Ismail meandered through the labyrinthine catacombs beneath Jabba's palace, finally finding herself in a tunnel with a group of equally lost courtiers and roisterers.  A skiff hovered beneath the suns-lit sky at the side of the butte upon which the palace sat, idling at a ledge at the end of the tunnel as a menagerie of alien guards loaded equipment onto the vehicle.  They adamantly refused passage to the entreating newcomers, and Ismail used the Jedi "mind trick" on one of the aliens to lure him into a dark byway, where she dispatched him and took his clothing, concealing head gear, and identity.  She boarded the skiff, which  rendezvoused with another, carrying the prisoners:  the man in black, the now unfrozen man in carbonite, and the wookiee.  The two vessels flanked the lavish sail barge carrying Jabba the Hutt and his servants, slave-girl, and honored guests, including Choree Kie and "his droid," T-101, as it set off into the desert.

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Meanwhile, Quinn awoke in a windswept dune, the sand and twin suns burning his eyes.  His last memory returned to him, of crashing the vehicle he insisted on flying to Jabba's palace, despite everyone's counsel that the sandstorms of the Jundland Wastes would suffer no transports.  He trudged on foot along the Dragonspine Path the remainder of the way to the palace, and eyed a third, momentarily unoccupied skiff, idling at another cave mouth on the side of the butte at the end of the road.  Quinn quickly scrabbled up the cliff-face and hijacked the third skiff, racing after the convoy toward the Pit of Carkoon.

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Choree Kie and T-101 selected refreshments from a tray borne by a blue and white astromech droid as the convoy came to a halt over a huge sandy sinkhole.  Something seemed to writhe hungrily from the depths of the crater as Jabba's protocol droid relayed his master's hope that the prisoners die honorably, and his vain offer to entertain prayers for mercy.  As the prisoners traded contemptuous gibes with their captors, Choree Kie and T-101 noticed, as did Ismail from her skiff, that one of the guards on the prisoners' skiff wore the clothes of Ismail's scout, Tamtel Skreej, but was in fact an incognito Lando Calrissian.  The Hutt's majordomo, Bib Fortuna noticed Choree Kie's vigilant surveillance of the prisoners' skiff, and sensed some treachery afoot.  The skiff guards prodded the man in black to the edge of a plank that overhung the pit and, at the last minute, the prisoner jumped, turned, grabbed the edge of the plank with his hands, and catapulted himself over the prodding guard as the astromech waiter fired into the air a small, cylindrical object from a hatch in its occipital dome.  The man in black caught the object and ignited from it a viridescent lightsaber blade, cutting his way through the guards on the first skiff.  Ismail ignited her own lightsaber and did the same to her unsuspecting skiff-mates.  Bib Fortuna squalled, the treachery now confirmed, and, deducing Choree Kie's complicity in the plot, lunged at the Crolute with a serrated kris blade drawn from his sleeve.  As Choree Kie desperately fended off his attacker's lethal slashes, the skiff guards fared less successfully against the man in black and Ismail, now fighting side-by-side on the second skiff, a feat that only could have been accomplished by a Force-induced leap.  Boba Fett hurried toward the stairs to the barge's upper deck, to aid Jabba's guards, and in the pandemonium, T-101 let loose a shot from his concealed arm-blaster, missing Fett, but hitting the bounty hunter's jet-pack, damaging it.  Fett flew over the Pit of Carkoon onto the first skiff, where the formerly carbon-frozen prisoner struck the damaged jet pack with a pole, igniting it and sending Fett into the maw of a great sarlacc beast beneath the sinkhole. 

 

Quinn arrived just in time to witness Fett's fall, and rammed his skiff into the monster's maw to attempt to extricate Fett from the belly of the beast.  The sarlacc swallowed the skiff whole, and Quinn descended below-deck, using the skiff as a corridor through the creature's gullet as groping tentacles pierced every porthole and crushed the hull around him.  Quinn managed to grab the gauntleted forearm of the bounty hunter and pull him out of the sarlacc, using a mooring tether to repel himself out of the crater. Choree Kie delivered a crushing death blow to Bib Fortuna with his meaty fist, ending the villain's life, and initiated a self-destruct code that T-101 discovered in the barge's on-board computer.  The man in black leapt onto the barge and rescued the Hutt's slave-girl, who had apparently choked the gangster with her shackles.  As the two swung from the barge to the first skiff from some loose mooring, T-101 and Choree Kie leapt overboard and joined Ismail on the second skiff, as did Quinn, carrying the limp body of Boba Fett, whose nearly denuded body was covered in the sarlacc's searing digestive fluids.  Ismail put Fett in a Force-induced trance until she could discern some measure to prevent his last breath from escaping.  The Hutt's barge exploded overhead in a fiery eruption, and the former prisoners disappeared into the haze of smoke and sand on their stolen skiff...