DreamLyrics™ Play-by-Post Forums Hall of Fame - Latest Top 10 completed games CFH: A Call For Heroes CFH12s: Surviving the Ion Storms

[Don't forget Sirra's opened a dialogue with Winta.]

[Ta: edited]

GM

As Preach drags Bastian to the ship, the younger man groans "Feetch!". He's alive, jelly-legged but not a completely dead weight. The wet duracrete must've absorbed most of the kinetic energy from the blaster bolt.

Nearing the cargo ramp, Preach sees Lientenant Bek standing there in his officer's uniform, breath mask on, EL-16 blaster carbine at the ready.

He waves to Preach and rushes to help. The ship must be on autopilot.

"I picked up the turbolaser explosion on the impulse detector, so thought I'd pre-empt your call-in." The Mon Calamari explains, grabbing hold of Bastian's arm, "Who's this?"

Bastian wears the uniform of a Resistance X-wing pilot, so it's obvious he's a friendly.

Suddenly Jix's voice crackles over the team's comlinks, replying to Winta.

«Top of hyperwave antenna. Amos--- collapsing antenna---»

Out on the landing pad, the cloud screens their escape from most of the Mountain Troopers but the spotter on the roof has quadnoculars, guiding in the sniper's DLT-19D. Winta has her hands full with shot-blocking.

Sirra might be helping Preach or Winta, but either way she hears someone call out nearby.

"REVENENT!"

Turning, she would see a figure step out of the murk. TIE Special Forces, black armour, red stripes, coated in dust.

He grips an SE-44C rapid fire blaster pistol in one hand but it hangs by his side and isn't aimed at Sirra.

"You're Revenent, aren't you?"

Sirra doesn't recognise him, though his flashes mark him as a group captain.

Preach

He gratefully accepts the help. Hauling Bastian while choking on the fumes of the planet's atmo wasn't his idea of fun. To the Mon Calamari he says "resistance pilot who was being tortured for information. We rescued him. He has proven useful," he added nodding to the arrays the pilot had acquired.

Sirra

“I am Revenant. Anyone else I may have ever once been I have killed. If you wish to interfere with those with me, you can join them. I hold them to be valuable, and I will bring your world crashing down to protect my betters.”

The next three words were simple but seemed to drop like lead weights from her lips.

“Here I am.”

https://youtu.be/Z1oR3PUQu60

In her old life those three words had been a death sentence to those they were uttered to. Whether to their face or under her breath.

“What reason have you to know that name?”

Winta

"We don't have time for this!" she called, "In case you had not noticed, there is a blizzard of incoming fire, and at some point I will tire and miss."

Sirra starts backing towards the ship.

GM

The Group Captain flinches and Sirra feels his presence in the Force, an undercurrent of unconstrained, wild Force powers. At once a drowning man and a man on fire.

Sirra realises the TIE Special Forces pilot is Force Awakened. Like her. A normal person, perhaps talented, sensitive to the Force even, who spontaneously develops Force power that can grow rapidly.

For Sirra, Winta and Preach, their Awakening was a trying time but they have since been trained....

"I've heard of you." Replies the pilot through his vocoder, his voice sounding synthetic, "I heard... what happened to you."

The surrounding blaster bolts seem slower somehow, as do the eddies in the dust cloud and the pulsing of the repulsors.

The Group Captain feels dutybound to raise his pistol, indoctrinated by a life-time in the First Order. Yet the Force has given him a connection to all living things and for sometime he's sensed the truths of the High Human are flimsy, wrong.

"I feel everything. I see all angles. I know you know! What is happening to me?" He asks Sirra desparately.

Sirra:

A brief pause before she speaks, and anyone who has been with her might suspect she is talking as much about herself as about the other man.

“You feel more, you see more. You might not know what is true but you know you are a living lie. You have caused hurt and anguish beyond measure which cannot be undone. You can’t forgive yourself. But you will also never be avenged upon yourself. You cannot undo - so start doing. If you are feeling a connection to the web of all living things then you know your road needs to take another direction. You are dead. Start living. You are stronger than their dark words. Start today by lowering that gun or by aiming it where it belongs. Do what you know and feel rather than what you are told. You know what you are doing is wrong. Do something else.”

Winta

She made sure that the line from the man's gun to Sirra was within the sweep of her light saber, so that she might give protection should he decide to shoot.

GM

Bek drags Bastian up the ramp and dumps him at the top.

The pilot groans, signifying he's alive and can't be too badly hurt.

Bek is more interested in the bag of Aratech arrays.

"Splendid job, Preach! I'll get them installed. Guard the ramp and get the others aboard." Bek says, turning to the ship interior.

Out on the landing pad, the Group Captain holsters his pistol and unfastens his helmet.

With a release of air, he pulls it off. Just some middle-aged guy, balding, tousled hair greying around the ears. Once handsome features, worn and dumpy.

He squints in the downdraft, rock debris still flying about. Sirra senses he has one last question.

"Are we human?"

For Winta, the sniper fire stops but signals the advance of the Mountain Troopers through the cloud. What's left of the base's garrison converging on the shuttleport.

And another sound, distant but distinctive, the high-pitched wail of TIE Fighters.

Sirra

“Hell if I know. That part is entirely up to you. It isn’t what you are beneath the skin but what you do with that skin that defines you. You are human if you act human.”

She moves towards her ‘ride’.

“Time’s wasting”

Winta

She backed away in time with Sirra, aiming to join Preach in defending the ship whilst repairs were made.

"I don't suppose," she called on the comm, "that we could do the repairs somewhere else?"

[Nice exchange, Art.]

GM

Bek is inside the ship but on comms.

«Get to the cockpit and take off, Winta.» Says the Mon Calamari, cranking a hydrospanner, «Stay nap of the earth and follow the mountains east.»

Outside, the Special Forces pilot nods to Sirra. Resolute. He lets go of his flight helmet and it bounces at his feet.

"I've wasted enough time." He says, then hearing the TIE, "Go!"

Group Captain Talkar steps back and disappears into the murk.

At the top of the ramp, Bastian drags himself to a seated position against a bulkhead.

"Getting shot in the head really sucks." He says vehemently, wincing and calling to Preach, "Hey, got anything for a headache?"

The ship has a FastFlesh Medpac stowed in the rec area but Preach also has his potent Nannarium Root preparation, a powerful psycho-neural stimulant.

Preach

"Aye, I can help with that. But let's get out of here first, I don't want to leave the door undefended." He lets out a long string of coughs after getting a sentence out in one shot.

Winta


«You don't need to ask me twice» she replied, as she turned and legged it for the cockpit, leaving her ignighted light sabre covering her back until the last minute before quelling it as she passed through the hatch.

She threw herself into the pilot's seat, clipped herself in whilst she shouted - "Get in Preach! Tell me when you're in!" and then as soon as he had said so, pushed the button to start closing the doors.

Even with the doors still closing, she applied power, to lift and turn in the direction she had been told to go, whilst she checked the state of the deflector shields and guns.

Sirra

She slid into the seat beside Winta.

“Talk about the blind leading the blind.”

She references her just finished conversation.

“Don’t know if I really did him any favors leaving him there to die.”

She looks at the controls and if familiar makes a few comments about flight characteristics of the ship.

Winta

"I know you are the better pilot." Winta stated.

"Are you okay to fly? I can do the shooting if you fly."

Preach

"We are in," he called confirming where they were.

He kept his blade up till the doors closed.

Once the doors were closed, he shut down his saber and pulled the herb stimulant.

Offering it to the pilot he says "it packs a punch, but should help."

GM

The sniper team on the roof of the terminal target the rectenna on the light freighter with no obvious effect.

On the landing pad, the Mountain Troopers pour fire into the cargo bay ramp as it closes but Preach's guard can't be broken.

The Bargon Flit lifts and spins with Sirra and Winta in the cockpit, washing the troops with the sublight engines.

Several of the nearest Mountain Troopers are incinerated, then as the engines throttle up the sniper team are blown screaming from the roof.

The ship accelerates, swooping down and away from the operating base, skimming the rocky slope.

Inside, Bastian has removed his helmet and stares at the blackened crater in the back of it.

He has two bloodshot, black eyes and a nosebleed; concussed but functional.

Bastian chews the Nannarium root, unconvinced by Preach's medicine. He says so:

"I don't think this is gonna wooo---oooah!"

His eyes clear. Whites, iris and pupils replaced by blue radiance. He lies back, mind-blown.

"I'll just... hang here and... contemplate the universe."

With the cargo ramp sealed Preach can snatch off his damaged breath mask and will be rewarded with the clean air of the ship. The smell of fresh motor oil with a hint of dark-roasted Spiran caf.

His breathing is wheezy and there's a pink foam on his lips. Lung damage then, but nothing a Bacta treatment can't cure.

"Preach," shouts Bek from the aft, "help me with this blasted packaging!"

The Mon Calamari has already installed the first Aratech array and is wrestling with the packaging of the second. His spindly fingers aren't made for the job. If only he had a box cutter!

In the cockpit, Sirra and Winta sit in the sleek red racing seats.

They fly out of the storm. Mountainside rushes by on one side, yellow sky and metallic lagoon on the other.

Systems are all green except for the inertia compensators, currently being worked on by Bek.

As Sirra steers, Winta checks the scopes. TIE Fighter inbound on their tail and up ahead it looks like a Jet Trooper squad lining up for a boarding action.

Preach

He moves to assist. "I can help," he offers. Though he doesn't carry a knife he will assist as best he is able. He is leery to use his sabre to help as it is a rough weapon, but if it seems his best option, he will carefully use it.

[OOC has the ship got a gun?]

[Quick run down on the Bargon Flit then. It's a YT-1210 Corellian Light Freighter. It has a forward-firing mass driver cannon for use against capital ships, operated from the cockpit, and retractable, Millennium Falcon-style quad laser turrets, top and bottom, requiring gunners. It also has a countermeasures suite that alerts all local ships to its presence when activated, but makes it much harder for hostiles to target lock the ship.]

Winta

"Tie on the tail, Jet Troopers ahead," she tells them all, "Time to get the guns in action. Preach, I'll go for the dorsal gun position, you take the ventral. The arrays can wait, they won't do us any good if we've been boarded or shot down."

She runs for the gun position ready to spoil the day of whichever she feels is the more immediate threat between the Tie or the troopers.

Preacho

He nods once and heads for the gunner's seat. It is more important that they live. He will try and use the gun to the best of his ability, probably on the troopers first, then the Tie fighters to allow them to esacpe.