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And back for another edition of Star Wars gaming, which I am posting before we do more tomorrow, as I have finally gotten my shit together.
Dramatis Personae:
* Aurun, hotshot ship captain, ex-assassin, untrained Force user
* 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
and introducing (in session 8)
* Arno Lassic, Zeltron hacker and demolitions guy
plus
NPC Elon, still a traumatized Jedi survivor of the Force-activation plague virus, medic, and having a bad day
So: we started out lurking behind some boxes while Vong prepared to discuss their religious differences. While we were dithering about how to deal with this circumstance, the Vong Shaper in charge said “Follow me!” and provided us with options other than getting into a suicidal brawl between Vong religious fanatics. We elected to take the non-suicidal-brawl option and followed the Vong into the station.
Discussion revealed that our ship was the closer refuge, but that there was something that they needed to show us first. So we picked our way around to the lab area again, and through some doors, and into a room that had a thing in it. A pyramid-shaped glowy red thing. A Sith holocron, in fact. (Which is apparently a sentient data archive implanted with a particular personality, for those people who have no more idea what the hell that means than I did.)
We tried to convince it to come with us. It zapped us. We tried to convince it that we would be more fun than the Sith Lord behind us. It laughed. Valis tried to offer it unfettered ‘We don’t know about this thing but we WANT to let us FIND OUT’ ambition, which was starting to sound a little bit persuasive to it, but slow going.
Eventually Tsavor said, “We don’t have time for this,” glared at the pyramid, stomped over, and picked it up. “Let’s go.”
And we all looked at Mr. Barabel Who Gives Everyone The Stinkeye For Being Able To EMP Things, I Will Sit And Meditate To Solve Our Problems. And we got our asses in gear to move out, because he was correct, there is no time for this.
We carefully navigated around the zombie-infested hallways, including giving up and going through the ceiling to a less busy floor. And somewhere in there we experienced a rather disorienting sensation of sense-scrambling, a little unclarity about up and down, and got informed that some kind of ship just jumped in. Great. Sion’s ride showed. And it feels unpleasant.
We were nearly to the room above the hangar where the Vrei was when the wall next to Tsavor blasted in and knocked him over and we were suddenly confronted with the Sith Lord who was held together entirely by power rooted in pain.
This is what we call a problem.
Chaos ensued, including burning a couple of holes in the floor to reveal the hallway below was full of zombies, generalised confusion, and Tsavor using force lightning to hold the bad guy’s attention. Selik got the hangar doors open into the hallway and laid waste to zombies with the ship’s guns so that we could all jump down into the hallway and run for the ship. Tereez cut a few holes through the walls to give Tsavor an escape route.
Karka came out of the ship behind the zombie death with a few of the ysalamiri (Force-suppression lizards) on board, popped up through one of the holes, and fired a plasma beam at Sion, who was in the process of attempting to Force-choke Valis. The ysalamiri let Valis get free; Sion deflected the plasma beam *back* at Karka. This did not end well; Karka hit the floor. Strategies were discussed.
"Black holes are explicitly useless against Dark Jedi."
Tsavor threatened Sion with the destruction of the holocron, which produced a certain amount of detente as people shifted positions, some escaped down the holes, and so on. A new hole was cut for Tsavor and Tereez to escape down, and the ship guns blasted through Sion’s last known position just to keep things interesting as they dropped into the hangar and ran for the ship.
Selik hauled in the refugee Vong and the crew with the tractor beam. Gently. Some people handled this better than others. Aurun kept her feet and pelted for the bridge. Selik set off the self-destruct mechanism on the zombie-infested zombie plague research ship, setting off blaring alarms; everyone else got into the ship. We closed her up. And Aurun took her straight to hyper from the docking bay, just in advance of the space being vaporised by the enemy ship.
In short, we got away. And Aurun handed the Vong one of the potted plants she has from the Twi’lek homeworld in the hope that it would help them feel better about being in an icky techy space, which nonplussed everyone, but it was clear she meant well. Her decision to teach them how to fly a shuttle went over much better, as they were given a shuttle and went on their not entirely merry way once we rendezvoused with our people.
There was some interrogation of Tsavor over the, y’know, aggressively picking up a Sith artifact that was mocking everyone else for being so soft and the force lightning and all, in which Tsavor wound up basically identifying the mysterious grey Jedi who saved everyone’s ass on Taris a while back (and who Tereez knew as the one who saved him from the Sith Academy) as “This one’s Master”, though that was clarified to “head of Order”, which was a little startling because as far as everyone knew, the Grey Jedi were not an order so much as a mish-mash of the unaffiliated. Tsavor noted to Aurun that there were now Options regarding her training.
And then we picked up our other plan, which was to pop over to a place Selik had found the stealth-field generating thing on salvage to see if we could get any more information off the site now that we actually knew a thing or two. So we headed off. And while we were puttering around we got a weird signal on an emergency frequency. Some signal boosting and fiddling later, and we realised it was an emergency signal from our buddies telling us something about no radio contact and someone had sent an elite hit squad to kill us.
Of, you know, our allies.
So we went to ‘focus on tracking the people who are warping into this Star-Wars-implausibly dense asteroid field and figure out how to get out of this dogfight without killing them or getting killed’, which was complex. It involved a lot of dodging and weaving, hacking decoy drones to pass out recordings of us saving the asses of other elite squads these guys might know, Valis putting people to sleep, and Tsavor aggressively beaming happy and nonaggressive thoughts at various people. ("... the giant battle lizard Jedi is care bear staring …”)
Eventually, this meant that the people who were trying to kill us broke radio silence to say, “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU PEOPLE?” at which point we told them that Daala’s offices had been suborned and they’d been sent to kill a bunch of people who were actually kind of bloody helpful. They were not best pleased about this, to say the least, but allowed as how we might well be the team they knew about, and oh, not happy. We created some faked logs of our own deaths, slipped an electronic tracer into them while they weren’t looking, and they uploaded them.
There was some consolidating data, and some trying to figure out, you know, what the hell this system was like before, apparently, every single stony planet and moon was blasted into an asteroid belt by something unknown, explaining the Ridiculously Dense Asteroid Fields, Previously Used For Dogfight. (It was briefly suggested that we could jump to a system at an appropriate distance away and use a really big telescope to see if we could spot planets, but we decided that this was probably silly. And maybe universe-breaking. Even if the science was sound.)
In any case, while investigating Stuff, we noticed an anamoly that needed to be tracked down. So we went to investigate the anamoly, and noticed a couple of our new fighter friends stealthily following us in hyper. Which produced a conversation that can be paraphrased “Hi there!” “Hi there!” “Whatcha doing?” “Following you to see what you’re up to!” “Um, we’re up to some highly classified shit.” “Cool, we wanna see.” “Um, you can’t tell anyone.” “… seriously. We don’t talk. Talking’s not our job. Besides, we already uploaded falsified logs for you people, a little trust?” “… okay sure whatever. (It’s not like we can get rid of you.)”
So. We got to our destination and found…
… what appeared to be a copy of Centerpoint Station, the superweapon the Corellians don’t know how to use but which destroyed a fleet and a half the one time they got it turned on, the threat of which has made people Leave Corellians Alone in ways that have allowed them to become alarming in an entirely uninterfered with fashion.
There was absolutely nothing good about this.
We got there, and it had clearly been battled over. Further, the primary warring parties appeared to be: space zombies, and a droid civilisation made up of droids like Karka.
Which at least meant that we had some spare parts to try to repair him.
(“If one fun-sized Death Star is good, ten thousand of them is better!”)
Various people started work on trying to figure out the systems of the thing, in which Aurun’s study of Karka’s language turned out to be useful for more than background character development. We got a star chart and some history docs and holy shit this thing came from another galaxy and generated a wormhole, and there was an evacuation, which failed. And we promptly started generating theories about Vong, and Vong warfare with droids, and did not have an explanation for the zombies yet, but we would work on it yes we would.
We concluded the session by determining that the only way this discovery did not immediately plunge everyone into intergalactic war was by having it held by a coalition of every Jedi faction we knew of which was not evil, and various people reached out to their various contacts to make this happen.
So we picked up there: working on deciphering systems, impending diplomatic groups coming in, including one from the Alliance which it would cause an international incident to make go away, even though there was the whole “they just tried to kill us and we know their system is full of holes” thing. We had been trying to limit it to just Jedi for the initial stuff and suddenly there are the political entities involved and argh, this was not what we were trying to do.
New guy shows up. Name of Arno Lassic, computer guy. Our team hacker had managed to recruit him as a mercenary to join our group of mercenaries and affiliated detached Jedi, because he does not like being where the action is, it cuts into his important playing tie fighter sims and also might lead to him getting shot, stabbed, fatally lightsabered, or otherwise mangled. Arno spent a while with Aurun, Tereez, and the others who were working on making sense of the station (mostly not Selig, who was trying to repair Karka), trying to make sense of character dynamics. Which included a lot of casual references to our Past Adventures, a fair amount of complaining, and figuring out that Aurun is actually not terribly good with computers but appeared to understand the language.
Eventually we collectively managed to decipher enough of the systems to, at least theoretically, reopen the transit wormhole to the other galaxy. Which meant that the higher-ups thought we should go scouting the other galaxy to see if we could get any useful intel. Now, of course the other galaxy is theorised to have been wiped out by murderdroids and space zombies but that’s no reason to hold back here, right? We concocted a suitably paranoid plan (open wormhole home here, if you don’t have our ‘we’re okay’ signal close it and try again two days later there, if we’re not there then go for two weeks later at the other place), and were reassured by the presence of a Chiss dreadnought equipped for scouting hostile terrain as our escort. (Our NPC hacker objected strenuously to all this, because this is why he arranged for people to hire Arno. He does not like going to entirely alien dead galaxies infested with murderdroids and space zombies. Poor him.)
There was also some discussion of a Corellian group turning up at some point, which was, well, Aurun has complicated feelings about that, and might have intel depending on who they are. Out of date intel, but stuff that other people are unlikely to know.
Valis eventually said, “… the Force tells me that Hutts are on the way,” and we swore a lot and packed up to go rather than dither further. It was not precisely pleasant, but we made it through the wormhole to the other side, to a star system where the Force felt, well. Undusted. It was very odd.
We investigated the planets in the inner system; our map said there should be three of them, two capable of supporting life. None were capable of supporting life anymore. Two of them had been hollowed out and were basically shells over an empty core; we assumed they had been mined out by droids. The third was a former city planet, from what we could pick up on scans, but covered with a toxic sulphuric-acid high Venusian atmosphere.
It was determined eventually that we would send down three search teams to have a look at things and see if we could find any records of what happened here in the ruins; each team would have some Jedi on staff. So it was the usual party plus a Chiss science team that were organised to get into the shuttle and went down with us.
Unfortunately, our Chiss escort was the one captained by Elon’s sister, who looked at the team manifests, removed Elon from our team roster, and shuffled things around, saying that she was not willing to let an untrained civilian fuck up the mission. Tereez went toe-to-toe with her on this - complicated, since there’s no clear hierarchy resolution - and eventually when told to take his team and go, took *his* team and went. His team including Elon.
Underneath the atmosphere, the cityscape was a melted mess, blended together by amorphous sprawls of tentacle-like cabling, all rather familiar to us from the developing monstrosity of Taris. We puttered about looking for anything that might have been a city center or seat of government or anything that might have surviving anything for a while, but of course it had all been eaten. One of the other teams reported finding a sort of pyramid thing, and we all converged to investigate.
The inside of the pyramid was sort of squamous and non-Euclidean, and gave the sort of feeling of crawling around inside a dessicated corpse. We wandered curling, weirdly sloped passages in search of something, perhaps a nerve center, that we could try to figure out. At one point we came out into a vast chamber lined with statues of some sort of humanoid that we were unfamiliar with. THough we were familiar with the statues; we had seen oozing ones rather like that on the dying Vong worldship, only the humanoids there were Vong.
We investigated the room full of creepy statues. And discovered that they were… in some complicated way… alive, in a sort of suspended animation, and ecstatically happy to be that way. Also, that their attention was Force-active, and directed a very long way away.
We were in the thing’s fossilised sense organ. We dubbed it the eye room. We asked the science team what they made of it, and they said they’d not have believed the statues were alive if we hadn’t told them. We poked the creepiness. Valis investigated the creepiness, and wandered back down the hallway, pulled out our Vong communication device from the Shaper, and asked her what she thought of this. She thought KILL IT WITH FIRE. IMMEDIATELY. We thanked her. “These things get really good range!” he said, as he signed off.
We extracted one of the statues to take it off for study and sent one of our droids to schlep it back to the shuttle, and continued along to where Valis thought we would find a nerve center.
What we eventually found was creepy. Of course. A sort of set of platform with silvery cables draped here and there, ringed with skulls on posts. Including three droid cores - two heavily damaged - that looked like the same tech as Karka. Our historian associate identified one of the skulls as Rakatan. Various people climbed to investigate matters further. Aurun spotted some silvery worms shifting and moving along the silvery cables, and a couple of near-inert dragonets; the worm dropped and phased, and Valis promptly bisected it rather than deal with it in his guts.
Aurun said, “Hey, we have a sample, that was going to be tricky otherwise,” to the moderate bafflement of poor Arno, who had been warned that things got weird around here, but perhaps not that the Twi’lek was completely blase about teleporting monsters that try to materialise their little buzzsaw teeth through people’s innards.
We grabbed various heads and cleared off the platform as some kind of horrible maw full of teeth descended to indicate we were unwelcome. The bomb we left it for an appetiser seemed to put it off its appetite; we indicated to the other investigating teams that the place was waking up, and look out for dragonets and maybe worms, and started booking it.
After a bit we realised that stealth worked, and that it might even work for people without magic stealth-from-this-stuff devices. (Our magic stealth-from-this-stuff device was now something that Selig was trying to replicate, now he had access to the stuff from the Centerpoint replica and a little more familiarity with the tech. Something that could stealth large ships, for example, we thought that might come in handy.) All parties extracted successfully; we guessed that with the guiding intelligence of the planetseed dead the lesser portions were just acting out near-randomly.
We started off just in time to lose contact with our dreadnought. Much swearing from Aurun, with a muttered, “My *ship* is up there”, and a very efficient arc up out of the obscuring atmosphere, to find the Chiss dueling with a ship very much like the one that had been ferrying Sion around. We got ourselves back on board and hypered out to our secondary pickup location, where we lurked in the outer system in case we were followed. We did not appear to be followed.
While we were killing time waiting for the wormhole home to appear, we hooked up the surviving droidbrain to some apparatus and tried to have a conversation with it. It was actually a very informative conversation, despite the hostility of the droidbrain, and we learned many things: that the droid race had been created to destroy the zombie plague and protect life; that it had had a schism over which of these directives was primary, with Karka being on the ‘protect life’ side and the rescued droid core being on the ‘destroy the zombie plague’ side; that the plague originated with a living planet, an ancestor of the Vong planet, which became sterile somehow and was attempting to reproduce itself with these conversions and creations; that the plague planet had always had Force-using allies; that life in the other galaxy had likely been largely wiped out by a massive killer virus, for which we got the formula, in order to kill the surviving zombie worlds and, incidentally, everything else. Evil droid was interested in the kills-people-but-makes-the-survivors-Force-active virus, discussed briefly the optimisation on it and noted that it would work better if it was race-targeted; the current version it could not see much scope to improve.
While we were chatting with the enemy, Karka drifted in, seeming more than a bit woozy. Arno got a major vision off touching Karka as part of the repair process - a vision centered on a burned child - and was a bit, “Did you know your droid is active in the Force?” “Yeah, he’s also fifty thousand years old.” Karka and the droidbrain in a box did not like each other at all and there were insults exchanged; afterwards Karka noted that it might be possible for him to recover information by hacking the hostile droid, but that ran the risk of him *losing* and thus losing himself. He did manage to pull some surface databanks without risk, though, restoring substantial information to his own memory and improving his language skills significantly.
Finally, the wormhole opened, and we got a garbled transmission on an emergency frequency, which is the sort of thing that happens to us a lot and we would like our circumstances to improve. We warped back to our home galaxy and nearly crashed into the sort of mercenaries who Hutts hire. Nearly, because the dreadnought opened fire to clear the way first.
So, with our pile of precious information, we enter a great space battle.
Dramatis Personae:
* Aurun, hotshot ship captain, ex-assassin, untrained Force user
* 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
and introducing (in session 8)
* Arno Lassic, Zeltron hacker and demolitions guy
plus
NPC Elon, still a traumatized Jedi survivor of the Force-activation plague virus, medic, and having a bad day
So: we started out lurking behind some boxes while Vong prepared to discuss their religious differences. While we were dithering about how to deal with this circumstance, the Vong Shaper in charge said “Follow me!” and provided us with options other than getting into a suicidal brawl between Vong religious fanatics. We elected to take the non-suicidal-brawl option and followed the Vong into the station.
Discussion revealed that our ship was the closer refuge, but that there was something that they needed to show us first. So we picked our way around to the lab area again, and through some doors, and into a room that had a thing in it. A pyramid-shaped glowy red thing. A Sith holocron, in fact. (Which is apparently a sentient data archive implanted with a particular personality, for those people who have no more idea what the hell that means than I did.)
We tried to convince it to come with us. It zapped us. We tried to convince it that we would be more fun than the Sith Lord behind us. It laughed. Valis tried to offer it unfettered ‘We don’t know about this thing but we WANT to let us FIND OUT’ ambition, which was starting to sound a little bit persuasive to it, but slow going.
Eventually Tsavor said, “We don’t have time for this,” glared at the pyramid, stomped over, and picked it up. “Let’s go.”
And we all looked at Mr. Barabel Who Gives Everyone The Stinkeye For Being Able To EMP Things, I Will Sit And Meditate To Solve Our Problems. And we got our asses in gear to move out, because he was correct, there is no time for this.
We carefully navigated around the zombie-infested hallways, including giving up and going through the ceiling to a less busy floor. And somewhere in there we experienced a rather disorienting sensation of sense-scrambling, a little unclarity about up and down, and got informed that some kind of ship just jumped in. Great. Sion’s ride showed. And it feels unpleasant.
We were nearly to the room above the hangar where the Vrei was when the wall next to Tsavor blasted in and knocked him over and we were suddenly confronted with the Sith Lord who was held together entirely by power rooted in pain.
This is what we call a problem.
Chaos ensued, including burning a couple of holes in the floor to reveal the hallway below was full of zombies, generalised confusion, and Tsavor using force lightning to hold the bad guy’s attention. Selik got the hangar doors open into the hallway and laid waste to zombies with the ship’s guns so that we could all jump down into the hallway and run for the ship. Tereez cut a few holes through the walls to give Tsavor an escape route.
Karka came out of the ship behind the zombie death with a few of the ysalamiri (Force-suppression lizards) on board, popped up through one of the holes, and fired a plasma beam at Sion, who was in the process of attempting to Force-choke Valis. The ysalamiri let Valis get free; Sion deflected the plasma beam *back* at Karka. This did not end well; Karka hit the floor. Strategies were discussed.
"Black holes are explicitly useless against Dark Jedi."
Tsavor threatened Sion with the destruction of the holocron, which produced a certain amount of detente as people shifted positions, some escaped down the holes, and so on. A new hole was cut for Tsavor and Tereez to escape down, and the ship guns blasted through Sion’s last known position just to keep things interesting as they dropped into the hangar and ran for the ship.
Selik hauled in the refugee Vong and the crew with the tractor beam. Gently. Some people handled this better than others. Aurun kept her feet and pelted for the bridge. Selik set off the self-destruct mechanism on the zombie-infested zombie plague research ship, setting off blaring alarms; everyone else got into the ship. We closed her up. And Aurun took her straight to hyper from the docking bay, just in advance of the space being vaporised by the enemy ship.
In short, we got away. And Aurun handed the Vong one of the potted plants she has from the Twi’lek homeworld in the hope that it would help them feel better about being in an icky techy space, which nonplussed everyone, but it was clear she meant well. Her decision to teach them how to fly a shuttle went over much better, as they were given a shuttle and went on their not entirely merry way once we rendezvoused with our people.
There was some interrogation of Tsavor over the, y’know, aggressively picking up a Sith artifact that was mocking everyone else for being so soft and the force lightning and all, in which Tsavor wound up basically identifying the mysterious grey Jedi who saved everyone’s ass on Taris a while back (and who Tereez knew as the one who saved him from the Sith Academy) as “This one’s Master”, though that was clarified to “head of Order”, which was a little startling because as far as everyone knew, the Grey Jedi were not an order so much as a mish-mash of the unaffiliated. Tsavor noted to Aurun that there were now Options regarding her training.
And then we picked up our other plan, which was to pop over to a place Selik had found the stealth-field generating thing on salvage to see if we could get any more information off the site now that we actually knew a thing or two. So we headed off. And while we were puttering around we got a weird signal on an emergency frequency. Some signal boosting and fiddling later, and we realised it was an emergency signal from our buddies telling us something about no radio contact and someone had sent an elite hit squad to kill us.
Of, you know, our allies.
So we went to ‘focus on tracking the people who are warping into this Star-Wars-implausibly dense asteroid field and figure out how to get out of this dogfight without killing them or getting killed’, which was complex. It involved a lot of dodging and weaving, hacking decoy drones to pass out recordings of us saving the asses of other elite squads these guys might know, Valis putting people to sleep, and Tsavor aggressively beaming happy and nonaggressive thoughts at various people. ("... the giant battle lizard Jedi is care bear staring …”)
Eventually, this meant that the people who were trying to kill us broke radio silence to say, “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU PEOPLE?” at which point we told them that Daala’s offices had been suborned and they’d been sent to kill a bunch of people who were actually kind of bloody helpful. They were not best pleased about this, to say the least, but allowed as how we might well be the team they knew about, and oh, not happy. We created some faked logs of our own deaths, slipped an electronic tracer into them while they weren’t looking, and they uploaded them.
There was some consolidating data, and some trying to figure out, you know, what the hell this system was like before, apparently, every single stony planet and moon was blasted into an asteroid belt by something unknown, explaining the Ridiculously Dense Asteroid Fields, Previously Used For Dogfight. (It was briefly suggested that we could jump to a system at an appropriate distance away and use a really big telescope to see if we could spot planets, but we decided that this was probably silly. And maybe universe-breaking. Even if the science was sound.)
In any case, while investigating Stuff, we noticed an anamoly that needed to be tracked down. So we went to investigate the anamoly, and noticed a couple of our new fighter friends stealthily following us in hyper. Which produced a conversation that can be paraphrased “Hi there!” “Hi there!” “Whatcha doing?” “Following you to see what you’re up to!” “Um, we’re up to some highly classified shit.” “Cool, we wanna see.” “Um, you can’t tell anyone.” “… seriously. We don’t talk. Talking’s not our job. Besides, we already uploaded falsified logs for you people, a little trust?” “… okay sure whatever. (It’s not like we can get rid of you.)”
So. We got to our destination and found…
… what appeared to be a copy of Centerpoint Station, the superweapon the Corellians don’t know how to use but which destroyed a fleet and a half the one time they got it turned on, the threat of which has made people Leave Corellians Alone in ways that have allowed them to become alarming in an entirely uninterfered with fashion.
There was absolutely nothing good about this.
We got there, and it had clearly been battled over. Further, the primary warring parties appeared to be: space zombies, and a droid civilisation made up of droids like Karka.
Which at least meant that we had some spare parts to try to repair him.
(“If one fun-sized Death Star is good, ten thousand of them is better!”)
Various people started work on trying to figure out the systems of the thing, in which Aurun’s study of Karka’s language turned out to be useful for more than background character development. We got a star chart and some history docs and holy shit this thing came from another galaxy and generated a wormhole, and there was an evacuation, which failed. And we promptly started generating theories about Vong, and Vong warfare with droids, and did not have an explanation for the zombies yet, but we would work on it yes we would.
We concluded the session by determining that the only way this discovery did not immediately plunge everyone into intergalactic war was by having it held by a coalition of every Jedi faction we knew of which was not evil, and various people reached out to their various contacts to make this happen.
So we picked up there: working on deciphering systems, impending diplomatic groups coming in, including one from the Alliance which it would cause an international incident to make go away, even though there was the whole “they just tried to kill us and we know their system is full of holes” thing. We had been trying to limit it to just Jedi for the initial stuff and suddenly there are the political entities involved and argh, this was not what we were trying to do.
New guy shows up. Name of Arno Lassic, computer guy. Our team hacker had managed to recruit him as a mercenary to join our group of mercenaries and affiliated detached Jedi, because he does not like being where the action is, it cuts into his important playing tie fighter sims and also might lead to him getting shot, stabbed, fatally lightsabered, or otherwise mangled. Arno spent a while with Aurun, Tereez, and the others who were working on making sense of the station (mostly not Selig, who was trying to repair Karka), trying to make sense of character dynamics. Which included a lot of casual references to our Past Adventures, a fair amount of complaining, and figuring out that Aurun is actually not terribly good with computers but appeared to understand the language.
Eventually we collectively managed to decipher enough of the systems to, at least theoretically, reopen the transit wormhole to the other galaxy. Which meant that the higher-ups thought we should go scouting the other galaxy to see if we could get any useful intel. Now, of course the other galaxy is theorised to have been wiped out by murderdroids and space zombies but that’s no reason to hold back here, right? We concocted a suitably paranoid plan (open wormhole home here, if you don’t have our ‘we’re okay’ signal close it and try again two days later there, if we’re not there then go for two weeks later at the other place), and were reassured by the presence of a Chiss dreadnought equipped for scouting hostile terrain as our escort. (Our NPC hacker objected strenuously to all this, because this is why he arranged for people to hire Arno. He does not like going to entirely alien dead galaxies infested with murderdroids and space zombies. Poor him.)
There was also some discussion of a Corellian group turning up at some point, which was, well, Aurun has complicated feelings about that, and might have intel depending on who they are. Out of date intel, but stuff that other people are unlikely to know.
Valis eventually said, “… the Force tells me that Hutts are on the way,” and we swore a lot and packed up to go rather than dither further. It was not precisely pleasant, but we made it through the wormhole to the other side, to a star system where the Force felt, well. Undusted. It was very odd.
We investigated the planets in the inner system; our map said there should be three of them, two capable of supporting life. None were capable of supporting life anymore. Two of them had been hollowed out and were basically shells over an empty core; we assumed they had been mined out by droids. The third was a former city planet, from what we could pick up on scans, but covered with a toxic sulphuric-acid high Venusian atmosphere.
It was determined eventually that we would send down three search teams to have a look at things and see if we could find any records of what happened here in the ruins; each team would have some Jedi on staff. So it was the usual party plus a Chiss science team that were organised to get into the shuttle and went down with us.
Unfortunately, our Chiss escort was the one captained by Elon’s sister, who looked at the team manifests, removed Elon from our team roster, and shuffled things around, saying that she was not willing to let an untrained civilian fuck up the mission. Tereez went toe-to-toe with her on this - complicated, since there’s no clear hierarchy resolution - and eventually when told to take his team and go, took *his* team and went. His team including Elon.
Underneath the atmosphere, the cityscape was a melted mess, blended together by amorphous sprawls of tentacle-like cabling, all rather familiar to us from the developing monstrosity of Taris. We puttered about looking for anything that might have been a city center or seat of government or anything that might have surviving anything for a while, but of course it had all been eaten. One of the other teams reported finding a sort of pyramid thing, and we all converged to investigate.
The inside of the pyramid was sort of squamous and non-Euclidean, and gave the sort of feeling of crawling around inside a dessicated corpse. We wandered curling, weirdly sloped passages in search of something, perhaps a nerve center, that we could try to figure out. At one point we came out into a vast chamber lined with statues of some sort of humanoid that we were unfamiliar with. THough we were familiar with the statues; we had seen oozing ones rather like that on the dying Vong worldship, only the humanoids there were Vong.
We investigated the room full of creepy statues. And discovered that they were… in some complicated way… alive, in a sort of suspended animation, and ecstatically happy to be that way. Also, that their attention was Force-active, and directed a very long way away.
We were in the thing’s fossilised sense organ. We dubbed it the eye room. We asked the science team what they made of it, and they said they’d not have believed the statues were alive if we hadn’t told them. We poked the creepiness. Valis investigated the creepiness, and wandered back down the hallway, pulled out our Vong communication device from the Shaper, and asked her what she thought of this. She thought KILL IT WITH FIRE. IMMEDIATELY. We thanked her. “These things get really good range!” he said, as he signed off.
We extracted one of the statues to take it off for study and sent one of our droids to schlep it back to the shuttle, and continued along to where Valis thought we would find a nerve center.
What we eventually found was creepy. Of course. A sort of set of platform with silvery cables draped here and there, ringed with skulls on posts. Including three droid cores - two heavily damaged - that looked like the same tech as Karka. Our historian associate identified one of the skulls as Rakatan. Various people climbed to investigate matters further. Aurun spotted some silvery worms shifting and moving along the silvery cables, and a couple of near-inert dragonets; the worm dropped and phased, and Valis promptly bisected it rather than deal with it in his guts.
Aurun said, “Hey, we have a sample, that was going to be tricky otherwise,” to the moderate bafflement of poor Arno, who had been warned that things got weird around here, but perhaps not that the Twi’lek was completely blase about teleporting monsters that try to materialise their little buzzsaw teeth through people’s innards.
We grabbed various heads and cleared off the platform as some kind of horrible maw full of teeth descended to indicate we were unwelcome. The bomb we left it for an appetiser seemed to put it off its appetite; we indicated to the other investigating teams that the place was waking up, and look out for dragonets and maybe worms, and started booking it.
After a bit we realised that stealth worked, and that it might even work for people without magic stealth-from-this-stuff devices. (Our magic stealth-from-this-stuff device was now something that Selig was trying to replicate, now he had access to the stuff from the Centerpoint replica and a little more familiarity with the tech. Something that could stealth large ships, for example, we thought that might come in handy.) All parties extracted successfully; we guessed that with the guiding intelligence of the planetseed dead the lesser portions were just acting out near-randomly.
We started off just in time to lose contact with our dreadnought. Much swearing from Aurun, with a muttered, “My *ship* is up there”, and a very efficient arc up out of the obscuring atmosphere, to find the Chiss dueling with a ship very much like the one that had been ferrying Sion around. We got ourselves back on board and hypered out to our secondary pickup location, where we lurked in the outer system in case we were followed. We did not appear to be followed.
While we were killing time waiting for the wormhole home to appear, we hooked up the surviving droidbrain to some apparatus and tried to have a conversation with it. It was actually a very informative conversation, despite the hostility of the droidbrain, and we learned many things: that the droid race had been created to destroy the zombie plague and protect life; that it had had a schism over which of these directives was primary, with Karka being on the ‘protect life’ side and the rescued droid core being on the ‘destroy the zombie plague’ side; that the plague originated with a living planet, an ancestor of the Vong planet, which became sterile somehow and was attempting to reproduce itself with these conversions and creations; that the plague planet had always had Force-using allies; that life in the other galaxy had likely been largely wiped out by a massive killer virus, for which we got the formula, in order to kill the surviving zombie worlds and, incidentally, everything else. Evil droid was interested in the kills-people-but-makes-the-survivors-Force-active virus, discussed briefly the optimisation on it and noted that it would work better if it was race-targeted; the current version it could not see much scope to improve.
While we were chatting with the enemy, Karka drifted in, seeming more than a bit woozy. Arno got a major vision off touching Karka as part of the repair process - a vision centered on a burned child - and was a bit, “Did you know your droid is active in the Force?” “Yeah, he’s also fifty thousand years old.” Karka and the droidbrain in a box did not like each other at all and there were insults exchanged; afterwards Karka noted that it might be possible for him to recover information by hacking the hostile droid, but that ran the risk of him *losing* and thus losing himself. He did manage to pull some surface databanks without risk, though, restoring substantial information to his own memory and improving his language skills significantly.
Finally, the wormhole opened, and we got a garbled transmission on an emergency frequency, which is the sort of thing that happens to us a lot and we would like our circumstances to improve. We warped back to our home galaxy and nearly crashed into the sort of mercenaries who Hutts hire. Nearly, because the dreadnought opened fire to clear the way first.
So, with our pile of precious information, we enter a great space battle.
