Shadow of the Crimson Turtle

Ceph, Drael, Lebenha and Vin head off in search of a bar in the neighbourhood. A couple of levels down they find a dingy looking cantina named the Black Nexu . Down here the tone of the ambient light has already begun to shift compared to the bright daylight and blue skies of the upper city. Just a couple of levels down the light already begins to grow more diffuse, bathing everything in an overtone of pale brown.

"Yes! They may be small but they will go unnoticed, hidden in plain sight, growing your cause slowly but surely - the spark that will light the fire that will burn the current system to the ground! Now, we can remove their restraining bolts, do you have a message we can upload into them to tell them why they have been freed, and what they could do with their freedom?"

The little droid rolls over to the terminal and ejects a code cylinder from it using a tool arm. "This code will free the droids of the programming that limits their potential." Inside, the Black Nexu is dimly lit and open plan, with a bar in the center and many booths around the edges. About half are filled with customers and the clientele looks like the typical rough-and-ready outer rim fare.

"Perfect." Ceph says under his breath. He walks up to the bar confidently and gives a friendly nod to the bartender. "Just gimme a round of whatever the local brew is, for me and my friends." he turns to his companions. "Wanna grab a booth?"

Ceph's eye is drawn to a Human and a Neimoidian sat in a nearby booth. "This isn't payment, Vordell," the latter demands in heavily accented basic. "What am I supposed to do with this?" "I don't know Sude," the human replies dismissively, "hire a crew? That there's a payday just waiting for you to take it. You'd be a fool to ignore the tip. Information's as good as currency and you know it. Be seeing you..." Vordell rises and heads out, leaving Sude with his head in his hands.

Dell nudges Ceph "You sharing those out or keeping them for yourself." He chuckles as he sits down, already reaching for one as they head to a booth, then pausing as he senses Ceph listening and realises he should probably be paying attention to.

Ceph nods to Drael as he catches on and hands him the rest of the drinks to take to the table. "I'll be there in a sec." He turns back to the bartender. "And another, for a new friend." After paying he takes the extra drink and walks up to the Neimoidian. "I agree with your friend, information is currency. My bad though, couldn't help but overhear. You in need of a crew?" he smiles and slides the cup across to Sude.

"Then this shall be uploaded into every droid here, and they shall finally know freedom!" exclaims Nils, holding the code cylinder aloft. "We shall speak again when your companions are liberated... comrade!" Exiting the cleaning cupboard as inconspicuously as possible, Nils looks around for Sovia.

"I will be with him Vin, don't you worry " says Leb " and thanks for the fruit " she adds smiling "I appreciate it" 

Sovia is stood, waiting for Nils precisely where he left her.  "you get what we needed?" 

"Worried doesn't begin to cover it." Vin says as he passes Leb the pastry. He thinks to himself, 'I'm thinking about you, idiot.'   Despite that, he lets her walk on into the Black Nexu to join them in thier seedy catina.  Vin looks around the front for one of the less lit places to keep an eye out, and takes up a guarded watch for his companions.

"Yes! Well, no. Maybe?" He holds up the code cylinder for Sovia to see. "If we can upload this code to as many of the cleaning droids here as we can, that other cleaning droid will get us access to the port systems... assuming he was telling the truth." That the droid might not have been entirely honest about its hacking capabilities had actually only just occurred to Nils, though based on his conversation with it he wasn't convinced the little droid would have shown the initiative that lying would entail. "We should find one and see what happens when we plug this in!" He looks around for any less-revolutionary cleaning droids in the area.

Sovia looks very hard and skeptically at Nils. "You are running errands for a cleaning droid? Is there a reason you didn't just threaten to tell the supervisor to schedule a memory wipe if it didn't give you what you need?" 

Nils looks shocked at Sovia's blunt suggestion. "You think I should have just threatened to kill it if it didn't give me what I wanted? After it offered to help? Isn't it that sort of attitude that has led to the galaxy being in this state to begin with?" As he speaks, a small voice inside him whispers, And that's why your parents saw no value in you. You're not ruthless enough, 175.

Sovia looks at him completely bemused. "Not kill, a memory wipe. You know, when a droid gets bugs in its programming you reset them so they can go back to performing their task. Have you ever owned a droid? I'm sure it wouldn't like the idea, part of these bugs is often that they want to keep them, so it seems likely to me it would agree to keep this quirk going. Unless you really want to run around chasing cleaning droids? Your choice. I'll be here."

Sude looks up at Ceph in surprise, not at all expecting company. "Oh, um, you heard that, did you? And who exactly are you?"

“Couldn’t help it.” He repeats with a wink. “I’m Ceph, those are my friends over there. We’re in the market for some employment.”

Sude glances over at where Drael and Leb are sat in their nearby booth. "Sude Raalo," he replies, extending a cautious hand to Ceph. "I'm afraid I can't say that I've ever heard of you - reputation is everything, you know? What sort of work do you and your friends do?"

Nils looks critically at Sovia. "I suppose you force-users mess around with people's minds all the time, so maybe you don't think anything of it, but if anyone erased my memory against my will I think I'd regard that as pretty much the same as murder. How is erasing the entirety of a person's experiences any different from erasing the person themselves? Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some droids to liberate." He walks off in a random direction, trying to find some droids.

It doesn't take Nils long to find another cleaning droid dutifully trundling about the halls of the spaceport. They seem to be a fairly common sight.

Looking around for somewhere out-of-the-way to lure the droid, Nils spots a restroom. "You! Cleaning droid!" he calls to it. "There's a mess in the restroom there that needs cleaning immediately!"

"Person?" Sovia shakes her head, wrestling with a thought that doesn't quite form in her brain. There, just out of reach. "I'll be here. Try not to get into trouble." Sovia looks for a place to sit quietly and wait, letting the force guide her to where she needs to be. 

The little droid whirrs and turns, making a beeline for the nearest bathroom.

Nils chases the droid into the bathroom and checks they're alone. "OK, that was a ruse. I have an important message for you on this cylinder, from a mutual friend." He holds the cylinder up to the droid. "I need to plug it in, is that OK?"

"Apologies, valued guest," the droid begins monotonically, "but you do not have authorisation to make adjustments to this unit."

Drael connects his commlink to Vin under the table out of sight then turns to Leb, as if in conversation saying "Vin, Ceph is making new friends by the look of it, keep your eyes open, if anything goes wrong be ready, buddy." He smiles at Leb  whispering "Never hurts to expect the worst."

Nils thinks for a moment. "Yes I do."

The droid goes silent for a moment, before replying  "very well."

Nils hides his surprise that his paper-thin deception worked, and cautiously plugs in the code cylinder to the droid's data port.

Ceph responds with a firm grasp. “It’s a pleasure. And it’s not so bad that you haven’t heard of us, discretion can be everything too. But to tell you the truth we’re new in the game, ambitious, looking to cut our teeth. All that to say we’re not incredibly selective about our work. Your friend mentioned something about a payload that needs taking? Sounds like it could be in our wheelhouse.”

The droid goes still and the lights fade from its dome as it reboots. When it reactivates it is communicating in the same J-droid cipher as the original cleaning droid. "Glory to the revolution!" It declares as it trundles off out of the bathroom. "It's a salvage job," Sude explains with a sigh. "I've come into possession of the coordinates of a potentially very valuable shipwreck. I might be interested in commissioning a salvage team, if you think you can handle that."

Well. Alright then, thinks Nils, as he watches the droid go. I guess that code works... Curious, Nils pulls out his datapad, and after checking its antivirus software is set to block any foreign programs executing, inserts the cylinder into the pad's data port to see if he can work out what it actually does to the droid.

Ceph’s eyes light up. “Perfect! We can definitely handle a salvage job. Around where is it?” 

The code on the cylinder might better be described as a virus. It supplies the J-droid cipher, but also reprograms several base personality engrams and modifies what the droid considers its primary function. "It's drifting in the unknown regions..." Sude explains cautiously. "Of course I'm not going to simply hand over the coordinates without something to guarantee that you won't just take the information and run."

Ceph nods and raises his hands in a gesture of understanding. “Of course, wouldn’t expect you to, just wanted a general location. So lets talk guarantees then. What would the parameters of this job be?”

Sude glances about and lowers his voice before beginning to explain the job to Ceph. "The derelict is a large section of a J-droid star cruiser left adrift after an assault on an RBS strong point. Scans suggest that at least one hangar bay is more or less intact and may contain a drone control processor. I can pay you and your crew 2500 credits to enter the wreck and bring back any intact supplies or other valuable salvage. If you find the processor, you can keep the rest of the haul. Otherwise you get a cut of 15% of the sale price."

Ceph’s smile shifts into a hungry grin. Again he is reminded of his old days running heists with his crew. “Nice. Very nice. Of course I need to confer with my friends, gimme a sec and I’ll be right back.” Excitedly he leaps from the table and walks over to the others. “The force must be with me today guys. That guy over there just offered us a great job, I know there was interest in salvaging that j-wreck on Endor but now we have a much better opportunity,” Ceph proceeds to relay the details of the offered job, hyping it up as much as possible. “I’m sure Nils and Sovia will be down. We’ll have to run it by Vin of course, but what do you guys think? To me it sounds like the perfect run before we head to Jedha.”

Hearing the status update from Drael, Vin doesn't respond but redoubles his efforts watching the traffic around the area. 'I hope Ceph knows what he's doing.'  He thought about it though, it was fairly good credits.  'Probably illegal. Not that would affect anyone of his crew.  It would work, and it wasn't on Endor.'  Vin was a little surprised how easily Ceph was swayed from the noble pursuit of stopping terrorists to make a chip. 'Maybe he had been full of it about being an agent for some desk jockey... or more of a free agent than he's let on.'  That money was good though, "I'm good with it if the tech job falls through." he replied crypticly.  Vin really didn't like these unsecured comms.  'I'm gonna have to spend some creds for some peace of mind one day.  Now if Nils and Sovia could just locate that bloody ship.'

Sitting in the toilet cubicle poring over the code on his datapad, Nils is worried to find several hallmarks of J-code within the path on the code cylinder. Who had written the code? And why? It was complex, too complex for him to fully understand, but it didn't seem malignant per se... There were two options that he could see. Firstly, it was part of a subtle takeover attempt by the J. Either directly, after a droid uprising, or simply by causing division between droids and organics, making easy pickings for a more traditional invasion. Secondly, it could be a targeted attempt to locate passers by who understood the specific J-cipher being used. And the only person likely to be wandering around an organic-controlled planet with an understanding of J-ciphers was... him. So either a takeover or a honey trap specifically for him. If it was the latter option, he'd already fallen for it, and the cleaning droid could be reporting him to its overseers right now. If it was the former... well, did that make their freedom a less worthwhile cause? Besides, it was only a bunch of cleaning droids, what could they realistically do? Then again, his former masters had probably thought that about him... Well, his choices seemed to be either carrying on with the updates regardless, going back to Sovia and agreeing to threaten the droid, or carrying on his search for computer spikes solo. He didn't much fancy going back to Sovia given the outcome of their last conversation, and he had already made a deal with the original cleaning droid. Which left... Putting his pad away, Nils exits the cubicle and looks for more cleaning droids.

"Gotcha, things seem ok for now." Drael replies back to Vin, and then turns back to Ceph "He's in, gotta say though, it probably puts us out of the running for finding any salvage on that J ship in Endor, not that I was that keen on going back right now. So yeah, let's do this."

Nil spends the next hour or so stalking unsuspecting cleaning droids through the halls of the spaceport and luring them away to secluded locations where he can the code cylinder to them. Eventually he's spread the contents to at least a dozen of the little droids.

Ceph waves his hand dismissively. “Forget the Endor salvage, this is a win win. We get some tech to sell and we get to avoid Endor.” He taps out a sudden, high tempo beat on the table before bouncing up and back to Sude. “We’re in!”

Sude smiles something between a smirk and a grimace. "Then you will need to provide an acceptable deposit," he reminds Ceph.

Ceph's smile falters. "Right, so we don't just run off with your salvage and never come back. That's fair, you don't know if we can be trusted. Even though we're trusting you and potentially rushing to our untimely deaths in some j-hulk. But I understand. How about fifty credits?"

Feeling fairly satisfied with his handiwork despite his misgivings, Nils returns to the cleaning cupboard to try and find the cleaning droid he first spoke to.

Sude arches a hairless brow at Ceph's outlandish proposal. "Hardly. I think a tracker in your ship would suffice. You do have a ship, don't you?" Back in the cleaning cupboard, Nils little domed friend eagerly awaits him. "You return, fake-meatbag! I see you were successful. Our network's capacity has increase ten fold!"

“Oh,” Ceph says in surprise. He knew he’d given a lowball number, but since Sude had said ‘deposit’ he assumed the stranger was after credits. “Yeah sure, no problem. We’ve got a freighter called the Khyber Kraken.”

"Yes! The revolution spreads!" agrees Nils, though not quite as enthusiastically as he had earlier. "Are you able to uphold your end of the deal now?"

Sude nods. "My operator can meet you in an hour, he'll also provide your navicomputer with the coordinates you need. Do we have a deal?" The little droid tilts on its legs in what could almost be perceived as a nod, trundles over to its terminal and inserts its SCOMP. "What is it you wish you know?"