Public Licensed to Slay : “Bounty Moon”

[Charlotte Savage]

Fighting crime by neon light,

Righting wrongs by blaster fight,

Never running from a real fight,

She'll probably flirt while chasing you!

The rain came down in sheets thick enough to drown a lie.

Nar Shaddaa's skyline bled with bleak neon pinks, greens, and sickly yellows dripping across the puddled duracrete like oil slick dreams.
Down below, the alleys steamed, and the streets hummed with the soft menace of too many secrets and too few exits.

She moved through it all like a bad decision. Her coat was soaked, her boots were ruined, and the last decent cup of caf she'd seen had probably been a mirage.
A hunter by trade, though tonight she looked like she'd walked out of a romance holo halfway through the explosion scene.
The bounty was supposed to be easy; a skip with a weak trigger finger and a big mouth.
Instead, it had turned into a six-hour tour of Nar Shaddaa's worst ventilation shafts and its even worse noodle stands.

Overhead, a holosign buzzed "LIVE DANCING" before sputtering out in a shower of sparks,
as if the city itself couldn't commit to the bit anymore.

A speeder roared past, trailing exhaust and jazz from a decade no one remembered. Somewhere in the distance, someone screamed. No one looked up. Nar Shaddaa didn't do sympathy... it charged extra for that.

She stopped beneath a flickering streetlamp, water sliding down the curve of her blaster.
The trail had gone cold, the night had gone colder… and the only thing she could rely on was the glow of passing freighters.

Out here, the odds were bad, the pay was worse, and even the rain smelled secondhand, like someone else's hangover.
But for those who knew how to play the game, Nar Shaddaa always had one rule:

The house wins... but sometimes, so does the one holding the gun.

 

[Oshin Jantu]

You can run and you can hide
But you won't escape the ocean's gaze
She will come like a titan's tide
And all her waves shall seal your fate​

Rain made for the coziest of days when you were nice and safe inside, with a blanket in your lap and cocoa in your hand, and a roaring fire warmed you right to the bone. Though, above a buzzing holosign that glowed pink and yellow, with every other word faded away like someone forgot to pay the electric bill, before the entire sign busted in sparks like broken bulbs, one still figure was far away from home, wherever hers was between the stars.

In the dark, draped in a long black leather trench coat, she was accustomed only to the wet and the cold at the moment. Her last cup of caf in a cafe that morning had been as bad as the weak beer in a bar the previous evening here on Nar Shaddaa. Hood pulled up, it kept the rain off her head as much as hid her visage.

Both sleeves of her coat were soaked, the garment serving its purpose to keep her arms dry, and the jacket’s flaps keeping whatever was inside on her person hidden, from weapons to other possessions. The black was perfect for the night, she reckoned, squatting as she did on a lower rooftop’s edge, watching and listening; though she was quiet as death, motionless as a frozen ocean.

Oh? She spied someone not far from her position, only this other person was below her vantage. It seemed that the flickering streetlamp beside the figure was going the way of the “LIVE DANCING” sign and the curved outline of a naked stripper beside it. And who are you? Might be nobody, in truth. A blaster was not exactly uncommon in this city.

However, Oshin Jantu had since been tipped off that somebody else might be after her target. That mark was proving hard enough to find on her own. Perhaps whoever was after them besides her would be her lead as she navigated this maze of streets and alleys. Otherwise her competitor might just get in the assassin’s way and become her victim of consequence. It tended to happen. In this scenario, who knows?

Charlotte Savage