Shadows of Bankor

If there was a single word to explain how Ru'ni was treating his breakfast, it was angrily. He almost attacked the food, manners be damned as he shoveled it into his mouth. Normally he savoured the tastes, so different from his traditional food, so decadent.

Today it was just fuel for his body, for his body would have much to accomplish. He waited to see if Sinnya had received the note he left for her, but he would not wait long. He thought his work yesterday was vengeance for his people, it seemed the Force wasn't done with guiding him towards revenge just yet though...

"Hey." Sinnya looked much more in-her-place in the food shop than Ru'ni, her eclectic Aznuri jewelry the only really obvious marker of (partial) outsider identity. She passed by his table to grab a pre-portioned bowl of noodles, tossing a credit chit onto the counter, then backtracked and slid into a seat opposite him. "Got your note. What is it this time?" Behind her outwardly casual expression, he could probably catch a hint that she was concerned. "We have got to get you a comlink..."

"Funny you should mention that, I think I know where I can get one." He slides across the recording he lifted off his mark last night.

"You spend more time in the Enclave than I do, have you ever heard of an Aznuri, Jintru of the Chaldi?" He lets Sinnya listen to the recording once he was certain there were no other ears close enough to overhear.

"Jintru? He's still alive?" Sinnya accepted the recorder with a curious frown, which became stony as the recording played through. "That... that sewer schutta. Shit-eating son of a skinny gizka. Let the Calm cast him out to black darkness. Shit." Once she had cursed her way, with gritted teeth, through every language of her upbringing and back around again, she banged the recorder back down onto the table and put her head in her hands.

"Jintru's just some spicehead. Or that's what I would have told you," Sinn muttered to the tabletop. "You know the kind. Got hooked on bad laowai medicine and couldn't really go back to the forest after that. Did odd jobs for whoever had money, or spice. But this..." She straightened up enough to look Ru'ni in the eye. "There's something wrong with the Chaldi. I took some laowai researchers out there to visit their village and it was full of Imperial troopers. One of their elders was acting like she owned the place, and we never saw any of the other elders, and I think they had people imprisoned in one of the houses." She used the Huttese word for jailing somebody; the Aznuri word for a hostage taken in a raid didn't seem to fit.

Ru'ni listened patiently to Sinnya's assessment of Jintru, the man's reputation confirmed by the Twi'lek.

"I think this problem has been brewing for a while. Changes like this don't happen overnight. I must confess to not spending much time with the Chaldi, have you heard any news from the other tribes? Or is Sister Tirali acting alone?"

"I never visited them before, either," Sinnya admitted, spreading a hand palm-up. If Ru'ni, a real and proper tribesperson, admitted (partial) ignorance on the subject, surely Sinnya shouldn't feel embarrassed for her own limited knowledge about the Chaldi. So she tried not to.

"Everything seemed normal when we first landed, except for the troopers. People were doing normal things like you'd expect in a village. We only noticed the houses being guarded once we got in." She chewed her lip. "Some of the Chaldi are with her. Other ones don't seem so sure. I don't think the other tribes know what she's really up to yet, because..." her voice dropped and the tip of one lek twitched rapidly in obvious agitation, "we heard her on the comms talking to that Sith demoness about attacking the Hidden Ones at the Calm. Attacking!"

Ru'ni slammed his hand on the table. "So when Viati wouldn't give this Sith whore what she wanted, the Chaldi, or at least a few of them, seem to have rolled over in submission."

"We must remove this weed growing among us. Cut it out root and stem. These invaders cannot be allowed to reach The Calm. The legends say that it took much to cleanse it, we cannot allow that to be undone. It is more important than any of us."

"Or else this one elder, Tirali, was with them already." Sinnya chewed her lip. "She wants what no Aznuri can have, it looks like. The Sith used the word queen." This was another word that didn't translate well into the Aznuri language.

"She doesn't have a Hidden One or any strong peacekeepers on her side, I'll bet. Verse--you remember Verse?--said she might have the gift, some. But if she had any of the real hidden knowledge, she wouldn't need to fight her way in, right? Taking whatever information the Sith wants from Sister Viati was the easy way. Using the Chaldi to attack might be the hard way in. They'll take it anyway, though."

Sinnya was a bit vague on the nature of the things the Hidden Ones knew and of what went on in the Calm, as befit an ordinary Aznuri--and certainly a half-outsider. Over the past few weeks, Sister Viati had intimated to her that she might have a little bit of the gift herself, but that was true of lots of people, wasn't it?

"Listen, I'm going back with those offworlders later today, to see if we can scout out the Chaldi instead of going through the front door. You want in?"

"You bet I do, these laowai are being helpful and sympathetic to our plight but this is an Aznuri issue. We need to get to the bottom of it." Ru'ni answered. If Sinnya reacted to the use of we, Ru'ni didn't comment. She might have been seen as an outsider by the tribes, but he saw her as having a true heart devoted to the people as any.

"This Queen," Ru'ni practically spat the word, "will learn true leadership doesn't come from a title."

"No," Sinn agreed.

Not 'queen,' and not 'emperor' either. That thought sent a scary thrill down to the tips of her lekku.

"If you come, the other tribes will trust you." More than me, was the unselfconscious implication there. "And I would trust your eyes to see anything I missed." She filled Ru'ni on the rest of the laowai in question, apart from Verse--Qareme, Jenna, and the rogue scholar Vaya whose research had originally led them out to the Chaldi.

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I figured I don't need to spend four posts listing everybody, but assume basic sketch descriptions for Jenna and Vaya, since unlike Verse and Qareme they weren't on the prison transport and thus already known to both Sinnya and Ru'ni.