[Kou]

Jolted awake by sirens and the roar of a fire, Kou started coughing. His face was plastered against the dashboard of the speeder, and blood was trickling down the side of his head. The smoke was thick and Kou was light-headed and he needed to get out, but every muscle in his body ached and refused to move. Swearing himself into motion, Kou lifted himself out of the chair and crawled out of the busted front-end of the speeder through the broken transparisteel.

Kou collapsed on his face on the skywalk and he struggled to push himself back up to his feet and continue stumbling away. The thing was going to blow up or something. That's what always happened in the holovids. He tried to focus his vision and see what was surrounding him. Surely a Red Flare strike team was on them--they had fired on the speeder, right? Or did they?

Unable to wrack his brain to put together what happened, Kou felt another explosion behind him. He hit the ground more out of gravity than actually taking cover. Chunks of debris fell on top of him, leaving welts. He grunted and brushed the dust out of his hair.

Then two pairs of boots hit the skywalk in front of him.

Oh, fuck.

The Red Flare gangsters--a Trandoshan and a Gran--walked right by him. Kou let out a breath into the permacrete and fished for his blaster. He turned to his side and readied his aim with a violently shaking hand.

The trigger was limp. The thing wouldn't fire. Kou dropped it and gritted his teeth, ravaging his pockets for another stim. Couldn't find any. Then a shadow fell over him and he felt someone grab him by the back of his shirt, hefting him to his feet. He stared into the slit-like eyes of the smirking Trandoshan.

Kou didn't find his stims, but he did grab onto his vibroblade. He brandished it and sliced across the Trando's chest, causing him to be dropped to the ground. He stabbed into the Trando's thigh, then fumbled for the blaster in his opponent's hand. The blaster dropped and the Trando's fist collided with the side of Kou's face, sending his weak body unbalanced and stumbling to the edge of the skywalk.

The Trandoshan made a limping advance toward him. "Shit, shit, shit, shit," Kou repeated through his teeth. He couldn't get himself to stand up straight. This was going to take a miracle.

[Catra]

"Ow! Hey!"

Catra had been distracted with the communication with Dabri and Keer and she didn't notice E'cho come up behind her and wrangle the RPG launcher off of her shoulder. She gasped audibly as he fired it down at the crash.

"E'cho!" she snapped. Maybe Catra lacked the killing instinct, but she just didn't think it was necessary to take out the survivors like that. A tiny part of her was glad that he had had the guts to do it, though.

Catra rose from her kneeling position and snatched the launcher back from him. She reached for her bandolier to reload it, then she realized the bandolier was gone. Must have fallen off during the crash. With a huff, she forced it back into E'cho's hands. "That was the last one," she said.

Looking to a panel on her gauntlet, Catra double-checked the fuel supply for her jetpack and warmed up the engine. After moving to the edge of the building, she gestured for him to hug her around the neck. "I'll get us down there with my jet pack, tayli'bac?"

Pausing, Catra's helmet tilted just as she noticed what E'cho was wearing under his jacket. Get it together, you git! she scolded herself. He's just a di'kut in armor!

After E'cho got himself settled on her (and Catra felt very rigid and uncomfortable for a moment), she fired up the jet pack and eased them down to the ground, one arm around his middle and the other holding her blaster out and firing down at the Scourge survivors. The jet pack whirred in protest to the extra weight until Catra felt E'cho's feet touch the ground. She let go of him.

"I'll take them out from up here!" she told him, rising back into the air. She swerved sideways and strafed the ground with her blaster.

Reservations about killing almost-helpless enemies were being dulled by the maiden voyage of her jet pack. Still, Catra felt a weird tug in her stomach with every shot.

[Jenya]

There was an almost silent whistle...
"We've got to move!"
Diving for cover behind a dumpster Jenya was lucky enough that it slightly overshot her follwed by a deafening explosion.

Cover or not she felt the shockwave hit her like a ton of bricks winding her. Coughing and trying to shake herself out of the shock and focusing on what was going on around her, she noticed to things...
One the sound of a trandoshan yelping in surprise, the other the distinguishable sound of a jet pack. A jetpack!!! She thought, a kriffing bounty hunter! Or worse a mandalorian...

Peeking over the dumpster she quickly ducked once more when it attacked a rain of blaster fire. Fierfek FIERFEK!! She had no blaster no grenades nothing...except her grapple hook...for all the good that could do to a flightbound mandalorian...she looked back in the direction of the trandoshan and saw a gran with him as well...Kou seemed to have been cornered...the trando walking with a bit a a limp.

They're gonna kill him she thought, unless she did something to distract them and give him the time he needed to respond. Not thinking of what she was doing Jenya fired her grapple hook at the trandoshan the hook impaling it's wounded thigh. It yelled in pain...but it gave Kou the chance to fight back...she just hoped it wouldn't mean the death of her.

[Saki]

“Jenya, get down…” Saki said to the girl between her teeth. It was a little too low for her to hear though. Jenya got down anyway, but that was after seeing the speeder explode. Saki cover her head and watched the speeder exploded. She rolled out of the way as something heavy landed right where she had been. She groaned and looked over what had almost hit her. Her pride and joy, her rotary cannon… was in pieces. Saki grabbed it and pushed herself up off the ground. She felt sharp pains throughout her body, but pushed them to the back of her head.

Saki focused on the big guy that had just been dropped by the tiny thing with the jet pack She narrowed her eyes and chucked the part right at the man. She didn’t seem too concerned about Kou and the other gang members. Jenya seemed to on top of that.

Red Flare never hit their speeder. The explosion had come inside of the speeder. So did someone rig it with explosives or did Kou forget to check the oil? She didn’t know who or what brought the speeder down, but second explosion came from above, and this guy just happened to fall from the sky.

"KOU!" Grit picked himself up in record time, seeing he pilot's predicament. He made a beeline for the downed man, DC-12 pistol spitting death. This thing was no Deece but he directed his fire on the gran anyway. The salvo of bolts caught the gran in the back. It knocked his foe over, but if it was a kill or not he didn't know. All he knew was his training- and that said grab his wounded squadmate and make for cover ten minutes ago. His head throbbed, and his body ached, screaming in protest. His mando armor was good, but right then he sorely wished he had his Katarn instead. Letting his own wounds get the better of him would have to wait though. "Hold on, ner vod.
I'm getting you out of here." He said making to pull Kou to his feet and keeping the pistol on the trando.

"KOU!"

E'cho heard a voice that sounded vaguely like his own. He swung around towards the voice...

...only to have a large, heavy, metal object bounce off the back of his skull. As if his migraine wasn't bad enough, already.

"Fierfek!" he hissed, doubling over with his hands on his head. "Who the hell throws--"

Lucky he did, though, as blaster fire pinged just over his crouched body and into a Scourge member behind him. He jumped back, sidestepping a vibroblade as it hummed in the air. The ((number twenty seven REDSHIRT)) reptilian Scourge growled and lunged forward again. E'cho dodged, weaving just marginally out of the way of the vibro. Seeing his opening, he diverted the Nikto's attack, snapped its wrist in his left hand, and kneed him hard in the midsection. He kneed it a second time, let the reptile drop to the floor, and kicked it in the face for good measure. A spray of red painted his shoes as he stepped over the Nikto, and plucked the scrap of metal on the ground--the one that bounced off his head.

"All right," he grunted, "Who threw this?"

As he waited for an answer, he chucked the scrap-metal at a pair of Scourge and Red Flare fighting, nailing the Scourge human in the temple. The Scourge dropped on impact, and didn't get back up. The Red Flare member stared blankly at the space, turned towards E'cho, waved, and moved on to the next fight.

[Jenya]

Seeing Kou being swept up by the very military like recruit was a rather interesting sight. It even caused the trandoshan to turn in suprise. Jenya quickly scrabbled behind her the grapple hook was stuck and she needed something to cut it...what she found was an unexpected surprise. out from a shattered crate she pulled out a weapon...none like she'd seen before but it seemed to be in working order. She shouldered it and fired at the trando blowing him off the edge.

Jenya smiled to herself that was to easy. Suddenly she felt a grab and she was sliding forward. FIERFEK! She had compeltely forgotten that she was stuck to the trandoshan and was now being pulled down with him off the edge of the skywalk.

No! No! NO!!! This couldn't be happening, not now not with all the things she had not yet relieved from their owners not with a future of riches and luxury awaiting her.....

Desperately she tried to find something to grab a hold of but to no avail. She yelled out for help, hoping someone anyone would hear and help her.

Grit

Grit adjusted his aim carefully, and fired on the cable, splitting it neatly in a salvo of pistol shots.
"Help me with him, we need to get to cover now." The downed Gran would recover any second now, and Grit was officially up in the wind trying to aid the wounded Kou. This could get bad fast.

[Jenya]

The cable suddenly split in two under the strain of blaster fire. She turned in the direction of the shots and saw Grit lowering it to continue helping Kou...he'd saved her, well then maybe he wasn't that bad after all.

"Help me with him, we need to get to cover now."

Nodding she replied, "sure thing," she picked up the weapon she had been using and ran over to him firing at the gran. One shot got him clean in the head...permanently disabling him.

She helped get Kou under cover then turned to Grit again.
"What now?"

Saki studied the man she had thrown the cannon part at. Her eyes widened for a moment and her brow furrowed. Hadn’t she seen someone who had his same exact build? She tried to think of who he reminded her of. Saki glanced over at her comrades and it came to her. He looked like Grit. It wasn’t completely obvious at first, but now that she had Grit in mind she could definitely see it. So were they brothers, twins, or clones? There was the slight chance that they had no relation of any sort, but something told Saki that wasn’t the case.

“Do I know you?” Saki asked as she walked towards him. She knew she didn't, but perhaps his reaction would tell her something.

“You look familiar. Really, familiar.”

E'cho spun on his heel and kneed another Scoure member, before tossing him aside like a doll. Anger temporarily sated, and migraine at full swing, he turned to face the woman speaking at him.

"You look familiar. Really familiar."

E'cho hesitated, his mind spinning from a thousand possibilities and all ending with nailed to a stake as a deserter and shot at. Pleasant thought in mind, he relaxed a bit and rubbed his left temple through the material of his combat sensor. He felt the bunched scar tissue webbed out from the impact center and curve around the rest of his head.

"I get that a lot," he said with a sad smile. "I guess I just have one of those faces."

"I'm sure we've never met before, otherwise I'd regret having to..." His hand dropped from his temple as he took a step torwards her, and his voice dropped a few degrees colder. "...deal with you. You know how Gang business can be."

Just one of those faces and body types. The topic seemed to bother him. Saki wasn’t sure if had to do with childhood trauma, or something else. And then it hit her. Grit had been in the army. An army made up of clones. The squabbling of politicians had never concerned her and neither had their war. All she knew was the war had none of her interests in mind and that the GAR was made up of clones. So he was a deserter? Good for him. She didn’t care one way or the other. But if she could use it to Contardi’s advantage, she would.

“I’ll try not to take it too personally,” Saki gave him a sinister smile. She formed a fist with her right hand and lifted it up by her face. She moved it back quickly as if she was going punch him in the face but instead she brought up her leg and swiftly kicked him gut.

((OOC: E’cho can block it, dodge it, fall or stumble backwards, or take it like a man!))

[Kou]

The world was a little bleary but Kou could definitely hear the screaming ex soldier in his ears. His splitting headache didn't like it, and neither did his injuries as he was dragged away from the Trandoshan. Well, it was better than being skewered by the reptile, right?

Kou pressed his palm into his eye socket and rubbed, looking between Grit and Jenya. So they were under cover. "We need a ride out of here, is what we need," Kou grumbled. He found his datapad and frowned at the crack across the screen. He spent a lot of creds modding that thing! When he found out who sabotaged their get away speeder, he was going to--

The sound of an incoming speeder was punctuated with the rat-ta-ta-ta of a heavy repeating blaster as it strafed the battlefield. Kou squinted and saw that it was one of their own speeders, in fact it was the ace in the hole, the most deadly of all speeders in the Scourge garage--

Yes. The Deathbuggy.

No one is sure who named it, as the speeder was passed down from generations of Scourge dynasties. But every Scourge member knew when he saw the otherwise sketchy-looking, "Free Candy" cargo van that it meant victory. Or in this case, rescue. And only the most apt pilot could sit in the driver's chair.

One of the windows rolled down as the speeder swung around and hovered over where Grit, Kou, and Jenya were taking cover. Isazu's voice came yelling out of the cockpit. "Get in, get in, get in!" he shouted.

The repeating blaster continued to rain blaster bolts down in an arc to keep Red Flare away as Kou fumbled with the ladder to climb on. "What about Saki?" he shouted into the cargo hold.

More Scourge members were running or limping toward the Deathbuggy. Another door on the vehicle slid open and a Ranat on a speeder bike swooped out and headed for Saki's position. Out of the corner of his eye, Kou could see the yellow blur of the airborne Mandalorian take a shot and go down.

Kou was nervous about getting on without Saki, but he knew there was nothing else he could do.

((OOC: So Isazu comes to save the day! The Deathbuggy is a fairly well-armored vehicle and this time it's not rigged to blow. Try and get your characters on board ASAP, and Saki, you better hope that Ranat can get to you and take you safely back to Scourge.

And feel free to get any last-minute fighting in before Isazu shows up. Good luck!!))

[Jenya]

As she was watching the stand off between Saki and that odd scruffy man who resembled Grit, she heard Kou muttering something.

"You ok back there Kou?" the poor guy had really taken a beating and would need medical assistance as soon as possible.

Suddenly there was an unusual whine, and then the sound of a heavy repeating blaster firing. What on earth is that thing?!
She gave Kou a questioning glance but all she got was a large grin and a sigh of hope.

"I'm hoping you're not going mad Kou, that better be on our side."

It dropped alongside them the window rolling down, Isazu, the man that had hired her for this suicide mission was now here to pull them out of the clutches of death...how cliche.

"Nice to see you remembered us, as the others started to board."

Wait a moment....Saki was still out there, she aimed and fired her blaster near the two in an attempt to distract the Red Flare thug and give Saki a chance to get away, hopefully it'd help.

"Ok get me...I mean us out of here!"

"I'll try not to take it too personally."

She was fast. But then again, so was he. E'cho took the hit and snapped his arm down, clamping Saki's leg to his side. He took a step back, jerked her leg towards him and twisted in an attempt to knock her off balance. As he did this, something caught his eye. Not far off, he watched the sputter of a jetpack snuff out as the young Mandalorian girl took a direct hit of a repeater and fell out of view.

Shab, he cursed.

Before he could follow through and snap the Scourge woman's leg, blaster fire erupted around them, pinging the ground and tossing cracks of the pavement into the air. E'cho released his hold and jumped to the side, taking cover behind what looked like a chunk of one of the buildings nearby. An old hunk-of-junk speeder on the large side fired into the mayhem, dropping down near the girl he had been fighting.

E'cho didn't have the ordnance to blow the hunk-of-junk out of the sky, but that... thing certainly had the means to turn him into a serving of chunky, bloody Byss cheese.