The Limmie Daylights/Chapter 4

The Limmie Daylights

Chapter 4

"You should take it easy today," Millie Braden, the young Human female, said to her Zeltron counter-part Francine. "You just got off of the injured reserve."

"Yeah," Francine responded, pulling the practice jersey over her head. "My leg felt pretty good yesterday. I'm ready to try the full practice session." She proceeded to pull her blue hair back into a pony-tail.

The only two female players on the Chiefs were in their separate locker room. The room seemed huge with just the two of them. But through the double doors and into the adjoining locker room were the males. The two locker rooms were the same size, but this one was loaded with players. Thirteen men were on the team as opposed to the two women, so the mens locker room was jam-packed, not to mention smelly and somewhat disgusting.

Most of the team was dressed and ready for practice, except for the smallest player: an Ewok named Mo Wanchuk. He strolled through the locker room wearing nothing at all. He had the bad habit of always speaking in vulgarities and profanity. "Come on," he said in almost perfect Basic while patting his Devaronian teammate, Ahern, on the shoulder. "Let's ditch this practice. I know a good place where we can pick up some Twi'lek twins."

Ahern just shrugged him off and stood up from the bench, now towering over the short Ewok.

"How 'bout you, Blake," Mo said, turning to the young Human Blake Tuttle. "You won't have any trouble pickin' up women with that good-lookin' mug. You're the poster child for the team, for Sith's sake."

"Just get dressed, will ya, Mo" Blake said, annoyed with the Ewok.

"Hey, did you guys hear?" Everyone in the locker room stopped their chatter and turned to look at their Twi'lek teammate Johnny Secura. "Rumor has it MI5 is gonna pay us a visit."

Johnny was a distant cousin of the family members of Clan Secura. He chose to leave Ryloth and pursue a limmie career. Because of his heritage, some of the other players considered him a "spoiled rich kid".

"What do you mean MI5?" The Rodian rookie Hanrahan asked.

"Yeah, I heard it too," Med Braden said. He was husband to fellow teammate Millie. "Apparently they're coming here to question us about a murder that happened in Aldera."

The players, almost in unison, exclaimed, "What?!"

"The Daylights are trying to blame the murder on us," Med continued.

"Those sons of banthas," Mo commented, shaking his head.

"We've got nothing to do with it," Med added. "I sure hope MI5 knows what they're doing."

- - - - - - - - - -

"I sure hope we know what we're doing," Shasta commented. "With the exception of a couple limmie players' grudges, we've got absolutely nothing to go on." Shasta was cleaning her MI5 standard issue blaster during the trip to Chandrila.

Shasta, Europa and Jace Bont were aboard the Savior of Muunilinst as it neared the planet.

"Look at this roster," Europa said, handing the datapad to Bont. The little screen had a list of Chandrila Chiefs limmie players he knew nothing about. They were just names to him.

"Okay," Bont said to her, "pretend I don't follow limmie..."

"Europa pointed at the datapad. "The whole team is nothing but goons. Meatheads. They all have a violent streak. All except their captain, Med Braden. He's the goal-scorer."

Shasta could see that Europa's love for the sport was getting in the way of the mission at hand. Wiping a smudge off the barrel of the blaster, she said, "This is all pointless. We'll never get anywhere interrogating a bunch of pro jocks. We should just go back to Headquarters and start all over again. Maybe take a closer examination of the Bith's dead body."

"Or hope that Pandolfo comes across something," Bont added.

- - - - - - - - - -

Back on Alderaan, Pandolfo had spent hours upon hours painstakingly going over the video surveillance footage from the day the Bith disappeared. His mind was beginning to wander. He thought about that QUAD droid that Q'u Branch was developing. The droid could probably find something in the video in an instant, rapidly going through every frame of footage. That would certainly cut down on these hours he's wasted sitting in the security room at the stadium.

His thoughts came back to reality just in time to see something flicker on the screen in front of him. "Whoa. What was that?"

Pandolfo rewound it and played it again, but this time in a slower play mode. Sure enough, a shadow suddenly jumped from one spot to another. Replaying it again, he noticed the timecode on the video never changed. But that shadow instantaneously moves.

Going back further to the video from the day prior, he matched it up with the "shadow-jump" video. The shadow moved normally over time in the previous day, which means there was video cut out of the other one, causing the shadow, cast by the sun overhead, to jump like that. But whoever edited the video reset the timecode so no one would notice.

Pandolfo wondered if Q'u's droid would have caught that slight change in the shadow. It would need some powerful photoreceptors for that.

Looking over that edited video, Pandolfo saw the Bith walk down the corridor, then the video was edited, and that was it. Pandolfo decided he ought to check out that corridor. Try to find out why it was edited.

Chapters: Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | Epilogue