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No sooner had the party arrived at Shilley's when they were off again on a chase! As soon as they entered the seedy cantina, they noticed a rough-looking Human across the room with a necklace that was flashing in time with the tracking indicator on Zayne's wrist-computer. That wasn't Captain Verana, but he had Verana's tracking device!

The swoop boss noticed that he was being tracked, and hurled the table away as he dashed out the back. Zax ran back out the front door and rocketed skyward with his jetpack. From his altitude, Zax saw that the man had leaped onto a speeder bike and was zipping away at top speed. He got off one blaster shot before his quarry got out of range. Zayne and Goly regrouped with Zax, hopping on other speeder bikes parked out back to persue the fleeing swoop boss. Thanks to Goly's skill as a pilot, he and Zayne, sharing one speeder bike, quickly caught up with the swooper. When they were close enough, Zayne jumped from their speeder to the other. The driver tried in vain to knock him off, but Zayne was persistent. The young Jedi managed to throttle the bike down, and soon the chase came to an end. The other members of the swoop gang, who'd been following behind, descended on them, but Goly sent them away with a quick Mind Trick. "Go away!" he commanded, "This is an Imperial... thing... "

The swoop gang leader's name was Bim Maldeen, and although he put up a tough front the heroes were easily able to interrogate him. He claimed that he and his gang were taking target practice at an abandoned building when a wall collapsed. Inside the shell of a building they found -- of all things -- a Y-Wing! Maldeen said that he found the necklace in a compartment in the starfighter's cockpit. They were going to see if they could get the ship running, but the astromech droid in the droid socket was programmed to disable the flight controls if it was forcibly removed. Instead, the swoop gang towed the Y-Wing to Honest Ellam's used speeder dealership and sold it. If anyone could get the droid out without damaging the ship, it was Ellam.

Since it was the only lead on Verana's whereabouts, the party forced Maldeen to take them to "Honest Ellams." The dealership was surrounded by a security fence, and consisted of an open lot with used speeders parked in rows ready for sale. There was a main office building, a maintenance building out back, and several other out buildings and supply sheds. They didn't see any active security other than a dozen or so mouse droids on random patrol routes. Goly knocked Maldeen out with Malacia so the three heroes could investigate the compound without him running off.

Goly used Fold Space to get into the office building and shut down the central computer and the power without setting off any alarms. Zax and Zayne entered the maintenance building the same way, and found the Y-Wing under a sheet of plastifilm. It had been given a hideous coat of green paint. Checking the cockpit, they found it in complete disarray. It had been all but stripped, with wires hanging loose, open control panels, missing instruments, and, worst of all, a missing core computer. Nearby, they found a mostly disassembled astromech droid. Zax figured that he could get it back together in a few hours. Perhaps it had some information to impart. Meanwhile, Goly managed to shut down five of the mouse droids and toss them into a bag for Zax.

The party exited the compound, and tossed the unconscious Bim Maldeen over the fence to implicate him in the break-in. Their plan of shutting down the computer and the power didn't dissuade the mouse droids, unfortunately. They sent an alert to one of the outbuildings, which opened up to reveal a slavering pack of caniphants! Caniphants were dog-like creatures with sharp tusks and long, tapering snouts. They dashed towards Maldeen, and Goly saved him by levitating him back up and over the fence. Zayne blasted the caniphants with Force Blast and rendered them all unconscious. They woke him up and told him to forget about them, and to rejoin the swoop gang.

Since it was now well after curfew, they decided to camp out in an abandoned building nearby instead of risking the trek back to their hotel room. Zax had his tool kit with him, and soon got the busted astromech droid functional again. It was reluctant to talk, as it had been through a lot lately, but they finally managed to get it friendly enough to tell them everything it knew. Its designation was R2-D0, "Deo," and did identify itself as the property of Adrian Verana. Unfortunately, its data banks had been badly damaged in the crude attempt by Ellam's technicians to remove it from the Y-Wing. It had very little useful information. It showed them some holograms it had recorded -- a female Human smiling as if in recognition of a loved one, a Morganian female they recognized as having been at Shilley's cantina, and Capt. Verana apparently arguing with a band of other Humans in a dimly-lit room.

Once again, they had only the vaguest of leads: the Morganian woman from Shilley's.

They made their way back to Shilley's that morning, and hung out for a while to watch patrons as they entered and exited. A Wookiee came to work around lunch time -- he was the bouncer, Snufftalon. They took note of a Morganian woman, the same one from Deo's hologram, standing at a window that overlooked the bar.

A little while later the Morganian came down to relieve the bar tender, and Zax made his move. He engaged her in a little idle chatter, and found that she was the Shilley in Shilley's bar. He started asking questions about Captain Verana, and Shilley noted that the R2 unit with him "looked familiar." She asked who he was and why he was looking for the owner of the droid, and he told her that he was a bounty hunter. She seemed to take a liking to him, especially after he admitted to having no love for the Empire. She invited him up to her office to talk business.

Once up in her office, she got right down to it. She told Zax that Verana had come to her a few days ago looking for information about how to get into Moff Bandor's palace. She was unable to help him, she said, and sent him to someone who could: the local crime boss Mosh Pelkan. She hadn't seen him or his droid since then. It was then that she offered Zax a deal.

She wanted to hire him to get himself "invited" into the arena at a party being held by Mosh Pelkan that very night. It seems that Pelkan was a fan of gladiatorial combat, and had a powerful champion named Cromag. The folks in Pelkan's city sector were afraid to do anything against him because of the threat posed by Cromag. If someone could get Cromag out of the way, Pelkan might be a little easier to deal with. The catch was that Cromag was a Mantellian Savrip trained in the deadly martial art of Teräs Käsi and was undefeated in several local sectors. Taking him down in the arena wouldn't be easy, and the difficulty was compounded by the fact that you had to use weapons provided only by Pelkan.

The deal was that Shilley would get Zax into the party so he could snoop around to see what he could find out about Captain Verana, in exchange for Zax getting into the arena and defeating Cromag. Zax felt confident enough in his own abilities as a close combatant that he accepted the deal. He told her that he had two friends that needed to get in as well, and she sold her other two invitations to him for 1,000 credits each. Shilley smiled and told him to make sure that everyone came in costume -- the party was a masquerade, after all.

That night, the heroes accompanied Shilley to Mosh Pelkan's crystal palace. It was shaped like a great mushroom, with the stem being a 5-star luxur hotel and the cap being Pelkan's personal penthouse. They were searched for weapons by Pelkan's personal soldiers, and allowed into the party. Creatures from all across the galaxy were present, in various forms of costume. It was rather enjoyable to the heroes to be able to relax and mingle a bit, but their mission to find Capt. Verana was always on their minds. Soon after the party officially started, the penthouse section lifted into the air on powerful repulsor engines and began to float lazily over the city.

An hour or so into the party, Mosh Pelkan finally arrived and wished everyone well. He directed everyone's attention to the center arena -- the games were about to begin! The arena was a cylindrical room that spanned the center of the "mushroom cap." Party-goers on all levels of the dwelling could gather at the windows to look in on the hosted combats.

Cromag appeared, every bit as fearsome and powerful as Shilley made him out to be. His first opponents wer a Gamorrean and a Wookiee, two species with reputations for strength. The fight began, and the three gladiators rose into the air on hovering platforms. They had to leap from platform to platform to reach one another, and the floor far below was electrified with a lethal charge. The heroes watched as the ferocious Cromag made short work of both of them. They also noticed that the weapons that Mosh Pelkan provided his gladiators were of poor quality -- a blaster grabbed by the Gamorrean failed to work.

With the initial battle over, Pelkan invited any brave or stupid party attendee to climb into the arena with Cromag. Zax accepted.

(Shamefully, I've let nearly a month pass on the session journal. I don't recall any details, so here are the highlights of the last session. My sincerest apologies.)

The group talked (aka. mind-tricked) Alonzo into bringing the already dangerously skittish trompa to the carnival show at Moff Bandor's palace. They intended to use it as a distraction.

The distraction worked, and the party was able to use Fold Space to get inside the palace to look for Capt. Verana.

In Bandor's office they found data disks from Coruscant that showed that Bandor had been in direct contact with several of the Emperor's closest advisors. One tape had a holovid of an Imperial advisor who mentioned that the Emperor as most pleased with the progress of the "Hurlothrombic Generator." They also found that Capt. Verana was sentenced to the "Game Chambers."

After dealing with a protocol droid and an Imperial bureaucrat (the ionized the droid and mind-tricked the bureaucrat), they found their way into the detention block.

They freed a band of pirates, who warned them that the door at the far end went into the Game Chambers, and that no one taken in there has ever returned. The pirates agreed to cover the heroes' backs, but they refused to enter the Chambers.

The Game Chambers were a subterranean maze of rooms, corridors, and traps set up by Moff Bandor as sort of a private hunting reserve. The prey? Sentient beings from across the galaxy. The heroes were told via a voice echoing from a hidden speaker that the maze also contained other beings like themselves, who'd also be hunting them in exchange for their freedom.

The first room contained a rancor, which was released from a cage that rose from the floor.

In the next room hid a female Twi'lek assassin, who they managed to stun and render unconscious after a brief firefight. They didn't want to kill her since, given what they were told when the entered the maze, she was only fighting for her own freedom.

The next room they encountered had a chess-board like grid on the floor and a series of floor-to-ceiling columns scattered in an apparent random pattern. This was a laser maze, and at regular intervals the columns would spout forth powerful lasers. They negotiated this room with only minor injuries.

The next room along held seven NIL-8 hunter-killer droids. The droids were easily enough defeated by the experienced heroes, but this was a more dangerous battle due to their sheer numbers and the fact that the launched missile barrages that independently tracked their targets.

Eventually they destroyed all of the droids, and continued on deeper into the mysterious Game Chambers of Questal.