Crispy.
Just seeing the word was startling.
It was sitting in the peripheral vision of my augmetic eye, clear as you please. I had a moment of vertigo, wondering how those squiggles conveyed that word directly into my brain, when I realised I was looking at Roman script. I hadn't seen any in years. I certainly wasn't expecting to see it while checking my messages. Dis transcribed into Aurebesh as a matter of course, even the messages from home.
Kind of strange, thinking of that blue ball as home. I'd spent maybe a fortnight, total, back on the old rock since the Perdition incident. (Please note, I didn't say it all went to hell - seriously, that one gets old quickly.) Apart from those few fleeting visits (not to mention one strange oddysey into Fairyland), all I'd gotten was plaintive messages from my parents that started coming further and further apart. My brother had had kids - two boys and a girl, so far - and I hadn't seen them except in the photos my parents sent. One of my old friends died suddenly in his kitchen and I didn't hear about it for months, being busy tracking down a slaver ring. It hadn't been much of a home for me for years. But no matter how far or wide I might roam, it seems, I still call Earth home.
So here I was, sitting in the shadows of some dive, populated by all sorts of creatures, but none of them human, waiting to see who my client was. He'd insisted on a face-to-face meeting, so I gave him a specific place to meet me. A place some thirty metres from where I was hunched under a cloak, seeing just who was so eager to get facetime.
My day job is a bounty hunter/mercenary/thug. Not so much an assassin - I've killed people, certainly, but I'm not exactly a precision operation. I've got a reputation for surviving the unsurvivable. And I'm undercover for the NRI.
Well, undercover is probably a strong term. I'm an asset, I guess. I report on my employers, on my colleagues, whatever intel I can gather from the barnacled underbelly of the galaxy. I get asked to ensure certain outcomes, accomplish secondary objectives, occasionally betray the entire mission, and basically be sneakier than a belligerent thug has any right to be.
I know I'm not the only one - a couple of jobs back, I was part of a crew hired to rob an illegal glitterstim warehouse. The guy hiring and the guy in charge of the crew were the only people on the job who didn't respond to NRI recognition signals. That was funny.
The NRI got me into the gig by feeding me info on a few high-profile bounties. After that, I took a leaf out of Dirk Gently's book and specifically denied a bunch of stuff.
I was not from a technologically backward world where we had to kill our food with our teeth.
I was never involved in a top-secret Imperial black ops recruitment program.
I did not take my lightsabre off a Jedi I killed with my bare hands. No, not even because she looked at me funny.
I did not emerge as the sole victor from a three-month gladitorial bout of every male my age on my homeworld.
I did not have sexual relations with that Wookiee.
Unfortunately, due to a quirk of Huttese, the word for 'earth' is also the word for 'fertilised ground', with all the connotations of what might fertilise it, as well as meaning, well, dirt.
So when I say people started calling me the Man From Dirt, well... it wasn't thrilling, let's leave it at that.
And now, after years of this stuff - 'Crispy'. Man, it seemed like someone else.
But then, life intrudes, as it always does. My client showed up, armed for bear and with goons in tow, and the news was not good. The client was a species I'd only seen one time before, some quivering mess of tentacles and gloop. The odds of a second, unrelated slime monster in my life so soon were not particularly good.
El Tentaclo grabbed some poor Duro schmuck sitting near the table I'd specified and began screaming at him. He was speaking Huttese, kind of, but not even Hutts drool as much as that. He sounded like a leaky blackwater pipe.
"Burble Dirtman burble burble nestmate burble burble." My Huttese isn't great, so that was the best I could do. He brought a blaster rifle out of... somewhere... and pointed it at the Duro's head. The Duro wasn't the picture of stoic manliness, and began to scream that El Tentaclo had the wrong guy.
One of the goons, a Devaronian, yanked one of the tentacles. "That's not a human," he said. "Dirtman is a human."
El Tentaclo shrieked, and flung the Duro across the table at which I was supposed to be sitting. "BURBLE Dirtman burble revenge burble BURBLE." He started waving his blaster rifle around, bubbling in fury, and a few people began to panic. "Show burble burble, Dirtman!"
That was my cue. I got up, put my hood back and turned the light on in my augmetic eye. "Looking for me?" I asked loudly. I stepped forward, holding my right hand over my blaster ostentatiously. "You looking for some revenge, gruesome?"
"Burble nestmate burble burble kill." He was now pointing the rifle straight at me.
I looked at the Devaronian. "Can you translate that for me? Sounded like a toilet backing up."
The Devaronian raised a blaster at me as well. "You killed his brother," he said. "Now he's going to kill you."
"I think I remember your brother," I told El Tentaclo. "He headed up a slaver ring. I got hired to bring a family back to their clan. Snatched from their home by your brother and his pals." I shoved my right shoulder forward, bringing my blaster into better view. "I don't much care for slavers at the best of times, but he made the cardinal error." I tried to be as stony-faced as possible, just on the off-chance I might actually intimidate him. "He got in my way."
"Burble honour burble burble," hissed El Tentaclo. "Burble blaster burble burble bantha fodder."
"He says it's a matter of honour," said the Devaronian. "He says -"
The rest of the sentence, not to mention several limbs, were cut off at that point. While I'd been making a big show of my blaster, I'd drawn my lightsabre with my left hand, and when it became clear that talking was not an option, I acted.
I felt vaguely sorry for El Tentaclo. It must be hard being honour-bound by a brother who's a slavetrading scumbag. But I've got a fairly strict policy when it comes to people who want to kill me, and I couldn't make an exception in his case. The goons, well, they should have known what they were getting into. I know that goons are people, too, but it's really hard to keep that in mind when they're trying to kill you.
The goons squeezed off a few shots before I cut them down, but I was moving too quickly to be where they were aiming - I may not be a Jedi, but I've sparred with some. In a little under three seconds, El Tentaclo and the goons were each in several pieces, though admittedly with El Tentaclo it was difficult to tell the difference.
Still, I had a rep to maintain as a hardarsed mercenary, so I told the remains of the Devaronian, "I heard," before I retracted the 'sabre's pink blade. While everyone watched, I walked back to my table, drained the rest of my drink, then walked back over to the mess and rummaged for currency.
They weren't precisely loaded, but they had enough to generously cover the cleanup costs and what little damage they'd been able to inflict. I walked over to the Twi'lek waitress and put it all on her tray, and walked on out of there.
I had a message to read.