Jackdaw

[Tatooine, 5 ATC 9] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I - Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Beck - The Jundland Wastes

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After the Sith had wrestled control of both moons from the joint Republic-PDF coalition and started landing the invasion forces on Corsin proper, the PDF had found itself stretched thin on resources, heavily depleted by the arduous defense of the homeworld. Billions of credits in military equipment has been lost in a slog across the system. Laser weaponry, something Beck had always taken for granted, was suddenly in short supply. There simply weren’t enough working laser cannons to shoot at the oncoming Imperial armor, and so the PDF found alternative options.

Advanced as technology became, there was always be something to be said about loading a multi-kilogram slug of durasteel into a long rifled barrel and launching it at supersonic speed towards something you didn’t like very much. Corsin Hardball, they called it, and it worked better than most expected. Sure, ray shielding complicated matters where it showed up, but the Imperial Army had heavily discounted the potential of basic low-mass, high-velocity physics while planning the planetary invasion. Beck had been a huge fan of Corsin Hardball.

Point is, when Beck saw that bloom of air that came with the sonic boom discharged by a slugthrowing artillery piece, he knew it and he didn’t like it.

A durasteel slug raked the side of the hover train before ricocheting into the earth of Tatooine, kicking up an eruption of bone dry soil and stone that rained down on the crew of his skiff. The thunder of the cannon arrived only after, the sound catching up with the supersonic projectile a second later.

“Kid!” he roared over his shoulder, throat rough and hoarse as he strained to shout over the din of battle. “Get that cannon online! I don’t know how many more of those shots she can take!”

He returned his attention forward, toward the slowly dissipating sonic bloom. It was rising away from a craggy growth jutting up from the Tatooine surface, almost directly in the path of the hovertrain. He lined up the sights of his rifle with the ridge and felt dread. Too far to fire at with accuracy with small arms, outside of the firing arc of the Kid’s blaster cannon, and firing two shots per minute or so. If it took the hovertrain five minutes to pass the cannon, that meant it was absorbing ten shots, more if the thing was mobile and the sand people understood show to reposition in.

They needed to kill it, immediately, and he wasn’t sure how.

He gritted his teeth leaned against the skiff’s rail, sights trained on the ridge ahead, waiting to take a lucky shot.

[Tatooine, 5 ATC 9] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I - Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Beck - The Jundland Wastes

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The Czerka barked once more, and on the next pull of the trigger gave a hollow click.

“Shit,” Beck growled, throwing his back against the skiff’s rail guard and sliding down to cradle the cycler in his lap. He jammed slugs into the magazine, muttering curses the long while, wishing he hadn’t lost his stripper clip back in Anchorhead. Swore it was in his pack, but it wasn’t, turned out.

A slug skipped across the handrail near his ear. “Oy, lads, get this cannon online and give us damned suppressive fire!” he roared, pointing out the inert anti-personnel cannon hanging limply on the rail. It should have been manned, but the would-be gunner was nowhere to be seen. Must have caught a slug in the fray and fallen off. Not a lot of rhyme or rhythm to a firefight, in Beck’s experience. Mostly luck.

He jammed the last bullet through and pulled the bolt handle home. Another slug plinked against the skiff deck, and he attempted to find the offending sand person through the scope. It was rough shooting. Between the heavily camouflaged attackers and the moving skiff under their feet, hitting a target was a tricky proposition. Beck did his best, loosing one shot after another in an effort to get the sand people to put their heads down at least, if not shoot them outright.

He found one, standing on a ridge, outlined nice and clear against the red Tatooine sky. Beck’s first shot skipped on the rock in front of his target, kick up shards of stone. The second struck true, and the sand person went down.

He didn't have much time to celebrate. There was a deafening crack from the hover train to their side, and Beck turned to see it shudder, as if some massive hammer had just been taken to it. The train was heavily armored, and it kept moving despite the blow, but something big had just hit it. Did sand people have anti-armor?

“Keep an eye out for whatever that was!” he shouted, scanning the ridge with his optics.

[Tatooine, 5 ATC 9] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I - Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Beck - The Jundland Wastes

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“I heard they’ll rot your lungs out eventually.”

“If I live that long I’ll take it up with myself then,” Beck retorted crisply. “Give myself a good hollering in the fresher mirror.”

Beck chewed at the cigarra as he looked out on the distant sandstorm, looming in the background behind the Jundland Waste’s pillars and trenches of towering rock faces. The hover train weaved between a pair of the things and Jeeda guided the skiff with it, coming all too close to smashing them apart on the rock. Odds were he wouldn’t be living that long.

“Careful, Jeeda!” he shouted. The Rodian shrugged, and Beck shook his head, looking to the motley crew of mercenaries Doga had purchased for the job. He knew some of them, worked with some of them, but there were some new faces. Jeeda, for one. And the woman with no name. He’d heard of her, which was something, given that she didn’t have a name. He’d heard she was good with a gun, which he reckoned must be true, from the way she thumbed the butt of the slugthrower on her belt. Confident.

All the same, he was looking to be the leader of this merry band of backwater soldiers, and he figured he ought to act like it. “Any of us survives a crash is only bound to die in the sandstorm,” he announced. Something plinked hard against the skiff’s lightly armored fore, leaving a fresh dent in the durasteel construction. He paid it no mind. A rock, likely. “So hold on tight, eh?” Plink, again. And then another. And this time Beck heard the report of a distant gunshot.

Not rocks. Slugs.

“On the left!” Jeeda shouted in high pitched Huttese, seemingly realizing what was happening as Beck did. Beck wheeled around, shoulders hunched, bringing the Czerka cycler to bear and looking for a target amount the passing rocks. He heard returning fire, closer by, from the mercenaries aboard the hover train, and shouts.

“Sand people!” a train-bound mercenary shouted over the din of engines, gunshots, and screams, taking a shot at an intricately featured wall pitted with cracks and crevices that seemed entirely vacant of any enemy. Except, of course, for the fact that the wall shot back. Beck could make out the muzzle flash of a slugthrower, wielded by an expertly camouflaged shooter, followed by a sharp crack. Beck aimed and fired, putting a hole in something that may have been a sand person, may have been a rock.

“Keep your heads down and shoot!” Beck shouted to the crew, and fired again.

[Approved] Captain Dev Arx, Human... Courier?

I really like this character. I’ll give its approval.

[Interest Check] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I

Due to the great positive response here, please find the RP here: roleplayerguild.com/topics/179117-onc….

[Tatooine, 5 ATC 9] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I - Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Name: Beck Ducrae

Occupation and Affiliation: Mercenary, Contracted by Mos Vaada Transportation

Description: Beck Ducrae is a tall, lean, hard looking human male hailing from the planet Corsin. He wears a woven poncho over light armorweave, a wide-brimmed hat, and boots he purports to be made of Krayt leather. Beck carries a blaster pistol at his hip, a standard military issue sidearm with the Corsin Planetary Defense Force, and a slugthrower carbine of Czerka design and manufacture. The slugthrower, a firearm of durasteel and wooden construction, carries eight slugs to a cartridge and can put a hole in all but the toughest wildlife on Tatooine. That includes the people, too.

Background: Beck Ducrae was an enlisted infantryman with the Corsin Planetary Defense Force during the closing years of the Galactic War, signing on with the army just as the Sith campaign extended into the Greater Plooriod Cluster. He saw combat for much of his short tenure with the Corsin PDF before the planet fell, and after the surrender of the world he struck out on his own aboard one of the many refugee vessels that fled to Republic space. A deserter, though there weren't much of an organized Corsin PDF to hold him accountable for his actions, he headed out to the Outer Rim, putting his military experience to work as a bounty hunter, enforcer, and general purpose mercenary for the Hutts. One among those Hutts under whom he found employment was Doga Anjiliac Jitetso, better known as Doga the Prospector of Tatooine and as the mayor, if you would, of the mining town of Mos Vaada.

[Tatooine, 5 ATC 9] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I - Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim

Episode I: Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Beck - The Jundland Wastes

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Beck cleaned the Czerka cycler for the third time that day. That was one thing he hadn’t had to do back on Corsin, when he carried a blaster rifle instead of a slugthrower. Less maintenance with a blaster, but the components and gas needed to be shipped in from off-world. With a slugthrower, everything you needed to keep it operational, from the firing mechanisms to the slugs, was made right there on Tatooine. He slipped slug after slug into the cycler as he finished up, cursing as he slipped and jammed his finger on the fourth round.

He hated this backwater world, and not just for the lack of modern industry. It was the sand and dirt, too, the barren, wasteland earth that stretched, invariably, all around no matter where you were on the planet.

At that moment, Beck was leaning against the guardrail of an open-air skiff, smoking a thick, slow-burning cigarra as the ship bobbed and weaved through the rocky terrain of the Jundland Wastes. Jeeda, the crew’s Rodian pilot, kept them moving at a slow clip relative to the craft’s typical operating speed. They weren’t on their way to Mos Vaada for their own sake. They were escorting the long, multicar hover train that skated over the barren land not more than fifty paces to their right.

He loaded the last of the cycler’s eight slugs, locked them in, and stuffed the cleaning rag in the inside pocket of his dirt streaked poncho. He tilted his wide brimmed hat down, shielding his face from the twin suns, and kept his eyes on the rocks that reached up from the ground around them. He chewed on the butt of the cigarra and inhaled a cloud of smoky carababba tabac.

Sand people would shoot at anything that moved, if they were in the mood, but it wasn’t just sand people Beck worried about. The hover train was carrying thousands and thousands of gallons of water for the people of Mos Vaada. Out in the deserts of Tatooine, no matter who you were, you needed water to keep living, which meant water was just the sort of thing worth killing for.

Mos Vaada Transportation, Doga the Prospector’s shipping company that owned the hover train, the skiff Beck rode, and even Beck himself, if you thought about it like that, kept a robust, if ragtag, security detail attached to each water shipment out of Anchorhead. This particular hover train was escorted by a few skiffs, each outfitted with a mounted anti-personnel blaster and carrying half a dozen or so armed mercs, and the train itself was manned by its own security team. Beck could see a few of the mercs standing atop the hover train, rifles in hand, eyes on the terrain, and another skiff drifting further up the way alongside the front end of the train.

Circumstances being what they were, what with the sandstorm of the century on its way, they even had air support for this operation. Granted, it was a rickety light freighter sporting a jury-rigged laser cannon, not exactly the same caliber of air support as the FT-5’s that had flown cover for Beck and his unit back during the war, but it was something. More eyes to keep a look out for trouble never hurt.

“Hey boss, you keep that thing loaded, eh? A clean gun no good if the shooting starts and you got no slugs in it, eh?” the Rodian pilot shouted over the whirring of the skiff engine. Beck’s Huttese wasn’t great, and the Rodian spoke a broken form of the language to boot, but he took Jeeda’s meaning well enough.

“I hear you,” he shouted back, and rested the cycler’s barrel on his shoulder. He kept his eyes on the rising rock faces as the caravan descended into a canyon, deeper into the Jundland Wastes, toward the Western Dune Sea, toward Mos Vaada and a stack of credits. Toward the sandstorm, too, though, and other dangers.

He tightened his grip on the cycler and chewed at the cigarra, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke into the Tatooine wind.

[Tatooine, 5 ATC 9] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I - Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Limited-Use Character Template

Name: [Your Character's Name]

Occupation and Affiliation: [i.e. Freelance Bounty Hunter, Mos Vaada Transportation Security, Independent Smuggler, Czerka Corporation Mercenary, Pilot]

Description: [Include such details as age, species, clothing, weapons on person, details regarding appearance, whatever suits you]

Background: [A very short and sweet, third-person account of who your character is, what he does, and what he's been up to prior to the commencement of his or her participation in this story]

[Tatooine, 5 ATC 9] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I - Last Skiff to Mos Vaada

Per the interest check:

Episode I: Last Skiff to Mos Vaada is the story of a a few bounty hunters and mercenaries working a job on Tatooine. Local Hutt kingpin of Mos Vaada, Doga the Prospector, is overseeing a new mining operation deep in the northwestern stretches of the Western Dune Sea. Mos Vaada, once barely worth noting with a pinprick on a map, is now a rapidly growing boom town. Though once self-sustaining, Mos Vaada's population has outgrown its ability to sustain itself on its own, and relies on shipments of food and water from Anchorhead to get by.

With water running low and a powerful sandstorm on its way, the people of Mos Vaada are depending on a hover train laden with water to help them weather the storm. Czerka Corporation, however, has other designs. Czerka's mining interests are the most expansive in the galaxy, and its directors are no fans of Doga the Prospector and his operation encroaching on their turf. Where the law and negotiations have failed, Czerka now turns to force to settle the score with Doga, organizing a crew of saboteurs to hijack and destroy the water shipment before it reaches the town with the goal of extorting the Hutt to hand over his mining operation to the corporation.

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Basically, it's up to our protagonists to save the people of Mos Vaada from dying of dehydration by protecting the hover train during its journey. Or, alternatively, it's up to our protagonists to destroy the hover train and force Doga the Prospector to give in to Czerka's demands. Maybe both, who knows.

@Jackdaw

Due to the strong positive response, I've gone ahead and made this thread to kick the RP off. As I said in the interest check thread, temporary characters are welcomed and encouraged. Follow the template in the character sheet section.

[Interest Check] Once Upon a Time in the Outer Rim: Episode I

Temporary/Supplemental characters or whatever you'd call them are welcome, by the by. Personally, I'm going to be playing a former PDF soldier from Corsin who turned to mercenary work after the war.