Chaid and the Problem with Roleplaying
Chaid hated bills.
Not the kind attached to the smug faces of ducks (although he disliked those too), but the small notes informing you that you have less credits than you did before reading them. Having been foolish enough to read several such notes in rapid succession, the bounty hunter was now wandering through the dark corridors of a Sith spacestation. He had to get a job and apparently there was one to get in this place.
He found himself disliking the Sith quite often. Not quite as much as bills, although still a fair amount more than ducks. For some reason, the force-users had decided that they controlled the entire empire. To make matters even more provocative, they actually did control the whole thing. It’s a commonly known fact that the one thing that makes people with delusions of grandeur more annoying is giving them actual grandeur. It came with the expectations of having everyone around them grovel at their feet, like dogs begging for scraps from the master table. Chaid had long ago decided that he wouldn’t do this. The force-users could destroy themselves for all he cared. They seemed quite keen on doing so anyway.
However, that decision had been before the bills. He had invested in a flamethrower, forgetting all the darn extras you have to buy to make those work. First you pay for the flamethrower itself. Then the shopkeeper reminds you to buy fuel for it too. Then you have to buy a lid for the gas tank to keep the fuel inside since apparently that wasn’t included in the original purchase. Then the shopkeeper assures you that a silencer for a flamethrower is a useful purchase and not at all a stupid idea and that he’s only snickering because he thought of something funny a friend told him. Then, on top of all that, you get an even larger bill to pay for repairs when a fire suddenly starts in the store for vaguely related reasons. Chaid needed credits now, even if that meant working for the force-users.
The door at the end of the corridor politely slid open for him. Entering it, Chaid found himself in a small room. It was sparsely decorated; something he hoped was a design choice and not a clue that his new employer was poor. On a large chair, almost a throne, sat a woman staring out the window at space. Her red skin quickly revealed her to be Sith. Not the force-user kind, but the race. Except she had a lightsaber attached to her belt, so she was the other kind of Sith too. Chaid rolled his eyes. It was another one of those moronic choices that would never make sense. Why use the same word for those things? Was it done on purpose to confuse people? He briefly pondered whether or not a ‘Sith Sith’ was really to be respected when it mostly sounded like something people with a lisp would tell their dogs.
The Sith-squared silently got up from her chair, spending a few more moments wordlessly looking out of the room’s large window, peering into the infinite darkness of space. She smiled, as if finding some small comfort in it.
Chaid coughed a few times to get her attention. “Name’s Chaid,” he announced as she looked over her shoulder at him. “I’m here about the job.”
She nodded as she turned around, facing him. “My name,” said the Sith as she crossed her arms, “Is Darth Superevil.”
Chaid raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?” he asked. Normally, he would have been the first to inform her of how idiotic that name sounded, but he really, really needed the credits.
“Darth Superevil. I am the timetraveling daughter of Darth Vader.” She politely did a dramatic pause, allowing the bounty hunter a few moments to ponder what the heck she was babbling about. “You must be Chaid.”
“Er..” He hesitated a few moments. “Yes, that would be what I told you ten seconds ago indeed. I heard you had a job for me?”
“Indeed. Have you noticed this scar of mine?”
Chaid shrugged. “You want me to kill the guy who gave it to you?”
“Oh, no, the scar is unrelated to the job. However, you might be interested in hearing the long and intricate story of how I got it.”
He shook his head. “Not really, no.”
The Sith Lord nodded. “I really don’t like to talk about it,” she said eagerly.
“Good, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“I would prefer not to tell you.”
“Great.”
Darth Superevil eyed the bounty hunter for a moment before finally taking a deep breath. “It happened back before the great war,” she began in a solemn voice.
“Oh, for feck’s sake,” muttered Chaid, silently wishing he had been wise enough to invest in a helmet with a built-in television.
The Sith continued talking, apparently not noticing how little interest Chaid was showing in her tale. “You may find this a surprise, but I was not always known as Darth Superevil. Shortly after my birth, I was banished from my own time because of my immense power and landed in the past. Here, I was adopted by the king and queen of Coruscant who named me Darkfear McMalice.”
“Yeah, listen, about this job you’re offering...”
“They were very cruel to me. When I woke up each morning, I would receive a solid beating for doing it wrong. These beatings would usually last all day until the king’s arm was finally weary. He would then go to bed while one of the servants beat me as I slept. That’s why I’m so dark and evil now, because of my dreadfully hard childhood. I eventually killed my parents once I became dark and evil, allowing for the Empire to invade Coruscant.” She finished talking, letting go of an evil laughter to end the tale.
Chaid looked around, confused. “Something funny happened?”
“No. I laugh because I’m dark and evil.”
The bounty hunter took a deep breath, silently counting to ten as he fought an inner struggle not to remind Darth Superevil that her moronic story in no way explained the scar. He finally decided against mentioning this as he had no intention of making the Sith-squared prolong her tale. “So, what is the job you’re offering?”
“Ah, yes,” Darth Superevil turned towards the window once more, peering out at the infinite universe before them. “I want you to kill Jerome.”
“Who?”
“I met him one day, then proceeded to tell him the deep and interesting story of my scar which I don’t like to talk about. He ignored me, didn’t even comment on my tragic tale or express any desire to join my guild. For this insolence, you must kill him for me.”
Chaid’s thoughts were now a continuing stream of insults directed towards the Sith who hopefully wasn’t reading his mind. “Fine, whatever,” he muttered. “My price is…”
Darth Superevil interrupted him. “You shall do it for free, out of fear and respect for my greatness. I am the timetraveling daughter of Darth Vader, the greatest being to have ever lived, remember?”
“No.”
“Well, I am!”
“Still not doing it for free.”
The idea of people being unwilling to work for no pay seemed quite foreign to Darth Superevil. She pondered it for a moment, trying to wrap her head around it. Before this strange concept could be fully understood, however, her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of Chaid wandering back towards the door. She quickly raised her voice. “Wait!”
Chaid muttered something under his breath as he stopped, looking over his shoulder at the Sith-squared a final time.
Darth Superevil waved her hand in a horizontal motion, looking him directly in the eyes. “You are finding me very attractive.”
“I find you about as attractive as a rancor in a bikini,” he declared. He briefly wondered if that was actually a real thing. With the size of the universe being what it was, he had little doubt that somewhere out there was a rancor sunbathing in its favorite two-piece blissfully unaware that a bounty hunter in a distant galaxy had just insulted it.
“Nonono!” demanded the Sith. “You can’t just ignore my mind trick like that! You find me very attractive and you wish to join my guild just so you can stay near my beauty!” she waved her hand a few more times in the air for good measure.
Chaid realized that this might have been the single dumbest thing he had heard in his life. He decided against saying that out loud. It would be wiser just to leave. "That's the single dumbest thing I've ever heard," declared his mouth in betrayal of his brain. Dammit, mouth! He shrugged and exited the room before the she could respond. As a final annoyance for Chaid, he couldn’t even slam the door shut behind him. It automatically slid closed with an intensely unsatisfying “Pteeeeew” sound instead of the solid bang he was craving.
Behind the closed door stood Darth Superevil, growling. She glared at the door for a brief moment before finally picking up a large notebook from her chair. Breezing through the pages, her eyes went over the hundreds of names written in it, before finally reaching the last one: “Jerome.” Below this name, in dark ink, she wrote the name “Chaid.”
****
In the end, the bills were paid. After the shopkeeper had hired some quite frightening men to help collect the money, Chaid had taken the economically responsible route and settled the debt. Doing so had unfortunately cost him his ship, every last one of his weapons and the suits of armor he has stashed away. He had nothing left now except for the clothes he was wearing and a flamethrower-silencer which the merchant had found it intensely amusing to let him keep.
It left him little choice in regards to employment. People don’t like hiring Bounty-hunters who show up in regular street-wear. You need an impressive set of armor and preferably also a means to travel that doesn’t include public transportation. Even if people had wanted to hire him, he was quite certain that bounty-hunting without any armor or weapons would make him as likely to survive as a whelk in a supernova.
Seeing no other choice, he had sold the flamethrower-silencer, purchased a ticket to another planet and now he stood in front of what was presumably the only line of work he was qualified for. With a sigh, he walked up to the reception desk where an old, grizzled war veteran sat.
“Here,” said Chaid briefly, handing him some documents he had filled out.
The old man looked at the documents. “Whassis now?”
“It’s an application for joining the republican army,” muttered Chaid, hating every single part of the sentence, even the consonants. Especially the consonants now that he thought of them.
The recruiter beamed. “Wonderful decision, young man! The Republic can use all the help it can get to fight off the evil Sith Empire. You make your race proud!”
Chaid shrugged, not really caring.
“Now please,” said the recruiter eagerly. “Stay a while and hear the story of how I got this scar of mine.”
