Ciphered Holos

"This is dangerous ain't it," Doc asked quietly as the Miralukan sat down, perched on the edge of his chair. She'd switched her hair he noted, the short pixie-cut half curled without the familiar weight of her longer hair to pull it flatter, hitting unevenly across her face, some part brushing shoulders while others barely hiding where eyes would've been on another species. Fingerless gloves on her hands he noticed, a long vibro-knife poking out the top of her armored boots. vest and mis-matched trousers, rugged materials that looks less ostentatious than her old half-armored coat had come off.

She finally looked less like a smuggling business woman and more like an occupant of the moon; Doc felt something break at the sheer dangerous air she was starting to pull, as if she was slowly on the edge of walking out and sinking into the darkness she'd spent so long rallying against. He'd never wanted to see her look like the edges had been filed sharp again, the same desperate air paired with bloody determination to make things Right. Whatever Right was to her now that was - it seemed to still be tempered by the desire to help.

For how long?

Aran shifted, adjusting the mask on her face over slim lenses, hands curling into fists. "You said someone was trying to squeeze you Doc, and I want to know who. Simple question." Her ire was raised at the mere thought of someone trying to blackmail Doc and his clinic, especially given how coincidental the blackmail attempt was.

Doc breathed out a wreath of smoke, coughing as he sat down. "What'll happen to them once I tell you who and where?"

"They'll stop." Her tone was edged with finality.

Doc felt a cold sweat at the base of his neck, reaching back to wipe the perspiration off. "Y' talking about murder."

"It's Nar Shaddaa," the woman countered sternly. "If they don't get stopped by me it'll be someone else, somewhere else." Her tone shifted to one Doc rarely was able to refuse, a soft plea. "You're my friend, Doc. I'm not going to let someone take advantage of you and I- I need to do this."

And Doc sighed as she knew he would and finally gave her the gang's location, even though she could've danced into his mind and taken the knowledge from him. But he was a friend and you didn't do that to them; you burned the world over and through for them, to keep them safe. Aran's hands curled tighter before she forced them to relax running the palms over her trousers as if the motion would soothe, calm. Her emotions were still running high, free and unburied.

It was odd to look at the world through the glint and glimmer of them again but even if she could've sunken them back into the recesses of her mind she wouldn't have - Sverdas still needed help, needed to be found and freed.

--

The first death had been the hardest. She'd had to cast her mind back to remember Doc - the way his hands had shaken, the way he'd broken his silent promises and pulled out from his stash and shot himself up while she'd been visiting - to remind herself why she was there. Why she was stepping past the soft but cold flesh, kneeling down for a single act of kindness to the dead and damned by closing their eyes with a brush of fingers from forehead to cheek.

She'd ripped through one man's mind and waited for him to start to scream to draw some out of cover, perched and waiting. Because it was easier to use one of their (albeit dying) own to draw the gang from the bowels of their safe haven than it was to play piper to their rodent. She'd taken no pleasure in horrifying the man's mind until it fractured under the sheer terror, but his emotions had been...

Powerful. And each death had grown easier as she worked through the gang, not even drawing a weapon as she tore through their ranks as easily as she once had before. They weren't force users, they weren't even particularly organized, but she left nothing but corpses and the dying - the woman ripping their life from them almost automatically.

And then she came inside their headquarters, to the heart of their forces. Now it was time to practice the technique she'd decided to work on, the reason she'd gone to ask Doc for someone to take out. She hadn't realized she'd have the chance to help her own friend- but that made this righteous.

She didn't even have to push aside a feeling as she turned to the first of the security forces inside. First she lifted a hand, a bolt of lightning leaving her fingertips. The emotion behind it was easier to control now, easier to summon - and as the lightning hit she twisted it, the flickers vanishing until it was a small arc over the screaming man's body but not a steady stream. Now he jerked as Aran frowned in concentration, her fingers still outstretched and flickering with Force - then he moved a step closer to her.

It was working. Her grin was frightening - in the midst of the dead, her victim screaming as she forced him to take step by agonizing step she smiled almost childlike at the wonder of getting it to work. Lightning occasionally sparked across his form as he took one slow agonizing step after another, screaming from the sheer pain her experiment was causing but he moved.

A flick of her fingers and he danced. Then she curled her fingers into a fist and he dropped with one last wrenching cry.

It worked. She was unaware that the smile was still on her face as she turned to the next member of the gang, this time her efforts - though just as pain-filled - were more fluid, the marionette of a human moving almost naturally. She knew she could make this pain-free as well but there was a lesson to it. A reason for the pain. A reason she set nerves on fire, using her knowledge of dulling their receptors to instead inflame them.

By the time there was only one other person alive in the base aside from herself she had managed to make one man strangle himself to death. Another had snapped their own neck. The last one had wet himself in fear as she simply walked up. When he fell to the ground, pleading for mercy, Aran knelt down, reaching a finger out to stroke his cheek.

"Anything you want-" the man began to plead but Aran shushed him, a finger to still his lips.

"-it's personal. You threatened a friend of mine." She let the man whimper before shushing him again. "With your gang dead the message is going to be pretty clear. But I'll repeat it so when they slice your security footage up it's apparent. I protect my friends. I cherish them, and I'll kill for them. And I'll do it over and over and over again," she said softly.

"I won't go after your friend, we won't-"

She shushed him again, putting her hand against his cheek now and a spark of lightning across her palm before he danced and screamed. She let him scream until his throat was bloody, dancing under her direction until she took some pity on him. Absently she hummed an old tune, half-forgotten with missing words but familiar, as she made his fingers dig into his skin until blood soaked his shirt, holes and screaming as he dug into his own flesh.

Shaking blood from her hand then wiping it off her face Aran turned, letting the corpse at last drop to the ground with a wet thud. She'd challenged herself by making the man rip his own flesh off, chunk by chunk, until his fingers had become ineffective. He'd screamed when the nails had been pulled off from repeatedly digging deep into muscle. She'd patted his cheek and drove him onwards.

Turning on her heel she slowly sauntered out of the gang's now-empty headquarters.