LL: Okay. So, dear, you and I have dropped off the face of the earth. And Aladailey is ready to explode with impatience, and I figured I could alleviate some of that. Thus, the update. winkwinknudgenudge Actually, I take that back because such nudges and winks are annoying and you've probably had the semester from hell like I have. So. It's Christmastime and I'm in the spirit to celebrate. KR does a scary Xmas dance. Here's some party music, you do the same. :)
And I've gotten random as well.
Sigh.
I think its an inevitability that fanfic writers are random by nature. The more successful, the more random. (That doesn't bode well for you if I'm going insane. Think of what your enormous popularity will do to you.) So, enjoy the land of Oz, as I'm sure you've been rejoined by your family for the holidays, and a happy Christmas to you!
KR
Aladailey: Aladailey, dear, this chapter is dedicated to you for your inexhaustive efforts to get LL and I to update. I don't know about LL, but I appreciated reading your nags very much. Hee-hee. Thank you very much for the motivation to get back on this massive thingie here. :)
Jillie Rose: Ah, I appreciate all kinds of reviews. Long ones, short ones, skinny ones, fat ones . . . Thanks for the favorites add!
Peach: I'm glad you are enjoying this story. Thank you for reading!
HSG: Thanks for the anniversary wishes, HSG. Where have you been lately? I haven't seen you at PatS! Come back!
Culf: Poor Leia seems to be the consistent remark around here. :) Thanks for reading!
Nebulia: It was fun to write Rimmas as the neurotic author . . . because no one I know is a neurotic author . . . ahem. :)
Summers2004: Yeah, well, you know. I'm trying to make it funny and interesting, but it just wasn't coming . . . Thanks, anyway!
GreatOne: Thanks for the compliment, PT! Considering I've shirked on reviewing your stories lately . . . well, thanks for reading anyway!
Reading Redhead: It was fun to write, but I love writing psychotic characters. Even normal characters somehow come out psychotic, it seems, when I try to write them. :) Thanks for the kind review, I appreciate it!
Ellina HOPE: Well, the hope would be that none of this story would be cliche or overused. I'm glad to see that is hasn't been that way, yet. We'll see if that changes as the chapters roll on, hmm?
Fair-Ithil: Aw, well, thank you for the kind words. I do so appreciate them. Once I get this pesky plot thingie out of the way, I'll get working on the HL interaction. Thank you!
Trout: I love you. So, I posted chapter 18 of this thing, as awful as it is . . . when are you posting your smut? Or at least letting me read it? Actually, I still need to review two of your stories . . . never mind about the guilt trip. It doesn't apply if the guilter is more guilty than the guiltee. Hee-hee.
SuP3R G1R: Thank you!
Solo Shodan: Well, like I keep saying, I've had this whole big plot thing all worked out since I started posting it, and its on a white board and everything. Never mind that I keep changing my mind and all, but whatever. Thanks for understanding how much preplanning went into this story!
Mirax Myra Terrik: Well, I very nearly did do that this time, not updating and all, but I'm back! Woot! Thanks for continuing to read!
Clare: Ah, well, reviewing these reviews is making me feel incredibly guilty, but that's my fault. Thanks for the nag, it was needed and helped motivate me to get back in my writing chair. Thank you!
Dimonah Tralon: Thank you!
QueenofAces: Squeal! Queenie, you're another one I haven't seen around too much lately. Not that I myself have been around too much ... whatever. :) Thank you for reading, and I hope your Xmas break is a good one!
TheZorpisuttle: You know, this is one of those moments where I'd really wish I could say "Yes, I'm a brilliant author and what you smart people see in this story was completely intended." Except I'm too stupidly honest to say that and I end up looking likea complete idiot when I tell you that no, actually, the pun on Meme Rar's name is by accident. Purely by accident. Isn't it refreshing to know that the person responsible for this trainwreck of a story isn't actually as smart as she seems? Lol, thanks for the comments. Perhaps you should write this story instead of me!
Anna: And this is my sheepish look. Well, its better later than never, right? Thanks for reading!
Linnath: I'm glad you like my sarcasm! It's kind of unconscious, really, so I'm glad you think it makes sense with the story. Thanks for reading!
Ginny-Star: I'm happy you think its so in-character! That's the best compliment to receive and I love getting it!
Passivor: Well, thank you. I appreciate the comment!
Rana Ninque: Ah, well, I can't speak for LL, but I'm updating as a Christmas present to my wonderful readers. Thank you for your interest and kind comments!
dm1: It isn't dead, just comatose for a bit. I've given it a shot of pure adrenalin, which has made it excited to be updated . . . I think I'm amusing, at least. :)
Okay, people. Here I am, resplendent in all my guilt and shame, ready to present a new chapter of this really annoying story to you, my loyal readers. :) Thank you for all your kind comments and not-so-subtle hints to update (ahem, Aladailey, ahem). I'm still amazed that so many people are interested in this plotline.
I know this seems to be a terminal issue with Pink Nails, but this chapter doesn't seem quite up to par with my expectations. But, I reasoned, I haven't updated in nearly four months, and it's time to get the show on the road again.
So here we go. Unfinished, unbeta-ed, and quite late, chapter 18.
Leia decided that things weren't going well right about the time the real Rimmas Stribur broke one of the red tracking earrings during breakfast the next morning.
The earring was merely the icing on the ryshcate. Earlier the previous evening, she'd herded "Meme" and Ivoen into her appointed quarters to get the dust settled and return Ivoen to her former status as blind, deaf, sickeningly cute, unbelievably naïve roommate. What had resulted was another barrage of questions and accusations that flew faster than the Falcon on a particularly green-lighted hyperdrive day.
Leia sat quietly and "Meme" fidgeted as Ivoen's voice rose in volume and fluctuated with her charges of spice peddling and slave trading, nexu race gambling and black market corporate stealing.
Amusing enough, treachery against the reigning galactic government was not among the allegations.
"If you would just tell me, I wouldn't be so angry." She huffed. "I'm not going to tell anyone and I might be able to help you get out of whatever it is you're into."
"No. If I tell you what's going on, you know what will happen?" Leia looked significantly at "Meme." "You'll get caught in it, too. And that is something I'm not willing to do."
"So I'm supposed to sit blindly by and just accept that you're doing something illegal without knowing what it is?"
"Yes."
"Blast it, Rims, that's ridiculous." She turned to "Meme." "You tell me, Meme Rar, or I'll go to my parents and get you arrested for whatever crime I decide you committed."
"Meme" put up her hands in a gesture of placation. "That's not something you'll want to do. Feds here aren't as corrupt as some planets. They'll check me out, and then Rimmas, and then who'll be next on the list?"
Ivoen shook her head. "This is insane."
"Yes, it is."
"We'll be stuck here all night if necessary until I get some kind of answer from the two of you." She stuck an index finger into Leia's face. "And don't give me that crap about how innocent I am. I can handle myself."
Leia looked at "Meme", who shrugged and gave a long, melodramatic sigh. "I don't know, Rims. Maybe we'd better tell her. It'd make life easier for you, at least."
Leia arched an eyebrow. "Fine, you do it. I'm not responsible if she goes crying to mummy and daddy."
Ivoen's indignant 'hey!' was ignored by the two Rebels. "Meme" sucked in a noisy breath and blew it out in a burst of falsified stress. "Okay. Er, Ivoen. It's like this." She waited until Ivoen looked fit to burst. "I started this business when Rims and I were in, what, secondary prep school?"
Leia nodded.
"And it became this enormous underground black market thing that just exploded in our pre-graduating year."
Ivoen's eyes seemed to swallow up the top half of her face. "What did you sell?"
"Do sell. It's a lucrative industry."
Leia nodded again. "Meme here has enough time to fool around in the fiction market because of the profits."
"So - ?"
Leia looked at "Meme" who answered with a note of pride in her voice. "You are looking at the founder and manager of Industro Lights."
Ivoen's stare mutated into confusion. "Industro Lights?"
"Meme" raised an eyebrow at Ivoen. "Stimgum? Caf pills? All-nighter burstbars?" She looked over to Leia. "Apparently we're not as famous as we thought."
"She's not a local." Leia looked towards Ivoen. "Industro Lights is a small, local-based company trading not-so-legal stimulation concoctions, based primarily on a combination of caffeine and small mineral supplements."
"Er." Ivoen bowed her head. "How 'not-so-legal'?"
"Somewhere between lifting pieces of fruit from the local grocery store and genocide. Meaning – " "Meme" put a hand on Ivoen's shoulder and whispered in a way Leia was sure she'd seen in a few B-rated holofilms released a century ago. "We could get a ihefty/i fine should any unwanted feds get wind of it."
"Oh."
"Yeah." Leia's lips curled up in amusement. "Welcome to the ranks of black market drug trafficking. We hope your stay is a pleasant one."
The charming restaurant was a wash of dark hues, of blood red and dark brown and tiny drops of cream running together on the walls, highlighted by enormous gaudy chandeliers propelled near the high ceiling on hoverclips attached to the ends. Cutlery ranged in size, several pieced to one place setting arranged with grandiose hysteria next to a centerpiece bordering on the effervescent. Patrons were eyeing each other with barely contained jealousy and distaste, flashing rings and currency cards priced up in the millions for their neighbors to see.
High society. Effluent, restrictive, and exclusive.
Leia sighed.
It is so good to be home.
The deterrent to the picture was Ivoen, whose eyes were racing back and forth between her easily conversational parents, who, it seemed, fully intended to ignore their daughter, her roommate, and her roommate's friend as long as their wine flowed in excess and the conversation remained interesting. Ivoen had been quiet all evening as she absorbed the fantastic narration of Leia and the real Stribur. They had intended to reveal enough of their fictitious illegal ways to scare Ivoen off the trail, to cover their tracks and the mistakes Leia had made earlier.
It hadn't been as easy to convince Ivoen as "Meme" had anticipated, but not nearly as difficult as Leia had. Ivoen seemed primarily soothed by the explanations, even interested in obtaining a sample of stimcaf dinner mints "Meme" had offered, an interest she justified on the grounds of "finals week stress" and what she called her complete lack of study skills whatsoever.
Leia was sure this had all gone way too well considering her history and Ivoen's unnatural recollective abilities. But the alternative was to wear herself down worrying about hibridium and Leorime and the Falcon – a concept that, for once, seemed unrealistic and stupid.
I'm going to just sit here and pretend I'm as emotionally young as I biologically am.
"So, Rims, you've seen the new sheercoats, I'm assuming, right?"
Leia shook her head and reconnected to the conversation. "I'm sorry. Huh?"
"Meme" repeated her question. "The sheercoats. The ones I told you were the next big thing?" Leia nodded her head. "Well, Bartev is slaving away trying to get enough out for the Semsort holiday season."
"Are they now?"
"Absolutely. And you know what I was thinking, right?"
Leia looked over at Ivoen, a tired expression on her face. "If this thinking has anything to do with my bank account, you can forget it."
Ivoen brought her napkin to her mouth to cover her smile as "Meme" shook her head and continued on. "Hilarious. Actually, I was thinking that tomorrow would be a fabulous time to check out the Rivaucnev City branch and see how much they're overpricing them." She blinked twice and turned her attention to Ivoen. "Do you much care for Core fashion, Ivoen?"
"Not so much." She blushed. "I'm more of a 'wear whatever's clean' kind of girl."
"Well, that is a shame. Someday Rims will have to remedy that." "Meme" smiled. "Then you wouldn't mind if I stole your roommate tomorrow afternoon before we all head back to civilization?"
Leia looked at the Rimmas Stribur and raised an eyebrow.
Huh. Well, the newbie certainly is on the ball there, isn't she?
It wasn't until they'd gotten out past the sweeping shores of the ocean to the mainland that Stribur managed to comprehend the import of the red earrings.
"Tracking? Positioning tech in a thing that small?" She huffed a breath into the climate controlled air duct to her right as she navigated the Sorreh's speeder at a ridiculously slow pace. "Solo's got quite the mind on him."
"Except that now I've got no real reason to have only one earring on me. You broke the other this morning."
"Right. Well, I'm sure he'll be able to fix it or get you something else. You have the other one with you, right?"
Leia shook her head. "It's hidden in the bathroom next to the master bedroom. I kept it there to make sure the audio feed could be tapped again."
"We got comms." Stribur looked at Leia. "We can do this. Don't look so worried."
Leia arched an eyebrow at her. "Who's worried?"
Furacom's largest hibridium-mining operation turned out to be located nearly 1.5 hours away from the Sorreh's vacation home in Rivaucnev City, the drive made even more maddeningly slow because Stribur seemed unable to push the speeder past the limit of the continental law. Leia spent the entirety of the trip remembering why she despised Stribur's constant upbeat attitude and wishing, for once, that Han was around to speed up the trip. His maniac obsession with speed would certainly come in handy right now.
By the time the Sorreh's speeder pulled to a hasty stop, Leia had fallen into an off-and-on sleep. She awoke to Stribur's insistent pokes to her shoulder, waving off the Intel agent before she incurred bruises.
The speeder was nestled in the back of what appeared to be a large, sheltered grotto overrun with blue fungi and luminescent moss that changed periodically to liquid and solidified again as they watched. Leia coughed into the sudden headiness of environment, a feeling of drowned hysteria seeping into her head and running down through her fingers. The darkness was almost complete but for a sliver of light cracked through the ceiling, nearly a hundred meters over their heads.
She turned to Stribur. "Care to tell me how we managed to get sucked into a space slug while driving in a speeder onworld?"
"The core production facility is down below us. I didn't think we wanted to ring the doorbell and ask for a tour."
"How did we get in here?"
"Speeders have headlights. I turned 'em off after we got far enough into the cave to shelter Besti."
"Besti?"
"The speeder. She should have a name."
Leia shook the comment off, well aware of the strange custom some beings had to give names to unintelligent hunks of metal. "The mouth of the cave is which way?"
Stribur hopped out of the speeder and shouldered a pack stashed below her seat. "This way. C'mon. We've don't have a long time before we have to be heading back to the Sorreh's. They might miss Besti." She looked up from where she was tying her boot. "Well. You know. You too. They'd miss you, too. I didn't mean – "
"Shut up and start walking."
The cave was not nearly as long or narrow as Leia had estimated based on its darkness. It took them about a quarter of an hour to reach the mouth of the cave, climb its wooded sides, and peer over a rather large ravine situated at the bottom of a massive set of sandy hills. Deeply entrenched in the sand sat a tower of soft black cortisaltine spewing workers in rough yellow jumpsuits carrying long vibroaxes and pails of ocean water. The line of workers hunched over in tandem and marched over a large sand dune towards another dune, where a large pool of orange-painted mining drills worked a wall of mossy green rocks.
Leia watched them as they alternated groups, as the headmen cursed and swore at the yellow line of pathetic workers, as the ocean water drenched them and swept some off their feet. As a chunk of green was heaved off the top of the wall, tipped over the edge and dropping without grace onto the waiting sand, wet from the aggressive tide as it came in. As the new line of workers replaced the old, reaching over piles of rubble to swing the pickaxes and vibrotools into pressure points of the wall, the emerald pieces of hibridium flying, chips cascading down onto the yellow suits, a nauseating combination of life and fire.
"Well," Stribur's voice rang loudly in the stillness of their perch. "They're certainly working something. Is that our hibridium?"
"That's it." Leia grabbed a handful of rock with her left hand to steady herself as she pointed with her right. "The green there and there. That's the mine. It's then refined in that –" she huffed "– building there and packaged, I guess, for sale and sent."
"Offworld?"
"I have absolutely no idea. I've never heard of hibridium mining anywhere other than on Garos IV."
"Which was cordoned off five, six years ago."
"Two and a half, actually." Leia sighed. "The Empire put a multi-billion credit fund onto the mining of hibridium from Garos IV. It was requisitioned through the Senate before I was a member." She gripped her handful of rock more tightly. "My father and Garm bel Iblis were both concerned about the large expenditures early on, and made it a priority when the Rebellion was officially established to look into small cloaking device technology."
"What'd they find?"
"Nothing. And then Garos IV was blocked off and the race for small fighter cloaking devices was stopped by both the Rebellion and the Empire. Except – " she indicated the long line of yellow " – it seems someone is still looking into hibridium."
"Not good."
"Not good." Leia smiled at Stribur. "And this on top of the big shockball match next week and my chem term paper."
"Care to let go of your oh-so-stressful schedule and do some extreme sightseeing with intention to spy?"
Leia's grin widened. "Sure, seeing as how they look so hospitable and all . . . "
Erm, hi? Review?Ah, screw this. I'm going Christmas shopping . . . :)
KR
Edit: Simone, from LiveJournal: I forgot to mention your wonderfully ego-boosting review under the reviewers. I am so sorry – I truly forgot. Your comment on LJ was so incredibly humbling and fortifying … I was rendered completely speechless as I read it. I thank you so much for your kind and gracious comments, which were entirely undeserved but nevertheless made my day/week/month. :) Again, I'm sorry … I hope you haven't read this chapter before I had a chance to edit it. I would feel terrible if you never read this. Have a wonderful holiday season and may your New Year be blessed and full of kept resolutions. :)