Authors Notes: Another contest entry from DeviantART that I participated in recently. It involved my character, Jedi Master Tank,
going after a smuggler. Like a Jedi is apt to do at times. Only to run across superheroes on an unexplored world.
Characters of April Ann Palmer and Sandra Frankford are © SHFan of dART, used with permission.
Enjoy.
AP Girl: A Random Encounter
A random encounter. It's a rather normal thing to have taken place in one's daily life: fairly typical in fact. Store clerks have a random encounter with a new customer coming in. School children randomly encounter other kids that they have never met before. Superheroes randomly encounter massive waves of evilly programmed robots intent on destroying their chosen city.
Or they randomly encounter a Jedi. Who is also randomly encountering a massive wave of evilly programmed robots intent on destroying their chosen city. Sometimes it's both.
Such as in this instance.
Jedi Master Tank had been tracking down a waylaid shipment of battle droids for weeks, without much success. Whoever had taken them had done a thorough job of hiding and disguising their tracks, making extracting the secrets of where the droids had gone a difficult process. He also was unable to determine a motive for the disappearance. The droids were obsolete models, and should have been scrapped decades previously. By all accounts, the shipment was being taken to do just that when they suddenly vanished. As far as he could tell, to the best of his ability, there didn't appear to be a reason for the theft. The droids had not shown up on the black market being sold to outfit any raiding groups or pirates, nor did they show up on the usual auction sites for those looking to pick up esoteric items for their collections. They just appeared to have simply vanished.
The breakthrough in the case came from when the ship was briefly detected at a refueling station. An intrepid slicer at the station, who enjoyed mysteries and acquiring information, as well as the credits for providing said information to interested parties, had taken it upon themselves to slice the ships navicomputer and copied the course from it: heading towards a relatively unexplored solar system in the Outer Rim territories. They had also sliced several other ships, but this one had stood out, and after finding that there was a report of a missing ship matching the profile of the one they had sliced, they reported the discrepancy.
Now, the red headed, stocky Jedi had reached the same solar system, and was able to track the ship's emissions to the third planet in orbit. He landed in a valley not far from a city, and worked his way inside, slipping past the metropolises inattentive and the curious denizens alike.
Currently he stood atop of a building, his tunic and hair fluttering in the breeze as the sounds of the city washed over him. In his hand, he held a softly beeping scanner as it ran through its programmed sweep, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Looking up from the device, he gave a slow look over the city, once more pondering why anyone would bring a contingent of obsolete battle droids to this world. Everything about the city was, for lack of a better term, primitive. Compared to the rest of the galaxy, it was not a highly advanced world. The scent of exhaust wafted in the air, tickling his nose as he watched an aircraft flying overhead to land at a nearby air strip. "Perhaps someone thought they'd have an easy conquest here." He mused, turning back to his scanner. "Now the only question is...why this city? And where are they?"
The crack of an explosion and sharp reports of blaster fire echoed between buildings at the same time that his scanner pinged, picking up on the metal content and signals common to the Confederacy's battle droids. A lot of them. "Well, at least that's one question answered." He mused dryly. Taking a deep breath, he released it slowly as he pocketed the scanner, and then took a step off the roof to drop down to the concrete below. Pulsing the Force out beneath him, he slowed his descent to land lightly on his feet before taking off at a run towards the increasing sounds of screams and blasters.