Luke (Corey): You are my father!
Darth Vader (Annie): No, Luke. I am your mother.
Sally: I knew it! I figured it out! The Japor snippet Anakin gave her has special powers, right?
GM: Yes, I put it in Anakin's inventory since I knew he'd need something to keep him alive as an NPC once you guys started interacting with him.
Sally: But – if Padmé is Darth Vader, how come she doesn't have limbs?
Ben: Do we know that Darth Vader doesn't have limbs?
GM: Yes. None of the characters here knows that in-character, but it came up in the session you missed.
{flashback to Darth Vader in bacta tank}
GM (narrating in the flashback) "In a medicated bath rests a battered, limbless figure, barely recognisable as human, shrouded by clouds of steam. This is Darth Vader, the Emperor's enforcer."
Jim: And in that scene you had Annie role-play Darth Vader, but then he – she – they went to being an NPC the next time we met them.
Annie: I didn't want to play her and Leia at the same time, in the scene where she reveals that Leia is her daughter.
Jim: It isn't hard, playing two characters who are talking to each other.
Annie: No, it would have been too easy. It wouldn't have been proper improvisational drama if I'd known precisely what Leia's mother was about to say to her.
Corey: Did Anakin not have limbs?
Pete: Not by the time Obi-Wan had finished with him. For someone who claimed to be playing his character as Lawful Good…
Ben: He is! That's why he couldn't tolerate a fellow Jedi who had been already turning to the Dark Side since he was nine years old. Jedi are like paladins…'
Jim: No, we agreed that Jedi are basically monks.
Ben: Yes, we're like monks in terms of how our spellcasting works, and being literally brought up in a monastic order, but we're more like paladins in being oath-sworn to uphold justice and righteousness. Compassion is important, but not when it comes to dealing with a fellow Jedi who is an unrepentant mass murderer and too dangerous to be left alive.
Annie: But you didn't have enough compassion or wisdom to finish Anakin off cleanly. You could have chopped his head off. It took him days to burn to death, lying there on that lava field.
Obi-Wan (Ben): I know, okay? Don't you think I was doing penance for that, in all those years living on Tattooine? But Anakin and Padmé were both at well below zero hit points, and Padmé was the one who was mostly innocent-ish and was about to give birth. If I'd stopped to give Anakin a mercy kill before getting her to a medical facility, she wouldn't have survived.
Pete: Except that she would, because of the Jabor snippet.
Ben: Obi-Wan didn't know that, and neither did Padmé.
Sally: This still doesn't explain why Padmé doesn't have arms and legs.
GM: You can have – three guesses. Annie, Jim, tell them if they get it right.
Pete: She decided to trade in her flesh limbs for superior technological ones.
Annie: No.
Corey: She had lots of training accidents learning to use a laser sword?
Annie: She wasn't being played by Jim any more, so, no.
Ben: Is that what happened to the character you played while I was away? Kyle Katarn, wasn't it?
Jim: He was one of lots of characters I played while you were away! I got killed four times in four sessions! It was epic! Once with two characters in the same session!
Ben: Because of the laser sword accidents?
Jim: No, that was just in Kyle's backstory. We have to tell you and Corey about Kyle sometime, the way he heroically sacrificed himself…
Pete: (snort!)
Sally: Anakin had been so effective in turning Palpatine to the Dark Side that he went mad and started experimenting on Padmé's limbs until they had to be amputated? I saw a documentary about some of the things they've done to laboratory mice, it was horrific.
GM: No. Palpatine is fairly far gone, but not to that extent.
Sally: So what was it, then?
Jim: Padmé would have already been dead, because of Anakin strangling her, and so would her unborn children, because of oxygen deprivation. But as long as they were inside her, the Jujube snippet protected them and her. But to do that, it had to divert all the blood from her limbs to the important bits: her head and her womb.
Annie: And then her other organs started to fail as well, which was why she appeared convincingly dead at her funeral. Palpatine had already had to amputate her gangrenous limbs and put the rest of her in a life-support suit well before she woke up on the operating table to find that her husband was dead, she didn't know where Obi-Wan had taken Luke and Leia, and Palpatine had transfused her husband's midi-chlorians into her body.
Ben: But – oxygen deprivation doesn't work like that! The body thinks that the brain is the least important organ – and evolution doesn't care about unborn children, as long as the parent can survive to make more! Padmé would have miscarried and suffered brain damage long before her limbs stopped functioning.
GM: Realism died in this game as soon as you and Jim started parrying blaster shots with your swords.
{Chewbacca, playing Ben, looks unimpressed}
GM: Oh, well then, I guess your suspension of disbelief dies and the campaign ends.
Ben: grumble Okay, okay, this is how medicine works in this universe, for someone wearing a magic necklace. While Luke and his mum are having this conversation, what's Chewie doing?