Public The Side Quest Society Presents: A Galactic Garage Sale

[Kitter Bitters]

ESTATE LIQUIDATION — EVERYTHING MUST GO.
​

Location: Ansion


The advertisement had been circulating across the local holonet for days, inviting any and all to the location of the warehouse. The late Varo Pell had apparently spent the better part of sixty years collecting anything and everything he could get his hands on: old droid parts, antique weapons, broken starship components, dusty artwork, strange artifacts, crates of unidentified junk, and enough miscellaneous scrap to fill an entire warehouse.

Now that he was gone, his family wanted all of it cleared out. No auctions. No appraisals. No questions. Just show up, make an offer, and haul away whatever caught your eye.

By midday, the old warehouse had become a maze of tables, crates, shelves, and bargain hunters digging through decades of accumulated odds and ends. Most of it looked like garbage, but treasure was a matter of perspective.

A forgotten datapad might hold something valuable. A battered droid could still have a story to tell. An old trinket might mean nothing to one person and everything to another.

After all, one being's trash was another being's treasure.

In a place like this, there was plenty of both.

This thread is open for anybody to play in. Are you interested in side threads like these? Join the Side Quest Society! ​

 

[Kinley Pryse]

You've been hit by... you've been struck by...

Kinley Pryse specializes in finding things that were probably better left lost​

Of all the places Kinley Pryse had expected the trail to lead, a garage sale had not been one of them.

And yet, here she was.

Ansion stretched out around her in all its dusty, unremarkable glory, the little settlement looking as though someone had dropped a handful of prefabricated buildings onto the plains and simply forgotten to come back for them. The sale itself occupied the yard, porch, and apparently half the interior of a weather-beaten homestead near the edge of town. Tables had been dragged beneath faded awnings and piled high with the accumulated debris of somebody else's life.

Old cookware. Broken droid components. Bundles of clothing that had seen better decades. A set of mismatched drinking glasses. Three different navigation units, none manufactured within Kinley's lifetime.

She picked up a small metal object, turned it over once in her hand, and frowned.

"What even is this?"

The seller had told her Varo Pell's belongings were mixed in with everything else.

That was the only reason she was here.

Varo Pell had been a navigator, explorer, liar, smuggler, treasure hunter, or some combination of the four depending on which story one believed. More importantly, he had supposedly possessed a map that Kinley very much wanted to get her hands on.

Not a holomap stored neatly in a navcomputer.

A real map.

Old. Hand-marked. Difficult to duplicate and, according to rumor, containing a route that Pell had gone to considerable trouble to keep secret.

Unfortunately, nobody had bothered to mention that after his disappearance, whatever remained of his possessions would eventually be scattered across folding tables between rusted hydrospanners and someone's collection of decorative plates.

Kinley set the unidentified object back down.

So far, Ansion had produced nothing but dust, junk, and disappointment.

She moved to the next table.

A battered datapad.

No.

A leather-bound journal.

Interesting, but no.

Some sort of ceremonial knife.

Definitely not.

Kinley exhaled slowly and glanced over the sprawling collection of clutter still waiting to be searched.

Somewhere in this mess, if the rumors were true, was Varo Pell's map.

And Kinley Pryse had not crossed half the galaxy to go home with a secondhand caf maker.

A Smooth Criminal

 

[Persephone Dashiell]

There was nothing worse than going to the estate sale of a hoarder that lived under the guise of collector. It seemed Pell collected everything and nothing at once. Kids were looking to unload without digging in piece by piece. Persephone had heard stories of rare art showing up at these things. Just had to know what to look for.

Tavian Djo would find such a shopping experience to be utterly beneath him. She would probably have to explain the concept.

Seeing a woman pass up the leatherbound journal, Persephone picked it up. A gentle thumb through revealed writing. She would be keeping this for future study later. Could be benign as a food log or as interesting as a plotted out and undiscovered hyperlane. Persephone was unaware of the map rumor, although it would explain the less than savory clientele present.

 

[Starlin Dinn]

Dusty though it might have been, Starlin found the world to be mesmerizing in its own way; the way in which the grasslands spread out in all directions was unheard of to him, he was used to towering desert dunes and sandstone, or more recently vast oceans. The life here was undeniable, and he felt it thrum through the ground beneath his feet.​

​

Uncle Theryn would love it, no doubt he'd have fields of fresh fruits, vegetables, and grains cropping up all over the place. He wasn't so sure Uncle Darien would enjoy it though, maybe the quiet solitude of it all but the rest? It was decidedly too boring, too backwater, for the Cordel.​

​

Safe though, Uncle Darien did prize his safety.​

​

After standing for an excessive length of time with his hands on his hips and his face turned toward the breeze, Starlin finally turned and focused his attention on the prefabs and the sprawling tables and sheets laid out before them. Something had called him out here, even now he could hear the swell of music and the tug at his chest, he just had to figure out what.​

​

Because this was a lot of chit to sift through.​

​

He eyed up things others might have overlooked, those objects which had no technological advantage and reminded him of home. Non-powered tools, an old lantern that took wax candles, and a decidedly empty leather-bound journal with a stick of graphite. None of them satisfied the growing draw of bow against strings, though, and the music only he could hear became all the harder to ignore.​

​

Reaching down, a small blinking device caught his attention. He had absolutely no idea what it was, but the novelty was enough for him to add it to his pile. Maybe it would keep him from losing the key to his rooms back on Zaathru, which yes he still carried even though he was far, far, far from home. Or his commlink. Or, well, pretty much anything that could be misplaced.​

​

Then, as he rounded onto the porch of one of the prefabs, something in his gut shifted. The music swelled, but it also softened at the edges; the calm it brought him was immediate, and he found himself wandering on toward whatever now demanded his attention.​

 

[Kinley Pryse]

You've been hit by... you've been struck by...

Kinley Pryse has a rap sheet longer than a protocol droid's complaint log​

Kinley picked up a child's toy and absently fiddled with it, though her attention had already drifted toward the girl examining the leather journal.

"The handwriting's awful."

Nobody had asked.

She set the toy back down, reached for a candle instead, and gave it an experimental sniff. Her nose immediately wrinkled.

"This guy ever hear of a trash compactor?"




Persephone Dashiell + Open

A Smooth Criminal

 

[Persephone Dashiell]

Starlin Dinn | Kinley Pryse
​

"It's a good thing I know how to read then."

Persephone offered a tight, plastered on smile. Every estate sale, auction, art gallery, you name it she had been to always had one weirdo. One person who was either so pathetically lonely in their own life they wanted some brief connection or, as was more common, would talk to those in attendance to get a feel for what they should buy.

Uneducated flippers. One saw them head buried in their datapad trying to ascertain values.

She decided this woman was category number one.

"Why spend credits on a dumpster when one can sell a used dusty candle to the general populace for one credit? Just seems like good business sense."

Head lifted up as she looked at a younger man with blonde hair also poking through the junk. An interesting number of younger folks today, normally it was the blue hairs she dealt with at these things. Someone out with their granny?

"What brings you here? Looking for a blender?"

 

[Starlin Dinn]

"Huh?"​

​

The boy turned his head from the doorway, having just been about to enter in search of whatever was calling him on, when a question was posed to him. A very... odd question?​

​

"A what?" he asked, "Who's a blender?" Not what, who, because in his mind looking for was reserved for finding people, at least in the heat of the moment that's what his dumb brain told him, and blenders were... well, he didn't know what a blender was. Certainly not something he was looking for, that's what.​

​

"I mean, no, I'm not looking for the, uh, blender."​

​

He nudged his head toward the door. "We're allowed to go in, right..?" He hoped he was, because whatever he wanted was most definitely inside.​

​

Persephone Dashiell ​

 

[Kinley Pryse]

You've been hit by... you've been struck by...

Kinley Pryse: bad ideas in a good hat.

​

"It's a good thing I know how to read, then."

The grin that spread across Kinley's face was one of pure, almost comical delight. Most people might have been put off by the girl's attitude. Kinley found it charming. There was fire there, and when the girl started talking about charging someone for a half-used candle, Kinley decided there might even be a decent head for business buried underneath all that sass.

The blond boy, on the other hand, didn't seem burdened by an abundance of good sense.

Kinley eyed him the way one might regard a lost Nexu pup, confused, mildly concerned, but mostly entertained. Her grin only widened when he asked if they were actually allowed to go inside.

Allowed.

That was a word Kinley rarely found much use for.

This was going to be fun.

"Only one way to find out."

With that, she turned toward the warehouse and strolled inside like she owned the place, or, at the very least, like nobody had bothered to tell her she didn't.


Persephone Dashiell Starlin Dinn

A Smooth Criminal

 

[Persephone Dashiell]

Persephone regarded the blonde. They were cute but tended to have nothing going on between the ears. Take Tavian Djo . Smokeshow yet she had never met one so sensitive and yet dense at the same time. She had decided it must be a sub-type of boy, like orange loth-cats who often shared one brain cells between the lot. Blonde boys were the orange loth-cats of the 'verse.

"Cowboy hat is right. We are here to buy. If one is not allowed there should be tape and signs. Plus, if we get in trouble I'll take the fall. You don't look like you would survive even the briefest of jail stays."

Notebook under her arm, the trio passed into the next space. Persephone looked around, gazing at the dusty ceiling then around the space. Coated in dust and boxes. As if the old man was using it for overflow storage.

"We haven't been yelled at yet."

 

[Starlin Dinn]

Whether golden-Nexu or orange Loth-cat, Starlin was a-smilin' as he followed one woman and felt the other close behind. There was a nervous excitement within his belly at the thought of doing something that was maybe not allowed, the worst that happened was they were told to leave right?​

​

And as the woman at his back said, once they had been inside for a few seconds, nobody was yelling.​

​

Inside was just as junky and hoarderish as the outside. Worse, in fact. Starlin groaned as he realized how much there was to go through, and as the music swelled he veered off from the women to track a path to the left. There was most definitely something here that was meant for him, as with finding the kasha crystal back on Arkinnea, he just had to find it.​

​

"What are you guys searching for?" the lad asked, as he stepped over a stack of flimsiplast slides and old news clippings.​

​

Kinley Pryse Persephone Dashiell ​

 

[Kinley Pryse]

You've been hit by... you've been struck by...

Kinley Pryse: making Jedi reconsider the Code one adventure at a time.​

Kinley felt like some type of pied piper leading the youth on their first bit of rule breaking. The thought made her grin as they walked inside and separated slightly to browse the overflowing tables.

"What are you guys searching for?"

“Never know in a place like this.”

She wasn’t about to just blurt out her map quest, even if the pair looked like they wouldn’t dare leave after their curfews.

She sifted through a pile and pulled up a shrunken Kel-Dor skull. Damn those things were ugly without the mask.

Persephone Dashiell Starlin Dinn

A Smooth Criminal

 

[Persephone Dashiell]

Leather notebook still tucked under her arm, her gaze searched the room before heading straight. The others veered off to the side. Persephone poked into a large, dusty box to only find very old Play Hutt magazines. She quickly closed the flap on the leering Hutt in a bikini very quickly and ushered herself to the next box. Full of take-out restaurant forks.

"Quite the evasive answer there Cowboy Hat." Persephone looked to the boy. "Art for me. Etchings perferably.You?"

Starlin Dinn | Kinley Pryse​

 

[Starlin Dinn]

Evasiveness and paintings, Starlin could not help but sheepishly smile as one called out the other.​

​

"Etchings," he said, "like, the physical etchings or the reliefs?" Starlin had done a lot of relief work in the ancient desert structures back home on Zaathru when he was younger, it had helped him to understand how the Shaalite and Zaathrian scripts had changed over the millennia.​

​

"I... Don't know" he confessed.​

​

Unlike the others, he did not look in any box or cupboard or... anything of the like. No, he was going forward like a man on a mission, to the back corner of that vast first room where the music swelled and became all-encompassing.​

​

Then, and only then, he knelt down - careful to avoid any sharp objects lost amidst the chaos of the floor's overflow stock - and reached out toward a tiny cylinder nestled among cracked photoreceptors.​

​

Kinley Pryse Persephone Dashiell ​

 

[Kinley Pryse]

You've been hit by... you've been struck by...

Kinley Pryse once walked into a cantina looking for trouble. Trouble left through the kitchen.​

As Kinley poked through the boxes and tables she hummed a Max Rebo Band song under her breath. There were several other ways she would have preferred to spend the day, but at least some of this junk was entertaining.

She pulled out a book and blew the dust off of it, coughing as it kicked up into the air. The title of the book read star charts. Maybe this was a start.

She glanced around to see where the other two had gotten along to.


Persephone Dashiell Starlin Dinn

A Smooth Criminal

 

[Persephone Dashiell]

"Relief etchings. Hand drawn line art. That sort of thing."

Both were eternally popular and always made a mint at auction. Versatile pieces for offices and the home, they had a wide client base. Persephone didn't need the money, but she needed the reputation. Part of that reputation was to start finding items and putting them through auctions or client lists that were curated. She already had a few via her summer internship.

"Don't know what you want...so spending credits to spend credits? Alright."

Each to their own. Or maybe this guy was a collector. By this time Cowboy Hat had returned. Weird one. Didn't seem to have the stomach for digging through and getting the work done. Maybe had that princess-type personality. Too good to dig through dusty boxes.

"You're back." Persephone delivered it flat, monotone.

Starlin Dinn | Kinley Pryse​