Star Wars: Starting as Diplomat of Madness

"If both sides suck, it's up to you to make a difference."​

Of all the things I had been through, it was bribery that made me lose sleep. Not from working with/for war criminals both past and aspiring, to giving the Empire my tacit approval by virtue of not running away or starting a civil war, to receiving confirmation that my allies were, in fact, ready and willing to kill me the instant it became convenient. Bribery.

Bribery!

All so I could get a suitable freighter out of an impound lot!

I had already checked that the legal owner was dead, so there was nothing morally objectionable about it. But nothing else I had done that day had been out of the ordinary or had weighed on my mind at all. The day had been rather draining, in fact.

And yet, here I was. In the wee hours of the morning, sleepless.

Maybe it was just one of those nights I didn't get any sleep. Yeah, that had to be it. Fortunately, this freighter I had acquired through entirely legal if slightly unethical means had a fully equipped kitchen in its crew compartment. After six hours of tossing and turning in the supply closet I had transformed into my personal quarters, chugging an entire pot of coffee sounded like a far better use of my time.

Said kitchen took up a sizeable corner of the rectangular lounge that made up the majority of the crew compartment. The coffee machine was the usual needlessly complicated collection of tubes, gaskets, and knobs that I was used to from back home, but I managed to figure out how to get a reasonably drinkable brew going in no time at all.

Unfortunately, by the time the pot was even half full, I was no longer alone.

"I'm starting to understand why Levin decided to camp out in the cargo bay," Natia said from somewhere behind me. Honestly, the fact that she was awake at all was surprising. "That noise you put out really is something."

The fact that she and all three of her allies had decided to tag along for the venture was even more surprising. Well, perhaps not Natia's presence; her extremely misguided sense of Sith HonorTM​ demanded she follow the terms of the alliance. Loa, the apprentice whom Lord Sadic had tried to implicate as a traitor to my cause, was not too surprising, either. She had something to prove, after all. Bybon and Levin were a mystery, however.

Oh well. All would be revealed in good time, no doubt.

"I am the gift that keeps on giving," I said with a smile. Deciding that the coffee pot would fill itself without my constant supervision, I turned around to do the decent thing and face the person I was speaking with. "But you could always join him."

"Pass." The Sith Apprentice had taken a seat at the kitchen island that marked the boundary of the kitchen area. Despite the early hour, she was already dressed for the day in her customary armored bodysuit. "The others are about to wake up, and I'd rather not be kept out of the loop."

She could tell when people were about to wake up?

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"A little trick you tend to pick up when you're surrounded by other people just as strong as you are for weeks on end and with a solid incentive to see you dead," she revealed. "Like Korriban."

"That explains it. Never been there," I admitted. "Don't plan on it, either. How long do you reckon until the others will join us?"

"Half an hour at most," she said. Half an hour? Plenty of time to prepare a simple breakfast. "How does someone become a Sith Lord without ever having been to a Sith Academy?"

"Either the best luck in the world or the worst luck in the world." Reaching out with the Force, I rummaged through the storage cabinets. Aside from the boxes of military rations that I had had brought aboard the ship in case of emergencies, there was an ample reserve of more civilized ingredients. Flour, eggs, and milk drifted onto the countertop.

Idly, I noted how from my current angle, the crew quarters reminded me more than a little of the ground floor of a suburban home. The thought was enough to set of pangs of nostalgia.

"Former Jedi, then?" she guessed. "Or Jedi trainee? Candidate? Whatever their word for an acolyte who can't hack it is?"

"Just an ordinary man," I said, mixing the ingredients to form a batter. Did we have pans? Yes, yes we did have pans. And a functional stove-top, too. Yes, my master plan to have pancakes for breakfast was coming along nicely. "How come you're so interested in my background all of a sudden?"

"Because you were very eager to join forces with the Jedi," she pointed out. "Not to mention your anger with certain imperial actions on Nar Shaddaa and your 'friendship' with the Jedi Shadow, and some of us are a bit concerned."

"You're afraid I'm abusing our alliance," I surmised, setting a pair of pans on the stove to heat up. "But you haven't left and taken your allies with you. Which means that despite all the un-Sith-like actions I have performed, you still have a reason to stick around, meaning that sticking around is your best option. Are things really that bad back on Dromund Kaas?"

Natia sighed.

"Darth Zash chose to take me on after she murdered my master, so it's not as bad as it could be," she admitted. "But I am an apprentice, not the apprentice. That she's let me wander around this long without recalling me is concerning. Almost as concerning as your priorities."

"Hm," I grunted noncommittally, holding a hand over the pans to check if they were hot enough. Yes, more than hot enough. "If Darth Angral or his goons have a holocron when we take them down, I'll make sure to look away while you're nearby."

"You better," she muttered. "You promised glory in exchange for my support, remember?"

"Are you always this snippy with Sith Lords?" I asked, ladling a healthy dollop of batter into the pans. They made a familiar hissing sound and filled the air with the familiar scent that I could only describe as breakfast-in-progress.

"Is someone making pancakes?" the almost familiar tones of the Hero of Tython filled the mostly quiet crew compartment. "Ah, Lord Nestor, that's very kind of you."

"I do occasionally try," I said. This was going to be a thing, wasn't it? No simple breakfast just for me, but a group affair. Suppressing a sigh, I reached out with the Force grabbed a stack of plates, and got started on what I could only describe as a family-sized breakfast.

Little by little, the rest of our little coalition trickled into the lounge of the crew compartment. The pot of coffee I had prepared for myself had been sacrificed on the altar of the common good, with a second well on its way to completion.

The Jedi Knight in command of the Republic effort sat in his Jedi robes giving every indication of being perfectly at ease. His padawan… was not the same. The vibrantly red-headed Jedi reminded me of the intelligence agent who had decided that car bombs were a great way of disposing of dead, but that was an unfair comparison. The drone from Imperial Intelligence had been eminently unbothered by anything and everything; The padawan sat hunched in front of her stack of pancakes like she wanted to use them for cover but making a valiant attempt to eat them all as quickly as possible.

I had no idea where the droid was. Hopefully, it was on the bridge keeping an eye on things.

Bybon was shoveling food into his gullet as fast as he could. Loa was trying to maintain a modicum of good table manners. Natia was succeeding. Levin was still missing.

And the Little Jedi was even more at ease than the Jedi Knight. That really should not have surprised me; she seemed to have an unusual amount of trust in me.

"Goodness, why is it so dark in here?" an elderly voice called out. A familiar voice, that of Doctor Godera. My head whipped in his direction, zeroing in on his presence in the Force, right as he hit the light switch.

The previously dimmed lights turned up to full in an instant, reducing my vision to a featureless field of white. It took a few seconds for my vision to return, but no one else in the room seemed to have been affected.

Right.

The bugs were still pumping things into me.

Even if I was on a lot of painkillers, I was still a lot more susceptible to bright lights.

...

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