It's a big galaxy for a young Jedi on the run. Even if she steers clear of the Core Worlds where most of the inevitable search's power will be concentrated, she's quite spoilt for choice. Somewhere in Hutt Space might be a good first choice. She'll be able to ditch the ship and buy a new one, or find other means of travel or gainful employment, with the only question asked being whether she wants her trade-in value in Imperial or Republic credits. The only downside to Hutt Space is that everywhere is somewhat... grungey. But she can at least pick her flavor. Ord Trassa for agricultural grunge, Quesh for chemical grunge, Nal Shanta for industrial grunge, or Nar Shaddaa if she prefers a veneer of glitz over the grunge.

Glitz. Glitz is good, the tackier the better. Glitz and soft things and all the height of hedonism a growing teenager can afford.

She lies whenever anyone asks about her origin. Claiming to have dramatically escaped from slavery is as close to the truth as she gets - wholly true in the broad strokes, a small fib on the details of who and where and how. (She rarely claims to be an escaped slave. More often she's a charming urchin, the abandoned child of a drunk, the tragically separated child of a doting couple - she invents as many stories as she can, uses a new name everywhere she goes, just for the joy of it.)

She sells the ship pretty early - she's choosy, perhaps oddly so, letting her instincts guide her to someone who'll take care of the ship that rescued her, even if they don't pay as well as someone who sees only credit amounts. She hugs the ship goodbye, and spends a while drifting, hopping between jobs on other people's ships, leaning engineering on the job. It's not always safe, but she takes to fighting - knives, fists, blasters - like she's only taken to the Force, before.

She trains herself in the Force, too. Gets better at hiding. Figures out how to make people's eyes skip past her, and takes up grand larceny as a side gig. She's not at the point of affording her own ship, not yet, but her world is one of possibility, now.

She learns how to flip switches without physically reaching. How to just know where and when a ship needs maintenance. How to summon her knives to her hands, how to jump and twirl and fall like magic - delights in what her body and mind can do with an unfading glee. She learns to cheat at cards the normal way, and then learns to make dice fall however she wants - and how to do that as unsuspiciously as possible.

Five years pass all too quickly.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the galaxy, the embers of war are stoked back into a roaring flame. The factory world of Balmorra is the first victim. Technically it was unaligned, but the Republic was its best customer. The Empire conquers it in fire and blood. A government-in-exile is proclaimed by a resistance movement, but without their factories, no one takes them seriously. Balmorran droids support Imperial troops armed with Balmorran weapons on their march into the Core.

That push comes to a head at Corellia. One of the founding members of the Republic, Corellia doesn't produce the sheer volume of ships that Kuat does, but a Corellian ship is known to be better engineered than anything the Drive Yards puts out. Here the Republic digs its heels in and makes the Empire pay for every meter of progress. After six months of fighting, the Empire has the Corellian Prime Minister sign a declaration of surrender on a live Holonet broadcast and declares victory. The smart money estimates they took as much as ten percent of their total forces in casualties. The Republic begins to advance much more aggressively.

All this the Hutts and the rest of the galactic underworld let pass by without much notice. Spice still needs to be run, slaves still need to be traded, and local businesses still need to be extorted. The color of the uniform on the police officer you toss in the acid pit doesn't much matter. Still, the war creates opportunities that an enterprising mercenary or smuggler could profit handsomely from, if they don't mind a little bit of risk.

She loves risk, and with big risks come big pay outs. She stays out of the slave trade, but spice and weapons and refugees she has no problem with, and ships she's on are lucky. (There's no other word for it. One of the captains she signs on with declares her a lucky talisman. She decides Albatross sounds like a fun working name.)

She throws herself into the war mostly as a smuggler - mercenaries have to obey orders, after all, but a smuggler's clients often just care that she got the goods on time. She gets her own ship, modifies it to hell and back, and learns it like her own skin, the hum of the engines like her own heartbeat. The Force is her copilot, she sometimes jokes, but in her own head it's true - she's never had a better friend than the Force. She makes decisions by closing her eyes and listening to its pulse. She takes not just big but apparently stupid risks, trusting she'll get out okay. And she does, again and again and again, the best copilot in the galaxy watching her back.

She names her ship The Albatross, starts calling herself Captain Abali.

And, as she flies and smuggles and grows ever more herself, she trains, and she listens for clues as to what she needs to be doing.

When's she built up a decent little reputation for herself, she gets a certain job offer from a friend of a friend, for item retrieval and delivery. All the information she gets before she has to decide whether or not to take it is a location, a remote planet on the frontier of the Sith Empire.

Item retrieval sounds like it'll be either exciting or easy money, and she has a good feeling about this.

She accepts the job.

The Imperial Reclamation Service has an ongoing excavation on the planet. Her target is a set of three tablets that is believed to recently have been discovered. They should still be at the dig site, and may even still be in place. She is to bring them back intact; damaged goods are of no worth.

Roger that.

She solicits information on what the local defences are likely to be, then sets course for the planet.

The Reclamation Service is technically a branch of the Imperial military, though their primary focus is archaeology. She can expect there will be armed guards and at least token aerial defenses, though entering orbit is unlikely to be contested. If she doesn't mind a few days' hike, she could land far enough out to avoid the sensor net and approach on foot. Or she could attempt to bribe or bluff her way into gaining landing clearance at the site itself, though that's likely to be challenging and will result in her getting shot down and heightened security if she fails.

She'll hike - she's not on a tight deadline, here, and it's good to stretch her legs sometimes. (Bribing and bluffing is stuff she's done before, but this is a new branch she's dealing with - maybe next time she tweaks their noses she'll go a more direct route...)

The forest is relatively tame and easily navigated. The most danger she'll encounter is a few packs of doglike creatures with six legs and long snouts full of sharp fangs, which are easily sent yipping away.

The excavation, when she reaches it, is set in a long, narrow valley perpendicular to her direction of travel. Security is concentrated at either end, the mountainsides being too steep and rocky for an ordinary person to traverse them without the aid of equipment. The building of interest seems to be some sort of buried or submerged structure. Neatly square holes puncture the ground at regular intervals, exposing the hidden walls. Roughly in the center is sloping ramp down to an arched doorway, with only darkness beyond. All over, Reclamation Service personnel swarm like so many ants around a colony.

She's no one important at all, nothing to notice or care about - she avoids as many people as possibly by scaling down the cliff right above her target, but surely none of them are going to look up? There's no point in that, and she's no more important than a random bird...

No one takes any notice of her. She's able to walk right up to the underground entrance unmolested.

As she does so, a vertiginous feeling grows in the back of her mind, as though she's leaning forward over the edge of a very high cliff.

She loves cliffs, and she's jumped before and landed safely.

Abali focuses on her trust that she'll get through this okay, and she keeps walking.

Inside, it is inky black. The light from outside halts as though cut with a razor at the doorway.

Interesting. Might make finding the tablets a fun challenge.

She closes her eyes, listening. What is the Force telling her?

Forward, like a whisper in an anechoic chamber.

Forward it is.

She keeps her eyes closed. She doesn't need them, after all.

Forward, then left, down, right, right, pause, back, right. Then an open space.

She should open her eyes.

She does.

Starlight. Or at least the impression of it, a sourceless glow from indefinable pinpricks visible in the corner of her eye that vanish whenever she focuses on them.

A wide chamber, carved with scenes of a war gone by.

And floating in the middle, gently revolving, the three tablets she's looking for.

Oh, this is pretty.

She steps up to the tablets, gently, and reaches out to take one.

Her hand is blocked by an invisible force. Her fingertips start burning.

Awww.

She holds her hand in place, neither pushing nor retreating, and focuses on a question in her mind - why not?

Most saliently, because she's probably going to lose the use of her hands. There's noticeable amounts of charring happening.