Trading Scars
Veesh, Nira, and The New Guy are a commando squad of three Umbarans, pale-skinned bald humanoids, protecting a space train on the planet Umbara. Veesh is trying to scare The New Guy with stories about times he’s almost been killed on the job. Nira chimes in with a story about the time her entire team was killed one by one by an alpha slybex. Nira hid inside the space train’s cargo hold for three days until a rescue team found her, discovering that the entire train was covered by claw marks. That was five years ago and Nira says she’s had to sleep with a nightlight ever since. “We all have scars,” she adds, but not all of them are physical! Suddenly they hear a thud on the roof of the space train as you the player jump aboard with Theron Shan and Lana Beniko to begin the mission Flashpoint: Crisis on Umbara. “Your lucky day, kid,” Nira says to The New Guy. “You’re about to earn your first scar.” I don’t know what happens next but I hope you the player kill them all.
This isn’t bad, just kind of pointless, as is typical for these web shorts. Given their nature as blog entries written to promote some aspect of the game, I guess that’s how they’re intended to be. 2/5 Death Stars.
Chasing Copero
Theron Shan meets with a female spy named Pova, who supplies him with the location of the planet Copero, a world governed by the Chiss Ascendancy. The Chiss are a blue-skinned, red-eyed race of near-humans created by Expanded Universe godfather Timothy Zahn as the species of Grand Admiral Thrawn, perhaps the most famous character from the EU. Like the Mon Calamari and the Dathomir Witches, the Chiss have an awkward history in EU continuity; supposedly a secretive, isolationist race largely unknown to the broader galaxy, they proved so popular that Star Wars authors would frequently use them in situations and time periods where it made little sense to find them. At this point on the timeline, the Chiss are the only galactic power to formally ally with the Sith Empire following their return 50 years earlier.
Theron asks if the Mitth family, into which Grand Admiral Thrawn will
be born in a few thousand years, controls Copero, but Pova informs him
that they’ve lost power and some other Chiss family is running the
planet now. Nothing else happens in this story except we find out that
the contact who has fed Pova this information is a Chiss woman with whom
Pova is romantically involved. Oh my god, these are the first
unambiguously gay characters we’ve met in a Star Wars prose story.
Too bad they’re in an otherwise worthless short story in the daily news blogs section of the website for a dead MMO. 1.5/5 Death Stars.
And just like that, as quickly as we began, we’ve reached the end of The Old Republic and its assorted tie-ins. Not with a bang, but a whimper. Since the MMO is still being updated, if any more story content is added to this last living era of the EU timeline I’ll come back and cover it. For now, though, this is where we leave Theron Shan and his estranged parents, Satele and Jace Malcom, the “light Sith” Lana Beniko, Vitiate/Valkorion the undying Sith Emperor who might actually be dead this time, and the fractured remnants of the Eternal Empire, Galactic Republic, and True Sith. The state of the whole galaxy is an unresolved mess but don’t worry, all the pieces will be back in the box by the time the next Sith Empire comes to power.
