Star Wars: Edge of the Empire

Episode III: That escalated quickly

Zet's journal

On the one hand, it was a really nice treat to have an all-expenses paid trip on a fancy passenger liner for a week. I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten so well in my life. But on the other hand, Santos is right… I don’t know if I’d pick that kind of cushy lifestyle in the long term.

It was all nice and quiet until earlier today, when COINCIDENTALLY we noticed Rakine in the dining area, minutes before we were waylaid by an Imperial customs ship. Callia was worried that her ID wouldn’t come up clean, so we did what any rational being does with a pint-sized Jedi and stuffed her in the vents in our room. I couldn’t find anywhere to stash my more dangerous grenades, though. The Imperials were about as bad as I expected. They barely even glanced at the humans but they were pretty rough with the rest of us. I managed to palm my frags off to Santos before they searched me, at least, while those morons were standing right in front of me watching me.

Suddenly the major was freaking out, saying there were rebels on board and they’d found explosives in someone’s room upstairs. Then Rakine just disappears into the kitchen and all the Imps start looking for her. When the Stormtroopers walked in there to look, a stun grenade went off and she came barrelling out and ran down the stairs! We were trying to get Callia on the comm – she managed to find the bomb, and took it to the bridge.

It took a little doing to get up there and meet her. I didn’t manage to sneak up on my own, so instead the major marched me up there and locked me in my room. Whatever, I’m small and bendy enough for the vents too, ha. Too bad Santos, Ingrid, and Qurzer weren’t even a tiny bit sneaky about it. We freaked the Imps out by getting on the PA and telling them the rebels had control of the bridge, at which point Rakine hailed us from engineering to clarify what was going on. So she’s … maybe a rebel? I’m not that clear on it.

We had to deal with the Imperials in the hall at that point, though. That major got me really good, more than once, before Callia lit up a frigging LIGHTSABER in the middle of the hall and cut her arm off. Obviously I’m happy I didn’t get shot to death, but that was kiiind of terrifying. I didn’t even realize she was carrying one of those.

Ultimately, this was the plan: Santos, Ingrid, and Qurzer had managed to take out three Stormtroopers, so we relieved them of their cool stuff and put Ingrid and Callia in their armor. They were supposed to fake-arrest Rakine and I to walk us onto the Imperial cruiser, while Santos stayed on the bridge of the passenger ship, ready to jump us into hyperspace as soon as we’d dealt with the Imperials. Qurzer stuck with him for backup and we were gonna help Rakine sabotage the Imperial ship so we could all just fly away. Easy, right?

It was actually all going fine until a guard looked the wrong way as I was breaking a door open for the others. Callia and Rakine ran for it to the hyperspace controls, but that left Ingrid and I to deal with a bunch of pissed off Imperials. Actually it mostly left Ingrid, because the guard threw me in a cell immediately. She was smart enough to start opening the forcefields holding the other prisoners in, and then she managed to shoot a light out somehow while I was still fighting with the damn locking system on my cell. That’s when Callia came busting back out there, her lightsaber literally the only source of light in the place, to let me out and chop a guard’s head off!?

Meanwhile I had Santos on the comm telling me more and more Stormtroopers were boarding the passenger ship, and then stuff started exploding over there. I’m pretty sure Callia wanted us all to bail anyway but I wasn’t even really thinking about that. I just booked it as fast as I possibly could to get back to him. The others were lucky I was nice enough to hold the elevator for them. By the time I got to it, he’d managed to get from the cruise ship over to the Imperial one and down to the very bottom level.

When we got down there, he and Qurzer were on a pair of speeder bikes they’d found, using them to fire on a bunch of soldiers. Callia jumped in right away, and I left a nice little surprise on the elevator for anyone coming down behind us. But we didn’t have much time to screw around in there. Ingrid managed to shoot out one of the consoles and suddenly all the lights and alarms started going off to warn us the room was about to open to space outside. We booked it onto a Lambda shuttle (with speeder bikes, in Qurzer and Santos’ case) and got the hell out of there just as a really, really badass Stormtrooper showed up to start trying to kill people.

I guess Rakine and Callia ended up using the lightsaber to wreck the hyperdrive on the Imperial ship, but inexplicably the passenger vessel half-exploded too. We had to jump away as pirates started showing up to raid them. Callia was not happy. I don’t really know how that happened… it wasn’t what I would’ve wished on all those innocent people, that’s for sure.

I kind of have a feeling Santos thinks I’m worrying about him too much. I didn’t really put much thought to it when we found out he’s sensitive to the Force, but after seeing what Callia did today… And she says things could get really dangerous for him if he doesn’t learn how to control it. Especially because he’s we’re so impulsive, and the kind of work we do… I don’t know. I told him to go and talk to her. He left me flying the damn ship. There’s nothing here to crash into, at least. Our next stop is some planet in the Jiroch system. Apparently there’s a Jedi temple there or something that’s calling to him and Callia. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me kind of nervous, but at the same time, what if we find something there that could help Santos? We’ve got to look.

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