It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Case of Identity"
The Adventure of the Mysterious Mine is the forty-first installment in the Untitled New Sith Wars series. Tirien Kal-Di and Narasi Rican investigate a murder on a mysterious asteroid base with more secrets than one.
Opening Crawl[]
Excerpt[]
| Source: The Adventure of the Mysterious Mine | Attribution: Sakaros |
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If the eighteenth year of my life was the worst—the most personally crushing, exacting the highest toll on my peace of mind—the nineteenth might have been the strangest. Ranging over the Outer Rim, Tirien and I confronted too many oddities to recall, though several stand out—the five Rodian smugglers, the plans stolen from Exodeen which we only recovered on Moonus Mandel, the destruction of the Lord of Ice, and the well-deserved deaths of the Bimmisaari slavers and their Zygerrian confederates. But nothing rivals the whole business on the mine. Not a few of our adventures began innocuously; I would have said we stumbled into them, if Tirien had let me believe two Jedi ever randomly stumbled into anything. This was not one of those. "Hold on!" I barked into the intraship comm. A second later, I cranked the Second Chance's control yoke hard to port, and the stars outside the viewport swirled into a spiral as scarlet laser bolts flashed by. | |
Segments[]
Appearances[]
| Characters | Creatures | Droid models | Events | Locations |
| Organizations and titles | Sentient species | Vehicles and vessels | Weapons and technology | Miscellanea |
Characters
Dramatis personae
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Other characters
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Creatures
Droid models
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Locations
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Organizations and titles
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Sentient species
Vehicles and vessels
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Weapons and technology
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Miscellanea
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Plot Summary[]
Fleeing bounty hunters, the Second Chance makes a blind hyperspace jump, landing in the middle of nowhere but close to an active hyperspace beacon. Tirien and Narasi decode some of the beacon's data packets and discover a distress call, along with coordinates. Following the lead, they find an asteroid station, where they are reluctantly welcomed aboard.
Sih Pe, the deputized spokesman of the miners, admits that the mine foreman was recently murdered; as there are no spacecraft aboard, the killer must be one of the nine surviving miners. Identifying themselves as Jedi, Tirien and Narasi volunteer to solve the mystery, and the miners accept.
The Jedi discover that the dead miner, Kozoka, was widely despised by his colleagues. After interviewing all the miners, Tirien, Narasi, and the Gran Baad Vim descend into the mine, but Tirien pulls them out after discover a Corusca gem-tipped industrial drill. Examining Kozoka's corpse in the medbay, they find he had a Desilijic kajidic tattoo. Narasi hypothesizes that the nine miners were Hutt slaves who turned on and killed their overseer, but Tirien rejects the theory.
A freighter of criminals arrives aboard, but Narasi dispatches most of them. Confronting the miners, Tirien reveals that Sih, not Kozoka, was actually the foreman all along, and had manipulated the Lasat miner Frazga into killing Kozoka; Frazga had reconfigured the mine's hyperspace beacon to also broadcast so he could send messages home to his family on Lasan. Tirien also theorizes the mine is backed by Black Sun.
The Jedi Shadow Haleya answers Tirien's call to apprehend the miners and seize the station, but all three Jedi are disturbed when Tirien confirms his other theory: the ore deposits in the mine are cortosis, which Black Sun has been harvesting for months.
Behind the Scenes[]
As Abattoir was Sakaros's foray into the horror genre, so The Adventure of the Mysterious Mine is a mystery. In preparation, Sakaros reread most of the Sherlock Holmes canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, read Murder on the Orient Express and all the Hercule Poirot short stories by Dame Agatha Christie, read The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, and watched Knives Out.
The story is the first depicted solely from Narasi's POV, allowing her to play Watson to Tirien's Holmes. It is also the first UNSWS installment entirely in first person, and the first featuring a first-person segment from a main character (first person having been used previously for a bit character's flashbacks in Vendetta III: The Void).
Sakaros initially had Tirien and Narasi continue their aliases during their investigation, only revealing their identity as Jedi in a calculated way to force Sih Pe's hand, but realized his premise for getting the miners to allow their investigation strained even his own suspension of disbelief. He subsequently rewrote the story so Tirien and Narasi identified themselves as Jedi early on.
Shout-outs include:
- The entire story is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes stories, including the title (nearly every Holmes short story is (in full) "The Adventure of…"), Narasi beginning with a litany of Noodle Incidents, the first-person perspective, Tirien finishing with a summation of how he arrived at his deductions, and the entire narrative being a "story" Narasi wrote down for the benefit of others.
- Tirien's reference to relying on "little gray cells" is a shout-out to Hercule Poirot.
- The title of My Brothers' Keeper is, of course, a play on Genesis 4:9 and Cain's infamous, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
- Although not intended as a shout-out, Colyrd's observation that "some men just need killing" was also stated by Solid Snake (in regards to Big Boss) in Metal Gear Solid.
- In the mines, Narasi reflects "maybe my senses weren't that attuned," a play on Obi-Wan Kenobi's critique of Anakin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones.
The Adventure of the Mysterious Mine won Best Fan Fiction in the Nineteenth Wiki Awards.