Valen felt something tugging at his soul. Her face appeared before his eyes, and he struggled to banish it. He was dead, and likely so was she. Why, then, would she not leave his mind?

He felt the tugging again, more insistent this time. At first he resisted, but suddenly he became consumed with the knowledge that someone was calling him. The Reaper. She was alive and requesting his help, and the Reaper was summoning him to join her. Again her face flashed before his eyes. She needed his help. She needed him…

Valen gave his consent and felt his soul rushing through the planes. For what seemed an eternity he flew through space until…

Where am I? he thought. He found himself standing in a vast room made entirely of some kind of metal. There were many doors along the walls, and the ceilings reached higher than he could imagine. As he was staring up at them, he felt a tiny finger poke his leg.

Flail in hand, he spun around to face his assailant. He looked down to see a smiling kobold.

"Hiya, Goatman!" said Deekin.

Valen rolled his eyes. "Well, at least if you're here, I must be in the right place, wherever that is…"

"Boss summoned you, too, then?" Deekin pulled out his quill to write, as though there was nothing particularly unusual about this encounter. "Deekin wonders if Drow Lady be joining us…"

As if on command, a drow woman materialized out of the shadows. "Here I am, Deekin. Good to see you again, Valen."

Valen nodded at Nathyrra but continued to look around himself in confusion. "Do either of you have any idea where we are?"

Deekin and Nathyrra shrugged. The three stood for a moment in silence. Suddenly, a soft chime echoed throughout the enormous room. A soft female voice rang out from nowhere: "Star Tours is now boarding."

"What in the nine hells was that?" Valen said, spinning around again. Deekin ducked under the flail with a practiced manner, scribbling down the words of the disembodied voice.

Clank-clank. Clank-clank.

The three heroes turned to face two figures approaching from one end of the long corridor. One was a vaguely humanoid figure made out of a gold-colored metal. The other was a silver bucket-like thing with wheels apparently propelling itself. Is that a golem? Valen wondered to himself.

Nathyrra pulled out her rapier. "I have a bad feeling about this..," she murmured.

"Greetings!" said the gold one when it got closer. "I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations, and this is my counterpart, R2-D2." He gestured to the silver one, which beeped in greeting. Deekin waved at it, while the other two stared blankly. "The next starspeeder for Endor is leaving shortly. You're going to have to hurry if you want to catch it in time. This way, please."

C-3PO shuffled past them, R2-D2 following behind. Deekin looked back at the other two, who were still motionless, and set off after the constructs.

"Where are you going, you foolish kobold?" Valen asked in surprise.

"Deekin not know where Boss is. Goatman not know where Boss is. Drow Lady not know where Boss is. Deekin thinks Gold Man and Silver Bucket knows where Boss is, maybe."

"He's right, Valen," sighed Nathyrra. "They're the only ones who seem to know what's going on here, so we should probably stick with them." She took off running. "Wait, Master Threepio! We're coming!" Valen growled softly and stomped after them.

They walked through a door and into a smaller room with rows of chairs. There were two occupants in the room already. One, seated in a partitioned-off section in the front of the room, was another construct, though it looked nothing like either of the other ones. It appeared to be fiddling with a panel of buttons and flashing lights with its three arms; behind it, a window stretched the length of the wall. The other occupant was a small girl, eating some strange, fluffy yellow food and wearing what appeared to be mouse ears on her head. When she saw the newcomers, her eyes went wide.

"You're not supposed to be here!" she screamed. Everyone froze, though one of the arms of the three-armed one continued to swing wildly. The girl audibly gulped and glued her eyes to her bucket of food.

Threepio cleared his non-existent throat and addressed the room. "Welcome, everyone," (he looked pointedly at the girl), "to the Endor Express! Before we begin our flight, we have a few safety procedures to go over…"

Deekin made a beeline for the front row, dedicatedly taking down every word the construct said. Valen and Nathyrra shared a look and sat down on either side of the mouse-eared girl. She was mumbling a tune about it being a small world after all, and she refused to acknowledge either of her new neighbors, staring pointedly at her food.

"Now, take the strap on your right and insert it into the buckle on your left…" Threepio was saying, though Deekin was the only one paying attention. Nathyrra ventured to say hello to the little girl. "Hello, child. My name is Nathyrra. What's yours?"

The girl looked at Nathyrra. "Bondari," she said simply. Nathyrra thought this was a very strange name for a human girl; she had heard it more commonly used for halfling boys. "Is that your real name?" she asked suspiciously. "No," replied the girl, just as simply. Before Nathyrra could question her further, she blurted out again, "You're not supposed to be here!"

Nathyrra looked over the girl's head at Valen, but he looked as shocked as she was. "What do you mean, Bondari?" the drow asked.

Bondari whimpered, clearly agitated. "You're Nathyrra, you're Valen, and the little kobold is Deekin the bard, and none of you are supposed to be here! This starspeeder isn't going to Hell; it's going to Endor! Buckle up!"

"Buckle up?" Valen and Nathyrra asked, but before they could figure out what she meant, the room suddenly lurched forward, throwing the two to the ground. Threepio stumbled forward, while the silver one squealed as it rolled to the back of the room. "See, Gold Man?" Deekin announced triumphantly from the safety of his buckled seat. "Deekin knew they wasn't paying attention!"

Threepio turned to the three-armed construct. "What are you doing, you worthless bucket of bolts? This ship wasn't supposed to leave until Artoo and I got off!"

"Sorry, folks!" cried the construct. "This is my first flight, and I'm still getting used to my programming!"

"Programming?" Nathyrra asked faintly.

"Flight?" Valen screamed. "We're flying?"

"Yes, sir," replied Threepio complacently. "How else did you expect us to get to Endor?"

Valen roared in rage and flew at the three-armed construct. "Valen, stop!" cried Bondari, but Valen couldn't hear her. Everyone watched in horror as the tiefling smashed the poor construct to pieces with his massive flail. He whirled around to face Threepio. "Put us back on the ground!" he yelled.

"I'm not the captain of this ship!" Threepio shrieked. "You just killed the captain, you overgrown goat!"

"We're doomed," Bondari moaned, and she slammed her face into her bucket, sending pieces of the fluffy yellow food flying everywhere.

Nathyrra shakily pulled herself up using the back of the seat in front of her and observed the chaos around her. Valen and Threepio were having an argument accompanied by much arm-and-flail waving, Artoo was spinning in circles around the disembodied captain, and Deekin was munching on a piece of the fluffy yellow food that fell on the floor. Deekin turned around in his seat to face the girl. "Deekin be wondering what be the name of this food, Miss Mouse Girl?"

Bondari pulled her head out of the bucket enough so the kobold could see her eyes over the rim. "Popcorn," she said wearily. "Do you like it, Deekin?"

Deekin picked up another piece. "Deekin be thinking it's good, but not as good as pie."

The girl sat up and smiled. "Few things are, Deekin. If I had known you would be here, I would have brought you a churro."

Deekin seemed ready to start a whole interrogation about this mysterious churro food, so Nathyrra cut him off before he had a chance to get going. She wanted to ask the girl some more questions while she was still in good spirits. "How do you know who we are, Bondari?" she asked.

Bondari shrugged. "You guys are part of a story that I know. Just like the droids here are part of a different story that I know. You aren't supposed to be in their story, so I need to know where you are in your story if I'm going to help you get back."

Valen had stopped yelling at Threepio when the girl began speaking. Now, he said, "Nathyrra, we don't have time to tell our entire lives' story to this child. We need to get this obstinate golem to help us get back on solid ground!"

"Hee hee, Goatman be afraid of flying. He not have lasted five minutes with Boss and Deekin in Undrentide!" Deekin chuckled happily, ignoring the dirty look Valen shot him.

Nathyrra put a hand on the girl's arm. "You'll have to forgive Valen. He doesn't like not being in control of a situation. I promise I won't let him hurt you."

Bondari looked at her in surprise. "Oh, I'm not afraid, Nathyrra. I know how impatient and scary someone can be when they're worried about someone they love."

Valen's face went as red as his hair. "I don't know what you're talking about, child," he mumbled.

The girl laughed at him. "What, you mean you haven't figured that out yet?"

Nathyrra tried to hide her smile. "No, but the rest of us have," she murmured. Bondari looked at her and laughed some more.

"Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen," interrupted Threepio, somewhat hysterically. "I hate to interrupt your conversation, but it appears we are approaching some kind of intergalactic blizzard, and without a pilot I am not sure how we are going to avoid it!"

Artoo rolled over to what was left of the control panel and was about to plug into the computer when Bondari cried, "Wait!" She turned to Nathyrra. "Valen's right; you don't have time to tell me everything, but that's ok because I know everything. I just need you to tell me what the last thing you remember before you came here was."

"Well…" Nathyrra began, unsure how to explain the sensation of being dead.

"We were dead," cut in Valen. "I felt my soul being summoned to the Realm of the Reaper, presumably to rejoin—"

"Got it," Bondari interrupted. "Looks like what happened is that the Reaper sent you three to the wrong place. He probably can't reach you out here—"

"I beg your pardon, Miss Bondari," said Threepio, "but I assure you our communications systems on the Starspeeder 3000 are state of the art."

"I'm sure they are, Threepio, but they're not the kind of communications these guys need. No, I'm pretty sure the only way for you to get in contact with the Reaper of the dead is for you three to die again."

Sometime during this conversation, Deekin had managed to steal Bondari's hat with the mouse ears and was now wearing it proudly on his own head. "Deekin not be liking this idea very much," he said nervously.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I agree with the kobold," said Valen. "This girl has given us no reason to trust her."

"What other option do we have, Valen?" asked Nathyrra. "Look around you. We obviously don't belong here. It is completely unlike any place I know of. Have you, in all your interplanar travels, tiefling, ever heard of a churro?"

Valen conceded that he had not, yet he remained stubborn in his refusal to listen to the girl.

Bondari looked him straight in the eyes. "You would do anything to help her, wouldn't you?" she asked. Valen, stunned by her direct manner, nodded slowly. "Then you must trust me when I say that there is nothing you can do to help her while you remain in this world. Your only chance of reaching her is to return to a place where the Reaper can find you and bring you back to her. Isn't that what you want?"

"More than anything," Valen said softly. He looked down briefly, and then looked up at her again, resolved. "How, then, shall we die?"

"Simple," Bondari said. "We just let the ship crash into one of those massive ice chunks, and boom, instant death!"

Artoo shrieked behind Valen, making the tiefling jump in a very undignified manner. "But what about us?" cried Threepio.

"This ship has an escape pod, right? We'll take that," said Bondari. She unfastened her safety belt and shook Nathyrra's hand. "It was nice to meet you all. Good luck saving Faerun!" She patted Deekin's head as she followed the droids to the rear of the cabin. "You can keep the hat, little buddy."

"Thanks, Mouse Girl!" said Deekin happily. The three waved at Bondari as she crawled into a hole in the wall after the droids. They could hear Threepio saying, "See Artoo, this is why I've always hated space travel," and then the door closed. Valen barely had time to turn around before the massive ice block rapidly approaching the window crashed into the ship.

The next Valen knew he was a soul floating in space again. In a very short time, he felt the Reaper's pull, calling to him on her behalf. He wondered how she would react to this crazy adventure. He also wondered if Deekin would still be wearing that ridiculous hat.

Author's Note: I didn't cross list this with Star Wars since the droids played such a minor role. If you think I should change it to crossover, please let me know.