"Everyone has a type. Unfortunately, it seems the whole galaxy knows mine."
Most Sith would not consider it a smart idea to follow a Jedi into a less busy side street. Granted, most Sith would have answered with whatever their equivalent of 'fuck it, we ball' is, and gone charging in regardless of the consequences. I, however, was not most Sith. Depending on whom you asked, I wasn't even Sith.
I still followed the Jedi out of the busy debate square, though.
There was a non-zero chance of me getting killed, but that was just in case I had screwed up my risk assessment somewhere along the way. I was fairly safe, I knew. We were in public, after all, and any attack on me would be a propaganda windfall for the Empire. And if there was anyone among the Jedi who knew how lopsided a trade that would be, a weak apprentice with minimal training for a PR boost, it was the Little Jedi.
But should the worst come to pass… I was quite confident in my ability to run away from my problems.
Shaking my head, I shoved those thoughts to the side as I followed the Little Jedi into the side street. As was to be expected, it was far less busy than the square. Massively less crowded, in fact, with no more than a dozen people present, and all of them were walking towards the square.
We, however, were walking in the opposite direction. It was practically asking for people to notice us.
Inwardly, I cursed myself for having shunned her presence for much of the previous conference after the tabloid journalists had done their jobs. I had kept her at a distance after that, desperate to avoid digging myself into a deeper hole of calumnies and shipping fodder. Which meant I did not know her nearly as much as I would have liked.
A shame, that; I had found her company to be rather amusing, if not exactly what I would have called pleasant.
Within a few paces, my long strides brought me up to the Little Jedi's side. Not out of some demented idea of a power move, make no mistake; I knew exactly who would wipe the floor with whom if everything went catastrophically wrong. This was simple physiology.
Oh, and I could hardly allow myself to be seen following a Jedi; That would invite too many unfortunate questions. No, I had to be seen as an equal to this Jedi at worst. Even if the image I was trying to project was at odds with reality.
"I must say, this is a pleasant surprise." Eventually, about halfway down the block, I had chosen to break the silence.
"That's the idea," she said, her voice deadpan. She kept her eyes on the street ahead of us. The very empty street, I might add, which meant she was on the lookout for something. But my mind instead tried to figure out precisely what she had meant.
Tentative translation: she intended to find me without me knowing ahead of time. Maybe. If she had said more…
"So you went out looking for me, is that it?" I asked. Personally, I would have thought she knew better after that whole mess on Cyrillia. At least we were in public this time instead of a heavily scrutinized event with intensive media coverage.
"Listened, more like," she answered, still looking ahead. More importantly, still not telling me why she had been out looking for me. "If anything, that gibberish of yours is even harder to miss."
"That 'gibberish' is the ancestral language of my people," I pointed out.
"Congratulations, it still sounds like gibberish."
In retrospect, I should have remembered that the Little Jedi's company was far from what I would have once called pleasant. Fun, yes. An amusing distraction from my current situation, but most certainly not pleasant. Naturally, remembering this made feel like a bit of pettiness was justified.
"Only to the unworthy and physically stunted," I shot back. "To the rest of us, it's a language of poetry and beauty."
"Bold words for someone I could track down from across the city in less than an hour," she pointed out. While that sounded like an exaggeration, I also had no idea what she was actually capable of. She might have been rounding up for all I knew.
Unfortunately for my health, I found trading barbs without needing to overanalyze every other sentence to be a refreshing change of pace.
"Congratulations, it took you an hour to put my shins in danger," I said, which finally got her to properly react. Well, it made her turn her head to glare at me after suppressing a twitch of the lips. Which, as far as I was concerned, counted as a win. I briefly shifted gears mentally, switching back to English just long enough to make sure she understood I was calling her short.
"Lightsabers have settings for length," she reminded me with a grin, tapping at the weapon swinging from her belt.
"Threatening my knees won't make me take you any more seriously," I said patiently.
No doubt we would have continued trading barbs until we were both blue in the face, but the side street had the temerity to join with a proper street. Clearly built solely for pedestrian traffic, it was still impressively broad and brimming with foot traffic. Taken with the presence of shops stores lining the street and how every fifth person I saw seemed to be carrying a paper bag with some minimalistic logo on it, it was clearly some sort of shopping area.
In other words, it was precisely the kind of place where I was completely out of my depth. And not in a high stakes fate of the galaxy kind of way. This was an 'I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here' situation.
Which begged the question: what was I doing here?
"This is a bit of a change," I commented, glancing over at the Little Jedi. She had been the one to lead me here from the politically charged square. Something had been planned and executed successfully. Now if only I knew what it was…
"So it is," the Little Jedi admitted. In a departure from her slightly more distant earlier demeanor, her grin had turned a bit more wolfish than I found comfortable. Something had just gone perfectly right for her, and I had not clue what it was. "Care to go for a stroll?"
Academically, I knew exactly what to do: turn around, go back to listening to the political agitators rant and rave about the state of the galaxy, and come up with a list of excuses about how I thought that had been the true objective all along.
Practically, I knew the people in charge wanted me to find her and do… whatever it is they wanted me to do. Distract her, perhaps. Which would mean going into a big crowd where I risked having my meager few possessions picked, my commlink bugged, or get drawn into a brawl or something equally catastrophic.
This was not helped by the fact that I had just pieced together what the Little Jedi wanted from me: she needed me to stick around, at least for a little while. For what, I could not guess. This was a trap, that much was obvious. Worse, this was a trap I needed to walk into.
How had it come to this? I was a poorly trained diplomat. Why did I have cloak-and-dagger stuff among my duties?
"I could be persuaded to keep you company," I said noncommittally, giving no outside hint of my discomfort. Of course, depending on how good of a telepath the Little Jedi was, she did not need to understand my thoughts to read emotions. "As a personal favor."
The grin widened a bit more. Oh yeah, this was a trap.
"Is that fear I smell, Little Sith?" she asked. "Or where else did this reluctance come from?"
"All I smell is your greed and desperation, Little Jedi," I said, slowly starting towards the right to merge with the pedestrian traffic. "But perhaps you will find a solution to that on this walk of ours."
Rather predictably, this walk of ours went sideways within ten minutes. Not from some sort of attack, or ambush, or civil disturbance. No, I could have figured out a way to deal with those. Those were things that were on my level. The soft trilling sound that was the distinctive sound of air speeder repulsorlifts, however, were another story.
Those sounds rapidly grew louder as their pitch rose. If I remembered my basic physics, that meant something was flying towards me.
At low enough altitude to be heard.
...
Hey guys I would really appreciate it if you could throw some power stones to help elevate the ranking.
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