Campaign The Imynusoph Run: Ord Thoden-Morellia

[Aeshi Tillian]

ORD THODEN
Jerec Asyr Coren Starchaser Milla Kryst Gren Blidh Okkeus Dainlei Aeson Keel
==========================================================

Even Aeshi was feeling the strain, and she wasn't even racing. But still, even trying to keep up with them all was beginning to wear down on them. More than halfway across the galaxy in less than five standard days. She'd barely slept, except in the stops between legs, and her ship had only the most basic regular maintenance performed. Something was definitely squaking inside the engine and the climate control was... wonky, to say the least. She suspected there was a coolant pipe leak somewhere. But she'd had to patch it up herself and would get it fixed for real once they reached Morellia.

This was not an easy race, and it was pushing many to the edge. One of the news ships had crashed due to exhaustion, and at least three of the crew were killed in the accident, and two other ships had been under such strain that they failed to function any further. She rubbed her eyes and tried to massage some energy back into her face, but even that couldn't hide how greasy her hair had become or the shadows under her eyes.

"Welcome to Ord Thoden, galaxy! The final leg of the race is about to begin, this one swinging around the edge of the galaxy into the Tingel arm to bypass the Sith Empire. This is the longest leg, and the most dangerous. There are no major hyperlanes through this region of space, and for the most part, it is has been left forgotten and neglected by most major powers in the recent decades. Charts are likely out of date, stellar phenomena has likely been uncharted. We frankly don't know what is all out there at this point. This is the final push towards the finish line and fame, fortune, and glory for those who make it all the way."

With that introductory segment, she made her way to the port where the ships were being touched up again. She nodded to them all and ran a hand through her hair again, calling to the racers. "Alright everyone, this is the last leg of the race. You've made it this far through daring, skill, and luck. Hopefully those will pull you through this last one as well. If not-"

She paused and took a long drink of water. "We've managed to move Rescue Service ships to a few key areas throughout the space along the route. Signal the emergency beacon and they'll be on their way, but it may take them a while to get to you. So if you blow up or crash, stay alive. Help will be coming. Hold out as long as you can."

Aeshi considered what else might be worth saying, but she just shrugged. "Good luck and may the Force protect you. See you at Morellia."

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"Okay, so, Muk, bear with me-

Muk Moadda looked at the much-scrawled-upon holomap then back at Jerec, then back at the map, then back at Jerec. "You're kidding me."

"With a drive as fast as ours, and nice fast hyperlanes? I am fething not."

"Through four separate warzones." The Mon Cal black marketeer bubbled something profane. "And the math checks out?"

"I can count."

"You sure?"

Jerec took a long minute to count it all out. "...I think so. Either way, screw it, let's roll. Buckle up."

 

[Coren Starchaser]

Last leg. And this leg, well, for Coren, he knew of one way to go. Straight through. After speaking to Cuan who was suggesting doubling back toward the Core, as he heard some Gran muttering about, Coren still was opting for the backcountry. Upon discussion with his co-pilot on ‘hyperlanes are safer’ the fact that they went more completely through Sith Space, and that was not anything Coren wanted to do.

Imagine if we take me, a Jedi Master, and instinctive pilot, through the Empire’s space. Oh not to mention we don’t have time to falsify the registration, so they’d KNOW its us. Was about the last statement that was needed in that discussion. They were going to be going Coren’s way. Cuan shook his head but he knew the Jedi had done plenty of this in the wars. He wasn’t nervous about it, but the other racers may not have the Force.

Before sitting down to the controls, Coren and Porter plotted out a rough guess. Use Bastion as a directional, then try to err on the side of Ord Janon, Koboth and then onto Morellia for the finish. With luck they’d keep themselves away from the Sith Empire territory, and prevent an interstellar incident. Porter was kept on the bridge to help with sublight and anything that may occur, and to provide proximity to systems.

Coren could do a lot, but he was going to be taxing himself, he could tell. They were going to break it up into a few tracks, but with restock of caf and citrus, he’d be able to keep himself going. A few drops from light speed to re-evaluate the course.

And once again… they were at the starting line. And the lights were green.


Captain Log

Well, leave it to me to start the day off well, right? First day of this trip, mind you, we’re listed for 52 hours, and I am going to need a nap somewhere… I was able to find a weird anomaly, seemed to be connecting space in two different parts. So, of course we hit it. I’m a Jedi, sure I’m in a race, but what if there was something to see there? It was odd with hyperspace, but seemed we bypassed Bastion and ended up somewhere by Belkadan? Porter is marking the location, will have to come back and check it. With Jorus’s books.



Captain Log

Coren’s asleep. Good. He set it up where he programmed the location for me to get to the next jump point into Porter. So we’re taking that. It was interesting, about an hour before it was time to wake the Captain up, he seemed to stir on his own. But as he did, the strangest thing. Old ships… I didn’t recognize them, but Porter said they were ancient from… the Republic? At least that was what the droid said.

Coren was able to catch the tail end of it. He was making mention of ‘ghosts and sins of the past living on in the Force.’ Apparently yet another thing to add to our list to watch for. And to come back and check later on. Anyway, he got us out to the next bit of hyperspace without event. Wait… how long were we watching that battle…

It is interesting to see him fly like that… I don’t think I could do it, but my people can navigate tunnels with our eyes closed!



Captain’s Log

We’re not far out, so of course this is the one point in the whole trip that we’re going to have a serious break down. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, we’ve had the ability to stop and rest every few hours. This one has been the longest leg, and it just makes sense that the old girl has a few issues. Porter and Cuan and I were able to route part of the pressure from the engines into the weapons systems. Venting that out by just firing blindly. The biggest issue was that it tossed us from hyperspace. Re-routing at sublight was able to help us cool down a bit, but the sublight engines are taking the toll.

All said and done, we’re on our way to the route again. I can feel Morellia.



Captains Log

Seeing the finish line is always nice. All said and done? 63 hours. I hope I am ahead of people. If not, I’m still going to get a massage. And a nap. I need one.

 

[Jerec Asyr]

NINETY-NINE POINT FIVE HOURS LATER
A RED-LIGHT DISTRICT ON MORELLIA

The room was meant for other things. Jerec, today, had issues.

"I haven't slept in four days," he said to the beautiful Togruta sex worker. He was lying on the couch with his head on her thigh, or rather her thigh comfortably in the crook of his hammer head. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes. "Stims and caf, caf and stims. So I thought I needed to relax and..."

The Togruta - Marle was her workname - nodded in sympathy. She found the stress between his wide-set eyes and got to work massaging it out. "So just how bad was it, Jerec?"

"I'm not gonna be recording any captain's logs about it, I'll tell you that much. Ugh." To lie on the couch like this, he'd draped his knees over the armrest. He wiggled a little to get comfortable. "So I came up with this super-clever way, oh so clever, to shave two hours off a fifty-two-hour run. So what if it took us through four separate warzones and the Sith Empire? Two hours. I just needed my two hours to try and catch up with fething Coren Starchaser and his fething Tachyon Rising."

"You know Coren Starchaser?" Marle said with a smile in her voice.

"Enough to catcall him when I pass him. But he's done most of the passing. I don't know if he's the - ugh. Look, early on, I coulda been a contender. But Coren and Aeson Keel and a couple others, they left me in the dust. So I figured I'd gamble on backtracking and taking-" He got up off the couch convulsively, pleasant as the eyestalk massage was. "You got anything to draw with?" He tapped a floor-to-ceiling mirror with one long finger. "On this maybe?"

Marle blinked. "Draw? Ah..." She chuckled and got up as well, cinching her robe. One of the walls had some inset cabinets containing an assortment of what previous generations would call marital aids. Marle produced a jar of edible body paint and a silky brush. Jerec snatched them from her hands and started drawing on the mirror.

"So we were supposed to make a long offroad jaunt - no major hyperlane routes for the most part - from Ord Thoden to Morellia, skirting around the Sith Empire through WIld Space and the Outer Rim. That's a long cold stint with not much to recommend it, real backroads stuff. Might've dropped in on Bosph to pick up passengers, learn their weird Force rituals - anyways. Here's what smarty-pants me decided to do instead." He inscribed a jagged route on the growing star map, which covered the entire mirror. "I turned right around and headed almost all the way back to the last waypoint, Taris, down the Braxant Run which is a nice fast lane."

"Pretty quick, yeah," Marle said, massaging his shoulders. "I'm from Muunilinst."

"Mm. No kidding?" Jerec shivered. "Muunilinst was my nightmare."

"Mine too. What happened to you there?"

He painted a big X through Muunilinst. "Micrometeor debris field from some battle or other. Severe engine damage. The whole thing was supposed to take fifty hours, remember. But I lost THIRTEEN HOURS fixing the engines."

"That's brutal."

"That's just the fething start of it. Oh, the rest of the Braxant was nice and easy - the New Imperial Order may be jackboots, but they keep a nice clean hyperlane for the most part. But then I hit Mando space, which it turns out is boiling over. Call it border control, call it piracy, but I lost another dozen hours fighting and dodging Mandos. Lost them. Then did it all over again, with another dozen hours on the clock. If I never see another Mando it'll be too soon. We got boarded twice - that's why the bandages. Got free of that and I slipped through the Sith Empire border like I do, heading up the old Hydian. Long tense run. Long, long tense run. Lot of caf." Another big X, this time over Ruuria. "Normally I love Ruuria. Ruurians are the best. But we ran straight into one of the most bizarre phenomena anyone aboard had ever seen, some kind of spacetime echo, Clone Wars ghost ships fighting each other. Good thing I've got quality engines, because getting through that was no joke."

"These...ghost ships could hurt you?"

"Oh yeah. Some commander a thousand years ago plopped an artillery walker in his destroyer's hangar bay, and that thing split us open. My ship, the Infinity's Free, it runs with a pretty small crew and we lost half. Contractors, not folks I knew well, but still - that weighs on ya." He painted aggressively. "But me, I kept driving. So we'd passed through the NIO/Sith Empire battlefront, the Mando implosion, we skimmed around the SIth-on-Sith hostilities near the Stygian Caldera, but now we had to deal with the other Sith-on-Sith action. And if that's a roleplaying service you provide, we should really talk once I'm in a better frame of mind."

Marle's hands worked at the knots in his shoulders with limited success. "Definitely. I've got lightsabers."

"Awesome. Okay, so, somewhere around Ninn is where I ran into real trouble. Worse than anything. Totally stable star, rated for another couple billion years, explodes. Unpredicted impossible supernova. Just total hell through the Force - did I mention I've got Force powers?"

"Mm-hm."

"Well it felt bad. It felt very bad. Swear to feth, I think it was some Sith Force superweapon test or whatever. Because that star should not have blown up with me right next to it. We were racing the shockwave and de-futzing the nav systems for six hours of sketchy little blind microjumps before we got clear, and let me tell you, the Infinity's Free has a serious need for a new coat of paint. Because it's charred to a crisp. Then I get down here, right down to Morellia, and Coren fething Starchaser has that poodoo-eating grin because his route did not take ninety-nine hours instead of fifty."

 

[Milla Kryst]

The final stretch, so far.... everything was fine. All the other legs had a couple bumps, but nothing Scar wasn't prepared for, nor that they couldn't adapt to. They were thankful, but they had no idea what laid before them for the final stretch. Scar had no clue if this race would make or break them, but in the end, it didn't matter. Scar would be lucky to make it out alive. As the buzzer sounded and the lights shifted, the Ba'jur was off, almost like lightning. The small ship had an obvious advantage over the larger ships, but hitting the pedal when the sign said go didn't mean winning the race, and this time Scar was afraid of not crossing the finish line. By now their mugshots were known in the race, and the added spending cash bounty wasn't going to help things get better, either. Scar needed to finish and get out, celebrity status wasn't something they exactly wanted.

Right off the bat, Scar was having trouble. A supernova erupted nearby after engaging the hyperdrive and barely even getting to cruise from the start. Pulling them out of hyperspace, Scar had to dodge debris and try to race out of the shifting space. You would think Scar was right inside the planet with how long it took to get out, and they didn't get out unscathed. The hull had started to take some damage, but thankfully the increased hull armor and the rapid recharging shields kept the thing tight and intact. A lot of scratched paint, but Scar had no plans to keep dodging debris, it was scary enough. Thankfully a small ship can actually maneuver!

But it still wasn't over, even after engaging the hyperdrive again, another anomaly cropped up. Scar was starting to think if it was the poorly jerry-rigged engine that was doing all this. Scar was getting to witness an ancient battle take place, with fleets on both sides engaged in a nasty battle. Some weapons fire didn't actually hurt the Ba'jur, but the ones that did basically pinged the entire hull and threw it wildly off course. Playing havoc with the systems, and even deadly creeping towards real, unsustainable damage. Scar was able to get out of the anomaly battle just slightly shorter than it took to get out of the supernovas path, but only barely. Already, Scars heart was racing, what in the heck is this last leg? If Scars ship was destroyed during the supernova or the anomaly battle, there'd be no rescue here...

After the daring escape, Scar actually had a moment of respite, able to finally take a nap and have some grub. Obviously not a gourmet meal, but always enough to sustain them. However, the moment of rest could not last. It wasn't allowed, and maybe it was even karma that the next thing to happen to Scar was life or death. Pirates. They saw Scars ugly helmet on the Imynusoph race contestants from the bounty boards, and this is where everything came together. They had long planned this ambush from the get-go, the distress beacon Scar ignored was just extra pay at this point. The pirates did their best to give their demands to Scar, but Scar just went into tactical mode. The weapon systems were either offline or severely hindered due to the new hyperdrive, and that was a problem. But it gets worse - this wasn't a simple band of pirates... they had the best ships to catch the Ba'jur.

---​

The battle was intense, and Scar already hit the distress beacon. But would the race emergency services really save a criminal? Systems were failing everywhere, and the defenses were destroyed. This was a lot of explaining to CorelliSpace, if Scar survived. The quick recharge of the shield kept the grazing hits off the Ba'jur, but only for so long, the rest was up to the Ba'jur armor. The Trimantium armor did its best to hold, but hull damage was done. Scar was unable to actually kill any of the marauders, since the turret was knocked out. Scar still had torpedos.... but only Connor Nets were loaded, and even though the special ability of the Ba'jur was to change missiles or torpedos whenever they wanted from the cockpit seat, at this moment it was far too dangerous - too much damage sustained and there were too many hostiles. The only other weapons left were the Ion Cannons mounted on the nose, but that required the Ba'jur to be in a head-to-head position, risking damage to the cockpit, or worse... Scar was able to knock out enough of the pirates to eventually get away, but not unscathed. Scar wished they were in a better frame of mind, but they had been panicking the entire time. And Scar was no expert dogfighter, they rammed or were rammed by the other pirates numerous times, with the dents to show it, but that also gave Scar the ability to get out of harms way as either the pirates didn't want to risk shooting their friends, or they did, and ending up hitting them instead of Scar.


Scar eventually made it to the finish line, after spending 12 hours in the battle with the pirates that wanted Scars head. But that was it for the Ba'jur, and without the cash to fix it? It was totaled. It took the Ba'jur 73 hours to finish the race, and the ship was struggling to move in the first place.

​

 

[Coren Starchaser]

The nice thing about this race? Even going backcountry, he felt good. His time total? That was like 152? Not terrible for a galactic crossing with stops and a path he didn’t ick to go from one end to the other. He’d probably have taken a southern route and gone through some space he knew. But he always did tend to hop lanes when he could. Tillian had made a great little race.

He knew he was getting in early, ahead of some of the others. And after hearing that even Jerec was getting himself stopped on his fancy hyperlane path. But being here a few hours early? It meant a bit of a spa day. He wasn’t normally one for massages, but this was a celebration and he needed to get some R&R.

And what better time than waiting for the others to finish?

 

[Gren Blidh]

Captain's Log
The Somberlane

Entry 1

We were lucky to make it out of hyperspace alive. The navigational charts for this sector of space were way off and I had to chart my own course, something I'm well accustomed to doing, but not this far out into the rim of the galaxy. Space is more dangerous here, and we were able to cut our own route, but it was a terribly slow one. Unfortunately this may cost us the race. We'll need a stroke of luck to have any chance of winning now.

Entry 2

Any hopes we had of winning have now been completely lost. We have lost power to the ship. I suspect it was the new hyperdrive that taxed the Somberlane beyond operational capacity. We are currently floating in the dead of space, going nowhere until we can get power back. I've debated sending out a distress signal, but I've resolved to not throw in the towel yet. We will get this ship started again, and I'm going to enjoy the trip I make back to Quekko's after this.

Entry 3

After 14 hours lost, we were finally able to reroute enough power to jumpstart the Somberlane and get on our way. It bears little repeating that the race is now utterly lost, so I spent most of the time meditating upon dark energies and saw fit to leave the ship on autopilot the rest of the way home. I will record these events for posterity for my own examination later; during my meditations, I felt the pull of the Force towards a sector of space that is all but dead on the hyperspace maps, and yet it called to me like a whisper only I could hear. There is a fine line between meditation and hallucination when the Force grants knowledge or visions to one, and I managed to convince Sidra Ater to redirect our course toward this sector as we had little else to fly for. What we found was startling to both of our senses, I suspect, as she seems capable of touching upon the energies of the Force as I have. We found a planet as yet undiscovered, peculiar in its strong radiation of dark Force energy. This planet is a nexus of the Dark Side, I am sure of it. We quickly marked it on our charts, and then returned to our course out of necessity, as fuel was beginning to run low. We shall return to this planet at the soonest opportunity. The Maw will find it most useful. Our spirits were high as we departed, feeling as though the race was not wholly in vain. We dock at Morellia within the hour. Once we finish, I have some unfinished business back at Quekko's Emporium that I'm going to enjoy greatly.

 

[Okkeus Dainlei]

What a karking nightmare this had been.

By the time he not-so-gently touched down on Morellia, the Blue Lightning had practically fallen apart. From multiple engine breakdowns, hyperdrive failures, and just ship problems in general. The ship had never preformed this badly before. He loved it and all, but it might be time for an upgrade.

Once landed, he laid back in the captain's chair, exhausted. But before he could rest, there was a message he needed to get out. Pulling out his datapad, he started to type. A vessel would be sent out here to come pick him and his ship up. Now more than ever was he happy for that enhanced membership the Spacer Guild provided.

After that was done, he pushed himself out of the chair. The rear hatch would open so he could go get some fresh air. Thankfully no one was around his ship. Why would they, anyways. He guarantees that he took last place. There is no way in hell that someone was behind him.

Thankfully a bright neon sign cleared showed where the cantina was. Rarely did he even drink alcohol, but tonight might just be one of those nights. Damn was he glad this race was over. At least he could say he completed it. Maybe next year he'll try again.