Chapter 40: Hotel Naboo

After going through customs, I changed a number of Peggats, a gold-based currency used in Hutt Space, into Galactic Credits. I’d sent a summoned pickpocket over earlier to acquire a sample to copy; unlike the crypto-currency credit, the Peggats were something I could simply magic up. I had no doubt that after changing a literal bag-full of Peggats that I was on a watchlist – it was worth more than one and a quarter million credits after all, and was shady as fuck.

Still legal though, so that was nice.

With a nice, fat bank account, Jon and I checked into arguably the best hotel in Theed, the Solleu Gardens. Jon wasn’t a fan of the flight over, at least until he got used to being in an air-car, but for me it was the culmination of all too many sci-fi dreams. The hotel itself was beautiful, the beds comfortable, the furnishings palatial. But Harrenhal was no slouch after I got done with its renovations, I had built some of the finest baths imaginable with my magic, and after improving my body so much, beds didn’t matter as much.

No, the really good thing about the hotel was the food. Don’t get me wrong; with my improved ingredients, Harrenhal had the best steaks, roasts, smoked meats and fish, excellent cheese and amazing fresh fruit and vegetables. But my cooks made medieval food; they did it well, but it got a bit boring. At the Solleu Gardens’ restaurants, a whole Galaxy of haute cuisine was available, from examples of the finest, cleanest tastes, to the most complicated molecular gastronomy and everything in between.

Jon and I shopped from the hotel’s stores, purchasing full wardrobes in the local fashion as well as the most cutting-edge electronics, blowing a small fortune on things that we probably didn’t need. I was just so happy to be somewhere modern. Well, in this case futuristic, but that just made it better. Television, movies, books… I was going to be alive for a very long time, and while I was having a blast playing Medieval Magician over on Westeros, I could do with a bit of a break.

But there was something about all this that was bothering me.

Something that seemed familiar. The alphabet they used, how the droids looked, the way certain words translated.

That night, reading through the galactic version of Wikipedia, I realized what it was.

I was in Star Wars.

=================================

Everyone back on Earth knew about Star Wars, had watched in the original trilogy as the amnesiac Revan defeated his treacherous former subordinate Malak before shacking up with Bastila. And most people had seen the prequel trilogy, where Revan fought the Mandalorians before falling to the dark side. I’d heard that there was a sequel trilogy in the works, but that wasn’t released by the time I’d ended up on Planetos.

The big problem with this being Star Wars?

The fuck-off levels of firepower. Planets were sort of like Pringles; no one stopped after eating just one. Between Force users like Nihilus who were capable of literally consuming all the life on a planet, superweapons that could do weird things to local physics or cause suns to go supernova, and just plain old orbital bombardment, Star Wars was hardly a safe setting to be in.

Luckily, it seemed that the events that I knew about had happened around four thousand years ago. Ever since the last dust-up between the Jedi and Sith was resolved nearly a thousand years prior to my arrival with the “total and complete destruction of the Sith,” (something I didn’t believe for a second) the Galactic Republic had been fairly peaceful.

I wanted to jump back to Westeros until I was laser-proof and could tank hundreds of megaton-range blaster impacts.

Except.

Except I couldn’t.

It wasn’t that my access to my mana was limited, thank all that’s holy. No, it was more that I was too heavy, metaphysically, to do so. I could still Summon copies, Call and Send originals, but all of those operations were sort of like sending someone down a zipline over a ravine. It was just that the zipline was attached to the massive mass of lands I had bound on Westeros, and on Naboo it was attached to me. Until I’d bound enough mana, I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried to cross back. Just that it wouldn’t be good, and would likely damage me, or my lands, or my bonds. I might end up somewhere else entirely, somewhere not as conducive to life.

So for now, I was trapped.

Which meant it was time to get serious about my safety.

=================================

Luckily, Naboo seemed like a reasonably safe place to be. The military, consisting primarily of a small but elite Starfighter corps, was strong enough to dissuade pirates and the like, while weak enough that any real invasion could roll them over. As a sector capital, anyone wanting to invade and conquer was likely to actually conquer rather than make an example of Naboo, because otherwise they’d be left administrating a sector where they’d just blown up all the administrative records (not a smart idea). And while Naboo did supply a large amount of plasma, it wasn’t the kind of industrial giant that would make it an attractive target for spoiling raids, nor would these hypothetical raids have to cause widespread damage other than to the plasma refineries.

Further, one of the largest Trade Federation bases was basically next door in the Enarc system. They were effectively an East India Company analog within the Galactic Republic, exploiting the Outer Rim and making phenomenal profits doing so. Last year the Trade Federation managed to get significant concessions on the level of armament on their vessels, giving a further boost to their company’s armed forces. I doubted they’d let anyone interfere with their plasma supply.

That wasn’t to say things were perfect. Naboo had recently elected a teenager as their queen, and her policy of renegotiating their deal with the Trade Federation to get better payment for Naboo’s plasma seemed somewhat naïve in outlook.

Did the original deal suck? Yes, definitely.

There was a loophole that allowed the Federation to purchase significantly more plasma than expected, then sell the surplus on to other entities at a multiple times markup. Rather than causing Naboo to become a center of industry and a crossroads of trade, the planet was making only a modest fortune supplying top quality plasma at cut-rate prices.

But was this Queen Amidala likely to be able to renegotiate a fair deal?

Sort-of. Honestly, the TF was a company, and profit driven. The ridiculously uneven deal was likely to be renegotiated, because the alternative risk of a breakdown of plasma supply was too dangerous for their shipping. But Amidala’s belief in a totally “fair” deal was unlikely. In the decades between making the deal and when I arrived, Naboo had grown used to Trade Federation goods, and Trade Federation droid labor. This dependency had extended to Naboo’s agricultural sector which I found particularly foolish.

There was an interdependency, and Amidala’s people were pampered, sophisticated artists at heart. They weren’t like the Russians, willing to freeze and starve, fight and die for national pride. Nabooians were barely willing to work at all, let alone make a real sacrifice. But that just meant that the Trade Federation had a stronger negotiating stance; the political fallout, including in other sectors, of being too strong-handed should keep the Trade Federation from being too dirty in their tactics.

However, there were some disquieting signs. Within the Federation there seemed to have been a quiet coup last year. Though they were blaming terrorists for wiping out the non-Neimoidian representatives, a few hours of research showed a quick and decisive consolidation of power in Neimoidian hands in the following days. Beyond that, the same bill that saw the TF gain the right to arm their ships more heavily removed some of the reduced taxation and tariff-free import rights that the Federation took advantage of.

Honestly, those allowances should have been eliminated centuries ago; they were introduced initially to motivate industrial development and trade route establishment in the Outer Rim. But those days, when the Outer Rim was effectively undeveloped, were long past and the TF’s trade concessions were giving them an unfair advantage against other companies, stifling growth in the inner systems. At the same time, it allowed the TF to fully leverage their greater development, preventing locals in the Outer Rim from making use of tax and duties laws that favored local (for a given definition of “local” at least) industry to have domestic growth.

The TF was still pissed off about it, of course, no matter that the newer laws were fairer. But there wasn’t much they could do. The Republic may have lacked much of a military (the morons), and crime may have been on the rise, but the powerful Core and Inner-Rim sectors that formed the swampiest part of the Galactic government weren’t vulnerable to even so powerful a company as the Trade Federation. Nor was Naboo – a peaceful, prosperous world in a peaceful, prosperous sector – threatened by the gradual slide of the furthest reaches into barbarism.

The Republic may have been on the wane, potentially even sliding into its twilight years much the way that Rome once did, but I estimated Naboo would be insulated from the impact of such for many a decade yet.

I was glad Jon and I didn’t have to leave the planet; I liked it there.

It did however mean I needed to get a home, and get cracking on just-in-case preparations.

=================================

The first step in getting ready for what the Star Wars galaxy could throw at me was getting access to truly fuck-off levels of money. I had a million credits and change which was, admittedly, a lot. Credits had about ten times the purchasing power of a dollar, after all. But I wanted to buy and fortify an estate, hire enough starship designers to make full use of my magical abilities to redesign a small ship into something capable of taking on capital ships, and generally live in luxury.

Peggats weren’t going to cut it.

Looking up valuables on the datanet, I found a few likely materials. Nova crystals, rare but highly reactive when non-stabilized, were used in some electronics and weapons systems, and worth about fifty credits a gram. Crystalline vertex, even rarer, was used by the Corporate Sector to back their currency and worth between ten and fifty thousand credits a gram depending on quality and color. Most valuable was Aurodium, typically seen in small quantities on the rarest and most expensive jewelry, at over a half-million credits per gram.

I was able to get the pattern for all three at various jewlers, and soon enough I traded twenty kilos of crystalline vertex for a half billion Republic credits with the local banks. With that, I was in business.

I purchased a large estate, and brought over two dozen Paragons to run site and personal security. I had three different security companies install shields, independent power sources and datanet connections, and defensive systems. One of those security companies was from Eriadu, a major planet a few sectors away. A local luxury audio-visual company put in better-than-cinema sound, flat-vid and holographic entertainment systems.

These installations were then checked over by at least a half-dozen droids, three purchased with each from different suppliers, and three summoned copies of those droids. Both the hardware and the software was examined. More teams of droids swept the property for bugs – to my surprise, none were found. I guessed others assumed me paranoid enough to check, or there weren’t any local spy-masters who felt me important enough to watch – at least not yet.

Jon was impressed and horrified at the level of paranoia. Then I showed him videos of orbital bombardment, and he was just thankful.

While my new home was being set up, I headhunted an engineer for my starship project. I ended up hiring a young woman called Sola Miran, a twenty nine year old weapons system designer who had worked for Theed Palace Space Vessel Engineering Corps. TPSVEC was a specialist designer which made ships for the Naboo government, including the Royal Yacht, and the N-1 Starfighter. Unfortunately they didn’t intend to make any new armed ships for a while, and so Sola was left mostly adrift with her work.

Intelligent, somewhat obsessed with weaponry, and socially oblivious she jumped at the possibility of managing a refit and upgrade with an unlimited budget. I had her sign a magical secrecy contract, then demonstrated my ability to enchant metals. I’m fairly sure she’d have married me if I’d asked.

On her advice, I ended up ordering a Corellian Engineering PB-950 patrol boat. Thirty seven meters long, twenty three wide and fourteen tall, the stock ship was relatively heavily armed with a quad-laser cannon, a pair of medium ion cannons and a concussion missile launcher. It had space for four crew and eight passengers, as well as up to a hundred and eighty tons of cargo on top of three months consumables. Double hulled and armored, the ship had good odds of surviving hits that penetrated through the shields. Contrary to its stocky, blocky appearance, the designers focused on speed, and it came stock with a class 1.0 hyperdrive.

The ship was pretty old, having seen at least three centuries since the first left dock, but that just meant that there were a lot of variations you could purchase. Corellian Engineering focused on having modular designs, which meant they could provide customized ships without long wait times.

I went in for what was basically the “very paranoid tycoon” model. It combined luxurious interior furnishings, a larger, better equipped kitchen, and top of the line entertainment system with more expensive, higher-functioning armor, improved sensors and communications gear, and a power-plant nearly three times as powerful and twenty times as expensive to supply the improved shield generator and sublight engines.

Of course, there was a cost to this; the supplies space was halved, and between one room with a king sized bed and another with a bunkbed there was only space for up to four passengers (and that if two were sleeping together). Not to mention the monetary cost; for the same price, I could have purchased a brand new CR90. But the patrol boat was much less assuming, practically ubiquitous, and a fraction of the size. For my travelling and emergency-evacuating vessel, it was perfect.

Naboo had strict environmental controls, and manufactory licenses were difficult to acquire, so I had to buy a defunct factory that was mostly driven out of business by cheap imports. While the ship was being finished and delivered, Sola was busy getting a research agreement with TPSVEC that would classify my ship as a “research prototype” and give an allowance from Naboo’s weapons control laws.

With that in place, Sola starting seeing how quickly she could burn through my money, buying an absolutely cutting-edge high accuracy manufacturing system, droid workforce, top-quality materials and specialty parts. I fully expected my spaceship to go through a number of refinement and optimization cycles, transitioning from mostly off-the-shelf products that I improved, to products designed with my potential magics in mind, to a ship that incorporated specially designed and optimized magics in critical components. Eventually, it would be a perfect fusion of techno-magical badassery.

I couldn’t wait.

Then my home was finally ready for me to move in. I magicked the place to hell and back. First I filled the walls and floor with enchanted steel which embedded into the bedrock, itself transformed into a solid slab of stone. A massive projectile ward was established that covered the house itself, while more were anchored to the grounds. Conceptual defensive enchantments were laid on the buildings. After initial tests showed improved performance, the power plants and shield generators were enchanted with White to improve their defense, Blue to improve their function, and Red to improve their power, while all but the outer-ring of weapons systems were enchanted with Blue to help their targeting, Red to improve their damage and power, and White to improve their cooling. Those initial enchantments were hilariously primitive and inefficient, but still made the equipment function significantly better.

Between that and two-score Paragons with their animal companions, I felt reasonably secure. At the very least, I’d be able to escape to one of the lands I had claimed on the other side of the planet. And after my personal yacht was upgraded, I’d have Sola work on designing some ground to space installations.

After all, I was excited to be in the Star Wars universe, but totally unwilling for it to become my burial place.

With my immediate security taken care of, I copied some of the best chefs from a cooking competition that was open to the public, and was finally ready to sit back and enjoy having access to the full breadth of games, shows, films, and books that a galaxy-spanning leisurely society could produce.

Just as soon as I built a spell to perfectly reflect lasers…

I was probably being overcautious, but over eternity even small risks add up.