One Man's Trash

[Velok the Younger]

Instability was a bad investment. Axiomatic, unless one was a speculative firm, working in derivatives and futures and bets. Now THAT was a business to be in, but Mohc Extractives was not that kind of business. Not in quality or in scale. So investing here was a horrendously bad idea by any professional standard.

But like those firms of speculation, Rave operated on hunches, connections, tips and educated guesswork. And this mess of a world was about to be under new management yet again, so far as she could tell. Management with which she worked pretty well.

Her civilian ships descended through atmo like a white kid descending on cake, all entitlement and furious need.

 

[Velok the Younger]

The world had seen many owners, many regimes. Most of them could be classified as authoritarian, regardless of ideology. Authoritarian regimes in decline tended to have similr, consistent patterns. Blurring between fee systrms and prebendalism, for one. Amd witha force disperser in her ship or briefcase, Rave was more than prepared to apply some further blur to the defiitions in question. auroduium ingots had their role, as did various gemstones. Mohc Extractives wasnt just a phtik corporation, after all.

Once the necessary fees were paid, she engaged with the mines in question on a more formally capitalist basis. A hundred million credits went a long, long way, and that nest egg was still bankrolling whatever she needed -- for now. That purchasing power put her in a certain boardroom with a Force disperser. For purposes of expanding Mohc's operations to an assortment of Bastion's mines, she called upon one of her most persuasive associates, and a new employee.

[member="Darth Kentarch"].

 

[Velok the Younger]

While she waited on Kentarch, she got to know the situation a bit better. High-powered executive she might or might not be, but either way, a certain amount of decorum was required. She confined her research to a single datapad, interspersed with necessary information from Fringe. Most of the time, her life was about reading. Commodities prices, labor statistics, military procurement options, and so forth. It was to the point where her yellowing eyes (currently hidden beneath contacts that duplicated the purple she'd been born with) were growing weaker as time went on. She simply had that much reading to do for her full-time occupations as businesswoman and Fringe Confederation High Councilor, not to mention her alchemical projects.

And, frankly, it was too much to handle. There were only so many hours in the day. Isley Verd and others helped to run Akure Executive Leatherworks, there were several other High Councilors, and Kentarch would be a boon when it came to the growth of Mohc Extractives, but X percent of all of the above still added up to a considerable burden on time. She was acutely aware that other Masters were growing stronger while she was splitting her attention.

Bastion wouldn't solve that problem. In point of fact it might make the problem worse, but she could endure. There was too much to be tried, too many avenues to explore, too many possibilities to tear herself away.

***​

For example, it was not long past that she'd journeyed from Zonama Sekot, where her research with seed-partners had born metaphorical and literal fruit, to Yalara, a remote Fringe world. Populated by primitive and deadly Noghri, Yalara had seen the Fringe salvage an immense, ancient cloaking device for its stygium supplies.

But only after Rave had personally set up the Fringe fortress on Yalara had she uncovered the truth: That Yalara had been a core world of a Yuuzhan Vong resurgence several years ago. Not the Horde, and not that new group at the other end of the galaxy, but a strain or clan or tribe which had failed.

There, buried beneath a landslide, she had found one surviving damutek, and, inside, a vivarium. Shapers and their biomachines slumbered there in hibernation, unable to escape. One by one she'd awoken them, overcome them, plumbed their limits. She'd begun to understand their drive toward evolution, toward chaos, toward creation. She showed them her creations, the living beings she'd made, the Zerek Strain, the Akure Leviathan, her own living armor.

And when she forced her way past their very strong objections into the Qang Qahsa, when her hunger for knowledge proved uncontrollable, they had been compelled to understand that she would become what she willed. That she could spend her time on phrik mines and terentatek hides, on trinkets for the rich...but her heart was in the fires of creation. Mutual understanding came about as they strapped her into the Boiling Caress.

Once mutual understanding was achieved, they urged her to place her hand inside a hole in the wall. Teeth had begun to contract around her left wrist, piercing skin and shearing flesh with agonizing slowness. They'd stood ready to kill her if she tried to break free. The bones themselves yielded, and her hand fell free in her life's greatest display of cognitive dissonance. A five-legged asymmetric crab scurried in a nearby pool, and when it attached itself to her blood-spurting wrist-

Words fell short. Her mind still flinched away from the memory, but she forced that memory to the forefront. Now, as she sat here in a dull but important meeting over the fate of the phrik mines of Bastion, her left hand twitched just so. A partial ooglith masquer covered the Adept-level Shaper hand, made it appear normal.

She shifted her mind away from the here and now, and away from the Force, toward the living fruit-crystal that now sat nestled in the complex hilt of Entropy. She felt only her hand, and that only subtly, as if the rest of the universe just didn't register. It was much like hearing heartbeats. Very soft, very mild. She'd grown a solitary lambent plant in the damutek to test herself, then plucked its fruit when it began to resonate. The range of her new perception was incredibly minor, and the cost of its use immense, but she calmed her twitching Shaper hand and returned to the conversation.