Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Ciphered Holos

At least the end of her arrangement with Drakkan had been pleasant - she'd settled up what remained as a debt and managed to swing a shuttle from the derelict station in addition to that.

The haven and safest place in the galaxy she could hole up and anticipate further Shadow activity? She'd given it up as the threat of the Dheroveer had definitively come back, and the lure of helping - which was what she convinced herself it was - was too strong. She was more than certain Drakkan thought her seven times a fool for doing it, too. But hey, they'd managed to not kill, attempt to kill, or even maim each other.

Improvement.

While she'd sat on the couch, Shouta Hazki watching her as she healed herself after his skillful triaging which had stopped the bleeding and started to close the wounds, she'd stolen the chance to watch people again. She was in, what she knew, was the Company's offices and the itch to leave had been strong. But she trusted Sriia more than was probably advisable, and she knew Sriia wouldn't have put her in a situation where she was likely to have been arrested. And the people there were, for the ones she knew by voice and Force, friends. She put her trust in them and the fact that they'd give her the time to slip away if someone noticed she was there and decided to act on it.

All the same as soon as she could limp she knew she'd be on her way out the door and back to the relative safety of the lower levels. There she could get lost again and still be a speeder away from helping.

Some help you turned out to be though she chastised herself, the Miralukan taking stock of the injuries the cyborg had inflicted. The shattered knee was healing albeit slowly - the same one Kneecapper had broken was weaker than she liked. She might have to let Doc replace the knee if she damaged it again. Her right arm was... the bolt had scraped bone she'd discovered when she healed the injury slightly, but it was far less important than the vibroknife she'd taken to her chest. But for all the damage she'd taken she felt a lingering guilt for the damage she'd inflicted.

She had frankly lost it. Hostility still haunted her perceptions of droids and while she knew it hadn't been a Hostility she'd attacked ruthlessly. She could only hope the few slips - the Force she'd used - hadn't been noticed by Torlem during the fight; the Sith and Sriia herself might've been enough of a distraction that her brief dip into Alchemy had gone unnoticed. Maybe no one but her knew what she'd done. It'd been so easy to attack once she'd taken the gloves off herself, so very easy. Ineffective as consciousness had slipped away from her and her fears had finally overwhelmed her to the point where she couldn't act, the mass of technology and pieces of some sentient being echoing like a ragged and tattered doll that moved and thought and hurt making her shut down. She couldn't have succumbed to fear at a worse possible time, the heavy weight of the cyborg crashing in to her to drive the vibroknife in deeper...

Gingerly she shifted; it was time to leave before someone caught up with her again. The one death already weighed over her and there was no Drakkan this time to take out a Jedi. If another was on her trail this time she'd have to act. And it'd be easy a part of her mind whispered. It was the same part that she'd drawn on before she had mentally crashed, the same knowledge that always had been in the depths of her mind. How to kill, how to torture, how to cut - how to hurt someone. It was there and she was slowly coming to the realization that sometimes fighting was not bad. It was just - she needed to walk the line, the one demarcation between actions to protect and actions designed to inflict pain. She couldn't break the line, as much as it was already blurred, or what little she held on to would fall apart. It'd already fractured and she had to wonder how easily that resolve would break now that she'd let it once already. She was fooling herself if she thought that her justifactions were anything but flimsy now, already, and that they wouldn't get moreso the more often she broke.

Torlem had been asleep when she'd woken up the first time, a comforting presence on a nearby chair. She'd found the safe cracked, the datapad with files nearby. The first file had fallen easily, cracking through the encryption and picking out three comms frequencies, the names making her lift a brow in shock. They'd suspected there was more than one person this time, she especially after the message she'd intercepted, but this... this was confirmation. Assassin, Commander, and Proprietor. Her fingers itched to do something but all she did was copy the information, adding it to her system files and starting to build linked associations for the Dheroveer. The second file had proven trickier and she swore as some files cracked while others managed to destroy themselves before she could save them. But even it had been useful, giving up a tie to the drug Leever.

Shipments of that could be a secondary transport in the company, Plavent, that they'd gone after once before. She fired off a new set of queries across the systems she had access to, a soft sigh as she wished she dared use Sanguine's resources. And then while everyone was absent, or asleep in exhaustion, the Miralukan began another search, this time looking for work. She couldn't freeload forever. And she needed to set up a new network of boltholes, places she could make her own. And a thousand other things - such as new network connections, a new data server, a new hangar - all of which required credits. She had to give the shaded life a try again before she considered a more drastic relocation - if only because even knowing what her friends knew about what she'd done they were still trying to help her. Krek and Torlem, Sriia - even Eron.

She would take Sriia's help though, especially to pay for removing the implants. And once they were gone... once she had a new safer place for Sparks and the rest... her mind turned towards little acts of revenge, carefully staying away from real emotions or naming the target. She'd changed enough because of them already and all she could blame them for was some warm and fuzzy feelings for one singular Sith.

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