Private With half a loaf and a tilted bowl

[Jerec Asyr]

The Lignan Lady Cantina
Port 300
Loronar

"It's called a Forzano-Staccato. Only nine ever made, and you and I, we got two of'em."

Jerec hefted his quickdraw vibrosword and sighted down the edge. The metal erred on the side of hardness, even brittleness, and the sheath had ceramic sharpeners built in to make sure that killer edge stayed perfect.

"It's payday, see. I finally moved a haunted ship that was taking up half my lot: the Ol'Sadow. Sold it to an honest-to-feth pirate queen for cash and some side arrangements. And with that payday, I snagged these off the smith, guy named Roan Helfast . So I figured, hey, who do I know that I owe a favor to and likes a nice sword? Cato Fett ."

Nobody in this place batted an eye at the swords. All attention rested on the Sith-themed strippers. It was the legendary Darth Voyance Night.

 

[Cato Fett]

There were nerve-shredding synth-wresh notes pulsating through mounted speakers, nested in clutches midst the cantina's bare rafters overhead. Emitter arrays welded roughly into the stanchions and splayed girders painted the forward stage floor with lurid crimson pallets and red-white bursts meant to approximate the strokes of Sith lazerswords. A flash lit Cato's T-bar visor, lancing the shape like a lightning burst. Reflections of bare flanks painted in rough, erroneous approximations of old One Sith serf tattoos played across the visor glass. A dancer played through a risque frisk, the crowd surged in appreciation, and Cato loosed a hand to take Jerec Asyr 's gift.

His hand folded tight over the long, skinny hilt and tugged the blade free a fraction from the mechano-sheathe. Felt the interior scabbard ceramics catch and sharpen the sword edge. The metallurgy didn't supplant his appreciation or preference for Asahian steel, or even good Songsteel, but the composition rose his brows behind his mask and caused Cato to sit forward. Purposefully higher carbon content, a harder but more brittle edge, along with a marriage of several indistinct metal matrices hinting at a closed-door tradition. He hefted the charging-scabbard and noted the bulk weighed his drawing-hip with a few extra kilos. All to accommodate the internal housing mechanisms that gas-charged a mass-launcher and helped draw the sword free at near-ludicrous speeds. A dedicated quick-draw concept weapon that applied the ideal of One-Stroke, One-Victory. With his own daisho webbed into his belting across his help and belly, Cato brought the Foranzo over his shoulder and secured its housing across his back-plate. He placed both palms flat on the table, facing Jerec, and offered a short, curt bow.

"Consider all debts paid and cancelled," He said. Voice baritone, accented oddly. Strobe lights played across his helm. Cato raised a glass of whatever passed for liquor in the Lignan Lady and toasted to the Ithorian. "May you live to see boring times. ...I am sad to see that vessel leave the lot. You don't see ships with her lines anymore, her kind of pedigree."

 

[Jerec Asyr]

Cheap lum (1.5 cans so far) blasted through Jerec's inhibitions and probably contributed to him taking it the wrong way.

"Ah, don't do that, don't do the 'everything between us is cancelled' thing. Sounds like my ex-wife before she ran off to be a Sith Lord." And an Ortolan go-go dancer he'd known since, come to think of it. "Sure, I owed you one, but friend to friend."

He backpedaled, slouching down in the booth, and crossed his eyes to avert an impending headache. Insufficient hydration was a curse and a scourge.

"Wish I'd clued in you liked the Ol' Sadow that much," he said as a lovely gender-swapped 'Sith Lord Reverance ' sashayed across the stage. Those looked like real Vong implants. Damn. "I know a light frigate's a bad fit for someone who works alone, but still. What you flying these days? For real, or in a perfect 'verse?"

 

[Cato Fett]

" What am I flying? Ah..." Cato cantered his helm back, enough to thumb up the shielding and allow him to sip from his shot-glass. Iridonian whiskey, and it flashed a brisk note of fire down his gullet and out his nostrils. The facial-shielding snapped back into pace, Cato loosing a thick exhale before idly refilling his glass. "It's a great-bellied thing called the Public Transit."

And it's embarrassingly all you can afford, he thought. As of late, he'd eschewed typically mercenary endeavours and operated in the discrete margins between the civilian world and the law. Vigilante work, paying poorly, for those few that had accumulated enough savings to dare try and post bounties in the black darkweb forums. Often, the messages he encountered plying along on his aged Esper-3 Supermatrix were so rarely answered. More than a few were punitive and petty scrawlings aimed at rivals or ex-lovers or jilted wannabes left jaded and hateful by the Edgerunner elite. But more and more, cries were echoing out from the wilderness. Where and when he could, Cato intercepted their darkweb communiques, shouldered his meagre kit, and went hunting in the Combat Zone wilds or, riskily, harrowing the fortresses in the Corporate Districts. His successes, though, did not net riches. It's not about the credits anymore, he'd told himself, but they do provide the edge.

He cracked the shielding back an inch, swigged back another whiskey mouthful. "But in a perfect 'verse?" Cato echoed. With the wet edge of the shot-glass, he absently drew on the table top, rubbing his tanto-pommel with a thumb and forefinger with his 'off-hand'. "If I were able? Like to sneak down into the old KDY archives, sift through a few of their defunct prototype schematics. I'd get my hands on the preliminary Firespray blueprints, find a hotwired punk shipbuilder with something to prove, and have them craft it to specification. ...It's something of an ancestral thing. Clan Fett is married to the Firespray imagery. Always wanted one my own, to be my own.

"But, Mister Asyr," Cato said and raised up his helm-shield once more. The shot glass tipped and doused his throat in whisky. Another ripping note of fire rocketing up his oesophagus. "I'm poor."

Jerec Asyr

 

[Jerec Asyr]

Jerec didn't poke at that. Oh, he wanted to talk about involuntarily disappearing for a couple years to a scrap labor camp — but he'd had enough junk boats squirrelled away to bounce back from destitution. He'd even had the good fortune to pay back some debts to Tarsin Kenn, and not the hard way. No, there was ship-owner poor and there was don't-own-faster-than-light-transportation poor, and putting himself even with Cato's situation would be a parsec past rude.

"There's a gig," he said. "Doesn't pay a ton, I'm doing it myself on the side. Darkwire set me up with it. A few of us are gonna sit down with a couple dozen Seven Corners civilians and teach them about civil unrest safety, protest tactics, all that jizzwail. Me, I'm signed up to teach neutralizing gas grenades with water and traffic cones, tricks like that from the last big round of protests. You want in, I'm heading that way in the morning." He snapped his fingers. "Hell, there's even gonna be another Mando there, a sneaky type goes by Sur'haai."

 

[Cato Fett]

"Griss Tallow?" Cato wiped a moisture bead from under a bristling chin. "I know her. ...Of her, more like. Definition of cuyan, manages to keep herself afloat. She's got a rare dedication to truth. ...I'll think about it, Mr. Asyr, thank you."

The shot glass, empty and wet with perspire, turned and spun round in his fingers. Held against the choppy light-emitter arrays still pouring red onto the trembling stage deck, it could approximate for dirty ice. Cato looked at Jerec through its chipped prisms, feeling the Iridonian whiskey begin playing with his faculties. He could, with a touch of the Force, metabolize the liquour more efficiently and curtail any drawbacks. But not tonight, Cato decided. He'd brake before tumbling into blackout stupefaction but he wanted the buzz warming behind his cheeks and nose. Tomorrow, he'd wake and tackle issues of passage costs, which only seemed to grow more exorbitant, hope his tiny Denon bolthole was still intact upon arrival, and trace his paths through the constant pre-dawn twilight.