Manually added by Adept Marick Tyris

Judges, please note:

The following fiction shares the same title as Marick Arconae’s fiction entry: The Real Test: Marick. The concept was to write the same introductory scene from two different perspectives, and then branching off into their own narratives. We felt this would be a cool display of how stories can have more than one point of view and explore the Master-Student relationship. While both stories exist on their own and without this explanation, we figured it was fair to suggest that they are read in close proximity to one another.

Thank you!

The Real Test: Adem

There’s a science to almost all things, if you’re willing to look for it. I do favor looking for the romantic qualities of something, but it admittedly doesn’t get much done. Marick had been making it a point to instill this function-focused mentality into me lately, though I couldn’t tell you if it really took or not.

At the time, I found it hard to see much in the way of science or art in Marick’s callously calculated dislocations and twists of limbs that I’m certain the mercenary writhing on the ground wished were someone else’s right about then. I elected to stare elsewhere at an interesting patch of ground. He was the least fortunate member of a small, five-man patrol we’d managed to single out and ambush about a minute and a half earlier. I’d killed just one; he died of shock before Marick could get to him, due to loss of an arm at the elbow. The Shadicar had claimed two of the guns-for-hire, and our third man had peppered the squad leader to death with blaster fire while shouting “Wynning” at the top of his lungs. I hadn’t yet decided how I felt about Wyndell Tyris, I hadn’t even learned his name, but he certainly didn’t seem redundant from then on.

Marick had developed a reasonable and then confirmed hunch that the mercenary forces that had been blowing up Arconan assets for weeks were planning to compromise Bulkhead. I knew little about the place other than the fact that it was a prison facility we quietly owned, and that a mass breakout would mean the end of the Clan’s hidden presence here.

The way we moved through the streets, you’d think we were walking through the middle of someone’s nightmare, just passing through. The acrid stench of smoke swirled along Ol’Val’s ceiling, waiting to be vented out when damage control would start later. Marick explained that as far as the shadowport’s denizens were concerned, this series of attacks wasn’t especially different from others that happened with regularity between criminal organizations. Buildings explode every other month in a place like this, and we wanted to paint this situation in that kind of casual light. Even the port seemed eager to move on and bury the matter, and some carried on as if nothing was wrong.

I kept shifting my eyes between Marick and the other man, making the logical leap that he was at least some type of Human. What I couldn’t figure was whether he was similarly attractive as Marick by virtue of also being Hapan, or just winning the genetic lottery.

“Looking’s free, Grey, but a dance will cost you,” Wyndell quipped at me. “Good luck getting one out of him.”

I didn’t have a pronounced fondness for nicknames, unless I really liked the person making them up. Looking for context, I asked him “Why ‘Grey’?”

“Two reasons, first being that the color’s all over you, and second that I prefer it to ‘I-Don’t-Know’ for your name.”

“Adem. You’re…”

“Wyndell,” Marick answered for the other man, speaking the name as dryly as one would utter “taxes” or “coroner”.

Wyndell snorted. “Brother dear, I’m about as fond of my full name as you are of the rest of the family. Stick with Wyn, kiddo, you’ll like me better.”

“Half.” Marick clarified tersely, having anticipated my pending question somehow. It certainly explained some of the resemblance between two chronically pretty people. Truth be told, I already found Wyn to be a welcome reprieve from my Shadicar teacher’s consistent intensity. Also unlike Marick, he wasn’t almost blind in a dim room, just slow to see.

We had no intention of entering Bulkhead proper, via the conventional Naruba Investments corridor. Marick had also pointed out to me that the only way possible to escape from the prison is by way of the mines above. A number of intrepid prisoners were more than likely trying to find a way out, while Teroch’s forces were probably searching for inmates willing to help compromise Arcona’s presence. We’d find all of these groups in the mines before they could escape.

If you haven’t spent much time with Marick, I could understand that you might be concerned with the fact that I was following a night-blind man into the darkest place you could find on Port Ol’Val. I can tell you that if there’s one thing working closely with him and Atyiru has taught me, it’s that vision is half the necessity everyone makes it out to be. That being said, yours truly still found himself playing the tip of the proverbial spear when the mine entrance whirred open. We slipped through and sealed it behind us, and when I discovered that the lamp power supply had been sabotaged, we experienced the complete absence of light.

Now, Umbarans being so rare, we’re subject to some handy misconceptions about our vision in the dark, which Wyn promptly demonstrated.

“Sooo… Is this like, day time for you? How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two, and I can also see inside your stomach and tell you what you had for breakfast a week ago.” Total lie. “Think of it like this; seeing into the ultraviolet spectrum lets me perceive the emissive glow of objects that have absorbed electromagnetic radiation, which-”

“I *glow*? Is that bad?”

Marick sighed. “The artificial lighting that runs through these mines has effectively painted the walls with harmless radiation Adem can perceive. He sees the light’s ghost, so to speak. Let him work, and do it quietly.” I always liked the way Marick would talk about my sight, and I wonder if he would have been a poet if he had the choice to do things over.

It only took a few minutes of passing through the yawning expanse of the tunnel to start finding the scenes that had led up to the events of the breakout. The mercs knew the entrances, no doubt thanks to intelligence leaks. I stopped for a moment to examine their path, where two dead workers lay slumped against their equipment. Their assistant droid was pacing and twitching, likely sliced for access codes and discarded. Wyn kept bumping into the droid while I described the scene to Marick.

“Only visible injuries are on the neck, significant bruising, skin broken slightly. Not very much blood. Don’t smell decomposition, likely to have died very recently.” I said. I find it easy to talk about corpses. Most Umbarans separate people from their bodies without much thought, likely why we seem so outwardly macabre.

“Garroted, and they didn’t see it coming since they cut the lights to this tunnel. Teroch equips his men well, if he went so far as to shell out on goggles. Let’s keep moving.”

We finally began to see light coming from the opening into the tunnel nexus, since the power grid for the mines was compartmentalized. I squinted a bit, but I imagine Marick welcomed his sight back. Something immediately struck all three of us as odd; we didn’t sense anyone alive in the room, despite it being the most likely site for cracking open Bulkhead. A few things still made sense, like how any miners in the room were already dead, killed in similar ways to the first victims. The gaping hole in the floor was also to be expected, with the drill responsible hanging from its machine arm above the opening. Anchors were bolted around the edge of the hole, with wires descending into the open Bulkhead cell block.

“Something wrong?” I asked the Hapan when he drifted past me, walking purposefully towards the hole.

“The opposite. This is all much too familiar.” He tested one of the wires, and promptly dropped down the hollow shaft, wordlessly bidding me to follow. I was halfway down the wire and letting go to drop to the floor, my legs girded for the landing by the Force, when I heard Wyn calling after me. Something about shattered femurs being part of my training.

I had barely landed before I saw the edge of the Shadicar’s cloak whip around the corner and out of sight. Marick generally didn’t move far ahead of me very quickly unless he was either trying to imply that I was too slow and needed to apply more effort, or that something was critically wrong that (for once) had nothing to do with me and he became single minded in the purpose of correcting that.

Although I needed to catch up, the scene I dropped into gave me pause. Eight bodies were strewn across the hallway, these dressed in dark grey (slightly better for hiding in the shadows from night-blind people) and sporting masks to conceal their faces. The goggles Marick surmised would have been used were either absent or smashed to pieces. While virtually all their eyes remained open, a few were strangled and their pupils lost color when the blood vessels in the eyeballs burst, making it difficult to identify all of them as Human. Curiously enough, only two of the eight men wore harnesses for extra blaster equipment, suggesting that only two were carried, and the rest wore standard wet worker’s kit. Vibroknives and the like. The ruined computer spike still pulled towards its former owner, who lay slumped against the wall with six holes burnt into his chest.

An educated guess at what happened suggested that the prisoners weren’t as predictable as their would-be liberators had hoped. They took advantage of the small space and their superior numbers to overwhelm the mercs, and took what guns they had. It wasn’t an altogether surprising result, given the conditions Arcona created in Bulkhead. Trap a bunch of criminals with knowledge of the Shadow Clan under tons of concrete and rock for years, light it poorly, and give them nothing better to do than exercise their bodies and nurse psychosis-fueled grudges. Fantastic idea.

Marick suddenly reappeared in the hallway, startling me like he usually did, I had just learned to suppress the reaction.

“You said this was a familiar situation. This has happened before?” I asked, expecting the usual fraction of an answer.

“Right. The last person to compromise Bulkhead was myself,” Marick replied dryly as he walked past me. Well, my, my, my, that wasn’t the answer I was expecting. “The man behind this is deliberately re-enacting the Trials of Loyalty I carried out years ago. He’s trying to draw me out.”

I exhaled sharply. I didn’t want any part of old grudges, but I couldn’t leave Marick to do this on his own. “Let’s go find a ringleader.” I turned to follow him, but found his wrist gently stopping me at about neck height.

“Not happening. Your concerns are in the port. The breakout was contained. Only fourteen escapees, they’re your responsibility and Wyn’s.” His rebuttal made me nervous, and quietly frustrated me, but I knew better than to argue with him. What good would I do against someone with experience tantamount to Marick’s anyway?

Before I could say anything else, he placed a hand on my shoulder. Touch, the gentle kind anyway, was also unusual from Marick. The only person I’d ever seen him touch gently was Atyiru, but it was also different with her, like watching silent promises being made. I imagine he may have been trying to reassure me, but it felt like goodbye. Not his fault, it usually feels that way. Another person I needed, gone. I swallowed air, and he disappeared in that same amount of time.

I turned my attention back to the dead. An object can be found in much the same way as a person by way of Force tracking, you just follow the link in the other direction. I pulled the mask from the face of one of the dead mercs, and placed my palm on his forehead.

Sometimes I verbalized my visions out loud. “Objective reached. Packages secured. Clockwork. Don’t like eyes. Two to one. It would be so easy. Too many hands. Wall. Floor. Broken teeth. Boot heels. Shouting. Hands are empty. Chirp, chirp, chirp. Chest, fire. I am riddled with holes. Not like this. . . Gone.” The last moments of his life matched up with my guess. I fixed my thoughts on the rifle that was once this particular mercenary’s only hours ago, wrapped the fingers of my mind around the link, and began to follow a magnetic pull down its thread.

Wyn was looking at me with a puzzled expression when I climbed out of the pit. “Care to tell me why my dear brother goes wordlessly into the dark without his seeing eye apprentice in tow?”

“I’m just slow,” I said. “If you were locked up for several years in a place like this and suddenly got a hold of military grade weapons in a mostly lawless port, what’s the first place you’d visit?”

“Brothel,” Wyn blurted immediately, “one that’s the perfect blend of classy and trashy. The kind of place that you can feel proud that you’re there but also like it’s not too good to be held up at gunpoint.”

“Loth-scratch Hotel?” I suggested.

“Damn, you can read minds too?”

---

I had been to exactly three brothels in my lifetime up until then, and they couldn’t be more different from place to place. The first made no illusions about its reputation as a den of iniquity, and it was a very strange place for a boy of about seventeen to be following his teachers on “talent recruitment” excursions for the troupe. (“Exotic dance” was the category we were looking to fill, excuse you) The second was significantly classier, and was a self described “cabaret”. (Having failed in the first excursion, a trio of Mirialan burlesque dancers we met there fit the bill marvelously)

The Loth-scratch was somewhere in between, and Wyn’s assessment of its character was reasonably accurate in terms of how likely it was to be held up by armed ruffians. The neon sign had just the right frequency of dysfunctional flicker, the building was appropriately run down but not decrepit, and the scent of glitterstim and cheap drinks swirled into a miasmic cocktail of oppressive aromas that helped the atmosphere positively radiate seediness. You could tell it was partially a hostage situation from the street, on account of the handful of people who had managed to slip outside being in apparent distress. This being Port Ol’val, it didn’t warrant fast enough response from (no doubt already busy putting out fires) authorities to create a standoff, and it’s awkward to call the police asking them to save the local cathouse. The magnetic needle of my mind was pegged towards the inside, so at least one of the missing rifles was present.

“Tell me, Grey; do you know the best way to slip into a house like this?” Wyn asked, the semi-rhetorical nature of the question given away by his face, excited to give the answer.

“Very carefully?” I humored him.

“Well, yes, but ideally you get in the same way you get out. Quickly, quietly, and through the window.”

“Sounds like you speak from experience.”

“Have a drink with me next time you run out on a fiance you never asked for, I’ve got plenty to share.”

“Stories, or fiances?”

“Can’t have one without the other. Now, to rescue some civil servants!”

Training with Marick means that entering a building through the third floor window is essentially like taking the stairs, if we were normal people. If it weren’t for Wyn being present, I wouldn’t think it was anything special, but it took him noticeably more time to bound between the walls and scamper up the climate control units of two adjacent buildings on the opposite side of the street from the Loth-scratch. We both took Force enhanced leaps across the gap when we were confident no one below would look up long enough to see us doing so. Aside from him having to scramble over the balcony a bit and quietly panting “Wynning”, it went off without a hitch.

The first of our quarry was moving through the upper hallway, visibly intoxicated, and I was ready to move behind the nearby bed to get out of sight, but Wyn stopped me. He gave me a wink, and his body began to swiftly disappear, melting into invisibility starting from his toes all the way up to his head until he was out of sight. I’d seen Marick do this countless times, but what I didn’t expect was to also disappear myself. The prisoner walked out of sight, having never noticed us, and we became visible again.

“See,” Wyn whispered, “I can do it, too.” He was the first Jedi I’d met since Siobhan who could share his abilities this way. I did my best to put the past out of my mind.

Wyn’s eyes shifted back and forth, and he leaned in to whisper further. “I’m going to show our friend in there the girl of his dreams. You just have to give him a bit of a push. We all need one every once in awhile, don’t we?” I nodded, and shifted across the room to the doorway in a liquid movement. Sure enough, the recently liberated thug started grasping at a specter hovering above the gap in the stairwell. I coiled the Force around my bones and sprung from the legs to tackle him from the back. He flipped over the waist-high railing, and loudly bounced between several flights of stairs on his way down to the ground floor. He landed on his back and sprawled out, very much unconscious.

You might be wondering why we were making so much noise after such a quiet effort of entering the building. After all, if that was the idea, shouldn’t we have gone through the front door? Marick had claimed that the most important advantage you have when hunting men like this is a psychological one. Sending a message that indicates your presence early on gives them time to consider things; your reputation, what you just managed to do to one of their men, the fact that no one noticed your entrance. In response to seeing one of their own injured, groups tend to adopt one of two strategies. Some spread out and try to find whatever it is that’s hunting them, but also isolate themselves and become vulnerable to being picked off, one by one. This group of prisoners decided they were better off bunching up in the main lobby and daring us to make a move.

We crouched on the second flight of stairs and watched the thirteen remaining prisoners huddle in a circle, looking for something to come pouncing at them from any direction. The working girls remained on the floor, close to the walls. I was pleased to see that two rifles were present, both the one unaccounted for, and the one I’d been tracking. The other prisoners were rather lightly armed, with only the occasional pipes and vibroknives. One, amusingly, carried a two-by-four as a makeshift cudgel.

Wyn nudged me. “How does giving them a nice show sound?” I gave a silent but enthusiastic nod. I definitely liked Wyn’s style by now. “I’ve heard the girls here are real monsters if you catch them on a good night, downright scary. How are you with illusions?”

“Decent. What do you have in mind?”

“Well, we set a scene. We already have our actors. You just make sure that the real girls stay put, and follow my lead on the matter of their stand-ins. Then, we play clean up crew.”

“Got a plan for that too?”

He tweaked some settings on one of his blasters. “Gotta learn to be a bit spontaneous now and again, Grey, just get them close. Not *too* close,though. Doakes and I will help them take a nap.” I elected not to pursue any line of questioning related to Wyn’s infamous “Double-D” naming scheme of his beloved pistols.

I shifted down the remaining flights of stairs, careful that the gaggle of panicked prisoners didn’t notice me. There were partitions between the walls and the main lobby, and I ducked behind them, warning the girls huddled there to stay put. I looked around the corner and up to see Wyn winking at me from the second floor, which meant we could start the show.

Projecting a very good illusion into someone’s head is difficult to do without a lot of practice and at least a little time to prepare. You’re fabricating a reality for a moment, and that difficulty is compounded when you’re trying to do it to a group of people. Thankfully, half was all I needed to cover. Wyn’s game was apparent almost immediately; from the forms of the hapless working girls sitting in the floor sprang monstrous versions of them, some transforming into nexu or wampa shapes hybridized with the bodies of women and slowly bearing down on the prisoners. I went for insectoid looks, which definitely upset the man with the blaster I tracked, since he fired numerous poorly aimed shots in a vain attempt to hit something that wasn’t there.

Wyn made his move. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, and he could reach it from the second floor. He leaped, wrapped his fingers around the metal frame and held on for dear life as he fired a blaster from his free hand at the prisoners. The thugs scattered as bolts burned into the floor, a shot or two managing to graze a couple of them. One made the mistake of approaching my partition. I watched his shadow grow until he was close enough to reach. My fingers wrapped around the cold, engraved surface of my lightsaber and it sprang to life in a yellow flash and a snapping noise. The blade burned through the paper stretched across the partition with ease, and pierced the former inmate’s elbow. My arms shuddered with a surge of the Force, and I punched through the rest of the thin wall to pull him through and throw him to the floor, smashing his face into the hardwood with a knee drop.

“Cut it!” Wyn called, dropping from the chandelier to the lobby floor, and he ducked behind another partition to avoid the prisoner with the blaster. I took aim for the chain that suspended the lighting apparatus, and hurled my lightsaber at it with telekinetic aid guiding its course. It spun rapidly, a “whup whup whup” sound emanating from it with every rotation, and sliced through the thin metal almost as easily as it did the paper. The chandelier plummeted down into the center of the room, and one poor guy wasn’t fortunate enough to escape it when it came crashing down onto his leg, trapping him.

I wouldn’t have time to summon it back, however. My mind was a live wire, and sparked to warn me of something unseen closing in from the left. I sidestepped a haymaker punch, shifting to my right. I carried the momentum of the movement and spun on my right foot to bring my left around, bending at my hips to raise it high and kick the prisoner in the back of the head. It was a hard knock, and he bumped into a column, but turned around and moved towards me. Now, he just looked angry. I took the initiative this time and rushed forward, this time kicking from the left foot. He managed to backpedal, and my right heel nearly brushed his nose. He wasn’t fast enough for the left foot that followed and crashed across his mouth a split second later. My body still parallel to the floor and held there by the motion, I kept the spin going and brought the Force-imbued right leg around again. My heel smashed into his temple with crushing force, and his limp form slid across the smooth floor before coming to rest at the fallen chandelier.

“Gun!” Wyn called, and another spark told me to duck the fast approaching bolts of plasma that were eager to punch through organs I needed to live. He was trailing me, and I ducked repeatedly as I ran around the circular room behind the partitions, the scent of burning paper hounding my every step. Thankfully, the prisoner’s volleys stopped when he made the mistake of turning his back to Wyn, and was quickly stunned by two well placed shots.

The sound of splintering wood and tearing paper preceded someone tackling me before I had the chance to recover. He brought me to the floor, and we rolled a couple times before I found myself on my side. He had one arm free from trying to hold me, and a distinct humming sound paired with a flash of metal told me it held a vibroknife. I cast my eyes to Wyn, who couldn’t help on account of being tied up trying to keep prisoners from getting close to him and making sure he wasn’t shot himself by the other rifle that remained in play. While my wrists were pinned, one of my hands was free to contort into a focus gesture, and I released a telekinetic push that knocked my aggressor clear of me for the moment.

I’d barely managed to get to my feet before my mental switchboard lit up again, and I moved just enough to let a blow meant for my head break across my back instead. The sound of wood clattering to the floor paired with looking behind me confirmed my worst suspicion; not only did I get hit, I was hit by the guy using only a cheap piece of wood as a weapon. Marick could never hear about this, and if Siobhan ever did, she’d never let me hear the end of it. I brought a hand underneath the clasp of my cloak and released it, pulling it off of my shoulders and throwing it at his face as fast as I could. Dirty, as tricks go, but at least he was blind now and I was embarrassed as it was. I closed in on him, placed one hand on the floor and then the other soon after, hoisted my lower half up and swung the weight of my entire body in a spin of my legs. Both of them cracked across his skull in quick succession, and when I was facing him again, I swung my right leg around to the left and into his ribs at high speed. I pulled my cloak off of his head when he hit the ground and tried to shake his blood, sweat, and spittle out of it.

Somebody calling about scalping me on account of unfinished business got my attention. Mr. Vibroknife challenged me again, undaunted. We were both panting, and I took the precious seconds the standoff offered for a moment to rest and optimize my body functions with the Force’s help.

I remembered some advice Marick gave me some time earlier. “When fighting someone using a blade, short ones in particular, you have to prepare yourself for the inevitability of being cut or pierced if you close in on them. Improvise to protect a hand so you can have one arm you are unafraid to reach for their weapon arm with.”

I wrapped my cloak around my left hand and wrist, and closed it into a mitt. Not a dexterous tool anymore, but a useful blunt one all the same. The guy with the knife surged forward, and I sidestepped to the left, grabbing the back of the knife and his hand. I heard the sound of fabric ripping, felt the blade shaking. My right elbow gouged into his eye, and I spun around to swing my wrapped left hand into his face. I prefer not to punch, too easy to injure my hands that way, and instrument strings are murder on broken fingers. I torqued his weapon arm behind his back and pulled until he dropped it, before kicking his back and calling for Wyn. Mr. Vibroknife walked into a single stun bolt, which hit him square in the chest, and he fell flat onto his back.

Wyn really was something impressive to watch, for all his grandstanding. Two assailants armed with pipes for bludgeons bore down on him from the same direction. In the span of my few free seconds of not getting whacked with boards, I saw him take both down, but this time without firing a shot. Wyn blasted the first man’s legs out from under him with a telekinetic burst. The other, he waved a hand at as a focus, and “reminded” the prisoner of how much he disliked his old neighboring cell occupant. Sure enough, the pipe was swung repeatedly, not at Wyn, but at the poor prone escapee’s exposed back. Wyn then pulled out a shiny orb, one of his glop grenades, and threw it at them. The grenade exploded on contact, covering both thugs in a thick adhesive foam and completely subduing them.

He grinned at me, calling “*Wynning*” once again. His face turned, and “Wynning--” turned into the warning of “--Gunning, gunning!” at about the same time the Force alerted me. We’d subdued one of the riflemen, but not the rifle itself. Again I had to run, then dove to the floor to knock over a table and huddle behind it. I tried to catch my breath. Where was my lightsaber? The knife was back in play too, when I saw it glinting out the corner of my eye from the left. The man holding it was wary of me, and waited for my eyes to move away.

Without moving my head, I called to Wyn. “My weapon? Seen it?”

“Glowbat, right. . . uh. . .” the answer came.

“Now, Wyn, preferably now!”

“Got it, here you go! I don’t want it!” I heard him grunt upon throwing the hilt as if it were a smoldering hot coal. His face had gone a bit pale too, but I did not have time to ponder why. I turned my head to get a fix on it when it fell to the ground, clinked, and rolled a few feet away. I knew the thug would make his move, so I reached out a hand and drew the lightsaber back to me with the help of the Force. It felt warmer in my palm now than when I held it last, and it *snap-hissed* to life just in time to swing it across my body and slice through the prisoner’s wrists, relieving him of his hands midway through his attempt to plunge the blade into my chest. I rose to my feet, focused my thoughts on his stunned body, and telekinetically flung him out the nearby window.

I’d like to take a moment here to acknowledge that, yes, the notion of non-lethally subduing someone with a lightsaber is pretty ridiculous, but it certainly has been done. Has been for thousands of years. Even as far back as learning under Bo in the troupe I understood that Jedi tried to approach taking someone down by degrees. Where words fail, take their weapon, and where that fails, take the arm that holds it, and if even that should fail, take their life. I’d killed, even in days as early as this, but it was never my decision to do so. Sometimes, one dies of shock from dismemberment, but that wasn’t my fault.

Even under Marick’s tutelage, I could never have resolve enough in anything I was doing or representing to be willing to directly take life the way he would. Where I would take a hand, he would take a head. He didn’t treat death lightly, or enjoy killing, that’s a common misconception about assassins. He didn’t treat death in any particular manner or light at all. Killing was a straightforward business transaction for Marick. Maybe the infamous *Deadheart* was to blame, but it was something about him that scared me. I could only hope for his sake that it scared him, too.

I reversed my grip on the lightsaber, the yellow blade held behind me and close to the back of my arm. Easier to swing in tight quarters, or move across terrain without hitting things. I saw two more prisoners in the rotunda created by the partitions surrounding the lobby. The first was blasting away with one of the rifles at a lovingly crafted illusory clone of yours truly, which Wyn had manifested on the other side of the room. The other was rushing at me with a splintered wooden scrap taken from one of said partitions. I charged the wall to his right at an angle and ran a few steps along it, carrying me over his shoulder. I twisted in the air and slashed through his weapon arm in a smooth motion. My feet hit the floor shortly after, and I rushed toward the still-distracted gunner with amplified speed, my body low to the ground to avoid the other thug with a blaster in the middle of the room. I dropped to my knees and shins, and the slick material of my bodysuit slid across the smooth hardwood without encountering much friction. Once underneath the rifle, I flicked my lightsaber upwards and sliced it clean in two, much to the surprise of the man holding it. I whipped my leg around and hit him in the back of the neck, sending him tumbling to Wyn’s nearby foot. He promptly planted a foot on that same neck and fired two bolts, thoroughly stunning the poor bastard.

“Mind your eyes, Grey!” Wyn called to me, one hand outstretched and the other occupied with a blaster. I buried my face and very photosensitive eyes in my cloak, still wrapped around my arm but my fingers having accidentally torn through it with amplified strength. I heard a few yelps close behind me from the working girls, but also a male one that was almost as high pitched. I turned around to see one red bolt collide with the thug’s knee, and then a blue one hit him in the chest and zap him into unconsciousness.

“That’s one former adventurer.” Wyn quipped, then turned his attention to the remaining prisoner with a rifle. He was panicked, firing at random in all directions, even up at the second floor for fear that either one of our phantoms or more monster prostitutes (monstitutes?) would rear their heads.

“You can. . . do the. . . honors.” I said to Wyn, between breaths, and deactivated the saber, figuring I was finally done.

“Perish the thought, my friend! He’s scared silly, doesn’t even see us. He’s the grand finale, the fireworks at the end of our show!” At this point, even I thought we were overdoing it a little, but I was too tired to be snide. “Besides, he’s out of stun range. Say, you’re not all that heavy, are you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I thought it would be fun to throw you at him.”

“*Excuse me*?”

“Come on, it’ll be great! You get to know what Wynning feels like!” He took a knee and held out an arm. He reminded me of Bhan; she’d never take “no” for an answer either. So, against my better judgment, I humored him.

I could feel that he had a hard time holding even my weight when I stepped on his leg. Wyn wasn’t all that strong in body on his own, but I felt the Force in his arm when the equal and opposite reaction came, and I soon found myself flying backwards. I twisted my front to face the floor and then shifted my weight into a forward flip, my hand tight around the lightsaber hilt and thumb sliding over the activation switch. I was going to land short of him. My feet hit the ground at the end of the rotation and I carried the momentum into a roll. When I came back up, I was close enough to strike, and snapped the lightsaber to life. The power of the entire movement carried the blade straight through both of the last prisoner’s knees and cut his legs out from under him. They sailed a few feet away while his body crashed to the floor. I came to rest on one knee after the stroke, the blade still humming as I held it in front of me and my lungs sucked air.

“Though he be modest in stature . . .” Wyn’s voice rang in a singsong tone, and he kicked the only conscious prisoner, the one trapped beneath the chandelier, directly in the head as he passed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“. . .And. . . mild. . . in temper and. . .style of life. . .” I breathed as I continued the quote.

“His arm be almost as fierce as his wife!” we said in unison. “Summer’s Eve Soiree” was a popular comedy, but I wasn’t expecting to hear it from anyone even loosely related to Marick. Wyn was definitely alright. Gradually, some of the frightened girls around the rotunda got to their feet. He held out his hands and moved them awkwardly in an attempt to make a calming motion.

“Everything’s fine, we saved your. . . uh. . . place of business.” A cursory look around the lobby suggested otherwise. “Try very hard to forget everything that just happened, particularly the Jedi you just saw, maybe take a nice bath or something. . .and. . .I really, *really* hope somebody can pay for all this. You put an effort into it and. . . uh. . .it’ll be as good as new! No, better than new! Make a proper cabaret out of this place, and you’ll be way too classy to wind up hostages again, I promise!”

---

Hours later, Marick finally materialized at the spaceport. We caught up to him, and Wyn left us alone to talk for a few minutes. Besides, he was mildly tipsy after stopping for multiple victory drinks at half the bars in the port, and went on singing as he strolled along the dock.

I looked at the Shadicar’s face. “Fall down the stairs?” I asked. He wore a bandage over a broken nose, with scratches across his forehead and a split lip. Still, even facial injuries did little to mar natural Hapan looks, and it was likely to heal within a day.

“Something like that. You got here quickly.” he answered nonchalantly. The tension was gone, he was safe. I wasn’t interested in the details of what happened, and I don’t know how much he would have told me to begin with.

“I had some help.” I replied, producing a vial of Marick’s blood I kept in a thick casing on my belt. I had drawn one for each member of Shadow Gate, (some secretly, some by consent) and kept a few taken from people from as far back as the troupe. Marick’s blood was entrusted to me by the Shadow Lady herself, though I hadn’t deigned to inform him of that. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

A flash of something like a memory danced across his ice water eyes. “Don’t be. It’s the exact kind of tool I’d expect you to use.” A long silence drifted by. You can feel and hear the absence of wind aside from drafts on Port Ol’val. It’s a bizarre sensation. “You did well.”

“It was nothing special, really.” Taking compliments from Marick was as awkward for me as he was at giving them. It wasn’t easy to take pride in brutalizing and recapturing those men for reasons beyond Clan loyalty, though I suppose we stopped them from doing harm to people who had nothing to do with the Clan at all. I held fast to that notion.

“All the same.” Marick turned on his heels, but didn’t start walking just yet. For the second time that day, he placed a hand on my shoulder, and applied gentle pressure for a moment before he let go and walked away. It had significance, meant something. That in particular, I would never doubt about him.

I stood by myself for a bit, slowly breathing cold, dull, recycled air in and out. I knew I would sleep like the dead that night. Maybe even have a good dream. When I turned around, I saw Marick still walking a ways down the dock, Wyn trotting along close behind. They were still there, and that was the only thing in the galaxy that mattered, then.

Adem could scarcely believe his eyes watching the shards of glass tumble in the air, along with the man they were following eighty stories down to the ground. Beven was this Umbaran man’s name, and he was just shoved from his office window to his gruesome end by the invisible hands of a pair of fourteen year old boys. His head struck a speeder in traffic on the way down, instantly killing Beven and sending his corpse into a spin, as if it were a macabre pinwheel. The body struck a building corner before finally coming to rest in an alleyway. A rather humiliating end for a man three castes away from being within grasping distance of the Rootai council. One of the boys, Solis, turned his face back to his twin, Adem. The odd sensation akin to looking into a mirror had been all but forgotten by the brothers years ago, but in this moment the feeling was resurgent and powerful. The expression they mutually wore was somewhere between horrified and exhilarated. In this sense, the brothers were of one mind, half their thoughts rooted in the grim reality that they had killed a man, and the other half dreaming that the winds of change may finally have shifted in favor of the twins.
These events had started innocently enough. Lowborn Umbarans within the bottom twenty castes were a hopeless lot, and the Bol’era parents had fallen there from the fifty-seventh caste after a legal dispute over whether or not their company employed a smuggler (and were unfortunate enough to get caught doing so) ended in results that were decidedly unfavorable to their family. The minor detail that the couple was carrying a child somehow managed to be relevant during the legal process, and it was supposed that was what had prevented the Bol’eras from being executed for their crimes. As is so ubiquitously the case, the technological opulence of the upper castes, the small world that the rest of the galaxy was allowed to see, typically came at the expense of the lower half of castes. The work was industrial, and the living conditions squalid. At the bottom rung of Umbaran society lived the true Shadow People.
It was a true addition of insult to injury that the child was conceived in paradise, and was doomed to be born in perdition. That the Bol’eras happened to birth twins seemed a further twist of the knife. There is a certain poetry in that something beautiful can grow out of something ugly, in this case brilliant Force sensitive children born from mediocre Force deaf merchants-turned-mill-workers. Solis was the eldest child by seven-minutes-and-twenty-nine-seconds-and-don’t-you-forget-it and styled himself as the dominant half of the two boys with his exceptional talent and intelligence. Adem was a decidedly passive second son, and while likely every bit as prodigious (for a street urchin, anyway) as his brother, he was content to let Solis make most decisions and take responsibility for both their successes and failures.
As they grew up, the boys saw less and less of their mother and father, who had taken up a full time residence at their workplace by the time the twins were eight years old. The children had the better living quarters however, situated in the rafters of an abandoned warehouse that the business district of town had built up around. They lived off of an infrequent stipend of supplies and rudimentary education materials their parents would deliver personally. These supplies would later be brought on their mother’s behalf, since she had to pick up her husband’s slack after his untimely death in a workplace accident when the boys were twelve.
Solis and Adem supplemented their livelihood as poor children tend to do; by embracing early years of petty crime. Solis had a pair of very deft hands and fast legs, while Adem proved an excellent distraction as an accomplished climber and a wit as quick as his brother. Their exploits were the source of some notoriety, though most people were slow to work out how the same boy could be in two different places at once. It also helped that the Bol’era twins were blessed with unusually good fortune, as is so often a misattribution of those who are strong in the Force at an early age. It was always something; subtle intuition that something was about to go wrong, a mark completely believing a rather slipshod and hasty sob story, one brother frequently guessing what the other was thinking, and so on.
It did come as a surprise to both boys when one morning Solis found his eating utensils making slight movements of their own accord. Adem was in the habit of leaving his water glass just out of reach when he fell asleep and hated getting up to retrieve it, but he was alarmed to find that it had slid across the floor into his hand when he woke up thirsty for a drink. Fear turned to morbid curiosity, and the twins refined this talent with long days of practice over the late months of their thirteenth year. With focus, they could manipulate objects of various size, as well as quickly draw things towards themselves and push them away. Solis learned how to emit a dazzling flash of light from his hand, (nearly blinding the light sensitive Umbarans several times in the process) while Adem found he could surround objects with darkness. It wasn’t long before Solis began to formulate ideas of how the twins could improve their lot in life with their new bag of tricks.
“Did you catch the business holos this week?” he asked Adem during a morning of mentally bending utensils.
“No, the billboard they usually play them on in Deechi Square was acting up again.”
“Did you bother to look anywhere else?” Solis asked. Couldn’t his brother take the initiative for once in his life?
“It’s the safest place. Anywhere else I’m not touching. News isn’t worth getting stabbed over by some glit biter.” Adem shrugged. Solis seemed intent on rocking their boat more vigorously all the time. Sure, life wasn’t as great as it could be, but at least things were easy. With change always came pain.
“It seems dear mother’s branch has some new management coming in. A fellow named Beven, strikes me as the yes-man type shooting for a chance as a Rootai lapdog. Guess who got their hands on a rumored set of holos depicting said lapdog’s history with the sale of death sticks?” Solis smiled, a small tape suddenly between his fingers with the help of some sleight of hand, while Adem listened to the sound of the gears turning in his brother’s head.
“You want to strong-arm this guy into giving mom a lift out of the mill, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. Bump her up a few castes, maybe the forties or so. She might have to work accounts for a while, but at least it’s close to what she used to do before we were born. She could work to retirement doing something she kind of likes and it won’t kill her one day like dad. Maybe even better than that! We could cheat our way into a fortune!” Solis pitched the idea with an excited look, while Adem’s face was troubled.
“I don’t know, she’s in a foreman position now. Thirties aren’t bad castes.”
“Don’t give me that! She deserves better, so do we, and you know it.” Solis rose to his feet and Adem knew that there was no debate to be had here. “Come on, Adem. I just want to make her happy, to make our lives what they should have been.” He extended a hand to his brother, as part of their pre-scheme ritual.
Adem took a deep breath and stood up to take Solis’s hand. “I can’t let you get killed by yourself.”
Solis smiled. “Misery loves company.”

The plan was foolproof, by a teenager’s definition of the term. Beven had a cushy office a couple blocks away from Deechi Square, where most of the buildings approached one hundred fifty stories. His office sat on the eightieth floor of the Cellic Millworks Administration building, which had embarrassingly poor security. Solis and Adem had broken in several times before to make adjustments to their mother’s salary and hours in her favor. The guards who couldn’t be tricked could be bought, the exterior of the building was covered with old disused piping and easy to climb architecture, and it sat close to several buildings that were even less secure. The idea was to slip into an old elevator shaft to reach the eightieth floor, where Solis suggested that they could disguise themselves from the security cameras with some of their light tricks. Solis had also been practicing his hand at slicing computers; once inside Beven’s office, uploading a copy of the incriminating holos and setting them to release to the public and the Cellic board of directors on a timer (unless Beven acquiesced to their demands, of course) would be child’s play.
The early parts of Solis’s plan went perfectly, and scaling the elevator shaft came as naturally to the twins as breathing. Breaking into the hallway, however, wasn’t terribly subtle, as both boys came crashing to the floor after breaking through the ceiling.
Apparently unhurt, Solis moved to his brother who lay in the debris, coughing up dust. “You okay? We have to keep moving!”
Adem clutched his shoulder. “I think I hurt my arm.” Specifically, he had dislocated it, though neither brother had any idea how to treat such an injury.
“Can you still do the. . . uh,” Solis wiggled his fingers, “darkness thing?”
Adem tried to move his arm to no avail. Solis’s face tightened and he cursed, then he pulled his brother to his feet by his good arm. The dust cloud from the old ceiling actually worked to their benefit, hiding them from the view of the hallway cameras while they fumbled along the walls looking for Beven’s office. Upon finally finding (maybe) the right door, Solis produced a battered datapad and took a few moments to slice the lock open. Adem nervously looked down both directions of the hall, very aware that the cameras could probably make out their figures through the dust as it began to settle. There would be no question that there was a break-in at this point, someone would be certain to come investigate soon. At least the door opened smoothly. The brothers shuffled inside, and noticed too late the orb on the ceiling which held a camera inside. Panicked, Solis tried to blind the camera. He extended a hand and released a flash without warning his brother or hiding his own eyes, and the bright flash left both brothers stunned on the floor for some time.
“Just what do you think you’re doing in here?” the weaselly voice of a man came from the door. His figure was blurry, but Adem guessed it was Beven. “The nerve! I have grounds to shoot both of you here and now!” There was a possibility that he was serious; Adem watched the official reach across his body for something while he approached. Beven grabbed Adem’s dislocated arm, wracking the boy’s body with pain. Adem felt something cold press against his temple for a moment, before he heard Solis grunt and tackle Beven to the floor. Beven stood up first, and Adem reached out with his good arm and let fly a column of air, sending the man tumbling backward into and over his desk. Solis recovered and sent a wave of his own, pushing Beven into the window. Before realizing what they were doing, both brothers made one more telekinetic push, which was enough to shatter the window and unfortunately took Beven with it.
There was a long silence that Adem finally broke. “Ooohhh frakfrakfrakfrakfrak *frak*! What did we just do?” If someone was going to panic, it might as well have been him.
Solis wasn’t altogether relaxed himself, but tried to calm his brother. “Adem, stop. Calm down, everything is going to be okay! You can do this.” The brothers tried to catch their breath, but their situation was certainly less than optimal. They looked down from the ledge where the window once was to find two things; one being Beven’s crumpled body far below them, the other being a ledge they could slip down to. They managed to clamber down and leap across a gap to an adjacent building, though much beyond that was out of the question. The legs of both boys had taken a beating in the process.
“At least the cameras didn’t get us, right?” Adem breathed, the question asked hopefully.
Solis half-smiled and nodded quickly. “Right, right. Of course not.” Their hopes were dashed immediately after they looked out the window to see the image of their entry into the office plastered all over the billboards.
“Fraaak.”
The boys sought familiar ground near Deechi Square. Already they had given up any hope of returning home and recovering their things. Getting offworld was the only hope they had of escaping their fate, but that was a difficult prospect for any Umbaran. Generally, only the Rootai and those close to them were free to come and go as they please, and visitors of the legal variety were exceedingly rare. On the other hand, at least the brothers did live close to a hub of illegal transportation. The bad news on that matter was that they couldn’t pay.
“Anywhere’s better than here, right?” Solis suggested, his smile tainted with worry. Adem nodded limply, but his feet were dragging. Solis was pulling him more than he was walking for himself. How much more wrong could things have gone? Getting out alive was barely worth considering as a possibility.
A massive storm drain was a leftover from an abandoned civic project to improve the sewage system, but there was still a gigantic metal hole in the ground hundreds of meters across, and someone needed to find a use for it. As it so happened, the drains were large enough to fly most freighters down, where they could dock just out of sight should the authorities ever bother to come looking. Would-be passengers like Solis and Adem would come and go by riding crane loads down, though in their particular case they made sure to hide under a tarpaulin on the way. When they at last hit the bottom, Adem noted that the place smelled remarkably like a sewer despite never getting the opportunity to become one officially. The boys limped off of the lift and did their best to look inconspicuous. Odd lights and faint music came from inside one of the freighters, and Adem couldn’t shake the feeling that particular ship was watching him.
“This was a mistake,” Adem said quietly, scanning the room surreptitiously and rubbing his shoulder, “we don’t know anything about ships.”
“You are no fun when you’re right, you know that?” Solis replied sharply.
“There are probably slavers down here.”
“Cut that out. Seriously, you are not helping.”
“We can probably spot them by deals that are too good to be true, maybe?” Do note that despite Adem’s lack of insight on the slave trade, he wasn’t far off the mark, though slavers more often make offers that cannot be refused.
“Doesn’t matter, we have to go back for mom first.” Solis said, his voice more hopeful than it was resolute. Adem, on the other hand, tended to lapse into cold pragmatism while in a dark mood.
“Solis, you and I both know we’re not going to have another chance.”
“What did you just say to me?” The boys stopped dead in their tracks. Adem feared for a moment that his brother might excuse himself as his crutch. More and more eyes in the makeshift hangar began to fall on them.
“They’ll catch us like rats before we get halfway to the mill. Even if we did reach her, we’d never make it back here.” Adem watched his brother’s eyes fill with horror.
“How can you say that? They’ll kill her! They always punish *someone*!” Solis’s voice rose. Any hope of going unnoticed was disappearing.
“That’s why we have to go, or we die with her! You think she’d want us to make a sacrifice when we had the chance to do what she never could?” Adem raised his voice as well, though his words surprised and somewhat appalled even himself. Instinct, fear and the will to live ruled him in that moment.
Solis grit his teeth and swallowed cutting words. His brother was right, so horribly correct. Unfortunately, the boys were in company only polite enough to let the fraternal spat die down before the vultures watching them finally decided to approach. A look into the nearest smuggler’s eyes suggested that he had seen the billboards and realized who they were.
“You lost, boys?” he asked, putting on his best concerned paternal voice. The wariness of the twins made the smuggler’s words impossible to believe. “I’m sure we can work something out.”
“Price on your heads is too high to pass up,” another man said, “you understand.” Within moments the boys were surrounded. The first smuggler reached for them. Adem and Solis gripped each other tightly; as much as they reluctantly agreed to leave behind, they would not abandon each other. When a streak of green light suddenly separated the first smuggler’s arm from his elbow, the boys were uncertain of how to react. The streak belonged to a column of light attached to a brown shroud moving almost too fast to see. The second smuggler flew back several meters and slid across the floor, a third had his legs clipped out from underneath him, then the shroud leapt over the boys to land upon a fourth man. The Jedi unceremoniously pulled his blade from the smuggler’s chest while the remainder dispersed. He turned to the boys, who hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Now look what you made me do.” the Jedi groaned in the voice of an older man. His blade lit the inside of his hood, bathing his Bothan features in a bright green glow. He turned his head to the freighter with the odd lights and music, motioning his hand towards the cockpit. “We’re leaving.”
The twins looked at each other, nodded, and followed the Jedi into his ship.
“What are you called, sir?” Adem asked, fumbling for Basic and slumped against the wall after a long silence.
“Bo. You probably can’t pronounce the rest, and when your shoulder is dislocated,” he said gruffly before grabbing Adem’s shoulder and snapping it back into place despite the boy’s protests, “you fix it. It’s like you’re trying to be in pain.”
The boys figured that was all they were going to get out of him, but they didn’t dare look at each other. There, a rift had begun to open between the brothers, but it would not become apparent until some time later. Adem began to wrestle with his guilt over his decisions, while Solis questioned his brother’s loyalty to his family. Meeting Bo marked the next chapter of their lives, when they finally began to learn of the Force and its place in their lives.

"Isn't it Life Day, not 'Sithmas'?" Adem asked Mks and Zakath, who had stopped at the Citadel's throne room doors. Crisscrossing the doors were makeshift garlands and strings of cheap electric lights, some of which blinked and flashed according to design while others flickered uncontrollably.

"The Conzul liked thiz name better." Zakath replied flatly.

"If I remember correctly, Life Day is specifically a Wookiee holiday. The rest of the galaxy has adopted it on occasion. Atty may simply prefer originality," Mks elaborated. "Besides, Sithmas drinks are considerably better than what most places will give you. Two cups last year, and I woke up in a wrapped box underneath a tree."

Adem whistled and raised his eyebrows at the thought. Zakath pushed the doors open, and what was moments ago thumping vibrations became clear and cheerful music. Where in the galaxy did all of these trees come from? There were at least three between each of the columns, some stretching several meters toward the ceiling, and some shorter than Adem, provided they hadn't toppled over onto the floor. They were dressed from stem to tip with various trinkets and garlands, some of which stretched between the trees.

The tables were arrayed in a line down the center of the room leading all the way up to the throne. Which is to say that some tables were actually angled up the stairs with the food creatively positioned in such a way that they would not slide down, and the Shadow Lady could use the Serpentine Throne for a dinner chair as well as a seat of power.

"Would you believe we're only fifteen minutes into the party?" she called from across the room. Zakath clamped his jaws on a drumstick from the table as he strode down the aisle, and by the time Adem had looked at Mks since walking in, the Miraluka was already halfway through his first drink. A confused looking Ryn was walking on top of the tables, though no one seemed interested in convincing him to come down. Adem climbed up himself, grabbing a cup and scooping it into the punch bowl, as the social climate demanded, then dumped a sizable amount of sugar inside. The taste was something akin to extraordinarily sweet battery acid, but it went down.

Adem watched the Ryn sit down in a bowl of stuffing. He reacted slightly, then continued drinking undeterred. He reminded Adem of Bo on nights he was bound and determined to become inebriated, but Bo didn't make as much of a sport of it. Adem sat near him, taking care to make sure he was sitting on tablecloth and not food, and nodded at the Ryn.

"Kor-*hic*dath." he replied, raising his drink in greeting and tipping some onto his shirt. Adem took another swig of the vile holiday spirits himself, feeling welcome enough for the time being.

*The Broken Blade, overlooking Port Ol’Val*
*Somewhere in the Dajorra System*
*0730 hours*

“First time visiting the shadow port?” a man casually asked from behind Adem, the latter standing lost in thought at the window. He turned to see a tall, wiry Miraluka standing close to the door and smiling at the window. He was familiar; the man with stones placed over his “eyes”, or rather the place eyes should be. Adem wasn’t accustomed to speaking with the blind and tried to position himself in front of Mks, though he never could get the man to point his face towards him.
“I’ve been before. Delightful, as places that don’t exist go.” Adem replied dryly.
“Oh, good, a sense of humor. Mks Ehn, at your service.” Adem found his expressions intriguing; smiles seem so odd when eyes aren’t part of the equation, but something was especially inscrutable about Mks’s face. Lucky for Adem that Mks couldn’t see that he wasn’t smiling back, the Umbaran too busy trying to figure out what his newly minted commander was thinking to no avail.
“Something wrong?” Mks asked, picking up on the sound of the gears turning in Adem’s head, who awkwardly smiled at last. For a Miraluka, the sound of thoughts churning in another person is magnified to the roar of a hurricane.
“Sorry, nothing.”
“Trying to figure me out? Just treat me like anyone else. I think you’ll be surprised” he said, waving a hand over his ocular implants, “how much a blind man can see. No need to apologize.”
“Right, sorry.”
“There it is again. I’m blind, and you must be deaf. What a pair we make. You’ll want to mind that habit around the grumpy lizard.”
“Point taken. I don’t suppose you have any work for me? I haven’t risked life and limb for some time now.”
“Ha, we’re going to get along just fine. I do have something for you. Ever spent time down in the Besadii district?”
“I’ve actually only been to the Complex on any visit to the port.”
“You haven’t experienced Ol’val at all yet. Besadii smells like the bizarre lovechild of money, sweat from particularly vigorous coitus, cheap booze and wildly pricey spirits alike, and a few other pleasures.”
Adem laughed. “So, I’ve got tourism for an assignment?”
“If only. You’ll be brushing up on the activities of the local criminal organizations, as well as the efforts of the police forces against them. Arconan activity has transpired here, and we want to make sure that our hand in current events has gone unnoticed thus far, so we don’t have any messes to clean up before we start making more to deal with.”
“You make it sound like a janitorial detail.”
“Only your mop lops off arms and legs like rotted branches, and you get to dress better.” Mks laughed. “Speaking of violence, here comes my favorite Barabel.”
Sure enough, an even taller and very imposing figure walked down the hall, bumping Adem’s shoulder on the way. The mass of dark scales turned to face the other men.
“Sorry.” Adem mumbled. The lizard’s eyes narrowed.
Mks sighed. “Apologies aren’t a concept he grasps, you’re just in his way. Zakath, meet our new friend.”
“Izz this the one I’ve heard so much about? I wazz expecting someone more… impozzing,” the Barabel hissed, “We are in need of no weak linkzz.”
“I think this one might surprise us both. At the very least, he won’t be a waste of your time, Zakath.” Mks said, smiling again. Zakath just shrugged and grunted.
“When do we get started?” Adem asked.
“Shuttle’s being prepped now,” Mks replied, and turned his face upward, “I think this will be the start of a great deal of fun.”

The old hangar of the abandoned mining facility was accustomed to emptiness. For decades it floated in the Dajorra asteroid field, desolate and virtually forgotten by all but a handful of people who made sure nothing in the system went unnoticed. The day finally came when Arcona found a use for it, when a group of elite hunters partnered with droids strode across its catwalks, the sound of their various comings and goings bouncing quietly against the walls. When the hunters of the Apex Brigade departed, the facility knew mournful silence again for several months. The roar of spacecraft engines and the raucous sound of military regulars turned pirates briefly filled the hangar with life once again, but the odd couple Hi’ijas decided to move on from their adventures and focus on their marriage. Adem Bol’era had said goodbye to them a week earlier, and set to work on clearing out the base. The young Umbaran who had spent the most time here out of anyone knew isolation well, and felt a bizarre kind of kinship with the hangar. He lay awake in a canvas hammock stretched between two catwalks, stricken with the familiar melancholy of introversion turning into loneliness once again.
The airlocks separating the hanger suddenly began whirring, and the bay doors opened to let the familiar grey shape of the *Broken Blade* slice into its drydock for the first time in weeks. Adem skittered down the decrepit rafters and descended several dozen meters in seconds to meet the floor. The landing ramp of the ship did likewise.

Hadn’t the ship been decommissioned and scrapped only days ago? Just what was it doing here? Odder still was the sudden influx of people walking out of the ship, with several of their faces matching those of the disbanded pirate crew. Had Mirus and Rhiann changed their minds?
Three cloaked figures disembarked, keeping the thought of the Hi’ijas alive for Adem until he looked more closely at their faces. On the left stood a mountain of black scales with a grim look in his reptilian green eyes. On the right was a tall and thin figure, with stone eyes and hair stretching down his back at a length that rivaled his cloak. In the center was a woman draped in white and blue, and despite the cloth over her eyes, Adem could not shake the strange tension one feels when making eye contact with someone, even if he cast his gaze to the floor. The Barabel hissed lowly at him, demanding the respect of being looked at, even if his blind fellows did not do the same.

“I’m impressed that you manage to stay sane in such a big empty place, Adem.” the lady in white said cheerfully. Frak! In the presence of the Shadow Lady, and Adem had completely forgotten his sense of decorum. He waved limply, then realized that the only person who could see it was a grumpy lizard.
“Uh. . . Hi?”
“Oh, no, maybe I spoke too soon. I do know about you, though. You have a nasty habit of insisting on staying in places by yourself.” Atyiru’s smile was warm and concerned.
“What can I say? I’m always alone, I’m used to it.” Adem shrugged.
“Ever since you had to leave the troupe behind, right?” Atyiru’s hands motioned for calm when she felt Adem tense up. What was a woman so gentle, so aware of how others around her felt doing leading an army of assassins, soldiers and criminals? “I’m aware of your story, doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear your feelings about it. But first things first; would you come inside? Mks and Zakath have a proposal for you to consider.”

Atyiru clapped her hands together and bid the men to sit after she finished tidying the bridge of the *Broken Blade* into a makeshift tea room, the low table bathed in soft yellow light. The familiarly sharp scent of Hapan mint wafted from Adem’s cup. It smelled like Bhan.
“My favorite. How’d you guess?” he asked Atyiru incredulously.
“Just a feeling. On to business. Introduce yourselves, gentlemen.” Atyiru kneeled down to the table and gingerly blew on her cup. The Barabel left his cup steaming away on the table and he turned to Adem.
“Zakath. I will be serving as an executive officer aboard this ship.” Zakath’s voice had the harsh feel of sandpaper, but his tone wasn’t inherently hostile. Adem imagined what an irate Zakath would sound like, and stowed the thought away to use in a nightmare sometime.
“Mks Ehn, at your service, though you might call me captain if formality’s your thing. I suppose we’ll both be getting used to the title, hm?” The man with eyes of stone wore a grin, but Adem was uncertain of its legitimacy, unlike Atyiru.
“Ooooh, maybe a hat? Hard to imagine a ship captain without a hat. I think it would radiate authority, especially with some feathers in it!” Atyiru mused, and the group laughed. Even Zakath snorted a little.
“Arcia doesn’t wear a hat.” Zakath pointed out.
“Maybe, but I don’t think this ship is going to be anything like Arcy’s rank and file. Arcona only has room for one of her and the Nighthawk.” Atyiru countered. Zakath agreed, lips curving with uncomfortable thoughts of his former captain’s wrath. “It’s a shame that the pirate’s life wasn’t for Mirus and Rhi after all, but it’s not a bad starting point for more. . . diverse criminal activities.” Atyiru gently sipped her tea and set a datapad on the table, bringing up a data map of Arcona’s connections to the criminal underworld.
“Concerned about our control? The Clan isn’t what it used to be with Antei gone.” Adem asked. Though he had steered clear of the war, he was well aware of how it had torn Arcona asunder.
“And how. We’re looking at the largest number of upstart syndicates and police forces disrupting our operations in the history of our time in the system. To simply wipe them out is overkill, and we’re done for if we make ourselves out as enemies of the public across the system.” said Mks.
“Hardly overkill. We’d make our point.” Zakath suggested.
“Rein in the stabbity mood, Zakath. That’s not apropos for tea time.” Atyiru smiled, and finished her cup. “I’m thinking that we’ll use this ship and its crew as a way of finally letting House Qel-Droma do what it says on the tin; make cute little underworld soldiers out of you.”
“Crime certainly isn’t disappearing anytime soon.” said Adem.
“Right, and it touches people’s lives every day. I’d much rather take that into our hands than leave it to people out just to help themselves. There are lots of criminal figures through whom we can do some good, but the odds aren’t really in their favor.”
“Lost causes, you think?” Mks asked.
“Hardly, I love an underdog. Actually, just dogs in general.” Atyiru replied. “Anyway, that’s where you come in. Your job is to flow through the underworld unnoticed, without incriminating Arcona. Think of it as becoming a river that no one realizes they’re swimming in. When it suits our interest, you change how that river flows here and there. Somebody drowns, somebody keeps floating.”
“Cute metaphor.” said Adem.
“Right? This clan needs more poetry. You’d be doing more or less anything and everything, because whoever’s the best, we are automatically better because we’re also Jedi. You’ll go from brokering information to dismantling a spice monopoly. Splinter a gang and help them take themselves down. Start good insurgencies, put down bad ones. All that and still plenty of piracy on the outer edges of the system to play with! Your talents will be very appreciated if we keep going in this direction, Adem.”
“I can be who you need me to be, right? A tool of many uses?” said Adem glumly.
“When you put it like that it sounds lousy, but I suppose that works. I want to assure you that if we can avoid doing anything unsavory, we will. I just want my family and its friends to be happy and safe. Please understand that.” Atyiru motioned for the meeting to adjourn. With that, Mks and Zakath rose to their feet and left the bridge. Adem and Atyiru remained at the table, the Miraluka sitting around the corner from him.
“Sorry,” Adem said mournfully, “that was out of line.”
Atyiru smiled and shrugged. “You said what you felt. Believe me, I know what you’re feeling better than you think. As hard as you try, every relationship you have seems so. . .”
“Ephemeral?” Adem finished her sentence between two slow sips from his cup.
“Ooooh, that’s a pretty one. Sad too. Tell me; in the troupe, did you do more comedies, or tragedies? What was your favorite?” The Shadow Lady was genuinely curious as always, even if she was already somewhat aware of the answer.
Adem leaned back and thought for a moment. “I guess Bo liked writing or adapting the comedies, so we tended to do those often, but the tragedies were better written. He’d usually write those when he was out of wine. Siobhan liked whatever play she had the lead in. My brother. . . well, Solis took every role he was given seriously, always passionate.”
“They sound fun, but what about you? If your life was a play, what would you describe it as?” What kind of question was that? She was almost as melodramatic as Bo!
“Tragedy, so far. If it plays out well, there’ll be a kind of beauty in it.” Adem stated flatly as he finally drained his tea to its last drops, ever the slowest person at a table. At that, Atyiru sighed and rose to her feet.
“I’m afraid I have to get going,” she said, passing behind the glum Umbaran but stopping to place a hand on his shoulder, “but I’d hope to talk more when you’re ready. I hope you find your home here, that you’ll be able to make this place a home for your friends when you’re ready one day. I’m going to change your mind about your play, you know. Just watch.” The Shadow Lady gently glided out of the room as easily as she had entered. Adem gently shifted the teacup in his hand and let the last remaining drop of Hapan mint swirl around the basin, the smell taking him back to better days. Still, he was alone, but perhaps a little less than before. . .

Manually added by OP Celevon Edraven