First Reply One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch

[Til Melarr]

Til spat onto a shattered stone slab, watching the brown glob slide down a defaced carving of some long-dead Sith bastard. The tomb was a joke. Every square inch of the place had already been picked clean by generations of scavengers, leaving nothing but broken stone and the scratch marks of crowbars to show for his trouble.

He dragged his glowrod across the floor, his golden facial tattoos twitching as his mouth set into a bitter sneer. He didn't need a massive treasure haul to make the trip worth it, though. He just needed one overlooked piece of garbage, a cracked crystal or a scrap of ancient tech to flip to a black-market dealer in Iziz.

That would buy enough cheap booze to keep him numb for a standard month, which was the only goal that mattered right now. But even that modest prize was proving hard to find, a frustration made worse by the deafening racket echoing from the corridor behind him. A heavy metal foot slammed down, sending a cloud of gray powder into the air as the IG-86 droid shoved its rusted, angular frame through a narrow archway.

Its red eye-lens whirring as it scanned the empty room, the machine was a walking headache. Til didn't bother looking back at the thing. He'd only brought the mechanical piece of crap along because the Onderon jungles were crawling with things that liked to eat green skin, and a walking gun platform made a great distraction.

"Keep it down, rust-bucket," Til growled, his knuckles whitening around the glowrod. "You're clanking loud enough to give me a headache, and I'm already in a bad mood."

The droid didn't slow down, its vocoder clicking with a flat, mechanical tone. "Acoustic stealth is unnecessary. Sensors indicate zero life forms in the immediate vicinity. Furthermore, this chamber contains no items of monetary value. Your search is inefficient."

"My search is the only reason your gears aren't getting melted down for scrap," Til snapped, turning his back on the droid to prove just how little its analysis meant to him. He stopped in front of a heavy stone sarcophagus that had been smashed open decades ago.

Instead of looking inside the empty box like an amateur, he knelt in the dirt beside the base, relying on a thief's instinct rather than the droid's useless sensors. He shoved his gloved hand deep into a narrow crack where the stone met the floor. His fingers hit something cold and metallic.

With a grunt, he wrenched his arm back, dragging out a heavy, tarnished slugthrower pistol encrusted with dark, unpolished stones. It was crude, heavy, and exactly the kind of antique some eccentric noble would pay a fortune for. He stood up, wiping the grime off the barrel with his sleeve, a smug grin breaking across his face as he looked back at the blind machine.