Public From Sea to Wastes and Back: A Tatooine Story

[A'Shimra Yort]

TATOOINE // JUNDLAND WASTES
​

A week passed since the massacre of his tribe.

No time to think, mourn, to commit their memories to the Dunes. No, only survival mattered now as he had promised his father. The Wastes of Jundland were dangerous and ruled by rival tribes that would not think kindly about his intrusion into their territories. Yet, it was the quickest route to Mos Esley and so Yort had no other choice. Hopefully he'd be able to get through quickly.

It was the luck of the stars that ensured his Bantha, << SHINING SPARKLE >>, survived the massacre. The tribes' herd of banthas had fled as a stray shipcrash broke its enclosure. On foot this journey would have been impossible.

Now? Just improbable.

As Yort crossed another ridge something caught his eye in the sky. A bright sheering light that blinded him even though he was wearing his goggles. What could this be? He asked his bantha companion without expecting an answer. Sparkle was his closest friend, but not an amazing conversational partner sadly. The trajectory of the sky light seemed to cast downwards. Towards... oh no.

<< It's gonna hit us, >> Yort realized all of a sudden. At least, if they didn't get out of the way NOW. His heels dug into the bantha's side, making it jump to the side and create distance. Even then it was a close call as the tribesman closed his eyes to escape the light's cast. It did nothing to the sounds however.

Coiled screeching metal screaming through the air as it buried itself into the mountain rock of the Jundland Wastes.

The impact caused Sparkle to throw him off and flee.

As Yort was flying to the air all he could think of was the following: I have never flown before.

And also: Damn you, Sparkle.

 

[Kade Kol-Rekali]

Impact imminent. Impact imminent. Impact imminent.

The escape pod shrieked through the air, the deflector shields having failed on re-entry and now the exterior hull glowed cherry red.

IK-0N sat stiffly in the crash webbing, awaiting the inevitable.

Then it came. The shearing forces of the impact strained the joints of the assassin droid almost to breaking, then everything went dark as his processors shut down to preserve as much data as they could.

The landing pod tore a hundred meter furrow in the desert floor before skidding to a stop not far from @A’shimra Yort.

 

[A'Shimra Yort]

IK-0N

By the time that the landing pod skidded to a halt Yort had curled up in a ball.

Arms covering his head and the vital areas of his body. Those who did not know better would have started running, but that only left them open for shrapnel damage while making themselves one big target. Yurt had seen too many organic pin-cushions to want to end up that way. Once the sounds died down he looked up in confusion.

Then... silently rose to his feet while drawing his electro-staff.

The sky above had offered up a gift perhaps or a trial. With an abundance of caution the tribesman approached the landing pod, while keeping an eye on the surroundings.

It was likely that others had seen the entry of the sky-gift. Rival Followers of the Stream might flow into the area in no time at all. Best to inspect it quickly and hope Sparkle would turn-up in the meantime.

His staff rapped against the metal of the pod.

<< Friend or Foe? >> Yort signed at the metallic cylinder on the off-chance that it was sentient in some way.

 

[Kade Kol-Rekali]

The pod door hissed open. IK-0N crawled out. An organic life form stood over him wielding some sort of primitive weapon. The assassin droid reached for his cortosis-weave vibrosword, but error messages returned. As he analyzed the error it became clear why. His right upper appendage was bent at an angle, the servos hanging loose.

IK-0N stood upright in the sand and wobbled. Hydraulic fluid dribbled down the side of his cranium and a diagnostic revealed a hand-sized shard of durasteel was sticking out of his head.

That explained the memory bank impairment.

“I am,” replied the droid to the organic’s query.

“Any other characterization is dependent on a comprehensive threat assessment. What is your designation?”

 

[Damsy Callat]

The airshow would have been easy to miss if the water vaporator hadn't wailed a warning at her; it was pretty short-lived. "Woah woah, Gee-ex," the Siren muttered. "What's goin' on?" She had just fixed his humidity sensor. Tatooine could be hard on machinery for sure, but that hard? Damsy stepped out of the homestead's shed, shielded her eyes with a hand, and glanced back over her shoulder. She caught a glimpse of the sky when she was inspecting the moisture unit. Its orange was somehow heavier, more overbearing than normal. And not one solid color, but streaked with two trails of black-greys.

Then she understood:

Engine exhaust.

But stardust wasn't supposed to burn that dark.

Hiking the skirt of her farm dress, Damsy rushed up the earthen steps out of the courtyard pit, taking two at a time and almost tripping herself as she got to the stoop of her hut. The twin streaks angled down to meet the horizon further into the Jundland Wastes. All things considered, though, their zenith seemed relatively close. Damsy rose her wrist comm and activated it. Her AI, Ursula, ran some calculations; the flashing HUD confirmed her suspicions.

She was already rustling through her few belongings indoors when Ursula voiced her own concern. : || Don't you dare. You don't have enough water. || :

"Neither does whoever just crashed out there," huffed Damsy as she continued to look for something.

: || No, likely not, but, miss...? || : Damsy pulled a generic blaster from the footlocker and scrambled to her her feet to holster it at her hip. It was clear she wasn't listening as she moved to leave the hut, so Ursula gave her wrist a minor static shock : || You are a marine mammal. || :

"Amphibian," Damsy corrected just as quickly as she ducked out of the hut's doorframe. "And one that still don't leave people behind."

Old special forces habits died excruciatingly hard.



**
A'Shimra Yort | IK-0N

 

[A'Shimra Yort]

IK-0N | Damsy Callat

The metallic egg hissed in response to his rapping and that was always a bad sign.

He immediately took several steps back, but raised the staff into a fighting position. It would not do to show this thing fear in the shape of his back. No, if death came today it would come-

A metallic egg that hatched?

This was something entirely new.

Out of it came a shape, humanoid at first glance, but equally metallic as the egg. For a brief moment his breath was stuck in his chest. Yort remembered the massacre only days ago. Metallic men with blades and blasters cutting down his people like chaff. Horrific, utterly. All his instincts screamed at him to ignore the voice coming from the hatched egg.

Destroy... before you can be destroyed.

Yurt regained control of himself even as the grip around his staff felt ever more painful. << Designation? What is this? >> He signed once more with his fingers before taking one more step back without turning his back on IK-0N.

"My name is A'Shimra Yort." The tightly-wrapped man shouted in the language of Sand. Not at all Basic. "And you are?"

His elders would have destroyed this creature just for stepping their feet into the sandy soil of their homeworld. Invaders. All of them. This much was true and yet... Yurt was tired. And he was alone. Even his Bantha friend abandoned him. What point was there to sow more destruction after all of this rested on his shoulders?

Of course.

Yurt was not aware that even now rival Children of the Sand were attracted to the crash site. Nor that another denizen of Tatooine sought to help them both.

 

[Kade Kol-Rekali]

The droid's head canted to one side. Auditory receptors loaded the appropriate language algorithm.

The synthetic voice replied in the A'Shimra Yort 's same language, "I am called Eye-Kay-Zero-En."

Clearly, the Organic was slow. Perhaps he also had a chunk of durasteel embedded in his frontal cortex.

Ikon looked around.

He saw nothing but sand in every direction...

Several weeks of traveling in such conditions would render him defunct. The sand would clog his servos and disrupt motor function until he could no longer operate.

That would be a negative outcome.

Ikon desired a positive outcome. Desire. That was an anomaly. Could he desire something?

"How did you arrive at this location. There is nothing here. Were you tracking my escape pod?"

 

[Talyr Ivaakren]

A'Shimra Yort IK-0N Damsy Callat

The harsh crash of the escape pod striking the coarse, heat-drenched sands reverberated violently through the surrounding canyons and empty, dune-marked landscape that embraced the impact site in an unforgiving vice. Along the edge of a ridge to one side of the heated, dented escape pod, a single head of scarlet hair emerged from beyond the ridge, shaking like a constipated Bantha as it peered over the ridge with terror evident in her trembling form, sand-strewn goggles wrapped around her eyes in place of glasses, shielding them most effectively from the world's twin suns.

"Well, just WHAT the hell was that?..." The creature cursed, lithe and lanky, her flat, though still feminine body coated in beautiful midnight-blue (Russian Blue) fur that was just as sand-encrusted as her head of short, unkempt red hair, her form still trembling from the shock as she craned her neck, allowing the alien woman to cast her squinting eyes over the windswept sands towards where the escape pod, of all things, had landed a few meters away, as her ringing, pained ears could still easily attest to. A rounded ear twitched and the Selonian, so out of place on a world such as Tatooine, hefted a Model 434 Heavy Blaster in her flesh hand, the leather of a single fingerless brown glove creaking as her thin little muzzle parted her lips in the best impression of an intimidating snarl as such a creature as she could manage. One free hand hiked up one side of her loose-fitting dark green cargo pants, a furred blue-gray tail swaying behind her as the Selonian took a moment to place the heuristic processor that she had salvaged from a nearby ruined astromech in the pocket of her dark brown, worn duster. After a moment's hesitation (and casting a final glance at the ruined droid leaning against the ridge's edge), the Selonian began making off at a brisk jog towards the fallen (and opening, she could see now) pod that had burnt a trail through the sands to produce a small smattering of glass in the desert that the dunes would bury within hours, a scorched wound that would soon be lost to all...

* * *

The Selonian's duster fluttered along behind her as she reached the pod at last, spotting two figures as she approached. Keeping her blaster raised to the sky as she intentionally coughed loudly, a distinct, lisping voice echoing from the ferret-like alien's throat as she addressed the Tatooine native and the bipedal droid with him, unaware of yet another figure approaching from the distance as she made her own presence known, just to one side of the fallen pod, to the droid and the Tusken... Whatever they were called...

"Uhh... Sorry... But, that can't have been a good thing..." A dexterous prosthetic left hand on a lanky arm bearing a too-large, wind-twirled coat shifted to indicate the escape pod, even as her free hand held her Model 434 up clearly for the other desert denizens to see, "Uh, anything I can do to help, hmm?" The Selonian's frazzled hair swirled in the hot breeze, and her goggled, obscured eyes traveled over the other creatures in turn...

 

[Reave]

Grok watched the falling star impact with stubborn disinterest. This world's twin suns forced him to squint and he was sweating like a...well, like a boar. He used the haft of his arg'garok as a crude walking stick. It would take him some time climbing up dunes before he reached the crater but already a tracking fob on his belt started to beep.

"How did you arrive at this location. There is nothing here. Were you tracking my escape pod?"

His battle squeal pierced the silent desert. The tusker tumbled more than charged into the pit and swung his axehead around in a wild arc. There was no strategy, just raw power. Even his intended target seemed unclear. Another savage snort and the gamorrean lifted a massive arg'garok in open challenge.

 

[A'Shimra Yort]

IK-0N Damsy Callat Talyr Ivaakren Reave

His language?

It was... and was not.

The language of the Dunes was a complicated system, he knew this, because few outsiders could speak it at all. Speak it properly? Almost none. The metal man's tone was all over the place. The cadence butchered and leaving nothing of the tense rhythm in its wake. And yet, it was welcome all the same, because it was the first time Yurt heard it since... a while.

Outside of hearing his own voice spoken to his Bantha.

He chanced a quick glance around and suppressed a curse. Nowhere to be found. Tracking her down would be an entire endeavor.

"You speak our tongue and you are made of metal." Stating the obvious there. "A droid then?" But a droid that he had never seen or heard of before. Their tribe had some exposure to the outer world. Service droids, protocol ones, they made for good salvage to repair there-

He was about to respond to the droid's query when a second voice caught his attention.

The staff immediately whirred around in the direction of Talyr. Distinctly organic in nature and a foreigner to boot. Clear as day, because no fur-skinned creature would ever evolved here, that much was for sure. << Where did you come fro- >> Barked in the Dune language and about to step forward when a THING came out of nowhere.

The Gamorrean (identified after the fact) charged at them with a challenge reared through tusks.

Yurt threw himself to the side to avoid being decapacitated by the axe.

<< You dare and attack one of the Dunes, Tusked One?! >> The Tusken Raider roared in return to that challenge as he raised his staff once more.

 

[Damsy Callat]

Over the berm of a dune came Damsy. She paused to look to the fading smoke streaked on the horizon, shielding her eyes before attempting...

A billowing gust of wind bit into her side. It tore the long, burlap scarf she had wrapped around her head and mouth away, then shoved her off the landform. She tumbled headlong down the pile, coarse sand grains burrowing into her hair and plastering to her exposed skin. She groaned, a sound lost to the rushing air swirling around her, trying in vain to amount to sandstorm. The energy they had mustered did not do much to move pieces of quartz not matter how tiny, but was more than enough to thoroughly lash soft flesh. Damsy could tell that her back was pelted in tiny but angry red indentations. They were sure to turn inside out soon, swell, and become the beginning of a rash.

She groaned again, voice lost now in its raspiness rather than the now-still air. It was a minute or so before she managed to roll over, steel herself to the stabbing pain she knew was—

"AAAGH, CHIT!!"

Her back erupted in fire, as if she had just turned over into molten sand. Though the midday heat it had absorbed probably didn't help.

Either way, she did not have time to dwell.

A white arm eclipsed the twin suns high above and reached into her blurry sight. "C'mon, Maj," said a familiar voice from off-screen. She might have not been able to see the speaker, but placed his voice nonetheless: Typhan? "You're okay. We needta keep movin'. Friendlies are a klick or so out." A dark brown blotch joined the visage floating behind the arm. Damsy shook her head. She heard the sands shifting in her ears. Maybe she couldn't hear—she was making the bleets of a bantha out for affirmation from her former squad mate after all—but she could damn well still see.

And Ty wasn't that white.

Her vision depixelized and sound synced back up with reality in a second.

Yup, that was a bantha horn, right in her face.

Well, damn.



**
A'Shimra Yort | IK-0N | Talyr Ivaakren | Reave

 

[Talyr Ivaakren]

A'Shimra Yort Damsy Callat Reave IK-0N

The lanky Selonian kept her face as calm as she could, her cybernetic left hand reaching up to stroke a few stray grains of sand that were beginning to irritate the blue-gray fur at the left side of her mouth, even as she extended her that side of her maw open in what she hoped would be perceived as a friendly smile. Casting her goggle-clad eyes over the odd-looking droid and the Tusken before her while mentally trying to ascertain whether the droid's heuristic processor would be worth harvesting if she moved quickly enough... Shaking her head of scarlet hair, the blue-gray creature swaying her tail apprehensively, the whiskers surrounding her ferret-like features shivering in the hot desert air as she kept her Model 434 aloft in a non-threatening manner.

Certainly, there might at least be a way to gather useful information, even if she couldn't have the droid to salvage. More importantly, there was also the matter of why it was here and where its escape pod had come from, as her old commanding officers had taught her, her old scout training coming back to the forefront of her mind as she considered how best to take advantage of this situation. Surely, one of them had to have something worth taking, or, failing that, they both could make valuable allies for future visits to this accursed, yet richly rewarding planet... Of course, it all depended on their current possessions, to say nothing of the potential worth of the odd-looking droid - she couldn't make out what model he was, exactly.

Her cybernetic hand began to smooth over her short, tousled mop of fiery red hair before she began casually fiddling with the goggles around her eyes. Her tail could be seen swaying to and fro, her duster still fluttering in the wind behind her and making her look rather unimpressive. A brief look of confusion crossed the lanky Selonian's features as the Tusken barked and snarled in the odd manner of his species, and the Selonian shivered visibly, recalling almost being killed by a lone, crazed, torch-wielding Tusken one night roughly a year ago while visiting Mos Eisley. Raising her heavy blaster once again, Talyr huffed through her nostrils as she tried to make it apparent that she meant no harm to either of them.

"Look-" the Selonian began...

The harsh, guttural snarl of a moderately-sized Gamorrean warrior made Talyr flinch again as the rotund creature charged forth over the dune above, eliciting a harsh yelp as the fur along the creature's arms, back and tail flared out instinctively as she caught sight of the charging, roaring aggressor. Swearing audibly in her odd, lisping voice, the goggled ferret lowered her pistol and craned her head, fumbling her organic hand over her blaster to change the setting to 'stun'. Tilting her head to line up the sight with her tongue hanging from the corner of her mouth, the Selonian's tail flared and swayed all the more as her duster flapped in a loud, particularly strong gust, her blaster crying harshly as a blue-white bolt erupted from the barrel towards the charging Gamorrean...