September 7 recap

•The party makes an unlikely ally of a Sith officer.

•A standoff ensues at a hidden Eutix laboratory.

The party, flying away from the Mandalorian war forge, discusses what to do with their Sith prisoner. At first, the entire party attempts to interrogate him all at once in the mess hall, which proves disastrous; Yvegeny and Kelif are more interested in causing pain than getting information, and the party fails to provide a unified front. The officer, who introduces himself as Ordal Naberrie, scoffs at the notion of providing any information to the party. Finally, after shooing Yvegeny and Kelif out of the room, Lyta talks to Ordal one-on-one and learns that he belongs to a military family dating back any generations, and that he served in the Coruscant Defense Militia during the Mandalorian Wars (and did not see any action). He follows Revan because he was the only Jedi willing to help the Republic fight the Mandalorians when no one else would, and Revan was single-handedly responsible for the Mandalorian defeat.

Lyta appeals to Ordal's sense of family tradition: Would his father and grandfather approve of him deserting the Republic? Ras jumps in, offering to get him away from the Sith (and specifically the Butcher) if he helps. Ordal acquiesces; he says his ship was on the way to the Sith rendezvous point, but had a hyperdrive malfunction and detoured to Naboo for maintenance. When they arrived in-system, they were attacked by Mandalorian gunships and shot down; Ordal and some of the crew got to the escape pods in time. While Ordal himself doesn't have the coordinates of the Sith rendezvous point — he's just a lieutenant — he knows his ship's navigator made it to one of the escape pods. Lyta and Ras take him to the cockpit, where he uses the Capanata's comm system to locate two Sith escape pods — one near the Eutix lab site, and one near Harte Secur. The ship sets course for the Eutix site.

Along the way, Ordal talks to Yvegeny about having fought in the war, and is underwhelmed that Yvegeny fought on the Mandalorian side. Yvegeny tries to intimidate him by threatening to torture him, but Ordal stands his ground and tells him he has tortured people. (Lyta, who is overhearing, loses all respect for Ordal.) Yvegeny uses his computer skills to change the transponder code of the Capanata to avoid detection by the Mandalorians, altering its ID to be that of an Orphanmaker gunship he saw near the war forge. Yvegeny and Ordal talk more about how they would take out the Mandalorians: Yvegeny is all for a revolution, but Ordal admits he'd rather just bombard the planet from orbit, not just because it's effective, but also because it gets the job done (as the destruction of the planet Telos a few months ago can attest).

The party arrives at the Sith escape pod landing site near the deserted Eutix lab; Marina, Oro and Gobmush stay aboard with Ordal while Ras, Lyta, Yvegeny and Kelif study the site. On the beach, it appears the escape pod drifted ashore, and whoever was aboard stripped it clean, loaded all of their stuff into a net, and dragged it to the Eutix site. While following the tracks, the party discusses the Yvegeny/Kazbich situation. Ras reminds the party about the fake Kazbich wanting to be in jail and getting financial benefit for doing so, so Yvegeny shouldn't act Kazbich-like to sabotage it. In fact, Ras says that after the death stick deal with R'vana on Coruscant, Yvegeny's got one more chance before Ras kills or arrests him herself.

The party eventually arrives at the abandoned Eutix labs — it's just a bunch of prefabricated buildings set around a landing pad. The buildings have been stripped clean, and it looks like anything of value has been taken. As the party explores, someone shoots at Yvegeny from inside one of the buildings; it turns out to be the other Sith survivors, including the navigator. Ordal quickly helps the party talk the Sith troops into a ceasefire. The Sith soon agree to help the party overthrow the Mandalorians, and even agree to provide information if the party can get them away from the Sith. They also loan Yvegeny their portable transmitter, which he plans to use to help coordinate his rebellion.

The Sith officers tell the party about a strange comm signal they picked up while hiding in the buildings; the Mandalorians didn't seem to have been too thorough when they sacked the place, so they must've missed it. It leads to an underwater facility near the planet's core. Everybody boards the Capanata and prepares to head deep into the planet's underwater core.

The party soon finds the facility, which has been extremely well-hidden, and Ras, Lyta, Yvegeny and Kelif enter. Ordal offers to enter the facility with them, but the party decides the Sith should stay on the ship. Marina is secretly ordered that if the Sith try to take over the ship and strand them there, she should vent water inside and drown them all.

Upon following the hallway inside, the party is stopped by a force field, where a security eye droid asks for identification. Yvegeny hacks through the force field, and the party is greeted by a Selkath scientist, who introduces himself as Bruck and asks who the party is. When the party reveals they've come from the Republic and the Mandalorians have taken over the planet, Bruck gets on his comlink and tells the executive officer to immediately begin scuttling the lab. The facility immediately begins venting water in to destroy their experiments. The party is quite surprised by this and intimidates Bruck into taking them to his executive officer.

Bruck takes the party to a central chamber, where Selkath scientists are working around a giant water tank with an enormous leech-like creature inside called a beck-tori. The executive officer, Quol, is convinced to stop the scuttling, then explains what's going on — they're a Eutix laboratory studying the beck-tori because of its natural Force abilities. It's a dangerous predator with a high midichlorian count (sending the party into groans) that can reproduce asexually, making it a threat to a planet's entire ecosystem. Because the lab's location has been compromised, the Eutix scientists want to relocate the beck-tori.

The party debates whether or not to kill the beck-tori — Ras argues that it's a living being that hasn't done any wrong, but Yvegeny says it's too dangerous to leave alive (the lab has a poison release to kill it if need be). Eventually, the party decides to leave the Eutix lab alone for now, saying they'll make sure a Eutix ship gets down there to move the beck-tori once the Mandalorians are overthrown. Yvegeny loads up on communications equipment to help their resistance movement, and the party decides to set up a rebel base at the abandoned Eutix landing pad, using the Sith to man the base. The party also considers using the underwater Eutix lab as a communications relay across the entire planet.

Trivia:

•Ordal Naberrie fulfills something I've been meaning to do more since the start of the campaign: incorporate the ancestors of Star Wars lore into the game. In the same way that Galduran Calrissian is an ancestor to Lando, Ordal is an ancestor to Padmé (and Kelif is an ancestor to Jar Jar). I plan to incorporate more of these kinds of characters into the campaign as time goes on.