NO MORE ARTISTS USING MY COMMENT SECTION TO POST ADS. YOU WILL BE REPORTED IF YOU DO.

Author's note: Okay. So, I've set myself a challenge.

Can I plot a round of politics, intergalactic trade problems, and assassinations as complex as Luceno plots? Although, I only have, like, four chapters, and he had a whole novel. So, I'm trying to shift gears and do a micro-Luceno, here.

Y'all can tell me how I did. This will also merge with Kaki Olsen/Darth Ishtar's Wife of Deceit characters, and she will be doing one chapter from the point of view of Palpatine's currently fifteen-year-old future wife. That will be sort of a fun chapter, NOT something you would see shoehorned into a Luceno novel ... but it's fan fic. Indulge us.

Sheev Palpatine sipped delicately at his caffe, manfully resisting the flatcakes his mistress happily tucked into, while his stomach howled and clawed at him.

Infernal steroids. They made him hungry and thirsty as hell. He had finished the accursed medication last week, but they took time to be purged from the body, and worse, they caused weight gain. Sidious had enough trouble with that as it was. He was not about to destroy the newly flattened belly he had acquired over his recent mission to Alderaan by indulging in flatcakes, no matter how hungry he was.

Sereine glanced over at him through the long red fall of her hair and shook her head once. "Sheev, my Sheev. Are you still not eating?" Her tone annoyed him: half reproof, half amusement.

"I'm making a prudent choice, my dear. Breakfast or dinner."

She smiled. "Well, thank you for keeping me company. You could have thrown me out last night, and then you wouldn't have to watch me eat." She winked. "Or perhaps, just not feed me."

Palpatine gave her a lopsided smile. "No need for you to starve, Ederra Chikia. There is nothing about your figure to cause you shame." It never hurt to flatter a mistress now and again.

A coy smile touched her lips, as he had known it would. "I'm glad you're pleased."

"So am I. Then again, your reading material—" Sheev set his cup down and craned his neck to inspect her datapad. "What is that?" He craned yet further and read. "Coruscant Confidential? 'Reine. I'm disappointed in you."

Sereine Lumisol, premier political consultant and campaign director, took a bite of flatcakes and smiled. "Excuse me, I take my tabloid reading very seriously. I'm checking for stories about my clients."

He sat back in his chair. "In that thing?"

She scrolled down, pushed her hair back, and looked up at him again. "You bet I am! My staff covers every tabloid rag in existence. Everyone takes their rag—or rags, as the case may be—and they're responsible every day for poring through it for anything affecting our client roster. Even me." She lifted her pad and sat it down again. "Only I just give myself one. The one, the only—CC."

Palpatine frowned through another sip of caffe. "Terrible waste of time."

"Not when the rags all give me readthrough numbers on stories in the hope I'll slip them something nice. How else do you think I know what's about to bite you in that sexy thing you're sitting on?"

Palpatine smiled, gave his own head a rueful shake, and went back to his own datapad.

Sereine laughed, interrupting his morning message catchup. "Well, you'll find this amusing. It seems two directors on the board of the Trade Federation got themselves thrown out of a restaurant in Eriadu City this weekend."

Sheev did not appreciate the distraction from the latest lobbyist dangling him an expensive lunch, and half-answered her. "Really?"

"Yes," she said. "Rominger and Baylis Ascaris."

Palpatine reconsidered what was actually important that morning and looked up from under his brows. "Ah. The Brotherhood. Any indication what this was about?"

Sereine ate flatcakes, scrolled, and read. "The family relationship has been strained ever since their father, Aptar Ascaris, left their mother for another woman … this was fifteen years ago. One son accepted the other woman and the other one didn't. Now both parents are dead and … this was at the luncheon after the other woman's funeral."

"Ah," said Sheev. "Money. Inheritance." And decided Sate Pestage needed to have a look into this for him.