SWEET CHILD OF MINE
~
Prelude to Apothecary
It was a not too uncommon thing for a company with a million reasons to go flat broke –seeming, as a matter of course, to be a sudden thing among the stock market and financial journals, when any honest observer would have foreseen destruction in the rampant decay of a corporation. However this may be, that often enough the chief executive would find himself suddenly in the mood to retire (and that with a pension ten times the size of all his non-managerial employees combined), it was sometimes the case when, be it youth or vigor or pride or hubris, a CEO might often take the road less travelled among his peers: put the crown jewels of the company's capital on the market, only to have every one of their competitors bid on the thing –be it intellectual property, a vast skyscraper, or a contract for ten thousand artillery pieces, this sudden interest in what was really a failing company would explode the value of it, perhaps giving management time to "pack their bags" as it were. Or, far less often than any imperial god would allow, last chance to get their collective act together.
So it came to pass that a particular building –a once-elegant skyscraper of white marble and glass, proportionally ten times higher than wide with the profile of antiquity's finest obelisk, had suffered so many such sell-outs and buy-outs and takeovers and subsidies and half-hearted renovations that all that was left of the actual structure desparate of any and all "market rumours" or "financial reports" was in point of fact a phallic husk of stone and steel, a horribly decayed finger of accusation pointing interminably heavenward in allegation to any all-powerful divinity, or appeal to one. Murders were done in her basement corridors, and crime-lords watched the blood moon as they ascended through this tower, crawling from lower shadows to sodomize what remained of civilization.
But in the fullness of time something did, in fact, happen, by the goodness of men: some measure of dumb and even stupid willfullness was for once a boon to the crumbling shame. The dice had been rolled far too often in a straight succession of snake's eyes for our tower: and it was an ancient and holy calling that entered, stage right, to shake the plot (and tower) of villains to the point where transformation was palpable as the dawn, sublime like an hero's love for his princess, but just as temporal as the lives of men.
By and by any race would build ways of counting, or measuring, or worshipping the night sky and its diamond-flow signature, the Great Sky River. It would be then only natural that any government, comprised of even a single race, would of necessity –even were it the most base of any psychologies—claim some knowledge of what stars and planets they dreamed of all the days of their lives. That the more maniacally astrological would demand an organization of sorts designed singly toward this ubiquitous calling destined such an Order be established in what was then an infant Republic. Immortality being nothing less than ubiquity in time, though a bit skewed through the years the Order so long established (fundamentally unquenchable, really) yet endured.
So it was that the tower was surveyed by a Father Avrael; a synod of the more astute among them was put to the task of aquiring the place as an observatory; a tribunal interviewed those qualified for the position of abbot; and, entirely against his rather frustrated and conflicting designs, Father Imrael was instructed that he and he alone held the responsibility of establishing what was currently nothing more than a vast crack-house into a new observatory fit for the re-cataloguing of every single star in the night sky from the relative position of Coruscant.
However, upon pointing out the vastness of this undertaking, and the question of safety which the structure held for any single, invading monk, the synod met again, proposing –as, what with proper timing and patience, bankruptcy claims had made the purchase of the tower all but scott-free—that they would fill their stoic coffers with a little bit of capital by allowing a particularly infamous, particularly retired and since particularly entrepreneuring former-member to purchase this very (his own!) building on the cheap, with the understanding that he mind his ancient and sacred calling enough that his retirement not be utterly useless and without benefit to the Galaxy if he would but renovate his purchase and log some time into a project that would surely take collectively several human lifetimes to entirely complete.
He obliged, and was on the next transport to sector 0, 0, 0 before sunrise.