Faction A Batch of Trouble: Slicers, Tech Users, and Rogue's Meetup

[Saul Colsan]

Saul looked down at the freshly delivered Beer. All he saw was a blank expression, tired blue eyes rapidly blinking trying to stay awake. It was hard to believe that the Galactic Alliance fell. Saul fought in the final days of the Alliance. He and the SIA did their best disrupting enemy movement, but Sith Empire managed to power through and finally took the Core Worlds. The Galaxy was shaken at the news, Saul was still processing it in a way that he knew how.

The former agent took a sip, his tongue enjoying the bitter and intoxicating flavor. He spent most of his time now and days going from planet to planet as a drifter just making enough credits doing the odd merc job and spending his time getting chitfaced. There was no purpose, no home for Saul the only that bought him comfort was the drink.

Sera Inkari

 

[Sera Inkari]

Tag: Saul Colsan

The hood was the same as always... but her cloak was different.

Woven in black synthfiber, its edge lit faintly with spiraling atrisan glyphs, running into holoscript, broken fractal patterns, code-dead languages of the undernet that somehow looked graceful when she wore it. Clothes someone wore after months or years wandering through the data and noise of Echelon, who had listened to the cityworld instead of fighting it, or found the voidway.

She wasn't a farseer here, in a place where the sky was replaced with metal and the stars with advertising drones or billboards.

Here, Sera Inkari was something else. She read signals and patterns and understood suffering spoken through crowds like data wanting to find freedom. Red hair slipped free from the hood as she pushed it back, because hiding in Batch's bar was pointless. This place could never be anything but real. She stepped closer to Saul with only the slightest hesitation, laying a hand lightly on his wrist. A human gesture in a world that had forgotten the value of those.

"Saul," she said, voice low, shaped by softness and a faint static in the accent. Up close, weight clung to him. Not just the alcohol or his exhaustion on his body, but the heaviness of someone who'd watched duty collapse in on itself.

"I walked the lower wards today," she whispered, eyes tracing lines over the bar's rawness. "All those alleys full of people selling futures they don't have, visions of lifetyles and products they never earned." AI. AI. AI.

She shook her head, small and tired. Real.

"Corporate prophets with nothing but AI algorithms and marketing budgets." Her eyes returned to him. "You're not like them."

She lowered herself beside him with her quiet grace she carried, circuit-stitched fabric folding like code collapsing into nothing. "There was nothing you could have done," she whispered, not as prophecy or trying to fix him. As someone who had read enough broken or shattered people to know a truth when she saw it. "Empires fall on the backs of those who try their hardest to hold them up."

Her hand hovered an inch from his on the counter, not touching now, but close enough.

"You fought in the dark where no one applauds, and held a line no one remembers." She whispered, threading her words as she always did. "And you survived it all."

Which in Echelon, and life, was what mattered most.

 

[Saul Colsan]

Saul heard a familiar haunting voice next to him but he did not dare turn his gaze to meet her. "Sera," Saul grunted in his gravelly voice. "Been a while." He hadn't seen her ever since she ducked out of their date just when things were getting good. After being in many wars as Saul, it was hard to trust anyone but of all people, Sera was the one that had Saul open up. Yet the moment he did, she left.

"Here to continue our date?" Saul took another swig of Beer while Sera gently squeezed his arm. "I fought all my life," he said. "And what did that lead me to? A destroyed faction, hundreds of years of existence just blown to bits in a couple of weeks."

He sighed. "And I just witnessed it." Saul said with sadness in his voice. "Survival means nothing if you don't win."

Sera Inkari

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Glade

Nøva didn't flinch at the weight of their silence— but she felt it.

It clung to her ribs like static, the kind that lives beneath combat armor, the kind that makes you want to smirk just to break it. She slid back into the booth's edge, fingers ghosting over the glass someone had left near her spot. The bar still hummed with the after-shock of her voice, and she hated—hated—how exposed that made her feel.

She didn't look at any of them first.

Didn't dare.

Instead, she reached for the nearest shot, knocked it back, then grabbed the second and let that one burn deeper, swallowing the tremor in her chest before it could choose its own way out.

The cigarette came next—

flick-flick,
spark,
glow.

Smoke curled around her jaw like a lazy serpent as she leaned her shoulder against the booth wall, eyes half-lidded but sharp enough to slice the tension in the room if she wanted to.

She didn't.
Not tonight.

"Y'all actin' like I just detonated the place," she muttered, voice low and slick, carrying that dangerous, pretty rasp she never hears in herself. "It's just a song. Just… noise."

Her foot tapped once against the floor—habit, not nerves. At least that's what she told herself.

Ghostkey still looked like she'd walked him off a cliff. Glade looked like she'd been handed her own soul in a glass. Batch's Atrisian salute still hung in the air like incense.

Nova exhaled slow, a ribbon of smoke unfurling from her lips.

Her hair slipped forward with the movement, that electric-teal blade catching the bar-light. She tucked it back behind her ear with a motion too delicate for someone who could snap a man's spine without trying.

She lifted the third shot—the one she didn't actually need—and let it hover at her mouth as she finally let her eyes roam the faces watching her.

"Don't… make it weird," she said, head tilting, voice dipping soft despite the edge she tried to give it. "I don't—"

A beat.
A breath.

A truth she didn't want to say, so she let it fall between her words instead.

"I don't do that often."

She took the shot, winced at the afterbite, and wiped her thumb across her lower lip.

"But… yeah," she added, the smallest flicker of sincerity breaking through the armor. "If it hit you—cool. Keep it. That's yours now."

Her gaze slid away again, down to her own hands—scarred knuckles, cybernetic seams glowing faint crimson under the skin.

"You wanted a piece of the real thing," she murmured, half to them, half to herself. "Guess you got it."

She lit the cigarette again, just for something to do with her hands, and for the first time since stepping off that stage, she let herself breathe.

Slow.
Steady.
Almost human.

​

 

[Glade]

Tag: Nøva

Glade's words trickled away from her like little fireflies, tiny breaths trying to scatter into something bigger, cluttering at her console before they could find their way. Her fingertips brushed glowing glyphs, remembering with light surface touches as she blinked fast to keep a tear from crashing down. She took a long drink of her decorated cocktail, sinking for a moment into her jungle of memories, stashing another one beneath the console for a future night.

A gentle nudge of Ghostkey's knee found Nøva . The kid deep in mems, hair slipping across his cheek as he chewed at a nail, polyplast burned nearly to a nub. "Zero weird," he mumbled, his own weird version of normal. "'Sides…" his gaze wandered toward a door, imagining regimented lines of night-shift corpos way out there somewhere in the world outside. "Normal's weird."

Glade perked up again at the mention of Nøva's not often, expression sparking somewhere between respect and admiration. "Loved hearin' your kinda 'not often'..." she confessed, dipping her head, trying to catch Nøva's eyes. "Our band, we only play once'a moonbeat these days. Mostly in my head, but still counts." A grin, curling small and sliding down.

Sickle shifted to give her space, arm draped along the booth's back like she was guarding all of them from outside attention, an anarchist's shield to family.

Across the other booth, Chronicle lifted his gaze for the first time since the song ended. Not the slightest shift in his expression. Just a slow, deliberate glance toward Nøva. "That wasn't noise," he said, voice calmly measured. "Noise doesn't move a room like that." His eyes held hers for exactly one nano-second more than polite "Truth does." Then he went back to watching the chrono tick away, as if he hadn't just said the most grounding thing in the room.

It landed differently with Glade, quietly tugging at her stomach. Not many people got Chronicle at first, or Glade, or any of them, and that was okay, but….

The booth exhaled.

Sickle tipped her glass toward him in wordless salute to Chron. Glade swayed softly, repeating a line of the song under her breath. Ghostkey stared up from the floor at the empty stage like it had just shown him something he cared about.

And the moment settled for Glade, in its own kind of weird, not over-heavy or fragile, just real, messy, and true. Here that was okay. A kind of real Echelon and the galaxy didn't give out often.

 

[Sera Inkari]

Tag: Saul Colsan

Been a while.

"Yes."
Her voice was softer than the wisps of smoke drifting through Batch's bar, quiet enough that only someone listening for her would catch her words

Seeing him like this pulled something deep in her, but Sera's hardest part wasn't Saul's grief on his face, but her knowledge that some version of this moment had always been waiting for them. In every path she'd glimpsed, every probability she'd traced, their thread ended here: Saul with the weight of a fallen galaxy on his shoulders, and her walking back into his orbit carrying a truth she could never quite say.

Echelon dimmed those visions now. The cityworld drowned her farseeing in noise until it was nothing but faint interrupted static at the edge of thought. For the first time in years, she didn't know what came next. And strangely, that gave her peace.

She eased down beside him, drawing her robe beneath her in quiet folds. The patterns stitched into its hem lit faintly as she breathed, not foretelling, or demanding, only existing. Like the rest of the bar. Like the people here who traded truths in small, simple pieces because that was all they could afford to risk.

"Saul…"
The word faded, as if even his name needed gentleness tonight. She felt the anger he held toward their parting, a sharpness beneath the exhaustion. She wished she could explain why she left, why she never stayed. But explanations were just another kind of burden. And everyone in this bar already carried more than enough.

"Across all the worlds you touched," she said quietly, not lifting her gaze from the worn metal of the counter, "every choice you made is still moving outward. You changed things that don't vanish just because an empire did."

Her fingertip traced a small looping pattern along the bar, not a sigil, just a gesture. Something human, fragile, real.

"A man you pulled from the rubble. A son you smuggled out of a warzone. A daughter who lived long enough to raise a family because you were there." Her voice wove truth together without brightness or praise, offering it the way the bar offered space. "Their children, and the ones after them… all of that continues whether you ever see it or not."

A slow breath. The bar's life around them, soft conversations, neon signs glitching outside, a quiet permission of a place that didn't demand anyone be more than what they were. "Survival isn't the reward," she said, tapping his hand lightly before letting hers fall away. "But it's the part that lets the pattern go on." Sera didn't try to hold his gaze, or to fix him. She just stayed, truth enough for this place. However fleeting a moment it was.

 

[Saul Colsan]

Saul continued to stare at the bubbling beverage while Sera whispered words of encouragement into his ear. It was like she was peering into his mind considering that he did all of those things she mentioned. "The Galactic Alliance is dead," Saul said in a forceful tone. "Just nothing but dust and echoes."

He took another sip of Beer but his mournful gaze met Sera's "I could've saved more," Saul said. "I could've done more. You weren't there, you didn't see all the death that the Sith inflicted on every man, woman, and child. I've placed hundreds of civilians in transports only for them to be destroyed by Star Destroyers."

Saul frowned. "So tell me....." he continued. "What's the point of fighting if everything is going to be lost?!"

Sera Inkari