Yandere on Yavvitiri

[Lord Ghoul]

Helix Resort & Casino, Yavvitiri​

​

The booming metropolis of Yavvitiri stuck out from the surface of Yaga Minor, crowded skyscrapers like fingers reaching toward the heavens. A testament to the city's ambition. Amid the heart of the metropolis' central district rose the six buildings that formed the Helix Resort & Casino, run by the Syndicate of the same name. But our tale does not concern the ambition of corrupt governors, or jackbooted Helix debt collectors - not yet anyway - but the tale of the happy-go-lucky youth in over his head, with hair a bit too long and eyes a bit too mischievous.

He stood at the entrance to the resort, wearing spacers clothes that had that tell-tale look of a yuppie trying to appear rugged while living off daddy's paycheck.

A front, obviously, since our protagonist never knew his father and hadn't got so much as a single check in his life that he hadn't earned, through means legal or otherwise. But the big Houk bouncer didn't need to know that.

"Hey, man, I need to get in."

Beady eyes looked him up and down. "Name?"

"Uh, Lucien, look I need to get in right now."

The spaceport engineer he'd been tailing was gonna get away if he didn't hurry in after him. The little Chadra Fan would be hard to spot if he got too far into the crowd.

"No. Pay the cover."

"What? Listen, do you know who my father is?"

"No, but he's probably smaller than me."

Blast.

"Good point. What is it, twenty?"

The Houk raised a hairless eyebrow. "Twenty-five."

Lucien fished in his pockets and pulled out a handful of credchips. He thrust them toward the Houk's hands. "There, you go- oh no."

A slip of the hand and cred coins spilled all over the floor. The Houk looked down. "What-" the coins started to shimmer, then disappeared. Holograms. Fakes. "Why you little!"

He heard laughter and turned, catching a glimpse of the kid slipping through the doors, then he was gone.

Lucien Shorn bolted through the hallway and into the casino interior. The complex was huge and he had no idea of the layout, but he could hear the Houk's stomping feet shaking the ground behind him. With many "Scuse mes" and, "sorry bros," he slipped in and out of groups of people busy losing their money on slots.

He thought he caught a glimpse of the Chadra-Fan's big ears moving through a doorway. Lucien followed as fast as he could, jostling through the crowd until he stumbled through a doorway with a neon sign he didn't read and into a dimly lit room full of poles and undulating bodies.

"Oops."

The kid turned to go, when he bumped right into -

[member="Alm"]

 

[Eurydice]

By all accounts, Alm probably shouldn’t have even been here. She was underaged! The bouncer didn’t know that though, not did he ask for any identification. Nasvali went through puberty a little earlier than baseline humanoids anyway, likely an adaptation in response to their shorter lifespans. That combined with her height was what probably got her a pass.

Smile more, sweetie. He’d said as he ushered her in. All Alm could think about was why she would smile when there was no reason to.

She was only vaguely aware that her natural resting face was made of stone. Angry stone.

After a few drinks she’d wandered into a nice dark room with pretty lights that moved across the bodies of…naked women. Alm wasn’t so much offended by their brazen nudity as she was by the prospect that it was cold outside and they had nothing on! How impractical. She’d stayed for a bit anyhow, curious to watch how enthralled some of the visitors seemed with the gyrating women. It didn’t look that hard. Did it pay well?

Growing up on a backwoods planet with very little in the way of technology, Alm was fascinated with recreational facilities on more technologically advanced planets. Where she had come from, everything had an important purpose. There were no places to sit and drink and watch naked women dance. At least, none that she knew of. The modern cities that were encroaching the desert on her homeworld likely had them by now.

That thought made her decide to switch rooms again and stop staring intently at the dancers as if she were a student at a lecture. Turning to leave the room, she bumped into a stranger.

‘Sorry’ didn’t leave her lips, instead her eyes swept down at the young man she’d collided with and simply stared for a moment with her face of stone. “Hm,” She grunted, taking note of the clothes he wore. “You spaceman?”

Her Basic still needed work.

[member="The Arkanian"]

 

[Lord Ghoul]

“Oof,” he took a step backward and looked- up?

He’d bumped into a girl. Human, but tall, with skin a shade of dark honey and eyes like almonds. Not warm, roasted almonds, but almonds left out in the depths of winter, frozen and hard.

Uh oh.

“Spaceman? Yeah,” his voice cracked slightly. He coughed, deepened his voice, and said again, “yeah.”

Still, she couldn’t have been older than him, even if she was taller by a bit. (Just a bit). Lucien raised an expressive eyebrow, lips curling into an easy grin more smirk than smile. He looked past her and didn’t see the Houk. He also didn’t see the Chadra-Fan. Blast. He looked back at the girl.

What was she doing here?

“What are you doing in here?”

[member="Alm"]

 

[Eurydice]

He looked…young to be here? Alm was definitely too young to be here but her height bought her a few years, or maybe women got an easier pass than men in this sort of space.

Alm grunted. She was not upset or unkind but appeared rigid and unsure of how to answer his question. Was he an undercover cop? A bouncer in disguise designed to eject the underaged from the premesis? It was cold outside and she didn’t want to leave, besides she was fascinated with the exotic gyrations in the dimly lit room behind her.

“What? You mother?” She grunted again, this time in Basic. “You here why, baby-face?”

It only made sense that she spin the question back at him, especially given that weird smile thing he was doing. It made her nervous in a sort of pubescent way.

[member="Lucien Shorn"]

 

[Lord Ghoul]

His smirk crept farther up, "Woah, baby-face, huh?"

Laughing brown eyes tried to read her stony expression. They didn't get much. Trying to discern her emotions was like trying to mine hijarna stone with a pickaxe. An exercise in futility. Luckily, futile exercises were what Lucien did most often, so rather than being blunted and misshapen like a defeated pickaxe, he just smiled more.

Hm, maybe she could help him. Four eyes were better than two, right? At least that's what his Aqualish friend would always say.

"Well, I'm trying to find this Chadra-Fan. You know, big ears, short furry kinda guy? I need to talk to him about, uh, some stuff, but he ran in here before I could. Help me find him?"

[member="Alm"]

 

[Eurydice]

“Yes,” She affirmed. “You have face like new baby.”

Alm felt it important that he knew that specific point.

Some people were intimidated by her build, but this guy didn’t. Perhaps he’d picked up on her relative naivety. She looked him over, arching both brows as she met his eyes. What was it that they said? Don’t do something for nothing?

Though he face didn’t say it, she was interested in helping. Alm was bored and she didn’t like to be bored.

“Fine.” Came the grunt. “Taller, anyway.”

Dark brown eyes scanned the floor in one sweeping motion, trying to pick out the described alien. Being around only those who looked like herself for most of her life made it more difficult to absorb the idea of radically different races. Being shorter and lighter, human were easy to identify as were those who appeared human colorful skin like the many pink dancers in the room behind her.

“What he do to you, baby space man?”

Might as well figure out why he was after this guy.

[member="Lucien Shorn"]

 

[Lord Ghoul]

Unconsciously, Luce reached a hand up to his cheek. He definitely remembered a girl calling them "adorably chubby" once. She'd also tried to pinch them. He wrinkled his nose at the memory, then glanced back at his new stony-faced friend.

Well she looks like a statue. Like if someone took a chisel to a block of sandstone and made a human shape out of it. A really tall human. Er, not a bad looking statue. Actually a really good looking - ugh. Forget it.

He scratched at his mop of thick brown hair

"Uh," he tried to think of a convincing lie, "He stole my hydrospanner?"

Nice.

She would definitely believe that.

As they moved back out of the strip club and through the crowd of gamblers, Lucien jerked a finger in the direction of a crowded hallway. "Oh look, I think I see him!"

He did not, obviously, but telling her he was here on a mission from the Underground to keep tabs on the Sith probably would not fly. What was she doing here anyway?

[member="Alm"]

 

[Eurydice]

“Oh,” Alm rumbled. “Oh no. To steal, bad. Much bad.” Her face hardened in firm sympathy. Stealing was something unforgivable in her tribal lifestyle and often punished with shunning or banishment. Here though, where no one knew eachother, stealing seemed to be more common place.

“I help.” She declared. She could have easily just shoved past him but he was…kind of cute? Like in a baby way. Not in like, a cute cute way. Like she didn’t think he had a nice smile or anything weird like that.

Gross.

“Hmm?” Alm turned sharply, squinting as she scanned the crowd back and forth. When she looked back to her new companion, she was surprised to find that he hadn’t run off.

“What your name?” She couldn’t keep calling him baby-face space man.

Well, sort of.

[member="Lucien Shorn"]

 

[Lord Ghoul]

"Lucien," he said, lips curling up one corner of his face in an impish smirk at her reaction. Her almost permanent frowny face made it hard to tell if she was messing with him or not, but it seemed like stealing genuinely upset her. Huh.

The Chadra-Fan was probably long gone by now, but Lucien would track him down again. Maybe. The little guy had habits he just couldn't shake.

"What's yours, Too Tall?"

He kinda felt bad juking her out like that, but he still didn't know much, if anything, about her. And the Underground was always telling him to try and develop contacts. Losing track of the Chadra-Fan might end up being for the better. Who knew?

[member="Alm"]

 

[Eurydice]

Too tall? Alm stared at him with that stony face, unsure of how to react. Part of her was somewhat embarrassed that he’d noticed her height. Her height, which was something impossible not to notice about her. Especially given the fact that she had the face of a baby.

“Am normal height, thank you Lucy.” She grunted in response with a bit less bite than before. Sure, on her home planet she was perfectly normal and unremarkable. Elsewhere—here—she stuck out pretty bad. Unfortunately(?) she was slated to grow another foot or so before reaching adulthood.

“My name is Alm.” She sounded proud now, probably because that was the only grammatically correct sentence she could speak in Basic. “Am from planet Manas, Outer Rim.” She didn’t expect him to know it…maybe he did? Manas wasn’t any cultural epicenter, but recently outsiders were being welcomed to do business in its capital city.

“You from here, Lucy?” She gestured to the room they were in as a whole. "You born in casino brothel?"

[member="Lucien Shorn"]

 

[Lord Ghoul]

Lucy? No matter where he went, the nickname seemed to stick. Pretty funny, since he could imagine the mortified expression of namesake - [member="Lucien Cordel"] - if the noble was ever referred to as "Lucy." He smiled.

She went on, mentioning her homeworld. Lucien didn't know anything about the planet, Manas, but it made him wonder.

"Uh, no. I'm from-"

Well, nowhere really. He'd "grown up" in the Chiloon Rift, but he really did not enjoy sharing that with anyone who came along.

"-you guessed it, space. Been on a freighter pretty much most of my life." They were still standing in the middle of the casino. Hadn't really drawn any attention to them.

"So how did a girl from the outer rim end up in a place like this?"

In Sith space.

[member="Alm"]

 

[Eurydice]

Alm nodded in understanding, perhaps a bit too quickly. One of her favorite modern aspects were holoflicks. She loved watching anything involving roguish spacers and their adventures tangling with pirates and the law. It was all painted in a romantic light of course, but to learn that Lucien lived that life made her think higher of him.

“Fantastic.” She said. It was a word she’d recently learned and probably seemed sarcastic given her deadpan stare and lack of enthusiasm because she didn’t quite understand the context it needed to be used in.

Then he turned the question on her, the one she really wasn’t ready to answer because Alm was not a smooth talker. She was hardly a talker.

“I travel, looking for work. Manas is poor.” She nodded quickly again as if that would help affirm her own lie. It wasn’t…exactly a lie but she was aware enough to know that being a part of something Sithy was enough to get you into trouble. “Here. I apply for the job.”

Obviously.

[member="Lucien Shorn"]