Rebecca "Revy" Lee was not happy. This had been the norm for her most of her life. Born on Mott Street, in the Moridebo District of Metellos, she had to grow up fast in order to survive. Metellos was a Ecumenopolis in the Corsucant Sector, or Imperial Sector as it was now called. The planet was dubbed "The Coruscant That Wasn't," as in the distant past, it had tried to become a center of galactic business but had been supplanted by the true capital of the galaxy. It had tried to create a hyperlane but the Metellos Trade Route lead only to the Negs, the sole part of the Core that could be considered Wild Space. Then the rulers decided to ramp up industrialization in the hopes of rivaling Coruscant. Too proud to ask for a loan, they turned to the resources of the planet itself. In the end, all they succeeded in was causing a recession and ruining the planet. While it wasn't as overbuilt as Coruscant, the seas were largely polluted and the deserts were ripped apart with the scars of mining. Places like Moridebo had become communities where the law rarely mattered. You could sometimes see the Stratablocks in the distance. They were attempts to create the mile high skyscrapers of Coruscant on Metellos and were largely occupied by office drones and the others who pursued an image of legitimacy. There had been many financial scandals originating there, ruining countless people but the news and police rarely paid them heed as stories of drug dealers and gang wars were more exciting in their minds, and because many policemen liked to bully the poor. Above them, were the floating cities. When the sky became choked with poison and the surface covered with trash stained with the blood of countless people at the bottom, the ruling elite built many luxurious space stations for themselves to live, throwing so much garbage out the airlock, that Metellos was now a ringed planet. Few people rose from the districts to the stratablocks, and even fewer rose to the orbiting cities. Revy had no interest in falling for that scam and she had learned there was nothing on Metellos worth staying for.
Her father was from a world in the Mid Rim of The Slice called Jedha. The native population liked to think that the Jedi Order was founded there because a bunch of crystals used for their energy swords were found on the immense moon, as if being the homeworld of a gang of magicians and con men was anything to be proud of. By the time Revy's father was born, few Jedi went to that poor, starving little desert of a world. He had gone to Metellos in a rickety little ship fifteen years before the Clone Wars to chase a rumor that Metellos had a hyperlane to some other sacred Jedi world in the Unknown Regions. Then, one of those orbiting cities fell out of the sky and annihilated almost everything where he had landed to stop for supplies, including his ship. Throughout her childhood, he kept talking about how meeting the Jedi who helped out of the rubble while she was passing through was the greatest moment of his life, even though she never stayed to help or even give him a ride back to Jedha. He fell into the role of menial labor on the city planet in the hopes of getting enough money to go back to Jedha. One day, he met a waitress who was also trying to return home. She was a Near Human called a Pantoran from the Sujimis sector of the Outer Rim. One night, they both had too much to drink, and nine months later, Rebecca was born, her burgundy hair being halfway between the pink shade of her mother and her father's black hair. She barely remembered her mother, who, when Rebecca was a little over a year old, went out to the store and never came back. Revy liked to think her mother was dead as opposed to have abandoned her. In order to feed himself and the daughter he was stuck with, her father had started holding stolen goods before they could be fenced on behalf of other thieves, as well as telling Rebecca to steal. He had also begun drinking and grew a propensity for violence towards those he could get away with, especially his daughter. He had become quite vocal about his belief in "The Force" as he called the magical element that Jedi got their power from. He never missed an opportunity to hit Rebecca whenever she pointed out that no Jedi ever came to help them with anything. Then the Empire was born and the Jedi's magic tricks failed to save them, showing that all he had ever believed in was nothing but a pathetic sham. After that, all he did was wallow in his own misery, drinking and watching wrestling matches. One day, when Rebecca was thirteen years old, he told her to get another beer for him. When there were no more beers, he tossed his bottle in her face and commanded she go out to buy more. Rebecca left to find someone who would sell alcohol to an underage customer, at which point a police sergeant grabbed her off the street and took her to a warehouse. He had a nice sideline in selling people for slavery or for their organs and Rebecca was next. She was kept in that cage for three days before the cop brought a potential buyer. She was so disgusted and angry at this man holding her, that she gained the strength to fight both the cop and the slimeball despite how both were at least three times bigger than her. The slimeball, she knocked him down a stairwell and he broke his neck, while the cop, she forced to the ground and punched him in the face until there was nothing but a bag of wet gravel under her knuckles. Setting a fire to cover her tracks, she made it home to her father. He was still on his chair watching wrestling, and when he looked up at her, he just said how annoying it was that he had to go get some beers himself and then held up an empty bottle to indicate he needed a new one. At that moment, Rebecca had enough of her father and instead of getting a beer from the fridge like he wanted, she picked up the blaster pistol he hid above it and shot him. She took his body to their speeder and drove to the Hellwell, a disposal pit for unwanted mining byproducts that was now used for corpses by many people. If anyone saw her dump her father's corpse down, they didn't care enough to do anything about it. Taking to the nickname Revy, she proceeded to train herself in marksmanship, ultimately becoming quite capable at dual blaster pistols. Eventually, she met a Red Nikto called Dutch, whose true name was unpronounceable. He had been a Coruscant Underworld cop, whose members wore armor and helmets to hide who they were so trouble didn't follow them home. Dutch had gone along with the endemic corruption of the job in order to survive, learning many tricks of the trade while doing so. Normally, Revy hated cops and had no problem killing them but Dutch had the honesty to admit there was no difference between cops and crooks, as well as knowing it was stupid and pointless to throw a tantrum and attack everything in sight whenever a coworker was killed on the job. Besides, with the rise of the Empire, some tool decided the best way to climb the ranks was to do an anti-corruption sweep. Dutch had caught wind of it and skipped town before he could get trapped in the net. He'd never told her how he got a stealth ship when he recruited her into the Lagoon Company as he called their team, named after the stealth ship dubbed Black Lagoon that they used for piracy and smuggling. Nor the Rogue-class starfighter she occasionally flew to outflank attackers and transports the Lagoon would hijack. Contrary to what she had heard, crime did pay, well enough for her to get a customized pair of DL-44 heavy blaster pistols she called Cutlass Sword specials. By the time Revy joined, Dutch had already recruited a slicer named Benny, who specialized in creating fake IDs for people and ships when he didn't access security cameras and communications for their own purposes. And finally, there was the newest member of the crew, Rokuro Okajima, or Rock as they had taken to calling him. He was an office drone from Alsakan who they had wound up taking captive when Balalaika hired them to hijack the Incom ship he had been attached to. As the ship contained details about a secret project the company was taking behind the Empire's back, the directors decided that Rock and the ship were expendable if it meant hiding their secrets and used their friends at Subpro to hire a Trandoshan hit squad to silence them. Thanks to Rock's ingenuity, tricking the lizardmen into an ambush by playing on how they lived to please their Goddess of the Hunt, they had managed to survive and deliver the ship, resulting in Balalaika successfully blackmailing the company for money in exchange for the ship's return. Afterward, Rock, already unhappy with how boring his life on Alsakan was, joined the Lagoon company as their accountant, an unnaturally good negotiator, and occasional strategist. Initially, she had shunned him, until he explained how she had gotten him to look for more out of life, and how she was now acting like the corporate assholes he had left behind. Sometime afterward, she wound up kissing him. She also felt compelled to protect him, such as when he accompanied her while Scuba diving to retrieve a set of precious metals on Troiken, left over from the Stark Hyperspace War, where she had to kill a bunch of thugs led by perhaps the last of Iaco Stark's pirates, an Advosec named Luak. After she killed the old pirate and they retrieved their sunken treasure, she started teaching him how to use a blaster to defend himself, so they wouldn't lose part of the crew, she said. The fact she got to see him with his shirt off was just a bonus, she told herself. These new feelings confused and scared her. While she had several admirers, men and women, she had never been able to trust them, so she rejected them. Recently, she had tried to push Rock away but he wasn't having it.
Her confusion about Rock aside, she had another reason to be unhappy, and that was who was paying them now. Kraken was a so-called Super Tactical Droid the Separatists unveiled halfway through the war to make up for the unjustly arrogant Tactical Droids that had been repeatedly defeated. Kraken loved to talk about his service to the Confederacy and the battles he had won with minimal droid casualties, along with how he survived meeting bigshot Jedi Anakin Skywalker. On top of that, he liked to boast about how he rejected the shutdown order at the end of the war and how he kept the Collicoid Swarm in fighting shape. While no one outside the other droids called him General now, and he had given up on any hope of Confederate victory, he was still afforded much respect by Balalaika and the other Hotel Novgorad members. Still, the Serennan syndicate was their most reliable employer, so putting up with Kraken now and then was worth it. Before handing them their payment, however, the droid commander did something rather peculiar. He walked over and turned on the monitor to the meeting room.
"Uh, General, what are you doing?" asked Rock, being diplomatic as usual.
"First, I am providing insurance for the Captain, in case our guests try anything," replied the droid in his deep voice.
"They are in the heart of your dreadnought, with the best of Alpha Group surrounding them," pointed out Benny. "If they tried anything, nothing would save them."
"Unlike many of my organic compatriots, I never underestimated the power of the Force, and as such I managed to survive when most of them did not," retorted Kraken, pointing to the slicer with his right index finger. "That Togruta who walked in was the apprentice of General Skywalker, and at the end of the war, her threat level was only one grade below him. In addition, I am curious what this Jedi and her turncoat lover want from Captain Sofiya."
"Really?" asked Dutch somewhat surprised. "And here I thought it was a coincidence she looked like the teenage terror suspect who broke my arm back in the underworld." Rock was rather curious; he had heard many things about the Jedi in his childhood and was quite intrigued by the idea of one escaping the Empire. Benny was fairly nervous, as he thought of the Jedi as a bunch of obsessed do-gooders who didn't know when to leave well enough alone. Revy, however, was rather unimpressed. Maybe there was something to the stories of the Jedi and their magical powers but from what she had gathered, they did almost nothing with it. They didn't use it to accumulate wealth for themselves like rational people, and unlike the Sith she had occasionally heard about, they weren't interested in attaining power. They just devoted themselves to hollow principles about "Safeguarding the Republic" and "Balancing the Force" whatever that was supposed to mean. But for all their claims of being the Guardians of Peace and Justice for twenty-five thousand years, she hadn't seen much evidence that they cared about other people. She had talked to people who were older than her father about the Jedi and they confirmed that the Jedi never came to Metellos, or at least their corner of it. This Jedi who Kraken mentioned would have fought in the Clone Wars and survived the rise of the Empire, so she was undoubtedly a skilled fighter but she was likely still addicted to the fantasy of a glorious Republic where freedom was paramount, as opposed to just accepting that the Republic was dead and gone, with money being the only thing to live for now. But at least there was some entertainment through watching this, so she would go along with it. After Kraken activated the monitor, Revy and the others sat down to watch what was about to happen.
This might be my longest chapter yet but I had to introduce the Black Lagoon cast. In addition, I had to keep them true to their characters. I decided to include Kraken because I was intrigued by a droid general who cared for his subordinates. I decided to have Revy born on Metellos and Rock on Alsakan because they have never been portrayed in any Star Wars stories and this is my chance to expand on them. The adventures I mentioned them having were loosely adapted from the Anime. Star Wars fans probably know what project Rock's employers were trying to hide. In addition, I gave a few hints about Rock and Revy that I will elaborate on. Next chapter will be told from Rock's POV. After that, we will return to the Specters on Arkinnea.