Padawan Menace
P • R • O • L • O • G • U • E
Alaris Prime was a colony moon pretty far across the wrong side of the tracks.
At various time, the lucrative mines had created economic wars between the Wookiees of nearby Kashyyyk and the miners who arrived in hopes of striking aurodium. More times than not, they didn't. But the mines became the only work on the planet, so the people who came to form the families surrounding the impoverished mining towns were trapped in an unending cycle of poverty that kept the dream alive by supplying work for the mine, one generation after the next.
As time went on, the mining towns became cesspools of the dejected hope, built on a boulevard of broken dreams. People wanted more out of life, and that avarice turned to vice.
And where there was demand, enterprising folks would find a means of supply. The pimps moved hookers. The dealers moved spice. A widowed, grav-ball mom behind on bills was the reigning whiff queen of Avalon Hills. A plethora of prescription painkillers had created a ryll epidemic that was burning through the suburbs like a wildfire no one wanted to talk about in polite company.
It started in the high school. A spice overdose. First one, then two. Then a high school track star. That was when the attention got to be too much, and the dealers looked for markets elsewhere.
Which was when they'd introduced it to a middle school.
To be clear, these dealers were not the dregs of society or demon's in sheep's clothing. Jimmy Arlen was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill high schooler from Avalon Heights. His dad had walked out on his pregnant mom before he'd ever been born into the pre-fab, urban development project in which his life seem inextricably bound.
He'd never been in any serious trouble with the law and went to church on Sunday. He made reasonable enough grades, but he wasn't scholarship material. At best, he might hope for community college out of high school, but the writing was pretty much on the wall that he'd go to work driving cargo skiffs just like his step-dad. Jimmy wasn't a star athlete, but he rode the bench for varsity limmie and ran track and field. He was a triathlete of meager, if respectable, talent and had gotten hooked on spice as a way of putting himself in 'the zone.'
He got reduced rates from his dealer, Mark, if he ran some 'errands.' Working for Mark meant becoming a middle man. Mark provided the supply and Jimmy helped with marketing, passing the word, distributing, and collecting the money for Mark as they passed the spice around the school. Then, when the High School had started cracking down, Jimmy found that his younger cousin was a gateway to a market of kids who could raid their mother's purses for credits.
One of those kids had been Fabian Juliard. At twelve, he was interested in girls and Endormon Go. His one mistake was that Jimmy Arlen's cousin was his best friend. Now, Fabian had never done anything like this before, but agreed to try it with a friend during a sleepover truth-and-dare that had ended with one kid headed to Juvenile Hall and the other to the morgue.
And Jimmy? Well, his cousin wasn't talking and the Antarian Rangers didn't have anything more than suspicion to connect the spice back to the high schooler.
Fabian Juliard had another friend, who'd also been invited to that same sleepover. Except, he hadn't been able to make it, because he'd been on Midvinter when it had happened.
Now, the Pantoran returned to Alaris Prime to find one friend dead and the other taking the heat out of some misplaced loyalty to the same family that had hooked him on drugs and used him to peddle death to younglings.
For what it was worth, Jimmy had apologized... before the end.
By the time the investigators had gotten together all of the information that they needed, and headed out to the trailer park on the lower east side where Jimmy Arlen lived, the call had already come in of a possible suicide at that address. Jimmy Arlen had hung himself with a length of rusted wrought iron chain. None of the cops had ever seen its like before.
The curious thing was, no one could tell just how Jimmy had gotten himself up the tree like that. But there wasn't signs of a struggle and the cops didn't see a reason to chase that tangent when the medical examiner was going to rule it a suicide anyway.
See you in Hell, Jimmy.
The slow, cold rage of the Dark Side rolled from off the young Pantoran's small form as the youth casually strolled up the loading ramp inside of the Equinox. Sometime, many hours later, the Antarian Rangers were going to discover Mark -- Jimmy's supplier -- face down in a ditch. Another apparent suicide.
Mark had given up some names before their conversation had ended. Names, and the scant details that he had on the spice distribution network that was helping sow corruption underneath the Silver Jedi's light-sided, can't-be-arsed-to-get-our-hands-dirty eye.
But Boo knew all about getting his hands dirty.
...and, this time, he'd do it for free.
