Saga Metamorphoses: Fog (sort of LOST-crossover/Beru Lars, Rotta, many OCs) Updated 6/19

Title: Metamorphoses: Fog
Author(s): cthugha
Timeframe: ANH-ROTJ
Characters: mostly OC, but lots of cameos by OT and EU characters
Genre: Mystery, adventure, crossover-of-sorts

Summary: A spaceship crashes on a mysterious planet. The survivors are not alone, and what they find there may change the fate of the entire galaxy...

Notes: That's right, it's LOST... in space! If you people like it and I keep having as much fun writing it as I have now, I'm planning to write at least four seasons--erm, books. I've pretty much planned it all out until the end (yes, The End), and the end product is supposed to provide answers to such long-standing riddles as the origin and fate of Yoda's species and the reason for the apparent technological stagnation of the Star Wars universe. Well, let's see if I get there.



PROLOGUE

50 years ago


A tall, gaunt figure strode through the vaulting hallways of the Jedi temple, its face shrouded in shadows by the cowl of its robe. None of the Jedi, Padawans, or service personnel it passed stopped to take a closer look at it, and if they had, they would have gone away with the vague memory of Master Poof or one of the other Quermian Jedi making his way towards the archives. There was nothing at all unusual in that, so why waste another glance?

The being in the dark brown Jedi robe did not enjoy resorting to such childish mind-tricks to keep his presence hidden; but there was no other way. This mission was far too important and too delicate to entrust to his apprentice, much less any of his lesser pawns; the one was too ambitious, the others were insufficiently equipped to carry it out without endangering their master's plans.

No, he had to do this one himself.

Sweeping past Jocasta Nu, the newly appointed Chief Librarian of the Jedi archives, with a slight wave of the hand and a noncommittal bow, he entered into her domain, the high-domed chambers filled with shelves after shelves of faintly glowing datapads. The knowledge of thousands of generations was preserved here, and even a lifetime as long as his could easily be spent looking up places, incidents and pieces of wisdom that could not be found anywhere else.

Yet the intruder had not come here to learn; he had come to destroy. Passing sideways between the shelves, he quickly found an access terminal and plugged his datapad into the connector. The program one of his associates had made for him would accomplish the rest; all he had to do was specify the item he wanted deleted, permanently and irretrievably, from the Jedi archives.

He called up a holographic map of the galaxy and entered the designation of the planet. When the image continued to rotate calmly before his eyes without any results showing, he pulled back his cowl, revealing a slender ashen face observing the representation with narrowing eyes. He entered the planet's name again, trying out different spellings and finally even the Republic Survey Number he had used when deleting all records of the planet's existence from the Senate's astrography charts, but the result remained the same.

The item you are looking for is not listed in this archive.

There was only one possible explanation for this: Someone must have deleted the planet from the Jedi databanks before, which meant that someone else, and probably a Jedi, must have found the planet and discovered its potential. This was as unexpected as it was unsettling, and for a moment the intruder felt the protective illusion he had built around himself waver. If anyone had been watching, they might have witnessed an exceptionally rare emotion crossing the face of the Muun.

Darth Plagueis was afraid.



CHAPTER 1: Passenger (part one)

"I'm sure he's going to be alright," the woman across the aisle from Jax told her husband for what seemed like the millionth time since they had come aboard at the last stop. "Ben told us long ago that it would come to this eventually."

"And you believe him," the man growled in a low voice, obviously unwilling to continue the convers

 

CHAPTER 1: Passenger (part two)

"So what are we doing in here, anyway?" the overdressed lady from Kuat asked in her unmistakable arrogant whine, looking reproachfully at Jax as he and the Tatooine woman pushed through the door.

"Surviving," Jax answered drily while taking stock of the group and the dim room they were in. This must have been a cargo hold, though it was mostly empty, with only a few loose crates labeled "Filters" and "FD consumables" that had piled up along the starboard bulkhead with the last tilting of the ship.

"We need to get further down," he concluded after a moment's reflection, realizing that the ceiling they were standing on would still conduct the full charge of a lightning strike thanks to the collapsed section of the hull acting as a connector. "Array, where's the nearest stairwell?"

The disjointed RA-7 droid in his arms swiveled its bug-eyed head trying to orient itself, but before it could say anything, the Huttling in front of Jax straightened up and bragged in heavily accented Basic: "I'm not afraid of that storm! It's so nice and wet and smelly and I--"

"Can you survive a lightning strike?" Jax asked bluntly.

"That's what my friends said, too," the slug-like alien pouted, pointing at the Rodians who were inspecting the crates in the corner. "But I think--"

"I don't care. You can come with us or take your chances, but don't get in my way." Jax had never liked Hutts, and though he had never met one who could speak Basic or referred to his underlings as 'friends' he had a hard time mustering any sympathy for the smelly alien. "Array, where do we go?"

"To your right, sir, although my optical sensors tell me that the blast door may not be functional due to its frame having been warped in the crash... Oh. I see." After carefully putting down the injured near-human, the Wookiee had walked up to the jammed blast door and kicked it out of is hinges in one powerful movement, immediately getting him the everybody's attention.

"It is urging us on downlevel," the RA-7 translated the Wookiee's roar, and with the thunder now rumbling through the ship continuously and lightning crackling dangerously close, even the Hutt seemed eager to comply. Predictably, the self-important Kuati was the first to follow the Wookiee into the stairwell, complaining about the almost complete darkness there until the huge alien silenced her with an unambiguous growl.

Stepping over the remains of the blast door and onto the angled surface that formed the underside of the narrow spiral staircase, Jax marveled at the Wookiee's apparent ease in keeping his footing on this ground without holding on to something, because he was now again cradling the injured man in his arms like a baby. Jax, burdened with a shattered humaniform body himself, had it much more difficult, leaning against the wall to keep from toppling over and finally shifting the disjointed parts of the protesting droid to one hand so he could reach the handrail on the wall above his head with the other. Behind him, the woman from Tatooine was only slightly more stable, at times bumping into him with a whispered excuse and repeatedly asking him why he was carrying all that junk around with him until the droid startled her by screeching what sounded like an offensive term in some exotic language.

Still, he figured was lucky not to walk behind the Huttling when he heard the Rodians who had just pushed it through the doorway screaming in their grating language as they slipped and tumbled helplessly on their master's broad slime trail. In the scant light of the RA-7's status lights, their motley trek looked more like one of the mixed-species comedy troupes that toured the Rim, drawing cheap laughs by exploiting each race's prejudices against all the others.

That impression faded quickly, however, when the first bolts of lightning struck the Lady of the Rim and they could hear and feel the crackle of titanic energies coursing through the hull and into the swamp below. For a moment, the cargo hold behind them was illuminated by electrical dischar

 

CHAPTER 2: The Rot

"Sinking?"

The four people conferring in the corner of the crowded rec room were talking in hushed tones, obviously trying to keep their distress from working the other survivors into a panic; but the one word spoken by the middle-aged woman in the plain blue jacket carried through the room nevertheless, an unintended exclamation that sent whispers and rumours cascading through the groups of frightened beings huddled together on the floor.

Nooma got up from where she had been cleaning out the bruise on the little Neimoidian's forehead for the umpteenth time and made her way towards the group, stepping over the bulky legs of two sleeping Gamorreans and pressing her back to the wall to avoid touching the smelly Huttling who acted as a sort of living barrier between the four and the rest of the room.

"Hey," the slug-like alien protested as she slipped past him and reached out with one of his stubby hands to stop her. "They are talking. You shouldn't--"

"It's alright, Rotta," the human doctor, Jax, becalmed his would-be sentry and invited Nooma into their circle with a wave of the hand. "We can't stay here," he explained, as much to everybody else as to her. "If the ship continues to sink at this rate, the mud will be here in less than an hour--"

"Actually, sir," the disjointed protocol droid in the old woman's arms chimed in, "the balance calculations which Commander Troch asked me to perform indicate that our descent may be slowing, sir, which is probably due to portions of the ship still being airtight and thus providing buoyancy--"

"How long?" Jatne Troch asked, his scarred face knitted in concentration. "And don't call me Commander."

"Approximately one and a half hours, sir. Depending on the stability of the interior airlocks, of course, and the--"

"How long until all of the ship goes under?"

"Four or five hours at this rate, sir. Less, if the sudden flooding of one section of the ship should cause the vessel to capsize. Up to this point, it seems to have been sinking in an almost impossibly straight--"

"We need to get everybody out of here." Jatne Troch's face was grim as he threw a quick look around the room. "Up to the hull. And then we'll need to find a way to cross the swamp. I don't suppose this ship has emergency rafts on board?"

"But we can't just abandon ship," the Bith girl protested, her reedy voice barely audible over the droid's superfluous negative reply to Troch's rhetorical question. "One, there may be others aboard; two, we still need to find out where we are; and three, wherever we are, we need to send a distress signal."

"There's no time for this," Troch objected. "We can try to salvage what we can later; now our priority must be to get everyone out of this alive."

Nooma looked from one to the other as they nodded their assent; but then the Bith suddenly grabbed the droid's head from out of the older woman's arms and, holding it close to her own bulbuous head, asked: "What about the bridge?"

"The bridge, madam?"

"Can we still reach the bridge from here? On dry foot?"

"Iquaza, we've got no power," Jax said softly, putting a hand on the girl's shoulder. "There's nothing--"

"The command section of any major starship is required by the ISA to have a separate backup power system," the Bith explained, unfazed by Jax' patronizing gesture. "Am I right, Array?"

"Madam, yes, madam," the droid replied. "However--"

"How long to the bridge?" Jax asked, his eyes widening at the prospect.

"Thirty minutes, sir, at least."

"No way." Troch shook his head. "Too close."

"I'm going," Jax said.

"So am I." The Bith - Iquaza - started to collect the droid's vital parts from the human woman's arms, taking care not to sever any more of the cables that still held much of it together. "Array, you'll show us the way."

Before the droid could protest, Jax remarked that they'd probably need both of their hands if they wanted to get down to the bridge in time. "We need a backpack or something," he said, already looking around the room. "Something we can carry him in without using our

 

CHAPTER 3: Flesh and Blood

Dak Ramis awoke to searing pain, a pain that nibbled at the edges of his newfound consciousness and sent strobes of entoptic light flashing through his vision. It took him some time and considerable strength of will even to pinpoint the source of the agony that at first seemed to be originating everywhere at once inside his body; neither did it subside much when he finally realized that most of it came from his right leg, or from what remained of it. His whole frame was rigid with shock and weak with blood loss at the same time; there was nothing he could do.

It was the best day of his life.

He held on to the pain, even relishing it; the pain proved that he was alive. Even while he was slipping in and out of consciousness, being fretted over first by a hairy Wookiee, then by a serious-looking man who amputated his ruined leg to save the rest of him, getting carried around by a different Wookiee and then a Hutt, of all things, Dak Ramis held on to this thought: He had never felt so glad to be alive.

Apart from this, however, his mind and senses were working in slow motion. It was only after a series of what seemed to him pointless travels back and forth through a strange place that he finally pieced together the truth of their situation: Their ship, the Lady of the Rim, had crashed -- nobody seemed to know where and why -- and most of the other passengers were dead. Either during or after the crash a portion of the bottom hull had caved in and buried his right leg under it, forming an artificial clearing in which the survivors were now gathering.

Dak was still in the hands of the Hutt, half of his face pressed against the gastropod's smelly skin, when the fresh air and pale light of the outside world suddenly cleared his mind after an eternity of painful swaying through the dark. For a few minutes, the Huttling just stood there, holding him securely, wriggling back and forth to let other survivors past and obviously waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Rather than complain, Dak used the time to let his eyes adjust to the light, to gather air in his lungs and strength in his stomach; then he abruptly cleared his throat, making the Huttling jump in surprise.

"You're awake!" he exclaimed.

"Yes. Thank you." Dak managed a faint smile, then raised his right arm with some effort to point at the slanting part of the hull that formed a sort of ramp up to the exterior of the ship. "Could you take me up there?"

Again the Huttling looked around somewhat nervously, as if hoping to get confirmation from somebody that this was the right thing to do. "Up to the hull, you mean?" he asked doubtfully.

"Please. I just... I just need some time by myself," Dak said. It was true; he couldn't stand the thought of lying prostrate in the middle of all those bustling and fretting beings again. "It should be safe now, shouldn't it?"

"I... erm, I suppose so? But..." The Huttling moved his massive head to indicate the Rodians, who were scurrying up and down the ramp carrying something. "I think that's where they are putting all the bodies..."

"Oh, are they?" Dak raised his eyebrows and ignored the spike of pain that seemed to pierce his skull even because of this small movement. Someone really had this group under control, he thought, if they were that quick disposing of the corpses. "Well, then it can't be dangerous, right?"

The Huttling seemed to ponder this for the space of a heartbeat, then said, "But it's gross!"

"There's enough room up there, I am sure," Dak responded, growing a little impatient. If he still had both of his legs, he would have walked away long since; or rather, he would be helping the other survivors with whatever they were doing. But as it was, he could be no more than a nuisance down here, a constant source of worry for the others, while he would much rather be alone to ponder his new situation.

After all, he reflected again, it was easily the most incredible day of his life.

"Alright, then," the Huttling said, his voice suddenly sounding as if he were trying to em

 

CHAPTER 4: Death of a Lady

They were everywhere, crawling onto the sinking ship from all directions like gravel maggots coming to feast on the dead body of a bantha. And they looked the part, too, Jax reflected when he first caught sight of their attackers. They were clearly humanoid, and most of them might even have been humans; but with their deathly pale skin and tattered clothes they looked like nothing so much as walking corpses.

Only they didn't walk. Using their feet, knees, and hands indiscriminately, they scurried all over the hull with alarming speed, their intentions as unguessable as their provenience. Jax was barely halfway up the hull when one of them came flying at him, all fours outstretched, knocking him down on impact with its full body weight and clawing at his face with long frayed fingernails. His reflexes honed by years of combat training, Jax rolled on his back and worked with the momentum of his fall to push the creature off his chest, then immediately twisted into a defensive crouch and fixed his gaze on the attacker to anticipate his follow-up attack.

Instead of coming at him again, however, the mud-dripping humanoid was already scrambling back up towards the pile of corpses the Rodians had assembled near the rim of the hull. Confused, Jax looked around to see the other attackers converging on the pile as well, and the thought crossed his mind that they might want to use it as a cover; then Jatne Troch caught up to him and tossed him something that turned out to be a palm-sized holdout blaster. The man was holding one himself and looking for a shot, but Jax stopped him with a hand to his shoulder.

"Wait!" he said. "We don't know if they're even hostile--"

"Yes they are." Jatne Troch pointed his blaster at the gruesome pile of bodies, and as Jax followed the gesture, he suddenly saw it, too.

The attackers were not hiding behind the pile; they were dismantling it. One body after the other was disappearing as they looked on, gripped by mud-encrusted fingers and dragged over the edge of the hull into the swamp.

"What are they doing?" the Huttling -- Rotta -- called from behind them, then, as he recognized the futility of his question, added, "Why?"

"I don't know," Jatne Troch snarled, "but I'm not gonna let them." Charging up the collapsed section of the hull, he fired randomly at the attackers, bringing down one and driving three more over the edge of the hull. Jax, on the other hand, was still reluctant to join him. In spite of their disconcerting appearance and the fact that they were stealing corpses, the reasons of which he could not begin to guess, the bog-people seemed to mean no harm to the living, so what right had he to kill them? He was no stranger to slaughter, and in the course of his career in the ISB he'd more than once had to kill innocents for the sake of the greater good; but only under orders, which never came without the accompanying reassurance that whatever atrocity he was committing really served to prevent greater suffering.

In this case, he was not so sure. Did the perceived indignity of stealing the corpses of strangers really justify killing the offenders in cold blood?

His quandary was resolved a second later when a blaster bolt coming from behind the edge of the ship nearly grazed his temple and sizzled into the ruined hull behind him. "Down!" Jatne Troch shouted, and everybody on their side of the confrontation complied immediately; even Rotta the Huttling somehow managed to squeeze his bulk almost flat against the ground. "They're armed--"

The piercing scream of one of the Rodians cut him off, and Jax cursed inwardly as the green-skinned alien came tumbling down the ramp with a smoking hole in its head. His indecision had just cost a life; had he not hesitated when Troch had thrown him the blaster...

Stop thinking; act. Rolling to the side, he came up where the ship's hull had broken apart and covered Jatne, who was lying on his belly near the pile of corpses, with a spray of blaster fire that drove away all of the attackers he could see. But still,

 

...and because rest sounds good (and I need to correct tons of end-term papers), this fic will now go on a 3-week hiatus, to return on Sunday July 10th with a fresh chapter featuring Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett and Sise Fromm.

Btw, if anyone here is reading this, why not drop me a line? Not that I object to writing just for writing's sake, but a little feedback would be very welcome