>>5547952“Here’s hoping that they also made it okay,” you offer seriously, raising your glass of <span class="mu-i">slightly</span> spiked blue milk in a toast. “Differences aside, they’re still our kith and kin.”
Ceyla clinks her novelty cup to yours, an over-priced, cheaply-made thing with a sticker of Rion wrapped around it. “I’ll drink to that.”
When you both finish, you set your cups aside and get to work. “So, here’s what we know so far…”
Nomiana Whrul. One in three of a group of Mandalorians, tentatively designated as Clan Whrul for easy recordkeeping. First spotted in the Unknown Regions prior to the slave revolution, working part-time as a bodyguard and bounty hunter. Disappeared during the revolution and said to be on ‘sabbatical’ with her cohorts. Now, only a handful of months later, she’s ended up on Rion, right in the Outer Rim on the almost-opposite side of the galaxy.
What she’d been doing in that time, you don’t know. It wouldn’t be possible to know definitively without asking her directly. But what was gathered from the locals paints a very interesting picture.
Nomiana had arrived on Rion two weeks ago, but she’d only been seen in public for the better part of the last few days. Under the guise of buying spare parts for the <span class="mu-i">Albatross</span>, Suzel and Elba made inquiries into the <span class="mu-i">Tracinya</span>, and discovered that a month’s worth of berthing fees had been paid up front, with another month in advance in the event they have to stay longer. But you have significant doubts that she’s on a vacation.
“She was here before the Empire scrambled towards Kessel,” Ceyla hesitantly deduces, “So she wouldn’t have been proactively hunting…us. Or any of our kind.”
You give a nod of approval as she catches herself. Well done. “Doesn’t mean she won’t otherwise leap at the chance. Last I checked, her family and ours have some…tension between them.”
That’s a whole can of worms that you don’t have time to examine. The Jedi-Mandalorian War during the time of Revan is only the tip of a proverbial iceberg’s worth of bad blood. Further down the millennia, one finds encounters such as the Mandalorian Excision and the Battle of Galidraan. And that isn’t even going into the factional hot mess between the True Mandalorians, the New Mandalorians, the Mandalorian Protectors, and the Death Watch.
Suffice to say that when Jedi and Mandos get in close proximity…things don’t normally happen the way they did on Mylus.
That she’s a breakaway is obvious, but you can immediately rule out the aforementioned four as a point of origin. Her wrist tattoo is the mythosaur skull, not the symbol of Clan Vizsla. Not a New Mandalorian on account of her weapons and armor, and the True Mandalorians died to the man on Galidraan. And last you checked, her name and Clan Whrul don't appear on the list of affiliates of the Protectors seen on the battlefield against the Republic.
(cont.)