AN :
The next goal is 350 power stones in 24 hours , and I'll bless you with an extra chapter.
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"...Mother was from the forests, but she married a man from Illentia. Father made sure I was educated offworld, so I grew up speaking Basic, and picked up Standard in boarding school. He died in the war, I've taken his yards." Obviously it wasn't a happy topic, but it was useful to know.
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It seemed that the villages and the cities weren't completely insulated from each other. There was at least enough communication between the two for a man like Hewno to exist. To be able to manage the lumber yards, Tan'ya assumed every owner would need to grasp a few languages.
When they came to the village Tan'ya was sure someone from Coruscant would be shocked by how primitive it was, but she had already mostly been forewarned. Most of the buildings were constructed from a bamboo like plant, and perched on stilts to escape flooding.
Almost all the roofs were thatched with leaves and grass to avoid the rain, with the exception being just two made from duracrete and stacked river stones with tiled roofs - the holocom terminal and the power station. There were no speeders in sight, just small canoes strapped to the side of each house in case of flooding, and the occasional goatlike pack animal.
The entire town was shocked by the sight of a speeder, looking up to watch it come and land at the edge of the village. A few mothers protectively shuffled their curious children behind them, with worried looks on their faces.
Phlelen explained. "For people here, the only speeders they've ever seen are the coach to pick the men up in the morning, and Abyssinian pirates on a slave raid, and this isn't the coach."
He stepped away from the speeder to speak in a raised voice to the people of the village.
Tan'ya stepped out of the speeder, and a wave of gasps ran through the crowd at the sight of her. The chain of office and cape she wore instantly marked out who she was, even this far out into the middle of nowhere. They didn't bow, but they did lower their gazes in difference, murmuring among themselves in their language.
Tan'ya didn't understand a word of it. It had to be completely unrelated to Galactic Standard and Outer Rim Basic.
Hewno stepped out of the car next, which drew some unsurprisingly dark looks. The man nervously adjusted his holster, but didn't put his hand on the blaster. It made sense that the villagers would resent the one they thought was so obviously exploiting them.
What Tan'ya didn't expect was the reaction to Sifo. If Hewno was treated coldly, the hateful anger directed at Sifo seemed almost ready to boil over into violence. A word ran through the crowd, repeated with spittle and a snarl. Each utterance had venom to it, a kind of burning resentment that was reserved only for a slur.
"What does that word mean?" Tan'ya asked Hewno, who was standing close.
"'Twurna.' Means alien."
Tan'ya was surprised. "But he's human."
"Doesn't matter." Hewno replied. "They can see that he's an offworlder, just from the cut of his clothes and the shape of his face."
For a moment, Tan'ya was so surprised she wasn't sure how to respond. Near the back of the crowd, some young men were beginning to push themselves to the front with long, whining vibro blades in hand and scared, but excited faces.
It took Tan'ya a moment to recognise them as modified vibrosaws, likely stolen from a lumberyard somewhere. The shape of the handle had been changed, and the oil feed removed, but in the end it was a razor sharp sword with just an odd bulk in the middle.
Hewno muttered a curse and unclipped the strap on his blaster's holster.
Tan'ya was afraid things were about to become violent, until Phlelen barked something out loudly. The armed men all looked embarrassed, and turned off their vibro swords, resheathing them in what looked like bamboo casings.
With the situation finally calming down, a slightly older woman came forward and spoke with Phlelen. Tan'ya noticed that all of the armed men in the village actually seemed very young, none of them older than their teens, with long lanky limbs.
No doubt all the adult men were out working in the yards.
Phlelen came over to speak with Tan'ya. "Come. I can show you the village now."
It was an educational experience in the end. The village had a population of not even a thousand, no house being bigger than a single large room, with maybe a rain shelter out front for those who could afford it. Much like in the city, every roof came to a peak, and many didn't even have doors, just waterproof plant fronds that hung in the doorway.
Many children ran about completely naked, even ones close to Tan'ya in age. The only source of electricity was the pathetic solar power station in the center of town, which on a rainy day would produce no electricity at all. The only thing it was ever used for was to charge batteries, that mostly went to the town's vibrosword armed defenders and the sole holoterminal, for if messages had to be sent over a distance.
Some of the young men practiced fighting with their powered down, makeshift vibroswords, practicing a kind of martial art Tan'ya had never seen before.
"Are these your only defenses?" Tan'ya asked.
"No, we used to need much more. During Ramil's reign, men were needed here to defend the village from bandits and pirates, so almost no one was out working. We often depended on hunting parties and what could be found in the forests to survive. Now the Rider Count has restored order, so all the men work. The yards are difficult, and dangerous, but no one goes hungry anymore."
"Are the vibroswords your only weapons?"
Phlelen shook his head, and led Tan'ya to the town's armory. Inside a number of clay pots, were other improvised vibroswords sheathed in those bamboo-like stalks. From one sealed pot in the corner, Phlelen withdrew a scarred, short barreled rifle with a battered wooden stock.
"A slug thrower." Sifo hummed to himself.
From another pot, Phlelen withdrew a small wrapped bundle that looked like a little flimsi bag attached to the front of a small battery. Phlelen loosened the string on the flimsi, exposing what looked like metal shavings inside, then he sealed the bag back up.
"Those are zero point two plasma cartridges." Hewno muttered with a shake of his head. "I knew I was going through a lot of them."
Stepping outside the armory, Phlelen took the plasma cartridge with the small bag attached, and opened up a breach in his weapon before neatly slotting the ammunition inside. He cocked back a hammer just above the breach, before pointing it at a nearby tree and squeezing the trigger.
There was a crack like a blaster being fired, and the tree was littered with countless small holes.
"That's not a slugthrower." Sifo's eyes narrowed. "That's a scattergun."
Behind them, grinning to herself wickedly, Tan'ya could not have been more pleased. This had been exactly what she was looking for.
Scatterguns were illegal in the modern Republic, due to their reputation for being a jedi killing weapon. The spray of high velocity ammunition was impossible to block or reflect with a lightsaber, so theoretically it could be an effective weapon against an unprepared jedi, but in reality it didn't work very well when a rogue carrying one would have their ill intentions in the front of their mind and detected by a Jedi from a mile away. Mostly, it only ever occasionally caught overconfident Padawan off guard when they mistook the firearm in their foes thoughts for a common blaster.
The Jedi saw it as a distasteful weapon that's only real purpose was to kill teenagers, which explained the disgusted look on Sifo's face.
Tan'ya saw it differently, though. The rules for Royal Guards were subtly different from the rest of the Galaxy's armed forces. Serving a traditional role, Royal Guards were allowed to purchase and own equipment and weapons that weren't allowed usually, for the simple reason that they were considered an important part of that planet's military tradition.
The Shadow Guard of Mystril for example were allowed to use shock whips, as they were part of that world's martial tradition. Other Royal Guard units in the Outer Rim even employed weapons as distasteful as agonizers and disintegrators.
This scattergun was certainly not the only one of its kind, and would serve as an important piece of evidence of Serenno's martial traditions when Tan'ya submitted their permission requests to Coruscant.
A scattergun might not be a very effective weapon for killing jedi, but for ship boarding and anti-piracy operations in the tight confines and narrow corridors of a starship, Tan'ya could imagine no better choice.
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