Lies! Deceptions! Maybe? But they might just guard Soniee's true identity for a little longer.

"Got something else for you." Saw tossed her a package and she caught it deftly while he continued to extract their picnic things from the pack.

"You're going to spoil me." She grinned before looking down to see what it was. She couldn't believe she was actually here in the clearing where her parents had met. Well that's what Saw thought anyway from the description of the land.

"Heh," he laughed. "That's the plan."

She settled herself on the ground and finally looked at holozine in her hand. "Oh Manda!"

Again he laughed. "You made the cover."

"It's not the first time." She bragged as if she cared about such things.

"Don't worry I won't let dating a holostar go to my head. But that other girl wasn't you evidently. You've got to read the article."

Soniee checked the table of contents and flipped to the proper page. There was a still of she and Lux, masked at the ball and underneath that a still of their parents at their betrothal party. She gently touched the image of her mother before she began to read the words.

"The Real Princess of Onderon," the headline began. And then the story went on to tell of the incident at the royal ball in Iziz some weeks past, in which Senator Lux Bonteri was finally reunited with his half-sister.

There was a short history of what the author knew about Lux. His mother was Mina Bonteri, former senator of the Republic who tragically lost her way in the manner of joining the Separatist confederacy. It was her death at the hands of Count Dooku himself, or so the stories said, that returned her only son's loyalty to the Republic. Senator Bonteri the younger had proved himself in the battles that freed Onderon from Separatist rule and he had remained loyal as the flawed Republic was swept away in the formation of the Galactic Empire.

However, little was known about Lux's father, Lieutenant General Dane Bonteri. With the appearance of the mystery girl who attended the planetary gala event at Lux's side, the esteemed publication in Soniee's hand promised that they could now answer some of those questions.

It was once assumed that the young, female, senatorial representative from Mandalore, a human girl by the name of Soniee Ordo may have in fact been the sister of Lux Bonteri. However wrong those assumptions may have been there was an air of truth to the story behind them. Representative Ordo was of course killed in the tragic mining accident on the planet Concord Dawn in the Mandalore system. Followers of the Lux Bonteri story would of course remember how the young senator mourned her death and along with her, it was presumed, the child she carried, that Lux himself had fathered when he visited the Mandalorian capital city of Sundari to attend Miss Ordo's graduation ceremony.

So who then is this new female friend who glittered so brightly on Bonteri's arm at the event held on his home planet to honor him? The head writer of the holozine sat down with Lux upon his return to Coruscant. (or bumped into him on a transport and wouldn't leave him alone until he spilled the whole story more likely.)

"Yes," Lux was quoted. "When I first saw Dara in a tapcaf in Iziz she reminded me of Soniee as well. It was difficult really to see another who looked so remarkably like Miss Ordo." He chokes up and the reporter waited for him to recover before they went on. "She sought me out, I feared, at first, for monetary gain or a moment of fame, but Dara wasn't like that. She was simply a young woman who had lost her family and wanted to connect with the one family member she had learned was still living."

"She is a family member, then?" The reporter asked him.

"She is. When he was a young militia officer, my father was given the duty of guarding the Senator Mina Skelari and fell in love with her. His family had other ideas. He was betrothed to an heiress named Melaana Rash."

All of this would be in the public record so it wasn't exactly a lie. Still Soniee didn't really like the light in which it painted Dane or Melaana. Especially since neither of them were now alive to argue the point. Maybe that's the only reason the ruse worked.

"My mother was already pregnant with me when the betrothal took place but she hadn't told my father. It was her plan to return to Coruscant and raise me on her own and leave my father to his own destiny. It was poor Melaana who learned of my existence and insisted that her betrothed continue his duty to the mother of his child. Little did she know that she was also carrying a child at the time."

"Your father was quite the rogue. His betrothed and his mistress both pregnant. Didn't this Melaana change her mind and wish that Dane come back to Onderon and do his duty by her child?"

"I've no idea." Lux shrugged thoughtfully. "When they discovered her disgrace, her family sent her first to wait out her pregnancy in a secret house in the jungles that once surrounded the city of Iziz but then all that's known is that she flew away while still pregnant with her child."

"Just flew away? All alone? Where did she go?"

"No one knew until Dara came to me and told me her side of the story." Lux gave the reporter a winning smile.

"And of course you will share that story exclusively with our readers?"

"Of course. You see it really is much like the old bard's play only the other way around. Melaana Rash ran away with her unborn child to Alderaan."

"You don't say!"

"Oh but I do. Melaana, under an assumed name of course, married a young noble there who had some condition that meant he would never father children of his own. He took pity on her and her child and swore to raise the child and never divulge the secret. Dara only discovered the truth when her mother and the man she had never questioned to be her father, contracted a fever and died. She went back into the medical records and found that her so-called father could not have been and that the date of their wedding was only a few days before her birth. They had always kept these things hidden from her and now she had a great deal of work to do to uncover the truth."

Lux sure could spin a story. Maybe Chairman Papanoida should have offered him the chance to study at the Bardic Academy on Chandrila.

"There was some sort of medical droid, a midwife droid specifically, that Melaana had brought with her from Onderon, insurance against the chance that she should give birth to the child in space before she reached her destination. The droid's memory was wiped to prevent it from revealing Melaana's past, however, in the depths of the stored medical records was a copy of the DNA scans that were run on a Lieutenant Dane Boneteri during his betrothal negotiations. Dara followed the lead and located the pictures of her mother with this mysterious gentleman at their betrothal party."

"Kriff," Soniee mumbled aloud while she continued to read rapt in the fiction that Lux had fed the reporter. "Why didn't I think of that?" Of course Momma Ordo had probably been a little more thorough when she wiped the midwife droid's memory before she sold the thing in Keldabe.

"Dara was thrilled to learn her mother's real name and home planet and she hoped that perhaps this Dane Bonteri might still be living. Though she had loved her adopted father, she hoped she might be able to be reunited with her real blood family."

" Aliit ori'shya tal'din ." Soniee muttered the old Mandalorian saying which meant Family is more than blood. She tried to imagine what it might have been like to grow up with a mother and father believing that they were really her true parents and then finding out that her father wasn't her father and going to search for the man who really was. Soniee didn't think much about her own father. He had sent she and her mother away. She wanted the journal to tell her why. She wanted to believe he had been as wonderful as her mother had thought in the beginning of their relationship.

"When she came to Onderon wishing to see me, I really didn't know what to expect." Lux shook his head in wonder. "I had never been told that my father was once betrothed to someone other than my mother but Dara's story rang true and she had the documents to prove it. I asked her to accompany me to the ball in the colors of her mother's house having no idea which house tha might be. And of course she wasn't here during the war so she didn't understand anything about the politics and the bad memories of the citizens who lived in Iziz during that time. Please don't be too harsh on her for that. That is if…" Here he seemed to choke up a bit again. "If you see her. When she ran from the ballroom… It was... the last I saw of her. I was finally reunited with the sister I didn't even know I had and then…. When she learned the truth that her uncle had been a traitor and a tyrant she just couldn't accept the truth."

Lux ended the interview after that saying that it was just too painful a subject for him to continue. He had plenty of experience grieving over dead or star crossed lovers. He would be able to give a convincing display that Dara Rash-Bonteri's re-disappearance was only another in the long line of women who had broken his heart.

Soniee closed the holozine and set it aside, just as Saw came and handed her a plate of reheated food. "Manda."

"It's really something, isn't it?" He sat beside her with his own plate. "I'll give Bonteri this: he sure can package a lie."

"He did it to protect me to throw off anyone who thought Dara and Soniee were the same person." She stabbed at her food with her fork absently.

"Yeah. That's a noble cause and all. But makes you wonder what else he'd be willing to lie about, doesn't it?" He took a bite of his own food.

Soniee rolled her eyes. She was never going to get Saw to agree with her on the subject of Lux Bonteri. The man was bound and determined to think the worse of his one time friend. She lifted a morsel of the food to her mouth for a bite and then made a face. "What is this?"

"Automatic self-reheating single serve rations." He shrugged and took another bite.

"And this is supposed to be edible?"

He looked critically at the morsel on his fork. "Yeah." He put it into his mouth and chewed.

"Now I know why you were always over at Shara's when they were in town. Only a lonely old bachelor could eat this stuff. It's disgusting."

He leaned toward her and speared a piece of the food from her plate onto his own fork and popped it into his mouth. Then while still chewing he told her, "Then it's a good thing I've got you to help me mend the errors of my ways."

She swatted him and went to dig in the pack for something more palatable.