Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 1: Batuu
A continued chronicle of my Galactic Starcruiser adventure
So -- with all of the wildness that happened on Day One, can you imagine how much wilder things were about to get on Day Two?
I bet you can’t. I certainly couldn’t have imagined just how absolutely packed with adventure our day was going to be.
Need to catch up?
6:30am: Noah and I woke up bright and early and got ourselves ready for a morning on Batuu! I already had a message from Saja Tycer, telling me to go tune into a certain comms tower to get some information.
We slept with the viewport in our cabin on, even though that meant keeping the white lights around it on, too. But we both decided we could deal with that. We wanted to keep seeing space! And it meant that, when the ship jumped to Batuu early in the morning, we saw that, too!
I wore a much simpler outfit for Batuu, being well aware of what sort of climate its three suns produce. (And that, truly, is another delightful bit of lore. What a great way to handwave the general Florida-ness of it all). Even Lady Annazena will sacrifice a bit of glitz for practicality -- but I like to think my Batuu outfit still had a certain style. (Hot tip for anyone going to Batuu — well, anyone whose body structure fits this kind of pant: cannot recommend these highly enough.)
7:15am: Breakfast! Loved the CSL waffle and the green-dusted pastry treat. I also really loved the metal insulated cups they had there. If they’d been selling those with CSL branding, I definitely would have bought one. (Yes, I know they are a very basic cup. But I wanted a Halcyon basic cup!)
7:40am: We were going to just go hang out in the transport bay to wait for the first shuttle, but they actually sent us out early! I’m guessing because they had 15 people ready to go and figured, well, might as well clear them out of the queue before more show up.
The shuttle is another genius piece of work. Okay, it’s literally just the back of a truck, but you’d never know it from the inside experience. The way they move you from the Halcyon to the Starcruiser is literally seamless. More on that in the analysis post, actually — here I’ll just say how cool the shuttle is. You get some tunes blasting through from DJ-R3X.
7:50am: Noah and I appeared to be literally the first people other than CMs to set foot in Batuu that morning. The park was not open yet even for early admission. It was empty. Amazing. We got a few good pics with no one in them, then got started on some missions since Rise of the Resistance wasn’t even open yet.
From Raithe, our first task was to procure a look-alike for the Hayananeya from Zabaka, the toymaker on Black Spire Outpost. This was a little challenging since Toydarian Toymaker wasn’t open yet, either! But we managed to trip the correct sensor anyway, and toymaker Zabaka got in contact with us about the stone. We had to slice her the Hayananeya schematics so that Oga wouldn’t interfere and take a cut!
Zabaka made fun of our slicing abilities (or at least mine, anyway, I don’t know if Noah’s were as bad! I definitely bobbled my datapad and barely got it done in the time limit), but agreed to help us. She dropped a little more knowledge about the stone, then told us to find a pit droid head she could use as a mold. That meant running around near the Droid Depot to find the right crate to scan. Once we got that to her, she promised to set to work.
Then, Raithe gave us instructions on the coaxium -- which meant riding Smuggler’s Run, so we saved that one for a bit.
8:00am: Lenka checked in and asked for our help with two things. Which first? Rescuing SK, of course! So she sent us to the Droid Depot to find an unbolting program in one of the crates outside, and told us to meet her in the atrium that afternoon to help create a distraction.
The Captain also checked in, telling me she needed me to send word to General Organa about the data that SK was protecting. She told me to find the Resistance base and make contact.
Y’all, I have to tell you, this was one of those moments where eleven-year-old Cass was just losing her damn mind. Leia Organa specifically needed me to send her critical information! I don’t care if 200 other people got the same message, it was still just a wildly cool thing.
8:15am: Got the unbolting program, told Lenka, then got sent to Oga’s to make contact with a slicer to figure out why Croy wants the Halcyon’s schematics.
8:20am: But, since our Oga’s reservation wasn’t until later, we decided to go to the Resistance base first, particularly since we know they, ah, aren’t always actively recruiting. (This is the in-world terminology for the ride being down — which is quite clever! In fact, they were not actively recruiting for over an hour later in the day, so my instinct was right. If that happens, you have a dialogue option for it, and I think that gives you a different mission to complete?). The Captain had us tune in to a comms tower to send some data, then told us to go talk to the Resistance members on the ground -- and this is what gets us on Rise.
Noah had never ridden Rise before! So that was very special. Seriously, that ride is… simply incredible. It’s a twenty minute experience. And the level of detailing in it is breathtaking. I think my favorite moment is when you come out beneath the AT-ATs. The utter scale of them is astonishing. Or the moment when Kylo Ren’s lightsaber starts stabbing down at you! Seriously, it’s such a thrill. At least that won’t be going away anytime soon.
Afterward, we told the Captain what happened with the Star Destroyer — uh, oops, perhaps not as subtle as we’d hoped to be! — and she noted that Croy wouldn’t be pleased and would likely escalate his efforts on the ship.
9:20am: I found the first comms tower I needed for Saja Tycer, then got instructed to go find Savi’s Workshop and scan some crates there.
9:35am: We checked in for our reservation at Oga’s — and told the folks out front that “Oga has some information for us”. The check-in lady passed us a special coaster with a scan code, which got us in contact with Gwellis Bagnoro. He identified himself as a forger and slicer — just what we needed! And he was willing to help us if we helped him. He asked us to shut down the Ronto Roaster podracing engine oven.
9:45am: Into Oga’s for a drink! I had a Bespin Fizz, Noah got the Jet Juice. Both were delicious. I really liked that the Jet Juice didn’t taste harsh to me, like most whiskey drinks do. We didn’t spend our whole 45 minutes in there, though, because we had too much stuff to do!
10:20am: Rode Smuggler’s Run! Got a message from Hondo afterwards, promising to bring the coaxium up to the Halcyon later in the day. Raithe checked in and told us to meet him on the bridge later so we could clear the way and get the coaxium onboard. (Thus assigning us our bridge subfinale).
10:35am: Went over to Ronto Roasters and shut down the podracing engine for Gwellis. Gwellis then acknowledged having taken a commission from the First Order to override the Halcyon’s security protocols. He sent us behind the Droid Depot to go find some datatapes. Gwellis agreed to reprogram them and send them up to Lenka.
Noah was having some trouble with his datapad, so while he figured that out, I ran around to finish my missions for Saja Tycer. I went to the crates at Savi’s and found Jedi training remotes and the Force-sensing portable viewscreens like Qui-Gon uses in TPM. Then Saja Tycer told me that he’d gotten a message from Savi about a shipment headed to Dok-Ondar. First I had to tune into another comms tower to get information about it, then I had to go find it. Once I did, I had to negotiate with Dok-Ondar’s assistant Tohago to get it -- but it worked! Saja Tycer invited me to join him later in the afternoon to open up the crate and find out what was in there.
In case it’s not obvious, we were running around all over the place by this point. Noah had also gotten very interested in scanning every crate he saw! The datapad game for Black Spire Outpost is highly addictive even without the Halcyon missions, as I discovered last year.
11am: Lenka checked in, so we told her we got the datatapes. We bounced around a bit more, tying up the last few things Noah needed to do, and then we headed to Docking Bay 7 for lunch. I wasn’t terribly hungry (I never am in the heat), but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Pirjanad Hot Chicken Tip Yip actually has a bit of a kick to it! I mean, it’s a Disney kick, but still. It was tasty, as was the Takodana Quencher! (Noah did not agree with me about the Takodana Quencher, which is, admittedly, very tropical in its flavor; he did, however, enjoy his Gold Squadron Lager).
And after that, we were just about done! We knew we needed to get cleaned up before the 1:45pm Lightsaber Training, so we double-checked all our tasks and then headed back to the docking bay for the transport back to the Halcyon.
11:45am: As soon as we boarded the transport, Lenka got in touch to tell us how to upload the droid unbolting program. So we did that before heading to our room.
To be continued in…
More of the tropical melon drinks for you!