Scratch dat Star Wars Itch

A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...


The Bounty Hunter didn't know how far she'd flown or for how long. She weaved through the layers upon layers of hover-traffic, barely eluding some pursuers. The beeping on her hoverbike indicated that her fuel cell had run dry, and she cursed in the Mandalorian tongue. She was losing blood and consciousness, the blaster burns on her armor melting the plasteel and fusing to her skin.

She couldn't land at this rate. Her radar told her they were still on her. She looked down and saw the teeming masses of lower Coruscant. She engages her suit's stealth functions and uses the last of her Bike's fuel to turbo boost into a building, while she slipped off and fell, undetected...

= = = =

"Klaatu Verata Nikto Insta-bread! Vao Un Kasandrae!" The large, lizard faced owner of the bread store rang a bell to summon his assistant, as his store's front display was running out of food. There was still a long line of hungry vagrants waiting for their food rations from this Lower Coruscant food station.

"I'm on it, Jakka." Sixteen year old Kasandrae Vao brought the push car with trays of vacuum sealed insta-bread into the shelves from the kitchen. Her shoulders and arms ached as she loaded up what must have been today's fifteenth batch of insta-bread. She blows a strand of her reddish hair out of her face as she rushed to meet the orders.

She stared out through the shelves to the store's front, and the street it was on. Down here in the bowels of Lower Coruscant, where sunlight never reached, there was only the light of a hundred neon signs and the Deathsticks of the unemployed masses. Kasandrae loaded the last of the trays and returned to the kitchen to make another batch.

She fetches the sack of bread mix and prepares a mixer bowl of water. Jakka was too cheap to get a kitchen droid, not to mention superstitious about them. Hence his use of organic labor. Kasandrae turns the timer on the oven, when she heard a loud crash in the back.

Kas looked at Jakka. The shelves would last for a couple of hours. She pushes out through the exit. The sight was something she'd never expect in a million years. Here, in the middle of nowhere, a Mandalorian warrior had landed right on their dumpster. She groaned in pain, Kasandrae shocked to know she survived what must've been a terrible fall. She looked at Kasandrae, holding up a Holocron.

"...Must... leave... Coruscant..." She groaned.

A young vagrant had been sleeping in the alley at the time.  He'd have called himself a vagabond but at the moment, he was not feeling particularly "happy-go-lucky."  Still, he had found a sufficently comfortably spot and wore his long coat as a blanket.

An instant before the commotion, the sleeping youth awoke.  It was in time to see an armor-clad figure fall from the sky, caving in a portion of a nearby dumpster.  He stirred as he recognised the figure's armor design: Mandalorian.  They were known as warriors but today made much of their living as mercs and bounty hunters.

Aaron Grey himself had accumulated a bounty but as little more than a streat thief, he doubted he had earned a Mandalorian's attention.

Still, a warrior falling out of the sky was not particularly common.  So, Aaron slid close to the dumpster...just in time to hide as the door opened...

His spying gave him some interesting information: she had a Holocron, likely holding long lost secrets of the Jedi or Sith orders.  To the right people, either was very valuable.  And suddenly Aaron wanted the thing.

Making up his mind, the young thief stepped into the open, hands held up, declaring he was not a threat.  "Sorry, couldn't help but overhear."  Turning to the bounty hunter he continued, "I don't know about the baker's daughter here, but I think I might be able to help you, lady."

From where she lay, the bounty hunter only saw Kasandrae. The baker's assistant approached the Mandalorian with trepidation.

"Sorry... kid... my problem... yours now. Get off... Coru... Cor..." The spherical Holocron fell out of her hands and rolled towards Aaron's direction, but Kasandrae's concern was the bounty hunter herself.

Slowly, she felt around the helmet to find release mechanisms and removed it. The Bounty hunter had fiery red hair down to her cheeks, visible even in the dim light of the alley, and had beautiful features despite being battle worn and scarred. Kas checked her for a pulse, or breathing. Her death gaze was fixed on Kas.

"She's... dead." Kas closed the hunter's eyes, letting her now rest. She saw sudden movement beyond the alley. She almost leapt out of her boots from the fear, wondering who it could have been.

Frightened, she dropped the helmet and instinctively retrieved the Mandalorian's blaster carbine, deftly activating the power and turning off the safety, setting to stun.  "Who are you- Aaron? Aaron Grey? You little rat, I haven't seen you in years! How've you been?!"  She rolled up her sleeve to show him the runner tattoo. Lower Coruscant teemed with gangs, and and an ex-runner like her ran the messages when droids or electronic communications were risky.

The former gang messenger felt a mixture of relief and curiosity. She lowered the blaster and approached Grey to give him a hug.

Aaron had allowed his boot to come down on the Holocron, trapping it before it could roll away.

He had not recognised the girl, the now armed girl, earlier. But as he made eye contact over the barrel of the borrowed blaster, the sight brought him back to his time as a pickpocket working for the same gang. Aaron had none of the gang tattoos, a personal choice that had annoyed many but he always felt it gave him deniability...

"Sorry, Kas," he said, lowering his hands. "Didn't mean to scare you." He did not move as the ex-Runner hugged him; he even chose to return the hug, though he seemed a bit surprised. "I've been moving around alot. Been off world since I left the gang," he said. In truth, he had betrayed a couple of the gang's leaders to a rival group. He had taken his pay and left before finding out their fate. It seemed no one in his old crew knew about this. Lucky him.

As the embrace ended, Aaron turned to the dead bounty hunter. "What are you gunna do about her?" he asked. "And what do you think she meant by her 'problems' being yours?" He looked for his best chance to pocket the Holocron without his old comrade noticing.

"Don't you see, Aaron? Someone was after this person. We found her on the dumpster behind Jakka's bakery..." She looked at the blaster in her hands.

"...And now I'm involved. This whole neighborhood is involved. they're gonna be looking for her they will, if not the gangs then something worse. and everyone in this neighborhood is going to be in danger. Unless... " She thought about the mess the woman had brought to their... quiet little portion of the city.

"Quick, help me hide her in our basement." Kasi told Aaron more than asking, though all those months lifting heavy sacks of breadmix meant Kasi dragged the bounty hunter inside with little difficulty.  

The basement was small, and contained the utilities on one corner and a freezer in the other. In the dim light of the freezer amidst frozen ingredients, Kasi began to remove the dead girl's stuff, arranging them in an orderly manner beside her.

Kas wasn't really thinking when she started undoing the woman's armor. Old memories and older habits began to resurface, being a scavenger's middle child in a brood of 9 meant you had to take what you could get. She didn't even spare her a second glance when the Bounty Hunter was reduced to her underwear. "...Still, makes me wonder who's after her." She said, looking at the Mandalorian armor arrayed before them. The girl was stockier and more defined in muscle, but otherwise the armor would fit her well.

"You know... ever since they let me out of corrections, told me to get  a job... I've been thinking... how do I get out... how do I get away from all this." Kasi had always been restless. She saw the support of her siblings as a tedious obligation, one she wanted to get away from- but she also worried for the younger ones. If she did this, they'd be... put to work. She glanced at Aaron, wondering if he had anything to say. Kas was still oblivious about the Holocron.

Aaron did manage to help with the body and participated in stripping the corpse's armor.  He noticed that the armor was a bit small for him but at a glance, he recognised the hunter's and Kas' physical similarities.  He chose not to voice this, or rather speak at all through he grim task.  Only in silence could one respect the dead.

As the pilfered armor was layed out, Aaron noticed he was losing feeling in his fingertips.  He took a moment to rub is hands together as he tried to rifle through he deceased's possessions.  All the while he listened to Kas' worries.

Some of her worries were well founded.  The wrong person looking for information could cause a lot of misfortune if they started prying...then there was her desire to leave...

"Look," he began, thinking of a plan as he went. "If you want to keep the community safe, the easiest way is to lead whomever away from here. And you want to leave so..." Indicating the Mandalorian's armor, he said, "If you dress as her and go off-world, you'd be able to draw off the these trackers..." Shrugging, he continued, "I might be able to find us a smuggler who could provid passage."

He continued to neglect mentioning the Holocron: for the time being, he wanted to keep it to himself.

"Alright. Alright. I'll get dressed. You... you are coming with me right? " Kas picked up the bounty hunter's armor, partially damaged. They'd have to get this fixed elsewhere. But everything else was in fine working order.  

"I wish we could bury her or something." Kas spared their dead bounty hunter a glance. "Guess we could just... put her in deep storage. Come back for her? or leave her for Jakka. I'd love to see the look on his face." Kas said with a hint of malice, as she headed to a spot behind a large crate to start changing, shedding her apron and probation uniform.  

Kas took most of the obviously good things, such as the grenade belt, the blasters and the armor. However she didn't take the Hunter's personal satchel, inside containing a tube, containing a very valuable artifact from the ruins of the Jedi temple...

Once she was finished, she hid the armor's damage under a dark maroon travelling cloak, her own. Now fully kitted out, she emerged to show Aaron the armor, holding the helmet below her arm.  "How do I look?"

She paused, thinking about something. Kas cleared her throat and lowers her voice an octave to sound more menacing. "How do I look... you ganger rat?"

= = = = =

VINCERE

The twin women in the hover car landed in a secluded spot in Lower Coruscant. Their hair was done in the lower city style of mohawks and shaved heads with tattoos and piercings and their faces, and they wore bits and pieces of their old Storm Trooper armor, colored over with blaster black and gungan grey to better blend into their urban environment. Whoever thought of shiny white armor was a complete idiot.

"You tell him." "No, you tell him." "The droid?" "the droid." They exchanged a quick conversation before settling on the droid in the hover car.

They park on the street, on the corner from the meeting place. rusty protocol droid approached the circle of hover bikes, and approached the lone, brooding figure with the sweetest, most pimp dark side ride of them all.

"Greetings oh great, magnanimous one. The Quinns have completed their reconnaissance and I am glad to report that our bounty hunter quarry is dead- crashed into the side of a Agri-Corp building, nothing remaining but a smoking ruin. I saw it myself. Mission accomplished!" He said with a synthetically cheerful voice.

He had been waiting, patiently so while the scouts had been doing a majority of the searching. Having to  venture into such depths was something that he normally did not enjoy but for what he was looking for, Vincere was willing to make an exception. This was after all the will of his master and theirs trumped all others within his mind. Metallic clawed gauntlets clacked silently against the exterior of the hover bike. Being here any longer than he needed to would likely lead to him having to deal with the rather poor air quality, which his mask managed to deal with to an extent.

As the time passed, eventually one would arrive to report on his quarry. A bounty hunter, dead in an explosion was it was. He leaned forward to consider the protocol droid carefully, taking in their slightly rough exterior. ”I see,” The filtered voice said, as the ruminated over that information. ”Excellent, and you say...nothing remains, correct?” They questioned, waiting for an answer. Their open hand clenched as one of the hover bikes began to buckle in on itself, metal denting loudly as the vehicle was reduced to a useless lump of scrap in a sheer bout of anger.

”Now that is not good.” He sighed, standing to his feet as the black material that formed a flowing cloak fell to the ground. ”I’ll need to be brought to this body or what remains of it.” He said, approaching the twins. ”Hastily, if you value your credits.” He then added, hoping these two would make themselves useful for something beyond the killing bit.

Aaron Grey had few quam about robbing the dead.  With little trouble, he checked the metallic cylinder tucked into an ornate box.  It bore a push button and a knob of sorts.  It did not take much to figure out what it was and pressing the button, a column of yellow plasma erupted from the weapon.

Another Jedi artifact, likely as valuable as the Holocron from earlier.  Interesting.  Hitting the button, the light faded alongside the low hum of the deadly tool.  He slipped the sleeping hilt into another of his pockets.  This was about when Kas returned, clad in the armor of a Mandalorian warrior.  She asked his opinion in a menacing tone and Aaron could not help but patronize her, saying, "You are truly frightening, my lady."  Still, had he not known her already, she might have seemed more terrifying.

Having the last of the late warrior's valuables tucked away, Aaron said, "So, if we want to avoid the ones who killed the 'poor, defenseless' mercenary, we should probably be heading for the spaceport."

Relying on his experience as a pickpocket, Aaron found some of the choicest and stealthiest routes hoping to dodge patrols until they could get off world. Hopefully they could find a smuggler willing to ship them out...

Once Kas got a close look at all the equipment, she was sorely disappointed but not surprised that most of it was damaged. The helmet's vision functions were busted, the jet pack's left thruster was completely wrecked and had no fuel left. The wrist mounted rocket launcher and the flame throwers had no ammo, and the Blaster Carbine and Blaster pistols had only had a quarter shot each... good for one or two scrapes at most. There were only three grenades on the belt which, from the looks of it could carry a lot more, and she didn't know what they did. Well, at least she was travelling light... Aaron's reaction sounded quit patronizing.

"Frightening huh, good. Most of this stuff is busted. I only look the part right now... I don't even have enough credits to fix them, let alone get the ammo for these things." Kas looked over at the bounty hunter's remaining things, seeing Aaron had already 'procured' everything.

"...Get anything good from our friend?" She rifed through the pack and came upon the Bounty Hunter's holo-tag. Kas didn't want to look but her finger instinctively pressed the button, causing a hologram of the woman in Mandalore armor with several other Mandalorians.

"Shae Ordo of Mandalore..." Now she did it. the bounty hunter wasn't just The bounty hunter anymore. She was Shae Ordo, and she was killed in lower Coruscant, fleeing some unknown attacker. And now a couple of kids were stuffing her in the fridge of some nameless bakery completely naked and dead, while stole her stuff. Kas felt like the scavenger trash that she thought she was.

Once Shae's body was wrapped up in cloth and stuffed into that cold, dark corner, Kas said nothing more. With Aaron's help, and her own trusty speeder, the duo would eventually reach the spaceport. While the Imperial travel restrictions had long been lifted, fuel prices were still sky-high, and seats on an off-world ship, even private, was worth at least ten years' salary. They'd have to negotiate with something... valuable, to make it worth some smuggler's time.

= = = =

The Quinn twins led Vincere's jet-biker posse to the site of the crash first, though of course there was no body to be had there. The Quinns were terrified of their Force using employer, unable to come up with leads.

Good thing the protocol droid was half-way competent.

"Terrifying one. Our spy droids in the Space Port customs reported bringing a lower-Coruscant ganger to the Space Port. He was accompanied by a cloaked Mandalorian."

"Wow that's great, let's go to the Space Port then!" The Quinns quickly lead them to the Spaceport. If they were trying to get off world, they'd have to pay for an obscenely expensive seat... or find a greedy, desperate smuggler.

A single bead of sweat rolled down the yellow skinned forehead of the  twi’lek that nervously tapped his claw like nails on the edge of the Dejarik  table while he watched the hologram creatures  that sprung from it do battle. His chosen creature, a large, intimidating lizard-man known as a Savrip wasn’t doing as well as he’d hoped against his opponent’s Kintan Strider, the latter’s club came down hard against the former’s skull to end the game.

“All right. That’s five in a row. Where exactly did you find this weird little droid, anyway?” Dalo asked the pair of pilots seated across the freighter’s main hold from him, “And how long has it been since our team last made contact?”

The team he referred to was a crack squadron of New Republic commandos. Accompanied by the Mandolorian Bounty Hunter Shae Ordo, they had been sent to Coruscant by the New Republic in order to recover an ancient Sith holocron that, according to their intelligence had recently surfaced in the area. The holocron was said to belong to Darth Fractius, the cunning, and the information contained in it could be disastrous to the fragile relative peace that only recently began to take hold in the galaxy, thus the commandos were sent to Coruscant to retrieve it before the Empire, and Dalo and the other pilots were sent to escort them.

Coruscant. Just being there felt inherently wrong to Dalo. Once the galactic crown jewel, capitol of the entire Empire, now declining capitol of one of the remaining Imperial remnants. Years ago, before the death of Palpatine, and the division of his Empire that followed, even setting foot in the sector would’ve been a suicide for any Rebel. He hoped that was no longer the case.  He hated being assigned to anything that wasn’t a dog fight, but simply waiting in a small cargo freighter here felt even more stressful than any previous assignments combined.

Just a little longer, he reminded himself, soon he’d be back in Republic space, back to his x-wing, and with the rest of their squadron, and far away from the former heart of the Empire.

An alert from a sensor array near the table reminded him that the source wasn’t just possible, but probable. Multiple life forms had entered their docking bay. Dalo pulled his blaster pistol from its holster, took a few steps toward the entry ramp and pressed his back against the wall where he motioned to his comrades to stay silent.

"So he looks me dead in the eye, and says- It's a Trap!" Nemo slapped his leg as he lunged forward to end his joke. "I said, 'It's a trap'!" Both his hands rested over his stomach. His eyes split their gaze as they both wandered off in a different direction to make contact with anyone else in the area. "A trap!"

"-- *. -- -- --. --. * * -- *. * * --. -- *. -- *. -- * -- --." The droid etched out a message in a series of beeps and pauses.

"I found him floating in a debris field outside of Ord Mantell. I brought him in, gave him a nice oil bath, and then-"

"I fixed the toilet, so no one try to flush things that can't fit through the pipes again." A blue skinned woman stepped out from the bathroom, adjusting her cybernetic hands. Black and green tattoos covered the shaved, right side of her head, while her red hair parted over the left side of her head. Both of her eyes contained a tinted hue of blue from implants, deepening the gaze she shot around the room.

"Hey, Charlie, you know it wasn't me because when I secrete my mucous-"

"*. *. *. * --. *--. *--. *--"

"Yeah, I was pointing fingers, or whatever." Charlie pulled a chair over and took a seat, examining the board.

"I just want all the ladies to know, I am one fully functioning Mon Calamari and even though a rumor got around that was Ascending Lamellae is descending-"

"No one started that rumor because no one knows what you are talking about. Did the droid beat you again? You need to be glad he doesn't have a functioning credit chip in his memory function."

Clad in his long coat and goonish attire, Aaron Grey walked into another dock in the list of docks he was checking to find a captain willing to shift him and his companion off world. The previous ones had been a flop, but he had a good feeling from this one.

With what looked like a mandalorian warrior in tow, Aaron marched. "Hello?" he called. Seeing the ramp down, the youth advanced. Common knowledge dictated that one did not board others' ships without permission, but Aaron had always had a nack for fast talking so he did not expect problems.

He stopped abruptly as he came face to face with a blaster held by a dangerous looking Twi'lek. Though it may have been the blaster that made him look dangerous but it was hard to decide.

"Easy guy," Aaron said, raising his hands. "No need for that. We're just looking for a ride." He kept his eyes on the Twi'lek, unaware of...many, many things.