Shadows of Bankor

Mia grunted and removed one of her boots. After a bit of a shake, sand came out of it. She had not taken proper measures back in the desert, though she wondered if it would have been a feeble attempt to keep it from getting everywhere.

She didn't want to think about where else it could have gotten on her.

"You're pretty good with a shovel," she told the twi'lek. Internally, she cursed herself for being so awkward sometimes. "Meant to be a compliment, sorry. Anyways, you seemed a bit shaken out there. How're you holding up?"

"Better... even better when I get out of Rygor again." Sinnya twitched her lekku, shifting her eyes away from the tall human woman. "It was just... nobody ever tried to kill me before yesterday. No person, that is, anyway."

She stripped out of her dusty jacket, glanced down at her sweat-and-dust-streaked tank top and bare arms. No, not really an improvement. She gave the jacket a good shake to get as much crud out of it as possible, brushing vigorously at the seams. Turning out the pockets might be a good idea, too, but a bunch of them were inconveniently full of items she didn't have other places for.

"How'd you get so far without someone trying to kill you before?" Mia asked, genuinely curious. She gave a soft smile. "Not that you aren't pleasing to be around, but seriously, it's hard to go places without a blaster aimed at you."

The tall human gave a casual look around.

"Especially on this planet. You from these parts?" She wasn't sure if the twi'lek would answer, given their relative unfamiliarity, but she asked anyways.

Sinnya blinked and her brows knit. "Is that a regular thing for you? People try to shoot you all the time?" Her jacket hung forgotten from her hands for a moment. "It isn't that hard, normally. Anyway, there are enough ways to get killed without adding murder. If a kath hound goes for your neck, that's just what kath hounds have to do, but people are... different."

She couldn't really articulate what was different about deadly violence between sapients and all the other various natural and industrial ways to get dead on Bankor. But after yesterday and this morning, her gut told her they definitely weren't the same.

"I'm from here. Never left. I was raised in this ashpit of a city." Her tone when she speaks about Rygor carries a hint of fondness buried inside a couple of tons of disgust.

"You're from here and it never got worse for you?" Mia asked, "I'm from another planet and I wasn't nearly shot at as much as I have been here.

"That being said, I can't say it's been a habit of mine. I try to keep my head down, though I'm clearly not always successful."

"Oh, you can get pushed around here all right," Sinnya said, distinctly bitter as she gave her coat a final hard shake. "People in Rygor are used to that. But most of us aren't important enough for anybody to want to kill."

She eyed Mia sideways. "Who's been trying to shoot you? Did you get into something, back where you're from?" Maybe that was a rude question. Whoops. But it also seemed clear Mia lived a rather exciting life and wasn't shy about that.

"Usually unimportant people are just as likely to die, at least from what I've seen," Mia muttered. She took a calming breath. "Well, mainly friends of our captors." She was still wary of speaking too openly against the Empire, though at the very least, the twi'lek was trustworthy enough. Racism was rife in the Empire's ranks.

"You could say that," Mia said, giving a weak smile. She then shook her head. "But if you really are nobody, why would they take you?"

"Oh, but it isn't blasters that kill the nobodies. We get poisoned or get in accidents or get sick." Sinnya shrugged back into her jacket, now slightly less desert-imbued. "People die in ways that don't need anybody else to lift a finger, or even notice."

She leaned her shoulder against the rusty warehouse wall at their backs. "I was with the wrong nobodies when management decided they were somebodies after all. I thought the foundry goons wouldn't bother with me because I'm not a foundry worker, I never signed their contract with its stupid discipline clause." She frowned. "Now I know the government gets involved even when you're just friends with labor organizers. I hope they all got away."

That just friends wasn't exactly disingenuous, but it did leave some things out. Things Sinn had been somewhat sure were almost perfectly legal, though!

"That's the Empire for you. They want to put us in the dirt if we're not useful to them.Disease and all that doesn't discriminate."

Mia raised a brow.

"You should be more careful who you're friends with then. Well, if you don't want to get involved in this sorta thing again." She gave a soft smile. "But, if you're not totally turned off by the idea, then you might be good at causing a bit of a fuss for the management or whatever. You look like you can handle yourself, especially for someone so, uh, thin."

"I won't bail on my friends." The response was immediate, firm, and perhaps a shade defensive. "But things are more dangerous than I thought. I need to figure out... how to not be surprised next time." Sinnya crossed her arms. "I can handle plenty if I know it's coming. I hate surprises."

Catching up to another layer of meaning, she raised her eyebrows at Mia. "I am getting the feeling you cause a lot of fuss."

"Surprises ain't fun. That's why I like to always be prepared." Whether or not the blonde was always prepared was another story.

"You could say that I do. I wouldn't have gotten an all-expenses paid trip to summer camp if I wasn't." Mia wondered how much her camps as a kid had cost but she wasn't going to vocalize that. That would be silly. "I just wasn't planning on getting caught."

"Does anybody?" Sinnya shook her head, but her lips quirk. "It ended better than I thought this time. Except that we may all be in in some police database now." She'd have to be even more assiduous about staying off the grid henceforth.

"What did they run you in for, anyway?" It seemed like Mia might be in a sharing mood, though Sinnya would understand if Mia dodged this question with some variation of wrong place, wrong time .

"It wouldn't do us much good to come back to town if we are," Mia said. She looked over her shoulder and then frowned. "Well, some people often get pushed around, and I don't like bullies." That was vague enough for her to be satisfied.

"That's good." Sinnya ventured a smile. "I don't either. But sometimes it seems like there isn't much else anybody can do about it, you know? It's one thing when the bully is some kid who's five centimeters taller than everybody else, and another when it's..." she waved her hands around vaguely to indicate the bigness of it all--the foundry, the Bankor administration, the whole damn Empire.

"Ah, yeah, it is different. But, like lifting many heavy things, it's all about, well, leverage. Fulcrums?" Mia asked, trying to remember physics terms. She hadn't done too well in school, despite Chandrila's emphasis on being a learned individual. Farming was much easier. "Like if I try to pick up a hay bale with my back, it's gonna be hard. But using my hips, my legs, and it's easier. And sweeping someone out from under them is easier than trying to just force it, ya know?"

From Sinnya's slightly puzzled expression, she didn't quite follow this metaphor all the way. "Getting the government to treat people better is... like a hay bale?"

"If that's the way you want to see it." Mia was starting to confuse herself. She shook her head to get it out. "What I meant is that something so big has weak spots. We can't go at it head on. We have to be smart."

That was a metaphor Sinnya could follow more easily. Still... "Hard to spot a weak point big enough to matter on something the size of a planet. Let alone the whole Empire." She puffed out a frustrated breath. "Where do you poke to just make them realize how many people are getting hurt? The Empire could have most of what it wants--the hypermatter, peace, taxes--without all this. They'd just have to be more patient, that's all."

"You're right. They could have it all if they were determined to approach it otherwise." Mia sighed. "I've been across the galaxy, though. Some places had it better but it all started to deteriorate. It's not a question of if it will happen here, but when."

“You really think that?” Sinnya fidgeted away from the wall and tucked her hands in her pockets, giving Mia a worried look. “What... what happened other places?”

Mia bit her lip, the images of her mother's burning corpse coming back to her. Her husband, Mia's father, had been tortured on the spot, presumably for information.

"Ah, hopefully that sort of stuff never comes here. I know that kind of goes against what I just said, but what I mean is that hopefully we get it to stop everywhere before it happens here."

Sinnya’s sixth sense—what she thought of as the distillation of her unconscious perceptions, somewhere way in the back of her brain—felt something of Mia’s pain. “I am sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean...” But since she wasn’t exactly sure what she didn’t mean, she left the thought unfinished.

“It’s already not good here for a lot of people in Rygor, and down near the equator where the Hutts rule, but everywhere else... between the colonists and the Aznuri people, Bankor folk like their independence.”

"Hm? Was I so obvious?" Mia scratched the back of her head. "Ah, water under the bridge. Is that the saying? Whatever. You don't need to apologize for anything," she concluded with a warm smile.

"The Hutts. Hm, how do they get along with the Imperials?"

"I don't know how they would describe it, but the Hutts and the Imperials... coexist." Sinnya frowned, wrinkling her nose. "The Hutts have been here a long time, even before the Clone Wars. They don't do anything the planetary government would have to take notice of, they invite the important people to their fancy islands now and then... besides that, as far as I can see, they do what they want. Even back before the Empire was declared."

"Well, I imagine they pay a lot of bribes, both before and after the Empire was formed. Might take them too many resources to be worth taking out the Hutts too." Mia shook her head. "Really goes to show that they're bullies. They crack down on little people because they're too afraid to fight someone that might be a challenge."