roccoschili 93
93
A Young Girl’s War Between the Stars93
Nar Shaddaa. 33 BBY/967 GSC.
Looking at myself in the mirror, I let out a quiet sigh.
My outfit consisted of a metallic top that left much of my skin exposed, but at least covered the important bits and even a little extra, in the form of an entirely decorative piece of silk that draped over my upper stomach and stopped at my belt. The top was attached from the center to a ring just below my throat, then from there to the thick band of a collar around my neck. A gold, triangle shaped belt sat above my belly button and supported a sheet strip of white silk that ran down between my legs and stopped at my knees with a bit of metal and a tassel that would draw the eye every time I moved—and an identical strip of silk in the rear. A single strip of more of that metallic fabric just barely covered my lips below it before turning into what most would impolitely call butt floss. More white silk covered my arms from wrist to bicep, loose and flowy, and held in place by more gold metal. And on my feet were open sandals that left my toes and the tops of my feet exposed.
[Note: Image link not allowed by RR ToS.]
On the one hand, I could appreciate that I looked amazing. The Salaryman I was would have fallen to his knees in tears if he had seen this.
On the other hand, it was . I felt practically naked. There was more cloth than there was covering my crotch or rear.
If this got out, I was never going to live it down. My reputation as Mandalore would be ruined. No one would ever take me seriously again. I really would have to go Sith, just to eliminate any witnesses.
And then there was the teasing that was sure to come. If Cindy, Aylin, or caught wind of it,I would never hear the end of it. Frustration welled up and I reached up, grabbing my hair and pulling as a frustrated noise escaped my throat.
A knock sounded at the door and I froze. “Tanya? Are you well?”
I forced myself to take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Pushing the anxiety, shame, annoyance, frustration, anger… all of the negative emotions down into a box to deal with later. “Fine. Give me a few more moments.”
…
I made one last attempt to straighten things out and make sure my computation orb was hidden behind the piece of metal over my belly. I wasn’t particularly worried about it being flagged by their automated security looking for weapons—it never had before, and I had passed through many scanners more thorough than what they had here. At most, anyone who saw it thought it was a particularly expensive antique pocket watch.
Next, I focused on my skin. Assuming the worst case scenario of being recorded and it getting out… if I wanted this to be in any way deniable, identifying marks had to go. Which meant my scars. So, using a combination of Force healing and alchemy, I created some temporary skin grafts. I’d remove them when I got finished. Then, if video did get out, it was easy to provide evidence to the contrary—at least enough to muddy the waters.
With that done, next came the uncomfortable part.
Finding physical prophylactics wasn’t all that hard. Finding some that weren’t coated in lubrication or other chemicals was somewhat more difficult, but doable.
Opening the box, I fished out one of the familiar foil packets and opened it up to reveal its equally familiar contents—after all, there were really only so many ways to do the job here. The job being, acting as a piece of personal protective equipment to coat a cylinder in a protective sheath such that fluids couldn’t pass between the cylinder and any receptacles it happened to penetrate once properly sheathed.
…It was a condom. A plain, un-lubricated space condom made of the same space latex as a vacsuit.
Grabbing my collapsed staff, I covered it and used the leftover material to tie the bottom end off. Taking a breath, I adjusted my legs, pulled aside the tiny strip of my panties, and hid it in one of the two places that my brief, covert observation of the facility had shown that security didn’t physically check—and the biggest reason why what I wore was the uniform of choice. It was impossible to hide a weapon on one’s person in one of these outfits except in one of two places, and the guards weren’t allowed to touch the hutt’s prizes before he or his guests got the chance to.
.
I bit my lip as my body clenched and slowly adjusted to the intrusion. It took a few moments to relax, then a few more to walk around the small restroom and adjust to the feeling and not accidentally push it out at an unfortunate moment. Then, I used the small space to slowly move through stretches, kicks, and a few limited acrobatics. Once I felt confident I could hold it in place and the sensation stopped being at the forefront of my mind, I made one last check to ensure the leftover material I was going to use when it was time to pull it out wasn’t visible and my panties were back in place, then stepped outside.
Master Qui-Gon, Knight Veridi, and Asajj looked up as I stepped into the common room area. The red haired woman’s eyes went wide as she slowly turned red, her emotions blasting out a confused mixture of arousal and envy. I felt something briefly from Master Qui-Gon, before he mastered himself and looked away, very intentionally quashing whatever emotions he had felt. Asajj was somewhere between amusement, awe, and the same feelings I’d felt from her and Allaya when we first met.
I frowned at the youngest. “I told you to go to bed.”
“I wanted to see you off.”
“And I didn’t want you to see me like this,” I grumbled. Shifting my attention to Qui-Gon, I asked, “Are we ready?”
The man turned back and met my eyes as he nodded—thankfully keeping his eyes above the neck. “Assuming your exit is going to be in the usualfashion… I’ll have the ship waiting.”
“Such a disturbing lack of faith in my ability to be discrete,” I grumbled.
“Are you planning to be discrete upon your exit?” he asked, and when I didn’t answer, he smiled and nodded. “It pays to be prepared for eventuality.”
Knight Veridi shook herself out of her brief lapse. “I’ll go keep an eye on our prisoner.”
“Very well.” Reaching out, I pulled the cloak I would be traveling under over to me and threw it on, pulling the hood up.
We set out from the ship and took Qui-Gon’s speeder around to where we had determined the next shipment of was coming from. We found a place to park and observe and, eventually, a group of girls and young men was led into the back of what looked like an industrial shipping speeder—the equivalent to an eighteen wheeler pulling a trailer.
Qui-Gon tailed them back to the hutt’s metropolitan fortress, where they landed on top of the roof. And it was a fortress in every sense of the word, in spite of the gaudy, gold inlaid and neon lit exterior that made it look like any one of a dozen casinos nearby.
Huge. Thick walls. Armored. Shielded. Covered in visible defensive emplacements and security sensors. Scans from a formula had revealed hidden pop-up anti-air and anti-personnel batteries that were impossible to see from the air. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to assault this place without either sending someone in first or leading with a strike from something to take out the AA and shields at a minimum.
I tossed off the cloak as he broke off and passed just above the building. An optical camouflage formula hid me as I leapt the few yards down to the ground and took off running back to the large speeder and slipped inside. I joined the line of girls exiting and dropped my optical camouflage, just before stepping out. Keeping my gaze on the ground in front of me, I put on my most naive and scared look as I marched behind them.
Slowly, I loosened my grip on my pheromones, breathing a quiet sigh of relief as they began to seep from my body and the ‘muscle’ holding that in relaxed. Out here, in the open where the wind could whip them away, they weren’t really noticeable. I didn’t stand out much in my current company, given that all of the other girls were just as scantily clad—at least, not yet. Once we got inside, I expected that to change.
The line of people moved forward, where security stopped us at the door. One by one, they had everyone walk through, stopping on a scanner briefly before they were ushered fully inside. Soon enough, I was standing on the scanner myself, and felt a brief tingle over my skin as it worked. For just a moment, I felt tension and I prepared to use the Force in case the scanner actually detected my weapon, or did some kind of deep tissue scan and picked up my body’s modifications.
Finally, after what felt like entirely too long, the guard watching the monitoring station called, “Clear. Go through.”
A man waved for me to come through and join the others, as another pair of guards joined us and we started moving down the hall. “This way, all of you.”
Behind us, I heard one of the guards comment, “A zeltron? That’s gonna be fun.”
“Nah. Probably going to be shut up in private quarters somewhere. You know how they get unless you keep ‘em happy or drugged to the gills.”
A third snorted. “I think the boss is more the type who’d prefer to just mind break one until they like it.”
I kept the disgust I felt off my face as I mentally added another reason to kill the hutt before I left.
Far from the casino it appeared to be from the outside, the inside more closely resembled a temple—or perhaps, more accurately, a tomb. It was dim and dry, with only the occasional spot of lighting that mimicked daylight coming from overhead, or wall sconces with flickering flames coming from them. The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in carved sandstone panels that had obviously been modeled off of a Jedi, or perhaps a Sith temple.
Of course, regardless of the facade, it was still a highly defensible and defended position, and its owner was paranoid. The further we went, the more evidence I saw of a creature that was deathly afraid of an attack, but who also wanted to make sure that no one who entered would leave without its permission.
The floor we were led through was a twisting, turning maze of disguised walls designed to shift and move to rearrange the floor layout and retractable defensible positions—durasteel plates that could be extended from the floors, walls, and ceiling—all of which were covered from both sides by automated turrets hidden away in the ceiling and floors. Behind us, my senses caught movement—the walls silently shifting and rearranging the floor as we went, rendering trying to memorize the path back outside useless.
I loosened my control a bit more as we moved, at the same time I used a light, three hundred and sixty degree push from the Force to fan a little wind away from myself to help aid the spread of pheromones. While I did that, I focused on that little muscle inside myself and everything attached to it that controlled my pheromones, then began feeding the Force into it, willing a small reserve of pheromones to grow stronger as I held them separate from the rest.
Discrete air vents were built into the ceiling and floor, and a scanning formula told me they were both connected to the main air circulation and reservoirs of something that blared alarm in the Force—likely gas of some kind. Unfortunately for them, the same system that circulated the air inside the false temple and which would also spread deadly gas was just as good at sucking in and spreading my pheromones.
Carefully, I lowered my mental shields—not entirely, but enough to more clearly sense everyone around me without being overwhelmed by the planet. The inside of the fortress was filled with a miasma of emotional residue that felt like it was soaked into the walls, and I hid a wince at what I felt.
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The nearest guards radiated a feeling of… predatory anticipation. They knew they couldn’t touch us yet, but it was clear that they felt that they would get what they felt what was theirs eventually. They were horny mutts waiting for table scraps.
The slaves were a mixture of scared and resigned, with a few just being completely numb to it. Entirely desensitized. As though they had been through this before. I had a feeling that if I caught their eyes, their expressions would be quite dead inside.
Further into the building, I felt more of the same—much more, and other things. Sadism and pleasure, taken from people feeling pain and humiliation. Malicious joy. Despair. The feeling of those who had given themselves over to drugs.
Two sets of feelings stood out in particular, apart from the rest. One was a massive, disgusting pit of depravity that I had only felt once before—from another hutt on this very moon. It was the same sort of feeling that had driven me to do whatever it took to remove it from the universe the first time, and already I could feel the disgust pooling inside me—I wouldn’t be leaving here without killing the worm.
The other that stood out was full of righteous anger and passion, burning hot and bright. The Force trembled around her, in time with her emotions. It was not at all what a Jedi should feel and . It felt much better than when she suppressed much of her emotions. More natural.
Finally, we stepped onto a square platform at the far corner of the room and were lowered down on what turned out to be a hovering elevator. We passed through the floor into a room lit from the ceiling, the glare casting the edges of the room in shadow and making everything in the beam of light stand out that much more as my eyes quickly adjusted while we descended, until the elevator settled with a thump I felt through the soles of my sandals. The chamber we had been lowered into was massive—three levels tall and taking up seventy-five percent of the interior space of the building for those levels.
Above us, there were open sections of the upper floors so that those above could look down on what was going on. Pillars in the floor supported transparisteel platforms that made up little islands in the middle of the upper levels. Each of those islands was bathed in neon light from above and below that put what was going on there in sharp relief—be that people lounging, dancing to the bassy beat that rumbled and bounced off the walls, or just fornication. Color holograms filled the air from floor to ceiling between the pillars, rotating through views of the different upper islands. The exterior walls were all transparisteel, allowing us to see out into Nar Shaddaa, though I could see the armored shutters at the top of the windows, ready to drop down.
The center of the lowest floor was dominated by what looked to be a artificial oasis—complete with water, smooth boulders or rocky surfaces jutting up from the water, palm-like trees, and paths which led to an island in the center. Just as it was above, people were scattered over practically every surface—eating, drinking, lounging, sleeping, fornicating, or partaking in alcohol and/or drugs.
On that central island was something that resembled a beach shack, where several people stood behind a bar cooking food and mixing drinks, while the scantily clad servants moved back and forth between them and those in the center to bring a constant stream of food and drink in. Additionally, there were several free floating vertical metal poles, their surfaces covered in lights that lit up as dancers moved upon them, floating in a field of anti-gravity—discarding clothes and moving their bodies in enticing ways that would have put professional exotic dancers on my first world to shame… although, I could legitimately say I had seen better performances just walking down the street on Zeltros.
That island in the center of the oasis was where the hutt and its retinue lounged. It was also, judging by the direction the feelings were coming from, where Obi-Wan was.
The air was thick with the smoke of several different varieties of inhalants, cooking food, and the stink of stale sweat and sex from a dozen or more species. I used a subtle application of the Force to keep my improved olfactory sense from being overwhelmed as we were led down a rock path across the water, to the island with the hutt.
Tol’la Besadii Taba the Hutt was fat, even by hutt standards. He was a light brown and yellow blob of fat rolls and filth, stretched out across a hover bed, gorging himself on food and drink so fast that a third of it didn’t even make it into his gullet and rolled off of his chin to splatter onto the bed, where it had piled high enough against his body to start falling to the floor in a half chewed mess of drool and wasted food. He looked like a giant, greasy pile of shit being polished by half a dozen young men and women rubbing oil onto his body, or fanning him by hand with large fans.
I jerked my eyes away from the hutt. Beside his floating bed, chained to the floor, a group of women lounged much as the others did. Four of them shared something that resembled a hookah. Others laid out on cushions, either napping or watching everything else going on with something between vacant looks and boredom.
Finally, I spotted a woman with sandy blonde, almost brunette hair laying on her side. Her body was lean and toned, athletic without sacrificing . The outfit that still felt ridiculous wearing showed off and emphasized while managing not to actually everything, drawing my eyes to the play of muscles, the swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips, stomach, thighs, bare armpits, feet, the way the flesh of her pelvis and thigh came together and as the infuriating strip of silk hid what was below it in this light. A cute face that her bored look just somehow made even more attractive.
[Note: Image link not allowed by RR ToS.]
My hearts skipped a beat as my mouth went dry. I felt myself growing warmer—no, suddenly . Muscles involuntarily clenched and I clamped down on an embarrassing sound before it escaped, trying to force myself to breathe and relax and failing entirely as my body grew more sensitive, more aroused with every passing second.
It felt like something in my mind, and everything that hadn’t made sense about Zeltrons before… did.
It was like the world came into sudden, sharp focus. Arousal hit what I had thought was the peak when I had first entered sexual maturity as a Zeltron, then just , building fast and quickly escaping my ability to contain—stronger than anything I had ever felt before, in any of my lives.
For a moment, it made it hard to think about anything other than to satisfy the feeling, but years of fighting while under the effects of turned out to be a boon in this case as I was able to at least focus on the present and leash the beast that was my suddenlylibido to the task at hand.
this
Obi looked disinterested, but I could feel her attention on our group as she occasionally glanced up and looked at faces. That is, until the guards had us spread out so the hutt could see us all. She felt my attention on her and her eyes instantly snapped to mine.
A pink tongue darted out to lick her lips—as she took me in. Incredulity was first. Then doubt. I raised an eyebrow and she practically mentally bowled me over with a combination of happy emotions, excitement, and a few other things I couldn’t put a name to but felt good. And then what I was wearing apparently penetrated, as her eyes swept down and I saw her take a breath as arousal and lust flooded her—for just a moment, before she forced herself to clamp down on it and glared at me as though it were somehow my fault.
Forcing myself to focus on the mission, I minutely jerked my head at the hutt and rolled my eyes towards him, before coming back to her, then down to the chain holding her in place and back. Obi rolled her eyes, then slowly took up the slack in the chain until it went tight against the loop holding it to the floor. Then, she flexed, her muscles tightening just a bit, before letting it go. The implication was obvious—if she wanted out, she’d be out.
I slowly looked towards the ‘windows’ outside then back, before nodding that direction. She shook her head and turned slightly, to make it obvious she was looking at the others in the line with me. Blinking, I carefully kept my face blank as what she was saying sank in.
I wanted to argue that there was no point.
What were we going to do, free every slave on Nar Shaddaa? That would be a lifetime of work and we’d be fighting against the hutts and all of their resources every step of the way.
Just free the ones we could, right here in front of us? If we let them go, someone else on this shithole of a planet would just capture them within the day. Transport them to a planet where they likely had no identity, couldn’t get work, and would most likely end up being exploited anyway? Take personal responsibility for each and every one of them to make sure that didn’t happen?
Sure, I was the Mandalore and yes, I had the authority within the space I was responsible for and even within the Confederacy to accept refugees and then that is, delegate. But then what? Throw the gates open to every runaway slave and refugee from war-torn lands—?
Where would it stop? it even stop?
No. Eventually, some bleeding heart—most likely one of Satine’s party—with more empathy than sense would argue that if we were willing to take in a hundred today, why not a thousand tomorrow, a million by next year, and then eventually because flooding Mandalorian space with cheap labor was ! It would be good for the birth rates, really!
I didn’t even need to look at Earth for my example as to how that would go. Many planets across the galaxy had done it at one time or another, and it all ended one of two ways.
The first? We’d drown under the flood and our social welfare systems in place weren’t equipped to handle that many people. The amount dedicated to that was specifically calculated for our population, plus growth, and a surplus set aside for emergencies. In order to keep from breaking the bank, we’d have to increase taxes for even a short term use of the system, which would then raise prices on everything else and lower wages as the private sector adjusted to keep their profit margins the same. Combine that with a flood of desperate, most likely unskilled or low-skilled people willing to take any job at prices our own people weren’t willing to accept and which you could only beat in terms of price with droid labor… Instant inflation and devaluation of our currency, and thus the currency of the entire CIS as we became a welfare black hole. Without becoming much stricter in the way we managed our government and resources, things would quickly collapse and we’d be left in a worse position than before we started.
The second? the Core set things up the way they did post-Reformation—some of which actually had very little to do with greed or corruption. Mostly just too much and enough government mismanagement that taking that many people in, feeding that many mouths, then allowing them to breed under conditions where they were consistently provided all the resources they needed to reproduce at the expense of had led to population explosion, followed by overpopulation and a whole host of other problems directly and indirectly tied to it. Just look at Coruscant. It was the perfect example of the experiment, played out in real life, with real people.
It took multiple entire planets worth of food and resource production to sustain that state of affairs. Resources which were being cut off, either by Trade Federation blockades, increased shipping costs because of the TradeFed, or because the Confederacy had cut off supply and begun demanding fair wages for our goods.
And that wasn’t even taking the social side of things into account! Bringing in too many people of differing cultures, beliefs, and so on over too short a period of time would eventually destroy your current culture and society if you weren’t careful.
The simplest analogy was the cup of tea.
I enjoyed a good cup of expensive coffee flavored tea. Sometimes, I liked to add milk to my tea. A little milk was fine. Stir it in until tea and milk become indistinguishable from each other and you have good tea. But keep adding more and more milk and suddenly, you no longer have you have watery milk with a bit of tea mixed in.
I was too much of a pragmatist for that. I couldn’t allow my people to starve, because we tried to feed the galaxy and didn’t save enough for ourselves. Nor would I allow our current culture and society, still settling down after removing the Death Watch, to be washed away under a flood of non-Mandalorians—I wasn’t done fixing what we had at the moment!
It was certainly bad that these people here were either enslaved or being exploited somehow, but actually fixing the problem wasn’t as simple as killing the hutt and/or removing them from the environment—even if I planned to do one of those anyway. And that was the problem with most Jedi. They came in, ‘fixed’ the immediate problem, but didn’t consider second order effects—namely, what would happen once they left—nor did they tend to address the root cause of the initial problem. And if I wanted to fix the that was Nar Shaddaa…
Removing the hutts would be —
A voice pulled me from my thoughts—loud and deep, spewing noxious Huttese around the wet smacking and chewing of a mouthful of food. “Me yarga! Me chuga! Koose incha nei! Koose gocola!”
‘I mentally translated as I listened.
The worm turned to one of the guards, before gesturing at the line of us. “Ne ompee doe shag—”
‘
“—That one! Bring her to me! Make her dance first!” he demanded, pointing to the far end of the line of ten or so people.
As the blue near-human girl was directed towards one of the glowing, two story floating poles, I frowned. I’d located Obi-wan and the hutt worm. We had an exit available and a ride waiting. The prisoner most likely to have the answers we wanted was waiting back on the ship and if the hutt was a dead end, it wouldn’t take long to figure that out. The guards were a minor cause for concern, but… extending my senses, I could feel most of them on the floor below us, either sleeping or entertaining themselves as they waited to come on shift.
I glanced back at Obi and my body reminded me that I had that I needed to address before I became mentally compromised. More, because the entire time I had tried to distract myself, a quiet part of my brain had been cycling through the most lewd, thoughts I had ever experienced and it was taking all of my self control to not go over there and take advantage of the ease of access these skimpy outfits gave.
So, that left only the question of how I was going to go about it. If I just started killing guards, the room was going to panic. The hutt may get away. The slaves Obi wanted to save could be shot in the crossfire. I needed a distraction. Something to keep busy and focused on other things.
Luckily, I had already been working on one, and I could sense those in the large room and in the rest of the building starting to react, as my pheromones spread. I just needed to help it along. And for that…
I looked within myself, at the pheromones I had been with the Force, doing everything I could to enhance them and their effects. They felt or at least, good enough.
Now, I just had to decide how I was going to do it. I could keep doing as I had been, just releasing pheromones and using the Force to spread them away from my body. Or I could use optical camo and throw out an illusion to keep anyone from seeing I wasn’t standing obediently in line, then move around the room, spreading the effect.
“Enough! I’ve seen enough of this one! Bring me another!” the hutt roared.
The guards moved the blue girl away after a rather mediocre performance and called up the next one. Really, I had to wonder where they were getting these people. Half of them seemed to have been recruited off the street. What were they doing, going out and press-ganging pretty young women into skimpy clothes and making them dance for the entertainment of the hutts?
The thought slipped across my mind and I paused, my head tilting slightly to the side as I actually it. I do better myself. Between my flexibility, coordination, and athleticism emulating the sorts of things I’d seen on Zeltros would be child’s play. , back ‘home.’ There were I had left, after all.
Part of me really, didn’t want to do it. I disliked that sort of sexual attention except from a very short list of people. And I had already embarrassed myself enough, walking in here wearing what I was.
The logical part of my mind pointed out that it would be an effective distraction. I was attractive. I could use the Force to draw and hold attention, and my natural Zeltron gifts to leave them distracted, then strike when I was ready.
From somewhere in the back of my mind came another reason to do it, as I found my attention drawn to Obi. I didn’t want to put myself on display for a bunch of , but for one person in particular… Well. I kind of wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get out of her.