Chapter Twenty-six

The twin suns were setting as Skeet looked out over the deserts of Tatooine. He sighed heavily, the container of juri-juice in his hand barely sipped at. He looked down at the blue liquid and then out at the suns.

What would he tell Emag? That Arcc Nedeen had found him, that he had come so close to being turned to the Dark Side of the Force? He knew his uncle would fret and worry, would start offering advice and quotes from the Jedi teachings but at this moment he didn’t want to hear about the Force. It had got his mother killed; the Jedi’s wiped out, had spawned creatures like Nedeen and had almost swallowed him whole. He sighed again.

He knew that he didn’t want anything to do with the Force. As far as he could see it was nothing but trouble for anyone who became involved with it. How could anything justify the lives that had been lost? How could the Force justify it?

There was a rustle of robes behind him and he turned to see Emag approach. His uncle was smiling broadly.

   “The presentation is about to be made and Driss wants us up there with him. Are you ready?”

   “I guess,” Skeet said in a small voice.

   “What’s wrong?”

Skeet went to tell him about Arcc and Queed and the encounter in the desert, but he couldn’t find the words. The more he thought about it the more he wanted to forget about the Force and prophecies and Jedi Knights. He quickly changed his words.

   “I didn’t win. Brey’s speeder was excellent but I still didn’t win.”

With a hand on his shoulder Emag turned his nephew to face him.

   “You’re a biker, not a landspeeder pilot. It was your first time and look how well you did. Besides, you sacrificed your win and saved Driss Cotta’s life. What do you think Brey would have preferred?”

   “I guess. Uncle, I’m...” Skeet didn’t know what to say next, confused and afraid of revealing anything to Emag.

   “You’re what?” Emag said, a confused frown on his forehead.

   “I miss my mother,” Skeet said, looking back out over the desert at the two glowing orbs of the suns, red and orange now as they started to sink below the horizon. Emag was confused at Skeet’s sudden change of words and wondered what could have happened to make him say such a thing.

   “We both do, nephew,” he said, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Why did you say that? What happened out there in the desert? Did being here again bring back memories?”

   “Yes,” Skeet lied. He shook himself and downed the juri-juice. “Come on, let’s go and wish Driss well.”

Emag nodded and headed for the fortress. A Skeet went to follow he gave one last look towards the horizon.

He could feel him, out there, walking the planet and plotting. He could sense him, now that he had been in such close contact with him, and he knew he was out there.

Waiting.

The crowds roared and applauded as Driss, Skeet, Emag and Eilen walked up the ramp to the dais at the top where Jabba the Hutt was laid out. The open doors to the fortress allowed the silver moonlight to filter in but there was also heavy artificial lighting within the only chamber of the fortress. It was packed, spectators and team members spilling out of the gate and into the cool Tatooine night.

They reached the top and Jabba undulated forward off the dais. A long silver tube ornately carved with Huttese symbols of wealth in his thick fingers.

In Skeet’s hands was a jumble of mechanical parts with several wires hanging from it and a bulky power pack strapped to one side. Enneight extended his photoreceptor from the mess, removed as he was now from the speeder, and surveyed the crowds, wishing he could somehow physically express his joy at the moment.

The high ceiling reverberated as the crowds cheered and Driss took the proffered tube, bowing slightly to convey his thanks. He turned and headed back to his friends who stood waiting for him at the top of the ramp. As he joined them they all turned to face the assembly.

They all placed their arms about each other, Skeet putting Enneight tenderly on the floor as Driss held the cylinder aloft. As he did so the crowds went wild, clapping and cheering and firing off harmless light beams. Bottles of expensive beverages were opened and showered the crowd, everyone caught up in the moment.

The four friends looked at each other with huge smiles and Driss pumped the cylinder with his winnings inside it into the air again. Enneight bobbed his photoreceptor to express his own joy, finally finding a way to express himself.

Skeet looked out over the crowd, feeling that somewhere in this room was Brey Yard, watching them from wherever he was, a bottle of his favourite liqueur in his hand and a smug, satisfied grin on his face.

Racers Part One – Shadows from the Past

1999/2000 novel by Jonathan Hicks

Six years before Episode IV – A New Hope

Histories - If you haven’t yet read the story of Skeet Jonus and his racing friends then I suggest you don’t read this just yet. There are several plot and design points included that may give away the story and ruin it for you. Take a look at the novel first and then come back to this.

The Concept

Star Wars Racers Part 1 - Shadows from the Past was originally conceived way back in 1997 as a role-playing campaign. I designed it as a Star Wars epic, utilising the classic Star Wars concept to try and inject an original style of play into the games. All gaming up until that point had been in the Setnin Sector and it was my intention to set it into a section of space that was unheard of, interacting with identifiable icons, such as the Galactic Empire, Tatooine and several aliens, and actual characters from the movies, in this case Jabba the Hutt. All the while I wanted to make sure that what I did wasn’t going to interfere with what had come before and the actual trilogy.

I never intended for Racers to be turned into a novel – in fact, after the game was ended it was left on the backburner for future use but the burner went dead. The story of Skeet Jonus was forgotten about until 1999, when the old notes and ideas were found and I decided to do something more with it.

The Setting

The first part of the setting was Raca City, originally named Racer Town but changed to increase the scope of the location and make it sound a lot different than a simple collection of buildings erected by several racers who named it for what it was. The triple-mountain design was intended to make the setting memorable, although it has to be said there was no practical reason as to why someone would build a city into three mountains, much less construct a racetrack around the base of it - it was merely for effect. I always find that people remember locations if there is something different about it, especially when that place is wild to look at but serves no actual practical purpose.

The racetrack itself used to be covered in traps and obstacles that the racers would have to avoid - mazes of tunnels, jumps, and poles to weave between. In fact, this was actually included in the game, which made it more exciting - the player wanted to do more than simply roll dice to see if he won. I decided to do away with this in the story, sticking instead to a simple winding track. I wanted to focus on the race - Skeet Jonus was a racer, not a stunt driver, and I didn’t want to include anything that would detract from that fact. The route of the racetrack I held onto and it is this course, which is described in the story.

The planet of Junduk IV was brought about by an old calendar I had on my kitchen wall. It was a wildlife calendar, and I was designing the setting in the month of June, and on the calendar was a picture of four ducks. June duck four - Junduk IV. It’s strange where creativity can come from.

Before I designed any of the plots I decided to flesh out the characters. When designing for a game I don’t usually lay out incidents, I simply create a situation and allow the players access to it. In this case, considering the nature of the game I wanted to play, I went into very fine detail about the additional characters in the story.

In the following text I will go over the novel and compare it to the original story, detailing ideas and sources and what really drove me to make certain changes or create certain parts. Like I said before, if you haven’t read the novel then do so now; anything you read from now on will ruin your enjoyment of the story. Other descriptions will be in box-outs.

THE STORY

When I first started tapping keys to get the first draft of Racers down I really didn’t know how to start it. The original game had begun with Skeet simply on Raca City to race. I know that Star Wars films don’t begin like that. I originally was going to have it start with a rumbling Star Destroyer and the scenes with Terrov and Galgen in the meeting room but that would have been confusing. I would have had to explain the situation and the planet’s function all in one hit and that would have been long-winded and, lets face it, really boring. I settled for the approach to Junduk option with Skeet and Rondosarn because it was the easiest way to explain Skeet’s character – new racer to the city, young, eager but also down on his luck.

Rondosarn wasn’t really a consideration, just an old sketch and a character idea I had a long time ago. He was originally designed as a fighter pilot for the Rebellion and who knows, maybe he’ll crop up in a later story in that role.

The real intention of the opening scene was to lay out the setting where most of the action was going to take place – Raca City. I felt that if the reader could visualise pretty much most of where the place was then it would be easier to add in later chapters. I wasn’t going to introduce Brey Yard until a later chapter when Skeet was having a shot at his first races. Originally, Brey was going to be the racer that Skeet beats in his first race, but I changed that for Driss Cotta so that Brey and Skeet could spend more time together in the story, making their friendship seem stronger. Also so that Driss could be present at the Tatooine Ten Thousand as another racer, a friend of Skeets and the reason why Skeet sacrifices the race.

Emag Retsam had already been fully created by this point. I was originally going to have him present Skeet with an award after winning his first race and then whisper to him something about how important he was but I didn’t think it would suit the story if the revelation that Skeet was special was made so obvious in the first few pages. I decided to keep Emag to the side for a while and have the fact that there was something about him that Skeet felt so that the reader would know there was something important, and allow the unfolding events of the Komag scene and the trip to the Malevolent to happen without any distractions Skeet may have had wondering what was happening.

The races were added to do two things. The first was to actually get some racing in there. It’s all well and good calling the story Racers Part One but what about the actual racing? I know that I didn’t want to fill the entire book with speeders battling each other for money but I at least wanted the racing to have an effect on the story. In many respects it did. Skeet had a bike, which was stolen by Kirrich that ended up with Komag and so on. What Skeet did for a living resulted in his trip to the Malevolent, which set all the story elements up and resulted in the plot, which Skeet found himself in. Besides, if there’s anyone out there that read it because of its title then they got what they expected, with other stuff thrown in for other Star Wars fans. If I had written the story about a simple boy from Tatooine who finds out he’s good with the Force and then has a darkly clad bad-guy after him... I kind of think people may have noticed that.

It was during the first race that I decided to include Driss Cotta. He was never in the original story but I decided I wanted another racer in there to add to the atmosphere, so that the friendly competitive nature of racers would shine through. I also included him as the second place racer in Skeet’s first win so that the reader would get the impression that Skeet was an excellent biker and could beat even seasoned professionals. I didn’t want him to beat Brey, like I had intended in an earlier conception of the story, because the details of the winner’s race and the dangerous run against Gern Omik I wanted for later.

It was at this point during creation that I decided I had spent too long designing and worrying about what was happening directly around the main characters. After all, the story was about racing but there was a darker line to this, too. It was what was happening on the Malevolent, with Arcc Nedeen, Grand Moff Galgen and Terrov. Originally the Arcc character was going to be some kind of Vader student or an Imperial officer who knew the Dark Side of the Force. I decided this was a little unsuitable for two reasons. One, Vader didn’t have any students. Grand Moff Tarkin told him in Episode IV ‘you are all that’s left of their religion’ when he referred to the Jedi’s and Force users, so that pretty much destroyed that idea. The second was that I wanted a character who wouldn’t be confined to rules and regulations. If Skeet had arrived on the destroyer and the Dark Force user was an Imperial he could simply have had him arrested and that was that. Hardly the pinnacle of space faring adventures. I settled on Arcc so that the Imperial element could be used as another threat, to both Skeet and Arcc, and add another level of depth to the unfolding plot.

The scenes between the three bad guys were easy to insert. I had completely free reign with their parts in the story as the details were not covered in the original game design.

What I really needed was a way to get Skeet involved with what was happening on the Malevolent but I couldn’t think of a reason as to why he would come into contact with Galgen and Arcc. Originally I was going to have them come down to the surface for a meeting with the governor, Emag, but if that happened then Emag and Galgen would have recognised each other and that would have made things complicated. I didn’t want that. This problem lead to the scenes with Kirrich and the bike theft, where Skeet manages to get his bike back and angers the Hutt who needs a ship to go to the Malevolent to get his payment from Galgen, and then the Hutt’s death, who people believe Skeet and Brey are responsible for, helping Skeet get into the Tatooine Ten Thousand. See how that works? I always try to make sure that when something happens it’s going to have an impact on later events. Will of the Force, and all that.

Talking about the will of the Force, I have to thank George Lucas for that small line in Episode I. After reading the story back to myself several times in its early design I noticed that it was filled to the brim with coincidence and happenstance. Thanks to prophecies and the will of the Force I think I may have managed to explain that quite well.

It was at this point I decided to concentrate on the bike theft and its impact on the story. I came out with the idea that a mechanic that hires himself out could be responsible for the theft. I came up with this idea after working at a British motor show and found out that apparently company-employed drivers were in fact people with forged passes who had managed to get into the show and simply drive away with vehicles when they were moving them from the halls. I used this to a lesser degree in the story but with the same impact.

In the original story there was hatred between Skeet and Komag. I was originally going to have Skeet actually responsible for Komag’s death - in the original game Andy Curtis actually had Skeet throw a bundle of grenades at the Hutt to finish him off after the initial bomb blast! After something serious happened between the Hutt and Brey that almost killed Skeet’s friend. Of course, this was dropped. Skeet wasn’t a killer, especially considering what I had decided he had learned from his mother, and this scene, although exciting, would not have made much sense.

It was during the bike theft scenes that I decided to include Officer Eilen. I noticed that the story was primarily male-orientated and wanted to put a female character in there. I was originally going to have her as one of the racers, even toyed with having Driss Cotta a female, but decided that I wanted the character to be a little more than that. I decided on Eilen after noticing that there would be short space battle as the heroes fled Junduk. I knew that Skeet and Brey’s skills were in their racing and having them hot pilots too would have seemed a trifle over-the-top. I included Eilen for two things; to be the person who was the action-orientated character and the pilot who got them all out of trouble. After deciding this I knew how to bring her into it, as Emag’s top cop. Unfortunately, the way the story panned out there wasn’t much gunplay or starship fights. Still, she’s there now and I have already decided her role in the future.

One thing was missing as I tried to get the first details down. I had decided that Arcc was manipulating the Grand Moff but I could do with a reason, and a way, as to how Arcc came into Galgen’s employ. I sifted through old notes and played with a few designs but decided to use a character I knew well and could add with no fuss. Queed was my perfect choice as the character had been well designed a long time ago and his personality well defined in short stories I had written about him. He served the plot in the fact that he was responsible for Skeet’s mother’s death, which added drama to the final Arcc-Skeet scene on Tatooine, and he was responsible for bringing Arcc and Galgen together.

The unfolding plot was probably the most complex and difficult I have worked on over such a short period of time. If you look at the Setnin Sector Chronology you will see plenty of plot twists and drama that happen between multiple characters over a long period of time, but they had years of writing and designing behind them with careful placing into the timeline to make them work. With Racers I was dealing with a few characters and ideas that would intertwine to create a coherent story.

There was plenty of stuff I threw out. First were the actual races. As mentioned before, the track used to be filled with traps and obstacles the racer would have to avoid but I discarded this at an early stage. If the reader were more interested in what the racers had to avoid then they wouldn’t focus on the characters, the driving points of the story. There were plenty of things on the track – poles to weave, narrow winding tunnels to navigate.

The design of race classes and landspeeder and bike races was retained and used in the final idea.

Also, the reason as to why the Empire invaded was changed, also. In the original story Galgen found out about Emag being in charge, knew that it was his dead wife’s brother and decided to rub salt in Skeet’s uncle’s wounds by taking away his city. Although this was dramatic, and was a viable reason for the invasion, it didn’t suit the story as attention was shifted from the relationship between Skeet and Galgen to Emag and Galgen. The story is based on the young man so I decided that not only would Galgen go after Arcc but also Skeet when realising he was there. Not only did it work as far as the story was concerned but added an extra sense of urgency to the situation.

In the original draft of the story it was Emag Retsam that was going to be killed and Brey Yard that escaped to Tatooine with Skeet. I dropped this for the obvious reason that Skeet needed a speeder to enter the Tatooine Ten Thousand and he had to use Brey’s. I also needed Emag around for future use, to guide Skeet in his power and be a source of information about the Old Republic and Jedis. I decided to lose Brey because I needed that dramatic moment to help define Skeet’s character and bring home the danger he was in. Besides, there was also a draft where both Brey and Emag were killed on Tatooine by Queed, so I had to draw the line somewhere. I couldn’t just go around popping off major characters by the handful.

The final scene in the desert was included because it had made such an impact in the original story. It is completely unchanged from the original concept, except perhaps some of the dialogue, and is something that really helps to close this chapter and begin the next.

So, there you have it. As you can see a lot more work went into the character’s influence on the story than the actual story itself. Like I stated before, it’s the plot that drives the characters. After I had decided what I wanted to happen and in what order I designed and manipulated the characters to fit into my stream of incidents. In many respects the influence of one character influenced the outcome of certain elements and of that I was very pleased. I believe that what we do now that is important has some effect on the future and I tried very hard to bring this to the fore as I was writing Star Wars Racers Part One – Shadows of the Past.

Jonathan Hicks - May 2000