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Nobody pays attention to the news reporters in the lower levels of the city. Corporate office buildings, luxury time-share condos, banking firms, suspiciously wealthy niche start up companies, their structures pierced the clouds like a great jungle of business. The mezzanine of neon adverts for virility supplements or dehydrated instant-meals shielded those on the ground from storms, political or sand.
It’s hard to think about the cosmic battle of the light and dark when there are bills to pay, jobs to do, the jump-drive light is on, and the power generator on the fritz (again). Alora Vaas had a lot of problems, but the galaxy’s morality debate was not one of them.
Alora has always existed in the walls of the system. Like any parent’s nightmare, she had been lured away into an unmarked ship, the Elysium, and spirited away to be lost in an indifferent economy of blood, spice, credits, and plasma fire. It was in the belly of Elysium that Alora acquired her taste for larceny.
Together with the other unfortunates trapped aboard the Elysium, Alora orchestrated the opportunity, the distraction, the hijacking, and the escape. There would be no more impressive a heist in the togruta’s career than the theft of Elysium-- even the Republic officers who pulled their craft over were impressed. It should have been a happy ending for all involved.
Unsurprisingly, Alora did not know what a Republic ID number was, or the designation of her planet, nor the surname of her family. Her colorful descriptions of the cliff near the house proved unhelpful to the Republic officers, who were already too overwhelmed with other matters to be attending misplaced children. So she watched as her new friends left aboard ships to be reunited with their parents from the reception office window.
Eventually, someone would come for her: a smuggler recently out of a ship who went by Vaas. They had heard of the one-in-a-million hijacking, and came to meet the thief for themself. They were a kind being, though liked their drink, and after hearing the story, asked Alora if she would like to do it again. Together they secreted away to the impounded Elysium and raced away. Just a togruta pretending to be grown up, and one grown up who never stopped being a child. She filled the blank entry on her Republic file with smuggling and larceny charges.
All it takes is one bad shot to ground a ship. Though, no reporter would be telling its account over the holocom. It should have been simple. An acquisition and a delivery for some soft handed corpo shill to a few goons of a Nar Shadaa cartel. They just had to sit back and let the adults talk it out. It was going just fine. Until a holocom ringer went off in the silence. Blaster fire erupted like a flash of magnesium. Everything was over in seconds. Business as usual.
The togruta were informed at gun point of the hustle they were accused of, and the debt that had to be paid. With a lot of undignified begging, Alora was able to buy her life before Vaas’s body had even gone cold not five feet away. The cartel promised to be fair. They gave room and board beneath the neon signs, jobs to keep busy with, and an allowance of spice instead of credits. “You can leave whenever you want,” they’d tell her. They support small, independent contractors here in Nar Shadaa, not like those big business slime. What they didn’t tell her was transport off was 300 credits she didn’t have, but she’d figure that out soon enough.
Life on the ground was miserable. Seas of unwashed people all struggling to get somewhere beneath blinking florescent clouds trying to sell mint flavored kolto gel. Spice let her return to the Elysium, Vaas, and sometimes, when the high was good enough, all the way back to fields of vibrant blue reeds. She didn’t necessarily resign her freedom, its memory was there every time she had a breath of spice. Spice made the bruises ache less, the hunger quiet, and the hands obedient.
After a string of bad luck resulting in botched jobs, she was “encouraged” to do better. Desperate to get away from the choke hold and reclaim some kind of control in her life, she stole aboard a shuttle and escaped to Viscera. To this day she makes her payments dutifully, and the ring of the holocom still puts dread in her gut.