Episode V.14

As Jabba the Hutt's sail barge exploded in a ball of flame over the Pit of Carkoon, a lone Verpine fell safely to the sand on the far side of the sarlacc pit, having sensed, with his antenna-palps, the radio signals of the self-destruct transmission moments before the vessel detonated.  As Ismail and Quinn tended to the dying Boba Fett on the fleeing second skiff, Choree Kie and T-101 noticed the green, carapice-covered, digitigrade legs of Ark'ik the Verpine kicking frantically in a dune below.  Choree Kie landed the skiff and T-101 used the tow cable to bungee down and retrieve Ark'ik, whom they had met briefly in their escape from Jabba's Palace.  The good deed did not go unpunished; a giant sarlacc tentacle burst from the sand and grabbed the skiff.  Choree Kie, T-101, and Ark'ik leapt from the skiff just before the huge tentacle hurled it, and the remaining passengers -- Ismail, Quinn and Boba Fett -- over the dunes and into the distance, where it disappeared on the horizon.  Choree Kie, T-101, and Ark'ik valiantly fought off of the tentacles, finally evading the long reach of the creature, but the skiff never returned for them, even as night fell.  They built a shelter from the wreckage of Jabba's sail barge and availed themselves of much needed sleep.

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The next morning, the trio awoke severely dehydrated -- or in need of recharging, in T-101's case.  The memory core of a protocol droid that the Jawa scavengers had installed in T-101's cranial socket included vivid memories of a thriving boom town on the eastern edge of the Dune Sea.  Struggling against the waning of their energy, Choree Kie and T-101 gathered pieces of wreckage from which Ark'ik managed to build a toboggan with a sail that they used to propel themselves eastward on the desert winds.  At the coordinates recorded in T-101's augmented memory banks, they found a great wall, built too precisely from the sun-bleached bones and skulls of thousands of Jawas and Tuskens, surrounding a pristine town filled with scores of humming, dew-covered moisture vaporators.  Climbing the wall despite their weakened state, they found, inside, not a boom town, but a ghost town, though every structure seemed as if newly constructed and every vaporator was filled to capacity with cool, clear, live-giving water.  Attached to each vaporator by a tangle of electrical cables were legless GNK power droids.  The nearest let out a weak, baleful "go-o-o-o-onk" as it beheld the newcomers.  Choree Kie and Ark'ik rushed toward the nearest vaporator for a drink, and a giant arc of plasma leapt from the vaporator's tip, scorching the ground where Choree Kie and Ark'ik had stood, nearly disintegrating them!  So desperate were they for a draught of water, that they braved the destructive plasma arcs and reached the vaporator, opening a panel and retrieving from it a full canister that they guzzled voraciously.  T-101, equally desperate for an electric charge, did the same, defying the vaporator's makeshift "death ray," and plugging into its power core for a recharge.

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Choree Kie and Ark'ik wandered about in search of some clue as to what happened to the town's inhabitants, and a small, innocuous Treadwell repair droid emerged from behind a building, the first sign of life, albeit artificial, that they had seen.  The droid rolled almost noiselessly up to the vaporator, inserted the empty canister back into its proper compartment, closed the panel, and polished Choree Kie's fingerprints from the pristine casing before retreating back to the nook from whence it had emerged.  T-101 approached the hobbled "Gonk" droid fettered to the vaporator and asked it what had become of the inhabitants.  In its binary language, the power droid explained that it had never seen the inhabitants of the town, which had been empty of any organic life since before the droid was kidnapped and enslaved here twenty years ago by the "sadistic caretakers."  Suddenly, from behind every building, rolled legions of Treadwell repair droids, some augmented with monstrous mechanical appendages of destruction and torture.  They surrounded the trio and began closing in...