Kosh's "Vaelin Spire" started on level five and rose nearly to the outside sky, making it quite huge. It was baffling to think that a lackey like Vaelin Kosh could own all this - whatever he dealt in specifically, it must be paying off well.

Hawke hired an airspeeder to drop him off at the spire. Upon arriving, he was not entirely surprised by the large number of attendees that had gathered to receive him. They were all uniformly dressed and radiated eagerness to serve. Kosh was doing well for himself indeed.

At the head of the group was a familiar face that Hawke wasted no time greeting.

"Carsul, my old friend, you really didn't have to wait up."

Carsul was obviously not amused. He fell into step next to Hawke as they made their way through the front entrance and through a grand receiving room to the lifts.

Carsul gestured for Hawke to follow him as he boarded one. The lift shot upward, its clear walls allowing Hawke glimpse many of the buildings, halls, and great rooms on the way up, until it finally came to a halt.

"This room is yours for the time being. I will leave you to your preparations and see you tomorrow." Carsul stated as he stepped out of the lift.

The room was hardly a room by most people's standards, more like an entire floor. There were no dividers or walls, but it still managed to convey the impression of multiple rooms - a gathering room, a dining room, a bedroom, a bath, and a viewing room; each partitioned only by a change in flooring, style, and decor.

The decor itself was especially noteworthy. In each section was an elaborately decorated female attendant, five of them in all. When Hawke realized they were meant to come with the room he looked back at Carsul, but the man was paying him no mind and waiting to ride the lift back down.

"Well...this is...spacious."

All five women were looking at him, though the room was large enough that he couldn't quite see the Twi'lek in his bed. He made straight for the eating area and started rummaging through the wall cabinets, slightly disappointed to find mostly beverages and snack foods.

"May I help you find something, sir?" a sunny yellow Twi'lek asked. She was beautifully if rather scantily adorned in swirling orange and reds that looked like fire against her skin.

Hawke looked over at her when she spoke. She didn't raise her eyes to meet his, just awaited an answer. He had a hard time reading her face. She wasn't sad, or afraid, nor was she eager or happy. She was just there.

"I was just looking for something to eat, actually," he finally replied, giving up on trying to decipher her expression.

"If you can wait just a moment, I would be glad to arrange a meal for you, sir," the Twi'lek said, still basically talking to the ground.

"Well, that would be great. Don't go to too much trouble though. Don't need anything elaborate."

"Certainly," she said and she finally began to move, using a small holoscreen to call up a menu and place an order, before setting the low table with cloth and dishes. Her outfit covered little enough as it was, and when she moved, it didn't even cover what it originally intended. Hawke turned abruptly and made for one of the other rooms.

The room adjacent was decorated in blues and whites and had a very comfortable looking lounge that Hawk decided he would occupy until it was time to eat. He didn't occupy it long however when a blue Twi'lek came to kneel before where he sat.

"Do you wish to be entertained while you wait?"

Hawke swallowed hard. This woman was even less covered than the last one and her physique spoke more of being an athlete than a servant. A dancer would be an obvious guess, but being that there was a white Twi'lek blatantly stationed in his bed, he had a sinking feeling about what "entertain" usually meant to the guests she served. With her cool cerulean skin, she was a dramatic contrast to the yellow Twi'lek, but her expression was the same. It was unsettling, like they didn't care about...anything, really.

"Listen, no, you don't have to entertain me. Ugh, what's your name?"

The Twi'lek looked up for the first time. Her eyes were a stunning green, but they just shone dully.

"Whyn," was all she said before looking down again.

"Pleasure to meet you Whyn. You can call me Hawke, everyone else does," he said and tried to smile as reassuringly as possible.

She met his eyes briefly and returned the smallest glimmer of a smile.

"Tell you what, why don't you go get your friends and bring them over here and we'll all have something to eat. I've got some time to kill and I haven't had a fresh meal in a while. We'll have us a dinner party."

Whyn raised an eyebrow and that glimmer of a smile escaped again. But then she rose and did as he asked, briefly stopping by the yellow Twi'lek girl to notify her to order more food.

"Order your favorite dishes!" Hawke encouraged them. "Kosh will think I have a healthy appetite." He grinned at the Twi'lek playing hostess. She hesitated for a moment, but evidently the other women weren't going to turn down a hand picked meal, and soon they were all crowded around her holopad, looking for their preferred foods. Eventually there were three Twi'lek women and two human women sitting around a low table in the dining area, more listening to Hawke talk than actually making conversation. The yellow Twi'lek, Feira, got up and down from her seat as dishes began arriving, and at one point Hawke decided to go get one of the sheets from the bed for the white twi'lek, Ranleou, as she wasn't really wearing anything at all.

He couldn't help thinking about all the other bounty hunters that had rooms here for the night. Were all their rooms filled with slave women as well? The thought made him rather angry. Slavery was commonplace here, as it was on several other spaceports and planets he had stopped at. It never seemed to get any easier to tolerate though. It was hard to believe sometimes that civilized systems could let slavery continue. Still, while Nar Shaadaa was certainly a modernized planet, it was hard to think of it as civilized.

"So… a lot of new faces here lately I'm guessing? Any idea as to what all the commotion is about?" he asked when there was a lull in the conversation. They all tensed. Feira and Leslin, one of the humans, both shot glances at Whyn, who had stopped eating and was staring at her plate.

"We don't really know much about what goes on," one of the human women said. Chealin, if he recalled her name correctly.

"Well surely there's some kind of household gossip," he said. Ranleou shook her head sharply, nearly smacking Whyn with her lekku.

"No. They're very strict about who we speak to and where we go." she said. "Anyone who seems too curious ends up sold or...terminated." Something about the way she said the last word made Hawke suspect she didn't mean fired from the job.

The topic was clearly making them uncomfortable, so he waved a dismissive hand. "I'm sure Kosh will fill me in on all the important details tomorrow. Now… who's ready for dessert?"

The dessert sampler was impressive, but the mood of the room had sobered noticeably since he brought up the bounty. He looked around the table watching the five women eating quietly, each one of them a different kind of beauty: Feira was fine boned and dainty, Whyn tall and well built, Ranleou was stunning with her perfectly white skin, dark eyes and dramatic curvature. And the human women were no less beautiful - Chealin was deeply tanned with short red hair, and Leslin reminded him of the women on the last planet he called home. Her ebony hair fell around her pale body like a curtain. It had to be almost as long as she was tall.

They were a sight to make any man's mouth water, but every time Hawke looked at them, another image came unbidden to his mind instead… a young Zabrak girl with no horns and an expression of pure hopelessness on her face every time he left her. Looking around the table at the women in front of him, he realized they wore the same expression, an expression born of the knowledge that their only freedom lay in death. However nice he was tonight, the very next night they could be ordered to serve someone far crueler than he was kind. His dinner party seemed a very small and meager comfort in comparison.

His seething was interrupted by the sound of blaster fire. Hawke leapt up from the table and lunged for the lift with his blaster in hand, but by the time he had gotten there, the firing had stopped. The lift tube was clear, and through it, he could see the lazy swirl of smoke inside one of the other rooms a few floors below. He had no idea who occupied the room, but whoever it was, they had either been taken out of the running for tomorrow or had reduced the competition themselves.

Hawke looked back into his own room for a moment, thinking to assess its defensible positions when his eyes fell back on the women at the table. All of their eyes were on him, yet they hadn't moved from the table. They just sat there, perfectly poised. Hawke wondered if they would have even ducked had the fire fight happened in this very room. They really did not care.

The night turned out to be a very long one. Hawke eventually ushered the women into the area meant for the bedroom as it was in an outcropping of the room least likely to get hit by stray shots if there was a fight. The bed was massive and easily fit all five. Even so, they huddled against one another as they slept, undisturbed by the abrupt bouts of random blaster fire on the floors surrounding them. Hawke assumed that when part of you was waiting for death, the fear of it was not such a substantial force.

The night brought Hawke no sleep as he sat behind some overturned tables looking out at the lift. The damn thing ran so smoothly and quietly, it could stop at his very room and let someone off here without barely a sound. So he sat there, watching it all night long, and as his eyelids began to feel weighted, he even shot a stim to make sure that he didn't get sluggish later into the night.

Several times the lift came past his room. He prepared for it to open onto his floor but it never did. He listened to each bout of blaster fire carefully. Sometimes it was the same blaster, sometimes it was an entirely new one. A few times he wasn't entirely sure how many gunmen were involved as there were several different guns fired and it seemed to go on and on.

Finally, the sun did rise. Or rather the simulated sun lighting slowly illuminated the building's interior. They were, after all, still a good distance below the rest of the city. No natural sunlight had gleamed here for hundreds of years.

The lift showed that it was on its way down again from above and Hawke prepared himself again for whatever might emerge if it stopped. This time it began to slow near his floor and then it stopped. The doors opened noiselessly and Hawke readied himself to fire if he didn't like what he saw, but the first thing that emerged were a pair of familiar dress boots and gloved hands.

It was exactly who the items indicated. Carsul emerged, looking rather put off and tired himself. He was only slightly startled by walking into a barricaded room and having a gun trained on him.

"I take it you had a restful night," Carsul said barely masking his annoyance as he walked past the barricade to look around the room and assess the damage.

"It had its pleasant moments, but I wouldn't exactly call it restful."

By this point Carsul had taken notice of the five women in the bed, two of whom had sat up, showing that their skimpy outfits were not well suited to staying in place even when they were resting.

"I see," he said turning abruptly. "Vaelin Kosh will see you in the grand viewing room now to give you instructions for retrieving your bounty. Come promptly if you would." He took one final disapproving look at the bedroom before he made his way back to the lift and took it back upward.

Hawke turned his eyes to where Carsul had been staring and almost laughed.

I like having an impressive reputation, he thought looking at the women curled up under his sheets. But I never really planned on it going in that direction.