#mendacitor

          Andromeda, the land of new prospects, of new chances. It was meant to be the clean slate so many people sought. The baggage grafted to the souls of wanderers no longer able to rot and make a home of the carcass. 

               It was your chance for a new life. Just as it was his. Reyes Vidal, a snake. For in the blink of an eye he would shed the skin of the liar and become the man of promise. A two sided fool playing himself as much as others. You did not know what it was he desired, but his fangs were sharp just as yours were, and In his eyes you saw yourself. That told you all you needed to know of the lengths he would be prepared to go.

        Your trust was a string dangled above the rapids, tenuous and shaking, would it snap? Or would the string hold true enough to keep you both from drowning in each other’s river? 

                       “Is anyone? Andromeda is our chance for something better.                                              So what are you going to make of it?”

       Will you sink, like the snake with a heart of stone, or will you float, shed skin to become a better man, Reyes Vidal?

“his type”??? and what “type” would that be hmm???

Ah, you had to love Kadara. Reminded Drack of Omega, all the way down to the reigning queen of the place, not that the human was any match for Aria. But it was still a damn good place for stuff to get done. Who needed the fucking Nexus when they could sit themselves down into a toxic planet and build up their own damn colony?

But it also meant that all the commerce came through here, which, in turn, meant Drack had to deal with men like Reyes. Fine, he had to give the human some credit, he was good at what he did. So good Drack had made a genuine effort in getting to know him. But that, apparently, was not paying off.

     Coming to Andromeda had, in theory, been intended as something between a retirement and a mid-life crisis - and it had managed the latter, but the former? Not so much. Even after the dust had settled in the wake of the Uprising, he hadn’t been able to sit still and ‘enjoy’ his golden years - his little pre-fab shack on Elaaden was nice, calm and isolated, completely surrounded by turrets and mines, but he hadn’t been able to make himself stay there for longer than a few weeks at a stretch. He could make a decent living, selling a little muscle to the water merchant when her operation ran into trouble, but the boredom itched at him - any longer than a month of relative inactivity and he was ready to start gnawing his own leg off.

     And so, Kadara. Places like this were hotbeds of conflict, and where there was conflict, there were people ready to give up their credits to keep trouble from knocking on their door, or to send it knocking on someone else’s. This contract was looking like the former; smuggler - relatively small-time by all accounts, but reliable, and good at what he did, two traits he always liked in a prospective employer. He doubted this would be the most lucrative - or the most exciting - job he could have found on Kadara, but the odds that his paycheck would come when promised were good, and the opportunity to make a useful contact wasn’t to be ignored.

     The fact that they were meeting in Tartarus suggested that he might be about to sign on to do something that Kadara’s self-proclaimed queen wouldn’t necessarily like, but hazard pay could be discussed before he agreed to anything - he saw that possibility more as a useful opportunity to haggle than as a cause for concern.

liara has yet to actually drink whatever swill they’ve given her. she’s here on a mission anyway, though she’s braced herself that she very well might be leaving here empty handed.