Dr. Corinna Magarin vs. Ranger Kalen Joss

Lightning shatters the sky and strikes the spire atop the cloning complex towering before anyone who steps off their ship and onto the rain-slick landing platform. Kamino, the Planet of Storms, is known for its roiling seas and constant torrential downpour. The fall of the Galactic Empire hit the planet’s primary export of military cloning projects extremely hard, but the Kaminoans remained afloat, both figuratively and literally with contracts to galactic warlords and the brilliant engineering of their iconic seaborne cities.

The initial landing pad is a wide circle designed to accommodate a variety of ships, and is connected to a series of other platforms as well. Every surface is slick with rain, but avoids flooding due to the sloped edges that allow the water to run off into the sea below and away from the center-point.

The cloning facility’s exterior is characterized by similar slopes, and raindrops rapidly transform into steam as they touch against the series of lightning rods around the platform, much like they would if they dripped onto a lightsaber blade.

History tells of the fateful encounter between Obi Wan Kenobi and renowned Bounty Hunter Jango Fett. The doors of the facility are sealed, which means that whatever challenge awaits will have to be faced in the heart of the omnipresent rainstorm.

Kamino's relentless rain hammered Corinna Magarin's face as she stepped off the Palimpsest's ramp. She tilted her chin toward the cloning spire looming above just as lightning forked against its rods. Apropos, it seemed to the Zeltron; the facility's imprint in the Force felt thick and staticky.

"Collar up," Kalen Joss hollered over the storm's din. Already several strides ahead, the human hadn't bothered to weatherproof. His auburn hair lay flat and drenched.

Corinna didn't respond, simply lifting a hood over her blue-violet hair and cinching her satchel's strap tighter against her armor's chestplate. She had set herself to cataloguing the environs: runoff channels carved into the platform's slop, the biting odor of ozone under the torrent, the swaying of structures designed to withstand the planet's extreme climate. Such was her habit as an ethnographer and archaeologist.

The landing platform stretched wide and circular beneath the pair, built to swallow ships far larger than the modest courier they arrived in. Beyond its edge, glimpsed only during lightning flashes, the gray ocean churned and roiled. Ahead of them stood the smooth, curved cloning facility.

"Doors are sealed," Kalen said jolting Corinna from her focused observations. Water sheeted off him in ropes as he spoke. "No welcome party or comm response."

"Someone killed the array, then. Or it's already dead." Corinna fished a datapad out of an inner pocket. The Inquisitors briefing charging them with retrieving some piece of cloning technology or other had promised minimal resistance. Then again, she trusted the Inquisitorius about as much as she trusted a journal article with endnotes instead of footnotes. That is to say, not at all.

"Or nobody's home." The Plagueian was already moving again. Uncertainty never seemed to slow him down. Such a modus operandi proved a welcome, if rash, complement to her tendency toward caution and overanalysis.

All of a sudden, a sense of dread washed over Corinna, almost as though the barometric pressure dropped. No sound or blur in her peripheral vision alerted her to danger; the space around her just seemed to exhale and draw still as the Living Force nudged her into greater awareness.

"Kalen—" she called out, though the man had already reached for his saber. Corinna's hand wasted no time in finding her own hilt.

Two shapes peeled away from the dark to the right of the locked entrance. They broke into a dead run, the slick platform giving them no pause or difficulty as the two lightsabers snapped to life and stuttered against the rain. Corinna drove her purple blade up in a rising arc to meet the first strike, a vitro-edged robotic limb. A shower of sparks flashed for but a moment as the saber shrieked through durasteel, the rain extinguishing them almost as quickly as they appeared.

"Droids!" Corinna yelled.

Kalen's own saber cut a bright blue line through the dark as he threw himself into the gap between his partner and the second unit closing in from her blind side. Whatever the Kaminoans had left behind to guard the place hadn't been decommissioned.

“Ugh! So much for the quick easy courier mission we were promised eh?” Kalen said after cutting down a seeker droid that had zoomed up over the edge of the slightly dome shaped landing pads.

“Never a dull day in our chosen profession it seems.” Corinna replied as the two quickly made their way towards the large alcove in front of the lift. No sooner had the two arrived when the doublewide cargo lift door whooshed open only to reveal two B2 heavy battle droids that immediately deployed their arsenals, engaged their self contained shield units, and began pelting the curved corner the two force wielders were hiding behind with laser fire.

“Ok, not this way. How about getting back to the ship?” Kalen held his blaster pistol around the corner and fired several shots at the droids on the lift without exposing more than a few fingers.

“Yep, we can regroup there and figure out what we just walked into… cover me.” Corinna said before darting back out from whence they came.

Kalen reached around the corner and fired several more shots, “Oh fark it,” he said as he reached out with the force, and with a single wave of his hand, seized one of the B2 droids and slammed it into its partner with such violent force that both friends were immediately disabled.

As the tall, lanky Jedi made his way out he noticed Corinna in the process of deflecting a few blaster bolts being fired from an elevated position to their left. When he got closer Kalen saw a jetpack-clad hooded figure fly off to their west in between two near simultaneous lightning strikes on adjacent buildings.

Just then another 2 B2 droids came rolling out of the alcove and deployed themselves.

Corinna keenly spotted something on the next landing pad over, “Lets go.”

Kalen dutifully followed the purple haired Zeltron after deflecting a few of the B2's laser blasts.

After leaping and slightly misjudging his landing Kalen awkwardly and slowly picked himself up after recovering from the tumbling somersault along the rain soaked landing pad. When he looked up he saw the good Doctor mounting a speeder bike.

“Come on, they're getting away.” Corinna chided. Kalen quickly ran and hopped on the back of the bike. As he did so Magarin gunned the engine. 

Out of a sense of sheer panic, and determined desire to not fall off Kalen reached out and grabbed her by the sides of her upper torso. As she continued to accelerate, Kalen wiggled his fingers and clawed around to the front of her chest, eventually squeezing Corinna breasts. For the next several seconds he held on for dear life. 

As the engine topped out and he was able to sheepishly shift so his grip was around her waist, “Sorry about that.”

There were actually two handles on the left and right that Kalen could have held onto, but Corinna had felt no need to inform him about them as she proceeded to chase whoever it was with the jetpack.

The wind screamed past the pair, raindrops stinging their face as the speeder bike cut through the stormy night. Corinna did not, for several very deliberate seconds, mention Kalen's hands cupped around her chest. Through the bond they shared in the Living Force, thin and half-formed albeit augmented by Zeltron pheromones, the Jedi shared in the edge of her reaction before she'd even fully sorted it out herself. Sharp, startled surprise followed by a scrambling confusion and, underneath both, a flicker of arousal. The potent mix made him flinch.

"You have got to be joking!" she finally shouted above the engine's whine and the drumming of torrential rainfall.

"I panicked!" Kalen responded, sounding sheepish despite the necessary volume as he fumbled his grip to land somewhere marginally safer around her waist. "The handles! I couldn't find the handles!"

The Jedi continued stammering until Corinna banked hard around a support strut. She took the turn sharper than strictly necessary, just to feel him lurch. "I have a fiancée!"

"I didn't think it was a proposal!" came Corinna's riposte through a guffaw.

Ahead, the figure on jetpack vanished behind the bulk of a secondary platform. Easing off the throttle, Corinna scanned the storm for a hint of thruster glow but found none. Whoever it was, they had planned the escape route carefully. She circled the bike back toward the first platform.

The wreckage came into view in pieces: one battle droid's photoreceptor flashing weakly beneath a cracked eye plate, another's shield generator ticking in a diminishing tempo as it cooled. A seeker droid lay in three separate pieces near the alcove.

"So," Corinna said when the speeder idled to a stop. At this point she was fully saturated, the hood of her robe clinging tightly to her head. "That was either a very well armed skeleton crew, or someone knew we were coming."

"The latter, it seems." Kalen dismounted and wrung out his cloak, to no avail. "No matter. We have an objective. Do we chase the jetpack or poke around the droid door?"

The Odanite weighed their options. Both presented dilemmas and deficiencies. "The jetpack," she said after a beat. "They're obviously skilled. They know we're here. And I'd rather not have them at our backs."

With a silent nod, Kalen stepped away. It was as if he'd read Corinna's mind. On foot they'd be much stealthier.

After chasing the Mando (or at least a person dressed in the appropriate attire of one) across the maze of mix-matched towers and platforms that made up Kamino's main landing area, they saw their targets jetpack disengage and the person land on a small platform with a lone Starspeeder 1000 parked on it.

“Does this thing have any weapons?” He shouted into the good Doctor's ear as they saw the suspected thief hurry up the ramp into his vessel.

“Nope.” Corinna replied.

“He might get airborne before we can land this thing. I have an idea but it's risky.”

“I can do something to slow him down, and give us a bit more time, but it will drain my energy and leave me in a nearly vegetative state.” Corinna replied. She was referring to her ability to reach out with the force and possess their suspect for a brief moment.

“Alright do it. I'll take the controls.” Kalen reached out to grab the steering handles as Corinna suddenly slumped in his arms, her head lifelessly falling forward.

As the speeder rapidly approached the landing pad, the oblivious Jedi suddenly realized he didn't have the faintest idea how to throttle down that model of speeder. In a moment of sheer brilliance, or panic, depending on your point of view, Kalen aimed the speeder right towards the shuttle's engine assembly and swiftly grabbed the unconscious Corinna and leapt off.

He used the force to slow their descent toward the landing pad as he watched the speeder bike smash into the starboard thruster of the shuttle.

Not knowing how long the Arcanist would be ‘vegetating’ or whatever it was, Kalen gently laid her down on the rain soaked landing deck and pulled out his lightsaber and pistol and ran up the entry ramp of the Starspeeder, ready for a fight. As he entered into the cabin he was met by the sight of the armourclad Mando individual awkwardly seated in the middle of the compartment with his legs crossed and arms extended in front of him, wrists together, as if they were just politely waiting to be apprehended.

“Well this is easy. Thanks for being so compliant.”

“RRRRRRGH!” The Mando jerked his shoulders as if trying to fight some unknown captor who was holding his body in place.

Kalen immediately walked over to the person, withdrew his stiletto, held it to the person's neck and pressed the button to deploy the poison tipped needle. A few seconds later the man slumped over unconscious and the Jedi picked up the small sealed case on the floor.

As he walked out he found Corinna slowly rousing from her stupor.

“What happened?” she asked groggily.

Kalen helped her to her feet, “Well, I had the speeder smash into the shuttle's engines after I grabbed you and jumped off. I got the cloning tech though.” He proudly held up the case to show her.

“Wait, if you crashed the speeder into the shuttle, how are we going to get back to my ship?”

“Uh…Iunno.” Kalen shrugged. He hadn't thought that far ahead.