Ralk Dall'rey's page

The Intrigue
Colossal* space transport
Init +6**; Senses Perception +10
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Defenses Reflex 20 (flat-footed 15), Fort 26; +15 armor
hp 120; DR 15; SR 30; Threshold 76
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Speed fly 12 squares (max. velocity 800 km/h), fly 3 squares (starship scale)
Ranged ion cannon +9 (5d10x2 ion, pilot) OR
Ranged proton torpedo +9 (9d10x2, pilot) OR
Ranged docking gun (blaster cannon) +9 (3d12, pilot)
Ranged laser cannons +8 (5d10x2, gunner) OR
Ranged docking gun (heavy repeating blaster) +8 (3d10, gunner)
Fighting Space 12x12 or 1 square (starship scale); Cover total
Base Atk +6; Grp +43
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Abilities Str 42, Dex 18, Con --, Int 14
Skills Initiative +6, Mechanics +12, Perception +10, Pilot +11, Use Computer +14
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Crew 2 (PCs); Passengers 6
Cargo 140 tons (1 ton smuggler's compartment); Consumables 2 months; Carried Craft none
Payload 6 proton torpedoes
Hyperdrive x2 (backup x12), navicomputer
Availability Unique; Cost not for sale
*This ship is treated as a Gargantuan starfighter for the purposes of being targeted by capital ship weapons, dogfighting, and using starship maneuvers
**Typically rolled using Pilot instead
Statistics calculated with Ralk as pilot and Kyra as gunner

Base Ship: Corellian YT-2400, Colossal space transport
MODIFICATIONS
--Bonus EP (-10 cargo): +2 EP
--Combat Thrusters: 1 EP, 10,000 credits
--Docking guns, 2: 2 EP, 2000 credits
----Blaster cannon: 3000 credits
----Heavy repeating blaster: 4000 credits
--Hypertransceiver: 1 EP, 10,000 credits
--Medium ion cannon: 2 EP, 3000 credits
--Proton torpedo launchers, 2: 2 EP, 9800 credits
--Slave circuits, basic: 1 EP, 5000 credits
--Smuggler's compartments: 1 EP, 1000 credits
--Transponder, disguised: 0 EP, 2500 credits
Total: 12 EP, 50,300 credits

"How I got that beauty?" The Bothan grins as he takes another peek at his hand, the sabacc cards barely leaving the table. "Actually, I won her in a game a lot like this one. The Sullustan I lifted her from had some choice words and tried to go back on the stakes, but I convinced him it'd be smarter to keep his word." He looks back up and leans back in his chair. "Call me a risk-taker, but I've got a feeling staking her against you could pan out. Maybe get some new thrusters installed. What do you say? I'm sure you'll keep to fair bets and promises."
- - - - -
Eshka Dall'rey looked up from the circuits as he heard his son's call. The Bothan engineer had been wrapping up the day's work in any case, having finally fixed the bug causing two converters to read as incompatible, and the shout of "Father!" was a welcome excuse finish his work. He nodded to the nearest other worker, who waved in return, and set his tools down--they marked the spot he'd return to the next day. He stood, his knees only giving slight resistance, and turned to see his son, almost an adolescent.

"Ralk. What brings you to the shipyard?" Eshka wasn't concerned at his son's presence--the ship they were working on was technically a prototype, a secret project, but only the head engineers knew that, and to maintain the secrecy they'd decided to construct in an open factory environment. To the Bothans, information are everything, and secrets are just a mystery to solve; the best place to hide was in plain sight.

"I wanted to see you at work. Did you fix the converter bug?" Ralk clapped his hands in excitement. "It was the circuit switch they installed, right? The nonstandard coupling workaround didn't do the job right?"

Eshka heard the low whistle that accompanied his partner's footsteps. Trem Ages'ek was himself a respected mechanic, although a little gray around the edges. He was mainly serving as a supervisor and consultant for this job, but he knew as much about the fundamentals of ship construction as anyone. Now, he appraised Ralk with a nod and a smile. "You've got a clever boy here, Eshka. I wasn't talking shop like that 'til I was at least fifteen. What's your name, son?"

Ralk was positively beaming at Trem--any Bothawui native who loved ships and mechanics as much as Ralk considered the man a celebrity. Eshka chuckled and clapped a hand around his son's shoulders. "This is Ralk, and you're right. He's very smart, very interested in the industry. I've got a feeling one day he'll take both our jobs--not that we'll mind when it comes." He laughed again, and Ralk beamed at his father. "Well, son, you ready to head home?"

"Just let me see where you left off!" Ralk slipped under Eshka's arm and crouched down by the toolbox, as he'd done whenever he had the chance to visit his father's workplace. It was a good way to learn hands-on, Eshka figured, and it gave him a practical look at the kind of work a mechanic did. It wasn't always glamorous, and some days the progress looked almost minimal to an untrained eye, but Ralk certainly seemed to like it. Besides, Eshka knew more or less how much his son really knew about starship design, and the real complexities of this ship were probably beyond him--

"Dad?" The questioning tone, clearly a repetition, drew Eshka from his thoughts, and he saw Ralk looking up at him. "Did you hear me? This wiring here, did you double-back on the patch you said they made a week ago? 'Cause if they're still using the substitute, it might cancel the charge once it reaches these."

It was Eshka's turn to stare in surprise, his jaw half-open. Did we fix those? I told them to replace, but... He hadn't even considered that possibility, it had completely slipped his mind as he put in the wiring today. He turned to Trem, who was laughing. "Like I said: clever boy."
- - - - -
It had taken the bounty hunters nearly two standard months, but they finally had him captured. Ralk Dall'rey might have been in the cockpit, but the team was standing in his only path out, and they'd already disabled his thrusters. Ralk wasn't going anywhere, not in the ship that Grolla the Hutt had paid them to steal back. The only thing that bothered them was how smug the Bothan looked, leaned back in the pilot's seat, and how smug he sounded when he responded to their commlink order to hand over the ship.

"Alright, I admit it, you got me. Ripping out my ion drive's wiring, well, it's a little brute-force overkill for my taste, but it gets the job done." How he knew they'd ripped them out specifically, the hunters weren't sure, but it didn't matter. "It'd take too long to fix, too. That's the recurring story of this ship, though, I suppose. Even how I got her. Bought her from a pirate if you can believe it. He was in the business of jacking ships, not fixing them, and it broke down too often for him to use it. It took a lot of work to get her in good order, but the price was practically theft, and look where she is today."

They can see him lean forward in the seat and rest his hand on a control joystick, but they figure it's pointless--until they see a panel shift open under the cockpit and hear the whirr of weapon coming on. Surely he wasn't foolish enough to fire starship cannons in here? "Of course, that was before I added the docking gun," Ralk says, and the bounty hunters have just enough time to raise their guns before the blaster cannon fires its first shot.
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Ralk arrived at the shipyard as soon as he could, having narrowly avoided three major collisions on his speeder bike along the way. He was still too late--security was already crawling, legal officers and paramedics everywhere. He slipped through the perimeter and ran inside, looking for his father. The inside of the factory was chaos: fires still burning, heaps of twisted metal and scorch marks everywhere. As soon as he'd seen the news of the attack he'd made for the factory. He needed to see his father, make sure he was okay.

He reached the door to the hangar and stood in shock for a moment. The inside of the hangar was cleaner than the rest of the facility, as though there hadn't been as much widespread fighting here--they must have had a clean getaway by the time they reached it. The bodies were already cleaned up, but it was easy to see where they'd probably been from scorch marks and splashes of blood here and there. Most obviously, though, the ship was gone. The starship his father had been working on for the past six years, the ship that had been his pride and joy, the ship that would likely serve as his legacy for the Dall family, perhaps the entire Rey clan or even the whole of Bothawui--gone. The hangar's ceiling doors were open to the sky above. Whoever took it must have simply flown it away from the facility.

As Ralk stared up at the sky he heard a weak voice call his name, and he turned to see his father sitting in the back of a medical speeder. He ran over, and quickly explained to the attending doctor that he was family in order to get by. Eshka Dall'rey was leaning against the side of the speeder, his eyes barely open and his arms folded beneath a blanket. "Ralk, my son." His voice was weary, harsh. "They took it. The Intrigue. She was... she was finished."

Ralk blinked. His father hadn't mentioned just how close the ship was to completion, nor that it had been named. "Who took it?" He crouched beside Eshka, but when he reached out to grasp his father's arms, the older man groaned and leaned back, falling faint. Ralk turned to the nearest paramedic in surprise and fear. "What's wrong with him?"

The medic glanced at Eshka and shook his head sadly. "We think he was working with one of the computers when they came in." He pointed at a space in the hangar where smoldering piles of slagged material lay on a few tables. "Either they threw a grenade or they had some powerful weapons, but whatever it was, it blew the whole bank. He's stable, but only because his limbs took the worst of it." The medic paused and frowned, then looked Ralk in the eye. "Son, I'm sorry to say this, but your father lost both his arms from the elbow down. He'll live, and he can get prosthetics, but..."

Ralk fought back the tears and turned to regard his father's unconscious form. He knew the way that sentence ended: cybernetic prostheses were getting better all the time, but they took years to master controlling, and they almost never matched the fine motor function of the original hand. Eshka Dall'rey might survive, but his career--his life--was over.
- - - - -
"At first I thought it might be Mandalorians," Ralk was saying. He was three drinks deep in Corellian absinthe, and of all the stories the bartender had heard about how the Bothan had found his ship, this was the first one that sounded at all true, even if it was mostly slurred. "Y'know, they were causing trouble at that point, everyone was talking about them. I figured, hey, it's a super special ship, why wouldn't they want it?" He looked at the bartender a second too long for it to seem rhetorical, but then kept talking before he got an answer. "But it was dead ends. Turns out, when a ship goes missing, it actually usually ain't them. More about the whole mercenary and conquest thing, as it turns out."

Ralk got quiet again, and the bartender thought it was over. As he turned back to the stock, though, he heard another voice--the Echani woman who was sitting a couple seats down. "So, who did steal it?"

The bartender turned back in time to see the customary smile cross Ralk's face, and then the Bothan turned to look at the Echani. "Would you believe," he said, now in a tone that was too honest-sounding to be anything but, "that it was an interstellar gang of Jawas?"
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Ralk glanced around and nodded, mostly to himself. As far as Hutt crime dens went, it was a decent one. At least it was lit well enough for him to see. The whole dark and brooding aesthetic had never really captured his taste, and it had a lot of drawbacks to accompany the fashion aspect. After all, what was the point of looking good if nobody could see you? And it made it hard to shoot anything.

The prod of a blaster pistol in his back brought Ralk back to the current situation, and reminded him he was here for more than interior decoration. Grolla the Hutt had his ship, at the moment, and Ralk had spent the better part of the last four months tracking it down. The Hutt was a relatively minor crime lord in the big picture, but his resources were still enough to make things difficult for a lone smuggler trying to recoup his losses. [i]You get impounded planetside one time and they act like the Galaxy's coming to an end. Now he'd gotten himself captured and brought right to Grolla's... pseudopod, and he hoped it wasn't all in vain.

"So, let me see if I understand you correctly." The Hutt's speech was almost lethargic, and of course in its own language. "You take a job from me and fail. You lose almost a full ton of precious spice to Republic dogs, and think I won't retaliate? Then when I take what now belongs to me, you spend how long looking, and then turn yourself in?" The Hutt eyed him for a moment, then began to chuckle. "What did you think, Ralk? That I would let you walk away with my ship?"

Ralk grinned and shook his head. "Not exactly. I figured I'd come in here, we'd go through this back and forth poodoo for a bit, and then I'd shoot my way out and fly away with my ship."

There was a tense moment of silence, and then Grolla started laughging, so the rest of his court did as well. Even Ralk let out a chuckle and a nod as he hung his head, breathing deeply to prepare for what came next. It'd be a lot easier with some backup. Maybe it's time I looked for a copilot. "It's a lot to go through to get back a ship, isn't it?"

Grolla's question didn't really need an answer, but Ralk shrugged. "You don't know what I went through to win it in the first place." In the same moment he finished the last word, he spun and snatched the blaster from the guard behind him, threw himself across the floor into some cover, and then the shooting started.
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"Remind me again how getting this ship was half as much trouble as holding onto it?" Kyra's voice crackles over the comms from the gunner's seat, and Ralk grins as he pushes the throttle ever further. The woman is nothing but a boon: she's handy with tools, she's good in a fight, and she's a very capable copilot. He's glad she has his back, especially in situations like a dogfight with hyperspace pirates.

"Oh, that all started with a pazaak game. You believe people still play that? Ready for a roll." Ralk dips the controls and ramps the ship into a rolling spin that avoids several laser blasts and gives Kyra an opening to peg the nearest of the starfighters. "Stakes go up and up and up, and when we max out it ends in a tie. Usually house wins, but since the whole thing was underground, what do we do, right?" He pauses to slow the Intrigue just long enough for another starfighter to fly past, and he hits them with a blast from his ion cannon, leaving the ship dead in space for him to blaze past. "So from there we settle on a swoop race. Mister Duros is pretty sure of himself, but then, he hadn't met me before, and most Bothans are more known for their inquisitive minds than their handiwork with an engine. Learn new things every day, and that day he learned a little about letting stereotypes run away with you."

Ralk checks the sensors to see Kyra blast the last of the real pursuers, and then diverts weapon power to kickstart the hyperdrive to full speed. "Of course, it always helps if you sabotage the other guy's bike before the race. Let's just say this isn't the first time I've flown this ship away from angry pirates with blasters."
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Ralk was sitting in a Coruscant cantina when the Republic agent came with the deal. He knew even as it was offered that he didn't really need to take it. For all the man's bluster, they couldn't really pin half the crimes he listed on Ralk--and a few of them were jobs he hadn't even pulled, which he wasn't about to correct. Still, he hadn't actually had work lately, and although the Intrigue had all the necessities, there were always more things to put in. If he could afford the process, he could modify some cargo space to hold extra sensor suites, or even route in some more maneuvering thrusters, or better shields...

He was already aware of the situation, at least in broad strokes. Most people were, especially on Coruscant, and especially if their jobs revolved around dealing with blockades and other trade issues. He'd already been approached by two other potential employers, offering jobs that were much less legal. One even paid better. But Ralk hadn't made his reputation or his credits by taking the simple option, or the expected option, or even the option that paid best right away. You had to think long-term, had to play the competition and make the move they don't expect. You had to take risks and hope you'd rigged the odds enough that it came out in your favor.

So when the agent finished her speech, he simply nodded and said yes. She blinked a few times and gave a thin smile that looked almost annoyed. "Just yes? That's it? No protests, no claims of innocence, no negotiating payment?"

"Oh, I'm sure there'll be negotiation." Ralk winked. "But that's for later. For now, what say you buy us a round to celebrate?"

The agent stared at him and then snorted. "They said you were an odd one. Here I had a whole speech on doing the right thing lined up."

"I'm glad I didn't have to sit through it. You started with that, I would've said no."

"That doesn't surprise me." She sighed and raised a finger to get a waiter's attention. "So what's your deal, Dall'rey? You and your ship. It's gotta be custom. Where'd you even get it?"

Even as he ordered his drink, the Bothan's eyes were lit up. When the waiter turned away, he grinned at the agent and leaned forward. "Where I got the Intrigue? I'll tell you. It all starts with a chance cube, see..."