doctoraphra | Comics part 1

Comics part 1

So far, so good, Aphra thinks. It could've gone smoother, and she's going to have to do something to get back in Tolvan's good graces (maybe), but on the whole, this part of the overall job has been a success. Maybe that luck will continue on to the next parts, but she's not really willing to bet on that. Syndulla is currently safely stashed away on-board, but that woman has probably gotten out of worse scrapes, so this next part needs to get done very fast.

She clears her throat, sitting up straight in the pilot's seat and cracking her neck before keying on the comms.

Here's hoping her smirk shows up clearly in her voice.

"Hivebase-1, come in."

This is going to be fun.

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"Just tell her," the lanky one snaps. The others, the man in the helmet and the one seemingly without a head, are tensely waiting as they walk through the ship. "The Empire's been making mutants, and there's a bunch of them here."

Hera stares at Aphra.

"And that's - you just let them out?"

"Yes?"

Aphra makes that a question, as if the plan she's set in motion does not at all sound insane.

"It'll keep the Stormtroopers away, and if my lot can't handle a couple dozen ravening beasts, then they don't deserve to be my crew anyway!"

Do you hear that, crew?

"Plus it's encouragement for us to go faster."

Well.

That doesn't leave many options. (Aphra seems to excel at that.)

Still, as they make their way out of the ship and into the small, but thankfully empty hangar, "You three have chosen some leader."

Aphra looks back over her shoulder, grinning brightly enough to show teeth.

"They didn't pick me," she allows, very cheerfully. "I picked them."

She doesn't really like when other people make choices, let's be honest.

"Now hold on a second while I get this door open."

Better not to hold her breath on whether Syndulla's droid will be a good friend and help out.

Chopper, however, does roll up to her. The beeping might not be... flattering, but.

Meanwhile, Hera tests her grip on her blasters. And doesn't complain as the others rearm themselves - it doesn't give her much comfort, but she can't expect them to walk into this defenseless.

Hera is too kind.

"Thanks, droid," Aphra says, particularly if Chopper decides to make quick work of this first obstacle ahead of them.

(And, of course, she's also got to get her own blasters ready. No sense not being ready to kill mutated creatures on sight. Honestly.)

"Right," Aphra says, once the door is open. "We're going to head right. Follow my lead."

Her steps are quiet, and that's no accident. The corridor ahead of them is silent, but who knows what kind of mutations the creatures penned in here actually possess?

She waves behind her to get the team to spread out, keeping a wary side-eye on Hera and the droid.

This, of course, may be why she misses the signs of a recent break-out on this hallway, and why the mutant that flings itself out of a broken-doored cell takes her completely by surprise. And that mutant, of course, is not alone.

Edited 2019-03-13 01:40 (UTC)

There are a lot of tentacles. Hera sees that first.

She rolls down along the floor, taking position behind a large metal crate, but before she can aim, one of those many tentacles grabs something attached to the wall of the hallway, and smashes it to the floor.

This turns out to be a fire extinguisher, which Hera realizes as the hall begins to fill with a dusty white mist.

The one time Aphra forgets her pocket filtration unit . . .

But first she's got to get this giant mutant off her face.

"A little help here!" she calls, to both her crew and to her former prisoner (and her droid), just in case anyone's listening.

Then she pulls up her feet, trying to insert them between the behemoth and herself, keeping its teeth away from her throat. There's nothing to be done about the tentacles, though, not with the angle she's got.

Another of the mutants appears on the left, arrowing directly toward the tight knot of Aphra's current crew.

Edited 2019-03-14 01:58 (UTC)

Aphra's lanky crew member sets to work firing from her many limbs, which keeps the tentacled mutant in check, but also fills the hallway with blaster bolts, and little room for cover form them. The masked man jumps up anyway, only by sheer luck avoiding being shot as he tackles the newest approaching mutant, something that looks like a Wookiee but with metal arms and orange antennae and very, very sharp teeth.

Hera's getting frustrated. This isn't moving them forward.

She rolls from one side of the hallway to the under, keeping under the blaster bolts, and grabs Aphra around the chest while she aims her blaster into the mutant's mouth.

"Hey!" Aphra yells. Not that she's not grateful to get pulled away from the mutant trying to engulf her whole, but there's appearances to maintain!

"Watch the goods."

She punctuates this statement by firing into the face of a fungus-covered mutant with crab-claws for hands.

"Distraction and then rush the next door? Because we're not going to get what we came for if we're stuck here."

"Hera ducks under an outstretched crab-claw, while still dodging the shower of blaster bolts above them.

"I think your team could use a little direction."

"Bog! Lay down some covering fire to drive them away from the door! Posla, back him up! There's no time for wrestling, here!"

Those two are going to want to cover each other's backs, so may as well take advantage of that fact.

"Sister Six! Get that door open!"

Surprisingly enough, the crew jumps to obey her commands, though the blaster-fire barrage only pulls one of the beasts away from the door. Sister Six, lover of dealing death that she is, manages to stab another through the heart on her way toward said door.

Aphra, meanwhile, keeps shooting at the crab-claw thing, trying to make it back the kriff up.

"You want to break for the door, too, Syndulla? Six is going to need the cover."

"Chop."

She nods for the droid to follow her, which Chopper does, if a bit reluctant to leave his cover. Hera ducks down toward the floor to make her way to the door, though once she's near it, she stands again, and turns to fire at the crab-handed mutant's less protected back.

Sister Six is snarling under her breath while she fiddles with the lock, two of her arms occupied with firing blasters back at the Wookiee-like mutant and the tentacled horror.

Bog and Posla are concentrating their fire wonderfully, finally pushing back several of the beasts and leaving a clear space along the floor that Aphra can make a break for.

She does, blasters blazing all the way.

It's only as Bog and Posla retreat to that position, Posla swearing as his weapon overheats and he has to pause to swap, that Sister Six stands up with a triumphant 'Got it!' and steps aside from the now-open door.

"I'll cover the rear," she says, a bloodthirsty smile on her face, as the rest of them file through.

Aphra is tempted to close and lock the door immediately upon going through it, but Six's retreat is brisk enough that she only has time to think about it, not actually do it. Maybe next time.

"Right!" she says instead, cheerful and halfway to manic. "Now that that's over with, let's get a move on. The Stormtroopers will track us down eventually, but I think I know a path that should let us avoid most of the rest of the mutants."

Maybe they'll get lucky!

(They get lucky.)

"Right," Aphra says, once they've actually stopped in front of the impressively locked door to the archive. "Well, we're here. Did anybody bring enough explosives to get us inside?"

She's kidding! Mostly.

Chopper rolls forward, grumbling something very much like 'oh, get out of the way.' He plugs into the console next to the door, and gets to work.

Hera doesn't bother asking he can really do this. She turns, listening for a moment for the sound of anything banging through the hallways nearby. And then, when it stays quiet, she looks over Aphra's crew.

"What're your names?"

"Mostly they answer to 'hey, you!'" Aphra says brightly. Then, of course, she waves them on in their own introductions.

They may as well, since it'll be a few minutes until the droid finishes its work.

"Sister Six," says Sister Six, waving one of her non-blaster-bearing hands in Hera's general direction. "Or Six, if you must."

"Lady, I myself am Caysin Bog," says the headless cyborg with half his guts exposed. He does not wave. "And this is my beloved partner Tam Poslo. He's an ex-lawman, which goes a long way to explain the stick that occasionally animates him from within."

There's affection in the tone, which is something?

"I hate everything about this," says Poslo. He hates a lot of things.

Aphra just beams at everyone.

"Look at us, getting along. In the spirit of making sure that lasts - How's that droid coming with the door?"

Chopper blats, and the door partially opens, about two meters wide.

"We should go ahead," she tells Aphra. "And get this over with as fast as possible."

She might have just told Aphra to go ahead, but - she has zero doubt that'd end with the rest of them trapped on this side of the door.

(Aphra would never! Besides, she's going to need Bog later. That's how contingency plans work.)

"Poslo!" Aphra calls out. "Bog! Cover our retreat."

She's already moving to go through the opening, pausing because Hera is still manifestly in her way.

"After you," she says, instead. But she's going to be hard on the Rebellion General's heels. Not least to avoid the last whipping tendrils from the still-not-dead-enough mutant that tackled her.

Lights flicker on as Hera steps into the room. It's not particularly large, and as might expected from a terminal room, its walls are covered in monitors and thick cases holding dense drives of data. A little surprisingly, there's a pane of glass on the far wall, looking out onto the empty space beyond them.

Hera moves to the far corner of the room, watching Aphra behind her as she does. Several monitors flicker on as she passes them.

"I hope you know what you're doing."

"When do I ever not?" Aphra asks carelessly, deliberately suppressing memories of all the times she's shot herself in the foot, both metaphorically and literally.

"Looks like . . . "

She trails off for a second, checking the writing on the data drive cases as she passes them by. "Not this one, not this one, not this one -- Hah! Here."

Two of the cases -- and the adjacent monitor -- have caught her attention, and she slings herself down into the chair at said monitor without a second thought.

"Let me get started on this while the rest of you see about blockading those doors. I don't think the Imps are going to leave us alone in here for long!"

It's good to keep the kids busy during the slicing part of a heist. They get so bored so fast!

The others manage to get the door wide enough that they can fit through, and hurry in as fast as they can. Unsurprisingly, none of them want to give Aphra a chance to lock them out, either.

Closing the door again goes faster, but as Chopper and Aphra's crew work on sealing it, Hera glances from the window out onto space, to a console in the far corner. The monitors above and below the console are dark, but there's a desk with a keyboard, and something connected to a long, thick cable that juts out from the wall. She walks over to it, and that the cable connects to a helmet - it's gray, and a size that would cover the curve of her head, and stop at her lekku. Equipment not made for humans isn't common in the Empire.

"This looks like the consoles onboard the old Federation ship," Hera observes, to... well, she supposes it'll have to be Aphra.

"Huh," says Aphra absently, flicking a look toward Hera and the helmet, eyebrows raising.

"I can see why it would, I guess? Nemoidians had a hand in both of them, and they do like putting Twi'leks into service. Good engineering, or so I've heard."

Oh, wait.

"Nasty practice, though."

That's the right thing to say, right?

"What -"

But she's broken off as a new alarm blares around, and the lights beyond the room go dark. There's only a cycling flash of yellow light pulsing against the window in their only door back out.

"Looks like you need to hurry up," Hera shoots at Aphra, before a voice sounds through the hallway beyond -

"INTRUDERS, SURRENDER IMMEDIATELY OR YOU WILL BE ANNIHILATED -"

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Comics part 1

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