Juragga frowned as he spied the Bothan, but said nothing.  Nodding at Rhijans' words, he made to beat a hasty exit, pausing to make sure he was bringing up the rear.  UY, especially, he wanted clear.  It wasn't so much that the droid might spill something - he actually had some protective feelings towards the mouthy droid, and besides, he was one of the few that could translate for him.

That goofy translator disc he had gave him a terrible Centuari accent...

"Interesting."  Shard nods her head. "Thank you, Citizen.  Very illuminating."

And it is.

Hutts, Hutts, Hutts.  They've been running into them quite a bit of late, either historically or with second party information.  Shard frowns, wondering if there's a library nearby she can access some data files.  Or maybe Haarmon...

Better check the ship.

Saying her goodbyes, she hurries back to glance into the docking bay.  Hutts.  It wouldn't be the first time the Empire has dealt under the table with criminal elements.  Is it possible that the Hutts are working toward something larger in this particular quadrant of the galaxy?

Rijans leads the group back out to the street, letting the door close behind them.  The Bothan seems oddly quiet considering he must have found the body by now.  Haarmon heaves a sigh, and says, "The owner of that room is listed as a Bothan PI called Padh Chirok.  Maybe he just came home."

Reldan grins, "If Chirok's a PI, then it could be he's used to coming across bodies.  Might explain why there was no screaming when he went in there."

They start back towards the ship, and UY-3P0 asks, "Should we report the death to the authorities?"

Shard also heads back to the ship, but being much closer, she gets there first.

Rhijans glanced back at the protocol droid.  "If you can manage it without leaving the authorities any way of tracing who called or where the call came from, be my guest.  But we can't take a chance of getting the mission side-tracked by having to answer a bunch of questions..."

He thought for a moment...the situation bothered him.  Something about it just didn't sit well, but he really didn't want to get diverted from the task at hand.  There were a lot of lives potentially relying on their intel-gathering and it didn't seem right, to him, to risk those lives over an issue that may only affect three or four lives here.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:14, Tue 04 Dec 2012.

Haarmon had never seen a Bothan before. Not in real life anyway. They were pretty much a staple of adventure vids. Every grizzled hero had to have have a plucky Bothan. It was as du rigueir as the three day's beard (or, in Haarmon's case, three months and counting - and still no luck).

He had to fight the urge not to stare. He won that fight, but only by the skin of his teeth, and only because Rags and Rhijans were watching. "Hey!" He stage-whispered to the dusky-skinned Rebel, "You think maybe that guy in there went to, like, steal the Bothan's secret spy stuff or whatever? And set off some kinda booby-trap? We should ask command if they have any Bothans here. Maybe he's an ally, like. You think?"

He was pretty excited.

Pushing back the pilot's chair in the ship, Shard leans back and crosses her arms behind her head. "Huh." The proximity to Hutt space seems to have created a lot of territorial issues regarding that race, constant crime war being one of them.  Intermittantly constant, mind, if that makes any sense.  "And Oomba the Hutt," she mutters.  Another factor.

Rising, she doffs her jacket again, going back to the tank top and Imperial pants.  It reveals an old burn scar on one shoulder, legacy of a blaster bolt that nearly ended her 'career', such as it is.

Another glare at the comlink.  "Rhijans," she hisses, irked at the silence, still nervous about breaking into what might be a precarious situation.  They'd better either ring or show up soon; if not, she's going to have to go out again, this time on hunt for lost Banthas.

"Probably best to leave asking about that until we get home.  Would be stupid to risk blowing his cover." Reldan Jalt replies to Haarmon.  Then he grins, "Besides, in spite of what you might have seen in vids and cheap action novels, not every Bothan is a spy.  If they were then nobody would ever let a Bothan near their  stuff.  Any Bothan."

The walk back to the ship is much faster than the walk away from it, due mainly to the fact that this time they know exactly where they're supposed to be going.  the droids keep up a steady conversation, and from You-Why's side of it, it's clear that he's concerned about Artoo's navigational skills.  The astromech unit's replies definitely sound ruder and ruder with each exchange.

Reldan glances up at the sky, visible only in narrow strips between the buildings, and broken up by cables, crosswalks and ductwork.  "Looks like it's getting late.  Sun'll probably set soon, which suits us."

They manage to avoid any Imperial entanglements, and make it back to the right docking bay, which prompts You-Why to claim the credit, "You see?  I knew I could find the way back."

Reldan walks up the ramp into the Bantha, calling out, "Hi Honey, I'm home!"

The door hisses open as they hit the ramp, and a fuming Shard beckons them forward.  "Get in here," she hisses.  "You've been out of touch for hours!  Hot void, how was I to know if you needed a rescue, or something equally stupid?"

Turning, she storms back into the ship, irritably tapping her hand against her thigh.  Her head hurts and the fingers of her right hand quiver as she clenches a fist - another wave of Not Having A Drink hit a short time ago, and hasn't helped her mood at all.

"Just...just give me a report, or something," she grouses, running her hand through her hair.

Rhijans resisted a momentary urge to grin at her agitated reaction to their return.  If it had been him stuck on the ship, he would likely have felt much the same.  He wouldn't have displayed it so openly, but he was used to being surrounded by more demonstrative personalities.

"Found our man, got in and out safely, and got the information we needed.  There's a shuttle waiting for us in a dormant volcano not too far from here, Jalt will fly us in after dark and we can cross-load our gear and be gone again while it's still dark.  The clearance code we got was, conveniently, supposed to be an ISB code, so that dovetails with our cover story nicely."  He shrugged.

"Part of the delay was because we stumbled across a fatality on our way back.  Since it was in the same place where we stopped to ask for directions on the way in, we thought it'd be wise to investigate briefly.  The body was not the resident, Dak went in to check on the security footage and see if he could scramble anything that indicated we'd ever been there, and we ended up helping someone move a large parcel to help provide a cover for our appearance in the area, just in case anyone official started asking questions."  He rattled it off with cool efficiency, professional detachment.  As he got to that point, he paused, and looked around at the others.

"Anything I missed?"

"Just the part where we didn't check in to let her know," Juragga offered helpfully.  Then caterwauled an apology to the nice Jedi lady.

He stood by the hatch, unlimbering his bowcaster and keeping a sharp eye until everyone was on board.

Rhijans turned, shooting an inscrutable look at the Wookiee.  There was little mistaking the tone of apology at the end, even if he didn't know enough to make out the words...but the rest of it went right past him...in a quantity large enough for him to puzzle out that the Wookiee had said something more than a mere apology.

Internally, he shrugged.  She'd been given the relevant data and if she had questions, she could ask for clarification.  Whatever Juragga had mentioned couldn't have been that critical, or else the Wookiee would have asked UY to translate it for him--or the droid would have done it on his own.  Having what was an apparently opinionated droid as part of the team was going to throw some unexpected wrinkles in the works.  He still counted UY's addition as unquestionably an advantage--but like anyone else, the droid came with some additional baggage to be handled.

All that flashed behind his eyes in a fraction of a second, and then he was back to looking askance at the rest of the group.  "Anyone else?" he urged, carefully choosing to maintain a neutral tone with regards to any response to Juragga's words.  He didn't understand them, editorializing on them would be dubious, at best, and disastrous, at worst.  Best to stick to what you do know, and improvise from there, he reminded himself.

Reldan raises his hands in a "not me" gesture, and carries on walking.  "I've got to prep for launch.  I'll leave you to handle the debriefing."  He pauses and sniffs the air as he moves away, "Why does my ship smell like the inside of a well-used suit of 'trooper armour?"

R2-O0 whistles a non-committal reply as he follows after the pilot.  A yell comes back along the corridor, "Five minutes and we'll be out of here!  Ten tops!"

UY-3PO feels the need to add his own detail to the story, "We have not reported the crime to the authorities.  I did suggest it, but the idea was rejected."  The droid moves his arms in an approximation of a shrug, "I suspect there is a reason for it, but nobody has thought to explain it to a mere droid."

He shuffles away, following Jalt and Artoo, muttering, "Organics!" as he goes.

Rhijans cleared his throat, and shot the droid's departing back a dark look.  "I DID address why we didn't report it.  We don't want the authorities to know that we're here, or that we've ever been here."

He turned and looked at Shard, a bland expression on his face.  "I also told him that if he could come up with a safe way to guarantee a report would be totally anonymous, I was fine with it being reported.  But the last thing we need is a bunch of Imperial officials delaying the mission to ask us a series of questions...one of which will almost certainly be, "Now, what, exactly, was your business here, again?"  Quiet in, quiet out, whenever possible."  And if you can't get out quiet, make sure you demolish anything that might have records of who you were and what you were doing, so they can't review them and track you down.  That had been the approach he'd opted for in the last mission...though, in his own defense, their orders had been, in fact, to destroy the mine, or at least render it inoperable for a while.  The fact that he'd done a fair part of the job before the fighters ever made their attack run was a secondary consideration.

Shard resists an urge to slap her forehead. "Yes, Juragga.  That."  But she flashes the Wookie a quick smile to let him know the tension in her tone isn't aimed his way.  Rhijans, unsurprisingly, gives a perfectly professional brief, and Shard mulls it over as he seeks further input.  It doesn't sound like the best situation, but it's a start and they have information.

That body, though... I know it's going to come back to haunt us.

She shoots a dirty look at Jalt's retreating back.  Trooper armor...  The older woman resists a sudden urge to sniff her shoulder.  I showered.  And it wasn't THAT bad!  Turning back to Rhijans, she folds her arms and nods along with his explanation.  "He makes a good point, You-Why.  I'm none too sanguine about not letting the authorities in on a murder, but we're on a mission.  Someone else can report it; we can't really stand up to close scrutiny, and don't want anyone sending word ahead about our covers, believed or not."

"All right," the woman relents.  "We'd better get strapped in.  Meantime, I'll just note that, as usual, we have Hutt presence in the area.  From the sounds of it, the people of this planet had to fight their way out from under them."  Ugly thought, that.  Turning away, she heads for a seat.

"I'm just glad you lot all made it back."

There is a sudden jolt, although quite a mild one - not even You-Why is in any danger of falling, and the Dancing Bantha lifts, climbing out of the docking bay and into the darkening sky.

Reldan takes her up, out of the atmosphere at a steep angle, while studying the tourist map and comparing it to a terrain overlay on the main scanner.  A short drift in low orbit, and then he drops her, vertically and with the lowest possible thrust, straight into the crater of the volcano.

The whole trip takes something under three minutes.

The Bantha hovers less than two metres off the ground, moving lightly around the crater.  Reldan's voice carries through the ship's internal PA system, "We're there, but I'm not seeing... ah... there you are.  Found the cave.  I'm going in, if anybody wants to come and watch."

Juragga shrugged at Rhijan's noncommittal look.  Women were one thing.  Jedi another.  A Jedi woman?  Some things you just didn't muck with.

At least, if human women were anything like Wookiee females.

They lifted off, and at Reldan's invite, the shaggy walking carpet moved up to the cockpit to take a gander.

Rhijans smiled thinly in Shard's direction.  "I'm pretty sure, short of someone dropping us into a singularity simultaneously, we'd have managed to let you know if something had gone wrong.  Even if it had been nothing more than leaving a commlink open and hidden while we were getting rousted by the authorities."  The smile faded, into something that could have been akin, perhaps, to fondness...but the naturally-angular features of his face didn't convey kinder emotions very well, so it was hard to tell for sure.

"We're a pretty resourceful lot.  While there's one or two of us that I'd worry about, all alone, it'd take something pretty major to get the drop on a group of us."

He heard Jalt's announcement about finding the cave and shook his head slightly.  He wasn't claustrophobic...but he didn't enjoy the thought of being surrounded by stone and at the mercy of someone else's skills, even someone with Jalt's background.  He'd been responsible for his own fate long enough that leaving it to someone else was a real strain for him.  The last thing he needed was a visual reminder that he was someone else's hair's-breadth away from a disastrous end.  He settled in, facing Shard, to wait out what was left of the ride.

Shard eyes Rhijans askance for a moment.  The sharpness of his smile puts her spine on edge.  But that fades, and she relaxes.  The man's a professional, she reasons.  Questioning him might set his back up, and she's not his mother, no matter how worried she gets when the group is out there alone.  "Wasn't thinking you lot couldn't keep yourselves going," she mutters, rising as Jalt announces their arrival.  "Quite the opposite, in fact.  If it came off as that, apologies."

It's not easy, apologizing.  Just when she thinks she doesn't have any pride left, it bubbles up to claw at her again.

But while Juragga heads into the cockpit, Rhijans opts to remain in place.  Dithering for a few seconds, Shard shrugs, sitting back down.  Counterbalance.

"Let me know when you land," she shouts over her shoulder.

Haarmon was in the rear of the vessel, opting out of the story-telling and snarky commentary for maybe the only thing that could distract him from the change to make an ass out of himself in front of others: computers.

He went to the nicest terminal on the ship, muttered a few bad words about what a shoddy piece of crap it was, and then got to work uploading everything they'd learned to Rebel High Command.

The cave is a lava tube, smooth walled and mostly circular, with plenty of room for a ship.  It decends into the mountain at a steep angle, while veering backwards and forwards.  The Bantha's lights play over the smooth stone, and Reldan notes, "It's dry out there, and the temperature is a bit higher than outside, but steady."

Finally they come to a point where a side tunnel branches off, and the shuttle sits there, like some huge bird, waiting for them with its wings folded.  The lights dance across it, causing shadows to move like living things on the cave walls.

"Looks to be in good shape.  no obvious damage, at any rate.  I'll put the Bantha down a bit further along the main tunnel, so she won't be in the way when I bring the shuttle out."

With their own ship landed and secured, the rebels make their way back up to the Imperial shuttle.  In the light of portable lanterns the shuttle seems to be undamaged, if a little dusty.  Inside as well as out...

Juragga frowned when he saw the shuttle.  Giving it a thorough look-see, he was skeptical.  But it looked decent enough to him.

12:14, Today: Juragga rolled 7 (12 excluding the wild die) using 4 dice and +1 pips with the WEG Classic system with rolls of 4,{Wild}1,5,2. Space Transport Repair.

"RaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAuuuuuhhhhhNNNN," he commented, endorsing it as a viable vehicle.

(OOC: This will only end in tears.)

Haarmon looks like he's thinking real hard for a second and then he nods. "If Rags says it's cool, then it's cool. He knows his stuff."

Rhijans shrugged.  He knew enough about ships to be able to pilot them...if the course was pretty basic.  Repairing and maintaining them was beyond him.  It looked Imperial...and that was all he required from it, as long as it operated.

"Well, no sense standing around.  Let's get our gear loaded aboard and get moving...last thing we need is some stray outdoorsman seeing a Lambda shuttle leaving the volcano in the morning and wondering what else might be down here."

"Sounds good." Shard's knowledge of all things mechanical makes for amusing stories around the table after a mission.  It's less amusing on the mission. "I'm good for stowing and going."    Rhijans' witticism produces a tight grin from her, the tension starting to bite again, and she claps Haarmon on the shoulder as she gets to work.

"I'm with you, Haarmon.  If he likes it, that's enough for me."

OOC: Oh dear...

Perhaps surprisingly, the shuttle's engines actually come to life as soon as Reldan completes the start up sequence.  The pilot moves it slowly through the tunnel and up to the surface, and then makes directly for open space, and a jump to hyperspace...