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Boredom was something Shnibbidy Bob Joe had long since learned to live with. Yet still there were times when the immense life's work of calculating Pi seemed to be not worth the effort. He got down like that, and he would stuff his paper and pen into the crack in the wall and swear he would never write another number. He always recovered though. There wasn't much else to do behind a Sith Lord's refrigerator.
Shnibbidy Bob set down his pen and leaned back, deciding to eavesdrop instead of work. Darth Vader was having a heated argument with some other admiral character, in which the words "space-time" and "vegetables" seemed to be appearing frequently. Remembering his own vegetable patch and the blue marble, Shnibbidy Bob tuned in his ears.
Luke Skywalker trotted forward a couple of steps as the elevator door slid open with a self-satisfied whirr and stepped into the leather- surfaced, padded elevator. He wondered briefly why Dr. Pamby would have paid so much money to get goose-down padding on the elevator walls, but that detail was, of course, secondary to the appearance of the other two elevator passengers.
To put it bluntly and cruelly, they looked even crazier than he was.
The girl was wearing flared denim pants and a faded T-shirt, as aforesaid, although we must make allowances for Luke's character. The man was wearing a long overcoat, over a fluffy anorak, over what appeared to be a tattered maroon angora sweater. Several expensive-looking pieces of jewelry dangled from the numerous coat pockets. He was immediately wary, of the man because it was unusual to see a guy in such beaten-up clothes wearing diamonds, of the girl because she was staring around with the vacant air of someone observing some imaginary land, and of both of them because they had obviously both been to the psychiatrist.
Oh well. Neither probably had dangerous lemon juice-drinking habits.
Luke stepped onto the elevator, exchanged a brief salutary nod with them and pressed the button L for lobby. The man nodded back. The girl nodded, then turned away and muttered, "Mom, Dad, if you can hear me I'm alive and I'm not in North Dakota anymore."
He took care to stand as far away from the crazy girl as he could.
Of course, this meant that he had to stand nearer to the diamond- jewelry man. Luke decided to stay on his guard. Sure enough, a couple minutes into the ride, he felt someone scrabbling around in his coat pocket, then felt a toothpick being detached and lifted clear of the fabric.
"Hey!" He spun around. "And what do you think you're doing."
"What?" The man looked genuinely bewildered. That just made him more dangerous.
"You were in my pocket a minute ago."
"Oh, sorry!" the man gasped. "That was your pocket? I could have sworn it was one of mine! I guess that means this is yours, too." He handed back the toothpick. "Pity. It was a very nice toothpick."
"Mine, not yours," Luke said firmly. The girl snorted in the background.
At that moment, there was a sudden, heart-stopping, stomach-expelling lurch, and the elevator jerked to a halt.
Mid-floor.
Good lord, why did everything seem to happen to him?
"Oh, lovely," the girl growled scathingly. "Really nicely planned, getting me, an innocent schizophrenic, stuck on an elevator with a kleptomaniac and..." She peered closer at Luke. "...someone who has an expression like he's been drinking lemon juice all his life."
Luke turned red from his scalp to his toes. How could she possibly have known..?
"I'm not a kleptomaniac," the man said defensively. "You can't believe everything everyone says about you."
"You are my hallucination," the girl shot back. "Therefore, you are not entitled to have opinions."
"Whoever is what," Luke broke in, "we are all stuck in an elevator in a psychiatric ward and could possibly be stuck here for several weeks."
"Such a nice thought." The girl glared at him.
There was a loud and dramatic clunk as the elevator shifted a little further down the shaft. It sounded as though the cable was breaking, as well. Just his luck. He wished he had some lemon juice with him.
"Passengers of the elevator," chimed an annoyingly cheerful voice from over the intercom. "Please do not be alarmed. The elevator cable is still attached by several strands of wire! If you move very, very little, we may be able to rescue at least one of you before the cable snaps completely! The lucky one could be you! Do not despair!" The annoyingly cheerful voice moved away for a moment, muttering, "Oh heavens, I hate having to do this sort of encouragement thing," followed by a still more ambiguous, "kill, kill, kill..." The three glanced at one another; it seemed that the annoyingly cheerful voice was perhaps not quite as cheerful as would be thought. But, after a moment, the voice returned, as peppy as before.
"Hang on down there!" it chirped. "We're sending support personnel down to get you out right now. In a few minutes, one of you will be fine. Count on it. I'm SOS-180, your operator, signing off."
There was a crackle of static, and the intercom switched off.
"Well, that was helpful," snarled the man. " 'One of you will be fine', honestly, how do we decide who lives and who doesn't?"
"We don't listen to that bratty android at all, that's what we do," Luke said briskly. "Let them send their support personnel down all they want, we can get out by ourselves." I wish I had some lemon juice, I wish I had some lemon juice. "See here, there's a trapdoor on the roof of the elevator. If we can get that open, we can climb up onto the cable before it breaks."
"Good point." The girl considered for a moment. "Only two problems. If we move too much, the cable will break entirely. And how are we supposed to get up on the ceiling to pop the trapdoor?"
"Someone could sit on my shoulders," the man suggested. "And we'll...we'll just not move too much."
Luke nodded, as there didn't appear to be an unmanageable number of holes in the logic. It was settled that the girl, being the lightest of the three, would climb onto the kleptomaniac's shoulders and open the trapdoor. She would then climb up onto the still-whole cable, and help pull the other two through after her. The plan was so simple that Luke didn't see why they hadn't thought of it in the first place.
Like lightning they had the trapdoor open, and the girl was shinnying like a monkey up the cable. The elevator rocked from side to side, and there was an ominous twang as another wire snapped. Now the elevator and its two remaining passengers were suspended by exactly three pieces of steel wire. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable fifteen minutes Luke had ever spent, but at least their plan was working.
The kleptomaniac was up the cable as well in short order, hanging onto the schizophrenic girl's ankles. Now, at last, it was Luke's turn to get his rear out of the swaying elevator.
Hup, one. Luke got a good grip on the kleptomaniac's leather boots and hopped up once, preparing for the big haul. Another piece of wire snapped with a low whine. There were exactly two strips of metal between him and death.
Hup, two. Luke bounced again. The elevator swayed again, banging against the elevator shaft's walls. Another wire snapped. His life clung to a single wire.
Hup, three. With an almighty heave, Luke pulled himself up by his arms, the kleptomaniac pulled up with his knees, the girl yowled as the combined weight of two men descended on her ankles, and all three scurried up the cable to safety. And a lucky thing it was, too, because the last jerk on the elevator had snapped the final thread, and now the freed elevator plummeted down story after story into the dark subterranean depths of the psychology building, landing at last with a crash and a plume of acrid smoke.
All three of them were alive.
Only then did they become aware of the voices from the mouth of the shaft far above their heads.
"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," the annoyingly cheerful voice was saying. "I'm sorry, sir, it appears that we've got here to late, the elevator's already collapsed. Oh, I'm so sorry, good lord, I hope there aren't going to be any lawsuits over this because then I will have to kill will have to be fired."
"SOS-180," a male human voice snapped. "This is your fault, and it's up to you to fix it. There's a very faint possibility that they're still alive down there, so it's up to you to go down and find out."
"Surely you don't mean me, sir!" The android's voice filled with a genuine panic. "I'm not trained for this sort of thing, I couldn't go down by the cable will murder, cold murder, cold death, I'd fall and be reduced to my basest components!"
"Then so mote it be," said the human voice grimly. Seconds later, a wailing, human-like golden android came flying over the shaft's mouth and plummeted down through the empty air, flailing hopelessly with metal limbs.
"Hey!" the kleptomaniac shouted. "We're all right down here, what did you do that to your droid for?"
"Don't stand and talk!" The girl kicked him in the nose with her boot heel. "Grab the droid as he comes past us!"
All three stretched out their arms, and, as the android came flying past, they reached out and grabbed him by whatever limb happened to be nearest. Though the momentum set the cable swinging, the catch was successful. Everything was going perfectly.
The first law listed in the great philosopher Seaborgium's book, Some Cynical and Unpleasant Observations I Decided to Write Down One Midsummer Morning, happens to be: If everything is going perfectly, you've obviously overlooked something. (Coincidentally, Seaborgium is also the author of the renowned book, Cooking for the Criminally Insane, but that story is for another chapter to tell.)
My point is, they had unfortunately overlooked something.
The elevator, as chance would have it, had been loaded with several jugs of highly volatile substance by a passing arsonist on his way down from Dr. Pamby's office, and was now blazing merrily at the bottom of the shaft. And, while they had been standing there waiting to recover their wind, the flames had crept up higher and higher, and were now pleasantly warming their toes like chestnuts roasting on an open fire. However, their toes did not happen to be chestnuts, and were definitely not keen on getting roasted over an open fire. Luke's toes in particular, which were closest to the flame, were very insistent about this, and they kept wiggling in unusual directions trying to convince whatever god was listening that they were not chestnuts, and therefore did not need to be roasted.
"Start climbing!" he screamed at the girl. "Like, now, so that I don't turn into a roasted chestnut here!"
"I'm trying!" she wailed in response, "but I have three hundred pounds hanging from my ankles!"
Nonetheless she began laboriously making her way up the cable, towards the faint patch of light and hope that was the shaft's exit to the roof. The kleptomaniac added his efforts to hers, and slowly Luke was pulled out of the range of the fire, to the tune of the golden droid's yowls. Hand over hand, foot over foot, they climbed and climbed and all of a sudden they found that they were on the roof of the psychiatry building, and that they were all alive.
"Well," the girl said, dusting off her hands. "Well, that's one way to spend an evening."
"No kidding," Luke groaned. "I-I want some lemon juice." Instantly he clapped his hand over his mouth, horrified at what he had just revealed. No one in the Galaxy had a lemon juice dependency. Only him, and he was crazy. He turned a beet red.
The kleptomaniac only shrugged, however, and said, "Hey, well, lemon juice may not be exactly what I was thinking of, but I'm hungry. Let's go get dinner; there are bound to be some places open even this late." "Spectacular idea, kleptomaniac!" The girl grinned. "Tell you what, let's go get some sushi. Sushi's the best food you can get, and there's bound to be some sushi bar around here somewhere. There were even sushi bars in North Dakota, and that's saying something..."
She turned away and began scanning the lighted rooftops of Mos Eisly for some sign that bore any trace of Japanese writing or words.
"Two things," the kleptomaniac growled. "One, my name's not 'kleptomaniac'. Two, I'm not a kleptomaniac. Three, what in the Galaxy is sushi?"
"Oh, sorry kleptomaniac," she said absently. "And that was three things, not two."
The great philosopher Seaborgium once said: "There are only three types of people in this world: those who can count, and those who can't." At least, he did say it, until he realized that every stand-up comedian this side of the planet Hoth had used the same joke at least twice in their career, at which point he went mad and started prowling through the underbelly of Coruscant begging people to bake him into a lemon tart. This also happens to be completely irrelevant to the story, so I shall now return to Luke Skywalker and his insane new friends on the roof.
"Yeah," Luke echoed. "What's sushi?"
"Fish, you dingbat," the girl snapped, waving her fingers at him in exasperation. "Raw fish, you know, specially prepared. It's very good, take my word for it."
"Well, it will certainly be an experience," the golden droid chirped. It was the first time he had spoken since their arrival on the rooftop. His voice was still bright and cheerful, despite his having been recently thrown down an elevator shaft and barely rescued from the fate of a chestnut on a chilly winter's night. It annoyed Luke intensely. "Even if sushi isn't for you, at least you'll know that it isn't."
The droid's voice trailed off, and a weird red glow crept into his optical sensors. "Raw sushi," he hissed under his automated breath. "Slice, slice, slice..."
Then, as quickly as it had come, the red glow vanished, and he was the normal cheerful golden android again.
"Apologies," he said cheerfully. "I get odd spells like that sometimes. Never could understand it."
Luke shrugged, nodded, and smiled the same nervous kind of smile that an Egyptian might have upon seeing the Red Sea split suddenly into two when an old man waved his stick at it.
"Anyway." The girl was already climbing down onto the fire escape. "Let's head out...er...who...and...who?"
"Luke Skywalker," Luke supplied helpfully.
"Han Solo." The kleptomaniac said. "They call me the Kleptomaniac in a Sweater."
"SOS-180!" the droid chirruped, attempting a salute with his mechanical arm. "At your service! And who do I have the honor of addressing?"
"Leah, only everyone keeps spelling it funny," the girl said. "I'm either Princess Leia, or Leah, the Local Beatles Freak, depending on who you ask. C'mon, everybody, let's go get dinner."
It took a while. Sushi bars were not particularly common in Mos Eisly. In fact, there seemed to be only one in the entire city, and that one they had bypassed earlier because it didn't look like the total square footage would accommodate three adult humans and one human-shaped droid. However, Leah the Beatles Freak/ Princess Leia was determined to have sushi, so in the end they decide to try and fit through.
It was called the Yoshimoto Sushi Bar, and it was wedged between a dentist's office and the largest pawnshop any of them had ever seen. It covered a couple of warehouse-lengths. In fact, that particular pawnshop boasted the title of "Galaxy's Largest Supplier of Useless and Semi-Useless Junk," but that, too, has little relation to this story. It appeared, however, that the pawnshop had eaten up all the space that the Yoshimoto Sushi Bar had once possessed. The bar's large neon sign was posted above an oversized rat hole in the wall, only just large enough to admit an adult human.
But in they went, or crawled, attracting several stares from passerby at the sight of three pairs of fancy boots sticking out of a hole in the wall.
Much to their relief, the bar opened up a great deal once they were inside. They appeared to be in a sort of lobby, with scenes of sea creatures painted on the walls and an ornate carved silver plaque above the door proudly proclaiming:
Yoshimoto Sushi Bar: The only place in the Galaxy where you can talk to squid.
Since no one was quite sure what to make of this unusual slogan, they decided to ignore it.
"Ready?" Luke straightened out his dusty shirt.
"Ready," the other three echoed. And together they walked under the sign that read The Yoshimoto Sushi Bar and stepped into...well...the Yoshimoto Sushi Bar.
Boredom was something Shnibbidy Bob Joe had long since learned to live with. Yet still there were times when the immense life's work of calculating Pi seemed to be not worth the effort. He got down like that, and he would stuff his paper and pen into the crack in the wall and swear he would never write another number. He always recovered though. There wasn't much else to do behind a Sith Lord's refrigerator.
Shnibbidy Bob set down his pen and leaned back, deciding to eavesdrop instead of work. Darth Vader was having a heated argument with some other admiral character, in which the words "space-time" and "vegetables" seemed to be appearing frequently. Remembering his own vegetable patch and the blue marble, Shnibbidy Bob tuned in his ears.
Luke Skywalker trotted forward a couple of steps as the elevator door slid open with a self-satisfied whirr and stepped into the leather- surfaced, padded elevator. He wondered briefly why Dr. Pamby would have paid so much money to get goose-down padding on the elevator walls, but that detail was, of course, secondary to the appearance of the other two elevator passengers.
To put it bluntly and cruelly, they looked even crazier than he was.
The girl was wearing flared denim pants and a faded T-shirt, as aforesaid, although we must make allowances for Luke's character. The man was wearing a long overcoat, over a fluffy anorak, over what appeared to be a tattered maroon angora sweater. Several expensive-looking pieces of jewelry dangled from the numerous coat pockets. He was immediately wary, of the man because it was unusual to see a guy in such beaten-up clothes wearing diamonds, of the girl because she was staring around with the vacant air of someone observing some imaginary land, and of both of them because they had obviously both been to the psychiatrist.
Oh well. Neither probably had dangerous lemon juice-drinking habits.
Luke stepped onto the elevator, exchanged a brief salutary nod with them and pressed the button L for lobby. The man nodded back. The girl nodded, then turned away and muttered, "Mom, Dad, if you can hear me I'm alive and I'm not in North Dakota anymore."
He took care to stand as far away from the crazy girl as he could.
Of course, this meant that he had to stand nearer to the diamond- jewelry man. Luke decided to stay on his guard. Sure enough, a couple minutes into the ride, he felt someone scrabbling around in his coat pocket, then felt a toothpick being detached and lifted clear of the fabric.
"Hey!" He spun around. "And what do you think you're doing."
"What?" The man looked genuinely bewildered. That just made him more dangerous.
"You were in my pocket a minute ago."
"Oh, sorry!" the man gasped. "That was your pocket? I could have sworn it was one of mine! I guess that means this is yours, too." He handed back the toothpick. "Pity. It was a very nice toothpick."
"Mine, not yours," Luke said firmly. The girl snorted in the background.
At that moment, there was a sudden, heart-stopping, stomach-expelling lurch, and the elevator jerked to a halt.
Mid-floor.
Good lord, why did everything seem to happen to him?
"Oh, lovely," the girl growled scathingly. "Really nicely planned, getting me, an innocent schizophrenic, stuck on an elevator with a kleptomaniac and..." She peered closer at Luke. "...someone who has an expression like he's been drinking lemon juice all his life."
Luke turned red from his scalp to his toes. How could she possibly have known..?
"I'm not a kleptomaniac," the man said defensively. "You can't believe everything everyone says about you."
"You are my hallucination," the girl shot back. "Therefore, you are not entitled to have opinions."
"Whoever is what," Luke broke in, "we are all stuck in an elevator in a psychiatric ward and could possibly be stuck here for several weeks."
"Such a nice thought." The girl glared at him.
There was a loud and dramatic clunk as the elevator shifted a little further down the shaft. It sounded as though the cable was breaking, as well. Just his luck. He wished he had some lemon juice with him.
"Passengers of the elevator," chimed an annoyingly cheerful voice from over the intercom. "Please do not be alarmed. The elevator cable is still attached by several strands of wire! If you move very, very little, we may be able to rescue at least one of you before the cable snaps completely! The lucky one could be you! Do not despair!" The annoyingly cheerful voice moved away for a moment, muttering, "Oh heavens, I hate having to do this sort of encouragement thing," followed by a still more ambiguous, "kill, kill, kill..." The three glanced at one another; it seemed that the annoyingly cheerful voice was perhaps not quite as cheerful as would be thought. But, after a moment, the voice returned, as peppy as before.
"Hang on down there!" it chirped. "We're sending support personnel down to get you out right now. In a few minutes, one of you will be fine. Count on it. I'm SOS-180, your operator, signing off."
There was a crackle of static, and the intercom switched off.
"Well, that was helpful," snarled the man. " 'One of you will be fine', honestly, how do we decide who lives and who doesn't?"
"We don't listen to that bratty android at all, that's what we do," Luke said briskly. "Let them send their support personnel down all they want, we can get out by ourselves." I wish I had some lemon juice, I wish I had some lemon juice. "See here, there's a trapdoor on the roof of the elevator. If we can get that open, we can climb up onto the cable before it breaks."
"Good point." The girl considered for a moment. "Only two problems. If we move too much, the cable will break entirely. And how are we supposed to get up on the ceiling to pop the trapdoor?"
"Someone could sit on my shoulders," the man suggested. "And we'll...we'll just not move too much."
Luke nodded, as there didn't appear to be an unmanageable number of holes in the logic. It was settled that the girl, being the lightest of the three, would climb onto the kleptomaniac's shoulders and open the trapdoor. She would then climb up onto the still-whole cable, and help pull the other two through after her. The plan was so simple that Luke didn't see why they hadn't thought of it in the first place.
Like lightning they had the trapdoor open, and the girl was shinnying like a monkey up the cable. The elevator rocked from side to side, and there was an ominous twang as another wire snapped. Now the elevator and its two remaining passengers were suspended by exactly three pieces of steel wire. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable fifteen minutes Luke had ever spent, but at least their plan was working.
The kleptomaniac was up the cable as well in short order, hanging onto the schizophrenic girl's ankles. Now, at last, it was Luke's turn to get his rear out of the swaying elevator.
Hup, one. Luke got a good grip on the kleptomaniac's leather boots and hopped up once, preparing for the big haul. Another piece of wire snapped with a low whine. There were exactly two strips of metal between him and death.
Hup, two. Luke bounced again. The elevator swayed again, banging against the elevator shaft's walls. Another wire snapped. His life clung to a single wire.
Hup, three. With an almighty heave, Luke pulled himself up by his arms, the kleptomaniac pulled up with his knees, the girl yowled as the combined weight of two men descended on her ankles, and all three scurried up the cable to safety. And a lucky thing it was, too, because the last jerk on the elevator had snapped the final thread, and now the freed elevator plummeted down story after story into the dark subterranean depths of the psychology building, landing at last with a crash and a plume of acrid smoke.
All three of them were alive.
Only then did they become aware of the voices from the mouth of the shaft far above their heads.
"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," the annoyingly cheerful voice was saying. "I'm sorry, sir, it appears that we've got here to late, the elevator's already collapsed. Oh, I'm so sorry, good lord, I hope there aren't going to be any lawsuits over this because then I will have to kill will have to be fired."
"SOS-180," a male human voice snapped. "This is your fault, and it's up to you to fix it. There's a very faint possibility that they're still alive down there, so it's up to you to go down and find out."
"Surely you don't mean me, sir!" The android's voice filled with a genuine panic. "I'm not trained for this sort of thing, I couldn't go down by the cable will murder, cold murder, cold death, I'd fall and be reduced to my basest components!"
"Then so mote it be," said the human voice grimly. Seconds later, a wailing, human-like golden android came flying over the shaft's mouth and plummeted down through the empty air, flailing hopelessly with metal limbs.
"Hey!" the kleptomaniac shouted. "We're all right down here, what did you do that to your droid for?"
"Don't stand and talk!" The girl kicked him in the nose with her boot heel. "Grab the droid as he comes past us!"
All three stretched out their arms, and, as the android came flying past, they reached out and grabbed him by whatever limb happened to be nearest. Though the momentum set the cable swinging, the catch was successful. Everything was going perfectly.
The first law listed in the great philosopher Seaborgium's book, Some Cynical and Unpleasant Observations I Decided to Write Down One Midsummer Morning, happens to be: If everything is going perfectly, you've obviously overlooked something. (Coincidentally, Seaborgium is also the author of the renowned book, Cooking for the Criminally Insane, but that story is for another chapter to tell.)
My point is, they had unfortunately overlooked something.
The elevator, as chance would have it, had been loaded with several jugs of highly volatile substance by a passing arsonist on his way down from Dr. Pamby's office, and was now blazing merrily at the bottom of the shaft. And, while they had been standing there waiting to recover their wind, the flames had crept up higher and higher, and were now pleasantly warming their toes like chestnuts roasting on an open fire. However, their toes did not happen to be chestnuts, and were definitely not keen on getting roasted over an open fire. Luke's toes in particular, which were closest to the flame, were very insistent about this, and they kept wiggling in unusual directions trying to convince whatever god was listening that they were not chestnuts, and therefore did not need to be roasted.
"Start climbing!" he screamed at the girl. "Like, now, so that I don't turn into a roasted chestnut here!"
"I'm trying!" she wailed in response, "but I have three hundred pounds hanging from my ankles!"
Nonetheless she began laboriously making her way up the cable, towards the faint patch of light and hope that was the shaft's exit to the roof. The kleptomaniac added his efforts to hers, and slowly Luke was pulled out of the range of the fire, to the tune of the golden droid's yowls. Hand over hand, foot over foot, they climbed and climbed and all of a sudden they found that they were on the roof of the psychiatry building, and that they were all alive.
"Well," the girl said, dusting off her hands. "Well, that's one way to spend an evening."
"No kidding," Luke groaned. "I-I want some lemon juice." Instantly he clapped his hand over his mouth, horrified at what he had just revealed. No one in the Galaxy had a lemon juice dependency. Only him, and he was crazy. He turned a beet red.
The kleptomaniac only shrugged, however, and said, "Hey, well, lemon juice may not be exactly what I was thinking of, but I'm hungry. Let's go get dinner; there are bound to be some places open even this late." "Spectacular idea, kleptomaniac!" The girl grinned. "Tell you what, let's go get some sushi. Sushi's the best food you can get, and there's bound to be some sushi bar around here somewhere. There were even sushi bars in North Dakota, and that's saying something..."
She turned away and began scanning the lighted rooftops of Mos Eisly for some sign that bore any trace of Japanese writing or words.
"Two things," the kleptomaniac growled. "One, my name's not 'kleptomaniac'. Two, I'm not a kleptomaniac. Three, what in the Galaxy is sushi?"
"Oh, sorry kleptomaniac," she said absently. "And that was three things, not two."
The great philosopher Seaborgium once said: "There are only three types of people in this world: those who can count, and those who can't." At least, he did say it, until he realized that every stand-up comedian this side of the planet Hoth had used the same joke at least twice in their career, at which point he went mad and started prowling through the underbelly of Coruscant begging people to bake him into a lemon tart. This also happens to be completely irrelevant to the story, so I shall now return to Luke Skywalker and his insane new friends on the roof.
"Yeah," Luke echoed. "What's sushi?"
"Fish, you dingbat," the girl snapped, waving her fingers at him in exasperation. "Raw fish, you know, specially prepared. It's very good, take my word for it."
"Well, it will certainly be an experience," the golden droid chirped. It was the first time he had spoken since their arrival on the rooftop. His voice was still bright and cheerful, despite his having been recently thrown down an elevator shaft and barely rescued from the fate of a chestnut on a chilly winter's night. It annoyed Luke intensely. "Even if sushi isn't for you, at least you'll know that it isn't."
The droid's voice trailed off, and a weird red glow crept into his optical sensors. "Raw sushi," he hissed under his automated breath. "Slice, slice, slice..."
Then, as quickly as it had come, the red glow vanished, and he was the normal cheerful golden android again.
"Apologies," he said cheerfully. "I get odd spells like that sometimes. Never could understand it."
Luke shrugged, nodded, and smiled the same nervous kind of smile that an Egyptian might have upon seeing the Red Sea split suddenly into two when an old man waved his stick at it.
"Anyway." The girl was already climbing down onto the fire escape. "Let's head out...er...who...and...who?"
"Luke Skywalker," Luke supplied helpfully.
"Han Solo." The kleptomaniac said. "They call me the Kleptomaniac in a Sweater."
"SOS-180!" the droid chirruped, attempting a salute with his mechanical arm. "At your service! And who do I have the honor of addressing?"
"Leah, only everyone keeps spelling it funny," the girl said. "I'm either Princess Leia, or Leah, the Local Beatles Freak, depending on who you ask. C'mon, everybody, let's go get dinner."
It took a while. Sushi bars were not particularly common in Mos Eisly. In fact, there seemed to be only one in the entire city, and that one they had bypassed earlier because it didn't look like the total square footage would accommodate three adult humans and one human-shaped droid. However, Leah the Beatles Freak/ Princess Leia was determined to have sushi, so in the end they decide to try and fit through.
It was called the Yoshimoto Sushi Bar, and it was wedged between a dentist's office and the largest pawnshop any of them had ever seen. It covered a couple of warehouse-lengths. In fact, that particular pawnshop boasted the title of "Galaxy's Largest Supplier of Useless and Semi-Useless Junk," but that, too, has little relation to this story. It appeared, however, that the pawnshop had eaten up all the space that the Yoshimoto Sushi Bar had once possessed. The bar's large neon sign was posted above an oversized rat hole in the wall, only just large enough to admit an adult human.
But in they went, or crawled, attracting several stares from passerby at the sight of three pairs of fancy boots sticking out of a hole in the wall.
Much to their relief, the bar opened up a great deal once they were inside. They appeared to be in a sort of lobby, with scenes of sea creatures painted on the walls and an ornate carved silver plaque above the door proudly proclaiming:
Yoshimoto Sushi Bar: The only place in the Galaxy where you can talk to squid.
Since no one was quite sure what to make of this unusual slogan, they decided to ignore it.
"Ready?" Luke straightened out his dusty shirt.
"Ready," the other three echoed. And together they walked under the sign that read The Yoshimoto Sushi Bar and stepped into...well...the Yoshimoto Sushi Bar.
