| Chapter 1: The Meeting |
| It is roughly thirty years after the destruction of the second Death Star and the fall of Emperor Palpatine. Many things have happened in those years, the Republic has been reformed and is lead by Leia Organa Solo, Luke Skywalker has started a new Jedi Academy, and Han Solo has settled down from his notorious career as a smuggler and stays with his and Leia's three kids. Everybody has grown up, and new generations have began, and this is all well know throughout the galaxy, except in one place. Far away on an unknown planet, far out of the reach of the republic, and old man exits his small cottage. This man, hunched over with age, with his long white hair and his long white beard, walks out into his yard. The old man, wearing a dark brown tattered robe, and using a cane to aid his movement, turns and walks towards a homemade clothes line that extends about ten feet between two trees. He walks to this line and begins to remove some clothes that were now dry after hanging for awhile. This old man stops what he is doing for a minute when the silence is broken by a loud boom. The man looks towards the sky, and he notices a streak of light followed by a line of smoke. This object disappears from the sky in a fast dive towards the ground. Suddenly the ground shakes from the object crashing to the planet's surface not too far from the cottage. The old man drops his clothes into a basket that he had sitting on the ground, then he begins walking towards the crash site. It is not a long distance to the crash site, but it is a hard walk for an old man crippled with age, but the old man will make it because he is determined. As the old man nears the crash sight, he suddenly stops. He suddenly realizes what the falling object was, it was a ship, and there is a survivor, or so his force sensitive mind tells him. Not only does the old man realize the object is a space ship, he realizes that the ship's survivor is also force-sensitive. The old man resumes his walk to the crash site, picking up the pace as much as his age-crippled body will allow him to. The old man comes up over a large ridge, where he spots the wreckage. Then he starts down the ridge in the direction of the crashed spacecraft. As the man nears the crash site, he stops and looks towards the horizon, where he notices the sun dropping towards the planet where it will eventually disappear. It was almost dusk, and night would soon follow. The old man came upon the crashed spacecraft, despite it crushed body, he could tell it was an X-wing, at least it used to be. The ship was all bent out of shape and crushed to the point of scraps and salvage parts. It was utterly beyond repair. The old man walked closer to the ship when he heard the alarming beeping of a droid. The droid suddenly hobbled out from the other side of the craft, its small cylinder shaped body with blue markings shaking with each loud beep it made at the old man. The old man looked at the small droid, an astromech droid that had somehow managed to survive the crash. The man looked at the droid for a second and a hint of recognition entered his eyes. The man stared for a second, then shrugged off the feeling and started to approach the crashed ship again. Again the droid began to beep uncontrollably. "It is ok little droid," the man said, looking at the droid again, "I am here to help." With that the old man started to approach the spacecraft again, this time the droid was quiet. The old man got to the ship and he began to climb up to the cockpit. When he reached the cockpit, he looked inside and spotted a middle-aged man lying unconscious in the pilot's seat. Even though it was hard to tell from the position the pilot was lying in, and through the cracked cockpit glass, the old man determined that the pilot was a well-built man of an average height for humans. He also noticed the man's light brown hair speckled with gray, which made the old man remember when his hair was that color. The old man turned back to look at the droid; "You were trying to protect your master from danger weren't you? You must be a good droid, he is lucky to have you." The man tried to wrench open the cockpit with his hands, but his strength had failed him in his old age. The old man stopped trying to pull the cockpit open, he had to do something, but physical strength wasn't going to work for him. Suddenly the man closed his eyes; he was about to do something he hadn't tried in years. He closed his eyes and concentrated, drawing the force into his body. Then with a gesture of both his hands slowly moving upwards, the canopy of the cockpit began to rise. It lifted up slowly as first, getting past all the crushed metal and other objects in its way, and when those objets were finally cleared, the canopy slammed up into the back of the ship with a loud crash and a shattering of glass. The old man reached into the cockpit to remove the body of the unconscious man. The old man undid all the straps and buckles that held the pilot in place. Then the old man started to lift the pilot away from his spacecraft. |