Objective: BYOO (Capture Pirates)
Three days earlier...
Howard The Pirate looked over his new cybernetic right arm, a complete replacement after taking a terrible amount of damage to it during a near fatal encounter with some type of military biot in the form of a female chiss. He had fled to a penthouse he owned on Coruscant. The adrenaline had kept him upright for a few hours before his injuries caught up with him and he had needed immediate surgery. It had taken him weeks to recover. They had put in a cybernetic eye with a combat implant at his request, along with bio armor at the joints, a Sith Regenerator implant and strength implant added also. The arm was plated in phrik and came with customizable attachments. It was about as much as the grizzled, aging man could handle. He had some fights left yet in him. The cybernetics would get him a few more. But the man knew he would likely have to quit soon. But he needed the money. He hadn't lived a clean life. He didn't imagine he would die cleanly. But he was gonna go on his terms and no one else's. Just like his mother had.
The old man was still pretty well built, maintained his remaining muscles through hard work, and as he waltzed around his relatively sparse penthouse in upper Coruscant, his graying hair a little grayer from the stress of his encounter with the android, his beard trimmed down to barely past his skin, his green eyes contrasting with leathery skin that was nontheless that of a bodybuilder.
He roamed the penthouse in his pink bathrobe with little red hearts on it, his bug-out bag ever ready on his bed. He had multiple bug out bags, planted strategically in any one of a hundred spots in the area around his penthouse in case he needed to take any one of a hundred exit routes to escape.
He nursed a glass of chocolate milk. He never drank alcohol.
"So let me get this straight, Clyde..." Howard said to his Alderaanian contact, a man who had been in the underworld intelligence business for a long time. Howard got most of his new identities from Clyde. Clyde was dressed in a red and black tunic, enjoying a glass of Juma. His head was bald and with a fair complexion, both his eyes replaced by cybernetics that glowed red on a wrinkled face.
"...You want me to go to some Gods-Forsaken desert in the middle of fething nowhere and obtain a treasure that might be there..."
"My intel is pretty solid on this Howard. You know I don't give you garbage...it 'is' there." Clyde claimed, as he sat at the black, round oak table, looking around at the stainless steel walls and floor. "They say its over twelve million credits in aurodium bullion, and its just lying there in that old wreck..."
"That old Sith wreck. Why don't you get an Adept? Galaxy is crawling with the feths these days..." Howard asked as he sipped his milk, plopping on his bed, wiggling little pink slippers with bunny heads on them.
"We would, but none of them are up to the challenge...and we have a particularly nasty customer in the area..." Clyde said, showing a picture of a bronze skinned woman in a red and gold chrome suit with fiery red hair, decapitating an imperial battle droid.
"She's cute..." Howard thought out loud, sipping more milk.
"She's killed every team of pirates sent before you. So we're assembling an extra special crew..."
Howard took a look at the datapad next to him, sipping more milk. "Real gang of tough cases..."
"All experienced pirates equipped with powerful, accurate weaponry." Clyde assured him.
"No blasters." Howard told Clyde. "Absolutely no blasters. We go in we hit her hard with shotguns, heavy machinegun fire from all sides and sonics. We have a ship to move the bullion?"
"As a matter of fact we do. A Silver Jedi Vessel known as The Spectral Heart is preparing to retrieve the bullion three days from now."
"How big?"
The size of a heavy frieghter, crew of twenty-five, Most of them are Rangers."
"Nothing I haven't seen before." Howard said, shrugging. "Can you get us aboard or are we going to have to take it solely on our own?"
"I'm afraid it'll be your job to actually figure out how to take the ship. I know you'll come up with something." Clyde answered with confidence in his old friend.
"I'm long in the jaw these days Clyde. Can't keep it up forever." Howard muttered, finishing the last of his milk as he looked over the skillsets. "Says your Jedi uses pyrokinesis..."
"She's quite good at it too..." Clyde grumbled, pulling out a candy bar, unwrapping it and taking a bite. "As my previous team found out.
"Easy fix. Cryo guns, spray bottles, water tanks..." Howard remarked. "I'll play it safe...but the ship the bullion is on...the Sith Ship...what was the nature of the ship?"
"A Sith Lady's personal mobile vault..."
Howard sighed.
"I'm bringing a minigun...no way I won't need it before this is over..." he grumbled, rising from his bed.
Clyde sensed it was time to leave. He rose.
"Be careful out there, old friend..." Clyde said clapping him on the shoulder. Howard did the same.
"You too, brother..." Howard said back, grinning that devil grin. "I survived a Jedi before. I know what I'm doing..."
Three days and six hours later...
Howard ran for his life through the rusted darkened ship, outrunning the murderous being just a step or three behind him. He was dirty from the blood and contusions to the rest of his body. The emergency lights, a deep red, flickered on and off as the ancient reactor core safety system sounded an alert while the old pirate ran through a nightmarish crimson strobe, gasses leaking from broken lights, bathing ruined passages and workstations. He had fifteen minutes to try and get off the vessel, one vibroblade, and a water pistol.
Following him, stalking, savoring the hunt, was a bronze skinned woman in a white and gold chrome suits, fiery red hair long and tinged with swaths of black flame, like the eyes, where the black fire leaked from, spreading down through cracks in her face. It orbited her hands as a ring.
Syd Celsius, corrupted by a dark magic that she had been unprepared for stalked Howard, her emotions completely out of control and over amplified, leaving melted warps on the floor she floated over, letting him run a little. It mattered little to her, so long as she got to make him suffer, make anyone suffer for that amber hell she had been trapped in.
Howard ran for his life, unable to think of any brilliant plans at the moment...
