Private A Galaxy Changed, Part IV: Coruscant

[Valery Noble]

​

Outfit: Combat Jumpsuit
Weapons: Double-Bladed Lightsaber

Coruscant felt so different than she remembered.

Valery had expected that much. The Core had fallen while she was still fighting, and she remembered all too well the people responsible for taking it. But those banners had disappeared since then. Another Sith power had crawled into the space left behind, and once again, Coruscant belonged to the dark.

Getting onto the planet had taken patience. Valery had once crossed enemy lines as a Jedi Shadow for a living, slipping through places where the presence of a Jedi meant execution or worse. Those instincts had returned easily enough. The Force had gotten her through the first layers of security, and her knowledge of Coruscant and its lay-out handled the rest. She concealed her presence, avoided checkpoints, and moved through the city without giving anyone a reason to realize that something was off.

Eventually, Valery found herself standing atop one of Coruscant's countless skyscrapers.

Wind pulled at her dark hair as she stared across the familiar skyline. Endless streams of traffic cut between towers, advertisements illuminated the night, and trillions of lives continued beneath Sith rule. From up here, Coruscant almost looked like the world she remembered.

It just didn't feel like it.

The Dark Side stained the planet, but Valery pushed beyond that oppressive presence and searched for something far more specific. Someone she had encountered a long time ago. Back then, their presence in the Force had been different. Untapped and though burdened, it had felt pleasant enough. Now it lingered against her senses like a wound that had been allowed to fester.

Valery closed her eyes and reached outward... there. Her eyes opened again, orange burning against the lights of the city. One hand lowered toward the hilt of her lightsaber attached to her belt as she stepped onto the very edge of the rooftop.

She had crossed half the Galaxy and slipped into the heart of Sith territory for this.

The hunt had begun.

Arris Windrun ​

 

[Arris Windrun]

Valery Noble​

Arris looked down at her hand, examining the intricate mechanisms that made her cybernetic body move. Just... not with her eyes. It had been long enough now since the cyborg awoke to the Force on Ruusan. Baptism by fire - fight after fight. Her concept of life and death was warped, then, as was her spirit.

She reached up, touching the right side of her head. The implant, her co-processor, the beast. It fed off her, and in exchange heightened her power to lengths that have allowed Arris Windrun to do terrible, terrible things across the galaxy...

Edic Bar.

The Tapani Massacre.

The Purge of the Core Worlds.

Abregado-rae.

Arris and Mercy were up to no good. Violent and despicable. And yet that was not where their true danger lay. Between the two of them, they each possessed an affinity towards broken people. They could each touch the cracks and know someone's fear, their desires; what drove them. They could know those things, and they could thread the person around their finger taut, yanking them so easily they'd never know they were being strung along.

She lit a cigarette and took a drag.

The cyborg was somewhere on Coruscant, standing high on a building away from civilian traffic, with the Temple on the horizon and the broken rotunda a little ways beyond it.

And she was alone.

Lily Rhodes , her apprentice, was likely somewhere in the Underworld - unless she was slacking off. The rest of the Sith? Well, none of them needed babysitting.

Another drag.

 

[Valery Noble]

​

Outfit: Combat Jumpsuit
Weapons: Double-Bladed Lightsaber

Valery drew in a slow breath when her senses finally settled on the presence she had been searching for. There was no mistaking it now. Whatever had happened to Arris since their first meeting had changed her considerably. The Force around her felt twisted, darker and far more dangerous than the woman Valery remembered.

Her eyes opened.

The air around Valery rippled as she pulled the Force tightly around herself. Light bent, sound disappeared, and within seconds there was nothing left to mark where she stood. Even her presence sank beneath the currents of the Force until the Jedi Master became little more than a ghost against Coruscant's skyline.

She then stepped from the edge.

Valery dropped several levels before landing on another rooftop, barely disturbing the surface beneath her boots. From there, she moved quickly. Rooftop to rooftop, across narrow gaps and maintenance bridges, always keeping Arris somewhere ahead. The old Jedi Shadow instincts guided every step. She had spent years hunting Sith exactly like this, and despite everything that had happened, those skills had never faded away.

Eventually, Valery stopped atop a building across from Arris. For several seconds, she watched. The cigarette ember glowed against the darkness, while the silhouette beyond it stood framed by the distant Temple and the ruined rotunda. Valery remembered their conversation all those years ago. Arris had been troubled even then, but this was something else entirely.

The cloak slipped away, and the air shimmered around Valery before her figure gradually returned to view. Dark hair shifted with the wind, one hand resting loosely near the lightsaber at her hip. Her orange eyes seemed particularly bright against the darkness as they fixed on Arris across the gap.

"Long time no see."

There was no smile accompanying the greeting. Valery studied her instead, searching for some trace of the woman she remembered beneath everything she sensed now.

"You've changed."

Arris Windrun ​

 

[Arris Windrun]

Valery Noble​

The cyborg's eyes flicked the Jedi's way. She finished another drag, then ground what was left underfoot.

"Oh," Arris uttered quietly. "It's you."

Long time no see, basically. Not since their encounter in the Nar Kaaga slums when Arris was nursing her way through a bad night. Well, they had crossed paths - briefly - on Kattada, when Arris, Mercy, and some other Sith assaulted the Enclave.

Suffice it to say, the cyborg had changed. Considerably. Both physically and in the Force. And not only because she swapped from blonde to raven. If you held up an image of Arris then against an image of Arris now, you'd see two completely different people... save the eyes.

The Force was an entire story on its own. She was force-sensitive back then, but wholly unaware. Maybe Val saw that potential, maybe not, but the Force welled something dark and twisted now. Hatred, self-loathing, and cold determination - not the kind of sick pride of other Sith. She didn't get her jollies from torturing people, but genocide and terror stained her.

Arris turned, leaning one arm against the railing. Her other rested comfortably across her lower abdomen, with the elbow propped by the butt of her revolver. It had a twin just on the other side of her hip.

"So what, do I owe ya credits for that ticket off Nark? Or am I just seeing ghosts again?"