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As you may have seen when you arrived on Tatooine, Mos Eisley is near the edge of the Dune Sea, and Shaara heads for the sands. She is not really paying a great deal of attention to where she is going, and before long she is very near to the Great Pit of Carkoon.

The Imps are right behind her. Their transport is more powerful than the landspeeder, but it is laden down with six of them while Shaara is alone and quite light, so they gain very slowly. They are still a few seconds behind Shaara as she flashes toward the pit. She tells me later that she is crying at this point, and I think she is telling me the truth about this.

She is now desperate. She pulls the family punch gun out of its rack where it is kept in case of trouble and she points it at the hull of the Imps’ transport.

Shaara has been a good shot from childhood, and I think the Force must guide her hand on this particular day, because she puts a hole right through to the transport’s engine. The resulting explosion should kill the Imps right then, but they all have been pulling their armor back on. None of them is fully dressed, and the driver is still down to his bodyglove, but they also seem to have an unusual amount of luck at that moment.

I say seem because although the explosion does not kill them it pitches them into the air just in time for all of them to land in the Pit of Carkoon, which I would consider to be a good thing indeed if it were not that the blast also sends the landspeeder tumbling, and Shaara is also dumped into the pit.

For a moment the seven of them lie there stunned. Then, and this is the part I always have trouble believing, two of the Imps begin crawling around the pit toward her.

They must surely know where they are. Even the Imperial Army must tell their troopers the basic hazards of the land before sending them out. Yet there they are right on the Sarlacc’s doorstep and they are more intent on finishing what they have planned for my poor sister than they are in saving their own miserable lives.

Well, of course all this movement gets the Sarlacc good and active, and its tongue-tentacles begin to poke around. It grabs one unconscious Imp and drags him in without a sound. Shaara sees this and lets out a screaming noise, but I guess the two Imps following her think that she is screaming at them.

Then a tentacle gets hold of the foot of another Imp who is awake, and now he begins to scream. This causes the others to sit up and take notice, all but one who never wakes up at all but falls into the mouth of the Sarlacc because of the shifting sands caused by those questing tongues. I do not know whether you have been keeping count, Mister Boba Fett, but this leaves only three Imps in the Great Pit of Carkoon but outside of the Sarlacc, along with my sister.

The two who have been creeping around the pit now cease creeping around it and begin frantically crawling in a direction away from the mouth of the Sarlacc, which of course does them no good whatsoever and only makes the sand under them shift downward faster than they can climb up it. This shifting attracts the attention of the Sarlacc, who immediately grabs them both and drags them screaming to their doom. I do not know whether the story Jabba the Hutt likes to tell is true, that you spend a thousand years being slowly digested in the Sarlacc’s belly, but I am frankly all in favor of the idea in the case of these two, though Shaara says she hopes they died quickly. Perhaps it is that she is of a more delicate nature, or maybe she just wishes that they are dead.

This leaves just Shaara and one stormtrooper staring across the Great Pit of Carkoon at each other and down at the tongue-tentacles of the Sarlacc. This Imp seems to be more sensible than the others, and he holds very still and does not send sand down the pit to let the Sarlacc know where he is. Neither does Shaara. He looks across the pit at her. She tells me later that he is not wearing his helmet, and she has never