Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic RPG

Recap the Eleventh

27 January 2011

Recap of the previous adventure.

Defense and Counter-Offense

Shagarr shared the results of his efforts with the rest of the party. There was a lot of discussion of available options, both legal and otherwise, but it was eventually decided that perhaps the quickest option would be for Kistra to use her influence to encourage a trial. All were fairly confident that they could denounce any evidence the prosecution would present, as long as Breaker kept his mouth shut. To that end, Shagarr procured some minor anaethestic and applied it to Breaker's food - he would be conscious, and move when directed, but he would be quiet.

The trial went fairly uneventfully. The prosecution's main point of order was the suspicious activity in Breaker's account. Fortunately, it was easy enough to get several character witnesses to testify that Breaker didn't hold a grudge against Reatt, and that he only spent money either if he absolutely had to or if it somehow led to the aquisition of more powerful weaponry. Since the assassination of Reatt actually made things more difficult in regards to the latter goal, it was highly unlikely that he would have hired someone to kill the Hutt.

Kistra was able to argue away the other points the prosecution introduced, and she convinced the judges to return with a verdict of not guilty. Everyone walked out of the courtroom free and clear of all charges - though the identity of the actual assassin was still unknown.

To that end, the party began their own investigation. They decided that the place to start would be the individual who attempted to poison Shagarr and Breaker while they were in the bacta tanks. The suspect had been carried off by Coruscant police, so they went to the holding cells where he was being detained for further questioning. But he had escaped!

The circumstances surrounding his escape were puzzling. An officer reported that a fellow officer had been trapped in the holding cell that contained the suspect. There was no indication of how the suspect had managed to switch places with the officer, and the officer in question denied ever being so contained under later questioning. A review of the security tapes confirmed the story, but, as the camera was panning back and forth, there were a few crucial seconds during which the suspect was not within line of sight.

Kistra, Shagarr, and Zeka proceeded to interview the officer who had released his coworker, only to find a mind-addled man self-medicating with alcohol and death sticks. He had been put on administrative leave due to his insistence on crazier and crazier theories on the turn of events. The theories all hung on one crucial point, which he shared with the trio: he could have sworn that, for just a second, the man in the holding cell was not his coworker, but himself.

From this piece of data, the party surmised that it could be possible that the suspect was a shapeshifter. Shapeshifting races were unknown in the galaxy - currently. But Chuurga had long suspected that the quarry he had chased across time might very well be a shapeshifter, and it would explain why Chuurga was named along with Shagarr and Breaker in a murder that did not really concern him.

Unfortunately, this is where the trail ran straight into a dead-end. The suspect was gone, and it could be expected that he had taken on a myriad of different forms. Their paths would likely cross again, but, until then, they had to wait.

Ships, Cats, and Zombies

In the meantime, there was the matter of the missing Oonta Goonta. The two remaining tracking devices led off-world, and for that they needed a ship. For a few thousand more credits than Shagarr was willing to pay, he purchased a ship that was very familiar to Kistra - a small freighter called the Runaway Star. Kistra had not seen any sign of her old Twi'lek captain since she had left her with instructions to meet at Nar Shaada ... but that was well over a full year ago. Hopefully the sudden appearance of the cherished vessel did not mean something was amiss.

The tracking signals were roughly the same distance away from Coruscant, though in opposite directions. As soon as Shagarr mapped the signals to a display of the known galaxy, however, he knew the most likely location: the planet of Cathar, his homeworld.

Sure enough, it didn't take long to home in on the signal once they were in orbit of Cathar. The planet had changed a lot since Shagarr had seen in last - full-scale bombardment and invasion by the Mandelorians will do that to a world - but alongside the desicated husks of city-trees and burned corpses of his fellow Cathar, sat the Oonta Goonta, all alone in a wide-open area. The party approached cautiously.

The inside of the ship had been severely altered. Almost all the bulkheads had been sealed, directing the party down one path straight through the middle of the ship and directly to the cockpit. The cockpit itself had been sealed off with transparent plastisteel, so they could clearly see the HK-series droid that was sitting in the pilot's chair.

The HK droid was polite, at least for one of that designation. It indicated that there was a problem on this world, one that only Shagarr and his companions could take care of. All they had to do was to place the head of the one responsible on top of a modified medical droid, and they could take the Oonta Goonta back. If they refused, or attempted assault or trickery, the entire ship had been wired to blow.

Shagarr took a quick look around, assessed the situation, then led the party outside the ship. He attempted to remotely trigger an explosive device that he and Breaker had placed in one of their droids, but nothing happened. Refusing to listen to other options, much less be victim of blackmail under any situation, he got into the Runaway Star and fired on the Oonta Goonta. The resulting mushroom cloud contraindicated any possibility that the HK droid was bluffing.

There was still the problem the droid had referenced, so the party headed to the nearest inhabited city-tree to see if they could discover what was going on. They were welcomed by the local appointed mayor, who was glad to see that the Jedi Council had sent a representative so quickly. The dead, you see, they've grown restless ...

It wasn't long after this announcement that the party got to see the results for themselves. Thousands, millions, of Cathar killed during the Mandalorian invasion got up and began walking towards anything living. The city-tree had dug a moat, filled it with fuel, and lit it on fire when the dead began to shamble forward. Fire was the only thing that seeemed to be able to stop the menace, or at least slow it down. Blaster fire had minimal effect - blast the head, and the body kept moving forward. Blast out the legs, and it would crawl. Blast off all the limbs, and it would do its best to inch towards you. Only reducing the dead to ash was of any use. Shagarr, Breaker, and Zeka took gunnery positions to slow the assault; Kistra tapped into the Force to call fire out of the very air, and kept the dead at bay.

After a little over an hour, suddenly the dead would fall over and stop their assault. The Cathar rushed out to set alight those corpses close enough to threaten the settlement, and then everyone would dig in again and wait for the next attack. The mayor was at a loss and, worse yet, somehow some of the dead had managed to sneak in and kidnap one of their youngest - a little two-year-old girl.

Chuurga helped to track the girl, and led the party to another city-tree, this one a burned-out hulk. By this time, the dead had started to rise again, swarming all over the tree like ants on a hill. The party had followed along in their ship, and so simply retrieved Chuurga and ascended past the reach of the dead. Once things had settled down again, they landed on a sturdy branch and began exploring. Kistra was able to sense a disturbance in the Force in a hollow area of the tree, and Zeka used her echolocation to determine that there was only a single, small life-form inside. The party rushed inside to attack - and Kistra was embraced!

They had found the missing child. She only had the barest command of Basic, but she was able to communicate that she had awful, terrible dreams about the Mandalorian Wars. Her father was dead, her friends were dead, everyone was dead - all she wanted was for everyone to be alive again, for the planet to teem with the many billions of Cathar it had once had ...

Kistra calmed the girl down, and examined her. She was exceptionally powerful with the Force, and was wearing a small necklace that was humming with dark power. The necklace Zeka recognized as a dream augmentation device, illegal on most worlds. Kistra saw that it had been further adapted with Sith alchemy, likely to increase the range and scope of the girl's inherent abilities. The combination had allowed this little girl's worst nightmares and desires to empower the dead to walk on Cathar.

Removing the necklace, the party took the little girl home. But Kistra knew that, as a Jedi Knight, she had a responsibility. She talked with the mother of the child, to let her know that her daughter was Force-sensitive, and should be taken to Coruscant to be trained as a Jedi.

Shagarr was against the whole idea. Why should the mother have to abandon her child just because she had a special gift? What right had the Jedi to take away the one shining light in this woman's life? Why should a Jedi have to abandon all attachments? It took a long, heated conversation before Kistra convinced Shagarr that this is what she had to do.

Meanwhile, Breaker had taken the opportunity to explore the area. It wasn't too long before he had discovered that the Mandalorians had left some excellent equipment behind after they had effectively conquered this world. His greatest find wasn't the large quantity of Mandalorian iron, or custom blaster rifles, or even a small stash of explosives - no, it would have to be the remains of a Basilisk war droid.

But Shagarr was upset, and wanted to leave this planet. He had found out nothing about his family or his history, and the Mandalorians had robbed him even of his pleasant memories of home. Home was his ship ... except he blew up his ship. Home was this world ... now a near-desolate rock. And then Breaker went and made a crack about what a dump Cathar turned out to be. So Shagarr gathered the rest of the party, and took off.

It took a long, long while before Shagarr eventually came back to pick Breaker up. Maybe it was because he was still upset, and shouldn't have been piloting. Maybe there was a heavy cross-wind that just couldn't have been accounted for. Maybe the universe tilted a little to the left. Whatever the cause, before anyone could do much about it, the Runaway Star crashed. Right into the recently salvaged Basilisk war droid.

Fortunately, everyone managed to survive, even though it was a near thing to rescue Zeka from a burning section of the ship. Cathar, a world in the midst of rebuilding, didn't have the resources to dedicate to shipwrights, and the Ithorians were half a world away working on the re-terraforming project. Fixing the ship took weeks of salvage, of combining the remnants of the Runaway Star, the Oonta Goonta, and even pieces of the Basilisk. Finally, eventually, they had a ship that was fairly spaceworthy that could get them back to Coruscant. As they took off, Shagarr firmly wished that he would never see Cathar again.

Endings and Beginnings

The Jedi Council had two things they wanted to discuss with the party. The first was the recognition that a Jedi does not work alone - it had become customary for several Jedi to acquire a following of trusted companions that were invaluable to getting the job done. In times of war, this was even more true, as commanders and officers of all types would ask permission to leave their posts to fight side-by-side with Jedi in whatever role they could fill. So the Jedi Council worked out an agreement with the Republic Armed Forces for the designation of "Rangers." Breaker, Shagarr, Chuurga, and Zeka would be known as Rangers, under the command of the Jedi Knight Kistra Horain.

Secondly, there was an assignment the Council would like to assign to the group. But first, one of the Jedi Masters took Kistra and Shagarr aside to discuss Shagarr's possible future with the Jedi Order. In that meeting, Shagarr learned that the Jedi suspected that he had been kidnapped at an early age to be taught in the ways of the Seyugi Dervishes, a highly specialized cadre of Force-sensitive assassins. The Jedi had all but eliminated them from the galaxy, but it was widely believed that most had simply gone into hiding.

The prime piece of evidence for this suspicion was the crystal that powered Shagarr's lightsaber. It amplfied the dark side of the force, making it easier to succumb to the easy path of anger, greed, and violence. These were valuable traits for a Seyugi Dervish, but were not for one who would be accompanying a Jedi, and who may entertain thoughts of becoming a Jedi himself. Three times, Shagarr was asked to give up or destroy his lightsaber, and thus give up the tainted power crystal. Three times, Shagarr refused, insisting that the lightsaber was a part of his identity.

So the Jedi Master took Kistra's lightsaber, and Shagarr's lightsaber, and exchanged the power crystals in front of them. Kistra's weapon glowed orange, and Shagarr's was the silver hue. He returned the weapons, cautioning that this was the far more dangerous path. But perhaps this way, Shagarr could see what life was like, if the taint of the crystal had not imprinted itself onto him. Kistra, with her years of training, should be strong enough to resist the crystal's sway.

There was a price for this help: their assignment was to return to Exis station in the Teedio system. It was likely heavily patrolled and fortified by the Sith, but nevertheless they must somehow infiltrate the station and retrieve a very important holocron that had been left behind. Only then could they discuss Shagarr's future with the Jedi.

The Adventure Continues ...