breaking queue to come at us. "Towards the refueling or at us?" "At you."
We studied it, analysed it quickly and... Q-ship.
("I know what that is because I read David Weber!" "Me too!" "")
Tsavor and Tereez split off to get into fighters and help defense with some of the local Jedi. Aurun says, "How good is your pilot?" and upon determining that the actual crew here is dead on their feet tired bumped into the chair and took the helm.
The giant hospital ship was not entirely as maneuverable as Aurun prefers in a vehicle, but instead of being a straight-on ram, the Q-ship hit it more glancingly, and locked on with tractor beams and emitted boarding parties.
Local defenses started to scramble. There were many and varied forms of chaos, which included Aurun having a strong impression of IMMINENT DEATH CLEAR THE FUCKING BRIDGE that managed to successfully evac the command crew just before the bridge evaporated in a cloud of beam weaponry. We ran down to engineering to get the ship back under control.
Various Jedi - and Karka the doom droid - worked to try to defend the ship and keep the civilians safe from the boarding parties. This was messy, because apparently something about the boarding parties was nullifying Force abilities, which meant the Jedi were not as well off in the situation as they might otherwise have been. Further, some of the bad guys appeared to be using Force abilities despite the null fields.
Meanwhile, Tereez, Tsavor, and several of the Jedi were blasting tractor beam emplacements so we could break free; they got two of four on the first pass, and that would be enough to make a run for it with heavy damage that might make it unsafe to jump to hyper. Not good.
Valis managed to determine that the enemy was using gravity-manipulation powers, not Force powers, like the Twi'lek genetically engineered escaped soldier we found murdered by Mandaloreans, so we started with the theory that they were from that slave army. In any case, he had a rather rough time figuring out what to do, though a bit of the ship damage putting a hole in the hull made things a little easier, at least until his helm got cracked when he was punched in the face by a guy wearing power armour.
Another tractor went down. The fighters that had scrambled from nearby broke off because they were Totally Unprepared for a Q-ship that was specifically built to drive off fighters. A local warship fired a warning shot. Aurun and Selig started tweaking the local gravity controls around places we knew that the invading parties were in the hopes of distracting them (and making them use their gravity poewrs to keep their balance rather than causing damage).
Valis shouted about whether or not anyone knew anything about something that might nullify the Force and one of the other Jedi shouted back, "Ysalamiri!" Which are basically lizards that nullify the Force near themselves to camouflage from hunters. So, great, we have guys in power armour some of whom have special gravity powers who are possibly carrying around magic wildlife.
The last tractor went down. Aurun took that opportunity to immediately shear away from the Q-ship now that it was no longer grappling, first to give local defenses a clear shot at it, and then to vector onto one of the secret routes we knew about. They did not give her a bad feeling.
"Extraction mission failed," radioed one of the invading squads to the Q-ship.
"That sounds like a kill signal," said Tereez, and he signaled the rest of the fighter jocks to be prepared, and so when the Q-ship rolled and popped out the giant torpedo bed and started firing, they fired back.
Tereez picked an excellent time to roll a critical success, sending a cascade shockwave back through the torpedoes, knocking several of them out and sending a wave of destruction backwards which blew the ordnance containment on the Q-ship. So, you know, good guys 1, bad guys 0 there.
We hit hyper and ran, working on trying to deal with the murdersquads on the way. Our fighters docked, and the Jedi split up to provide backup various places. Tereez, because taking out the entire Q-ship was not enough heroism for the day, came up behind the squad that was trying to kill Elon and his civilians, drew both his blades, and stabbied two of them from behind, because some days you just gotta be an assassin.
Cleanup continued. People were very grateful that we were there to save their asses.
We investigated the attack teams, and discovered they were all Bothan.
Tereez, in a state of Very Unhappy, grabbed the highest-ranked prisoner and went to have a little talk in a dark room.
The conversation with the prisoner was highly unsatisfactory but managed to pull out a certain amount of information. Specifically, that Bothan Intelligence had at the very least a substantial faction which had decided to take advantage of the chaos in the universe to establish a new order at which Bothans were not getting the shit end of things but were in fact in charge of everything, complete with a lot of anti-human in particular racism (other species did not really come up as topics). The viral outbreak related to the survivors kills fewer than the first round did, but more humans survive than other species, and this was pointed to as evidence of human malfeasance. Threats were exchanged all around.
Tereez recommended spacing the prisoners. The captain of the hospital ship was kind of horrified. "We don't do things that way in the Alliance!" "Maybe that's how it goes now," said Tereez, depressed. He had never before felt ashamed of being Bothan.
Aurun had a glorious rant about, basically, where does this chucklehead get off thinking that his species, as one of the movers and shakers of the galaxy, responsible for the control and flow of information in the halls of power, was getting the shit end of the stick. "Do you know why there are Twi'leki everywhere?" she asked, semi-rhetorically. "Because people came in ships, and said 'Your daughters are beautiful. Sell them to us and we will give you the stars!' And because over time people were convinced that it was their sacred duty to sell their oldest daughters as slaves! We didn't have ships of our own! We didn't have the stars!'" This was the most furious anyone had ever seen her.
The fact that her response to totally losing her temper and having a fit of rage was to stomp off to her berth in the Vrei when she had time and light up enough incense to make anyone's eyes water probably goes to show that she has the temperament to be a Jedi or something. Sort of.
Tereez had a message from his Bothan Intelligence contact. It was blank, like she was interrupted sending it. He sent a reply through a different channel, and got an autoresponder saying 'You are in danger. I will find you.'
We reported in. Many many troops arrived to take the prisoners away. Good luck with that.
They wanted us to go find the Vector. We agreed. They also wanted us to tell them where Han was. We refused. (Because a) we told him we wouldn't, and b) he's almost certainly not there anymore anyway.)
We went to the unnamed, rather empty system where Han said the Vector was lurking. It was not in the inner system, but a Force impression suggested it was that way. On the edge, where the local star is barely more visible than the nonlocal ones. So we hopped out that way, and we found it.
There was a ship docked with it. Yuuzhan Vong.
We slipped in on the side and sliced into the decrepit computer system to try to figure out how to deal with this. We knew there were Vong apostates working with the zombie end of things, after all; they might be trying to pick up a resupply or something. We also patched hacker ally in to start downloading as much data as he could get.
Elon looked rather uncomfortable about approximately everything, and had ever since we'd gotten to the hospital ship really. "Hey, you all right?" asked Tereez. "There is no emotion, only peace," said Elon. "I'll take that as a no," said Aurun. "I prefer the other one,*" said Tereez. Aurun added, grouchily, "No emotion means no life."
(* We had had some discussion of known Jedi codes at the beginning of the session.)
The entire crew of the Star Destroyer was zombies. Sleeping zombies. We hoped not to wake them up. The Vong, with their Force unreactivity, were not alerting them. We lurked in the shadow of the zombie invisibility device and watched the Vong.
Who appeared to be having an argument about how, in the weeks they’d been there, they had accomplished nothing useful, and these icky computers were not giving up their secrets. They should blow the place and leave, ugh mad Jedi, etc. We developed a suspicion that these were not the Vong we had previously encountered, and worked at testing this theory; we flickered up a possible login screen and started leading them through things about what questions they might want to ask, to see if they were trying to weaponise zombie things or prevent it from happening.
This provoked a combination of anxiousness and investigation from the Vong, and some wariness.
We gave them images from Taris. They brought in their leader, who wanted to know HOW THE COMPUTER HAD THAT THING. “They had no way of knowing about that!” he said.
The general consensus was increasingly freaked out and ‘this must be a trap, the computer has not been this helpful before’, and there was a little more keymashing, and agitation, and eventually we put up a message in Vong language and character-set that said “This is not a trap” which got one of the techs to bash the computer console in with his staff. “This place is cursed!”
We requested a parley on the bridge. With the comment, “Anyone who’s not prepared to die right here should probably go back to the Vrei.” So we dropped Aaron on the Vrei where he could be safe from the zombies in the company of Valis’s lizard terrarium. (Valis would like to commune with the lizards and learn their mastery of the Force and stuff.)
We asked for no more than ten Vong because we didn’t want to be intimidated; forty or so showed up. Whcih wasn’t all the Vong on the ship! So taht was something!
There was a discussion with a number of touchy, unpleased to be spied upon Vong about our mutual interest and maybe we could pool information, and by the way those pictures were from a week ago, not wahtever thing the Vong knew about, so really, let’s share information, we think you know about that. Why? Because we have a source who may have been there before your people gave up on technology and left your home galaxy, no we’re not telling you who, you understand that opsec is a thing. (Which got an ‘anyone who does not understand how to keep information is DEAD.’)
We explained that we had fought Sith (“mad Jedi”), and if they opposed that we wanted to trade information. We quoted the line we found in the sick-unto-death worldship (“[something I’ve forgotten] is Maker and Sion is his prophet” and got a near-violent screech of “HERESY” that was brought a bit calmer but noting that we had fought the people who said that, really, we don’t agree, we don’t mean to offend, just, those are our enemies too, etc.
We talked for a bit and maybe made a little progress - and then maybe made a bit more when we said there was a ship approaching, our friends spotted it, stealthy progression and blips on the scan. We described it. “Heretics,” they spat. They wanted to deal with it themselves; we indicated we had overwhelming firepower we could call in, but only if they wanted it.
Valis reached out to touch the incoming ship with his senses, and said, “Pain. Is taht the ship or who’s on it?” A shrug. “I know your culture considers it a motivator for strength, but this is a pain worse than being skinned alive. I would know.” Another shrug. “We’ll find out,” said the Vong.
We figured out where they were coming in, and people went to meet them. We non-Vong concealed ourselves somewhat so as not to muddy the issue.
There was a heated religious discussion as the other Vong arrived, in a ship that was not so much hybridised as a similar biomechanical structure to the plague-spreading dragonets. The religious differences expressed, the new boarders said perhaps the prophet would convince them, and someone - humanoid, with cracked and burning skin - came out, and lit up a red lightsaber.
That would be Sion. Who is at least four thousand years old, and a being of such power that his body is only held together by his conscious mastery of the Force, who feeds on the pain of his internal self-destruction from flame in order to draw the power required to not disintegrate. He invited the Vong to discuss their religious differences.
“Selig!” Valis hissed over the comms. “GET THOSE LIZARDS DOWN HERE NOW."
Which meant I spent a chunk of the afternoon chortling to myself because "Come to Dark Side. We have cookies."
Last session, we framed the Sith for killing murderball.
Dramatis Personae remain:
* Aurun, hotshot ship captain, ex-assassin, full of complicated feels about field training as a Jedi (link is to my monthly column on Patheos, from March)
* Aaron Selig, demagogue ship's engineer, mad gadgeteer, pessimist
* Tereez, half-Bothan senior Imperial Knight, ex-Sith infiltration specialist
* Valis, junior Imperial Knight, healing and body mod specialist
* Tsavor, also called Hissy, Barabel ex-gladiator
NPC:
* Elon, increasingly traumatised Chiss Jedi healer with a complicated past
Things that need to be covered to make this session make sense:
1) The Oniama was a passenger vessel on a routine trip that came down with a sudden horrible disease; 90+% of the people on board died. The survivors all manifested Force ability afterwards. Our healer friend Elon was one of those survivors.
2) There was another outbreak of the same disease, apparently, on the ship Laraden. Survivors were evacuated to Jedi protection on the Alliance medical ship Ishikarra. The Alliance issued a capture order for all the survivors for some unknown reason - but presumably wanting to hush things up somehow - and the Ishikarra was on the run, hiding, and had managed to ask for amnesty and protection from the Empire, which it had been granted. We set our hacker NPC teammate on trying to track them.
3) The research for the zombie-making virus had been done on a ship called the Vector, which was lost. There were very few survivors, but a few prisoners and others escaped. Among those survivors? A man named Han Solo, who has Left Galactic Society due to life-related trauma in the Expanded Universe version of the SWverse.
4) The evidence we have is that the disease outbreaks that cause Force powers are a response to the zombie virus, and some people theorise that it is a rival Sith group opposing the zombie end of things, since Force sensitivity provides some level of immunity to zombification. The mortality rate still not great.
5) Meanwhile, the Imperials got tipped off by allies in the Alliance that there is information suppression going on, with a basic, "Don't trust us with informationb ecause we don't know who's going to misuse it" sort of message. Fantastic. Jedi to be used as mediators, because Alliance agents who are trying to figure out WTF keep turning up dead.
So. The information we had about Han was that there was a bar on the planet where we killed murderball that he hung out in, and that he had had minimal cosmetic surgery to foil automated security cameras casually. So we decided that we would go check up on that while we were there, as that was the sensible thing, before running off to deal with any of the other galactic fires.
So Team One (Tsavor and Valis) infiltrated the cantina. One of the televisions in the bar had a commentary about how there had been a disruption of the Huttball game, but it was dealt with handily by security forces, etc., etc., and the general mood of the place was mocking derision, as they were sure they were being lied to, though not in what way.
Meanwhile, in the street we observed casual police brutality, which included droids obliterating a family on the street who may or may not have had a member who had committed some kind of offense against a local corporation. Life on Nar Shaddaa continues terrible.
(We had a lengthy political digression while setting up about the moral quandaries involved in the Anonymous (they call themselves "the Resistance") blowing the shit out of the infrastructure of a corporate-controlled system, and whether the likely innocent death toll was worth the getting the corporate control out, whether or not there was a state of war between the corporation and the rest of humanity, the nature of when being forced into making certain choices turns one into someone who makes those choices of their own will, social indoctrination and the capacity to see how to choose other things, corporate indenture, whether or not blowing up the infrastructure will lead to people actually being free to make better choices, and so on.)
(Aurun feeling very thinky about her life choices of late, so "You chose differently" mostly got her sort of ranty about how she was in a position where she was raised in a way that didn't actually have the infrastructure to remove those choices from her in the first place, but where she was keenly aware of not having it. "My mother tried to give me the blinkers, but she didn't have the infrastructure.")
Han was spotted at the card table. Team Two (Elon and Aaron) moved in and collected information, which included watching someone accuse him of cheating, and him snarking back, "Yeah, so're you, I'm just better at it than you are," which appeared to defuse the situation.
Team Three (Tereez and Aurun) moved in, to try to get in on the table. We got glared off, circled around and figured out which bartender was the gatekeeper. He made it clear that it wasn't the sort of game where newbies came around all that much, which led to a, "But I was in here last week!" mind trick moment. "Oh. Oh, right. No starting fistfights before 18:00." "No problem. What time is it?" "... nine." (It was the sort of place where, y'know, nobody sees daylight anyway, soooo.)
Eventually a spot at the table opened up, and Tereez took the chair, engaging in the time-honored technique of trying to lose to the guy he wanted to talk to, while Aurun draped over the back of the chair being Twi'leki arm candy who looks like she'd cut you if you caused a problem. (It was a rough bar. Also, she will totally cut you if you cause a problem. There was a side conversation about open carrying weapons and what's communicated by being seen carrying knives and I commented that mine aren't... visible....)
People were grumpy. Tereez nudged the conversation around to why they were grumpy and there was a lot of ranting about police brutality and terrorist Anonymous and the Hutts. And there was 'heard the Hutts got a setback' referring to the murderball game, and there was shrugging and 'there's always another Hutt' and so on. Han got visibly displeased at the ongoing politics discussion, and eventually threw in his chips and started to leave.
"My cousin said it was Sith who did the murderball thing...." dropped in Tereez, which got 1) Han stopping to stare at him for a moment before moving to move out quietly and 2) someone saying that it was good to hear about Sith kicking around because hey, things were better under Palpatine, which led to an immediate "What, are you some kind of Empire loyalist?" and a "WELL YEAH" and shots fired and, well, the bar brawl was still going when we left.
Even though Tsavor stood up and bellowed, "IT'S NOT SIX YET, PUT IT AWAY," before going back to drinking.
We tracked Han to a long-term flophouse hotel and swapped up teams, with Selig and Valis going in to make contact as they wouldn't be obviously the people who were slightly to blame for the card game getting ruined by politics and incidental gunfire. They rented a room in the flophouse for two days, said they wouldn't cause trouble and were eyerollingly disbelieved, were told not to get vomit on anything or there would be additional fees, and got sent on their way, at which point they went to the floor where we knew Han was.
And discovered that most of the floor was run by a brothel. "Whatcha want? I got...." And there was a long list of species suggested. Valis rolled with it, and tried to get Selig to put in an opinion on his favorite species of prostitute, which mostly made him make a large number of lovely awkward faces and appear uncomfortable. "I got droids! Not my thing, but hey, I don't judge!" suggested the burly madam (who I believe was male, but really he was more a madam than a pimp anyway). Valis finally said, "I think we'll go for 'Surprise me!'" at which point the guy running the place rolled his eyes, said "Surprise me will be a hundred", tacked on a surcharge for us getting a room near the one we wanted to investigate, and sent them off.
A few minutes later, a Barabel knocked on the door. "You said surprise me. Surprise!" she said. At which point people blinked, called down to Tsavor on the principle that hey, he doesn't get to talk to other Barabel much, and he might be able to tell whether or not she was voluntarily in this position and would be inclined to assist if she were not. "Surprise!" the party said, and Valis went to bang on Han's door.
"Whaddayawant." "We want to talk." "Go 'way." "We'll make it worth your while!" "I doubt it." "... wanna bet?"
And there was a long sort of silence, the sort of silence in which someone said the exact right thing.
The door opened, with a groggy and unhappy sort of Han there. Who was rather anxious about what we wanted to talk about. And tensed up again at the word "Sith," with an, "You were in the bar. I was having an okay morning."
They got permission to haul in the rest of the party, with a grumpy, "There's more of you?" and then we explained we wanted to talk about the Vector. Which was apparently a relief, as opposed to other reasons this universe's Han might have to talk about Sith, many of which are rather more personally traumatising.
We convinced him to give us the information about where the Vector wound up, promised him we wouldn't tell anyone where he was, and cleared out. Aurun said, "I'm not going to say what these Jedi would because fuck the Force, but... clear flying." "... yeah." Aurun is still working through her Feelings.
We packed ourselves up, checked in with base, got the news that our hacker had tracked down the Ishikarra to Mon Calamari where they had temporary haven, and headed off their to get them our interdiction escape field so we could get them to Imperial space. And so we bopped off there with usual cover, and tightbeamed over a 'we are your escort team to help you get the fuck out of here' message.
We were not greeted as liberators. We were greeted by a heavily armed assault squad who relaxed suddenly when they saw who we were, and that we were not infiltrators. And apparently there was a sense of 'we were reviewing routes and one of the Jedi had a bad feeling about them, so we were staying here, but our welcome might run out....'
Our Imperials said '... you know, we have a bad feeling about staying here....'
The back routes that we had were more options. Aaron went down to the engine room to get the anti-interdictor up and running. Valis and Elon went to the medical areas to check on the survivors and lend a hand. Tereez, Tsavor, and Aurun went up to the bridge to talk to people about things, and we got the ship under way.
Tightbeam signal from our hacker: "weird comm traffic, here...." And there was a freighter breaking queue to come at us. "Towards the refueling or at us?" "At you."
We studied it, analysed it quickly and... Q-ship.
("I know what that is because I read David Weber!" "Me too!" "
Tsavor and Tereez split off to get into fighters and help defense with some of the local Jedi. Aurun says, "How good is your pilot?" and upon determining that the actual crew here is dead on their feet tired bumped into the chair and took the helm.
The giant hospital ship was not entirely as maneuverable as Aurun prefers in a vehicle, but instead of being a straight-on ram, the Q-ship hit it more glancingly, and locked on with tractor beams and emitted boarding parties.
Local defenses started to scramble. There were many and varied forms of chaos, which included Aurun having a strong impression of IMMINENT DEATH CLEAR THE FUCKING BRIDGE that managed to successfully evac the command crew just before the bridge evaporated in a cloud of beam weaponry. We ran down to engineering to get the ship back under control.
Various Jedi - and Karka the doom droid - worked to try to defend the ship and keep the civilians safe from the boarding parties. This was messy, because apparently something about the boarding parties was nullifying Force abilities, which meant the Jedi were not as well off in the situation as they might otherwise have been. Further, some of the bad guys appeared to be using Force abilities despite the null fields.
Meanwhile, Tereez, Tsavor, and several of the Jedi were blasting tractor beam emplacements so we could break free; they got two of four on the first pass, and that would be enough to make a run for it with heavy damage that might make it unsafe to jump to hyper. Not good.
Valis managed to determine that the enemy was using gravity-manipulation powers, not Force powers, like the Twi'lek genetically engineered escaped soldier we found murdered by Mandaloreans, so we started with the theory that they were from that slave army. In any case, he had a rather rough time figuring out what to do, though a bit of the ship damage putting a hole in the hull made things a little easier, at least until his helm got cracked when he was punched in the face by a guy wearing power armour.
Another tractor went down. The fighters that had scrambled from nearby broke off because they were Totally Unprepared for a Q-ship that was specifically built to drive off fighters. A local warship fired a warning shot. Aurun and Selig started tweaking the local gravity controls around places we knew that the invading parties were in the hopes of distracting them (and making them use their gravity poewrs to keep their balance rather than causing damage).
Valis shouted about whether or not anyone knew anything about something that might nullify the Force and one of the other Jedi shouted back, "Ysalamiri!" Which are basically lizards that nullify the Force near themselves to camouflage from hunters. So, great, we have guys in power armour some of whom have special gravity powers who are possibly carrying around magic wildlife.
The last tractor went down. Aurun took that opportunity to immediately shear away from the Q-ship now that it was no longer grappling, first to give local defenses a clear shot at it, and then to vector onto one of the secret routes we knew about. They did not give her a bad feeling.
"Extraction mission failed," radioed one of the invading squads to the Q-ship.
"That sounds like a kill signal," said Tereez, and he signaled the rest of the fighter jocks to be prepared, and so when the Q-ship rolled and popped out the giant torpedo bed and started firing, they fired back.
Tereez picked an excellent time to roll a critical success, sending a cascade shockwave back through the torpedoes, knocking several of them out and sending a wave of destruction backwards which blew the ordnance containment on the Q-ship. So, you know, good guys 1, bad guys 0 there.
We hit hyper and ran, working on trying to deal with the murdersquads on the way. Our fighters docked, and the Jedi split up to provide backup various places. Tereez, because taking out the entire Q-ship was not enough heroism for the day, came up behind the squad that was trying to kill Elon and his civilians, drew both his blades, and stabbied two of them from behind, because some days you just gotta be an assassin.
Cleanup continued. People were very grateful that we were there to save their asses.
We investigated the attack teams, and discovered they were all Bothan.
Tereez, in a state of Very Unhappy, grabbed the highest-ranked prisoner and went to have a little talk in a dark room.
The conversation with the prisoner was highly unsatisfactory but managed to pull out a certain amount of information. Specifically, that Bothan Intelligence had at the very least a substantial faction which had decided to take advantage of the chaos in the universe to establish a new order at which Bothans were not getting the shit end of things but were in fact in charge of everything, complete with a lot of anti-human in particular racism (other species did not really come up as topics). The viral outbreak related to the survivors kills fewer than the first round did, but more humans survive than other species, and this was pointed to as evidence of human malfeasance. Threats were exchanged all around.
Tereez recommended spacing the prisoners. The captain of the hospital ship was kind of horrified. "We don't do things that way in the Alliance!" "Maybe that's how it goes now," said Tereez, depressed. He had never before felt ashamed of being Bothan.
Aurun had a glorious rant about, basically, where does this chucklehead get off thinking that his species, as one of the movers and shakers of the galaxy, responsible for the control and flow of information in the halls of power, was getting the shit end of the stick. "Do you know why there are Twi'leki everywhere?" she asked, semi-rhetorically. "Because people came in ships, and said 'Your daughters are beautiful. Sell them to us and we will give you the stars!' And because over time people were convinced that it was their sacred duty to sell their oldest daughters as slaves! We didn't have ships of our own! We didn't have the stars!'" This was the most furious anyone had ever seen her.
The fact that her response to totally losing her temper and having a fit of rage was to stomp off to her berth in the Vrei when she had time and light up enough incense to make anyone's eyes water probably goes to show that she has the temperament to be a Jedi or something. Sort of.
Tereez had a message from his Bothan Intelligence contact. It was blank, like she was interrupted sending it. He sent a reply through a different channel, and got an autoresponder saying 'You are in danger. I will find you.'
We reported in. Many many troops arrived to take the prisoners away. Good luck with that.
They wanted us to go find the Vector. We agreed. They also wanted us to tell them where Han was. We refused. (Because a) we told him we wouldn't, and b) he's almost certainly not there anymore anyway.)
We went to the unnamed, rather empty system where Han said the Vector was lurking. It was not in the inner system, but a Force impression suggested it was that way. On the edge, where the local star is barely more visible than the nonlocal ones. So we hopped out that way, and we found it.
There was a ship docked with it. Yuuzhan Vong.
We slipped in on the side and sliced into the decrepit computer system to try to figure out how to deal with this. We knew there were Vong apostates working with the zombie end of things, after all; they might be trying to pick up a resupply or something. We also patched hacker ally in to start downloading as much data as he could get.
Elon looked rather uncomfortable about approximately everything, and had ever since we'd gotten to the hospital ship really. "Hey, you all right?" asked Tereez. "There is no emotion, only peace," said Elon. "I'll take that as a no," said Aurun. "I prefer the other one,*" said Tereez. Aurun added, grouchily, "No emotion means no life."
(* We had had some discussion of known Jedi codes at the beginning of the session.)
The entire crew of the Star Destroyer was zombies. Sleeping zombies. We hoped not to wake them up. The Vong, with their Force unreactivity, were not alerting them. We lurked in the shadow of the zombie invisibility device and watched the Vong.
Who appeared to be having an argument about how, in the weeks they’d been there, they had accomplished nothing useful, and these icky computers were not giving up their secrets. They should blow the place and leave, ugh mad Jedi, etc. We developed a suspicion that these were not the Vong we had previously encountered, and worked at testing this theory; we flickered up a possible login screen and started leading them through things about what questions they might want to ask, to see if they were trying to weaponise zombie things or prevent it from happening.
This provoked a combination of anxiousness and investigation from the Vong, and some wariness.
We gave them images from Taris. They brought in their leader, who wanted to know HOW THE COMPUTER HAD THAT THING. “They had no way of knowing about that!” he said.
The general consensus was increasingly freaked out and ‘this must be a trap, the computer has not been this helpful before’, and there was a little more keymashing, and agitation, and eventually we put up a message in Vong language and character-set that said “This is not a trap” which got one of the techs to bash the computer console in with his staff. “This place is cursed!”
We requested a parley on the bridge. With the comment, “Anyone who’s not prepared to die right here should probably go back to the Vrei.” So we dropped Aaron on the Vrei where he could be safe from the zombies in the company of Valis’s lizard terrarium. (Valis would like to commune with the lizards and learn their mastery of the Force and stuff.)
We asked for no more than ten Vong because we didn’t want to be intimidated; forty or so showed up. Whcih wasn’t all the Vong on the ship! So taht was something!
There was a discussion with a number of touchy, unpleased to be spied upon Vong about our mutual interest and maybe we could pool information, and by the way those pictures were from a week ago, not wahtever thing the Vong knew about, so really, let’s share information, we think you know about that. Why? Because we have a source who may have been there before your people gave up on technology and left your home galaxy, no we’re not telling you who, you understand that opsec is a thing. (Which got an ‘anyone who does not understand how to keep information is DEAD.’)
We explained that we had fought Sith (“mad Jedi”), and if they opposed that we wanted to trade information. We quoted the line we found in the sick-unto-death worldship (“[something I’ve forgotten] is Maker and Sion is his prophet” and got a near-violent screech of “HERESY” that was brought a bit calmer but noting that we had fought the people who said that, really, we don’t agree, we don’t mean to offend, just, those are our enemies too, etc.
We talked for a bit and maybe made a little progress - and then maybe made a bit more when we said there was a ship approaching, our friends spotted it, stealthy progression and blips on the scan. We described it. “Heretics,” they spat. They wanted to deal with it themselves; we indicated we had overwhelming firepower we could call in, but only if they wanted it.
Valis reached out to touch the incoming ship with his senses, and said, “Pain. Is taht the ship or who’s on it?” A shrug. “I know your culture considers it a motivator for strength, but this is a pain worse than being skinned alive. I would know.” Another shrug. “We’ll find out,” said the Vong.
We figured out where they were coming in, and people went to meet them. We non-Vong concealed ourselves somewhat so as not to muddy the issue.
There was a heated religious discussion as the other Vong arrived, in a ship that was not so much hybridised as a similar biomechanical structure to the plague-spreading dragonets. The religious differences expressed, the new boarders said perhaps the prophet would convince them, and someone - humanoid, with cracked and burning skin - came out, and lit up a red lightsaber.
That would be Sion. Who is at least four thousand years old, and a being of such power that his body is only held together by his conscious mastery of the Force, who feeds on the pain of his internal self-destruction from flame in order to draw the power required to not disintegrate. He invited the Vong to discuss their religious differences.
“Selig!” Valis hissed over the comms. “GET THOSE LIZARDS DOWN HERE NOW."
Tags: