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The Big, Wide Galaxy: A Star Wars Underworld Quest

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mouli said:
The whine of a speeder sounds off in the distance and there's more blaster fire washing off your armor. You sigh and duck while tossing a grenade into the loading bay that's been fenced off with some sort of sangar
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This sentence looks incomplete. This is after the datapad got backtracked
 
[x]To Sector 50-A: The derelict reactor building soars above the surroundings on that layer as if built to be a monument, and the rest of Sector 50-A cannot appreciate it. The industrial zone is a dead one, where the jobs dried up and the striking workers were herded off by security droids. Dreams lie thick on the ground here, and alive in the minds of the new inhabitants of 50-A.
[x]A Slicer or Three: Old, old friends, somehow still alive is all that she will say, her fingers flashing across the commlink's keyboard and her eyes distant with old regrets. The Muun murmurs something in solemn tones as she types in the messages and makes a call, something in her language said in a solemn singsong, an oath long remembered.
 
Warmach1ne32 said:
This sentence looks incomplete. This is after the datapad got backtracked
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Corrected, thanks.
Shane_357 said:
Did we leave that suit of beskar on that Zabrak?
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Yes. No time to search an unknown rooftop for loot.
KnightDisciple said:
[x]To Sector 50-A: The derelict reactor building soars above the surroundings on that layer as if built to be a monument, and the rest of Sector 50-A cannot appreciate it. The industrial zone is a dead one, where the jobs dried up and the striking workers were herded off by security droids. Dreams lie thick on the ground here, and alive in the minds of the new inhabitants of 50-A.
[x]A Slicer or Three: Old, old friends, somehow still alive is all that she will say, her fingers flashing across the commlink's keyboard and her eyes distant with old regrets. The Muun murmurs something in solemn tones as she types in the messages and makes a call, something in her language said in a solemn singsong, an oath long remembered.
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I'm afraid this vote is passed. The current update has different vote options.
 
[x]Cousin Rhaj: Your cousin is in armor, modern models sans beskar. With him is a troop of mercenaries in the black armor of the Death Watch. There's a heavy blaster cannon in the back of the bunker's entrance being manhandled to the rooftop. When you report to Cousin Rhaj, Redvers Buller is at his back and the fuzzy hologram of a Nemoidian nods sharply at your report. Good work, says your cousin. Get ready, says Redvers Buller. We are convinced, says the Nemoidian, wearing a captain's uniform of the Trade Federation.

I vote for this option precisely for the same reasons others avoid it. Our cousin is a slimy character, so I will be voting for whatever has a chance to put us at odds, as the promise of a conflict gets my blood pumping.

I kept my eyes on some of your quests, and wanted to get on at least one. I find this quest easier to follow than the rest because of the narrative structure as opposed to the turn-based empire building. The fictional setting is also a welcome reprieve as historical quests either make me feel inadequate when my knowledge of the subject matter proves superficial, or make the place feel like the extension of News&Politics which is not something I care about.

The sci-fi Bratva Wars is an amusing concept; the noir feel crosses it with one of my guilty pastimes and makes it doubly so.

All in all, it was something of an unexpected find, and out of the four I've seen go up in the last month, the only one I stuck with. ...I kinda want to check out the Seven Year War one, though, but I don't think I'll find the time before the New Year. The slower update pace certainly doesn't hurt this quest in my eyes.
 
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[x]Cousin Rhaj: Your cousin is in armor, modern models sans beskar. With him is a troop of mercenaries in the black armor of the Death Watch. There's a heavy blaster cannon in the back of the bunker's entrance being manhandled to the rooftop. When you report to Cousin Rhaj, Redvers Buller is at his back and the fuzzy hologram of a Nemoidian nods sharply at your report. Good work, says your cousin. Get ready, says Redvers Buller. We are convinced, says the Nemoidian, wearing a captain's uniform of the Trade Federation.

My bad about the old vote pick.
 
[x]Cousin Rhaj: Your cousin is in armor, modern models sans beskar. With him is a troop of mercenaries in the black armor of the Death Watch. There's a heavy blaster cannon in the back of the bunker's entrance being manhandled to the rooftop. When you report to Cousin Rhaj, Redvers Buller is at his back and the fuzzy hologram of a Nemoidian nods sharply at your report. Good work, says your cousin. Get ready, says Redvers Buller. We are convinced, says the Nemoidian, wearing a captain's uniform of the Trade Federation.
 
mouli said:
AN: I have a plot threaded out for both options. The reason things seem very noir-ish rather than thuggish gangsterism is more due to Mandalorians being consultant enforcers akin to certain Chechens in the early 1990s, and thereby sidestepping some of the mess. The rest of it is more me using this first arc to set the stage for what your initial crew looks like and what your character does. As always, feedback is welcome. Discussion is rewarded.
Feedback and discussion will be rewarded with XP or the character sheets of your coworkers at the arc's end. If you think this quest is good, let me know. If this is not meeting expectations somehow, let me know before you drop the quest. It'd be a big help.
Thank you for playing thus far.
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I'm not certain I understand the significance between the two options, but I want less interactions with our cousin right now.
I'm quite happy with how the noir portions are going. I'd read more Mando Mysteries. I feel you have a good feel for pacing and balancing dialog versus description. This is especially hard given being written in second person, which is an unusual perspective for fiction. You have the appearance of depth in your descriptions of Coruscant and your action scenes flow.

[x]Redvers Buller: He's singed by what seems to be a blaster's grazing shot and has a grim look on his face. His orders are terse and to the point. You did well enough he says, telling you that he's in command. Your cousin is absent and out of contact. There's whispers of levers moving in the shadows. When you mention Republic Intelligence to Buller you get a grimace and a nod. The boss has been busy, he says, as if your report confirms something unpleasant to know.
 
Coming back after last night, and thinking about things, I suppose part of the issue is that there really isn't any room for meta-gaming. It's all about what story you want. With that sentiment in mind:

[X]Redvers Buller: He's singed by what seems to be a blaster's grazing shot and has a grim look on his face. His orders are terse and to the point. You did well enough he says, telling you that he's in command. Your cousin is absent and out of contact. There's whispers of levers moving in the shadows. When you mention Republic Intelligence to Buller you get a grimace and a nod. The boss has been busy, he says, as if your report confirms something unpleasant to know.

We've had plenty of hints about what the boss has up to, and I have to wonder how Death Watch fits into his operations, but I think I might prefer to let that confrontation build some more. Things got exciting pretty quick with this last chapter, and you're saying this quest won't be too long, so I'll admit that I'm not 100% it matters. But here I am.
 
[x]Cousin Rhaj: Your cousin is in armor, modern models sans beskar. With him is a troop of mercenaries in the black armor of the Death Watch. There's a heavy blaster cannon in the back of the bunker's entrance being manhandled to the rooftop. When you report to Cousin Rhaj, Redvers Buller is at his back and the fuzzy hologram of a Nemoidian nods sharply at your report. Good work, says your cousin. Get ready, says Redvers Buller. We are convinced, says the Nemoidian, wearing a captain's uniform of the Trade Federation.
 
[X]Redvers Buller: He's singed by what seems to be a blaster's grazing shot and has a grim look on his face. His orders are terse and to the point. You did well enough he says, telling you that he's in command. Your cousin is absent and out of contact. There's whispers of levers moving in the shadows. When you mention Republic Intelligence to Buller you get a grimace and a nod. The boss has been busy, he says, as if your report confirms something unpleasant to know.
 
Vokivas said:
I suppose part of the issue is that there really isn't any room for meta-gaming.
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Isn't that a good thing though?

[x]Cousin Rhaj: Your cousin is in armor, modern models sans beskar. With him is a troop of mercenaries in the black armor of the Death Watch. There's a heavy blaster cannon in the back of the bunker's entrance being manhandled to the rooftop. When you report to Cousin Rhaj, Redvers Buller is at his back and the fuzzy hologram of a Nemoidian nods sharply at your report. Good work, says your cousin. Get ready, says Redvers Buller. We are convinced, says the Nemoidian, wearing a captain's uniform of the Trade Federation.
 
[X]Redvers Buller: He's singed by what seems to be a blaster's grazing shot and has a grim look on his face. His orders are terse and to the point. You did well enough he says, telling you that he's in command. Your cousin is absent and out of contact. There's whispers of levers moving in the shadows. When you mention Republic Intelligence to Buller you get a grimace and a nod. The boss has been busy, he says, as if your report confirms something unpleasant to know.
 
[X]Cousin Rhaj: Your cousin is in armor, modern models sans beskar. With him is a troop of mercenaries in the black armor of the Death Watch. There's a heavy blaster cannon in the back of the bunker's entrance being manhandled to the rooftop. When you report to Cousin Rhaj, Redvers Buller is at his back and the fuzzy hologram of a Nemoidian nods sharply at your report. Good work, says your cousin. Get ready, says Redvers Buller. We are convinced, says the Nemoidian, wearing a captain's uniform of the Trade Federation.
 
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Sidestory: The Muun And The Man Of Steel
  • Sidestory
    • The Muun And The Man Of Steel

    "If there is anything the Muun detest more than wasteful spending, it is nonconformity."
    -Darth Plagueis The Wise    ​

    You are Fel Tephe, and though you are born and raised on Muunlinst, the only child of two proud actuaries, you never quite seem to fit in. Your differences mostly show themselves in subtle ways: your cool disinterest in the various pitches the banks trotted out during the last years of your adolescent education, how you would spurn most offers from your classmates to go and soak up the atmosphere of the cafhouses clinging to the very bottom of the bustling Main Spire in favor of trawling the HoloNet, first as entertainment and then as a means of illicit thrills, or watching the podraces through the narrow mountain canyons where drivers still occasionally had lethal encounters with the local wildlife. Most notable of all, a desire to learn more about the other species of the galaxy than the easiest way to get them to agree to a floating interest rate that they would be prudent to reject, and a knack with blasters.

    For this, your parents mainly blame your Aunt Chira, who swans in at family reunions with stories of her work for Collections and Security. She takes a shine to you as soon as you're old enough to pepper her with questions about her job, moreso when you refuse to let your parents' horrified reactions stop you from taking deeper interest as you grow older. She begins to comm you more frequently, goes to podraces with you, even gets you into the pilot seat of one where it turns out you have a knack for fancy flying. She tells you stories of working with battle droids and Iotran veterans and even Mandalorians, soaring around distant battlefields in jetpacks and gleaming armor that seems to shrug off blaster fire like nothing. And she teaches you how to use a blaster, bringing you out to practice in the forests on the city's outskirts where your parents won't catch wind of it.

    At first you think you might follow in her footsteps. Not for you the slow, steady march from student to intern to analyst or paralegal to some comfortable office in one of the AA-rated interstellar banks, shaking down corporations for fifty thousand credits of hush money here and there or scraping away to try and beat the market and keep your clients from just buying into the Coruscant Index Fund. You want to get off of Muunlinst, and you're not enough of a savant or a brown-noser to claw your way into a position at the only market maker worth anything, the Banking Clan. But you have good reflexes and decent aim, and your slicing's turning from the clumsiness of an amateur thrillseeker into the sort of well-honed craft that might actually get you into interesting places. Places others would pay to get into.

    You're preparing your resume for a recruiter at Collections and Security that Chira knows personally, when your mother comes in, her voice thick with emotion, and carefully enunciates that Aunt Chira has died. She leaves you some money, and a message she'd recorded that arrives three days later, its signal taking a long time to bounce through the Clan's hyperspace intranet from wherever she'd been.

    "Hi Fel," she says. Not 'young one', or 'niece' or 'little glacier grub' or any of those trite nicknames. Just Fel. It makes you feel- made you feel- like she respected you. "I'm just getting ready to do another op. This one's a milk run, but it's zero-G-" she floats away from the projector, turns it to show the interior of some small starship and the military-grade vacsuit she's wearing. You can see figures in the background checking each other over like simian creatures grooming each other for lice, and in the dim blue glow you can make out how their armor shines and how the glare reflects off the t-slit visors of their helmets. "-so I've gotta make extra sure my gear's good to go. Gotta be able to maneuver in tight quarters."

    She does a cartwheel in midair to demonstrate, and you see a couple of the Mandalorians behind her-they must be Mandalorians, you've seen the armor on the holovids before- glance over before turning back to their jetpacks with a shrug. "I'll teach you how to do it when I'm back on Muunlinst, we'll get some wetsuits and go swimming together. You'll learn how to do stuff like this on your own anyway: These sorts of missions are what you can expect when you first join up with C&S." Something chirps from the cockpit, and one of the Mandos turns and gestures with obvious impatience. Chira waves them away and grins to the camera. "Looks like it's the witching hour." She says. "I'll call you afterwards."

    You spend the next few days sitting in your room, your parents tactfully avoiding disturbing you as your mother handles her own grief at the loss of her sister. But they don't know you're not just sitting there mourning. It takes a lot of doing, and you're probably only able to pull it off because the case itself was so unimportant; Chira's service record itself is protected by firewalls you're too scared to even poke at, but you find a cost analysis forwarded to the IGBC from Chira's insurance provider and take a look at it with judicious cloning of your parents' company intranet access codes.

    Collections Specialist Chira Tephe died during a botched attempt to impound a freighter whose skipper had fallen behind on their monthly payments. The crew unexpectedly donned vacuum gear of their own and ambushed the team as they made their way along the vessel's dorsal side. Tephe died, one Mandalorian subcontractor sustained minor injuries, all crew killed save for the captain and first mate who both had outstanding bounties. Impounded vessel sustained severe damage due to overzealous use of kinetic boarding tactics by subcontractors. Bounty rewards expected to cover funeral and personnel replacement costs. Subcontractors reprimanded, new Specialist assigned.

    The debt they were collecting on was seventy-five thousand credits.

    You know you shouldn't watch the attached video, but you do anyway. You see the bolt of energy slam into Chira's helmet when she leaves cover at the wrong moment, see her flail for an instant from the burns and the impact, her hands coming up too late to cover her face before she goes terribly still. The quality is so good you can even see little glittering shards of her faceplate trailing in her wake. Then one of the Mandos abruptly breaks cover, jetting over to her and gripping her by the arm, seemingly unconcerned by the shots glancing off their armor as they return fire and glide back into safety with her body in tow.

    It was probably only to recover the data from her vacsuit or something. But at least you're able to put a hand on her for a moment, to say goodbye before they seal her up in a suitably modern tomb, carved out of a cliff overlooking the sea. Seeing her lying there, in the crawlspace of stone some mason had artfully roughened to disguise the too-neat lines of laser cutting, reminded you of your history lessons, where they had walked you through a hologram of the old sepulchres on Scipio where great warriors had once been interred with their weapons and armor and the walls were carved with images of ancient battles. Thankfully the Muuns had moved on from such savagery, your teacher had told you. They had recognized that the risks of conflict were far outweighed by the profits of negotiation and harmonious trade.

    Your extended family have come out of the woodwork for the funeral, and they have the same self-righteous looks on their faces as your teacher did, even as they each take their turn to cover the tomb's entrance with a stone. Except for your mother, she just looks hollow and frail, though she doesn't shed a tear when her turn comes to seal her sister away.

    "What did she expect?" You hear Cousin San mutter to his wife, scowling as the sea spray soaks his fine black business tunic. "A child could have seen it coming. We should have brought Neret with us, showed him that this is the career waiting for you when you don't take the aptitude exams seriously-"

    As a modern Muun who is able to look back on those barbaric and warlike days with an enlightened eye, you recognize the costs you would incur by punching him in the face as hard as you could. But that doesn't mean it isn't absolutely worth it, even when your family bans you from going to the podraces anymore. It's mostly for appearances sake anyway: your mother is taking the death harder than you thought she would, and your father is trying to keep his head above water at the height of busy season, when all the Coruscanti firms are looking to renew their insurance contracts. You hear your father late one night, begging your mother to go back to work, telling her that he simply cannot meet his performance targets alone, so after a week your mother dons her business wear and marches out the door to work, doing her best to hide how listless and tired she is.

    You think for a while about the Banking Clan, about Aunt Chira dying for 75K and how it might be you doing the same thing soon. And you might be adventurous enough to brave a lap around the podracing track, and handy with a blaster and clever enough to slice into a bank's records, but you're able to admit to yourself that you're afraid to die, and even if you weren't you don't want to work for C&S anymore. Not after seeing how fast they replaced her, how they were happy to provide a life insurance payout and a beautiful tomb and a handmade ossuary for when her bones are reinterred in the family vault but couldn't give her sister two weeks off work to grieve.

    So you throw out the resume, and start thinking of another way offworld. Because there is one, there must be, and you can stomach staying on Muunlinst now even less than you could before. Shooting your way out isn't exactly an option, so you concentrate on slicing, poking around in systems, taking on a few petty, anonymous jobs: cyberstalking someone's ex, DDOSing somebody's holonet chatroom, tracking down racy emails between a married father of three and his mistress. Then you meet some friends, and the jobs get bigger.

    And then you get a call from a smooth talking voice whose breezy charm is only slightly spoiled by a voice modulator. He introduces himself as an investment broker, at the Bank. The capital letter is implied in his tone. He says he needs some help with trouble at work. Annoying colleagues and an overbearing boss, you know how it is, right? Ha-ha.

    You tell him you can't help him, and then he finally deigns to tell you about how he found you in particular. A friend in IT found something a few months ago, a network intrusion using a cloned ID from an employee at the bank. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you? Fel. Can I call you Fel? No he cannot, you say. But he can give you some jobs, sure. You'll see if you have time for them. And of course you will, because he's got you by the throat, and your friends and parents too.

    At the start it's just more small stuff: slicing into home computers, turning smart fridges and dishwashers into listening devices and sending the raw traffic somewhere. For a while all you do is hack into a series of alarm clocks and set them ringing in the middle of the night, turn kitchen appliances connected to the HoloNet into a series of domestic disasters. Great work Fel, he says. Make sure you get a good night's sleep after this one. One of my colleagues hasn't been sleeping so well lately, and her performance is really slipping. All these smart home gadgets are really temperamental, aren't they?

    Yes boss, ha-ha. And don't call me Fel. But he can still call you whatever he wants and whenever he wants, and he's got more jobs for you. You watch fuzzy traffic cam footage on your datapad of an executive's speeder suddenly veering down and right, head on into another vehicle. Merrett crows on the other end of the voice call. No system is safe from a slicer like her. You make sure that when your father gets a new speeder it has an override for the autoflight system. Not that it would really help.

    You do some more jobs, and before you know it some of them involve some shooting. You only fire a couple of times, and when you do kill someone it's some third-rate lawyer who didn't even know you were there before you put three bolts into his back and ran. It's easier than you would have thought. And you make enough money to start putting plans together for passage offworld. If you could only find a way to slip your boss' leash.

    As it turns out, he takes care of that for you when his eyes get bigger than his stomach and everything very abruptly goes tits up. It feels different shooting four people in the front when you're up-close and can look at them, especially after the shooting stops and you glimpse the words Collections and Security written on their blue armored vests and a familiar shoulder patch sewn into the green fabric of their fatigues. But you don't have much time to think when you've got to haul Iren out of there before reinforcements show up, even as he curses you out and refuses to thank you.

    Well, no problem Iren, you think to yourself, I only murdered four people for you, nothing major.

    Your boss very abruptly becomes unreachable, and as it turns out there is actually a system safe from a slicer like Merrett, because not only does her clever little trick get her kicked out of the bank's network completely, it also helpfully pings her location for a hit squad you barely manage to escape at the cost of her larynx. So you do the only thing you can: you get your credits together and skip town. The only place you can think of to go to is Coruscant, because everyone goes there. And once you get there, the only place you can think to go is down.

    The first Mandalorian you meet isn't what you'd hoped for. A middle-aged woman named Ruusaan with a bit of paunch and armor so scuffed it looks like she puts it on every morning by having a nexu wrestle her into it. She's not a pimp, she's a warrior. She corrects you very fiercely on that point when you first meet her, and to be sure she looks very warlike as she sits all day in an apartment so gaudy it wraps right back around to dingy, watching the plaza below where nervous young Twi'lek and Togruta women offer crude come-ons to the drunken, spiced-up punters and disappear for an hour or two. Sometimes she walks the plaza, swaggering in that armor of hers and the girls quail in her shadow and hand over credit chips, and in exchange she keeps anyone from getting too handsy. But she's not a pimp, she's a traditionalist. Just offering protection, like it was on the old world, before the Blonde Bitch and the Jedi came in and ruined everything. Uh-huh, sure thing. You'd rather she just shut up and let you get on with your work, rewiring the traffic cams to splice the footage.

    "It has to look good." She tells you, leaning back in a chair that looks more like a fucking throne than something you'd put in a living room. That's one thing you miss from Muunlinst, aside from your parents. Quality interior design. "The guys it has to fool, they're real serious. So it's gotta look good." You nod, and she goes back to amusing herself with whichever one of the girls is in her apartment today. Usually Lyra, who keeps thanking you even after you bluntly told her that getting rid of that automated court summons took you all of thirty seconds and was honestly just for practice with getting into CorSec's legal system. You feel dirty every time she smiles at you, knowing how terrified she is when she dances for Ruusaan.

    You still have Chira's last message to you, and the video of her death. You know logically that it's unhealthy, but you rewatch it every now and again. Probably because it helps to harden your resolve that ending up here was worth it, that taking the hand C&S offered you would have just been slow suicide. Not that slumming it with Ruusaan all day feels much better, but at least it's something. Even though the more you look at the gleaming armor of that mando who retrieved your aunt's body, the dingier she looks in her battered old suit of durasteel. The Blonde Bitch made off with her beskar set. You know that story because she made a nursery rhyme out of it that she sings when she's drunk. You start considering other employment opportunities, anything to get out of this horrid apartment where you spend all day just cutting and looping footage of Ruusaan's girls standing in the plaza in place of the brisk few hours of trade they do in the evenings.

    And then you find out who Ruusaan was trying to fool.

    You can hear the commotion downstairs as the gangsters Rusaan pays with crumbs and "free samples" start shooting at something, and that something starts shooting back with a much bigger blaster. You see Ruusaan go pale and grab her battered helmet, and before you can try to dash out of the room and make for one of the fire exits you hear the last of the shooting stop and heavy footsteps coming up the staircase. You grab a trembling Lyra roughly and drag her into the 'freshers, all but throw her into the bathtub and tell her to lie down and stay there, and then you look for an exit, see none, and shrug and pull your blaster.

    Because fuck it, why not? You're probably not a better shot than what's coming up the stairs. But it's better to at least try and shoot back. Maybe you can win. You've beaten four guards at once before, after all.

    The door flies off its hinges and a wall of muscle comes barreling in after it, holding a big gun. You make a split-second call to drop the blaster on the carpet and throw up your hands.

    The man hardly seems to notice you, though. You hear the crash of shattering glass and close your eyes against a stinging wind whipping in from the urban canyon outside, and when you half-open them again the man is simply stepping past you, pausing only to growl "Don't move." and kick your blaster away. Ruusaan, it seems, has decided for some reason that it makes sense to go out through the window.

    The gunman seems as mystified as you are, doing nothing to stop you as you turn to peer over his shoulder, seeing no immediate sign of where your employer's gotten to. Then you turn and let out an instinctive gasp because she appears to be trying to shuffle along a ledge that's about the width of a mouse droid, her visor fixed on a boxy ventilation unit just beyond. It would be quite the leap, especially since you've already seen her put away four whiskey pegs today.

    But then, she is a Mandalorian.

    The wall of muscle follows your gaze and mutters some scintillating Hutt profanity. He sighs like a parent watching their child do something stupid, but not yet dangerous. "Ruusaan." He calls. "Rhaj wants to-"

    His voice trails off as Ruusaan starts at the sound of her name, loses her balance, and topples off the ledge in a flailing, metallic heap. Usually when something like this happens in the holovids it's some criminal mastermind or scheming politician plummeting down, down down through the endless towers until they just sort of disappear into the twinkling lights below with a doppler effect to their scream for good measure.

    But this is Coruscant in rush-hour traffic, and so Ruusaan falls about maybe thirty feet before a delivery speeder going full-tilt slams into her with a metallic crump so loud you and the gunman both wince. And then she exemplifies why just about every linguistic enclave on Coruscant's lower levels has some insulting word for jumper, by careening through the lanes of traffic below like a tin-clad wrecking ball.

    "Fuck." The big man sighs, now with a pinched expression of exasperated misery that reminds you of your father doing the family's taxes when they stubbornly refused to balance. "All I wanted to do was get her to give us the money she owed." He glances over at you, his expression becoming more questioning. "Who were you? Her second-in-command?"

    You shake your head emphatically. "Subcontractor." You say, hoping desperately that he won't put two and two together about what Ruusaan would have hired a slicer with a custom datapad to do for her. "And reluctant drinking buddy." That part, at least, gets a chuckle out of him, but you see how his eyes flick to the datapad and know that he's guessed your part in all this.

    "Subcontractor, huh?" He says. "Well, your work was solid. We had to go to some very talented friends to work out what you'd done." He pauses, glancing down at the courtyard where Ruusaan's girls are milling around, confused. Some of them are still working, as if nothing had happened at all and someone else would be down any minute to take a cut of their earnings. The fatalism of it shocks you for some reason.

    "Well, we might as well salvage something out of this." He says. "I'm assuming you're looking for work as of about a minute ago, so here's your new job. Get on the traffic cams and make this go away to the best extent you can, and we'll pay you, better than she ever could. And give you new work, too." You don't ask what will happen to the girls. Just go and get Lyra out of the tub and tell her to go home. And then you get onto the traffic cams and try to figure out how to turn a falling middle-aged Mandalorian into literally anything less suspicious.

    Apparently you do a good job disguising her as an air-conditioning unit, because the muscle man, Buller, calls you for work. And he's right, it does pay much better, and the staff are more professional, and no one makes you supervise them getting a lap dance while they drunkenly hold forth on conspiracies about how the Jedi steal Mandalorian babies.

    Rhaj Taaltsa is the second Mandalorian you meet, and to be honest you also find him a little underwhelming. He's better than Ruusaan, because he doesn't get drunk on the job and he has a proper outfit with a front of his own and has the decency to find girls who put out for him because he's flashy and witty and owns a nightclub rather than because they work for him. Not that you get away from Ruusaan's trade here: there're more sad-eyed girls and boys, and this time marked with those weird tattoos of his, but at least you don't have to work with that side of the business anymore. Plenty of other work to go around, stealing secrets and hiding evidence and setting up ambushes. Lots of pulling a trigger too, although you're rarely the main shooter these days. There are other people who focus on carrying the guns. "Your specialties lie elsewhere." Rhaj says, with a winning smile and an expectant look as if he actually thinks you'll be flattered by this. Of course they lie elsewhere. You were good enough to survive getting the attention of the Banking Clan. That's something the average lower-levels gangbanger can't hope to match, even if they can shoot as well as you or better.

    You bump into other Mandalorians, and find them disappointingly dour. All long silences and seen-it-all attitudes and stoic warrior pride, as if they weren't slumming it in back alleys with touts and dealers with the rest of them. Their armor tends to be shinier, but they're every bit as grimy as Ruusaan at the root of it. You still watch the two holovids of Aunt Chira sometimes, and the more you do, the more disappointing these mandos seem.

    And then Rhaj lets slip, with great cheer, that his cousin is coming to town. Jaing, is his name. "Finally got off his shebs and quit farming on Concordia." You finally get the chance to take his measure when he stumbles into the middle of a briefing, ten minutes late. You see him give the bouncer a second glance as he passes, and find yourself glancing over at him as Rhaj drones on. To your surprise, he glances back, although you don't like the set of his shoulders when he looks at you.

    He's about average in size for a human, you know, but something about his armor and the way he carries himself makes him seem bigger than he is. You've had enough experience by now to know that the set is full beskar, not durasteel, and lacks some of the obvious upgrades that some of the Mando hitmen you've seen have added to their armor. But the sea-green color scheme and various other emblems, including some of the ones Rhaj has inked onto his employees, are obviously freshly-painted and meticulously kept. He's got a monofilament blade hanging at his waist, and for the first time since you laid Aunt Chira to rest you're reminded of the ancient caves on Scipio, the warriors lying in state with their weapons close to hand.

    Rhaj says something, and Jaing glances over at you again. You should probably stop staring. Redvers' bulk can't hide you forever. You turn back to the briefing, but to be honest you're already pretty much appraised of the situation. Rhaj doesn't go in for the usual public speaking method of 'tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.' He just tends to skip to the telling them part, and then telling them what he told them and then telling them again.

    Anyway, you're off to the Outlander Club with this cousin to meet with a contact, and he almost immediately stands out from the usual parade of mandos by asking you a question. Granted, it's an annoying question that a child could answer, but at least it's actually initiating a conversation. He seems to slump a little bit into the seat when you reply, so you throw in an insult too, just so that he doesn't start thinking he knows it all already.

    Ah, his dander is back up again. With his helmet off it's easy to read his expression and the feelings in those dark eyes of his. He's quite plainly annoyed at you. That alone you might have found amusing, were it not mixed in with something else. Suspicion. He thinks you're unreliable. A cold, calculating mercenary. You've seen that look before: you Muuns are all the same.

    Well. You let out a huff of irritation when he glances away at a fairly salacious billboard advertisement. That's quite the attitude for him to take when he's a weather-beaten provincial from a dirtball in a backwater sector who just got off the ship yesterday. Putting on airs because he's the result of Rhaj's uncle forgetting to pull out.

    Alright, well, maybe you are basically just under contract. And you're not especially attached to Rhaj. But that's still no cause for this clansman done up like a supercommando in an Old Republic war epic to go strutting around like he's the greatest thing to happen to this place since the Jedi Temple. You see him cast a critical eye at your hands working the controls. You pass the garbage speeder in front with a bit of extra panache, just to make a point. Smirk as he grabs on to the armrest for dear life, swamped by a seat designed for someone your height. He doesn't give your piloting any more doubtful glances. There we go, you want to say, but don't.

    You see him scoff at a billboard advertising a Mandalorian-run security service, and smirk again. If he finds that to be diluting the Mandalorian brand, he'll be appalled when he sees what the lower levels are like. You remind yourself to ride along with him next time you visit one of Rhaj's "franchises" that's gone native, just so you can see his reaction. The rest of the drive passes mainly in silence, save for a few more jibes from you. You've yet to meet a Mando who's quite so risible, but when you glance over and see him practically sulking as he watches the ads and the traffic fly by, caught up in a seatbelt long enough to hang himself with, you find it hard to hold back your laughter. Now he looks less like an armored mercenary and more like some sort of angry housepet.

    Then he has to go and argue the toss with you again, and takes exception to you setting him straight about the things a slicer can do. It's refreshing to see a Mandalorian smile, at least, and even more so to hear one laugh, far too amused by a casual observation. But then, small things amuse small minds. You choose not to carry that proverb to its conclusion when you end up grinning like an idiot too.

    He goes and spoils it again by trying to bring weapons into the Outlander Club. But you can't say it hasn't been an interesting drive.

    His demeanor changes when he approaches the Outlander, and you're surprised to see how serious he gets when he speaks to the bouncer in purple. You've heard Rhaj speak Mandalorian before, but it sounds different coming from Jaing: an accent that you now realize Rhaj has all but obliterated from his voice, as have the other Mandalorians you've spoken to briefly in their hurry to seem like they've lived in the city all their lives. You're even more surprised at how he wakes whatever throwaway advice the bouncer gives him. Rhaj would have just smiled glibly and tried to respond with some wisdom of his own. The cousin just listens, quietly.

    Why can't he do that when you tell him about keeping the fucking autonav off?

    The meeting with Mr. Green doesn't go as well as you'd liked. Thankfully, Jaing follows your lead and knows enough to back off and stop being so pushy when you shoot him another glare. He seems to understand the import of the situation when Green lays out his story of a gang war powerful enough to steer an election to the Chancellorship being reignited, so you know he's done at least a little bit of homework. But then he says something about a cousin and a code and the Mando's head jerks back like he's been slapped. And then he's shouting something back over the fucking awful music, something about ancient words and clansmen, and it's all starting to feel a little bit like a low-budget fantasy holovid except Mr. Green's reply leaves Jaing wandering to the speeder in a daze.

    You try and jog him into action, and once again he surprises you by showing he at least understands the gravity of the situation. Whatever family ties might have brought him here, Mr. Green's words seem to have shaken his faith in them, badly. At least he agrees to make a deal with you. In uncertain times like these, a strapping Mando in beskar makes a pretty good hedge against whatever these supposed Black Sun remnants can throw at you.

    You haven't spoken Muun in a long time, but you fall back into it easily as the next few minutes turn to a blur of traffic and jumping from one contact to the next. Your stomach seems to turn weightless, leaving you swimming in vertigo until finally…
    "What have you gotten yourself into now, sticky-fingers?" Iren says, and this time you can't hold back the laugh bubbling up in your throat, because it's been too long and even with your nervousness at reaching out to them again after your last parting was so sudden, you feel good about having somebody from the old days in your corner. A known quantity. Jaing may have weird issues going on with his cousin, but you know better than to rely on blood being thicker than water when there were only three family members you ever liked, and you haven't spoken to any of them in years. This is a different bond, forged from years of being comrades-in-arms, of a sort anyway.

    You go through a familiar dance, tantalizing them with information that you know will pique Merett's interest, if nothing else. There's an edge to the patter now though, and it leaves you irritated and jittery. You'd played a few cards close to your chest back home on Muunlinst, but all of this feels so much more distant and fraught. The Mando can sense it too, sitting stiff in his seat and craning his neck this way and that as if he thinks he'll see two Muuns in hooded black robes watching him from a balcony.

    You make a point of looking him over, particularly the blaster in his lap that he's fiddling with obsessively, but if your attention flusters him he doesn't show it. You shrug and turn your attention back towards dealing with increasingly narrow streets and alleyways. He at least shows more good sense by taking care to set up the proper countermeasures when he speaks to your old friends directly, although it's becoming increasingly obvious that his armor is even older than you'd thought.

    Still, no time to second-guess your choice of muscle. A bit more condescension from Iren, a bit more not-quite-joking banter with Merrett, and you're in position. The Mando has turned terse and serious as he checks his weapons, but it's only as he gets out of the speeder that you notice the full extent of the change in his disposition. The pieces of his armor don't so much as rattle as he moves smoothly through the winding corridors of the abandoned building, sweeping the corridors with such practiced ease for someone so new to underworld skirmishes that you half-wonder if Mandalorian parents bring their children to killing houses instead of playgrounds. He doesn't hesitate when you pull him down to duck under the crumbling wall of the mezzanine, and seems utterly unfazed as he pops up and surveys the power plant and its garrison. There really is no other word for it.

    You, on the other hand, need to take a moment when you first get a proper look at it.

    You've broken into plenty of places that dangerous groups would have strongly preferred for you to stay out of, and you've been through far more serious firefights on Coruscant than you'd have ever thought possible on a planet that served as the capital city of an entire galaxy. But this is something else altogether: the defensive emplacements that call to mind HNE footage of endless unimportant shooting wars Outer Rim worlds, the battle droids straight out of the footage Aunt Chira used to send you, the menacing heavy blasters and the hundred yards devoid of cover where the gunners will be able to fry you at their leisure before you even reach the plant's hulking facade of ferrocrete and rusting metal. It's a firebase doing a poor impression of a warehouse.

    And worse, Iren- sorry, Control, he's been anal about that designation since the three of you were still hacking smart reheaters on Muunlinst- can't seem to get into their comms network, because it seems to have been set up by a member of that vanishingly rare breed of information security consultants who are both able to accept the fact that their super-encrypted double-firewalled communications network will stand up to the attentions of a high-end slicer with about the same grace as a Jedi knight at an orgy, and able to convince the client to spring for the infrastructure of a point-to-point network rather than a cheaper option comfortingly similar to the slicing they've seen in the holovids.

    You let out an especially profane selection of Muun vocabulary when Iren points out the sniper. They might as well have been fucking invisible amid the tangle of grey stone and ductwork, and even with the helpful red marker it takes you close to a minute of looking through your binocs before you actually spot the jagged-headed fucker. For all you know, that ramshackle mess could conceal a dozen more sharpshooters and a hailfire droid. Then your big shiny bodyguard points out that she's wearing beskar. It would appear that you're completely fucked.

    But Jaing doesn't seem worried. You see him cock his head to one side, fingers of one hand almost imperceptibly drumming some complicated rhythm on his blaster rifle. When he speaks, it's with an evident note of satisfaction, his tone laid back enough that it sends a pang of irritation roiling at the bottom of your stomach. You're probably about to die, and here he is acting like it's whatever bloodsport passes for a picnic on the barren rock he sprang from. And he goes on yet again about the fucking clan markings. You wonder how Mandos ever got a reputation for fearlessness when they apparently have to double-check everything in their sights to make sure they don't accidentally waste someone who once fucked their second cousin twice removed and irreparably stain their family's honor. For all that Rhaj can be smarmy, at least he never seemed constrained by that sort of bantha shit.

    But you'll have time to simmer later. Right now you get your datapad set up (disposable, always disposable, no auto-erase program or fail-safe is better at preventing embarrassing data recovery than simply destroying the device it's stored on) and try and psych yourself up to run directly towards the most dangerous location on this entire level. You size up the distant red dot of the sniper, feel the howling wind tugging at your vacsuit. You ask the Mando if he's sure he can make the shot and the irritated "Yes" he shoots back is enough to make you shut up and stop asking dumb questions for a change.

    Even if he bags the sniper, there's still a hundred yards of ground to cross before you'll have decent cover from incoming fire. You wonder if Aunt Chira felt this way when she first laid eyes on that freighter, or when the first flashes of blaster fire revealed the debtor's stupid, desperate gamble. Probably not.

    After all, when she'd stepped out the airlock that day she hadn't had an inkling that storming that ship was the most dangerous thing she'd ever do. You can't say the same.

    You practically leap a foot into the air when the Mando snaps off a shot without warning, and then he's up and moving without even waiting to see if the shot hit home with you scrambling behind him. The adrenaline almost seems to turn your perception into a slide show.

    You're just starting to abseil down and he's already reached the ground- you can see him roll, come up neatly into a sprint as if the suit of armor he's wearing weighs nothing at all. You stumble forward a few paces and then drop at Iren's direction as the grenade arcs overhead, the concussive blast rattling your whole body for a moment but there's no time to spend checking yourself for damage because the warrior is up on his feet again, firing as he goes. Blaster bolts wash right off his armor, scattering in showers of sparks that seem to hardly check his momentum. Seeing it up close puts the footage of Chira's last firefight to shame: he seems practically invincible, a soldier from some timeless battlefield striding through it with impunity.

    A round whizzes past you from a much sharper angle, which must be the sniper's spotter coming into action. You blaze away with your pistol, not that you really expect to hit anything, and even as you let loose every profane word you've ever heard in panting breaths from the exertion of this sprint, you're able to keep a cool head by focusing on Jaing's gleaming beskar bulk, still loping ahead of you as if you were the one weighed down by a set of dense metal plates.

    Just when you start to get a grip on the terror of the situation, a low, growling bark sounds beneath the tinny din of droid blaster fire, and a much more solid projectile slams into Jaing's shoulder. You see him wince and stagger, the bolt seeming to splash against his pauldron and flow into the gaps between the plates rather than scattering as the others had done. You start shooting at the figure in front of you even before you recognize it as a Black Sun guard, because you're honestly not sure what you'll do if Jaing isn't able to press this mad charge home. Your shots are close, made slightly wild by panic and adrenaline, but Jaing recovers an instant later and puts him down with two quick shots to the head. You run past the guard without sparing a glance as his body crumples to the cold pavement like a puppet with its strings cut.

    Jaing stops running outside a fenced-off loading bay, shots still washing off his armor. He pulls out a thermal detonator and you see his shoulders slump with a sigh, as if a hail of blaster fire is the same sort of irritation as a sudden downpour spoiling a walk. He primes it, pauses for an instant and then perfectly tosses the grenade home: a few moments later you hear the thunderclap of an explosion, followed by a geyser of viscera and appendages that confirms his aim is true. The blaster fire slackens noticeably. He turns to you, looking like a sick parody of a poster for an action holovid in his gleaming armor backlit by blasterfire and spotted with gore. All you can manage amid the terror and the colony of daywings flitting about in your stomach is a stretched and brittle smile. It's at least better than looking as stupefied as you feel right now.

    And then you clue back in to Iren's countdown and scramble into the loading bay with seconds to spare. A few victims of the grenade are still moving, trying numbly to crawl away or retrieve shattered body parts or simply curl up out of some primal instinct to die quietly. Jaing moves past them with barely a look, and you do your best to ignore them too as you follow him.

    The power plant's interior is much quieter, though you can hear voices up ahead as you approach the core. By the time you stumble upon a lone guard and a trio of technicians, you don't even bother to draw your pistol as Jaing dispatches them with ease. You do at least see that the fighting has not entirely transformed him into some fearless avatar of battle when he trips a droideka's proximity sensors and reels backwards when it jerks to life. You cheerfully inform him that the droids haven't been properly reprogrammed, and smile at the sounds of his labored breathing through his helmet commlink. You barely manage to bite back a comment about helping him find a good dry cleaner as you hook up your datapad to the central console.

    You work quickly in the silence: ordinarily you'd be glancing over your shoulder every few seconds, but with Jaing covering you you feel oddly safe, even though you are crouching exposed at the center of an open platform with a small army hunting for you just a few meters away. In the silence, all you can hear is the occasional chirps from your datapad, your own fingers tapping across its surface as you deftly slice your way into a treasure trove of files, and the occasional muffled clatter from Jaing as he shifts to cover the entrance from new angles. You're impressed at how fast he manages to get his breathing back under control, controlled puffs tinnily sounding through his commlink a steady background of white noise in the still and mostly silent air.

    Wait.

    Wait.

    You feel the alarm bells sounding in your head before your conscious mind actually works out what is wrong with this picture.

    Iren hasn't spoken so much as a word since you entered the plant.

    The thought enters Jaing's mind at the same time it does yours.

    "Iren." He rasps, his voice dry and husky from exertion. Your heart begins to pound as the crackling of static is the only reply. You feel your hands turn clammy, only years of long practice keeping them steady as they skitter across the screen. So close. But all this is starting to remind you far too much of an office tower on Muunlinst. "Iren." The cousin says again, his voice growing tighter with nervousness. "Come in."

    For another few racing heartbeats, static is once again the only response you receive. And then comes a rolling cascade of muffled booms from outside, their deep bass humming in your chest even with the thick walls of the plant between you and the source. A trickle of duracrete dust showers down onto you. Moments later, the air fills with a cacophony of blaster fire, even more intense than your initial rush on the perimeter. Some very, very heavy piece is working away on the defensive positions outside: you can hear its throaty, staccato bark and a rapid whump-whump-whump of its rounds impacting on the plant's exterior walls. The rumble of heavy speeders seems to echo all around you, a steady backing track to the hellish concerto of what sounds like a full-scale battle.

    "That's military grade heavy weaponry." Your Mando muscle says, and you're once again surprised at how calmly he seems to be taking this. His next words only spell out the inescapable conclusion you've already come to, even as you frantically scramble to finish slicing into this fucking terminal: "This is a Republic operation. Judicial, maybe. Republic Intelligence, maybe. Not some gang."

    Merrett's voice cooly sounds in your ear, the synthetic buzz in her voice sounding heavy with accusation even as she retains a forced tone of total calm. "No, this isn't a gang. This is Republic Intelligence and their special operations arm." The words slam into you like a piledriver, knocking the wind out of you even as your breath comes faster and faster. The readouts on your datapad seem to blur together into a chaotic mess of flashing lights. "There won't be a Black Sun here in-" even when it feels like your world is crashing down around you, you can still tell that Merrett's pausing to check that gaudy chrono she wears on every job. Even this one. "Best get moving, Fal and Mando muscle. Before they breach." The one where she's betraying you.

    This is wrong, all of this feels so wrong. Smart groups stayed together, you'd all agreed on that. You'd all been tired of climbing the cutthroat corporate ladder that seemed to be the future of everyone on Muunlist, stabbing every unguarded back to clear the way ahead as the grasping hands of your peers tried to pry your fingers from the rungs. You'd agreed, even after you'd fucked up so monumentally in your last job at home, that you'd never turn out like your old boss, done in when his constant betrayals and mind games became too much for his bank to bear. And now here they were, the only friends from home you still had, chatterbox Iren and invincible Merrett. Here to listen to you die.

    You gulp back a panting, gasping breath, focus on the rage roiling in your gut to keep your fingers steady, your eyes fixed on your datapad, your voice reigned in to an acid-tipped point as you snap, "You sold us out." The anger sinks in further as you remember the four dead C&S men, the blood staining your hands as you tried to keep pressure on the wound in Merrett's throat. "You sold the information to RepIntel." Jaing is starting to look antsy now, but you're not done, dammit. With this datapad or your traitorous colleagues. "After all those years we worked together. You're fucking me over and leaving me to face the blues."

    "No we're not." Iren sighs. Liar. Fucking liar. "You have ten minutes to get clear and a clean zone to do so. They'll honor that side of things. We have a reliable contact." The weight on your chest eases a little at his words, even as you get angrier at yourself for believing either of them after they've done you like this. For all you know their contact could have a team waiting to gun you down when you leave, or have left a bomb on the undercarriage of your speeder. Who the fuck in RepIntel would even talk to them in the first place? Mr. Green? All these questions and the fucking download still isn't done-

    "Then we go." Jaing's voice is firm, despite the nervousness in his body language. He tilts his head to you and then motions to the droideka tree with tight, explosive movements. "Get that charging station disconnected, let's go." You hesitate for just a moment more, just a few more files and you'll be done-

    "Now." his voice is curt in its finality, and you're about to shoot back with some bile about being bossed around by this backwater farmboy who flew in yesterday, but then you see that metal mask looking back at you impassively, the dim fluorescent lighting gleaming on the tinted visor. It reminds you too much of the Mandos standing in that loading bay with Chira. So instead you say nothing, wince as you unplug your datapad and it buzzes angrily. You try to salvage at least a bit of your dignity by storming towards the loading bay without another word, but you end up feeling less dignified and more petulant when you glance over your shoulder and realize Jaing is only trailing behind you because he's covering your back.

    It's a quick rush back to the loading bay, the din of the fighting growing louder outside only stoking your paranoia. Every echo of your own footfalls in the empty corridors sounds like an entire RepIntel wetwork team is bearing down on you. You step into the cavernous space and find yourself immersed in a pitched battle. The Black Sun technical seems to have been swatted from the sky by the unmarked heavy speeders strafing the complex: the guards and B1s are firing back with everything they have, only to be ripped to pieces by the heavy blasters mounted on the vehicles. Then you hear a boom, a growling bass note breaking through the general clamor, and watch with eyes wide as a mortar shell comes arcing down with a crackling hiss, tongues of burning tibanna gas flickering in its wake. Jaing ducks his head seemingly automatically, but you're left blinking spots from your vision as you watch the round slam into the ferrocrete and briefly turn into a blazing supernova. The blast almost deafens you, though you fancy you can hear bits of B1 ping off the durasteel piping around you.

    For a moment you're left reeling. You've been in firefights before, but this is on another level entirely. There's no way you could make it through crossfire this intense because it's not just gangsters now there's military-grade speeders tearing the plant to shreds and fucking artillery and why isn't Jaing moving yet, and then you realize he's waiting on you to move first.

    Shit.

    You take a deep breath, try and recall the battle psychology Chira taught you in occasional messages and trips to the firing range. You take a deep breath. Try to stay calm. You rest a palm on Jaing's back plate, crouched next to you and as immovable as a rock. An analytical eye helps you to work out the logic behind the chaos. There's a guard post dug in, supporting the B1s the mortar shell just turned to scrap. They're trying to suppress it. A heavy speeder comes howling in and unloads with its heavy blaster directly into it, and the fire pouring out of it abruptly stops. There's another such post fifty yards or so to your right, and now RepIntel have turned their attention towards it. The storm of blaster bolts still seem impenetrable, but you know logically that the special forces are focused on this new emplacement. It's the best chance you'll have. Unless you've read the situation wrong, and then you're dead, but you don't have time to think about that now.

    "Go." You force out, and then you're up and running, and the only thing keeping you from withering at the sight of the whole world being lit up by multicolored blaster bolts and slinking back to the loading bay is Jaing's great metallic bulk behind you, fearlessly driving you onward as he too breaks into a sprint. In a moment you're through the bay doors and out into the killing zone again, and then you really don't have time for anything that isn't running, keeping your eyes fixed on the mercifully unoccupied mezzanine, or gathering vague, animal impressions of Zone 50-M tearing itself apart.

    It's loud. The blaster fire, the screams, the explosions, the speeders whirling overhead, it all comes together to form a crescendo that leaves you hardly able to hear yourself think. You feel the heat of shots whizzing past you, hear Jaing grunt in your earpiece as they wash off his armor and the barking of his own blaster rifle as he responds in kind. Some lizard part of your brain picks out the sound of the mortar firing again and fills your mind with clamoring alarm bells of some vague bad bad bad thing before you hear the crackle of the round's descent and then blinding light out of the corner of your eye. It feels like a large, excitable akk hound slams into you and combined with the shock of sudden pain in your side you totter on your feet and nearly topple to the pavement.

    The shriek of terror is only stifled by the sudden breathlessness from the blast wave knocking the wind out of you because you're going to fucking die you're going to fall flat on your face and in that moment of stillness that fucking sniper or some Republic soldier on overwatch is going to riddle you with blaster shots or maybe that next mortar round will be on target and you'll just have a split second of watching that falling star bear down on you before you're vaporized or blown to bits or cut to ribbons by the shrapnel and you've still got that ache in your side and the clothes under your vacsuit feel soaked through, is that just sweat or are you bleeding out even as you topple towards the mezzanine? But you don't fall, you keep staggering onwards and your hand doesn't come away bright crimson as you feel the painful spot on your side, just tugs at a small tear in the vacsuit so you're fine, you're fine, just grazed, and you wheeze that assessment through your commlink to Jaing at least three times because you're too focused on the mezzanine in front of you, the rappel line dangling invitingly and then your hands close around it and you scramble up and over the lip of the mezzanine.

    Something reins in the animal terror still telling you to run run run, makes you wait until you see Jaing's helmet pop up as he hauls himself up the line and scrambles to his feet. You race to the speeder, vault into the driver's seat and have the repulsors on even as Iren's voice sounds once again through your commlink. He sounds tired, you note. You can practically picture him hunched over a terminal somewhere, his shoulders slumped.

    "This is where we leave you." Like he hadn't left you before in the power plant? "You'll find that the traffic cams and monitors are disabled. Good luck." You wouldn't have needed luck if they'd just been honest with you. After all you'd done for them. But you're too busy focusing on making your escape to vent your spleen at him, and you've already punched the coordinates into the speeder's nav computer by the time the click of his commlink hanging up rams the reality of the situation home. You quickly buckle your restraints. Between the adrenaline from the battle and the storm of emotions in your head, you almost feel like you might float away. You fight off the insane urge to giggle at the madness you have just survived, focusing instead on the cold reality of what had just happened. Of what Iren and Merrett had told you, and what they hadn't.

    "I can't believe they did that." You say, too rattled and wrung out to even try and rein in the tremor in your voice. "They sold me out. To Republic Intelligence. They turned an operation." Your tone is disbelieving, and you're still trying to make sense of it in your head, even as that part of you who grew up learning about finance and the tangled world of the banks tries to chime in with all sorts of rational calculations of cost-benefit analysis and never doing business with your emotions. "We almost died." You say, and maybe it's finally expressing it out loud, but right about now your hands start to shake so badly it's all you can do to grip the steering wheel.

    "I've known them since Muunlinst." You say, still too rattled to clam up like you would usually do. "We came to Coruscant together." You'd been the reason they lived long enough to get to Coruscant in the first place, and sure, you'd drifted apart after that, but for a while the three of you had been the only people you could rely on, the only people you could trust in a city so massive that it could callously forget entire neighborhoods full of people had ever existed. You just can't get your head around the fact that they'd betrayed you.

    Maybe that's why you're saying all this to Jaing, because at least he might understand why you're so shocked. Just about every other Muun you've ever known would have understood Iren and Merrett's reasons instantly. Just like they would have understood Aunt Chira dying over a debt the size of an accountant's yearly salary, or your mother having to put her grieving aside and go back to work, or the broker getting a team of slicers to make his coworkers' lives hell. It was just business. Just a simple, rational cost/benefit analysis.

    But for all your smarts, that way of thinking in its coldest, most practical application had never come easily to you. Maybe that was why you'd gravitated towards Aunt Chira. She'd chosen an early grave and an embarrassing, dangerous profession over entering into that world of amoral calculation, because she too had known that way of thinking didn't suit her. You'd thought that it hadn't suited your comrades either, or at least that there was some line where the analyzing stopped and emotions meant something. You look back on all your memories of them, of Merrett celebrating as that speeder swerved into traffic with that helpless man aboard. Maybe you'd just been reading her wrong, all this time. You manage a shaky breath. "Merrett was-"

    The force of all your recollections finally makes your brain slam on the brakes. You turn to see Jaing watching you, his helmet still on, at the edge of his seat as if he's wondering whether to lean forward or shrink back. You can hear the hesitation and uncertainty in his voice when he speaks. "Look, maybe-"

    He's trying, at least, and that's something else you've never seen the Mandos around you do. Certainly not Rhaj, with his charm and composure. He's trying to talk you through it even though he only met you a few hours ago and he's obviously terrible at giving the usual comforting platitudes. He actually reaches up and pats the back of his helmet as if he were awkwardly scratching his scalp, and in an instant he has transformed back from Jaing, invincible warrior into your father in a suit of armor, hemming and hawing over admitting to your mother that he'd forgotten something important or self-consciously trying to make conversation with his in-laws. So much for that armor hiding his true face from the world: he's about as easy to read as a tabloid holozine.

    In all likelihood it's just the adrenaline kicking in that makes you have to bite back gales of laughter and fight a valiant struggle not to smile. The daywings fluttering in your stomach are back again, this time soaring up into your chest, and you decide that this is most definitely anger. Wry, sardonic anger at how terrible this Mandalorian warrior is at trying to comfort you for the betrayal of your oldest friends after he'd just waltzed through a battle as if it were nothing and let laser fire glance off him like spring rain. Of course.

    "Shut up Mando." You say, trying and failing to inject some venom into your voice. "I don't need commiseration now." This is good, yes, this is familiar. These sorts of put-downs are the norm for the two of you, as much as any two people can establish norms when they've only been around each other for less than a day. You take a breath and steady yourself. Back to normal now. Sniping at Jaing, the clueless backwoods Mando. Yes. "We have half an hour before cams come back online. I've set the autopilot to take us back to 43-A." Mercifully, he chooses not to restart your previous argument.

    The nice thing about the autopilot is that it leaves both hands free for you to sift through the data. "In the meantime, Jaing Taaltsa, let's see what Black Sun was doing." You quickly run down the technical data of the droidekas and Black Sun's man on the inside with the Techno Union, quick to pre-empt any stupid questions from Jaing. You can't help but shake your head a little at his impatience, but to be honest you're going to be a little irritated too if all you got out of this near-death experience was some schematics and one third of a cell structure.

    Ah. Here's something. You let out a whistle as you outline the plan. Jaing is thankfully quick to catch on that it's essentially a built-in recipe for a gang war. He's quick to offer solutions as well, bless his heart, even if he doesn't yet grasp the awe-inspiring mire of red tape which is Trade Federation bureaucracy. As for you, you're not really sure if you see an out for this situation, and after the power plant, you're not sure if you're up for a fight of this scale.

    Maybe Jaing isn't either. He might understand what the plan means, but he's new to the city, new to the underworld, even if he's not quite as helpless as you first thought he might be. You at least owe him an explanation of your plans. "I'm inclined to hand this off to Buller and wash my hands of this mess. I might sell the information about Mustafar to the Federation later, cut you in on that. I have enough contacts to get offworld again, maybe back to Muunlinst." And back into the welcoming arms of a bank's security team, in all likelihood, but you're not ready to admit to him that you still have no idea where you can go if you leave Coruscant. The old slogan may have become a bitter joke among the residents of the lower levels, but in many ways it still rang true: Coruscant. If you can't live here, you can't live anywhere.

    Jaing pauses, digests the information for a moment. The idea of you leaving his cousin in the lurch probably unnerves him, since he's still too bound up in that blood-is-thicker-than-water thinking to realize that Rhaj is using him for muscle. "Difficult." He says eventually, and you're glad that he at least spares you some kind of lecture on loyalty.

    He won't take you up on that offer, you know that now. He's going to stay with Rhaj to the bitter end, even if this plan ignites the sort of gang war that kills thousands. He turns to look out at the cityscape beyond, craning his neck, in the way that almost all beings first do when they arrive on Coruscant, to stare first up, and then down at the towers stretching high above, and then descending endlessly into the planet's core, stretching farther than the human eye can see. The dazzling city lights are reflected in the polished surface of his helmet, dappling across his darkened visor as he glances back and realizes you're watching him. You're unable to hold back a chuckle this time, as he belatedly tries to go back to looking impassive, rather than like a rubbernecking twenty something dazzled by the galaxy's biggest brightest metropolis.

    Well, you think to yourself. Maybe you can stick around for a little while. At least until all of this kicks off. Not really a rational move, you know, but you owe Jaing. And standing next to him is probably the safest place you're going to find when you're associated with Rhaj's organization.

    It's a long drive back to the safehouse, through evening traffic that the autopilot simply sits through instead of pulling out your repertoire of hair-raising maneuvers. You find yourself falling back into old habits, once more watching the video carefully sequestered on your datapad, of Aunt Chira's last firefight. You watch the Mandalorian break cover, the blaster fire washing off their armor as they haul Chira's body behind cover. You glance up at Jaing, his gaze still fixed on the skyline, and check his armor for damage from the hail of fire he'd sprinted through. There are a few black marks where the armor had been tarnished, a bit of scorching on the undersuit where the heavier blaster bolt had hit him, but for the most part it remains pristine. You lean back in your chair, and don't even realize it when you set the datapad down and just watch Jaing watch the city, an unblemished warrior, his head held high in the face of a world that had tried so hard to swallow him whole just a few minutes before.

    You take it back. Sticking with Jaing isn't irrational. It might be the best idea you've ever had.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------​
    AN: This has been simmering in my google docs for the better part of a month. I have offered Mouli the suggestion that romance is always good for player engagement on SV. Who better to fill the candidate of femme fatale in this Coruscant noir film than our lovely slicer? By the way, I feel obliged to point out that the working title of this omake was "That Forehead Do Be Lookin Kinda Cute Tho". Hope you enjoyed!
     
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