Head Full o' Hurt

[Barton Henning]

Doc – got something on my hands I'd like to be rid of. Think you could probably find some use for it.

Seemingly innocent words, but Barton Henning knew better. The communication came from an information broker he'd made some use of on Nar Shaddaa. He was a Bimm by the name of Ginder, who made a living scavenging anything and everything he could lay his fingers on – then selling it on at an inflated value. That he was wanting to give something away was suspicious, but intuition told Barton this might be worth looking into – intuition and a friendly nudge from the Alliance agents aboard the Wheel, who were always on the look-out for a useful lead or link.

There was a set of co-ordinates with the message, which lead the Knightfall and it's creature to the cloud city of Tolea Biqua. They'd barely landed when someone almost threw up on Barton's boots. A tangle of buildings, all connected by a spiralling web of garish neon lights, Tolea Biqua was like a low-budget, second-hand version of Nar Shaddaa. Henning had hoped they would be meeting Ginder in somewhere other than a bar, but on first impressions of the city he couldn't be sure that it had anything else to offer.

The sign above the cantina door read the Falling Rodian, and had a crudely drawn picture of a bug-eyed Rodian toppling over a cloud city railing. The obligatory warnings about no droids or blasters were scrawled underneath. Something told Barton that few if any of the patrons payed attention to the last part of that request. Glancing at the members of his crew who had elected to follow him – either for moral or physical support, or out of sheer curiosity – Barton nodded.

Inside, it was a typical cantina scene. Humans and aliens alike, with glasses of oddly coloured ales and strange infusions, some biting on hokkums of glitterstim or breathing in the smoke of smouldering braziers. A few of them wore blasters openly, and doubtless many more had concealed weapons. A few eyes turned Henning's way, but no one paid him and his companions more than passing attention. They had their own business and were neither interested in nor threatened by a handful of spacers.

“We ought to spread out, see if we can spot the Bimm anywhere,” Barton muttered, low.

[Ben Merasska]

Ben let his hand rest on the blaster pistol hanging off his hip. It would surprise some how good a shot Ben really was with a pistol, despite how much he hated the things, and how jumpy he could be whenever danger or fighting seemed close. Ben also had the penchant to wound instead of kill, and then run like he was getting out of the Corellian Hells.

“Sure thing, Cap’n,” he said. “Though I’m not too sure what I’m supposed to do if I find him. Don’t think you’d be very happy if I started shouting, eh?”

He grinned. Ben had been feeling greatly relaxed ever since they’d left the Rebel fleet/convoy/whatever, and it showed. Out in the great vastness of space, he didn’t need to worry about Empires and Rebellions or think about anything in the past. He was just a speck among trillions of other specks, and he could let his past float off into the black.

[Barton Henning]

“Wave me over,” Barton replied, then as an afterthought added: “Discreetly.”

Ben met his eyes for a moment and Henning gave the smallest of smiles, before moving off into the crowds. He narrowed his eyes against the smoke that seemed to hang over every part of the cantina, and studied what there was to be studied. In one corner, there was a Bothan and a surly looking Human male arguing over something, but on the whole the place seemed... sedate. A tentative brush with the Force gave Barton the impressive that there was more to the Falling Rodian than met the eye.

As he turned past the bar itself, the bartender grunted out a hey! Henning gave him a nod.

“You gonna order something or what, spacer?”

Fishing into his pockets for whatever change he had, Barton slid a few credits across the counter.

“Blue milk.” The bartender snorted and cast a leering grin at a few of his other customers as he pulled a grimy jug from beneath the counter, sloshing a tumbler full of its contents. Barton took a sip. It was foul. “You know Ginder?” he asked, plainly. The bartender eyed him for a moment, then nodded as he wiped out the inside of another glass with a cloth.

“Sure. Usually doesn't get in for a half hour or so yet though.”

“Think you can point him my way when you see him?”

Again, a nod. Barton picked up his glass of milk and turned away, keeping his pace casual as he moved to meet up with Ben.

[Lyanie Quez]

Lyanie laughed, though not too loudly. It was essential, sometimes, to have a sense of humour about you in this life, lest you go insane. Ben has enough of it, often, for all of them, though Lyanie was rarely low-feelin' enough that she actually needed the uplifting. It was good for the soul, anyway.

"No, I don't think so, Ben. Unless you want everyone and everything in the cantina sizing you up for disturbing their... whatever it is they might be doing." She smiled and looked to Barton. Quez had spent enough time in cantinas like this to know, for the most part, what might or might not cause you trouble. And those things sometimes never remained the same. She wondered what Barton wanted them to do when they found the Bimm. Wave him over? Hum. Maybe not. Well, maybe, if you weren't going to flap your arms around frantically. Keeping to subdued motions tended to be best in places like this, but she hoped to hear what the captain had to say about it. Which he did. Smart man. "Sure thing, chief."

Barton wandered off to grab a beverage, to look more casual and fit in and bring less notice to himself. Or maybe he just wanted a drink. Either or. Lyanie move up to beside Ben, about as best could be managed in the busy cantina and wandered idly through the cantina, as if to look for a table and waited for Henning to come back to them.

[Ben Merasska]

“So we gotta look for a Bimm, eh?” he murmured quietly as he and Lyanie ostensibly searched for a suitable place to sit.

“Shouldn’t we be looking under the tables too?”

[Barton Henning]

There weren't many empty tables, but somehow had Ben managed to find a booth that was unoccupied. The trio sat down, looking about as inconspicuous as a white bantha. Luckily, nearly everyone sitting nearby was busy trying to find the bottom of an ale mug.

“I don't know much about them,” Barton admitted, as Ben ducked low and – in all seriousness – scoured the underside of the table in search of their contact. “The only dealings I had with Ginder were done over comm-channels. I only ever saw him from shoulders up, so I suppose you're right. He could be a midget, or a giant, for all we know.”

Pondering this dilemma, Barton did not noticed the small figure bustling into the cantina, a package clutched tightly under his arm. Frantic eyes darting here and there, he looked as if he'd jump at the sight of his own shadow. When his eyes fell on Henning and the others, some of the anxiety lifted and the Bimm scurried quickly over.

“Am I glad you came,” Ginder said, placing his parcel on the table with a heavy thump. It was about the size and shape of a human head. “I’ve been carrying this around for days, even sleeping with the thing. It’s been too much. They’re after me. I have to get off the planet. A ticket, a berth—anything. I’ll give it to you, and then it’ll be your worry. You’ve got to help me.”

[Serrena Alcine]

Sable curls were bound back from a slender neck and delicate features, while a pair of stylish glasses obscured her eyes. From the line of her cleavage to mid thigh, the woman was clad in skin-tight black leather that left little to the imagination. Most would think her little better than a street-walker, given the patrons in this particular establishment, and anywhere else, they might be right. But, clipped to her ornate silver belt was a pair of heavily modified verpine shatter guns, while the well-worn and cared for hilts of a pair of sais were visible tucked into the tops of her boots.

Alluring and dangerous, she'd once been called.

Beautiful, even...the top of her field in looks and...stamina.

She almost choked on the thought, remembering the awards ceremony some scant few weeks before. When everything she knew about her life had ended in the world's worst possible way.

Well, whethere she was recognized or not, it didn't matter. She needed a drink to kill the time until her next sceduled 'performance' at a club a few streets over. Galaxy's best selling adult holovid star, and the best she could now book was a third-rate hole in the wall on Tolea Biqua.

Sidling up to the bar, she pulled her glasses off and stared at the bartender, daring him to either complain about her weapons or recognize her. As he wisely did neither and simply widened his gaze at her, she nodded. "Starshine Surprise. Now." she said, her voice accented and a bit rough from the last few weeks, a single fingertip sliding her credit chip across the bartop.

Off to her left, at the end of the booth, stood two shadowed figures, watching and waiting. They thought they were doing so unnoticed, but she didn't get to where she was by being quite that careless - her outing as a half-breed not-withstanding.

[Lyanie Quez]

Lyanie nearly jumped when the Bimm suddenly came alongside the table they'd only just managed to secure for themselves in waiting. A hand to her chest, she calmed as she listened to Ginder spill everything he had to say at about a million miles a minute. And the packaged item which had practically been dropped on the tabletop - she wondered if any of her two companions were thinking the same thing about its dimensions.

The thought made her slightly uncomfortable. She'd used a blaster before, both in practice and in reality and in many different makes, models and sizes, but she had never beheaded someone. Never actually had to use so much as a vegetable knife in on-the-spot self-defense in the kitchen. Overactive imagination. That just had to be it. The mechanic shook her head and glanced at Ben, trying to gauge what he might be thinking, what with the look on his face, while keeping an ear to the conversation, which seemed mostly to be between Ginder and Barton and at this point, heavily one-sided.

[Ben Merasska]

“Looks like someone’s head,” he hissed quietly. “And he’s slept with it?”

Ben was blanching. That was the expression that Lyanie saw on his face, and the expression that stayed there. Despite that, his curiosity was in full swing. His eyes flitted between the barely seen head of the Bimm and package on the table.

Cautiously, he raised a finger and slowly made to poke the thing.

[Barton Henning]

Barton eyed the worryingly shaped package for a moment. He didn't smell anything unsavoury coming off of it, but the way Ginder was acting did not bode well for what was inside. Ben prodded at the thing, and fortunately it did not squelch, squeak or give any other indication that it was still alive.

“Unwrap it,” Henning said. The Bimm gave him a look that said he'd rather not, but Barton simply gave the parcel another pointed glance. With obvious reluctance, Ginder sat forward and peeled away the cloth that was folded over the parcel, to reveal.. what looked like weathered copper. Barton frowned.

“What is it?”

“A protocol droids head,” Ginder snapped, shoving it with trembling hands towards Ben. It rolled across the table, loose wires straggling from the neck where it had once been secured onto a pair of shoulders.

[Ben Merasska]

Ben caught the rolling droid-head with a curious look on his face, both happy and disappointed it wasn’t what he thought it was. It would have made a good story. And in his year as a security officer, he’d dealt with weirder. He caught Lyanie’s eye.

“Well,” he said, imitating a protocol droid’s voice, “this certainly is a bad situation to be in. It seems to be my lot in life.”

As he did his horrible ventriloquism act, he moved the head around as if it was speaking itself.

[Lyanie Quez]

Lyanie's expression went from something of relief and/or disappointment (at the package being a droid's head) to feigned appalling shock (as the head rolled across the table) to, finally, undeniable amusement, punctuated with laughter at Ben's antics.

"Oh, come now, Ben. That ain't no way to treat the dead." She said, between giggles. Her eyes began to stray to the expressions of both Ginder and Barton and her giggles died more quickly than they had begun. She swatted Ben on the shoulder and gave him a stern, pointed look of knock it off.

She turned her head to Ginder, now.

"So what's the deal, then?" She jerked a thumb at the droid head, which Ben still had his hands on. "Mr. Decapitated there know something he shouldn't?"

[Ben Merasska]

Ben sighed, seemingly oblivious to the pointed looks being thrown his way.

I can’t take this stuff seriously, or I’ll go bonkers, he thought.

“Yeah. There’s not a bomb or something in this here brain, is there? Or a spy program? Or one of those little secrets that means we’re going to have an exciting week? I hate exciting weeks.”

[Barton Henning]

At first, the sight of the droids head was a relief – though it wasn't long before Ginder snatched that from under everyone's feet.

“Bang on, friend, bang on,” he said, jabbing a finger at Ben. “Not a bomb, of course – but it knows something. Something valuable! I'd keep it myself but... like I said, I can't sleep for fear of some soon giving me a blaster-bolt enema.”