Shaking his head, Zel quickly makes his way back to the AT-AT cockpit. "I gotta say," he begins as he sits down, his hands flying to the controls. "This might just be the dumbest thing I've ever done. And coming from me, you know that means something." His head moves back and forth, his eyes darting between the controls in front of him and the others behind him. As soon as everyone is aboard, his hand slams a button on the console, closing the doors and sealing the interior of the walker. "All right, here goes nothing." With that he begins maneuvering the walker toward the hangar doors.
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With everyone aboard and strapped into the hulking metal monster, Zel starts the walker moving forward, encouraged by the clone. The room seems to shake more and more with every second, sections of the ceiling starting to collapse. Rod powers the cannons, blasting hole after hole into the metal wall between you and space.
As the hangar is exposed to vacuum, you witness three Star Destroyers firing full upon the Deception. The walker continues forward, no speed feeling fast enough.
As you edge closer and closer to the abyss, a fatal worry fills your head: Mith had the datacard with the flight codes, and he and it are gone forever. But as you step into space and begin the long plummet to the ocean below, nothing fires upon you. You fall unhindered. Perhaps the fleet's tracking detects you as nothing but debris, or perhaps each and every cannon is too busy ripping apart the vessel you spent the last month aboard, but regardless of the reason, you are safe.
Well, as safe as one can be performing atmospheric reentry in a tank.
As the walker picks up speed, and the hull heats and begins to creak, something tears away, metal wrenching away. A panel at Flan's station beeps rapidly, showing that one of the legs is missing. Just as well, you won't need it in the water.
The water that grows ever nearer and yet seems never to come. The reflection of the setting sun is almost blinding, preventing any from getting a consistent estimate of how far or near the ocean is.
With a great groaning, another leg snaps off, this one at the knee. The vessel spins once, twice before leveling out facing back the way you came, providing a final look at the space battle overhead.
The fleet has stopped firing. Another ISD has docked with the crumbling Deception, and the remaining two ships are nowhere to be seen, likely resuming their posts orbiting the planet.
The two behemoths rapidly wink out of sight, lost in the night sky.
With a deafening slap, the walker's backside collapses as it crashes into the water. Your ship slowly rotates, bobbing up and down, unsure whether or not to sink, until finally all movement ceases but the gentle rocking of ocean waves.
You are nauseous, dizzy, lightheaded, fatigued, exhausted, terrified and strapped in upside down, but you, all of you, are alive and in one piece.
You have escaped the Imperial Star Destroyer Deception, and taken your first step to joining a Rebellion.
Ral's the last one up into the walker, after OOM, clinging to one of the retracting lines. He casts about for one of the jump seats in which troops usually sit while awaiting deployment from the walker, then buckles himself in and makes an odd sort of motion with his jaw - apparently trying to make sure that he doesn't clench his teeth, as he might risk breaking his jaw if there's a sudden jolt during the descent.
As the walker makes its way through the atmosphere, he clenches his hands on the jump-seat's grips with each sudden shift, doing his best to keep steady though the group's fate is out of their hands at that point.
Finally as the walker splashes down improbably into Mon Cala's oceans, he remains seated for a good additional minute, before glancing around to make sure that nobody fell out during the tumultuous descent.
"Everyone still intact?" he says finally.
Now that the din of re-entry and the whine of armor being flensed from the walker's hide have subsided, there is nothing to drown out Dara's groans of misery. Even as a prisoner aboard the Deception, subjected to so much uncertainty and fear, she has never experienced something so harrowing as that escape - and never felt a physical misery like this.
Her head throbs as though a drill has bored through her skull, and she can't bear to even open her eyes against the dizzying ache. Her mouth burns with the remnants of vomit and bile, which she can also feel copiously soaking into the front of her prisoner jumpsuit. Her shoulders and waist are rubbed raw from the harness' valiant effort to keep her secured in her seat.
"I'm alive," she hisses through grit teeth, as much to reply to Ral as to reassure herself.
Rising slowly from the shattered, sparking consoles of the cargo bay, OOM meekly glances down at the ground, then with a disdainful gesture unbuckles its harness. "Yeah.", it remarks a loud thud later. It stands up slowly a moment later, and as it shakes its twisted arm, there's a jingle and rolling voices indicating that it's at the very least, not intact. "Better than the day I walked out of fa- fa- fa- fa- factory."
The droid's outer surface, once light matte gray, is now battered, dented and smoked. "I can sa- sa- sa- safely say.", it blurts out, its vocabulator glitching as it turns its photoreceptors towards Zel, "Would not recommend this liner. Hey!", it suddenly snaps towards Dara and the rest. "Should you be leak- leak- leaking those excretions?"
"Keep still, OOM," says the nobleman. "We'll have someone help make sure your systems are all intact." He glances back at Dara and says, "Someone grabbed the medical kit, right? Give Dara a hand? Anti-nausea maybe?"
Flan straps herself in with shaking hands and grips the sides of the seat so tightly that her knuckles turn white. Terrified, but unable to look away, she stares out the viewport as the walker edges closer to the hole in the wall of the Destroyer.
She screams as they go over the edge. The noise is lost in the deafening sounds of reentry, but it makes no difference; she screams until her throat is raw and scrabbles desperately at the seat's grips, rubbing her palms and fingers sore on the rubber and metal as she holds on. The beeping panel warning her of the missing leg goes unnoticed as her vision tilts and blurs, and she starts to black out.
She comes to, strapped in upside-down in her seat, the harness digging painfully into her shoulders as it keeps her suspended in place. "I'm- I'm- I'm alive, she gasps, her breath coming in short bursts. "I'm alive!
Clawing at the buckles of the harness until they give way, she lets herself tumble to the floor — rather, the ceiling — and lays there for a moment while her panic starts to subside.
Dara unstraps herself. She tries to keep a grip on the seat, but gravity again proves the stronger force. With a muted yelp, she manages to clutch at the seat restraints and spends a moment dangling in the air. She attempts to carefully drop down the rest of the way, but her legs - with all the strength of noodles - buckle beneath her.
She soldiers on and pushes herself up. Wincing at the feel and reek of her soiled jumpsuit, she crawls along the ceiling of the troop compartment to a row of lockers in the back. She rifles through the jumbled mess of uniforms, undersuits, and other gear until she drags out a light gray crew flightsuit. She sequesters herself in a darkened corner of the compartment to swap clothes.
Holding the flightsuit helmet, looking at it nervously, she turns back to her fellow escapees.
"We're...we're on the planet? We're in the water, right?" she asks, her voice trembling with fearful wonder.
The droid seems to glance at Dara, somehow making disbelief appear in its photoreceptors. "Either this, or a really, really large space station. Also, fun fact - I'd rather not swim to shore. Because I can't particularly swim." It glances at the pilot seat. "So, all that's left is our in-int-repid pilot. Can you make the walker bantha-paddle?", it asks in a sarcastic tone.
Rod opened his eyes and blinked a couple of times in disbelief. They really had survived an unassisted orbital drop in a walker. The clone blinked hard a couple more times to rouse himself from the meditative state he spent the drop in and relaxed his grip on the lightsaber he had been unconsciously white-knuckling the whole way down.
With a few tugs at the straps, Rod is free from his upside seat and tumbles down to the "floor". There's a quick look around to confirm his companion's safety and a quick yes-I'm-alive nod before Rod has his head down in the walker's supplies, gearing up, swapping his damaged body glove for a properly sealed thinsuit and throwing a poncho over the whole outfit.
"Is there even a shore to swim to?" Rod asks, looking to Zel for confirmation. "I didn't see any land when we were in orbit."
Mon Cala has no shoreline to speak of, and without approaching the sea floor or knowing the planet's asterisms and constellations, no real landmarks either. The ocean bed varies in depth; only 10-20 meters at its most shallow, but at the deepest, nearly 20 kilometers.
Cities take a variety of forms; some drift with tidal currents in or atop the water, others remain tethered to the ocean floor. The Quarren are even known to live in caves dug into the side of great underwater mountains.
”I don’t know much about this world, but I think if we’re going to find help, we’ll have to go down,” says Ral. ”Zel? Thoughts?”
Zel unclasps his seat harness, falling out of his seat rather ungracefully. "Ow..." The smuggler rubs his head
"Hahaha!" He finally responds to the situation, laughing exuberantly. "I can't believe we just pulled that off!" He spends a few moments glorying in his apparent ability to land an Imperial walker from space, pacing the cabin as he does so.
At last he settles down. "Ahem. Yeah, not much of a 'shore' here. Unless we happened to land near a Mon Calamari city, I'm thinking going down and find some friendly Quarren..." Zel looks aside, as if remembering something. He suppresses a shudder. "Yeah, down's probably the best bet. Maybe we ought to gather our bearings first, though."
Flan scrambles to her feet, suddenly desperate for a task to keep her mind busy, and begins ransacking the interior of the Walker for anything that might be of use. She finds a jumpsuit, cleaner, sturdier, and more protective than the prison suit she's spent the last few weeks in, and finds a corner to change in; lots of other gear goes in her pockets or her pack.
"Down?" Her voice wavers with uncertainty. "We don't even know where 'here' is." She has no more reasoning than that, and abandons the conversation to look for a solution that doesn't involve leaving the surface and diving down into the deep, dark ocean. Clambering back up toward the top of the AT-AT, she tries to open the rope-deploying sphincters that let out onto the legs.
The first sphincter Flan attempts to open stutters, clapping open and shut, jammed or somehow bent, with the second refusing to open at all. The third, however, opens smoothly. Thick, warm, humid night air wafts slowly into the craft, a welcome departure from weeks of dry and recycled oxygen.
Flan pulls herself up and out, gratefully breathing in the fresh air. The endless ocean and stars above induce a sense of vertigo, and she has to steady herself on one of the outstretched legs before she can properly look around.
The Corellian gazes out at the distant horizon, entranced by the calm waves and the distant moon. Cloudless, the night sky is alive with color, bright and unpolluted. No wind touches your face.
The shadow's steep triangular shape betrays it: an ISD in orbit.
Rod follows Flan topside, eager to escape the stuffy walker interior and get some bearings. Feet planted outside, Rod takes a great big breath and savours the fresh night air. A welcome change from the stale sharship air. Invigorated, he casts a sharp eye over the surroundings.
The clone shakes his head. "Can't tell where we are but I can tell wherever we are is a deathtrap. Dead winds and no current means we can't move from this spot unless it's under our own power. No fish in the water either, so if thrist doesn't get us, starvation will." Rod reconsiders a moment. "Except the clanker. He'll just rust or run out of juice or something."
Dara climbs out of the troop compartment and is immediately struck into a stupor. The endless blue of the night sea mesmerizes her, and she is too overwhelmed by the wide world to pay attention to the finer details. She remains mute for a time, letting Rod make his observations.
"Are there signal flares in the walker?" she asks without actually looking at her topside companions. Her eyes, adjusting to the moonlight, continue to scan the watery horizon with wonder.
"Y-yeah.", the droid replies wearily, its vocabuliser still glitching as it reaches to fiddle with a shaking shoulder. "Don't know about you, vatjob, but I don't like being surrounded by dead people. Very poor conversationalists." It glances back down towards the messy insides of the walker, the flickering emergency lights brightening the broken interior. "Let's check for flares. I-i-if that fails, you look like someone who crawls through junkpiles.", OOM suggests, picking idly at its restraining bolt. "A fan from the vents and a steel panel should be good enough to make a raft, too. I have enough battery for at least two weeks." It leaps back down, then looks up and shouts.
"You know, in case we do-o-o-on't feel like announcing our presence to whoever's in charge here."
"If we had a desalinator that would take care of the water problem... haven't seen any flares," says the noble.
He fiddles idly with his communicator, checking for other frequencies in use in the area. While most of the Mon Cala population lives underwater, having satellite communications to the rest of the galaxy means that they have to send some kind of signals out of the water, and that might be trackable.
"Flares?" Flan digs around in her pack to produce one of the flares she scrounged from the AT-AT supplies, and passes it off for someone to light.
"I also found this." Reaching back into the bag, she takes out a small, cone-shaped apparatus. "I think it's a water extractor. Bel Iblis had one with his emergency supplies, so I knew it would come in handy," she adds helpfully.
"Perfect. You really are on point, miss," says the nobleman with a smile. "Rod, looks like we're set. I'm going to see if I can track any local transmissions."
While the droid heads belowdecks, Ral paces back and forth, checking different channels and frequencies. All transmissions are fuzzy and scattered at best, but he does find three channels of import:
Firstly, the playboy picks up staticky local com chatter between what seems to be two fishermen, and while they don't respond to any hails, it proves you are not alone in this section of ocean. Second, a crystal-clear Imperial broadcast on loop, advising all citizens to stay in their homes. Lastly, one (1) unscrambled music channel, currently playing lounge j+&z.
Inside, the droid readily identifies emergency materials, perfectly suitable for a raft or some sort of emergency repairs.
Easily affected by any amount of praise, Flan beams at Ral as he fiddles with the coms. Eager to continue helping, she kneels at the head of the walker, swaying slightly to the sounds of lounge j%!z, and lights the flare, sending the stark, brilliant light shooting out of its cylinder.
"We should think of some way to let people know that we're not Imperials," says the nobleman while he fiddles with the equipment. "Or, if an Imperial squad shows up to rescue us, we'd best be ready to fight them off and then find someone friendlier."
After taking his sweet time pouring over the contents of the walker and picking out a few things for himself, Zel clambers up out of the walker's troop compartment and onto its exterior. He inhales deeply, taking his first breath of fresh air in months. Finally he exhales, and as he takes in the scene around him, smelling the sea, feeling the warmth and humidity of the air, at once so familiar and so strange to him, it occurs to him that he's finally home.
The utter lack of motion leads him to feel like his homecoming is a bit anticlimactic. "Would have expected a better reception than this," the Mon Calamari grumbles a bit as he walks around a bit, stretching his legs. "Hey Zel, welcome home! We missed you so much! Here's some credits for your trouble!"
As he peers over the edge of the AT-AT into the ocean below, he considers jumping in to get a feel for the water immediately around the walker.
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Rod looks disapproving at Flan's launched flare. "Better hope no imperials see or respond to that. We're fish in a barrel out here. Wouldn't put it past the locals to turn us in to Imperial authority either. No, we're better off rescuing ourselves." Remembering the speeder bikes he saw in the walker, Rod walks back up the legs to the AT-AT's body. With the vehicle deployment doors underwater, those bikes would need another way out.
The clone draws the lightsaber. It's a rough, battered old thing. Small pockets of rust infest the length of the handle except for the sections of the casing that have been crudely patched with panels of replacement metal. Traces of what appears to be delicate electrum detailing suggests that this weapon was once a beautiful, elegant piece before falling into its current state of disrepair. The whole thing looks to be held together by a generous wrapping of wire and mesh tape.
*Pssshhew!*
The lightsaber's internals however, work just fine as Rod ignites the lightsaber. For a long moment, Rod simply holds the Jedi tool with trembling hands and stares into the glowing green blade, seemingly almost mesmerized by it. The moment passes and the clone's hands still before he plunges the blade into the AT-AT and begins slowly cutting a hole large enough to move a speeder bike through.
"I like to think I'm some kind of fish wherever I am, barrel or no barrel." Zel laughs loudly at his own joke. He looks back at the water's edge, sighs, then shakes his head. "Guess I'm goin' in," he declares to no one in particular.
He begins removing a few pieces of gear from his person in preparation for his first plunge into Mon Cala's oceans since he was a child. The smuggler hums a tune to himself, but stops at the sound of a lightsaber igniting. Zel's eyes widen and his head snaps toward the sound, where he sees Rod standing a short distance away, staring at the green blade. He can't help but stare as well; he can't recall ever having actually seen a lightsaber.
The Mon Calamari finally turns away once Rod begins cutting into the side of the walker. "All right, I'm going for a real quick swim, see what the deal is right here," he announces. "Anyone wants to join me, they're more than welcome. The water's fine!" Zel glances back at the still, empty water. "Probably." Without waiting for a response he dives in, entering the water smoothly and with little commotion in the water itself.
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At first, Dara is of little help, as mesmerized as she is by the vast wide open.
When cycling through the transmissions, the music catches on her mind like a hook.
"Wait. Was that music?" she asks, snapping back to reality - sort of. A look to the severity on her companions' faces tells her that now is not the time to press the issue.
She's about to return inside the walker to help the clanker scrounge for parts when Rod ignites his lightsaber. Awash in the glow cast across the floating walker carcass, Dara is enrapt by the spectacle. The closest she can compare the sight to is a welding torch, but this is clearly something of an entirely different stripe. Her amazement only increases as her father's double proceeds to cut a hole in the walker's armored hide.
Another distraction arrives when Zel dives into the water. Dara yelps slightly as tiny droplets of sea water splash her unexpectedly. Although she had some practice swimming through a flooded room aboard the station, the unknown depths of the sea is another beast entirely. She is torn between curiosity and fear.
Eventually, just to feel useful, she finally returns inside the walker to look for parts.
The flare arcs high into the air, marking their approximate location for a good five or ten minutes. Nothing appears on the horizon, but the scrambled fishermen on the coms do seem to grow a bit agitated around the same time.
With comparable resistance to pushing two magnets together, the lightsaber nonetheless pushes through the metal. Rod cuts a large hole in the deck, though building a ramp would still take some doing.
Zel dives down, his mucusy skin rejuvenating in the water as he swims laps under and around their craft.
The Mon Calamari's large eyes filter in the moonlight, allowing him to survey his surroundings. Firstly, the ass end of the walker has completely flattened, accordioning in on itself, but the walker isn't listing or taking on water. Though powerless, you estimate it could float for a good number of days before sinking, possibly for forever.
Moving deeper into the water, he finds that while he cannot see it clearly, the ocean floor is just beneath them, some 30 or 40 meters away.
OOM's dug deep into a console as it hears the turning on of Rod's lightsaber. "Hey! Jedi around!", it blurts out, suddenly standing up with insane speed and pointing its blaster into the nearest face - it being Dara's. "Get down, the Je-", it rumbles out, before noticing the Stormtrooper burying the blade into the walker's side. Of course it's the vatjob., it seemingly slumps it shoulders, and lowering the blaster.
The sight of the exact compoments it's been looking for in Dara's hands, however, seems to brighten its mood a tiny bit, as it reaches for a ventilation fan. "Wow. I do-o-o-on't want to be the quartermaster responsible when you're around, young human.", it adds, thought it's clear that its pride is slightly wounded. "Hey, uh, you. Do you know a thing or two about droid rep-rep-repair, too, while we're at it?", it quizzes as it climbs up the ladder to start the raft assembly on the walker's side.
Your aunt said she and the other survivors were stuck down there for months, never making even a single sound, for fear of being eaten by the great clawed eel that still patrolled those tunnels. Eventually, the survivors ran out of food, and decided to to feed off each other. When finally, they were rescued, it was just her and one other left.
Sometimes, when you were naughty, she would threaten to eat you, too.
While you have grown to doubt the veracity of her story (for one thing, it bears more than a passing similarity to the plot of the holoseries Claws), perhaps something similar has happened here. There are likely no cannibals, and there might not even be any large, killer fish, but a mining accident would explain the water's strange odor, as well as the total absence of life in the area.
Though doubtful of the likelihood of his aunt's story being true, let alone such a thing repeating itself right next to their crash site, Zel is still sufficiently spooked by the thought that he decides that right now might not be the best time to further investigate the area. After treading water for a few moments longer, he turns and swims back to the downed walker.
"Weird smell down there," he comments once back above water and sitting on the AT-AT. "Smells like blood and oil, and not in a fun way like you've partied a little too hard at some Hutt's palace." The smuggler pauses and blinks. "Could be an industrial accident. If we're still around in the morning and the cannibals don't get us, maybe I'll look around a little more." With a laugh he lies back, staring up at the sky above them.
With a bike-sized hole cut in the AT-AT, Rod begins working on a makeshift boarding ramp to get the bikes out of the walker's interior, using the lightsaber to carve sections of the metal hull into the nessessary shapes. The whole process reminded him of wood carving and whittling he had done on Ithor, actually. Just less artistic and with worse consequences for a fumbled cut. Rod made a mental note to pick up a knife and some wood the next time he got a chance.
"Industrial accident?" Rod asks, while keeping his head down on his work. "From what? I don't see any industry out here."
The night passes quietly, and the fugitives take the chance to rest and recover, each organic spending an hour or two through the night to keep watch and work on personal tasks. The droid, however, works the night through constructing a raft.
As Ral wakes for his shift in the watch rotation, he brings the transceiver with him, occasionally cycling thru the only three unscrambled channels he had found earlier. The Imperial broadcast remains unchanged, and the pirate radio station has switched to softer, sleepier beats, but the scrambled fishermen have gone quiet.
Towards the end of his watch, however, he switches over to the fishermen just in time to hear one shout through the line, clear as crystal, "I got him! Clean through, just like you taught me."
A reply, "Good shot kid, don't get cocky. Chase after, flush it my way; if it sinks to its lair, it'll have beaten us."
The next reply is entirely garbled, too fuzzy to make out much more than "blood," and "rich." With the audio cutting in and back out, it is apparent now that the fishermen are talking over an unsecured comlink frequency. They, and whatever they are hunting, are likely to be nearby.
In the morning, the OOM-class Battle droid introduces their creation! Made out of 400 pounds of scrap, it is one ugly son of a gun. The raft floats, certainly, and sticks out a lot less than two and a half huge metal legs sticking straight into the air, or the bulk of the beast below in the water, but the question of locomotion and navigation still remains.
Flan rises early in the morning, after a fitful night of nervous sleep in the belly of the walker. She looks a little green, still adjusting to the gentle motion of the craft as it bobs on top of the water, and is relieved to sit outside and stare at the horizon while she sets up the water extractor and takes a long drink.
Peeking cautiously over the edge and into the water, she tries to see what could not be seen by moonlight, and prays that she won't have to dive in with whatever horror is surely lurking down there. The aquata rebreathers she pulled from the AT-AT supplies are piled in plain view, just waiting to be used. She eyes them suspiciously, hoping someone else will take the first plunge.
With the suns shining bright, the water is pristine, clear to the bottom. It's disorienting at first, as though the ocean floor was just there beneath your feet.
There are no fish, no people, no trace of whatever Zel claims is polluting the water, and no monster.
Rod awakes bright and early, pleased that his ability to sleep well in rough conditions hadn't faded in the years since the clone wars. His good mood slips a bit as he recognises a slight creak in his legs that wasn't there before as he gets up but he's thinking of other things by the time he's suited back up in his salvaged armor.
The old clone eyes OOM's creation dubiously. Didn't look like much but it wasn't as though the group was swimming in options at the moment. He gestures toward the bike sized hole and ramp he was working on the previous day. "Let's get those bikes out of the walker. We can lash them to the raft for propulsion."
Although she sleeps in the troop compartment of the walker - unconsciously seeking the familiarity of its confines - Dara rises early and clambers back atop the floating walker. The sleep schedule her parents had enforced was thrown out the hatch by the Imperial abduction, so her rest patterns are still very irregular.
To combat the gnawing hunger that threatens to roar furiously, she withdraws one of the ration packs from the utility belt she scavenged from the locker. She looks to the sky and curiously observes the change in color on the horizon. Wolfing down the dry, tasteless food, Dara watches her very first sunrise.
When Rod rises and begins giving direction, Dara snaps to attention and brushes the crumbs from her flight suit. She focuses on lashing the speeders to the raft, and the work distracts her from whatever might be hidden among the still waters.
While Dara works on the raft, Rod turns his attention to the water and the ocean floor. They hadn't seen anything the night before, but the visibility had been terrible. If there was anything down there, now would be the time to find it.
Rod stops at the water's edge for a moment, seeing Flan eyeing the rebreathers. "Don’t worry, I'll go first." And with that, the clone dives right in, trusting his suit's air supply.
Spotting the odd...dwellings? on the sea bed, Rod swims further down towards them to get a closer look.
Zel rises groggily, blinking his large eyes several times to chase away the last vestiges of sleep. He sits up just in time to see the aging clone dive into the water. What's he gonna do down there? Never seen a human swim all that well.
With a shake of his head the smuggler simply rolls over and, without even standing, slips off the side of the AT-AT into the water below.
He immediately sees Rod swimming down toward something, though for the life of him Zel can't tell what the clone thinks he sees. Unsure what else to do, he follows along behind Rod toward the sea floor.
Dara sets to work attaching the Grand Moff's speeder bikes to the droid's raft, and in short order crafts a heavy but reliable rudder/engine. While Flan resists yarfing, OOM-93b rests on low battery mode and Ral enjoys a well deserved late sleep, Zel and Rod swim down to explore the sea.
The water is cool and refreshing and crystal clear, the early morning sunlight dappling across the ocean floor like wrinkles in velvet. As the pair descends, a cluster of buildings comes into view, short, bald, round things ordered in a semi-circle around a large arena. Quarren huts, decently camouflaged, but missing the disguised roofs of coral or sea grass Zel has seen before.
There are twelve buildings all in all, each facing inward towards the arena. Eight of them are homes, all abandoned seemingly at a moment's notice, one even having left a viewscreen running, open to a black screen with the Imperial Cog dead center. One seems to be a community gathering area, another two are food stores, with huge quantities of rotted fish and seagrass locked behind barred doors, and the last is filled with hundreds of pressurized canisters, carefully organized.
Rod Life Sciences DC 25 or Zel Memory
They are creatures of vast intellect and unknowable whim.
While the water here is stiller and far shallower than where they usually make their homes, individual whaleodons or single family groups have been known to bless small communities like this one should they receive worship as they once did.
Wonderful. Quarren. Zel rolls his eyes as he descends. As the pair descend, though Zel's movement underwater is likely more fluid than Rod's, he generally keeps the armored man between him and the sea floor until they get down there. Rod is wearing armor, after all.
A quick survey of the little settlement reveals no Quarren or anyone else for that matter. Puzzled, the smuggler looks over at Rod and shrugs.
Wait, is that...? No way.
It takes the Mon Calamari a moment to notice the large depression in the arena, but when he does his mind immediately flashes with memories of stories told about massive whaleodons lurking in the deepest parts of the ocean.
After you finish loading the raft and hitching the speeders to it as an impromptu engine and rudder, you gather around to eat a meager breakfast of 10+ years old military rations and watch through the crystal clear water as Rod and Zel swim back and forth.
As you rest, all your devices begin broadcasting an Imperial radio signal. A familiar voice begins.
"Citizens of Mon Cala," the speaker swallows audibly. "This is your governor, Grand Moff Raelin Baldwin. Last night, I was attacked by terrorists who left me for dead. As you can tell, they were quite mistaken." A few short seconds of dead air. "However, they were but a symptom of the true illness plaguing our planet," he spits, incensed, full of vim, "unrest, disobedience, all this only breeds death. They opposed me, they thought to kill me, and now they, like many before them, have perished.
"So security must tighten, twice over! Imperial presence is now mandatory for group meetings of over twenty people. ID badges will be issued for citizenry and visitors alike over the next two weeks." The list of new and frightening laws continues for some time, spoken without thought or irony. "I care about you, Mon Cala," finishes the speaker. "Help us to keep you safe."
They are like the ocean; simultaneously a gentle caring mother, wanting only to house you, to protect and feed you, as well as a cruel and unkind mistress, personally dedicated to your destruction.
In more recent years, Zel knows that whaleodon meat, bones, blubber and blood has started selling for millions on the black market, and even more recently, begun to double and triple the longer the blockade stands.
As you contemplate the arena and empty houses, a strange buzzing comes from a long ways off. An engine, perhaps? Two? Yes, definitely, underwater and coming this way!
"Well, great."
"Uhh, Rod?" Zel calls out to the clone. "We got company on the way." He gestures to one of the empty buildings and begins swimming there. "Maybe we should, uh, hide and see who's coming." Without waiting for much discussion the smuggler quickly puts his plan into action.
The broadcast spooks Dara. She doesn't quite understand everything decreed, but the tone alone is enough to leave her shaken. Thus, when the sound of approaching engines comes within earshot, her response is to take cover within one of the walker's hatches, with her blaster rifle tightly in hand.
Rod nods at Zel and follows along with the Mon Calamari's plan, quietly hoping that whatever it was that they were hearing, it wasn't hostile. As he goes, he contacts the others above water with his helmet's integrated comlink. "Rod here. We're hearing engines approaching down here. We're moving to hide and see who it is and you might want to do the same."