23 BTC
The Skeins
Pale, nearly clear blue eyes shone like twin lamps in the darkness. The woman's gaze was every bit as unnerving in the bowels of the earth as it had been under the glaring artificial lights of the lecture hall.
"Salvage team. My crewman's injured," the response was uttered more quietly than she had anticipated, but every syllable hung distinctly in the air, like cold drops of water pinging against Baara's skin.
"Hang on," Dargla cut across the tension in his typical straightforward manner. "You're not with the garrison then?" One hand waved accusingly, or perhaps merely confusedly, at the blonde woman.
"Brilliantly deduced, Aarmas," Holberi muttered, rolling her eyes with a huff of annoyance. "She's not in uniform and has just clearly stated otherwise..."
"Nobody said anything about a salvage crew, Laren," Dargla scowled at Holberi, who merely looked down her nose at him with a cold expression of disdain. "So I, for one, would like some answers."
"So would I."
The stranger's eyes flitted from the conversation taking place between Dargla and Holberi to regard Baara once more as the latter spoke up.
"It's not my fault if no one informed you..."
"You were at our grant proposal presentation," Baara's words cut across the stranger's like a blow. Surprise flickered in the woman's clear eyes, aggravating Baara further and banishing any lingering unease her presence inspired.
"What? Did you think I wouldn't remember? Or are you just not used to being interrupted? It's not so nice, is it?"
"I don't remember making much of a scene, myself..."
"One more word out of you..."
"Baara Amittai, are you unharmed?"
"There you are...who is this?"
Baara turned, reluctantly pulling back from where she'd all but jabbed the stranger in the chest with an accusatory finger. Shame burned in her chest at the woman's seemingly innocuous statement. Weighed down with double meaning, bearing the weight of their failure.
It was too late. It wouldn't have mattered. They were never going to give us funding.
"Sovann, Doctor Witwar, yes, we're...fine. This is..."
"Zenda Roshni. Kavan Sastoa's crew."
"And who, precisely, is Kavan Sastoa?" Baara cut in coldly. Anger restrained behind icy formality, bound up and funneled into sheer disdain.
"An independent contractor whose crew has been assigned to assist with wrapping up your excavation site," Sovann answered for the woman. The latter inclined her head in acknowledgement but added nothing further to his explanation. Baara's eyes narrowed.
"And a member of his crew just happened to turn up at a presentation before funding was denied? What a curious coincidence."
"Take up your paranoia with Sastoa. I was there on my own time," Zenda replied bluntly. "Besides, as I said, I don't recall making much of a scene."
"Who's funding your operation?"
"Couldn't tell you."
"Or are purposely refusing to do so?"
"Baara," Witwar cut in gently, placing a hand on her arm. Baara glanced at the old man. "Now really isn't the time."
"I am curious as to why this individual is down here, Gannleo Witwar," Sovann spoke as placidly as he ever did, as though the threat of civil war wasn't literally hanging over their heads, separated from them by nothing more than earth and stone.
"Are there more of you?" Zenda raised an eyebrow as if in challenge to Baara's annoyed grimace. "I'd prefer to not repeat myself."
"This is it, I'm afraid," Witwar smiled wearily, waving his arms at those assembled. "The tried and true."
"The optionless doctoral students," Dargla muttered under his breath, so softly Baara barely caught it.
"It makes leaving the planet easier, fortunately," the old man continued, oblivious to Dargla's comments. "Can you imagine trying to move more than this?"
"I can, actually," Zenda answered flatly. "My team had to separate. That's how we ended up down here."
"We?" Witwar's brow wrinkled in confusion. He glanced about the cavern as though expecting to discover more strangers idling amongst the stalagmites.
"Four of us were in a group. I left two behind, one of them injured. The fourth..." here she stopped, her own eyes settling on the shadows lingering just beyond their lamps. "...left us behind."
"That sounds ominous," Dargla eyed the woman warily.
"He's probably gotten himself lost by now."
"And let me guess," Holberi interjected, "you want our help to find him?"
"Not really," pale eyes widened slightly, as though surprised at the question. "He wasn't very useful. I don't see the point in looking for him. I'd take a medpac, though, if you've got one."
As she spoke, a series of dull, distant booms reverberated through the rock tunnel from some unknown point.
"Assuming the other two are still alive when I get back," the woman added as an afterthought. "I'm sure I could find a use for it, regardless."
It was absurd, Baara reflected, just how utterly blasé this Zenda was about the whole thing.
"No love lost there, then," Baara shook her head in amazement. How anyone could willingly abandon a comrade...
...and to a place like this...
She couldn't fathom it. She wouldn't leave her worst enemy stumbling blindly in the dark, waiting for a slow, drawn out death. Alone.
Well...she might leave one or two members of the Academic Board down here, but...
"Are you going to keep sermonizing for long?"
"You can't just leave someone down here...What...seriously?! No one..." Baara had chanced a glance at Dargla and Holberi's faces. Why she picked on them for sympathy for a stranger, she couldn't have told you. Neither student looked particularly concerned at the fate of the hapless contractor.
"Well he did go off on his own, Baara," Dargla began.
"She could be lying! We don't know anything about this woman..." Baara protested.
"In which case, if she was dangerous, I would think she would be trying to lure us into the dark, spooky tunnels, don't you think?"
"It could be a distraction," Holberi replied idly. "Though I can't imagine for what."
"Well why bother? This crew's being paid, I assume. And we're already leaving. It's not like she's working for the natives," Dargla refuted.
"She could have her own agenda."
"Well in that case, we'd never guess it..."
"Enough."
Baara resisted the urge to caress her temples. The pair of them were threatening to give her a headache. "We don't have time for this...Where..."She spun so swiftly on her heel, that she very nearly lost her balance. Body tense, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up as her head turned back and forth, eyes searching the cavern.
"Where is she? Where did she go?"
"Where did who go, Apprentice?"
...32 BTC...
The third moon of Galara winked at the Sith from where it sat atop the mountains ringing the wooded valley. Then, discarding the ragged scraps of clouds from its person, it cast the full weight of its dusky red light upon the treetops. Stone, cold and rough underfoot, stretched out in a semi circle ten meters across before melting into a series of worn, sunken steps and abutting side platforms. Behind the Sith, a simple doorway, little more than a rectangle carved into the blank face of the rock, revealed a yawning blackness.
The Dark Lord stood in this doorway. One pale, long fingered hand rested upon the frame of the door.
"...no one, Master...I was sleepwalking..."
"Do not lie to me, Apprentice," the Dark Lord's words were sharp and sudden." What did you see?"
"...shadows, alright? I saw something walking in the shadows...I thought it was a woman."
The Apprentice felt compelled to answer, but the Force had nothing to do with it. Fear, both of the Dark Lord and the thing glimpsed gliding through the lonely passages of the temple ruins in the midst of the night.
"This planet is completely abandoned. There is no one here but the two of us, Apprentice," the Dark Lord's voice had dropped to nothing more than a hoarse whisper.
"That would be pretty difficult to verify..." the Sith muttered, scarcely conscious of having spoken out loud till the Dark Lord's eyes gleamed in bitterly amused response.
"Though you wield the Force with all the finesse of an inebriated spacer, not all of us are so helpless. I can sense every iota of life that surrounds us; I can feel the insects moving through the grass; I can hear the pulse of the predators that stalk the forest; I can smell the fear on you."
"There's lovely," the Sith bristled at the taunt. Fear and anger warred together, and anger won the day. "I'm glad I don't have to worry about anyone dropping in on us when you're here, Master. Just me..."
"...sleepwalking. He's never done that before. If it had been a one off thing, I wouldn't have worried about it, but it's happened thirteen times in the last month."
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"Have you spoken with anyone about it?" the words emanated unconsciously from the Sith's lips.
Where am I?
The woman with skin the color of coffee and thick, dark hair rolled her brown eyes.
Human Imperial. Upper class by the posh accent, though you wouldn't have been able to tell it by the casual streetwear she had donned.
Beyond that, the Sith didn't know who this woman was.
Intuition, though, told the Sith that a blaster was concealed in an interior pocket on the left side of the woman's jacket, completely invisible to the outside world, but ready to be drawn at a moment's notice.
No, it wasn't intuition. The Sith had watched her place it there. It was the woman's habit to do so whenever leaving her home or ship.
"It's perfectly normal for children to sleepwalk," the woman continued dryly. "Which I knew. What his doctor fails to realize is that it's probably not normal for a child to sleepwalk at least three times a week."
Everything was sharp. Clear cut. The colors stood out vibrantly and seemed to pulse under the Sith's gaze, wavering and glimmering in the rain.
Rain.
It was raining.
Steady, warm sheets of precipitation poured in waterfalls over black towers and illuminated duracrete. A familiar skyline rose in the distance, standing starkly against a crown of lightning and jungle. The Sith knew this place...had seen holovids of it as a child.
Disoriented, wondering where the Dark Lord had gone, the Sith chose to play along, muttering a noncommittal, "He'll grow out of it."
The woman's eyes widened slightly before narrowing.
"Thirteen times. In a month. And he always goes to the same corner, just...staring at the wall. He's three. This isn't normal." Her eyes were tired, the strain evident in posture. Briefly, inexplicably, the Sith had glimpsed something akin to...disappointment beneath the irritation now coloring her voice. Even more inexplicably, the Sith felt bad about it.
"Does he say anything about it?"
"Nothing I can understand. Rubbish about monsters."
"Maybe you should take him off planet for awhile," the Sith murmured. The colors were dimming, the people furthest from their position beginning to blur into nothing but moving blobs of grey. "Change of scenery..."
"...you're sweating, you know? And you've looked ill since you got back."
Back?
"I'm fine."
"Nerf shit. You're not. Come on. We're going home..."
Pulling away from the woman, the Sith took a step back, feeling a few drops of water tossed haphazardly from the boundless ocean pouring from the sky.
A hand should not been able to slither out from beneath the vaguely humanoid mass of writhing darkness hovering at the woman's shoulder, its pale fingers resting lightly on the edge of her jacket. The woman didn't seem to notice. Her eyes were focused on the Sith, an expression of troubled familiarity on her face. She smiled, and it seemed almost sad.
"Well, I'm here if you need me."
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Instinct made the boy freeze, holding his breath.
But there could be no mistake. The little Ortolan hadn't been bluffing. He'd seen him, and he'd called him out directly.
That made him a threat.
He couldn't be allowed to live.
Scooting back in the air duct, Essian flipped over on his back and gave the grating a solid kick with the soles of his heavy boots. The metal plating resisted. Drawing his legs up to his chest, he struck a second, third, and fourth time. On the last hit, the grating popped loose with a screech, flying out into the room and striking the object of his dilemma.
Leveraging himself through the hole in the wall, Essian dropped into the room and landed in a silent crouch, eying the fallen alien.
Rising to his full height, he placed his palm on the hilt of his lightsaber, a plan still formulating. The guard had been about to shoot the little blue alien. No one with any common sense would mistake a lightsaber wound for a blaster mark, but...well...
He supposed he could use the rats, subtly urge them to attack the man. There were a fair few of them, scrabbling frantically about in their cages, but his grasp of beast control was minimal at best. It might be his best option, however, if he wanted to kill the man in any sort of innocuous way.
"Why did you have to make this more difficult than it already was?" he muttered irritably, glaring down at the stranger.
Meep was used to carefully laid plans going awry. Everything in life was a game of chance, and Meep didn't mind that in the slightest. Life for him would have been awfully boring if everything always went according to his carefully laid plans. Whatever he'd been expecting from the little interloper hidden in the airducts, it was certainly not what the boy actually had in store for him.
As the boy moved back, Meep mistook that as acceptance, that he was leaving room for the small Ortolan to climb into the ducting with him, but perhaps he should not have assumed so readily. He'd been accused more than once of having a soft spot for kids, and now, as the grating slammed upwards against his ribs and sent him tumbling backwards on his heavy frame, he'd probably have a soft spot there to match as well.
There was a groan as he hit the ground, but it was followed by laughter. Though his stature may have been quite small, the dense blubber that surrounded his body made him thankfully rather impermeable to blunt force trauma, a boon during moments like these. Children were a delight in their unpredictability, and he was was tickled by this one's spunk, though it hadn't, perhaps, come at the most advantageous moment... With any luck his enemies would be chasing their tails about the explosion he'd triggered for a short while, but eventually, someone was going to come back to the room to finish the job they'd started. He was on a timeline that had very little wiggle room now.
Rather ignoring the threat of the young boy for a short moment, Meep rolled to his feet and offered the boy an apologetic smile. "I do tend to have that effect, young... Sith. There's no denying that," he said, eyes flicking momentarily down to the lightsaber on the boy's belt before returning to his face. "What plans have I spoiled though? Pretend I wasn't here, and carry on, my boy. I'm not here to stop whatever fun you were having spying of the Trandoshans. Weird hobby, not going to lie, but it takes all kinds..."
"Stop. Talking," the boy commanded, exerting his will through the Force as he'd seen the Sith on Korriban do to so many weak minded slaves and mercenaries. In case his words didn't have the effect he intended, he followed them up with a not so gentle shove with that same invisible energy that held the universe together.
The man's nonchalant manner both annoyed and unnerved him (which annoyed him even more). People who narrowly avoided execution in dingy storerooms of smuggling bases shouldn't be quite so...bubbly. This man was either much more dangerous than he appeared, or he was an idiot. Essian was banking on the idiot theory, though. He didn't have room to be wrong on that point.
The locks on the rats' cages were rudimentary. Closer inspection now revealed how they'd been able to so easily escape in the chaos earlier. It wouldn't take much...
Pulling on first one latch, then another, the boy used the Force to wrench open the cages. Let the guards blame the Ortolan if the metal looked a little worse for wear later on. He was running out of time. The room would not remain unwatched forever.
Reaching into the primitive minds, stirring up fear and primal panic, the boy did his best to direct the aggression of the little beasts towards the Ortolan.
The last Sith he'd met had been considerably chiller than this one, though there was no faulting the boy. Children were volatile creatures, and this one had clearly been shaken by his appearance there. He was reacting on impulse, and short sighted as it may have been, this was a delicate situation that was going to take quicker thinking than solving the problem with a blaster.
"It's sort of a catch 22, isn't it, kid? I stop talking like you want, you won't know why it's a bad idea to get those rodents all riled up," he pointed out with a disarming smile as he, yet again, pulled himself to his feet after catching the wrong end of the boy's developing Force powers. He was very impressive; his master would likely be proud of that, even if his brashness hadn't yet been tamed.
At the risk of angering the kid further, he was definitely going to keep talking, though it was hardly surprising. "I'm willing to bet those awful Trandoshans aren't going to be any happier to find you snooping around than they'd be if I escaped this room, and the more of a commotion you make in here, the more likely it is someone's going to come and look...Could take a while for those rats to chew through my skin. I'm liable to scream at some point in all of it."
"Obviously you're up to something, and I'm not here to do anything about it. Maybe I could even help you, I know this port like the back of my hand..."
Essian sent a truly nasty scowl in the little blue man's direction as he contemplated his offer.
Precious seconds spent weighing any possible motives the man could have, but, truth be told, there was no way of knowing. The rats stirred under his influence, chittering anxiously as they strained, snapping at the man who stood but a few paces away.
"Fine."
It took considerably less effort to turn anger into fear, and the boy sent the vermin squeaking into the furthest recesses of the room. Managing the creatures had taken more effort than it should have, leaving him feeling slightly winded, but he wouldn't show weakness.
"I'm not waiting for you. You'll have to find your own way up."
He was most definitely waiting for the man. He'd break the blue alien's neck and be done with it if necessary, suspicious guards be damned. Dead men told fewer tales than live ones.
Approaching the duct, he leapt straight up, seizing the edges of the opening and hoisting himself inside in a feat of graceful acrobatics. "Hurry up, old man!"
Author's Note:
Another shout out to StrangeDisease for the addition of Meep.
