Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Sith Attack

The Sith were dead almost before I knew they were even there. Their bodies hit the sandy ground with three dull thumps, kicking up three small clouds of dust into the air.

I was on Tatooine to clear up some final real estate arrangements outside of Mos Nox. We were finally letting go our plot of land where the GDC had originally been headquartered, to some local entrepreneurs hoping to make a quick buck on some new-fangled solar energy capture devices. I was just happy to be done with it all - I had no patience for playing landlord anymore.

The Sith had come up suddenly, roaring up on Swoop bikes and howling as they hurled themselves at me. They were human, or humanoid anyway, and frightful in appearance, dressed in dirty, dark cloaks and baring teeth as yellow as the sands of Tatooine.

Instinctively, I lowered myself and extended my right leg, sweeping it in a tight radius - a basic Teräs Käsi defense against a charging attack. The sweep caught two of the Sith and sent them sprawling headfirst into the dirt. The other leaped over my leg, just barely escaping the blow to his shins.

In an instant, I was up and at the ready as the third Sith came at me, this time raising a vicious looking dagger and preparing to strike with all his strength. That was his undoing, of course. I let him throw himself into the blow with all of his power, then simply evaded at the last moment. Before he knew what was happening, the dagger had fallen out of his hand, into mine and was then lodged into his lower back. A sharp twist ensured that his spinal cord would never again send signals to his brain.

The other two were back up and upon me by that time, but they were dispatched more easily than their partner. They launched themselves at me as if to grapple, but with two easy blows they both fell, the bone of their noses impaled into the grey matter inside their heads.

I looked at the three bodies sprawled in the sand around me in bewilderment. I had done battle before, but this was the first time that I had been hunted. Every other encounter I had experienced had been of my own volition, of my own design.

I considered what the Old Man had said, and the crystal he had given me to protect. It must have been what they were after.

I knelt down to search the bodies, to see if I could find any clues as to their origins or intentions. Aside from a few credits, I found nothing on two of them. On the third, however (the one with his own dagger lodged in his spine), I found a datadisc. I picked it up and examined it.

It was a waypoint disc. It told the location of, well, something.

It seemed my return to Dantooine would be delayed. I had a new destination for the time being.