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Episode II: A New Beginning
ACT I, Scene iii
Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops
While plotting the hyperspace route to Sullust to meet up with Targeter,
the Duros captain of their ship asked the astrogator Lim to assist him. With the help of an
Instinctive Astrogation roll, Lim noticed that along their path the particular effects of a blue giant known
as Niven's Star had been fading over the past few hundred years. If they cut in a bit closer to this star, they
could hop from the Hydian Way onto the Rimma Trade Route and remove several days from their journey.
Satisfied with the plot change, Captain Ellor Joo entered the course and the party were on their way.
After a few days in the near-spotless Ghtrok 720,
our heroes were yanked from their lethargy when the
ship was suddenly ripped from hyperspace by a rogue gravity shadow. Racing to the cockpit and the top turret,
the party saw before them a massive brown horizon shot through with patches of glowing blue. The brown mass
was some sort of massive space-born plant that was orbiting Niven's Star like a natural Dyson's Sphere.
The blue patches were where the plant material had not fully grown together and the light of the star
could be seen as it filtered off a tenuous hydrogen atmosphere like sunlight shooting through clouds.
Lim's calculations had cut them too close to the star, who's power decreases were not because of any
size reduction, but instead because of the plants blocking off the majority of the habitable zone. The Gthrok 720
had detected the plant's mass, and had shut off the hyperdive just in time to avoid a direct collision.
Nevertheless, the hyperdrive had overloaded and was going to need a major overhaul to get it operational again.
But before the party had time to think about plotting a course with the backup hyperdrive, the ship was grabbed from
something below.
Panicked, the party rushed to the windows at the urging of Kit in the turret, they had drifted down close to the surface
of the plants and several half-meter wide tendrils had shot out to ensnare them. The party desperately tried to free
the ship from the tendrils, but every time they shot some off more would latch on. Quickly approaching the surface, the
crew tried overloading the sublight engines to burn the tendrils off the hull. While it worked for awhile, they were quickly
pulled down into the mass of the "space kudzu" with engines glowing and blasters firing. Before being totally swamped, the
party released Ellor's droid in a survey pod to fly up above the grasping tendrils. The pod trailed behind it a long towcable,
which our industrious party quickly converted into a wideband antenna.
With the survey pod safely above the kudzu, Sera began calling for help on the coms as they were sucked down deeper.
Much to her surprise, she quickly received an answer. A junior officer aboard an Imperial vessel responded to her
call suggesting that they disengage their engines and let the kudzu pull them down. The party agreed, and Yanna shut
down the mangled engines. After the fight with the plants, both would now need even more work than the hyperdrive.
The Imperials inquired about their ship, the hyperdrive and coms in particular, and offered to send over a shuttle
if the party required assistance. They tactfully declined, and the Imperials suspiciously let the issue drop.
The Gthrok 720 suddenly dropped out of the bottom of the brown kudzu layer and was free floating in space again.
Below them, 93 million some miles away, was the blue giant. It was in the process of shuffing off layers of its outer
mass, which were then being slowly distributed upwards. The plants, acting as a form of incomplete Dyson's Sphere, were
trapping the outgoing gasses at the habitable zone and thereby forcing a sort of stratification. While everything at this level
was still in free-fall, there was a tenuous nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere around the ship. Thanks to the push they had
received from the plants, they were drifting farther down into thicker atmosphere. There, drifting in their own orbits around the star,
were billions of city to continent sized clumps of plants and peat material. Imbedded in the islands were rocks,
asteroids, and starships--although relatively few of the latter.
After a quick scan, it was determined that none of the ships had power cores active but one. There was a
definite Imperial power signature some 30km distant coming from a very large island. While still attached to their pod via
the thin tow cable disappearing into the plant mass, the party decided not to contact the Imperials just yet.
They were safe for now, but with dead engines they were going to keep drifting past the habitable layer and towards the star.
While discussing options, they were surprised to see someone looking in their cockpit windows at them.
After a short panic, our heroes eventually opened the door and greeted six human children wearing rough
fibrous clothing. There were two females and four males, all were in good health and spoke passable Basic.
After some discussion, it was discovered that they came from a village on a nearby island. The majority
of the party agreed to return with them, for the first time spotting their "flyers". Made form the body
of a very large mynock,
the underside was rigged with a three person harness system. The girls rode
the middle slot and were the pilots while the boys pumped two levers that flapped the wings. While never
airworthy in a gravity environment, they worked quite well in this strange weightless atmosphere. Each mynock
flyer was also equipped with a long spear and rope, presumable for anchoring yourself to a nearby island
and pulling yourselves in.
After some shuffling and trying out of the flyers, the party made it down to the village--only Haselvlat
(who was too dense to be easily pulled by the children) instead rode an EVA backpack down. The village
was made up of various sized domed huts made of woven living vines. The center of the village sported a large wooden
plaza made of disk-shaped tree slices that were imbedded with handholds. The center of the plaza sported a bare sickly tree, which had
several flyers attached to it. The children flew in over a fractal-looking orchard and docked their flyers to the tree.
Almost the entire village population turned out to see the new arrivals, looking every bit the part of the crashed
multi-species starship crew. In fact, part of their ship (a Mon Cal design) could be seen rusted and poking out of the island
nearby.
The party was lead into the largest hut to meet with the Council of Wisdom, many of whom were some of the original
crew of the ship--there was even a functional white protocol droid called C2-G1. It turned out that they were a group
of botanists on their way to Ithor to study the floating worldships when they crashed here. They had made the best of
it until the arrival of the Imperial ship 6 months earlier. They did not know what the Empire was, but quickly learned.
When asked, they said that they had been here for over fifty standard years. The Imperials had come looking for
parts and slaves, but were fought off by the two Jedi. This got Lim's attention. Apparently, a Jedi
courier ship
had crashed on the other side of the island 17 years prior. The two Jedi had come to live in the
village, but nothing was known of what happened to the rest of the crew. The ship was still there, however.
Hopeful for parts, and curious about the Jedi, the party set off in flyers with guides to lead them
to the desert side of the island. There, half buried amidst rolling thorn bushes and twisted
cacti was a red-pained vessel. The bottom half was crushed and the nose was crumpled, but the
engines were above ground and intact. By this point Yanna had finished converting one of the Gthrok's
escape pod into a makeshift shuttle, which she used to fly down to the Jedi ship to join the party.
Together, they all searched the ship.
Yanna managed to find several components that she needed, and Sera assisted in rigging the Jedi ship's
tow cable to the Gthrok to keep it from drifting any lower. Lim and Chuni got into a fight with giant lizards in
what was once the hangar bay--discovering a crushed Jedi starfighter amidst the debris.
It was an older design, and still sported a truncated astromech droid. The droid, R3-P972, was still barely
active after all these years. Chuni set about cutting it from the fighter as Kit and Haselvlat discovered
an old battle scene amidst the thorn bushes near the ship. There, they saw the remains of five imperial
Spacetroopers
who looked like they were cut apart by lightsabers. They deduced that the Jedi had been here as little
as 6 months ago.
They party managed to nudge the Gthrok down near the plaza of the village and Yanna set about repairing the
engines. Everyone spent the night in the village, although Lim decided to stay in the Jedi's old hut.
That night in his dreams he was visited by the ghosts of the two Jedi. They pointed to a spot on the
floor, but he could not hear what they said. In the morning, he dug in that spot and found a beconcall
device. Following it's signal the next morning, the party discover an overgrown red Lightrunner Hypersled.
Investigating, they deduce that it was once aboard the Jedi ship, but hadn't been used for about 6 months.
Lim found that it was equipped with a small hyperdrive module and had a curious astrogation plot in
the navcomputer. Downloading it to his datapad for later reflection, he wiped the data from the ship's systems.
Getting tricky, Chuni got the shuttle up and running and they used it to spy on the Imperials.
The Imperial ship was something they had never seen before, but it was
safely imbedded in a bowl-shaped valley with serious damage to her starboard side. The Imps had the engines idling,
presumably to provide power to a massive communications dish that they were constructing nearby the ship
at the bottom of the valley. The party saw that it was being built with the help of slave labor from
the surrounding islands and was nearly complete. Also, several of the ship's turbolasers were being remounted
to fire up at the sensor-dampening plant layer.
The plan was obvious, fire the lasers to cut a hole in
the plants just long enough to send out a signal to the Fleet for rescue. If that happened then the Empire
would think nothing of enslaving the entire population of this system and using it for their own nefarious purposes.
The party quickly decided on a plan of action: Stop the dish construction, rescue the slaves, use the turbolasers
to cut a hole to fly the Gthrok through, and somehow knock out that ship in the process so that they wouldn't just start
the process over again. Sadly, before they could put any plan into action they were spotted and had to make their escape.
Later that day the Imperials returned the favor by flying their own Lightrunner shuttle over to the village
to "render assistance" to the newly crashed vessel. The party plays it cool and jumps the Imperials
en masse. After short firefight the remaining Imperials reboarded their shuttle and attempt to lift off.
Kit takes a few shots at them with her blaster pistol and Yanna finished them off with the turret laser on the
Gthrok (although Kit claimed the kill). Getting an amusing idea, the party decided to park their shuttle out of the
way and repaint it to look like the Imperial one--with it's old Republic era codes it might get close enough to land
on or near the Imperial ship.
While the party was doing this, the Imperials were getting nervous. Their team of security officers in disguise
had not reported in yet and their last shuttle had not returned yet. Wanting intel, but more importantly wanting
the party's hyperdrive and com suite, the 1st Officer (acting Captain) of the Dagyar-1 sent in his best Commando team
on Nightwing stealth gliders to "take care of the problem". The team of five humans consisted of a male dark-haired rifleman,
a bald male heavy weapons trooper, a scruffy male sniper, a blonde female techie/demolitions expert, and
Officer Zeryn Soe the team leader.
The Imperial Commando team arrived on the party's island and managed to quickly surround the village without being spotted.
After surveying the scene they prepare their assault--blondie and baldy would breach the Gthrok while the sniper provided cover.
The rifleman would provide distractions, while Zeryn orchestrated the operation and intervened as needed. the plan was going
perfectly, too perfectly. The poor party and the villagers were going to get slaughtered or enslaved. Officer Soe,
after seeing six months of Imperial cruelty first hand, had had enough. Her Alderaanian soul finally broke through her Imperial
training and she broke from cover just as quickly. Running for the far side of the compound with the help of her Imperial issue
gravity boots, she was taking fire from some of the party when the rest of the Commandos struck.
Outgunned and outflanked,
he party was in serious trouble until Zeryn blatantly surrendered to Lim. The Commandoes had wounded and captured most of
the party by this point and had rounded them up in the open plaza. After a short talk with Lim, Zeryn commed her troops
and told them to stand down. There was some mutinous debate on this point, but it worked long enough for the party
to turn the tables on their captors with the help of Zeryn. The Commandos that weren't killed in the fighting were deposited
on a nearby island with minimal supplies for safekeeping. Zeryn Soe, now an Imperial traitor, had officially joined the party.
With her help, they now had a chance of getting on board the Dagyar-1 but still needed a way to
disable her. The leader of the Council of Wisdom, Mynar Tare, had an idea. They went to a large
crack in the island and descended down into the peat layers until they came to a small hut. There, they
were threatened by a crazy old human with a pulse-wave pistol. After some discussion, they discovered that he
was the chief engineer of the botanists' ship and blamed himself for not being able to get them
away from this place. The party sent in Yanna, a fellow engineer, to talk him into helping out the party.
This worked, and he led them into the ruins of his old ship. There, they found two very old proton
torpedoes with carrying cases. Kir and Yanna then used their smuggler's forgery skills to decorate the
boxes to look like more survey equipment containers. With this last step in place, the party set out to save the
day.
The girls, with the exception of Zeryn dressed as locals to be brought aboard as pleasure slaves.
Kit was injured in the earlier fighting and needed to get to the ship's bacta tank quickly. Yanna was
equipped with a poisoned thorn hidden in her hair to use to knock out the officer she was given to.
Haselvlat was pained up as one of the local yellow monkeys (albeit a bit larger) and Chuni had even
gotten the old Jedi droid a repulsor box to float around in. Chuni himself would be staying with the Duros
to prepare for the flight out. Yanna had gotten one engine working, but he'd need to be there to baby it.
Zeryn, Kir, and Lim then dressed as Imperial Commandos and everyone boarded the shuttle.
Getting permission to land on the Dagyar-1 was easy with Zeryn's help, but landing was another story
entirely. The hangar was in the bottom of the ship, and the Imperials had to cut a tunnel through the peat
between the mandibles to get in and out of it. Sera made the job look easy though, and all got aboard safely.
Kit was rushed to a medical bay as the 1st Officer claimed Yanna as his new play toy. Haselvlat scrambled into
the air duct system as Lim, Zeryn, and R3-P972 (now dubbed Flotsam) headed towards
the computer access port in her quarters. Kir, meanwhile, stayed behind to guard the shuttle and ended spending most of the time
convincing the droid dock master to give it a few upgrades while they were there.
All in all, things were proceeding smoothly--thus far...
View the optional Director's Commentary for this scene
(caution, possible spoilers)
 Back to Act I Scene ii
On to Act I Scene iv 
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