STAR
WARS

EPISODE IIIc

THE LAST BUTTERFLY

In the wake of a daring raid on an Imperial research facility, Jedi Padawan Star Butterfly, only surviving heir to the throne of the planet Mewni, has vanished into the Tatooine desert.

MOFF TOFFEE, Imperial appointed power of the Mewni System, enforces terrible oppression on the Mewman population, hoping the suffering of her people will call the Jedi Princess to return home.

As the Mewmans suffer, a band of freedom fighters strike back against the Imperial forces…

Sir Lavabo raised the blast shield of his helmet, squinting against the sunlight as he stealthily peered out from the brush. He raised a pair of macrobinoculars to his eyes and scanned first to the left, then to the right. Either the subject of his search eluded his scopes, or was not there at all.

"He should have returned by now…" he whispered to himself.

Lavabo peered through the scope again, focusing on the structure some 50 meters away beyond the reaches of the forest: a long, single-story building, surrounded by a security fence. Fourteen Stormtroopers (Lavabo had counted them exactly) milled about within the compound and stood guard at the gate. To the uninitiated, this would appear to be an Imperial mutinous depot or similar armament storage. But Lavabo knew what it really was: A work camp.

Several similar buildings were scattered about the Mewni countryside. They housed approximately four dozen Mewmans, kept working in shifts around the clock. Lavabo's team had already liberated two of these facilities, but had yet to determine what exactly the prisoners were being forced to construct. Even those who had been rescued could not cast any illumination upon their forced labor. "They wouldn't tell us what we were building," they would say. "And the finished product was nothing we could identify."

This was mainly because the finished product was actually far from being finished. Every three days, a cargo transport would land at each facility to pick up the "finished" fruits of the prisoners' labor. It would then transport the cargo to Skywynne Airbase and offload. Whatever the Empire was building, they were taking a significant amount of care to ensure no one discovered exactly what it was.

Lavabo lowered the macrobinoculars once more. "Where could he have gone…?"

"Hello!"

The cheerful greeting came from just under Lavabo's arm. The Knight of the Wash jumped in surprise. The scrawny man, his head adorned by mushrooms and his entire body covered by leaves, had so well blended into the brush around him that Lavabo had not even noticed his unannounced presence.

"Are you looking for me, then?" the leafy man asked cheerfully.

"I am most pleased to see you," Lavabo whispered, "But I must remind you to please keep your voice down."

"Oh!" Eddie whispered. "My mistake, your knightlyness."

"Was your mission…successful?"

"Ah! My mission!" Eddie exclaimed, once again forgetting to be quiet. "Yes! I found-!"

Lavabo quickly clomped a beefy hand over the man's mouth, fearing his exuberance would give away their presence. "Very good, Eddie," he said quietly. "Why don't we go tell the general?"

The leafy man, seemingly unconcerned with having the big knight's hand covering his mouth, nodded excitedly. Not willing to allow Eddie to speak freely so close to enemy territory, Lavabo simply scooped him up and carried him deeper into the woods.


"Star!"

"Staaaar?"

"Bleorp-whirp!"

"STAR!"

Tom, Janna, Rosado, and PY-HD spent nearly the entire day scouring Mos Espa for their missing friend, but the young Padawan had well and truly disappeared. They reconvened at the Raventalon around mid-afternoon, having found not a single trace of her.

"Anything?" Tom asked.

"If I had found Star, do you think I'd be coming back alone?" Janna snapped.

"Geez, you don't have to be so snippy about it…" Tom said sheepishly.

"Sorry, Lucy, I'm just exhausted and hot."

Rosado shook his head. "I don't understand it. How could she have even gotten past us and none of us even heard her leave!"

Janna wiped sweat from her brow. "Star can move in almost total silence. And I guess we were all kinda…" She waved her arm, searching for the right word. "Doing that thing where moisture comes out of your eyes?"

"…Crying?" Rosado ventured.

"Yeah, that."

A memory came flooding back into Tom's brain, not of Star, but of Janna tightly embracing him, resting her head on his shoulder as she wept, mourning Marco's death. But as soon as they noticed that Star was gone, she had hardened up, returning to her old self. Tom still felt broken inside, even more so with Star missing. He found himself longing to hug his old partner again and just hold her, and feel safe. Janna, however, didn't appear like she would be very receptive.

"We've checked the whole city, and there's no sign of her," Janna went on as she took a seat in the shade on the Raventalon's boarding ramp. "And she left her commlink, of course, so contacting her is out."

"She clearly doesn't want to be found," said Tom, kneeling down to clean some sand from PY-HD's joints while the astromech chittered and complained. "Maybe she just needed some alone time to…you know…mourn."

"Sure, but if she isn't here in Mos Espa, then where is she?" Rosado asked. His eyes wandered up past the Raventalon toward the empty desert beyond. "You don't think she…?"

Janna followed his gaze. "It's starting to look that way…unless she stole a ship, which doesn't seem like her."

Tom looked out toward the desert, heat waves rising off the sand distorting the dunes beneath the twin suns. "But if she went out there…"

Everyone looked back at each other, gazes locked for just a second, and then quickly sprinted for the cockpit.


Lavabo and Eddie, now walking on his own, reached the resistance camp. It was not much to look at. They had very little in the way of technology; Mewni was a rather low-tech planet to begin with, and most of what they did have, scanners, comms equipment, cannons, speeders and ships, was mostly military equipment at Skywynne Airbase, which was now under the control of Imperial Forces. A few droids milled about through the tents and impromptu shelters, and nearly all of the fighters did have blasters, but otherwise, the camp may as well have been from the stone age.

The pair headed for the largest tent, really just scavenged sheets and blankets stitched together and stretched over a frame of erected tree branches. This was as close to a "command center" as the band of freedom fighters could hope for. The resistance leader, a tall, muscular being clad in the uniform of the Mewni Militia, stood at a table examining holomaps from a flickering and battered projector scavenged during a previous raid.

Lavabo gave a respectful bow. "General."

Buff Frog looked up, his face and arms covered in scars and scratches. Typically jovial, the frog man's expression was hard and serious. He wasted no time with pleasantries. "Laundry Knight. What news have you?"

Lavabo turned to Eddie. "Go on, Eddie. Tell us what you have learn-ed."

"Hmm? Oh! Right! You were right, General! They have changed the cargo shuttle's pickup schedule!"

Buff Frog tapped fist against the table. "I knew it! When will it arrive now?"

"In about an hour."

"An hour?!"

"Yup! They think we'll be too skittish to attack in broad daylight." Previous cargo runs had been in the late evening, and it had been much easier to sneak up on the facilities attacked in previous raids under the shadows of the setting sun.

Buff Frog thoughtfully rubbed his chin. "We will need new plan, and we need it now. How will we attack without cover?"

"I was actually thinking about that myself!" Eddie exclaimed. "See, I think we actually shouldn't attack. Not right away, anyway. This mission calls for sneakiness!"

Buff Frog and Lavabo exchanged a hesitant glance. "And you…have plan?" Buff Frog asked.

"I reckon I do!"

Buff Frog pulled up a battered stool and took a seat. "Well then…Go on."


The scanners were blank; not a single life form appeared anywhere within range.

"I don't understand it," said Tom, his eyes turning away from the vacant readout screens. The view outside the forward viewscreen was not much more interesting: Sand as far as the eye could see. "Star can't have gotten far on foot. We should have been able to catch up with her by now."

"Well, not to be morbid, but maybe that's why we can't find her on the scanner," said Janna. "She could have died of heat stroke. Or sun stroke. She could have been killed by the sand people, or a Krayt dragon, or a swoop bike gang, or-"

"Please stop," Rosado cut in. "She's gotta be somewhere! Somewhere we haven't checked, or haven't thought she would turn up." PY-HD blooped an agreement.

"Hovis is right," Tom said. "This is Star we're talking about. If we can't find her, there's no way it's because she's dead. She must seriously not want us to find her, that's all."

"So what do you suggest we do, Lucy? Wait around indefinitely to see if Star turns up again?"

Tom looked embarrassed. "I mean, when you put it like that…"

"Tom does kinda have a point," Rosado said slowly. "Star did just lose her best friend. They've been friends for…how long?"

"Since they were…five? Six?" Janna shrugged as she banked the freighter through a wide turn to continue their search grid. "Give or take? Point is, since they were really young."

"And she loved him. They were inseparable." Rosado sighed. "Star is really hurting right now. She's lost an awful lot. Maybe she just, you know…needs to be alone right now."

The young smugglers exchanged a look, each silently asking the other if they were really about to abandon the search for the missing friend.

"She did, after all, sneak right past us while three of us were bawling our eyes out," Rosado added. "And Pony Head was…beeping mournfully, I guess."

Janna sighed. Without a word, she turned the Raventalon back toward Mos Espa. "Alright, Star. If you need some alone time…you can have it."

Tom gave a solemn nod of agreement. "I just hope she's okay."

Hey, everybody! I think this site finally fixed their notification system, so if this is the first chapter update you're seeing in a while, welcome back to the party!

SO: This is the first chapter of Act 3. This will be the final act. We're finally getting toward the end of the story! But don't worry, there is still plenty more to come. If it took me three and a half years to write the first two acts, then it'll probably take close to two years more to write the last act.

Next: Jailbreak