1.0 An Inauspicious Beginning
The door slides open as I back through.
The cavernous room is a mess of noise, smoke and cursing.
"Yo! Lunch is here." I bellow into the room, noises slowly falling silent as actual employees extricate themselves from the machinery of their charges.
"Alex. 'Bout time." Djingo, a tall slender, probably human, man with skin the colour of pitch calls down from the shuttle he's working on. He extends one hand pleadingly, long, dark fingers attempting to reach across the void to a fresh… pastie.
"I've only got two arms mate. You're gonna have to come down and get it yourself!" I holler back. The man grumbles as he clambers of the ship with the lazy grace of someone who is too fucking tall. Little Chanim, the bosses grandkid, scampers by. She's a small Feline nonhuman, her species only gets to about a meter tall but the little blighter is more than capable of leaping high enough to pilfer someone else's lunch from the heavy box in my hands.
"Oop, Chanim just stole your lunch." I mutter as the little scamp disappears into the shadows in the back of the workshop. Other workers swing by and grab their orders, a meatbread thing, rat onna stick, something which looks all the world like a purple meat pie and finally and (almost) sugar (quasi) mouse.
Djingo grabs the rodentlike confectionery between two slender fingers with a sneer of disdain. "Really Alex." he remarks in a deep voice.
"It's what was written on the list man, you know she always steals your lunch." I remark.
He sighs the long suffering sigh of the serially pranked and downs the mouse in a single comical gulp.
"Also got that part you wanted, XE 751, on the left." I jiggle the box so the bit in question moves.
He hefts the part with a grunt. "Huh, where did that come from." He mutters rhetorically plucking the meat pastie from behind the power coupler.
"Dunno. I mean, she does always steal your lunch." I shrug. The taller man bops me on the shoulder as I amble towards the office.
"Ryan. Lunch." The door snaps closed behind me as I ease the box onto a bench. My potbellied employer, fuzzy as he is, bounces onto the bench and fishes out his own meal.
Ryan Pieweto is a fair bit larger than his granddaughter, certainly circumferentially if not as much vertically and has, as he has told me several times, been in the used shuttle business for centuries. "Ha ha, Alex you never tell me how you find these things." He reaches in and delicately plucks out a gasket used in a short run Mon-Calmari luxury shuttle from the box.
"I'm just good at finding things old cat. It's a talent." I boast.
He gives me the furry eyeball.
"What?"
"I'm an old cat young man," He remarks carefully pulling another rare component from the box, "There is talent, there is brilliance and then there is this." He sniffs the part, and lays it down with a gentleness borne of reverence.
"Here," He passes a small list of parts to me. "It would take another person at least a month to get any one of these. Less than a week would be suspicious." The old tom gives me a steady gaze as he withdraws his hand.
I read the list, I don't know what any of these are.
It hasn't stopped me before.
"Kay."
"Kay?" He asks.
"Yeah. Lunch tomorrow?" I reply He sighs.
"Something different next time." He mutters, his tail reaching out and snagging a pouch of what passes for coinage on Coruscant.
"May the schvartz be vith you." I give him a Vulcan salute as I leave. He snorts.
I wander around the workshop aimlessly, I don't particularly know many of the other employees well but most give warm, if distracted, hellos and pass on their own purchase orders, mostly generic bits and pieces but 'Old Toms Shuttles' has been dealing with aged and elderly prestige vehicles for quite some time, not all of the parts they're looking for are available or even recognisable on the open market.
"Alex, you coming tonight?" Djingo asks as I get around to his project.
"Wouldn't miss it mate. Will your sister be there?" I ask the man.
"She'll clean the floor with one as close to the ground as you my friend." He replies with an ivory smile leaning over the side of the shuttle, long arms hanging down.
"Worth it." I mutter, he laughs in my face. Djingo has a twin sister, she stands eye to eye with her brother and appears to be largely made of skin, bones, lean stringy muscle and legs which go all the way up. She leads classes in Old Republic fencing, from her vantage point she can take a different view on things and is more than happy to teach the little people.
"You always say that and she always beats you." Djingo remarks, taking a bite of his lunch.
"Always worth it man. Purchase order?" I hold out my hand and he lets a thin film of plastic fall to my hand.
"I'm going too." A little voice squeaks from the shuttle interior.
I stick my head around the corner, Chanim's pulling cable for Djingo. "Cool Fuzzball, you sure you're old enough? Errai's friendly but she hits like a truck."
She flips me the bird, I taught her that. "She's fifteen Alex." Djingo comments.
"Really?" The girl's the size of a preteen, a short preteen, and doesn't appear to be made for fencing.
"Really." She states, with finality.
"Ok… Well… That's a thing. See you tonight then." She sticks her tongue out we give each other our usual crude sign off.
"Later Djingo." I leave the garage to the sound of people finally getting back to work and look out over the town which I'm, temporarily at least, calling home.
Coruscant.
48 by 32, sublevel B, Southside.
It's a big planet, more or less entirely city and this sublevel is one of the untold thousands of light industry areas dirtside, it isn't half as dingy as the underside nor a fraction the price of topside. It's a dark place, perpetually in shadow with a single great spear of light entering from the surface. A place where people by and large make an honest living.
My helmet flies into my hands from my speederbike and I strap it onto my head.
Time to go home.
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Coruscant.
48 by 32, sublevel B, Westside.
The door doesn't have any physical markings, there's no handle, no keyhole and no little control panel as is so common in this place.
I place my hand against the surface.
Because the funny thing is the door is not locked but is in fact open.
…
It doesn't actually have a locking mechanism, or even a latch, it's natural state is swinging in the drafts caused by the great cities activity.
...
For fuck sake.
I ease my groceries to the ground and press both my hands to the smooth surface.
THE DOOR IS OPEN.
The door is open, I pick up my groceries and haul them through the portal. I close it with a kick and remind the fucking thing that it is in fact fucking closed.
'Bout two, maybe three months ago I woke up in this place, there's a basic bed, power outlets, a 'kitchen' for lack of a better word and a small bathroom out the back, just a shower and a loo though nothing even approaching luxury. In fact the closest thing this place had to luxury is the extensive reading material, enormous piles of books in neat stacks take up all of the outside wall, they have titles like the Book of Circles (Sword Bible), The Real Barenziah (Royal Lewdness with the Queen Mum) and Galerion the Mystic (Magic for Beginners).
When I arrived all I could do was read.
Galerion was the real find, there are other books on magic here but it is more or less the Mages Guild entry exam textbook. It teaches entry level Tamrealic magic, basic conceptual tricks and the fundamental mindsets behind each skill. Which is just as well because without it I wouldn't have even been able to leave the room, condemning myself to a slow and painful death as the food ran out.
Now the place is a mess, mostly because mess is my natural state but more because the apartment is both really small and really full. In the background a public service announcement runs on the Vidscreen, as it blinks on reminding All Good Imperial Citizens to keep an eye out for Subversive Elements and Irrational Superstition. There's junk everywhere, not trash, I incinerate or science trash, junk. Old pieces of this and that that I've picked up on treasure hunts, I keep them because... They used to be great.
To explain, Magic isn't just magic. It's a way of interacting with the more etheric part of the universe.
That doesn't explain anything does it?
Okey.
Alteration is holding reality in abeyance, disregarding Reality for Truth. My Truth. The Door is Unlocked.
Illusion is making reality play make believe. Believing something so hard that other people believe it too. The reality is largely irrelevant, the less you bend it the easier it is.
Destruction is a philosophy of power instead of method, find the one simple variable and give it power and shape. The more the better.
Conjuration is the art of the planes, the things which exist beyond this reality. The art of bringing, binding and rejecting. It cannot be simply described but it's taking many simple straightforward things and making them work together in a seamless way. Super tricky.
Restoration is the art of life and to a certain extent death, it's less about what you do to life but more how to get magic to work on life itself. The tricks of getting past someone's natural resilience and change things.
Mystycism is…
Everything else really. It's the original magic, the first steps of mortals into the arts of the Daedra and the purest expression of mortals influence against the aspect of creation itself.
Such a grandiose wank.
More practically while all of the other arts of magic are about acting Mysticism at its core is about listening, understanding and knowing. Mysticism spells which do things are more about identifying that one crucial thing, sorting through the aspects of reality for that single point of leverage and giving it a push. Not necessarily a big push either, Recall, the single most bullshit spell I can kinda sorta make work burns much more power on simply finding a target than the actual teleportation and that's once I've already marked a location with the spiritual equivalent of fifteen foot high neon letters.
That's how I find things. There's a residue of what Ryan wants, the part he desires when he he gives me the order. With some work and research I can find the thing.
Sometimes the thing as a two hour flight away hidden in a old junkyard under centuries of detritus, other times it's a bit more tricky to find. Coruscant has been the galactic capital since well before the old republic, there are junkyards here older than the pyramids.
I place my food down and shuffle the old bracer off the kitchen bench. Once upon a time, pyramids ago, the bracer was a Mando' Power Shield. Now it's a shell with electronics which feel right replacing the destroyed components.
Still doesn't work.
No matter, it was once great and if I have anything to say about it will be again.
This is my life now and so far it's pretty Ok.