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Yes, I know—you have heard the tales. But this is a truth of the heart, if you can believe I have one: Beings embellish.

I am not crazed; I do not skulk; I don’t drink blood. I take pride in appearances, pride in my heritage, pride in my work. It is serious to me, such work; there is no room at all for error, no latitude for a bad attitude.

Given a legitimate and efficacious way out, I would stop the killing … but I have tried joydrugs, and they are not effective; the rush is temporary and counterproductive. Synthetic derivatives and recreations are utterly useless; in fact, such half-measures make me ill. Which leaves me only one answer, the answer for all Anzati: the soup in its purest form, freshly exuded and as freshly extracted. It rots outside of the body.

Which means there must be a body.

It is a mother lode, Mos Eisley, a powerful concentration of entities of all gender, gathering on private business that now is also mine. Between jobs, it is vacation, holiday, opportunity to hunt for myself. To track and find the vessel most capable of satisfying my palate. Call me gourmet, if you will; I see no reason not to please myself between those assignments that, in their completions, in the method of their completions, serve to please my employers.

I have time. I have wealth. I am in fact quite rich, though I say nothing of it; credits are a wholly vulgar topic. If you cannot afford to hire me, you do not even know I exist.

Only one employer, my first, complained about my prices. He was a hollow man of small imagination … I drank his soup for it, but he left me unsatisfied; the entities who hire me are usually cowards themselves, incapable of anything beyond the desire for power and financial reward, and their soup is dilute. But it served, that death; no one ever again complained.

Loyalty, like Luck, cannot be purchased, only borrowed for a precontracted space of time in which I serve myself even as I serve others in furthering the ambitions—or settling the petty squabbles—of myriad entities. It is altogether a wholly satisfactory arrangement: My employers have the pleasure of knowing a certain “annoyance” will no longer annoy, I drink the soup of the fallen foe, and my employers pay me for it.

But what the entities do not realize is how transitory my bondage: It is only the soup to which I am loyal, and the purposes of extraction.

Other Anzati bind themselves to small lives, lives wholly focused on hunting. But there is more, so much more; one need only have the imagination to see what lies out there, and to find a way to take it.

Let them bind themselves. Let them live their small lives, drinking soup from unworthy vessels. Let me take the best instead. A heady brew, such soup, far more intoxicating—and therefore longer-lasting—than the temporary measures that other Anzati rely on.

And meanwhile I am paid to do what I must do.

Yes. Oh, yes. The best of all the worlds.

It is always the spaceports, always the bars. I suppose one might equally suggest the brothels serve much the same purpose, but in those places an entirely different sort of business is conducted, transitory in nature and without much risk taken save in choice of partner and, perhaps, of mechanics. In bars they drink, they gamble, they deal. They come here first when a run is completed, seeking such vice and spice and entertainments as might be purchased in the cantina; and they come here looking for work. Space pirates, blockade runners, hired assassins, bounty hunters, even a handful of those involved in the Rebel Alliance. The Empire has driven the latter out of such places as they might prefer, altering good-hearted, once-innocent entities into souls as desperate as others, but with a vision pure and argent as the double suns of Tatooine, wholly unadulterated by the harsh realities of the times.

When one believes firmly enough, when conviction is absolute, one is undaunted by odds. Their soup is very sweet.

Sand chokes. It is an entity of itself, at once coy and pervasive. It dulls boots, befilths fabric, insinuates