The Company You Choose (Vector)

[Lemur, The Kool-Aid Guy]

Tashra Gly stared at the landing strut of a medium freighter with suspicion, wary of the hydraulics that were clearly out to get her. They were persistently stubborn in retracting, or so she was told, and she believed it of course.

"What's your angle?" She whispered intently as she ran an orange finger across the tube, looking for any leaks via tactile sensation. "I don't trust you landing strut, I've got a funny feeling about you."

With the same hand, Tashra stroked her chin thoughtfully, leaving a brown and oily smudge on the yellowish orange skin of her face where her fingers had imprinted.

Experimentally, Tashra hit it with a wrench. She was rewarded by a hiss as the ship sank lower on the strut. Somehow she'd made that happen, or else it was the coincidence of the century.

"What did you do?" The pilot asked in wonder.

"Uh, special mechanic stuff," The Togruta teenager answered in as serious a tone as she could muster. "You probably wouldn't understand it."

"Well, I pay for results rather than explanations, so here you go Sparky."

A wad of Hutt currency was placed into Tashra's hands, which she stuffed into a pocket of her shorts with a grin. "Thanks."

The girl meandered away from the docking bay with her droid in tow, heading in any old direction around Anchorhead. She didn't really know where she was going, or even care. She had shiny new credits she could spend on anything at all.

Sparky paused at the entrance to a cantina, and a devilish look came onto her face.

Cantinas were filled with all kinds of awesome adult stuff. Like alcohol and tabac, and there were probably card games and things going on. It would be awesome. Of course she remembered her last visit to the cantina had been rather boring and uneventful, but this was gonna be different.

Tashra headed inside.

[Vector]

It was hot and damp at the same time, and ‘damp’ isn’t a word that Visumi thought you could apply to anywhere on this planet. He didn’t have to contemplate or wonder how he ended up in this hellhole, because he had planned most of this in advance. The problem with being an information thief on any planet was that people wanted you dead. The authorities, the rivals gangs and even the people you were working for wanted to kill you, be it to punish you, cripple the opposition or simply tie up loose ends. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Visumi’s penthouse was besieged by a team of no less than at least 15 wet squad workers from some Hutt or other. Visumi didn’t bother to learn who it was that wanted him dead, people wanting him dead was just part of the job and he had no hard feelings. He had heard a saying about his line of work: ‘’the only way to win is not to play’’. It was very true, but where was the fun in not playing? The fun was in the thrill of the chase, especially if you were the prey.

Never-the-less, Visumi had to leg it out of that god-forsaken moon and hitch a ride (illegally, of course) on some shuttle or other to the next best scumhole in the galaxy. And what was the next best thing from that corrupt moon of Nal Hutta? Well, the sandy dunes and sweaty watering holes of Tatooine, of course. And that’s the reason why Visumi, the petite, delicate and womanly master thief was sitting in some bar or pub or… bomb shelter, whatever it was supposed to be, sipping the worst tasting drink he had ever consumed in his life.

There was a potted plant nearby (or, what Visumi thought was meant to be a potted plant, more like a collection of sticks in a bucket) which he swiftly dumped his drink in and started scanning the cantina for his prize. The one thing he loved about Tatooine was that people here were still using hard currency. Credit chips were making things harder to steal from pockets, but proper hard cash could be picked with no problem. And, with haste and delight, he saw a target.

Some silly looking Muun had genuinely left his coat (and, in its pocket, a badly concealed wallet) resting on the chair he was sitting on. Why he even bothered with a coat in this heat, Visumi couldn’t tell. But with it resting on the chair like that, Visumi could pick it without problem, and so he got to work.

Visumi got up and adjusted his hood, making sure to cover his vestigial eye sockets and keep his identity something of a mystery. He took a step from his table and meandered slightly, adjusting the rhythm of his steps and purposely throwing himself off of his centre of gravity. As obvious as it may have appeared to him, Visumi would appear naturally drunk to the many other drinkers in the establishment: a perfectly legitimate reason for him to meander his way past the victim’s table on his way to the bar. Plus, the best thing about drunks is how people tend to focus on trying to ignore them, especially those too busy playing cards. This made it easy for him to swipe the wallet without trouble.
He kept the act for a few steps before sauntering over to the bar and setting his arms across it whilst he waited to be served.

He took the time to plan out his future movements in his head. As much as he liked having people chase him down and kill him, he had made a good few enemies. People were likely to come and hunt him down at some point and he needed some legitimate means of transportation beyond just stowing away on smugglers ships. To this end he had ‘’commandeered’’ a disused yacht and was planning on making some adjustments to its design. He had already retrofitted an old but powerful engine from a larger ship in to the interior, as well as tweaking it to make it all fit nicely. He had also been working on all of these different plans to do with stealth technology and droid interfaces, just for the fun and challenge of building it all, as whilst professionally trained as a ship builder, Visumi was a hobbyist at most, but that just meant he built ships for fun and not professionally. This would be the first time building it outside of his work back on coruscant, and no way in the ‘verse was he going back to that boring hellhole. So he chose this life of thievery, waiting to get served in a dingy cantina in the back-end of the galaxy.

[Lemur, The Kool-Aid Guy]

"You'd better wait by the door," Tashra told Perry in a soft voice, not wanting to draw any attention to the fact she'd brought a droid inside. As it happened, Perry quite agreed in a similar tone.

The Togruta girl walked down into the dark interior of the cantina, and walked up to the brighter bar area, promptly sliding onto a bar stool and looking at herself in the mirror along the back. Sure enough, there was a smudge on her face.

She tried to rub it off and succeeded in making it worse, but mercifully before her attempt at cleaning could go further awry the bartender arrived and asked her what she wanted.

Tashra slapped the counter and said "I'll have a beer!" rather boisterously, which was funny because she'd never had beer before. It was gonna be exciting all right, miles of fun swigging down the amber liquid everyone loved. In fact, she'd seen an Echani man wearing a shirt that said something about beer in the Aurebesh.

It just had to be good.

Soon the liquid arrived and Tashra slapped down her currency, taking a sip of the precious liquid as soon as the bartender had left.

The look on her face quickly changed from bliss to utter disgust. Her tongue rolled around in her mouth and she cringed. It tasted like... like urine? Bitter urine?

How did people drink this?

The teenage mechanic picked up the glass and left the counter, looking for somewhere to dump it, in secret so no one would know she hadn't finished her beer. There was a potted plant, and furtively she dumped the mug down onto it, emptying it of liquid.

She then returned to the counter and sat next to a womanish man who had just come up to it.

Tashra looked him in the eye.

"I just drank this beer. All of it. Honest. Yup, I sure love the beer."