I and Jabba have been friends for a long time. As far back as I can remember, our friendship has been a symbiotic one.
I remember a time when Jabba was actually small.
He wasn't always the immense cruel monster of rebel legends. He actually had heart, and, dare I say it, tenderness.
My earliest memory is of the avian visages of my parents peering at me through the first crack in the egg I'd been born from.
My mother and father were beautiful Kowakians, their beaks a wonderful charcoal black, bent in that noble expression of sourness so highly sought in any male or female of our species. Their necks were long and slender, like mine, their plumage the rich dusty tan-brown of the Hiskuvu plain at noon, during a dust storm, their skin a lovely olive green.
The first word I heard father say to me was "Salacious." It was also the last word he ever said. I'm still not sure what it meant. Perhaps he was making a comment about my mother's sexual behavior. At the time, however, I thought he was naming me.
My family's nest lay in a rock outcrop in the dusty rocky wasteland of Mos Eisley. It was quiet out where I was, a desolate little mound of rocks where Kowakians could breed and lay their eggs and pick at sand trout.
There were other infants with me. While father spoke, I could see her regurgitating food into their mouths.
During the late hours of night, a pair of figures in dirty brown outfits and scary horned masks sneaked up to our little home, armed with plasma rifles.
A second after my parents were introduced to me, these foul creatures took them away with a few cruel pulls of a trigger.
My entire family. Gone. Just like that. Mother and father, brothers, sisters, reduced to a pile of smoldering meat for the desert scum to whore out to the market.
The metal goggles of that wretched face turned my way, and I thought I was done for. Roasted in the shell, hard boiled, whatever you may call it.
I burrowed deep inside my egg, not knowing what else to do.
I heard a gurgling screech, then silence.
Curious, but afraid, I peered through the crack in my shell, and was startled to see a green face peering back at me.
His name was Jabba.
"The Tusken Raiders are gone," he said in his strange language. "You can come out now."
I looked around and saw this was true. The figures in brown lay around my family's nest, unconscious.
Still, I didn't trust the stranger.
He was about the size of a human boy, but had no legs, only a long snake-like lower body. His head was big and thick, merging with his neck, his arms wide and strong looking for a boy...ish...thing.
"I will not harm you," he said, but I confess I knew very little of any language, having just been born.
"What is your name?" he said. "Do you have one?"
"Salacious," I squawked.
He pointed to the rocks around us. "Safe."
Although he meant well, he should not have helped me out of my egg. The exercise would have made me less weak and sickly.
When I at last lay in the cold air, I was hungry, tired and shivering. I couldn't even stand.
Jabba responded by doing something else well meaning but ill advised: Picking me up.
As he carried me away from there, I could feel my life fading away from me, my consciousness slipping into the dark.