GM RESPONSE:
The deeper into the ship they moved, the stranger the air became not thicker, not colder, but
tuned. As if something invisible had begun to vibrate just beneath the surface of every surface, every wall, every thought. The Echo Resonator was awake now. It did not speak. It didn't hum like a machine, or bleed light like some hidden power core. It pulsed but not in any way the eye could see. Those attuned to the Force might have felt it first: a soft thrum in the back of the skull, a pressure building behind the eyes, like a premonition trying to claw its way out of a mind not yet ready to receive it.
For everyone else, it was subtler still. Equipment began to respond to things that weren't there. HUDs flickered with false updates. Scanners caught phantom readings shadows of events that hadn't happened yet. Some saw motion on sensors
just before it occurred in reality. Others saw blood patterns on walls that were clean a moment later. One trooper swore he saw his own vital signs spike a full second
before he felt his heart begin to race. The further they moved, the stronger it got. It was calling but not to them alone. Something else had heard it too.
At first, it was subtle. A shimmer along a corridor bulkhead. A barely-visible ripple in the starlight pouring through a fractured viewport. The faintest outline of a figure at the edge of vision, vanishing before the brain could register it as real. But then came the sound. Not footsteps. Not metal. Something wetter. Organic. A dragging scrape. A skittering. Dozens of them. Echoing wrong as if heard both now and
before now. Not the random drift of mindless phantoms, but the
coordinated advance of something with purpose. Starweirds. But not like before.
They didn't lash out blindly or hover alone in dark corners. They were moving in groups. Triads. Pairs. Lines. Crawling across the ceilings and walls like arachnids tracing a pattern in the metal skin of the ship. One group passed through a collapsed corridor in perfect silence, their forms phasing between the seams of reality itself, eyes fixed forward not on the interlopers, not yet. But on the core. On the Resonator. And with that certainty came a revelation. These weren't aimless predators anymore. They were on a vector. Converging. Driven by something more than instinct. By
command. It was not madness that guided them now. It was
intent.
It began without warning. No roar. No cry. Just a
snap the sound of compressed air imploding through a breached panel as one of the corridors ruptured. And through it, a Starweird came screaming silent in the vacuum, but howling in the Force. Not alone. Three more followed, their bodies elongating mid-flight like ribbons pulled from a wound in space. The air shimmered around them, bending sound and thought alike. Lights flickered, then stuttered, then failed entirely. For a breath, only muzzle flashes and sabers lit the way. Across the wreck, the same thing unfolded.
Teams positioned at different bulkheads blinked and found the shadows crawling Starweirds emerging in mirrored formations, flanking both sides of corridors, gliding with unnatural grace through bulkhead seams. Their limbs struck out not with random violence, but with calculated intent. Some drove straight for comms arrays. Others toward EVA breaches, trying to isolate and separate groups. As if
disabling resistance. And they were
coordinated. That was the terror of it. One would strike high. Another low. A third phase through a wall just behind a fighter's blind spot. Like wolves. Or something worse. Not feral
militarized.
The attacks came in pulses. One moment, nothing. The next, a sudden rush of movement bodies twisting and clawing through the air and just as quickly, silence. They would vanish again. Blink out. Retreat into the hull, only to strike anew from a different angle. And all the while, their paths trailed back toward the same gravity well the Resonator. As if something was calling them there. Or as if they
already knew what it was, and needed to claim it before the interlopers could. Not to destroy it. Not to ignore it. To
possess it
Then time broke.
For some — like
Darth Strosius
,
Tamsin Graves
, and
Yolaghun
Cali Ziiva
it happened all at once. A step forward became a blink to the past. A raised blaster arm finished a shot that hadn't been fired yet. A scream echoed down the corridor… before anyone opened their mouth. These few were trapped seconds
behind, haunted by aftermaths before they could act, watching comrades fall before they even heard the sound.
Others —
Jacen Breska 'TK-710'
,
Cato Demora
,
Kaila Irons
remained locked in the brutal
present. Every strike was real. Every death was now. But their allies moved strangely. Out of sync. Gone before they could speak. Responding to orders they hadn't given yet. Holding the line became harder when the line was never in the same place twice.
And a rare few surged
ahead of the timeline.
Merion Oreno
,
Zanami
, And
Lorn Reingard
, flinched at wounds not yet taken. Fired at shapes not yet formed. One swing, two heartbeats too early. They moved on intuition, chasing ghosts of motion, always one step too fast. When they turned, they saw their teammates still catching up or already gone.
Lights flickered not just in space, but in memory. A blaster's fire became a loop of the last six seconds. A saber clash repeated three times before finally striking true. And worse worse was when faces changed. A friend's helmet flickered into the face of someone already dead. A squadmate turned, and behind the visor was yourself older. Bloodied. Dying. Comms distorted with ghost transmissions.
"
Cover me."
"I need help." "
They're behind us " All looping. All desynced. Voices without origin, echoing through time's collapse. Multiple timelines folding like a collapsing deck of cards. Echoes of possible deaths. Echoes of futures that might still happen. And in each, the Starweirds moved right. They navigated the chaos with terrifying precision. Some phased with their prey. Others timed their claws to land the instant a breath caught. No hesitation. No doubt. They
understood the Resonator's rhythm. And now, they used it. The wreck became a labyrinth of broken seconds where instinct failed, memory betrayed, and every action only mattered if it aligned just right.
They came without warning. Not crawling or drifting but
advancing. Purposeful. Unified. Starweirds flooded the broken corridors, spilling through ventilation shafts, phasing in and out of hull fissures like living static. Their howls didn't echo once they layered. A rising chorus of discordant shrieks that bounced in and out of temporal sync, like screams trapped on repeat across centuries. But it wasn't noise. It was
direction. Orders. Some deeper will driving them. No longer the mindless predators of myth, they hunted like pack beasts with one intent: reach the Resonator.
They ignored crew corpses. Bypassed systems. Every movement coordinated, flowing like water through the maze of the derelict. They didn't stalk they
flanked. One passed a team and vanished, only for two more to phase in behind. One struck too early, but its twin emerged a beat later to finish the kill. Some even died impaled by blades, vaporized by blaster fire only to
reappear three corridors over, unchanged. They were learning the corridors faster than any map could update. For the squads, it became clear: the Starweirds weren't just intercepting. They were
racing them. They were no longer just intruders on this ship they were in the way.
Behind shattered bulkheads, rows of the creatures crawled in silence before erupting in unison. In zero-G chambers, some drifted like corpses until eyes opened and they
burst forward, latching to walls with limbs that stretched too far, too wrong. They tore through the hull not to kill but to
shortcut paths. Every meter gained toward the Resonator, the pack responded. Thicker. Smarter. Faster.
And then one among them didn't attack. It watched. Its head tilted. Not like a beast. Like a tactician. Its fingers twitched in patterns the others mirrored seconds later. And when it moved they followed. The teams were being
herded. Back, split, redirected down dead ends and fractured decks. Forcing separations. Cutting comms. Not through chance. By
design. Somewhere deeper in the ship, the Resonator pulsed again a slow, rhythmic beat like a heart trying to restart. The Starweirds shrieked in response. And then they came faster. The hunt had begun.
GM Account
