"A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man."
* * *
The Ambassador scuffed his way across the sleek floors of Cloud City with an air of mild disgust. It was so clean, this habitat - on it's upper levels, at least. Everything was so bright, so polished, so sterile. The floors all felt as if they had just been buffed into a treacherous slick moments before you arrived, and the walls felt bland and spartan, as if no one had ever bothered to even try to make the place look presentable. A few of the wealthier areas had the decency to put a carpet down and throw up a few drapes, but the rest of the place was like shuffling through a hospital or a laboratory. How anyone was supposed to develop a good healthy callous on their propodium, Rath had no idea.
Perhaps that is why Okar is so soft.
It was certainly a possibility that warranted due consideration. Okar was somewhat deviant from Hutt social norms, more interested in fashion and in profiting from the joy and comfort of other beings rather from their suffering and misery. From the perspective of outsiders, that perhaps made Okar seem like a good, benevolent sort of Hutt, but to the more puritan and traditional, is was the sort of thing you spoke of in hushed tones when any interested parties were well out of earshot. True, Rath had himself just acquired the Holiday Towers casino and resort, which was undeniably part of the entertainment industry: but while a few patrons might enter happy and leave the same way, the vast majority came to spend their credits on alcohol to drown away their misery, and then plunged deeper into it losing all of their earnings at the gambling tables. That was the quintessential aspect of business that Okar had not properly grasp: happy people wanted for little, and so each sale was a hard fought effort; but misery was abundant, and it multiplied, leaving a vast and endless resource to be mined with no difficulty at all.
Perhaps today, Rath could change this. For too long he had focused on his responsibilities as master of an investment and criminal empire, and neglected his responsibilities as patriarch of the Ouishii Kajidic. No longer would he shirk his duties. No longer would he tolerate Okar's kind of weakness within his clan. Today, he would make a real Hutt out of his frilly little slug of a cousin.
"Okar!" he boomed, sliding his way into the OKWear boutique. "We have business to discuss."
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