Pete poured a seventy credit shot of Corellian Whiskey into the glass. "Will that be all, sir?" This particular customer was almost a regular now. Though deeply creepy and prone to taking up an entire table by himself, the hooded figure would sit there at the corner table and drink one whiskey every half hour with the regularity of a droid. This would go on for exactly five hours, whereupon the hood would rise and leave with a huge tip, so long as Pete made no attempt to engage in any kind of conversation.
"That's fine. Leave me for now." The hollow hood rose, revealing nothing but blackness beneath as he drank.
"Yes sir." Pete went back to the bar, suppressing a shudder. The hood was creepy as hell and caused people to leave, but he tipped even better than the frog.
The door chime rang and Pete smiled as another regular entered. Anakin! How's the wife? He poured a dram of Blue Ruin, then mixed in the cacao juice, not bothering to ask what the approaching Jedi wanted. Anakin was indifferent to the concoction but they had determined through terrifying experimentation that a Blue Stinger was the only drink that the Jedi's hormonal nightmare of a wife couldn't smell on him.
"Big as a rancor and twice as mean." Anakin sat down at the bar and took a grateful sip of his drink. "She's chewing on my ass every single day, like some kind of... ass chewing thing. Going on even the stupidest Jedi suicide mission is like a beach vacation."
Pete sniggered. "Well, I told you that young love is fleeting."
Anakin hunched, cupping his drink. "Hey, I still love her and all, but, you know, sometimes I just want to have a drink, play a little sabbac, buy some cool stuff without asking her permission. I tell you, she was never like this before she got all fat. Force! I mean pregnant!" Anakin cursed his loose tongue again. He'd vowed not to use certain words anymore. He would rather face fifty heavy droidekas with nothing but a rolled up news-fax than slip and say the 'f' word to Padme ever, ever again.
"Whipped you are, Anakin. Heh heh heh. Deserve it you do. Plumbing the depths of attachment you are. Funny it is." Lying in his usual spot behind the bar, a drunken Yoda poked Pete with his stick. "Hit me again, ugly human."
"Gladly." Pete mixed another Plum Evil and passed it down to the small alien with a professional smile. Yoda was an uncommonly abrasive little frog, but his tips were enormous.
"Aw, he's back there again? That's all I need today." Anakin leaned over the bar and noted the old Jedi Master's eyes looking in separate directions. Sitting back on his stool, Anakin ran a palm down his face. It wasn't even five o'clock yet. From the sodden look of him, Yoda, the lush, had probably started right after the council meeting broke up, well before noon. Anakin scowled. He'd been possessed of the same impulse, but Obi-Wan had ditched his duty, sadistically forcing his reluctant padwan to teach a class of younglings Form III defensive dueling. It was a truly onerous task for Anakin, who had grown up scrapping in the Mos Espa bazaar and was utterly creeped-out by the ultra polite and almost emotionless Jedi kids that the temple raised. The whole thing was crazy. Only a truly sick mind would invent a lightsaber form that was purely defensive, like Form III, and then teach it to kids that had been raised to have almost no sense of self preservation. Anakin vastly preferred the relentless balls-to-the-wall-and-kill-'em-all assault of Form VII, and that's what he'd taught as 'Form Three and a Half' in the training hall today.
Yoda snorted. "Relax, Whipped One, Friday it is. Talk of Force or Jedi poodoo I shall not inflict." Yoda guzzled noisily, then exhaled loudly. "Drunk am I and so much drunker will I become."
"Awesome." Anakin wondered what else he could possibly have to talk about with Yoda. Actually, he mostly came to Blastars Rest to talk with Pete. Anakin never made a move anymore without qualified advice. His last three missions had been planned out on napkins by Pete and a couple of the regulars at the bar. Pete tended to emphasize stealth and personal survival over the more suicidal 'straight down the middle' tactics favored by the Obi-Wan and the Jedi Council.
Pete mixed up a pitcher of stingers and motioned with his eyes toward a table. "Say, Anakin, hate to bring it up, but your tab is really getting up there. Can you pay?"
Anakin sighed. "Padme had Artoo hack my credit account. She keeps track of every single credit I get and every single credit I spend. I don't know what to do about it."
Yoda sniggered.
Pete frowned. "Hmm. That's a tough one. I take it that Queenie knows exactly when you get your pension check?"
"Yeah. She keeps nagging me to invest it too. She has all kinds of financial crap that she wants me to read." Anakin took a morose sip of his drink and plunked a very high denomination universal credit chit down on the bar. "Just let it ride. I don't know what to do about her."
"Just wait till she pops. The kid will distract her and you can ditch the droid as a bodyguard for the kid." Pete picked up the chit and fed it into the bar's point of sale register. "You're paid ahead for a good long time. So where did that come from?"
Anakin shrugged. "A guy I met at work."
Pete nodded, wiping the bar. "Is this like your droid parts business?" Anakin had started picking up some of the more valuable droid parts that he ran across during a mission after Pete had introduced him to another regular, Solly, who had a droid repair business.
"Sort of. Headless Nemodians who are about to be completely blown up anyway don't need universal credit chits. Besides, as my old master used to say, 'To the winner goes the pickings."
"Hit me again you will. On the Whipped One's tab, place it." Yoda struggled up to a sitting position. "Unusual philosophy that is, for a Jedi. Which Master so speaks?"
"Right away, Master Yoda." Pete hesitated over some drain cleaner, then reluctantly selected a bottle of the Plum Shandy that his nephew made. Half a glass of pure grain alcohol, half shandy, one stir and a sprig of loco berry to add some pop and the drink was prepared. No one but Yoda would dare a 'Plum Evil.'
Anakin smirked. "Master Wattoo, back in the day. He was a real philosopher. He also said, 'There is no second winner,' and 'Never give anyone an even break."
"Wise words and true, but not words of the Jedi Order. Fearful we were of your potential to fall to the dark side. Delighted I am that the power of the bottle you have uncorked."
"What do you mean?" Anakin nodded his thanks as Pete poured another stinger.
"To want, attachment leads. To fear, want leads. To anger, fear leads and to the dark side, anger leads," mused Yoda. "Unless to strong drink want leads first. To a sound sleep on the pile of cardboard in the alley, strong drink leads. A problem for the Republic this is not."
Pete was polishing a glass, listening intently. "Wow. That's kind of profound. So do you think I should open up a place by the Jedi temple? As a public service, I mean."
Yoda sighed, deeply saddened by a memory. "To be caught in the bar a Jedi cannot, lest to Deep Flatulence or one of the other agricorp planets the council assign. Closed by the Republic's order some three hundred years ago was Darth Bob's Place, the last Jedi bar, when came to power the Reform Party. To drink well, far from the temple must the Jedi go."
"Those damned dirty no good do-gooding tools!" Pete hated the Reform Party with the heat and focus of a finely tuned turbolaser.
"Hey!" Anakin was a little offended. Padme was one of the Reform Party's legislative whips, or something like that. He had no problem believing it and stayed as far away from the Senate as possible. He never wanted to see her whipping anyone. Politics sounded really violent. It was no surprise that she was so good at it.
"I meant the Jedi council," added Pete, insincerely.
"Oh. Yeah, real bunch of dicks." Anakin poured himself another from the pitcher.
Yoda just sighed again.
Pete nodded in agreement. "Hey, speaking of Padme, how did the visit to the obstetrician go?"
" I almost forgot." Anakin hurriedly downed his drink and poured another. "It's twins, a boy and a girl."
"How can twins there be if one of each there is?" Yoda thought human reproductive practices weird and unpleasant, but the question had to be asked.
"I don't know, that's just what she told me. It never came up in the temple's suicide training." Anakin slammed down another and shuddered, clenching his teeth. "I do know that the boy has a midichlr- a midicr- a force bug count of forty thousand."
Yoda fainted.
"Is that a lot?" Pete gingerly prodded Yoda with a foot, then poured out the half glass of Plum Evil, replacing it to the same level with a less toxic Blue Ruin. There was an art to forensics. "I hope he isn't dead."
Anakin shrugged. "It's no big deal to him if he is. The Jedi don't believe in death, just some kind of poodoo about the force. Speaking of which, my force bug count is ten thousand. Yoda's is eight thousand, and he's the most powerful Jedi master."
"Wow. Well then, to fatherhood." Pete poured a drink and tossed it down.
Anakin followed suit. "Yeah, forty thousand is just crazy. If he's anything like me, he'll probably kill us all the first time he throws a tantrum."
"Fatherhood indeed. Pour me one of whatever it was that Master Yoda was having."
Pete almost choked, then gave the hood a fake smile. The creepy freak had somehow managed to sit down on the stool next to Anakin without being noticed. "Of course, sir. At once."