THIRTY YEARS LATER...
Chapter Two: The Next Generation
"Here we are," Jacen said from the cockpit of the Hapan transport ship Rock Dragon. Beside him sat his new wife, Tenel Ka. "Naboo." He finished.
"Yes, I know you wanted our honeymoon location to be a surprise, honey," the Dathomirian said as she blinked her grey-green eyes, "but why Naboo?"
Jacen was obviously taken aback by her statement. "Well..." He paused, thinking for words. "It's the only world that the New Jedi Order authors have ignored so far." Catching her unforgiving stare, he hesitantly continued. "Besides, my grandmother was born here. Did you know that she was queen of this planet at age eleven?"
She was obviously not convinced. "Sure," she said with a tone as bored as she could make it, looking out of the viewport with a forlorn stare. Indeed, she was in the same position by the time Jacen set the Rock Dragon down in the capital city that the author conveniently forgot the name of.
"Well?" Jacen asked impatiently, turning toward the exit. "Aren't you going to come with me into the capital city that the author conveniently forgot the name of?"
"Sure," Tenel Ka tried to say as cheerfully as possible, but only managed to come out with a tone that sounded as if she had ended up tripping over the coffin at a funeral.
As the couple debarked their starship, they were suddenly confronted by a horde of angry (and horny) Gungans. Jacen promptly ignited his lightsaber, and then proceeded to cut a path through the crowd. Tenel Ka grimaced as a pair of Gungan testicles impacted against her lizard-hide armor with a messy splat, but continued to follow Jacen. Somewhere behind her, a pair of worker droids were supposed to be unloading the luggage, but they were completely engulfed in the crowd.
When they had finally breached the spaceport walls and left the angry crowd of Gungans behind, Jacen deactivated his lightsaber and pulled out a map.
"You know where we're going, right?" he asked his wife, who simply nodded in response. Nodding himself, he crumpled the parchment map into a ball and threw it into a convenient waste receptacle.
He didn't see the blatantly obvious figure that was trying desperately to be inconspicuous as it followed them.
"This is the place we're staying? Good God, Jacen, my pet rancor has better tastes!"
The edifice that Tenel Ka had so eloquently described towered before the couple, five stories high at a minimum. Many windows were covered in plywood (for the sake of keeping the cost of this book down) and the ones that were not covered so had ugly cracks in them. Many fake spiderwebs hung from balconies, lending a phony air of creepiness to the former Royal Palace.
"I don't see what's wrong with it," Jacen replied. "See those webs? They're spun by a particular breed of highly poisonous spiders native to this planet..."
"Jacen?" Tenel Ka flatly asked.
"What?"
"The webs. They're fake."
"Uh..." He looked at the building again. "Yeah, that's what I meant to say."
She only glared at him.
Their room proved to be in even worse shape than the building itself. As Tenel Ka forlornly looked about the room, she observed that the bathroom door was hanging at an angle, one of its hinges having been blasted at some indeterminate time in the past. The vanity mirror had a large crack running diagonally through it. The vanity itself was not in much better shape, with many insect holes bored through it. In addition, a real spiderweb adorned a far corner, and Tenel Ka wondered with a morbid curiousity if it really was made by an extremely poisonous species of spider. She decided not to test for herself, and looked at the bed.
The Dathomirian nearly fainted.
The bedspread looked as if a Bantha had decided to use it to clean up after it took a crap. The floral pattern, while still vaguely visible, was mostly covered by a layer of unrecognizably brown stuff that she didn't bother to guess as to the origins of.
Grimacing, she turned around to order one of the droids to clean it - and then noticed that they were not there.
"Jacen," she asked in a somewhat panicked tone of voice, "where is the luggage?"
"What?" he replied absentmindedly, having been inspecting some unidentifiable creature that resided in the corner. "Luggage? I thought the droids had it-"
"They're not here."
"Blaster bolts!" he shouted, and proceeded to tear out the door, which fell with a resounding crash. He ignored it and continued running toward the turbolift.
The turbolift, as he neared it, decided that it was the perfect time to go kaputz. With a great screeching and grinding of gears, it ground to a halt bare meters from the fifth floor.
"Guess I take the stairs," Jacen muttered, yanking open the emergency exit door and scaring approximately 1.5 million spiders. They split in all directions as he hit them with a wave of Force-induced fear, allowing him to dash down the rickety steps.
Halfway down, Jacen stopped suddenly, allowing his shadow to fly through the brick wall and crash three stories to the street, where it was promptly abused by the remaining Gungans. Sighing with relief, he then continued without the shadow.
At the bottom, the door simply would not budge no matter how hard Jacen pushed. He finally pulled out a skeleton key and inserted it, but with no further luck.
The he noticed a large red lever marked "PULL IN CASE OF STUCK DOOR."
He pulled it, and pulled it hard.
The lever did several things. First, a large tree trunk fell from an unknown location, impacted the door, and carried it several hundred meters through a giant stained glass window. Second, all the stair steps aligned themselves at forty-five degree angles. Third, an ancient-looking Scotsman astride a sheep rode out of the chamber the log had come from, and began to slide down the steeply inclined steps, screaming in an unknown language.
At that point, Jacen decided that discretion was the better part of valour. He turned tail and ran for all the Force could give him.
The Scotsman slammed into the wall at nearly twenty kilometers per hour. The sheep never made it, but quite dizzy the Scotsman managed to peel himself off the wall. He turned, and promptly stuck his head in a toilet that had appeared to his right.
This is the way Jacen found the Scotsman a half-hour later, although he personally had no luck in finding the lost droids.
After giving a double-take to the Scotsman, he jumped straight up the stairwell to the fifth floor.
"No luck?" Tenel Ka inquired as Jacen half walked, half tripped into the room.
"Don't ask," he replied, throwing himself onto the bed that Tenel Ka had managed to make into a somewhat respectable state of cleanliness.
She silently nodded, closed the now-fixed door, and began to pull off her testicle-spattered armor. As she was undressing, she turned to Jacen and tried to start a conversation.
"What happened with Danni Quee, anyway? You never told me."
Throwing her a slightly annoyed glance that he immediately regretted, Jacen slowly responded. "I never had anything going for her - I just rescued her from Helska and got out of there."
"She acted like there was something."
Jacen groaned. "Maybe she had a crush on me. What can I say? She's a blond."
Tenel Ka stopped, her armor only halfway off. "Do you mean that you married me only because I'm a redhead?"
"I never said that."
She quickly finished taking the armor off, then proceeded to unbraid her hair. But just as she was getting into the bed beside Jacen, there was a knock on the door.
"Aw kriff," Jacen cursed, "an hour into our honeymoon and we can't even get some peace? Kriff this." He threw open the door (prompting a slight scream from Tenel Ka, who buried herself under the marginally clean sheets) and glared at the alien who had knocked.
"Vong, huh? Go away," he shouted, slamming the door in the warrior's face. With it closed, he began to turn around to head back to bed, but another knock of the door pushed that idea aside.
"What is it?" Jacen angrily asked, wondering at the Vong's appearance. It was dressed - oddly enough - in a black suit, and carried some sort of book under its arm. Beside it was an equally black bicycle. The Jedi only glared more. "Can't you see I'm trying to make love with my wife?"
"Heathen!" the Vong shouted, opening the book up and thrusting it beneath Jacen's nose. "But fear not - Yun-Shuna will cure you of your heathen tastes! Read what Shuna IV, book three verse one has to say of your condition! 'For-'"
"Kriff you!" Jacen promptly cut off the Shunan missionary, and slammed the door again. When another knock came, he ignored it and proceeded to walk to the bed. But before he could get in, an even louder knock was heard that threatened to break the entire building.
"Now what?" the Jedi stormed, throwing open the door in a fit of rage.
"'-when thou mustest-'"
Jacen pulled out a crystal of kryptonite and shoved it down the Vong's throat, slammed the door once more, and walked back to the bed. Then he handed Tenel Ka a set of earmuffs, and got into the bed with her.
This time, the knock was felt more than it was heard. Extremely pissed off, Jacen stormed back, pulled out his lightsaber, then opened the door.
"'-anger has no place in the sight of the gods-'" was all that Jacen allowed the Shunan missionary to say before he decapitated it. He then gave the dead Vong a hearty kick to the pelvis before slamming the door and returning to bed, wondering how the alien could have spoken with a large kryptonite crystal jammed in its throat.
The carcass of the Vong slammed into a large purple dinosaur that was unlucky to be standing behind. Its inertia carried the dinosaur back into the turbolift shaft, where it fell the full height of the building before coming to a stop. At the bottom, the Scotsman pulled his head out of the toilet full of beer long enough to determine what the new arrival was before he stuck his head back in.