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Maul had long since ceased to be under the impression that his master loved him. It had seemed a natural conclusion when he was a child, freshly taken from Iridonia, and he had been provided with food, shelter, and all the water he could want, not to mention the vast expense it must have taken to transport him (he had had no idea what intersystem transport costs were, only that no one he knew on Iridonia could afford them). What reason could there be but love?
 
His opinion did not change for several years. His educational programs were intense, clearly top of the line, and his martial training was even more rigorous. His droid caretakers were a far cry from the rusty, greasy scrap droids he had known on Iridonia; they were sleek, clean, and blisteringly intelligent, and several of them even had vocabulators capable of speech in Basic and a thousand other languages. He had at first taken the facility for a palace, mostly underground though it was, because it was so clean, smooth, and symmetrical, so different from the permacrete huts he had grown up with. It was clear to him that his master must care deeply about him to go to such trouble to raise him. The fact that he saw his master no more than two or three times a year made no difference—a man of such immense wealth and power must be busy, and Maul was honored that he’d taken such an interest in an unremarkable Dathomiri bastard from Iridonia.
 
Except that he wasn’t unremarkable. This was another reason he was sure that he was loved. The educational programs, carefully tailored to him specifically, kept telling him that he was an ideal apprentice, poised to become one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy, a sentiment that his master affirmed on his rare communications and rarer visits, and though this did not sit well at first, he began to believe it. And to have been recognized on Iridonia, of all places, his master must have been searching for an immensely long time. Yes, that was love.
 
His certainty had not wavered for those years, no matter how brutal the training became. He was rapidly becoming a warrior, small as he was, but the training droids (he went through them as fast as they could be repaired) adapted with him, using more and more of their arsenal as he improved. When he could reliably defeat one using all of its advanced programming, he started fighting two at a time, and then three. On the all-important visits from his master, he would perform his skills with the droids first, and then his master would pick up one of the training blades from the rack and test him himself. That was always vicious—his master never pulled his blows, but struck with agonizing precision and strength with a speed and power that the droids could not match. The medical droid usually put Maul on several days of bed rest after a visit from his master. The training was excruciating, yes, but, as his master and the training told him, how else could he reach his full potential? That, too, was an act of love, for what greater gift could there be than to help one become their ultimate self?
 
It was not until he was ten years old that he began to question his master’s affection. He had a few hours of spare time once a week, and he invariably used it to terrorize the droids that did everything in his life. He had long since mastered sneaking up on the security droids and leaping onto their shoulders to take them down, and he hadn’t captured an educator droid to replace its sound data with rude bodily noises in years. That was kid stuff. He was older now, and wiser and stronger, and he could do better than that. He decided to slice the facility’s main terminal and see if he could convince the system that it was normal for him to have two sleeping pads. Maybe three. Or perhaps if he went for four, he could build himself a den… he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
 
His educational programs included plenty of detailed lessons on computers, from their mechanical construction to slicing them, but the main terminal for the facility turned out to be heavily encrypted, and it took Maul quite some time to decode even a bit of it, and the bit he decoded eventually revealed itself to be external communications. He skimmed it, bored, for a few seconds. Supply orders, every message, nothing interesting. Except… ah, there was something different. He opened the message.
 
A security droid found him still sitting in front of the terminal two hours later, and escorted him to his quarters for his nightly hygiene routine. Maul went quietly. When the security droid returned to undo the damage to the main terminal, it took no notice of the fact that the terminal had been open to the monthly progress report of the other sixteen facilities.
 
From then on, his master’s love became a competition. Maul worked harder than ever before. He had something to lose now. He extended himself in ways he hadn’t thought possible, and every month he breathlessly compared the progress report to his own statistics. He would be the best. He had to. He focused his studies on areas where he was lacking compared to the others, practiced martial techniques that the other facilities were reporting. He even reprogrammed a couple of training droids to match the reported combat statistics of two of the other trainees, and when he could beat both of them at once, he programmed a third.
 
One month, there were only fifteen other facilities. Maul stared at that message for some time, trying to decide what it meant. Had there been an accident? Possible, he supposed, but unlikely—the medical droid here was a prototype 2-1D unit, the best money could buy, and presumably the other facilities were similarly equipped. Had the facility been intentionally decommissioned? A thought struck him, and he compared the facility list to the previous month’s statistics. The facilities were not named or numbered in the progress report, but he knew the statistics of his competitors well enough to recognize that, sure enough, the missing facility was the one that had had the lowest performance for the past three months.
 
He stopped believing that his master loved him, but he now worked to attain that love. Within three years, his was the only facility remaining.
 
By the time he was seventeen, he was well aware that he was a tool for his master, nothing more. He was the finest tool his master had ever had, he was sure, lovingly crafted and honed throughout his life into a versatile and stunningly effective agent of the Sith, but a tool nonetheless. Still, he held out hope that one day, if he worked hard enough, he would become more.
 
He had been close for a while, he thought. He had carried out a variety of delicate, hideously difficult missions for his master across many worlds. He was confident that very few others in the galaxy could do what he had done. He was, without a doubt, his master’s finest, most useful operative.
 
At twenty-two, he was cut in half at the waist by a Jedi Padawan named Obi-Wan Kenobi, after which he fell down several hundred feet of energy conduit and was filtered out by Theed’s automated screening system, which deposited his torso and legs in a wastewater pool well outside the city with a variety of other contaminants. After approximately seven hours of unbroken agony, during which he exerted all of his will to keep ahold of a floating insect trap and force his mouth and nose above the foul, greasy surface, he was recovered by his twin probe droids and returned to

Scimitar,

where he was transported back to the facility on Mustafar.
 
The insect trap must have been broken, because the lower half of his body was already riddled with pests that had eaten through most of the major blood vessels. The medical droid disposed of the damaged flesh and fitted him with a sleek prosthetic. From the navel down, he was now durasteel. The parts all moved smoothly and effortlessly, and were equipped with standard tactile arrays, but even in his exhausted state, Maul stared at his legs for a long time before he finally fell asleep.
 
His master had never been warm to him, but now he was distinctly cold. His communications had never consisted of more than orders, but now those orders were more often relayed through text than a holo. He had not seen his master in person since he had been dispatched to Naboo. After two months, he accessed the facility’s external communications and found that three facilities had been reactivated.

Three years after his great failure, Maul lay sprawled on his sleeping mat in

Scimitar.

He still had access to the ship, at least. He’d just assassinated a minor Serrenian noble on his master’s orders, and transit back to Mustafar would take several days. He would use the time to train, as usual.
 
He had been planning on it, anyway. Instead, he was lying here, naked—though he dressed in the same robes as ever when among others, clothing had felt less necessary since the loss of his most vulnerable parts—experiencing a familiar sensation and wondering what to do about it.
 
His prosthetic was specifically designed to help eliminate phantom limb pain. It did this fairly well; though he had experienced a great deal of generalized discomfort, it had only rarely been truly painful. He could usually meditate himself through it, forcing awareness of his prosthetic limbs and mentally realigning himself with his body. This was a little different. It had happened before, this particular problem. He had not managed a solution then, and he did not expect to manage one now.
 
He had never been encouraged or discouraged from masturbation. He had learned of it in his education, and when he reached puberty, he had cautiously explored it, and for a few weeks he had used all of his spare time in that pursuit. The novelty and desperate need had worn off quickly, and his life had returned to normality, with the exception of an occasional quick release in the refresher. It felt good, of course, but it had limited appeal for him. It did not contribute toward his ultimate goal of being his master’s best and only apprentice, and while it could swiftly relieve his stress for a few minutes, it did nothing to resolve the root cause, unlike training, from which he could receive a similar high if he worked at it hard enough.
 
The prosthetic had no erogenous sensors, and with the smooth codplate, he found that there was nothing he could focus his meditation on to relieve the sensation of the throbbing sex which was most assuredly not there.
 
He knew that he could not be feeling was he was feeling. The relevant tissue and nerves were all gone, incinerated years ago. His cock hadn’t existed for three years, and his balls certainly weren’t straining, overfull, but he could feel it, and if he closed his eyes he could almost believe that they were there.
 
Running a hand through the space that he knew they had once occupied did nothing. Tensing nonexistent muscles to make himself twitch only made the urge stronger. He gently rubbed the surface of the codplate with three fingers, trying to imagine that he was playing with himself, but the cock that wasn’t there stood straight and tall, unmoved, untouched, its tattooed ridges swollen dark and angry.
 
He rested his hands at his sides and stared up at the ceiling of the sleeping compartment. Fluid dripped from his tip—Zabraks of both sexes got wetter and wetter the longer they went between orgasms, a mechanism meant to assist penetration and release, as well as providing a nutritious, electrolyte-rich medium for the sperm to pass through, and Maul hadn’t climaxed in three years. His prostate would be bulging with it, and his balls would be aching to let go their contents. If he could take his cock in hand, he could finish himself in moments.
 
But he couldn’t. When he closed his eyes and put his hand in the familiar position, trying to imagine that he felt hot, hard flesh between his fingers, it did nothing. The phantom cock remained as inaccessible as ever.
 
He tried his nipples for the dozenth time. Plenty of people derived intense sexual pleasure from nipple stimulation, but Maul had never been one of them, and toying with the small, bumpy nubs did nothing beyond frustrating him further. He gave one a hard pinch in annoyance, which drew his attention away from his cock for a moment, at least, but the pain was over quickly, and he was back where he had started with the exception of a sore nipple.
 
He rubbed listlessly at his stomach. The last few times this had happened, he’d gone over his entire body with careful fingers, hoping to find an erogenous zone that could help him. The closest he’d found was a line down the center of his stomach that produced a pleasant tingling, but it wasn’t particularly sexual and did nothing to ease him. He repeated the process now, probing every inch of himself, both flesh and metal, in the hopes that something had changed or he’d missed a spot or something. He did find a spot behind his temples, below the horns there, that seemed to be a bit more sensitive than the skin around it, but it wasn’t enough for anything.
 
He thudded his head against the sleeping mat wearily. Damn that Padawan, and damn himself for being too proud of his victory over the master to pay sufficient attention to the boy. He’d ruined his own life with those moments of foolishness. He played them over in his head, again and again. He’d thought through those few seconds ten thousand times since they’d happened, every spare moment his brain had, and he’d come up with ten thousand things he could’ve done differently that would have saved him, but he hadn’t done a single one of them. It was unproductive, he knew, and did nothing but distract him from his work, but he couldn’t stop himself. Over and over, the lightsaber boiled through him, and he gave a short, harsh gasp, and stood still for a teetering moment before he toppled over into the conduit. Again, and again, and again, world without end.
 
He brought a fist smashing down onto his codplate. Not hard enough to do any damage, just to vent a little frustration. He felt nothing in his cock.
 
Then he sat up, gripped with a sudden, stunning realization. He remained still for a moment before vaulting out of the recessed sleeping compartment and leaping over to his workbench.
 
Nerves operated via electrical impulses. His nerves had been severed and cauterized. To give him tactile sensation in his prosthetic, the burned ends of the nerves had been trimmed back, and each one had been grafted to one of a few deftly programmed neural arrays in the body of the prosthetic. Those neural arrays operated via a complex electrical system, powered by his own body. If he could find the right node on the right array, and direct an impulse of the right intensity, he ought to be able to produce a sensation. He’d have to bypass the complex strings of sensors that ran throughout the prosthetic, but that shouldn’t be too much trouble. He just had to get to those arrays.
 
He pulled up the schematic of his prosthetic and removed the codplate to get at the internal workings. It looked like the inside of any computer, full of neatly routed wires, filaments, and cables, but it was all so small and fine that, for a moment at least, he had second thoughts about interfering with it. His nonexistent cock twitched furiously and squeezed out a copious stream of fluid, and he dove in.
 
It was delicate work to shift aside the cables and expose the arrays without putting more stress on his damaged nerves, but he managed it, and gently pulled one to the fore for easier access. Attached to the smooth, round array on one side was a dense bundle of hundreds of synthetic filaments, and on the other side, anchored in place by clamps, were even more thin, pale, organic fibers. He gazed at it for a moment, awed that his ability to feel depended on this bit of equipment and its ability to make a bridge between sensors that he could buy in any computer supply store and sensors that he’d spent twenty-five years growing. Then his cock pulsed again, and he grabbed a droid mechanic’s probe from the workbench.
 
He didn’t turn on the electricity at first. He wasn’t entirely sure what a bare nerve would feel like when touched at all, let alone with electricity, so he cautiously set the finest point of the probe against the side of the bundle.
 
It was far and away the oddest sensation he had ever felt, and he almost dropped the probe, but it wasn’t exactly painful. Rather, it was a constantly shifting sense of temperature and pressure, coming from a thousand seemingly unrelated pinpoints on his legs. He sat still, panting, for a few moments before he tried it again. It was overwhelming, and he could only make contact for a split second at a time, but he gradually worked his way around the outside of the bundle, and an hour later, he’d determined that none of the nerves he’d touched linked up to anything other than his legs.
 
He slid that array back into place, retrieved a second, and repeated the process.
 
Four arrays later, each taking a little less time than the last, he’d found nerves that had once run to his legs, feet, and hips, but nothing in the area that he was most interested in. There were six more arrays to go, and he was tired, but his cock was still insistent as ever.
 
The next group of nerves he touched lit up a spot that felt so completely, absolutely, startlingly odd that it took him several more tries before he registered it as somewhere inside of his right testicle. He tweaked it a little, hoping that he’d finally found a solution, but it refused to register as anything other than incredibly strange, and he had to move on. His hopes were rapidly climbing, though—he was in the right area.
 
The next bundle was the very tip of his urethra. That was an odd feeling, strikingly oversensitive, but definitely arousing, and he let out a soft sigh as he toyed with it, phantom cock twitching wildly. If he couldn’t find anything better, he just might be able to finish himself from there.
 
After that, he found his shaft, and he wanted to cry with how absolutely perfect it felt. The bundle that the probe was pressing against also seemed to activate something in his appendix, but he ignored that, and moved the probe infinitesimally, just enough to register, and it shot harsh, too-precise sensation through him. It didn’t feel like he was stroking himself, but it was

something,

a part of his body that he hadn’t felt in years, and he thought he might explode.
 
Normally, he enjoyed playing with his balls while he was masturbating, but that was going to have to wait. He’d found the most useful group of nerves that he could, and it was time to try the electricity. He extended the probe’s smallest set of calipers and cautiously fitted them around the nerves. Even that was enough to make him close his eyes briefly, but he recovered and continued. He’d start off as small as possible. He held the probe in place with one hand, just in case the sensation was too strong, and kept his fingers poised delicately by the sliding switch for a few nervous seconds before he slid it up to the lowest impulse the probe was capable of.
 
He was on the floor, screaming, almost before he knew what had happened, and it took everything he had to convince one hand to grab the probe and shut it off.
 
He lay there, shuddering and gasping, for several minutes before he recovered. That had been far too strong, for starters—it had felt like he’d shoved a sparking power cable into his cock. Secondly, it appeared that the electricity from the probe had jumped between the nerves, and the result was that every nerve ending in his groin, every last one, had fired off simultaneously. He ought to have seen that coming, he supposed.
 
All right. He couldn’t do that again, he’d probably have a seizure. But he still needed an orgasm, doubly so now that he knew it was possible. He pressed the probe up against the array a few times before he found the right bundle again, resulting in a wide variety of awkward sensations, but he found it eventually, and tried again to stroke it.
 
It really wasn’t at all like touching his cock. It was rather more like there were needles positioned around it, and every time he stimulated the nerves, they pressed down a little. At first, he thought he could make do, but fifteen minutes in, things seemed less hopeful. He lay on the floor for a while, probe fitted around that group of nerves, and wished yet again that Naboo had happened any other way.
 
Perhaps he could connect the probe to a different power source, something that couldn’t deliver anything but the lightest of shocks. Normally, the probe would simply seem inoperable, but the electricity would still be transmitted, of course, and he was quite certain he’d be able to feel even the smallest impulse. The trouble would be finding a sufficiently weak power source.
 
Eventually, he removed an indicator light from one of

Scimitar’s

atmospheric temperature control and cautiously pried out its tiny battery. He hooked the battery up to a mechanical drill and let it run for a while. After only a few minutes, the bit was barely rotating. He then connected it to a meter and found that the remaining battery power hardly registered. Yes, that would do nicely. Taking out the probe’s integrated power source took some time, and getting the new battery to hook up to the motivator took more, but Maul had been hard and ready for nearly four hours, and he intended to finish soon, for the first time in years.
 
He settled himself onto his sleeping mat and gently clamped the probe around the relevant nerves. Then he took some time to prepare himself, taking deep breaths, running through a simple meditation pattern. All the while, he could feel his cock straining, his excitement running hot and quick through parts that he didn’t have.
 
He switched the probe on.
 
The moan that left him without his consent was far and away the least honorable sound he had ever produced. It was thick and hot and absurdly wobbly, vibrating between pitches that he’d been only vaguely aware he could reach, and it cut off sharply as he involuntarily thrust his durasteel hips up, back arching off the mat, limbs shaking uncontrollably.
 
The new battery was much weaker than the probe’s integrated power source, but it was still violently overpowering. It was painful in places, but Maul could ignore that. He’d spent most of his life dealing with pain. Besides, the places where it wasn’t painful were absolutely insane. His cock was pulsing desperately, every millimeter of it exploding with pure sensation, inside and outside. His balls were quivering in places that he’d never expected to feel. Hot power was building up and surging fiery in a thousand places that he’d taken for granted his entire life, including a number that were purely embarrassing—he hardly remembered what it was like to have a bladder, but his body obviously did, and while he’d been aware that prostate stimulation could be pleasurable, he’d never tried it himself, and was shocked to discover that it felt stunning.
 
It all paled in comparison to his cock. It wasn’t like touching himself, not remotely. It was… he had no idea what it was, but it felt like a blinding, furious light inside of him, and his entire body, not just the missing parts, clenched up in paralyzed ecstacy. Within six seconds, he was screaming in the most intense climax he’d ever experienced, one that went on and on and on and on until he ran out of air to howl with.
 
He shoved the sliding switch back down, detached the probe, and flung it across the room with boneless fingers. The array he’d been tormenting lay loose in the compartment, durasteel prosthetic cool and unyielding as ever, and there was no seed to expel, but while he kept his eyes closed, he could feel hot come dripping down his stomach, spattered thickly across his heaving chest, and his wet cock slowly softening against the intact flesh of his thigh. His balls hung loose, and he rested his head on the sleeping mat, breathing deeply, an expression of true calm and contentment on his face for one of the first times in his life.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Maul’s initial analysis of Ka Vodna had been based off of a combination of publicly available material, a sliced Republic military briefing, and his own scans. The brochures were largely marketed toward rich adventure tourists from Core worlds, the military briefing recommended extra care in communications and gear for a variety of extreme weather conditions, and the scans he took with instruments pried out of

Scimitar’s

navigational array suggested that most of the surface didn’t get much traffic. This data all pointed toward the Inner Rim world being a good place to lie low for a while. What he’d failed to understand from the data was that Ka Vodna was also a miserable place to live.
 
He’d taken a spear through the lung a month ago. A true spear, a projectile weapon, not an energy bolt. It would’ve killed him if he hadn’t been quite near

Scimitar

at the time, returning from a mission in snowy plains that belonged to a local tribe that harbored Force-sensitives. He’d killed the tribal elders, as his master had instructed, and made to return, and then he’d suddenly found himself lying face-down in the snow, unable to breathe, skewered by a large wooden stick, contemplating his second great failure.
 
He’d harnessed the Force to keep himself together long enough to get back to

Scimitar,

take off, and set a course for Mustafar, and then he’d collapsed and allowed the probe droids to stop the bleeding and keep him anesthetized and stable until a medical droid could look at him. It wasn’t until he woke up in the facility’s medical wing that he learned that the probe droids, in their efforts to stop him respirating blood, had actually sealed the entirety of the wound’s edge in a neat cylinder, leaving a hole several centimeters in diameter through his torso. The medical droid had largely been able to fix this, but there remained a sunken, ugly scar, and, more importantly, it had informed him that his lung would never operate normally again, and that it recommended a synthetic replacement. Maul had conveyed the data to his master. The response, rather than a shipment of a synthetic lung, was an assignment for another mission.
 
That had been the turning point. It had taken him several days, days spent alternately sitting silently on his meditation mat while his insides threatened to explode with indecisive agony and taking out his fury on training droids, but he had been forced to accept that he was not, as he had once believed himself to be, the next heir of the Sith. Perhaps he might have been, at some point before Naboo, but after that, he had become nothing more than another expendable for his master, and his medical needs were no longer worth supporting.
 
Faking his death was easy enough. The next mission involved taking out a group of pirates who were robbing Confederacy supply lines. All he had to do was kill them, move his equipment from

Scimitar

to one of their landing craft, and destroy both ships. After that, it was a matter of getting to a planet, researching possible escape routes—his master had

Scimitar’s

HoloNet connection monitored, he was sure—acquiring a new ship, and getting out.  
 
Living on Ka Vodna was much harder than that had been. The planet was an oceanless world built on three layers. First there was the desert, flat and endless. In some areas, sheer vertical cliffs shot up in great snow-covered plateaus, forming the mountainous regions. And then, speckled across the desert, there were swampy valleys like vast sinkholes, miles across.
 
Most activity centered in the valleys, especially those of mid-latitude near the frozen mesas. That was where the resorts were built, where enterprising travellers could go from snowy peaks to sandy desert to jungle in a single day. The gleaming infrastructure of the hotels stood out, fresh and elegant, from the steep walls of the valleys, and the resort towns usually crawled along the transit lines, across the desert and up the mountainside, and then back down into the valley in a long snake of varying degrees of shabbiness.
 
Maul couldn’t risk living in a resort town, not for now. He didn’t think Sidious would find him—he could hardly sense his master in the Force these past few years, and that connection likely went both ways—but he wanted to give it some time, a year at least, if he stayed here that long. So he chose a shantytown across the valley from one of the smaller resorts, where the workers not directly tied to tourism lived. After concealing his tiny, rusting, stolen ship in the desert, he trekked into the valley and scrounged together a hut on the lower edge of the town, in the jungle proper. It was wet, and hot, and dark most of the time, but he had access to food and a water filter.
 
Food he obtained by scavenging through the respective junk piles of the resort and the shantytown. The resort was generally more profitable, with plenty of expensive items to salvage and sell, but there was competition there from everyone else who had the same idea. The shantytown, on the other hand, was largely unsalvageable, but now and then, Maul would find something that he could repair and sell, usually to a pawn shop in the resort town that claimed to sell “rustic” handmade local wares.
 
Tonight, he’d gone to the resort’s junkpile, in a crevasse behind the main resort building. It was a multi-level structure contained by corrugated durasteel between several natural stone pillars. It could get dangerous in there; people died occasionally when the junk shifted. Maul didn’t have any trouble. His lung might catch now and then, but he was still an extremely athletic man with years of training in teras kasi, acrobatics, lightsaber combat, and the Force. No junk pile was going to get the better of him.
 
He worked in silence alongside a couple other vagrants, starting at the top of the pile, the most recent waste. Every now and then, he pocketed an empty credit chit, or a damaged energy cell, or a single glove. Once he fished a sports helmet out of the pile and tucked it into his bag.
 
Then something caught his eye, a glimmer of plasteel limbs. He vaulted over to it in a swift, easy motion and examined it further.
 
It was a droid. A nice one, too, sleek and well-formed, ergonomic, with a—
 
He stopped dead. This wasn’t just any droid. It had a sealant coat of something rubbery over it, its joints filed perfectly smooth, and… breasts, formed out of some soft material. Yes, that was most definitely a pleasure droid.
 
One of the others noticed him and stopped what she was doing, followed quickly by the other. There was a long silence. “Split it?” the Rodian asked, looking at him with great dark eyes. The human woman nodded vigorously.
 
Maul pulled the droid free, slung it over his shoulder, and climbed out of the junk pile.

Once he had the droid in his hovel, spread out on the plasteel board that served as his workbench, he sat back on his heels and looked at it. It was definitely made for human use. Its coating—real synthskin, he realized—was a bluish white, but its head was definitely human from the nose down, though the upper part was a mass of torn wiring and a few coated plates. He removed its power cell, just in case, and began to examine it in detail.
 
It had a very detailed mouth, obviously designed to be used. The oral cavity ended somewhere around its collarbone, and stretched easily. The teeth were rounded and a little flexible, and when he pressed a spot in the cheek that gave, sweet-smelling lubricant dripped over its lips. He frowned and wiped his fingers on a rag before continuing his inspection.
 
Nothing further surprised him until he reached the droid’s groin. A quick probe revealed an apparently fully-functional synthetic orifice—no, two of them. The droid was equipped with an anus as well as a vagina. Something cloudy flaked off when he touched it, and he grimaced. That would have to be cleaned. He unscrewed the cosmetic plate, revealing the housing, and was surprised to discover that the thing seemed to have been designed to be modular. The orifices were one unit, a wedge shape that slipped free easily once he found the release. He set it in a bucket filled with a sanitizing cleaner and looked at the rest.
 
He groaned in dismay when he peeled off the synthskin. Okay, he could see why it had been thrown out. The outer layer of wiring was melted across most of the torso. It looked like a connector had blown somewhere along the spine, where the droid’s motor processors were located. That entire area was a misshapen mess of wire and melted plasteel. It would be hideously expensive to repair that delicately programmed filigree. He certainly didn’t have the skill to do it. The most he could hope for now would be to strip the droid down into its component parts and sell them separately. The synthskin would get a good price, at least, and if he could get all the plasteel out of the wiring, the conductors could probably feed him for a few days.
 
By the time he’d separated the synthskin from the chassis, it was quite late. He set the pale, wobbly sheet on the workbench and gulped a handful of water from the steadily dripping rain filter. He still had a few packets of dehydrated ration bread that he’d bought off of the old man with the rickshaw up the hill. He unsealed one, dropped it in a salvaged bowl, and set it off to the side to prepare while he removed the groin module from the sanitizing bath and rinsed it.
 
The housing, now free of the synthskin and rinsed of the accompanying adhesive and whatever fluids had been left behind by the droid’s previous owner, was a mid-range polished durasteel, but the penetrable orifices were a soft, thick, glossy, high-end rubber compound. Maul pressed a finger to the smooth lips of the vulva and confirmed his initial guess that it was porous—beads of lubricant dripped out onto his skin. There had to be a reservoir somewhere in there, then.
 
He deftly unscrewed one plate of the housing on the side of the module and set it off to the side, revealing the module’s inner structure. Two thick, squishy tubes had to be the internal components of the orifices. He fingered the artificial vaginal canal curiously. This side of it was rough and unfinished, but when he rubbed the tube between his fingers, he thought he could feel raised detail on the interior—sculpted for pleasure. A quick, experimental tug proved that it was absurdly stretchy and bounced back flawlessly.
 
Also fitted neatly into the housing were several soft reservoirs. One of them was linked to a thick film surrounding the vagina; that had to be the lubricant, then. The second was similarly linked to the anal cavity. The third proved to be more complex. Maul toyed with it for some time before he discovered that the module actually had a third orifice in the form of a urethra, and that this reservoir was a form of artificial bladder. Maul was aware that women of many species issued fluids during orgasm; perhaps the droid had been programmed to simulate this. Of brief confusion was the fourth reservoir, which was connected to the droid’s rubber clitoris. Out of ideas, he squeezed the reservoir carefully, and the clitoris swelled. A hydraulic erectile system, then. He removed the top plate of the housing next, and after a moment’s puzzlement, sat back in stunned shock.
 
The top of the module was lined with sensor array ports.
 
Who would put sensor array ports in a droid? Quite apart from being more expensive than the usual tactile inputs, there was no point. The droid certainly wouldn’t get any benefit from them. The only reason for something like this would be—
 
Struck by sudden inspiration, Maul returned to the main body of the droid and checked the capacitors. Aratech manufacture, relatively high-end but not phenomenal. Then he checked the groin module’s power connections. Kuati construction, cheap and entirely the wrong model. Someone had tried to put a high-end sexual prosthetic into a high-end pleasure droid and had used cheap connectors to do it. That was why the motor processors had blown out.
 
He sat on his salvaged mat, looking at the module, for some time, trying to fight off the objectively stupid impulse that was clamoring in the back of his head. It would be foolish, pointless, nothing but a distraction, and possibly dangerous. Who knew what the short might have done to the module?
 
He dropped his loose-fitting pants and removed the codplate from his prosthetic, revealing the delicate sensor arrays. He had no difficulty remembering which one he had used to artificially stimulate himself to orgasm, and went straight for it. He contorted himself awkwardly to get a good look, and examined the array.
 
It was the right size. He had been fairly certain, but now he knew absolutely. His sensor arrays were the same standardized side as the module’s. Some quick research on the model with his cheap datapad showed that they were perfectly compatible.
 
He was breathing a little more deeply than normal. He noticed it and held still for a few seconds, returning his bodily functions to their normal pace, including his heart rate. He would not stand for this loss of discipline.
 
Further research brought up an advertisement for this specific sexual prosthetic. It had set back its buyer many thousands of credits. Maul ignored that and set to finding its schematics. He didn’t manage that, after nearly an hour of looking, but he did find an excerpt of a Huttese manual that showed the diagrams he was after. All there was to do now was fit the module into his own prosthetic and hope that the medical droid that had attached his legs had used the standard configuration for the sensor arrays that held his damaged nerves.
 
He ended up having to warp the module with the Force to get it to fit. It was too broad and flat for his prosthetic, and a series of long, careful gestures with his eyes closed were needed to contort it sufficiently, bending it in ways that it was most definitely not certified to bend. No matter. He was a skilled mechanic, and he knew the module’s structure could take the stress.
 
When he had finally wrestled the module into shape, he held it in place while he gently eased the relevant arrays into place. He had to reroute quite a few cables, but eventually, he was reasonably certain that he had hooked all the inputs up to the right places. With that in place, he connected his arrays to the module’s.
 
Sensation was immediate. He almost dropped the module when he felt the utterly alien pressure against…

something.

Something wet. He forced himself past the strangeness long enough to press firmly on the module, clicking it into place. Then it was back to leaning against the wall of his hut, breathing hard, metal legs shifting, trying to understand what he was feeling.
 
When he put a hand between his legs, he felt immediate wetness. He wasn’t sure that he’d tuned the sensors properly, but the module was definitely registering him as aroused enough to leak copious quantities of fluid. The rubber lips of his new vulva were dripping with it. He ran his fingers along the unfamiliar folds without thinking and promptly gave a shuddering gasp.
 
He could feel it. It wasn’t quite his cock, but it was similar, similar enough that he couldn’t stop himself from putting a hand over his mouth. He could feel. Years of nothing below his waist but metal, equipped with basic tactile sensation and nothing more, and suddenly he was feeling something warm and wet and

his.

If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that it was flesh. Real flesh, suffused with blood and nerves and entirely himself, and he could

feel.

He could almost ignore the hot pulse in his belly in the face of touching something that he’d lost so long ago.
 
His hand went instinctively to where his cock had been, ready to stroke and fondle, and instead found a soft little nub that proved to be agonizingly sensitive. It pulsed heavily beneath his fingers, reacting to his touch, and a little noise escaped him. His body. His body, it was his again, responding to his fingers and to the insistent squirming need in the pit of his stomach, responding with arousal and oversensitivity and slick fluid that clung to his fingers in drooling lines, he could

feel

it.
 
It was an unfamiliar territory all the same. He explored it with shaking hands, trying to familiarize himself with the smooth, simple folds of his vulva and the gently squishing dimple of his anus. He learned quickly not to touch his clitoris directly, and instead put two fingers on the hood that covered it and slid that rubber sheath up and down and side to side. It wasn’t quite like stroking his cock, but it was close. He could feel an almost-familiar swelling as the module’s hydraulic erectile system grew the clit until it protruded proudly between his fingers. He squeezed the hood around it and shuddered.
 
A different pulse of pleasure hit him, and he froze for several seconds, wrapped up in the impossible ecstasy of

feeling

things that he had thought were entirely lost to him. The module was reacting as flesh might, wanting to be touched and toyed with in different places, and he was happy to oblige it. He ran the heel of his palm down his vulva and trembled at the sudden building urge. He hesitated briefly before deciding to try it.
 
After a little cautious exploration—Maul had no practical experience with female genital anatomy—he slipped a finger into the module’s sopping vagina, and was immediately stunned with an overwhelming sense of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity. The module had obviously been designed to interface with natal females, and the nerves didn’t map up perfectly across sexes. The result was that when he probed the inside of the vagina—

his

vagina, and that thought made it pulse wetly around his finger—he was touching something that he thought might have once been the back of his balls, or maybe his perineum, but was also sort of his shaft, but was also none of those things. He ran his finger around his absurdly stretchy walls, which seemed to be covered with ridges and bumps that massaged his skin, and his metal toes dug hard into the dirt floor of his hut.
 
Maul had never been one to take things slowly, and he was quick to add two more fingers to his vagina—what was the slang? His cunt? His pussy? Neither word felt entirely comfortable, but regardless, once he was past the firmer, less-stretchy entrance, he spread his fingers out inside of him, and thought he might climax then and there when he realized that he could feel all the other internal components of the module through his walls. He shoved a finger from his other hand up his rubber asshole and wiggled it to confirm the sensation. He tensed up hard, his entire body contorting on the floor, as his fingers squeezed each other through rubber walls.
 
Anal stimulation had never been a particular interest of Maul’s, and he removed that finger quickly to return it to his clit, but the fingers in his pussy were lighting up nerves that he’d once accessed by stroking his cock, and he couldn’t move them fast enough. Fast, wet, slopping sounds filled the hut, but he couldn’t be bothered, it felt too good. It was raining, anyway; no one was likely to hear anything, even if they were standing just outside, and people rarely came this far down.
 
His fingers weren’t working fast enough, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Still fingering himself furiously, he took his free hand from his swollen, throbbing clit and fished around in his toolkit. He was rocking back and forth a little now, mouth open, hands shaking, and it took him some time before his hand finally grasped his hydrospanner. He shoved the plasteel handle up his cunt without any further thought and promptly groaned in a convulsion of pleasure.
 
He didn’t waste any time trying to acclimate himself to it. His taut entrance was sending little sparks of pain up his nerves, unlike the obscenely stretchy interior, but Maul had spent most of his life in pain, and had no difficulty ignoring it. He went straight to pushing the hydrospanner in and out of himself, thrusting it as quickly as he could, and couldn’t stop himself from groaning in blind pleasure. It was so like and so unlike stroking his cock to climax, but he hardly even cared—he was

feeling.

It was a cunt instead of a cock, a fat little clit instead of a cockhead, smooth rubbery lips glossy with slick instead of balls and a taint, but he didn’t

care,

it was

him,

he was feeling his own body, and it was feeling him, it was hot beneath his fingers and dripping slick everywhere and sending jolts of hot pleasure up and down his spine, throughout all his body above the tactile-only prosthetic, all of him coming together to—
 
He came apart in a shuddering, moaning climax, every bit of him contracting, tensing in a mad explosion while his fingers frantically rubbed his clit and the hydrospanner hammered into his pussy. It went on and on, and he sank down slowly against the dirt floor, his urethra expelling fluid in steady, measured spurts that arced up and landed in time with the immense pleasurable contractions that wracked his body. He didn’t know exactly when it ended, and found that he did not care.
 
He lay still for a while, getting his breath back, before he withdrew the hydrospanner and dropped it. He ran his fingers gently up and down his genitals, squeezing his new folds and bumps and soft places. Pinching the hooded part of his clit and wiggling it gently almost felt like shaking fluid free from his cock. It was deflating, the fluid retreating back into the erectile bladder, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Maul stayed out of the shantytown proper as much as possible. His tiny hut was a good ten minutes’ downhill hike from the lowest building in town, longer going up. He took as many precautions as possible to avoid detection. He had felt very little activity in the Force since coming here, and he was reasonably certain that his master either believed him dead or did not care, but he still did his best to blend in with the locals. In clothing scavenged from pirates and junk piles, he fit in well. A little shabby even for this town, but not remarkable. Or at least not any more remarkable than his appearance already made him—there weren’t many Zabraks here, those that were here were not Dathomiri, and certainly none of them had the telltale sickly red-rimmed yellow eyes of a Force user strong in the dark side, though he kept that last out of view of most passersby with a low, slouching hat.
 
He worked hard to blend in with his habits, as well. He walked more slowly than came naturally to him, kept his posture slack and weak, shook his head when the man with the rickshaw tried to sell him scavenged military ration cubes for four times their value. For the most part, he did not speak; that did come naturally to him. He tried to amend it a little, but found that communicating largely in gesture and expression, grunting out a word at a time when it was absolutely required, was common here, especially in the lower levels of the shantytown.  
 
He kept to himself more than most of the people in the town. He did not spend his evenings in the cantina, as most of the residents did, and carried his pack up to the market platform only to buy food and sell whatever items of value he had scavenged; he did not browse or stop to converse. He did not buy food from the town’s only licensed store, but from vendors like the man with the rickshaw. After a month of living on Ka Vodna, he had gleaned enough from overheard conversations to know how to collect a few types of edible plant from the jungle, which saved him from having to acquire certain supplements. Another month, and he learned that a small purple root, which he saw with some frequency while crossing the valley, could be used to make a hallucinogen. He took care not to sell it too often, lest he be marked as a supplier by law enforcement or drug cooks from a local gang, but it occasionally netted him a few extra credits.
 
The shantytown was rather more vertical than the resort town across the sinkhole-valley. The resort had paid for prime real estate, and it had modified that real estate rather significantly, so that the buildings, streets, and recreational areas rested comfortably on solid ground. The shantytown had no such resources, and was constructed as a series of platforms hat teetered ominously during storms, mounted atop poles and pillars of varying materials. Horizontal space was severely limited. Most buildings were supported on the back half by the boulders, roots, and mud of the valley wall, but their front halves stretched out into the air. Buildings were built on top of other buildings—the supports reinforced with scrap to compensate for the added weight, if they were reinforced at all—walkways of bolted scrap and wood wove between them, and everything was covered in a thick layer of moss that thrived in the constant humidity and made slips a deadly danger.
 
The market platform extended in front of the town’s lone store. It was made primarily of wood, and the long pillars that stretched down ten meters to the side of the valley were solid tree trunks. This made it one of the sturdiest structures in the town. It was raining when Maul got there one evening, so it was not as busy as usual. Most of the vendors were clustered close to the store, which was shielded from the rain by another platform some distance above. The man with the rickshaw was among them, and Maul went to him first. He pointed to the sack of dehydrated bread and held out a sports helmet that he had scavenged some weeks ago, during the same trip that he had acquired the pleasure droid, the parts of which he had been steadily selling off.
 
The man, an elderly Nautolan, took the helmet, looked it over, muttering in broken Huttese, and eventually offered a number. Maul nodded, and the man tucked the helmet into the rickshaw before handing him five packets. Then it was on to the young Duros woman who wore gloves to hide her spice-stained fingers, even while she fiddled with her electronics. He wordlessly proffered a bundle of wire that he’d worked free from the pleasure droid. She unwound it and coiled it on her hand, lips moving in a soundless count, and nodded. “Three creds,” she said in her croaky voice. Maul accepted this, too, and took the chits that she removed from a lockbox and held out to him.
 
He would normally have gone straight back to the hut after this, but it started to storm properly, complete with copious quantities of thunder and lightning. Maul’s durasteel legs were fairly well insulated, but without his specially woven pants from his apprenticeship, which rendered him as neutral as any fully organic being, and which he avoided wearing for their suspiciously high quality, he didn’t want to risk attracting a strike. So he tucked himself up against the wall of the store and waited for the weather to improve.
 
He settled into a light meditation after a while, not entirely intentionally. His discipline had relaxed a little since coming to Ka Vodna. His thoughts and actions were not so precisely calculated as they once had been. He saw it happening, and regretted it, but he did nothing to stop it beyond his nightly teras kasi practice.
 
His awareness filled his own body first. His damaged lung didn’t like the humidity. Nothing severe, but it felt a little damp, a little sticky. He ought to climb the valley and spend a night out in the desert. It wouldn’t cure him, but it would dry things out a little. Below that, his gut was adjusting well to the food here. This did not surprise him; Zabraks were notoriously hardy. His organic and artificial limbs were fine. His new genitalia, on the other hand, were begging for attention.
 
Maul was not unused to this. Since he had fitted the sexual prosthetic into his existing prosthetic, he had found himself masturbating at least once a day. He had tinkered with the sensor arrays extensively, but he found that reducing sensation seemed to cut it off entirely, no doubt a consequence of his own arrays’ rather simplistic construction. Thus far, he had been unable to accept that as a valid option. He knew, logically, that the sensible thing to do would be to remove the sexual prosthetic and only use it when he wanted sexual pleasure, at a time that he chose. Illogically, he could not force himself to do it. To be able to

feel

himself was… a luxury, yes, but one that he seemed unable to do without. He had taken the prosthetic out the evening he acquired it, and the sudden loss of sensation had been… unexpectedly intense.
 
He felt hideously empty without it, hideously unwhole. Abhorrent. It had been worse when he looked down at himself and saw the gaping void, sensor arrays dangling loose, nothing there but durasteel and wiring. He had never felt so thoroughly detached from himself as he did at that moment, not when he was floating next to his own legs, not when he woke up without them, not ever. There was something about regaining the connection and then losing it a second time that was strikingly intolerable. So he put the prosthetic back in, and he kept it in. The sensitivity was too high, and his cunt pulsed and throbbed between his steel legs almost constantly, dripping slick—though not as much as it had initially, he’d figured that out, at least—forcing lewd thoughts past his usual discipline. When he was out scavenging, it was a mild annoyance, yes, but it was also… comforting. He could feel, and the new influx of bodily sensation, intrusive as it might be, was a constant reminder that

he could feel.

So he sat with his back against the store wall, thinking about his cunt, and what he would do with it when he returned to his hut. The storm likely wouldn’t be over anytime soon, and it was a long walk-climb back down the side of the valley, so he would have plenty of time to think about it. He would not think too hard, in case there was a Force user in the area who might pick up on him; a wildly unlikely occurrence, but the consequences would be catastrophic enough that he avoided it anyway. He did not think of exactly how he would use his now-treasured hydrospanner, but he did think of the tool, the pleasantly ergonomic shape of the handle, and he mentally ran through each object in his possession, running it against a checklist of qualities that a potential sex toy needed to have. Roughly cylindrical, easily cleaned, of a certain dimension…  
 
Then, as his meditation spread deeper, something brushed his awareness, and he blinked. His mental walls went up immediately. The classical mind-training mantra—

my mind is my own, and none may enter—

passed through him near-instantly, and he was ready for any Force user present. When no attack, or further probe of any kind, was forthcoming, he reached out cautiously, scanning the area to find what he’d touched.
 
When he found it, he frowned a little in annoyance and dismay. It had been nothing but an emotional outburst. A nearby one, true, but one that he should have been able to recognize without conscious thought. He would have to do better, he realized. He could not keep letting his skills atrophy. He needed to practice his meditation, his use of the Force, hone his mind and body back to what they had once been. He needed— 
 
He blinked again. Another outburst hit him. Like the last one, this one was sexual in nature. Someone had orgasmed. Not unusual, except for the fact that both of these someones were very close, within a few meters. Not on the platform, none of the vendors, but… behind him? In the store? A careful stretch of thought discovered that they were in the store’s bathroom. Neither of them were Force-sensitive in the slightest, so he pushed a little further, and suppressed a shudder. One of them had a penis, which he had inserted into a hole in a wall, and on the other side of the wall was another, a hand squeezing the trio of genital tendrils between his thighs, the first one’s penis in his mouth. There was a thick layer of ignorance between them; these two did not know each other. Maul’s cunt pulsed hard at the thought. After a few minutes, one came out—a human, the first one—and strolled out into the storm, heading uphill. A little later, a Rodian emerged. He looked around a little, and then made his way down.
 
Maul was not entirely certain as to what he had just witnessed, but the part of his mind that was thinking about his cunt was already throwing out theory after theory as to how it might work. Anonymous sex in a public place. Obviously, it required two parties, and a wall with a hole in it. How did one party signal the other? Was there a signal at all, or was it a matter of waiting? Could it be prearranged somehow, with one stall guaranteed to be occupied at a certain time? 
 
He interrupted his own stream of thought rather forcefully. It was a mildly interesting problem, but really not one that he needed to be dedicating himself to. He should be thinking, for example, about where he was going to salvage tomorrow, or perhaps where his next destination should be—staying in one valley too long would be dangerous. He had heard rather promising things about a valley to the south that sounded rather more livable than this one, a larger one, with shallower sides, mostly dedicated to agricultural work, with a few small mid-range hotels and a variety of spas and boutiques in the small resort town. He would likely have to live in the jungle proper in that valley, so as to avoid unnecessary contact with adventurous offworlders and agricultural workers, but it was certainly a viable option.
 
Someone walked into the store, and he touched them briefly in the Force without thinking. A Nikto woman, tall, broad, confident, and… in a heightened state of arousal.

No,

he told himself firmly. He wrapped his somewhat-waterproof coat more closely around himself and shifted against the wall. He tried to screen out his awareness of the woman, but she was heading into the bathroom, and she was sliding a hand down the front of her pants and settling in for a wait. His cunt squeezed desperately, and he felt his clit swell up further.
 
No. What would he do if he did walk into that store? Go into the bathroom and bare himself, make himself vulnerable in a public place? What if the woman was dangerous? What if it was a trap? He wasn’t sure what sort of trap it might be, exactly, but he knew that sex was frequently used to lure people. He was not going to fall prey to something like that.
 
The woman didn’t feel malicious in the Force. Just very, very aroused. Which made absolutely no difference at all. What if there were spy devices in there? What if he were caught on audio or holo recording and distributed onto the HoloNet? His master had many servants that trawled the Net for information. What if one of them found evidence that Maul was alive and well? Sidious would never let him escape like that a second time. He would be killed.
 
He expanded his awareness, as lightly as possible. He couldn’t feel anyone trained to use the Force nearby, though there were a few dim lights of Force-sensitivity in the darkness—he had learned that many more people in the galaxy were sensitive than he would have believed, but the vast majority of them, even with the best training, would never be able to do more than sense one another’s presence. 
 
With his concerns about being noticed somewhat assuaged, he focused his awareness on the store’s bathroom. It was much easier to sense living beings than it was to sense electronics, but provided that there was power, it could be done. The electricity of an artificial device was not so different from the bioelectric functions of a body. He followed the vein-paths of the bathroom’s light fixtures, scouted carefully for other points of energy. He could feel the vague outlines of the space, enough to determine that the toilets were mechanical, lever-based, that the doors were manual, that the air circulation system was nothing more than a vent. There was nothing that spoke of more technology than the bare minimum necessary to operate a bathroom. 
 
Sinking even deeper into his study of the bathroom, he was unable to find any biological signs that were out of the ordinary. The Nikto, obviously, and the usual assortment of mosses and fungi crowding around the window, along with a solitary potted air-sponge, rather unhappy with its lot, presumably intended to improve the quality of the bathroom’s atmosphere. Beyond that, the only thing he could feel that seemed worth his awareness was the old Ithorian who ran the store.
 
Could he just walk past the Ithorian? Did he have to ask for permission to use the bathroom? Did the Ithorian know what its bathroom was being used for? Would it make a note of Maul somewhere?

Zabrak, male, quiet, stupid enough to have sex in a public bathroom with a stranger.

The Nikto was squeezing and rubbing at something. He forcefully yanked his attention away from her, but not before her pleasure made his cunt pulse hard in desperate sympathy. He would sit quietly here until the storm died down a little. It would be stupid to go in there. 
 
He could leave tonight, really. After he left the bathroom, he could go down to his hut, gather up his limited possessions, climb out of the valley, and make his way across the desert to the other valley, the nicer one. Anyone looking for him would stay in this valley, surely—he would take care not to be seen, and even weakened, with his discipline lax, if Maul did not wish to be seen, it would take strong eyes and a stronger mind to see him. That would be… not safe, perhaps, but not suicidal. A sexual encounter in the public bathroom of the shantytown’s only store with a complete stranger, and then an immediate nighttime move. He would vanish.
 
He stood up, shook himself a little to shed some water, and moved into the store, taking care to meander a little. 
 
He had only been in here once. The inside of the store was full of teetering shelves, stacked with goods. They were cheaply made, the foods full of mildly toxic additives, the rest defective merchandise sold wholesale to vendors at a discount, but after a few months in the shantytown, they seemed luxurious. Real nerf meat, ground and frozen into cubes. Bottles of alcohol with peeling labels. A camping kit, covered in dust and looking very green around the base, advertising a leak-proof tarp in badly misspelled Basic. Vegetable pastes supposedly from the Core Worlds, most likely by way of Hutta. Cheap electronics, datapads and holocommunicators and data disks, empty credit chits in various tacky colors. Maul briefly eyed a small package of Ondoolian spice-fruit before realizing that it was actually a candy meant to taste like it.
 
He wandered down an aisle for a little bit, trying to decide when it would be appropriate to ask to use the bathroom. The longer he waited, the more awkward it felt. The Ithorian was leaning on the counter, offering a bit of fertilizer to another air-sponge, this one marginally happier than the one in the bathroom. The Nikto was rubbing her mammary glands. His large clit, full of fluid, twitched against his pants. “‘Fresher?” he grunted.
 
The Ithorian pointed with long fingers and said nothing. It didn’t seem to be looking, but with its glassy black eyes, it was hard to tell. Maul felt no suspicion from it in the Force. Its attention felt focused on its plant.
 
He walked to the bathroom, making sure to move slowly, unhurriedly, no urgency. When he reached the door, he swung it open casually and shut it behind him with a gentle push. Then he was standing in the bathroom, dim and humid, with the heightened breathing of a Nikto audible to his sensitive ears.
 
He stepped into the free stall, the one the Rodian had been in. The hole in the wall was large and misshapen, and did not look particularly sanitary, but neither did it look particularly foul. He decided that he would disinfect the prosthetic and groin module when he got back to his hut. In the meantime, he undid the flimsy tie of his pants and pushed them a little down his thighs, just enough to make his groin available. His durasteel hips were quite flexible, and while it was awkward to jut himself out enough to be able to put his cunt to the hole in the wall, he managed it. When it was aroused, as it seemed to be near-constantly, its soft rubber form pouted out well past the durasteel facing, and he could push it out even further by flexing the muscles that he had once used to make his cock jump. 
 
There was a bit of a giggle from the other side, and then a deep, breathy voice said, “Move fast, don’t you?”
 
Maul froze. He had not accounted for the possibility that he might be expected to

talk.

The next giggle was more open. “It’s all right, I’ve always wanted to see one of these. It must’ve cost you. I had a girlfriend once who wanted one, human, you know, had a cock, but she couldn’t afford it.” An open hand cupped his mound, and he suddenly realized that the gap between masturbation and sex was rather wider than he’d anticipated. The Nikto chuckled, low and dark, and said, “Fuck, you just soaked my hand. You’re really sensitive, aren’t you?” 
 
Maul was too distracted by the pressure to bother with an answer. He rested his forehead on the wall and steadied his breathing. The Nikto’s hand was as rough and pebbled as the rest of her, a sharp contrast to the glossy smoothness of his cunt, and it felt shockingly powerful. A stranger’s hand, touching him there. He hardly had time to think about it before two claw-tipped fingers slipped between his labia and spread them a little, shifting him around, apparently admiring. Then something warm and wet and a little rough rasped across him, and he flinched back in surprise.
 
“Sorry,” the Nikto said. “Don’t like being licked?” That had been her

tongue,

her

tongue

had been on his

cunt.

“I can stick to my fingers if you want. Or, uh…” She hesitated for a moment. “Wouldn’t suggest it, normally, but seeing as you’re sturdy down here, and easy to clean… I’m a Nikto, yeah? You know what that means?”
 
“No,” Maul said, pitching his voice lower than usual.
 
“Means I got a little something extra. Our, uh… it’s a pussy, you can fuck it, but it comes out, too. Kinda like a cock, only soft and squishy. Helps keep come in, or push it out, whichever. Anyway, if you want something a little more filling, I can use it on you. If you’d like that better than fingers or tongue.”
 
Maul’s insides were squirming. He was suddenly realizing that he had no idea what he had come here for. Did he want her to touch him with her fingers? Lick him with her tongue? Penetrate him with her… thing? Did he want any of those things? He hadn’t thought about that. He’d only been thinking of the general concept of sex, without any of the details. 
 
“What you thinking?” Her voice was breathy.
 
“Do it,” Maul said. He wondered how long he would be able to keep up the false voice. Vocal control certainly didn’t last long during his masturbation sessions. “Put it in me.”
 
“Oh, fuck yeah,” the Nikto said. “Shit, I really wasn’t expecting a pussy. It’s all cocks in here, normally. Oh, this is gonna be good. Can I touch you now, or are you gonna get scared again?”
 
“Touch me,” Maul said, in what he intended to be a commanding tone, but ended up sounding more like a request.
 
“Your wish is my command, baby.” Fingers brushed his lips again, and he shuddered. He could feel himself pulsing, and imagined what it must look like, his cunt, hot and wet and swollen, on display, freely accessible… There was a sound of fabric, of a gription closure coming undone, and then a soft, wet squish, accompanied by a soft sigh. “Oh, that feels good. I don’t do this often enough.

Ohh…

” The squishing continued, and her voice grew strained. “Oh, yeah. Yeah.” A sudden

shlup,

followed by the sound of liquid spattering on the floor, and she groaned in relief. “Okay. Okay, it’s out. I can go straight in, or I can use my fingers to get you ready first.”
 
Maul had to think about that for a moment. He had learned that there was a pleasure to be had in delaying sexual gratification, that it grew more intense the longer it was held at bay. But he didn’t really have time for that, did he? The longer he was here, the greater the risk. No, things would have to go quickly, and then he could leave, move somewhere safer. “Put it in me.”
 
“All right. Hold on…” There were more wet sounds, and what sounded like shuffling feet—the Nikto must have been getting into position—and then something warm and wet slipped unexpectedly across the front of Maul’s cunt.

It was much more slippery than he had expected, less like his cock had been and more like his cunt was now, which he realized he probably should have expected. It was also much thinner, which was odd, less than a finger slopping up against him, and much stronger and more flexible. A tentacle, really, was what it was. Thin, smooth, dripping something that mixed with his own fluids. The tip of the tentacle wrapped around his clit and tugged, and he parted his lips to let out a choking sigh.
 
“Like it?” the Nikto purred. Only on her, it was more of a rumble, almost a growl. “It can do all kinds of things, baby.” The tentacle continued to play with his clit with its tip while something thicker rubbed up and down his cunt. It came as something of a shock when he realized that the thicker thing was simply a length of the same tentacle. It varied in width, then. Below his clit, the tentacle was slipping and sliding its way between his lips. It felt like he was straddling a very soft rope, one that was spreading him apart and letting him drip all over it.

“Fuck,

you have a good pussy,” the Nikto said. “Look at this

gorgeous

fat cunt of yours.” Her hand cupped him again, pressing the tentacle deeper between his lips. He could feel its length squirming against his vaginal opening, and, faintly, against his urethra. Her hand squeezed, and the breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding came out ragged. “Could suck on that clit for days. Could even put it inside me, probably. And these

lips…”

The tentacle squeezed his clit hard, pulling it upward, dragging his inner lips up with it. The Nikto’s rough thumbs stroked down the insides of his inner lips, right next to where the tentacle was wriggling gently. Then her fingers pressed against the edges of the durasteel facing, and she pushed with her thumbs, spreading and stretching him out. His hole would have been exposed if part of the tentacle’s length hadn’t been rubbing it. 
 
“Gorgeous. You practically got a package down here. I’d love to see you in tight pants. Bet I could see a nice bulge here, not hard like a cock, but a lovely soft pussy.” Her thumbs were rubbing him in circles, and the tentacle was moving a little faster on his clit. “If you got a pump, you could get it even bigger. Maybe with enough practice, it’d sway when you walk… Is it like this all the time?”
 
“No,” Maul grated. Oh.

Oh.

He hadn’t anticipated that words might increase his arousal. He was theoretically familiar with the concept of dirty talk, but it had never struck him as a useful skill, or one to pay any attention to at all. Only now, the Nikto was getting him awfully close to orgasm, and he wanted to believe that most of it was from her fingers and tentacle, but he could not deny that something inside of him was jumping and clawing at the words she was pouring on him.
 
“Oh, I see, there’s a panel. Here…” Before he could say anything, the Nikto slid the module’s modesty panel into place. His cunt was automatically pulled hard back into place behind it to avoid any pinching, and he gasped.

Shit.

He had never been penned up like this while aroused. The panel retracted automatically at a certain level of arousal, so while he had often been aroused at inappropriate times, it had never been contained. His cunt had always been free to feel what it would. Now, however… the pressure was immense. He was too aroused for the fluid to drain from his clit and labia, but there wasn’t space for them behind the panel. His cunt squeezed furiously against the durasteel, erect clit forced back while his labia strained. His vagina clenched, compacted by his external genitals pushing back. Everything was jammed in a space too small for it. His legs trembled a little. He didn’t realize how hard he was breathing, how he was braced against the wall, how his fingers were digging into the cheap plastic board, until he heard the Nikto chuckle.
 
“Wow,” she said. She rubbed the panel, and he nearly cried out, barely contenting himself with jamming his cunt up hard against the hole, grinding a little against the edge, getting nothing from it. “Never done that before, have you?” She tapped her fingers rhythmically on the panel, and he twitched with each impact, imagining that he knew which finger she was using each time. He couldn’t feel much through the durasteel, but he suspected that it would be enough to drive him mad.
 
She released the panel again, and he groaned. The sensation of letting go was so intense that he almost thought he’d urinated accidentally, and he tried to clench the relevant muscles before he remembered that it was not possible for him to urinate in that way. Instead, he felt his hole twitch. “Well, look at that,” the Nikto said. She was purring again. “Look at that all hang out.” Her hand gave his cunt a gentle slap, as if she were greeting a friend, and Maul felt himself almost climax then and there, complete with a little gush of fluid. Then she started

kneading

him, as much as she could on a mound the size of a small fist, fingers massaging him up and down and side to side, pulling, stretching, squishing, and he made a small noise that he couldn’t name.
 
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I’d do that to you all the time if you were mine. Oh, no, you know what I’d do? I’d buy a vibe, a big one, lots of texture, and I’d work it inside you, fill you up with it, and then I’d close that little panel. And then, before you could get used to the feeling of having

all

that inside you, I’d turn it on.” Her tentacle brushed him again, winding across his cunt. “Yeah, I’d turn it on, and then I’d leave you to it. Maybe for an hour. Maybe for a day. Maybe for a week. You wouldn’t be able to open yourself up without me. At first you wouldn’t be able to do anything, just lie around and moan and come, over and over, but after a few times, you’d start getting used to it, and that’s when things would get really fun, once you started thinking that you could deal with it. You’d be out and about, in public, doing whatever, and you’d feel a finish coming on, but you’d be, shit, I don’t know, at the checkout or something, and there’d be nothing you could do about it. You’d just have to stand there and come—are you a squirter? I hope you’re a squirter—and try to look as normal as possible, like you weren’t a big fucking slut with a huge vibe in your huge cunt, coming your fucking brains out.”
 
Maul let out a low groan, and she chuckled. “Yeah? You like the sound of that, don’t you? You want that, baby? Want me to make your beautiful pussy happy?” Her tentacle slipped up between his lips again. “Well, I don’t have a vibe for you, but I do have a nice cock to stuff you with. It’s hot, and it’s dripping, and it’s very excited. Hasn’t fucked a pussy in years, and now its first one is going to be

this

gorgeous thing.” Something pressed against the wall, and he was distantly aware that her forehead was resting there, roughly where his was, on the opposite side. “Yeah, I’m spoiled. You ready, baby? Ready for me to fuck you?”

“Yes,”

Maul said, half a hiss and half a gasp. 
 
“I guess I did tell you I’d get right to it, huh? You distracted me with this pussy. I just had to get a close look at it.” She squeezed his clit between two fingers. “Well, let’s do it.” The tip of her tentacle—cock, she called it a cock and he would, too—pressed up against his entrance, and slipped inside.
 
It was easy, the first part, thinner than a finger, and consequently thinner than anything he’d put in his cunt before. But it

moved,

and was so clearly

alive

that Maul nearly pulled away in instinctive horror. He had very rarely been touched by other beings, and absolutely never in an intimate way, and it was an invasion. The Nikto’s cock was bringing him pleasure, his cunt clenching in delight at the promised penetration, but for the first time, he was not in control of it. He had never had anything inside him that he had not controlled, and it was difficult to accustom himself to the idea of giving up that control. But there it was, delving deeper, warm inside him, moving in ways a finger couldn’t quite replicate, and that a hydrospanner could never hope to achieve. It was soft, after all, and utterly prehensile, and it writhed inside of him as if it were a climber scrambling to get in.
 
Then, as it pressed further inside, it got thicker. Maul’s insides opened up accommodatingly, but his entrance was more resistant. Soon the Nikto’s cock was working hard to squeeze in, his opening pressing back so hard that her cock was wider both inside and outside of him. The squeeze only got more extreme as the Nikto forced herself further in.

“Fuck,”

she groaned. “You’re tight.” Her fingers toyed with his clit, rubbing the hood up and down it. “I’ll get in, don’t you worry, my gorgeous pussy, I’ll get in.”
 
Her cock suddenly shoved hard, ramming in another few centimeters. Maul’s mouth was open, his knees against the wall, nails digging into the plastic, toes curling in his shoddy, leaky boots. He was panting now. His prosthetic’s hydraulic module was making his cunt and clit throb in time with his pulse. He couldn’t feel it very well in his cunt, but he could feel his heartbeat in his clit, swelling and retracting a little with every beat, and he had to resist the urge to pull back and rub himself off. His entrance felt stretched taut, and still the Nikto was feeding more and more of her cock into him.
 
Something thicker pressed against him, and inward progress stopped entirely. “Shit,” the Nikto muttered. “There’s a bit of a bulge at the base, the extruded antevaginal chamber, a knot if you like. Fuck. I’ll get it in. Stay with me, I’ll have to push pretty hard.”
 
Maul could not have considered doing anything else. He was breathing higher up in his chest, now, air coming fast and shallow. The cock that was inside of him was

wriggling,

curling and twisting and dancing inside, stretching him in new ways every moment, absolutely unpredictable. It was incredible. Had anyone asked him whether he wanted a tentacle squirming around in his rubber vagina, he would have been fairly certain that he did not, but it was happening, and at that moment, there was nothing in the galaxy he wanted more than for the Nikto’s cock to make it all the way into him. He was beyond most conscious thought, but he strung together a couple of words. “Fill me,” he panted. “Fill me.”
 
“That what you sound like when you’re not putting it on? You have a gorgeous voice, baby,” the Nikto said. She strained against him, and his entrance gave just a little, but it wasn’t enough, and she relented. “Gorgeous voice and a gorgeous pussy.” She pushed again, and for a moment, Maul thought she might do it, but then she fell back again. “Fuck. Fuck, I’m just gonna go for it. Brace yourself.”
 
Maul did, letting his heels cling to the bathroom floor. He settled his hips into place, and the Nikto took a few slow, deep, breaths, and then she pushed,

hard,

and for a long, agonizing moment, he was spread around something bigger than anything he’d had in him before. It was huge, throbbing, hot, wet, and the cock that was already in him was writhing madly. He couldn’t breathe, only stand there, shaking, and then, with a wet

plop,

the widest part was in, and the rest followed as deep and sudden as a punch to the gut.
 
“Oh, fuck!” the Nikto gasped. “Oh, fuck!” The knot was huge inside of him, and his entrance was squeezing uselessly at the base of her cock. The tentacle-cock wriggled frantically inside of him, battering at the walls of his rubber cunt and its durasteel frame. The Nikto was making little bit-off gasps that were getting steadily higher and higher. Her cock was moving faster and faster, less and less precisely, quickly moving into the realm of spasmodic jerking. “Fuck!

Fuck!”

He could hear her hands scraping at the wall, feel her hips tremble.
 
He intended to tell her to rub his clit. It needed the attention desperately. He felt as though distilled pleasure were being pumped into his cunt, but it wasn’t going to be quite enough to push him over the brink, he just needed a little help. His clit twitched and jumped like a cock, and he clenched hard around the Nikto.

“Uhhnn.”

Oh, that wasn’t what he’d intended at all. “F—

nnnnn.”

No, nor was that.
 
“Is it your clit?” The Nikto’s voice was all harsh, breathy desperation, thick and hot and fast. “Is it your big gorgeous clit? You want me to touch it?”
 
Maul made a noise that may or may not have sounded like assent. He was beyond thinking and almost beyond caring.
 
“Well, I’m not gonna.” She was panting hard, and if the wall had not been between them, it would have been into his ear. “I’m about to come, and when I do, you will too. I’m going to come all up in this big gorgeous pussy like it’s begging me to do, and then it’s gonna clamp down, and you’re gonna come harder than you ever have in your life. Understand?” 
 
Then she made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a whine, and suddenly there was a surge of pressure that bulged against his entrance, and then inside him, and then deeper, and then there was

another

one that pulsed up into him, and

another,

and then, as the fourth one swelled the Nikto’s cock inside of him, something hit him so hard that he almost didn’t realize that it was an orgasm. He clawed at the wall, his nails scratching grooves into the surface. His metal toes curled hard into the soles of his boots. His breath stuck in his throat. His spine arched. Then the tension let go for an instant, and he smacked his forehead against the wall in uncontrolled sensation before it claimed him again.
 
By the time he finished riding out the waves, the Nikto’s knot had receded to the point that it was indistinguishable from the rest of her cock. She was getting her breath back, but still a little shaky. He could sense her forehead pressed to the wall where his was, her hands nearly by his. “Fuck,” she mumbled, slow and tired. “I really needed that.” Then a grin colored her voice, and she said, “Think you did, too.”
 
Maul didn’t bother responding. He just stood there, the Nikto’s cock in his cunt, returning his breathing to its usual measured rate.
 
“Can you hold that in you?” she asked. “I don’t want to make a mess.”
 
Maul considered briefly. “A little. Use the panel.”
 
“Right.” She didn’t move. He felt her hand on his cunt, gently stroking the labia stretched around the base of her cock. “I’m all wet,” she said after a pause. “You are a squirter.” She touched him for a while longer. By the time she said, “Ready?” he had gotten his heart rate back to normal.
 
“Do it.”
 
She pulled out, all in one slick rush, and he clenched as hard as he could. He felt a little fluid dripping down him, but he managed to keep most of it in until the Nikto engaged the panel, and his cunt forced itself back into place. He groaned at that. Whatever she’d deposited in him, there was a lot, and while his clit and cunt were going down, they were still swollen. It was hideously tight in there. He wanted to rest a hand on his prosthetic and rub it, though he knew it would do no good.
 
“Nice,” she said approvingly. “I’ll leave first.”
 
Maul waited several minutes before leaving the bathroom. He gently touched the Ithorian in the Force as he left the store, and found that the shopkeeper knew exactly what went on in its public bathroom. He winced inwardly, but there was nothing to be done. He was leaving anyway.
 
Making the descent back to the hut proved to be more trying than he had expected. It was still raining, though the lightning had ceased, and the path was as treacherous as ever, but these things did not concern him. What did concern him was the weight and pressure in his cunt, which were so great that it felt like he were trying to hold a large stone there. It gave his hips a bit of a sway, though he hid it as best he could. He was relieved when he finally ducked into his hut and closed the door behind him. Then it was off with his boots and pants, and then, to his own mild surprise, the rest of his clothes, until he was standing naked in the makeshift hut. 
 
He grabbed a metal bowl, set it in the middle of the floor, and knelt with a knee on either side of it. He managed to stop himself from putting a hand on his lower belly in an attempt to soothe it, but it was a near thing. He settled himself, waited a moment, and then disengaged the panel.
 
The sense of relief was unstoppable. Fluid gushed out of his cunt, filling the bowl quickly. He couldn’t bring himself to stop the flow, and by the time he had expelled everything that the Nikto had pumped into him, there was a small puddle around the bowl, beginning to flow thickly off the uneven floor. Judging from what she’d said about Nikto being able to push unwanted semen out of their bodies, he inferred that it was probably some form of natural cleansing agent. Judging it to be harmless, he emptied the bowl out the door and left it outside for the rain to rinse out. Then he removed his prosthetic and began the laborious process of cleaning up.