- Joined
- Sep 7, 2014
- Messages
- 532
- Reaction score
- 90
A near paradise world. Only a few tightly organized, well-kept cities. Miles and miles of verdant greenery. Oceans bluer than her hair with fresh dye - which reminded her, the bleach was showing and she needed redone - and air so clean that every breath felt revitalizing. It reminded Ishale of times surfing on the beach, sneaking out past curfew hours with a pretty young girl or boy, and going to open-air concerts that turned night into day and went well past when she should have been going to bed.
It was peaceful, calm compared to much of the rest of the galaxy, and Ishale could have seen she and Corric settling down here some day.
So she hated it.
When she'd taken this job from the Imperial bounty roster, she hadn't expected the last ten weeks of searching and tracking to lead her. She'd been given a lead that one skip-tracer had pulled up swearing individuals "suspected of involvement" with the former Archon of Hapes had been spotted on Tatooine. Raiders, handsy pod-racers, and farmers were all involved in that week. After that came up a dead end, she'd searched two different space stations from top to bottom until she found something actionable that found her on a tramp freighter running core-ward.
Planet to planet, station to station, city to city. Sometimes it was breaking in to a high-end apartment at a god-awful hour of the night. Sometimes it was rucking through country-side waist-deep in muddy water along the same kind of routes used by the less legal pharmaceutical practices.
And after a while she got an inkling, following these clues. A suspicion about just where it all was leading her. But she dismissed it, because the conclusion would be far too obvious - too simple. There was no way, she told herself, after going through places that all had their own unique miseries and losing three perfectly good pairs of pants that it was going to be that simple. She would strangle the first Hapan if it was that simple! And sure enough as evidence was compiled, Ishale found herself with an oath to strangle some poor Hapan - and a fifth pair of trousers, everything said and done.
She'd made her way to Hapan and rented an apartment at the edge of the city. The last three days had been slinking out into the more rural parts of the city, looking for the sorts of signs one found with military build-ups. That usually meant heavy duty vehicles, finding street corners that always had somebody "waiting for a friend" or something like that, and seeing certain areas of a town where the "normal" folk tended to travel through in more sparse numbers than usual. It would have all been very hush-hush and high-speed, low-drag secret-squirrel style business, Ishale suspected.
And then they went and invited her in.
Or near enough to it that they might as well have.
One day walking past one of the usual lookout points, the man holding the spot down had called her over when she'd stopped for a smoke. She looked tired, he'd said. Yes, she'd replied, it was five in the morning and she'd had a long night. No, he'd clarified, she looked tired of the world. He could recognize a former soldier, he assured her, and could see it in her gait and eyes. Now she'd always figured it was in the fact that her arms and legs had model numbers but she didn't argue about it. If she was a true lover of freedom and wanted to see a change for the better brought to the people of Hapes then she should meet some friends of his at a cantina called the 'Royal Lush'.
Go in back to the few rooms that the cantina had for rent, foond Room 7. Knock four times, and when prompted say, "She is my mother, as yours."
It was something straight out of a corny spy vid. But still Ishale returned to the apartment and fulfilled the next part of her contract - contacting her Imperial contact to let them know that she'd tracked her target down. They were going to send a small team for aid, they told her. A few Stormtroopers, members of the 501st. She just needed to give a rendezvous point to meet up with them in a few days time. And that was how Ishale got where she was now, in the near-daylight of a Hapes midnight.
The place she'd agreed upon with her handler was a parking garage roughly ten blocks away from the Royal Lush. Ishale had shown up an hour before the scheduled meeting time to give the place a quick sweep before heading up to park her speeder and finding a nice, surprisingly dark corner by a maintenance doorway to light up a smoke and wait for whoever it was her former superiors had deemed to help her.