Milkshake and Vodo had departed to see to their own last minute affairs, leaving Leia alone with the Wookiee.
Azak rumbled something about being hungry, and Leia consented to keep him company in the dining hall.
It was not long after that, that Leia found herself seated at a table in the dining hall with a Wookiee who was hungrily slurping down sizeable slabs of meat. The sight wasn't really all that appetizing, so Leia focused most of her attention on her datapad. The Wookiee was more intent on eating than conversation anyways....
First she would have to procure a generic transport ship... her own ship had an Imperial warrant on it, and the rest of the ships typically used or owned by the Jedi would easily be picked out. Then there was the matter of disguises.... as a human she was easy enough to disguise, but how did one disguise a gungan, for instance...?
Leia frowned in thought, and lost herself in her work....
***
Day One
It was late afternoon the next day, and the three Jedi and one Wookiee stood in one of the many docking bays of the Theed spaceport, reguarding a middle class transport ship. All three Jedi were hooded and cloaked in non descript robes; Leia hoped to avoid any and all attention to their departure if possible.
The ship was ugly and blocky, and a dull metallic grey in color... nothing like what Leia would have chosen if she were actually looking for a ship of her own. Leia glanced sidelong at Fraktusk and Vodo, to guage their reactions to their new ride. They didn't seem too impressed....
"Well," Leia started, "doesn't look like much, but this is exactly what we need for the job. Nice, generic, and most importantly quite harmless looking. Remember, we're not looking to stage a battle here..."
They collected their personal things and what little gear Leia had not had loaded overnight, and boarded the ship. The entrance ramp lead right into a small common area, to which was connected an even smaller bunk room and passages leading to the cockpit and cargo holds.
"This ship was designed for only a 2 or 3 person crew and a lot of cargo, so I apologize in advance for the cramped quarters we'll be dealing with. It shouldn't be that bad, Azak and I can just make beds back in the free space in the cargo hold... one of us will always have to be up with the ship anyways, it'll work out. So, welcome to the Flying Nerf, guys."
Leia shed the robe that had been concealing her identity, to reveal a well worn flight suit. She reached over and hit the hatch release, and the hatch slid shut with a hiss, locking them in. A long grinding whine sounded as the ramp retracted, and as she listened to it's struggle Leia tried to not have second thoughts about choosing the older ship to make their freelance spacer visage all the more convincing....
Perhaps the easiest way to put everyone more at ease was to get the old bucket off of the ground and into the air....
"Well, there's really no point in messing around with anything until we get into hyperspace. Come on, let's get going."
Leia assumed the pilot's chair in the cockpit, and Azak the copilot's chair. Leia glanced over at the Wookiee next to her and was briefly reminded of the memories she had shared with Han and Chewie in the Falcon... They had all lived life on the edge then, and damned if she still didn't choose to be there now. In a way, she lived for it...
Leia shook her head to clear her thoughts, drawing curious stares from the other three occupants of the cockpit, and wordlessly fell into the start up routine. The power up process was fairly straight forward, and it ran surprisingly smooth considering that the crew handling the ship had never worked with it before.
Within the hour, they had successfully taken off and were plotting the coordinates for a series of jumps that would make them look like nothing more than a trading ship out looking for work. As the bright pinpricks of light that were stars faded into lines and then the turmoil of hyperspace, Leia turned to glance over her shoulder at the other two Jedi.
"Well, we're on our way..."
Day Two
It wasn't until her watch shift on the second night that Leia decided she really didn't mind the quiet time alone during such lonely and monotonous watch shifts, and she lazily propped her feet up on the console before her. Outside the viewport the turmoil of hyperspace whirled around her, and inside there was no sound save the soft hum of the ship working around her. Well, that and someone snoring rather loudly in back, but anyways....
Leia produced a small holocube from one of the pockets of her flight suit, and thumbed it on. The now familiar schematic that Azakhaban had given her of the discovered remains of the old Temple flickered into existence before her, and once again she traced every line, reassuring that she had committed every part of the schematic to memory...
The plan was about as simple as they came. Disguised, they would go through customs like any regular traveler, and continue freely from there. The only solution Leia had come up with for disguising Fraktusk had been to not disguise him at all, and instead declare him a life debt servant to herself. Unfortunately for Fraktusk she hadn't broken the news to him yet, because she wasn't quite sure how she was going to do it with any degree of sensetivity. Poor Fraktusk. The rest of the disguises had been somewhat easier.... Azakhaban required no disguise, and Vodo would be fine in his regular hooded and cloaked form, with a few modifications. He was not known to the Empire.... yet. And for herself Leia had simply picked out a random suit of concealing body armor with a full helmet and fake methane tanks. It had worked before, she doubted it would fail this time around. The New Order was just too.... confident in it's own power and security to be pessimistic enough to strip search all of even such an influential planet as Coruscant's visitors.
Getting onplanet would be a challenge, but not overwhelmingly so. Once they were there, they would be free to seek out the remnants of the temple at their own leisure, the hardest part of the mission would be smuggling whatever they might possibly find, especially if it was anything large, back to the ship ad escaping with it off of the planet....
Leia grinned, at nothing and to nobody in particular.
This would be.... fun!
