Rel Theslin

Runan Vao… Twenty meters down a pile of scrap from her stood the blue Twi’lek, avatar of their trouble. He had seen her, approached her, and must have known a deal to find her digging around in scrap. And yet here she still stood, no stun blast, no poison dart. Just walking forward. Rel felt petrified. Blaster on her hip, blast vest worn, but still defenseless where it most mattered. Vao held the cards and he probably knew it. He motioned to the doors and yelled something inaudible over the blowing fans and thrumming power generators.

Lazy… Lazy! Gotten complacent, walking around alone in a space station without telling anyone where she was going. So focused on her pet project and how much trouble had been stirring in other lives she had somehow let slip that their unique brand of family was still particularly sought. Dross might even be getting his information straight from Bah’ger, wouldn’t have been the first time he played both sides, she’d wager. His only friends were credits, he said. Kill off the two of us,  Turn Yanna over to Imperial Sector, reacquire Seela easily and acquire the newly upgraded Viridian’s Gambit which was likely sitting in his own damn drydock. All at a tidy profit. Ge’hutuun filth. Vao stepped closer and repeated his gesture and yell, now barely audible, ‘Can we talk?’ She’d done it again, pausing at a critical moment and thinking rather then acting. She could probably play it off as shock and fear. He’d expect that, maybe.

She walked abreast of him, thumbing a code sequence in her commlink to Var, thinking furiously, wishing they had done a proper set up and plan about Ghambeezi, noted code identifiers for the different areas of the station. All normally Vica’s job, his lead. Well you wanted to follow Var into this, Rel, time to start acting and doing and not just playing the spoiled engineer brat.
There was a bar they walked into, the passkey was admitting she’d killed a man, Vao said he’d watched, almost sounded proud. A scumbag bar, a vile home where prey and predator played. Something was coming over the tinny speakers. A soft ballad, vaguely Sullustan, and quiet enough to give white noise without interfering in the games of whispers. Vao claimed it was safe here, but she knew without doubt that enough credits on the floor and not a soul would even recall her existence. She had only his intent to base off of, had he wanted her captured, that dance would have passed, killed, the same. Something else motivated.

----

“That was Runan Vao, that makes you a Theslin.” The bartender observed, a wry grin on his face as he looked over the rumpled spacerat he had just given a small shot glass to.
“I thought the hat gave me away.” Rel let spill out, not having the presence of mind to even look at the bartender, acknowledge him as a sentient.

“This one’s on the house, you bounty hunters are my kind of scum.” The bartender moved away to answer another customer as Rel looked at the small metal cup, then to her dormant commlink, sitting quiet, then back to the shot.

No response from Var, either she had been busy and missed the code, or was fairly busy trying to hunt Rel down and hadn’t thought to call back, or had assumed Rel wouldn’t be able to respond. Well you did send a Jare distress signal.

She thought over the proposition Vao had given, ‘apologize and this’ll be over’. She favored her answer and the answer she hoped Var would give. ‘Give up Gorv’don and we won’t annihilate the entire Fenten Guild to get to him’. Bold words for a scared thirteen year old girl, but if they were attempting parlay, they were afraid of losing. Bank on greed, Vica used to say, their greed deserts them a lot slower then their ideals or their loyalties.

Rel took her first shot like she had watched Var and Ura before her, like every cheap holovid star in every advert. She took the shot like she had no idea what an afterburner was. Her eyes watered and her throat caught fire as she leaned forward in a quick violent cough, drawing a few chuckles from near tables, a few drifting eyes to the child in their midst. Her vision cleared just as slow as her throat cooled, replaced with a distant headache. Way’ii. In the meantime someone had left a glass of what was hopefully water, she hadn’t even noticed. It was cold and flavorless, which she was thankful for.
She had been two feet from the man who had killed her parents, and he’d walked away. Not the distant faceless crime boss who had ordered their death or gloated of it, but the hand who had sabotaged the Scarlet Flag, and chased them. She wanted to hate him, wanted to want to hurt him back. But that didn’t seem fitting.

A fire gem in the hyperdrive, A small crystal imbedded in the power control relay so as to overheat as soon as full thrust from the sublight generators was routed into creating the hyperspace bubble, enough of an explosion to throw feedback along the lines and short the generators just as the bubble was forming. A surge like that would overload any bypass switch or capacitor. Quick and efficient. Already she could think of four other places where a fire gem could be placed in the old SoroSuub on the Flag, but none would have been quite as effective or guaranteed successful.

Vao left warning about Dross’ pet Jedi being in pursuit. Laser swords and moving things with their mind, meditation and predicting things happening. Between the Imperial assassin, the vid from the Stormtrooper helmet, Klew’than, Yanna, and now Seela, maybe? Yanna and her had been doing weirdness the past few days. Talking about this Force of theirs. Dead order, my ass. If Dross’ Jedi had a laser sword she was dangerous, if she didn’t have a laser sword she was dangerous.

Rel’s feet were unsteady under her for a moment as she walked to the door, palming her commlink.

Yanna Tarassi

Meanwhile....

With a resounding thunk, Yanna Tarassi hit her head on the underside of the small snubfighter for the third time in as many minutes. Cursing softly to herself, she bit her tongue against giving the small vessel an angry vocal lashing that it didn't deserve.

"Why did they have to make them so small?" she questioned rhetorically, electing a squawking series of remarks from the black P2 droid standing nearby.

"Don't you get technical with me," she scolded the droid lightly. "Of course they have to make them small, it's a fighter."

"It's just that I'm not used to working on something like this," she continued dejectedly, waving her hand at the little starship and getting nothing but a slow headtwist in response from the droid.

"I'm a transport mechanic," she explained "not a snubfigher tech, I should be helping get this crate up to snuff instead of kriffing around with this old thing. But I get it, I understand why Rel doesn't want me poking around her ship. I probably would of shot anyone taking an access panel off my dad's ship. Still, it wouldn't hurt to ask. What do you think, ask Rel to let me help her out on a ship I know or keep banging my head against this old one-seat deathtrap?"

The blatted a rude response to her description of the fighter craft. It promptly rolled over to the small vessel and extended a manipulator arm to indicate a maneuvering cluster that needed realignment.

"Some help you are," Yanna commented, laying down on her back to shimmy under the chassis of the triangular craft. Despite her comments, Yanna knew that the snubfighter was all that was left of her life aboard the Excessive Debt. And truth be told it didn't even belong to her. The snubfighter and the droid both belonged to a certain Lim Res, a handsome if naive young passenger from their last couple of voyages.

Yanna had liked Lim, to the point of Captain Kir making a somewhat crude remark about her looking at Lim like she needed to get her power couplings aligned. She couldn't explain it but there was a connection between them, something that they both noticed right away. That in itself was out of the ordinary. Yanna was generally not known for her perceptive abilities. As an engineer, she could pick out a burned-out circuit from the way the dampeners vibrated--but she would miss seeing a rancor juggle gungans unless it was pointed out to her.

With a sigh she got back to work, pulling off an access panel and peering into the compartment. "What model did you say this was again?"

The droid had slid up to the side of the small ship, disapprovingly examining a micrometeor gouge that had appeared while Yanna had been at the helm. It squawked a curt reply to her, forcing the young girl to lift up a nearby datapad to get a translation.

"Delta-7B Aethersprite-class light interceptor," she read. "Never heard of one. But maybe you could tell my why it's got a Z-95's TransGalMeg class-2 hyperdrive module jammed in here where the cargo compartment used to be?"

The droid fired off a series of replies, forcing her to look at the datapad again. Tiring of the game, she simply reached out with the Force to lift the datapad into her line of vision and resumed poking around the innards of the ship with both hands.

"Hyperspace docking ring huh? Well that's a stupid idea. I mean, you just flew into a system, left your hyperdrive behind, and hoped it would be there when you got back?"

The droid replied snarkily, blatting a few short squawks at her. Yanna glanced at the reply, muttering to herself. Every sentient over 40 seemed to have some version of the same story: In the days of the Old Republic an unarmed transport full of spice and Twi'lek virgins could travel from one end of the galaxy to the other without fear of attack... Whatever. She hadn't been around for it, all she'd grown up with was dirty space stations, even dirtier worlds, and downright filthy sentients all out to make a credit any way they could.

The galaxy needed order, she mused to herself, there were wrongs the Jedi could of righted if only they had just chosen to do so. No matter what Lim had said to the contrary, Yanna believed that if she'd of had that kind of power to do good that she would of used it.

Lim. The name brought forth a wave of conflicting emotions: love, hate, anger, but mostly frustration. For the first time in her life Yanna had found someone who was like her. Someone who could touch the Force. He wasn't a dream, or a character from her banned holonovels about the long lost Jedi Order, he had been real. And cute. Oh had he ever been cute. Tanned skin and blonde hair, with the lean muscular body of a marathon runner. And he'd betrayed her.

Just when she had realized that he was like her, she had committed a fatal mistake. In her zeal to show him that she too had the ability to feel the Force, she had saved him from getting shot by flinging a convenient toolkit into the chest of the stormtrooper leveling a rifle at Lim's back. And how did he thank her?

"You have started down the path to the Dark Side," Yanna mimicked his voice spitefully. "I can not train you until you have overcome the darkness within you." She stopped to wipe a tear from her brillian teal-coloured eyes. And yet he had saved her. In the end, when the Mandalorian bounty hunter had emerged from their secret cargo hold and killed the entire crew of the Excessive Debt, it was Lim who stood in the door way to Engingeering and forced the monster to stop.

For a little while at least. Lim had called himself a Padawan. In the old stories that made him a Jedi in training, little more than an intern. He was strong, fast and agile. But his home-made shockstaff and incomplete mastery of Jeet Kun Do were no match for a fully trained Mandalorian warrior and his brutal Beskar'rev martial art. The monster in the grey and violet armour had a hollow dignity about him. He had holstered his weapons when Lim faced him with the meek-looking shockstaff, but it was only because he wanted to finish off the last of his opposition with his own gloved hands. Lim never stood a chance.

For the second time in her life she was thrown into an escape pod as a man she loved held off her attackers. Lim had not been the first, he had missed that dubious honor by about 6 standard years. The scene had been the same though: scared little brunette girl with big eyes cowers screaming in the middle of her once-familiar array of engineering consoles--suddenly feeling the full force of the malevolent intrusion upon her safety as the faceless monsters in the hallway try to beat down the door to her sanctuary.

But someone had stood between her and her attackers both times. One with a shockstaff, the other with a glowing yellow sword that he had desperately tried to keep hidden for over a decade. Both had failed. Yanna could still feel the flush of heat as the vibrosword slashed through her father's lightsaber, discharging the power core and forever cracking the crystal. She could hear the shattering bones and sickening pops of snapping tendons as Lim withered under the assault of metal-covered fists and feet. Both had fallen to the ground in front of her, both had screamed for her to flee.

And she had, both times. She fled. They died and she ran, too weak to fight back. Her father's last breath had been used to push her and everything around her into the escape pod. Lim's had been less dramatic, a simple look. An apology for not being able to do more. But the second time she did not flee without striking back. Her crew was dead, he ship was lost. Bit it was her ship. She was her engineer and she knew it better than anyone. As the Mandalorien stepped into the engineering bay it was a simple matter to reach out with the Force and trip the proper relays, interrupt the proper safeties, and overload the hyperdrive. The initial explosion nearly blew her across the room, and like so many years before she soon found herself watching a YT-1300 disintegrate through the tiny porthole of a cramped escape pod.

Yanna sniffled, desperately trying not to break down into tears in the middle of an unfamiliar ship. She could see Frida's feet walking on the other side of the cargo bay and pitifully turned her head away so that the older woman would not see the red in her eyes. Yanna only looked up when the datapad unceremoniously clunked her on the head from where she had been holding it suspended in midair. She frowned at it, rubbing her head for what was now the fourth time in as many minutes.

Concentrate... you must learn to concentrate. Unlearn what you have learned.

She could almost hear her father's voice echoing to her in the cavernous cago bay. Yanna stopped her undignified sniffling and looked around the cargo bay. She had almost heard his voice. Sticking her head out from the underside of the ship she glannced around. Frida was gone, but she could hear Var clanking down the hallway in a run--her distinctive Mandalorian boots thumping on the deck plating. Go'ram kriffing Mandalorians, she sneered openly.

Anger leads to the Dark Side, Yanna. Let go of it.

Yanna jumped with a start, yet again cracking her head on the underside of the snubfighter. That time she was sure she had heard her father's voice. She stuffed several choice curses to the back of her mind.

"Did you hear that?" she asked the black-shelled droid. It was sanding nearby watching her, but made no reply to her query. But it had been watching her. Yanna climbed out from under the fighter, standing up and brushing herself off.

"So, what is this dad?" she asked the otherwise unoccupied room. "Another little test? Don't think that I haven't finally figured it out. You'd been training me hadn't you? To be a Jedi." She paused, fingering the gold medallion that constantly hung around her neck. It was old and horribly scratched, the figure on the front a blur and the aurebesh lettering nearly unreadable. But she knew what it read, like she knew in her heart the implications what it meant: Limres Tarassi, Jedi Master. Her father.

"But you didn't count on mom did you?" she continued, her only audience a broken down snbfighter and an outdated astromech droid in an otherwise empty room. "She was Echani, or at least part. She taught me how the Galaxy really works when you weren't looking. It's a bad place out there dad, really bad. You never could admit how far things had fallen since the Republic took the Final Jump, but she knew. She saw it and I've seen it. And I can change it."

You are reckless Yanna, much like your mother. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defence, never for attack.

It felt as if he was standing right behind her, but she dreaded to turn around. Looking first to the droid, it was watching her intently. No.. it was watching something behind her.

"I can change it dad, me. There are wrongs the Jedi can right, and I choose to do so."

Yanna took a deep breath as she spun on her heel. Not knowing what to expect to see, she was somewhat shocked to be facing nothing but the canopy of the little snubfighter. All she could see was her own reflection, shaded darker by the anti-glare tinting in the transparasteel. She looked at her own dark reflection long and hard, the whispers of her long-dead father no longer echoing in her ears. Eventually, she took a long breath and stood a little straighter.

"If that is my path, then so be it. I won't fall into darkness dad, just a little more into the shadows. You'll see."

"You'll see," she repeated, more to convince herself than she'd like to admit.

"I just need a place to start." The droid piped up with a squawk, beginning to roll towards the door. Yanna turned that direction, facing the door just as Seela'fenn raced into the cargo bay. If not for her extremely agile reflexes, she would of easily tripped over P2-D4 as he continued to bump past her and head out toward the cockpit.

The Twi'lek was jabbering at her in Twiliki, to excited to slow down and use Basic. Luckily, Yanna had made more than a few smuggling runs to Ryloth in her time.

"Rel's gone missing and Var just got a distress code huh? Well dad, let's see how your little Echani Jedi daughter handles her first mission."

"Lead on Seela," Yanna said to the Twi'lek, strapping on her blaster as she did so. "And on the way I'll show you a trick my dad once taught me for finding people in a crowd. I'm not very good at it, but I get the feeling that you might be."

"So Seela," she continued as they left the cargo bay and the old snubfighter behind, "tell me, have you ever heard of something called a Padawan?"

Peshk Vel'ag

Peshk Vel'ag was a patient sentient, in his line of work he had to be. You didn't get as old and wealthy as Peshk Vel'ag by being rash and impulsive. Such concepts were as foreign to him as the Duros' need to wander the stars or the Human need to stick their short, pale noses into everyone else's business. Peshk Vel'ag was a Bothan, raised on the bustling commerce world Bothawui in the Mid Rim. He knew that in the galactic sense of things his species was famous for a very short list of things, but one of these attributes was an unending well of patience. Which was fortunate for Peshk Vel'ag of Clan Ag, for he was a bounty hunter.

In the impulsiveness of youth, Peshk Vel'ag had left home durning the waning days of the Clone Wars to seek his personal fortune. There were plenty of opportunities for a Clan-trained Bothan such as himself to join up with one of the innumerable mercenary bands plying their trade to both sides of the conflict. But direct miliraty force was not The Bothan Way. No, truth be told the Bothans believe themselves long since moved past such petty direct disputes. They considered such things as an adult muses upon the playground squabbles of children.

Peshk Vel'ag looked around the crowded outer docking right of the Ghambeezi Drift Station, taking in the sights and smells of a hundred different species. His hair flattened against his neck and shoulders, unable to keep his contempt for them hidden. They fought and killed, much like his ancestors did in their never-ending clan wars. But these days The Bothan Way was different, it was a simple philosophy that Peshk Vel'ag highly approved of: The individual's power is rated above all other things, with anything short of outright violence being a perfectly acceptable way of gaining such power.

This worked very well when dealing with other Bothans, but since they had integrated into the Old Republic with its millions of species they were having a hard time getting the rest of the galaxy to play by the rules. The rest of the galaxy, especially the Humans, had an annoying tendency to settle their disputes by actually shooting at each other. Disgusting habit, he mused, when a properly placed bit of blackmail or criminally suspect money transfer would do the same thing? He resolved that if he lived for another 80 standard years he would never understand Humans.

As such, when Peshk Vel'ag made his way out to the galaxy to earn his reputation, he did not do so from the barrel of a gun. Peshk Vel'ag had been a spy. First for the local Bothan Spynet, then for a few minor worlds in the Kathol Sector. He traded his services from one client to the next, dealing with everyone from planetary governors to Hutt crimelords, building up a reputation as a sentient that got things done. The Hutts he had especially worked well with. Their tactics were almost.. Bothan in their application. It was an old Hutt named Aruk of the Besadii kajidic that had hired him for his first bounty mission.

By this point the war was over, the new Empire was crushing the last of the CIS opposition and had no more need for non-human intelligence operatives. Peshk Vel'ag was looking for a new line of work, but had not been keen at the time on being a bounty hunter. However, the Hutts has a way of being persuasive. Unfortunately for him, most of the work he had done during the war he had no proof of being involved with. Deep-cover spying, it turned out, was no way to build up a political following back home on Bothawui. He needed something flashy, something almost Human, so he joined the Guild and became a low-life bounty hunter.

What Peshk Vel'ag remembered most of the intervening years was the thrill of the hunt. To out think his opponents, to trap them like Corellian vrelts in the corner until they were ready to surrender themselves to him. He was no Bossk, and certainly no Boba Fett, but he got the job done--because he was patient.

It had been over a standard month since he had spotted his quarry on Wrea near the Smuggler's Run. The Empire had placed a standard catch-and-detain out on two suspected "Jedi" and as luck would have it they were traveling together. Peshk Vel'ag remembered the Jedi Order, before they turned against the Republic all those years ago. He did not really believe that Lim Res and Yanna Tarassi were really Jedi, it was probably some Sector Moff using those old tales as an excuse to put out a personal hit. Peshk Vel'ag didn't give a three day dead mynock if they were really Jedi or not, it wasn't his business to care. But he wasn't going to take any chances.

He had hit every antique dealer and dark-corner weapons dealer on the Outer RIm to find what he needed: Top of the line hand-free target/tracking gear, plasma-resistant body armour, and a handfull of old Kamino saber darts--loaded with enough soporific to drop a raging gundark. On top of his usual array of stunblasters, connor nets, and vibroblades he was about as prepared as a sentient could be. Sure Gorm liked his disintigrators and Fett loved his flame-units, but Peshk Vel'ag wanted the bonus pay for an "undamaged delivery". The Empire was paying very well for undamaged Jedi these days.

But things did not go as planned. It was as if the Galaxy itself had decided to thwart him. First, his targets decided--against all logic and reason--to not only stop an Imperial crackdown of a civilian protest rally, but then managed to take on the entire planetary garrison as they blasted their way out of the system. Peshk Vel'ag had briefly considered sneaking aboard their dilapidated YT-1300L and popping out in flight to surprise them, but quickly decided against it. First was the sorry state of that vessel, he'd of rather hijacked a Gamorean garbage schow.

The second was that someone had beaten him to it. Peshk Vel'ag had seen a tall humanoid in Mandalorian armour boarding the vessel as their owners were otherwise occupied with the Stormtroopers. It occurred to Peshk Vel'ag's devious Bothan mind that the man in the grey and purple clan Ordo armour could of very well called the Imperials down on the rally as a diversion. He would have to remember that trick for a later time. But Peshk Vel'ag was a patient sentient, he simply secured a tracking device to the near-by small snubfighter that his targets had in tow and exited the docking bay before they came racing back to their ship with blasters blazing at the Imperials on their tails. All Peshk Vel'ag had to do was wait.

And what a wait it was. Annoyingly so. By the time his quarry had limped in to Ghambeezi Drift Station there was only one of them left. Their ship was gone and had taken both the male bountyhead and the damnnable Mandalorian with it. The Mando must of really snuffed the grinka on that one, he observed. But one bounty was better than none, so Peshk Vel'ag waited until the young human female was alone and distracted before he made his move. Jedi or not, it was best to be cautious.

Of course, the Galaxy was not quite done playing games with him. A second Mandalorian in Ordo armor stopped him from making the capture. A female this time, in considerably more well-used gear. What did this Tarassi girl do to Clan Ordo for them to send two of their Protectors after her?!? Perhaps it had something to do with the new Imperial decree declaring Mandalore an "Imperial Protectorate", fancy words for a sanctioned slave world. Peshk Vel'ag did not particularly care, be had a bounty to collect.

Luckily for him, he knew of this second Mandalorian's reputation. She was one of several Theslins, a bounty hunter herself. Peshk Vel'ag had pointed this out to her, even going so far as to denegrate his honour by suggesting they split the bounty for the girl. But the Mandalorian had refused, claiming the girl as a "friend". Peshk Vel'ag found it odd that the Mando would do such a thing, on Bothawui naming a clan-mate was a very serious thing to do. But Peshk Vel'ag was not about to protest, direct violence was not The Bothan Way. 

Peshk Vel'ag turned to his strengths. It was said that calling a Bothan "prone to backstabbing to achieve their goals" was like calling the torrential rains of the ocean world Kamino "a little wet." To Bothans, using others as pawns for your own ambition came as easily as breathing. So Peshk Vel'ag got down to work. He was tired of Mandalorians, and sick of this bounty. Peshk Vel'ag had contacts on this station, Tyvek the Hutt owed him a favor and by Drev'starns guilded spires he was calling in the marker.

Not knowing when the damaged ship would lift for another system, Peshk Vel'ag was initially dismayed when they broke seal the next morning. However, they were only relocating to an internal repair yard on Tier 8. Counting his lucky banthas, Peshk Vel'ag dusted off his old spying gear and got down to research. The ship was named The Maltese Falcon under a Captain Frida Lovelace. Peshk Vel'ag had seen that holovid years ago, and knew the name of the leading actress. Cute, thought the Bothan, but unless they have the real Frida Lovelace on board (unlikely) it was undoubtedly a fake ship ID and Captain's papers. The Mandalorian female must be using the Lovelace name as a cover. But the Glorious Jewel in the the crown came from Zyvek's people. The Mandalorial girl was named Var Theslin, and she had enemies in very dark places. Luckily for Peshk Vel'ag, he had friends in the same locations.

It took over a standard week to determine who the passengers and crew of The Maltese Falcon were, a few hours to track down Dross Gor'vdon, and a mere three standard days for a ship to blast its way across the galaxy carrying Dross' chosen assassins. Peshk Vel'ag stayed out of their way, he only needed them to remove the Thesslin woman to give him a clear shot at his bounty--"Let's you and him fight" was a time-honoured adage in Bothan philosophy. All he had to do was watch their ship and wait, his target would present herself in time. After all, Peshk Vel'ag was a very patient sentient.