This chapter contains, spoilers: bisection, castration, genital mutilation, knifeplay

Chapter 3: Rodian Run-In

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“I’m impressed.” Cabe said, the pointed tips of his metal legs clicking across the flat sheet metal streets of Geen-14.

“With what?” Jed asked, biting into her breakfast bar and slinging the small backpack stuffed with provisions over her shoulders beside her oxygen tank.

“You’ve managed to not only make the three worst decisions of your entire life all in one day, you’ve somehow managed to make each one dumber than the last. I’m not sure anyone else could’ve pulled that off.” He said, the tinny simulation of his voice maintaining a surprising degree of sincerity.

“Oh, Cabe!” Jed said, rolling her eyes and delivering a playful kick to the area between Cabe’s two back legs, which was all that could currently be called his butt. “I know you can be a sore loser sometimes, but you should be happy right now! You’ll get your body back, I’ll meet my Jedi master and master my own Jedi-ness, everyone wins!”

Cabe cursed as his mechanical legs wobbled beneath him, though he managed to keep his balance and continue walking with Jed, albeit several paces ahead of her now. “No, everyone dies. We die. Horribly. Or did you forget the last six times you tried this and the last six times I had to come and save you from possessed zombie droids?”

She took another large bite of her breakfast, and without swallowing answered “Simple misunderstandings. I didn’t have a lightsaber back then, so I couldn’t prove I was really a Jedi. You can’t expect a Jedi master to just let any old crazy waltz into their temple, especially while it’s still under construction!” Jed emphasized her point by patting the section of her robe concealing her weapon, paying no mind to the fact that talking about it loudly on a public street sort of defeated the point of concealing it.

“I don’t expect him to let THIS crazy in.” He said, pointing a back leg at his friend without ceasing his skittering. “He’s already tried to kill you six times, and I’m not going to be of much help saving you this time. Besides, he probably knows your face by now. I don’t think that presenting him with the stolen weapon you pried out of his friend’s cold dead hands is going to warm him to you.”

“How do you know it’s a he? Jedi can be women too, you know.” Jed asked, motioning to her bathrobes.

It was Cabe’s turn to roll his eyes, his scuttle stopping only long enough for him to stamp his spidery legs indignantly. “Well, when THEY send THEIR droid army to tear you limb from bloody limb, would you at least try and throw me the lightsaber before they pull both of your arms out of their sockets?”

“No one’s getting anything pulled out of anything. Trust me, everything is going to work out just fine. We’ll go to the junk temple, speak with the Jedi, get him or her to give us a spare lightsaber, get your body back, then I’ll return to get some training done while you scavenge to feed us. Easy as one-two-three-four-five…six.” Jed said, her tone doing an excellent job of concealing her niggling doubts. To be entirely fair to Cabe, the last few times she’d tried to contact the Jedi of the junk temple (or Jedi, plural, since no one knew exactly how many where in there… if indeed there were any) it hadn’t gone particularly spectacularly. The Jedi (or Jedi) of the junk temple was naturally distrustful of outsiders, what with the whole “Jedi extermination” thing the Empire had going on. As such, Jed had been repeatedly denied entry to the temple grounds by an army of cobbled together scrap soldiers. Said denial involved the droids chasing Jed down while trying to put some new holes in her with blasters and jagged lengths of rusty pipe, and on several occasions they only thing that prevented the droids from completing their objective was the timely arrival of Cabe and his brute strength. Strength which was no longer an asset available to them, as Cabe was keen to point out. Whether or not a lightsaber would allow them parley with the Jedi.

The timeframe of their quest was also something of a worry. Pach was expecting a lightsaber or a lump of money equivalent to a lightsaber in ten days. Since Pach had also taken the majority of Jed and Cabe’s money, they couldn’t afford a pilot skilled enough or stupid enough to fly them anywhere near the junk temple, which was almost as deadly to ships as it was to people. As such, they’d be walking to the junk temple, and since the junk temple was a four day journey from Geen-14 on foot that left Jed and Cabe only two and a half days of leeway, of which Jed had already spent 3/4ths of a day showering, sleeping, eating breakfast, sewing her clothes back together, and shopping for the necessary food, water, and filters for the road. Any delays at this point could prove fatal to Cabe’s body.

And, of course, there was the slight possibility that there was no Jedi at all. The junk temple had started slowly but surely rising from the wreckage a decade ago, the giant complex seemingly assembling itself through sheer willpower. Rumors over who was behind its construction and why they were doing it had become as common as the scavengers who had died trying to plunder it, and since so many plunderers did die, information on the temple was scarce. Some believed that sentient droids dumped on Raxus Prime had banded together and were in the process of constructing an army of vengeful droids to one day lay waste to the organics who had treated them like garbage. More superstitious minds claimed the restless ghosts of those who died on Raxus Prime had cobbled together crude bodies to posses and had gathered around some incredibly haunted shipwreck as ghosts were want to do, building a temple around the wreck for reasons known only to ghosts. There were of course those who thought that a Jedi survivor of the Imperial purge was behind the temple’s construction, which is a theory both Jed and even Cabe supported based on their observations of the junk droids’ mechanically impossible construction. Neither of them thought the droids should even stay in one piece, let alone function, without supernatural assistance. Since neither Jed nor Cabe believed in anything as preposterous as ghosts, the Force was the most plausible explanation. That said, one of the most popular conspiracy theories surrounding the temple was that it’s all an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the Rodian Mafia. According to the conspiracy, the Rodians had found an absolute loot goldmine and wanted to keep it all to themselves, so they set up a spooky haunted temple to scare away any meddling scavengers or Imperial salvage squadrons while they continued to plunder the site.

“Hello, Jelly belly. Fancy running into you, here.”

Jed’s heart stopped, her jaw froze mid-bite, and her legs welded themselves to the ground. Turning slowly to the source of the voice, she saw exactly who she expected to see yet had been praying with all of her being not to see. “Tug.” She said, swallowing hard and forgetting to chew. She bowed her head demurely to the Rodian gangster as she stepped out of the alley, her heart resuming its beat with unhealthy enthusiasm.

Despite being equal in height to Jed, who was not a very tall woman, the swaggering gangster’s presence made Jed feel like she was being towered over. It didn’t help that Tug had brought an entourage with her, a tall and somewhat lanky looking human with the scraggly shadow of a beard and a jawa of indeterminate… everything. The jawa and human were both open carrying blasters, while Tug was seemingly unarmed, yet it was clear from their body language and the way that they obediently trailed in Tug’s wake that she was unquestionably in charge. She may have been a Rodian woman of middling height, unimpressive musculature, sporting a ridiculous mane of mangy orange hair that shot out in all directions, but she was still a Rodian. Ergo, in the Rodian mafia, she automatically held rank over all non-Rodians.

Jed didn’t remember backing away from Tug or her crew, but when her back clanged against the sheet metal wall of someone’s shanty while Tug was still two meters away, she realized she must’ve been retreating. Jed clutched her left side on instinct, painfully recalling her last encounter with Tug and her screwdriver shiv. While that specific screwdriver had been left inside Jed and was now long one, Jed did not doubt Tug’s ability to find another sharp object on a planet buried under metal scraps. “You’re looking fresh. Take a bacta bath recently?” Tug asked, choosing to speak Galactic Basic. When speaking to their marks, most Rodian gangsters spoke Rodian to assert dominance or to make the listener uneasy or something. Tug speaking Basic, however, rattled Jed far more. Speaking Basic was a show of friendship and goodwill, and if Tug impaled her friends, Jed really didn’t want to know what she did to her enemies.

Realizing that Tug was waiting for an answer and knowing that it was a bad idea to keep Tug waiting, Jed said “Yesterday, yeah.”

“Yesterday? I see. And what about your friend?” She pointed down to Cabe, who was cowering behind Jed’s right leg. “If memory serves, your boy toy was a little taller when we last met.”

One of Tug’s associates, the pasty human with the definitely-not-compensating-for-anything sized blaster pistol on his belt and the large cheek scar interrupting his poorly shaved face, chuckled . He firmly but playfully tapped Tug’s shoulder, and remarked “What’re you talking about, boss! That lizard’s ain’t no boy, and without his boy parts he ain’t got a toy for this girl ’neither!” In case the joke was too subtle for anyone present, the human took the liberty of grabbing his crotch while looking down at Cabe, cackling at his own wit.

The cackling continued for a few more seconds, right up until the human realized that Tug wasn’t joining him. “Lerdun, I’m trying to have a conversation here.” Tug flatly stated. The human raised his hands defensively and took a step back, his boss continuing “Seriously, though, what happened to poor old Gabe? Cut himself shaving?” To which the human, Lerdun, laughed. He couldn’t summon a genuine laugh, however, and tried to compensate for his lack of sincerity with volume. One of Tug’s big, black eyes twitched with annoyance, though Lerdun couldn’t see it.

“It’s Cabe.” Cabe said. “And you know I’m still a person. You can talk to me.”

“There was an accident.” Jed said, not wanting Tug to talk to Cabe, or more accurately not wanting Cabe to talk to Tug. “We were salvaging and we got caught under some rubble and I could pull myself out but he was too big so I had to cut his head off but it was okay because he’s Londarr and can survive that for a while and now we’re raising money to get Pach to make him a new body and… that’s it.”

“Pach? The mad cyborg Pach? Heh, that girl is more of a crook than I could ever hope to be. I bet she’s charging you an arm and a leg!” Tug said. She turned, and coldly stared at Lerdun when she failed to hear laughter. Lerdun, who had been daydreaming, snapped to his senses and chortled uproariously, shaking the jawa who, based on their complete silence thus far, was either completely deaf or could not speak Basic.

“Yeah, she’s not making this cheap for us.” Jed said. “But we’ll manage.”

“I’m sure you will, Jedha. You’re a resourceful, talented, smart young girl.” Tug said, taking a casual yet disquieting step closer. “So, how much have you raised so far?”

“Uh, nothing. We just started. Today. Like, we’re going out to salvage right now.” Jed said, her back pressing further against the wall as her legs tried to scoot sideways. The jawa sidled between her and her escape route, slowly but deliberately pointing their blaster rifle at Jed’s feet, and by extension Cabe’s entire being.

“Oh, but you must have saved up something. You’ve bought yourself breakfast after all.” Tug said, reaching out and slapping Jed’s breakfast to the ground. “Come on, how much do you have on you?”

“Tug, I…” Jed said, sweat building on the ridge of her goggles as she stared at the smiling gangster. Her left side flared up, her intestines their master to give the mugger whatever she wanted. “I sold a bunch of my stuff to get supplies for the trip, I really don’t have a credit to my name right now.”

“Trip?” Tug asked, genuine surprise entering her voice. “Going anywhere in particular?”

While Jed managed to stop herself from hissing, she couldn’t stop her mouth from stretching into a hissing shape. She raised her hand to eye level, waving as she spoke in the hope that Jedi mind trick would come to her naturally. “Nope. We’re just gonna wander around. Hope we stumble across some valuable loot. You know, like always. But for longer. Because we need to raise a lot.”

Tug didn’t speak. While her eyes lacked pupils, the subtle twitches of her neck and face told Jed that she was looking her up and down. “Just gonna wander around?” She repeated.

“Yes!” Jed said, excitedly. Reining herself in, she continued “Yes, we have no idea where to look, but I’m sure that we’ll figure something out. Eventually. And, uh, once we raise the money, we’ll tell you if we saw any good looking-

Tug placed her left hand on Jed’s cheek gently, her extremely long and slightly tacky fingers shushing Jed without even touching her mouth. “Jedha, dearie, you know it’s not nice to lie to your friends.” She said, draining Jed’s eyes of hope. Were Rodians immune to mind tricks, or did Jed just not have enough experience to do it properly? It was a hard technique, after all. It probably required a lot of training, and couldn’t be learned on the fly. “Cho’no saubo dondi, ahn?” Tug asked, switching to Rodian and draining Jed’s hopeless face of color. Jed knew enough Rodian to translate the sentence, roughly, as “You do consider me a friend, don’t you?” That said, Jed’s Rodian wasn’t strong enough to allow Jed a timely and coherent response. Before she could untangle her the words and deliver them, Tug’s fingers tightened around the back of Jed’s head as she pushed herself against the human, her snout resting on Jed’s oxygen mask while her larger yet harder d-cups compacted Jed’s c-cups into her ribs and her back into the wall behind her. Between all the terrified thoughts of what Tug would do to her if she didn’t fess up, Jed briefly wondered why so many humanoid reptile species had breasts. Didn’t that make them mammals? Isn’t that why they were called mammals? Because of their mammaries?

Jed felt something sharp press against her left side, in the exact spot Tug had already stabbed her, and realized that taxonomy was not her most pressing concern at the moment. Jed looked down and saw that Tug had fashioned herself a new shiv, some sort of pipe with one end beaten into a jagged conical point, and was now lightly yet firmly holding its point against her. Jed could feel the cool tip of the improvised weapon on her quaking stomach already, the tip effortlessly burrowing through her clothes while the jagged taper caught. Jed did her best to slow her breathing, each exhale stressing her skin against the spike and each inhale causing a few threads of her clothes to split with a quiet yet very audible snapping sound. Her robes and undershirt were trying their best to stay the blade, but the cloth steadily tightening against her even as Tug refused to move a muscle. If the Rodian put even the slightest effort in, Jed would be impaled. Or, rather, if Tug stopped putting so much effort into not stabbing Jed, she would be impaled. And unlike the small point and smooth, narrow shaft of the screwdriver, the pipe’s girth and the jagged, bent angles running up to its crudely fashioned yet fine point would do some serious damage. If Jed didn’t immediately bleed out or go into shock, which was a very real and increasingly probable outcome, she would need a lot more than a quick bacta dunk to heal her. She needed to get out of this, now.

“Tug, friend, listen. I only have a week to raise enough money for Cabe’s operation. I’m going to have to spend every last hour out scavenging. I’m not tripping anywhere specifically, but I’ll be out of town for ten days. I’m telling the truth, you can search-” Jed stopped herself, realizing what Tug would find if she searched her. Then, when she realized what she had implied to Tug by stopping, Jed finished “Search me. I have no money.”

Jed felt a trickle of blood sink into her undershirt and creep down her side, her skin yielding to the tip of Tug’s shiv as the Rodian thought it over. Tug was still staying her blade, but Jed’s skin and clothes had given out. She moaned, her stomach shaking and inadvertently widening the hole as it rubbed against Tug’s blade. A flick of Tug’s wrist, and Jed would be dead. Tug allowed the moment to drag on, basking in the power she held over her defenseless prey. She giggled, and Lerdun joined her. It felt good to be a gangster, especially when the mark was a pretty, powerless little girl like Jedha Kraz. No one could stop her, and even if they could they wouldn’t. Tug’s thigh’s quivered with delight as she felt each of Jedha’s heartbeats run up her shiv and into her palm, each on a vibrating plea of mercy. She felt a wetness in her jeans, and judging from the confused and then disgusted twitch of that crossed Jed’s face the pasty little girl felt it too. Tug couldn’t care less about the money, she didn’t become a gangster for anything as arbitrary as credits. No, she was a gangster because she had a deep love of dominating people, and if she was going to make a living for herself on this garbage heap of a planet she was going to do it doing what she loved.

When Tug was satisfied with the beautiful look of terror in Jed’s eyes, taking a mental snapshot of the sight for future enjoyment, Tug allowed the moment to pass. She smiled, shrugged, and said “Sauban ch’kc’la oten, a hska anau ban!”

Or, in Basic, “I think I’ll take you up on that offer, and I’ll start the search with your guts!”

The eyes of both women widened in surprise at the sharp pop and dull hiss that followed Tug’s declaration, and both looked down in unison.

Jed struck first. Without conscious thought, Jed’s Jedi instincts had kicked in, the Force guiding her hand slowly and carefully down to her robe as Tug brought herself into range. Jed had wrapped her fingers around the weapon’s handle without attracting anyone’s notice, even her own, and when Tug made her threat, Jed’s thumb twitched. Now, a shimmering green blade of justice had pierced through Jed’s robe and through the entirety of Tug’s abdomen.

Shock overpowered the pain of having a glowing rod of concentrated plasma punch through several vital organs and many feet of intestines, and Tug’s initial response was little more than a confused huff. Her brain refused to believe her eyes, even as the green glow began to dazzle her in her unblinking stare. No one on Raxus had a lightsaber, certainly not Jedha Kraz. No scavenger would dare impale a member of the Rodian mafia, certainly not Jedha Kraz. She’d never let a mark get the jump on her, certainly not Jedha Kraz. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t happening. She couldn’t be impaled. She wasn’t impaled. It was all a trick, somehow. Her organs weren’t sizzling, she couldn’t smell her own flesh cooking inside her, her stomach was unpunctured, and it was Jedha who was about to get it. She just needed to take a closer look to figure out what sort of trick Jedha was pulling.

Without thinking, Tug took a step back. Then, the pain hit.

Tug only screamed for a fraction of a second, yet her abbreviated cry of anguish echoed through the metal streets like the wail of an alarm. The lightsaber hadn’t impaled her exactly perpendicularly, the blade entering her body two inches left of her navel yet emerging only a fraction of an inch away from her spine. In stepping straight back, Tug had eliminated that fraction of an inch, and the blade effortlessly sawed through her spinal column before she knew what was happening. Her legs buckled and dropped out beneath her, the delightful sensation of wetness in her jeans instantly vanishing along with the feeling of her tensed thighs, poised calves, and everything else below her hips. These feelings were replaced with pure, literally burning agony, which traveled up her spine in equally literal fashion as her body collapsed straight onto lightsaber. The blade carved up her flat, tattooed abdomen, between her large, firm breasts, and when her body finally stopped falling, its square-ish and somewhat flat butt landing on the body’s booted ankles with the knees spread out in front of her, the bisecting blade had reached the base of Tug’s throat.

Tug’s bisected shirt, a thin and stained wife beater, fell down her shoulders as they slumped down, exposing the Rodian’s large, firm breasts and hard abdominals. Apart from the blackened line of vaporized flesh and the inch-wide swathe of discolored meat still cooking away from the residual heat, fairly major things to ignore admittedly, it was a good looking body. While Jed didn’t swing that way, not without heavy drinking and coaxing, she couldn’t help but stare at the large, blue breasts as they involuntarily twitched beneath their now former owner. That said, Jed’s brain may have only taken an interest in the taxonomy defying mammaries in an attempt to distract her from the fact that the ostensibly noble Jedi had now managed to mortally wound two people in two days, and unlike her friend Cabe’s injury this wound was certainly lethal.

Whatever Jed’s mental state, Tug was very aware that the end was near. She could feel her neck shifting as her body’s twitching and imbalanced weight began to slump her forward, the line where living agony and deathly emptiness met crawling its way up her throat even as her useless minions continued to do nothing. She couldn’t beg, she couldn’t breath, even if her associates decided to do something now she was well past the point of no return, she was going to die. Tug up, and if her trachea hadn’t been bisected and her lungs severed from it she would’ve let out a cold laugh. With the long, powerful shaft of the lightsaber emerging from Jedha’s robes at belt level, and with her head temporarily halting its deadly descent at stomach level, Tug couldn’t help but notice the suggestive pose she’d fallen into. She’d already taken in a very similar view on more that a few occasions, though normally the face looking down on her belonged to a smug male Rodian, not a bewildered and somewhat remorseful female human.

Tug’s head fell forward and was sawed in two by the lightsaber, black smoke rising from her corpse as a line of messy orange hair was burned away.

When Jed looked up from her first kill ever, her wide and stunned eyes met with those of the human thug, Lerdun. This look seemed to snap both he and the jawa out of their stunned stupor, though their reactions to finally being able to control their limbs were vastly different. At the sight of a mysterious robed figure killings its boss with a forbidden Jedi weapon, the jawa ran away screaming, babbling a string of nonsense noises that even other jawa wouldn’t have been able to decipher. At the sight of someone killing his mafia superior and the human’s only in to the Rodian mafia, Lerdun swore and grabbed for his blaster pistol. Seeing this, and seeing the many meters between them, Jed squeaked in alarm and held up her lightsaber in the best defensive posture she could manage, praying that she’d suddenly unlock her Jedi reaction speed before Lerdun could draw and fire his weapon.

While the Force didn’t intervene, Cabe Zarro and the poor life decisions of Lerdun Whitt did. Lerdun had not only chosen a blaster unreasonably large for his scrawny physique and dainty fingers, he had also chosen to store said blaster in a beefy black holster which, while very intimidating, was terribly slow to unfasten and did not offer its user anything even vaguely reminiscent of a quick draw. Lerdun may have discovered this at a more opportune time, if he’d practiced drawing his pistol in a hurry, but he hadn’t. He was far more interested in posing with his blaster in the mirror and not-so-subtly flaunting its size to any woman who passed him on the street.

While Lerdun’s poor decisions indirectly saved Jed, Cabe’s intervention was far more hands on. Or, claws on. Scuttling out from between Jed’s legs and letting out a tinny warcry, Cabe charged the floundering gunman. Lerdun’s gaze shifted from Jed down to the furious green and chrome blob skittering towards him, and he let out a high pitched squeak of terror as the disembodied alien cyborg head dug its talons into the ground and then launched itself directly at him.

Cabe had actually been trying to latch onto Lerdun’s face so he could poke his eyes out, but the londarr had greatly underestimated the weight of his own head and overestimated the power of his new mechanical legs. He got about as high as Lerdun’s sternum, still several feet away from the shrieking thug, before he began falling. Luckily for Cabe, he had still managed to land on the thug, and doubly lucky he had still managed to hit a vital area.

Lerdun’s high pitched shriek somehow managed to climb several octaves as Cabe’s needle-sharp talons plunged into his groin and inner thighs, digging through the muscles above and beside his junk as the baseplate of Cabe’s body slammed into said junk full force. The thug immediately abandoned his attempts to draw his weapon and placed both hands on the lizard’s spiny head, valuing his real cock and balls significantly more than his metaphorical one. Lerdun pulled with all his might, and immediately doubled over as his pain doubled. Blood soaked into Lerdun’s trousers as Cabe’s claws tore through his groin muscles, the weight of the londarr’s head and the force of Lerdun’s desperate shoves pushing the blade-like appendages assisting the mincing of his meat. Realizing the devastation he was wreaking on his own crotch, Lerdun switched to limp wristedly punching the angry lizard in an attempt to knock himout. It was a fruitless effort, however, and the punches only became feebler as blood continued to drain from the now crying man’s crotch.

Then, Lerdun became a crying non-man. He kicked and squealed as the pain ramped up to a horrible crescendo, then fell to an equally horrible emptiness. Cabe’s head dropped from his body and slid from his grip, and Lerdun’s hands immediately clutched his throbbing crotch. He could feel the muscles of his groin, the ragged flaps of pubic skin with blood soaked hairs, and… nothing else. Lerdun looked down, and moaned pitifully at the ragged stump that had once been the base of his shaft. Lying on the ground, several inches away from the rest of him, were Lerdun’s genitals, a deflated mass of quickly draining blood vessels and oozing skin flaps attached to a lump of eviscerated muscle. It was a surprisingly large thing considering the size of its blaster pistol surrogate, five inches even in its beyond-soft state and it probably would’ve been six if hard, but such facts were irrelevant. It couldn’t get hard, and it wasn’t a manhood once divorced from the man. It was dead meat, dead meat which Cabe took significant satisfaction in further piercing and slashing to ribbons as he righted himself.

“Who’s not a boy now, huh?” Cabe asked, stabbing and pulling off the tip of Lerdun’s penis with two of his claws before flicking the sad scrap of meat into the half conscious thug’s face. “Who’s got no toy now, huh?”

“Uh, Cabe?” Jed asked, stepping over the pile of Tug and tapping the back of her friend’s had. “I think we should leave.”

Cabe’s rotated his body clockwise, and in doing so spotted nearly a half dozen gawkers gawking at the aftermath of their scuffle. Looking the other way, Cabe saw three more horrified onlookers. While none of them had intervened, all of them would be talking about it, and it wouldn’t be long before their talk reached people that would take exception to Jed and Cabe’s antics. Cabe nodded, and the two of them quickly sprinted down the street and out of town, the sparse crowd scattering at their approach.

It was very lucky the two of them would be gone for the next week, and very unfortunate that at some point they’d have to return.