The Pleasure Cruiser Morning Star, midway between Tattooine and Zeltros
This was the best prison sentence I'd ever served. Once I'd properly acclimated myself to it, that was. Sasseeri Reeouurra was a stone-cold bitch, and I still half expected any day to catch a blaster bolt in the ear for my trouble. That being said, as long as you accepted the fact that you could die at any moment and that you were only allowed to travel where instructed, you were treated pretty damn good. No, not pretty damn good. Damn good! Ridiculously damn good! Oh my God!
For one, an associate of Vigo Sasseeri Reeouurra had to look the part. That meant that half of your time was spent being massaged, coiffed, manicured, and generally highly maintained as eye candy. I won't lie, there are probably some guys (somewhere?) that are better looking than I am. But can those guys skin a blaster this fast? Or fly a ship this well? Shit no. I am form and function, baby!
Now, only so much of my appearance can be attributed to my own good genes and exfoliating masques. The other half of the equation involves a dizzying wardrobe of fashions fresh from Coruscant and Naboo. Ithorian silk, Dantooinian leather, to name a few. Even in my best days at skippering Layla independently, I never so much as sniffed half the credits required to buy these clothes. The man-hours required with my Neimoidian tailor alone were enough to nearly qualify as a part time job. Certainly should count as employment if you count the number of times my balls were incidentally touched when taking measurements.
It had been a month of crash courses in high elite fashion, and I'd taken to it like a gungan to water. Caridan cuffs, a Kursh collar creased precisely to allow 2.1 inches of lapel at the widest point. The shoes were an Ithorian toe loafer with a half inch sole. The patina was a little glossy for me, but the Ithorian cobbler insisted on nothing less for wearing aboard a starship. Yes, there were entirely different sheens of leather intended for wearing on a ship as opposed to wearing planetside. Who knew shit like this? I did, now!
Of course, sometimes those Ithorian shoes wind up underneath your overstuffed antigravity couch, and your Kursh collar jacket lands in a heap next to an obscenely expensive Alderaanian rug atop a half dozen spent bottles of Chandrilan champagne.
I woke up a stranger in a strange land. There was alcohol involved, sure. I rememeber that vaguely. I had no pants or underwear on, but a delightfully overknit towel with the pleasure cruiser's crest was cinched carefully around my waist. An unlit stim was cemented to my lower lip by trace amounts of saliva, and some woman's bra hung around my neck like a lei.
And was that an Ewok splayed across the coffee table like roadkill?
The worst part about it? Or the best part? I was hardly surprised by any of this.
I stepped over the fallen bodies of two of my partners in crime, and shambled over to the wall comm. Slapping it carelessly, I gruffed when the voice chimed in on the other side.
"Room service, please."
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