| Entry Two *Disclaimer: George Lucas still owns the Star Wars universe. I'm just playing in his sandbox. The lyrics of "Welcome to the Jungle" are the property of Guns'n'Roses; I'm just quoting 'em. Ria is still mine, as are the Freedom Fighters. Synopsis: Ria gets tangled up with an underground slave organization, and runs into a familiar alien badass. "Welcome to the Jungle, things get worse here everyday; You learn to live like an animal, in the jungle where you play..." Axle didn't know how true those words were. Granted, Tattoine is no jungle; yet another detail Lucas didn't mess up on. I'd managed to get myself sold to an impotent Hutt with horrible people skills and worse manners. I'm just happy that I'd managed to get out of the position of a dancing girl, and into the position of enslaved muscle. This particular Hutt, Glarkeesh, already had quite a few dancing girls, and the best off of those seemed to be the Twi'leks. They were perfectly happy to run around half-naked, and were horny enough to never mind "entertaining" any of Glar's guests. Though, considering the climate, I didn't blame them on the clothes OR the extra activity: It had to have been at least 120 degrees Fahrenheit daily, and that was only in the morning. As soon as the suns set, the temp dropped to below freezing. That happens when there is little or no cloud cover to keep the heat from escaping a planet... I stared around the Hutt entertainment hall. I'd been in Glar�s keeping for about five months, and had found out some interesting information. Turns out that a few of my fellow Terrans didn't like being slaves. Gee, who'd have thought? The non-Terran human slaves wouldn't do anything to free themselves; they'd long ago convinced themselves that there was nothing that they could do. Since the Republic needed to focus on problems closer to Coruscant, the Republic sort of turned a blind eye to what went on in the Rim. I suspect that the Republic and the Hutts had just made a deal so that the Hutts wouldn't get mad and stop whatever it was that the Hutts did to keep their smugglers from overrunning the more "legal" means of trade. So it was up to us Terrans to get ourselves out of this humiliating predicament. I glanced at my fellow bodyguard and partner in crime, Ryan. He was supposed to be some sort of technical genius, and swore that he could find a way to figure out where our S.T.I.'s (Slave Tracking Implants) were in our bodies. Though, from the way my shoulder kept itching, I already had a sneaking suspicion as to where mine was. Ryan blinked at me owlishly. I blinked back, twice. He nodded, and turned away. Good, that meant another meeting as soon as we got off-duty. If he'd blinked instead of nodded, that would have meant that he thought that we were being watched, and hence, no meeting. Now, to get back to business... He and I were two of Glar's personal bodyguards. Apparently, some of his client species took offense if they happened to be female and none of Glar's guards were. Surprisingly enough, some species in this galaxy were actually female-dominated. Take the S'ilkonesh race, for example. Each woman had at least three husbands to cater to her every whim, and that was if she was poor. The richer ones that Glar traded with tended to have harems of fifty or more males, and not necessarily all of them were of the S'ilkonesh species. The S�ilkonesh females were even known to occasionally keep a few slave-girls, just for variety. Poor Earth guys, disillusioned after so many years...I suppressed the urge to laugh evilly. I'd never forget the look on Ryan's face when the last S'ilkonesh tried to barter for us as a matched pair. I forced my face to resume its blank look. I didn't need Glar thinking that I was anything other than competent. If my predecessor had been competent, I still would've been on the floor with the dancing girls, and not up on the podium keeping an eye on things. So far, it had been a fairly easy, if boring, existence. My predecessor hadn't managed to stop someone before he had almost choked Glar; I'd pulled out my throwing dagger and had nailed the intruder...in his eyeball. Granted, the Hutt wasn't too happy that a slave was armed and he didn't know about it, but that was my predecessor's problem, and not mine. Well, once she was gone, he needed a new female bodyguard. Gee, whodya think he picked... Now the only armed people inside of the complex were ones that I knew about. The self-styled �Freedom Fighters� had approached me shortly after my promotion; they were a little hesitant at first. Granted, I was a Terran, but I had just saved the life of a Hutt. I couldn't really blame them for not knowing whether or not they could trust me. I'd just seen that intruder as my ticket off of the dance floor. Either I'd be promoted to the position of bodyguard, and I could finally put my skills to use again, or Glar would've killed me for possessing an unauthorized weapon. Either way, I'd have been better off. So, anyway, the boys had decided to approach me in the form of my new "partner", Ryan. He'd sat down next to me as I was cleaning the gunk off of my new, inherited, toys. "So," he'd said quietly "did you kill that guy to help the Hutt, or to help yourself?" I'd looked at him. "What do you mean? Helping the Hutt was helping myself. In case you didn't notice..." I flipped the knife I'd been cleaning so that I was holding it by the blade's tip, and flicked it into the wall. "Dancing in a flimsy costume ain't exactly my thing." Ryan sidled closer to me on the bench, and talked to me in an even lower tone. "So, do you do everything that you do just to help yourself?" He raised his eyebrow at me. I'm sure, that to passerby, it probably looked like he was trying to proposition me. And, if that passerby had looked at me, they would've thought that he was about to get knifed for his trouble. I drew back from him. "Only...when it suits me. Why?" Ryan had continued to inform me of where things really stood in our new little home. Glar was a narcotics dealer, and he also turned a nice little profit from the slave trade. In other words, he was your typical Hutt. It didn't matter how well you worked, or how hard, as soon as he got the urge, he could, and would, kill you on nothing stronger than a whim. Your best defense was to make sure that he never noticed you. Now, Ryan and his boys, they'd gotten it into their heads that they didn't much like the status quo, and that it was time to do something about it. Ryan was working on a way to find our S.T.I.'s; one of his boys was a former surgeon, and Joe was fairly confident that if Ryan could find the damn things, he could cut them out. Now, Chad, a former cop, had worked with bomb squads a few times, and he thought that we should test this "find, cut, and run" theory on something else; he thought that any tampering with the damn things would automatically trigger their detonators. Hell, I just wanted the damn thing out so that I could get away from anything that even remotely smelled like a Hutt, and to someplace with a decent shower. The boys, on the other hand, wanted to get everyone's implants out, and encourage all of the slaves to rise up in revolt. Men. Hell, the Tattoine slaves had been so long without escape that they no longer knew what the Hell "escape" was. Plus, if all the slaves in Glar's complex suddenly rose up in revolt, where would that leave the slaves in the other Hutt complexes? ~ Continue ~ |