Intermediate Stop: The Hospital Room.

Aristarchus tipped awkwardly with one hand and two fingers into his comlink. 'Nothing makes sense anymore.' he confided to his encrypted diary. 'The assault had been the one incidents of too many. After mother's death, this place only holds misfortune and disaster for me.'

Then he saved the file and changed to the holo net for converting his decision. He bade on a virtual compulsory auction and hoped for a purchase of a promising parcel of mountain land on the planet of Tinto, as someone knocked at the door of his room.

His friend's John's head appeared. "May I enter or would you prefer to be alone?"

"Sure. Come in, please!" He beckoned him over. "Take a chair from the table over there and have a seat beside me. It's great to see you." While John came in and followed his offer to sit beside his bed, Aristarchus closed the program with three tips and afterwards the display of his comlink at his wrist.

"How do you do?"

"I have been better at times", he croaked hoarsely.

John shook his head. "Oh man, your neck looks terrible. Everything there is swollen, green and blue. Marks of throttling?"

"Mmh." Aristarchus nodded slightly and carefully. "In addition, cutting wounds at the leg, a laceration at the temple and a concussion." He stretched his hand towards the small table beside him and drank a mouthful of water.

"What happened exactly?"

He placed back the glas of water, before looking at John again: "Even I don't remember all in detail, but apparently I have been the victim of a usual robbery. Afterwards, they cleared out my apartment and also devastated the rest of it."

"Is the console gone, too?"

"Yeah, the only things remaining are the holo ownership files and saves, lucky me. They aren't hacked, yet. As I can't play much with this comlink here", to emphasize his point he lifted his left arm with the named device on it strapped like a vambrace, "except some tipping mini-games, it is sufficient to look after and check some save files."

John nodded. "Any clues, yet?"

"The only surveillance camera nearby was covered with black spray paint."

"Are you suggesting that it was executed by the 'hunters'?"

"Black spray paint is available for everybody. It could also be a deliberately and wrongly laid trace.

Even the protocol droid told me so that recorded my report."

"Only vague humanoid body shapes, probably male culprits, can be detected from the tapes of my apartment. You'll find nobody with such generality on Coruscant."

They both lowered their gaze and remained silent. None of them wanted to answer aloud the question hoovering in the room: Where were the patrols a that specific time? Resulting from that, were the patrols bribed, and if so, by whom? Or had it been necessary that at that specific time unreasonably high contingent of troops were withdrawn from their usual duty due to the Skylane-incident?

"Am I able to help you in a way, Aris?"

The question interrupted Aristarchus' thoughts and he took a deep breath. "Yes, actually, you can, John. Please listen to me. I am planning a new start, far, far away from here …" He hoped to convince him and not only to extract sympathy. His friend John Louis Galvan was the founder of a medium-sized electronic enterprise, which he had built up from its start by flying small space freighters. John also had the means to support Aristarchus' plan actively. It helped, too, that after their work done, they could always use the possibility for exchange in their gaming group via holo net and could have some fun to stay in contact during smoother periods on Tinto.