Connroy's Venture

[Gilamar Skirata]

What had she gotten herself into?

Okyaab VI was a backwater world, even more backwater than Concord Dawn in the eyes of the Galaxy. The sun was low in the sky today.

She had been in the brush for a few days. Coordinates for this place pinged it hundreds of miles from the closest settlement and her client had told her to be discrete. The whole interaction had been...Strange, if what the dispatch team said was true. He wore Mandalorian armor but had no Clan symbol to speak of on his armor. They said it had been the Bard, but she hadn't heard of the Bard in Mandalorian space in years.

"This has strange writen all over it don't you think?" She ruffled the short black fur between the ears of one of the Mandalorian Vornskr she had brought with her. It looked up and barked. The fire cracked as dawn slowly became full blown morning. With a sigh she stood and dusted off her pants and replaced her helmet.

It was time to find these Ordos or whatever.

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Okyaab VI. If the memories I have of this place weren’t as fond, I’d kick the planet off its’ gravitational circuit and watch it ping like a cue ball off its’ nearest planet into the sun.

It’d be like playing pool… take a few thousand years, but nobody could tell me it wouldn’t be worth the wait. Course nobody would live long enough to tell me anything at that rate.

Maybe I just want to play pool.

“Honey, you have no idea how strange things are going to get.” I lean on a tree downwind from the Vornskyr, and as much as I’m concerned by the presence of a Mando’ad near Jasper and Rianna’s homestead, I can’t help but admire the beast at the tin can’s side. Vornskyrs… my favourite pet. An ache in my chest reminds me that Aran and my vornskyrs weren’t that old when they died on Manda’yaim, curled around their Master in a last protective hug. The shiver in my hand, which I stuff under my other armpit, reminds me of the blisters I got digging their grave beside Aran. Jasper’s following too soon after. Why’d I stick around? I don’t know. Maybe I’m waiting for someone to tell me to leave Rianna and the kids. Maybe I sense too much doom in the wind, flying away like Ginnie and D’ral.

My silver hair peeks out of the forest green hood of my coat, arms stuffed in armpits against the shake in my fingers. Basic canvas cargo trousers brush against bark. “Now you’re thinking, what’s this Echani doing in the woods of Okyaab VI… I’m thinking… pool. Want to go play pool? Is there a pool hall around here? You know, the game with the sticks and the balls. Smack’em around into the little pockets. You tin heads play?”

[member="Aria Lissiri"]

 

[Gilamar Skirata]

She flinched as she dropped her sack into the passenger seat of her speeder bike. What was this woman talking about pool doing in the middle of the grassland? For a brief momement she questioned if she was even talking to her.

She then realized they were the only ones in the immediate area.

"Ummm..." She had played pool a couple times, mostly drunk and probably wrong. "I guess there's a cantina a couple miles east, that's where I came from yesterday...Do you....do you need something? Water? I can't give you a ride if that's what you want." Her voice was uncertain, young and a little naive. Behind the black T-shaped visor her face was shaped by her confusion. She waited a moment for an answer but decided regardless of her answer she needed to get moving. Credits weren't gonna make themselves.

She took a few steps over to the small fire she had made and stamped it out and whistled. Two more vornskr rustled from the brush and all three hopped into the speeder.

[member="Ahani Najwa"]

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

I can almost smell the girl’s confusion from here. Got called out for calling a twenty year old a girl once… she can suck a drain pipe for all I care, once you get to be 850, you not only stop counting, but everyone turns into a child.

Kids upon kids. Galaxy’s full of ‘em and half of them don’t have a clue, the other quarter is tromping around for gains, credits, or planets or churning the galactic power machine like the little cogs they are. Guess there’s a quarter left. Or maybe an eighth who get it. Really get it… maybe a sixteenth who understand the trick, the absolute to our whirling dervish galaxy and the others which swirl like bubbles fading in dishwater left alone too long without agitation or that divine guiding hand…

Cling to nothing but the folk who make you passionate. Ask for nothing but the love of a family you breed, bond or make. There is no better path than the one which leads to a spouse’s slumbering sigh, a child’s desire to curl into your arms. Took eight hundred years meditating on the Force to figure out the simplest life was the best.

My eyes shut and I shake my hooded head… none of that was out loud. Maybe I needed it to be. But now? Kind of forget what I was thinking, ‘cause Vornskyrs are coming out of the woods and the girl is pounding out the fire with her foot. Extending my hand, I clench it and even the embers go out, crushed into a fist-sized charcoal ball. The ball veers into my hand, and I throw it into the distance, half out of a desire to see if the vornskyrs play fetch.

“Need… yeah, I need a lot. I needed a run, which brought me out here. You know, motion cleanses the soul. You need things too… might need more than I do… Eh! That’s okay! I’ll join you!” Three more Vornskyrs. One, two, and three. And an awkward sounding kid on a mission. Force Sensitive creatures usually have fits around me, either sticking their tails between their legs, sniffing wildly or snarling about. They can smell power on me, heck, I’ve trained enough Vornskyrs in my time. Beautiful creatures… make me sneeze but it’s worth it to be around them.

The gears in my head are cranking like the invading factions of the Galaxy around us. A Mando with three vornskyrs in the woods not far off @Rianna Ar’klim-Organa & Jasper’s farm… I hop onto the back fender of the girl’s speeder and smirk.

“Going west, then? Liable to get lost out here, where are you going? Mayhap I can help you find it. Go much further and you'll run out of fuel with nowhere to fill it. That what you want?”

[member="Aria Lissiri"]

 

[Gilamar Skirata]

Forcer. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. This wasn't Ri though. She knew Ri, well, not int he typical sense. She was a doctor and Aria had happened to be one of her patients.

This woman was not Ordo's wife.

Why was she here? The vornskr weren't listening to her commands either. Instead they milled about, pretending to be lazy, yawning, but she knew better. They walked in a lazy amoeba of a circle between her and this Forcer. With her back to the old camp site and out of visual range of the woman her hand instinctively tightened around the sawed off scattergun attached to her the small of her back.

"First of all lady, I don't know you. Second, this is my pops' speeder and I'm on my way to a job. No room for sightseers and exercise freaks." She cursed internally. Was that really what she should be saying to someone who just made a pile of ash into a ball dense enough to fire out of a verpine shatter rifle?

She backed away the speeder slowly.
[member="Ahani Najwa"]

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

A job.

My feet splay a bit wider on the fender of her Pop’s speeder and my first burning question is this: “What does a non-alcoholic beverage have to do with a speeder?”

My second question is answered more by the thrill within her, the clench of her body position, the tightness seen only slightly through her posture in armour. Armour… an Echani’s bane, armour. Can’t read what I can’t see… aside from global things like massive tension causing shoulders to shift and stances to tighten up.

One thing is clear, she didn’t like my little exercise with the Force. “If you’re going where I think you’re going, don’t. How much are they paying you? You said it’s a job, and this is your beverage’s speeder… you must be pretty down on your cred-accounts if your transportation is owned by a drink.”

I call a tree branch to me, and throw it for the vornskyr. Pack animals who love hunting? Aren’t many who resist even the momentary jolt of chasing something in motion. My head nods eastward, back in the vague direction of the Cantina in town.

“How’s about I buy you a beverage that doesn’t own anything and we play that game of pool? My hubby loves that cantina he…” Unlike Mandos in armour, my face is as open a book as a saucy novel in the hands of a housewife who finished her chores. My jaw twitches, eyelids stinging around the edges with the red before stinging tears. I won’t cry, oh no. “Oh… I keep forgetting conjugation of verbs changes once someone’s dead. Come to the cantina with me. Turn around… don’t go where I think you’re going.”

My voice ends in a whisper, and I shake my head. “Whatever it is you think you’re after, you won’t find it.”

Please… today’s not the right day to kill a kid, even if it would gain me a pack of vornskyr.

[member="Aria Lissiri"]

 

[Gilamar Skirata]

"Are you one of them? The raiders?" Her grip tightened on the shortened stock of her scattergun. The vornskr picked up on something, their circle was tightening. She needed to throw her off, she knew something. Well, she wasn't sure what she knew, but it was better to make up a story than find out the hard way she was here for the same job she was.

"I heard there were raiders out here burning farms...I didn't think a forcer was one of them." Keep your head clear. Build that wall. Just like in the holo vids. Jetisse couldn't read your mind if there was a wall. Her mind drifted to her father and mother, their small property on Concord Dawn, their spaceship.

"Are you telling me to leave these people and let you and your little band of pirates take their land?" Her eyes flicked to the corner of her HUD. Connecting wirelessly to her speeder was taking longer than she thought.

[member="Ahani Najwa"]

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

“Hah! Raiders, huh? Must be desperate if they’re burning farms… and idiots. What, there a wheat deficit on Naboo? Byss? True story, I was raised on Byss. Hated it, but Dad had his work… ooh, you do not want to know how terrifying it was to train with Palpatine watching every blue moon… are moons blue? I guess some of them are, aren’t they? Gasses and ice and chemicals… huh. Wonder if one could live on a blue moon… you ever think of where you’d want to live if you had everything you needed in life?” The vornskyr movement continues to calm my shivering hands, to take the ache of missing Aran and our pups out of them. It’s a temporary mercy, but a good one.

“If there were raiders burning farms, I’d have strung them up by their splayed ribcages by now. There’s no fire on the wind. No ash in the sky. Kid…” I heave a sigh and sit in the back seat of the speeder, propping my elbow up on the side.

“Master.” I say, inspecting my nails for tree sap. Funny how it gets everywhere. “The correct term isn’t Forcer, it’s Master… Master Ahani Najwa-Ordo, and I really would like to take you for a drink and part pleasantly… but I can’t, because I’m telling you under no uncertain terms are you going to take one more mile toward what remains of my dwindling Mandalorian in-laws… So please, kid. I know you want to do your job, get those credits, but what do credits do for you? Buy you nice things? Pay off your debt? Debt’s a construct, like things. Curious nouns we expend ourselves for that don’t matter one twitch in the grand scheme. Someone told you to come out here and start searching. To kill raiders or figure something out. Cool. What for? Is it worth it? Mando Honour, or combat experience or those zeroes in your accounts? It’s not worth it. Come. Let me buy you a drink… before you do something that will make me… twitch. Last chance, honey pie.”

The ache of violence settles ill in my muscles, willing me to move, to snap and snarl and make short work of the speeder and the girl. Aran believed I was redeemed, once. He took the chance and fell for a hunting, dancing Echani, who laughed heartily around the table with his parents, Jasper and Rianna. My teeth chatter twice as I chuckle sordidly and gaze upwards, the coils of my radiant powers lapping like a breeze on the bushes nearby. Please, for all that's less cloudy than a pitch black room, please don't make me kill a kid today.

“Tell me the truth, are you here to hunt my family? Are you here to poke around the Ranch? I can forgive you if you’re not here to hurt them. I can let you be… but if you think… if you… all I wanted was to go for a run after breakfast, you know… stretch my legs. If it’s credits you’re after you don’t need to keep going. If it’s intel you’re after, come get that drink and I can smooth over whatever it is you think you need to know… just stop… and come for a drink.”

 

[Gilamar Skirata]

"The Ordo Clan isn't here anymore. They all left Mando Space after Mantis killed Ordo in the Civil War. I'm just here to scope out potential homestead locations for an interested settler and clear out any local raiders or animal pests." The truth as it was given to her, if not slightly twisted. This one was wordy, a Master of the Force? To be honest when Connory said Ordo she knew she might run into someone with the Force, but she thought they'd be a lot more friendly than she was being.

Ding!

A green light flashed. It was ready. Hopefully she had wiggled her way out.

"I'm not working for the Mandalorian Empire if that's what you're wondering. Just some spacer who wandered into our office." The first full truth.

[member="Ahani Najwa"]