Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 12:00:38 -0500 (EST)
From: Tenandys Qural <beattier@river.it.gvsu.edu>
Subject: Qural Halloween Special Part 1
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	Life was a sequence of increasing odds.  Live through one 
impossible situation, and the next one would try harder to kill you off.  
Survive that, and things just got harder.  So it went until luck and wits 
failed, and they cleaned your shattered corpse off of the pavement.
	Tenandys Qural reflected on this as he crouched in the doorway of 
the burning tenement.  By rights, he shouldn't have gotten this far.  But 
since he had, his potential for getting messily slain had bounced.
	Shots caromed off the walls around him, causing him to pull 
himself tighter against the steel of the door.  The resistance was slowly
advancing along the thoroughfare, and he had to think of something fast 
or be hedged in by superior numbers.  His tail twitched with an edgy 
anticipation.
	They had pulled him out of the wreckage of his Trav 6 after the 
battle of Kyan, his left arm mangled beyond repair.  They had said it was 
a miracle.  It hadn't been.  But it had been close.
	They fixed him up, replacing his forearm with a work of art, and 
sent him out to fight again.  To survive in a situation that would, 
again, try to kill him.
	He'd thought he'd had it on his last mission for the Alliance.  A 
covert operative dumped into an Imperial Sector Capital, betrayed by his 
contact, left to die by his own commanders, hunted by a Jedi slayer with 
a vendetta against him, and facing off against a Dark Lord that should 
have died years before - he had thought his number had come up.
	But somehow, he had cut the impossible deal with the Moff and 
wound up here, waiting to die at the hands of two thousand angry 
citizens.  It made him wonder why he tried so damned hard.
	Habit, he supposed.
	He chanced a quick look down the street, garnering a couple of 
stray blaster bolts for his trouble.  He still had a little breathing 
room.  They had taken up position in a bank 20 meters down.  From there, 
it was only a matter of time before they realized that he was alone.  
Then it would get sticky.
	"VX, punch up a schematic of this zone.  I need a backdoor, and 
soon."
	A couple of LEDs lit up on his arm, but otherwise, there was no 
indication that anything was happening.  Qural snapped off a couple of 
shots at the more daring members of the resistance, biding time until the 
droid was able to position him.
	And then, for a strange, flickering instant, an image blossomed 
in the center of his mind's eye.  It obscured all else in his perception, 
cutting away the external world in vivid hallucination, and then faded 
quietly away.
	The interface was a little buggy when it came to visual images.  
Text and vox were simple enough, but the cortex linkage was still 
somewhat experimental, so it had trouble coordinating his perception with 
downloaded images.  It was a software problem, but Qural had neither the 
time nor the patience to upgrade.  One of these days...
	The map lasted for a second at best, but it told him what he had 
to know.  He was only a couple of blocks from some kind of shrine park.  
He could hole up there if need be, and from what he could tell, there was 
a network of tunnels beneath it that would allow him to escape.

[To be continued...]