#meonlyred

5. What would their recruitment mission be? It’s an ordinary sort of day in your extraordinary level 30 life. You’re just doing your thing, fighting crime, doing crime, rescuing random people and murdering somewhat less random people. You’re headed to Alderaan for your own reasons.

That’s when you get a call from whoever it is that’s always calling you with problems that only you can solve. From whoever usually preaches to you about duty, who gives you orders or threatens your life or just offers you good old-fashioned credits in exchange for your services, like any sensible person would. There’s a problem, they tell you. (There’s always a problem.) It’s a mission gone sideways, a crashed ship with a not entirely inconsequential Jedi on board who may or may not have gone rogue. Information is scarce, danger is guaranteed, and the problem is on Alderaan where the political situation is too unstable for any big, bold moves.

You take the job. It’s already on your way, and besides, you see potential in it. Potential good, potential credits, potential prestige. The potential to quiet your insatiable bloodlust, however temporarily. Whatever it is you’re looking for.

The Republic bosses want answers. What happened to the ship? To the mission? To the Jedi? They want you to bring her back into the fold if you can. They don’t say what to do if you can’t, but you can guess. The Imperial bosses want an edge. They want whatever was on that ship, but mostly they want the Jedi. She’s a thorn in the Imperial side and if they can’t make use of her, if she hasn’t fallen like rumor suggests, they want her out of the way.

Maybe you ask what the ship’s mission was, what the Jedi was even doing there. Maybe you know better than to ask questions. Regardless, the only information you get is a name.

Nirea Velaran.

A human woman, physically formidable for her species and notoriously unpredictable. She’s good with words and better with lightsabers and ‘dangerous’ is the only thing anyone will say about her for sure. That, and she’s Corellian.

It’s not the profile you’re used to for Jedi. Maybe that peaks your curiosity. Maybe it worries you. Maybe a job is a job and you don’t give a fuck about the details.

On Alderaan you follow the columns of smoke to a small lake nestled between snow-capped peaks, an oasis that might have been peaceful before a small frigate blew a crater into the mountain. The ship is split down the middle, its innards scattered across the ice. You don’t see any bodies, but your scanners detect something alive and moving in the wreckage.

You find a scavver in the remains of the ship’s engine room, greasy and poorly-clothed, elbow deep in the ship’s hyperdrive. The only weapon you can see is a shock stick that’s seen better days, leaning against the wall on the other side of the room.

She’s unconcerned by you and your armed companions. Asks if you’re in the market for an Aratech repulsion compensator. They’re hard to find, she promises, because Aratech pulled out of the hyperdrive manufacturing business almost as soon as they got into it. They make good speeders and, in her opinion, they ought to stick with that. She promises to give you a good price on account of her not having to haul it down the mountain if you buy it up here. She also tells you how the Jedi wasn’t interested on account of not having a ship anymore.

Maybe you notice the knowing gleam in her blue eyes, maybe you don’t. Either way, this scavver has information you want. You negotiate. With charm, with reason, with threats. It doesn’t matter how. You get what you want in the end, just like you always do.

The scavver takes you to the ship’s bridge, where she says she met the Jedi earlier. You find a Republic Senator’s corpse on the floor, two distinct lightsaber wounds in their chest, but none of the carbon scoring you’d expect from a fight. You get what you can from the ship’s damaged computers, but it doesn’t amount to much more than navcharts, a manifest, and escape pod launch records. When you turn to ask the scavver where the Jedi was headed, you find that she is gone and the path out of the bridge is sealed behind you.

You make a new path, of course. You always do.

The scavver’s trail predictably takes you back to your ship. The good news is that it’s still there. The bad news is your protocol droid is disassembled with apparent care, lying in a neat pile at the top of the boarding ramp. The word sorry is scrawled across its forehead in very poor handwriting using what you suspect to be lipstick. From the loving way the droid was taken apart, you guess the message isn’t for you.

There is no apology scrawled on the floor where one of your speeders used to be.

You follow your speeder--a simple task with all of your skills and your crew and your resources--to a valley below the crashsite, where the plains of pristine snow are pocked with scorched-black escape pods. Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of them, their hatches all hanging open. A path of brown mud and green grass marks the slow march of their inhabitants out of the valley.

There is another ship at the other end of the path. A freighter, small enough you aren’t sure it can even carry the hundreds of people slowly shuffling aboard. They are aliens, all of them, and clad in identical grey jumpsuits. You catch the gleam of metal around some of their wrists and ankles.

The scavver watches you from the ground beside the boarding ramp. Maybe you already guessed and maybe you didn’t, but you see now that she’s not what she seemed. The shabby cloaks and scarves have been thrown off, leaving her in a Jedi-brown combat suit she wears like a second skin, a lightsaber at each hip, standing tall and sure. The Force swirls around her in a storm of certainty and power and even if you can’t feel that sort of thing, there’s something about the way she holds herself that tells you it’s there all the same.

This is your objective. This is Nirea Velaran.

She tosses you a careless grin as the freighter’s aftermarket guns spin round to face you. You could perhaps kill her before they get you, but you wouldn’t survive to enjoy the rewards of a job well done. She tells you this doesn’t have to be stupid and you don’t have much choice but to talk. To let her explain.

What she tells you is an indictment of the Republic’s system of law, a story of a prison that’s little more than a slave mill for aliens, of Senators that blithely profit from the gaps deliberately written in their own laws. A story of the Jedi Master who knew about it and did nothing, who sent her to prop up something broken, who cared more about law than justice. It’s the story of a Jedi Knight who murdered a Senator in cold blood and will die before apologizing for it.

She’s cavalier about what she’s done, but passionate about her reasons for doing it. Whatever the price of this liberation turns out to be, she’s clearly prepared to pay it. Clearly prepared to ensure its success no matter what it does to her.

The boarding ramp begins to rise as the last of the prisoners scrambles aboard. You don’t know if she planned for the ship to leave without her, but she doesn’t seem to care. The guns remain fixed on your position.

You consider your options as your target considers you. Her attention slices through you like a laser, hot and sharp and precise. Looking for something specific, you think, and you can’t tell from her inscrutable expression whether she found it.

When she’s seen what she needs to, she offers you some flattery and a gratuitous wink. Maybe you appreciate it; maybe you don’t. She asks for a ride off this shit planet. Promises to put your droid back together and put a little life into your drab little ship. Mentions how it’s generally better to have someone with a talent for destruction and mayhem working for you than than against you. And maybe she hints that she’s got talents beyond wanton chaos. Maybe she offers to show you what they are.

Accepting her offer will have consequences. This Jedi is the sort of person who wears trouble like a signature fragrance. You are familiar enough with trouble by now to know you can’t stand that close to its storm without being swept up yourself. But maybe you can make that storm work for you. Maybe it’s your kind of storm.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe you have enough trouble of your own. Maybe you aren’t interested in the kind of trouble a willful, bleeding-heart Jedi carries with her.