A Hive of Scum and Villainy.

[Dire Wolf]

Makem Te

An arid wind born beneath gloomy storm clouds surged across the vast sandy expanse of Makem Te. The wind whirled around hundreds of miles of gravestones and later twisted past the great iron houses of Thousand Thousand, Makem Te’s greatest city, until it battered the back of a lonely hooded spacer. The figure continued to walk down the side of the road with the clack of a bronze colored staff against dusty ground to punctuate her boots.

“Filthy mongrels,” Lady Vesperia spat through a scoff as she passed by a pair of the planet’s misshapen denizens. It took all of the woman’s being to keep her composure as they chattered over some worthless trinket. But she needed to play relatively nice. Their extreme regenerative abilities would prove extremely useful in the coming war, and they had just handed a victory by their species ability for deception.

Multiple Republic senators, some of them ranked in rather fortuitous positions, had been captured not twelve hours before. A rare smile cracked across her face at the thought. Her first victory. Not only that, but it was a victory that she had created, designed, and executed. Completely hers. Some other Sith may have assisted with the execution and many Imperial troopers lended their weapons, but in the end she would be given due credit for the skirmish would be given to her. The rank of Darth was within her grasp.

Only one task remained before she could relieve some stress with a captured senator in an interrogation room aboard The Crimson Tide. Mako Tao’sen was her task. Humans seemed so fickle, and more than ready to skim from the top when they think that no one’s eye is upon them. Only the empire’s eyes never blink, and she had been dispatched to retrieve the stolen money. Possible depose the man from his ill organization and install a more reliable supplicant.

“Stop,” a large man snarled at her, but she obliged. Not everyone recognizes a Sith without their signature black robes.

“What is your business here,” a native of Makem Te asked her through that sickening smile of teeth.

Vesperia resisted the urge to remove the swokes-swokes’ non-existent neck from its shoulders and instead revealed one of the two lightsabers from beneath her dusty brown cloak. The two guards’ eyes fell to the ground before they muttered some cordial greeting.

Fear.

She stirred fear in the fearsome creatures’ hearts. Pathetic. Merely revealing a lightsaber meant nothing to anyone that knew anything, yet the Sith still found herself feasting on the emotion. It exhilarated her to sow fear in others, even if it was within the weak. Without a word she passed by the guards and through their poorly defended gate. Before too long the Sith Lady had stepped into a large, circular room filled with people’s conversation and cantina music. One of those people sat on a throne above all the others, and that man was Mako Tao’sen.

“I see that you have thrown quite the little soiree, and I have yet to receive an invitation.” Her voice was hardly a yell yet it seemed to drone out the party’s cacophony, “I must be correct in assuming that ‘tis still in the mail?”

Everything in the room came to a screeching halt and all eyes were on the traveler. A plasteel cuirass could be seen beneath her dusty brown cloak, and only those closest to her could see that she wore armored boots and the vambraces at her wrist. Lady Vesperia began to pace like a lion, and the crowd gave her the same berth as if she were one of the fearsome cats.

“You took what you should not have, Tao’sen. Count yourself infinitely fortunate, however, as the Empire has decided to let you simply return what you have taken and put this mess behind them. Business is business, you understand, and what we had was so lucrative for the both parties. If you refuse, however, we will be at quite the impasse, no?”

A growl disturbed her innermost being told her of a disturbance in the Force. It was difficult to sense it amidst the throng of people in the room, but it was there all the same. Somewhere. Icy blue eyes darted from Mako’s surprised face and about the crowd around her. The crowd had gone from staring at the Sith to gazing at their master in wait of his reply.

“I thin-”

“-shush,” her annoyed shush seemed to echo from the walls. Not a single soul had the gall to speak, cough, or even fidget. Only a Sith could make a ripple in the Force like that. Then, a Jedi could, too. Did one of them escape from the ambush only to hide in the most unfortunate place possible? Or was this coincidence?

An icy fury welled up in her heart as her eyes fell back upon the throned man, who only fidgeted in his seat beneath the weight of her gaze.

“You seem to have a force user in your midst, Mako. Tell me its name, elsewise I will be forced to begin killing until I find it. You have five seconds before we begin.” Lady Vesperia’s voice held a calm, possibly even sweet, tone to her words that thinly veiled the deathly threat.

The silent countdown began...

[sofaking]

Things hadn't been going according to plan per say, but really when did they ever? His plan for the last umpteen years had been get in - get friends - get done - get out, and what actually transpired had never been anything close to that. So when he found himself seated at a table in the room hosting this Tao'sen man and his fan group talking to a few traffickers a smuggler, and a couple that worked in the cook labs but what connected them to Tao'sen exactly he couldn't figure out; they just said he was bank. Fine by him as that was enough of a trail for him to follow for now. He'd definitely tracked down harder threads on much thinner ice. Right now in the quasi lighted room with music scratching on his eardrums, and the company everyone kept it wasn't hard to buy his ruse as a user looking to make a credit off of his addiction. His eyes were dark and sunken like he'd been awake and strung out for the last few days. Nostrils were an irritated red as were several dots on his wrists and forearms that unabashedly pointed out injection sites. Lived in clothes completed the ensemble and his story of ex-military looking to get away from the nightmares and memories of service was hardly unique, there were thousands that lived this cover full time.

As the last of the scotch was tipped back to be swished and appreciated in its full flavor he was suddenly unnerved. This was going too well. He was in fast. Not too fast by his experience but fast enough that it threw up red flags. These dealers and cookers were readily agreeing to supply enough product to make him a fortune without much more than a few good guesses and thready resume. Any dealer would see something was up and any junkie would know that too much of a good thing was being pushed onto him very quickly. Why? If he was pushing this fast it would be to either squeeze more than he normally could through a time window....or he wanted to get rid of assets, drugs or money, or even other currencies didn't matter at this point. The alcohol hadn't bothered him at all, thank his genetics for that, but with the melting pot of people and businesses here he'd pulled his emotional tendrils in a little closer to better keep from outside influence and distraction. His stomach flipped when a ripple in the force turned into the whip-crack of dark thoughts, black deeds that carried emotional scars reached him in his seat.

A voice washed over all noise in the establishment, coating everyone in a think blanket of apprehension. She started her declaration of intent polite enough but he didn't have to fake the wide eyed look he shared with everyone at the table but unlike them, who were trying to shrink in their seats and become as little as possible, he ever so slowly began to focus on making his force signature as small as possible. From where he was in relation to the voice, a woman's voice, she was to his left and even with his position. As his force signature shriveled ever so slowly he reached out with his natural abilities to snag onto currents of feeling and emotion, as much as he could get. If this wasn't a Sith that had just stormed into his hunting grounds then it was someone immersed in a foul life. The emphatic reports that were coming in all registered one of several things. Confusion, fear, panic, caught red handed, and recognition. The last one was the faintest and came from Tao'sen but the signature overall was unmistakable. He was bound, now, by the force to cross paths with whatever force user stood only a handful of feet away from him.

This woman also confirmed his suspicions about Tao'sen wanting to get something out of his neighborhood as fast as he could. There was no way he saw himself getting out of this jam without a confrontation, not with another force user in the room. He could make himself scarce enough around force sensitives and even a bounty hunter wise to the game but around a Sith or other Jedi? No. No, that wasn't one of his specialties and he didn't kid himself about it. Kaylix could run. He could make a bolt for the door hoping to draw her attention and create a dandy little chance where he might loose her in the graveyards. That thought appealed to him a lot but it wasn't a surefire way to divert her attention; at least not when she was on an errand from the Empire. Neither could he just leave to chance the fate of the people around him be they criminals or other nefarious individuals. They were caught in the Jedi/Sith conflict now too and hopelessly out of control of it. He had to know what he was dealing with before he could even start to make a plan so he formed a tendril in the force and reached out to the mystery woman and brushed against her. He stifled a groan.

This was going to hurt.

She was years beyond him in skill, that much he could tell right away. If that quick and curious prodding wasn't proof enough she also noticed and made it public knowledge.

“You seem to have a force user in your midst, Mako. Tell me its name, elsewise I will be forced to begin killing until I find it. You have five seconds before we begin."

She was looking forward to that part. He didn't need the wave of emotion to spell it out for him. Inwardly he sighed in pity and sadness, what a desolate life that had to be. Still he had to do something, he couldn't just walk away from this, not anymore. Mimicking the others at the table he scooted down in his seat to minimize his target profile despite being sheltered by a thin wall of people. His hand dipped into his backpack and withdrew his best wingman in the whole universe, his lightsaber; handgun never having left it's holster in the small of his back either. Three seconds had been eaten up just accomplishing this but he had a plan, loose, and by the seat of his pants but gods above and gods below watch out, he had one. No question in his mind lingered on the innocence of the people around him. They were all guilty of one crime or another and if given the chance he'd have found a way to remove them all from the soft underbelly of the common people. She might be a predator but the sea of people around him was his hunting ground, his killing fields as it were. Without a sound he moved from his seat and in a curved line towards what everyone around him would think was exit, stage left. Watching her with one good eye and one low light vision eye Kaylix prowled low behind the crowds back, catching glimpses of this Sith threat through a forest of arms, fingers, and legs. If she wanted to play a game of cat and mouse then he was game for a few rounds.

[Dire Wolf]

… Four.

Time and space stood still as the crowd silently counted down to one. A cocktail of emotions wafted from the throng of lowlifes, and each one felt sweeter than the last. Fear. Anger. Defiance. Murder wasn’t something that the Sith Lord enjoyed in her later years, but she didn’t begrudge the task. Enough death and discord had been reaped by the woman’s hands for the excitement to dim, but what didn’t diminish was the anticipation. The fear that every mortal with a shred of intelligence felt before her power was unleashed upon them.

Three.

Two.

One.

“Hey, where are you going,” a man in the back cried out, is that a light-. That guy’s got a lightsaber!”

Too little too late. A weequay mercenary positioned behind Lady Vesperia had already begun to quick draw his pistol when the voice cried out in the back. Within a blink one a yellow sun sparked to life and seared through the merc’s blaster. The big weequay acted off of muscle memory from that point and made the poor decision to charge the lightsaber armed Sith Lord. Golden yellow light caused shadows to dance on the far wall as her blade whirled about faster than it had any right to move. There was no weequay merc when the light’s dance came to a halt.

“I do not have time for this,” she murmured to herself while the press of people gave her an even wider berth. Bottled up rage welled up within Vesperia’s body to fuel her movements and power them far beyond anything that the plebians around her could hope to match. Her form turned into little more than a flying blur until the Sith’s boots slammed into the deck on the far side of the crowd.

The presence was stronger now. Muffled and stifled, but stronger. Icy blue eyes flicked between the few people that hadn’t melded with the crowd until her gaze found one man in particular. A zeltron. They made poor jedi due to their lack of control, but powerful telepaths thanks to their natural empathy. Likely not of the Jedi, but not evil. This one would be one of those rare kills that she actually enjoyed. Best take her time. Sowing fear in the hearts of the powerful brought infinitely more pleasure than bringing weaklings terror.

“Poor luck, Jedi.” A rare smile curled the lips of the ageless woman’s face in a way that could curdle the blood. That bottled rage and pain began to pour into the air around her until it was palpable. Static cracked between the fingers of her free hand while the other was firmly wrapped around the staff. Everyone would be ill at ease while Force sensitives could likely see her form shrouded in a thin veil of the Dark Side.

“Maybe next time. Any last words?”