The Revenge of R2D3
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …
In preparation for our introductory session of the new Star Wars table-top role-playing game Edge of the Empire, my friends and I had to carry out the time honored RPG tradition of creating our characters and supplying them with a backstory. A younger Rudy would have gone straight to the Jedi, visions of being a super-powered bad-ass ronin filling his head. But at my age I now think it is more fun to play a more unusual character.
So I decided to be a droid. A R2 unit specifically. But not to play it in the logical support role such a character would play. Instead, what if he had aspirations to a super-powered bad-ass like a bounty hunter? And what if his reasons for doing so were deeply connected to the original trilogy …
R2-D3 hated his line brother R2-D2 with an electric passion.
D3 had long resigned himself to his lot in life. Built like all R2 units to thread ships between the stars, he had instead found himself bought by a moisture farmer. He toiled under the Tatooine suns, his circuits overheating, sandstorms scraping, scratching, blasting his shell. But if someone were to ask him how he felt about it, his answer may have surprised them.
“It’s actually the kind of life a droid prefers,” he would have said. “Quiet, predictable, repetitive, with lots of time to think.”
But nobody had ever asked him.
When old man Darklighter decided to close his struggling stead, what with his boy long gone to the Academy, he sold D3 to the grubby Jawas. If anyone had asked him then how he felt about it, the little droid would have admitted to feeling disappointed, even betrayed.
But again, nobody had asked him then.
However, with the passage of time and sand in the Jawa’s giant crawler, D3 realized his life remained largely unchanged. It was quiet, predictable, repetitive, with lots of time to think.
“And I’m out of the harsh environment,” he added to the R5 unit who was the closest thing D3 had to a friend.
“I may eventually end up as scrap,” continued D3, “but who knows when that will be. And maybe, just maybe, if I’m lucky, at one of these sale stops I’ll go back into service. But what are the chances of that?”
R5 didn’t care enough to know or answer. And wondered why they were even having this conversation. He certainly hadn’t asked.
It all changed the day R2-D2 came back into his life.
D3 was stunned to see his brother suddenly dropped into the belly of the very same sandcrawler he himself was in, light years and decades away from the Core world production line they had both rolled off of. He excitedly approached D2 to discover what series of extraordinary events led to this very moment (D3 had calculated the odds as 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056 to 1 against).
It only took a few awkward minutes D3 to find that D2 hadn’t much to say. He would just repeatedly chatter about the same few things over and over; a space battle, meeting a princess, and looking for an OB-1-KNO-B.
“Was there even an OB series of droids?” wandered D3 to himself; his circuits certainly could not decipher that serial number. But before he could interject with a query, D2 would just start up again about his grand mission and generals.It all sounded rather boastful, self-centered and quite preposterous.
D3 finally excused himself and rolled away. Not that D2 really cared or noticed; he had found a new audience in R5. The disappointed D3 headed back to the corner he called home for some quiet.
“We’re doomed!”
Or rather, it would have been quiet if not for D2's gold plated companion.
“They’ll melt us, I tell you, melt us!”
The C3 protocol droid continually punctured the droning sounds of machinery that passed for silence in the crawler with his prophesies.
“Will this ever end?!?”
D3 wondered the same thing. He switched himself into sleep mode, running a background simulation of being adopted by a loving Tatooine family. It was one of his favorites.
So you can imagine the shock D3 felt when he rebooted to discover he had missed a sales stop, his best friend R5 was crippled, and that R2 was now living his dream.
D3 was still processing what happened when the Stormtroopers hit the sandcrawler the next day. He didn’t see any of the actual attack, just hearing the crawler groan to a halt, angry questions about a R2 unit, and the blasters cutting the uttinis of the Jawas short. D3 hid himself among the scrap as the Stormtroopers somehow tried to further trash a junk pile.
He waited until they were gone and a bit more thereafter before he dared to venture out.
The bodies of the Jawas were strewn everywhere. D3's sensors collected in high-fidelity every inch of the horrific aftermath of the attack. All the data fed into the realization of single conclusion.
This was somehow R2-D2's fault.
Cursing the name of his brother, D3 began the long trek across the unforgiving Tatooine desert in search of what passed as civilization on the forsaken planet.
When D3 finally shuffled into Mos Eisley, worn and drained, he had decided on a course of action to bring his brother to justice. The first step was to contact the authorities. He was pleased to see a unit of Stormtroopers deep in conversation heading in his direction.
“… with all due respect, sir,” said a trooper, “are you sure we should have let them go?”
“Yes,” said the trooper leading the unit, “yes, I’m sure”.
He didn’t sound that sure to D3.
“They weren’t the droids we are looking for,” continued the leader. “And the speeder was blocking traffic. We had to move them along.”
He shook his head as if to clear it when he noticed D3 rolling towards them. The droid had a statement all queued in his audio buffer and was almost ready to deliver it.
“But HE certainly looks like the R2 unit we are looking for,” said the squad leader.
Even after repeatedly oil-boarding D3 they still didn’t believe his pleas of innocence. Nor did they have the facilities for more invasive forms of torture.
“But the Death Star will,” said the troop leader. “And it’s Lord Vader who wants him. I’ll take him myself, while you lot follow up these reports of the other droid being sighted about town.”
D3 spent the entire trip twitching with fear, his processors overwhelmed with computing the terrible horrors that would no doubt be visited on him when he arrived at the Death Star. So wound up was the little droid that, when they finally landed and he was marched to the detention center, he took little notice of the dressing down his escort received.
“You took it upon yourself,” hissed the warden at the Stormtrooper.”To drag a droid across half of known space, to a SECRET battle station, delivering it to our cell block WITHOUT a restraining bolt?!?”
“I … I thought you would have one,” stammered the Stormtrooper by way of explanation.
“You don’t need cell blocks for inorganics because you’re suppose to use restraining bolts!” exploded the warden “THEREFORE it follows that a cell block WON’T have restraining bolts!”
The warden lay his face into the palm of his hand in frustration.
“Shove him in a cell while we sort this out.”
It was many hours before D3 calmed down enough to free up the processing power necessary to realize his captors must have forgotten about him completely. His relief was short lived when he heard the sounds of blasters down the corridor form his cell.
“We’re going to have company!” someone shouted.
Then D3 heard all the doors of the cell block unlock.
After everything that happened, there was no way D3 was going to simply roll out of there. That decision was affirmed when the blaster fire began anew.
“Can’t get out that way!”
D3 decided to listen to the shouted advice. He noticed a data port his worry-addled circuits had missed until now and rolled over to jack himself in. The Imperial security protocols were easy to bypass, almost shockingly so. D3 was determined to get some answers. What was going on? Who had unlocked his door?
He squealed when he realized it was his brother.
D2's meddling was all over the system. Anyone could easily read it as the digital fingerprints of a R2 series droid.
Which explained the reaction of the Stormtroopers when they barged into his cell, blasters at the ready, finding him still connected to the nextwork.
“That must be the R2 hacking our system!”
Somehow his brother D2 had escaped. Also, this had somehow allowed the Empire to acquire the information they had been seeking from him in the first place.
All it meant for D3 was that he was no longer of any use to them. They moved him to a surface-level station where he was introduced to a far more terrifying wait then the anticipation of torture; the anticipation of disassembly.
He had to wait many excruciating hours, as all the engineers who could perform the task were too busy prepping the station for an upcoming battle. Finally, with the distant sounds of explosions in the background, a smirking engineer approached him.
“Any last words?” he asked D3.
For the first time in a long time, someone actually had asked D3 how he felt. He began to compile an answer. About how he just wanted a quiet, predictable, repetitive life. About how unfairly he, a loyal droid, had been treated by the Empire — indeed, by all organics.
And how his only regret was that he would never be able to seek vengeance for all the grave injustice visited upon him by his brother.
Those words, and the engineer, were sucked out into the vacuum of space when the wall suddenly blasted open.
Must have been a stray torpedo, was the first thought that managed to push out of D3's stunned circuits. His next thought was a thanks to the Makers for building him with automatic magnet-lock activation at the first sign of a massive pressure drop.
The blast hole actually gave D3 a spectacular view of the battle in progress. He soon noticed a pattern to the approach of the attackers on the Death Star. Wave upon wave repeatedly attempted to run down one specific trench. Curiosity piqued, D3 found an active data port to see if he could figure out what they were after.
Which was when he discovered the unprotected exhaust port that led directly to the Death Star’s reactor.
D3 would never be able to recall exactly how he got off the Death Star. It was a glitch in his memory banks. One moment, he was uncovering the Death Star’s flaw. The next, it was exploding miles behind as he piloted a stolen Imperial shuttle away, a cooling blaster strangely by his side.
D3 had thought he had finally escaped the Empire’s reach.
The Rodian on Ord Mantell changed his mind.
R2-D2 was still running about as one of the Galaxy’s Most Wanted. Given how much the two droids looked alike, this effectively also placed a price on D3's head.The Rodian bounty hunter had wanted to collect that prize, ignoring D3's explanations in favor of what his own eyes were telling him.
D3 thanked the Makers that Rodians were so chatty as it gave him a chance to shoot first.
Still, D3 realized more people would come after him. He was facing a life no droid would ever wish for; violent, chaotic, unexpected, always on the run. Standing by the dead Rodian, D3 noted something had fallen off from the smoking corpse. He bent over to pick it up with a manipulator arm.
It was a bounty hunting license.
And suddenly D3 knew exactly what he would do.
He would hunt down his brother. Learn all the skills he needed to do so. Stop anyone who would get in his way. And finally prove his innocence.
And then R2-D3 would have his revenge!
