Chapter 1/9:
Commander Igar did not relish his position of Tempest Force's "Commander-in-Chief" for the entire Imperial Army contingent stationed on the Forest Moon of Endor. Well, it should perhaps be caveated that he greatly enjoyed the benefits of the position, what with his more than fair pay, connections to Imperial high-life through his Kuati upbringing, and personal guard of stormtroopers; but all of that said, having to board the Tempest 1 at two in the karking morning to resolve a "minor issue" with the garrison's supply routes was doing a lot of work to help him remember his many grievances with his current posting.
The … disturbances, for lack of a better word, had started out simple. A few larger trees fell on previously cleared convoy routes, conveniently just common enough to make the path annoying to travel for the AT-ST escort. The scout walkers are technically capable of moving across "All Terrain" effectively, but in practice if the terrain in question was particularly uneven, the speed at which the walkers could maneuver decreases dangerously close to slower than the infantry being escorted. Occasionally, speeder patrols would report that sensors placed in the underbrush or high in the trees had been marginally adjusted past the optimal coverage area. Or sometimes, these sensors would be displaced entirely and relocated a few meters away. In this way, small gaps in the sensor net, theoretically exploitable by a group of a few people, were created.
They weren't events that were stressful enough to make his hair turn gray early, so it didn't really bother him. They were small things, explainable things - he had rationalized at the time. Surely on a planet almost entirely covered in dense foliage, it would be hard to maintain unpaved and relatively unmonitored supply routes against the common natural phenomena like old trees falling over. Coming from Kuat, he knew that happened in forests. Surely minor differences in sensor acuity (and position) could be attributed to insecure attachment points or even atmospheric conditions? And for those sensors that had been moved more than a few centimeters … Well, there is a large population of native wildlife. Maybe they tried to eat it and discovered it wasn't up to their standards … while managing not to register on the sensors themselves?
The problems really became noticeable when the supplies started disappearing. It only came to his attention when, after a very long day of looking over troop dispensation records, he asked his aide to get him a steaming cup of Caf from the dispensary downstairs. After the first half an hour that his aide had not returned, Igar was, justifiably, starting to become a little impatient. He still had another four hours of clerical work to do himself because his secretary sprained his ankle last week - during the bi-annual Sanctuary Moon in-house, morale booster function for officers - and a new one had yet to be transferred to his division. When another hour had passed and he still didn't have his damn Caf, he told his guard to have someone contact his aide and ask him where he was and, more importantly, where his Caf was.
Only five minutes after did he hear from his guard, who'd called the comm of his aide and been relayed to an off-base technician, who transferred the conversation to the Section Commander for the Ewok Research Center of all places, who relayed that his aide was stuck in confinement in one of their temporary holding cells after attempting to steal said Section Commander's last box of Oyu'baat-blend; a premium Spiced Caf imported all the way from Mandalore. Never mind that the research center was over eight hundred klicks away and under an entirely different section of regional command - making it completely outside of his jurisdiction - Igar instead hyper-focused on the latter detail: that his aide had attempted to steal Caf for him. This scenario, of course, begs many questions of why. Why go to the furthest possible Imperial installation on the planet from the main base to make him a cup of Caf? Why did no one inform him of any of these details while they were happening? And why did his aide feel the need to steal instead of just using the standard provisions each base had?
Well, as it turned out, the answers to most of those questions were all related. Across the board, all over the planet, Imperial installations were facing minor supply shortages; not crippling and hardly even noteworthy. The next week or two was spent compiling all instances of resource shortages and comparing these logs against known supply issues that came from off-world sources. What turned up was very confusing, both in terms of how these issues even came to be and how no one had noticed them sooner. In fact, no one had reported the issues at all because no one knew the issues weren't expected.
The armor corps had a deficiency of repulsorlift repair components, but had not reported this issue up the chain because the fighter corps had documented an overdraw of parts on their part for the repair of the TIE wing. The fighter corps submitted an official complaint that they lacked sufficient solar cells to maintain the TIE wing, but later withdrew this complaint after they received an acknowledgement from the research division that the cells were being used to help surveyors catalog Ewok camps and other population centers. This horrid pattern continued throughout the entire on-planet bureaucracy, involving every single office and station present, culminating in a byzantine mess of logistical reports documenting an utter failure of communication at every level of operation. In the process, minor amenities like Caf, had been slowly drained through the growing logistical dead-zones, and eventually completely ran out. An unfortunate casualty in a larger, brain-cell deadening, clerical civil-war the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Corporate Sector Authority tried to assign the clerical duties of competing CEOs to recovered Separatists tactical droids.
Of course, with the attention of the Imperial Military seemingly diverted, it was at this point that the local lower lifeforms determined they needed to make their own grievances with the conduct of the Imperial Military known. The week Igar and his remaining command staff spent dutifully combing over inconsistencies in his own documentation, the Imperial Army spent in minor skirmishes along every "border" they had drawn in the forest. While hardly any casualties occurred - given the general primitive nature of the resistance - and no fatalities were reported, the Imperial Army spent this period bereft of the majority of its leadership. When Commander Igar finally got around to reviewing the performance reports of the garrison during the short and mostly pointless conflict, the damage was already done.
Half of the sensor net in the forest was relocated or destroyed in the chaos, more than a quarter of the major supply lines had been reorganized into highly inefficient - if very defendable - routes, and an entire AT-AT was temporarily out of commission as someone had decided the best way to haul an important shipment of electrical grease to the outlying garrisons was to run an AT-AT, at its top speed of sixty klicks an hour, through the forest at two in the morning. Considering that not a single stormtrooper involved could point to a definitive instigator, Igar chalked it up to mass, fatigue-induced hysteria and sent the whole group to the research center to spend some hours "volunteering" as lab assistants. Maybe some time spent with the little creatures would restore some measure of rationality to them or, hopefully, it would at least allow them to relax; the poor boys in white had spent half the night trapped in their own upside down AT-AT with no power and a lot of leaking barrels of grease.
Considering that his review was coming in at the end of the month, Igar was torn between his duty as an officer in the Imperial Military to fix all of the horrible oversights made by both his staff and the garrison at large; and the alluring, and often politically incentivized, option to sweep it all under the rug and just patch up the obvious issues before the Moff had him shot. At this point, a blaster bolt to the back of the head was looking almost preferable to reading through the sheer amount of complaints he had to address from his subordinates and the sector at large. Given that his execution was far more likely to come at the hand - or rather the telekinetic grip - of Lord Vader than an E-11 blaster rifle, Igar resigned himself to making the upcoming report he'd be submitting look plausible at the least. Leaving out any of the major failings, perhaps he could spin it as a blameless and expected result of the time-table he was forced to work under? This, Igar reflected, was surely much better than telling the Moff "my entire ground complement suffered temporary and only slightly debilitating insanity, my apologies for the continued delays in favorable results."
And so it was that the Imperial Garrison on the Forest Moon of Endor decided to hamper their own operational efficiency in order to maintain the newly decided status quo.