"...Wow, seriously?" Vai tightened her brow, slapping the backs of her fingers lightly along her stim pipe. A tiny spark, then a useless plume of vapor coughed out of the streamlined enamel tube, and it once again went entirely inert. "Piece of shit. Just what I needed."<br/><br/>Sighing and making a mental note to get a new one when the time came -- the time being "when she actually had money again," which could be who knew when -- the blue-skinned smuggler tucked the little thing back into her long, sleeveless black jacket, her long antennae exploring contently in front of her as she made her way through the spaceport city of Bay Taua, the closest thing the Nauelli had to a halfway house.<br/><br/>This place reeked of sex and sin and booze and smoke, something that Vaiwen Zeca -- Low Nauelli by birth and scoundrel by choice --<i>could</i>have been drowning out with the lovely scent of her stim pipe, had it not decided to break down entirely. She was here because she had nowhere else to go, here with all the freed slaves, undocumented q'orrine, and exiled gutterblues like Vay herself. She liked to think of it as "between jobs," which it could technically be considered, as long as she got some other kind of work before getting stabbed in an alley somewhere in this smoggily-lit hellhole of a city-planetoid.<br/><br/>The one good thing about hellholes, though, was that they had bars. The door to one such establishment hissed and tried to automatically open when Vay approached, only for the lean smuggler to lean down and open the cracked, tarnished thing manually with an upward strain of her muscles. The name of the place, Blue Heat, had been enough to catch her attention. If she was lucky, other gutterblues would be drawn to the place, too. Then at least she'd be able to find a friendly face instead of bumping shoulders with all the other aliens she'd never really gotten a chance to... erm... "bond" with the same way she had with her own people.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>