Tabletop Squadron Transcript, Season 1 Episode 30:
The Imperial Job

Transcript by Tyler (Twitter: @Tyler_MoonSage)

## Intro

NICK: Hi everyone, and welcome to Tabletop Squadron, a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire actual play podcast. I’m Nick, your game master. Every other Thursday our story follows a thief, a bounty hunter, and a slicer as they explore the galaxy helping a mysterious benefactor and each other.

(musical chimes)

Hi, I’m Sydney and I play Valorissia Creed, a human technician. I was going by an old name and pronouns during this recording and also using a rather different voice at the time. So while we have left the audio as originally recorded, I would request that you use my current name and pronouns, she/her, when discussing the episode. Thanks!

(musical chimes)

Friends, space aliens, country folk… we here at Tabletop Squadron are just ecstatic with the support we’ve gotten lately. We’ve reached our first goal, and our celebration of $69 – Nice! – stream is going to be on April 28, 2019. There will be a ton of information coming out of our Twitter, website, and social media, so if you wanna watch us eat pizza and be excited and play games, tune in.

We are currently $11 from our next goal. It’s a big one. If we hit that point we’ll cover our hosting fees and our overhead for providing transcriptions which makes the podcast a lot more sustainable. If you feel the urge, we’d be honored to have you as Patrons.

Speaking of which, we have some more Patrons we would like to thank. Alice Tobin, thank you so, so much for your support, you get space ice cream. Aaron J Amendola, hey! Aaron is supportive and awesome and made a super cool game that made me sing in public. We like Aaron. Thank you Aaron. Chris Grant, thank you for supporting the squad. May your hyperdrive be always full of that sweet, sweet fuel. Zachary Tabor, thank you, your support means the world to all of us, you rock. Kyle Thomas, woo! Thank you! You’re helping keep the lights on, and I hope that light’s a little super nova in your soul… like in a good way, not a catastrophic chest explosion. Jules Cunningham, thanks! I like the way your brain works. I feel like if you were in Star Wars you’d be a member of the Cantina band. MolarDuck, you’ve been there since the beginning. You helped me brainstorm podcast titles in a Twitch chatroom. Yes, I still remember that. Thank you for your support from the bottom of our seven Nautolan hearts.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us and will support us in the future.

Additional music this week is In suspense by psychadelik pedestrian, pocket zombie by Flex Vector, and hard fight by manuel senfft.

Now let’s get into the episode.

##

NICK: Hello! Welcome to Tabletop Squadron, Episode number 30! My name is Nick and I’ll be your game master today, subbing in for your normal game master, Nick. It’s a joke because it’s the same guy.

CAMERON & HUDSON: (false enthusiastic laughter)

LAURA: … Stop it.

(laughter)

NICK: (smiling) We’re gonna go around the table real quick. Everybody introduce themselves and say who they’re playing today, starting with Austin!

AUSTIN: Hi, I’m Austin! I am playing Valorissia Creed, a Human technician.

NICK: Hey~ He’s our special guest this week. Oh boy!

CAMERON: What-what!

NICK: Up next we’ve got Cameron.

CAMERON: Hello! I am Cameron, and I am playing Karma Nailo, the Nautolan bounty hunter.

NICK: Wonderful. Up next we’ve got… Hudson.

HUDSON: Hi, I’m Hudson, and I’m playing Tink, a Gigoran slicer.

NICK: Acceptable. Last but not least we’ve got Laura.

LAURA: Hello! I am playing Xianna’fan, a Twi’lek smuggler. Yup. I think that’s it.

NICK: Yup. Radiant. Like I said at the beginning of last episode, you all do the summary if you’re so smart. (smiling) What happened last episode?

AUSTIN: Last episode, I punched Tink repeatedly, and he hugged me.

CAMERON: (chuckles)

LAURA: Xianna bet 20 Credits on Valerissa. She encouraged the fight. I do have in my notes, because I made them fight, oopsies, and then under that, but I won. So I won money. We determined that bluegrass is called either bluejizz or jizzgrass. We got Valerissa to agree to work out something, and then we’re gonna do something…

CAMERON: We never introduced ourselves.

LAURA: We never introduced ourselves to her.

CAMERON: Besides HK.

LAURA: Xianna had some drinks, and…

CAMERON: We’re still saying her name wrong.

NICK: Yeah.

AUSTIN: Valorissia.

CAMERON: Sentinel told us Valerissa, and she has not corrected us yet. (laughs)

LAURA: So what is it?

AUSTIN: Valorissia. It has an I, an extra I at the end.

LAURA: Oh…

NICK: It’s been wrong this whole time.

LAURA: Yeah, Nick…

CAMERON: Well, Sentinel.

AUSTIN: Sentinel. I’m sure that had nothing to do with why I hung up on him.

CAMERON: (giggles) ‘No. You don’t even care enough to know my damn name.’

NICK: Click.

AUSTIN: It probably didn’t make a difference. (laughing) I wasn’t gonna be in a good mood anyway.

HUDSON: Last episode, Tink may have fallen in love.

(laughter)

LAURA: And fallen down.

HUDSON: I definitely fell down a number of times. I am hurting a little bit. My ribs are bruised.

LAURA: And then we got brought into Valorissia’s workshop.

HUDSON: And we said (emphatically) ‘what the heck?!’

NICK: Yup. What a great and complete overview. And now for the Destiny Roll!

CAMERON: One light side.

AUSTIN: Two light side.

LAURA: Two light side.

CAMERON: (gasps)

HUDSON: One dark side.

CAMERON: Oh…

NICK: Yes! High-five, Hudson! Alright, so we’re gonna kick off the episode. (laughs) We start with Valorissia flipping on the lights and revealing the laboratory/workshop where she spends her time, and the rest of the squad all looking around and saying ‘what the heck?’ Austin, why don’t you describe what Valorissia’s workshop looks like?

AUSTIN: Yeah. It’s a big garage thing. There’s basically piles of random junk just all over the place. There’s pathways between everything. The piles look organized by category but not in the pile, it’s just piles of ‘related to gun parts.’ There’s several open bays that have a door that opens out to space. It looks like there’s really only two ships that have a pathway to get out, and everything else is in various amounts of disarray. Then there’s also an office over in a corner that’s got a desk and behind that a bunk.

NICK: Cool. Is it well lit, dimly lit?

AUSTIN: It’s well lit.

NICK: Cool. One thing I’m gonna add to your workshop here, there’s a cleared out area where the piles around it are pretty tall, like head height, and there is a clear, stainless durasteel workbench there with a rolled up blueprint. The five of you, HK stumbling behind, as you’re getting close HK stops by a pile of droid parts and says, “Lamentation: My fallen brothers,” but without actually looking at it, and continues on.

HUDSON: (chuckles)

NICK: Val gets to the table and spreads out the blueprint and you see a very large research facility. Do you want to give a background on what the facility is?

AUSTIN: Sure. “So what we’re looking for here… This is a Kuat drive yard’s research lab. It’s somewhere around here, and I’ve got coordinates somewhere but I’m not an astrogator. Basically they’ve got something deep in this lab that I want. I’m a power engineer by trade, I ended up out here anyway, but I just like power. Power comes from explosions, and if you can do an explosion right and it stays in the reactor then you can power your ship! So, what I want to go do is I want to get in here and I want to take their experimental power core that someone, somehow let slip, and I want to break in and take it and bring it back here and build something crazy out of it.”

LAURA: “Okie.” Xianna’s just immediately looking on the blueprints. “Where are the cameras? Where are air vents? Points of access?” And if there’s a pen or anything she’s marking little things and just little notes that don’t really make a whole lot of sense, it’s just weird little symbols. Sometimes it’ll just be a frowny face and then other times little happy faces in certain areas.

NICK: So, now we get to get into me trying to make heist mechanics work in Edge of the Empire. There’s a couple of things here. Val knows the three main security protocols that are for this space station. There’s one I’m going to add at the beginning, which is that this power source is in the main vault of this facility. The main vault is 40 floors below the rest of the complex. The elevator is behind a cage, then there’s an eye scanner to get on an elevator, then there’s an elevator that has cameras watching it, then there’s a pressure-sensitive hallway leading to the vault, and then there’s a combination to get into the vault. That is where your goal is, this experimental power source. That is one of the security measures. There’s a big research facility, there’s lots of labs and things on the main floor, and then there’s this shaft going all the way down, and the blueprints start to be done in pen because that part wasn’t blueprinted out when they built it, and you can see this big—it basically looks like they took a giant reactor core off a capital ship and hollowed it out so it’s got really thick shielding and they use that to store stuff. It’s in there. What are the other security measures?

AUSTIN: “Yeah, so it turns out this rock that it’s in is kind of magnetic, so there’s no signals that can get out of it. Once you go into it you can’t talk out, so you can’t call for a pickup or anything.”

CAMERON: “Great.”

LAURA: “But you can talk within?”

AUSTIN: “You can talk inside, yeah.”

LAURA: “Okay. We can work with that.”

HUDSON: “Yeah.”

AUSTIN: “And then the labs are all distributed almost randomly around the thing. All the hallways between the labs are kept drained of atmosphere. They only fill with atmosphere when someone’s walking through them, so the guys go through an airlock and then go half way down the hall, airlock, the rest of the way down, airlock, and they’re always empty unless there’s a scientist in them.”

LAURA: “Okay. Do they keep track of which rooms currently are filled with atmosphere?”

AUSTIN: “I’d assume so.” (laughs)

LAURA: “Yeah. I mean, I figured, but…”

AUSTIN: “Someone probably cares. Yeah.”

LAURA: “Someone cares.”

AUSTIN: “I mean, it’s done automatically. It’s not a person controlling the airlocks, but a droid brain is probably paying attention.”

LAURA: “So, Tink will have to figure that out. We will have to have Tink in. you will take care of that. … Okay.” Xianna’s just flipping through things and saying a lot of words of like, “okay, I do not think a Nautolan switcheroo will work for this one.”

CAMERON: (snorts)

LAURA: “We might have to do a nerf and switch on this. Who knows, though.” Heh.

AUSTIN: “And the last thing is there’s two victory class star destroyers sitting, watching the outside where their sensors can cover almost all of the external of this station.”

LAURA: “Okay. No nerf and switch…”

AUSTIN: Because it’s a fairly small one. It’s an asteroid?

NICK: Yeah.

AUSTIN: “So there’s probably holes, because there’s only two, but that’s still two. They’re small star destroyers. They’re only victory class.” (laughs)

LAURA: “Mm-hmm. Maybe a Corellian tangle… Maybe that one will work.”

NICK: I mean, this crew’s taken out a super star destroyer.

CAMERON: I took out a super star destroyer earlier this week. That went well.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

NICK: Ish? I mean, relatively.

AUSTIN: You only blew up a herdship in retaliation.

CAMERON: Hey, you don’t know that. (laughs)

NICK: So, those are the main security protocols you all know about. What doesn’t make for fun listening is listening to everyone make every nuance of the plan and then going through it step by step playing, so I just want broad strokes of what you all are planning to do to get around those and how to get on the station in the first place, and then we’ll address it when we get closer to it. To counteract that, as more things happen we’re going to give you three opportunities to do flashbacks to say oh yeah, we knew about that and we planned for it, and here’s what we did, which will give you blue dice on your checks to get past those things. Sound good to everybody?

OTHERS: Yes.

LAURA: Rooms are de-atmosphered when not in use.

CAMERON: Atmo in hallways only when scientists in them. Two victory class star destroyers watching outside. When you’re in the vault you can’t communicate outside the vault.

AUSTIN: When you’re on the station at all.

CAMERON: The facility, okay.

NICK: Unless the ship parks inside, yeah.

AUSTIN: You can’t call HK for pickup or anything, yeah.

CAMERON: He’s coming with us.

NICK: He’s a terrible pilot.

CAMERON: He doesn’t need to breathe.

AUSTIN: Oh yeah, true.

NICK: Oh, that’s a fair point.

CAMERON: “I’m not concerned about the atmo. This guy doesn’t breathe.”

AUSTIN: “That’s quite convenient.”

CAMERON: “Isn’t it?”

LAURA: “Okay, but is he going to get down a pressure-sensitive hallway?”

NICK: “Lamentation: My poor whole plating will oxidize. Frowny face.”

CAMERON: “We’ll give you a nice oil bath afterwards.”

NICK: “Sassy statement: What do I look like, some sort of C3 unit?”

CAMERON: (laughs)

LAURA: “Question. Have you ever been in this hallway? What does the ceiling look like?”

AUSTIN: “I’ve never been to the station at all. I got this in an email from one of my contacts outside, because I’m always looking for fun stuff to go steal.”

NICK: The email is stuck to the workbench and it’s on the Kuat ship drive’s letterhead, and says FYI, XOXO, with no signature, and then has that list.

LAURA: XOXO, (whispers) Gossip Girl~!

NICK: (laughs)

LAURA: “Okay. So, getting into the cage, probably not a problem. Getting into the vault combo lock, probably not a huge problem. The monitoring and the atmosphere, we will have to get Tink in, do that. Don’t pee on yourself this time.”

HUDSON: “I never peed on myself. Oh my gosh.”

AUSTIN: “I’m a little bit concerned.”

LAURA: “It’s okay. The eye scan… maybe. I don’t know if you can get that one, Tink.”

HUDSON: “Oh. I can get that one.”

LAURA: “We could also just, you know, steal an eyeball, steal a guy, keep the eyeball in him? I don’t know. I don’t think Karma would like us taking the eyeball out.”

CAMERON: Karma is making a face, much like Cameron was just making, as Laura said that.

(laughter)

LAURA: “We will all have to go into the com facility. Tink, you usually pretend to be maintenance. People do not care about the maintenance people as much, tend to get in easier.”

AUSTIN: “You guys know that Kuat is an Imperial run company? They only really use Humans.”

LAURA: “Oh shit.”

NICK: (laughs)

CAMERON: “You know, they didn’t mind when we used that same trick on the star destroyer.” (laughs)

LAURA: “Well no, so on the star destroyer we did get arrested on purpose.”

CAMERON: “Tink didn’t, though.”

HUDSON: “I didn’t.”

LAURA: “Tink didn’t, but I think… Okay.”

AUSTIN: “This one is a research facility. It’s not a detention center. If you’re there you should be there. We’re gonna have a hard time getting probably anyone but me in the front door. You probably… I’m really good at talking to people, right Tink? And by Tink I mean big furry guy.”

CAMERON: (laughing) ‘Because I don’t know your name yet.’

HUDSON: “You don’t know my name yet.”

(laughter)

CAMERON: “Oh! Yes. Hi. That’s Tink,” Karma says pointing at Tink.

AUSTIN: “Hi Tink.”

HUDSON: “Hello.”

CAMERON: “That’s Xianna.”

LAURA: “Ello.”

CAMERON: “I’m Karma. You already met HK.”

AUSTIN: “Hi HK.”

CAMERON: “I suppose you could also call him Hank if you so desired.”

LAURA: “I call him hank.”

NICK: “Greeting: Hello.”

LAURA: “So, what is the air vent situation on this?”

AUSTIN: “We could look at the blueprint.”

LAURA: Are there air vents included? How big are they?

NICK: There are air vents. There are some that look crawlable. There are none of those convenient, comfortable crawling sizes, and there’s parts where it narrows to where you couldn’t get through, and there’s parts where there’s random laser grids and serrated blades and things.

LAURA: Oh. Yeah, whatever.

NICK: Obviously. That’s how air works.

AUSTIN: That’s how air works on a classified government run facility.

LAURA: They just need to be big enough for Xianna to get through.

NICK: Yeah. There are parts where you could use that.

CAMERON: “Sorry, and you’re Valerissa Sentinel said?”

AUSTIN: “For one, it’s Valorissia Creed…”

CAMERON: “Oh, I can see why that—Okay.”

AUSTIN: “…but only my mom and the government call me that. I’m Val.”

CAMERON: “Okay. Thank you.”

LAURA: “Val. Okay. Do you know what their emergency protocols are?”

AUSTIN: “Probably get the hell off the station.”

LAURA: “Okay. We can maybe work with that if we create a controlled explosion. You said you like explosions.”

AUSTIN: “Controlled explosion?”

(laughter)

LAURA: “Yes, so that it is just in one area. Still an explosion blowing things up, but so that it is not where we need to go. Somewhere else.”

AUSTIN: I reach into the pile behind and hold up a shaped charge.

LAURA: “Exactly!”

AUSTIN: “I think I can help with this.” (laughs)

CAMERON: “From experience, when explosions do occur within Imperial facilities it does tend to also trigger lockdown as well as the evacuation.”

LAURA: “Yes, but if no one is there then we can actually get in, Tink can take care of that, I can get through…”

CAMERON: “That’s also when the stormtroopers tend to show up.”

LAURA: “That is what you do. You and Hank, you go take care of that. You will be the lookout. You will be the hitter. You stay there. You hit people, with your guns.”

CAMERON: “Alright Hank, I might be finding you some organics.”

LAURA: “And then we get Tink into the control room, he controls things, and then I break into the cage, I scan, maybe we knock someone out for that one. Elevator, we can deal with that. It’s monitored, but Tink can you know control the feed.”

HUDSON: “Oh yeah.”

LAURA: “Pressure-sensitive hallway? Eh. It’s already in lockdown, so as long as it’s filled with atmosphere maybe I can get on the ceiling depending on what the ceiling looks like. And then the vault combo lock, you know, between me and Tink we can probably get into that.”

AUSTIN: “Or we could just blow it up.”

LAURA: “Or we could just blow it up!”

AUSTIN: “I think any of these walls we could just blow up. We just need to do it really fast.”

LAURA: “yes. If we time things out we can get in and get out probably…” How long do you think if someone was just straight walking through, like how long are these hallways?

NICK: Like for each hallway?

LAURA: yeah, like getting into the cage, eye scan, elevator, hallway… vault.

AUSTIN: From the front door all the way to the thing down.

CAMERON: And then the 40 story elevator ride.

LAURA: Just the physical time it would take to walk through it and then back up.

NICK: Well that depends, how are you planning on getting onto the station in the first place?

AUSTIN: Is that room in the middle of the asteroid?

NICK: Yeah.

AUSTIN: Okay.

LAURA: How long it would take you from being in the facility, getting down to the vault, getting back up… Like, how long are these hallways?

NICK: Are you running or walking?

LAURA: Both, like a combination. Is this a 10 minute thing or is this like 30 minutes? How long are the hallways?

NICK: It’s like a 10 minute thing.

LAURA: “Okay. So you know, in and out we could probably do under 15. Depending on how far away the stormtroopers are, how long it takes them to mobilize, we might be able to do that.”

CAMERON: “There are two victory class star destroyers. They’re not gonna take long to mobilize.”

LAURA: “Yes, but they have to get them into the ships and then get the ships onto the… whatever asteroid it is, and then…”

CAMERON: “I think the Empire is far more organized than you’re giving them credit for.”

LAURA: “Are they though?!” (laughs)

CAMERON: “Yeah. They move fast.” (laughs)

AUSTIN: “Also, there’s a room in this facility that says Stormtrooper Barracks.”

(laughter)

LAURA: “Also we blow that up.”

CAMERON: “There’s gonna be a contingency on-planet.”

NICK: Austin read my poker face. (laughs)

AUSTIN: (laughs)

LAURA: “Maybe we have many explosions. We blow them up in their barracks, we—“

AUSTIN: “No, I told you, big explosions not mini explosions.”

LAURA: “Okay, but again, we have to get out. We have to not get exploded.”

CAMERON: “Val, she said many, not mini.”

LAURA: “So many.”

AUSTIN: “Many explosions. Oh! Oh yeah. I can do that.”

LAURA: “Many explosions!”

CAMERON: “Tink has issues with her accent too.”

HUDSON: “Oh yeah.”

LAURA: “So we explode the barracks, we explode maybe some of the entrances…” Looking at the plans, are there any air vent systems that would be big enough for us to get into the facility?

CAMERON: Big enough for Tink to get into the facility. (laughs)

LAURA: For Tink to crawl through, even if it is just getting in a few feet. He only has to come into the building and not use a main door.

NICK: So, here’s a sci-fi question for you, and it’s gonna come off sarcastic. Why would the air vents lead to vacuum?

LAURA: Because they have to… So coming from a science background—

NICK: Yeah, that’s why.

LAURA: –working under a fume hood for chemicals, it may be a thing where they have to vent out fumes.

NICK: Like a two foot exhaust port that leads to—

LAURA: Like a two meter exhaust port—

CAMERON: Two meter? (laughs)

AUSTIN: Whoa boy.

LAURA: Well no, what is it? It’s like…

NICK: Oh, it is two meters wide.

LAURA: It’s two or three, the size of a womp rat.

AUSTIN: The death star, yeah.

CAMERON: It’s only two meters wide, a small exhaust pipe.

NICK: That’s a big ass womp rat.

AUSTIN: That’s why you can shoot it from your star fighter.

LAURA: It’s not much bigger than a womp rat. I’ve been watching a lot of Leverage lately. (laughing) Full disclosure, a lot of Leverage.

CAMERON: You have to land a precise hit.

NICK: I picked a good time to do a heist episode.

LAURA: You picked a great time to do a heist one. So yeah, just a vent that maybe they use to vent fumes out into space. Maybe a safety protocol one, or even if it doesn’t initially vent out into space, if there’s one that skims the surface close enough that we could…

NICK: Like cut into it?

LAURA: Cut into it.

NICK: If you flip me a light side point you can cut into one. That will get you into the facility.

LAURA: Xianna’s looking at the plans and goes, “Okay, so this air vent is big enough for Tink and the rest of us to get through, and it skims the surface enough that we can setup a small little atmosphere bubble, cut into it, get into the facility, and then we can blow the doors with explosions. That would make it harder for the stormtroopers to get in, and since we’re already blowing up the stormtroopers inside the facility, no stormtroopers!”

CAMERON: “Wait. You wanna blow up the doors out into the vacuum?”

LAURA: “No, no, no. Not necessarily blow it up so that they are like…”

CAMERON: “Just so they’re not operational anymore, not like busting through the doors?”

LAURA: “So they’re not operational. Also, most of those ones are, you know, a double door situation, so to create a—“

CAMERON: “Or they have the shield.”

LAURA: What is it? There’s a name for the, when there’s a door that opens, you go in, atmosphere, then the next door.

OTHERS: Airlock.

LAURA: “Well most of them are double doors for an airlock, so if you just blow up the first door then it makes it much harder to get in, because one there is rubble and then two there is no airlock anymore, so it makes it more difficult to get in because they don’t want to depressurize the whole building… so you just blow up the first door, and many rocks, many explosions, maybe some—well, no fire, because no atmosphere. But rocks, rubble, distraction! We will come in through the air vent and we will get in, we will get Tink to the computer room. Val will blow up more things.”

AUSTIN: “Heheh.”

LAURA: ‘Karma and Hank will take care of anyone who does try to get us. We will get into the cage, steal someone for the eye scan, then the elevator, then I will figure out the pressure-sensitive hallway, and then combo lock. Maybe I get it, maybe we blow it up. Who knows!”

HUDSON: “Just have a few guesses at first.”

LAURA: “We’ll figure it out as we go. You know, keep things fluid. Heh. Room to improvise!”

HUDSON: “So, this is a question for the crew and for Val especially. There’s Humans only in this base, so would you like me to shave myself all over, to…”

LAURA: “Oh no Tink, please do not do that.”

CAMERON: (wincing, laughing) “No, please don’t. Please don’t.”

LAURA: “I once saw a shaved Wookie and I will never unsee it.”

HUDSON: “It could just look like a Human who’s been through a lot.”

LAURA: “You know. You will look like a gigantic penis.”

CAMERON: (snorts)

AUSTIN: “That doesn’t sound exactly like it would be passable as a Human.”

LAURA: “No. You are too tall. Also, you can’t speak Basic without your translator, so you would just be a giant penis running around going AGGHHH.”

HUDSON: “No. No, I could pass it off as—“

CAMERON: “No, that’s not fair. He sounds more like bus breaks.”

LAURA: “Oh yes. It sounds more like (whining growl noise).”

HUDSON: “I could easily pass that off as something that…”

LAURA: “Again, Tink, we are gonna do more of a smash and grab situation. If we see a Human, pew-pew, okay?”

HUDSON: “Okay. Wait, whoa, o! Swish-slash!”

LAURA: “For you swish-slash, for me pew-pew. One we will have to take for an eye scan. So, look, I know Karma does not approve of this, but if they are already dead just, you know, scoop-plop, take the eyeball.” Heh.

NICK: That is definitely an entire chapter in Becoming Medicine, how to take an eyeball from a corpse.

(laughter)

CAMERON: Ew.

LAURA: You use a grapefruit spoon!

HUDSON: “Yeah but, for the sake of ethics, we would need to look at their identification card to see if they’re a donor.”

LAURA: “Tink, you went to an Imperial school. They automatically sign you up.”

HUDSON: “You’re right. Alright. This is fine then.”

LAURA: “So we just need to make sure that they have access.”

CAMERON: “But you don’t know if they’re a contractor or not, so you need to check and see if they have the little heart on their badge.”

HUDSON: “Why don’t I try to hack it first?”

LAURA: “We can try to hack it first. We will get you to the hacking room, you can see what you do, and then we will go from there, okay?”

HUDSON: “Okay.”

LAURA: “I’m just saying, I have no issues taking an eyeball out of a dead body.”

HUDSON: Out of character, I really hope I get a triumph, because I can do so much badass shit if I get a triumph.

CAMERON: (laughs)

LAURA: We will do everything possible!

NICK: On the hacking or on the Medicine check?

CAMERON: Uh, on the eyeball popping check.

AUSTIN: (laughs) Two triumphs.

HUDSON: On the hacking.

NICK: You’ll get multiple tries, because there’s different systems in there.

CAMERON: Xianna’s very focused on the ‘okay, this is how we’re getting in.’ She’s very much in the blueprints.

LAURA: She’s still marking on the blueprints. She’s just all over the place X-ing things out, circling things, making paths, smiley faces, winking faces. One section has a taco emoji, you don’t know how that happened, you don’t know what it means, but it’s there. She’s just like in her zone marking things.

CAMERON: “Val, what was your plan for getting there?”

LAURA: “Oh yes, we have to get there.”

AUSTIN: “I am so glad you asked.” I do the Wheel of Fortune gesture over one shoulder. “I’ve got two ships here that are currently in working order. The first one,” I point to the right side, “this one is the Morning Sunshine. It’s a WR542 Shooting Star.” I’m describing physical description out of character now. It kind of looks like an A-Wing that you scaled up to be the size of almost a small freighter. It can fit like ten passengers in it. It’s pure white paint with a bunch of greenish-blue and then purple geometric designs all over it. It looks really pretty.

LAURA: “Okay. Okay nice.”

NICK: We get a sweeping 360 camera shot and then splash are that says Morning Sunshine!

AUSTIN: “So this ship is super fast, it’s super maneuverable, it’s so much fun to drive,” and by drive I mean fly because we’re in Star Wars. “It handles great in atmosphere, and it’s even got a couple of guns on it for … something.”

LAURA: “Question. Please don’t touch my blueprints. I am working… Question. How does it handle not in atmosphere?”

AUSTIN: “Even better. It’s got a .5 class hyperdrive. It’s a courier ship, so it’s really good at getting you to places where you don’t want the guys to get what you’re carrying.”

NICK: Systematically, .5 class hyperdrives aren’t even in the Edge of the Empire system, like the fastest ones are 1s, so it’s very fast.

LAURA: “Okay. Does it have any stealthy things to it? Because it looks very bright and pretty, but…”

AUSTIN: “No! It’s for pure speed.”

CAMERON: (laughs)

HUDSON: “I can handle this part. I can go into the coms and we can pretend like we are an Imperial ship.”

LAURA: “No. Look at that, Tink. That is not an Imperial ship. It has paint on it.”

HUDSON: “We can say that we’ve been through stuff.”

LAURA: “No!”

CAMERON: “It’s not a boring gray color. You can’t just yell we’ve been through stuff. We gained a personality.”

LAURA: “You would be like we got a very fun paint job? No, that is how you get executed in the Empire. Putting on your own fun paint color? No~”

CAMERON: “Alright. What’s the other ship?”

AUSTIN: “Well, the other option, this is the one I really like. It’s the Stubborn As Hell. I call him Stubs.” (others giggle) This is a Skipray blastboat, so it’s like a really big star fighter. It’s all gray. It’s got a bunch of scars. There’s no paint on it. There’s actually paint on the other side that you can’t see, but on the side that you’re on there is a giant turbo laser basically duct taped to the side of it, and it reaches from the back of the ship and past the cockpit so you can see it out the cockpit, it blocks part of your view. “So this is the Stubborn As Hell. It used to be a Skipray. I kind of replaced all of the reactor tech with my own… so I was able to power a turbo laser. Now, I had to rip off all the missiles, but it’s a turbo laser!”

LAURA: “Okay. Okay. How sneaky is it?”

AUSTIN: “Not at all!”

NICK: (laughs)

AUSTIN: “But it’s still really fast, and I can put a hole in a star destroyer with it… because it’s a turbo laser.”

LAURA: Which one is smaller?

NICK: They’re both the same size. They’re Silhouette 4.

LAURA: “Um… Maybe the one without the paint? If they look outside they won’t see it as much? It might blend in better?”

AUSTIN: “You know it has a turbo laser on it…”

(laughter)

LAURA: “It does have a turbo laser, but I’m thinking it is less easy to see mat gray than it is to see bright white and fun colors.””

NICK: Well, and in space, visual confirmation almost never happens.

AUSTIN: Have you done the 360 pan around it?

NICK: I haven’t yet. So, we get the camera doing the 360 pan around…

AUSTIN: On the other side that’s not the turbo laser, where there would normally be your graphic pin-up girl, there is a girl on the side of the ship but it’s Taylor Swift just with her arms crossed making a scowl.

(laughter)

NICK: (smiling) And it comes back around and it says Taylor Swi—and then that gets scribbled out and says Stubs!

CAMERON: It does the thing when you’re in a video game and you’re picking which car you’re gonna drive and it’s doing the spinning thing for both of the ships, and they’re on the lit up platforms. ‘Choose your ship~’

AUSTIN: “I have like eight half-built uglies in the corner and we can fly X-TIEs and Y-TIEs and XYs and Z-Wings and—“

LAURA: “Okay, but are there any that we can fly in without being detected?”

AUSTIN: “If we fly fast enough, or we blow holes in everything that can detect us.”

LAURA: “Okay… Maybe we just go fast enough… I think I am going to take everything inside the building. I will figure this all out. Tink and Karma, and I guess Hank too, you figure out how we are going to get to the building because I don’t fucking know.” Heh.

HUDSON: “Hey, HK.”

NICK: “Answer: yes?”

HUDSON: “How do you think we should be stealthy and get onto the asteroid?”

NICK: “Annoyed Statement: What part of my skills and personality makes you think I’m qualified to answer that?”

HUDSON: “I don’t know you very well right now, so you can just get that snippy attitude and take it right out of here.”

CAMERON: “HK, I appreciate your snippy attitude. Why don’t you look at the blueprints with Xianna and pick a defensible location near the elevator for you laying down, cover fire, if the stormtroopers show up while people are still in the vault?”

NICK: HK starts to walk away, and as he approaches Xianna you hear him say, “Musing: I wonder how many organics I can vent with this weapon.”

LAURA: Xianna actually starts explaining blueprints to him. “And you see, okay. So over here where there is this thing, if you were to create an explosion it would come back, so you could get more people that way. And you see over here, there is this window, you could shoot through that one,” and is actually telling him about the blueprint and how that might make him shoot people better.

NICK: This is all from by Tink, Karma and Val. The camera shot is long towards them. You hear HK say, “Character Analysis: You are very good at murdering people in underhanded ways. I like you.”

LAURA: “Yes. You see this symbol? That means it’s a door. You see this symbol? That means a window. This symbol is for refreshers, so you know, that is where—Well you don’t have to do that, but…”

NICK: “Commentary: I only have lights for eyes, but I would be rolling them right now.”

AUSTIN: (laughs)

LAURA: “Well, just letting you know, there are ways you can kill people in a refresher. You can drown them I guess. I don’t know. There are things you can pick up and hit them with, you can hide things in there, but do remember there are always hidden coms in the refresher. You have to find them usually behind the toilet. For some reason the Empire always bugs the refresher.”

NICK: “Reassurance: I am well aware of their policy with paper towel dispensers and refreshers.”

LAURA: “Good…”

(laughter)

NICK: So, we’ll cut away from that to the other three standing by the ships. Very lightly in the background you hear (musically) ‘Cruisin’~’ … because that was the best arcade game for cars. Anyway!

LAURA: Heh. Some light jizz.

CAMERON: “Alright. So Val, tell me about these ships.”

AUSTIN: “Both of these ships are pretty much the same speed in vacuum.”

CAMERON: “Alright.”

AUSTIN: “The Morning Sunshine is much faster in atmosphere, but I don’t think we have to go in atmosphere on this mission, so realistically unless we’re expecting to get chased back out of hyperspace I don’t think the hyperdrive difference is gonna make a difference, and we should just take Stubs… because we can put holes in things.”

CAMERON: “That is true. Alright, talk to me about the handling. You said one was more fun to drive. Is that because it drives Better?”

AUSTIN: “The Morning Sunshine is significantly—If I was gonna rate them on a scale, I would say that the Morning Sunshine is a +1 and Stubs is a -1.” (laughs)

CAMERON: “Okay.” (laughs)

NICK: The Afternoon Delight is like a -2, right?

CAMERON: (laughing) Yeah! The Afternoon Delight is a -2 handling, because it’s a fucking giant boat!

LAURA: It’s a pleasure yacht. It’s a party boat! We have a hot tub.

CAMERON: It wasn’t meant to maneuver good.

AUSTIN: “Stubs’s armor is significantly better, it’s twice as good… on a scale of 2 versus 4.”

NICK: (laughs)

CAMERON: “I do appreciate the better armor and  appreciate the being able to fire back and actually do damage.”

AUSTIN: “Yeah, so Morning Sunshine only has a couple of laser turrets, Stubs has triple linked ion cannons and a laser turret and the god damn turbo laser.”

CAMERON: “Damn!” (laughs) “Alrighty. I’m leaning Stubs.”

AUSTIN: “And it also even has a small tractor beam, because I use it to pick up salvage. I don’t think that’s gonna assist in this mission, unless we happen to decide to blow that asteroid up, and then we can hope that we didn’t blow up that impossible to find power core inside. I’ve tried that before and I couldn’t find it. It was very sad.”

HUDSON: “You know, if you like explosions then I like explosions. I say we go with Stubby Stubs.”

CAMERON: “yeah. I think the likelihood of us destroying both star destroyers, and the asteroid, and then successfully locating the part you’re after is very low. I’m not a droid so I can’t prove you the exact probability there, but not thinking good.”

AUSTIN: “Well actually, Morning Sunshine has an onboard droid intelligence, so if we wanted to go ask I’m sure he’d give it to us with six digits of zeroes first.”

CAMERON: “No, it’s okay. it’s always depressing.”

NICK: (laughs) We get a cut to the cockpit of the Morning Sunshine and there’s an equalizer display that’s doing voice sound waves, and you just hear an AI voice going, (musically) “Lonely… I’m so lonely…” and then we cut back.

(laughter)

CAMERON: “Alright. Practical question. If we take Stubs, can we park our ship in here?”

AUSTIN: “That should be fine. Sure. As long as you can maneuver it around. Can you fit in this bay?”

CAMERON: “Sure! Yeah.”

AUSTIN: Is its silhouette the same?

NICK: No.

CAMERON: “Our ship is the Afternoon Delight, and it—“ It does behave as a Silhouette 4, which means I should be able to park it here. (laughs)

AUSTIN: (laughs)

LAURA: It BEHAVES as one.

AUSTIN: Is that part of your upgrades?

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: It LOOKS like a Silhouette 4 for targeting purposes.

CAMERON: (giggles) yeah.

NICK: It would fit. It’s not gonna fit well.

CAMERON: I just really want the Afternoon Delight to be parked next to the Morning Sunshine.

NICK: Yeah. That’s fair. It’ll fit, it just may knock over some of the piles of stuff, but you don’t have to tell Val that.

CAMERON: Okay. yeah, I love it.

LAURA: “Question. Do we have suits to go out into space?”

AUSTIN: “I have suits. You guys are on a ship. You should have suits in your ship.”

LAURA: “Do we? I don’t know. Oh, they might be in that one room.”

CAMERON: “Oh, they’re in the costume closet.”

LAURA: “They are? Okay.”

AUSTIN: “Yeah. I’m really experienced at doing EVAs, because I have to go fix things on my ships a lot. Turns out when you put an oversized power in your ship and it starts shooting sparks whenever you turn the engines on you have to go fix things.”

LAURA: “Okay. We use Stubs. We get to the planet. I think at this point we will get the suits on. Val, and maybe someone else, will get explosives on the outer doors, and then some of us will setup a little atmo bubble, we will break into the vent. Then we all go into the vent after the explosions are placed.”

CAMERON: “Rewinding a little bit. How are we getting the ship past the two star destroyers?”

LAURA: “I don’t know! That was for you to figure out!”

AUSTIN: “We’re gonna blow them up! It’s got a turbo laser.”

LAURA: “We go real fast.”

AUSTIN: “Well, I can’t aim it, but I can guarantee that it’s gonna put a hole in the star destroyer.”

HUDSON & CAMERON: (laughs)

LAURA: “Oh! Tink!”

HUDSON: “yes?”

LAURA: “Maybe say that some sort of maintenance thing is happening and so ignore the ship. That a new maintenance crew had to be hired and something is being fixed on the planet, and put in like a work order so it makes it look like our ship is the maintenance crew.”

HUDSON: “We said earlier I couldn’t do that.”

LAURA: “No, no, no. We can’t do that and we pretend to we are the crew, because they will notice we are not Humans, but if it is just for the ship they don’t see inside the ship, so just to get past the destroyers.”

HUDSON: “Okay. I can do that.”

LAURA: “This is just for the ship to land. Once we land we will be in the suits and no one will be looking anyways, because again, no one cares about maintenance.”

CAMERON: “We can be George Jetson.”

HUDSON: (laughs)

CAMERON: Karma says holding up a code cylinder.

LAURA: “Oh, yes!”

NICK: And, camera wipe! (laughter) We get a quick shot of everyone piling into Stubs, the ship taking off, the Afternoon Delight being parked. It knocks a bunch of stuff over and barely fits at an angle with the landing pad stretched out. It’s a lot bigger and there wasn’t a ton of space. Then we see Karma coming out of that ship in an atmo suit holding the two other atmo suits that she has…

CAMERON: Boop-bwoop.

NICK: …locks it, and then the next thing we see is Stubs snapping out of hyperspace. It was a very short trip, it’s like half an hour. Turns out it was really close. All of this is taking place on the far reaches of the Outer Rim, almost to wild space, which if you’re not familiar with Star Wars.

LAURA: (snooty mocking)

NICK: Wild space is the part that’s like… Outer Rim is Tatooine and all the places that are really lawless. Wild space is literally lawless. There’s nobody out there. People just do whatever they want. It’s like international waters, but space. Isn’t that fun? There’s not a lot of it. Also, I think the Chiss are out there somewhere.

LAURA: The Chiss are out there somewhere.

AUSTIN: I thought they were in the unexplored regions.

LAURA: Yeah, but wild space is kind of merged into the unexplored areas.

NICK: So you do like wild space and then unexplored, but it’s kind of all slang for the same thing.

LAURA: But there’s no distinction, yeah.

AUSTIN: Yeah.

NICK: It’s different EU writers calling it different things.

AUSTIN: Yeah. Wild space is like you can’t really hyperspace jump, and the Chiss base you also can’t but they have their beacons or whatever.

NICK: Yeah, it’s a whole thing. So the ship snaps out of hyperspace. The asteroid is almost perfectly spherical. You can see little bunkers and stuff sticking out, but it’s very obvious that a majority of this station is inside the rock, they carved it in. You can see some lighting that the top third or so seems to be the majority of the stuff. It’s like they only settled part of it, or like there’s a secret vault further in…

CAMERON: Bum-bum-BUM!

NICK: Ooh. And there are two victory class star destroyers, the Hammer and Sickle, that are on either side of this. (laughter and groaning) They’re in interlocking sensor grids to where there’s no way you’re gonna get to it without being seen. To illustrate that, what’s the ringtone for the coms on Stubs?

HUDSON: (hums Crazy Frog)

(laughter)

NICK: God damn it.

CAMERON: (hums Kim Possible stinger)

HUDSON: (laughs)

NICK: I was just picturing the fax noise, but that’s just me.

AUSTIN: Nah, I think it’s just like an air horn. I didn’t rig up something to really replace it, but I needed something on there, so like I don’t know!

NICK: Yeah, so you get a mechanical air horn that goes off.

LAURA: “Ahh! What is that? Are we dying?!”

AUSTIN: “That’s just the coms.”

LAURA: “Oh. Okay. We are not dying.”

AUSTIN: “It’s fine.”

LAURA: “Oh shit.” Heh.

NICK: Who’s flying? Val, are you flying or is Karma flying?

CAMERON: Karma’s flying.

NICK: You did enough test flying. You’re comfortable with the ship at this point.

AUSTIN: Yeah. I did an ask around the crew. I can okay pilot, but I’d much rather be able to go fix things and make things better if we need to.

NICK: There was an awkward scene of everyone just standing around in the cockpit and Val just kind of pointing at the chair and then walking away and karma shrugs and sits down.

AUSTIN: “Figure it out!”

LAURA: Tink and Xianna would have just been looking at Karma like, “you know how to fly. You fly? We don’t.”

CAMERON: (laughs) Karma’s like “It’s not my ship, I don’t know if Val wants to,” and then Val’s like ‘meh’ and walks away. “Alright! I guess it’s me.”

AUSTIN: “Just figure it out. I gotta get the reactor started and I gotta make sure it doesn’t blow up on us. I’m sure it hasn’t happened before.”

CAMERON: (nervously) “Great! Okay.” karma’s flipping switches and shit.

NICK: Okay. The com channel opens and you hear, “This is the ISS Sickle calling unidentified aircraft. You will be destroyed in the next 30 seconds as our weapons charge. What is your purpose here for our logs for ships destroyed? Thank you.”

LAURA: “Okay, so you got to send them the—“

AUSTIN: “SUP?! We’re here to visit the facility!”

LAURA: “You send them the code with the thing you are—“

AUSTIN: “And here’s that code! Give me the code.”

CAMERON: (laughing) karma plugs it in and sends it.

AUSTIN: “There!”

NICK: “Weapons charging at 75%.”

LAURA: “You are Officer George Jetson.”

AUSTIN: “I’m Officer George Jetson!”

NICK: “Why are there multiple people talking on your end?”

AUSTIN: “Shh! I’m the extra officer here!”

LAURA: I would be on a com or something, or whispering, so it’s not…

CAMERON: There’s not enough space in the cockpit for all of us. (laughs)

AUSTIN: No, there isn’t.

LAURA: So I would have just been like whispering, yeah.

AUSTIN: There’s a pilot and a co-pilot, and I think there’s like two extra seats back where the gunner and the coms are or something, or maybe there are two gunners. I don’t remember.

LAURA: Whatever it is, I would have set it up so that they couldn’t hear me talking to Val.

NICK: Right.

LAURA: “Okay. Say you are Officer George Jetson. You are here on a secret undercover mission.”

NICK: “We see here that you have clearance that does not match your ship. What…”

AUSTIN: “You ever heard of field acquisitions? This is a great ship.”

LAURA: “Say you are on an undercover mission!”

AUSTIN: “I’m on an undercover mission. Can’t you tell what undercover looks like?”

NICK: “Um… Please stand by,” and the coms click off.

LAURA: “Okay. That was not terrible, but it was not great. I would not even say it was good, but I think I can work with this.”

AUSTIN: “Karma, hit that green button. We might need the turbo laser.”

CAMERON: (laughing) Click.

NICK: And the whole ship starts to rattle and jitter and you hear this high-pitched whining and sparks start shooting everywhere. It’s probably fine. That was the Sickle that called, right?

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: The Hammer is coming around the opposite side and all of the turbo lasers from these two things are pointed at you.

CAMERON: Karma cracks her neck and grabs onto the, I don’t know, the steering wheel.

AUSTIN: “I’m sure they’ll let us in. Just keep flying towards it.”

CAMERON: “Yep. That’s my plan.”

AUSTIN: “You said your credentials are great. That means I can do whatever I want.”

CAMERON: “(heavy exhale)”

LAURA: (nervously) “Maybe. We will see~ Okay… Let’s wait for them to get back to us. So far they haven’t—“

AUSTIN: I hit the button. I’m gonna call them back.

(laughter)

LAURA: “They haven’t shot us yet. You know what, be assertive. Good.”

AUSTIN: “Quit aiming your guns at us!”

NICK: (whining) “I’m sorry! Let me put the captain back on the line!”

Then there’s a break. “Unidentified ship!—“

AUSTIN: “Quit aiming your guns at us! This is an Imperial ship. I claimed it!”

NICK: “This is standard protocol.”

AUSTIN: “Now quit aiming your guns. Didn’t you see the clearance?!”

LAURA: “Say you are an, a very, an… enforcer!”

AUSTIN: “I’m on a very important mission. I need to get on that station right now, and you need to get out of the way!”

NICK: The captain says, “Oh, my goodness. You’re that George Jetson. My mistake, sir. My apologies, sir.” You can see the ships drifting back and the turbo lasers snap away very quickly. “We didn’t know. You didn’t tell us. Protocol is you’re supposed to give us a forewarning.”

AUSTIN: “That’s right. I’m George Jetson.”

LAURA: “But say that you could not give a warning because of the special undercover mission.”

AUSTIN: “Thanks for your time!” And I hang up.

NICK: (laughs)

LAURA: “Oh no… Okay. Thankfully that code is very good and they should listen to you anyways. Okay…”

NICK: The cannons click away and you’re clear to approach. Do you avoid the airlocks and go towards the weak point in the wall that you were planning to cut into? What is your plan?

LAURA: Yes. The plan was to land by where we’re gonna cut into for the vent, because we would need to put up a little bubble or something so that when we get in we can put atmo in there, because there’s no wall anymore.

CAMERON: We needed to grab a shield.

LAURA: So we would need to put a little shield bubble thing, so while Xianna and someone else was doing that Val and someone else was gonna put explosives on the main doors, so we would get out with our suits on…

NICK: Ah, okay.

LAURA: …and Xianna would start setting up the bubble with whoever else wants to setup the bubble, and then two other people and probably Hank would go around and put explosive devices by the doors.

NICK: Okay. You land on the side of the ship and you hear (air horns).

AUSTIN: (laughs)

NICK: (air horns)

AUSTIN: (laughing) I hit the button again. “Say my name!”

(laughter)

LAURA: “You cannot be this assertive!”

NICK: (nervously) “Inspector… Inspector George Jetson.”

AUSTIN: “You’re god damn right!” And I hang back up again.

(laughter)

LAURA: “Oh my goodness! Oh, shit. If they call back just tell them you are on an undercover mission and to not worry about it. Just say to ignore you.”

NICK: (air horns)

AUSTIN: (laughing) I hit the button again.

NICK: “Um, Inspector Jetson, our extreme apologies—“

AUSTIN: “We’re on a secret mission! Can’t you see we’re trying to infiltrate this facility?!”

NICK: “This is our facility, sir…”

LAURA: “No! We are checking protocol!”

AUSTIN: I hang up again.

(laughter)

LAURA: “Oh my god. If they call back say you are checking security weak points and to just ignore our ship, and anyone… okay, okay…”

NICK: They don’t call back.

CAMERON: “Xianna, I would like to point out that it was your idea to have Val play the part of George Jetson.”

LAURA: “IT was my idea, but I didn’t think any of us could—“

AUSTIN: “They’re leaving us alone! I don’t see what your problem is.”

LAURA: (breathy) “Okay. Oh boy.”

AUSTIN: “The star destroyers are backing away. You just gotta be assertive with these guys.”

CAMERON: “Val, how do I turn this laser off?”

AUSTIN: Heh. “You hit the red button and then the purple button and then toggle those two switches over there, and then hit that green button.”

CAMERON: “Okay!” Ba-dum, toggle, toggle, plink.

NICK: It doesn’t turn off. It starts to power charge.

AUSTIN: “I’m gonna go walk back there and go deal with that.”

CAMERON: (laughing) Karma just hits the control panel.

NICK: Yeah. That, and then Val does that (clunk) trying to walk calmly but running very quick and cuts full power to the ship. The next thing we have is you all setting up your bubble and then a bunch of explosives all over the station. It sounds like some people are setting charges to breech and some people are setting charges to booby-trap later to vent atmosphere. Yeah?

CAMERON: Yeah.

LAURA: Some are going to breech into the vent. The rest are going on the outer airlock doors to make it harder to get in, as a distraction, and to create rubble.

NICK: Okay. Who’s in which group?

LAURA: Xianna would be setting up the little bubble and then setting to get in. How many outer doors are there I guess?

NICK: There’s the main hanger bay, but that’s not really a door, that’s one of those open things. There’s two access ports scattered across.

LAURA: Okay. it would really just be Val and one other person putting explosives on those.

NICK: Who’s gonna go do that? Who’s gonna be the third person?

CAMERON: Karma.

AUSTIN: Karma has seen a bomb before.

CAMERON: Taken some firepower.

NICK: HK and Tink are gonna stay on the ship until everything’s ready.

CAMERON: HK’s probably watching Xianna’s back.

NICK: Oh, okay.

LAURA: Tink is probably helping me setup the little bubble.

HUDSON: Yeah.

LAURA: Then we cut into the wall to get into the vent. On coms we’ll let everyone know that we’re ready to go in, and then when Karma and Val get back we get into our bubble and… then we go. We penetrate.

NICK: So, the only thing with that—Ick. The only thing with that is we’re gonna need some Stealth rolls for the people blowing the outer ones, because there are sensors outside of this station. Karma and Val, I’m gonna need you to cross the station appropriately, and then also I’m gonna need… I guess it would be heavy weapons? What do you use for explosives?

AUSTIN: Mechanics.

NICK: Okay. I’ll need Mechanics checks from Val probably for having set them up.

AUSTIN: Yeah. Karma can put them down, bring them over and put them in the right spot, and then I do the final (clicking and whooshing noises).

CAMERON: Heh. Karma’s helping carrying them and is then just holding her blaster watching out.

NICK: Yeah. So, Stealth rolls.

CAMERON: What’s the difficulty on this Stealth roll?

NICK: (comically long, drawn out “um”) … Average.

CAMERON: (snickers)

AUSTIN: We must have gotten another com call.

SEVERAL: (air horn noises)

AUSTIN: Say my name!

NICK: God damn it. (laughs)

AUSTIN: You’re god damn right.

CAMERON: (laughs) Alright. Three successes, two advantages for Karma.

NICK: Do you want to use your advantages to give Val a blue die on her Stealth roll?

AUSTIN: Two advantages are worth one blue die on mine?

NICK: You can give her two.

CAMERON: Ha-ha!

NICK: Because technically one advantage can give a blue die to whoever’s turn is next, so…

CAMERON: So I just did that twice~

AUSTIN: And you can stack that?

NICK: Yeah, but it costs more to be like, if it were all of you doing stuff, it would be ‘I specifically want to give this person something.’

AUSTIN: Well, I am not sneaky at all, and also not agile, so we got two greens.

CAMERON: Ah, you’re fine.

AUSTIN: Two successes and a threat.

NICK: Great. We’ll do this as a montage thing. Make that Mechanics roll for breeching. Specifically what you’re trying to achieve with this is to break the door or to breech to vent atmosphere?

AUSTIN: I think we’re breeching it. We’re just gonna blow them away and wreck the station behind us.

LAURA: Yeah. The idea was to blow up the outer doors of the air lock, because then there’s no airlock.

AUSTIN: So that they can’t land people.

LAURA: So it makes it harder to get into the facility.

NICK: So you’re trying to just blow the outer doors of the airlock, not both doors?

LAURA & AUSTIN: Yes.

NICK: Okay. That’s gonna be hard difficulty, then.

AUSTIN: Fortunately I have a 4 in Mechanics and 3 Intellect, so this is three yellows and a green.

NICK: Well… Ooh. I wanna flip a dark side point. Upgrade that difficulty.

LAURA: Could we argue that she had time to plan, and since we had the blueprints it would be maybe easier and she could have a boost die…?

CAMERON: For being more exact with the amount of explosion necessary?

NICK: Sure.

LAURA: Because we had the blueprint, so we could look exactly where they would need to go.

NICK: That’s fine. I’m just going for that good, good despair.

CAMERON: (laughs)

AUSTIN: (laughs) I’m sure nothing will go wrong.

CAMERON: Phew.

AUSTIN: One failure and four advantages.

NICK: These were things you were gonna blow later, like after you went loud, right?

CAMERON & AUSTIN: Yeah.

NICK: I’m sure it will be fine.

AUSTIN: (laughs nervously)

NICK: We’ll talk about those advantages later. Walk me through what it looks like sneaking over the station, setting the charges. It fails but you don’t know it failed. What does this all look like?

AUSTIN: We mis-hooked up a cable or something, so either it won’t blow right or it’ll blow wrong, or whatever you decide is the worst.

NICK: Yep. We’ll find out.

AUSTIN: I just walk over.

NICK: You just walk across the station?

AUSTIN: I walk like I’m meant to be there, because I’m god damn George Jetson.

LAURA: Well, because we’re outside.

AUSTIN: There’s no sneaking. They can see us.

LAURA: yeah.

CAMERON: Karma crouches and walks the whole way in a crouch, because that’s how you sneak.

NICK: All the cameras go just over Karma’s head and see Val, and track Val, so it looks like there’s just the one.

AUSTIN: I look like I’m supposed to be. I have a maintenance vacuum suit on, because that’s what I do.

NICK: Ooh! Something I should point out. While you all are wearing vacuum suits, as you take damage or take threats there’s potential that they will get holes in them.

LAURA: Yeah. You take them off once you get in. That’s what Xianna’s gonna do.

NICK: yeah. There’s vented hallways too. Just something to bear in mind, that could be a problem. Yeah. You make it there, you set all the charges, you come back, you’re gathered in the bubble, ready to rock and roll.

LAURA: Yeah. Once we get into the bubble, we seal off the bubble, and Tink and Xianna cut into the wall? I think it was a wall.

NICK: Yeah.

LAURA: Xianna goes first into the vent, and we get into the vent.

NICK: The vents have atmo in them.

LAURA: Okay. The bubble would just have taken some of the atmo. That’s why we had a small bubble.

NICK: Yeah. The vent smells very bad for the record.

HUDSON: Ew.

NICK: It’s like a sulfur castoff kind of situation, so that’s fun. (smiling)

CAMERON: Hmm.

AUSTIN: I’m sure having it come out of a lab won’t be a problem.

LAURA: Xianna would have had everyone walk in as far as they can with the vents until we can no longer use the vents because they get too small, and we then exit.

NICK: You’re able to go through the vent. Basically you crawl through some stuff. These are probably the biggest vents the station has which is why you picked them, so you’re able to get through pretty easily, even HK can with his big old gun. You spit out into a hallway next to a series of labs. The first thing you notice is there are about twice the amount of security cameras as there were on the blueprints. You are in a blind spot, but they are freaking everywhere.

LAURA: “Oh no.”

NICK: You know from your experience that the computer server room is gonna be to the left, the vault’s going to be to the right, and where you’re at is probably the third best place on the station to setup a kill zone if you’re trying to do weapons cover. Who’s going where and doing what?

LAURA: “Okie. There are more cameras than I thought. I do not know if we can sneak past them all, so maybe what we do is we have Val, the Human, in a maintenance outfit, get to a computer room, plug in Tink’s stuff, and then he can control everything from in here…”

AUSTIN: “Sure. Give me that rank cylinder.”

LAURA: “… and then we can turn the cameras off, or loop them. You want to loop them so it doesn’t look…”

HUDSON: “I’ve dealt with this before. Yeah.”

LAURA: “Yeah.”

NICK: Mmm. Hmm…

HUDSON: GM decisions.

NICK: I don’t think Tink is gonna be able to control everything wirelessly. I think Val may be able to shut down enough cameras to get Tink there, but he’s gonna need to be in the room.

LAURA: Okay. “Val, you will pretend to be maintenance worker. Get into the computer room—“

AUSTIN: “Oh, that’s easy, I’m am a real maintenance worker.”

HUDSON: (laughs)

LAURA: “Yeah, you are. So you just go into the maintenance room. If there’s only one person in there you can just, you know, boop, get them on the head, you have that room now, shut down a few of the cameras, and then we get Tink in there. If there are not enough people for you to take care of immediately so that no one calls for help, you will need to sneakily turn these few cameras off and then we get Tink in there, and Tink can smash them too, and we shoot them all. Sound good?”

AUSTIN: “Yeah, we’ll see what happens.”

LAURA: “We’ll wing it! Yes, we will wing it.”

NICK: You all are setting up a position in this hall and Val’s going off alone?

AUSTIN: I’m stripping the vacuum suit off. I’ve got my maintenance coveralls under it. I’ve got a leather jacket on now, because I’m armored.

NICK: Cool.

CAMERON: (laughs)

NICK: You wave your hydrospanner at the cameras like ‘hey.’ Alright. You take off down the hallway. The security room is not that far. About half way there you see a kind of squat looking guy who’s just freaking jacked and he has a cut-off vest on. You notice he has a red bandana tied around his head. “Hey, uh, can I see your identification  please?”

AUSTIN: I wave the rank cylinder with all its wires hanging out at him.

NICK: “Uh, wait, hold on.” You try to walk past him. He puts his hand on your shoulder. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” You notice he has a very big blaster rifle that’s pretty stripped down. “Now, that one’s not regulation. You can’t just wave that around. Your ID badge. I’m a security consultant here. I just started so I don’t know everybody, but I need to see…”

AUSTIN: I open my leather jacket and show him the patch on my chest that just says Val.

CAMERON: (laughs)

NICK: “No, that’s very good. It’s nice to meet you, Val. I don’t want to cause any problems. If you lost your card that’s fine. We can go to the security checkpoint and get you another one.”

AUSTIN: I look around the room while I’m reaching for my wallet. How many cameras are where I’m standing?

(laughter)

NICK: Like, one is pretty obvious.

AUSTIN: What about that hallway that he’s pointing me down towards the security room?

NICK: If you flip me a light side point there’s a very obvious camera dead side. Okay, yeah. He’s pointing down that way. You can see it’s 50 yards down this hallway and then there’s a metal detector with a couple of guards. It’s around a corner, you can kind of see the reflection, you know what the setup is, but if you get to that dead spot no one’s gonna bother you.

AUSTIN: I look around through my wallet and I flip through and I’ll just look at him kind of disappointed. “Sorry man, it looks like I don’t have it. I guess I’ll follow you down to the office.”

NICK: “Hey, that’s fine. Back where I came from we’d lose stuff all the time. It was the trees. They’d just take stuff, so… We’ll just go this way.”

CAMERON: Oh no~! (laughs)

NICK: (smiling) He lets you walk first and starts to head down the hallway. You get to that dead point. What do you do?

AUSTIN: Yeah. I’m gonna just turn around and punch him in the face.

NICK: Alright. I’m gonna need a Vigilance roll from you.

AUSTIN: Can I do a spinning back fist so that it’s a Cool roll? It doesn’t make a difference stat wise.

NICK: You absolutely can do a spinning back fist, but I’m gonna need a Cool roll for if you get the drop.

AUSTIN: It doesn’t make a difference, because my—

NICK: It does for him. He’s not as Cool.

AUSTIN: Okay. Yellow and a green. That is two successes and a triumph.

NICK: Nice! He’s three green.

CAMERON: Three successes.

NICK: Hey—Ooh.

AUSTIN: I don’t know how that racks up.

NICK: He gets to go first, but your triumph means he’s… So, he sees you start to spin and he ducks. “Man, this is like day one,” and he puts the gun into your stomach and pulls the trigger. I need a shooting roll, which is three greens against one purple, because he’s in close.

LAURA: Did you say you had armor?

AUSTIN: Yes.

NICK: Do you have defense?

CAMERON: No defense.

LAURA: No defense on it though?

NICK: Just soak?

AUSTIN: yeah, and it’s not a melee attack.

LAURA: Okay.

CAMERON: One failure and an advantage.

NICK: Damn. The advantage is that it throws you back. Your padding absorbs the blast. His gun kind of malfunctions. “The sap! I must not have cleaned it enough.” He steps back from you, but it doesn’t hit you. The advantage is it knocked you off balance a little bit. It’s your turn.

AUSTIN: Well, as an incidental, I’d like to slot my blast knuckle cylinder in. For explanatory purposes, I’ve got gloves on that are like armor, like biker gloves, but they have a slot on the back where I can put a cylinder in and I have blast knuckle cylinders, which basically means when I hit them I take a strain and they get shot by a blaster.

NICK: Cool. Very cool.

AUSTIN: I put that on.

NICK: Yeah. You slot a blast knuckle cylinder.

AUSTIN: And then I’m gonna just go for the uppercut, just under the chin, because he’s like a foot shorter than me.

NICK: Yeah, he’s pretty short. Alright, roll your attack.

AUSTIN: I got three yellows against always two, because every melee attack is two difficulty.

NICK: Mm-hmm.

AUSTIN: We got two successes and three advantages.

NICK: How much damage do your blast knuckles do?

AUSTIN: My blast knuckles do +4, which means that I’m doing 9, and I take a strain.

NICK: (scoffs) If you want to spend your triumph you can just knock him out, if you would like, or put him down if you’d like to do that, or you can roll a crit, or you could use your triumph for something else. It’s up to you.

AUSTIN: Yeah, I’ll just knock him out. I just hit him up and he bounces off the ceiling and comes down in a heap.

NICK: Yeah. He slams down and doesn’t move.

AUSTIN: I shake my hands and get a little bit of that steam off, because I did just shoot him.

NICK: Yeah. That’s pretty bad. Because you got a triumph and the way this has gone so far the security people don’t hear, it’s a dead spot in the cameras, you’re able to just shake your jacket off, brush the scoring from the misfire off, and head back down to the hallway.

AUSTIN: I’m gonna grab his ID badge too.

NICK: Oh, okay.

CAMERON: And take the cylinder back.

AUSTIN: Yeah, and take the cylinder back. Can I get that body back? Yeah, I pick the body up and I just take it back down the hallway with me.

NICK: Okay. He is indeterminately alive right now, but the ID badge you took says Mills, Private Contractor, and has a picture of this same scarred up, jacked dude.

AUSTIN: Yeah.

NICK: You bring Mills back.

CAMERON: “Oh hey, it’s Mills!”

NICK: (laughs)

LAURA: “Oh look! Look at him.”

AUSTIN: “Wait, you guys know this guy?”

LAURA: “yes!”

CAMERON: “Oh yeah! Huh.”

LAURA: “We are still going to put him in binders, in case he wakes up.”

CAMERON: “Yeah. I have an idea. He’s my grand plan for how to get through the atmo-less hallways. They should just open for him, and then we take him with us.”

LAURA: “Yes, that is why we get the badge. Okay, so I take the badge since Val and I will be going.”

CAMERON: “She needs to go to the computer room first, Xianna.”

LAURA: “Yes. Val takes the badge to get into the computer room, and then Val and I will go into the things with the atmosphere whatever, hallways, you know. So go.”

AUSTIN: I walk back down the hallway that same direction I tried a second ago. (laughs)

NICK: Yeah. You go back. You’re able to get to the security room. There’s a bunch of screens everywhere. There’’ some computer terminals. There’s some buttons. How are you trying to solve this situation of turning off specifically that one stream of cameras they needed?

AUSTIN: There’s no people there anymore?

NICK: Not right now.

AUSTIN: Okay. I just start walking around and looking at displays trying to find the one that has something that matches the current hallway.

NICK: You’re able to find it pretty easily. You can see these scuff marks from where you dragged Mills. There’s mud for some reason. You can see where it leads. You found the right bank. As far as turning them off, there isn’t an obvious power switch here.

AUSTIN: Is it just like monitors with keyboards?

NICK: Yeah.

AUSTIN: Is there a tower for each set of displays?

NICK: It’s like a bank behind it set into the wall.

AUSTIN: Can I reach?

NICK: Yeah, you could reach it.

AUSTIN: I just take the whole thing out of the wall.

NICK: Okay. You just rip that out.

AUSTIN: I just grab it and go (crunch). I don’t bother with trying to unscrew anything. I have the tools for that, because I have a tool belt, but it’s faster to just rip it.

NICK: You assume it shut everything down.

AUSTIN: Yeah.

NICK: Great.

AUSTIN: (laughs) The displays went out!

NICK: The cameras that you can see along that hallway just go (fart noise), so they’re probably off.

CAMERON: “heh. Camera down, go, Tink, go.”

HUDSON: “Right.” I start a hefty jog.

NICK: Heh. You shuffle-run your way down the hallway.

HUDSON: Yes.

NICK: Tink, you get in, there’s rolling chairs everywhere. This is your web an you are the spider. You are ready to get in. Val, do you meet up with the others?

AUSTIN: Yeah. I nod at Tink as I walk past and go back down the hallway.

HUDSON: I crack my knuckles. … “Ow.” (laughter)  “I did that too hard.”

LAURA: “Tink!”

AUSTIN: His knuckles are a little sore from our fight.

LAURA: “Tink, don’t hurt yourself.”

HUDSON: “Sorry…”

NICK: (laughing) Okay. He sits down, and that’s where we’re gonna end the episode.

ALL: Ba-naaa~!

## Outro

CAMERON: Thanks for listening to Tabletop Squadron. If you’ve enjoyed our show please consider logging onto iTunes and giving us a five-star review. Five-star reviews will help new listeners to find the show and will make the squad smile and blush adorably when we read them. If you’re so inclined, you can also help support the show through our Patreon which can be found in the show notes, on our website, and basically anywhere we post things. We have all sorts of Patreon levels including some of my favorites: Bantha Buddy, Tarkin’s Underwear Drawer, and Build-A-Beru which all have fabulous rewards and super great names.

Valorissia Creed is played by Austin Whittington. You’re not going to find him on the internet, but you can find him on our Discord, so stop by and say howdy.

Xianna’fan is played by Laura Penrod. She can be found on Twitter at @cheerio_buffet.

Tink is played by Hudson Jameson, and he can be found on Twitter at @hudsonjameson.

Karma Nailo is played by me, Cameron Robertson. You can find me on Twitter at @midnightmusic13.

Our game master is Nick Robertson, and you can find him on Twitter at @alias58.

Our intro song is Space Jam by Pablo Ribot.

Additional music by James Gunter.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram at @Tabletop_Squad, and join our Discord and share all of your food and cute pet photos with us. We also sometimes talk about Star Wars. You can find the link to join our Discord on our website and in our pinned tweet. See you next time.