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

[gffa_archer]

"You had a great teacher!" Jannah called back.

[nothowtheforceworks]

They were almost at their destination. They grabbed their explosives bags, jumped from their orbaks, and sprinted along the ship with BB-8 at their heels. One group of red-clad Sith troopers engaged jet packs, and lifted into the air to get a better vantage point for shooting at them.

They flew now, too, apparently.

Finn kept firing, but most of his shots were going wide as they raced forward, ignoring everything going on around them but being aware of how much was going on. When they reached the nav deck, they found the bunkerlike structure, built out from the hull. "This is it!" Finn yelled above the shooting.

[gffa_archer]

"BB-8, do your thing!" Jannah told him, whipping out her bow to help keep troopers off of them while BB-8 opened the panel for Finn to plant the explosives.

[tros_npcs]

One shot hit a jet trooper, who spun into the air, missiled into an oncoming TIE, and sent it crashing onto the Destroyer's surface.

[nothowtheforceworks]

Finn was aware as he worked that the thrusters had begun to glow bright blue. He had to work fast. If he didn't, this ship was going to leave atmosphere, which would instantly kill them all.

But he worked fast, and finally he gave Jannah the signal, and they both ducked, hands over their heads, as he triggered the explosion.

The blast was loud, and shook the hull, and lights all along it began going dark. The navigation beacon was down.

[heroic_jawline]

"Starlight, that wasn't you, right?" Steve called out.

[imafuturist]

"That was our side doing that, right?" Tony chimed in over comms.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Not me!" Annie confirmed, though whoever it was -- she admired your work, because that was neater than she would have done it. (Not to mention she wasn't sure she could do quite that much, anyway.) "Sure hope it was our side, though."

This was probably not the good news it looked like, if it hadn't been.

[heroic_jawline]

"Hi!" Steve said, the smile clear in his voice. "You're still okay! You could see that from space?"

It was a big boom.

[imafuturist]

"J's keeping tack of you guys down there!" Tony replied. "We're doing great--"

Ignore the screaming sort of noise of one of those TIE fighters and then an explosion over the comms. "Doing great! I'll get back to you in a moment."

[heroic_jawline]

"Love you," Steve said. "Stay safe."

Well. Safe-ish. For them.

[bb8_dad]

"Nav beacon's down!" Poe yelled into his comm. "They did it!"