The locker room was plain an unadorned, free of personality. The individuals who used it in preparation for their duels left no mark up on it, and it showed none of the history of violence it had witnessed. There was no sign that it had once held contestants who knew their future held only two paths: death, or survival paid blood of another.
The age of the deathmatch was gone, and with it much of the glory and riches of dueling. Enough so that the locker room, like much of the once-fine establishments of Upper Taris, was beginning to show a certain wear, a fading veneer of civilization and elegance replaced by small gatherings of dust in the corners and the scuffs of boots on the tile floor.
There were two women in the room. One was in the showers, washing free blood and sweat, removing what evidence she could of a loss in the ring, hiding blunted ambitions a personal ritual ablution. The other waited for her chance at victory, checking the weapons and armor laid out before her.
Her hands moved with practiced eased across the straps of her armor, searching for flaws, making sure the settings were exact and that it would fit her perfectly when she donned it. That task completed, she slid the power cell out of her blaster, eyed the charge indicator, and replaced it. The gas chamber received the same careful treatment, ensuring that the pistol would not fail her if she needed it.
She didn't think she would. She carried the weapon out of habit, but the ring was small. Small enough for pistols to still be accurate across the floor. Small enough that an opponent with energy shields could close to melee range with ease. As she intended to do, so her vibrosword was lovingly examined, every knick, notch, and scar as familiar to her as her name. Power levels were checked and rechecked.
It was her own ritual. There was nothing wrong with her gear, and there was nothing dangerous about the man she was to face. But the mindless intensity of preparations kept her mind from wandering. It allowed her to stay focused on the here and the now, the things that would keep her alive in a fight. Not that her death was likely—The duels had been sanitized a decade ago, deathmatches declared illegal and energy suppressors installed in the ring to make it safe. As safe as trying to kill someone could ever be, and people had still died in the ring since then. It was called a tragedy, but the spectators screamed loudest when lifeblood pooled on the floor.
The shower stopped, the hiss and splash of water suddenly silenced. The duelist known as Ice walked into the locker room, clad only in a towel. The blond woman's imperious features showed no sign of her defeat, or any emotion at all save the lingering casual arrogance of the aristocracy of old Taris.
Unconcerned by the presence of another in the room, Ice stripped off the towel and began to dress. The other woman watched as she did, taking in Ice's lithe body, noting the thin lines of old cuts and the small, scarred craters where armor had not been enough to stop blades or blasters.
They were the marks of the dueling ring, a legacy of the oldest of sports. The woman had her own scars, but they were not the same, and they were hidden by the underlayer of her armor.
"You looking for a reason?" Ice asked, interrupting her train of though.
She shook her head, then made sure her hair was pulled back securely from her face. She stood, picking up the hard plates of her armor.
The room was silent as both women finished dressing. Ice wore well-made, elegant clothes that spoke of the wealth she had gained from dueling as the wealth of the old aristocracy began to run dry. Neither the pistol holstered on one thigh nor the vibroblade hanging from the opposite side of her belt detracted from the clothing's appearance.
The other woman carried her weapons in much the same way, though she left her vibrosword unsheathed and close to hand. The solid clamshell of her armor protected her torso, while vambraces and greaves were strapped on to protect her forearms and shins. Her upper arms and thighs were left free of armor so that her movement was not restricted, but the fabric of the underlayer covering them was tough enough to take a weak blow from a vibrosword or absorb a glancing blaster shot.
A seasoned eye would have recognized the armor as standard issue to Republic heavy infantry and special forces during the Mandalorian Wars, despite the missing pieces that would have completed the solid outer shell and the lack of helmet. Ice did not.
Ice broke the silence. "So you're up against Duncan. If you can beat that worthless excuse of a duelist, I might begin to consider you one of us. Might."
The other woman had watched Ice fight. She was skilled enough to justify her arrogance, and her loss against Marl, the man ranked directly above her, had been a close thing, as much a matter of luck as any other factor.
"I don't need your approval to do this."
"You do if you want to last." Ice's face was expressionless. "Accidents happen, after all. Especially to those who aren't sufficiently skilled. Are you?"
"You can decide for yourself."
"We'll see. I guess there's some truth to the name you got stuck with."
They began to walk in different directions. The armored woman headed for a door with a display above it, counting down until her match began. She spoke as she went. "Ajuur's a moron. But if he thinks calling me 'Mysterious Stranger' is going to make me more popular with the crowds… Well, it's his ring."
She didn't see it when Ice smiled, and Ice would have denied it if anyone asked. "Try not to loose, Stranger. You seem interesting, and being beaten by Dead-Eye Duncan?" The smile developed a predatory edge. "That would just be embarrassing."
The other woman didn't respond. The display flashed red, and the door slid aside. She stepped forward into the dueling ring, blade held low at her side. A discreet motion with her free hand activated her energy shields as the announcer began to speak. She ignored him, tuning him out the same way she had the screaming crowd that the oldest of sports drew.
Her focus settled on the man across the ring from her. He was old, older than he should have been to fight in the ring, and there was no confidence in the way he held the blaster. Whatever had driven him to dueling, it had not given him skill.
The announcer finished, and the duel began.
Duncan was called Dead-Eye; he was anything but. His first shot, snapped off as she began a headlong charge, missed by more than a meter. His second was no more accurate. Then she reached him and it was over.
Her hand grabbed Duncan's wrist and pulled forward. He dropped his blaster in surprise and she kicked his legs out from under him. He went down, one arm still in her grip. Her blade swung down in a vicious chop, coming to a perfectly controlled stop just above the back of his neck. The ring's energy dampening fields would have protected him if she had struck, but the demonstration of skill was enough. The buzzer sounded, ending the match. Duncan sagged in her grip, defeated, and she dropped him, turning to walk away.
She didn't say a word as the crowd cheered her sudden victory, instead retreating to the solitude of the locker room.
When she was clean, and had removed her armor in favor of comfortable clothes with her weapons strapped over them, she emerged. Carth was leaning against the wall across from the locker room door, waiting for her. "Now can you explain why that was a good idea?" he asked, taking the kit bag she'd slung over her shoulder.
"Later. In the apartment." The hallway was deserted, but that didn't mean people weren't listening. Carth nodded and rested a hand on the butt of his blaster. He understood the consequences of being overheard as well as she did.
They encountered no one as they climbed the short staircase up to the main level of the cantina. The music emerging from one of the side rooms was loud enough to make conversation difficult in the main room, but that did not stop the many occupants from trying. The vast majority were human, Tarisians of the Upper City, which had been ruthlessly segregated even before the Sith arrived. Their conversations added a low susurration to the room, a buzz that hung below the music, and the two combined to block all other sounds.
The woman ignored them. She'd already circulated through the cantina before signing up to duel, taking in the locals and listening to their conversations. Instead she pushed through to Ajuur's room, where banks of viewscreens on the walls showed the currently empty dueling ring, and bored spectators who couldn't afford a ringside seat waited impatiently for the last match of the day to start.
The Hutt Ajuur reigned over the room from his place at the far end. It was his dueling ring, and the duelists, organizers, and spectators answered to his pleasure alone. As Hutts went, he was small, not yet having reached the prodigious size of the elder crime lords of the Exchange or Nal Hutta, but his slug-like body still took up a quarter of the back wall.
He looked up from the datapad he was holding in his stubby arms as the woman approached and addressed her in the gargling, liquid sounds of his native tongue. A protocol droid waited nearby to translate, but did not speak. She'd already proven she didn't need it.
"Good fight, good fight. People like you, Mysterious Stranger. They bet a lot of money when you fight. It makes me happy… and rich." The Hutt said.
"I'm glad to know people are willing to put money on the new meat. What about my share?"
Ajuur laughed. The sound rumbled out of his massive belly and through the gaping slit of his mouth, shaking his whole body. "You'll do well in the ring with that attitude, Stranger, if Duncan wasn't a fluke. Or somebody doesn't kill you first. Here, many of my duelists would say, attitude has to be earned."
"It's good to know you care."
"If somebody kills you in a back alley then I don't profit. If they just beat you down in the ring, I make extra." The Hutt ejected a chip from his datapad and handed it to her. "Here's your ten percent. If you want to fight again, come back tomorrow and I'll find an opponent for you. Someone with actual skill this time."
"I'll be here."
One fight and two days later, she spoke with Ice again. They were standing in Ajuur's room, mixed in amongst a crowd of spectators, but separate from it.
"Ice."
"Stranger. You've had a few wins, but you won't beat me." Ice's confidence was as unshakeable as her arrogance. Ajuur had decreed that they would fight and she was certain she would win. The other woman disagreed.
"I've seen your scars, Ice. You haven't seen mine."
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
She smiled. A friend had once likened the expression to a Kyat Dragon barring its teeth. The scarring around her right eye did not move with the rest of her skin, giving her an unsettling visage to go with the predator's smile. "What do you think it means?"
"It doesn't matter what it means. You'll still loose."
"Will I?"
"Yes."
"When was the last time you fought without safeties? When a mistake meant death, not defeat? You're cold, Ice, but you've got no edge." The smile disappeared. "I do." She slipped into the crowd before Ice could respond. Letting her have the last word would have ruined the effect.
"Did you really have to needle her?" Carth asked as he followed her through the crowd, one hand always close to his blaster.
"She's good. I'm better, but I want her off balance."
"Do you really think that rattled her?"
"Do you?" Carth was a good man and a better pilot, but he wasn't cut out for this sort of work. He'd have to get better if they wanted to survive Taris, and that meant making him think.
"I don't know." He was honest enough, both with himself and her, to admit that he was out of his depth.
He did know, though. It was something most pilots understood, it was just something they couldn't put into context on the ground. She decided to provide context. "How would you feel if you were perfect in sims, but found yourself in a head-to-head with a known ace?" Catiene faced him, and looked him in the eye. "I'm the ace here, and she knows it now."
"Even aces get shot down." That he did know. He would have seen it happen, and come within centimeters of it himself.
"Exactly. So I'm playing it safe."
"Stacking the deck?" Given enough information, he could draw sound conclusions.
She nodded as she walked into the locker room and the door closed behind her, cutting him off.
She went through her ritual. Every piece of her equipment was checked, rechecked, and checked a final time before it was donned. She expected to find no flaws, and there were none. The methodical nature of her preparations was reflected in condition of her arms and armor: nothing was immaculate and it all bore the scars of use, but any flaws found were addressed immediately. She'd seen deaths caused by insufficiently cared for equipment, and did not intend to add her name to that tally.
Eventually she was dressed, her normal clothing stored neatly in a locker with her kit bag. Her vibrosword was a comfortable weight at her side that bounced as she stood, one hand calming the movement by unconscious reflex. The straps that held her pistol holster in place on her leg exerted a familiar pressure on her unarmored thigh, bringing back memories of fights undertaken without the security of durasteel plating.
She brushed them aside to focus on the present. The clock above the door to the arena had begun its countdown, slowly ticking towards zero and the upcoming fight. She stood patiently, with the air of someone long used to the brief pauses and moments of solitude that preceded a fight. None of the tension betrayed by her pre-battle ritual was evident, nor was there any anticipation in her stance.
The door slid open and she stepped through, her thoughts narrowing once again to the focused perception of combat. Her entrance was an exact replica of her previous two fights, down to the drawn sword in one hand and the activation of her energy shields.
Ice stood across from her, blaster in hand, surrounded by the faint shimmer of her own shields, with a long barreled pistol in hand and a vibrosword at her waist. One side of the woman's mouth quirked upwards for a moment before her face returned to normal. The two of them were armed almost identically, but Ice had chosen to begin with a blaster, rather than the sword the woman favored.
The announcer made his usual declarations. The fight began.
Where Duncan had faltered and panicked at her charge, Ice did not. Her first shot was precise, impacting squarely on the woman's shields and dissipating. She did not try for a second shot. Instead she holstered her pistol, drew her sword, and in a smooth continuation of the action, countercharged.
The two women who met in the center of the ring were identical. They wore different armor, wielded different blades, stood at different heights, and had hair of different color. But their faces and the aura of controlled violence around them as the first blows were exchanged was the same. For that alone, to those watching, they could have been twins.
Ice fought with a cool precision to match her name. In her style it was possible to see the refined duels of the old Taris aristocracy from which she hailed. They were not the crude deathmatches of the mobs, but the elegant contests with which the businessmen and politicians had settled private disputes. Every strike was measured, the benefits and risks weighed.
Every strike was blocked, turned aside by blade or armor. There was an equal precision to the woman's defense, but it was another form. It was raw power and brutality tempered by experience and edged with subtlety, born on desperate battlefields.
Defense flowed smoothly into offense. Ice had been trained to meet each attack and turn it before responding in kind. The woman made each block a blow of its own, rattling Ice's sword in her grip and numbing her arms.
Ice was the lesser of the two duelists, and in the end power won out. The woman accepted a blow that bruised through armor in exchange for the opening it offered. Her blade chopped into Ice's extended arm with enough strength to knock it aside. She reversed the blow and her sword raked across armor, leaving a trench that leaked blood.
The ring's energy dampeners kept Ice alive by stilling the vibration of the sword so the sharpened edge merely cut skin and grated on ribs instead of sawing through them, otherwise it would have been a deathblow.
The buzzer sounded as Ice staggered backwards and collapsed to her knees. The woman knelt beside her, laid down her sword, and slowly lowered Ice to the ground.
Ice's eyes were glazing over with shock as the woman pulled the emergency release tab on her armor and removed the damaged section. The wound was long and painful, running from under Ice's arm up across the tops of her breasts and ending just below the collarbone. The woman pushed the torn underlayer aside, revealing the sliced, bloody flesh and the wet, glistening bone beneath.
"You'll live." She stood up and moved out of the way for medics Ajuur kept on standby, who took over where she'd left off. Then, with a quiet sigh that no one heard, she bend over and reclaimed her weapon, which still dripped blood as she carried it back through the door and into the locker room.
A/N: This story brought to you by yet another KOTOR playthrough giving me ideas.