No Sympathy for the Stranded?

Yana Ishale Sularen wasn't precisely pouting. Nor was she sulking. She was, as she liked to repeatedly phrase it 'going for fresh air.' Not that the air here at the edge of the Caldera was fresher. There was definitely a stronger wind, kicking through her unruly black hair, tousling it about even messier than it already was. Mostly what this spot had going for it was that it let her seethe in peace.

Nobody came out here. There wasn't a damn thing out there in the wastes between calderas. Now and then they'd ride swoops out there, or people would take potshots at old dumped appliances. But by and large it was quiet. Well quiet except the shuffling sound as Yana kicked a rock down the gradual slope outside their caldera. It was very gradual and the rock too flat to roll. It skidded to a stop, and she let out a long sigh, sitting heavily on a boulder.

"Stupid dad," She huffed, "It's not like I'm a little girl, it's not like I can't take care of myself just fine. So what if a guy grabs my ass dad? Do they it to every other girl in there, not like you need to make a big moral stand out of it. If you turned away every frelling customer who grabs ass, then we'd close the doors in a week."

Her lean and muscled frame bent down to pluck up a flat stone, and she tossed it out along the dirt, watching the small plume from the impact. She let out another exasperated sigh and lay down flat against the boulder. It was hot on the exposed skin of her back, but not enough to be uncomfortable. She was used to all the heat, and her weird skin had apparently been blessed down the line with great UV and heat resistance. Well compared to Hope who was always burning hehehe.

It was the ongoing struggle, Yana mused, rising back up to vertical with her stomach alone. Her lithe frame was good at little things like that, and she kept her hands securely on the worn leather over her thighs. She stared out over the waste with her green eyes, and they narrowed. Her thick brows were knit together.

"What the hell?" She muttered, fumbling in the backpack she'd brought for macrobinoculars. Her fingers brushed aside the sandwich, and the water bottle, and then pulled out the binoculars. She leaned her body against the boulder and peered through them. What she saw was exactly what she'd thought she'd seen. And it was weird.

One single Imperial stormtrooper running through nowhere, going to nowhere. Well, probably toward the caldera, but angles were weird things when dealing with a circle as huge as that was. But the real question was what the hell was a stormtrooper doing here? Yana looked around, and realized she didn't have a blaster with her, just the large bowie knife tucked into her boot.

"Shit," she muttered some more, the wheels of her mind moving about repeatedly. They moved more when she cursed, so a steady quiet stream of profanity emerged. The thoughts went about as follows.

There's one of him. He's armed with a blaster. Better to get his attention and find out what he wants before he decides to start shooting. And if he does start shooting, better he does it far away so I have time to bolt.

With the thinking done, Yana stood up to her full height, clear of the boulder, waved one arm over her head, and let out a very loud and piercing whistle.

Yana wasn't inclined to be friendly to the Law. Coming from a family of, to be generous, cutthroats, bandits, and general scoundrels and ruffians... Well the Empire wasn't good for families like that. It was just one of those things. You know, like common sense. For all that mattered. So she was about as pleasantly surprised as possible that he didn't just start taking potshots at her.

He just casually turned and walked up. No more of the running. Whether that was good or bad she couldn't guess. It just sort of was. He stopped a pretty hefty distance from her, and had that formal kind of look where he wanted to be in charge. Maybe it was the armor. Maybe it was the big Imperial way they did things, just intrinsically. Of course the cheesy citizen line was expected, but the dumb ass question was worse.

"You got heat stroke inside that bucket or something?" Yana queried. How precisely was it possible for him to be ON the planet and not know what it was? Did he just plummet from the sky? One guy? Without any briefings or something? Maybe that was it though. Maybe he'd crashed or some crap like that, and it explained why there was just one of them. Guy was probably shitting himself in there hoping nobody decided to mess with him.

Assuming it was a guy. It probably was.

"You're on Saleucami, and I wouldn't go in the spaceport dressed like that, half the damn city'd pack up and run, the other half'd probably kill you."

Crazy plastic boy. You had to be certifiable to be in the Empire, it was official.

Yana blinked a couple times.

Body... working at full efficiency. Was it a damned droid in there? The Empire'd fooled everybody maybe, and the suits were just a bunch of droids? Or maybe they'd succeeded in finding people who were genuinely that awkwardly robotic. It was surreal. As was his statement about killing half the town. Delusional as hell that one must have been. Maybe they all were, she'd never actually talked to one before.

"Look, plastic-boy," She hazarded a little sass, because her hands we both non-offensively in the air, "I've got food and water in my backpack, you can have it. But we need to sit down and have a little talk before you go around blowing people away. This isn't some action film on the Holonet, and I wouldn't mess with people here, some of 'em are pretty scary. And it's long odds anyway."

It was actually downright daft, she mused. Take down half the city? Him and what army? Yana's green eyes bored into the armor, trying to get any feel for what was under there. Asshole? Amiable sort? Droid? Cleverly disguised Rodian? Who could say, but she wasn't gifted with patience. Not by a long shot. No, she was Yana Ishale Sularen, daughter of Finn Ishale Sularen, and that meant she was well steeped in hot-headed crime and bad decisions. Bring it on.

"Also quit with the 'citizen' crap, you're in the middle of nowhere, just march your ass over here and eat the damn sandwich."

Yana was, properly speaking, throwing shade at the trooper. Her green eyes were staring flatly, her jaw square, teeth gritted in exasperation at the backbirth who'd been slapped into a set of cheesy armor and dropped onto a hunk of desert nowhere. On top of all the other defects, he must have hit his head pretty damn hard to think he could take out a few thousand people by himself. The Empire was way out of touch with reality. Indoctrination was one thing, but stupid was a whole other ball of wax.

Or not wax. Something substantially shittier.

At least he was walking toward her. Probably some ugly boring snaggle-toothed stupid-looking dunderhead who-

Was incredibly hot. With a chiseled jaw, a boyish sort of nose, the most gorgeous pale skin and hair... And these sparkling blue eyes that were like pools. Or oceans. Or some incredibly poetic shit.

After Yana picked up her jaw from the dirt below, she handed the bag over, and immediately tried to straighten her hair a little, pulling it off of her face, fussing with it as if it was going to make her more attractive. She cleared her throat a little, and tried to act friendly. Friendly interested, not 'blatantly smitten' interested as was really the case.

"So uh, y'know, you could just call me Yana. Instead of Ma'am, or citizen. And uh..." She slanted her look at him a little, trying on bedroom eyes (which wasn't a look she could pull really), and she turned up her charm dial to the maximum. Which was probably 8 and a half.

"There's got to be something you're called too..."

Yana was slightly red in the cheeks, for her that meant slightly more bronze than usual, over the trooper's sandwich fixation. Of course it was hard to anticipate that she would promptly be romantically wooed or something. In fact the more she thought about it, the more Yana realized she genuinely had no plan. Well no plan beyond 'throw it out there and hope it sticks.' She was going to wing it, also in fine Ishale Sularen traditions.

The sandwich, she was surprised to see, was gulped down rapidly. How he'd handle all those peppers she didn't know. He somehow didn't look the kind who could handle a bunch of spicy.

The name query at least yielded... Something. What precisely it was, she couldn't say. It sure didn't sound like a name. TK-1104/D. Sounded like a piece of paperwork you had to submit in triplicate. Sounded like a statue in the civil code of Chandrila over approved amounts of heavy metals in dog food. It was definitely not a name. She pursed her lips a little and thought about how to respond, giving him time to eat and drink.

He was apparently hell-bent on marching on into town. A minute and a half ago she'd have let him gladly get himself offed. Now, given how... circumstances... had changed. She felt a lot worse about that possible course of events. She bit on her lower lip a little, wracking her brain with thought. There was no way around it. The armor had to go. And he wasn't gonna like that. Not one bit. In fact it'd be hell.

She eyeballed him again.

Worth it.

"OK, uh, TK. So here's the deal, you go in there, and somebody's gonna kill you. You can't make it through a thousand people. What I can do... Well, I can get you some clothes, so you blend in. You could also use some shade yeah? Maybe a place to rest for a little bit?" She queried hopefully.

He started to turn pinkish.

Uh oh.

His eyes were even watering.

Yana's jaw slanted a little, and she grit her teeth. Go figure. Good-looking stranger lands, asks for her sandwich, and he lacks the basic spice tolerance to handle the mild peppers she put on it. Bad luck. Just plain old bad luck. Stood to reason. I mean she'd probably find some other innovative way to sabotage her own charms. That was the disadvantage of having no charm.

He dropped the sandwich. But he also, surprisingly, agreed to her 'not dying' approach. That meant she had to plan this a little more.

It was probably a fifteen minute walk back to town. On the way there was that derelict building, it'd do for nice cover. He could hide in there while she found him some clothes, and she did indeed mean 'find' in a very dubious way that included theft. In fact that was probably the only decent solution, her dad's clothes were designed for a man significantly shorter and wider, and if he saw some guy wearing them he'd probably bludgeon him to death anyway.

"All right, follow me," Yana motioned, walking downhill on the dusty track, the shack she intended visible down a ways, before the rest of the caldera's settlement. Nobody lived out here on the rim. It was hotter than hell, windier than a storm, and there wasn't any water. Nobody was gonna watch or see, save her. Or Hope if she was there. But she was busy with something or other, probably to the point nobody'd see her for a day or two. That meant her little stealth game could continue pretty okay.

"So you see that little shack? We're gonna hide you in there until I grab you some clothes. We'll also probably need some kind of cover for you, like, you're a trader or something."

Yana wandered off in search of clothes, taking something of a circuitous route through the town. Lifting from the market was usually pretty hard during day. Well, for the big stuff anyway. Little things you could fit in a pocket, but clothing required some creativity. There were a couple different people who sold clothing. One was a tailor, and that ruled him right out. Never steal crap in a small city that was recognizable, because somebody'd notice it. And then your ass was sitting in jail for a few nights.

Normally that wasn't a huge deterrent, but Yana's thoughts kept flitting to a few things different she'd like to do for a few nights.

She made the decision to hit the more successful merchant who sold packaged clothes. He kept his supply in his storefront while he sold from the market. That meant the task of the day had been to break in quietly. Normally people thought that was pretty hard given the bars on the windows and the big lock on the door. Those people had no creativity whatsoever. In Saleucami, everybody relied on the same little sewer system down below to haul off what they didn't want, and to pipe in steam for heat, and the fresh water too. That meant they had a whole big network of utility tunnels down there.

It had been Finn who'd suggested mapping it all out and putting it on a datapad. The result was that if she felt so inclined, she knew the way into everybody's business or house. Provided you didn't mind moving through a narrow metal catwalk over a stinking flow of unpleasantness. It burbled down a slope at a brisk pace, probably shunted into some lave flow for convenient disposal. Stuff was engineered pretty great on Saleucami. And of course the lock on the access to the business was old and mostly broken anyway, so it took absolutely no effort to get in there.

Since it was still peak market hours, the storage was empty, and Yana had plenty of time to sort through the wares. She took a pretty ordinary linen set of garments, naturally colored with some blue-grey accents, full of billows and equipped with a hood. He'd be able to hide that sexy face if he had to. A pair of boots and a belt followed, and Yana slipped right out undiscovered. The sun was getting quite low in the sky when she made it back to the shack on the outskirts. TK was still asleep. Or dead. It was hard to tell since he was slumped against the wall wearing the helmet. Yana set her armful down on the dead couch some teens occasionally used on an hourly basis, and tapped the helmet a couple times right on the forehead.

"Hello?"