<div class="floatright">(https://i.imgur.com/qh8hBhV.jpg)</div><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;">Pantoriana Lelajan Kestrel</span></strong><br/><strong>Location:</strong>Sapphire's Shard, a nightclub on the outer edge of Tur, on the planet of Odund<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Jakira D’han<br/><hr/>The<em>Abyssine Clutch[url] (https://i.imgur.com/I05OmUo.jpg)</em>sliced down through Odund’s atmo, drawing a sharp line through its sparse cloud cover. This unimpressive hulk of a planet was like so many Pantoriana had seen in her relatively short life; devoid of life, devoid of all meaning except for the resources that hid beneath its surface. The ever-expanding sprawl of galactic sapients drove unceasing demand for raw materials, and they would never be satisfied with the meager gifts found upon their home planets, no. They would demand more and more, and reach their avaricious fingers out into the stars, plucking the fruit from every last tree in the galaxy, until there was nothing left. It seemed unsustainable to Pan, but she knew she wouldn’t live long enough to see the day that it would all come to a head.<em>Bigger problems for bigger brains,</em>she decided.<br/><br/>The Empire was crawling all over this system, but in a scattershot, almost disorganized fashion. Whoever was leading the mining operation only cared about what they were extracting and had no intention of staying long-term, it seemed. Outside of their strongholds, there weren’t much for checkpoints, and especially not in Tur, apparently. It hadn’t been much hassle for a former Partisan to find the right avenues to arrange a meetup with a slicer, even on short notice.<em>I could get used to this fringe work,</em>Pan mused as her ship entered auto-landing mode. Her old boss, Saw Gerrera, had always wanted big targets in populated areas. It was never about liberation with him, just notoriety, adrenaline, and revenge.<br/><br/>The<em>Clutch</em>landed outside the city, as was standard for everyone visiting fringe towns that either didn’t want to be officially logged or didn’t want to pay a docking fee. For Pan it had more to do with being antisocial than anything; docking agents were always nosy. The canopy popped and she hopped out, her heavy landing kicking up dust.<br/><br/>By any casual glance, Pan was just another human female with a little borg on her, but below the neck she was quite a bit<em>more</em>than human. Though a cursory medical scan would confirm her species as plain old human, her bones were biosteel and her muscles synthfiber. The human replica droid body to which she’d been hastily grafted had once been an assassin, designed to seduce and annihilate chosen targets for its master. It had lost its head somewhere along the line and thrown in a scrap heap, where it sat for years until Pan’s pathetic near-dead scraps replaced the head the droid had lost. Though it had been three years now, she still felt dysphoria and awe when she inspected her new body. The old one had been wiry and lean, the body of a knife’s-edge smuggler. Now she looked like a HoloNet starlet, buxom and fertile at every curve. She wore a full bodysuit not only to accentuate her looks for others, but to hide them from herself.<br/><br/>The walk into town was effortless. She didn’t really get tired since the change; droid bodies didn’t work that way. They were at full power all the time unless she allowed the batteries distributed through her bones to get critically low, and that would take some intense deprivation over a period of weeks, or many hours of unceasing physical combat. HRDs were designed for long term undercover insertion, and it just wouldn’t do to need to be plugged in overnight! Her contact had provided the location, and so she weaved her way through the bustling town to find the Sapphire’s Shard, where her potential slicer awaited.<br/><br/>Citizens made way for Pan as she entered the bar. She had gotten used to it by now, the way people tended to avert their gazes and change their routes to stay clear of her. Smuggler Pan had learned to be quiet as a mouse, and her stature had helped quite a bit. But now she was tall, almost towering, and while the droid body had been made to seduce with sexuality, it was also powerful. Synth muscle rippled just beneath the surface of that silky brown skin, and when combined with her piercing glare made Pan imposing in a way she was still learning how to utilize. The days of sneaking around in the shadows was over, and she would never go unnoticed again, that much was certain.<br/><br/>The bright purple bodysuit probably didn’t help.<br/><br/>Pan was tall enough to swing a leg over the back of the chair and plop her robotic-but-shapely ass down opposite the one who she assumed was her slicer, who the contact had described succinctly as “a hot-ass Zeltron,” which wasn’t necessarily helpful since Zs always tended to be attractive, but as the only bright red woman in the building, it was easy to conclude. The communications array that was literally bolted to Pan’s head chirped in her mind, and with a wink, she sent the response code.<br/><br/>“Heard you’re looking for a job,” Pan said with a violet smile. “Turns out I got one for you.”