#Yautja Huntsworn

[stellaralchemist]

Come Fly With Me - A Summary

Or: The Gang Robs Protostar

The Starchaser let down amid the jungles of Celestion, the clouds above heavy with rain and rolling with thunder. It was a gloomy day, the jungles lightened only by the lights from the ship and the fires of a crashed ship just at the other end of their little clearing.

“Okay, but how come the ship is on fire?” Jeremy Murdoch asked, sensibly enough given the situation. He was reasonably pragmatic for an exiled Cassian who seemed to spend at least fifty percent of his time inebriated.

"Yeah... I thought it crashed last year or something,” Lady Starheart supplied, but it was too late. The back end of the ship was not on fire and despite the fact it was covered in tumbling vines that should suggest it had been here far too long to be on fire the gang was away.

It wouldn’t really do to be last on the ship, would it? Lady Starheart always ran freckled-face first into danger.

As the gang scrambled around like ants, trying to make hide or hair of this fascinating vessel the ever-sensible Morducai, with his oddly glowing pistols, waited down below. He was far too sensible to get caught in the trap, the trap which appeared to have sprung when rustling sounded from the side. Unluckily for Morducai he seemed to be wrong, and the little bot appeared to be harmless.

Bolo was a Chua, and Bolo was not wholly sensible. E excitedly poked around the little bot before announcing to the crowd, "Is just new Protostar bot. No bombs. Unless bombs come in original model." E couldn’t seem to stop irself looking just a little disappointed with this fact.

"Aww, poor buddy," Bron said, taking a step up to have a look. The granok was always sympathetic to robots, perhaps because (with proper maintenance and unlike the humans around him) they could live as long as he could. "Must'a gone down with the ship."

The granok scraped some mud away from the bot. “You look like an Isaac.”

The gang, with some intermittent bickering, and with the Isaac’s help discovered a door, its keypad indicating that it was even still being powered, at least a little bit. The red light waxed and waned over its face.

“Ooh, power! Good news for us, probably.” Bolo exclaimed. Bolo was relentlessly positive.

"Hopefully," Jeremy muttered to the chua. He was not as relentlessly positive. "Unless there's turrets behind the door or something."

“Is that likely, with Protostar?” Seeker asked, it was possible he was the least positive person in Celestion at the moment, given the current company this was also extremely impressive.

"One advertising bot and nothing else is a bit weird though, right? Protostar shit is usually so... you know, protected,” Lady Starheart pointed out helpfully. It was all a bit weird.

At the door, Jeremy was having trouble. He had a special eye that should have helped him get in, as it stood all he managed was to explode the panel. That made things rather difficult for Bolo, who tried to reconnect some wires. E managed the wires alright, they shocked the chua so badly e ended up rolling down the stairs, smelling of burnt fur.

Jenny Brightmist had a laser, and as the usual ways of opening a door didn’t seem to be working she tried that. Jenny Brightmist was an engineer, an excellent one at that, but even she couldn’t seem to do much more than put a little dent in the thing. Protostar was not fond of being robbed but they also weren’t immune to being blown up. The slightly weakened door coupled with a large number of explosives rendered the doors into pieces and revealed a treasure hoard of gadgets and gizmos, many of which were most definitely not for public consumption.

The hoard was enough to send Bolo into a dead faint but Yautja, the old draken, the clanlord of Mikros who was now the clanfather by default of the Starchaser, knew how to sort that out at least. "He'll come to. Watch this." He leaned down over the chua and said, lowly, "Morducai is touching your tools."

As the crew began to load up the goods, Bolo launched irself at the one-eyed man while Lady ran behind screaming,  "Bolo! Bolo no! Yautja was just trying to wake you up buddy! Don't hurt his face!" She hesitated and helpfully added, "Or his dick!"

It took the crew a few hours to load up the hoard of equipment, above the sky rumbled with thunder and below the crew sat on the ramp, sweating, as the last few pieces went away. Isaac, who had helpfully followed along and beeped cheerfully was nowhere to be seen, an oddity that the crew may have happily overlooked had a heart-rending and panicked mess of beeps not sounded from somewhere in the woods.

Bron was off already, that soft spot for robots would get him hurt one day, and behind him Lady Starheart, whose soft spot for idiots would get her killed. From there it was a domino effect of sorts. Yautja followed along with Jenny, and then Morducai and Jeremy. Seeker and Bolo were smart, they stayed back, at least for the moment.

Isaac was in a clearing, found smoking and injured, its front panels gouged away. It sounded as though something stalked the woods around and Bron, helpful as he was, focused on fixing the droid. Lady Starheart called for Bolo to bring them supplies, something she regretted when the Chua appeared and, beneath the clearing, a crude trap door sent all but Morty, Seeker, and Jeremy tumbling into a cage.

The trapped gang came to with numerous injuries, a snapped leg, cracked ribs, an injured shoulder… perhaps the worst was Yautja’s broken tail. Those were important to Draken, having it broken was a rather large tragedy. Still, none of them were in as bad a state as the bones around them, so there was still hope.

They lay in pain until helpfully supplied with medkits and a few beers from the safe men above. There didn’t seem to be anything to perform a rescue with, either inside the ship or outside. And so, after an hour’s work at the top the three men disappeared and the injured five below were left in the dark, to ponder what had happened to the bones around them.

------

It was six hours or so, before anything happened. When it did it came in the form of a J-X3 Protostar Shipping Protection Unit, its shoulder-mounted laser cannons were decorated with red and gold leaves tied together with vines and it communicated toward the cage in a series of beeps. It looked like it might be an Edgar, possibly a Francis. It came with five other protection units, these ones smaller and flying.

“This definitely how Chua expected to die,” Bolo observed. That was fair, now that it was upon them it seemed reasonable now they would all die this way.

Edgar/Francis tried to communicate, Bron tried to translate, they came to the agreement that what the bots wanted was the Starchaser and this was non-negotiable.

"Tell them they can get fucked,” Lady said after two abrupt a laugh. “Over my dead body and all of yours. Sorry Bolo, dude." She did sound apologetic about that but at least this way her mother would be wrong and she wouldn’t be dying alone.

"That's a no from the captain, friend. How about we work something else out?" Bron asked hopefully but this was not a negotiation on either side. But Isaac was there and Isaac was helpful. It tried to point out the power core in the corner and may have succeeded then if Seeker hadn’t appeared in another cave mouth.

The three men who had not fallen had been trudging all day, through miles of twisting caves, until they found a tunnel that opened here. And now, frustrated, Seeker has stepped out to try to negotiate. This may have been a poor decision given the jumpiness and unease of the bots, one fires and burns the man’s arm. It is not going well.

The bots descended into bickering, the one that shot Seeker even tries to offer him a pebble as an apology. It isn’t going well. The pebble clatters to the ground. The bot looks upset if bots can.

In the cage Bron is just excited to see Jeremy, they are good friends after all. A few pleasantries are exchanged, an attempt to understand what is going on. Edgar (or Francis) points to the power core, it lies dead in the corner beside a powerless bot. An examination of the others yields an indication that they’re all running low on power, their indicators are yellow and red.

Jenny voidslipped out of the cage, why she hadn’t done that hours ago was anyone’s guess but now she stood next to Morty, looking over the power core.

"Power core's fine,” Morty said “Just off. Looks like these bots tried to fix the damage to it and got themselves fried."

"Shame,” Jenny said without meaning it.

They got to work while the bots freed the caged group. They did look excited to be free at least, it was better than being in the cage. The bots seemed mostly curious about them, the bots hadn’t seen people in a while, not living ones anyway.

On the edge of the room Jenny, Seeker, and Bolo were at work on the power core while Jeremy and Bron determined whose fault this was (Bron’s) and Lady Starheart expressed her happiness that Morty had not “Stolen her ship and fucked off”.

Things, it seemed, had ended well for the gang. They repowered the robots (who still had a cage full of bones it was best not to think about) and said their farewells to Isaac, who sent them off happily. And then, well, they were up in the air. Back home and safe.

Well, except for Bron who had a bomb around his neck, but that was very much a different issue.

#Lady Starheart #jeremy murdoch #Morducai Mossfoot #seeker eldanhand #Yautja Huntsworn #Jenny Brightmist #Bron Dreadnaught #The Starchaser #Treasure Hunt Adventures #WSRP #Adventurelogs In Space