CANTONICA SYSTEM, CORPORATE SECTOR
☯
Never in her life had Rabé seen this many lights, as if the stars themselves had made planetfall. The galaxy's finest, all gathered together to celebrate being the galaxy's finest. The creamy white spacescrapers lit up like suns, so bright they seemed to render the stars above invisible, something which Rabé had never thought possible anywhere in the galaxy. The seemingly infinite sea before them, even the waters of which seemed too extravagant to be natural, carried luxury yachts and the most exotic-looking sea speeders. Casinos littered the city, separated by racetracks and surrounded by restaurants, cabarets and luxury hotels of all sorts. Cantonica easily overwhelmed her acute senses.
It was exotic, this city, in the heart of which stood the Crescent Royale Casino in which she currently stood. What was even stranger was the fact that, somehow, all of it felt so... wrong. She could sense strange... shadows, creeping through the crevices of the planet like a gigantic slitherette of darkness, which made no sense to her, considering this must've been the brightest spot in the whole wide galaxy. Granted, this was quite literally the third planet she had ever visited ever since she had been awoken from her birth slumber, and even she could tell the first two weren't much of a sight to behold, so she couldn't be sure if it was. But she doubted any place could have more lights than this city,
"What's on your mind?" she heard deep, serene voice interrupt her thoughts, and turned her head aside to glance back at the elder man on her right. Nuur Solana, the venerable Master Jedi, whose name she had taken as her own, for he had been the only family she had ever known.
She smiled up at him, tightly but kindly. The dirty blonde man, hair interspersed with patches of gray, the same shade as his sideburns, stood a good seven inches taller than her, arms crossed over his chest with a single hand resting on his bearded chin. He stared down at her with eyes the colour of the Sea of Cantonica. Gone were the unremarkable brown and tan Jedi robes that he could make to seem somehow fashionable despite their intentional blandness. Instead, the elder man was dressed like a smuggler; a light shirt underneath a black vest and black cargo pants, over which he wore a brown, Corellian-cut trench coat with a large everted collar spanning his entire chest and reaching down to his knees. His belt contained a blaster holster (which in fact carried his lightsaber instead of his blaster), and knee-length boots covered his feet. Her father looked like a bounty hunter from the Western Reaches.
"It just feels a bit..." she shook her head, trailing off.
"Disturbing?" he chuckled. "Vestiges of the Dark Side. None of these people are honest citizens, most of them are quite depraved, and this place has been their playground for centuries. The spiritual residue of their misdeeds soils the place. Bear with it, we must focus on the task to which we have been assigned."
Nuur placed a hand on Rabé's shoulder and squeezed comfortingly. This had been the first time he had seen the girl dressed up - no, this was the first time she had dressed up, and she looked stunning, in a two-piece black dress of the finest Nubian silk, the full-sleeved top revealing her mid-riff and back, and the bottom piece a gown falling onto the ground below with a split in the middle on each side to reveal her legs and allow for easy movement. Instead of her usual sidebuns, her chocolate brown her were elaborately braided today, held back by a golden headpiece. The extremely expensive dress had been paid for by the Galactic Alliance's government, and she had no intention of returning it.
"Right," Rabé murmured. "The mission..."
This was her first mission as a Padawan apprentice to Master Solana; they were acting as undercover Jedi escorts to a group of Alliance operatives. They were supposed to get close to Elom Dusk, a corporate executive considered to be perhaps the richest Muun in the galaxy. His influence spanned Imperial-Alliance borders, and the Galactic Alliance Intelligence Service had received nuggets of information about his Imperial leanings and the participation of his network in cross-border operations as part of an anticipated Imperial incursion into Alliance territory. Still aching from the loss of Rhen Var to the Sith, the GAIS wasn't about to take any chances with the Empire. The Solanas and the GA operatives were supposed to get as close as possible to Elom Dusk himself, attain any information possible about the operations through any means necessary, and, if even remotely possible, bring the man in for questioning.
Just recalling the mission parameters sent an anxious shiver up her spine. She quickly sipped on her glass of cab sauv, her hazel eyes finding Dusk surrounded by a chortling crowd of high society - Duros, Dugs, Rodians, more Muuns and Humanoids, all clearly from around the Core by simply the way they carried themselves - at a gambling table in the middle of the vast hall.
"Worry not, young one," her master said. "Consider this your first step into a larger world. Now, I see my contact," he nodded towards a brown-haired man with an eyepatch in the far corner, sitting on a table opposite a female Togruta in an elegant blue dress. Her Master took off in their direction.
"Remember. Stay in the moment," his parting advice as he disappeared into the crowd.
Sighing, Rabé calmed her nerves before turning her attention back to Elom Dusk. 'I have a bad feeling about this,' she thought, stilling her nerves as she began to slink over to the Muun in question.
