Star Wars: Duality

CHAPTER TWO: DIRECTIONS

    Aedan Fainwell was having a very bad day.
    When he woke up, his caf maker shorted out. It left him groggy, but at least he was still functional. Then he was hit with a serious migraine, which only seemed to grow more distracting as the day went on (which was totally unfair; Aedan hadn't drunk that much the night before). But even with that, the day wasn't a complete blow-out.
    Then he started getting shot at.
    "Come on, guys! Do we have to do this now?" Aedan called out from behind the overturned table he was using as cover. "How was I supposed to know that air conditioner would fall on your speeder?"
    A pair of Rodian twins, Hulo and Koobis, kept firing from the other side of the empty cantina and swearing at him. Hulo (Or maybe his brother? Aedan could never tell them apart) finally answered in heavily accented Basic.

    "You've been a pain in our ass since we got to this void-forsaken rock, Fainwell!" he swore. Aedan rolled his eyes at this. Of course I have. You couldn't help but stick your lumpy green proboscises in my treasure hunt, could you? Damned if I don't fight you for it.

    Like any good treasure hunter, Aedan was trying to get his hands on a map; like any good mercenaries, the twins had taken a job to get it for some rich Hutt-licker who was too soft to get it for themself. About a week earlier, Aedan had first spotted them at the spaceport, and he quickly guessed their paths would eventually cross. They didn't notice him then, and they definitely didn't see him when Aedan began to throw every spanner he could into their plans (sometimes literally). There was the comms booth he disabled, the rats he lured into their hotel room, and the speeder he wrecked by dropping a heating unit on it, to name a few.
Most recently, Aedan had followed them to Gus's Cantina, a hole-in-the-wall bar down on Prosperity's lowest level where it was unusual to own any piece of real estate nicer than a piece of one of the city's overcrowded slums. Gus, an old but resilient Ithorian, had a habit of buying up and selling off little treasures when he could, like the map; somehow, though, it never taught him much discretion when it came to shady clientele like Koobis and Hulo. Gus very helpfully and unintentionally outed Aedan (incognito at a neighboring booth) as another interested party, and even the twins didn't take long to put two and two together. Well, not too long, anyway.
Gus poked his head out from behind the bar, as terrified as his typically serene and pacifistic species could appear.

    "I don't care who walks away with that damn map, as long as you all walk away without burning any more holes in my business-!" he grunted through his translator, then he had to duck back down as a stray bolt shattered a bottle a meter to his left. "Somebody's gonna owe me big for this!"

    The map, a small, old-fashioned holo-projector about the size of a drink coaster, was lying on the floor in the center of the shootout; no one could make a grab for it without getting hit. Aedan felt bad about giving Gus a mess like this to clean up, but he had more pressing concerns to address. He noticed the mercenaries' shots slowing down, so he holstered his own blaster. More than one way to skin a tooka, right? he thought. Aedan prided himself on his ability to get out of sticky situations in a number of ways; now he only had one trick to use, something he rarely employed if he knew word could get out about it.    

    He had to use the Force.

    Aedan knew as many stories about the Jedi as the next being, but seeing as their precious Order had never really bothered to get their hands dirty in his corner of the galaxy, he didn't care what they had to say... for the most part. Aedan simply understood the Force like a great wind, rushing between all things, funneling through the canyons of life formed by sentient beings and their actions. It could be a refreshing breeze or a deadly storm. And he had a knack for getting it to blow where he needed it, when he needed it.