Ashkhen's cappuccino cup, containing four of her afternoon ristrettos, nestled back into its saucer with a soft clink. Lamentably, soup bowls just wouldn't fit under the caf machine's spout to accommodate six at a time.

In a previous life, Ashkhen's greet-the-new-day rituals started before the crack of dawn. Meditation and training with Master Balian awaited the Padawan upon waking up, then she would attend courses or do independent study in the Temple Archives.

Nowadays, the new days greeted Ashkhen a little before noon time. She would crawl out of bed, put on whatever clothes flew into her hands, and doze a little more on the hoverbus en route to Drosili's Diner. After the midday rush, she sometimes took a turbolift to the surface level, spent her lunch break in a park, then descended back to the underlevels to gear up for the dinner shift with unholy amounts of caf.

She worked five afternoons at the diner and three nights at Irigo's, though Imos had started pushing for a fourth night in the past few weeks. Ashkhen pushed back—that would have meant three consecutive days on which she had to be on her feet from noon till the wee hours of the morning, when the bar was left in Dottie's capable upper extremities.

Today was one such day. Lunch guests were already sweeping crumbs off their laps and putting their coats on to head back to work. Ashkhen looked after them with a tinge of envy—their workday would end in about four hours, while hers had another twelve to go. Sitting at the lunch counter, fingers curled about the cup, she wondered how long could she, in the light of her recently adopted lifestyle, hold off on getting her only two-chambered heart checked out.

Tilla had just finished recounting her plans for the upcoming Festival of Stars. Making the long put off trip to back Ryloth was inevitable—she wouldn't dare bring the wrath of her clan upon her head for missing a fourth cousin's wedding.

"Don't you want to go home?" she asked, interrupting Ashkhen's attempts at tracking her own convoluted pulse.

"I am home," Ashkhen said. "Look, I know my passport has Glee Anselm written on it, but my real connection is to the…" she trailed off. That particular affiliation had been cut, too. "Ouch, Tills, would you mind stepping off my toes?"

"I didn't mean to, I just…" Tilla gave her lekku an embarrassed twirl. Her eyes lit up with an idea the next moment. "Okay then, how about you come with me?"

"To Ryloth?"

"Well, yes!" Tilla said. "It'd be a nice change of scenery for you, and my family would love to have you for the holidays."

Ashkhen wondered in what way would a barren, rocky desert planet be considered an upgrade from the barren, duracrete desert planet she currently lived on, but Tilla had meant well, so she kept her thoughts to herself.

"You'd have to keep an eye out for my two youngest sisters though," Tilla continued. "They'd likely try to tie-dye and bedazzle your headtails the minute you turned your back."

Ashkhen's mouth pressed into a thin line—as a dropout herself, she didn't have the audacity to label anyone as a 'problem child'. Besides, holding neurotypical children and Jedi younglings to the same standards would have been unfair to both groups. In that regard, Ashkhen wasn't even sure whether a lack of, or an overabundance of midi-chlorians warranted more leniency.

"You do realize that coating a Nautolan's headtails with a drying oil suspension is the technical equivalent of waterboarding them, right?"

"It's high time the little troublemakers learned about cultural sensitivity." Tilla got a little misty-eyed thinking about her little sisters, including the older ones, all four of them. "I'll tell them to use watercolour."

Ashkhen stayed quiet. She took up a spoon and gave her milk-free and sugar-free caf an entirely unnecessary stir.

"I just don't want you to spend the holidays by yourself," Tilla said.

"I appreciate it, but it's okay. I'm not really into festivities anyways. Besides, travelling to the Outer Rim is way out of my current budget. You know, I took your advice and started a savings account."

"Really? How's the interest rate?"

"Fixed, I guess." Ashkhen scratched her head. "I stashed it inside an out-of-order air conditioning unit in my apartment."

Tilla lowered her voice, concern written all over her face. "Ash, I know you were raised by a"—she thought hard about choosing the best term—"spiritual bunch, but I don't think it's safe to keep so much cash at home."

"Eh, you're right. Maybe I should set up a real account." Ashkhen added the task to the long list of things tagged, someday, I'll totally get down to it.

"What are you saving up for that's worth missing the chance to sample my Mom's special fermented Wet Rot Root Cake?"

Ashkhen's stomach dropped to the floor and scuttled away in horror. She balked at the level of diplomacy required to weasel her way out of that one in person, without hurting anyone's feelings. On a side note, the achievement would have likely granted her the rank of Master.

"I found a food shelter that's accepting volunteers," she said. "I've started looking at used speeders so I can apply."

"Some fancy shelter!" Tilla cocked her head to the side. "They need someone to chauffeur the one percent homeless from one charity event to another?"

"No, to make food deliveries to the bedridden," Ashkhen said. "Remember, I used to—"

Her words were cut short by the sudden commotion in front of the restaurant. Drosili stood outside, waving her gangly arms and barking orders at the young cargo speeder driver. Ashkhen glanced at Tilla, but was met with the same question in her eyes.

"Complete menu overhaul, ladies!" Drosili announced as she burst through the entrance, followed by a group of delivery droids. "Revitalizing business, attracting more clients and donating all the extra profits to the Victims of War Foundation, ha-ha! I may have lied about the last part!" She set her heavy bag on the counter and plopped down to the seat next to Ashkhen, wiping her forehead.

"What have you got there, Drosili?" Tilla asked.

"A vision!" the matron said, sweeping one hand in a wide arch, encompassing the whole restaurant in front of her. Her face grew serene, her voice carried as though she meant to speak across a thousand star systems. "So many have lost so much already! This war is tearing families, planets and systems apart, driving people into despair and hysterical overspending, and luckily, it doesn't show signs of stopping."

Ashkhen drained her cup in one big swig. "I'm sure the Grand Army of the Republic will end the war in no time, the Republic can start on rebuilding war-stricken worlds and the Jedi can finally return to do what they do best—keep the peace."

"Yes, yes, the Jedi." Drosili nodded absent-mindedly, ripping the tape off a huge cardboard box. "I wish I knew who's in charge and how much are they spending on their social marketing. Jedi lead the military, Jedi saunter in and out of the Senate, Jedi, Jedi, Jedi everywhere." She fumbled with the oddly shaped polystyrene packaging box inserts, breaking off big chunks as she tried to pull out the product. "I heard not one, not two, but three new holoseries are already in production, featuring—you've guessed it—Jedi! Well, not real ones, obviously, they're too busy dying in the war. And you know what? The annual Coruscant Fashion Week reports are out, and the colour trends for next year's spring-summer collections will be Ultimate Fawn and Castle of Sand!"

Ashkhen's face darkened. "I'm certain the Order did not wish for any of that to happen."

Drosili finally extricated the machine from the box and held it up. "Brand new non-stick ceraplast waffle-maker!" The problem of the popular culture swallowing up and brandifying the Jedi left her unruffled. "Look at that mold! It makes hot, crispy waffles in the shape of a thermal detonator!"

Tilla and Ashkhen glanced at each other. Thermal detonators atomized everything in a six-to-ten meter radius—not the best message to send on a family breakfast when the kids were acting up because one of them apparently got one nanogram more of whipped cream on their pancakes than the other. Drosili continued to present her haul with unbridled enthusiasm.

"Wait, you're going to love this"—she presented a bunch of flat, metallic discs—"stencils for latte art, ha-ha! We've got a clone trooper helmet here, then bulky clone trooper transport ship with closed and open doors, starfighter with the thingy on its wings, starfighter with the, uh, long nose, another starfighter that's—wait, are these the same?" She held up two cutouts against the windows.

"No, that one is an Eta-2 Light Interceptor without its external hyperspace transport ring, and this one is V-Wing with its wings folded, so it looks similar to this one." Ashkhen pointed to the one in Drosili's right hand. "But this is a Delta-7. It's an older model though, we don't…" she continued after a pause, "the Jedi Order had them decommissioned and replaced a few years ago."

Drosili gave a little snort. "You sound like my twelve-year-old. You collect to-scale replicas, too?"

"No, I've piloted all three of them and crash-landed with an Eta-2 once."

That totally hadn't been her fault. Ashkhen had always considered herself a decent pilot, but Master Garen Muln of the Starfighter Corps took the mandatory training to a different level. During a simulation exercise, her communications array took a hit and she was cut off from the rest of her squadron by two enemy fighters on her tail. Sans communications and anyone with even a modicum of affinity for Battle Meditation, her team failed to synchronize the manoeuvre and her fighter got raked with friendly fire. Shields and port side stabilizers knocked down, the Eta-2 left a thick trail of smoke behind as she reentered the atmosphere of Centax-2 at twice the speed for safe landing. To add insult to injury, she ditched the fighter into an artificial water reservoir. That, and the associated stereotypes of aquatic species and flying offered a great deal of hilarity for the rest of the Padawans. Undergoing the basic Ace training the same year as Anakin Skywalker and ending up on the enemy team had sucked big time.

"Riiight. You flew Jedi starships." Drosili rolled her globular eyes. "Which was it, Jedi-Grant-A-Wish or Take Our Wretched Poor to Work Day?"

A jolt of alarm, a quick throat-clearing, and Ashkhen was ready to salvage the situation. "In an arcade. You know, those flight simulator games? Those are so much fun! I'll take your son one day."

Drosili fished a permanent marker out of her bag and wrote a small aurek, besh and cresh on the three starfighter stencils. Her mind was so focused on the restaurant's new Clone Wars theme, Ashkhen's behaviour didn't even register for her.

"This one was custom-made. It's going to give us one leg up on the competition," she said as she pulled out the last stencil from the case. "Limited edition, check it out."

"No!" Ashkhen slammed her palms on the counter, snare roll heartbeats pounding in her ears. "We can't use that to sell more caf!"

"Why not?"

"That's not just a logo for some star-forsaken brand, that's a symbol for peace," Ashkhen said, turning over the last stencil in her hands. A lightsaber, encircled by fiery wings. "We can't monetize this."

"Of course we can!" Drosili snatched the thin sheet of metal out of her hands. "Yes, yes, war is terrible and sad, but we've got our handsome Jedi generals who are going to take care of everything and save the Galaxy." She put the stencil back with the rest. "And that's why people will be willing to shell out 5.95 for a cup of caf with a glowstick made out of blue foam on it."

"This is so wrong." Ashkhen shook her head. "This whole war is so wrong! And Jedi fighting in it only make it so much worse!"

She saw the look Drosili and Tilla exchanged and didn't care. They didn't know what it meant when smoke was rising from the Tranquility Spire. Their hearts never grew as heavy as Ashkhen's, reading reports from the front lines. They never sat on a bench in a rooftop garden overlooking the Jedi Temple and said goodbye to former clanmates, Masters, friends and those she only knew by name. They never felt the same dread whenever the name Sarkis Balian popped up in any of the articles.

Master Balian had spent the better part of the last year away from Coruscant. One star system after the other, he employed his skills in diplomacy to dissuade governments from joining the Confederacy, reached out to political organisations, even universities and student associations, to advocate the values of the Galactic Republic and inspire the coming generation. Although he mostly undertook ambassadorial missions, to Ashkhen's dismay, the press still referred to him as General Balian of the Grand Army of the Republic. Curiously, he was only ever mentioned together with Commander CT-4114, nicknamed "Pod", and not Padawan whats-her-name.

Drosili's features grew troubled. "Yeah, well, many people think that way." She looked around the restaurant, then gave an encouraging smile to Tilla and Ashkhen. "But most importantly, we're safe here. The droid army wouldn't dare to set foot in the Capital, no-no!"

Her comlink pinged with a message. Then another. Then four more.

"You're popular this afternoon," Tilla said as the restaurant owner rooted about in her bag.

Colour ran from Drosili's face as she glanced at the screen. The rogue wave of her dread washed over Ashkhen, making her lose focus for a moment. The comm hit the edge of the countertop, then clattered to the floor.

"What is it?" Tilla cried, grabbing Drosili by the shoulder. She covered her mouth with trembling hands.

"Phindar, m-my homeworld… is under Separatist attack!"

Tilla took over the restaurant for the rest of the day shift.

••• ••• •••

"De-carbonization and an oil bath!" Ashkhen looked Dottie up and down. "Someone's getting ready for a first date!"

"Off-schedule chassis maintenance at Master Imos's behest," Dottie said. "High ranking government officials made reservations for tonight, I must look representative."

Ashkhen's brows drew together. "Glad our overtaxed senators could squeeze a night of frolicking into their busy schedules. It's not like there won't be any Clone Wars left for tomorrow to fight."

"I'm detecting eighty-one point nine percent sarcasm in your statement." Dottie finished hooking up a new CO2 tank to the beer keg, then set out three genuine chromium champagne coolers on the bartop to fill them up with ice. Ashkhen's eyes twitched.

Some VIP guests, all right.

"Look, Dottie, I'm just not sure about the message." She handed out two pitchers of draught beer to a waitress, then turned back to the droid. "Who do you think is going to pick up their tab?"

"I assume either the Finance Committee of the Galactic Senate or, if unlucky enough, Master Imos himself."

Speak of the devil. The club manager himself appeared in front of the bar, dressed to the nines with a nimbus of cologne to match, which had been lathered on to mask the sickly sweet smell of his sweat. That was the pong Ashkhen usually noticed when Imos was already more than halfway down from the previous hit, but was holding out to rail the next one just to get the timing right.

"Listen, Ash. Any order comes from tables oh-three-one to oh-three-eight, you drop everything and get on it, understand?" He ran both hands through his hair, slicking it back. "If they want a toothpick and there's no waitress around, you pour a kriffing pile of them on a tray and fly over yourself. If one of them wants a lap dance and Rix's unavailable—"

"Then they'll wait for their turn just like every other creep." Ashkhen's face distorted into a look of pure disgust. "Imos, what the kriff?"

"Okay, okay, chill!" Imos bid himself as much as Ashkhen, pressing his index and middle fingers against his temples to rub his headache away. The last two fingers on his hands trembled at a frequency that made them a blur to the naked eye.

"Congresspeople booked out the whole VIP-section?"

"That, and the private suites Amethyst and Sapphire upstairs." He bounced away to instruct the up girls and the fillers. Ashkhen felt sorry for the latter bunch, for half of them worked last night, too. Conversly, all of them looked beyond pumped up—she had her suspicions that many an eight ball of Stardust had been snorted in the changing room.

Her eyes wandered up the wide set of interior stairs to the second floor. Smaller tables dotted the outside of the large mezzanine, beyond them, tinted plexiglass double doors led to the private rooms—Emerald, Garnet, Amethyst, Sapphire, Krayt Dragon Pearl, Beryl and Obsidian. Amethyst and Sapphire, combined with the eight tables around the dancefloor accommodated about seventy people. She ran the numbers in her mind, then turned to Dottie, shaking her head in disbelief.

"Dottie, give me a ballpark."

"Considering that the delegation requested premium table service in the VIP-section, and booked the largest two of our private suites, I estimate a compound expenditure of thirty-eight to forty-five thousand credits."

Ashkhen remained silent for a moment. The latest article she read about the relief efforts mentioned eight grand. Half of that had been spent on a kriffing monument, erected in the very spot where a bombed-to-nothing hospital once stood.

"There are starfighters costing less that that," she said quietly.

"Do you want a list of models currently available for forty-five thousand credits?"

"It's okay, Dottie," Ashkhen said. "I'd rather not think about it too much."

As the night wore on, Ashkhen relied more and more on the covert use of the Force to finish the delegation's endless stream of drink orders. She soon gave up on keeping an eye on Imos, watching him buzz and whirl around the VIP tables made her dizzy. By the time their party really took off, Ashkhen struggled to keep up with their demands—Dottie shouldered the rest of the club, and Imos assigned a waitress to the beer tap. It was getting crowded behind the bar.

Minutes before midnight, one of the waitresses came up to the bar almost running, wringing her hands on the verge of tears.

"What's going on?" Ashkhen asked her. She could barely spare half an eye to glance at the esteemed bunch. They mostly just seemed happy-drunk. Could they be getting handsy-drunk already? Bust had been giving the VIP-section a wide berth all night—he must have deemed himself superfluous, considering the headcount of the delegation's own security.

"I… Th-they…" The waitress's distressed gesticulating amplified into a hysterical flailing of her arms. She took a deep breath, tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear then grabbed the edge of the bartop with both hands. "Takeaway, for sixty-eight people, is on its way here."

Ashkhen's jaw dropped. "We can't serve a kriffing seated dinner! The club doesn't even have a permit for that."

"Yeah, you go over and tell them that!"

Ashkhen ran both hands through her headtails. Politicians were even worse than that bunch of holofluencers from the previous week who had sent back their drinks three times, because they wanted matching straws, but couldn't decide on the colour. She breathed away the resurgent frustration—the dinner issue had to be sorted in less than an hour.

"No, I think I have an idea," she said. "Fetch Imos for me, will you?"

She took up the comm from under the terminal, and dialled Tilla's earpiece.

"I've got a job for you," she said. "It's about speed and precision, having Imos owe you a big one, and a chance for extravagant tips."

"You had me at tips," Tilla said.

A grin spread over Ashkhen's face. "I knew I could count on you." She chucked the comm under the counter and turned to Dottie.

"Dottie, you still online?" she asked, waving the club owner down as he wound his way across the dancefloor. "Can you register Irigo's for a one-day Special Event perm—"

"Done."

Dottie's level of multitasking was a sight to behold. She processed orders from all the waitresses' datapads, made elaborate cocktails, sent pings to the back staff as the bar needed restocking, and browsed the HoloNet on Ashkhen's request all at once, with a permanent smile cast onto her face. "It will take eight business hours."

"Perfect, thanks," Askhen said, just as Imos walked up to the bar.

"Ash, what are you doing? We can't make them wait eight hours!" The club manager's widening eyes revealed his unevenly dilated pupils. Ashkhen's overcaffeinated hearts were breaking for the lonely, cardiomyopathic ticker fighting for its life inside his chest.

"We won't have to." She was met with an apprehensive frown. "We filed the request before midnight, we'll get the permit with tomorrow's dates. We serve the food right after midnight, break no rules doing so."

Tilla sat down her empty tray on the bartop as she joined them, raising a questioning eyebrow at Ashkhen and getting a tiny I'll-explain-it-later nod in return.

Imos still wasn't convinced that things were heading in the right direction. "And how the hell do we serve seventy people dinner? We're talking members of the kriffing Galactic Senate!

Ashkhen closed her eyes for a second, opening her mind to the subtle prompts of the Force. Details came together and formulated a plan. She snapped her fingers. "Schedule Rix out of the Obsidian suite."

"Why?"

"I'm gonna need her stage. Dottie, check where's the closest kitchenware store for me, please."

"Ash, I'm not following!"

"Zero point six kilometers away, Code Luxury Way of Living 98-91-Senth, Kooriva Square, Level 4855. Sending you the link."

Ashkhen pulled up the site on her terminal. "These look nice."

Tilla looked over her shoulder. "Wow! Royal!"

"Imos, is it true that your account verification number is your and your brother's birth date?" Ashkhen typed something on the console, then tapped the lower right corner of her screen. "That's not really safe, you know."

The club manager's comm buzzed in his pocket. Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead as he checked the notification. "What the kriff did I just buy for nineteen hundred credits!?"

"Dinnerware for seventy people."

Imos's complexion matched Ashkhen's. He was so strung out that he heard his own hair turning white. Some words could be heard mumbled in his native tongue.

Ashkhen pressed her palms together and took a deep breath. "I need three bussers to pick the order up from the store and bring everything up to the Obsidian. Send the food there, too."

"Ash, you on uppers? What the hell are you doing?"

"Turning your VIP guests into your lifelong regulars," Ashkhen said. "Trust me. Tills and I, with the help of Dottie, will pull this off."

Imos shook his head, then, for a lack of better alternative, stood behind the bar himself to weather the storm for the next hour or so. Ashkhen lead the way towards the stairs in front of Tilla and Dottie. "Make sure no one, and I mean not a single soul comes anywhere near the Obsidian."

"You're going to do it, like, you know…?" Tilla asked, wiggling her fingers in the air.

Ashkhen interlaced her fingers and turned her palms outwards, cracking them.

"I'm going to serve the shit out of the Republic."

••• ••• •••

Tilla stood sentry in front of the darkened glass doors. Inside the Obsidian suite, Ashkhen sat cross-legged on the freshly disinfected striptease stage, deep in meditation. The pole she leaned against throbbed with a fiery orange light, the one on the opposite side shone with an icy blue glow. Titillating bump-and-grind music blared from the overhead speakers. She focused through the distractions. Concurrently, she also made a vague promise to run ten penalty laps around the Coruscant Opera House to no one in particular.

Size matters not. Quantity matters not. The absurdity of it matters not.

With one last round of calming breaths, Ashkhen stood, stepped between the rows of plastoid takeout containers and raised an arm in a sweeping motion—all the lids popped open. The smell of exotic spices from twenty different worlds filled the room. Ashkhen stayed in the flow and slowly turned her palms out. The brand new plates floated forward and formed neat rows. They circled around the orange pole, then slowed their descent as they approached the open boxes.

Steady, steady.

Inhale, hold. Food rose from the containers.

Exhale.

Ashkhen raised the other arm—the plates glid under the food. The invisible conveyor belt of dishes travelled through the air towards the hovercarts by the other end of Rix's stage.

I should totally be teaching home economics back at the Temple.

••• ••• •••

In the meantime, the representatives had moved into the private suites upstairs, forming smaller groups around the tables. Dottie had synched her storage unit with the aides' datapads, matching order to person in an instant. The last two waitresses Imos could spare were done with making neat little napkin rolls of the new cutlery, dinner was ready to be served.

"You guys ready?" Ashkhen looked from Tilla to Dottie.

Tilla, with a strange mixture of determination and doubt etched on her face, gave a tiny nod.

"Dottie, can you switch to radio?"

"Testing communication," Dottie's voice chimed in her earpiece. "OHU-1, OHU-2, are you receiving?"

"What does OHU stand for?" Ashkhen whispered back.

"You are my Organic Hand Units One and Two," Dottie replied. "You're One, because you've got one organic hand. Tilla has two."

"For a crowd of this size, six servers would be the absolute minimum," Tilla said. "I think we're crazy for even trying."

"Do or do not, there is no try," Ashkhen said, leading in front, pushing one of the serving carts.

"Your sayings don't make any sense!" Tilla called after her.

Ashkhen's gaze swept across the suite, noting the people sitting, or rather, sprawling on the U-shaped couch, engaged in animated conversation in groups of threes and fours. Some of them were familiar from news reports, but no one could track over two thousand congressmen and identify everyone in the room. That was where Dottie came in.

"Start with the three Venjagga Wraps," Dottie said. "The one without onions goes to Senator Philo. He's the one sitting under the holoprojector."

"…and he just kept yapping and yapping, I thought I was going to fall asleep during a live broadcast!"

Ashkhen cleared the empty glasses and bottles from the tables, set down napkins and cutlery, and placed the dinner plates in front of the guests as unobtrusively as possible. Tilla was doing the same, albeit with an extra wide, tip-expectant smile.

"Nonsense! You're giving way to much credit to the TechnoUnion. Wat Tambor couldn't pull a bandaid off, much less a scheme of that magnitude!"

"The other clawfish casserole goes to Tal Merrik."

"Who?"

"Senator of Kalevala."

"Which one is that?" Ashkhen turned her back on the delegation as she walked back to the cart.

"Human male. Really tall."

"Dottie, be more specific! There's about eight human males sitting here, all of them really tall from my perspective!"

"Merrik is the man sitting next to Nix Card. He's Muun. Even taller."

"Yeah, got it."

"…and what good did it do Bonteri? Cross the wrong people, you know, is all I'm saying…"

Almost done. Sitting on the far left, four people sat huddled closely together, talking in hushed voices. They fell silent as she approached—the Corporate Alliance representative and the Neimoidian from the Trade Federation eyed her suspiciously, only the human male gave her a friendly smile.

"The soup is for Lott Dodd," Dottie signalled. "The extra hot nuna wings are Representative Argente's, sitting right next to him, and the bantha bourguignon goes to Rush Clovis. He's the human. He's tall, too."

"Enjoy," Ashkhen said, keeping her expression neutral. Dottie was right—the Senator was almost as tall sitting as she was standing.

"Thank you for your trouble," Clovis said. The genuine appreciation in his voice took Ashkhen by surprise. Could it be that there existed politicians who didn't fit the stereotypes? "Pass on my gratitude to the management, please."

"Our pleasure, Sir."

She put down the very last plate and turned away, straightening up with a jolt. She clamped down on the sudden urge to throw back a discouraging elbow—one of her headtails was being twirled around a finger.

"Yes, Senator?" She tugged the tendril free from the Ishi Tib representative's hand and turned around to face him.

"Bring me a new bowl and put some salt in it," Senator Gume Saam ordered, with an entirely different message in his eyes.

"Very good, Sir," Ashkhen ground the words out, forcing a smile.

Tilla finished her round from the other direction, they met at the double glass doors. Ashkhen waited until they were well out of earshot, and stopped at the top of the stairs for a moment.

"How do you resist punching the naughty out of someone's eyes when they are being rude on purpose?"

"Oh, sweetie, it's your first time venturing beyond the bar, isn't it? If I had a credit for every time someone slapped my butt—"

"Pfft, amateurs." Rix walked up the stairs, bending her Caminoan neck into a beautiful arch as she passed them. "You can charge so much more than one credit for that kind of stuff."

"Can you switch with Imos?" Ashkhen asked, nodding at the bar. "I'll be with you in a minute."

She climbed up the stairs carrying an extra bowl and salt shaker on a tray, then a few moments later, stormed down again in a torrent of fury. Senator Saam's translucent plastoid calling card was crushed into fine dust with the Force.

Oh, the kriffing nerve! Ambassadorial suite, my ass!

Late night shifted into early morning, the club's closing time drew near. Few of the guests still lounged around their tables, the majority of the senators had already trickled home. Imos's exhausted staff attended to the ones who stayed in the Amethyst with exemplary diligence, cleared away the remnants of their dinner, and carried up the umpteenth round of drinks to the suite.

At long last, the front door bouncer announced that all the air taxis had arrived. The last stragglers, those in Clovis's group, finally called it a night, and were escorted out by Imos himself.

Ashkhen had long fallen asleep on the changing room's couch, using her big, bumpy-lumpy bag of credit chits as a pillow under her head. It was nice not having to worry about rent for the next few months.