Exegol preplay

[bb8_dad]

The ships exited hyperspace, and Poe's first thought upon seeing Exegol was that it looked dead. It was the the ugliest thing he'd seen in a long while, and he wondered if it had always been this way, or if building a colossal fleet of Star Destroyers here had killed the place.

And when the ships dived into the cloud cover, they nearly ran into the Sith fleet. It was massive. Their triangled hulls were enormous, but they grew even smaller as their numbers seemed to stretch into infinity.

"Great dark seas," Aftab Ackbar gasped across the comm. "Look at that!"

"No sign of the Falcon or allies," Tyce said from her ship.

"Help will get here," Poe assured them.

Comments

Re: And then...

[bb8_dad]

"What?" All of Poe's relief at getting the fleet back together ebbed away. He couldn't lose Finn. He couldn't. He peeled his X-wing away from the attack and dove for the Steadfast. The ship was now pointed downward, ready to spear the planet's surface.

His buddy had done that.

Scanners were useless in this atmosphere so he was stuck doing a visual sweep. He buzzed a comm tower, now parallel to the ground, and he almost missed the two figures huddling together on top of it.

"I see them! I'll double back."

Re: And then...

[tros_npcs]

"You'll never make it in time," Tyce warned.

Re: And then...

[bb8_dad]

"Trust me, I'm fast!" Poe insisted, starting to turn his fighter around.

Re: And then...

[tros_npcs]

"Not as fast as this ship," Lando pointed out over the comm.

Re: And then...

[somethingwithturquoise]

To that, Summer could only snort. "Step aside, ladies," she said, fiddling with a few controls to reset her portal configurations. "I got this."

Hopefully. Look, she wasn't quite as good as Rick at knowing exactly how to coordinate her portal gun, but she felt confident she was good enough to manage to get her popping through the one in front of her to the Steadfast, her little pink ship bursting out of her shiny pink portal, not even hesitating a moment to drop the hatch and sing out through the external comms, "Need a lift?"

Re: And then...

[nothowtheforceworks]

What the hell.

"I'll take it," Finn said, carefully inching forward to urge Jannah into the hatch first.

Re: And then...

[somethingwithturquoise]

"Just watch out for all the cat stuff back there," Summer warned them cheerfully. "Let me know when you're in and we'll get you guys out of here."

Re: And then...

[nothowtheforceworks]

A moment later she might hear, "...That is a lot of cat stuff," followed by a louder, "We're good! Go!"

As the Steadfast fell apart beneath them and started falling to the ground below.

Re: And then...

[somethingwithturquoise]

Pancakes was an incredibly spoiled feline, it was true.

And with a quick U-turn back into the portal she'd come from, Summer and the others returned back into space far, far away from the wreckage.

If a ship could preen, you'd better believe that was exactly what Summer's ship was doing just then.

Re: And then...

[nothowtheforceworks]

Finn started making his way up by her with Jannah following close behind, and then it felt like he'd been punched in the chest so hard that he had to hold the wall for support.

"No," he breathed. "Rey..."

She was gone. He meant to tell her, and he hadn't. Now he'd never get to.