Recall please, that Lel's plan in this is his plan, not automatically mine. I know better than him what's going to happen next. :)

Chapter 3

Lel stared at the empty chair where Ceron had been and sighed. Three days later, he still felt terrible for having to dump the body of his friend at the first opportunity. On the Rim, finding someone willing to cremate a body without asking too many questions was easy, but that didn't change how he felt about it. It had hammered home that he knew next to nothing about Ceron's background, except that he had some form of Alderaanian roots, but that was four or five generations back, so that was a dead end.

Which had left Lel with no other option than what he had done. It had been worth burning one of the cover identities for the ship. Doing that would very likely keep the imps guessing long enough for him to disappear into the great mass of the galaxy. But for that, he needed to decide which name to use for the ship. [I]Ultimate Argument[/I] was burned, as was [I]Running Blue Tirak[/I], so Lel called up that particular encrypted data file on the computer, but before he could bring himself to look at it, he decided that it was something that could wait. He actually needed to decide what the hell to do next, so he left the cockpit.

Lel sat down at the table with a sigh, crossed his arms on it, and lowered his head down, his forehead resting on his hands.

The ship's tanks were still two-thirds full, and his other consumables would last a single person a few weeks, so he was in no immediate danger of getting stranded somewhere or starving. However, Ceron had never gotten around to paying him, so effectively, Lel was still as broke as he'd been when leaving Bespin.

He contemplated bee-lining straight for Alderaan, but there was the little matter of his being wanted by the Empire to consider, so even if that was limited to the sector right now, they had to know he possessed a hyper-capable ship, which meant that lying low and waiting for the heat to die down looked like the best option right now. This, in turn, meant that he would still have to make some cash to stay afloat until he had contacted the Alliance.

What was more, he knew that many events were happening this year that were vital. A skirmish near Komnor would see Han Solo earn Chewbacca's life debt, Lando Calrissian would win the [I]Falcon[/I] in the tournament that was happening on Bespin in a few months, and he still had a vague recollection of something happening with Tarkin's younger brother. The Alliance had been formalized around this time too. This was only what he could remember; gods knew what else was happening that he had forgotten.

Lel sat up properly and massaged his temples. This felt awfully like he was justifying not doing anything to himself, but then, he knew that if things were more or less on track, he would have five years or so before the Death Star was ready, so blindly rushing in was going to be counterproductive at best and downright deadly at worst.

As much as he hated the memetic 'I instantly know everything' Palpatine so espoused by many in the fandom back on Earth, Lel was willing to bet his left lung that Palpatine kept a close eye on Bail Organa. So rocking up at Open Court and then have Bail go into full emergency mode out of the blue was bound to catch precisely that sort of attention.

Which meant that his existence would be nasty, brutish and short. As well as entirely useless.

So trying to find a way to contact the Alliance without getting seen by either Palpatine's near-certain network on Alderaan or Imperial intelligence, in general, was the long-term goal. He grinned. Ironically, this would have been comparatively easy in Disney by way of flying to Lothal and shacking up with the Ghost Crew until they ran into Ahsoka Tano.

Except that unless someone had done a Kamino on it, Lothal didn't exist in this universe. He'd checked.

Having never actually seen Clone Wars much beyond Ahsoka's exit from the Order, he didn't even know for sure if and how she had survived Order 66. He assumed that she was still around in Legends since that show was the rare non-movie crossover between both, but there wasn't really any proof for that. Meaning that she wasn't an option either. As far as he could recall, she had never appeared again in any other Legends material, and all he had for proof was that he considered her too tough and resourceful to fall prey to Vader's early Jedi hunts.

So overall, he was, somewhat ironically, this meant that he was falling neatly into a gap of his knowledge. He knew a lot about what had happened during the Clone Wars, what had happened during the rise of the Empire, and what would happen during OT times. Thanks to this, the most straightforward approach was out.

Then there were what felt like a million and one Jedi remnants or survivors hiding out across the galaxy.

Lel chuckled, then sighed. While not all, or even many of them were still around, and even fewer of them had direct connections to the Alliance, and the likes of Starkiller were, at best, of limited reliability. Never mind that the man had Palpatine's gaze on himself everywhere he went. As did most of the remnants, to the point that Lel would have been unwilling to seek them out. The only two okayish options that came to mind off-hand were parked on Tatooine and Dagobah, respectively, and of those, one likely had no way to contact anyone farther away than shouting distance. Tatooine was right out since Lel certainly wasn't going to go anywhere near Jabba the Hutt without a perfect excuse and enough of a believable backstory that would deflect awkward questions.

Which meant that at least for the next few months, he would just be working to maintain himself and generally establish himself. The only thing he needed about as much as a personal audience with Palpatine was having his ship seized because he couldn't pay for the docking fees and bribes at some sort of ass-end of nowhere space station in the Outer Rim.

He would need to build himself a War Chest. Including the capital letters.

At this moment, he remembered that he still had something in the freight compartment that he had yet to even look at.

The droid that he and Ceron had loaded on board just before the Imps had arrived to spoil the party. It was a mixture of his inner geek and the practicality of having a sort-of second set of hands available that drew him to where he had stashed the crate.

"Open here" and "This side up" was written all over the outside of the crate. He knew that this sort of thing was always there for a reason, so he applied the small vibro knife he'd taken from the tool chest in the engineering bay to the tape on the top, revealing a small electronic handle that would let him open the crate. Of course, the battery was long dead, but the designers had anticipated long-term storage, and there was a small universal power connector. He pulled the handle and stepped back as instructed.

The crate folded in half, with both sides collapsing on the ship's deck, revealing a block of a styrofoam-like substance, a small compartment containing written instructions. Lel began to remove the elements that made up the whole, and then it stood in front of him. A factory-fresh R3-type droid in a flat, dull beige factory primer colour. It had the translucent dome typical of the series, and some packaging elements were stuck to it, but other than that looked…. Lel shook his head, trying to get rid of the feeling, but he couldn't. Instead, he looked at it and laughed, heartily and for the first time since going into hyperspace ahead of the imps.

"I think I'll call you Urbie."

It did look like an UrbanMech that had lost an arm right now, and Lel needed the humour. So it took him several minutes to collect himself enough to actually get back to the matter at hand and removed the remainder of the packaging from Urbie's body. By that time, he had come up with a suitable paint job too. It was a bit... out there, but at the same time, given what he had experienced, would likely experience, and that he would never see that part of his past again, he had to get his laughs where he could. And to further that, he made a mental note to get some dark blue paint for the droid.

He extended the rear leg from its 'at rest' position and began to examine the droid, and as far as he could tell, the internal systems were all still in factory-fresh condition.

Going by the startup guide he had removed from the packaging earlier, an R series droid of this vintage needed around two hours to fully charge itself from the sort of power connection available onboard his ship. Still, like every other electronic device that Lel had used during both his adult lives, you could do first-time startup procedures while the unit charged. So Lel connected a cable from the ship's systems, and after waiting for a bit to ensure that the cells had enough juice to survive power-up, they pressed the button. Just as described in the instructions. Next, he used a generic normal datapad to connect to the primary data entry port, ready to program himself as the droid's 'owner'.

The central sensor eye blinked several times in the proscribed manner as Urbie's internal systems ran through several diagnostics and eventually began to beep and swept the room.

Supposedly, the pad was also meant to translate from Binary to Basic, but that was something that Lel didn't need.

/Industrial Automaton R3 Unit Serial number Onith 5791761138 = ready to receive programming. / USER = enter parameters./

That made him relatively late production.

"Initiate vocal programming for binary user."

/R3 = Acknowledged./

"Primary designation Urbie. Association with private individual Lelenvole also called Lel. No restraining bolt usage, projected primary employment in astrogation, starship maintenance, and general computer assist duty."

/R3 = designation programmed as Urbie./

Aside from putting in a few things like adjusting his internal clock to what it actually should read and generally ensuring that Urbie wouldn't go around proclaiming his loyalty to the Galactic Republic, getting the droid to run proved, overall, to be surprisingly straightforward and painless. He made a mental note to get Urbie the best slicing packages he could find and generally look at retrofitting a few things he'd seen on another R-series droid, such as a Dagobah-proof extendable camera sensor. Another would be increasing his repair abilities to bring them in line with at least a baseline R2 unit. Lel would also be teaching them both of the extra-galactic languages he knew, as that might come in handy someday.

"Right then, Urbie," he said as he rose to his feet, "you get yourself all charged up, then yell for me, and we'll get you fully mobile."

The droid beeped a careful acknowledgement, and Lel smiled. So he rose to his feet, tapped the droid on his dome and went to the small kitchenette. He was feeling a bit peckish, and he knew that in half an hour or so, the last of his random hyperspace jumps would conclude soon, and then he would have to decide where to go next. Chewing on what was billed as nerf-beef jerky but tasting not quite right, Lel returned to the cockpit. He sighed as he glanced at the empty seat and sat down in his own.

As ordered, the Computer was still displaying the file from earlier, and Lel looked at it only because he had to, but the one at the top of the list made him laugh. Laugh so hard that he ended up coughing. When [I]that[/I] stopped, he began to hum to himself and began to apply the ID to the ship's computers.

Lel knew that this would do indeed, but he would have to look into getting enough olive drab space-rated paint to repaint the blue panels and accents. She was called [I]Fortunate Son, [/I], and there was no other acceptable paint job. The effort would be worth standing apart from that other ship of the same type.

The system where Lel's ship emerged from lightspeed was close to a poorly defined border between the mid and outer rims. Close enough to the Hydian Way to benefit from its proximity, but far enough away from worlds like Bandomeer to not attract attention by the likes of the Hutts. He knew that many far more famous worlds were pretty close. Yavin and Mandalore were only a few short hops away. He wasn't going to risk any force-related shenanigans by going there right now, but to say he wasn't tempted would have been lying.

Instead, he was approaching the primary planet of the Ralac system. Its location showed. The system and the world of the same name were surrounded by a level of space infrastructure that spoke of a moderately successful trading world. There was little in terms of an Imperial presence beyond the customs service. Despite his irrational fears, he went on to someone more attractive once they confirmed that his holds were empty. The primary spaceport outside the planetary capital was pretty busy, so Lel was preparing to wait for his landing clearance. Urbie was using that time to comb the local HoloNet for information, scoping out the lay of the land. He knew to stay away from anything illegal. His slicing packages were military issue but also limited and twenty years old. Still, the droid had sounded cheerful more than anything else as he dug into the local HoloNet.

Eventually, Lel was given his clearance, and while he was following the approach beacon for the spaceport, he took his time to get a good view of the city. It was focused around three bridges crossing a deep gorge, with buildings grafted onto and into the sides of said gorge, going down deeper than what Lel could see from his angle.

And unlike the last place he'd been, this planet clearly had a working economy. Going by what Urbie had dug up, the mag-lev trains that went off into the distance connected the city, and its port facilities with factories fed by on and off-world materials, the products of which were shipped out through both the spaceport the [I]Fortunate Son[/I] was landing at. With everything, there was enough traffic to ensure that one more freighter wouldn't raise any attention, and that said freighter pilot would find work of some form here. Be it acting like a tramp freighter or ferrying someone desperate to get off the planet.

Parking the [I]Son[/I] in the assigned landing pad took only a few more minutes. It was part of the port reserved for civilian traffic and recessed into the ground enough to keep the weather from being an issue. Apparently, this planet occasionally had heavy wind storms, which was why the city was built the way it was, but that didn't seem to bother the four TIEs that flew overhead as he got out. With that reminder of the Empire's galactic grasp, Lel turned to the harbour master. The fees for docking the [I]Fortunate Son[/I] there were high, but he was willing to use some of his few credits for that if it meant that the ship would still be there when he got back. The rest of the spaceport was indicated by what Urbie had dug up and by what the officious harbour master said, busy. Even so, non-humans were more thoroughly searched by the officials.

However, a lone Twi'lek and his droid, not on any wanted list, seemingly unarmed and entering a trade world with a commercial pilot's licence, didn't draw much in the way of attention by the busy immigration/customs officials.

So Lel shouldered the bag with the few belongings he'd taken off the ship and walked towards the maglev train that would take them from the spaceport to the city proper. As expected, after a five-minute ride, he found himself in a local re-creation of every other harbour district he had ever seen, from the high turnover cheap hotels over the gambling dens to the houses of ill repute. However, the latter was usually hidden away in the side streets.

Ralac was a system that didn't have a merchant's guild or something of that sort, so the best bet for finding work was going where spacers and their prospective customers met and hope for the best. Now that he had a ship, and a pretty fast one at that, ready to go at a moment's notice, he considered his chances as at least average. It wasn't as if he had any other choice because desperate trilogy mains willing to pay fifteen grand for a trip to Alderaan were rare outside Tatooine.

The cantina he ended up entering was the cheap but still respectable sort that drew people like him. In fact, every personal development had taken place in one, from the time old Lel had gotten beastly drunk and ended up merged with a human turbo geek to when he had met Ceron.

"Third time's the charm, isn't it, Urbie?"

The droid beeped cheerfully. In the last few days, Lel and the little droid had found a happy medium, and Lel had come to genuinely like the little droid. He knew that the R3 series was made to feel best in crowds, so he had decided to take him along as often as he could. It was also to fulfil one of Urbie's tasks, taking advantage of most people's dismissive attitude towards droids, not their own. Information gathering, and to facilitate that, Lel had done one first mod to him, a direct comlink that allowed him to contact Urbie without the droid needing external hardware.

The inside of the cantina was damn near perfect for spacers of Lel's apparent wallet size, so he didn't hesitate to steer directly for the bar when no one kept him from coming in with his droid. The bartender was a Bothan woman, and despite her diminutive size for her species, Lel realized without her saying a word that starting something wouldn't be wise. Not that he had any intentions of doing so.

"What can I get you?" she asked in slightly accented Basic, and Lel, sitting down and arranging his lekku to drape down his front, smiled.

"Medium Photon fizzles blue; I might need to be able to fly soon."

"Gotcha," the bartender replied and turned away to fix his drink. While waiting, Lel half-turned in his seat to observe the cantina. It was apparent that it served spacefaring folk, from the starship artwork on the walls over the faint smell of fuel and lubricants mixed in with alcohol to the incredibly diverse crowd that frequented its tables and the slot machines in the back corner. Musical accompaniment was provided by speakers somewhere and consisted of low and slow music that was apparently more meant as a backdrop to conversation than anything else. Without needing prompting, Urbie was already off doing his thing, quietly drilling the other droids in the cantina for information. Lel was sure he would be safe, as the only official presence that he could see were a group of regular Imperial Army troopers trying to chat up a few of the locals of the opposite gender.

"There you go."

The bartender's voice came as something of a surprise, but Lel kept himself in check as he turned around and accepted his drink with a grateful smile. "Thank you," he said and meant it.

While he took his first sips, he could sense that the bartender studied him. "You're new since I haven't seen you before, but you look like someone in need of work."

Lel tilted his head. "Am I that obvious?"

She laughed and shook her head. "No, but you [I]are[/I] new, I've been doing this for a while now, and my people are good at gathering information."

"Fair enough, I suppose," Lel replied with a chuckle of his own. "Hopefully, you can help me answer a few questions."

He pulled out a few more credit chips to underscore this, but the bartender waved that away. "That sort of thing is on the house, my friend."

With a nod, Lel turned fully back towards her. "You're right, though. I need fuel, for myself and for my ship."

She tilted her own head and looked at him. "If it's [I]legitimate[/I] work you're looking for, I think I can give you a hint…."

"That would be perfect, thank you. The last thing I need is…" he trailed off and hinted at the Imps by nodding towards them, "official issues."

"Trouble with the law in the past then?" she asked, but Lel shook his head.

"No," he semi-lied, "but the last thing I want is a TIE shooting up my main drive because the wrong Imperial official felt insulted by an Alien."

The bartender sighed. "Can't fault you there, I suppose. And speaking of, the best chance you'll have on Ralac would be the Exchange."

Before Lel could respond, she nodded at the door. "Two blocks south of here. You should be able to trade for your services there."

"Legal?"

"One of the only places where you can be sure they are. The local Merchant's Association had some serious issues with pirates and CIS holdouts after the Clone Wars until the Empire dealt with them out. Since then, every legal merchant operating out of Ralac is encouraged to operate out of the Exchange. Strictly speaking, there's no legal requirement to do it, but.."

"But," Lel continued where the bartender had left off, "but using the exchange prevents too many annoying questions by the authorities. Gotcha. And thanks for the assist."

He finished off the last of his admittedly delicious drink and rose to his feet. With the press of a button on his wrist-com, Lel recalled Urbie.

"Again, thank you," he said to the bartender.

The Bothan woman grinned as much as was possible for her species. "At least try to stay out of trouble."

Lel laughed as he left the bar.

TBC

Yes, I am aware that the Alliance to Restore the Republic wasn't formalized into what we saw in the OT until 2BBY, but it's one of those things that I choose to keep from Lel. The exact date was unknown to me until I looked it up while researching this story, after all.

The Plan ™ : Ultimately, that's just Lel's plan. Me the author… well, let's say things won't automatically go that way. ;)

Me and music: My very first exposure to Star Wars was not the movies, or even a novel or comic, but a very, very early, pre-special edition version of the OT sound track on CD. I all but stole that thing from my brother and listened the crap out of it for years before I just so happened to catch ANH on TV. I mean come on, let an impressionable six year old listen to TIE Fighter Attack and Asteroid Field over and over and over and over again and then complain he turns into a John Williams Nerd?

For that reason, the soundtrack pack also contains Solo. Why? Because John Powell did the only thing possible to improve TIE Fighter Attack by adding percussion. Go to 1:44. That is one massively underrated movie.

The only other times I had a similar epiphany was when someone had me listen to Queen's "A Kind of Magic" and Jerry Goldsmith's "The Enterprise".