if God had a name, what would it be, and would you call it to his face?
Jeez. The one day I have nothing to do at work but read LJ and be bored, and NOBODY posts all morning. Get on the ball, people! (c;
Anyway I guess I'll try to fix that lack of posts on my own. The school year is fast approaching, and with it a new lease on life for all the games we've dreamed about and plotted for all summer long. That means it's time to get caught up with Star Wars plot summaries if I plan to make this a regular thing at all in the coming year. Previous installment here.
Simon wakes up the next morning to the sound of something being transmitted to his comlink. When he looks at the message, he can't read it because it's heavily encoded, and no sort of key has been provided. G4 takes a look at it and determines that it's a very secure code often used by the Rebels, but his processor is unable to even begin to decrypt it. It seems that the group doesn't need to go to the Rebels, because the Rebels have come to them. However, their small triumph is all for nothing unless they can decode the message and figure out exactly what the Rebels want from them in the first place. Simon sends another transmission telling the Rebels that they can't decode the original message, but they just get the same message bounced back to them again.
Thus begins a mad rush to decode the apparently undecodable Rebel codes. G4 is the only one in the group with any sort of skill with cryptography, so he runs out and buys an illegal slicer unit and hard-wires it into his body. One day later, the message is only 1% decrypted. The group doesn't have that kind of time to wait around, so G4 decides that if he's going to break through the encryption, he's going to need to do it using the Iron Maiden's computer. So Simon sends a message up to the space station where the Iron Maidenis being repaired...only to learn that the Imperials are very curious about the nature and severity of the damage to the ship, and have thus closed the docking bay to anyone who's not a mechanic or an investigator. It doesn't matter that Simon is the owner of the ship; they're not going to let him in until the investigation is completed and the ship is repaired.
While this is going on, Sima decides that the group needs an alternate plan just in case this message-decrypting thing doesn't pan out. Sima has decided that the money to support the Rebellion has to come from somewhere, and that if he can find the people who pay for it, he can get his foot in the door. To him, this means looking around Corellia for the most upscale and swanky gatherings, going there, and asking around (discreetly, one would hope) until he finds some Rebel financial backers. To advance this goal, he spends Vem's money (without Vem's knowledge, of course) to buy a bunch of tickets to an expensive concert. This completely drains Vem's bank account.(1)
Meanwhile, the Rebels have kept sending. After a lot of thinking and not much action, Simon and the others eventually decide that the best course of action would be just to go up to the space station, barge in, and see what they can find out. They'll be harder to ignore in person. This definitely proves true, but convincing the spaceport employees that they need to access their locked-down ship proves more difficult than they thought it would be. They manage to get on the bad side of spaceport employee after spaceport employee, and are only saved from being kicked off the station and/or arrested by Imperials by Sidda's timely application of the Jedi mind trick.(2) G4 commits the most notable blunder: "I have it on good authority from my Jedi friend here that we're looking for Rebels." Sidda is horrified, but fortunately for everyone, the receptionist just thinks they're crazy and has them thrown out.
All the while Simon has been continually receiving the same encoded message to his comlink. The group realizes that the Rebels must have pretty urgent business with them, and they're not going to get anywhere by talking. So they resolve to break into the hangar and steal their own ship back despite the fact that repairs aren't yet completed. The group waits until the stormtroopers are changing shifts, and then G4 overrides the locking mechanism on the door. He feeds the encrypted data into the computer and soon discovers that it's a set of coordinates for an isolated planet and an invitation to visit the Rebel base there. After determining that while the ship is far from fixed, it'll hold together to fly to these coordinates, the group blasts off and makes their escape. Yes, this means that the expensive and non-refundable tickets that drained Vem's bank account end up not getting used.(3)
The planet the coordinates lead to is small, out-of-the-way, not very advanced technologically, and generally not the sort of place one would expect to find any sort of Rebel base. They start their search in one of the larger cities on the planet (which is still pretty small). After a rather comical misunderstanding which at least allows the group to establish that no, the natives do not know anything about a Rebel base(4), they learn that ships are often seen landing and taking off from a canyon to the north.
The group flies to the canyon and, while they don't see any other ships, they find a natural plateau where they can land and then get out to explore on foot. After wandering into the mouth of a cave and running into a guard who almost dies thanks to Sima's quick-draw twitchiness, they manage to clear up all misunderstandings and establish that they came here following the coordinates. They've found the Rebel base at long last. The Rebel lieutenant in charge of the base offers them a place to stay for as long as it takes them to sort everything out, and the exhausted group accepts it gratefully.
The next morning, the group wakes up to discover that Sima has vanished from the base. The Iron Maiden is still where they left it, and he's nowhere to be found on the surface. The Rebels report that a small shuttle is missing from their hidden landing pad, but they didn't see the ship depart and they were unable to track its trajectory. Everyone is concerned about this development, the group most of all, but the matter gets mostly dropped due to lack of evidence or hints to follow. Besides, when the Rebels learn that Sima is a former Imperial spy, they're not so sure they want him to be working for them anyway.(5)
However, the group has too much work to do to let themselves be concerned by Sima's absence (at least, not overtly). G4 and Vem set to repairing the Iron Maiden while Simon and Sidda explain their situation to the Rebel lieutenant. He tells them that the Rebellion has attracted a number of brilliant scientists being persecuted by the Empire, and that they've been relocated to a secret Rebel base at an undisclosed location. They're willing to use their resources to start finding a cure, provided that the group is willing to work with the Rebellion. Simon's news of the Imperial planet-killing disease concerns them, and they're certainly interested in having a self-proclaimed Jedi Knight on their side, but thanks to the group's previous shady associations they're not so sure if they trust them. The lieutenant says that he'll need to check them out a little more and contact his superiors to see if this is really the sort of business that the Rebel Alliance wants to get involved with.
After a few idle and nervous days and a few more inconclusive conversations like this one, the lieutenant comes to see Simon. He says that someone has arrived. Simon and the others go to the lieutenant's office, where they meet a nondescript human man who Simon recognizes immediately. His name is Syvna, and he's a fellow bounty hunter who was sort of a mentor and informant to Simon back when he was just getting started.(6) When the lieutenant asks Syvna how he found the hidden base, he skips over the question and says he's interested in collecting bounties or doing some other sort of freelance work for the Rebels. The lieutenant says he'll look into it and leaves them alone.
After the lieutenant leaves, Syvna tells Simon why he's really come to the Rebel base. It seems that word of the Iron Maiden's daring escape from both Simon's home planet and the Maw Cluster has begun to spread, and the Imperials have offered Syvna a large reward for information pertaining to the whereabouts of its crew. Syvna needed the money, so he took the job. He's been tracking them for a week or so now, and he just sent a message to the Imperials telling them the group's exact location. However, Syvna always liked Simon and thought he was an okay guy, so he's decided to at least inform his former protege that the Imperials are coming so he can get a head start. It should come as no surprise that Simon is not exactly grateful to hear this.
Simon and Sidda ditch Syvna and run back to warn the others. They find them in a storage room in the back of the base, looting scrap metal for parts. Despite Sidda's insistence that they stay behind to help the Rebels defend their base, since they were the ones who brought the trouble down on them in the first place, the others are in agreement that they should get off the planet as quickly as possible, leave the Rebels to their own devices, and try to find this Rebel medical installation on their own. To appease Sidda, the others agree to at least warn the Rebels of what is happening. They're on their way to do just that when they walk past an outer door and hear an unmistakable noise coming from the other side. Blaster fire. Looks like our heroes will be helping to defend the Rebel base after all - at least, if they want to get out of it alive.
1 - Again, a great reminder of why you should never ever EVER miss a session when you are in a campaign with paulkedarkhanna.
2 - I honestly do not remember a damn thing about what we were doing up here or what Simon and Sima kept saying to people to piss them off so much. I only remember walking into office after office, saying the wrong thing and the person getting upset, and having everyone else in the party shoot Sidda a meaningful look...at which point I would Jedi mind trick the person into forgetting and they would start the whole process over again. We seriously did this at least 5 times.
3 - Some hilarious quotes about this...
Sidda: Don't you think you should have asked Vem before you spent all of his money?
Simon: He won't mind. It's all for a good cause.
Sima: The cause of my ass. Saving it, that is.
And later on...
Simon: Vem's going to be so upset. He's a gambler who's about to wake up without any money.
G4: That's okay. You and Sima have more guns than he does.
4 - While reflecting on the fact that it's a good thing there's no Prime Directive in Star Wars: "Go down, conquer them, and set yourselves up as gods. That's our Prime Directive." - Iain
5 - This bizarre plot twist was, as I mentioned in the Vampire summaries, a consequence of Sima's player leaving for a month to recover from knee surgery. However, I think it definitely worked to our advantage here and elsewhere.
6 - Syvna was originally a PC. However, his player only showed up for one session and then vanished off the face of the Earth. I like the player a lot, but if what follows was going to be the kind of stuff he was planning to do to the party, I can't say I miss his presence in the game that much.
Thought I'd leave you with a nice little cliffhanger here. Who knows, I might even get to the next installment later today if work proceeds the way it's been going. Next up you can expect to see an epic battle (well, sort of) and the introduction of Aspree.
Anyway I guess I'll try to fix that lack of posts on my own. The school year is fast approaching, and with it a new lease on life for all the games we've dreamed about and plotted for all summer long. That means it's time to get caught up with Star Wars plot summaries if I plan to make this a regular thing at all in the coming year. Previous installment here.
Simon wakes up the next morning to the sound of something being transmitted to his comlink. When he looks at the message, he can't read it because it's heavily encoded, and no sort of key has been provided. G4 takes a look at it and determines that it's a very secure code often used by the Rebels, but his processor is unable to even begin to decrypt it. It seems that the group doesn't need to go to the Rebels, because the Rebels have come to them. However, their small triumph is all for nothing unless they can decode the message and figure out exactly what the Rebels want from them in the first place. Simon sends another transmission telling the Rebels that they can't decode the original message, but they just get the same message bounced back to them again.
Thus begins a mad rush to decode the apparently undecodable Rebel codes. G4 is the only one in the group with any sort of skill with cryptography, so he runs out and buys an illegal slicer unit and hard-wires it into his body. One day later, the message is only 1% decrypted. The group doesn't have that kind of time to wait around, so G4 decides that if he's going to break through the encryption, he's going to need to do it using the Iron Maiden's computer. So Simon sends a message up to the space station where the Iron Maidenis being repaired...only to learn that the Imperials are very curious about the nature and severity of the damage to the ship, and have thus closed the docking bay to anyone who's not a mechanic or an investigator. It doesn't matter that Simon is the owner of the ship; they're not going to let him in until the investigation is completed and the ship is repaired.
While this is going on, Sima decides that the group needs an alternate plan just in case this message-decrypting thing doesn't pan out. Sima has decided that the money to support the Rebellion has to come from somewhere, and that if he can find the people who pay for it, he can get his foot in the door. To him, this means looking around Corellia for the most upscale and swanky gatherings, going there, and asking around (discreetly, one would hope) until he finds some Rebel financial backers. To advance this goal, he spends Vem's money (without Vem's knowledge, of course) to buy a bunch of tickets to an expensive concert. This completely drains Vem's bank account.(1)
Meanwhile, the Rebels have kept sending. After a lot of thinking and not much action, Simon and the others eventually decide that the best course of action would be just to go up to the space station, barge in, and see what they can find out. They'll be harder to ignore in person. This definitely proves true, but convincing the spaceport employees that they need to access their locked-down ship proves more difficult than they thought it would be. They manage to get on the bad side of spaceport employee after spaceport employee, and are only saved from being kicked off the station and/or arrested by Imperials by Sidda's timely application of the Jedi mind trick.(2) G4 commits the most notable blunder: "I have it on good authority from my Jedi friend here that we're looking for Rebels." Sidda is horrified, but fortunately for everyone, the receptionist just thinks they're crazy and has them thrown out.
All the while Simon has been continually receiving the same encoded message to his comlink. The group realizes that the Rebels must have pretty urgent business with them, and they're not going to get anywhere by talking. So they resolve to break into the hangar and steal their own ship back despite the fact that repairs aren't yet completed. The group waits until the stormtroopers are changing shifts, and then G4 overrides the locking mechanism on the door. He feeds the encrypted data into the computer and soon discovers that it's a set of coordinates for an isolated planet and an invitation to visit the Rebel base there. After determining that while the ship is far from fixed, it'll hold together to fly to these coordinates, the group blasts off and makes their escape. Yes, this means that the expensive and non-refundable tickets that drained Vem's bank account end up not getting used.(3)
The planet the coordinates lead to is small, out-of-the-way, not very advanced technologically, and generally not the sort of place one would expect to find any sort of Rebel base. They start their search in one of the larger cities on the planet (which is still pretty small). After a rather comical misunderstanding which at least allows the group to establish that no, the natives do not know anything about a Rebel base(4), they learn that ships are often seen landing and taking off from a canyon to the north.
The group flies to the canyon and, while they don't see any other ships, they find a natural plateau where they can land and then get out to explore on foot. After wandering into the mouth of a cave and running into a guard who almost dies thanks to Sima's quick-draw twitchiness, they manage to clear up all misunderstandings and establish that they came here following the coordinates. They've found the Rebel base at long last. The Rebel lieutenant in charge of the base offers them a place to stay for as long as it takes them to sort everything out, and the exhausted group accepts it gratefully.
The next morning, the group wakes up to discover that Sima has vanished from the base. The Iron Maiden is still where they left it, and he's nowhere to be found on the surface. The Rebels report that a small shuttle is missing from their hidden landing pad, but they didn't see the ship depart and they were unable to track its trajectory. Everyone is concerned about this development, the group most of all, but the matter gets mostly dropped due to lack of evidence or hints to follow. Besides, when the Rebels learn that Sima is a former Imperial spy, they're not so sure they want him to be working for them anyway.(5)
However, the group has too much work to do to let themselves be concerned by Sima's absence (at least, not overtly). G4 and Vem set to repairing the Iron Maiden while Simon and Sidda explain their situation to the Rebel lieutenant. He tells them that the Rebellion has attracted a number of brilliant scientists being persecuted by the Empire, and that they've been relocated to a secret Rebel base at an undisclosed location. They're willing to use their resources to start finding a cure, provided that the group is willing to work with the Rebellion. Simon's news of the Imperial planet-killing disease concerns them, and they're certainly interested in having a self-proclaimed Jedi Knight on their side, but thanks to the group's previous shady associations they're not so sure if they trust them. The lieutenant says that he'll need to check them out a little more and contact his superiors to see if this is really the sort of business that the Rebel Alliance wants to get involved with.
After a few idle and nervous days and a few more inconclusive conversations like this one, the lieutenant comes to see Simon. He says that someone has arrived. Simon and the others go to the lieutenant's office, where they meet a nondescript human man who Simon recognizes immediately. His name is Syvna, and he's a fellow bounty hunter who was sort of a mentor and informant to Simon back when he was just getting started.(6) When the lieutenant asks Syvna how he found the hidden base, he skips over the question and says he's interested in collecting bounties or doing some other sort of freelance work for the Rebels. The lieutenant says he'll look into it and leaves them alone.
After the lieutenant leaves, Syvna tells Simon why he's really come to the Rebel base. It seems that word of the Iron Maiden's daring escape from both Simon's home planet and the Maw Cluster has begun to spread, and the Imperials have offered Syvna a large reward for information pertaining to the whereabouts of its crew. Syvna needed the money, so he took the job. He's been tracking them for a week or so now, and he just sent a message to the Imperials telling them the group's exact location. However, Syvna always liked Simon and thought he was an okay guy, so he's decided to at least inform his former protege that the Imperials are coming so he can get a head start. It should come as no surprise that Simon is not exactly grateful to hear this.
Simon and Sidda ditch Syvna and run back to warn the others. They find them in a storage room in the back of the base, looting scrap metal for parts. Despite Sidda's insistence that they stay behind to help the Rebels defend their base, since they were the ones who brought the trouble down on them in the first place, the others are in agreement that they should get off the planet as quickly as possible, leave the Rebels to their own devices, and try to find this Rebel medical installation on their own. To appease Sidda, the others agree to at least warn the Rebels of what is happening. They're on their way to do just that when they walk past an outer door and hear an unmistakable noise coming from the other side. Blaster fire. Looks like our heroes will be helping to defend the Rebel base after all - at least, if they want to get out of it alive.
1 - Again, a great reminder of why you should never ever EVER miss a session when you are in a campaign with paulkedarkhanna.
2 - I honestly do not remember a damn thing about what we were doing up here or what Simon and Sima kept saying to people to piss them off so much. I only remember walking into office after office, saying the wrong thing and the person getting upset, and having everyone else in the party shoot Sidda a meaningful look...at which point I would Jedi mind trick the person into forgetting and they would start the whole process over again. We seriously did this at least 5 times.
3 - Some hilarious quotes about this...
Sidda: Don't you think you should have asked Vem before you spent all of his money?
Simon: He won't mind. It's all for a good cause.
Sima: The cause of my ass. Saving it, that is.
And later on...
Simon: Vem's going to be so upset. He's a gambler who's about to wake up without any money.
G4: That's okay. You and Sima have more guns than he does.
4 - While reflecting on the fact that it's a good thing there's no Prime Directive in Star Wars: "Go down, conquer them, and set yourselves up as gods. That's our Prime Directive." - Iain
5 - This bizarre plot twist was, as I mentioned in the Vampire summaries, a consequence of Sima's player leaving for a month to recover from knee surgery. However, I think it definitely worked to our advantage here and elsewhere.
6 - Syvna was originally a PC. However, his player only showed up for one session and then vanished off the face of the Earth. I like the player a lot, but if what follows was going to be the kind of stuff he was planning to do to the party, I can't say I miss his presence in the game that much.
Thought I'd leave you with a nice little cliffhanger here. Who knows, I might even get to the next installment later today if work proceeds the way it's been going. Next up you can expect to see an epic battle (well, sort of) and the introduction of Aspree.