That Motor City Spirit (PM to Join)

[Jak Bexel]

Coronet Heights, Coronet City, Corellia

Jak stood in a very important place in his timeline. Yet he was far, far away.

20 years ago, you maybe didn't come here. The Imperial occupation left a number of neighborhoods outside of the big city to the gangs and criminal element, and when the Republic took it back, the whole mess of them fled off-world or to the center. Shops stood run-down. Abandoned droids littered the streets, servos damaged from the elements and two decades of rampant street war. The only inner city concessions, of course, were the off-off-off brand supermarket chains and less-than-digestible fast food enterprises that seemingly fed off the poor unfortunate souls who had nowhere else to go. It did not help that the edge of Coronet Heights was fenced in by a criss cross of highway and freeway going anywhere else.

It was here that a 17 year old Jak Bexel lived in a slum and worked his first job at a Drallist pub as a bar-back, then bartender, then manager, then fired, then back to bartender. He'd had enough of his family's machinations upon his life - always did - and vowed to remove himself from the good life, the privileged life, the care-free bubble he sometimes enjoyed in the center of the city. It made sense; his family were dilettantes and bandits before their accidental fortune in the hospitality industry and sought to insulate their children from hardship. It worked to their detriment; spoiling a soul that cries for freedom only instills an anxiety that can't be understated.

For Jak, he was afraid of being soft; being the weak link in the Bexel family, the frail other brother who would give them up like he read in those old holomovies whose cubes sat dusty and stockpiled in his childhood bedroom. He was given every opportunity to succeed, and all he managed to do was fail his family in school and in ambition. His brother Dev went straight away to Coruscant. War had subsided, accords were drawn, and Dev saw a life of order and prosperity within the Empire. Masha, his older sister, would work up the chain of command at BexTel Suites, their flagship establishment. Goram was still a boy, with a pure heart and a wild imagination. Jak wished he could take him with him. But to where?

Jak broke his back to make a meager income and learn what it was to live lean, never asking for help. The Boiling Sea, as it was named, sported rustic food from the pretty temperate sister planet of Drall and a lively, low-lit atmosphere. The depression reduced it to a dive, with electrified chicken wire wrapped about the bar and stage to protect against the odd bar fight. You could singe your shoulder if you turned the corner wrong, or had extra shoulders, as was the case with Grokmead the Besalisk bartender. Blasters were in hidden compartments throughout the establishment to aid in security, because they needed it. When you're not enlisted in a militia of any kind yet you have pressed a bar napkin over strangers' stab wound multiple times, you need the security.

He worked their for 5 years before the family came calling him back with a desk job in CorSec. By that point, our boy was ready for a change and dangerously exhausted from the underground nightlife that had grown in the dingy neighborhood that was a slum 5 years prior. From that fiery chaos, order began to form. The bar became nicer, eventually dipping back into Drallist aesthetics but retaining the spirit.

Looking back now, as Jak was in the process of doing, he recalls an old song by Corellian singer/songwriter Loj Ghillis -- "They say that these are not the best of times / But they're the only times I've ever known". It was a harder time but simpler all the same. And from the mess of a post-apocalyptic place, bloomed a new community. He remembers the spirit. He remembers the sweat and blood and pouring whiskey on a knee that's been torn up by nek dogs, or being evicted while working a double, or taking home Sandi or Sebara or whomever else was with him on those long journeys through the night of untamed youth, and he crinkles his nose in disgust.

"Hipsters, one and all," he grumbles. His mind back in present day Corellia Heights, he shakes his head and stares off into the middle distance.

Modern Corellia Heights is an aristocrat's paradise. Quaint - not TOO corporate - with intergalactic food vendors aplenty, bakeries galore, interspeciel couples walking down the street carting their off-spring, nanny droid in tow. Coffee shops dot the way down the main drag of Antilles Avenue. You can buy a 1500cc pair of bloodstripe jeans on this street now. You can pat yourself on the back for buying Corellian, only to suffer a crotch blowout during your first gunfight wearing them. Every corner is a banking clan, every strip club has become a cupcake shop, and where people used to sleep in the streets is now a long row of rent-a-speeders.

The Boiling Sea is no more. It was now The Boiling Pot, and it serves — you guessed it — artisanal jawajuice. Locally made pastries are tastefully positioned behind old fashioned glass. A long way from chicken wire. The deco has been gutted - gone is the Drallist design and smell of cleaning fluids and vomit. There’s a lot of grout flooring and soft couches. The walls have pictures of old Corellia, a eulogy for a planet long gone. It looks just different enough but as if the other one still exists, trapped in the flicker of a holomovie frame, still not giving up but fading under the weight of its too-high rent and commercially driven purpose.

“Sir?” The barista asked in that mid to high range of someone who had better things to do but was here anyway. “What can I getcha?”

“Huh? Oh, I’ll take a cold brew. Large... Can you put a little extra something in it?” Jak asked.

“We only have 12 ounce cups, and that’ll be two credits for extra,” she offered, except it was less an offer and more an admission of terms."

“It's 7ccs for 12 ounces.”

“Yeah and that’s two credits more so it’ll be nine,” she deadpanned back at him, the hatred swelling in her eyes to meet his confusion. They made unbroken eye contact until he produced the credits from his inside jacket pocket.

“You know I used to work here, back when it was a real neighborhood," Jak grumpy old manned at her, crooked finger wagging far enough so as not to have as much Get-Off-My-Lawn-ness. "You're working in a simulation."

"I know, but at least I have health insurance, sir," She accepted his money and slid him his 12oz cold brew. "You have a great day."

"They should have replaced you with droids all ready," he said, and thus marked the end of his short tirade against the persistent grinding of the gears of time and gentrification. "Give me my damn coffee."

She pointed, straight and sure and against all protocol at the coffee on the counter — after guiding his eyes with her finger down to meet the cup. She had some sass, he reckoned. It must be hell to go through the rigamarole of customer service this plastic as a sentient. Almost as if meeting the mind of a droid at the midway, the uncanny valley of human-cyborg-droid relations. He snatched the coffee up and dropped a 50cc coin on the counter, flat and without sentimentality and facing her. She could not have been more than 16.

"Don't work too hard," and he was gone.