I think I need to get Santos to teach me how to lift or something. I can’t keep getting the shit kicked out of me like this.

Palob got us to Selonia and buzzed off to deliver his package to Nossk. It quickly became clear that things weren’t how Qurzer remembered them, but they weren’t willing to admit it outright, so we were all kind of stuck just going along with it. And before we even managed to get onto a transport to take us down to the planet, a Star Destroyer under construction blew up, and by crazy random happenstance, Rakine Bokete was hanging out waiting for a ride. That’s not suspicious at all.

Apparently it’s highly unusual for the ride between the shipyards to the surface to be ticketed. Or for tunnels to end in dead ends. Or for male Selonians to be in charge of anything, let alone Force-sensitive ones. But that’s what we found! Along with some kind of huge subterranean worm that I fed a frag grenade after it tried to rip my arm off. Also, Callia almost drowned, and there were a few times that I thought we were gonna lose Santos to a particularly narrow passage. I guess we better start carrying engine oil for those situations.

After a very strange encounter with Qurzer’s queen, we met up with this other one who was very concerned about all the local changes. I don’t know much about Selonians but I think politics and business kind of fly above their heads. CEC has been working on a merger with Kuat Drive Yards, which in turn is part owner of the Selonian shipyards. So somehow they were behind all these changes, like they were coming in and changing the business model or whatever. Selonians were losing their jobs and their homes, which, by the way, it’s pretty messed up that no one on that planet seems to understand what homelessness is.

I don’t feel the connection to Ryloth that my parents do. I’ve never lived there, and I’ve only visited once or twice. But I feel for them when they talk about it.

We decided to help by reestablishing communication between the Selonian septs. We managed to steal a CEC food supply ship (with minimal casualties, just for Callia) and head up towards the shipyards. En route, we overheard radio chatter that suggested the CEC was about to get crazy violent down below, so Qurzer hopped on the comm and convinced them all to rise up and rebel. But what they really wanted to do was get into the CEC area and find our old friend Rikkard Bel.

Rakine and I managed to talk and/or threaten our way through the guards when we docked, and we got all the way into a boardroom where Bel was going to meet us so Qurzer could tell him all about the rebels. That was the story we fed them, anyway. We knew he’d recognize us as soon as he walked in – a Chiss who travels with a Twi’lek isn’t exactly something you forget. The minute he saw us it turned into a firefight, but those guys weren’t much of a challenge. The problem was Qurzer just went for Bel right away and the two of them disappeared down a hallway before the rest of us had dealt with his guards.

This is where things started to go really badly for us. We hit a fork, and Rakine went one way while the rest of us went another. We found this hangar bay, with a transport ship right in the middle, and then someone with a super creepy voice got on the ship’s comm to say hello to Santos. He’s told me a lot of things about Nossk, but I don’t think I was even a little bit prepared for the real thing. Nossk had put a bomb on Qurzer – and also on Palob, who’d had the shit kicked out of him on the other side of the hangar. Before we could even begin to try to negotiate through the situation he just blew Palob up…

It’s kind of a confusing blur after that. I sort of remember Qurzer running onboard the ship to try to take Nossk on himself, and Santos doing something cool with the Force. But Nossk decided to just drive his ship right at us, and I was the only one who couldn’t get out of the way in time.

By the time Santos managed to stim me, Nossk was pretty much long gone. We found Rakine – she’d already been blown up by ANOTHER bomb he planted, and then hit with a stun grenade. We used her comm to call the rebels for a pickup and turned Bel over to them to deal with – maybe they can help the Selonians somehow.

I’m so relieved that Santos didn’t do anything really awful… I was supposed to be there for him, to make sure nothing bad happened. And I can’t even begin to imagine what Qurzer is feeling right now. They’re sticking with us, they want to find some of the other Selonians who’ve been away from their homeworld, but they aren’t saying much about what just happened. And then there’s Palob… I know we barely knew the guy, and we didn’t even know he was working for Nossk before it was already too late. But I keep wondering if we could’ve done something. If we’d followed him in the first place, maybe we could have saved him, but then we wouldn’t have been in the right place at the right time on Selonia to help all those beings on that planet. Or maybe if I could’ve just thought of something faster, when we came into that hangar bay and saw him there, he’d still be alive right now. We’re gonna track down his family and tell them what happened, and we’re gonna make sure we send them some money, but money can’t replace a person you cared about.

Even the thought of finally unloading these old Jedi artifacts for a chunk of change can’t quite cheer me up. Things were supposed to go back to normal after Jiroch. We were in our groove on Corellia, and then the second forces bigger than us get involved it all gets out of hand quickly. I hope Duros is quiet.