THE TERRIBLE

The venue had been built to impress the military mind, not the artistic one. Angles upon angles of smoked transparisteel and brushed durasteel stretched upward, as if the very geometry was meant to shame Naboo’s softer domes and marble halls. Every surface gleamed with severity. Water did not fall naturally here, it sliced in sheets from unseen seams in the walls, tumbling at sharp, artificial diagonals into recessed pools that hissed with light. The entire room was alive with the chatter of contractors and officers, voices bouncing harshly from stone and glass while holographic war machines rotated above them in slow, silent arcs.
Thessaly had given it half an hour. Long enough to smile at the right men, to offer the right nods, to make it known that her coin now whispered through more than one of their precious contracts. Long enough to remind them that her husband's ruin had left her neither powerless nor meek. And then...she was bored. Their flattery was too eager, their laughter too nervous. She had not dressed to waste herself on sycophants.
The bar was tucked beneath one of the angular waterfalls, its black stone counter lit from within so that it glowed faintly like some alien mineral. Here she took her place, gown alive with every fractured light that touched it. Sequins glittered like a night sky in motion, drawing the eye down the long line of her back where only the thinnest of straps dared restrain the fabric. She leaned one elbow against the counter, fingers idly circling the rim of her glass, her posture a study in deliberate invitation and disdain.
If they wanted her attention, they would come to her. And if one particular man found her first...well. She almost smiled. Fate had such a wicked sense of timing.
