The Azure Expanse

[Lorva]

So uh, pardon me gents, but I was pouring through system logs and just happened to notice your conversation.

You guys like horor holovids eh? I've got a bunch of movies stored on my computer. About 2300 of 'em. Some with aliens I don't even recognize. Not that I've been around that much of the galaxy. Maybe we could start a horror movie night on the ship.

I must have a movie or two with a red shaded fiend.

Uh let me know then. I'll go back to decoding imperial traffic.

[Edj]

[Sigh]... It's not just some red shad... nevermind. Play the jacking vids.

As a sidebar on this topic however, I've lately been spending some time browsing through one of the Verp's files on particle physics in an attempt to rationalize aspects of the scarlet spook, or to, as it were, scrape away the horn putty.

What I have discovered, mind-numbing boredom aside, is that leptons are not gold-hoarding, vengeful little humans with rainbow fetishes, quark is not the sound either a duck or a squeezed balloon makes, mesons aren't as solid as brick, upsilons have bottoms, and a top is jacking hard to come by.

The only bits that actually struck a congruent chord were a spattering of text on force carrier particles that might be what Drax was talking about when he mentioned wind and robes or some such, and the mention of dark matter, which is certainly relevent. But then it inevitably dribbles into squiggles and numbers with letters and parenthesis everywhere and I start to go blind from confusion.

Still, armed with this, erm... admittedly sketchy information, or at least with the will to apply a more analytical tactic when next presented with the crimson cadaver, perhaps I will competently lock my bowels and face down the spectre, or at very least hinder its abilities.

Or maybe it'll just up and go away on its own without the effort. Like a now benign carbuncle.

Make me shoot myself... whoever heard of something so ridiculous?!

[Edj]

For the faithful - a tale of scavenge, deception, and a glimpse into the nature of competition in the Imperial universe:

We recently came by a bit of information suggesting something worthwhile had happened very near a chunk of rock called Yavin. Apparently a small moon, or a dead star, or something of that nature had floated in and gone pop, leaving behind a field of valuable, mechanical debris - which sounds a little suspect to me.

The folks on the Blue Lightning seemed overjoyed about this event, though it sounds pretty cosmologically horrifying. I mean, imagine you're sitting in your dining room staring out at the frigid morning sky, and suddenly up springs a new moon that explodes in front of your eggs and rycrits. That'd shake me a little. How many more of these covert moons exist? Is the only the first? Has the apocalypse come? Should I buy more rycrist?

To proceed however, we took it in our heads to set about seeing if we could pull something of value from the remains. We are, after all, in pretense, a mining company. So we blew out there in the Eye and found ourselves a spinning plane of exploded metal and a lovely Imperial Destroyer, erm... maybe not lovely... but it didn't shoot us, so that was nice. We kindly passed the Imperials our salvage certificate registration code (or somebody's anyways) and started trying to find good spot to loot.

We hooked up with the remains of some sort of command center that must have been on the surface of the now-even-more-dead star and the crew, sans myself, went off to find adventure. They came back with four soiled Imperial uniforms, a couple storm blasters, a box of Imperial grade laundry detergent and a lovely collection of photographs - quite a haul. We should be able to make almost 100cr when it's all said and done. Subtract costs and we only stand to lose a couple hundred.

Apparently the newest member of our crew - Cassin Ridge, has decided it would be nice to put up a poignant collage of Imperial-friendly images in one of the spare rooms - in case we get boarded. "Better than a bribe", he'd said. I'm not sure there's anything better than a bribe, but it does add character to storage bay 7A. Until we get boarded by rebels of course, wherein it adds blood, gore, carbon scoring, and mayhem to storage bay 7A.

It was as we were contemplating a departure from the decimated hulk that we were approached by a representative of, presumably, a competitor. He opened a pleasant and lively, albeit brief discussion with us. Unfortunately, though he pressed his opinion heatedly, we proved a bit too thick to really absorb the point he was making, and responded with a very terse, but exceptionally well phrased response that completely disarmed him.

His vessel contained a pilot of some deep-sea origin, a crewman predisposed to incontenance and babbling pathetically when bludgeoned repeatedly with Cassin's boot, and twin dancing girls - both members of the most beautiful race in the stars (wink), and both previously poised for immediate sale on the black market. We will, of course, rectify oustanding issues with all of this. Tie off the loose ends as it were.

Apparently the ion blast I had earlier fired into their hull as our final word on the matter they had brought to our attention had been a little too significant, and we found it would cost more to repair the ship than to scrap it, so we did not gain a new vessel for our fleet this go around. I expect there will be other opportunities however.

Again, preparing to leave, we were stopped - this time by an argument we couldn't effectively debate. The destroyer circling the wreckage asked if we wouldn't mind popping down to the surface for a little chat about the laser show that had just ensued. We did so, speaking truthfully, and were not detained as such, or further harrassed, though we were not granted pass to leave the surface immediately.

Not wanting to spend the afternoon in an Imperial outpost, we flashed our Cherrywood Mining Corp. ID's, threw up some big, friendly smiles, and asked if we could be allowed to scour the local surface for mining opportunitues. This was allowed, and we went in search of goods.

At this writing we have staked a legal claim to mine rubies at a prime locale that will also serve as an effective staging point for the rescue of the hidden rebel forces trapped there. Now if we can just get the ship in there, load it, and get out quietly...

Maybe we can hide the rebels in storage bay 7A... behind the collage... we do have those nice uniforms too...

[Jedi Skyler]

Sounds like things are beginning to come together, Edj!

[K_Feldspar]

You cry out softly as you are startled from sleep. The woman carrying you whispers quietly to you, but you don’t understand. You do know that her voice is very familiar, and to hear it means that everything is ok. Even though everything is not ok.

She is running with you in her arms, and there are tears in her eyes. She is afraid. There is a loud rumbling in the background. She loses her footing, and stumbles for a second. You notice that the whole world around you is shaking. Then there is another rumble, and it seems to be closer. You are afraid.

She sings a song to you now as she runs. She seems to calm down a bit. You notice now that there are others around you running alongside her. They are big men, and they don’t have head tails. The woman finishes her song, looks down at you, and whispers, “I love you Edj.”

She rounds a corner, and comes to a doorway as the world shakes and rumbles again. You see a great open area filled with huge winged machines. It has a single illuminated window that looks out into a starry night. She takes a step through the doorway with you, but comes to an abrupt halt.

Three men are pursuing some sort of peculiar dance. Each has in their hand a wand of pure light. One dressed in dark robes wields a red wand. The other two wield blue, but one has head tails. He too is familiar to you. Sparks fly from their wands as they spin and flip and careen about. Then the dark robed man with one great flourish strikes both the others. They fall. The woman screams. She is frightened again, and you cry.

She turns to run, and you wake up.
_________________
"I don't believe it!"

"That is why you fail."

[Edj]

"DAMNIT!!"

The word tears through the world of my failing slumber. I recognize the voice as my own, yet it is spoken from a Twi'Lek man standing some distance away from the battling Jedi. I do not know why he has said this thing; do not, being but an infant, in fact yet even comprehend the language, but I find I understand and agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment nonetheless.

As my clenched eyes flitter hesitantly open to be greated once again by the pale, wavering overhead I keep alight in my bunk the recently vivid images fade swiftly to a haze of memory. The word however remains, sharp and intact. Damnit indeed. It would appear the hours spend watching Holovid slasher flicks has done little to curb the reality of the demon in my head. Not that I held out much hope it would.

So here I am again, still plauged by phantastic slayers, still coasting through the black expanse with no established goals, and still deeply wanting - though for what I can't begin to imagine.

Enough of my tiring saga though. Any who have read my previous prattle fully understand the depth of my misery concerning Mr. Burgandy, and though I wish it were otherwise, nothing has changed on that front.

In other matters however, there have been some exciting developments. I believe at last writing, we were encamped on a moon near Yavin, sifting through the debris of some ridiculous Imperial other-moon station that had up and burst all over the horizon.

We are no longer so encamped. Utilizing a few hansomely tailored and sparklingly clean Imperial uniforms, a rebel diplomat recently rescued from the surface of said moon stuffed into the light-smudging jumpsuit of the former ISB assassin Rika had crushed in an earlier escapade, and a scant few seconds of dialogue we gained approval to leave. Unfortunately, we may not have made as clean an escape as hoped. The Imperial snob in charge of the moon seemed to be, perhaps, a bit more shrewd than we were capable of dealing with. Perhaps.

In any event, we rocketed for the deep black, and gained starlight in no time. Running the rebels back to our gravelectric humanimal hideout, we encountered no trouble. Upon arriving, we were met by Karol, who asked if we would be kind enough to hop-skip over to the local Imperial grocer to procure a quantity of capital ship weapons to outfit the new station. And some snack cakes, if possible.

Feeling an itch for some good pastry, we said "why not?" and blew back out to the noir. First however, we had a pile of lovely gemstones to unload. A trip to Baleus seemed in order, and so it was we plotted a course, pressed the "Go" button, and watched the universe shamble into a familiar web of lightwork spaghetti.

Baleus proved to be, well, Baleus. It had shops, people, and Corellian Cruisers planning bombardments against the striking laborers that, in my opinion, seem entirely too resistant to the notion there are safer, or at least more effective ways to manage a revolt.

We found a gem merchant, hauled in a crate of significantly stunning examples (based soley on size of course), and let the man ponder the goods. He came up with a figure. We came up with a figure. He didn't like our figure and came up with a deal instead. So now we have an exclusive contract with a small gem merchant to try and sell our rubies on commission. I know, commission deals are iffy, and exclusivity arrangements can severely cripple a small vendor - but mining rubies isn't exactly our rycrist and butter is it? So we went for the convenient buy-out, and I expect it will work fine for both parties.

Then we left, turned around and stopped the armed gunmen who had got it in their head that a solid robbery would set the cards right in their world. Unfortunately for them, we held the aces. And a couple kings. And the wookie.

So it was hats off to the bad guys, a quick exchange of pleasantries, and a bit of cleanup after the party died. Their party being the... ah, you understand.

So, some cash in hand, some promises in head, a middleman well versed in our capable means behind, and a bright sun shining, we stepped out into the heady Baleus morning to find some capital snack cakes.

These things are not easy to find incidentally. I mean, you'd think there'd be a catalog or something wouldn't you? Somebody has to be making these things don't they? But no, nothing. Not a cake in sight.

Frustrated, we began asking for local news to pass some time while we pondered a new method. Imperial Day was all the rage apparently. Some grand parade in three days. A day of fun with the establishment. How... trite. It wasn't until a short while later we were presented with a contact that lead to a contact who knew a man who put us in touch with a friend who had a buddy who told him that there was a convoy of snack cakes floating enroute to a new Imperial installation near Baleus. With the Imperials all up and preoccupied with the Day in their honor, it became plausible to hit the caravan and make off with the puffs.

We purchased (at no small expense) a complete recipe for snack cakes including access codes, routes, crew compliments, ship plans, physical descriptions, inventories, bin locations, and familiy geneology of each crew member. All we needed were the ingredients.

We blew off towards the caravan with a light crew. Zeke was out with some cockroach influenza - head stuffed in a nebulizer, the kid's been running amok on the station for some time, Cherrywood was off masaging his retirement funds, Cassin had gotten one of the Y's stuck in an asteroid belt somewhere, which left myself, Drax, Rika, our new diplomat, a rebel pilot we picked up (I'm so bad with names...), Morris, and a couple R2 units. R2MNot and R2MI I believe.

The plan was that Morris and the Verp sit in deep, scramble the coms from the two freighters and the Karak (Quarack? Krak? Corac?), hack the lead ship, and issue an order to deviate. Meanwhile, Rika and I slip into some suits, float over to a freighter, board, and take out the contingent of six manning the vessel. On the second freighter, Drax, the chatter, and the pilot do similar. Once the freighters are under our control, we receive the false deviation orders, and, of course, deviate. Devious isn't it?

It went off quite well. Nary a med-pack was slapped, and we floated home with two beautiful freighters packed to the gills with snack cakes of all types. Karol was tickled.

I'm still a bit peckish however. Shame we never did get any of those pastries.

[Edj]

From the depths of the cold bleak haze, consciousness comes swimming swiftly towards me.

I try - always try - to turn from it, but there is no direction I can twist, no facing I can adopt that allows reprieve. And so it crashes into me, again, and I awaken to face another Azure day.

I am shuddering in a small, utilitarian bunk, huddled with my frigid back to a cold steel wall, face turned away from the weak, stuttering light shining from above. A coarse, inexpensive woolen blanket; blue, is tangled around my legs, presumably placed there by means of a violent attempt to escape one of this chamber's capricious bouts of stifling heat - a shame since currently the temperature is just slightly above freezing. Maybe its time to have a chat with the Verp. Again.

Grabbing the blanket and wrapping it over my shoulders, I slide to a sitting position, drop my head into my hands and try to piece together the latest of the poignant events that form the spattered beige paint on the sheet rock of my life.

We are, as some may recall, members of a little insurgency a few insit on calling, I propose erroneously, "the Rebellion". I'm just not sure its a suitable moniker. I mean, we aren't terribly rebellious per say. We're more, sort of, pragmatists. We see a problem with the efficiency and effectivity of certain political machinations, and rightly feel a need to offer correction. We're servants of the Empire when you get down to it. Building a better universe by facilitating productive improvement through whatever manner of reinforcement best applies. Sometimes we smile and pay our dues and other times we smile and they pay thiers, but either way, we're smiling.

In any case, there are some who are far better at identifying wayward efficacy than we, and it is from they we take our orders. Sometimes.

So it was we were asked to retrieve a few members of a more affluent "efficiency engineering team" from a bobbled "workshop" on "impromptu weapons redeployment", and with a hearty "why not?" we were off.

The jump through space was uneventful and the landing smooth. We set down in the wide clearing of what appeared to be a large, slowly rotating galactic shrubbery having been apprised that somewhere in the humid jungle was the Imperial base we sought. Why it was there I do not know. I wasn't even terribly sure why we were there. Its not like we botched the heist.

We sloughed through the thick foliage for a couple hours, probing here, scanning there, looking diligently for Imperial sign and eventually became aware of the base's perimiter thanks to sunlight winking off the lens of a small camera buried in the brush.

Not wanting to give away our presence, we decided to remotely disable the camera by hurtling a small, indigenous forest creature through it at as close to the speed of sound as Rika could manage. Not surprisingly it was pretty close.

When a stealthed ISB technician came to check out the faulty camera, our tufted femme finished the job by bludgeoning the remains of the device using as many parts of the technician as chose to remain attached to the torso. We then scooped the pulp from the stealth suit (you may begin to see why I try to drown out some of these memories with an abundance of alcohol), slipped it on Drax and stomped towards the base proper.

We arrived to find a small compound complete with a communications shed, stalwart bunker, and a landed Imperial shuttle. So much happened here it would take more time than I am willing to impart to give it proper attention, but through careful attention and not a few grenades we managed to clear the communications shed, and beat a hasty retreat to the landed shuttle as a walker pushed through the brush.

Trying to fire up the cannons on the shuttle proved disasterous - the action tripped a security system that latched the doors and pumped noxious gas into the cockpit. Swooning, we struggled to free ourselves, and with one notable exception, failed miserably. If it weren't for the Verpine (the exception) you wouldn't be hearing this tale.

He managed to get the doors unlatched, and further shatterred the ankle on the walker with a series of very well placed strikes from the shuttle, but couldn't get the engines online.

With the walker disabled, we decided to give up the shuttle and rush the bunker. Erm... they decided. I had long since passed out from the aerial contagion that had been pushed into my lungs.

When I awoke I was in a hangar filled with Imperial equipment. The others had abandoned the unconscious, forced their way into the bunker, blown past the permiter security and rushed to the interior. A small firefight had brought them to the holding cells wherein the original "facilitators" were stored. Once freed, the original team joined with the conscious members of our humble squad and shattered the world, briefly.

The highlight, to hear it told, was a showdown with a red-clad Agent (but not, quite unfortunately, that red-clad agent (shudder)), Would that I had been there so as to enlighten you all, but that fight might best be told by those who then shared mind-space with the living. If the others should prove shy, and should I be able to reassemble the fragments that formed the fight from the ether in which I slept, I will certainly offer it to you all.

In the meantime I need some rycrits, a very warm shower, and, Cherrywood willing, a new bunk.

[K_Feldspar]

The Azure Expanse is certainly far from anywhere important. That’s inconvenient. Its undeveloped star systems full of raw materials and native populations are easily exploitable. That’s convenient. So certain individuals in the Empire and the Rebellion began sniffing around to find out what was most easily exploitable. The Rebellion found a moderate amount of individuals interested in advancing freedom of the peoples in the region. The Empire, however, found vast untapped resources of metal and cheap energy. A ship or two for orbital bombardments and a legion of troops helped provide cheap labor. So much for freedom, but really that’s why there’s that Rebellion anyway.

In any case, one day a team of four Imperial science surveyors and a droid were busy trying to exploit one of the strange stellar phenomena of the region. There are actually several strange stellar phenomena specific to only this region of space, but they were specifically looking at one unstable blue-white giant star.

There are no planets around this star, no habitable stations of any kind in fact. It lies about a light week away from the only space lane in or out of the Azure Expanse. Which really is the only reason why the star was found. Some pilot who was less accurate then he would like with his nav computer stumbled on to it while trying to flee from authorities. Authorities are prone to cataloging as you might know, and so as they arrested the young miscreant they cataloged the star system he was captured in. Several years later our science team arrived.

This star had a curious dent in the side. Well, it was somewhat larger then a dent perhaps being about 1 million km in width and 2000 km deep. There was also a peculiar energy pulse the star emitted every 7 minutes. It had precise timing too. The scientists had measured and remeasured the timing, and it was absolutely exact down to the smallest fraction of a second that their instruments could perceive. The scientists figured the two might be related, and there might be some secret the universe would reveal if they watched it long enough.

Sure enough, the universe decided they had waited long enough. The scientist on watch was viewing a holovid. If he had been watching the window or the computer readouts he would have perhaps seen a curious ripple that started near the center of that dent. The ripple went and swooshed its way outward from the star. The ripple really isn’t the important observation though. It was short-lived, and not as spectacular as what followed.

The computer beeped. A noise the scientist was expecting, and almost knew to ignore now. It was the computer acknowledging that precisely timed energy pulse. Oh, but wait, he thought. That wasn’t quite the normal beep. He turned from the vids, and saw that ripple through the window. It churgled a bit, slowed, and got sucked down into the center of the dent. He glanced at his computer, and saw that the beep indicated the energy pulse had gone missing. Unheard of, it was now a second or two late!

He fumbled for his comlink, and called for the rest of his team. He watched out the window in sheer horror at the beauty outside. Starting from the dent the star started sucking in on itself. The photosphere was shuddering around it, and huge plumes of blue-white plasma began to arc all around it. Then the implosion began to accelerate. Faster and faster the stars surface was sucked inwards and downwards from that dent as if there was a humungous drain emptying it. Even the blasts of plasma were now being sucked downwards. It seemed like a cry for help as those plumes licked and danced at the edge, and then disappeared through the hole.

The other scientists showed up over the next 30 seconds and watched as the light show continued. Then in a heartbeat they watched the remaining 90% of the star suddenly contract down into nothing. They looked at each other in amazement and fear. Suddenly two of them passed out. A third fell retching. The fourth could only see the lab spinning. He thought he was dieing. As the room spun he saw the familiar form of their droid however, and he shouted. The droid was not immune, but not being paralyzed with fear it could react better. It spun about stuttering, went over to the nav computer, and began some computations.

They leapt into hyperspace just as an invisible shock wave was entering their vicinity. It was fast; in fact its rate of propagation is still a matter of some dispute among the scientific community. It likely will remain so for years. When they entered real space a relatively short ways away they weren’t where they expected. The droid checked its computations, and found that those were of course exact. So it searched it’s databases searching for special phenomena that could account for the error. It found one, and no coincidence of course, it was a phenomenon that existed in two other places in the Azure Expanse, but nowhere else in the galaxy.

The droid was still watching the sensors, and the gravitic disturbance they showed approaching, when it finished some modified navigational calculations. The ship lurched back into hypserspace, and arrived at Baleus some time later. The scientists had come to in the meantime, and sounded an alarm to the governor of the region. A terrible tragedy was about to befall them. That implosion had set of some sort of gravitic wave that was changing the shape of space everywhere it touched. In five days it would reach the Azure Expanse’s only highway to the rest of the galaxy rendering it unusable. Certainly, it could be reestablished, but it would take time.

The governor packed up, and made a run for it. He never made it out, but we’ll find out what happened to him later.

[K_Feldspar]

Footsteps echo down a long extravagant hallway. The echoes stop as Captain Stygian steps out to cross a courtyard. He looks up for a few seconds at the gray wedges that appeared overhead just this evening. “Now what could he possibly want? Furthermore, what’s he doing stuck in this sector with the rest of us?” Stygian checks to see the Imperial Navy uniform he’s wearing is in proper condition. He wasn’t expecting to have to pull a con job this evening on top of everything else.

He watches the shuttle landing in the private bay nearby, and walks on to greet its passenger. As he passes through to the adjoining walkway to the shuttle bay his thoughts turn back to rebels. “Where are you Karol?” The charismatic labor leader would take trips, but usually just to neighboring systems to organize more protests. He had been gone for months now. “Perhaps I could entertain the thought of your death for a few minutes… No, I suppose that’s unrealistic.” But where had Karol gone? Was he replaced by this more standard team of rebel specialist scum? “That’s more likely.”

Stygian frowns extra darkly as he sees the occupant of the shuttle descending from the craft. A human male steps out of the shuttle. His uniform identifies him as a captain of the Imperial Navy. Stygian steps out onto the pad and greets his—guest he supposes. His team has assumed gubernatorial authority of the sector after all.

Stygian musters the least displeased greeting he can think of. “Captain Corē Ander, welcome to Baleus. How can the Office of the Imperial Moff assist you this evening?”

Captain Ander looks Stygian over slowly, but replies curtly, “I beg your pardon Captain. I do not know who you are.”

The two exchange small talk for a moment with Stygian becoming obviously irritated. He presses the newcomer on his purpose in The Expanse. “Captain Ander, we of the Moff’s Office are rather busy at the moment trying to explain the Moff’s absence in these difficult times. What is it that you require of us?”

“Indeed Captain Stygian, I expected to offer you some assistance. When we captured the Moff he indicated that he had fled with his entire command staff. So where did you come from?”

Stygian made up a convincing story on the spot how, yes the command staff had fled, but of course there were plenty of mid level bureaucrats like him around. He had just been the one to step up to the plate, and get the Stormtroopers out to the streets to begin restoring order.

“Interesting. Well then since you have things well in hand here Stygian I’ll keep the Moff locked in his cell for a bit.” Stygian let a surprised look escape his normally gloomy countenance. “We were sent to the sector to, ahh shall we say encourage the Moff to rule this sector more efficiently. As luck would have it we were in a perfect position to set up a trap with our interdictor when we news leaked to us of the Moff’s flight. I knew the coward would try to escape. He’s not a career man like we are Stygian, he just has friends in high places.”

Stygian’s attitude changed entirely here. Finally, a man he could work with. The two new comrades went back to the office Stygian had commandeered when he assumed control. Their conversation turned to tactics and strategy and lasted well into the morning.
_________________
"I don't believe it!"

"That is why you fail."

[entropy]

Drax here, the tales of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Perhaps not all that greatly, as it would turn out.
But that is a story for another time.

The past few months, nearly half a year now, have been quite busy for us. Busy in the way that keeps us lying low and not posting our activities on the holonet. Things have calmed down for the moment, so I'll try to explain what you've all missed.

As you may have guessed, Admiral Rayne's team is not the only group of rebels operating in the Azure expanse. We've had to perform some rescue operations, and run interference on some ship combat, but for the most part they did their thing, and we did ours. Turns out, they weren't doing their thing all that well, and Karol gave the orders to head back to Baleus and bail them out. Unfortunately, Rayne and the Eye of the Hurricane were needed elsewhere in the expanse, and wouldn't be joining us. We were directed to signal our completion by going to a particular pub and ordering a #3 with extra skip-fries.

Our first order of business on Baleus was to make contact with a certain jeweler who was selling off our rubies on consignment. I know, not exactly part of the mission, but the Alliance never seems to complain about the new ships we keep bringing them. Besides, we're still a bit more mercenary than rebel, anyway. We made a good chunk of change there, and left to find out what happened to the other team.

We weren't on Baleus a day, and we already knew no one would be asking for skip-fries. The pub smelled like a setup, with one guy not-too-discreetly watching us. We checked out the place the previous group of rebels had been staying at earlier in the day, and the same guy had been there. Could have been a coincidence, but not likely. Then there was a bit of commotion out on the street. An explosion, and some guys hopping into a land speeder to get away. We followed them, of course, all the way back to an old building in a seedy neighborhood. The guy seemed a little shaken that we had followed him, but when we offered him hard credits for his FinBat, he warmed up quickly. He even let us take over his lease that was paid through the end of the month. I assume he was skipping town.

The next day, we found out why. There was a knock at the door, and a guy claiming to be his landlord demanding to talk to him. I told him he had left, and the landlord told us to clear out of the building. We ignored him, but he was hanging out around back, kind of suspiciously. I went out to talk to him and saw he was planting explosives. Of course I argued the sanity of his actions while telling everyone to get out of the building, but he calmly informed me that this was cheaper and faster than filing all of the appropriate requests for an eviction. I calmly shot him, on stun, with my blaster. He looked surprised, shouting "You shot me!?" as he pressed the button to blow up the building and fled. We decided not to stick around either, and headed off in the landspeeder. It was all very surreal.

A few blocks down the road, we were all reminded that we should be lying low and observing when a rocket exploded right in front of us. Rika deftly avoided the crater, and swung us around to face our assailant, which appeared to be in a window on the sixth floor of the building across the street from the explosion we had just left. Realizing I could never expect to hit him with a blaster at this range, I flipped open my new toy, the aforementioned Fin-Bat Anti-Walker concussion missle launcher, and fired at the fifth floor window facing us (I figured he'd be trying to escape).

As the building started to crumble, I realized I was right. Unfortunately, he decided to escape up--not down--using some sort of rocket pack. More unfortunately, for him, it turns out I was able to hit with a blaster at that range. He had several seconds to contemplate his actions as my shot disabled his rocket pack, and he landed with the fouth explosion of the morning. Four explosions before 9:00 AM is not normally my definition of laying low, but we decided to search the rubble and see if we couldn't find out who was trying to blow us up.

The biggest surprise of the morning: turns out, the guy blowing up the other building really was the landlord. Weird. Next biggest surprise: The imperials were at the site investigating in under a minute. We had already recovered a hold-out blaster with an engraved plate on the handle, which we were hoping would lead us somewhere, so we exchanged some small talk and quickly made our exit. We were not surprised to run right into the guy who had been watching us at the bar and the hotel.

He said he wanted to talk, so we went to a quiter place down the block, one that averaged *less* than four explosions each morning, and let him talk. He claimed to be the guy who caught the other rebel team, confirmed our suspicions about the pub with the skip-fries, and said he knew where they were being held. He further explained that his last paycheck had bounced, so he was a little less than happy with the government on the planet, and was looking for a way out. We were more than a little suspicious, but his plan involved him standing in between us and the imperials we were shooting at, so it seemed like we could deal with him easily enough if he was trying to pull something.

We decided to use his rank, and the bureaucratic skills of another rebel agent lying low on Baleus, Tatyana von Zorovich. We filed the appropriate forms at the starport and were assigned an imperial Lambda-class shuttle to escape in. Got to love the bureaucracy!

His intel was good. We blasted a hole in a sewer tunnel alongside the prison, snuck through a maintenance shaft, and came in through a storeroom. He took a chance trying his access code on the door, but when that failed we had to do a little lockpicking. The room filling with poison gas caught us a little off-guard (and apparently I'm the only one in the party that carries breathmasks). But it was the guard animals that really got us. Two of the biggest, ugliest, smelliest creatures you'd ever seen. Nothing in any of my horror vids could compare to the real-life beasts. Rika had never fought anything she couldn't lift before, and out blaster bolts bounced off their skin like it was wookie fur. They did quite a bit of damage before we managed to get a few lucky shots into soft spots, but eventually they went down.

Fortunately, the guards who got the "down the hall from the smelly beasts" assignment weren't the best of the bunch, so we were able to complete our rescue without any more damage, even in our wounded state. We headed back to the imperial hangar and noticed something odd. Everyone, and by that I mean any pile of rust remotely space-worthy, was leaving the sector. Our Lambda-class was still there, but it was in the process of being commandeered by the Governor's personal guard. We couldn't have that happen, and explained this to them with vibroblades and wookie fists. They were stubborn about it, but eventually conceeded the point, and lay in bloody heaps on the floor.

So why was everyone fleeing? As best we could tell, a Blue-white star imploded near the only hyperspace route out of the sector. We knew we didn't have time to make it out, so we made for the gravity-powered starbase instead, and let the chaos envelop the sector.

[entropy]

Drax again...
It's funny how a little scuffle in space can have you flying around the sector looking for the strangest things. When we went up against the arrester, we knew we were out-gunned, out-manned, and out-shielded. But we had no idea their shields could stop ion cannons. We fled, of course, and did a zig-zag of mini-jumps to disguise our route back to the base. And like any good scientist who has just encountered an "impossible" technology, we tried to find out how it worked.

It wasn't hard to track down a scientist who was on the team that designed the arrester's shielding. Fortunately it was commercial, and not strictly imperial. Turns out, the lab where it was prototyped was on a backwater planet in this very sector. With promises of funding and lab assistants, we were led to a hidden bunker deep in the jungle, and found our way underground to retrieve some carelessly abandoned backups of the lab's computer system. Unfortunately, the vercoon couldn't resist firing up the old core and jacking in. Never jack into an unfamiliar classified system without an opto-isolator on the line, it's just common sense.

So we dragged the vercoon back and headed out, only to be accosted by a group of primitives who were unhappy about us making noise and lights in their metal cave. We made more noises and lights, of the blaster variety, and they ran off into the jungle. The trip back to the ship was uneventful, though we continued to hear the calls of the voracious duck-billed lizards that roamed the jungle, and the death wails of their prey. We got back home and turned over the schematics to our crack team of verpine, and went to talk to Karol.

He had something special in mind for us.

[entropy]

It seems the rebellion is tired of sending us to bail out the failed missions on Baleus, so Karol is sending us first this time, and to top it off, he's coming with. This seems a little odd, but the whole stunt seems more like a political maneuver than a tactical strike, but who am I to judge as long as the check clears at the end of the month.

It seems the former governor did not escape after all, but was caught by an imperial interdictor that just happened to be passing by this incredible remote outer rim sector just as a star blows up and traps everyone here. I'm used to coincidences, but this is crazy. Well, in the governors absence, the ISB has taken up residence in his palace on Baleus, and begun issuing laws and acting in his stead. Karol wants to send a message to the people, so we're going to blow up the palace.

We sneak on to Baleus undetected, and use Karol's contacts to arrange for enough detonite to blow up a few blocks, and someone with the expertise to place it. Getting into the palace went pretty smooth. I pretended to be giving a tour, the guards didn't buy it for a second, we exchanged heated words, and superheated blaster gas, and moved on. A few more guards at the elevator, and half our party was disabled, but we continued pushing. Edj made a miraculous recovery from what would have killed a lesser Twi'lek outright (probably would have wounded a human, and may have tickled Rika--if it cauhgt her off-guard).

The funny thing about Governors' palaces... they never seem to trust toe power company, so they have their own generator room and power core. It seems that this is exactly where one must plant some explosives to blow the whole thing spaceward. All of this is far removed from my area of expertise, which is shooting things that get in my way, and arguing with aliens. The demolitions expert earned his check this month, getting everything placed and ready to move before more guards came. We were just about to head back when Edj heard a voice or two in his head.

It seems there was a certain Jedi named Denile Stygian who felt he was more powerful than Karol. He wanted Edj to come train with him. I politely reminded him that we had just placed explosives, and didn't have time to go looking for Jedis on our way out. Edj understood, and we headed for the ground floor.

When we got there, we found that a blast had taken out the way we came in, and that we had to try to get to the shuttle parked in the hangar across the courtyard. Guarding the courtyard were two LE-VO enforcement droids, one of whom looked very familiar. It was my old partner, LE-VO-7TN. He told the other droid we were authorized, and we made our way toward the hangar. I should have known things were going too easy.

Blocking the door to the hangar was the very same Stygian, flanked by two nasty-looking humans dressed all in black. Not knowing much about dark Jedi, I figured what works well on buildings ought to work well on them, so I fired the Fin-Bat...

Both black-clad men exploded in a flurry of flaming limbs, but when the smoke cleared, Stygian stood there, nearly unaffected. I say nearly unaffected, because he did look quite a bit more unhappy, and was holding a lightsaber. He took a few swings at the Wookie and I, we took a few shots at him, and then in one fateful moment, I zigged when I should have zagged, and realized just what one of those beams of light felt like. It was all I could do to keep breathing, consciousness faded, and I awoke to find a familiar verpine sewing me up and making comments about my carelessness.

From the descriptions they gave me, it seemed I missed an amazing encounter. Rika can apparently parry lightsaber attacks with the power of her glare. She managed to hotwire a shuttle, do the complete pre-flight, and run back to get me, all in about 5 seconds while being fired on by imperials in on the catwalk. Karol died, but Edj managed to get the lightsaber. Somehow we all escaped, narrowly evading the Victory-class and Interdictor in orbit. Some day someone has to make a movie about all this, it was pretty intense. Of course, they could have been exaggerating, I was unconscious at the time.

[Edj]

Identitiy. More than a scattering of characters on a plasticard photo-badge, it is the nature of self that many spend an entire lifetime trying to capture. It is the knowledge of why we see what we see, hear what we hear, and feel what we feel. It is the epipheny of personality discovered at the end of an introspective journey; a force that governs every action in our lives, whether we are aware of its impact or not.

I have of late become acutely aware of the concept of identity. Of late I say, because I had formerly spent my life trying desperately to flee self-discovery; running wildly from a series of misguided suppositions implanted in my psyche by the depraved creatures I have the priviledge to call my parents. Childhood weekends spent on the cold, bleak corners of Baleus' less savory streets hawking my soul for countless small bags of dust, jelly, rock, juice, jars, or capsules capable of quieting my mother's eternal suffering, if only for a few hours. Evenings spent locked in my lightless cell, body and face swollen and burning from the backhand justice levelled against me by my father Kal'dur - a brutish, gin-scented b@st@rd* of a Twi'lek.

Knowing this, one may begin to understand my desire to run from any sense of identity these experiences have stapled to my mind. But let's move past that, for a moment, and catch up on the tale.

Some short time ago we were in the presence of a rare celestial phenomenon: the astoundingly inconvenient collapse of a star. And in its wake we witnessed as well the equally terrific collapse of our only means of egress from the system. So began the hunt for a new hyperspace route - a process leading one to wonder at the short-sightedness of the sentient: hundreds of years with probes, droids, and navicomps in abundance, and not one thinking creature sparked a spare neuron on the notion that it might be worthwhile to have a backdoor somewhere. Ah well, some things never change, and so now we find ourselves engaged in this task.

Now, the amount of time required to track down a hyperspace lane is daunting, and I promise I won't bore you with such thrilling adventures as "plot point m7 at six-twelve-zeta point five-eight and sustain seven-nine-zero for ten parsecs". Instead, I'll bore you with the following:

While exploring seemingly random specks of vacuum, we stumbled upon a small, outmoded yacht listing slowly through space, engines dead, crew dispersed by rapid blaster fire many years prior. Within I happened upon the frozen corpse of a strikingly familiar Twi'lek man clothed in the simple brown robes of a Jedi. The rigid body beneath the robes had been gruesomely bisected some time ago, perhaps as many years ago as I am old, but was subsequently placed in peaceful repose on a bunk in the crew quarters of the converted pleasure craft.

Since the corpse claimed ownership to nothing of intrinsic value, I discarded the knowledge of its exsitence blissfully and turned my attention to searching the room, delighted to find moments later a small crystal shard atop one of the foot lockers. My intent had been to use the splinter as a pleasing bit of decoration in my otherwise spartan quarters aboard the Eye, but it was quickly snatched from me by a six-foot, yammering earwig in a pimped-out powersuit who then began examining the corpse on the bunk while babbling something about genetic similarities and family resemblance. I have no idea to what he was referring.

Zeke later claimed the crystal was some sort of holo-shank; probably just another one of those miserable spook-vids, but he really, really wanted to jam together some tech to watch it, and who am I to tackle a bug with a HERC?

He also began another insipid spew of Verchatter regarding near-match DNA indicating I was genetically related to the Twi'Lek Jedi in the bunk. I explained the only mind-tricks my booze-addled family were capable of centered around self-delusion and grotesque rationalization, but he seemed unfazed by this truth, as well as by my suggestion he check his equipment and procedures again.

Finding nothing else of significant worth, we left the craft and its frozen crew adrift, mostly intact, and continued the search for a lane out of the system. R2-BDoo lethargically calculated a plausible course and Cap... erm, Admiral now I guess, Cherrywood, mashed the "go" button to swiftly catapault us through the cosmos towards yet another unknown point in space, which, improbable as it may sound, turned out to be somewhat more exciting than most of the melanoid polkadots we've discovered within the obsidian quilt of the universe.

Plopping out of hyperspace into an uncharted system and thumbing the "what up" button on the primary console to start a scan, we quickly noted there were a number of planets that rated M-Class (that's "M" for "self-sustained, carbon-based, life-supporting planet"), and further saw they were populated by beings; exclusively human, but nonetheless capable of limited planetary travel. Intrigued, we parked the Eye behind the farthest significant celestial object in the system: a gas giant, and watched the show.

To summarize the events of the next couple weeks: we recorded and translated their heretofore unknown language, watched them fumble through clumsy intrasystem impulse maneuvers, scanned a ship, were scanned back, met Leutenant Autism and Master Sergeant Moronic who quite clearly explained their culture's unbelievable but surprisingly complete xeno-abnegation, going so far as to explain flossy, chitter, and myself as "costumed humans". I mean really... I've never... The impressive arrogance of these people - the only race among the stars. Stunning.

As a retort, I forged a billion dollars of their insipid linen and ink currency using the autochef and a bit of calligraphic artistry, with which we had a delightful meal at one of their resorts, whereafter we verified we could in fact drive an intergalatic expressway straight through their insular, anthropoid agglomeration of rocks, decided we wouldn't, and merrily shoved off to begin the hunt anew with a hearty chorus of "mark beta-epsilon eight two...", but that's not the point.

The point, dear persons, is identity. Incredibly, these people had completely buried one of the most prevalent of human traits - curiosity, behind a cloud of ignorance so complete I can only wonder at what they have created. Identity for these poor, simple fools is nothing but a blanket of denial and absurdity; a mesh of lies and self-deceit wound so tightly around them they have no more chance to escape its grasp than a Mandalorian has of escaping a Sarlacc. They are no more aware of who they are than might be a cup of yogurt.

How can someone, yet alone an entire society, so completely deny their true identity in the face of all evidence to the contrary?

It boggles the mind.

[Edj]

This is somewhat outside the scope of my normal drivel, but, and I only ask because I've exhausted the Holonet's resources (even going so far as to post an ad at various personal pages), does anyone know the location of any being, non-Imperial in employment status, who might know, possibly, the first jacking thing about Jedi wizardry?

See, I knew this guy, a good guy, who was showing me a few things. Nothing bold - just a few parlor tricks like a technique to outdrink the other sots at the bar, or to sharpen my focus when a blow to the noodles would put me face down on the duracrete. Things of that nature.

Neat bits of prestidigitation those, but it turns out people with this ability are apparently somewhat gaseous in form. I don't know the genetics behind it, but its as if they desubstantiate somehow. I say this because this guy I knew, this good guy, was recently poked by a Jedi twinkle stick, and was summarily reduced to a pile of well laundered rags.

Rika was, incidentally, struck by the same weapon, but sufferred only a bit of terribly smelly burning fuzz. Drax took a stab to the chest that seemed a bit more potent than the strike against the wookie (not surprisingly), but proved no more lethal. Karo... erm, this guy I knew, this good guy, took a glancing shot to the knee and in a puff was reduced to his Sunday best.

So this guy I knew, this good guy, is no more, and I'm stuck with an education that is, ahem... lacking, a propensity for getting tangled up with the wrong sorts of people, often enough in red and swinging those jacking glow rods, and a condition that may well reduce me to aether in a melee encounter.

Can anyone spot me a new instructor then? I'll take anything non-Imperial (those folk are just wrong in the head). A crazy but harmless lunatic on some deserted moon perhaps, or an audio book series maybe? A Holovid on Jedijitsu in twelve weeks? Anything. Anything? At all?

Oh man, I'm gonna die...

[entropy]

<Drax is flipping through Lorvas pirated horror holovid collection>

"Here it is! 'Day of the Jedi' I knew I had heard that word before."

"According to the notes, it was funded by an imperial officer trying to control a system in the outer rim where two jedi were hiding out. He tried to drum up public support by portraying jedi as sneaky cold-blooded killers with magical laser-sword, who couldn't be killed by conventional means.

"Standard horror vid plot, after an hour of <snap-hiss> <shlunk> <head falls off> each time someone on-screen is alone, they finally corner a few people and push them into bottomless pits, only to find out that they've killed the wrong people. The suspense continues for a mind-numbing 45 minutes until they manage to corner one of the jedi and push him off a cliff. Then, in the only interesting twist the vid posesses, the main character accidentally cuts himself in half picking up the laser-sword.

"After another 20 minutes of the female lead persuing the last jedi on a space station, they finally chase him into an escape pod, which they blast to pieces with a turbolaser. The scene wipes unsurprisingly to the bottom of a cliff, where the first jedi was slowly climbing down, having caught himself in the fall. He screams "NOOOOooooo," which echoes through the canyon. Then, noticing the top half of his pursuer lying on the ground, he gives a sneer followed by an evil laugh. There is a <snap-hiss>, and everything goes black. Credits roll.

"Of course, when the Empire officially ruled that the jedi never existed, they couldn't have this video floating around, so the imperial officer responsible, and the entire cast were killed, and all traces of the video (except Lorva's, apparently) were wiped out."

Edj will love this one, especially in his current mood, and horror vid night is tomorrow...