From 24th April, 2008:
So, the team is off to the penal colony on the third moon of Storm, Naboo system, there to find Doktor Das, the man behind Yavin IV's shield.
Finding the facility easily enough (barring a brief confusion between 'radioactivity' and 'radio activity'), they enter the first guard bunker even more easily, discovering later that this is due to the duty stormtrooper being in the lavatory. Storge's Natural 20 Of The Week is used to convince him that Sabat is an Imperial Grand Moff, and that he should skedaddle while they do what they have to do.
What they have to do is deactivate the security around the main prison to allow them access, while not enticing the roaming native rancors to follow them. With a map downloaded from the bunker's computers, they decide to hit the comms-station first before heading to the underground complex itself.
Some off-duty stormtroopers are enjoying a drink in the comms station. They are brutally gunned down. An Imperial colonel is tending to a computer in another room, and he is beaten and shot to [almost] death, revived by ArEx and then interrogated with a mixture of mind tricks from a patient Jondo (with perhaps a slight cramp in his mind-trick hand-waving wrist) and rifle-butt face smashings supplied by Yoon-Kai. He is defiant, but the general location of Das is discerned.
Disinterested in the conversations, Daur wanders into another room, coming under fire from a quartet of stormtroopers and an officer, who had been watching events transpire over viewscreens linked to the cameras throughout the building. They get a few good shots in, but are sliced up in the end. Daur returns to the rest of the group for medical attention, finding that they didn't realise he had left.
The merits of duct-taping the prisoner to the ceiling are debated back and forth at length before the party gets its act together, investigating the security cameras, the computers and the final room of the bunker.
The former shows various scenes from around the prison, including the white-clad Veer Assad slaughtering a Yuuzhan-Vong prisoner in one room. This is followed by all the screens bursting and an annoying chant being heard around the room, burbling about the rule of two and Darth Loathing.
The computers give a full run-down of how the facility was run under Republic, Imperial and now Inquisition hands, even if it doesn't go into specifics.
The final room has a final Imperial officer, engaged in conversation via holo-net with Inquisitor Athos Boleth. Boleth derides our heroes hero'ing capabilities, but does let slip about his plan to convert the Jedi of Yavin IV into a Sith army. When Sabat and Yoon-Kai join in with retorts, another person makes himself known on the holo-line - none other than the crippled crime-lord Billatikka, who's still a little angry at having been shot in the foot and having his holocron stolen. In a fury he promises horrible fates for Sabat and Kai.
A rough trace of the line by Nebbit shows that the transmission likely comes from Lorta, Billatikka's base of operations. The non-Jedi then realise that their Force-sensitive companions have both gone running off to the fourth below ground level of the prison to confront Assad (that being the floor shown by the camera before it exploded, as Jondo noticed).
The Force messages given back by way of explanation lead to a little confusion, with Sabat bowing down before Boleth's image while Sabat goes running from the bunker, but in time they too head to the lift, to begin a more systematic search, floor by floor.
On floor one, Sabat, ArEx and Yoon-Kai run into stormtroopers, but nothing that they can't handle, right? The march of reinforcements approaching is getting louder, though...
On floor four, Jondo and Daur find a bunch of cells filled with butchered Yuuzhan-Vong and dead humans, but not a trace of Assad. Not one. Besides the meat he left in his wake, obviously.
Laurence J Sinclair
