World Tree MUSH

    Mos Eisley hadn't really changed much over the centuries, it seemed. Talia was lying low over the past few days since she met Juno, and got her mission. Since then, she did reconnaissance. Two weeks of doing odd jobs from Mos Eisley to Pelgo, delivering goods under an alias as courier and spacer Amilla Ios, an alias she had used before. Birth records weren't a thing they checked much in the Outer Rim, especially on this podunk sandbox of a planet.

    Using the coordinates Juno had given her, Talia parked a speeder bike not far from the warehouse, to estimate enemy strength. Enemy being a somewhat broad term, Tatooine was a place criminals flocked to for work or simply to avoid the authorities. Nobody but bounty hunters came out here looking for someone, from bail jumpers to murderers.

    Then there were the bloody soldiers in white. White was a terrible camouflage out here, but the Stormtroopers of the First Order made an impression wherever they went. They were like bleached skeletons with blasters, a faceless authority that shot first and asked questions in between sessions of brutal beatings. It hurt Talia deep down to see the good people caught between either an uncaring law or brutal outlaws.

    Unfortunately the direct approach would be suicide. So, she waited, studied. Chewing on some dried jerky, she observed the patrols outside the warehouse, tracing their paths. She wasn't a slicer, so listening in on their comms would've required she 'borrow' a commlink from one of these goons.

  Putting aside the temporal and historical difference between the two subsets of worlds, Mos Eisley doesn't really have a reason to change. Most of the city if not the planet is heavily involved with the Hutt Cartel. In the interest of keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes, the Hutt Cartel doesn't like changes. Especially when those changes interfere with Cartel business interests. Even the vaunted Galactic Empire never got much of a foothold in this place, although there was never much worth having, here.

  What it does have is a whole lot of commercial space. Markets sprawl across Mos Eisley's flats. A lot of them are legal. Just as many of them aren't. Anything can be found here... for a price.

  There are a few First Order Imperials wandering around here in uniform, but not enough to make things problematic; just enough to remind people that while the First Order ostensibly holds sway here, nobody believes it, and everyone seems to be just fine with that status quo.

  <<If you really want to start something, you could just waltz into the First Order depot six blocks away.>> The clipped inflections of an Imperial accent crackle to life over the comms. Fortunately, it isn't one of the actual imperials, but the voice of Juno Eclipse. It sounds grainy but intelligible. <<Or we could get a drink and keep an eye on these bastards.>>

  Footsteps nearby suggest that Juno isn't as far away as her comm gear may suggest, but then again, the Rebel general is a slicer. A damned good one, to go by Rebel word of mouth. Slicing into security cameras is one of her favourite tricks. She's probably been watching Talia and the area for the better part of an hour.

  "You really ought to get that droid of yours to earn its keep and do some slicing. The security out here is thin, even by sloppy Imperial standards. A child could slice in." Approaching around the corner, Juno looks dusty, disheveled, and absolutely beyond threshold for dealing with Tattooine. It's too hot. There's sand in her everything. "I, however, plan on spending the next few hours in the cantina. Take a break," she murmurs, purposefully pitching her voice low. It wouldn't do to alert the First Order rank-and-file. "I've already got Rebel eyes on the area."

  <<Nitram, give me a sitrep.>>

  The Bothan responds immediately in a cheerful yap. <<All quiet out here, General. For now.>>

  <<Notify me if anything changes. Keep the comms clean.>>

  <<Aye-aye, sir.>>

  Juno glances at Talia with a 'see-what-I-mean' look, gesturing for her to follow.

    Talia's jaw tightened a little before she lowered her binoculars and eyed Juno. She shrugged a shoulder. "En-Dee isn't the most subtle of slicer." She said softly. The Jedi began to stow her gear and she considered Juno's words. It had been some time since she had a chance to really relax, and...well, something about Juno intrigued Talia. Something about grizzled military professionals just intrigued her, between Thane and Juno.

    Sigh. "Alright, let's go. For the record, I wasn't planning on breaking into the roof at night and infiltrating covertly while En-Dee sliced her way through the security system to buy me time as I sifted through their storage." She grinned crookedly, keeping her voice very low as she followed the general.

    "Not much else to do around here other than drink, other than pick fights with drunks...and I don't feel like taking arms off right now." Talia said. She switched out her tunic and leggings for a rugged tan jumpsuit and a brown toolbelt, tones that just blended into the sandy surroundings. The nearby cantina was fairly welcoming enough for a couple of spacers. The holos on-screen projected footage of podraces, a Huttball game, Nar Shaddaa's gambling scene, the kind of thing one expected from spacers.

    "Do you have any interest in racing, by chance?" asked Talia, ordering up some spotchka.

  "For the record, I don't have any way to know that, and as long as you're in my galaxy, I'm going to call the shots." Juno's response is dry. "They're not worth picking a fight with, anyway. None of this is real power. This is where Imperial careers go to die. It's probably where a lot of smugglers go to die, too, although most of them don't know it yet."

  Sand sifts underfoot as Juno starts forward. "That's fine, though. You want to act independently, you can act independently." Blue eyes turn sideways to regard Talia from the corner of her gaze. "Just don't expect a bail-out when you bite off more than you can chew. Our resources are stretched too thin as it is."

  The pilot squints. "Picking fights with drunks and ripping off arms don't strike me as particularly Jedi-like outlooks." Still, she seems disinclined to dig into it too deeply. It isn't like she was ever a Jedi, or understood them particularly well.

  Her order is simpler; Corellian whisky, and something savoury to crunch on. She steers toward a table out of the way, but with a vantage that overlooks the cantina floor. While Juno doesn't quite throw herself into her chair, she does slump into it in a way that suggests exhaustion more than the physical.

  "I don't race, of course. Nobody human does. We just don't have the reflexes. I bet, though, and I used to be a fair hand at the wagers." A hand flicks dismissively towards the banks of screens. "It's anybody's game, these days. All the names I used to know are dead. Even the best racers never run for very long." She takes a careless swig. "I stopped recognising the up-and-comers' names decades ago."

    "Even out here there's a bottom to the barrel." Talia mused dryly. Tucking hand a hand in her pocket, hovering over the hilt that wasn't stuck there just as a particularly unsavory looking klatoonian sized the ladies up. A stern look from Talia was enough to tell him they weren't easy marks to muscle on.

    She took a sip of spotchka and shrugged a shoulder. "I try not to avoid it when I can afford to. A stern look, or just a simple apology can assuage most but sometimes it can't be helped." The Jedi took another sip, and she watched the screens and nodded.

    "It's not really a thing you do for long. Either you make it big and cash out, or you die messily and everyone laughs." She said, wincing as a racer onscreen avoided a particularly treacherous stretch of course, narrowly saving his ride from going over the edge. "Some might call the good ones lucky...I think they're just chasing a high. Either a deathwish, or just the rush from speed in of itself." Sip. "Or just pure stupidity and greed. I'm not a mind reader."

  "There's always a bottom to the barrel, Kyras," Juno mutters, eyes hooding as she regards her shot glass. "Anyone who thinks there isn't is a fool." Juno delivers the line without emotion and without inflection. For her part, she's wearing two blasters, and somehow she's managing to watch everyone in the room at once. Her hand strays for one of them at even the slightest hint of a hard look. Between the blasters and the lightsaber, nobody seems intent on bothering the table too much.

  Juno casts a long, measured look at the Jedi. She gives a slight shake of her head, but she doesn't comment. 

  She quirks a brow as the podracer on screen threads the needle, but she doesn't comment, taking a drink instead. Impressive, but most of the alien races piloting have reflexes or mental processing power orders of magnitude better than human physiology. "Or the purses. Podracing can be lucrative for the ones who learn how to do it without dying." Juno swills her glass, eyeing the other woman. Talia doesn't read minds? "No? Isn't that what Jedi do?"

    "That's not h-" Talia sighed, feeling her emotions rush in irritation. She had to stop herself from snapping. A deep breath later, and she regained composure. Juno shouldn't be able to know the intricacies of the Force, it's understandable. Talia knew this, but the typical 'why can't you read minds' or 'cast a spell to make the wall go away' always drove her up a wall. There were some things about the Force that people would never be able to understand without experiencing it first.

    "We don't do that, we sense emotions and feelings...but I guess it's really just semantics. Sounds a lot like mind reading no matter what." Sip. "We're less wizards and witches and more seers, I guess."

  Any chance the old general may have had to experience the Force died decades ago at the hands of the burgeoning Galactic Empire. With him died all of Juno Eclipse's mercy and warmth. There is a hard edge to this woman's emotions that describes a bottomless well of roiling grief and simmering anger that hasn't faded over time so much as been reinforced; calcified into something even more dug-in.

  Hm. She's known Force-users, but... nobody would have ever mistaken General Rahm Kota as having been particularly eloquent. Nor Galen.

  There is a twinge of brief, savagely-stifled pain so great in its intensity that it almost seems incongruous against the stillness of her expression.

  Juno throws the shot back and sets the glass down with a sharp bang of glass against scarred wood.

  "So I'm to understand from Miss Kamoya. She goes so far as to call herself a seer. I've known Force-users in my time, but either I didn't know them well, or they were never able to explain it sufficiently to me."

  "Or they just weren't particularly good with words in the first place." Nobody would have ever mistaken Kota for a poet.

    Talia shrugs a shoulder. "It's probably the best way for us to describe it to people not in the know, or at least the shortest." She concedes.

    Talia eyes Juno briefly, looking her up and down. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? You're from Corulag, aren't you? Your accent is familiar. I...I knew someone from there. A long time ago." The Jedi says, trying to nudge Juno away from a dark place.

    Unfortunately, it's leading right into Talia's own painful past.

  Reaching forward, Juno pours another measure into the shotglass, setting the bottle down with another vitreous bang on battered timbers. She cocks a bleary eye towards Talia and seems to take the Jedi's measure for a long moment, slowly raising a brow.

  "Congratulations. Either you've studied the local systems here, or your galaxy isn't so different from my galaxy. Yes, I was originally from Corulag." The old general knocks back the shot and sets the glass down decisively. "What about it?" If she's defensive about it, she's very good at hiding the edge of her bladed suspicion.

    Talia pours herself another drink, this time some Corellian brandy. Taking a breath, she begins. "One of my fellow padawans growing up was from there. Serissa Moran is her name. She...she was my friend. My master taught us, and others, we were like his children, and by extension brothers and sisters. Serissa was the most brilliant of us, she loved exploring and history. Maybe a little too much. At some point our master tried to curb her ambitions when it came to relics, something were best left hidden. Serissa didn't care, and it caused a rift between us. She felt Master Gareth snubbed her and favored me, and jealous led her down a dark path."

    Talia chugs her brandy in a few gulps, the bartender staring at her from the corner of her eye as the Jedi slams her glass onto the counter. "Serissa betrayed us. Led us into a trap where everyone but me died. I barely escaped with my life, and now she and her new master have been hunting after me. I have something they want, something vital. Something dangerous."

  The slight twitch of a shoulder and shake of her head at twitches at the mention of the name, as though to say, Serissa who? Juno lets Talia finish, though, tilting her head the other way and resting her jaw against her hand. Those hooded eyes watch the Jedi Knight in what is either drunken disinterest or a sharper focus than she lets on. It's hard to say which without tapping into the Force.

  She shrugs again at the explanation, and doesn't so much as flinch when Talia slams her glass down.

  "Sounds like there isn't much to be redeemed, is there?" Kind of an unpopular stance for a Rebel General to have, isn't it? "Unfortunate. If you need any help..." Juno grins, although it's more a baring of her teeth. "I can always pitch in, for the right number of credits." The Rogue Shadow is a stately old lady, but she's also an enormously expensive date.

    "I'm not so sure myself." Talia murmurs. Her eyes are heavy with sadness, and the brandy might be lowering her inhibitions a bit, as she slumps forward.

    "I appreciate the offer. I'm not rich, but I do know a few ways to get credits and fuel. I've got a mission in mind you might be good at. Two, actually." The Jedi smiles crookedly, though it doesn't reach her eyes.

  "I'll take them." Juno waves a hand dismissively before Talia can even finish the offer. "I need to overhaul the sublight drives again before anything important burns itself out. If that happens, I'm laid up in whatever spaceport I can hole up in where the First Order isn't sniffing around." The old general straightens, marginally. There's a tight-coiled anger beneath the surface when she speaks of the Galactic Empire's successor. "I always have repairs, so I can always use the credits. You can count PROXY and I in." Juno tilts her shotglass this way and that, idly. "Details, Kyras?"

    "There's a hovertrain route across Balmorra, running cargo to strategic sites. Work camps, factories, bases, weapons testing facilities." Talia begins to explain. "I want to throw a hydrospanner in that route, gum their works up. Garo's regime needs to be taken out from the inside. I want to make his life as miserable as he's made life for his people. The other...well, it's a vineyard."

  The old general folds her arms, leaning back in her chair. She's more alert than she lets on, interested in spite of her sleepy-eyed regard, and the tactician in her is doubtless already figuring out how to go about things. "Done," she responds, turning her head slightly to regard Talia from a glittering eye shadowed by loose, silvered blonde hair. "The Rogue Shadow and its crew are yours."

  "Rebel support might be a possibility, depending on the situation, but I wouldn't count on it." She pours another measure into her shotglass, swilling it around vigourously. Corellian whisky, it smells like. The cheap stuff. "Anyway, PROXY and I may be able to help you out, for the credits. Just keep in mind this ship is built to run and hide; not to go toe to toe with anything nasty." Juno's grin is cold. "Might have been a starfighter ace once upon a time, but those days are behind me. I don't have those kinds of reflexes any more."

  ...Probably she does, but it would cost her, and turn out to be something of a Pyrrhic victory endangering her flagging health. "Damn, but I miss flying like that, sometimes." A wistful aside, before she cocks her head. "A vineyard. What's the story on the vineyard?"

    "You must've been good at it, if you lasted this long." Talia says. She wouldn't accept 'luck' as an explanation. There is no such thing. Either you make it, or you don't. There's no in-between. "In any case, I wouldn't expect you to handle anything you can't do. You've done perfectly well as a tactical asset as is."

    Sipping her brandy, Talia then pours herself another glass's worth. "THe vineyard is the fun part." Talia says, with a little mischief on her darkened cheeks. "Garo fancies himself something of a wine connoisseur, instead of ordering it off-planet, he went to extreme levels taking farmlands and converting them to a personal vineyard. He's got people by the hundreds working there, and the conditions aren't exactly comfortable or well paying. So...I figured we'd kill Garo's morale, rob him of the thing he uses for comfort."

  "You live or you die, when it comes to starfighters." Juno's shrug is fatalistic to the core. "There really isn't very much middle ground, you know? There simply isn't room for any middle ground. Much like podracing, the vocation is inherently lethal."

  She tilts her head, side-eyeing Talia a bit. "Well, I should hope so. You're paying for my services." She snorts, softly. "I'm a professional." Just ask Mando.

  To the matter of the vineyard, she thins her lips, and the distraction in those faded blue eyes is fleeting. Her mind is whirling through the many problems already.

  "I'll see if I can secure Rebel support. I may be able to twist the arms of a few captains who owe me a few reluctant favours." Juno frowns. "I may also be able to convince Admiral Viedas to lend me the support." Her mouth tightens into a sour little smile. "I'm afraid I'm not well liked around Rebel High Command right now."

    "Do or don't. It's a common phrase in Jedi training." Talia nods in agreement. "Indeed."

    She does smirk a little, "Oh, have a bad reputation do you?" She says with a chuckle. "I'll take any aid you can give us. I know Thane will be very happy to have some ships to command beyond a shuttle or two, or my own personal vessel."

  "I don't have the patience to waste time and play High Command's political games." Juno snorts, irritably. "General Rahm Kota, may the drunken old sot find peace in the Force, didn't have the patience either. Once upon a time I used to spend my days cleaning up his messes and smoothing ruffled feathers in High Command." Her mouth twists in a mirthless smile. "Heh. Now I'm the one charging around like a rancor."

  She gestures dismissively with a hand. "If I can get away with it, I'll try to request support from the Salvation. I used to captain her, and I handed her to her current captain: Nitram, a Bothan. He'll support me if I ask. I'm the reason he has that command at all." That, and he's too much of a pushover to say no, but she doesn't voice that part. "Beyond that, I make no guarantees."

    Talia bristles softly at the sudden burst of irritation from Juno. The General was certainly anything but gentle about her feelings. "You sound just like my master. So did this General Kota. No time for being given the runaround when matters were at stake." She muses with a chuckle.

    "Every bit helps, Juno. For what it's worth, I'm glad we met. You've been a good ally. Thane's pretty sure he's found a common soul with you, too. You should come visit sometime, swap stories." Talia offers. "You old war horses are birds of a feather, I suppose."

  "The Empire took everything I've ever loved from me." That tight-coiled anger slithers in on itself like a dragon stirring from its sleep. "I'll spend the rest of my life destroying them or die trying. We don't have time for High Command to squabble amongst themselves about the best hypothetical course of action. Since you can't bloody well please everyone, I already know waiting for them is pointless, so somebody around here may as well get something done."

  She rattles all of this off relatively calmly, tilting her head sideways and regarding Talia blandly, hood-eyed. "Hunh." This, to all Talia's commentary on being glad she'd met Juno. Her gaze slides aside from the Jedi Knight. "I lead a busy life, but I can certainly make time, some time. All the better if he likes cheap Corellian whisky, and has a few engineering bits and bobs to sell me."

  Juno pushes herself up from the table, looking a bit bleary, weaving unsteadily and bracing her hands on the table's edge. A few blinks and she manages to steady herself, but she's not nearly as inebriated as she lets on. Her head tilts swiftly from one side to the other -- crack, crack -- before she tosses a few credits onto the table. "I should be going. I've spent too long here already."

    Talia nods. "An unfortunate thing. I remember my diplomatic training being a lot of trying to appease people, trying to reach compromise. They don't really train you for what to do when the other party has no interest in compromise." She muses tiredly. It feels so long ago, and even then, those lessons became less and less vital as wars broke out. "I wish it was the most of my worries."

    She does smile. "I'll make sure you're given a welcome from the resistance. You'll be treated as practically one of us." She says, before patting Juno's shoulder. "I should probably turn in too. May the Force be with you, Juno." She says with warmth, before she pays for her own drinks.