"And why should I help you again?"
Roughly half a day later, and Zelka's clinic had emptied considerably. Most of the beds were empty, all of the volunteers were cleared out, leaving only a skeleton staff of Zelka and a couple techs to look after the survivors. Not that there were many of those — the only ones left were a half dozen Zelka had stuck in bacta tanks (the only one she recognized was Ferlip), none of whom he expected to survive. Asyr, though, was going to make it. She was laid out on one of the beds, lines sticking out of her arms and monitors beeping, looking rather odd with patches of her fur shaved off and covered in kolto patches, lopsided. She'd woken up briefly, a couple hours after she'd been brought in, Zelka was sure she'd recover.
If she'd had any reason to doubt Asyr was tough as nails, they'd all been dispelled now. From what she could tell, reading between the lines of what the people who'd brought her in had said, Asyr had taken a glancing blow in orbit, frying her fighter's electronics, sending her into a freefall towards the surface. She must have pulled some emergency rewiring right there in the cockpit, because she managed to fire her repulsorlifts hard just before landing, shattering glass and flinging trash and debris into the air. She still crashed, of course, but she survived.
Apparently, she'd even managed to fight off the thugs from some swoop gang who had been the first on the scene. The people who'd brought her to Zelka had found her sitting with her back against her ruined ship, half-conscious, one hand clutched over a bleeding wound in her side and the other around a blaster, surrounded by perforated and smoking corpses.
She wasn't even really surprised. Bothans did make a point of being unreasonably good at everything they did.
She was sitting in a chair next to Asyr's bed, watching her sleep. Mostly, if she were being honest with herself, out of a lack of any better ideas on what she should be doing. Taris was Sith-controlled, and as far as she knew there wasn't a University campus. She doubted there was even an Alderaanian consulate here anymore — there would have been before, of course, but they'd likely fled ahead of the Sith. She'd been forming a vague idea of looking around for a bank she knew, see if she could access her accounts and buy her way off planet, but she hadn't been seriously thinking about it yet.
Her head still swam sometimes, thinking too hard hurt.
It wasn't the only thing giving her a headache. Onasi was making an enormous bloody nuisance of himself. He was standing over her, arms crossed firmly over his chest, brow lowered in an angry glare. An angry glare that wasn't turned directly at her — once she'd woken up enough to pay attention to such things, she'd realized she wasn't exactly wearing much. Which hadn't come as much of a surprise, she wouldn't expect her clothes had been any good anymore.
He might be avoiding looking at her for more than a couple seconds at a time, but he sure wasn't shy about lecturing at her. "You swore an oath to the Republic, same as me."
She frowned up at him. "Um, no, I didn't."
Rolling his eyes, Onasi let out something between an exhausted sigh and an irritated scoff. "Come off it, I know already. No reason to go on playing dumb."
"Know what?"
"Granted, I have no idea why the Jedi made such a big fuss of going all the way to Coruscant to pick up a SecInt agent, but—"
"SecInt?" Even as she repeated it, the abbreviation filled itself out in her head. "Wait, Security and Intelligence Service? You think I'm with Republic counter-intelligence?"
Onasi forced out another thick sigh. "Yes, obviously. The mission's gone completely fubar, you might as well quit the act."
For a short moment, she could only stare, her mouth working silently. "What the fuck makes you think I'm an intelligence agent?"
"Am I supposed to believe you learned to shoot like that back home on Shelkonwa?" Onasi let out a scoff, shaking his head to himself. "Hell, I'd never even thought of turning a blaster into a grenade like that until I saw you do it, didn't know it was possible."
"Well, no one taught me to do it! I just... I just realized I could."
"I guess you just realized you could fight while you were at it."
The sarcasm was obvious, but the words had her coming up short, the building irritation abruptly draining away. "Yes, actually, that's exactly how it went."
"I'm serious, this isn't the time to—" Onasi turned, clearly intending to yell at her, but he suddenly froze. The glare shifted, turning less angry and more confused. "You're not just messing with me, are you."
It wasn't really a question. "No, I'm not. I had no idea I could do any of that. I think..." She broke off, turning to frown down at the table. Not at Asyr, not even at the table itself, really, just in that general direction, unfocused. She bit her lip, turning the thought around for a moment. "I think my memory's been modified."
"What? How is that—" Onasi broke off before he'd even finished the sentence, eyes going wide. When he spoke again his voice was lower, cautious, as though speaking of it too loudly would make it more real. "I've heard terrible things, of what the Force can do to a person. Mess with memories, drive you insane, destroy everything you are." Eyes going softer, just the slightest note of pity, "You don't think...?"
"If some Jedi did do this to me, they did a pretty shoddy job." Not all of her mind had been altered — her explicit and implicit memories didn't match, implying they came from different sources. And she had plenty of semantic memory that didn't fit either. It was almost like whoever had done it had only gone for her episodic memory. Which, well, that was what most people thought of when they said the word "memory", but the subject was actually far more complicated than that.
The really weird thing was, she hadn't even noticed anything was wrong until she'd woken up during the battle. There had been a few odd moments on Coruscant, but none of those had been jarring enough for her to really notice at the time. But on the Spire... It was like that hit to her head had shaken something loose, the fictions stitching together everything she was, as Onasi had put it, starting to fray apart.
She was starting to suspect it might be one hell of a mess in here. She'd been trying to not think about it. Had been doing pretty well, too, until Onasi had gone and stuck his handsome nose in it.
"This sounds more like something a Sith would do. Hey, there's a thought..."
She waited a moment for Onasi, eyes staring unfocused into the near distance, to put words to whatever he was thinking about, before giving up and asking. "Going to share this thought of yours?"
He blinked, turned a dense look down on her. Tired, sad, pitying. "Maybe you were a Republic agent, and you were captured. The Sith tortured you, broke your mind. The Republic recovered you, but it was too late. The Jedi fixed your head up as much as they could, but— Hey!" he said, eyes going wide, excitement slipping into his tone. "Maybe that's why they want you on Dantooine! Maybe whatever they were bringing you there for has something to do with your last assignment, they might be trying to help you remember."
That was ludicrous. She opened her mouth to say so, then froze, let it fall closed again. She couldn't honestly say it was impossible. She had no better explanation.
A frown narrowed her eyes — Coruscant. The weird events, knowing things she couldn't explain knowing, it had started on Coruscant. The Jedi had insisted on an overlong interview, stretched over several days, before confirming her for the project. Felt more like a psychological evaluation than anything. It'd seemed strange and excessive at the time, but the Jedi could be strange and excessive, she hadn't thought...
Come to think of it, how had she even gotten to Coruscant in the first place? There were shuttles from Alderaan all the time, but she couldn't remember...
"I think you're right," she said, the words slow and cautious. "Well, I can't say about the Republic agent part and the thing on Dantooine one way or the other, but I think the Jedi might have been helping me. The confusing moments started on Coruscant, they were asking me all these questions that had nothing to do with the job. I don't even remember getting there, I think..."
The thought had her teetering on the edge of a black, yawning pit, her stomach rising up her throat, a sudden frigid wave flashing over her head to toe. The thought was terrible, horrifying, part of her rebelled against it, so hard she felt the beginning of tears sting at her eyes. But at the same time, she knew it, she knew. No matter how awful the truth was, as soon as she saw it she couldn't make herself unsee.
"It's all fake. Me, I mean, my life, everything. The Jedi made the whole thing up."
Onasi said nothing, falling into blessed silence for what felt the first time in hours. But he was looking at her. The rigidity had gone out of his stance, the glare had disappeared entirely, his face had gone soft. There was warmth in his eyes, filled with pity.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, her stomach tightened with hot fury, her teeth clenching. She didn't want his pity, she hated feeling— She straightened in her chair, cleared her throat, trying to work the anger out of her voice. "So, in light of all this, explain to me again why I should help you find Jedi Shan. I can't see what it has to do with me, honestly."
"She's—" Onasi broke off again, frowning to himself. "I guess you have no obligation to. I think I'm right, that you were a Republic agent, but if you don't remember it, you may as well not be. But it's really quite simple. The Republic won't survive long without Bastila. I don't pretend to understand how this Force stuff works, but..."
He wasn't entirely wrong about that — however exactly that battle meditation thing worked, it was clear even to her, who knew little in the way of details about how the war was going, that the Republic had little chance without it. Anyone not blinded by denial could see it. The Sith were just too many.
"Do you want Malak in charge of the galaxy?"
"No." The word tore from her lips, automatic but harsh. Malak might have been a great man once, but these days he was nothing more than a bloodthirsty maniac. The Republic had serious flaws, she couldn't deny that, but an empire ruled by Malak would be a hundred times worse.
She still thought the Jedi had made a serious miscalculation when they'd decided to assassinate Revan. She might have seemed the bigger threat to the Republic, but at least she'd been a reasonable human being. Malak was...something else. It hadn't accomplished anything, it'd just made everything worse.
And besides, she'd been under the impression the Republic considered assassinating political leadership to be a war crime. But she didn't expect the Jedi to not be hypocrites.
Onasi gave her a crooked, cocky smile, laughter dancing in his eyes, and, damn him, she'd forgotten how handsome he was, smirking like that. Not making her any less annoyed. "Then I guess you have no choice. This is gonna be hard enough with the two of us, you know, there's no way in hell I can do it by myself."
She jerked her head to the side, gritting her teeth. The irritating little shit was right. Malak would be the death of billions if he wasn't stopped. If there was anything she could do to rescue Bastila, get her back on the front lines where she belonged, she had to do it. She had no choice.
No, that wasn't exactly right. She did have a choice — nothing was forcing her to help, she didn't need to. But if she didn't, if she could stop it and did nothing, at least a portion of the blood of those billions would be on her hands. She chose to not accept that.
There is always a choice.
Her head went floaty again, she shook it off. It took her a second to remember where exactly they'd been in the conversation, she'd gone off for a moment there, disoriented. "You might have forgotten, you're not alone. You have Asyr."
Onasi shook his head. "Unfortunately, she won't be going anywhere for at least a couple days. Face it, Hayal, you're all I've got."
Dammit. The little shit was right. Again.
She really hoped he wasn't going to get into the habit of doing that.
She let out a long, heavy sigh, staring up at the ceiling. The bright, too-white lights stung at her eyes, but she ignored it. "I don't suppose we could find me some clothes first?"
Clearly pleased by her surrender, Onasi gave her another smirk. And there he went being far too handsome again.
Yeah, let's hope that wasn't going to become a habit of his either.
She stepped out into artificial twilight, the towers stretching far over her head reducing the sky to a thin blue band. Still staring upward, not turning to him, she asked Onasi, "So, did you actually have a plan in mind, or are we just going to wander around until we hear someone in the middle of a prissy lecture?"
"Bastila hasn't been captured yet, so she's probably somewhere in the lower levels. The Sith presence is thinner the lower you go."
"We should set up a base first. It could take days to find her, we'll need somewhere to sleep."
"Right, of course. The alien quarter of the capital isn't far from here. There might be abandoned apartments pretty close to the top, with how xenophobic Tarisians can be."
She blinked in confusion for a second, then nodded. Right, she knew about that — the original colonists of the planet had been human, other beings only immigrating as trade took off in the last couple centuries. The Tarisians had gotten used to being the only species on the planet, and hadn't handled the diversification of their population at all well. Non-humans were second-class citizens, the ones that were even citizens at all. The alien quarter of the upper levels this close to the center of the capital would be nearly empty.
The suggestion there would be empty apartments made sense, but she was less than convinced claiming one was a good idea. She glanced to the side, shooting him a look. "You might want to get your short-term memory checked, Onasi."
He was far less handsome when he was glaring at her. Which was just an additional reason to annoy him as often as possible. "And here I thought you were the one with memory issues."
Part of her wanted to be angry at him for throwing that back at her, but it didn't even hurt, really. And honestly, she preferred to avoid thinking about that as much as possible. She couldn't have an existential crisis if she just ignored the matter entirely. "You just said the Sith presence is thinner the lower you go. I was assuming you would prefer to not be arrested but, hey, I'm not the Republic officer here. If you want to walk into their arms, be my guest."
"I suppose you have a better idea," he said, scowling.
"I'm sure we can find somewhere we can hole up further down. Near a market or cantina of some kind, if possible."
And that scowl just got deeper, his lip curling enough she could see his teeth. "So we can be killed in our sleep by a gang thug or some random thief."
She shrugged. "Sith thugs or criminal thugs. Take your pick. I think the Sith are a greater threat, myself."
For a few seconds, Onasi just stared at her, and she stared back, an eyebrow slowly crawling up her forehead. Then he threw his head back, let out a harsh sigh. "And how do you suppose we get down there? You might have forgotten, but the Sith have all the turbolifts on lockdown."
"Honestly, Onasi, it's like you've never been on a city planet before." Holding out her hand, "Give me the pad." He gave her another glare, but after a few seconds he surrendered, digging the datapad Zelka had loaned them out of his pocket.
Zelka had been quite generous, actually. He'd done his best to save as many of the Republic people as he could, though admittedly there hadn't been much he could do for most of them. But he'd treated Asyr and herself, and hadn't mentioned a thing about payment. He'd gotten both of them clothes — herself because hers had been ruined, Onasi so he didn't have to walk around in a Republic uniform. Hers weren't great, true. In her size, he'd only been able to track down a too-baggy dress, leggings of some synthetic material she didn't recognize, torn and fraying in a couple places. The boots were fine, though a little too big, her feet slipped in them with every step. But she could walk around without drawing too much attention, which would have to be good enough.
Not that carrying around a blaster helped with that too much. At least she'd been able to tie the lightsaber Annas had given her high up her thigh, that could have led to awkward questions. Zelka's suspicious stares had been bad enough.
He'd even given them a few credit chits and a datapad, loaded with a map of the capital. She opened that up now, waiting a moment for the outdated pad to cache, tapping her foot on the plasteel walkway. Once it was up, she scrolled around a bit, flipping between levels, looking for a tower that would work. "Got it." She marked their current location quick, so they could find their way back to the clinic later, closed the thing out. "Follow me."
Contrary to what most people believed, no two city planets were the same. They weren't even uniform in different regions of the same planet. There were, however, a few basic principles that applied to almost all of them. The simplest one involved property values — generally speaking, the wealthiest people would be nearest the top, the industrial wasteland usually found at the planetary surface inhabited by the most destitute. According to the map, and just by the look of the place, they weren't quite at the top of the towers, but certainly some ways into the upper levels. The walls around them were all chrome and glass, glimmering in the thin sunlight. The street they were walking down, actually a suspended platform a kilometer or two above the surface, was split in the middle with a garden, bushes and flowers in bloom, the air sweet and spicy, thinly populated with well-dressed, well-mannered beings (mostly humans), the occasional gleaming aircar flicking by overhead.
The lower levels, of course, wouldn't be nearly so pleasant.
The quickest way between levels were the huge, highspeed turbolifts, designed by the government just for that purpose. But, according to Zelka, since the Sith invasion the swoop gangs had risen in revolt, the lower levels were practically their own country by this point. To stop the gangs from assaulting the upper levels in force, the turbolifts were now strictly controlled.
But, see, the turbolifts were the quickest way, not the only way. One of those universal principles of ecumenopoli was that they were not built up evenly. They would start as ordinary, terrestrial skyscrapers. Separate buildings, of separate designs. They would spread out as far as they could, grow closer and closer together as space ran out. And then they started building up, but they couldn't tear one down and replace it with a taller one. No, there was no room. Instead, they built tower on top of tower, on top of tower, again and again. Occasionally, a walkway, called a concourse in architectural parlance, would be slapped between the towers, giving the illusion of a "ground" floor, usually every thirty stories or so. The lower structures had to be regularly reinforced, of course — on most city planets, preventing the superstructure from collapsing upon itself was a multi-billion credit construction project that never ended — but the older buildings were technically never replaced.
And therein lay the trick. The towers didn't all start and end at the same heights — just because two buildings exited onto the same concourse didn't necessarily mean this was the first floor for both of them. And each of them had their own way of getting from floor to floor inside of them, be they turbolifts or even just stairs. So, they didn't have to use the big, official, government-run turbolifts. They could just descend inside the towers, gradually making their way down level by level, switching from one building to another whenever one came to a dead end. It would take longer, obviously, but it wasn't that complicated.
And no, she had no idea where all that was coming from. Before those few weeks on Coruscant, Cianen had never been on a city planet before. She certainly hadn't the experience to know any of this. But she was trying to avoid thinking about that.
She led Onasi into the tower she'd found, the inside brighter than the outside, warm lights gleaming against polished hardwood. Looked real too, nice place. Some commercial district by the look of it, stores of all kinds separated from the hallway by ceiling-high panels of glass, but that wasn't important. It was only a brief search to find a lift. They took it all the way down. It took a while, shoppers loading and unloading at nearly every floor, so she pulled out the map again, panned around a little. The bottom floor was much like the one they'd entered on, if slightly less clean, some of the stores dark. She walked off for the nearest exit, coming out onto the narrow walkway hugging the building.
It was far darker here than it'd been at the top — but then, it should be, with two concourses above them the sun was completely blocked now. They didn't happen to be on a concourse level, she could see one above and below, the towers separated with what looked to be an eight meter gap, narrowed somewhat with little walkways here and there, running around the buildings, stitching them together in places. It took her only a second to orient herself, and she was walking off again, slipping through the thin crowd on the tiny walkway.
"Do you even know where you're going?"
She shot a smirk over her shoulder. "Come on, Onasi, don't you trust me?"
And there was that scowl again. His face was getting a fair bit of exercise today. "Trust you? Lady, I don't even know who you are."
Well, that made two of them, she guessed. "You better be nice to me, Flyboy. I might just leave you lost and alone down here."
"Like you wou—" Onasi cut off mid-syllable, blinked down at her. "Flyboy?"
The sight of her crooked grin pulled Onasi's lips into a snarl.
They followed another building all the way to the bottom, though it didn't go very far — this one ended on the concourse level just below them. She led them through another building, another, another, descending ever further. Slowly, the environment around them changed. The lighting grew worse, pleasant yellow light meant to simulate the sun substituted with harsh white glowpanels and brilliantly colorful argon lights, twisted into enticing shapes and figures and slogans. Polished wood and gleaming tile and chrome vanished, replaced with dull ferrocrete and durasteel. The air grew warmer, enough sweat started slipping down her back, humidity turning it thick, tangs of pungent organic waste and acrid industrial byproducts scratching at her nose. The people changed, their clothes simpler, dirtier, personal weapons more and more common. When Onasi bumped into a particularly shifty-looking Kadas'sa'Nikto she almost thought a fist fight would break out, barely managed to talk their way out of it.
Also, it turned out she spoke Nikto. She couldn't even summon surprise at this point. Though she was starting to wonder exactly how many languages she had in her head. How many languages could a person learn, anyway? There must be an upper limit somewhere, the human brain only had so many neurons.
After at least an hours' descent, she stepped out of yet another lift — this one rattling a bit, one glowpanel flickering — and took a glance around. The place looked like it'd once been the lobby of an office building of some kind, but it'd obviously gone to seed at some point in the past, likely centuries ago. The walls and floor were granite, pitted and patched, blackened here and there from blaster hits, crumbling furniture and half-disassembled machinery and refuse scattered around. There were people about, likely residents, the majority dressed in mismatched clothes that were little better than rags, walking purposefully through the open space in and out of doors and lifts, avoiding eye contact with each other. A pack of people, armed and armored, were reclined in what looked like the remains of a fountain, laughing and passing around a bottle. Past the foggy transparisteel there was another concourse, she could make out the snarled wrecks of two swoop bikes from here, the grey walls colored with graffiti.
She turned, gave Onasi a little nod. "Much better." The look of dumbfounded disbelief on his face had her chuckling. Which only made him look at her like she was completely insane.
Which, well, he wasn't wrong. She was pretty sure a conviction one's own memories were fake was considered a form of psychosis. And she couldn't even say with certainty that it wasn't psychosis — it wouldn't be unusual for a human women to develop schizophrenia at her age. She didn't think it was, she had enough reason to believe her conviction was correct, but...
Yeah, trying to not think about it.
This concourse was, in a way, both quieter and noisier than the one outside Zelka's. It was certainly dirtier and smellier, she'd expected that, but the odd contrast in sound was throwing her off more. There were fewer people around, the foot traffic so thin as to be practically nonexistent, what people there were going about their business silently, the low chatter that had filled the air on the upper levels absent. But that didn't mean it was completely quiet. Off in the distance, she could hear the clanking whine of swoop bikes, the sound shifting higher and lower as they came and went, occasionally passing just over their heads, the concourse vibrating in time with the engine, a dull pain throbbing above her ear. Some were common people, she could tell, taking advantage of the unregulated traffic lanes to get around quicker, but she started cataloging gang colors and symbols as well.
It was hardly the safest place in the world, in any other situation she might not have risked coming down this low. But they'd been down here for a few minutes now, and she hadn't seen a single Sith uniform yet. The gangs, at least, had no particular reason to target them.
Following Zelka's map, it was a tense fifteen-minute walk, both of them glancing around the shadowy concourse, hands unconsciously hanging over blasters, before they reached the cantina. She didn't go inside, slipped into the building across the street instead. As luck would have it, it happened to be a residential tower. This lobby was smaller and somewhat less trashed than the other, but just as barren. Curiously, the floor was dominated by a huge reproduction of what she was pretty sure was a gang symbol — a starburst of white lines on a deep blue circle. It vaguely reminded her of a color-inverted Bendu Wheel, she couldn't tell if that was intentional or not. This was probably gang territory, the area would be under the protection of whoever's symbol that was.
She paused at the entrance for a moment, mulling it over, before dismissing it with a shrug. Around here, chances were just about everywhere was claimed by one gang or another. This place didn't look like a warzone, at least, it would have to do.
She took them up a couple floors, stepped out into the hall. The thick carpet was stained and burned away in places, the walls scuffed, a few panels in the ceiling cracked or missing. But there weren't any corpses in the hall, the place seemed relatively quiet. Good enough. She walked down the hall, staring at one door, then another, then another, all down the hall, around a corner, another, another, another.
Finally, after walking around for a few minutes, she stopped, frowning at one apartment in particular. There was dust on the receiver, along the handle. She tried to open it, but of course it was locked. The standby light was on, so the lock was definitely powered, but she didn't have the equipment to crack it. Or the skill, honestly. They could just break it down, she guessed, but she'd like to be able to lock the door behind them. She sighed, biting at her lip.
"Oh, are we breaking into people's homes now?"
She rolled her eyes. "Don't get your knickers in twist, Onasi. It's abandoned."
"How the hell do you know that?"
She didn't dignify that with a response. There was no way she was getting through the door, but maybe... She looked up at the ceiling, and there, perfect. "You think you can get me up there?" she said, pointing to the missing ceiling panel.
"Ah..." Onasi looked up, then at her, measuring the distance and her height with his eyes. Or maybe her weight, come to think of it, as low as the ceilings were. "Sure, I think so. Why?"
"I'm gonna go through the ceiling, open the door from the other side. I'd rather not crawl up there myself, it's going to be disgusting, but I don't think you'll fit."
Onasi's eyes widened, and for a short moment he just stared, blinking at her. "Um, okay. You realize you'll probably have to cut your way in."
"That part won't be a problem."
He didn't seem to entirely believe her, but he shrugged it off. In hardly a minute, with a boost from Onasi, she was yanking herself through the hole, slipping into the narrow space above the ceiling. There wasn't very much room at all, she couldn't even get up to her hands and knees — they only kept these sorts of things in to make it easier to get to pipes and lines and vents and such, nobody actually had to go inside. That wasn't even the worst thing, it was dusty as anything, and it smelled awful, excrement and decaying corpses of vermin, she'd barely wriggled a meter in before she already felt a couple bugs crawl onto her arms. Shivering with revulsion, she pushed on anyway, pulling with her hands and shoving with her feet, forcing herself through wires and piping and such inch by inch.
Finally, she felt she'd gone far enough. It took a bit of awkward twisting to get her arm under herself and up her irritating dress, finding Annas's lightsaber. The glow of the thing was blinding, in close quarters and such darkness, but she narrowed her eyes, cut a curving line below her. She had to pass it from hand to hand a couple times, shuffle around a little to get under where she'd been laying, but she thought she almost—
With a shuddering crunch, a circle of ceiling fell out from under her, and she yelped as her head and half her torso fell with it. She flailed, the brilliant blue blade of the lightsaber nearly passing through her head, her skin clawed with fright, and she let go on instinct, the thing immediately shutting off, clattering to the floor under her. She managed to not fall forward, one of her hands finding the edge of the circle. She hung there for a brief moment, breath heavy, heart pounding in her throat.
Okay. That could have gone more smoothly.
Once her pulse had returned to normal, she awkwardly turned herself around, started lowering herself down feet-first. She wasn't tall enough to get all the way down, obviously, but the drop to the floor wasn't too bad. It took a moment fumbling around to find the lightsaber, and she switched it on again, scanned the walls. She found a light switch, filling the room with a harsh white glow. She made her way through the tiny apartment, flicking on lights as she went. The place looked abandoned, layered with dust and empty of any personal touches, even most of the furniture gone.
Eventually, she found the front door. She yanked it open, shot Onasi a grin. "Welcome home, Captain."
His exasperated frown swiftly turned amused. "I see you had fun."
She glared at him, but he just kept smirking. "Yeah, yeah. Get in here. See if you can get the lock to respond to our coms. I'm taking a bloody shower."
Her face starting to ache from how long she'd been forcing an ingratiating smile, the revulsion roiling in her throat almost painful, she sank into a respectful bow. "I thank you for your generosity, Great One."
The best way to ingratiate oneself to a Hutt, of course, was to flatter them. But that didn't mean she had to like it.
After idly wandering around the area — she was pretty sure that's what "scouting out" meant, she didn't think there was a real difference — she'd returned to the cantina across the concourse, where she and Onasi had agreed to meet before splitting up. It was a seedy little place, but she thought she actually rather liked it. The only illumination was from argon lights, twisted into the logos of various beverages, all of them intoxicating and a few she recognized as poisonous to humans, residual smoke from various inhalants both legal and illegal hanging heavy in the air, the combination turning the place into a colorful haze, the thin light almost a physical presence. Speakers in all directions were blaring what some part of her recognized as anachuche, a percussion-heavy, synthesized dance music overwhelmingly popular throughout much of the Huttese-speaking rim, so loud she vibrated with it, her chest and her head filled with something light and shivering.
If she'd had occasion to predict how she'd feel about a place like this, she'd have expected she would hate it. The fumes on the air scratching at her eyes and throat, the bodies of more beings than she could count — Hutt slave species were over-represented, she noticed, which was curious — pressing in at all sides, the noise almost overwhelming. At the very least, she'd have thought she'd be getting a headache from her barely-healed concussion. But, to her own surprise, it made her feel... It made her feel alive. The sheer energy of the place, surrounding her, enveloping her, she was twitching with the urge to move, shivers running all down her back and arms, it took conscious effort to keep herself from grinning.
It was strange. But she thought she liked it.
When they'd been making plans earlier, some part of her had known a cantina like this would be neutral territory — no one gang would have claimed it, and they'd try to keep any violence away by mutual agreement. But, she'd learned, after taking a quick peek around, it wasn't entirely neutral...but in a way sort of was. It'd only taken a muttered question to a passing Klatooinian to confirm the cantina, or at least part of it, functioned as what passed as a local office for the Exchange. She hadn't been able to stop her lip from curling in a scowl. The Exchange... Well, she didn't like the Exchange.
Not that she was entirely sure how she knew anything about an underground spice- and slave-trading cartel slowly spreading across the rim, but by this point she had stopped even being confused when her brain shit happened.
Despite her feelings on the matter, she'd decided to approach the local representative. Surprisingly, a Hutt. They weren't known for tolerating second string. She'd managed to hold her gorge through the conversation, but it was a near thing on a couple points — she'd suggested she might be looking for work, and she was very much aware what "acquisitions" was supposed to mean.
For a moment, the realization that slavery existed on Taris had filled her with an throat-clenching, frigid rage she couldn't quite explain. The practice was horrid, of course, but...
In the end, she'd gotten little useful information from the Hutt. (He'd only been willing to tell her so much without compensation.) There was currently a gang war going on in the area, the biggest fishes in the sea the Black Vulkars and the Hidden Beks. The latter rang a very dull bell of recognition in her head, but she couldn't place the name. By the sound of it, the Black Vulkars were likely to emerge victorious in time.
And by the way the Hutt praised their leader as a reasonable, pragmatic sort of person, she got the feeling that was unfortunate.
Other than that, nothing was really news. Darth Malak himself was in orbit, come to chastise the local governor, which she'd already known. A Republic fleet had been crushed, Sith soldiers sweeping the lower levels for survivors, yes, yes. The increased Sith presence down here had only kicked up the violence, their patrols could hardly get anywhere before they were torn apart by swoop gangs or even random Tarisian citizens. (Taris had joined the Sith voluntarily, but the decision was still very controversial.) She might have guessed that would happen, but it was actually good news: it was likely the Sith hadn't managed to find Bastila.
Of course, that didn't mean the smug little chit was still alive down here. Even if she'd survived the crash itself, there were still the gangs and the Exchange and the environment itself to contend with. She was a Jedi, but even Jedi could get unlucky.
There didn't seem to be anything else the Hutt was willing to tell her. With a few last disgusting pleasantries, she turned around to step back into the central taproom. Wandering, searching for either Onasi or an empty table, she felt her eyes drift toward the game tables. It'd occurred to her, they would be needing money. They were seriously under-equipped for the task at hand. Not to mention somehow getting two of the most recognizable Republic war heroes off a Sith-controlled planet, that wasn't going to be cheap. Also, well, food, she liked being able to eat. Zelka had been generous, but the handful of credits they had wouldn't carry them very far.
There was a sabaac tournament tomorrow. They had barely enough credits to buy in.
Onasi would take some convincing.
He didn't seem to be here at the moment, so she had at least some time to figure out how exactly she was going to talk him into letting her literally gamble with all their money. Picking a seat along the outside of the circular central room, she slid into a seat, pulled out her datapad, and settled in to wait.
After some time paging through news and information nodes on the holonet, she was startled out of her distraction by a raised voice, cutting over the music from only a table away. "—back off, bug-eyes! Your breath smells like bantha shit."
She blinked, straightened in her seat. Sitting at a table just to her side was a Twi'lek, round bluish face twisted into a dismissive scowl. Where the table didn't obscure her, there were a pair of goggles pushed up on her forehead, by the way the lenses glinted in the light clearly more than simple protection, heavy black synthleather shrouding her shins and her shoulders. Couldn't see her belt from here, but there was a band around her wrist, a glint of metal visible. Spikes and picks, most like. Street kid, petty thief and slicer, was the feeling dropping into her head, but a successful one, the combination of suspicious hardware and rather clean and whole clothes suggested as much.
The odd thing was, the girl was young. It could be hard to judge ages with alien species sometimes, but she'd put her around thirteen or so — which, since Twi'leks matured more or less at the same pace humans did, was a bit young to be hanging out in a seedy cantina by herself.
The concerning thing was, two Rodians were flanking her at the table, hovering malevolently over her. Thick synthleather slit and dirty, heavy blasters at their hips, one of them had a nasty burn across the side of his head. Thugs, clearly. She noticed a symbol on one of their sleeves, three black claw marks torn through a red circle — Vulkars.
She reached a hand under the table, slowly, slipped her blaster out of the holster.
"Little girl need lesson in manners!" The Rodian's Huttese was broken, the accent from his native language heavy.
The girl snorted. "That's funny, coming from Vulkar gutter trash."
"Friend and me, maybe we teach—"
"In the middle of Javyar's? Go ahead."
She frowned. The girl was taunting the Vulkars, trying to get them to break the neutrality of the cantina. (Or just mocking them for starting a confrontation somewhere they couldn't finish it, either way.) That suggested she was involved. With what she understood of the area, that meant the girl was probably a Bek. She might have to reconsider her feeling the Beks were less scummy than the Vulkars — she doubted she would see eye to eye with any gang leader who thought it acceptable to recruit children.
But she brushed the thought off, moved her blaster over the lip of the table anyway, flicked it on. She doubted the girl was a totally innocent party, but she was still a child. She wouldn't just sit back and do nothing. It wasn't in her.
Apparently.
She needn't have worried. Just as things looked to be a step away from violence, one of the Rodians even reaching for his blaster, a towering mass of shaggy auburn fur collapsed into a seat at the table, a food-laden tray falling with a clatter. She twitched — was that a Wookiee? She hadn't thought Wookiees ever left Kashyyyk.
...Had she ever even heard of Wookiees at all? Until a datacard's worth of knowledge of their culture suddenly dropped into her head a couple seconds ago, she hadn't even known they existed.
This brain damage thing was really starting to get old.
"Eating again, Zee? Honestly, we had lunch just a couple hours ago."
The Wookiee opened his mouth, letting out an odd howl of broad vowels broken with uvular and glottal fricatives and trills. She wasn't at all surprised to find she understood every word. "You're much littler than me, Sister."
She blinked. Sister. Eyes flicking to the Twi'lek girl, she nodded to herself. Wookiee honor family. Right. Curious he was acknowledging someone of a different species, but fine.
"Oh, sure, just go and throw that in my face."
"Our problem not with Wookiee!" The Rodians had jumped harder than she had at the much larger being showing up, backed off the table a few steps. But she noticed their hands were still hovering near their blasters.
The look of affectionate exasperation vanished from the girl's face as she turned back to the Rodians, scowling again. "You got a problem with me, you got a problem with Big Zee here. Ain't that right?"
"I'm trying to eat. I can threaten red-sun-slime for you later."
Zee might not be trying, but apparently to those who didn't understand it Shyriiwook was threatening enough on its own. Practically shaking in their boots, one of the Rodians squeaking something about this not being over, and the both of them fled, heading straight for the doors out to the concourse.
Shaking her head to herself, she switched the blaster off, started returning it to its holster. But she'd moved too slowly — the girl saw it. A frown crossed her face, head cocking a bit to the side, lekku twitching with curiosity. She leaned closer to the Wookiee, muttered something too quiet to hear from here, getting a grunt in return. Then the girl stood.
A brilliant grin on her face, the girl walked toward her table, her swagger almost impressive given she didn't really have the hips for it yet. Before she could hardly blink, the girl was seated across from her, an energetic, friendly sort of light in her eyes. "Hi! I haven't seen you around before. You new around here?" The girl had the high, thin voice of someone still half a child, bright with eagerness she could almost taste.
She blinked. A quick glance around, but it didn't look like Onasi was here yet. Eh, fuck it. "You could say that."
"Well, just consider me and Zaalbar the welcome committee!" The girl frowned, glanced over her shoulder. "Uh, just me, I guess. Zee is pretty serious about his food."
"No kidding." This Zaalbar had a plate of...something reconstituted, couldn't even guess from here, but his head was bowed halfway to the table, sucking down his meal with hardly any pause for breath. Table manners were something of a foreign concept to Wookiees. Casting the thought off, she turned back to the girl. "He's Zaalbar, and you are...?"
"Oh, sorry. It's Mission, Mission Vao." The girl paused a second, seemingly just to grin at her for a second. "I saw you pulling a blaster on that slime-face's back, you know. I didn't need the help, but thanks for the backup anyway."
"No problem." She nearly said something about how she couldn't do nothing when a couple thugs were picking on a little girl, but she had the feeling that would be taken the wrong way. "I was about two seconds from shooting the bloke, actually. That might have gotten a little awkward."
The girl paused for a moment, mouthing bloke to herself. Her accent would sound a little weird to someone from out here. "You talk funny. Where are you from, anyway?"
"Shelkonwa. It's an Alderaanian colony." Even as she said it, she felt herself frowning. Now that she thought about it, she didn't think her accent sounded particularly Alderaanian. It was hard to tell for sure — on top of the difficulty in picking apart her own accent while she was speaking, the dialects of the human core were rather homogenous to begin with. She didn't centralize her unaccented vowels the way most speakers of Basic did, or at least not quite as much. And how she tended to monophthongize or break more complex vowels, and spirantize affricates... If she had to guess, she'd peg it for something on the Alsakani–Shawken axis.
Which still left her with dozens of possibilities for her homeworld. But she was starting to wonder if she'd ever even been on Shelkonwa before. She remembered Shelkonwa, of course, she'd lived there for half her life, but...
She shook the thought off. She didn't want to think about that.
"Alderaan, huh. I hear it's pretty there." There was a faint note of skepticism on Mission's voice, as though someone had told her about forests and mountains and rivers before, and she couldn't entirely believe such things existed, especially on a world as old as Alderaan. She must have grown up here.
"It is, I guess. Such things are a matter of personal opinion." Herself, she'd never felt the awe so many people seemed to get from certain examples of the natural world. It was nice, she guessed, but it was just...there. Of course, she didn't have a high opinion of visual art either. Not what she preferred to use her eyes for. "How about you? You're obviously not from Ryloth."
Mission frowned at her. "How can you tell?"
"Your accent's wrong. The local Basic is your first language."
"You can tell that just listening to someone? Far out." Mission paused for a moment, her head tipping to the side again, sending one of her lekku sliding against her shoulder. "You don't really seem the type. To be hanging around here, I mean."
She felt a wry smile twitching at her lips. "You could say I've had a significant change in fortunes recently."
A curious look crossed Mission's face, but she didn't voice whatever she was thinking. "Well, if you ever need help finding your way around, just give me a call. You got a com?"
Without a thought, she dug out her com, and swapped codes with the strangely friendly little girl. Which might be a mistake, she realized, when her brain started up again. They weren't going to be here long, and she hardly knew the girl, and... Well, it generally wasn't wise to give a stranger who obviously dabbled in slicing a direct link into a wirelessly broadcasting bit of tech you carried with you everywhere. It was a basic security precaution to keep com codes private, in fact, one of those rules everyone knew. But she'd done it anyway, without pausing to think.
She couldn't explain it. It'd just... It'd seemed like the right thing to do.
Shaking off the tingles along her arms, the vague feeling of unease, she shot Mission a teasing smile. "I'm to take it you know the area like the back of your hand, then."
The girl's face broke into a grin again. "No doubt! Me and Zee have been here forever, we know everyone around here. If you need to find anything or anyone, I know where it is — and how to get there without some slimeface blowing your head off. Though, if you're really new you should probably talk to Gadon. He can set you up with a place to stay, find you some work if you like."
"Who's Gadon?"
"You really are new, everyone knows who Gadon Thek is. He leads the Hidden Beks."
There was another odd sense of familiarity, that she'd heard the name before, but she still couldn't place it. Since she'd had a similar moment with the Beks a while ago, it was probably even the same Gadon Thek. "No, I'm fine, I don't need a place to stay." Explaining she'd broken into an apartment in a building under Bek protection would be a bad idea. "How does someone like you wind up falling in with a swoop gang anyway?" By someone like you, she was referring to her age, but she was trying to avoid drawing attention to that. She'd seen the way Mission had scowled when the thugs had called her little girl.
By the brightness of Mission's smile, she didn't notice the subtext. "Oh, I've been with the Beks forever. The gangs aren't all the same, you know." Or, maybe she had caught the subtext, just the swoop gangs are bad part instead. "It's Vulkars going around shooting anyone who looks at them funny like psychos, not the Beks. Gadon's a good man, he looks out for people."
She made a mental note to not speak ill of Gadon and the Beks too directly. It sounded like Mission had practically been raised by them. Though, that the girl was biased didn't necessarily mean she was wrong — it wasn't unusual, in places like this where government power broke down somewhat, for the common citizenry to fill the vacuum. Sometimes, the gangs that took over were violent, corrupt thugs, but others provided for and protected their people when the state couldn't or wouldn't. The former were more common than the latter, but the latter still happened.
Of course, she wasn't taking it for granted the Beks were the latter kind just because some random teenager thought well of them, but she'd keep an open mind, at least.
For some minutes, they just talked. Or, if she were being honest, Mission interrogated her about whatever came to mind. What planets she'd been to before, what they were like, what the people there were like, what exactly did linguistics professors do with their time, what even was linguistics, did she follow swoop racing at all, on and on and on. She shouldn't really be doing this, she should be avoiding any sort of personal interactions with locals, but...
Stang, she just couldn't help it. The kid was just so precious. Such a cocky little shit, with a blaster on one hip and weighed down with who knew what illicit equipment, talking casually about poverty and sickness and repression and violence, but always smiling, a light in her eyes she couldn't help but find...
It was nice. Somehow, despite not being able to remember, she'd known it'd been a long, long time since she'd been around anyone so...so happy.
She shouldn't encourage the girl, but she just couldn't help herself.
So, of course, Onasi had to show up and ruin it.
She and Mission had been talking for some time, she hadn't been keeping track, when he came walking up to the table. Through the rainbow haze of the cantina, it took her a moment to recognize him. "You have me wandering around a slum one misstep away from open war, and here you are chatting up some kid?"
The shift in Mission's face from grin to scowl was so quick it was almost impressive. "Watch who you're calling kid, you withered old geezer!"
Her eyes drifting closed for a second, she let out a thin sigh. She knew, instantly, there was no way these two would ever get along. "Mind giving us the table, Mission? I have some business to discuss with my friend here."
Mission gave her a skeptical look, as though she couldn't quite believe her new friend, who'd she'd only known for an hour, could really be friends with this arseface, who she'd only known for a couple seconds. She shrugged. "Sure thing, Cina. We should be checking in with Zaerdra about now anyway. Give me a call sometime." The girl popped up to her feet, something hidden in her belt clinking a bit. "Come on, Zee, let's go." And the two were off, banter about mealtimes and portion sizes quickly fading as they wandered away.
Onasi sank heavily into the seat she'd vacated, shooting a suspicious glance at their retreating backs. She couldn't help the feeling she'd just traded down, so far as conversational partners went, but she wasn't exactly in a position to be choosy about the company she kept. "Did you actually do any recon, or did you just sit in the cantina drinking and chatting up the locals?"
She sniffed — he should be glad she hadn't been drinking, she'd nearly gone up to the bar to order something. The only thing that had stopped her was the half-faded knowledge that alcohol and head trauma didn't mix. She brought her datapad out of stand-by, in a few seconds had her annotated map of the area transmitted to Onasi. "It's not my fault you're slow, Flyboy. I got here over an hour ago, questioned the Hutt over there for a while before Mission got friendly. Did you know the Exchange are big on Taris? They operate out in the open, even, agents in bloody cantinas."
Partway through sending his own map, Onasi twitched, glanced around the cantina, a sudden razor of concern about him. "I heard some thug named Davik runs the syndicate around here, but I didn't realize it was so bad. They own the cantina? This cantina?"
"I don't know if they own it, but they certainly use it as a contact and recruiting point." Her lips turned up in a dark smile. "Zax was quite open about asking if I wanted to collect bounties for the Exchange."
The glare on Onasi's face was so cold it could freeze a blaster shot in midair. "You told him no, of course."
"Of course. I have no intention of running errands for a cartel of slavers and murderers." Hot annoyance flared in her chest at his look of relief — honestly, who did he think she was? "I did manage to get some information out of him, but it's not good news. This planet is swimming with Sith, swoop gangs, and the fucking Exchange. It's unlikely we'll find Shan first."
"Maybe she'll be the one finding us."
She fought the urge to roll her eyes and completely failed. The confidence some people had in Jedi was just so absurd. They were mortal beings like everyone else. "If the Sith captured or killed her, they'd be bragging about it on the net. Since they haven't, and seeing as she didn't show up at Zelka's, her pod must have fallen rather further into the city than ours did. Who knows how many buildings and walkways and such it hit on the way down? Shan would have been rattled around in there something awful, I wouldn't be surprised if she's hurt nearly as badly as I was. If someone stumbled across her while she was still out of it..." She shrugged. "Even Jedi can get unlucky."
Onasi winced, a hand rising to rub at the side of his face. Apparently, the same thought had occurred to him, but he'd been in denial.
"This isn't going to be an easy job, Onasi. Someone is going to get to her before we do. We need to find out who, then we need to break her out. That's going to require contacts, and guns. Lots of guns. Possibly mercs, if we can afford them. But we can't afford them. We can't afford any of this. Just feeding ourselves will see us drained of cash inside the week."
"Yeah, I know." The frustration on his voice was clear, and for a second despair fell over him, face closing up as he slumped into himself. But it lasted only a second before he rallied, straightening in his chair, shoulders back and firm, eyes glinting with determination. And there he went being handsome again, that was really quite annoying. "I don't suppose any money-making opportunities jumped out at you while you were looking around?"
She felt the smirk spread across her face.
"I'm going to hate this idea, aren't I?"
She didn't answer. She just smirked all the wider.
Argon lights — Throwing a curveball at you, like I do. Making this more difficult than I have to, I know, but I'm not certain it would make sense for people in the Star Wars universe to use the same name for the same technology. The name we use is an artifact of our history — we happened to popularize the technology using neon first, but there are all sorts of gasses that work just as well. In fact, neon isn't even the best option, from a practical standpoint. Argon might take more energy to ionize than neon but, while neon is abundant in space, it's a very thin, light gas, light enough most of Earth's neon floated off eons ago. Argon, which is used in purple and blue "neon" lights, is roughly 519 TIMES more abundant in our atmosphere, coming in at just under one percent.
Presumably, the atmosphere of any planet with biospheres similar to ours would also have atmospheric argon. Earth-native life requires potassium — it's essential for proper cell function, making up about .2% of the human body — and a small percentage of potassium comes in a radioactive isotope, which happens to decay into argon. By comparing the isotopes present on Earth, it's clear the vast majority was produced by potassium decaying over millions of years (over 99% of it, in fact). Thus, we can assume any life that is chemically anything like ours would have evolved on a world with significant amounts of argon in the atmosphere. Not only is it likely pre-spaceflight humans would have discovered argon gas-discharge lighting, but virtually every other intelligent species should have as well. It's less likely, I feel, that the use of neon in lighting would be nearly as universal.
In the modern day, I wouldn't be surprised if most of their "argon" lights actually use synthesized krypton — it's (theoretically) easily produced with the level of tech available in Star Wars, and glows a plain white, so you just have to tint/paint the glass to easily get whatever color you want. But I'd expect them to still be called argon lights for historical reasons. Of course, it is a bit of a stretch to assume they'd still be using cold cathode gas-discharge lighting after thousands of years, but it is simple to build and comparatively efficient. People use what works.
Yeah, I know. Can't help myself.
[smells like bantha shit] — If anyone's wondering, I know "poodoo" literally means fodder. Cianen translates for intent, so shit is a better fit.
[she'd put her around thirteen or so] — Mission's canon age at the beginning of KotOR is actually fourteen. The art director has said the model for her face was a mistake, she looks too old.
[Had she ever even heard of Wookiees at all?] — KotOR happens not long after Kashyyyk was discovered by the wider galaxy. It's quite likely the vast majority have never heard of Kashyyyk or Wookiees before.