|
|
Epidode I: The Evaritt Expanse
ACT I, Scene i
The bounty hunter we ran into on Ord Mantell
The serene starfield slowly pans down to show the busy, yet underdeveloped, world of
Ord Mantell.
Soft blue-green continents and framed by purple oceans and highlighted with drifting pink clouds.
Starfighters and small transports of every variety can be seen rising up and descending down to
the planet's developed southern coastline. Beyond the starport-enhanced glitter of the casinos and
banking cartels lies a massive continent-wide junkyard of wrecked technology.
The camera drops elevation, passing below the outer navigational markers where the cruise liners
drift in their parking orbits and the lines of bulk freighters jostle for position to get through
Imperial customs the quickest. The camera rotates to the left as we continue to descend, passing a flurry of small
bulk freighters as they come and go from a dilapidated space station built onto a chunk of low-orbiting asteroid rock.
The designs are familiar ones: the rounded Corellian YT series, sea-turtle shaped G'throks, and even one ancient mk3 Firefly.
Hundreds of shuttles pass between the ships, the station and the ground, intermixed with a handful of corporate-owned
Z-95 Headhunters and Imperial TIE fighters eyeing each other warily.
The camera follows one of these shuttles, a rusted but serviceable Kuat STG-19
Lightrunner Hypersled--a design known to the galaxy at large as "Old Trusty". The boxy
shuttle's engines flare as she descends quickly through the pink clouds and over a
glittering purple shaded ocean below. The ship is approaching a line of skyscrapers that cling to the
coastline of the continent. They form a thin artificial ridge between the polluted ocean and the
massive junkyard of debris and crashed starships that stretch out to the horizon. The camera slows
and the shuttle is quickly lost in the swarm of disorderly air-traffic above the city.
Sentients of every sort travel the spacelanes and streets of this bustling trade world.
There are a series of establishing shots, each no more than a few seconds long, that show
a number of the people living, working, vacationing, or just plain surviving on Ord Mantell:
Crowds of sentients mull through a marketplace, the brightly colored stalls pressed close against the walls of the
canyon-like buildings around them. Sunlight streams through the buildings in sheets, casting the world
below in stark contrasts of bright and dark slivers. A Zabrak corporate officer in an upper tower is chatting
on a headset comlink, surrounded by holodisplays showing stock prices and charts of supply and demand levels.
He glances out the transparasteel window to the casino across the street and sees an unfortunate Chandra-Fan being
tossed from an upper-story balcony by a pair of Gamoreans. He pauses for a second to watch before going back to
his conversation. A Kel-Dor is sitting at a small stool at a noodle shop, having difficulty eating the soba
noodles through his breather mask. The proprietor, a blue-skinned Feeorin, unhelpfully offers him a shaker can of ground cinnamon with a smile.
A young human in a SAGroup uniform walks around the corner of the starship hangar and stops short when
she realizes her ship is missing. She looks over to a stack of crates where a dejected human female in purple and red
armor is trying to avoid her glance. An Imperial technician leans back in his chair and yawns, but sits up
quickly when the holodisplay of a SoroSuub Luxury Yacht and a wanted poster for an Imperial Admiral flash
across his screen. He turns to his superior, pointing at the screen excitedly. An attractive brunette woman
in an elegant gown is just stepping out of the lift to return to her room in the casino when she spots several
of the local Hutt's goons guarding her suite door and ransacking the room inside. She drops her magna key
down the nearest cycler and exits the hallway through a side door--she has other clothes at the starport for situations like this.
A group of bounty hunters are negotiating with the leader of a swoopgang. The hunters offer a large stack of credits, the leader
shrugs and hands over the keys to his bike. A brown Skipray Blastboat, marked in aurebesh as the Deaf Pedestrian alights
from one of the corporate hangars and blasts into the sky. The camera stops the clipped cutscenes with a screen wipe from bottom to top
the follows the ship out from the surface as she gracefully speeds through the lanes of shipping and passes by the
orbiting space station.
The Skipray passes close by one of the innumerous Lightrunner Hypersleds. From inside the cockpit we see two
mercenary-looking bounty hunters arguing over the sensor display. As the Skipray clears their field of vision we see their
pray, a gleaming Sorosuub Luxury Yacht inthe distance. The pilot gives chase as
the gunner powers up the ventral turret, behind them four boarders in space suits strap on the helmets and prepare to take
the ship. The chase is on as the pilot of the yacht
notices the pursuit. Despite her size, the yacht is quite maneuverable. She pulls up and out of the station by swinging
past two of the larger docking arms with the smaller shuttle in hot pursuit. Just missing an Action IV heavy bulk freighter,
the yacht points her nose to the system's hyperspace beacon and initiates a dangerous unplotted microjump. Surely the bounty hunters
would be fools to follow the yacht, but the pilot has not counted on the power of greed to overcome common sense. The hunter spin up
their own hyperdrive and in a flash they two are gone.
The scene jumps to the inside of what at first appears to be a TIE fighter cockpit. The illusion is quickly dispelled by the
tall, female, albino Wookiee at the controls of a small scoutship. This old scout
ship has seen more hyperspace jumps
then can be easily counted. Originally issued new to the Republic Explorer Corps, it still bears the
red and white paint scheme of a Republic diplomatic vessel--although years of neglect have left the markings barely discernable.
The pilot of this vessel, a wookiee named Kilarra Warr, has been listening to the Notice to Spacer's
broadcast coming off the hyperspace beacon and ignoring her partner's annoying silver A-3PO droid when the luxury yacht
decanted from hyperspace not more than half a kilometer ahead of her. The ship was quickly joined by a Lightrunner bearing the markings of
a bounty hunting guild. It wasn't long before the lightrunner began jamming communications and firing on the yacht. The wookiee, never a fan of
bounty hunters, decided to join the fight.
The pilot of the yacht had hoped that the microjump would of given him enough time to
replot an astrogation course out of the system. It had, after all, been a long time since he had done this on his own. He did
not expect the bounty hunters to chase him this quickly--nor did he expect the antique scoutship hovering off his starboard aft quarter to
begin firing at the hunters. The Admiral kicked on his sublight engines and the hunters gave chase. Kilarra was able to get off a lucky
shot without even firing up her engines, ionizing the hypersled's controls. They quickly began to slide off course of the yacht, but
had another plan in reserve. Opening the loading door on the rear of the shuttle, the hunters proceeded to grapple the yacht with a
magnetic harpoon. Being drug behind the white wale of the yacht, the hunters prepared to board the ship. Admiral Viridian instead
reversed course and left them back toward the scoutship--which blasted a shot directly into the open door and out through their only laser turret. The
Admiral began a series of high-banking turns to keep the bounty hunters busy while they figured out what to do next. Kilarra prepared to
leave the scene when her sensors picked up two snubfighters approaching from the planet--Imperial TIE fighters.
Meanwhile, on the surface, the sisters Var and Rel Theslin were in a jam.
Var had decided to lose their ship, the Deaf Pedestrian, but didn't plan on doing it over a game of Sabacc. It was part of an
ill-planned attempt to
throw off the pursuit of a certain Drell Gor'vdon--the smuggler king who had killed their parents. Unfortunately, her plans went a bit awry and she lost not only what the ship was worth
but several thousand credits more than that. Left at the starport with no cash, no ship, and a crime lord (whom Var could barely remember)
about to come collect the rest of his winnings, the sisters decided to head out in to the city to hide. Rel was not too pleased
with this, but at least they had a plan. Unfortunately, the sisters quickly ran afoul
of the crime lord’s goons and were soon being chased through the streets and alleyways of Ord Mantell. A firefight quickly broke out,
with Var and Rel taking shots at Falsetto's thugs--one shot missing terribly and hitting the innocent proprietor of an imported fruit stand.
But suddenly, just as it looked that Rel's head would be crushed by a Barabel shockboxer, a mysterious Kel-Dorian
in a brown trench coat and smelling vaguely of cinnamon appeared to assist them. Pushing through the fight and literally disarming
the Barabel with his elegant use of a vibrosword, the Kel-Dor named Kluw Than would later claim that he "sensed that the girl [Rel]
was in danger". Var, with a sneer, showed her disbelief, but recognized a useful fighter when she saw one.
The group made their way into the larger and more crowded streets just as a pack of a dozen thugs came pouring
through the alleyway they had just left. Var, in her purple armor, was easy to spot and the chase was on again.
Var got one shot over her shoulder, but as Kluw pointed out "When a Jedi says run, RUN!". They quickly dodged
into a crowded underground maglev train station and pushed their way into the forward car. Usually reserved for
more upper-class passengers, this car was nearly empty. Nevertheless in their haste to get into the car they bowled
over an attractive brunette woman who was making her way to the starport in some haste.
Var, Rel and Kluw quickly hit upon the idea that she had a ship, and she believed the same thing of the other three.
Also, there was something odd about the Kel-Dor that she couldn't quite place. Kluw, on the other hand, had noticed
that for some reason he could not feel her in the Force--it was as if she was not even there. They gave each other a
few odd looks as the train made its way to the starport.
At that moment the Admiral realized that the bounty hunter's jamming was turned off when Kilarra ionized their controls.
He quickly called her up, thanking her for her assistance. She was reluctant to face Imperial starfighters, but had
little choice when the Admiral made a break for Ord Mantell's nearby moon. One TIE fighter pursued the yacht, while the other headed
her way. The bounty hunter, also not wanting to face Imperial questioning, had finally managed to disconnect themselves from the
yacht with the help of a plasma torch. Kilarra was hoping to pin the entire incident on them, but they quickly jumped
to hyperspace. The Admiral was hoping to do the same, but with the magna-poon's cable wrapped around his left engine
nacelle he knew his ship would come out the other side in pieces (and him along with it). He began juking the agile
yacht to try to throw off the TIE pilot, but the nimble little TIE was too quick. It soon got a lock on the yacht and began firing.
Kilarra, left to face her own TIE fighter, still hadn't moved a meter since all this began and had just been pivoting in space.
She lightly tapped the thrusters to get her ship to slowly spin. The TIE pilot, involved in scanning her ship, did not see the
maneuver until it was too late. Kilarra got a shot off at point blank range which ionized the maneuvering systems on the TIE.
He began firing back, just missing Kilarra's transparasteel viewport by scant centimeters but unable to correct his aim.
She fired twice more, eventually destroying the craft. Mourning the loss of spare parts, she rotated the ship and managed
to clip the wings of the second TIE at extreme range. The Admiral ducked into a series of canyons, just as the
uncontrollable TIE impacted onto the lunar surface with a green fireball. But it wasn't over yet, the Admiral had just flown
into range of a pirate base posing as a mining facility. He drew a few shots from the pirate's Z-95 Headhunters and ground
turrents before simply calling them up on the com and telling them they if he got shot down there that the Imperials would
be all over the site in minutes. The pirate com officer believed him and ordered the weapons to stop firing. Viridian passed
his ship close by the habitation domes of the facility, effectively buzzing the base before launching straight up from the surface.
In the process he startled a pirate dock worker as the poor fellow got a close up view of the broadside of the yacht as it
roared past at top speed.
Joining up with Kilarra, the Admiral invited her to dinner for her assistance. Still in need of supplies and repair,
they began their descent into the atmosphere unchallenged. Unfortunately the loose end of the cable began to flap uncontrollably during the
decent, slashing off part of the engine cowling and setting fire to the port nacelle. Quickly shunting power, the Admiral got the fire
nominally under control and pitched his nose up to try to aerobrake as much as possible. Streaming smoke, the yacht was dropping
toward the starport like a flaming brick.
Somewhere in the city ahead of the yacht, the rest of the party had made it to the station but were detained by security who wanted to
search all the passengers for anything having to do with the firefight at the last station. The party, led by Diyar, fast talked
their way past the guards and quickly exited the station and into the starport. It was then they realized that none of them
had a ship on this planet. At that moment a SoroSuub Luxury Yacht streaming a smoke trail and screaming into the starport at
just under the speed of sound rocketed over their heads. Two groups of corporate or gang-backed technicians jumped to their feet and
began racing to the yacht's landing bay. It was obvious that the first ones to get there would get the contract to fix the ship, and
could recommend the crew to stay at their respective casinos or hotels (for a fair kickback). Rel knew she could fix such minor
damage, and sensing opportunity the party also made a break for the ship. The race turned into a fight as the technician teams began
firing at each other with non-lethal stun and sonic weaponry. While they were merely an extension of their master's territory wars,
this part of the starport was a little to civil to be using lethal weapons. Nevertheless, the party was in for a tough race as they
eventually made their way to the blast doors first. Shutting them to keep the other technicians out, the party made their way to
the ship's aft loading ramp.
There at the top of the ramp, was an older clean-cut human in upper-class clothing that looked about 15 years out of date.
He was drinking what looked to be a double Tatooine Sunset and eyed the party warily. Still, he reasoned, he needed a crew and
these misfits fit the bill. He only looked up once, to note with satisfaction that a Lone Scout A flew low overhead and landed nearby.
Rel, although dressed in her space rat clothes, was still a SAGroup Youth and recognized an Imperial Officer when she saw one. The young
girl snapped a salute to the man, who grudgingly returned it, saying "Bend your knees before you pass out." Negotiations for repairs
and passage were just beginning to be discussed when Var mentioned that she still had business on planet. She was looking for a place called
Trifeil Shipping, but didn't immediately say why. The place supposedly had a small starship dock and it was obvious that she needed a ride.
The discussion had just resumed when the Admiral's bartender droid returned with refreshments.
View the optional Director's Commentary for this scene
(caution, possible spoilers)
On to Act I Scene ii 
Engage the hyperdrive and return to the Campaign page
|
