Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic RPG

Recap the Nineteenth

20 July 2012

Recap of the previous adventure.

Discourse With the Dark

After a lot of discussion, Shagaar reminded the group that they - well, he, but they were complicit - had destroyed Kaname's ship. When she discovered that, they might well be fighting a battle on two fronts. Better to leave, let Kaname win or fail, and come back if it was necessary.

So they left. They boarded the Loss, and, just to add a special something, Shagaar made sure to leave a signature carved into the docking bay so Kaname would know that he was responsible for her missing ship. The debris had long since been cleaned up by the native droids, but Shagaar found a place to carve his name anyway.

Just before they were ready to hit hyperspace, Kistra felt as if they were about to hit a solid wall. Shagaar slammed on the reverse thrust, and performed a scan. There was nothing there.

But Kistra was sure of it. She could feel a barrier in front of them with the Force. Beyond it was pain and struggle, more than she had felt before. Something was terribly wrong.

As an experiment, Shagaar pushed the ship forward just a couple of meters. Part of the ship was now extending beyond the invisible barrier. And with it came a slight change, perceptible only to someone with initimate knowledge of his ship - beyond the barrier was not the Breaker's Loss, but the Oonta Goonta. Shagaar's old ship. Somehow.

They could have easily reversed thrust and turned back to the Celestial Gate, to see if Kaname could still be successful in her mission without them. They knew the risks and the potential possibilities when Shagaar pushed the ship the rest of the way into the invisible divide.

Only Ish had a strong enough constitution to not pass out from the shock of entering another reality. A timeline where the Celstials ruled their empire for a hundred thousand years, and had set sights on a hundred thousand more. This was not the ship they knew, nor was it the galaxy they were familiar with.

Ish was dressed as a scientist, and all records showed he was highly regarded in his field. This Ish had never fired a sidearm before, and specialised in hyperspace technology and had sufficient clearance for some Celestial technology.

Kistra was his assistant. She had been rescued from a Celestial harvesting ship not too long ago. She was known to have Force powers - or, in this galaxy, she was "blessed with the power of the gods" - but was not trained.

Shagaar was the pilot, but he did not own the Oonta Goonta outright. He had used his connections with the Cathar royal family to get a respectable position among the rebels fighting against the Celstial Empire.

Zeka was his co-pilot. According to records, she did most of the actual flying, but Shagaar was the pilot on record. She was there to make sure he didn't blow anything up.

According to the mission logs, the rebellion had dispatched a frigate with these four individuals to locate and identify mysterious spacial anomaly at these coordinates. They were to investigate and report back.

And there was a very large battlecrusier outside with an unknown configuration. Checking against the ship library, it was a Celstial Warhammer. It was scanning the area, either for the supposed anomaly or for their ship - it was hard to tell. Until Shagaar tested to see whether or not he could still use the Force. The answer was yes, but then alarms announced that the ship was scanning for them after all. So they punched the hyperdrive, and off they went.

Our heroes struggled to identify their new roles. They could remember everything that happened in the old timeline, but nothing that happened in this one. They had physically replaced their other selves, but did not take any possessions from one timeline into the next. Zeka had woken up in the medbay, and saw reports of third-degree burns across her body, but saw only burned tatters of her clothes with healthy, normal skin underneath.

Paranoid as always, Shagaar dug up a holographic recording his other self had made for just such an eventuality. It gave a brief run-down of the mission parameters, access codes for the ship and its defenses, and a lament that the rebellion didn't seem to trust him to his own affairs. Finally, it warned that this recording was likely because Shagaar had lost his memories, and that he should make sure to keep that a secret from anyone who asked, especially the rebellion.

The first priority, it was agreed, should be the restoration of the original timeline. Kistra had traveled back in time before, in her adventures with Alora on Nar Shaada. Theoretically, the device should be intact and operable, and they could fire it up and stop the Celestials before they took back their empire.

First, however, they had to deal with the rebellion. Using the access codes Shagaar had given to himself, they contacted the rebellion to report in, as ordered. They acknowledged that there had been a spacial anomaly - what else would have caused them to travel to another timeline? - but that there was no sign of it now. Ish, as ranking officer, then requested the data on the other anomalies in the galaxy.

From his analysis, it appeared that these anomalies happened just before a rebellion got truly underway. There would be the stirrings and undercurrents of dissent, leaders would rise, and then a disturbance in the fabric of space, and the leaders would be quickly identified, tried, executed, and the rebellion would simmer and die. This had been going on for thousands of years. They were here to see if there was a direct, scientificially explainable link, or if it was just a facinating coincidence.

"They're looking for us," said Shagaar. His theory was that the Celstials, knowing that the party had moved from one timeline to another, would appear sometime, somewhere, and have something to do with a rebellion. How they knew that or why they couldn't just kill anyone matching their descriptions were questions that were not raised.

Their communication with the rebellion over, they headed to Nar Shaada. Using the Force, Kistra pinpointed the location of her previous adventures with Alora. Deep within the bowels of the planet, in the ruins of the Rakata temple, they discovered a box that no one could touch, and a Rakata datacron.

The guardian of the datacron was apologetic. It had been his plan that had failed to annihilate the Celestials on that fateful day. They were supposed to have frozen the Celestials in time, aware but unable to act, as vengeance for terrible actions against the Infinite Empire and its people. But it all came down to a single Celestial strike team, in exactly the right time and place, and everything fell apart. The Infinite Empire was no more, the Rakata a dead race.

Yes, yes, cried the group, but what about the time machine? It was here last time.

It turned out that temporal mechanics was largely theoretical at the time the Rakata were waging war against the Celestials. They had pieces of the first prototype scattered among the galaxy - one on Coruscant, one on Alderaan, and one here. They were to be assembled here at a later date, but that day never arrived.

The box, or crate, was a trouble all on its own. As an emergency precaution, when the offensive against the Celestials failed and terrible vengeance for the attempt was being wrought, the Rakatan scientists devised a forcefield that could not be breached, internally activated and contained. Only a Rakata or the premier slave race, humans, could pass through the forcefield.

Lacking humans in the party - or Rakata, for that matter - the team decided to simply take the crate with them. So they used the Force to manipulate the box to the ship.

On the way, they ran into an Imperial Agent, a Force-using acolyte of the Celestial Empire who takes the role of dispensing justice and law, sometimes at the end of a lightsaber. The Agent and his cadre attempted to take the party into custody, but they and their droids were soon dispatched.

Interrogating the Agent revealed that those who defeat an Agent in battle are welcome to join the Imperial ranks, so long as they submit to the nearest Imperial soldier, present the Agent's lightsaber, and undergo the appropriate trials. Shagaar filed away this information for possible use later.

Fortunately, the Imperial Agent was human. And in his weakened state, the party was able to place his hand on the forcefield, and saw that it went right through. Before they could force him to help them, however, the Agent bit hard on a hollow tooth, swallowed the cyanide, and perished.

The Adventure Continues ...