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.