Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Smuggler who keeps bribing you with something more valuable than their cargo
"Between you and me," Auria says placidly, "the gate control regs here are pretty intimidating. There are so many, and you seem to have changed them every time I come through this way."
She's not wrong; the only natural resource that the Shavian Polity has is that they're camped out on a gate-travel bottleneck. If you want to get across the galaxy, sooner or later you come through here or you go the long way, out by Verde, and either way you're going to get shaken down. There are new rules every time, new ways of catching out honest spacers and nickel-and-diming them.
Or you pay megacorp rates for an Expedited Advance Pass, and get waved through, which makes sense if you have megacorp turnover and service level guarantees.
...Or you bribe someone.
"Hell," Marie says genially, "I can barely keep up," and takes Auria's sheaf of paperwork, expertly estimating from the stack's weight and resistance to bending just how many soft, heavy plastic Central Promissory Notes are tucked into the middle, and then she holds her breath to see—
"Heavy on the brainwork," Auria says, hand in her jumpsuit pocket. "You eating a good breakfast? Need enough fuel for all that," and there, there it is, a little jar, a size to fit in the palm of your hand.
You can't get honey out here. Marie has no clue how Auria's sourcing it. She does know — and Auria must, too — that if she walked out onto the gate station concourse and spoke to the right people, she could pull down the cost of ten under-the-table expedited gate transitsfor it, and instead, she's matter-of-factly passing it Marie in addition to the going rate.
And this is the third time.
Marie's not sure whether Auria expects to one day need a help-move-bodies level favour out of her, or if this is some kind of weapons-grade seduction of infuriatingly slow pace; either way, she's pretty damn sure that Auria's going to get what she wants.