Inner Reflection

[Sasha Santhe]

It was an intriguing design back in the day, a cloaking device designed and tested by Sienar Fleet Systems. It even worked, not that the big wigs at the time knew it. It wasn’t the first cloaking device the company had created, they had created so many, however it was the first that wasn’t reliant on crystals. Sabotage, rebel scum, they had damaged the cloak and stolen the design schematics. But now Sasha was on the trail, hundreds of years old it was.

Raxus junk heaps. Sasha didn’t hate the junk heaps as much as she thought she would. It was a chance to reflect and to practice her arts of Mechu-Deru. She collected parts and used the force to meld machine together creating a strange entourage of motley pieced droids. They fanned out in the area designated After a week of searching they were closing in on their querry. At least that is what the woman told herself. The truth was they couldn’t be certain. “You certain that junk dealer said the cloak ship was here?”

Cloaked ship junked for years. The device schematics sold by the junk dealer matched the plans Sasha had in her database of Project NOVA. “Well Emperor?” She liked to call [member="Darth Janus"] Emperor in her petulant tone. Why not? Sirella did it. “And you [member="Jared Ovmar"], can’t you be of more use?”

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] | [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Tyrin loved Raxus Prime. Not the smell of it, obviously. It was a treasure trove of resources and recyclables just waiting to be harnessed for a good cause. The farcical facsimile that was the Silver Jedi should have been honored to own such a planet, but instead they just sat around in what should have been Hegemony space, stinking up the place with the clumsy logic and faulty reasoning. Tyrin had considered it next to impossible to be worse than the Jedi, yet these upstarts had managed to do so. And they did it all in addition to having a bland silver color scheme.

Clearly, a force to be reckoned with.

The Umbaran frowned at being reminded of his former post. "If I weren't certain I wouldn't have brought you here and come by myself."

In addition to the presence of the Santhe harlot, an Ovmar harlot was present as well. Tyrin had to give Jared credit, he wasn't as annoying as he had been when he slammed into his office on Hypori and acted like a troglodytic toad. At least now he was laboring towards a cause higher than himself. Sasha, on the other hand was content to remain as scornful as she could. Some people.

"I'll call the search team."

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Darth Janus"] | [member="Sasha Santhe"]

In contrast to the former Emperor I really did not enjoy wading through the piles of waste and garbage, it seemed… dirty to a degree. Then again, Tyrin had been the Emperor of the Sith Empire, in that capacity he had probably become used to wading through proverbial crap and all that. Sasha was getting on my nerves yet again, there wasn’t really anything to do here, except running around trying to find that damn prototype thingie of hers.

And yet she insisted on implying that I could do something, which was fairly annoying to say the least, oh well. I walked around for some more, ignoring her question pointedly, before I finally decided to address Tyrin. Until I realized I didn’t actually have anything to say, and instead just kept the silence for a while longer.

One step, two step, three step and then my eyes were attracted to something in the dirt, I picked it up and it was an old holozine tabloid with Sasha on the frontpage.

“Catch, Ardik.”

Which was followed by me throwing the tabloid in Tyrin’s direction.

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] | [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Tyrin deftly snatched the magazine out of the air as it sailed towards him. He did this with one hand, as his other was occupied with keeping the comlink in his ear active as he called in the search droids. Tyrin rolled the magazine up to get a better look at it. The title was barely legible. It read "Sasha Santhe: Brilliant CEO or Spoiled Trollop?" Frankly, Tyrin didn't enjoy magazines. They were for the low brow dregs of society. They usually reflected this in their content. A good example was this one, because it assumed being a brilliant CEO and spoiled trollop were mutually exclusive.

"How completely interesting." Tyrin remarked, crumpling the thing up and tossing it to the side. "Thank you for sharing."

Hopefully Ovmar would find some helpfulness within him before they were done here. Overhead, three Z4 Cargo-loading droids appeared. They had been refitted with shovels for hands and were presently each carrying a duo of Z3 Labor Droids armed with other mundane digging equipment. Tyrin had taken a liking to Cestus' products as of late. It was probably because the writer for Tyrin and the writer for Cestus Cybernetics were the same person, but who really knew about that, anyway?

At Tyrin's direction, they started digging about. They knew what they were looking for.

 

[Sasha Santhe]

[member="Darth Janus"] & [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Sasha rolled her eyes at the two man-children and snorted. The search parties were out, the location was confirmed to be around here. Wrinkling her nose she thought about the dirty work. “So Tyrin,” Sasha asked as she scanned the readings from the droids out there. “I’m getting energy readings from up ahead.” She could imagine Tyrins ears perking up underneath his glorious locks of platinum hair. Yes, this was promising, the most promising reading they had in at least the last day and a half.

Junk, piled up everywhere. As Sasha walked by she pulled down droids and used her Merchu-deru to warp and manipulate the various parts assembling a further entourage of droids behind her. They would be needed to disassemble the datacore and cart away the ships computers. “Lord Janus, are you getting these readings?” Something was active, it wasn’t the barely registered signals of a dead ship, no it was something else. “Can you feel that?” Technology, something big. Her mechu-deru sense was tingling. Rubble shook as something old awoke underneath the cluttered piles of discarded technology. Something old and deadly, a massive droid cobbled together from whatever pieces it could find.

Sasha light her lightsaber as she stared at the Guardian. Why wouldn’t the derelict they were looking for have a guardian of some sort? No way a cliché like that wasn’t buried in the junk.

 

[Arage Bao]

I blinked.

Then I blinked again.

Which was closely followed by a third blink. Who the hell came up with a Derelict Guardian Droid Thingie in the middle of nowhere, protecting some stupid prototype that had never worked anyway. I sighed and looked around… where the feth did Janus go? Again, I sighed and then shrugged to myself, couldn’t get any worse than this I suppose.

“BARBARA. GET ME MY LEMON-POWERED ION CANNON.”

And out of nowhere my secretary came running with a prototype cannon, I took it with a serious look on my face and… faced the Garbage Demon.

“It’s Recycling Time.”

 

[Sasha Santhe]

“Really?” Sasha said rolling her eyes, “Its recycling time?”

She stared at the giant mechanical creature that was lobbing its way towards the trio. A mass of droids rushed at the thing as Sasha controlled them like puppeteer. The great garbage guardian swung its mighty arm and swept a number of the droids away. “I mean really, recycling time?” Seriously what a loser, Sasha thought. She stood at the creature and narrowed her eyes facing it down.

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] | [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Tyrin observed the derelict garbage guardian rise from the trash and the refuse. It was a large, hulking aberration that no-doubt possessed considerable strength. To surmount it, Tyrin would need to use his inherent deceptive abilities and his speed. He would start with the legs and then subsequently decapitate it once it was grounded. A quick, satisfying victory.

Or he could let the broad with the Mechu-deru powers and the Ovmar with an ion cannon handle it all.

In the blink of an eye, Tyrin vanished from sight. A well-rehearsed practitioner of Force Cloak, the Umbaran became undetectable by both man and machine. He would remain this way, and about fifty feet away from the action, until it was resolved. This was peon work for peons to handle. He was not a peon. His luxuriant golden mane was a testament to that.

 

[Sasha Santhe]

[member="Darth Janus"] & [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Tyrin disappeared, how typical. Sasha sighed to herself. These guys were so useless. Men, no wonder Sirella fed them to plants. Sasha disengaged her lightsaber and ran toward the creature. It took a mighty swing at her, which she avoided by vaulting off the arm. As her hand s touched the metal of the creatures arm she focused and used her considerable skills on it. The arm loosed and electricity surged. Mechu-deru. It was really a catch all for doing weird things to droids with the force. It made her somewhat unique in the galaxy, though others were now trying to learn the skill.

She hit the ground and rolled hard and in an impressive display of acrobatics shot back up to her feet. The droid didn’t roar in anger as its arm overloaded and became useless. It didn’t know pain like silly organics. Instead it turned and faced Sasha, opened up a hatch on its chest revealing several repeating blasters, and then opened fire.

Sasha jumped out of the way and ignited her red light saber blade. She deflected a few bolts before running to doge the torrent of red energy that was directed at her. She could take the droid on herself or course, that was her specialty, but it would still be nice if the boys helped.

 

[Arage Bao]

The fact of the matter was that ever since Sasha had come back, I took a bigger liking to my wodka bottle. Which would probably explain a lot of the weird quarks in behavior, and yet nothing does more to sober up a man, than an ugly, big, piece of metal junk coming right at ya. Adding to that was a quick use of Detoxify Poison, which made me see clearly for the first time in a few days of this week.

I blinked and looked at the lemon in my hand, then back to the big droid and then back to the lemon. Damn wodka. I threw the lemon at the droid, while starting to focus some of my power into the creation of kinetite balls

Sasha was bouncing around the battlefield like it was nobody’s business, took me a while to rejudge where she was, but eventually I found an opening and threw two kinetite balls, the size of a large golf ball, at the droids.

One hit him straight in the… knee? The other blasted him straight in the chest and hit his friend or foe-system. Making him go total berserk and starting to shoot everywhere.

Droid 0, Ovmar & Friends 1

[member="Darth Janus"] [member="Sasha Santhe"]

 

[Sasha Santhe]

[member="Darth Janus"] & [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Sasha felt like clapping and cheering on [member="Jared Ovmar"] as he shot two balls at the large droid. This was the first time since coming back that the man hadn’t been useless. Good. Maybe she could respect him at some point. The droid jolted when the two balls struck it and stopped firing its weapons at Sasha. It was damaged, its higher functions unable to cope with two targets. Stupid droids. Sasha swayed back and forth running towards the massive droid. She jumped up as the Guardian turned to face Ovmar and lay her hands upon it.

She manipulated the force and twisted the machine. Mechu-deru loosened bolts surged electricity and burst the things head in a small explosion. "Oh Darth Janus...." Sasha called...

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] | [member="Jared Ovmar"]

With it's head burst, the hulking metal automaton lurched forward and face-planted. At least, it face-planted with whatever was left of its face. With the threat sufficiently neutralized, Tyrin popped back into existence wordlessly. He was only a few feet from Sasha, standing in front of the downed guardian droid. He gave the defeated machine a light kick in the face, simply to be symbolic.Once again, fighting was for servants. In this specific instance, he was not a servant. When securing planets for the One Sith, he most certainly was.

But he was not with the One Sith.

"Wow. Exhilerating. Truly." Tyrin commented. "Can we now get back to the task at hand, or would we like to beat up another robot?"

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Darth Janus"] [member="Sasha Santhe"]

“Depends if the plot demands it, Ardik.” I said while staring through the partially destroyed head of the robot at the squashed lemon that symbolized crushed hopes and dreams… or it was just a lemon. Behind us the searching party of droids appeared and started doing their thing, excavating the damn prototype thing we were here for.

Didn’t really have much else to describe here, in the back of my head I wondered if we would get to fight a robotic rancor slash krayt dragon combo. That would probably be pretty cool, a fight for the ages, at least if Tyrin didn’t run off again and do whatever it is he does while cloaked.

Probably… look at Sasha while she was prancing about the battlefield, she turned nineteen sometime ago. Always figured Ardik was that guy.

 

[Sasha Santhe]

[member="Darth Janus"] & [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Sasha laughed a little at the old man that was Tyrin. Yes it was all good. She walked around the husked corpse of the droid and smiled. "Light power readings," she examined the device and then looked at the circled radius on her holomap. "This has to be the ship..." and so she ordered her droids to start working.

They dug in the trash and pulled out droids, engines, and even whole fighters from the heap. There was hundreds of years of junk to contend with, and only a small hole capable of being traversed to the craft below. Sasha could have fix of course, maybe even cut the others out of this completely. Not now. The vessel was the first step, the first obstacle in the roadblock toward recovering old lost data. Once a hole was made and the ships hull was revealed Sasha commanded the droids, including those under Tyrins command, to go down to the ship and break in. They tore at the hatch until it was ripped free and then one by one they burst into the ship.The ships databanks were ripped from it beind dissembled and brought to the surface where Sasha started to use the force to reassemble it. "There," she said looking at the databanks. "There we have our information..." With a flick of her wrist the droids took up the datacore and hauled it along toward the trios ship.

After retrieving the data they took off toward their next destination, following in the footsteps of the rebel agent and the NOVA Project schematics.

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] | [member="Jared Ovmar"]

The droids tore apart the ship like it had insulted their mothers. When they finished, they had removed the ship's databanks and brought them to Sasha for analysis. Using her mystical Mechu-Deru powers that Tyrin may or may not have been jealous of, she was able to discern exactly where the ancient agent of the Rebellion had jumped to after stealing the plans for the prototype stealth field generator.

Yavin IV.

Like, seriously, where else would a member of the Rebel Alliance go?

The trio departed post-haste. In the time it took for them to board a shuttle, make the hyperspace journey, and arrive in orbit of the small, forested moon, Sasha Santhe's avatar had changed radically. This did not change the fact that she was written by a dude, however, and so she remained totally unbangable. This was enough meta in one descriptive post, though.

Their shuttle descended to the moon's surface, locating a long-abandoned installation which it landed near. It's location had also been documented in the ship's databanks, making the building much easier to find than usual. It had been overgrown with plant life. To say nothing of what horrible beasts must have wandered in over the centuries. As always, Tyrin brought with him a host of security droids to guard them. This time, they were TA1 Battle Droids. Three of them to be precise.

"I suspect most of this facility is underground. It is likely also very large." Tyrin commented to the others.

 

[Sasha Santhe]

Sasha sighed at [member="Darth Janus"] and frowned. She didn't like underground facilities. So much could go wrong, and yet that is where they needed to go. Two E1000 droids walked on either flank of the young woman. She gave the signal mentally to them and they jumped into high positions around the facility putting themselves on over-watch. No matter what came, they would be warned of external threats at least. The droids shields came to life and they settled in. Sasha always thought the E-1000 droids were cute with their little legs...

"This seems so much like a trap, it isn't even a trap..." Sasha frowned. "Yes, lets just go down into the dark powerless facility...."

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] [member="Darth Janus"]

I too sighed at the excessive use of tropes in this thread, the sheer mention of a powerless, underground and ancient Rebel Base where mysteriously the plans and working schematics were located for the thing we were hoping to produce. Then again, a stealth apparatus which didn’t rely on Crystals? That was pretty nifty, almost nifty enough to make this whole journey worth it.

Besides, it was pretty fun, waltzing around the Galaxy with Captain Grump Gramps and Miss Tramparator 3000. Alright, my apologies, that title is reserved for the plantwad, Sasha is pretty okay most of the times really. She did have some weird fascination for droids though, pretty damn… weird, yeah.

Anyway, as she spoke about traps I could only blink and speak.

‘Hmm… seems too convenient, Sasha. It ain’t like we told the current Rebels that we were planning on doing this, right? Let’s not jinx the mission any further.’

Everyone knew that talking about problems usually brought troubles. Universal rule really.

 

[Caulder Dune]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] | [member="Jared Ovmar"]

"If you're both quite finished..."

Tyrin shook his head. There were too many trope inversions going on. If they kept lampooning the dangers of going down into the abandoned, powerless facility, then they would have no way of predicting what would be down there. Why were they even talking about this? Genre savviness was supposed to be Tyrin's thing. Ovmar's shtick was being lecherous, Santhe's shtick was being jailbait. Genre savviness belong to Tyrin by divine right.

Whatever. There was hardly any point in arguing about it. Whatever was down there would be overcome easily enough. Besides, like all rebels, the rebels that previously occupied this facility probably did not have a single brain cell between the lot of them. It was unlikely they had any sophisticated defenses. That in mind, they were still a great deal more intellectually sound than the current incarnation of their abominable order. Oh, the times. Oh, the morals.

He gestured for this three droids to take point, which they did wordlessly. Tyrin followed after them. They would need to comb this level before descending, as it would be a pretty big bummer if they turned the bottom floors upside down when it had really been on the ground floor the entire time.

 

[Sasha Santhe]

[member="Darth Janus"] & [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Sasha went first before both boys, Tyrin hiding behind his droids as per usual. Leave it to the boys to lag behind. The walls were the smoothest stone, age having not decreased the precision in which they were cut. "You could cut yourself on these corners," she said gently playing her finger down the wall. She started into a skip a little with each step and she moved down the hallway. "The Sith made these temples," she said. "Can't you feel their energy here?"

It was all so exciting, delving into the unknown in the footsteps of an ancient mystery. "Make sure you're ready for anything, who knows what spirits may linger here!"

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Sasha Santhe"] [member="Darth Janus"]

I followed behind her, the droids were busy exploring the temple and for a while we didn’t hear anything except our own voices filling the empty, dead hallways of the Temple. Energy was pretty potent here, the darkness was still lingering. Which was pretty surprising, considering the Rebels being here.

Almost as if they were blind to the poodoo.

‘Yeah. I can feel it.’

Then an explosion rocked the installation, the feth was that.