Star Wars: The Last Word

[Wolves]

STAR WARS
THE LAST WORD​

​

Scorpio Lightless slept. The fiery hearts of her twin sublight engines smoldered a dim blue as they pushed her ever so gently through space, far above the swirling storms of Hespherex V and deep below the black, light-pierced blanket of the Peligian Gulf. The ultrasleek starship slid through the void like liquid metal, and her stealth subroutines and cloaking technology made her all but invisible to the galaxy, a durasteel ghost between the stars.

"Two system patrol craft approaching." The electronic, disembodied voice of Scorpio Lightless's AI jolted her captain awake. By the time he'd come to a fully conscious understanding of where he was and what was happening, he'd already pulled the handgun at his hip halfway from its holster, and every fiber of muscle in his arm was primed to finish the draw and pull the trigger. He relaxed his grip and slid the weapon home as he slumped back into his chair.

"Vectors?" he requested, clearing the sleep from his throat. The AI, in her feminine, educated Core Worlder's accent, chattered off a string of numbers and directions that amounted to exact positions, speeds, and orientations. Rubbing his temples with one hand, the captain cut her off and pulled up a holographic, three dimensional map of the system. The Scorpio's scanners, updating the graphic in real time, tracked two small icons across the map.

"Fuck," he growled, rubbing his eyes. He'd forgotten to adjust the virtual copilot's alert settings before falling asleep. The patrol craft, two Yzhikov-class heavy fighters, were on course to pass the Scorpio Lightless eighteen kilometers out, blissfully unaware of her presence. He dismissed the holographic map with a wave of his hand. "Venus, can I get a cup of caf?" he asked. 'Venus;' his take on VNAS, Virtual Navigation Assistance System.

"Brewing. Three minutes to completion. The patrol craft?" she asked.

"Disengage – no, set course for Oracle-3, drop cloak, ping the patrol, open a line with Sedulga, request docking permissions. In that order," the captain answered as he made his way to the mess. By the time he returned to the helm of his ship, caf in hand, Sedulga was on screen.

"Kaivr Thane," the dug addressed him with a sneer, "our scanners did not detect your ship exiting hyperspace."

"Vigo Sedulga," Kaivr replied, bowing deeply. "I see you're in good health." The dug, who sat on what seemed to be a lavish throne of a chair, was not in good health but was very fond of deference. An avaricious glutton, the only thing on Oracle-3 fatter than Sedulga's wallet was Sedulga himself. The dug dressed in fine, brightly colored silks to disguise what Kaivr imagined was an unhealthy figure. "Do I have your permission to dock?"

"Permission granted. One of my associates will receive you when you land," Sedulga answered with a scowl. The comm line went down, and the dug's image vanished.

"Does he know who you are?" Venus asked.

"He absolutely does," Kaivr replied, sliding into his captain's seat. He sipped the hot caf as Oracle-3, the asteroid station that served as home to a half million souls, grew larger in the Scorpio Lightless's viewport. "He's the one who asked me to stop by."

---

​

If you know me, you know the drill. I'm no fan of character sheets. If you'd like to go the extra mile, by all means, but all I need are short and sweet descriptors.

Name:
Description:
Background:

Name is where you tell me your character's name. Description is a physical description of your character. When I describe your character as a blonde woman of middling height, I come here to make sure that she's actually a blonde woman of middling height. Background is information about your character's history, experience, skills, and so on. And, of course, these are more rules than actual guidelines. Do what you will.

Participants are admitted after being reviewed and talked about behind their backs, and even then only on a case-by-case basis.​

 

[Dervish]

Jebik

Name: Jebik
Age: 36
Height: 1.1 meters
Appearance: Wearing the familiar traditional brown cloak and facial shawl of his people, Jebik's garb is actually new and custom tailored clothing he commissioned over the years, giving him an abnormally clean and respectable appearance for a Jawa. When in public, he is rarely seen without his phrik and bronzium body armour, a custom-made set he salvaged from an InterGalactic Banking Clan vessel he took refuge in on Raxus Prime, and his bandoleers and rucksack. Like most Jawas, no outsider has ever seen his true face and it's something he intends keep that way.

History: Born on Tatooine, Jebik was still adolescent when Rodian slavers had ambushed his clans' sandcrawlers after a Swap Meet, taking the surviving Jawas off world to work as labourers on Raxus Prime to salvage the valuable materials from the endless seas of abandoned metal and equipment, ranging from starship hulls to decommissioned droids. Since Jawas by nature are rather timid and passive, most did not fight their forced servitude and performed the dangerous salvage operations for their alien masters, and some grew to even enjoy the work, taking pride in doing what Jawas do best; taking non-functioning equipment and restoring it to working order. Given the literally endless opportunities to tinker and create, the clan eventually managed to carve out a somewhat comfortable living on the planet, making the most of a terrible situation. While most of the indignant Jawas died during the raid on Tatooine, some remained on Raxus Prime, rebelling in quiet, subtle ways, such as designing equipment to fail on their Rodian masters, stealing supplies, and generally making life miserable in ways that wouldn't immediately get anybody shot.

Jebik, however, had grander plans.

Having matured under the heal of the Rodians and having a rebellious nature, Jebik decided that he wasn't going to live and die a slave on a trash heap of a world. Taking what little free time was afforded to him, Jebik scoured the wasteland for something, anything, that could help his situation. Initially hoping to find something he could use to pay off the Rodians and be taken back to Tatooine, he soon realized that they'd just take his bribe and punish him for it, leaving him with fewer options of escape. Not trusting other aliens, he eventually entrusted a few like-minded Jawas, including his two brothers and his mother, to look for something resembling a serviceable ship that they could repair and use to escape Raxus Prime. Eventually finding a small shuttle, the group worked on the ship in secret, often sacrificing precious sleep and missing meals to work on it. This taxing behaviour cost a few members of the team their lives due to easily avoided accidents due to fatigue, including one of Jebik's brothers. After nearly a standard decade of labour and secret projects, the Jawas had finally refitted the shuttle to something serviceable and were almost ready to make their escape. The only thing missing was a fuel source, which would have to be taken from the Rodians.

Upon his explorations, Jebik had come across an InterGalactic Banking Clan communications ship that still had much of its equipment intact and salvaged, thanks largely to the difficulty of reaching the vessel and the fact it was very well concealed under a pile of much less worthwhile prizes. Jebik worked with a team of 6 Jawas who worked in shifts of 2 to make the most out of the valuable metals and equipment left on the ship, crafting armour and crude weapons out of the ship. When the ship retrofitting team reported they were ready to go, so were those on weapon duty. The Jawas then organized a raiding party against the Rodians when their camp was asleep, and relying on sensors looking for vehicles and droids looking to intrude upon their stake. After years of Jawa compliance, the Rodians had not considered them to be a threat or capable of pulling off the heist that was about to occur.

Quickly subduing the few guards loitering around, the Jawas loaded up transport skiffs up with as much fuel and supplies as possible while others set about rigging improvised explosives across the encampment for when they were discovered. When the Rodians finally realized what was happening, the explosive detonations devastated much of the slavers' equipment and buried much of the site in rubble. A few of the Jawas were killed by retaliatory blaster fire, which to the Rodians' horror was returned by the few Jawas who had taken captured arms from the fallen guards and shot back. The Jawas defended their shuttle until it was fueled and made their way off of Raxus Prime, and to freedom. It was heard that many of the other Jawas from the Rodian camp managed to flee their captors in the confusion and found much better opportunities across the planet either working for other alien groups, Jawa clans or starting their own enterprises.

Now a free man, Jebik parted ways with his fellow escapees and made his way to Nar Shadda, the so-called Smuggler's Moon and a thriving den of criminal activity and industrial growth. While his motivations for going there and his actions for the first several months are unclear, it is known that Jebik began to take up posted bounties against several Rodians as a personal sense of revenge. He is quick to tell people that his first job was given to him as a joke, since nobody would take a Jawa bounty hunter seriously, but when the Xexto who posted the bounty found the bagged head of the Rodian smuggler who crossed him dropped off in a nightclub he owned, he sobered up quickly enough. Taking the pay, and the beginnings of a reputation, first as a novelty hire before turning into something more serious, Jebik became something of a minor celebrity in the lower levels of Nar Shadda as he amassed a respectable client base and an ever increasing arsenal of weaponry and equipment. Having rebuilt and retrofitted a discarded and junked Interrogation Droid to be his personal translator, the Jawa has found it much easier to obtain contracts and unlike most of his kin, he's taken a liking to water and bathing, having quickly discovered that many aliens consider a Jawa's typical odour to be repulsive. Uncharacteristically well-dressed, equipped, and clean for a Jawa, he stands out far more than most of his brethren, some of which he's grown to see with a mild distain given their passive nature and letting the galaxy walk all over them.

While he does not command the demanding prices of the famous bounty hunters of the Outer Rim, Jebik still carves out a comfortable living and a fairly steady supply of contracts now that he has a reputation to be taken seriously. His background and disposition to mechanical aptitude has given him inspiration and experience to rig together several tools, traps, and equipment to suit his needs to take down anyone and anything that he's set after. Even with a small amount of fame and a respectable success rate on the posted bounties he claims, he is still waiting for the one big contract that will propel his name upwards so he can begin his journey of making his name as well-known as some of the greats. What had begun as a need for revenge and to scratch a vindictive itch has turned into a lucrative, if improbable career, where the unlikely bounty hunter has discovered a sense of personal satisfaction and worth he is convinced he would not find anywhere else.

Equipment:
-Blaster carbine with stun setting
-Thermal detonators
-Ion rifle with net gun under barrel attachment
-Stun cuffs
-Gas grenades
-Modified YI-5 Surveillance/ Interrogator droid
-Concealable gas mask

 

[AtomicItalian]

Willing to offer up any plot/timeline info? Just curious about the nature of the story.

 

[Wolves]

Willing to offer up any plot/timeline info? Just curious about the nature of the story.

Absolutely.

The Last Word is set approximately 400 years (or more) after the Battle of Yavin, far beyond the setting of any canon story. The galaxy has changed quite a bit.

The Republic is the centralized governmental entity of the galaxy, but has limited control over the Mid-Rim and minimal influence in the Outer Rim and beyond. The outermost territories are controlled by organized crime syndicates, warlords, Hutt despots, and worse. The Vigo of Oracle-3 and the Hespherex system, Sedulga the Dug, is one such warlord.

This brings us from the lore to the story. Vigo Sedulga of Oracle-3, an asteroid-based space station located in the asteroid belt of the gas giant Hespherex V and a hive of scum and villainy, is assembling a crack team of mercenaries to take a pair of Senate Knights into custody. These two, Petra Caradhra and her yet-to-be-named partner, are on Oracle-3 to obtain star maps of the (officially) uncharted Peligian Gulf in pursuit of a lost exploration vessel. Unaware of their mission, the Vigo sees their presence as a threat to his position.

Also, on the Senatorial Knights. The Jedi Order was disbanded and banned at some point over the course of the past 400 years, and was replaced by a pair of orders, the Knights of the Senate and the Knights of the Republic. They are more or less the same, both being branches of the military, but the far more numerous Knights of the Senate report to the Senate, while the Knights of the Republic answer to the Office of the Chancellor. They are differentiated by their standard issue lightsabers, colored silver and gold, respectively. They are soldiers, enforcers of the law, and peacemakers, not monks and diplomats.

The Jedi still exist, in small numbers, and live as fugitives from the law. As far as anyone is concerned, the Sith have been extinguished, and while Dark Jedi occasionally surface in the fringes of the galaxy the Order itself is extinct. But, y'know, they've been wrong about that before.

Anyway, it's a very lore-light RP. Someone who isn't familiar with it can check out different planets and races or terms like "durasteel" on Wookieepedia, but just about everything else is wholly homebrewed material. On top of that, there's a lot of mystery to the setting. What happened to the Sith, why the Jedi are outlawed, why the galaxy has regressed into lawlessness and warlordism at its edges, these are all great questions without satisfactory answers. Travel to the planet of Ossus and it's a massive graveyard of dreadnoughts and battleships left over from a war no one knows about. We're in a bit of a dystopian Dark Age, and one of the major thrusts of this story is lifting that veil.

But it all starts with a few mercenaries on Oracle-3. I don't want to jump too deep down the rabbit hole of higher aspirations, so we're focusing on a few good mercs with a mission for the moment.

Hope that's helpful.

 

[Wolves]

Next post is a go.

Back on track.