Tabletop Squadron Transcript, Season 1 Episode 31:
Smooth Criminals

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.

First of all, we have a new iTunes review! alchimage2, thank you for taking the time to review our show and thank you for your kind words.

We also have some new Patrons this week. Elaine and Steve, thank you for your extremely generous donation, and thank you for buying me dinner this weekend. Elaine and Steve are my parents, and they’re just fantastic people. Thank you for supporting this thing that we love. With their generous donation we’ve hit our next Patreon goal. We can now actually cover the overhead for our podcast, paying for the hosting fees, transcription costs, and other expenses. We are geared up and ready for our celebratory, super niiice, pizza party. We’ll be streaming it on Twitch on Sunday the 28^th at 7 PM Central Time. Stop on by and celebrate with us as we eat pizza and play games. There may even be a surprise culinary creation by our very own Laura. There will be links on the website and all of our social media. Our next goal is within reach and would unlock a lot of new content. When we reach $150 we’ll create the Hot Tub Hangout tier for Patreon, allowing for some private streams with us playing games, Q&As, a special Discord channel, and movie nights with the squad. An extremely heartfelt thank you to all of our Patreon backers. We’re honored by your support.

Additional music this week is Hard Fight by manuel senfft, and Bottoms Up by Morphamish.

Now let’s get into the episode.

##

NICK: Hello, and welcome to Episode 31 of Tabletop Squadron! I’m your host and game master, Nick. We’re back again! … Good for us.

LAURA: Listening to some smooooth jazz. Up next—

CAMERON: Uh, it’s jizz, actually.

LAURA: Listening to some smooooth jizz.

NICK: (groans) I don’t wanna talk about the texture of the jizz. Let’s go around the table and everybody—

CAMERON: So smooth. (laughs)

NICK: Uck.

LAURA: Up next, we’re gonna take some listener calls~

NICK: (chuckles) No thanks. I don’t- We’ll just tweet at them. Tweet at us if you want to do listener calls for smooth jizz.

CAMERON: (laughs)

NICK: Go around the table, everybody say who you are, who you’re playing, starting with Hudson!

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

NICK: Great. Up next we have our special guest today, Austin! Hello Austin.

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

NICK: Oh boy. Up after that we have Laura.

LAURA: Hello! I play Xianna’fan, a Twi’lek smuggler. Everything’s gonna go great. It’s gonna be fine. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.

NICK: Sounds good, and I definitely believe that. Last but not least, we have Cameron.

CAMERON: Hello listeners. I’m Cameron, and I’m playing Karma Nailo, the Nautolan bounty hunter.

NICK: My first thought, I don’t know why, but I was like, hello, I’m Cameron, the Nautolan bounty hunter, and I will be playing- (laughs)

CAMERON: Hello~ I’m Cameron, the Nautolan bounty hunter, and today I will be playing the part of Nick, the GM.

NICK: Before we go to the summary, let’s do the Destiny Roll!

CAMERON: Two dark side.

AUSTIN: Two light side.

HUDSON: Two light side.

LAURA: One dark side. Oopsies.

CAMERON: It’s okay. You didn’t fuck up as much as me~

NICK: Great. It will be fine.

AUSTIN: You have a big pool today.

CAMERON: Four light side, three dark side is our start.

NICK: Great. We’re gonna give one more try with this test pilot of everyone else giving a summary of what happened last episode. Take it away, everyone but me.

AUSTIN: We did a lot of planning.

LAURA: Yeah. There’s a lot of planning, a lot of notes.

CAMERON: Things that we know about that are security things we shall have to overcome during this heist: two victory class star destroyers, the Hammer and Sickle, which we have bypassed already; the atmo in the hallways is only there when the people are in them; and you can’t communicate with anyone outside of the facility from inside the facility. The path to the vault is as follows: cage, eye scanner, cameras watching, elevator, pressure-sensitive hallway, combo lock on vault. There is a piece of technology of indeterminate size located in the vault that Val wants, and we shall retrieve.

LAURA: And we ran into Mills.

CAMERON: Oh yeah! We found Mills!

LAURA: And he is unconscious in our little hidey hole, and Val was able to get into the computer room and get Tink into the computer room. It went great.

AUSTIN: No problem.

LAURA: No problems at all.

NICK: Mechanical hacking.

LAURA: And now Tink can do all the fun hacking.

NICK: Great. We’ll pick it up there. We’ll start with Tink. The rest of the crew is situated with Mills ready for the go-ahead, and Tink is in the security room, just attempted to crack his knuckles, and…

CAMERON: Hurt himself. (laughs)

NICK: …hurt himself a little bit, and what are you doing?

HUDSON: I look up at the screen. “This is a Unix system. I know this.”

(laughter)

NICK: Gah. What are you doing? What are you trying to bypass? What are you trying to do for the crew?

HUDSON: So, the first thing I try to do is make sure the cameras are disabled.

NICK: Okay. You’re disabling all the cameras in the whole place.

HUDSON: Yes.

NICK: Okie-dokie. That will be a slicing check. Are you just plugging into one of the terminals nearby? Are you trying to find the main node? Are you going in through the wiring? How are you going in?

HUDSON: Oh. I try to login through the main computer.

NICK: Okay. The bigger computer. You press some light up buttons, because it’s Star Wars.

HUDSON: I’m using my thing, my outlaw tech data breaker.

NICK: You’re gonna have two black dice because the way the security system is setup it specifically looks for an outlaw tech data breaker.

HUDSON: I get to remove one black die per rank of Bypass Security from checks made to disable a security device or open a locked door.

NICK: Well there you go.

AUSTIN: How convenient.

HUDSON: So that’s one black die.

NICK: Yeah. This is gonna be hard, so three purple.

LAURA: Oh, well fuck you. (laughs)

HUDSON: Oh god. I have one advantage.

NICK: So, the system is really kicking your ass here.

HUDSON: However, I can reroll that Computers check.

NICK: Do you want to spend that now?

AUSTIN: Is that a once per session?

HUDSON: Yeah, it’s once per session, because I have the skill Natural Programmer.

CAMERON: And the advantage is they don’t notice.

NICK: Do you have to flip destiny points or anything to do that, or just once per session?

HUDSON: Nope, just once per session.

NICK: That is, uh, incredibly handy.

LAURA: I have a similar thing. I have Natural Rogue, so I can do the same thing with Skulduggery or Stealth.

NICK: I have Natural GM.

LAURA: Yeah.

NICK: I can reroll a GM check once per day.

CAMERON: So sometimes he just doesn’t have to roll and can just say what happens. (smiling)

HUDSON: I got five successes.

NICK: Yeah. All the cameras are off, and you do it in such a way that nobody is suspicious of the fact the cameras are off.

LAURA: Well, he could loop them or something.

NICK: Yeah, but even the loop tells them nothing. Security cameras are scratched off the list. They are no longer a concern, and you are very into the system.

HUDSON: I go, “get wrecked.”

(laughter)

LAURA: “I’m assuming that means the cameras are off?”

HUDSON: “Yeah.”

LAURA: “Okay. Val, you and I go to the cage now. Karma and Hank, you shoot people. Yes.”

NICK: “Obvious Statement: That’s an obvious statement.”

LAURA: “Yes, I know, I’m just making sure… Okay. You had some sort of override. I don’t know.”

AUSTIN: “We don’t need to shoot anyone yet. We still haven’t been compromised.”

LAURA: “Yeah. We haven’t been caught.”

AUSTIN: “We did such a good job at taking down those cameras, and you know, we got this dude over here that hit the ceiling.”

NICK: “Hopeful Statement: He looks like a threat. Would you like me to put him down?” And his gun, the barrels start to spin, (ascending whoosh).

CAMERON: “Not yet. Let’s keep the loud blaster fire to a minimum as to not attract. You can shoot people later.”

NICK: (descending whoosh)

HUDSON: I go back and meet Karma.

LAURA: “Tink, can you see what the cameras see? Can you still see what they’re seeing even though it’s not in the system anymore?”

HUDSON: “Yeah.”

LAURA: “Okay. What we are going to do is I’m going to go to the cage, Val is going to go put more explosives in places, and then once I get through the cage we meet back up. Okay? You need to tell us if there are going to be people, okay? You understand?”

HUDSON: “Okay. Yes, I’m on the lookout.”

LAURA: And then Xianna starts going to where the cage is.

NICK: You’re staying in the security room then?

HUDSON: Yeah. I’m actually on the lookout now.

CAMERON: Karma flips her blaster to kill.

NICK: Ooh.

CAMERON: Because we’re in an Imperial base, so fuck ‘em.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

NICK: There was an orchestral swell as you did.

CAMERON: And it did a close-up on it, and she goes (click-swish).

NICK: Cool. Alright, you’re heading straight for the vault then?

LAURA: Yeah, because we have to get through a cage to get into the thing.

NICK: Yup.

LAURA: Xianna was gonna start working on that while Val places a few more explosives in the building.

NICK: We’ll just assume, as you’re going through here, because there’s some more stuff here probably, you’re just slapping them on the walls, putting them under trash cans, just wherever.

AUSTIN: Yeah. Am I using a remote detonator or am I trailing my det-tape behind me as we go? (laughs)

NICK: I was assuming a remote detonator, but if you want to run det-tape to everything that’s an option.

CAMERON: I would say we probably sent HK with Xianna, since she’s a secondary user, so that she has fire support and Karma goes with Val, so if they encounter anyone who needs to get shot on the way to their destinations… we split up and go down the different hallways.

NICK: Okay. You’re snaking in and out, meeting around, and just kind of wreaking havoc as you go.

AUSTIN: Armed escorts.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: And Tink is overseeing the whole thing from the security room.

HUDSON: Yup.

NICK: You got enough successes on that, you’re in the system, you can do shit. You may find some deeper levels of security, you’ll have to hack again, but you can see a lot of what’s going on. So, you’re continuing down these hallways. You come to… Laura, I have a question for you.

LAURA: Yes?

NICK: What is the craziest security feature that Xianna has ever broken through?

LAURA: Ooh. Um… I mean, just thinking of things that they always have on these heist shows, there’s motion sensors and pressure sensors and heat detectors, all other sorts of detectors, and crazy laser grids. I mean, the weirdest security systems are always like those vibration sensors so if you move around it senses it.

NICK: We could go with that. As you’re heading down these hallways you notice that the cameras just stop, there’s a section that does not have them, and that’s suspicious. You see—Well, roll me a Skulduggery check, I guess.

LAURA: Can do!

AUSTIN: Where did we leave Mills?

NICK: I don’t know. Where did you leave Mills?

AUSTIN: Are we dragging him? Is he like over HK’s shoulder?

LAURA: I thought we brought him to the vent.

CAMERON: Nah, he’s back in that hallway handcuffed and unconscious. We probably handcuffed him to a pipe or something, removed his radio, things like that so that he can’t make contact.

AUSTIN: As a trained bounty hunter.

CAMERON: Duct taped his mouth shut.

AUSTIN: Yeah.

LAURA: What would be the—

NICK: Hard.

LAURA: –the hard? Okay. Do I get any sort of boost dice because I looked at plans?

NICK: Not on this one. There’s a lot of stuff not on the plans.

AUSTIN: Weird.

NICK: Turns out, they either had crappy contractors or were very secure, one or the other.

AUSTIN: It could also be that because Kuat is a company, so the company built it, and then the Imperials came in and said nah, you kind of need all of these things.

LAURA: I rolled a triumph with its success cancelled out, three failures, and four advantages.

NICK: Okay. (laughs) So, huh…

LAURA: Yeah…

NICK: So, you fail to see these tremor sensors, but you have a triumph and a bunch of advantages.

CAMERON: It was a good Cam roll.

NICK: Yeah.

LAURA: Can it be that it does set off an alarm, but Tink is like immediately able to cancel it so it only goes off for half a little claxon, so maybe someone might be alerted but most people are just like oh, okay, never mind.

NICK: Yeah, so we’ll cut over to Tink in the security room. What are you doing, just watching them?

HUDSON: Yeah. I found some Twinkies.

NICK: Nice.

CAMERON: (laughs)

AUSTIN: But not in that hallway, because he’s about to run out of cameras.

CAMERON: Tink has Twinkies!

HUDSON: It’s a server room, they’re gonna have snacks.

NICK: There’s all these camera displays and you saw the group walk off of the displays and there weren’t anymore, they just like vanished off the screens, but then you notice a screen that’s stuck in-set in a panel that has a wire diagram of a hallway, and you start to see dots appear on it, and the alarm goes (“WOMP”), and you go ‘oh, this is a tremor sensor,’ and you have a chance to try and hack it to turn it off. It’s gonna be a hard slicing check.

LAURA: Can I use my many advantages to give him blue dice?

NICK: Yep.

HUDSON: How many?

NICK: How many did you have, four?

LAURA: Yeah, I had like four advantages or something.

NICK: So that’s two blue dice, but you do still have two black dice, but one removed, so one black die for just the internal security here.

HUDSON: Plus two blue dice.

LAURA: And then for using your computer thing.

NICK: Yeah. You’re probably gonna be fine. It’s like someone’s good at hacking.

CAMERON: Weird!

AUSTIN: (smiling) And has an outlaw tech data breaker.

CAMERON: Look at us.

HUDSON: This might be the most dice I’ve ever rolled.

NICK & LAURA: That’s a lot.

NICK: May the Star Wars gods save me from competent characters.

LAURA: Oh, fuck…

HUDSON: I have two triumphs with the successes cancelled out and a threat.

CAMERON: Oh no.

LAURA: Yep.

NICK: Huh!

CAMERON: (giggles nervously)

LAURA: Great.

AUSTIN: Boy.

HUDSON: Now, when making a Computers check I can spend a triumph to make further Computers checks within the system as maneuvers.

NICK: Okay. yeah, you can spend one of those triumphs to…

AUSTIN: Does that apply outside of combat?

NICK: It doesn’t say, so what we’ll say is technically you can use that to try to save this. The thing cycles up and gets through a full (power noise), and you’re like ‘oh no-no-no’ and you’re able to try again. That other triumph, be thinking about what you want to use that on.

HUDSON: So I just reroll this entire thing that I just had?

NICK: You’re missing two of those blue dice because you already spent those, but besides that, yes.

AUSTIN: I look at Karma and start looking excited.

CAMERON: (laughs) Our hallway, we’re like ‘oh fuck, they did something.’

HUDSON: I got a wash.

(laughter)

NICK: And we’re live, ladies and gentlemen!

HUDSON: What do I do with my triumph though?

CAMERON: Weren’t you just saying that we were good at things?

NICK: He is good at things!

AUSTIN: Turns out Nick made his prayer to the Star Wars gods, and he said we’re done sneaking.

HUDSON: So what I wanted to do with that was send out a coms, but like text coms or pager, of an alarm malfunction.

CAMERON: (laughs) Send out an email to all personnel.

HUDSON: To all personnel!

LAURA: Alarm malfunction, ignore.

CAMERON: Please ignore that. Whoops, my bad.

HUDSON: Please ignore.

AUSTIN: We’re doing a security test today. (laughs)

NICK: Okay…

HUDSON: Because that will still trigger something, like some people will come after me, but maybe not—

NICK: Oh, they absolutely will. So, here’s what happens. This is great.

CAMERON: (laughing) They’re not gonna come after you, they’ll come after that hallway.

NICK: You have activated Nick’s Security Measure #1. We’re gonna get a quick montage. That happens, you can’t cut power to it, it’s starting to go, and you put in a ticket for security malfunction. ‘I can’t turn this off. I don’t know what’s going on.’ So a bunch of IT people are annoyed. Some of them are headed to see you right now, because you had to put in a ticket to try to cover your tracks. We get a shot of a squad of stormtroopers that are hanging out in a barracks and that thing I said earlier, one of them stands up and says “And we’re live!” and then he gets a scroll on his com. “Oh, false alarm. It’s just a security malfunction.” They all (groan sadly) and sit back down.

The shot cuts to a couple of people in technician uniforms that are like “and we’re live! There’s an error! Let’s go, let’s go!” It’s two people dramatically running, and it zooms out to a map of the facility and they’re on the far side, so it’s gonna take them a while and they have to wait for the airlocks to cycle and for air to pump in, and then they run, so it’s gonna be a minute. You probably have 15 minutes for them to get to you from where they’re at.

HUDSON: I run and jam the door with my vibro-axe.

NICK: Oh, okay. The other thing that happened from you failing two hacking checks in a row is it cuts to a different barracks. Whereas the stormtrooper barracks had beds that were unmade and three of the stormtroopers were playing poker and stuff, this one just has one red light to preserve dark vision and two benches, and sitting in those benches in unison are stormtroopers in mat black armor that look very similar to the very first episode we did that were chasing you. The red light starts to silently flash and the one closest to the door stands up, looks at the red light, and through the speaker says, “and we’re live,” and does a roundabout gesture and signs, and they stand up all in unison and go out the doors. There are some intense stormtroopers starting to pursue this facility.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

NICK: Yeah. You said you wanted to hack to mess with the airlocks for the technicians coming to see you?

HUDSON: Yes, I would like to do that, so another Computers check. What’s the difficulty?

NICK: Hard. Tink’s on the struggle bus today.

HUDSON: I have a success and two advantages.

NICK: Okay. It’s enough to slow them down. Whereas before they were going to get there about the time the rest of the crew got to the safe. Now it’s probably gonna be on their way out. You may have to deal with passing them in a hallway, but the timer will take longer. You set it up so that the airlock cycles are just as long as possible without arousing suspicion. (laughs) You see, because you can follow on the cameras, they get in the airlock and the technicians pull out their coms and start doodling with stuff, and you’re like oh these guys aren’t counting what the cycle is, so you set it that each one takes longer. (laughter) So yeah, you still got some time, and your door is barred so if anybody tries to get in you’re gonna hear this door mechanically malfunction, although having to get out will be interesting. I guess if you pull the axe out you’ll probably be okay.

So, we cut back to the rest of the crew. HK, Val, Karma and Xianna are all in this hallway and the claxon is (going off).

CAMERON: I thought Karma and Val were in a different hallway.

NICK: Well, you met up in the…

LAURA: Yeah.

AUSTIN: We met back up.

CAMERON: Oh okay.

AUSTIN: We just kept walking quickly while the alarms are going off.

LAURA: “Okay. We are going to book it to the cage. Let’s go, let’s go.”

NICK: Okay. You are running basically. You go past a bunch of doors and stuff. There are some scenes of you leaning up against a wall, and people walking by talking about this technical malfunction, there’s parts of laser grids and stuff that you just quickly step over, no problem, you know where they are. You get to the quote unquote ‘cage’ and it is a chromed out, durasteel box that goes around the elevator shaft which is not touching the ceiling, it’s just sticking out of the floor, you can see the elevator shaft. There is a gate on it with no discernable locking mechanism. Ooh~

CAMERON: Ooh~

LAURA: Okay. Can we do—I was about to say Investigation. It’s not Investigation.

CAMERON: Perception?

LAURA: I guess for me either a Skulduggery of looking to find a lock or a Perception?

AUSTIN: I start fingering the red cylinders on my belt.

NICK: (laughs)

AUSTIN: The blaster ones are black. I have two red ones.

NICK: Yeah.

LAURA: So would it be a Skulduggery to try to break it?

NICK: Skulduggery would be trying to identify how this gate works.

LAURA: Okay.

NICK: At this point while Xianna walks over to look at it—Do you touch it? He asked in his best GM voice.

LAURA: I don’t know if I would touch it. I would be mostly looking.

NICK: Okay. While she goes over to investigate, HK says, “Suggestion: We should setup firing positions here.”

AUSTIN: Can I do a Mechanics check to also look for a different set of problems?

NICK: Sure.

CAMERON: HK and I start shifting crates around and shit.

AUSTIN: What’s the difficulty on this one? Hard?

NICK: Yeah.

LAURA: That was two successes and one advantage.

AUSTIN: A triumph and its success.

NICK: Okay. Between the two of you Xianna is able to figure out what this is and how it works, Val gets an idea for how to get through it. This is an electrified security cage by Kuat Drives. They sell this as a side thing. It is deadly, high power voltage which is not great, and the locks aren’t controlled from here, it’s remotely from another place, not the security system, it’s like a literal buzz-through button that’s down the hall. The only way to do it is have an appointment of ‘we’re gonna buzz this thing open,’ or have a friend go press it to let you through. The way that Val figures out how to get through this is, if there’s a way to insulate the door and apply a bunch of pressure just going up, they cut costs on the hinges and you may be able to bust this thing open.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

NICK: At this point HK is behind a cluster of crates with the gun set on it, and as the barrels spin, he’s just been keeping them spinning on and off pretty regularly to keep it spun up, and it rattles on the box. His face doesn’t move but he looks pretty excited. Karma pushes over some potted plants and some more crates and sets up her own cover. You haven’t seen anybody down this hallway in a while. This is high clearance.

AUSTIN: I just realized I have my hydrospanner still in my pocket. I have another advantage I can add to all of my Mechanics.

NICK: Oh. Nice.

LAURA: Xianna looks at Val. “You know how to get this open?”

AUSTIN: “Yup.”

LAURA: “Can you do it yourself?”

AUSTIN: “We’ll see.”

(laughter)

LAURA: “Okay. Good. I will be right here. Go ahead and you do that.” Xianna’s going through her pockets, and…

AUSTIN: I start ripping up floor panels looking for the way to turn the power off to this thing.

NICK: Okay.

LAURA: Xianna takes out a small box, and opens up the box…

AUSTIN: I could ask Tink, but I don’t even think to, because he might have access to it but it’s not a thing I was thinking about.

CAMERON: Karma drags over her last potted plant with a small tree in it. “Tink, do you want to start working on the eye scanner?”

LAURA: There’s a small baggie in the box.

HUDSON: “Sure thing!” I start working on the eye scanner.

NICK: (laughing) Okay. Let’s let Laura take her drugs.

LAURA: No, it’s fine. It’s like smash cut scenes, like they do in these things. They’re just cutting to different things, and then she has her baggie, and she snorts her impact.

NICK: “Supplication: Can I have that floor panel, please?”

AUSTIN: I give him the floor panel and I reach around the corner and I grab a small orange cone and I put it in front of the thing while I’m waist deep in this panel looking.

(laughter)

NICK: HK sets the floor panel in front of the crates and says, “This will help from heavy laser fire.” With your triumph you’re able to shut down the electricity pretty easily, so there’s no problem there, so it’s just applying the proper leverage.

AUSTIN: I just go try to lift it.

NICK: Okay. Make me a Brawn check, I guess?

AUSTIN: Brawn? Is the skill by itself just greens?

NICK: Uh, Athletics would be lifting heavy shit, if you have Athletics.

AUSTIN: Nope. I’m sure it will be fine.

NICK: This is average difficulty, because you know what you’re doing.

AUSTIN: Two threats.

NICK: You take 2 strain.

AUSTIN: Ow.

NICK: Yeah, trying to lift this, and it doesn’t go. Maybe if you ask someone for help or use a lever of some kind.

CAMERON: “You need help?”

AUSTIN: “Hey Karma, can you get over here and help me lift this thing? It’s a little bit heavier than I was hoping.”

CAMERON: “Yeah sure.” Karma swivels her blaster around her back and walks over and assists.

NICK: Okay. You’re able to pop the gate. It comes right off.

CAMERON: I am very athletic. (laughs)

AUSTIN: Perfect. Yeah.

NICK: Well, and there’s two of you. I think Val lets go and Karma’s just holding it.

CAMERON: “Do y’all wanna go in?”

NICK: (laughs)

LAURA: “Okay, we go in. Okay bye!”

CAMERON: I set it back down, walk back over, swing my gun back around.

NICK: At this point several things happen all at once. Tink starts hacking to deal with the eye scanner on the elevator because you need that to get in, and you hear simultaneous clomping of feet and they are so in unison it’s hard to tell how many there are. Then you hear…

LAURA: “Oh no…”

NICK: “Security has been breached. Activate the alarm now.”

LAURA: “Val! Explosions!” Heh.

NICK: And a bunch of really scary, mat black stormtroopers come around this corner. Tink, you’ll notice they were not on the screens.

HUDSON: Huh.

NICK: They weren’t on the cameras.

HUDSON: What’s the difficulty?

NICK: To hack the eyeball scanner?

HUDSON: Yeah.

NICK: Hard.

HUDSON: What’s the black die for again?

NICK: Because this thing has protocol specifically to keep you from using an outlaw tech data breaker on it, because they know that’s the toy people use. If you get a triumph you can spend it to get past that so it stops bothering you.

HUDSON: I have one success and four advantages.

NICK: One success and four advantages! Yeah, so you’re able to pop the eye screener. You basically just… There’s a folder, and in the folder is past logins, and you just drag the login from the past logins into the current login and it opens. They didn’t really think that one through all the way. They didn’t assume you would be this far into their system. There’s like the whole web, and you’ve just been like well here’s the application that handles this, let me play with that, and we’ll back out, and here’s the… You’re just in. You’re just making stuff happen. The elevator slides open, you’re able to get in. Val, do you detonate the explosives in the hallways?

AUSTIN: I reach into my pocket and pull out a canister.

NICK: Okay?

AUSTIN: It is a fuel air bomb.

NICK: (laughing) Oh god!

AUSTIN: (laughs)

LAURA: “No, Val! Set off the other explosions. I think those were stormtroopers!”

AUSTIN: “We still gotta get out that way!”

LAURA: “No. We didn’t put explosions in that hallway.”

AUSTIN: I chuck the bomb down the hallway.

(laughter)

NICK: This one explodes big enough you probably want everyone to go down the elevator with you.

AUSTIN: Yes.

NICK: Okay. Do you have the stats for this thing?

AUSTIN: Yeah. It’s Mechanics skill, the damage is 9 + 10, it’s medium range, and it’s Concussive 1 and Knockdown.

NICK: Yeah. Go ahead and roll me that Mechanics check for the bomb.

AUSTIN: “You might want to get in now. This is gonna be a bit of a boom.”

NICK: HK looks up and we get the shot from his shoulders of his head tracking it very specifically as it goes sailing into the hallway. “Frantic: We do not want to be on this floor when that goes off.”

CAMERON: (laughing) Karma lifts the cage back up by herself. “Alright HK, get in there.”

NICK: You haven’t seen him move unsurely yet, and he’s like scrambling over his hands trying to get in the elevator. The stormtroopers kneel down and take up positions along the wall, and you hear their commander say, “Firing pattern beta, now!”

AUSTIN: What’s the difficulty? I’m just chucking it down the hallway with a fuse on it.

NICK: It’s medium range, so two.

CAMERON: You said it’s a Mechanics check?

AUSTIN: Yeah.

NICK: He does Mechanics explosives.

CAMERON: You get your blue die for your hydrospanner?

AUSTIN: I get an advantage, I think. It specifically had the advantage symbol, so I just get an added advantage.

NICK: I mean, you don’t get to use your hydrospanner throwing a bomb.

HUDSON: Can I donate my four advantages?

NICK: For throwing a bomb?! You can use your advantages to shut a door in the hallway so the explosion’s gonna hit them harder if you want.

CAMERON: Yeah!

HUDSON: Yeah, let’s do that.

AUSTIN: Yeah, let’s shut the door behind them.

NICK: So Tink sees the cylinder flying and is like, oh, and just starts shutting doors to try to shape the explosion at them.

AUSTIN: Three successes.

NICK: Yeah… You said it was 9 + 10 damage?

AUSTIN: Nine + 10. I don’t know what the difference…

CAMERON: Plus 3.

NICK: Either way, they’re in an enclosed space and you threw a fuel air bomb. So, what we see, because this is a PG-13 Star Wars movie, is they get in the elevator, Tink goes, oh, and starts shutting and opening doors and vents to force all the explosion into a smaller space. The stormtrooper leader says “Blast cover, blast cover,” and then we see the elevator start to sink as the doors are closing and just a huge gout of flame goes into the top of the elevator over everyone’s head, and the elevator starts to go down. That’s all we see. All of the cameras in that hallway, which you couldn’t see the stormtroopers on but you saw the bomb, Tink, all of the cameras are out. This is a black zone. Before they were off, now they are gone.

LAURA: Also, when we put the bombs in the other hallways, the ones Val set, they were not in the hallway from the elevator to our little safe section.

AUSTIN: On the side ones?

NICK: Yeah, they were like side hallways. That’s fine.

LAURA: They were other areas, so those wouldn’t have blown up our hallway. Our hallway is now blown up though, but…

AUSTIN: “Yeah, sorry Xianna. I just- The other ones were gonna cause structural harm, and a fuel air bomb really just blows the air up and all the things that breathe the air, so this way we still have a hole to get back out of.”

LAURA: “Yeah, okay, but so the other bombs were not going to blow this area up, so… we could have, you know.”

NICK: (starts humming peaceful elevator music)

AUSTIN: “Yeah, but I don’t wanna collapse it while we’re still here.”

LAURA: “No, they would have collapsed those hallways and killed those stormtroopers and not the hallway we were in. We would have been fine.”

AUSTIN: “We’ll blow it up on the way out.”

LAURA: “Okay. On the way out.” … (joins in the humming)

AUSTIN: “This is a really long elevator!”

(humming stops)

NICK, LAURA & CAMERON: It’s down 40 floors! (laughing)

LAURA: “Forty floors is a lot.”

AUSTIN: (laughing) I look up at the floor count and we’re on like 11.

LAURA: Ding… Ding…

CAMERON: “Okay. Everybody get to the sides. HK, you setup on that side of the door, I’ll setup on this side of the door. Y’all get behind us.”

LAURA: Ding… Ding…

NICK: “Acknowledgement: Okay.” (gun powers up)

CAMERON: “Feel free to shoot anybody you see, HK.”

NICK: “I’m smiling.”

LAURA: “Tink! Tink! Make sure the walkway we are going down to is pressurized, atmosphere, you know.”

HUDSON: “Not pressurized?! It’s hard to hear you.”

NICK: (laughs)

LAURA: “No. Tink, you need to make sure we can go into the hallway.”

HUDSON: “Oh!”

AUSTIN: If the rock itself blocks signals, as we get lower do we–

CAMERON: (laughs nervously)

NICK: Flip me a dark side point, would you?

AUSTIN: (laughs nervously) Weird!

LAURA: I mean, Tink was already told all of this.

HUDSON: Yeah.

CAMERON: Tink should know, but…

NICK: (musically) Dramatic tension.

AUSTIN: Now all he can do is look in the cameras if there are any down there.

HUDSON: So I’m looking, and yes, I set it up.

AUSTIN: You can probably see sensors and stuff anyway.

NICK: You’ve been adding atmo before, and then weirdly they were mostly going through hallways with people close enough that the stuff was aired, which is why you haven’t run into that stuff so far. What you do see in the hallway is two very large battle droids on either side of the vault door. They look like the super battle droids, but their legs are like big old tank treads and they have arms with tri-barreled heavy blasters on them and shoulder mounted rocket launchers, and they’re just staring at the elevator like they’re part of a newly added security system or something. You can’t contact them through coms, but you see that this is coming. So… yep. (hums elevator music)

HUDSON: “Uh… Um. Oh my. Oh my. Uh… Ooh… Eh… I’m gonna just trust that they can take a handle on that one. They got this.”

(laughter)

CAMERON: ‘I have faith in my team!’

NICK: Tink finds a very interesting quadruple-encrypted file on the computer and you just start fiddling with that. You’re like ‘they got this! What is this? Why is it so hidden?’ You’ll get into it if you spend time on it, but that’s why you’re letting them do this.

LAURA: So, we were standing in the elevator in a specific order is what I heard? Yes?

CAMERON: yes.

AUSTIN: We’re flat against the wall.

CAMERON: Xianna and Val are behind Karma and HK to where the elevator doors open in the middle, there’s always the small space on either side, so both Karma and HK are setup on those on each side with their guns ready, and then mostly blocking Val and Xianna, and we’re ready.

LAURA: Cool.

NICK: And the doors go (PING) and slide open, and basically the lobby music from The Matrix starts. Good luck, Nick, finding a royalty-free version of it that’s close enough. So the droids both are already pointed at the door and you just hear a robot voice say “Contact!” and then they start getting ready to unload.

HK says, “Gleefully: Contact!” And we’re gonna roll initiative~ Hudson, if you want to roll initiative for Tink too, you can use a round to do stuff to affect the room if you would like.

HUDSON: Okay.

LAURA: Is it Cool or–?

NICK: This one’s definitely Vigilance.

AUSTIN: They know we’re here.

NICK: You all can have a blue die for it, because you were prepped in case there was somebody in the hallway.

LAURA: Oh boy!

AUSTIN: One success and five advantages.

NICK: Wow.

HUDSON: One success and two advantages.

LAURA: I got a triumph with a success, another success, and an advantage.

CAMERON: I got three advantages, yeah, and I roll yellows. They just didn’t, guys.

NICK: Can you roll me two greens and a yellow for HK, please?

CAMERON: One success, four advantages.

NICK: And then can you roll me two yellows twice?

CAMERON: One success, three advantages. Two successes, one advantage.

NICK: Okay. The order for initiative on this is going to be a PC, an NPC, two PCs, an NPC, and then two PCs. That being said, there were nine advantages and a triumph on this that you can spend to add things to this scene to be advantageous.

AUSTIN: How many bad guys are there?

NICK: Two.

AUSTIN: Okay. Just the big tank things?

NICK: Yes. They’re very strong. So, if you want to add stuff to this room now would be a good time.

LAURA: How far apart are they already?

NICK: They are the width of a double door apart, so roughly two meters apart. Also they have four advantages, but don’t worry about it.

LAURA: It’s okay. I had a triumph. Can we use one of the advantages to get through the coms just a little bit and tell Tink to manually half way close the elevator doors, so we have a little bit more cover?

NICK: No, but you can spend two advantages just for the doors to get stuck half way.

CAMERON: Yeah~

LAURA: Like we have a jam button?

NICK: Like they start shooting and the doors short out.

CAMERON: The doors start to close and they hit the control panel which means that the doors stop moving, because that’s how Star Wars works.

LAURA: So we have a little bit more cover?

NICK: Yep. That works.

AUSTIN: Can I look at the floor and see that one of the pressure plates has an outlaw tech logo in the corner, and it’s actually one of the spring plates from the station?

NICK: (laughs) yeah. Sure.

CAMERON: Heheheh.

NICK: There’s a spring plate in the floor.

HUDSON: What defensive measures are in the room that I can use?

NICK: I’ll just say that you know, because you can’t talk to them. There is an arc electricity turret thing in the roof of the elevator that they’re currently using for cover. It probably would go off and shock the crap out of them pretty soon. There’s also one above the door above the droids.

HUDSON: Got it.

NICK: Those are the main things. There’s also all those pressure plates. Apparently one is the opposite of a pressure plate and is a spring plate.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

CAMERON: Boing!

NICK: But those set off a bunch of things. We’ll also just go with it. Also the air vents are all rigged with poisonous gas canisters that can fill the room at any time. Luckily that’s activated from where you’re sitting.

HUDSON: Got it. So we haven’t used the triumph yet?

NICK: Nope.

LAURA: Do we want to do something like one of the droid’s motion sensors, or whatever they use to ‘see,’ air quotes, is malfunctioning so its aim is slightly off?

NICK: Cool. It will have two black dice all the time forever. Help me remember that. You notice one of its eyes is just dangling on circuits and the other one keeps blinking. It can’t see real good.

AUSTIN: Does it look suspicious, like it has a ping-pong ball instead of an eye?

CAMERON: (laughs)

NICK: (smiling) Yeah. Someone put a googly eye over the broken visual sensor.

CAMERON: And drew on a smiley face.

NICK: Yeah. Someone in IT likes to have fun.

AUSTIN: So we got a smiley droid and a serious droid.

NICK: Yeah. We get a quick cut to those two technicians coming to check on Tink in the office, because he put in the ticket, and they’ve been in the same airlock for like four minutes and they’re just playing rock, paper, scissors not paying attention. Cool, so that’s the setup. First up is a PC slot. Who would like to go first?

LAURA: Xianna has a grenade. (laughs)

CAMERON: I feel like HK or Karma would shoot first though, because we had y’all behind cover, so in the time that the doors open and we judged the scenario HK would start laying down cover fire or something before you analyzed the situation.

NICK: Probably.

LAURA: Remember that Xianna is all jacked up on Mountain Dew, AKA impact. She would be jumpy.

AUSTIN: Grenade time! (laughs)

LAURA: So we could have HK shoot first since HK is programmed to do that.

CAMERON: Yeah, because HK is gonna have the best reaction time out of any of us, because he is droid.

NICK: “Expletive: Fuck yeah I am.”

CAMERON: Yeah!

NICK: Okay. We’ll let HK go first. It’s medium range. Let’s look up the stats I gave him for this gun… His ranged heavy is going to be, ooh, two yellows and two greens.

AUSTIN: Turns out a murder droid is good at murdering.

NICK: Yeah, no shit.

CAMERON: Weird.

NICK: He’s gonna aim too, so give him a blue die. That will be the pool.

CAMERON: One success, three advantages.

NICK: Okay. How many advantages?

CAMERON: Three.

NICK: Heehee, he gets to go again. His gun shoots automatic, so he can spend advantages to hit them multiple times. What he’s doing, he basically has a mini-gun thing, so he can spend advantages that multiple bullets hit, because he shoots very fast.

HUDSON: Got it.

NICK: Yep. Cool. He is going to do… that’s 24 damage.

CAMERON: (snickers)

NICK: I’ll say he shoots the one that does see well, because he doesn’t like him.

AUSTIN: His analysis is that this is more dangerous.

NICK: He peppers through the droid. It does have a lot of soak, and he only has Pierce 1. He almost kills it.

CAMERON: Alright. Another additional tidbit about auto-fire, before you roll the check you can say that you’re targeting more than one person.

NICK: Okay. That’s useful. He wasn’t.

CAMERON: So, you can allocate hits to different targets, so you can do like a full pass.

NICK: Suppressing fire, potentially.

CAMERON: If it’s two separate targets the GM chooses which target is the initial target.

NICK: Right. … Wait, that’s me.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: Eh.

CAMERON: There you go. You get to decide. (laughs)

NICK: Cool. This one on the left, the one that isn’t malfunctioning and stuff, is particularly bulky. It has extra armor plating and stuff. HK says, “Gleefully: Suppressing fire!” It just peppers it with bullets. The thing is sparking and smoking but not quite down. It is very, very, very hurt though. That’s that one. Now it’s an NPC slot. We’re gonna go with the one that just got shot. It’s gonna shoot its concussive missile on its shoulder into the elevator.

AUSTIN: (coughs) Ooh boy.

NICK: (smiling) That’s what it’s gonna do.

LAURA: Say if I have Dodge, which is when targeted in combat I may perform a dodge incidental, how does that work when it’s targeting a whole group?

CAMERON: I have the same question. (laughs)

NICK: I would say as the missile is flying you can take your dodge to step out of the elevator, which would give you cover.

CAMERON: Okay.

LAURA: Well, the dodge is to upgrade the difficulty of their attack by that number.

NICK: What we’ll do, because this is a blast thing, I’ll let you use it to just step out of the blast range. It’s just gonna hit HK and Val I guess.

LAURA: Okay.

NICK: It’s gonna be four greens, average difficulty.

AUSTIN: If the attack misses does it hit the people that just jumped out of the elevator?

NICK: Maybe. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

LAURA: Also I do have a Melee Defense, not that it affects anyone else. Heh.

CAMERON: It wouldn’t do anything for a concussion missile either, would it?

AUSTIN: You try to catch the missile!

LAURA: It adds a black die to all ranged and melee attacks against me.

NICK: Alright, well he’s shooting at the elevator.

LAURA: yeah, it wouldn’t.

AUSTIN: Oh boy.

CAMERON: It hits the elevator.

NICK: Uh-oh.

CAMERON: Three successes and two threats.

NICK: Two threats, you say?

CAMERON: I do say two threats, yes.

NICK: Well, the good news is it doesn’t set you on fire, but it does do 7 damage.

CAMERON: Oh no.

NICK: Hey, HK’s not real happy about that.

AUSTIN: Val takes 1 damage, because she has a soak of 6.

NICK: It’s not a big missile, it’s like a micro missile, it’s not like a ship missile. It hits the back and it does mostly just a blast of force and it throws you into the wall. HK takes a hit and is sparking a little on his back, but he’s otherwise fine. That was its turn.

AUSTIN: “I bruised my knee.”

NICK: (laughs) HK says, “Statement: It must be so inconvenient to be organic,” and starts to step into the hallway. Next we have a PC slot.

CAMERON: Xianna can throw the grenade, if you want to try to take out the first one.

LAURA: Yeah. I’ll toss the grenade. What distance are they?

NICK: Medium range. What’s the range on a grenade?

LAURA: Short.

NICK: So you will have to close with it and then you can throw it, so just use your maneuver to run forward. You wouldn’t have been able to do it from the elevator anyway.

LAURA: I guess I wouldn’t have. Yeah. It would have come up short.

NICK: Hey, what do you know. Rules and junk. I forget we’re playing a game.

CAMERON: Look at those, mechanics!

AUSTIN: No, I’m mechanics. (laughs)

CAMERON: (wry laugh)

LAURA: (nervously) Four advantages?

NICK: Oh no. (chuckles) Are you gonna activate blast while missing?

LAURA: I think you can. If the attack misses I can spend three advantages for the original target and every target engaged with the original target—

NICK: Which they are.

LAURA: –suffers damage equal to the blast rating of the weapon.

AUSTIN: Two meters is engaged?

NICK: Ish, within melee range. Close enough.

CAMERON: If the grenade hit in the middle of them then it’s one meter from both.

NICK: We’ll say that. What’s the damage?

LAURA: Blast 6.

NICK: Oh no… They have Soak 6.

LAURA & HUDSON: Oh no…

CAMERON: (laughs) Welp.

NICK: This thing lands perfectly. Well, it doesn’t, because you were aiming to bounce one off of somebody and it lands in the middle, but the explosion catches them both. The smoke clears and they’re still standing there.

LAURA: “Oh fuck.”

(laughter)

NICK: Up next we have another PC slot.

CAMERON: Alright, Karma’s gonna take it with her big gun so that she can use Quick Strike, because the one with the googly eyes hasn’t gone yet, so I get my blue die.

NICK: That’s true.

CAMERON: And I’ma gonna shoot it, with my carbine.

NICK: Okay.

CAMERON: Oh, and I’m gonna aim, so I’m taking another blue die.

NICK: (musically) Mechanics~!

AUSTIN: You’re not in cover anymore because you’re outside of the elevator.

CAMERON: That’s true. It’s fine. Two successes, one threat, and a triumph. Mm-hmm!

NICK: Threat happens off-screen. Don’t worry about it.

CAMERON: Cool! So my gun does 11 damage.

NICK: Got it, 11 damage. That’s a pretty solid hit. It definitely pierces the armor. Droid looks sad. Well, it’s face doesn’t move, but the googly eye droops a little bit. Did you want to crit with that triumph?

CAMERON: Yes.

NICK: Alright. Roll me up a critical hit. I don’t have the chart in front of me~

LAURA: We have it right here.

NICK: Oh.

LAURA: You do have the chart right in front of me.

NICK: I literally have the chart in front of me~

CAMERON: Uh, heh, 12.

LAURA: Sudden Jolt: Drop item in hand.

CAMERON: Lethal Blows: Add +10 per rank of Lethal Blows to any critical injury result inflicted on opponent, so that is a 22.

NICK: This feels like Yu-Gi-Oh.

LAURA: Twenty-two!

AUSTIN: You’ve triggered my trap card!

CAMERON: Ha-ha! Wait, nope, sorry. Add another 10, 32. I have two in Lethal Blows.

LAURA: Thirty-two! Stunned: Staggered until end of next turn.

NICK: Oh shit. He can’t act.

CAMERON: Ha-ha-ha!

NICK: We’ll have to skip his NPC slot. It pierces and the droids are starting to roll forward, but this one shorts out and its head falls down, and you can see it running internal diagnostics to come back up. You managed to hit something pretty important.

CAMERON: I forgot that I added 20 to all of my crits.

NICK: We don’t actually crit that often, or if we do it’s against mooks so it doesn’t really matter.

CAMERON: No.

NICK: So, that was Karma and Xianna. Up to an NPC slot. He’s shorted out. He can’t move.

CAMERON: Heh-heh.

NICK: They were both rolling forward menacingly, not enough to mechanically change the difference but enough to make the scene look cooler, and this one veers slightly and starts grinding against the wall. It’s doing whatever the mechanical droid version of when your computer freezes and plays the one-eighth of a second noise it was playing when it freezes over and over again. It’s doing that.

LAURA & AUSTIN: (error noises)

NICK: Yep, that one. Thank you all for your illustration. Up next we have another PC slot.

AUSTIN: It’s my turn!

NICK: Okie-dokie.

LAURA: It’s Val~

AUSTIN: I’m gonna sprint at that robot, bounce on the jump pad, and punch him in the face!

(laughter)

NICK: Okay. You’re medium range.

AUSTIN: Yeah, I have to take a strain to double maneuver.

NICK: You can take a strain to double maneuver, or you can use the jump pad to just do it, but if you take the strain to double maneuver I’ll let you add a blue die to your attack with the jump pad.

AUSTIN: I’m gonna take the blue die.

NICK: Okay. You can take two blue dice because that’s real cool. Some Sonic stuff right there. No pressure.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

NICK: Are you using a black cylinder or a red cylinder?

AUSTIN: This is a black. The red ones are still… I thought about it for the gate and then I didn’t need them. Two successes and three advantages.

NICK: Okay…

AUSTIN: “Power slam!”

NICK: God damn it.

CAMERON: She yells.

AUSTIN: (laughing) As she’s jumping.

NICK: Which one were you hitting, googly eyes?

AUSTIN: The almost dead one. I’m gonna finish him.

NICK: You did how much damage?

AUSTIN: Nine damage.

NICK: Yeah, you punch its head off. It just (burst noise).

AUSTIN: It’s the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. I hit it and it just goes poink!

NICK: (laughs) Yeah. The thing is though, you have these fists that also shoot blaster bolts when you punch. When you do does it eject the canister so you can put another one in, or does the canister just work for a while?

AUSTIN: We can say they eject, because it’s cooler.

NICK: That’s cool, right?! (ca-ching) And then it’s an incidental to slap another one in.

AUSTIN: Yeah, so I have a bunch of black ones.

NICK: You knock its head off, but you leave a smoking crater from the chest up. You blew this thing off and it just slouches into its treads and makes a sad droid noise and dies. Yep, success. Good work. We get a cool shot of Val standing over the corpse pumping her fists.

AUSTIN: Pumping her fists, looking really excited that she just got to punch a droid and it worked. (laughs)

NICK: Has Val not actually used these punch gloves before?

AUSTIN: It’s rare, because you don’t use them on civilized people.

NICK: Oh.

AUSTIN: You use them on Imperials and pirates.

NICK: Cool. Alright, we’ve got another PC slot. Tink, did you have something that you wanted to do?

HUDSON: Yes. There’s a turret above the elevator, correct?

NICK: yes there is.

HUDSON: I would like to try to activate that turret and shoot the droid.

NICK: Okay. There’s a turret above the elevator and there’s a turret above the vault where they were. Do you have a preference? They are closer to the one by the vault.

HUDSON: Let’s do the vault one then I suppose.

NICK: Alright. Make me a slicing check. This is a different system so it’s going to be hard with a black die, but if you succeed I’ll let you roll a shooting check.

CAMERON: (laughing) Oh no. He doesn’t have any shooting.

HUDSON: Great. I have a triumph with a success, two additional successes, and two advantages.

NICK: Wow. Do you want to spend the triumph that this turret already has targeting and you don’t have to roll to shoot? It just hits it.

HUDSON: yes.

NICK: Okay. You’re gonna hit this droid. It’s basically like a tesla coil, so it sticks out and this crazy arching electricity goes and hits it. How many successes did you have?

HUDSON: The success from the triumph plus two more.

NICK: Wow. Yeah, that does frickin’ 10 damage to it. It is pretty hurt. It is now malfunctioning, but the electricity seems to have kind of restarted it, which is cool. It kind of gets back up and it’s starting to run. It is going to have a black die with some of your advantages thrown in there, because it is now torn between if its enemy is behind it or in front of it. It was not designed for six people to murder it from various angles. That’s not what this thing’s purpose was. So, that is that. Next up we got a PC slot. Who wants to go?

CAMERON: I’ll shoot it again.

NICK: Sure.

CAMERON: Gonna aim. Can I still use Quick Strike because it still hasn’t gone? It had its turn but was staggered and couldn’t take an action, so it has not acted in this combat.

NICK: It has not acted, so I guess you can Quick Strike it twice.

CAMERON: (giggles)

NICK: Seems fair.

AUSTIN: Well, we almost one-shot the other one, so…

CAMERON: It does say ‘have not acted yet this encounter,’ so it is specific that they performed an action.

NICK: Yeah, there’s a reason HK just sits quietly in the background most of the time. He’s only good at one thing.

CAMERON: One success, three advantages, which does let me crit again. That’s 10 damage and a crit.

NICK: You guys are whittling this thing down. It’s obvious when you see one that wasn’t hit by possibly whatever space Geneva Convention violating weaponry it is that this thing can take a beating, because you have hit it with a lot of hits that would kill a person and it’s still rolling.

CAMERON: So this crit is gonna be +30.

NICK: Yep, because it’s already been crit on once.

CAMERON: And I add +20, so a 97 + 30 please. (laughs)

NICK: Oh…

LAURA: So, 127. Gruesome Injury: Permanent -1 penalty to random characteristic, and there is a random characteristic chart. It’s a d10. I don’t know if we’re gonna…

CAMERON: I’ve got a d10.

NICK: Here’s the thing. I don’t want you to do minus Charisma to this battle droid.

CAMERON: (laughs)

LAURA: I wanna see! I wanna see.

NICK: Okay.

LAURA: It’s more likely to be Brawn and Agility.

CAMERON: It would be funny if it was Charisma. (laughs)

LAURA: Because 1 through 6 are Brawn and Agility.

CAMERON: It’s a 3.

LAURA: That is Brawn.

NICK: Okay, so its soak is gonna go down by 1. What does that look like? What does a gruesome wound on a battle droid look like with a rifle?

CAMERON: It’s probably just like I completely take off its tread.

LAURA: Yeah, like a whole piece comes off.

NICK: Oof.

CAMERON: The tread just detaches from the center, so the spinning part is still functioning but it’s no longer going to actually grip on that side, and it shifts down slightly so it’s now sitting slightly at an angle, and there’s sparks and it looks cool.

NICK: The camera zooms in on the fact that the tread has a very small support and electrical chassis, and you’re like oh… (blast), and it just dismembers it slightly. It’s the kind of thing the first time you defeat an enemy with that mechanic in a video game you’re like oh this is so cool, the 50^th time you do it you’re like this is dumb.

AUSTIN: (laughs)

NICK: So yeah, it is missing a leg, it is very sad, and it is its turn now. I think it is going to shoot at Karma because Karma just shot it very good. You jumped behind it basically to kill the other one, so it’s not paying attention to you.

AUSTIN: I’m out of sight right now.

CAMERON: What is its shooting stats?

NICK: It’s the same as the missile. What was that, four green?

CAMERON: Yes, it was four green, because I had to get out another green. It does have three black dice, because it has two black dice from the googly eyes and one black die from being shocked.

NICK: Yes, you’re right.

CAMERON: Because I added it to my black dice pile over here.

NICK: Okay. Man, this poor droid, it just wanted to learn to love. It had a whole backstory you guys. I wrote a short story about this battle droid.

CAMERON: And then I’m gonna suffer another strain to dodge and upgrade its difficulty by one. It’s upgrading so it’s going from a purple to a red, because it’s not increasing.

NICK: Yup. Big dice pools today.

CAMERON: Yup. Two threats.

NICK: Aww. Not three?

CAMERON: Just two. There was one advantage. I thought there was three for a second.

NICK: Oh well. It shoots a lot. It mostly hits the walls. It’s off kilter. The other eye is flickering from the electricity. This thing is just having a rough day. The walls look sad. The threats, whoever shoots at it next can have a blue die because it’s got big open wounds in its armor now and it’s very obvious where that is when it lights up from the inside trying to fire its weapons. Another PC slot.

LAURA: Xianna can just stop and shoot.

NICK: You’re within close range of it right now anyway, because you were from the grenades. It hasn’t gone past you.

LAURA: She’s not gonna move, so she’ll aim. That’s three successes and five advantages.

NICK: Wow!

LAURA: Yeah, that’s a crit. Yeah. It’s definitely a crit.

NICK: Man, this thing got critted on a bunch.

LAURA: It’s 9 damage, but a crit is activated.

CAMERON: And it’s gonna be a +20 crit.

LAURA: Because it’s been critted on twice.

NICK: Mm-hmm.

LAURA: I know its soak is gonna take most of that 9 away, but…

NICK: Yeah, but you guys have whittled it down enough, it’s in pretty bad shape. Oh wait, and also its soak is down one, so it’s one more damage than I thought it was.

LAURA: Oh, that’s like 3 damage.

NICK: I mean, if you do that in repetition this thing doesn’t last very long. It’s already pretty much on the outs. It’s very sad. This went from a triumphant battle to executing something very quickly.

LAURA: Alright. Let’s see what its crit is. I don’t have d10s, or d100s.

CAMERON: Do you wanna roll it?

LAURA: You can roll it.

CAMERON: That is a 43 + 20.

LAURA: Sixty-three. Slightly Dazed: Disoriented until end of encounter.

NICK: So that’s a black die?

CAMERON: Another black die.

AUSTIN: I don’t think it’s gonna be hitting anything anymore.

CAMERON: It’s up to four black dice anytime it does anything.

NICK: Okay, another PC slot.

AUSTIN: My turn!

NICK: yeah…

AUSTIN: I wanna run over to it and just rip its heart out. It has so many holes in it now. I’m a mechanic, and I know what to grab, so I’m just gonna bounce on that jump plate, jump on its torso, and just (roars).

NICK: Alright, make me a Brawl check I guess. (laughs)

LAURA: Oh! Also, I had two more advantages that weren’t spent. Can I give Val some boost dice?

NICK: Sure.

LAURA: Like I step out of the way and…

AUSTIN: Is it Brawl or Mechanics to do that?

NICK: We’ll say Brawl. You’re aggressively mechanic-ing.

AUSTIN: Percussive maintenance, except extreme! Two successes.

NICK: What’s the total damage?

AUSTIN: Two + 3 + 4 again, assuming I’m blast knuckling it to rip this thing out. I put my arm around it and then squeeze and then shoot the pieces behind it.

NICK: Hey, you killed it, just barely. You coup de grace this thing. You just go and pull out its central processor?

AUSTIN: yeah, the droid heart.

NICK: Okay. Well, good work.

AUSTIN: I throw it at HK’s feet. “This is what happens to droids who get in the way.”

NICK: “Reassurance: If I’m to kill you it will be from far enough away you don’t know it happens.” It just looks unphased.

AUSTIN: I wink at him and turn towards the door. (laughs)

CAMERON: How is HK doing health-wise? You said he took a pretty decent hit.

NICK: He took a decent hit. I think he took 3 out of 12, so he’s at 75% right now.

LAURA: Okay, that’s fine~

NICK: He’s un poco squishy. Yeah, you are at the vault, the vault with the combination lock on it.

LAURA: Xianna starts trying to get through the door. If it’s a combo lock… Oh, I don’t know how Star Wars ones work. I don’t know if you can do the like, listen to it and hear for the tumblers.

AUSTIN: Like a keypad or a mechanical?

NICK: I was picturing a keypad but now it’s like a twisty lock. That’s fine.

LAURA: Oh, it’s a full twisty lock?

AUSTIN: Is it a digital twisty lock? (laughs)

NICK: It’s a mechanical one. No, it’s a mechanical one because they wanted to avoid slicers getting into it, because most of their stuff was electronic at this point. Quick cut away while she’s doing that. Tink, you’re just patrolling the cameras real quick and you notice there’s a circling drone that goes around the station looking at the exterior stuff. You already shut it down so you don’t have to worry about that, but you notice that the handcuffs with Mills on it are empty. Mills has escaped.

HUDSON: (seethes) Ooh.

NICK: As you look through you can actually see him running down hallways trying to get somewhere. So, that’s going on.

HUDSON: What about that encrypted file?

NICK: Ooh, that encrypted file you say. You are able to get into it. There are a lot of blueprints for some weird shit in there.

HUDSON: I collect it on a little, little… stick.

NICK: Cool.

CAMERON: (laughs)

HUDSON: Computer stick.

NICK: There’s some weapon stuff and some ship stuff, and mechanically what that will do is you can either use it to do a weird custom upgrade to your axe or to help do a weird custom upgrade to the ship, your choice, later, but you have the data. This Kuat Ship Drive’s highly confidential exploratory technology, you now have. If you did it or if you gave it to someone who was in the know they could turn it into something cool.

HUDSON: Nice.

NICK: Yup. It’s a file that says like Do Not Read, 1998 taxes. (laughter) Laura, are you rolling a Skulduggery to try to just old school crack this lock?

LAURA: Yes, and I’m gonna flip a light side point. This is a model Xianna has seen before and knows exactly what to listen for.

NICK: Oh. I want to know when you’ve tried to crack this safe before. What hijinks were you in?

LAURA: Ooh! Let’s see.

NICK: (laughs)

LAURA: It’s probably something really ridiculous and petty. Someone at a club took her coat home instead of hers, like the coat check switched them up, so someone went home with Xianna’s super special thief trench coat… and so Xianna as like NO. (laughs) So she broke into this person’s house and also opened up their safe as an additional fuck you, you don’t take my coat, I’m taking your coat and your money.

NICK: (laughs) Okay. We cut back from that flashback to you trying to open this safe manually.

LAURA: What would the difficulty be?

NICK: Daunting. Doing a safe with no specialized tools is pretty hard.

LAURA: I don’t think I have any…

NICK: You don’t have a stethoscope or something?

LAURA: No. I would just smoosh my lekku (laughs) up against the door. I have some stuff for Bypass Security and it’s all remove black dice. Scanner goggles don’t see into things. I’ll have to get some more thiefy stuff.

CAMERON: Ooh. I want to aim my carbine at the door and look through my scope. Do I see any heat signatures? (laughs)

NICK: You see one blindingly bright heat signature.

CAMERON: “Guys, there’s something really hot in there.” Is it just like a box of bright light?

NICK: It looks like a cylinder.

LAURA: “It’s probably the engine. Engines go… they run. They get hot.”

CAMERON: “It does not look people-shaped.”

NICK: Good roll.

LAURA: Okay, so that is a triumph with a success, three more successes, two threats.

NICK: If you would like, that triumph is that you identify the potentially deadly booby-trap on the safe and it doesn’t go off.

LAURA: Yes!

NICK: Okay. Cool.

(laughter)

LAURA: I would like that, thank you, very much.

NICK: You’re actually able to get it on the second try, and it’s not that you didn’t figure out what the numbers were on the first try, it was that you just forgot that oh, when you go right it has to go around twice.

LAURA: “Oh, this is the X24… S model. On this one it goes this way. On the F model it goes the other way.”

CAMERON: “Alright.” And we put in the year that the Emperor came to power, and open.

NICK: (laughs)

LAURA: “You have to do Sheevy in numbers, because you know, everyone knows his first name and his nickname is Sheevy.”

(laughter)

NICK: So, the safe pops and you see in the safe door, because this is a big bank vault looking thing, you see something that catches your eye. It’s a poison dart that’s on a proximity trigger. You just put a finger into the side of the dart and it shoots off and shatters against the wall and starts to acid burn a little bit. That would have been real bad. And so, the door swings open.

Inside the vault you find a durasteel cylinder about the size of a breadbox. It’s sitting on a small work table. It has a universal port on one end and a power button on the other. It’s polished to a mirror sheen but otherwise featureless. You all can roll Knowledge checks to recognize more about what the heck this thing is.

CAMERON: What type of Knowledge?

LAURA: I can roll an Underworld.

NICK: This would be like Education kind of situation probably.

CAMERON: eh. Hell, we can try.

LAURA: I mean, I’ll roll. What difficulty?

AUSTIN: I do have Education.

NICK: Hard.

LAURA: I’m pretty sure Xianna dropped out of school at like 15. (laughs)

NICK: Tink, you could probably see it through the cameras if you want to roll.

HUDSON: Oh, great.

LAURA: One advantage.

CAMERON: Ah! That was close though.

NICK: Fail?

CAMERON: Yeah.

LAURA: Yeah. Xianna literally dropped out of school at 15.

CAMERON: Psh. Oops.

AUSTIN: (smiling) Three successes and three threats.

NICK: Oh…

CAMERON: You’re just so shocked. You fall prone!

AUSTIN: “yes!” And I fall over. (laughs)

HUDSON: One threat.

NICK: Tink sees it through the cameras. ‘I think I know what that—‘ Nope. Someone starts knocking on the door outside your security room.

AUSTIN: I probably walk over and start getting a better look at it and just trip on a seam in the floor and face plant.

NICK: (laughs) yeah.

AUSTIN: I fall prone. (dramatic bass noise)

NICK: Yeah. Your legs are a little watery from the combat, because you haven’t done that in a while. You went pretty hard in the paint there. You get close, but you recognize this is a power source. You actually can put your hand on it and it’s not hot. It just has so much inherent energy that heat sensors and radiation sensors freak out, but it doesn’t emit any harmful radiation. This thing is basically—four of these things could power a star destroyer, and it’s just in this little tube that you could just plug into something. It doesn’t consume fuel. It will last 15 years and is already operational. It is technology that you recognize just miniaturized way more than you would expect and is incredibly expensive to make which is why they’re not using them yet. They haven’t made them cost effective, but you got one!

AUSTIN: “No way, guys! This is so exciting! Look! They miniaturized the thing, and the flux coils are down to that small, and they got rid of the heat signatures,” and I’m just bouncing around being really excited. “Guys, this is why we’re here!”

LAURA: “I am so happy you are so excited, and I am very happy it is small enough for one person to pick up. Very excited about that.”

AUSTIN: I just grab it off the table. I just pick it up and go “YAH!” (laughter) and then think about it for a second and look around and make sure I didn’t trigger an Indiana Jones trap.

LAURA: “Okay. You already picked it up. It is going to be okay. Let’s see… Now explosions. Distract people on our way out, but we don’t want to be caught in the explosions and stuff.”

AUSTIN: I pull out the detonator.

CAMERON: “I would maybe wait until we’re more up in the elevator, because that was a really long elevator ride.”

(laughter)

LAURA: ‘oh, I guess.”

CAMERON: Was there anything else in that room?

NICK: Nope. That was the only thing.

AUSTIN: Can I rip a gun off of one of those droids, one of those mini-guns?

NICK: If you make me a Mechanics check.

AUSTIN: I have remove a black die per rank of Utini to find and scavenge items and gear, so I’m gonna remove whatever that black die was.

NICK: (smiling) It was going to be a black die because it was all damaged so now you don’t have that. Make me a Mechanics check to steal one of these gun barrels.

AUSTIN: I don’t actually want to use it myself, but I want to put it on the ship. Actually, I wanna put it on a speeder.

NICK: It’s a lot heavier.

CAMERON: What’s the difficulty?

NICK: Average.

CAMERON: (laughing) Because you don’t have any right now. You’re gonna be very successful.

AUSTIN: Yeah! Advantages. Five advantages and a success.

NICK: Okay. Let’s make it so that the advantage is you actually get a piece of the security suite from the droid with it so getting out of here is gonna be a lot easier than getting in was, and you have a big old repeating blaster. It’s gonna take both hands and it probably weighs 20 kilos, 25 kilos. That’s like 60 pounds.

LAURA: Mm-hmm.

AUSTIN: I look in my tool belt and find some rope and just tie it across my shoulders.

NICK: (laughs) Okay.

AUSTIN: I don’t want to use it, I just want to have it, unless someone else wants it.

NICK: “Observation: That’s a pretty impressive piece you’ve got there,” and turns to head to the elevator.

LAURA: “I literally do not think I could even pick that up.”

NICK: (laughs)

AUSTIN: (roars)

LAURA: “If you were to put numbers to how strong I am, it is a 1.” (laughter) “Say if we were on some sort of 1 to 6 system, my Brawn, my strength as you say, would be a 1.”

NICK: You get on the elevator. The elevator starts to go up. We get a scene of the coms starting to reconnect with Tink and you get the crackle back to connection. Tink, what have you been doing, clicking through the files seeing all the cool stuff you got?

HUDSON: Yeah.

NICK: Just weird arc technology, kinda like those electrical turrets probably were, but you could use it to do what we talked about before.

AUSTIN: Would you say that thing we found is an arc reactor?

NICK: No.

CAMERON: (giggles)

NICK: I would not, because it wasn’t a donut. I was tempted to make it a donut but I didn’t. So, the elevator is going up. (hums elevator music)

LAURA: Ding… Ding…

NICK: Tink, you can see on the cameras that—

CAMERON: (laughing) It’s dinging even though there are no floors. It’s just letting us know where there would be floors.

NICK: You can see on the cameras that Mills has re-found his gun and is standing in front of the elevator watching the counter go, just looking really upset. At that point someone is pounding on the door trying to get in. “Hey, you put in a ticket. We’re trying to keep our response times within LOS. If you could let us in, we’ll help you with that security error. We heard explosions though, are you really sure? Could I resolve this ticket now?” (laughing) What do you do?

HUDSON: First I get on coms and I try to say and whisper so they can’t hear from the hallway, “Mills is right outside the elevator.”

CAMERON: Oh shit.

HUDSON: Do they hear me?

NICK: Yeah.

LAURA: “Oh no. He will most certainly shoot us.”

CAMERON: “Oh hey, coms came back on.”

HUDSON: “Uhh… I gotta deal with- Gotta go. Love you.”

(laughter)

LAURA: “Okay! Love you too! Bye~!”

HUDSON: I go to the door and I say, “Um, yeah, that ticket can be resolved. I already dealt with it.”

NICK: “This is highly suspicious. Can we just get in real quick to look at it? The door seems to be malfunctioning. We’re not really mechanics though, we do the software, but if you could let us in… We did a long walk over here. The air locks really need some preventative maintenance, they were pretty slow, and I’m starting to ramble, but if I could… Just let us in for a second, would you, buddy?”

HUDSON: “I thought there were some explosions and evacuations going on?”

NICK: “I don’t know anything about that. Um… I don’t know. That seemed like just some sort of gas leak. Just… Why won’t you let us in? That’s kind of weird.”

HUDSON: “Oh. Who are you with?”

NICK: “We’re with… the… We resolve tickets. We’re the IT team.”

HUDSON: “How many of you?”

CAMERON: (giggles)

NICK: “Um… You know, maybe I should just go and get the security detail. Maybe they can help you more.”

HUDSON: “No, no, no. I just wanted to see if my friend was out there.”

NICK: “Hey, you don’t sound like Ted. Where’s Ted?”

HUDSON: “Oh. Ted? Hold on. Let me just… Ow, the door’s jammed. Just a second.”

CAMERON: (laughs)

HUDSON: I open the door. Remove my vibro-axe, open the door, and get into position to slash.

NICK: Okay. (laughing) So this is just these two dorks with backpacks, they say like Geek Squad on their shirts. The door swings open and they are standing there like “huh, where’s that guy?” Are you hiding next to the door?

HUDSON: Yes.

NICK: “Huh, where’s that guy?” They walk in and they go to the computer and they see how deep into the files you were. “Man, I haven’t even seen these registries. No wonder it’s all messed up,” and they start clicking away.

HUDSON: I slip out the door.

NICK: (laughing) Okay. Roll me a Stealth to leave without them noticing.

HUDSON: Oh no… Oh. Okay, I can do that. I actually have three in Stealth.

NICK: What?!

(laughter)

LAURA: yeah!

NICK: Canonically, Tink moves like a ghost. We established that before.

LAURA: Because his feet are padded, so there’s not a lot of sound.

HUDSON: What’s the difficulty?

NICK: Average, these guys suck.

CAMERON: And he blends into the surroundings so well.

NICK: You can have a blue die because they’re dorks.

HUDSON: Three successes and four advantages.

NICK: Do you want to spend the advantages that while they’re exiting out they don’t take any logs of anything so there’s no trace of you having been there?

HUDSON: Yup!

NICK: Okay. Four advantages I think would cover that. Three successes, you’re just gone. You actually beat them back to the rendezvous place, or were you gonna go to the elevator and meet up with them? It’s a reasonably long walk.

HUDSON: I would say rendezvous place then. Yeah.

NICK: Okay. You head back to the bubble. “Man, I don’t know what these programs are, some sort of bloatware.” He’s like deleting stuff and cleaning up the tracks for you.

(laughter)

CAMERON: ‘That’s why it’s running so slowly.’

HUDSON: So wait, they came in, were just talking to someone, and then—

CAMERON: Yup!

AUSTIN: They saw the problem and immediately are…

NICK: They saw the computer, immediately wanted to do it, that’s a fair point. They came in and the guy started working on it, the other guy was looking over his shoulder, and then you stealthed so good you got out. “Hey… Oh, I don’t know.” (laughs)

CAMERON: And the door had swooshed open so they can’t see where your axe was in it, so they’re just like huh, I guess he left.

NICK: Yeah. They think it’s weird. A guy pokes his head out to look around, but you stealthed so well that he didn’t find you. You’re gone, easy-peasy. So, we get back to the elevator crew. (hums elevator music)

LAURA: Ding…

NICK: It goes PING! It opens, and HK is pressed against the wall. “Statement: Tell me when to fire.” The rest of you see Mills standing out there.

CAMERON: Karma had flipped her blaster back to stun after we found out Mills was out front.

AUSTIN: I have the detonator in my hand still.

NICK: (laughs) yeah. The door opens. Mills sees—Well, are you all pressed against the doors, or…?

CAMERON: We probably took up the same positions as last time.

LAURA: Yeah, pressed against the door, and knowing that it’s Mills, Xianna would just yell out “Excuse me, Mils. Please do not shoot us~!”

NICK: He’s just flabbergasted. “Uh… You sound familiar. Is that a Twi’lek accent I hear?”

LAURA: “Yes it is. It is me. We met on Unroola Dawn, like, the other week I think. I have no idea how long it has been.”

NICK: “Aw man, no kriff.”

CAMERON: (laughs)

LAURA: “Yes! Do you remember us? There was those trees and they ate someone, and yes. We got deserters, and… How is Falx doing? I hear he died. Is that true?”

NICK: “Oh man. Yeah, if you’re calling out the trees you’ve definitely been in the shit.”

LAURA: “I’m purple, a Twi’lek. Remember me?”

NICK: “Oh yeah, I remember. You killed a tree with a grenade.”

LAURA: “I did, I killed—Yes. Well, I killed one of the deserters with a grenade by accident.”

CAMERON: “I think the tree made it, actually.”

LAURA: “I think the tree survived, but we did shoot the tree.”

NICK: “You’ve passed my subtle test.”

LAURA: “Yes. Yes.”

CAMERON: (laughing) Karma’s just gonna step out of cover, still with her gun out though.

NICK: He’s standing there, and as you step out of cover—Val do you go with her, or are you still hiding in the elevator?

AUSTIN: Yeah, I’ll walk out.

NICK: He sees Xianna and Karma and he drops the gun. “Wow. Long time no see. You working for Kuat Ship yards too? They pay pretty well.” Then Val steps out. “Oh, holy shit!” He puts his gun on her. “You caught yourself a prisoner. I didn’t know they hired more security contractors, but step aside, I’ll put her down.”

LAURA: “yes! No, hold on.” Xianna wants to really quickly scurry up next to Val and slap a binder, just on one hand though, and then be like “no-no-no, we have to take her in for a bounty, remember? This one ,the Nautolan, Karma’s a bounty hunter.”

CAMERON: “They wanted to question her, Mills, so…”

LAURA: “Yes.”

NICK: “Hmm…”

LAURA: But I won’t attach the binders, so I won’t actually close them. I want them to just loosely be on so that it looks—

NICK: The Chewbacca treatment.

LAURA: Yeah, the Chewbacca thing. Would that be a Skulduggery?

NICK: “I’m pretty suspicious. This seems like a Deception.”

AUSTIN: I have the box like in one of my arms.

LAURA: Oh yeah.

NICK: He doesn’t know what that is. That’s super top secret. It just looks like a tube. “This sounds like some sort of a Deception check.”

LAURA: Oh, more Deception than Skulduggery? Sleight of hand?

NICK: Yeah. I’ll let you just slip the binder on, that’s not a big deal—

CAMERON: But us lying to him.

NICK: The lying.

LAURA: The lying.

NICK: He has two purples and a red.

CAMERON: But take a blue die, because I assisted with the lying.

NICK: I’ll do that.

LAURA: Two successes.

NICK: The thing is, he just needs there to be a good enough story that he would be able to tell somebody if they questioned him about it, so he’s not thinking about it too hard. “Well, I know they’re hiring a lot of people from dangerous places right now. There’s some new technology here that’s a really big deal. My next step is to have them expand the air vents so I can get in there, do better security from hiding. That’s kind of my thing.”

LAURA: “Oh yes. Mm-hmm.”

CAMERON: “Yes.”

LAURA: Xianna would slowly sidestep halfway in front of Val so that Mills can’t see what she’s holding. “Uh-huh, yes. We were hired to catch someone trying to steal these things, and you know, they need to up their security. Yeah, those vents, they need to check out the vents. Uh-huh. Yes.”

CAMERON: As Xianna’s talking and Mills is relaxing, Karma’s gonna go over and lift up the cage again (laughs), so that everybody else can get out.

NICK: Because he was on the other side of the cage.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: Okay. At this point HK snaps around the corner and his gun starts charging. “Tactical Statement: Suppressing fire.” He’s about to shoot. Do you stop him?

CAMERON: Yeah, I’m gonna stop him.

LAURA: “Hank! Do not shoot him, Hank!”

CAMERON: I’m gonna hold up a hand. “Hank, stop. Agh! Gosh darn it, Xianna. You got me calling him Hank. HK, stop!” (laughs)

LAURA: “It is Hank. Heh.”

NICK: Xianna said it first, ‘hey, Hank, don’t shoot him.’ “Statement: This is not a sufficient order from a secondary user. Please see an administrator.” And then Karma said no, no, stop, and so he powers down. “Disappointed sigh.”

LAURA: “Sorry about that, Mills. The company that hired us wanted additional, you know, backup for us and gave us this droid, but I think the droid is broken too. You know, budget cuts, you know how that works.”

CAMERON: “I think it’s just been a little bit too long between memory wipes. He’s getting real murderous.”

LAURA: “Yes. You know they need to wipe them every so often or else they get personalities and things like that, you know.”

NICK: “Statement: I resemble that remark.”

CAMERON: Resemble? (laughs)

NICK: Mills just shrugs and slaps his gun over his shoulder. “Well, I’m gonna go see who put down all these people. I guess it was your prisoner here, but there’s a bunch of dead stormtroopers in the hall.”

LAURA: “There’s people?”

CAMERON: Karma walks forward and peeks. “Holy kriff!” (laughs)

NICK: Yeah, it’s just smoldering. It looks like Uncle Ben and Aunt Beru from New Hope.

SEVERAL: Oh no! (laughs)

NICK: They’re just frickin roasted. The armor is all splattered against the wall in melted drips. It’s like an anti-army weapon they used in a hallway. This is not good.

AUSTIN: (smiling) With all the doors shut.

NICK: Mills didn’t seem, like… The reason you had this calm conversation is he was like “yeah, I’ve seen some stuff. Whatever. I guess I’ll go file a report or whatever, but I hope to see you around soon.”

CAMERON: “Totally. We should get lunch!”

NICK: he just kinda shrugs. “By the way, the wall you breached through, we haven’t vented any of the atmo yet so you should be able to get back to your ship.” He just kind of winks and walks away.

CAMERON: “Thanks buddy!”

LAURA: “Bye! Thank you!”

CAMERON: (smiling) And off we go~

NICK: And you have to step through this flaming hellscape that you have created. You’re able to get back down the hallway. The security has mostly been disabled. All of the airlocks are open and there’s air everywhere, so that didn’t really come up which is cool. You’re able to get back to the ship. Tink is waiting right there.

LAURA: “Ello Tink.”

HUDSON: “Hey guys!”

CAMERON: “Hey!”

LAURA: “How did it go?”

HUDSON: “Pretty swell. I got some really interesting documents I want to show y’all later.”

LAURA: “Oh cool. We can sell them for money.”

CAMERON: “Oh, really?!” Karma’s putting her suit back on.

LAURA: “I hope they are proprietary secrets.”

HUDSON: “I mean, maybe, but…”

LAURA: “We can sell those.”

HUDSON: “You’re all about money, aren’t you?”

LAURA: “yes I am! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

NICK: We get everybody bounce-hustling their way back to the ship that’s stuck to the side. As you take off we get the view of the cockpit of Karma flying. Val, are you in the co-pilot seat or are you messing with the engines?

AUSTIN: Yeah, I’m in the co-pilot seat right now.

NICK: Okay. As soon as you pick off you hear, “This is the ISS Sickle. Unidentified ship containing George Jetson, please wait. We’ve heard sounds of a disturbance and we really need you to stay around. We need your report.”

AUSTIN: I set the bombs off.

NICK: Yeah?

(laughter)

AUSTIN: “That sounds like my cue!”

LAURA: “Boom!”

NICK: (explosion noises) And the captain says, “Ship, stop now. Whoever you are, there’s been some sort of attack. Stop now.” All of the turbo lasers are pointing towards you. We’re gonna resolve this cinematically, because ship rules… fuck that. I think what happens is Karma does some fancy flying to get around it, and the Sickle gets into the route that you need to hyperspace jump back to the labs, and you get a chance to shoot the turbo laser at this star destroyer. What is Val’s response to there is a big old star destroyer right in your flight path?

AUSTIN: I hit the green button… (laughing) and then I run back in to the power reactor core and start hitting things, getting it ready to charge to be able to survive that shot.

NICK: Yeah. You’re insulating stuff, rerouting power. The engines start to sputter out.

AUSTIN: I think turbo lasers are just a whole bunch of capacitors, so it’s just drawing all of the power out of the engine while that thing charges up.

NICK: Yeah, so the ship’s still moving but it starts to jutter a little. We get Tink—Are you involved in watching this mechanical mayhem that’s going on?

HUDSON: Yeah, I’m just kind of observing.

NICK: ‘Seems fine. Oh, don’t forget that one, that might make us die.’ Karma, we get your flying and you see there’s a trigger on the yolk that’s covered with glass, and you flip it up and the button that you can hit starts glowing green, and that means you can shoot.

CAMERON: I’ma punch it!

NICK: Okay. The whole ship actually—

AUSTIN: (heavy crunch)

NICK: Yeah. It’s not a big ship. This is like a minivan covered in guns with a World War II artillery piece strapped to the side of it. The whole ship’s forward momentum is negated by the shot. It just stops.

AUSTIN: Goes off in a spin because it’s off-center.

NICK: Yeah, it starts to spin a little. It pierces the shields and the armor of the star destroyer. It doesn’t kill it, it doesn’t core it out, but it does enough damage that the captain starts peeling off. He’s like I don’t know what the heck that was, but this is too much and if I lose the ship I lose my commission. We see it start to drift with sparks going everywhere as it backs away. There’s a line of explosions along the left side of the ship. And your way is clear, so you get it back under control, and you punch it, and you go back.

The next scene is you all in Val’s lab having successfully completed your heist.

ALL: Yay~

LAURA: “Okay, so uh, you will join Sentinel’s team or whatever? I don’t really know what he wanted from you.”

AUSTIN: “But did you see the turbo laser?”

LAURA: “I did.. It was big and—“

AUSTIN: “It was SO COOL!”

LAURA: “It made a big pew, pew-pew-pew, lasers everywhere. Yes. Great.”

AUSTIN: “That’s the first time I’ve seen a ship live through it.”

CAMERON: “I mean, it was a star destroyer.” (laughs)

LAURA: “Oh… Huh.”

AUSTIN: “I always hit like cruisers and frigates and they just kind of explode.”

LAURA: “Okay…”

CAMERON: “Yup, but you know, even the victory class star destroyers are pretty kriffin’ large.”

LAURA: “yes. So anyways, you will work for Sentinel? Take his job? I am sure the reason he is hiring you is so that you can blow things up. Blow more things up. I heard there was something about an Imperial shipyard to blow things up in.”

HUDSON: “Additionally, do you want to get caf later?”

(laughter)

LAURA: “Yes, are you single? Are you single or what?”

AUSTIN: “Yeah. I’m currently single, but you’re not really my type.”

LAURA: “Okay. No problem. What about Tink?”

HUDSON: “Oh…”

AUSTIN: “Yeah, neither of you.”

HUDSON: “Aww…”

LAURA: “Okay. That is fine. You blow things up for Sentinel?”

AUSTIN: “Tell him to give me a call back.”

LAURA: “yes, of course. We will do that. Yes.”

NICK: Cool.

LAURA: Xianna’s just gonna wander around and she finds a piece of machinery, and there’s a button on it, and it’s gonna do the whole “oh, what is this button?!” (laughs)

CAMERON: (smiling) No~!

LAURA: And starts going to press it, and everyone is like NO~!

NICK: (smiling) And then we zoom out, and then you just see a plume of fire go out through one of the ship ports, and that will be the end of the episode!

ALL: Ba-naaa~!

CAMERON: Wee!

## 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.