Vulpter

It began on Vulpter.

Vulpter lies in the Deep Core, and at the time it was already a planet polluted beyond salvation. Heavy industrialisation had transformed the surface of the formerly lush world into a sprawling mess of factories and junkyards, and had long since rendered the planet largely incapable of sustaining plant life. The Vulptereens had gradually been forced into a position of near-total reliance on foreign imports for food. A long history of industrial waste being shot into orbit created the features that no visitor to Vulpter will ever forget, and it was this feature, the massive, dark rings of waste orbiting the planet which greeted the two Jedi as their ship left hyperspace.

In the small courier ship were Master Xin Zovo and Jedi Knight Kasra Zhan. The purpose of their visit was the investigation of a disappearance on Vulpter. A young Jedi by the name of Amila, a Togruta who had only recently been made a Jedi Knight, had disappeared without a trace not quite a standard month ago. She was last recorded on Vulpter, but all attempts to regain contact with her had failed, and the reason for her presence on Vulpter was unclear.

The courier passed by a giant advertising board placed on Vulpter's rings of junk, and began its descent down to the city of Hpaq.

"Look at it - the planet is a wasteland," said Xin as the courier came in to land.

"The huge belts of junk orbiting it didn't give that away?" quipped Kasra.

Wasteland was putting it mildly. It was a miracle that Vulpter could support any life at all. Kasra had to agree, its atmosphere looked absolutely toxic. The sky was completely covered with impenetrably thick purple clouds. The air was so horribly spoiled that the taint of pollution was visible floating around you with your own naked eye.

The courier ship landed in a hangar, which thankfully minimised the amount of the filthy air the Jedi had to breathe. They were guided to their lodgings by two Vulptereens who spoke only a minimal amount to them, and then left them to their own devices.

The place they were given to stay was a small apartment which had a view of Hpaq that, if it were another city, might have been nice. Hpaq was one of those cities which, by and large, looked the same no matter where you were. No matter how high above the ground your apartment was, uncountably many more skyscrapers towered above you; no matter how low your apartment was, it always seemed that there was always an impossibly long stretch down to the ground. Kasra stood at the window looking out upon the city. It was late at night in Hpaq upon their arrival. All the lights in the city took on a ghostly glow as they shone through the haze in the air, which made all the lights look just a little more distant, and just a little bit more faded.

Behind him, Master Zovo sat meditating on the floor. Kasra glanced his way. He had all the look of a sage. His eyes were closed. His breathing was deep and slow. One might be forgiven for thinking he was a statue.

The disappearance of Amila was a problem with no hints as to its solution. She was on Vulpter. Beyond that, they knew nothing. Her purpose on the planet was unknown. It came as a total surprise that she was determined to have been on the planet at all. So the task of the two Jedi was to investigate a mystery which was shrouded in complete darkness.

It was in times like these that the Force would be their most faithful guide. And at the end of Master Zovo's long, silent meditation the Force guided them to a great underground marketplace. The marketplace was expansive. It was so large that the full extent of the place was impossible to see from any one vantage point, and travelling through the bustle of the lookers and the buyers at the busy street vendors took them on long and winding paths which closed up behind them and vanished into the crowd as they went. The Knight and Master wore nondescript clothing and eased themselves through the throng, hands gently guiding themselves inoffensively past the tightly packed people, Xin looking perfectly genial, Kasra a little more alert, having the feeling in him of being in wait for an impending arrival and remaining on the lookout for it, though what he was waiting for he had no idea. To their left their was a Rodian, selling something which the dense cluster of potential customers around him hid from their sight; just over from the Rodian was a Twi'lek selling all sorts of food with delicious scents which unfailingly pulled over hungry customers within its radius; over from the Twi'lek was a Dug, and from what Kasra could see there was no way the weapons the Dug had on sale could all be legal.

Kasra's head was torn away from the Dug's dodgy dealings as a sudden jolt stopped him in his tracks. He looked down in front of him to see a small Amaran boy, who apologised profusely for smacking into him.

"Oh, no harm done," said Xin with a warm voice and a smile, and he carried on strolling through the market with the smile still on his face.

The boy went to go on his way, but was stopped by the hand of Kasra on his shoulder pulling him back to face an outstretched palm. The boy looked up at Kasra with a pitiable look on his face.

The Jedi rolled his eyes. "I'm not an idiot. I've done the same thing myself. Go on," he said.

The boy's face warped to take on a look of contempt. He slapped his stolen credits back into their owner's hand and walked away with a swagger. Kasra stood watching him leave. When he turned back around and carried on walking, he saw Master Zovo in the middle of a conversation with what looked like a new friend.

He was chatting with a Vulptereen who was also selling food, but was rather less successful than the Twi'lek girl not too far from him, with only a couple of other people eyeing up his food aside from the Jedi Master. Another Vulptereen managed the other customers, while the first was engaged in conversation with Xin.

"Ah!" exclaimed Xin as Kasra approached the two. "You've returned. Hard not to be drawn to the scent, isn't it?"

Kasra felt that there was a certain significance to his old Master's former choice of the word drawn. The Vulptereen made some comment about his tail-head competitor only getting more sales because of her - for politeness' sake, we'll pretend that he simply said 'her good looks.'

"I was just asking him about how long he's been a cook," said Xin. "He's had quite a misfortune."

Between the two of them, the frustrated Vulptereen's angered comments, and Xin's perpetual obliviousness to that anger and bitterness, they related to him the story he'd missed. The poor Vulptereen had not been a cook for very long at all. Not even a standard month. Despite Xin's enthusiasm for the food, whatever it was, that he'd bought and had started eating, it was fairly obvious on all fronts - the smell, the look, and the lack of buyer enthusiasm for it - that he wasn't very experienced. But these two had indirectly been the victims of an explosion. A place nearby had some bizarre accident, and what it was they still don't know, but all of a sudden, there was a great explosion, and their business had been so heavily damaged that returning to work was impossible, and in the meantime, the two of them had decided to do the only other thing they knew how to do in order to make money, which was try to cook and sell what they could make at the markets, though clearly it had bought them very little profit.

"Where was this explosion?" asked Kasra.

"It was a small building owned by the incompetent idiots over at New Sun," said the cook.

"New Sun?"

"New Sun Engineering," he said. "Mostly starship manufacturing."

Kasra glanced up to Xin, who looked back at him while licking his fingers.

The Vulptereen interrupted their silent communication. "Now are you going to buy anything else, or not?"

"New Sun? You can't have been on Vulpter too long if you haven't heard of New Sun."

"Starships, weapons, probably some droids, too. You name it, they probably make it, and by the way you're dressed, you certainly couldn't afford it."

"Yes, terrible explosion, wasn't it? I could hear it all the way from my place. One of their workshops, or something. Just exploded. Don't know what went wrong, though."

"Well, they were asking for it, as far as I'm concerned. Any engineer with a brain knows that New Sun will cut all the corners you can think of and a lot more you didn't as long as they make a quick profit off it. Work with the stuff they work with and you're lucky explosions aren't more frequent occurences."

"New Sun! Do yourselves a favour and don't even bother! Ha!"

"Oh, it's on its way to become one of the biggest engineering corporations in the galaxy. You should see the things we're doing there! The company's come out of nothing to start producing some of the finest ships in the galaxy, and at a much more affordable price than anyone else does."

After a succession of appraisals, dismissals, sneering criticisms and mindless rants, the two Jedi arrived at a youthful human man, whose eyes seemed to light up when they spoke the words 'New Sun.' But before the young man could continue his adulation, Master Zovo raised his hands slightly, and leaned in and asked him, "You work for this company?"

The man's smile only grew bigger. "Working on starships is something I've wanted to do since forever ago. So you'll have to forgive me for being quick to start singing their praises, 'cause this is a dream job for me. I only hope they don't catch on and move me from engineering to PR."

Both the Jedi laughed with the man. "Just fortunate you weren't involved in that explosion, then," said Kasra.

"Yeah," the man said with a heavier voice than before. "Unfortunate accident. Though I never worked around there, so fortunately I was safe a long way away."

"What happened, anyway? Did they tell you?"

"Well, not exactly, no. I don't know if anyone knows for sure, beyond a bit of talk around work. The actual investigation didn't turn up anything conclusive, as far as I know."

"Oh, what's the talk around work?" Xin asked.

The man's face twisted slightly in apprehension, but before he could say anything Kasra interrupted him with an eager smile and a pointed finger. "Oh, it's something exciting," he said, pointing at the young man's face. "See that? It's something good, he knows it."

The man couldn't help but laugh and look down with a sheepish smirk. "No, it's nothing like that - "

"No, no, no, don't give us that. Come on, I'm a Jedi, half the fun of being in the Order is getting the inside details on stuff like this."

The man's eyes widened. "You're a Jedi?" He looked between the two of them with the wild excitement of a child written all over his face.

"I was like you," Kasra said, like a mirror, his own face taking on the same childlike enthusiasm as the man in front of him. "I dreamed of becoming a Jedi Knight as a small child, and you can only imagine how exciting it was the day I found out destiny was on my side, and I was going to the Jedi Academy to learn all about the Force. Sometimes it still amazes me, to look back and see where life took me. It must be the same feeling you get when you see one of your completed starships. The feeling of having found the thing it is you were meant to do."

"Yeah," the man breathed, "I know what you mean." He couldn't help but dart his eyes down to Kasra's waist to look for a lightsaber. "Oh, anyway," he said, apparently returning from the excitement-induced trance he seemed to be in, "like I said, it's really just talk. A few of the other guys at New Sun have been wondering if it wasn't industrial espionage. Due to our rapid growth, we've had trouble with Corellian Engineering Corporation, which doesn't want to lose its spot at the top, you know? I don't know if there's anything to support it, but apparently there was some suspicions about that going on a while ago. I don't know. It's probably nothing, anyway."

"Why industrial espionage? I don't think I've heard of CEC having a reputation for that sort of thing."

"Well, you wouldn't, because they're at the top of this industry. Like I said, it's probably nothing, but it's not a completely wild theory. There was a guy, another engineer, who some of the other guys had thought was pretty strange for a while. He came back from a trip from - I don't know, somewhere else in the Deep Core, and then he was just downright weird, apparently. Don't ask me how, because I didn't really know the guy, but he became very secretive, so I heard. Would disappear, and wouldn't let anybody know where he went. Weird guy. I shouldn't tell you this - in fact, I shouldn't have told you any of this, so both of you keep all this to yourselves - but apparently one of the guys found out that on a personal datapad of his they got during the investigation after the accident, he'd been stalking this woman or something. Some Togruta woman. There were all these images of the same woman on there, always taken from afar. They never found out who she was. And as if that wasn't bad enough, there's some talk that some of his finances don't quite add up."

A Togruta woman. But wait - "What do you mean, they took his datapad during the investigation of the accident? I thought this was just talk."

"Well. The same day as the explosion, he went missing. They never found his body there."

Xin's initial silent disapproval of Kasra sharing their Jedi status with this man vanished. And it was replaced with his full interest in this man. With a touch of the Force behind his voice, he said to the engineer, "Why don't you take us somewhere we can find out more about this man?"

The headquarters of New Sun Engineering were a giant slab of architecture placed right in the centre of Hpaq. The height of the monument was enough that it cut an imposing figure, looming ahead of them for a long time before they finally drew close enough to make out the details of the building. Its width exceeded its height, and when the building finally ended there was yet more territory carved out of the city for it, and several New Sun starships could be seen lined up outside the building.

They were received by a short Neimoidian, who held a datapad in his hands, and would frequently return his eyes down to its screen. Master Zovo attempted to hold what he could of the Neimoidian's attention.

"We heard of a problem that your company might be having with a certain employee - or former employee, I take it - and, as it turns out, your problem may be closely related to one of our own. We thought that it might be more efficient if the two of us could work together for a resolution - I'm sorry," he said, leaning down and waving his hand slightly, "do we have your attention?"

The Neimoidian looked up briefly and then returned his gaze down to the datapad again. "Master Jedi, as I'm sure you've heard, and if you haven't, I hope it was implied by what you saw of this building and the multiple state-of-the-art starships around it, we are all very busy here. You will have my full attention when you get to the point."

The two Jedi shared a glance, eyebrows raised.

"You suspect a missing employee of industrial espionage. We heard images of a Togruta were found on his datapad. We're investigating the disappearance of a Togruta female. If they are the same, we might be able to assist each other, and resolve both our problems much more effectively."

At that, the Neimoidian looked up from his datapad at Xin, and then at Kasra. He looked both of them over, before in a demanding tone, he snapped, "Who told you this?"

"That's not important."

"I consider it very important."

"We overheard a conversation held indiscreetly. There's no information we can give you."

"The point is," said Kasra, "we need to see the Togruta. If you can show us the images on his datapad, we can be of great benefit to you in getting to the bottom of your problem."

The Neimoidian stared at the two of them, not saying anything, just staring, for the longest time. Then he turned, and while walking away he called out, "Stay there." And he walked down the hall until he vanished.

Kasra remained standing, while Xin sat and closed his eyes. His breathing slowed until it it was so slow it seemed as if he had halted his breathing altogether. Kasra stood, looking down the hall, and then eventually resigned himself to a seat beside Xin and closed his eyes as well.

At last, the Neimoidian returned. Both the Jedi sensed his presence and opened their eyes at his approach. The Neimoidian held a slightly different make of datapad in his hands this time. "The datapad will not be accessed by anyone outside of New Sun. Jedi or not. However, we have decided to accept your offer of aid. Here - " and with outstretched hand he offered Xin the datapad, "is a datapad with only the images of the Togruta."

They knew immediately once they saw the first image. Although she was in a crowd, they recognised her right away. There, in the crowds of the underground market they had just visited, was Amila. And there she was in the next one. Again in the markets. And there she was again, this time seated by herself at a table with a drink on it.

"Well?" asked the Neimoidian.

Kasra nodded his head.

A slow smile split the Neimoidian's face. "Then it seems we've found our man. And it looks like your new destination is Corellia."

That was how it all began.