Sainted seagrass, I've seen trees grow faster!
For the sake of dramatic emphasis, Ashkhen blatantly passed over the fact that those had actually been tree-sized mushrooms during rainy season on Felucia.
Despite having had just finished the Mantra of Forbearance three times in a row, Ashkhen's frustration hit a level she was unequipped to handle. The stress only exacerbated the caffeine induced eye-twitching—the lady right before her in line was the eighth person in a row who came to take care of banking related tasks that could have been handled with a few clicks over the HoloNet.
She ran her hands over her face. Setting up an account online the very same morning took her about as long as steeping herself a cup of tea. The only thing she couldn't skip was physically taking the money to a branch to make a deposit. Why did people insist on coming in person for absolutely no reason?
Ashkhen was sitting within hearing distance of the teller counter. As the old lady's tirade about the incompetence of droid clerks went on and on and on, the simple task of depositing credits turned longer, longer and longer. Hands balled into fists and grinding her teeth, Ashkhen reminisced about her previous life in which money was simply not a factor. In hindsight, maybe it wasn't just because of spiritual reasons why Jedi never had chequing accounts and only ever carried a token amount of cash.
Coming from the right, an even denser wave of boredom brushed against her senses. A small Rodian baby sat in a hovering pram with listless hands in his laps and a thousand yard stare in his pupil-less eyes. His mom was absorbed in a heated argument over her comm.
"Chin up, little one!" Ashkhen muttered, leaning closer. "Representative Binks saving your homeworld from the Separatists isn't nearly as embarrassing as it sounds."
The baby's tiny snout twitched with a depressed sniff.
"Staying loyal to the Republic was the right call," she contiuned. "And I'm sure the promised supplies will arrive... eventually."
Way too young to have such a grim outlook on intergalactic politics!
Ashkhen took a better look at the toy which his small fingers curled around. The stuffy was a to-scale replica of a can-cell, a large, six-legged insectoid native to Rodia—a rather odd choice for a kid's plush toy, in Ashkhen's opinion. Then again, she remembered how Master Balian had debated the unparalleled cuteness off anglerfish.
'Make them believe magic is real,' Tilla had once suggested.
Ashkhen glanced around—minds were bored and unfocused, eyes were glued to data feeds—and slowly raised her hand.
The can-cell's wings fluttered; its young master let go with a surprised coo. Instead of dropping to the floor, the toy hovered around his hand, front and back pair of wings flapping to a different rhythm. Ashkhen leaned a little closer to shield the magic trick from the customers sitting nearby, and continued to entertain the baby by levitating the can-cell in small circles above the pram.
The tiny Rodian's eyes grew wide with wonder. He followed the flight path of his toy, then looked up at Ashkhen and reached out his hands.
"I don't care about your programming and I don't care if I'll have to spend the entire afternoon arguing with you!"
Ashkhen's head swiveled around. The lady up front had gotten the droid clerk stuck in a loop. To her dismay, she looked exactly like the type who would try and win over a droid. An involuntary yelp had people glance up from their comlinks when one of her headtails got pinched in a surprisingly strong grip.
"That's some grasp reflex you've got there all right." Ashkhen slowly turned around.
Enthralled by her headtails' sinuous dance, the little guy only tightened his hold on the captive appendage and pulled it closer. He took hold of the tendril with both hands and gave it a rattle. It didn't make any interesting sounds, but the sight of it flopping left and right still elicited a delighted giggle.
"I validate your argument." Ashkhen gave him a solemn nod. "That is indeed entertaining. How about we proceed with a hostage exchange? I release the stuffy into your custody and you stop violating my bodily autonomy, hm?"
Ashkhen was a little out of depth when it came to child development—was it too much to hope that he would lose interest and simply let go? Jedi toddlers never threw their toys, they levitated them. The baby however, mischief written all over his tiny face, popped the end of the headtail into his snout and started gnawing away on it with apparent joy.
Ashkhen's mouth curled down in disgust, looking at the purplish-blue dribble slowly making its way down the unfortunate appendage. "Yeah, that's a no from me. I'm sorry little fellow, but this is the point when I terminate negotiations and default to higher authorities. Excuse me!" she waved a hand at the Rodian baby's mother.
She hung up, beyond pissed.
"Look, I was onl—"
She yanked the headtail out of the baby's snout, closed the hovering pram's cover and stormed over to the opposite row of seats.
After close to an hour of waiting, it took Ashkhen an aniclimatic ninety-five seconds to deposit the speeder fund, then she headed upstairs to get rid of the purple smudge in the washroom. When she reached the top landing, a wide corridor opened up in front of her. On the left, she passed a long strip of tinted plexiglass panel offering courteous privacy for the clients of the private banking lounge. A few smaller offices occupied the right side.
Two sentient guards manned the last door at the far end of the corridor. Ashkhen agreed with the arrangement; considering the attitude of average customer, humans carrying firearms certainly belonged in the least populated area of the bank. She took a right and entered the ladies' room.
As soon as the door closed behind her, all the lights went out. The lambent emergency beacons cast an eerie greenish glow on the walls. An overwhelming bad feeling consumed her.
Power outage? Unusual.
Ashkhen reached for the tap but her arm wouldn't move. She glanced at her cybernetic hand, hanging useless by her side.
Coincidence? Unlikely.
Her comlink: also dead. Chances for that? Astronomical. EMP grenades sprang to mind, but hand-held ones were regulated, and only had a blast radius of about three meters. The washroom was empty. The corridor was also, save for the two guard dudes. If someone threw it downstairs, and it still killed all electronics one floor up, beyond two closed doors…
Military grade? Unsettling.
Three shots were fired downstairs. Ashkhen's gaze fell upon the sticky purple smear in the mirror. She flew out the door the next instant, determined to stop the Separatist terrorist attack, or die trying.
"Lady, stop!"
Ashkhen spun around mid-sprint. Both of the guards had drawn their weapons, prepared to hold their position at the door. One of them whisper-shouted, "Don't run down, we don't know what's going on. The room to your right is empty. Go in and block the door from the inside!"
Despite the severity of the situation, an odd warmth spread in Ashkhen's chest. She all but reached up to touch the memory of a calloused hand on her shoulder. That was the most Jedi-like sentiment she had heard in a very, very long time, exactly what Master Balian would have said.
Except I'm not gonna hide under the covers while people are in danger.
Ashkhen nodded in return, and inched back the way she came. She slipped into the highest net worth individuals' lounge, careful not to expose herself to the attackers below.
The guard was right—to come up with anything sort of a plan, proper evaluation was the paramount priority. The late Master Trebor's example highlighted its importance—even Council members could get unceremoniously gunned down when rushing into a conflict unprepared. Ex-Padawans, unarmoured, unarmed and presently inconvenienced by an inoperative prosthetic, should be thrice as chary.
Ashkhen settled into one of the gratuitously comfortable armchairs. An upmarket espresso machine right across got into her line of sight. Oh, the backwardness of social stratification! People with the most money would get luxury stuff thrown at them for free, but not even a star-forsaken drinking fountain had been installed in the waiting area for the plebs downstairs.
She focused past the distraction and listened through the Force, letting her awareness expand beyond her surroundings.
"Get on the ground! Get on the ground NOW!"
"Dergal, we good?"
"S'all good. Backup alarm system's fried, too."
That's two. She let out a slow breath and sank deeper, bowriding the massive waves of shock and terror that churned beneath. The source of the customers' fright paced up and down in front of the bank teller stations. Ashkhen locked onto his presence—cold, calculating. Number three, the mastermind. Her brows drew together. Only three people to rob a bank?
"You two head back to the control room. Wojtek, you're up."
Heavy footfalls, of different cadences, ascended.
Four, that's more like it. Wheelman out front—five.
One ear-splitting wail soared above muffled cries and pleas. Ashkhen's slobbery little friend made it clear that he was mad unhappy with the proceedings.
"Shut it up or I will," the gang leader hit a warning tone.
Precious little time to come up with a strategy. The EMP grenade had taken out all automated security on premise. Even if the secondary backup alarm had pinged the authorities, the average police response time around this depth on the Capital was still well over eight minutes. That left the two guards and Ashkhen, three against four, heavily out-gunned. Two were on their way up.
Fat chance steamrolling them with one hand.
A grimly short shootout ensued. Ashkhen's stomach sank at the telltale rat-a-tat of heavy repeating blasters being fired in a closed space. The pair passed by her door, and she cursed herself for not having had negotiated the idea of leasing a lightsaber from Master Huyang upon leaving the Order.
The corridor fell silent again.
Do or do not.
Two bodies lay across the doorway down the far end. Ashkhen stepped over them with heavy hearts and tiptoed down the narrow flight of stairs to tail the pair of terrorists.
The stairway lead into a series of three connecting chambers, all of them lit by the same green emergency lights. Ashkhen passed the first room full of dark screens and offline droids. In the second, she found a technician peppered with blaster shots. Poor dude was still sitting in his chair, staring at his own brain matter slowly trickling down his screen. Why didn't he get up when the shooting started? The charred remnants of a headset answered her question. Ashkhen came upon the two Separatists in the third room, still in the process of breaking into the safe.
A scrawny and twitchy Ishi Tib knelt before the vault door. Small sets of explosives had been stuck on its round panel. He was cutting long strips of wire to connect them.
Of course his partner had to be a Herglic on a mass gainer diet!
The other amphibian conformed to the shape of the double doorframe, forming an impenetrable barrier between the demolitions dude and Ashkhen.
Taking him out physically was out of the question. For Ashkhen however, throwing hands had never been in the top five choices for managing misaligned interests anyways.
"His fumbling is making you so mad," she whispered right behind his back, making a small wave with her hand.
"Hurry the kriff up, Wojtek!" he barked, his aura taut with impatience.
"Get off my ass!" The Ishi Tib carefully collected all the wires in one hand to twist the ends together.
"The cops are coming," Ashkhen continued, "If you get caught, he's gonna spill."
It was neither the time nor the place to ponder how objectionable a tactic using Mind Tricks for banthashitting was. The Herglic cleared his blowhole and ran his thumb across his mouth.
The charges took off a round chunk of the stainless durasteel plating. The inner layer of the vault door panel glimmered through the slowly dissipating cloud of smoke. Wojtek worked it through with the safe drill, then grabbed a length of insulated copper wire from his kit. He carefully pushed it into the hole and plugged the loose end of into a small, hand-held device. The meter pegged at a hundred and fifty.
"He's stalling. He wants to get caught. What if he's been planted?"
Wojtek wrapped the wire around the instrument and set it on the floor, oblivious to his partner's arms slowly uncrossing.
"Done?"
"Kriff off, Horve, I still need to—"
Horve fired a single shot into Wojtek's back. He stepped over the Ishi Tib's body with a toothy grin and grabbed the locking bar. His cry of agony never got past his clenched jaws; spine bended into an unnatural arch, he promptly collapsed on top of his accomplice.
"—bypass the EMI shield on the door's embedded security," Ashkhen finished Wojtek's sentence.
She kicked the blaster out of the Herglic's hand. SE-14. How in the Force did these amateurs get themselves armed to the teeth with BlasTech and Arakyd Industries weaponry? She squatted down to check another two other blasters that had been tossed into a corner. Standard issue, the security's. She took one and retraced her steps through the command center, feeling a little more confident and a little less civilized.
As she came upon the dead guards again, the corners of her mouth quirked downwards. This was no heroic defending against the Separatists, just a regular stick up. Two men had died, not for the values of the Republic, but for a bunch of credits that wasn't even theirs.
"What the kriff is taking so long? Oi, Dergal! Go check on them!" the boss's voice carried down the corridor. "I said, kill that noise!"
The Rodian baby picked up on his mother's distress and went from upset to ballistic in a span of two seconds.
Not good!
Ashkhen weighted her options: (A) fling herself down into the main hall, stick the superhero landing and face them both, or (B) wait in ambush to drop the lookout first. Option number one would leave an extremely narrow window of surprise and an extremely wide opening for return fire; number two might even the numbers, but not the odds.
Every way you look at it, you lose.
The cautious shuffle of feet ascending the main stairway decided for her. Still in cover behind the service door, she took a deep, focusing breath.
Supressed memories flooded back with vengeance. The tangy, aminic smell drifting down the corridor triggered a short bout of panicked hyperventilating—the last time she had stood against Selkath was during the disastrous Trials on Manaan.
Ashkhen centered herself and made a quick mental note to circle back to the question of associating the smell of Selkath with impending death. At first thought, this new emergence seemed less like meditation material and more like an issue that warranted some serious cognitive therapy.
She glanced at the blaster in her hand. Considering everything, it still felt wrong. She looked around—neither the corridor, nor the stairs leading straight down offered much cover.
At least we're both out of our element here.
Thence came the spark of an idea. Regardless of their specific diving range and behaviour, all marine species shared some basic defense mechanisms. No matter how deep their built allowed them to go, still there always remained an unfathomable depth of ocean. Evolution ingrained in them to always expect the bigger, scarier deep sea creature's attack from below and rarely, if ever, from above.
Ashkhen looked up, pulled the covering panel to the side with the Force, and jumped into the overhead ventillation shaft. Due to the lack of space, she settled in an uncomfortable crouch—not unlike a mew about to hover-dip to catch its prey—and resolved to stay the kriff away from the venom-tipped claws this time.
Dergal stopped for a second directly below the opening to look at the dead guards, stroking his lobes. A blue stun shot hit him at the base of his skull, and he gently toppled onto the floor.
Three down, one to go.
Ashkhen softly landed next to them. For a lack of a better alternative, she levitated the Selkath's blaster into the air vent, then kicked his feet away so his boots didn't touch the dead guard's uniform.
"Yo-yo-yo, what the kriff's going on back there?"
The gang leader couldn't have heard much from where he stood through the indistinct whimpers of the crowd. His voice carried an ugly undertone of distress. Ashkhen had seen that kind of desperation in acton many times before—it wasn't much longer until he would go over the edge and do something scary stupid.
"Horve? Dergal?"
Ashkhen toggled the switch on the blaster back into its default position. There was no negotiating with terrorists.
As she headed back towards the main hall, she all but emptied the cartridge into the ceiling. Some of the blaster bolts ricocheted off of the lightning fixtures, doubling the intended acoustic effect.
Ashkhen reached the top of the stairway and looked down. As expected, a little old man stood between the rows of seats, legs trembling, shaking a timid 'no' with his head. A silent plea for mercy welled up in his eyes.
"Stay the kriff where you are or I'll blow his head off!"
The warning came directly from behind the poor old human shield. The gang boss spoke with an even heavier Tibranese accent than Wojtek did, clacking his beak after every syllable ending with a vowel.
"Your men are dead."
It wasn't the words that she said, but rather her voice, so out of place in a hostage shoot-out, that made the last Ishi Tib pop his head out from behind his hostage. His yellow eyes widened with utter confusion.
"Who the—?"
Ashkhen dropped him in one shot. She tossed the blaster behind with a dismissive scoff, then walked down the stairs, slowly breathing out the remainder of the adrenaline rush. Numerous pairs of eyes followed her movements with cautious reserve.
"Jedi business. Go back to your mortgages."
••• ••• •••
The small gang knelt in a meditative pose in the middle of the foyer, to all appearances, contemplating their poor life choices. Ashkhen kept watch over them, sitting on the reception counter, swinging her legs. At the sight of the reinforcements, she slid off the counter and walked towards the policemen with a big smile.
"Officers, what a relief! You see, these guys over he—"
The electric whine of a dozen blasters charging up in sync drowned out the rest of her words. The tactical unit leader's harsh voice came amplified from under his helmet.
"Let me see your hands! Take your hands out of your pockets!"
"Wow, okay." She complied. "Now, liste—"
"Turn around! Get down on your knees!"
"What!?"
"Down on your knees, lace your fingers behind your head!"
Ashkhen had expected pats on the back, not green dots on her chest. She glanced at the perpetrators and swallowed past the lump in her throat. Suddenly, a highlight reel of all the articles she had ever read about racial discrimination in policing started playing in her mind.
"This is your final warning! Cooperate with the police!" The sargeant signed form ambush to his men.
"All right, all right!" Ashkhen turned around slowly, keeping her arms spread out to the sides.
Patrolling the underlevels for the better part of twenty years, the unit leader had grown adept in, and inured to the laborious arrest of criminals who were combative, under influence, of a bigger built than himself, or the combination of the above. Regrettably for Ashkhen, he simply forgot to downscale the reasonable force he used to wrangle hundred kilograms of Wookie-wrestling musculatures to the ground.
And it started out as such a good day, too, she thought, wincing as she was frisked, handcuffed and hauled to her feet by deft and rough hands.
Another squad of the policemen busied themselves with taking the bank robbers into custody. With the last pair of stuncuffs in place, Ashkhen saw no point in overexerting herself and released them from her Force Influence. The gang looked about as confident of their surroundings as bathypelagic fish finding themselves in a wall mounted aquarium.
"They are on their way, Sir," one of the officers said, hand on his earpiece. The sargeant picked up one of the offender's weapons from the reception counter, then tossed it back with a snort.
"Excellent."
His sense of accomplishment rippled across the room. Ashkhen knew the type from experience—his ego wouldn't take kindly to the reminder that she had apprehended the criminals well before he arrived at the scene, and arresting her was a blunder at best, serious overstepping of authority at worst. She thought it wiser to wait for his superior, explain the big misunderstanding, have a good laugh about it, shake a few hands and be on her merry way.
"Officer, if I may…" she ventured, addressing the arresting officer with uncharacteristic acquiescence and meekness. "I'm already in restraints and I'm not resisting… There's really no need for hard control."
"You have the right to remain silent." The policeman gave her a sideways glance. "And are encouraged to do so."
"You may not know, Sir, and it's totally not your fault, but, uh… Wrapping a headtail around your fist, clenched like that"—she swallowed—"is extremely painful. If you pull any harder, it's gonna come off."
"Oh." The officer let go of the bruised tendril and grabbed a hold of her jacket instead. "That was unintentional."
Ashkhen's breathing gradually returned to normal. "It's okay. No hard feelings."
A pair of GU-series police droids came through the gates and stood sentry on either side of the main entrance. A man in his forties entered next, flanked by two more droids, speaking simultaneously into his comm and barking orders at a young police technician by his side. He wore civilian attire, but carried a modified police special blaster on his right side. As the small procession walked up to the Sergeant, he took a long look at the figures kneeling on the floor. His brows drew further together as his glance fell upon the young Nautolan in the tactical force officer's compliance hold.
He didn't seem like the belly-laugh and high-five kind of Lieutenant Ashkhen had hoped for. He smelled of vending machine protein bars, t'bac and caffstim, wore his kriff-you-for-looking-in-my-direction expression, his shirt from the previous day and the stubble from the day before that.
Why keep shaving their beards but not their eyebrows? Ashkhen wondered. Humans are so weird.
"Is that the whole school of them?"
"Aye, Lieutenant," said the officer holding Ashkhen's arm. "One of the perpetrators had been shot in the back and killed, another in critical condition had been taken away by the ambulance.
Ashkhen drew herself up in indignance and called the Lieutenant out on his words in a huff.
"Okay, first of all, that's extremely speciesist, and—"
"Shut the kriff up." The Lieutenant raised a warning finger without even turning his head, then nodded at the officer. "Bring them in for questioning."