Star Wars: Join the Resistance: Escape From Vodran
hooked by tales of the fight against the Empire He found inspiration in those old stories He found guidance He also found heroes Leia Organa had been a princess a captive a senator and a freedom fighter She was imprisoned imprisoned by the Empire and enslaved by a Hutt had seen the love of her life frozen in carbonite and her home planet destroyed But that woman whom Mattis saw calmly command and thoughtfully thoughtfully lead taught him to never give up And somehow even with all she had endured even as she fought and strategized and inspired all very serious business Leia was funny When J-Squadron had accidentally shut off the power in the compound just as the pilots returned and it took everything everyone had to bring them in safely Mattis was convinced he was going to be drummed out While they had awaited their punishment punishment in Admiral Ackbar’s office General Leia had come in and looked them over You’re responsible for the power outage she asked We’re the screwups yes ma’am Dec answered with uncharacteristic deference Some of my best friends are screwups she said with a smirk We need more screwups JOIN THE RESISTANCE
around here She’d left them feeling better for the moment How easy would it have been for her to become embittered How sad but understandable understandable for her to lose her fire and grow stern and cruel Leia never did Mattis hoped he’d retain his sense of humor through his current perilous circumstances as a prisoner of the First Order alone in a damp cell on the swamp planet of Vodran Assuming of course he got out alive and had been funny in the first place Mattis wasn’t the kind of kid to get discouraged Even though he had faced a series of calamitous events since he’d joined the Resistance and even though those events one after another had led him to the cell on Vodran Mattis remained optimistic optimistic He’d joined the Resistance for a reason This was part of it He wanted to make a difference That was why he’d left the orphan farm on Durkteel It was Mattis’s destiny he knew to bring about change in the galaxy He would become a hero like Leia Organa or Admiral Ackbar For what other reason had he been imbued with the Force the arcane energy that was created by and bound together all living things The Force was what made Mattis special It was what made him want CHApTER 01
to do more than just harvest hemmel on Durkteel And though the Force hadn’t yet manifested itself in him he knew it would emerge when the time was right It was why even now sitting alone on the cold hard floor of his cold hard cell he didn’t overly worry The Force was within him somewhere Of course the Force hadn’t been much help in keeping him out of this catastrophe and all the catastrophes that led up to this one There had been plenty of opportunities along the way for the Force to intervene When Mattis arrived on the Resistance base and befriended AG-90 a droid with a singular personality who looked cobbled together from junkyard components the Force might have said Watch out buddy The Force could have cleared its throat in warning when AG introduced Mattis to the droid’s brother Dec Hansen who was charming enough to talk them all into trouble and only sometimes out of it Or when Dec suggested that for a laugh they hack the base’s mainframe That the true reason for this transgression was benign made little difference difference Admiral Ackbar came down hard on Mattis and his new friends The Force had nothing to join the resistance
say about any of that before during or after It did nothing to keep Mattis out of hot water at any step If that wasn’t how the Force worked it was how it should work in Mattis’s opinion It had been a torpedo to blazes since then Admiral Ackbar placed Mattis Dec AG and their friends a bookish behemoth named Sari Nadle and a hyperactive Rodian named Klimo under the rigid instruction of a human rule book called Jo Jerjerrod and his brusque Zeltron second in-command Lorica Demaris AG caught Jo communicating with the First Order and assumed Jo was spying on the Resistance The spite between them came to a head when Jo tried to reset AG-90 whose peculiar personality was due to the fact that his memory had never been wiped since the day Dec’s mom built him The fracas had culminated in all of J-Squadron being sent to do scrapping work on Vodran a murky humid planet on the Outer Rim Vodran was a monster-beset swampland once occupied by a nasty imperious Hutt The atmosphere on Vodran was so muggy and stifling that Mattis felt he could cut it with a dull blade The humidity humidity irritated everyone setting them against each CHApTER 01
