Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic RPG

Recap the Sixteenth

2 May 2012

Recap of the previous adventure.

The Sarlaac's Maw

A few days later, Shagaar got a message from Reatt the Hutt. Instantly wary, as Reatt had been dead for several months, he looked closer at the message. It was using a code established between himself and Breaker. The message was asking for help, and to meet at a place known as "Fort Nowhere" on Ruusan

The team went to Ruusan, only to find that there was no such place as "Fort Nowhere." Asking around, eventually they discovered Chuurga drinking heavily in a bar. She had seen better days - her entire left side was replaced with cybernetics. These caused her great pain (her doctors had never seen her species before, and did the best they could manage without the xenobiological records), which she drank to relieve, both of which contributed to a weakened mental state

Chuurga revealed that she and Breaker had met up with a "big, blue, four-armed man," easily identified as a Celestial agent, who told them of seven pieces of a key that led to an artifact of great power. Breaker pumped the agent for information, then sold the story to the Exchange. The Exchange agreed to hire Breaker to locate the key and the artifact.

Breaker had also sold the story - and obtained comissions - from two other less-than-reputable organizations. By the time he located the first key, the three agencies had discovered one another's interest, and Breaker was caught in the middle of a very dangerous firefight. The Exchange appeared to come out on top, retrieved Breaker and Chuurga from what remained of their ship, paid for Chuurga to be "fixed," and put Breaker into carbonite as an example for those who might think double-crossing the Exchange was a good idea. Chuurga was, according to the Exchange, indebted to her protectors. She owed them her life in service. The Exchange had specifically asked her to get Shagaar here. Breaker had provided her with a coded communiqué to use in just such an emergency, so she had followed the orders. Oh, and it was likely a trap.

Shagaar and Kistra, disguised as a mere pilot and co-pilot with no Force sensitivity, went to the local Exchange hideout. The place was ostensibly run by Reatt the Hutt's brother, Tarc the Hutt. In reality, his second, a human named Donovan, ran the show. Donovan laid out the terms for Breaker's release: find the other six pieces of the key.

Shagaar flat out refused. He knew that Breaker had, in part, been captured because Donovan wanted Shagaar on the case. Shagaar would retrieve the pieces of the key, but only if Breaker was released after one piece was recovered. There was a lot of back and forth, and a heated argument during which Shagaar revealed himself as a Force-user, but eventually Donovan agreed - provided they took an escort: Tahl, the Twi'lek bodyguard. Stymied, Shagaar agreed.

Tahl was a no-nonsense, heavily armored, expensively outfitted female mercenary, under semi-permanent contract to the Exchange. While on board the Breaker's Loss, she made sure to never be seen outside of her armor, save for occasionally removing her helmet. When Shagaar got a little too fresh, she shot him with darts that debilitated him for a couple of hours - not enough to seriously impede the mission, but enough to let him know that their relationship was purely professional.

While Tahl was preoccupied, Kistra and Shagaar managed to contact the Jedi Council. The Council was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together and realized with some horror that there was a working Celestial Gate somewhere in the galaxy. Celestial Gates were a way for people to travel instantaneously between two points in space; they had been used to bombard a planet from an undetectable location, launch entire armadas into critical locations, and were generally regarded as ultimate expressions of doom whose time had thankfully passed into history. The Council wanted the Rangers to make sure that the Celestial Gate was never used.

And so the new team made their way to a small, out of the way world known as Naos. Five hundred years ago, a bounty hunter had chased his quarry to this isolated world. This same quarry was supposed to have one of the pieces of the key. Both hunter and hunted had landed here, and neither had been heard from since.

The largest continent was primarily untamed jungle, though there was a fairly large Czerka fortress nestled in the foothills. Aiming to keep away from corporate eyes, the team landed their ship in a clearing a few hundred clicks south, where their instruments detected a decaying power source.

Fusion cores, especially those used in the time of the Old Republic, are rated for three hundred years. It was a testament to the bounty hunter's mechanical skill and adept modification techniques that the core was still able to provide minimal power to the subsystems. It took some work, but the team was able to retrieve some information from the navigational computer, a couple of partial log entries, and a few boxes of important cargo.

Well, important to someone. One of the boxes held the skeletal remains of what looked like a child, which the team respectfully buried. The other box contained a large piece of unidentified ore, which the group decided to keep in case its purpose became clear.

As they left the remains of the ship, they were ambushed by the natives - little reptilian men, no taller than a meter, brandishing crude spears with stone tips. Their sole experience with offworlders was Czerka Corporation, and they wanted them dead or gone.

Czerka had not taken kindly to the native's demands, and released a Rancor into the jungle to deal with the problem. The natives were becoming adept at running away, but they knew that they would not be able to survive for long with such a beast in the area, and asked these newcomers for help.

The natives were open to help because they had sacrificed a few of their strongest warriors to what they called the "Great Mouth of Ka," in the hopes that their god Ka would listen to their pleas. With a little prodding, the team was able to identify the Mouth of Ka as a sarlaac pit.

It didn't take too long to locate the Rancor, but Kistra sensed that the great beast was in pain. It turned out that Czerka was controlling the beast with a chip implanted at the base of its neck. It took no small amount of effort to remove the chip without causing permanent damage to the creature, but Kistra did not want to unnecessarily kill it. So they sent the Rancor to the far side of the contienent with a simple touch of the Force.

The next thing the team wanted to do was to find out what Czerka was doing on this nondescript world. So they infiltrated the compound under the guise of explorers and traders, and managed to finagle a tour of the facility. Czerka had begun a deep pit mine extended halfway to the core of the planet. They had originally used the natives as slave labor, but eventually decided on droids, as they were less troublesome or likely to revolt.

Shagaar saw an opening, and pursued it. He and Kistra managed to gain access to the main command and control center and upload an AI virus into all the droids, which would cause them to revolt. They exited the C&C to find the Czerka compound in chaos. The mining pits would be caved in to stop the droids from killing everyone in the compound, and a ship in orbit would saturate the location in turbolaser fire to wipe up any stragglers. This being the third such failure on this world, many of the workers were saying that Czerka would just abandon the world and move to greener and more profitable pastures.

The natives were relatively safe, so the team continued on their quest for the key. They asked the natives if they knew anything, and they mentioned an old story about a great battle between two figures. At the end of the battle, a settlement was in ruins, the jungle for many miles was destroyed, and, in the center of it all, a single man encased in metal. Seeking revenge for their settlement and pleading for justice from the god Ka, the people threw the man into the Mouth of Ka, and life was good.

There was little for it, then; their only lead was being slowly digested inside a sarlaac.

Entering a sarlaac was, of course, tantamount to suicide. They had little trouble finding the beast - it was a full mile in diameter - but they didn't quite know what to do. Kistra attempted to contact the sarlaac telepathically, but the mind she encountered was so chaotic and alien that she could not communicate clearly. It was a lucky thing, then, that they saw the tribe shaman climbing out of the sarlaac pit unmolested.

The shaman indicated that this was common for him; it was one of his duties to communicate with the great god Ka, as well as those warriors that had been sacrificed to the Mouth over the millenia. Because of this innate connection, he could freely move around the sarlaac without fear.

As best they could, the team described to the shaman who and what they were looking for. Could he help?

The shaman was reluctant; communing with the Great Mouth of Ka was draining, and usually he only did it in times of great trouble, and even then only once a season. But, seeing that their need was great, he was willing to risk his fate if it meant that it could save so many.

The shaman emerged a day later, exhausted but alive. He had talked to Ka for quite some time before he found the information they sought. The god spoke to him with many words that he could not understand, but he was able to comprehend that what they sought lay at the root of a great tree on an airless world.

The team had the data from the navigational computer; it would be a simple task (if time-consuming) to go to every airless world the bounty hunter had visited and look for a "great tree." But Shagaar suggested a simpler way: they would just hand over the box with the ore sample instead. He argued that they were not given any indication as to what the key looked like, so how were they to know the difference? If they were found out, they could claim ignorance. By leaving a key part hidden, the Celestial Gate was safe.

So decided, Shagaar also suggested that he meet with Donovan alone. He was sure that the Exchange would try to renegotiate the terms of Breaker's release, and anticipated that he would have to kill everyone in the compound. As this was an overtly dark act, he would understand if Kistra and the others did not want to join him. Leaving most of the others on Ryloth with Tahl, Shagaar returned to Ruusan.

What he found surprised him. The search for the key parts had gone public. Donovan had put together six teams, each tasked with locating a single piece. Accompanying each team was at least one droid, which relayed a video/holographic feed back to Ruusan. People watching at the Exchange could bet on outcomes, such as who was likely to die first, who was going to find a key part, and, as the contest developed, how one team, led by a woman named Draconis, would manage to capture other teams' pieces for her own.

Shagaar recognized Draconis, though he knew her as the traitor Kaname Song.

He made his way through the bedlam, noting several Sith in the audience, and managed to present himself before Tarc the Hutt, Donovan at his side. The exchange of the worthless ore for his Gungan friend took less than five minutes, and then he was waved away.

Bewildered, Shagaar took his friend back with him to Ryloth, picked up his teammates, and filled them in on the latest development. With six teams, Donovan had clearly not trusted Shagaar to come through with the key piece, and one of the teams had been on the vid-screens fighting their way into a sarlaac. The secret of the piece's location may not remain safe after all.

In other news, Breaker was not doing well when he was thawed from the carbonite. It was unknown if the carbonite freezing chamber was faulty or if Gungans simply did not take well to the cryogenic process, but the medical droid on board the Loss was stretching its medical algorithms to their limits to keep him alive.

The Adventure Continues ...