Windy Gibbons - a Star Wars story
'Create An OC' challenge​

Created from scratch: Windy Gibbons
Where the name came from: Windy - no idea. I doubt it was fart related; maybe it was windy outside... Gibbons - ah, safer territory here. Old white-haired guy, possibly the model for this fella, was fictional retired FBI agent, Augustus Gibbons (hates his first name, so everyone calls him Gibbons) half of author Anthony Bruno's Gibbons and Tozzi' series of books.
Backstory: Our hero is retired Cloud City security. Graduated to the Cloud Cars, then the elite ARS:E (Anoat Revenue Service: Enforcement), retiring post-Empire, when the New Republic donated confiscated TIE Interceptors to ARS:E, allowing them to replace their aging Z-95 and Dagger-class starfighter, fleet.
Note: This entry is stitched together from posts in the roleplaying game, Creatures of the Dark (Always Accepting New Players), and the words of the game characters that he is speaking to over comlink, are variously provided by @WarmNyota_SweetAyesha (first comlink responder); @galactic-vagabond422 (Take Charge Girl), @SkywalkerShine (Miss "What about the civilians?").

****

IC: Windy Gibbons (npc private security guard), Echo Burning store, Worlport High Street
Location: Worlport city, Ord Mantell


The wispy-haired human male, responsible for the safety and security of the wood burning stove emporium, Echo Burning, had his feet up on this relativity quiet day. His tan and blue clothes were worn from use, and he had a blaster in a holster on his left hip.

The cramped shop was cluttered with stoves, heaters, and other heat-generating items, which meant he did not have a clear view of what was going on outside the shop, but if someone else came in-

-as the tearful youngling, toting a school backpack, who burst in through the glase-paned front door, vaulted over his outstretched legs, and crouched behind his seated form, tiny hands on his shoulder.

"Why, hello Timmy." Windy greeted uncertainly, unsure of the significance of the boy's panicked entrance.

The retired ARS:E (Anoat Revenue Service: Enforcement) officer, coached Timmy's Limmie-

The sudden realisation that he had just rhymed the words, gor forgotten as someone else crashed through the front door, a black-uniformed biped, his face hidden behind a polarised black visor that reflected the seated security guard, and toting an evil-looking disruptor rifle. He definitely was not a local.
"Get back here, you little-" The pursuer snarled.

Windy speed-pulled the sidearm, bringing the soldier up short. "Can I help you?"

"He killed Mum!" The boy wept.

"That ain't a gun." The soldier audibly sneered, bringing up his disruptor.

Windy shot him in the face, blowing imaginary smoke from the upward-facing barrel as the deceased soldier fell backwards, the back of his helmet putting a long vertical crack in the glase pane in the door. "Yes, it is." He turned to the boy as he re-holstered his blaster, or as much as he could without taking his feet down. "Right, what's going on?"

"They are taking people?" Sobbed the tousle-haired human lad, his little face pink and wet with tears.

"Who are taking people? And, what people?"

"Mum just called them the Bad Men, and told me to run. They are taking everyone from my street, and shot Mum when she tried to fight back!"

This sounded serious.

"Okay, hold on." Windy pulled his comlink from his belt, set it to for the local government frequency. "Hey, anyone on this frequency, this is Security Officer Gibbons at the Echo Burning store on the High Street. Anyone know anything about people being taken from the poor-" He paused to silently mouth 'no offense' to Timmy, as if that mattered the same day as being half-orphaned. "-district; and killed if they resist? I've got a kid here, who says they killed his mother-"

Windy put a comforting arm round Timmy's waist, whilst waiting for a response from local gov' frequency 1-5-4.

He was only the boy's limmie coach, so not that close to him, but he had been a cop on Bespin Cloud City, so was no stranger to physically comforting victims, where just patting them on the head, and stiltingly telling them to "shake it off", was not going to cut it.

"Eventually, an answer came back over the comlink, an unfamiliar femme's voice. "We have various droid types, crushers-"

What in Flamewind is a crusher? He wondered, listening hard.

"-and a battle droid we're dealing with and some Mando types being led by unknown agents for who knows what dark schemes. We're holding them off for now, as much as possible." She speaker sighed heavily into her communicator.

Windy frowned down at the voice pickup grille of his C1 comlink, thinking variously that it sounded like a right battle in the background; that it would have been handy if she had said where; and that she couldn't have been more confusing if she tried!

"What?!" He responded curtly.

"Not 'what'," Timmy corrected into his shoulder. "'Pardon'."

He silenced the boy with a gentle corrective pat to the bottom. "And where is this going on?" He asked her, thinking that if he was going to learn anything useful, he needed to lead this conversation.

A different female voice answered his earlier questions: "Plaza, outside the main governmental building."

Windy and Timmy continued to listen to the comlink, when the elder sniffed the air, sensing something like sweetspice. Ah, either there was sweetspice in the store, or more likely, the Toydarian owner, a small flying mammal, like a winged hoojib with curved proboscis nose, feral eyes, clawed hands and webbed feet, had returned. Probably through the back of the shop.

"And what sort of help do you need?"

"Lots of blasters-"

"Where are they taking the people? I mean, if they are just taking them to the Scraplands, I have a starfighter to help take down the guard towers..."

"-and we have no idea but, I am working on it."

"Thank you." Windy transmitted, absorbing the information while his boss flew out over the counter at the back of the shop, stopping abreast of him and Timmy, his gaze doing the habitual sweep of his wares, then alighting upon the dead intruder by the front door, then back to him, and then to Timmy, and back to the soldier. "Well, if these invaders are just taking the poor people, amd not touching those with money, or the harming the merchants, they came to the right place for a lack of resistance. Most people here only care about themselves, so you won't get 'lots of blasters'. Give me a few minutes to get to my ship, Ma'am, and I'll do a flyover. Windy clear."

He finally brought his feet down from where they had been resting, and stood stiffly up as his knees re-aligned themselves, quickly explaining to his employer that strangers were taking people, and had killed Timmy's mother when she had resisted.

Timmy held onto his arm. "Coach, don't leave me."

"I gotta leave you," Windy explained, gently.

"Don't worry, I will look after the boy." The Toydarian rasped, hovering in front of the two.

"Thanks Watto."

"He reminds me of another little boy that I used to know."

"Alright, getting creepy." Windy prised the youngling's fingers away from his sleeve.

"He can stay here for a few hours, then we can call his Dad to come collect him."

This brought the security officer up short, looking from Watto to Timmy. "That's a point, what about your Dad?"

Watto aimed a gnarled claw at the body. "Well, they haven't got him."

"How do you know?"

Watto smiled, revealing tusks that had come through to replace the broken ones that he had had on Tatooine, and tapped the side of his ridged proboscis. "Trust the nose."

Windy stepped over to the body, dropped down beside it, and ran his nose up the torso, inhaling like he was sniffing up glitterstim, then rose. "Watto's right; your Dad has been nowhere near these guys; no smell of Guarlara guano." He knew Timmy's father worked up at the stables, and if he had been taken by these guys, at least some of that acquired stench would have spread to the soldier.

Guarlara poodoo was pervasive as all heck.

Departing out the back of the shop, the last thing that Gibbons heard, was Watto asking if the kid was any good at pod-racing.

He continued to an isolated corner of the open-air back area, to a large, tarpaulin-covered object, which was weather and pollution-stained.
He started to deftly haul the material down to the ground, revealing a sharp-finned Dagger-class starfighter.

****

It was a while since he had flown the craft in anger, he reflected as the myriad rooftops passed underneath him, and the barren ferrocrete expanse of the plaza adjacent to Government House, hove into view, its usual mix of fountains and ice cream vendors, marred by someone's idea to use it as a makeshift spaceport!

A badly parked Gallofree transport ship and a blocky, twin-engined Gozanti-class cruiser dominated, alongside a dorsal-finned Lambda-class shuttle.

A group of paramilitary-looking abos were gathered at the side of the Gallofree, whilst there was separate fighting going on between organics and combat droids.

Gibbons looked left and right, frowning through the segmented panes of transparisteel that made up his cockpit window, trying to spot the people from Timmy's district. No sign of them...

Spying old Clone Wars-era droideka with their blue energy shield globes deployed, he was surprised that there were so many people still alive down there.

"Just don't fire on the shuttles," that last girl he had spoken to, instructed over the commo board, "the civilians are inside."

Oh, well that explained a lot.

Gibbons scowled at enemy ship, the beetle-like Gallofree with it's white upper carapace, painted by his targeting reticule before him, and thumbed the Transmit button. "So what are we supposed to do, blow kisses at them?"

Sensors and alarms indicated that the ships were powering up to leave!

"Hey, they are getting ready to leave, Kid. Call it, do I try to stop them, or let them go?" The security officer suddenly remembered that Gallofree freighters, made famous by their involvement in the Battle of Hoth, were piloted from a small crew pod that jutted up from the main hull. "Actually, you know what, frak it."

Gritting his teeth now, and trusting that these apparent slavers had not taken any of the kids up there to show them the cockpit, he dropped the fighter to put it level with the crew pod, about two hundred metres out from the craft's starboard side, and pressed the trigger, a fusillade of scarlet laser bolts erupting from two of his three laser cannon, heading directly for the larger ship's dorsal crew pod.

He scowled out the window at his non-functioning weapon emitter, then looked ahead towards the slaver ship to see his first volley coruscate across a clearly shielded crew pod, failing to penetrate the barrier, then caught movement along in a couple of places along the transport's upper hull where it curved down to the sides.

Surely not. He thought, These things are unarmed...whoops, no they aren't!

The moment he realised that a pair of weapons emplacements were raising and swivelling towards him, he pulled his control stick to the right, and banked the fighter sharply away from the slaver ship as laser blasts, well, blasted past him, skimming past his left-side canopy.

He was far too close to the ground to do a fancy evasive manouver, the heads of people not that far below him, as he skimmed over them.

The targetting mechanism sounded a warble as it found a new target, and he depressed the trigger instinctively, even as he was still moving sideways, his bolts zeroing in on a droideka, and exploding it into a roiling expanse of golden flame, almost instantaneously as it's shield globe evaporated.

Windy steered the ship to put the Gallofree's crew pod between himself and the ship-mounted guns.

"Gold Leader from Base One."

The security officer recognised that being the only starfighter of the volunteer-staffed Gold Wing Defense Force up here, meant that he was the Gold Leader being referred to, and if lived he lived through this, he would make sure to impress upon the rest of the squad that they were taking this 'volunteer' thing a bit far!

"Base One?" He transmitted, warily keeping himself clear of any return fire as the transport and the other ships lifted off, people clutching the retracting ramp at it climbed for the heavens. "That's a bit grand isn't it? You're a watchtower!"

"Be advised, TIE Fighters have cleared the planet."

Gibbons leaned forwards to glance up through the window panes, at clear blue skies. "TIE Fighters, what TIE F-"

Green laser blasts bracketted him, gouging twin swathes through the plaza, and then two sets of folded solar fins, reminiscent of those that the Empire used on, well, their TIEs, swooped past to the left and right of him, let go a missile each, and nosed up in pursuit of the slave transports.

"Oh, you sons of slitches-"

The retort over his communicator snapped off as the fired concussion missile hit the watchtower halfway up its bricked height, shattering it, and continuing out the other side towards the horizon.

The other government building did not fare much better, the upper floors collapsing completely as the areas around the impact spot were pulverised by the velocity of the concussion missile.

"Get your stuff together, we have to leave." That take-charge girl's voice, broadcasted over the government response freq'. "We have a shrinking window to find these monsters and I don't want to miss it."

Gibbons felt a twinge of regret that he could not be part of that, or even pursue those escaping ships.

His fighter had no life support, and he had gotten over here too fast to find and put on his vacsuit, or even do the requisite pre-flight checks on his craft: he would never know if doing so would have enabled him to fire upon that crew pod with all three of his guns, or have picked up those inbound TIEs much earlier, or at all, come to that.

Someone else came over the comm: "B-But... what about the civilians? Will they be alright?"

Maybe if the Republic shipped in some therapists. Getting taken off the street, and herded onto slave ships, was fairly traumatic.

Hovering a couple of hundred metres up in the air, and now out of danger, Gibbons nosed his ship around to survey the scene. Ambulances could be seen nosing tentatively into the plaza from all routes, but not actually coming in, despite the 'take-charge girl' telling first responders what to expect.

He thought that calling them first responders was a bit generous on this occassion. He was a second responder, and he had gotten involved long before those cowardly frakkers.

He transmitted over 1-5-4, laying the patronising tone on with a spatula, "Medical vehicles from Gold Leader. It's alright, you can come in now; the bad people have gone."

"But what about those droideka?" Was the response from one of them.

He looked, nosing his ship down to help. "Good point."

Two of the war droids were still firing pinky-red blaster fire across the plaza, while in an eerie copy of the iconic Lethal Weapon Two holo-actioner, the third, legs akimbo, appeared to have been smashed by a disembodied fresher from one of the destroyed buildings. He hoped no-one had been sitting on it at the time.

The surviving droids were mainly targeting those that had been abandoned by the departing ships, civilians and paramilitary alike, as far as he could see.

"Our mission is to find these monsters, not clean up after them."

Well, you are doing a bang up job, Darlin', he thought, transmitting back to the ambos (ambulances), "Alright, give me a minute."

"Gold Leader from Ground One, hold your position. We've got this."

The very welcome, but rather belated sight of a ten-wheeled A5 Juggernaut thundered into the plaza, heading for the centre, its huge wheels not caring about the fractured terrain from the TIE strafing.

Concussion grenades took out the remaining droideka in short order, eliciting, a moment later, a wail of emergency sirens, and the activation of roof flashers, as ambulances glided into the plaza from all directions.

The End​

 

This looks pretty cool, @Sith-I-5! I'll be sure to read the rest. Sadly, I must be off. But keep up the great work on your stories!

 

Well, this is just the RP posts stitched together, to meet this fanfic challenge, so very likely that you have already read this.

 

Enjoyed Windy's snarky observations and excellent weaving together of posts. You get the flow of action very clearly.

 

Thank you for reading, and for the feedback, @WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

 

Wow, what an engaging and action-packed start! Kudos to Windy on his swift, decisive action in defending and protecting Timmy; poor little fellow, I’m at least glad he has a familiar acquaintance beside him at this rough time. And he seems to have deductive capabilities that would impress a Sherlock Holmes, or at least an amazingly keen sense of smell. Cool cameo by Watto, too; I see he’s “gone respectable,” as one might say, though one can see a bit of the old sleaze still coming through. He better be nice to poor Timmy while Windy’s gone!

And what a battle! Windy definitely has gumption, rushing headlong into it the way he does, even without putting on a vacsuit or running preflight checks—but I guess that too shows too how determined he is to protect the poor people of the city who have gotten so much grief from the invaders. I’m as relieved as he is when the A5 Juggernaut shows up!

Thanks so much for sharing this with the minichallenge and for bringing your readers into the action-packed, in-the-moment fun of the RPG world—definitely a unique treat!

 

Cool story. I like Windy, and I also like the suggestion that, in his own odd way, Watto had some kind of warm fuzzy feelings for Anakin, offering to look after Timmy because, "He reminds me of another little boy I used to know."

However, Tony Stark would tell you that you need to work on your acronyms. I mean, ARSE? Really?

 

Many thanks for reading and reviewing, @Cowgirl Jedi 1701 .

I am glad that you liked the story, and Mr Gibbons, along with the Watto dynamic. I enjoyed updating Anakin's old owner, as well. Weird what ideas occur to me whilst writing things.

I can well imagine Tony Stark saying that. Neither of you would be impressed with ARS' administrative side then, A.R.S.O.L. (Anoat Revenue Service: Operations and Logistics) - already featuring in a Fanon Thread near you!


@Findswoman - Thanks muchly for looking in, and providing such a nice review.

Roleplaying Games differ from fanfiction due to what I refer to as their "dynamic" nature. Compared to a writer's own story, where they control everything; in RP, actions have consequences, and a lot of the world, and what happens, is out of one's control.

On the one hand, it can be good to test one's favourite story character in an RP environment; on the other, to paraphrase an anonymous Imperial aide aboard the first Death Star, "there is a danger".

You're favourite character could end up getting killed. Either by his/her/it's own actions, or those of another player.

An easy error for those new to RPs, and some veteran players if no-one corrects them early enough, or they get too excited; is for them to arbitrarily affect someone else's character by including them in their own update, without consulting that player, and posting it to the game.

In this narrative, Windy broadcast over comlink, "Give me a few minutes to get to my ship, Ma'am, and I'll do a flyover."

A player read this intention, put 2 and 2 together, and wrote that their character actually saw him and his ship in the air.

Now this has consequences, and it is better form to go with things, rather than chop and change narratives, and potentially embarrass people to correct such things.

The consequence here, was that someone positioned Windy's ship over the plaza, before he would have found, unpacked, and changed into his flightsuit; and done a pre-flight check. I worked that into his lack of effect on the bad guy's craft when he shot at it, later; and when the story moved beyond Ord Mantell.

But suppose I decided that I wanted Windy to join the pursuit? Because of someone else, he doesn't have a spacesuit with him, and that Bossy Girl is hurrying people up to leave. Can I get round this? Does he have time to go back for his suit? Does his ship have life support? Computer Wookieepedia says no.

Well thanks. That was taken out of my hands.

When it goes right, the roleplaying adventures of your most decorated and legendary Findsperson, could be more memorable and exciting than anything he/she/it has done in your fics, but, it could also be the end of them.

 

Meh, I dunno. It's better than ARSE.