5.06

Moving on from Commenor down the Trellen Trade Route, we only dropped into the Rasterous system because it was a mandatory stop in the charted hyperlane. It took an extra two hours to skim the edge of the system, but it was better than the alternative. However chaotic the situation in Kuat might be the Kuati-owned shipyard on the planet Rasterous was bound to have a decent garrison, and with the shipyard being more militarized than in Kuat they'd probably have better training and readiness as well. The trip also served to reveal an oversight in our ship's multiple upgrades; the Sprinkle's oversized reactors might be able to power its drive to greater speeds but the drive itself had limited micro-jump ability. At least it could outrun even starfighters in sublight mode. The Sprinkle's unusual course drew attention; we turned towards galactic Northwest and jumped out five minutes ahead of the microjump-capable Interceptor-class frigate that was on patrol. From there, it was only one relatively short jump to our destination.

From space, Zeltron was purple-pink, with splashes of green in the tropical and temperate zones. Slightly smaller than Earth, with slower rotation speed and less temperature variation, it had fewer clouds and less intense weather overall. Like its sapient population, many of its life-forms had high levels of carotenoids and collectively produced the biosphere's vibrant hues, from plankton turning its seas and lakes various shades of indigo and violet to algae coloring many springs and rivers in prismatic hues, to the Zeltrons themselves being among the most literally colorful people in the galaxy. This was a major part of what made the planet the most famous resort in the galaxy; many places offered all the pleasures invented by civilization but few could pair them with an aesthetically pleasing yet safe and natural environment.

Another unusual feature of the planet and its culture was that it didn't have urban centers, as became evident as soon as our ship reached the lower atmosphere. Having significantly more comfortably habitable land than Earth, and a smaller, self-sufficient population, it didn't really need them. Its five billion inhabitants were more evenly spread out in towns, villages, and resorts instead. That it both lacked large-scale industry and did not need imports to cover local needs was telling. Its primary trade was luxury goods, primary consumables for the half-billion visitors it had at any given moment. This was why our small shipment of collector-grade wines and precious stones was expected to turn a significant profit. Unfortunately, Jestra had been sequestered in her cabin for the past seven hours to "freshen up" and Aurra was finishing her daily exercise routine, so I had nobody to annoy with this trivia. Alas, Ratty's lessons on planetary geography and culture would go unused yet again.

The Sprinkle was guided by a surprisingly competent and suspiciously well-armed customs authority towards one of the more remote landing strips in the Southern Province. This put us well away from the elective queen's palace in the North and other important government centers, but we were otherwise left undisturbed despite our ship's obvious attempts at being a full cruiser in under forty meters of hull; we were probably far from the most well-armed or most dangerous visitors to the expensive planetary resort. Upon landing, we were given two hours to get in "appropriate attire" from a rather cute, red-skinned customs officer before we'd have to deal with inspectors. Naturally, he was in swimming briefs when he said that.

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In the end, I had to borrow one of Jestra's shawls. My cousin had somehow managed to disappear every article of clothing in my not-insignificant collection except for shoes, lacy underwear, and swimwear while I was handling the atmospheric insertion. I, in turn, had refused to change, however inappropriate a flight suit might be for a business meeting in Zeltros' culture. Aurra had somehow produced a tiny blaster from her one-piece swimsuit's nonexistent pockets and threatened to stun and strip us if we didn't stop wasting time. Jestra was game until I threatened to give her wrinkles with the Force, so we compromised. As a sacrifice to the dread two-headed hydra of fashion and culture, I was down to a black two-piece skirtini of Kashyyuk Webweaver silk that covered little and felt like wearing nothing at all, but the gleaming silvery shawl of spun aurodium made for decent, if sheer cover.

"You are not what I expected of a Kuati scion," our host admitted as the four of us lounged under a palm tree by a prismatic spring. She took a sip from her 'fortified' tea and smiled. "We have seen far too many uptight, judgemental, stubbornly traditional envoys from our more industrious neighbors."

"Is trading snide remarks part of Zeltron culture now?" She, on the other hand, was a fairly normal Zeltron on the surface. Copper hair, maroon skin, a black leather two-piece that wouldn't mesh well with seawater. Then again, it was beachwear, not swimwear. Underneath the pretty exterior however, a tightly leashed core of anger simmered even through the mantle of joy, hope, greed, and envy pervading the atmosphere. The only physical hints of that desire to lash out was the challenging gleam in our host's eyes and slight tension in well-defined muscles. A dainty socialite our contact was not.

"Sometimes," she answered my question with a smirk and a hint of malice. "But let us eschew with tradition." Her eyes noted Jestra's feigned interest in and careful sipping from three different mildly drugged cocktails, my height and athletic build, and Aurra's silent intensity. "My name's Lyshaa and I believe we can do business."

The negotiations went on peacefully, despite the dozen watchers hiding in the surrounding woods, all in high vantage points too far for normal eyes to see, with narrow but unobstructed sight lines to the clearing.

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"The sell went well enough," Jestra shared her opinion between slurps of fuchsia spice-enhanced ice cream. She lazily paddled in the purple pool, aimlessly moving her air mattress while slowly absorbing the pool's greatest feature.

"Yes, we temporarily avoided getting shot while dealing with a criminal," I snarked, swimming in circles around her. The superhuman constitution and the Force required far greater exposure to begin to experience the algae-produced stimulants, let alone the muscle relaxants and strong hallucinogenics. "And we're still being watched."

"Spoilsport," Jestra shot back along with a splash of water. "Risk is the spice of life. Besides, with you two here we were hardly in danger." She waved vaguely to the East where Aurra was sunbathing after a brief swim. Far more alert than she appeared to be, she kept scanning our surroundings for those armed observers. The snipers would be far less content to wait us out if they knew of her apparently waterproof holdout blaster, or that she practiced in the Doughnut's thousand-meter shooting range on moving targets.

"If this blows up in our face, I reserve the right to kick your ass." Grumbling aside, the contact Jestra had provided had matched all our demands in cash. Twenty percent above market value and no taxation meant we'd made two and a half billion on the Chrysopaz gems alone. It was the kind of money only noble Houses, planetary governments, or criminal cartels had at hand and there was no doubt for which of them 'Lyshaa' worked. "Whatever our watchers might be thinking-" and they were ogling all three of us while waiting to capture us once we were too drugged to complain "-whoever controls their organization isn't here for me to read their mind. There might have a whole battalion of mercs and thugs around in case their usual scheme fails, and just because we'll see them coming doesn't mean we can avoid them."

"How about witnesses?" Jestra said with a slight slurring in her words that fooled no-one. "Because I got an idea..."

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"Giving upsh, wittle wady?" The Mandalorian asking that particular question might only have an inch or two on me, but outweighed me by eighty kilos and he was ridiculously ripped, even for a Mandalorian. In fact, his muscular bulk had to suffer mobility issues, and there was no way he was within the body mass limits set by the Supercommando Codex. Which was probably why he made a killing as the local drinking contest champion instead.

"Not a chance!" I downed my ninety-seventh shot to the cheers of everyone present, then shot Jestra an absolutely venomous glare. A trained force-sensitive could out-drink Andre the Giant ten times out of ten, but there other issues than alcohol poisoning with over-drinking, Force, or no Force. And with over a thousand people watching, I refused to lose like the last three of this arrogant lump's opponents had. Worse still, all Zeltrons were empaths; they'd know if cheating was involved even if they couldn't tell exactly how; knocking my opponent out with the Force was a no-go. So I crossed my legs, tapped into the Force for endurance, shot my cousin another glare, and held on. The guy was already tipsy, he would pass out soon.

At least we weren't drinking beers.

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The Force was the essence of life and a vast energy field with innumerable uses, and I'd just discovered one more. A combination of enhanced agility, precognitive reflexes, and Soresu katas kept me intact in a battlefield of more than five hundred opponents, continuous blinding flashes, and incessant booming shockwaves that rattled the bones. Keeping ahead of the attacks while carrying out the directions provided took effort comparable to battling a quartet of assassin droid in close quarters, except much deeper tapping into the Force, was needed because conventional danger sense did not help and the rapidly shifting battlefield and cramped conditions limited the available avenues of evasion.

On the other hand, compared to the tension and uncertainty of the drinking contest the new situation was very relaxing. I let myself rely on the Force's guidance more and more, not consciously directing my moves at all. Under a sheen of sweat, I was closer to a lazy sprawl than I'd been at the drugged pool, gentle nudges shifting me between beats and around reaching foes as I relaxed. In brief glimpses through the crowd I saw both Jestra and Aurra doing considerably worse... or perhaps better, from their perspective. Jestra couldn't use the Force to avoid the other dancers' gropes after all, not that she seemed to mind. At least she'd yet to lose her top, unlike a third of the women on the dance floor. Aurra was actually inviting them yet always disengaging on her terms in an impressive display of teasing and flexibility.

We'd arrived in the packed disco after a very narrow victory over the Mandalorian and a hasty retreat just ahead of Aurra's sniggers. The former bounty-hunter had been the one to suggest the place after a brief yet unavoidable pit-stop, to my dubious consent. I'd been pleasantly surprised; I'd forgotten how it felt to dance, to let go in a (relatively) safe place and have fun. Zeltrons were all empaths as well as capable of controlled pheromone production; their biology and culture uniformly pushed them towards intense, traditionally positive emotions and the echo of five billion of them in the Force was like a tropical storm. This planet might have a fraction of the population of Nar Shadda, but every one of them felt more strongly and constantly; connected in a vast network through their empathy they emanated what they felt like a single force-sensitive being the size of a planet. To that sea of emotion was added the excess of non-Zeltron visitors, half a billion of the galaxy's richest, most active, most thrill-seeking beings gathering in a single world where every pleasure was available for a price, free of most risk or exploitation such overindulgence would have in any other place.

The cold I'd soaked in near the Hutt's violently criminal homeworld was already gone. The shadow of millions of voices tortured to death in the void of space was drowned out by billions having the best day of their life in the closest to true paradise this galaxy could get. Even the gnawing nightmares of a madman dealt the worst fate imaginable faded ever so little. It felt great...

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Dawn found us back in the Sprinkle with our criminal stalkers nowhere in sight. Not dawn after that first night, mind you, but three days later. I didn't remember sleeping. Then again, memories of two of those days were somewhat lacking incoherence. I was sore from head to toe, had a headache the size of Centerpoint Station... and was feeling better than I had in the past year.

"Hey, Jestra?" I laughed and stretched for a minute or five. No reply came so I prodded my cousin with the Force.

"Wuzzat?" Since she didn't seem to be awake, I prodded her some more. "Heeeey! Sthap that!"

"I got an idea." I tried to focus on the details over the haze of emotion. Little stars were dancing everywhere I looked over a background glow of silver and... hey, was I still linked to the Zeltrons? It felt goooood.

"Whizzit then?" Jestra slurred, prodding me in turn. I giggled; she prodded me some more.

I lost count on how many times we went through that exchange until Aurra came in the main hold, carrying an unconscious Zeltron guy under each arm. The boarding ramp had to be painfully loud from how Jestra was holding her head, but I couldn't hear it over the buzz of the thousand closest people having fun. Or were they a million? I was shaken out of the haze when the former (?) assassin kicked the Zeltrons off the ship then splashed both Jestra and I with an unreasonably large amount of freezing liquid. Not water; that wasn't cold enough to inconvenience Arkanians.

"Krufff..." Jestra slurred and swore at the same time as we got mostly awake. "Wait... wass that crazy bitch nekkid?"

"Probably." What happened between consenting adults and crazy assassins was not my business. "You awake yet?"

"Sure..." the groan that followed made that highly doubtful. "What did you want to tell me?"

"Nothing that can't wait an hour or two." I grinned, then giggled, then shook with laughter.

"You done?" Jestra asked sourly, cradling her head between her knees. Her headache had to be a lot worse than mine.

"Yep!" I jumped up and scooted over to her. "And I have a great idea on how to have even more fun."