Intro: Doyl Jaxon "DJ" Morano
I wasn’t exactly heartbroken when they called my number; my cellmate, Myk, was a fairly decent sort, but I was glad the sweeps kept him from holding onto a shiv. Myk tended to get…excitable…when frustrated. It’s why he was in slam, for cutting a guy over a bad hand of Sabacc. And he talked. Incessantly. Who he’d fought, who he’d killed, who he’d frakked, on and on. So I wasn’t going to shed any tears over our separation, however brief.
Hey, at least he didn’t want to cozy up to me.
Stepping out onto the tier, four goons were coming to collect me. I felt honored. Four toughs for little ol’ me? I stood still while they ran my number with the wand, listening to the din of all the other animals. One was particularly inventive, so I shouted over the shoulders of the goons, “Yeah, and your mother was an Ugnaught!”
“I got yer Ugnaught right ‘ere!” Not so inventive after all.
After a quick nod confirmed that I was unarmed, the goons surrounded me and turned toward the main processing area for the block, with little more fanfare than the head goon snarling a curt, “Let’s go.” Who taught these guys their manners?
Under my breath, I muttered, “And your mother was an AT-AT.”
“Whuzzat?” the goon asked dangerously.
“Nuthin’,” I said as pleasantly as I could, with my best “Mostly Harmless” grin.
Then the “interviews” started, like I was some kind of regular square looking for a square job. God, I hope it’s not Mess Duty. You want to see “criminal?” Look at what we eat. I swear, the Food Services Director had to be taking at least 25% of his budget out of here in his pocket. If it was Food Services, I was going to take a poke at a goon, for thirty days of R&R in the hole to get out of it.
Bad enough I gotta eat that dren; no way I was spending 12+ hours a day around it.
I finally glommed to the fact that this was exit processing. I tried to chat up a screw, to get some skinny, but he wasn’t in the mood for conversation. Finally, I’m standing at the cage getting my worldly possessions handed to me; magnanimous bastards actually gave me a room to myself to get dressed. None of this made much sense, but I wasn’t going to waste a golden opportunity like this. If it was some sort of data-glitch springing me eighteen-to-twenty-four-months ahead of schedule, I was going to get ghost as soon as I hit the street.
The street-Ah! The first breath of free air! Listen to me well, my Brothers and Sisters: ain’t no air sweeter than free air. Well, short of, you know, like, methane, or something. Unless that’s what you actually breathe.
Grass! Green, green grass! Sweet, cut to within a millimeter of it’s sweet, green life (I should know, having pulled Yard Duty a couple of times), I wanted to take off my boots and run barefoot through it.
Sunlight! And not some anemic little shaft through a window so high a troop of Wookie acrobats couldn’t reach it, and so small an anorexic Jawa couldn’t squirm through it after a month of fasting. Just lots of pure sunlight, beaming down on the just and unjust alike with equal abandon.
“You done sightseeing, frellnick?” Jenkins, one of the screws, a goon supervisor. Oh, how I was going to miss him. Five minutes around him and you start thinking them Rebels might have a point.
“Yeah,” I answered with a sigh.
He tapped my shoulder with his stun baton (not activated, and none too roughly, I noted; I was now a “citizen” once again, and he couldn’t damage the merch), pointed me towards the parking lot, and barked, “Get ghost.” One of these days, someone is going to give him a stun baton suppository. I’m almost sorry I won’t be around to see it.
I figured to hit the public transit as soon as it stopped by, as no one was coming to pick me up; even if anyone had known, my old crew was two planets away by hop, my parents two sectors away, and neither about (or even able) to go out of their way to give me the time of day. Mum and Da were sadly disappointed in me.
The feeling was mutual.
To get to the public transit stop, I had to cross the prison parking lot. I might’ve thought about boosting a speeder right there, but I had no tools with me, and didn’t really want to start my new life of newfound freedom by committing a felony right in my former residence’s parking lot. Goons and screws can be a bit tetchy about that kind of thing.
I get down to the parking lot proper, and there’s a shiny black speeder, a real “I’m Important” model I couldn’t immediately place, but I street priced it at 10,000 creds. Nice.
I gave the square hanging out by it a quick once over, ready to bop on by on my way to getting ghost from this place as quick as my feet could get me, when she says to me, “DJ.” Like we knew each other, or something. That stopped me.
“Greetings.”, she says, all formal and stuff. I open my mouth, but she cuts me off.
How rude.
“Though I’m sure you have many questions, I’m not here to answer them, beyond this: your record has been cleared as far as the Empire is concerned. You are free to do as you wish with your new freedom, but I’d strongly encourage you to keep this”, she tossed me a comlink, “...on your person. At an appropriate time, someone will contact you. And when they do, the circumstances surrounding your release will become more clear. Understood?”
I smiled pleasantly, and said, “Not in the slightest. Totally clueless. Lost.”
Miss Manners apparently wasn’t in a chatty mood, turning without so much as a “Later, tater,” to get in the Mobster Mobile. I couldn’t be sure, but there might’ve been someone else in there, too. Aha! I says to myself, Aha! She’s just a Face. Da Boss is there in back, scopin’ me out. I felt honored.
Before she was all the way into the speeder, she turns back and says, “Almost forgot. It’d be rude of me to secure your release and then provide you with no provision or recourse but to resort to crime again to provide your own necessities. Please use this until you can make other arrangements, or are contacted.”
“This” turns out to be a credit chip. Checking the balance, it’s a rather nice credit chip. I’m immediately suspicious. People don’t toss around this much coin without a lot of strings attached, and I hate being other people’s fools, dancin’ on the end of the strings they pull hither and yon with gleeful abandon, having little regard for how dinged up their puppet might get.
But then again, I was standing in the parking lot of a prison I had no intention of ever coming near again if I could possibly help it, with a clean record, a slick grin, and the one set of clothes that was the sum total of my worldly possessions. Well, there was my “stash” back in my old cell.
Myk was welcome to it; Kardo wanted my action anyway, and he had crazy eyes. Let him fight Myk for it.
Looking at the receding Mystery Mobile, I figured I was still taking the bus.
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Originally Posted by coldskier0320
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