Saga [OC, GWG Amnesia challenge] New Kids on the Block

New Kids on the Block - A Gentlemen's Writing Guild' Amnesia challenge (Nov 2015)​

Potentially starring:
The Individual - amnesiac sentient waking up on an Imperial dropship, wearing their armour;
Aurora Cradmoon - female pilot, Silverra native, and Merc.

---

Sudden intake of breath, and the Individual rocked his head back to look up the low metal ceiling, the rectangular lumi light-panels hurting his eyes.

Bringing his gaze back down, he noted he was surrounded. By Imperial Stormtroopers, black energy weapons cradled at port arms. No-one looked at him, which prompted him to put his hands up to his own face, the gloved fingers sliding down smooth metal.
Crap, I'm one of them.

"SEVEN SECONDS!" Someone shouted.

Till what?

Seven seconds later, he found out, almost driven to his knees by the unexpected impact from below which seemed to push the floor up at him, while the troops to either side of him, looked down curiously.

Light, not artificial this time, flooded into the compartment with increasing intensity as a horizontal line formed in the wall ahead, partially blocked by the two first two rows of stormtroopers, the line widening downwards towards the floor.

"GO GO GO."

The Individual could only follow the others into the light, the floor falling away into a ramp, and then he was on rough ground, bits of grass jutting in clumps and dozens of his fellows clattered past him, their shoulder armour battering his.

"HEAD FOR THE TREELINE"

He stared round at a side-on view of a winged transport that was had dropped them off, it's front, to his right, sharply tapering down to a sharp nose, while the stern, to his left, was a near vertical bank of thrusters.

Petering out, troops continued to emerge from the dark hatchway, and he stared dumbly as a verdant green energy bolt splashed against the chest of one of them, the man flying back into the dropship like a ragdoll, the other troops stepping round or jumping over their fallen comrade like river water jumping over half-submerged rocks.

Don't just stand there, seek cover! flashed up before his eyes and stayed there, and it was a moment of staring at the aurabesh, before he realised the words had flashed up inside his helmet, behind the polarised lenses.

The ground erupted with explosions not too far from him, shaking the ground underfoot, and showering him with dirt and pebbles that he heard and felt through his helmet.

Beyond the slightly tranlucent wording, the Imperial Dropship Transport rose fast on a cloud of displaced dirt, suddenly intersecting with an energy bolt more powerful than the one that took out his fellow trooper, and exploded, the back blast throwing him onto his back.

His breath sounded harsh inside his helmet, in, out, in, out, till it was all that he could hear.

Your memory has gone, but only temporary, Kitten.

Laying on his back, dis-oriented and confused, his focus was on the words floating before his eyes, while his thoughts ran a mile a minute. Kitten? What am I, a Trianni? I didn't know there were Trianni stormtroopers! And what about the tail?

First up, you are not an Imperial Stormtrooper. I will repeat that for the cheap seats; You. Are. Not. A. Stormtrooper. Now I need you to repeat that ten times.

The Individual's mouth fell open.

Repeat what I have just told you. Aaanytime you like. It's not like we are on the clock here...oh wait, yes we are.

"I-I am n-not a stormtrooper."

This is great, typing crap to cope with any eventuality. Knowing that you will only see this if you fail to repeat the words ten times. I really wish you had asked me for a pony. What little girl doesn't want a pony? I better delete this **** later, cos otherwise you are going to find it all very confusing.

As more words were added, up to four lines were generated before his...her(?) eyes, with the upper lines vanishing as more were created underneath, so that only a maximum of four lines of Aurabesh appeared at any one time, before his/her wide, shocked, eyes.

-ut my girl is smart, there is no way she can't manage to obey simple frakking instructions.

"I-I am not a stormtrooper." He/she muttered, hoping for the words to stop. "I am not a stormtrooper. I am not a stormtrooper. I am not a stormtrooper."

The line was repeated like a mantra, while the world outside the helmet was ignored, and for the moment, the world ignored him too.

"Baille, this is your Dad." A voice full of so much bass that it could not be natural, boomed softly into the helmet. "You are my baby girl, and an SGIS agent. You badgered me to let you volunteer for this undercover assignment. Your memory will gradually return. Your mission is to deliver a replacement data core to the Rebels. But, and I cannot stress this enough, Kitten; you have to be done and back home by seventeen hundred hours."

I'm a girl. That must have been some amnesiac.

"Sweetheart, seriously, I wish you'd have asked me for a pony."

The knowledge that the stormtroopers that had been running past him, were not his friends and colleagues, focussed the mind a bit.

He....okay, then, she, rolled over onto her elbows and knees, because there had been a lot of shooting and shelling earlier, plus the burning hulk of the dropship threw orange and red hazes across the helmet infra-reds.

Baille lifted the helmet off, ignoring the spectrum of smells and stenches that assaulted her nostrils with her first breath as she took in the long red hair draped over the scorched soil under her. "Oh yeah, I'm a girl." Her gaze darted to the upturned helmet. "And now I cannot hear what is going on?" She scooped the thing back onto her head, to find that the voice had gone silent, which was alarming. Had she missed the end of the message?

"Stang. Stang. Stang." She swore aloud, annoyed with herself.

"Okay," the bassy voice was music to her ears, and she quickly choked off her relieved laughter to listen. "-to get the Simply Red dressmakers in town, as quickly and directly as you can. Trust no-one, until you can verify their veracity...oh, right, you've lost your memory; veracity means..."

Baille, as her name was according to the recording in her ear, rolled her eyes. She knew what the word meant, which kind of made sense that her Dad would not know the exact effects of what had been done to her. Trust no-one, he says.

She knelt back and sat on the back of her calves, which her armour, and the undersuit did not allow her to do easily. The morass of verbal flotsam in her ear from Dad included the advice that if she wanted to pause the flow of info, all she had to say was 'stop'. She did so without having to be told twice.

Baille looked about. The action seemed to have drifted away from this spot, now that the dropship was toast, and the stormtroopers had run away.

Muscle memory put her hands in her lap, with one hand feeling heavier than the other, and she looked down to see a grey plasteel case laying on the scrubland beside her, connected to her wrist by metal chainlinks and handcuffs.

Now why in the Original Light did I never spot that before.

It was heavy to lift, but manageable. She felt around the edge with gloved fingers but could find no entry point. Molecular seal. Not for her to open, then.

If she had stolen it from wherever she had come from, she would presumably have had the means to open the case, so by process of elimination, that meant she was a courier, delivering the content somewhere.

She struggled into a standing position, swaying in the unfamiliar pose. Time to get to the dressmakers, which presumably would be in some sort of town. She could not imagine getting much business being located at the side of a highway.

"So where's this town?" She muttered, to be rewarded by an oscillating 3-D holographic arrow in washed-out yellow, a bit above eye level, so it would not interfere with her looking out through the helmet eye lenses.

For now, the floating arrow pointed up and to the right, changing to straight up as she experimentally turned in that direction.

"This way it is, then."

She trotted off towards the treeline, and although still early morning, the light got cut drastically the moment she entered the forest, and she expected that she would have felt a drop in air temperature if she had not been wearing the thermal undersuit.

Despite the holographic arrow on her helmet's heads-up-display (HUD), to tell her which way to go, the sudden loss of light played on her psyche and confidence levels, and she unlatched the strap over the long synthleather holster resting against her left thigh plate, and pulled the E-11 blaster carbine out, transferring the weapon to her unencumbered hand.

Wan sunlight dappled the fallen leaves with angled shafts of light as she proceeded deeper, following the slowly oscillating arrow.

This was definitely some spooky sith.

She spotted stormtroopers ahead of her just once, so pick a direction almost perpendicular to the one the troops ahead were heading, knowing she could rely on the holo-arrow to re-acquire the target.

****
Folic's Town: Population 3008

Operation Follow-the-Arrow, morphed into Operation Nick-A-Speeder as soon as she had exited the trees and found what passed for a highway on this planet.

The arrow inside her helmet had helped her pick which direction to walk in, speed marching along the grass verge, ready to dive into the trees at the first sign of a moving vehicle.

She had found a roadside cafe pockmarked with blaster holes, rotting food still on plates inside, buzzing flies that bumped heads on the dirty, fogged windows fronting the forecourt where she located the http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/A-1_Deluxe_Floater]Mobquet[/url] A-1 Speeder.

Puke yellow, she thought it looked more like a personal submersible than a landspeeder, but the still-working repulsorlift motored her past the city limit sign, and into deserted streets choked with rusting vehicles and overgrown with weeds, and bordered by dark-windowed abandoned-looking buildings perfect for snipers.

Whatever had happened here, had happened years ago.

The agent pulled a lever up to increase the cruising ceiling so she could drive over the parked vehicles, while she kept her eyes peeled for this Simply Red place.

Oh, there! Two hundred metres down the street on the left, she spotted the faded scarlet sign for the place she needed to be, and smiled.

She pushed the vehicle forward, parking it out front, and looked down at the large square pane of ceraglase showing the shop name in an arc, along with decals of a red wide-skirted outfit, and a pair of scissors.
Definitely the place.

The speeder's canopy retreated backwards, and after the trials to find this place, it was a happy woman that unstrapped her restraints, put the helmet on, and jumped out to explore the place, quickly finding the front door to the shop distorted. It scraped against the floor as she heaved it open, to find the ceiling bowed and stained dark with long-evaporated water damage, and holed, something heavy having crashed down from the floor above, and through the floor ahead, both views above and below, stygian blackness that did not invite investigation. A mouldy smell permeated.

General debris covered the floor, and to the right of the bottomless pit in the centre, a chest-high counter had a space behind it for the credit till, and slots in the wall containing folded bundles of material.

The agent donned her helmet, both to protect against falling debris, and to trigger the voice playback.

"Reached the dressmakers, have you? Good girl." She smiled at the warmth and sentiment in the voice. "Go behind the counter inside the Simply Red, and the Alliance will somehow detect your presence, send their contact to you, to pick up the data core. Obviously, they will be wary of meeting if you are dressed as a stormtrooper, so a change of clothes will be in the back of your armour. You will have to lose all trace of the stormie gear, apart from this helmet, though keep it out of sight. I would hold onto the footwear though, as I could not fit the shoes in there. Hopefully, with the amnesia, you still remember how to take that stuff off, otherwise we're fragged."

Harte eyed the sagging lip of flooring between the front of the counter, and the rim of the crater, and did not fancy trusting her weight to it. Instead, she stepped up to the bit of it that she could reach, turned her back to it, and tried to haul herself backwards onto it.

Nope, too heavy.

Leaving the helmet and torso protection till last, she started working her gloves off, then released the straps that connected the armour protecting her limbs, tossing everything into the crater, listening to the crash of them bouncing off something hard and metallic.

Hauling herself into a sitting position on the counter went smoother this time, with the sharp edge scraping down the back of her armour, rather than her back, though there was a brief moment when it dug into the space between that and her backside plate.

Sitting on the level surface, she swung her legs over to hang behind it, and lowered herself gingerly to the floor, testing to see if it was firm, and able to support her weight.

It did, and she unlatched the groin plates, arcing it into the crater, pausing in her stripping to rub through the black undersuit at areas of pinched skin.

Both her Dads would have called her a 'brave little soldier' for enduring all that without complaint, she thought with a grin, then started to unlatch her torso plates, removing the helmet in order to get them off, and laid both out on the counter top.

Despite instructions to get rid of the rest of the uniform, she resolved to keep the belt; too valuable to dispose off, she figured.

She accessed the back plate that normally contained a tightly packed Galostar survival tent, instead finding a black cloth square, and lifting out what turned out to be an outfit composed of gauze-like black clingsilk, over a thicker layer of charcoal armourweave.

"What in the Original-" She had spotted something in the depression that the dress had been laying in, and now she stared at the flat, coral-coloured plastic bottle nestled there. "Mitch, I questioned you over the God of Cops thing, and now I have to question your masculinity. No man would think to pack some Rbollean petal oil. No man."

The black undersuit was sloughed off in moments, down to panties and footwear, the deflated mass draped over the plasteel case chained to her wrist.

Pleasantly scented viscous oil poured into hands, rubbed together and caressed down arms and over her chafed...areas, while she moaned softly in a combination of relief and pleasure. "Mitch, you are a beautiful man."

She was probably safe uttering that down here, but she would have to be careful not to say that around him, not if she wanted to be sitting down during the mission debrief .
How he gained new family members aside, the Twi'lek had fairly conventional parent-child values.

Baille bent down to rub oil into her thighs, over the knees, and down her calves, then paused, her eyes alighting upon the pulsing green glow of the transponder beacon under the counter.

She had wondered why her shins were green, but y'know, petal oil.

"Well hello there," she murmured gently, kneading the emollient round into both calves. "how long have you been signalling, eh?"

That wasn't a classic Imperial transponder, which meant the Alliance, or perhaps an unexpected third party was on their way, which meant she had to wrap this up and prepare for their arrival.

And best to assume the thing had been signalling from the moment she had been standing beside it, giving its owners a lead time of about seven standard minutes.
She had no way of telling how far they were coming from, and she didn't want them coming upon her while she was eau naturale.

Baille laid the dress out on the armour, keeping as much of the material away from the filthy counter top as she could, and noted it was a exotic-looking, closed-collar, sleeveless cheongsam, long enough to reach above her knees, high slits on both sides reached up to the apex of where the costume widened to accomodate her hips. Much like the dresses she wore at home, except with transparent panels between neck and bust, and the armourweave ended a few inches short of the clingsilk hem.

"Risqué. And I should probably put it on now."

She hesitated, noting obstacles to the action. Despite standing near starkers in a place that looked like the local avians had had their New Years Party in here, she was reluctant to touch the dress with her hands oiled up. Plus the case chained to her right wrist meant that arm was not going to be able to get into its armhole.

She eyed the sleeve hole. She eyed the case. She eyed her E-11.

Dad hadn't anticipated this, had he?

She probably shouldn't shoot off the chain, but then she also couldn't attend a meet-and-greet naked because the plasteel number stopped her from getting dressed.

What would she say? Risked operation security so she could get the nice dress on?

"Way to go, Baille. Mum's taken you to youngling paddling pools less shallow than that would sound." A thought occurred to her, a distant memory from her school days coming to mind.

She had had only had a peripheral interest in the flimsi fashion catalogues that her friends obsessed over. but she recalled a style with only one shoulder strap, the other arm basically orphaned outside the outfit on its own.

She turned back to where she had laid the black outfit. There were ornate fastenings for an opening that ran from the neckline to just under the right arm hole. Presumably for any fashionistas with necks the width of a Herglichs, she guessed.

​

Baille deals with her security case​

She might be able to get the case through that gap, re-secure the fastenings, and while that beautiful dress would be a misshapen monstrousity on her, at least she'd be dressed.

The physical hostage negotiation that her plan entailed went off easier than getting the undersuit off, and within seconds, she was pulling the armourweave down past her hips as far as it would go, tugging to release where it was stuck to her oiled skin, and smoothing the wrinkles over her bust as best as she was able.
The padded material was chilly against her, but she reasoned her body warmth would alleviate that in a few minutes.

She had been through far worst predations at the Naval Academy on Carida.

"Hello?" A voice called up, startling her! She grabbed at the E-11, and peered over the counter at the dark crater.
Something new there, the top three rungs of a ladder.

"Whose there?" She called back, nervously.

"Ummm." The voice sounded hesitant. "That isn't the password."

Oh stang, the password! She stared wide-eyed towards the crater, where the voice' owner had perhaps wisely not yet shown themselves. "Just a minute!" She trilled, grabbing the stormtrooper helmet and dropping it over her head as she squatted out of sight behind the counter, bathed in the steady green light from the transponder. "What's the password?"

"The password exchange is you asking the contact, 'How in Oseon did you break your data core anyway? You drop it while cleaning it?'. The correct response in tone and words is the Rebel sounding world weary and going, 'Oh, that sarcy Twi'lek sent you, didn't he?'"

She took the helmet off and kept it out of sight while she rose up again, her back slamming into the wall behind her at the shock of finding the visitor waiting patiently on the other side of the counter, less than two metres from her!

He was a light-skinned Human, blue-grey long-sleeved shirt of a coarse material, paired with a darker open vest, that looked like it offered minimal flak protection. He wore a backward-sloping black and grey helmet connected to him by chin-strap.

From her angle, she could see smears of dirt where detritus had fallen on it, already.

Spotting that helped to overcome her hesitation. After a moment's stutter, she repeated the password she had just learned, and to her relief, the man responded correctly.

"Lieutenant Arachnid Jons." He introduced with a smile. "Alliance Intelligence."

"Baille Harte. SGIS." She stared up at him. "You don't look like an Arachnid."

"Not enough legs, eh?" He looked over the counter, where the inverted torso armour still lay. "So, where is my package?"

"You mean this?" Harte heaved the case onto the counter, throwing up a small cloud of dust, which Jons stepped back from, then teetered wildly, clearly at the edge of the floor crater!

Harte launched herself across the counter to grab at him, her left fist catching hold of his vest, and bracing herself, she hauled him back upright till he could grasp the dirty shelf himself.

"You okay?" She panted.

"Wow, you saved me."

"No probs." She let go, relaxed and placed the case on the counter to the right of the armour, so that the short length of chain was taut between the handle and her wrist, then took up the E-11, and held the business end of the barrel close to the durasteel links. "Listen, you probably want to look away; fire in the hole."

Jons turned away just as the lime-green plasma bolt punched through the counter, the noise retort loud in the confined space, setting off audible shudders and shakes above them from the upstairs floor.

He stared up worriedly. "This place might be more unstable than it looks, which is going some."

Harte ignored both him and it, one-handedly re-opening the top of her outfit so that she could retrieve the now-released arm, and snake the hand through the arm-hole. The cheongsam had to be lifted above her head enough to show underwear, in order to give herself room to manouevre.

Both hands available for the job, Baille re-sealed the shoulder slit. "Ah, that's better." She looked brightly up at him as she smoothed the material at her waist. "Now, how do I get off this rock?"

"I can get you off." He raised a cheeky eyebrow. "Maybe not the planet."

"Ho-ho. Very funny."

"You'll need to come with me. Your un-official cousin is waiting back at base."

She cocked her head and looked puzzled. "My what now?" New to the SGIS family, she was used to the Twi'lek casually dropping the existence of relatives that she now had, into conversation. She did not dwell on this development.

Jons took possession of the case, lifting it by the handle, and clattered a spare helmet like his own onto the counter. "Your cousin. Aurora Cradmoon. She's standing by with a two-seater Y-Wing to take you back. You ready to go?"

She nodded vigourously. "Yeah, my memories have been returning, and I remember it is imperative that I get back home before five in the afternoon. Just let me grab my belt."

The stormtrooper belt that she had decided to keep got cinched round her waist, along with the E-11 which she hesitated to holster, looking at the weapon in her hands. She placed the stormtrooper helmet on which she had been relying these last few hours onto the floor between her feet, and aimed the blaster into the vulnerable bowl, again warning aloud, "Fire in the hole."

pow

"There! What was that?"

Harte and Jons snapped their gazes to the grimy shop window, and silhouettes moving.

"We've got company. Stang!" The Rebel crossed to the ladder and slid down out of sight, while she hopped up backwards onto the shelf for a third time, swung her feet round 180 degrees, and landed on his side of it.
She approached the top of the ladder poking out of the crater.

"I don't like the look of that speeder left floating up there. Could be a booby trap. Call the AT-ST in, and we'll blast it out of the way." A voice continued outside, unmistakably produced by a stormtrooper helmet filter.

"Yes sir!"

Harte was secretly relieved that her abandoned vehicle, which had probably keyed the Imperial patrol to their presence in the first place, was also going to delay them. "Oh, don't worry about holding the ladder."

"No. I insist."

She threw up her hands, "Alright, fine." She gingerly got onto the upper rungs, grimacing as she had to put her hands onto the utterly filthy floor, and stepped down after him without hesitation, while he admired the view. She stepped sideways from the ladder onto the slightly angled flank of a laundrette machine, one of several piled together down here.

"Alright, where now?" She let the Rebel hold her hand to help her splash down into the black stagnant water pooling down here. "Ugh." She grimaced daintily at the chilled splashes trickling down her inside calves.

"Follow me."

They jogged to a parked Gian speeder, an open-topped repulsorlift with a heavy blaster cannon mounted on the nose.

"Get in." Arachnid jumped into the driver position, and slapped the plasteel case onto the seat beside him, leaving Harte feeling slightly miffed that she was relegated to the back seat, as she again obeyed.

A loud rumble sounded behind them, followed by noises reminiscent of a protracted landslide.

"Sounds like they brought the whole shop down."

The speeder accelerated into a side tunnel, rectangular lights flashing past above them as the thing sped along for what she guessed was a number of miles.

She found the cool air battering her face to be quite pleasant, and totally got what dogs got out of this when they stuck their heads out of vehicles.

The route angled upwards gradually and she could see ahead that the tunnel ended in a circle of real brightness!

Baille closed her eyes just before they emerged, knowing that she would have to protect them from the sudden glare, and when she opened them again, she found herself staring wide-eyed at a massive construction site surrounded by high walls and a pre-fabricated ceiling.

A long mottled-grey star cruiser with rounded lines and covered with nodes and domes, dominated the place.
It was surrounded by gantries, scaffold, and various ground vehicles, which played bright light beams over it.

"What the sith is that?" She queried, as Jons steered through the hundreds of people going about their business inside.

"Variation on the MC80 star cruiser, built here by the Alliance." Jons revealed, hands turning the steering wheel to take them under the vessel's huge thruster mounts, which were still a good number of metres over her head. "The Empire has discovered our presence, but fortunately our build was complete. Only thing was that we could not lift off, not without a data core."

"Which I brought along."

"Precisely." The speeder left the MC80 behind and proceeded to a flat area populated by a number of starfighters: Y-Wings, X-Wings, Z-95 Headhunters.

The Intelligence officer deftly steered the Gian between craft, and up to the side of a parked Y-Wing, where another woman with dark brown, slightly curly hair around a pale, serious face, leaned against her craft in a grey flightsuit with white harness straps.

"Ms Cradmoon!" Arachnid called pleasantly to her, then turned in his seat to indicate Baille, "I bring your package."

"About time." The woman gave Baille a shy little wave, which the agent reciprocated, standing and climbing out of the speeder.

​

Baille approached the other young woman, stopping before her and looking her up and down. There was a black patch on the chest of her flightsuit, reading 'Half Moon' in red letters. "Baille Harte. SGIS."

"Aurora Cradmoon. The Mercs." Cradmoon was also appraising her. She pointed up to Baille's forehead. "Look, are you wearing that?"

Baille reached up and encountered the blast helmet that Jons had lent her, "Frag, I should have given this back." She immediately started working on the strap under her chin, bouncing it across the nose of a nearby Z-95, then eyeing the bundle of clothing in the woman's hands.

Taking it, she sighed as she realised it was the youngling-themed flightsuit that Nifesta had given her during her original rescue from the Imperial prison over Christophsis - white one-piece flex-suit patterned with multi-coloured pictures of fruit. Purple ribbed ankle-boots, and a visored helmet.

She was relieved that the Rebel had driven off, and got changed in the space between the starfighter's flank and the domed front of one of the ion engines, hanging her stormtrooper belt on its connecting pylon till she was ready to put it back on again.

Soon, they were both seated in the cockpit with the canopy closing over them, while the craft's pilot communicated with Baille's parent. The ground dropped away as the craft slowly rose into the air. The Y-Wing nosed out of a rectangular aperture in one of the walls, and headed up into a cloudless blue skies.

Baille strained against her seat restraints to look forward. "We are still docking with the Darth Unlucky though, right? I have to be onboard by seventeen hundred."

In front of her, the woman shook her head. "Well, you are not making that. That was ten minutes ago."

Harte sat back into her seat fearfully contemplating the Twi'lek's reaction when she got home late. "I've got a bad feeling about this."

End, initially at 7770 words. I needed to pare down to 5000 for challenge purposes. Grud, that was brutal.

 

I love this challenge. It sets up for some riveting nonstop action. And the initial disorientation of the amnesia is quickly replaced by the mission parameters. Efficient teamwork and code words too.

 

Thank you, Nyota's Heart.

Glad you liked it.

I thought it was going to be an incomprehensible mess after 2770 words were excised from the story, but in the light of day, after a kip, turns out all the down-sizing made for a tighter, more efficient tale.