Eralam's Explosive Emporium

If it goes boom, we can probably get it for you. For now, we mainly deal in bulk orders or specialty items, though there will be a weapons shop in the front of the building.

*Mr Morden enters the EEE, leaving his four escorts at the door. He wanders around, taking a good look at the displays, before approaching an individual who looks to be a sales rep. Almost idly he asks, in a polite and friendly tone.*

*An R2 unit rolls out of the back. Instead of the usual tweedles and beeps common to its kind, it has a proper vocabulator.*

"I think we might be able to do something. Tell me sir, how much do you need, and how quickly do you need it?"

*Morden turns from the mannequin he thought was a sales rep to face the R2 droid. His smile never fades.*

*The R2 unit consults a datapad for a moment, and turns to address his customer.*

"That's a rather large quantity, but I'm sure we can find a supplier. Once we do, we'll discuss the matter of the fee."

*Morden inclines his head and lowers his eyes in a curt nod.*



*Morden stoops down and produces a laminated business card for MandalArms and hands it to the droid. On the back are private comm codes for the procurement division chiefs.*

*Morden turns and leaves the Emporium, collecting his escort on the way out.*

*One part actor, one part soldier. Mix well. One part socialite, one part gearhead. Mix and bake in hell till golden brown. That's how a terrorist is made. Not bad, not evil, just a person in the fear industry with good PR. Chloro did this act well, ineffectively trying to hail a ride for 15 minutes outside the Emporium. This was scoping. Then she succeeded and returned, reading a magazine. She loitered. She sat on benches outside it. She even went inside and nearly bought something. And the day past, with nothing done, but watching.

And this is how it would happen:

Deliveries happened each day. The sproadic arrival time made a pretimed charge not suitable, but the actual offloading time was fairly predictable. So, during peak lunch hours, when the streets would be filled with civilians, a delivery van would arrive, with an priority package. 4 minutes later, it would detonate a packed caesium charge that would set the entire emporium ablazing. Another barradium charge, planted on an adjacent wall earlier to the arrival of the first package would be triggered after 3 minutes. It was placed where armory would be and given that the intense chemical fire had damaged the vault enough, it would be sufficient to set off the arsenal stored therein.

In 7 minutes in would all be up in smoke.*

*And that's how it happened. Smoke, glass and flaming rubble was everywhere. Bleeding, dying, screaming people were everywhere. And Chloro even had time to leave her signature behind, a surprise to the horror.

And she was one of those many people who were near enough to to be in the blast, but near enough to help to the wounded. It also allowed her to survey her handiwork, leave the inevitable claim of responsibility and get the timing just right on the act...*

*The shop went up in a cloud of smoke and flames, throwing off a shockwave powerful enough to shatter the windows of nearby buildings. The EEE was a sturdy structure, and was able to keep the blast from causing too much death and destruction in the market as a whole. MDF troops respond within minutes, quickly containing the fire and treating the few casualties in the street.

Truthfully, it was probably a poor choice for such an attack (for the blinding flash of baradium had left little doubt about that.) Eralam was a paranoid android, and built his Emporium to match. The thick duracrete walls had a ceramic core to stop incoming projectiles, and a layer of iridium on either side of the ceramic would ablate off the energy of anything short of a starship's heavy turbolaser. Together, they managed to conduct the heat of the baradium well enough that while the inside of the building was scooped clean by the blast, the shell stood firm. Meanwhile, the ceiling had been deliberately designed to allow shock waves from the inside to travel upwards, thus sparing the neighboring structures from any significant damage.*

*Chloro surveyed the damage with a critical eye. Somehow, she didn't hear the deep vibrating explosion that was the hallmark of an arsenal going up in smoke. And on closer inspection, she saw no crater. Dammit. Next time...

Then there was soldiers. Lots of them. And Chloro was among them. One of them gently removed her from the wounded person she was attending to and led her off as they began the mop up operation. And she let herself be shooed off.*

*Thrusting her hands in her pockets and burying her chin into the collar of her jacket, she smirked to herself and and pulled the trigger she held. The delivery vehicle that brought the bomb into the building didn't only have one bomb. And lying, overturned, not 15 meters from the first blast. It had four drums of Naplam derivative, made from reactor slag, compliments of the dockyards, that exploded in a huge greasy spreading inferno. That would get everyone's attention. She didn't look at the explosion, but instead, stole an unattended comlink and moved along with the second crush of fleeing people. This was who she was, another person in a crowd...*

*It is said that Coruscant's security system is sufficiently pervasive and intelligent enough to track a single being in a sea of trillions. Unique features such as one's gait, facial musculature, even gaseous emissions can be compiled together into a comprehensive portrait of an individual. Eralam had seen this system, and had even considered basing the Market's security setup off of it. There was one thing that he found it lacking in. While the computers running the vast networks of cams and sensors were perfectly capable of tracking, they were notoriously horrible at behavior recognition.

Sure, they could pick up patterns. This person was witnessed at suspicious point A, exhibits behavior B, will be picked up for questioning. The sort of intuitiveness that says "This person seems off, let's keep an eye on them," no computer can match that. Force sensitivity, even on a minor scale, plays an enormous role in this ability. The combined Jedi of a thousand generations couldn't keep up with the population of that place, so no effort was expended towards trying.

The Market, on the other hand, rarely sees more than a few thousand people on any given day. Though it is a hub of trade, much of the day to day business is done via the Holonet. This means that a team of ten individuals of human or near human intellectual capability can keep track of the entire crowd with relative ease. A team of operatives left by TIM had been assigned to this task, and it was to the crowd that they turned when the first blast went off.*

"What's the situation?"

"Triple-E just went up in smoke!"

"Trip E? You mean that crazy rodder Eralam's place? The hell did he have in there?"

"No idea, looked like baradium."

"Mir'osik. That wasn't a bloody accident."

"A little early to be making assumptions, isn't it?"

"Not at all. A Mando tried to pick some up from him, and he didn't have the goods. Something about trying to order from Blastech."

"...Stang. Stang!"

*No one spoke after that. No one needed to. They knew the job they were to do, and damned if they weree going to let a little thing like conversation get in the way. Multiple suspicious characters, most of them Mando. They were automatically discounted on the grounds that any Mando that would blow up a weapons dealer with decent prices was surely a being of fiction. There was a Rodian muttering into a commlink immediately before the blast, but a quick intercept revealed a conversation between a father and son discussing grades at school. The matter was moot now, because the Rodian and been standing directly in front of a window when the blast went off. He was dead before the final piece hit the ground.

Dozens of other leads turned out empty. And then, there was one. Female. Was in the area most of the day, almost painfully unobtrusive. Loitered around aimlessly in an area where few chose to do so these days (blame the riots and the Mandos.) Was far enough away from the explosion to be unharmed, close enough to inspect the damage. Facial analysis revealed none of the standard ticks and twitches of surprise, even a subconscious level.

Wind back to earlier in the day. Woman arrives at spaceport posing as a crewman of a cargo freighter. Subsequently participated in exactly no crew-related activities. Instead, suspect (for there was definitely suspicion at this point) met with a man who had been in a political agitator in the area for quite some time. Suspected involvement in organizing the recent protests, ect. Is seen physically accosting the man at some point, and then...*

"KRIFF! Switch to live!"

*A smirk, that single utterly inappropriate expression that seemed so out of place with the terror and panic on the faces around here. And then-*



*The screens blanked out for a moment as the massive fireball overloaded the optical sensors. When the viewscreen cleared, the profilers were expecting death and destruction, chaos and carnage. Instead they saw Eralam. The Shard had been in one of the few remaining parts of Dressel that had been left to nature, training his apprentices. They had been given a mission to Breehara, and Eralam had made a run to the Market to ensure that their mission would go as poorly as he had planned. He had been on his way to his shop to look up contact info for a bounty hunter when the first blast went off, not 500 meters away.

The Iron Knight's speed was nearly impossible to track by holocam as he raced towards ground zero at full tilt. Rather than fight his way through the crowd, Eralam has actually racing across the rooftops. He had darted across the street, right over top of the firebomb when it went off.

For the lightning fast brain of a droid, every second is an eternity. Subjectively, nearly a century of surprise raced through his crystalline "brain" as the truck beneath him began to buckle outwards and rupture. Another century of recognition as the first lick of flame peaked through the durasteel cargo box. A decade to form a plan, and an instant to act.

The RoboNinja used the Force to tweak his jump, landing on top of the truck as the explosion began in earnest. There was no helping those in the 5 meters closest to the blast, they were killed by the heat alone. That same heat that rendered the nearest organics down to their constituent elements was fuel for the Iron Knight. There were few people in the galaxy that could match Eralam's proficiency at Absorb, and that ability allowed him to suck up enormous amounts of energy from the explosion. There was far too much for him to Absorb completely, but he didn't need to.

The initial surge of energy was merely a primer for what was to come next. Using every ounce of Absorbed strength, Eralam twisted the fireball into a telekinetic vortex that stabbed skyward as a crimson and orange finger. The fiery tornado quickly took on a life of its own, funneling heat (and more importantly the burning napalm) upwards and away from the mob below. The ancient Shard, aglow with heat and reflected light, continued to feed the conflagration with energy of its own until it finally burned itself out. The napalm residue, its chemical energy completely expended, fell to the ground as foul smelling ash.

The security team was left in awe. Rumors of Eralam in action were rampant in the MDF, but no one had really seen what even a fraction of what the peculiar creature could do. What was even more surprising, however, was how no one in the throng seemed to notice. They were convinced that the only way to survive was to get Somewhere Safe, and had little time to worry about their robotic savior.*

*A stocky human man walked into the emporium, his scarred face bearing that of a seasoned veteran. He moved around, looking for a clerk to place his order. Finally finding one man he walked up and nodded.*

"I am here to place an order to be filled quickly. You should have a fair amount of these products sitting around. I need 100 Tenloss DXR-6 disruptor rifles and then 100 Czerka Arms SH-9 slugthrower pistols, preferably in one or two crates if you could manage that. Give me a price so I can get this over with already."

*Chaz shifted on his feet as he would wait for the man to look through databases and the like to find if they did have all the equipment he requested.*

*Sometime after the terrorist attack, and well after the building had been remodeled.*

*The Shard behind the counter did a quick check of his inventory. The Artoo unit he inhabited was built more for starship repair than data crunching, but it did an admirable job of the latter anyway.*

"We do indeed have a both items in stock, as well as the requested number of units. Unfortunately, we do not have cases sufficiently large to everything with just one or two or even five. However, if you wish to bring a hovertruck, we'll gladly throw in the weapon racks as part of the deal."

*A moment's more consultation ensues.*

"As for the price, we have a strict no-haggle policy. Eralam believes it to be a waste of time, and has given me and my associates permission to disintegrate anyone who believes otherwise. However, you are free to name your price, and if it's reasonable, we'll go with it. If not, you get our price, and you can take it or leave it."

*Almost as an afterthought, the Shard said:*

"Oh, and if you choose to keep the weapon racks, you might as well tack on 2500 credits to whatever figure you were going to name. They're good kit, so 2500 is a steal, I assure you."

*Chaz nodded,*"We will not be needed racks, I will get our other crew members to bring come crates for us to load them into on a flat. What is your price?" *Chaz sighed, thinking about annoying it will be to hand set each of the weapons into the crates they have. It would probably take an hour or two, but god was it going to be boring.*

*Additionally, he sent a quick message to the ship's inbox which would give whoever was in the cockpit at the moment the flickering red light to show there is a message. Soon they would be on their way and Kurt would be back so that he would be able to lift off this planet.*

*The droid sighed, though the sound more resembled a mechanical burbling than anything even remotely like a human's sigh.*

"The standard price for the Disrupter is 3500 credits, and 1000 for the pistol, silencer included. Altogether that would make your order come out to 450,000 credits. But since you're buying in bulk, we'll offer a 30% discount. That brings your total down to 315,000 credits."

*Chaz nodded,*"Very well, give me a place to wire the funds or some other way to pay you and such. I have somebody coming shortly to help pack all our purchase up and then move it out. Hopefully this can be resolved quickly enough so that we can make out time. We are on a schedule of course." *As Chaz continued to chat the droid up and he rummaged into his pocket for a datachip containing some information he inserted it into his datapad and looked it over.

David soon arrived with the repulsor lift and unpacked the extra pieces on it to make it four times as large to accommodate the extra crates that they would need to using. He also pulled up the portable duraweave sacks to help contain all the weapons and ship them back to the Gift.*

"You may wire the funds ."

*The droid was careful to keep a close eye on the surveillance holo, just in case any of the delivery people tried to pull something sneaky.*

*Chaz pulled out his datapad, entered in a series of pass codes and the like, opening the datapad and other such applications needed for the transaction. Soon the money was wired to the proper account, even though there were not nearly as many wires as when banking was first invented and integrated with electronics. The payment cleared and was in Eralam's bank account.*

"You should have the money now and if you could bring my purchase around to here so I can load it up and be on my way, that would be swell." *Chaz said calmly. If this droid took up anymore of his time, it would not be pretty.*

*He was annoyed as it is having to make this purchase by himself and without Kurt since he had been called to conclude the previous job completely. He was not here and now he had to rely on David, who in a pinch could not fight to save his life, even if he had to. The poor kid was not one to really be caught in a firefight, unlike most of the other crew who could handle themselves in some shape or form.*

*Without further ado, a large, scarily painted YVH (pink with flowers) arrives from the back room.*

"You may direct your vehicle to the rear of the building. We have a loading dock ready and waiting. Meanwhile, if you'd like to survey the goods, please follow me."

*The cheery, kid's holotoon voice did nothing to detract from the deadliness of the YVH's weaponry. It did, however, sound really cute.*

*David and Chaz moved their containers and such out to the back area, following the directions given. They soon began loading everything up in the crates and putting them in the cordoned areas on the repulsor lift. Soon with everything secured they thanked the droid vendor and such and carted their newly bought wares off toward the spaceport, where the Mystic Gift was waiting.*

*MDF troopers are looking around the store, inside and out. They are still investigating the mass explosion incident a few months ago. Everything in the Galactic Market was as normal, although back then everything was in an uproar.*