Wearing:
Lawyer Suit
Armed with: Fists, Legal Briefcase
Objective: Secure final settlement proceedings aboard abandoned ocean fuel rig
It had taken weeks to arrange this meeting.
Rolind Hathor, a long time swindler in the fuel industry, had finally had one of his schemes backfire when he had cut one corner too many on the safety regulations of the fueling rig she was now standing on, having arrived by shuttle which had just departed, resulting in a tragic fire that had cost over a hundred workers their lives.
Her ruthlessness was well known, and she had initially been approached by Hathor with an offer of millions to lead his defense team. Instead, wanting to impress her beloved Karlie, she had instead come to the side of the prosecuting families for what she considered an insulting pittance to her greatness, and honestly didn't give a damn about their problems or what they had suffered. She had to impress Karlie, had to let her know she was capable of doing something more than killing, though she was not yet sure how.
It had been delicious, admittedly, watching the previously smug CEO become desperate and neurotic as she laid damning evidence against him time and again, savoring his breakdown in public. When she was done, he was done 'for'.
So it was that he was forced to sell off all his assets, luxuries he had accumulated through years of shady deals and grift...somewhat like her ironically. And now she was coming here to make him finish signing the papers to pay off the last of his assets, effectively leaving him mostly penniless. She had been nice, from her point of view--she had left him 'just' enough to live comfortably on a budget, and let him keep one of his small summer cottages. But his CEO days were over.
She was in her Lawyer Configuration, that of a middle aged but curvy woman with pale skin and black hair, wearing a white leather dress, holding a briefcase that would allow her to finish legally slitting his throat. She was going to enjoy this.
She walked past the evidence of the fire that had swept over the rig, her enhanced sense of smell picking up what to her was the delightful odors of roasted viscera and cooked human flesh. The ruined rig and that cottage were all that was left to him and soon the Rig would be hers as well. (She planned to turn it into a Private Luxury Mansion!)
Vera's heels clicked on the ground, a cold smile already playing out on her gorgeous features as she walked across the ruined deck to the damaged control tower where his office resided. She had broken him in court, decimated him.
He had been so smug, so confidant at the start. He was sure at worst he would lose maybe a hundred million if it actually came to it. He figured Vera was only doing it for publicity, to make herself look like some sort of hero to environmentalists. (He was right about the publicity bit, but it was for the attention of only one. He was quite wrong about her caring for the approval of environmentalists. She would have slaughtered them like any of her other prey, and with relish.) But then she had begun to lay into him, both in the court and in public, spending weeks building the most damaging case she could, even surreptitiously poisoning his two best lawyers, breaking into his mansion to non-fatally stab his wife twice in the knees in her spy configuration...he had been in no condition to be of fully sound mind in prepping his legal defense.
She heard his heartbeat and the whir of his remaining body-guard droids before she actually entered his large, spacious office, once filled with a priceless collection of paintings and statues, now bare and sold off. It was just him, in a ratty, secondhand used business suit behind a makeshift desk and two B2 Droids. A large window to display the ocean was behind him. He looked like he had been drinking.
"Ah, Miss Mina. Come to finish driving the knife in?"
"Oh, the knife was driven in a week ago. I'm just here to start the embalming process." Vera said in a pleasant voice, pleased at his disheveled looking state. She took a seat in his secondhand chair, watching him pour a drink.
"Well...you did it. Turned me into a pauper in less than a month and a half. And for a pittance at that. Hope it was worth it. I'd have made your time and effort worthwhile."
"Don't care." She said, brushing past his passive-aggressive comments. She held up the briefcase. "I'm here to finish acquiring this rig and then kicking you the feth off it."
"I've known actual highwaymen who were more considerate robbing my sorry ass than you were in that court."
"That's why they are highwaymen and not lawyers." Vera said, infuriating him with her pleasant polite tone. He swallowed what looked to be strong whiskey.
"I was one of the first people to start fueling in these parts you know. My Rig at its peak produced a hundred gallons of crude fuel a day. I envied no one. And now...because of you...I shall die a pauper. Was it worth it? I had powerful friends. I could have introduced you to a whole new field of clients."
"All of whom will pay for my services just as eagerly regardless of your continued presence in their lives. They might even pay me more given how thoroughly I destroyed you...if only so I will not destroy them."
Rolind glowered.
"Logical." He said quietly. "Flawlessly Logical."
Vera's own unnatural nature allowed her to break the Fourth Wall for a second and cast an aside glance at whoever was reading this, hoping they got the reference. Especially
Jacen Nimdok
.
She then turned back to the once powerful CEO she had fleeced, opening the case.
"Its not so bad. I left you a cottage." She gloated, watching him take another swig as she slid him the papers to sign over his rights to the platform they were doing business on. "At least you aren't in prison."
The man frowned, took one more swing, pulled out a rusty pen and signed it.
"I'm surprised you want this place, given every thing that happened here. Of course, given how you own it now, I suppose my surprise counts for very little."
"You're wrong. It counts for
nothing." the sociopathic Android Vampire sneered. "Now call a shuttle and leave this place. You're Trespassing. Droids, show this man off the Premesis."
"You didn't get everything Miss Mina." Rolind muttered grimly, drunk. "My father owned these droids. They were ruled by the court to be priceless heirlooms that couldn't be taken to pay off the debt.
"They're perfectly useless to you now, as you are no longer important. Tell me, did you just bring them to taunt me about the few things I could not take?" She inquired dismissively. "Tell me, what other pathetic trinkets did The Judge allow you to keep?"
Rolind grimaced.
"Fine...I'll show it to you. This alone could get me a hundred thousand credits...people are very afraid of spies..." He trailed, drunkenly stumbling over to a suitcase full of his clothes, retrieving a medium sized black box.
"Pretty much the only thing besides the droids and the house I have and soon it'll be gone just to keep me fed and clothed..." he muttered, clearly miserable. "Thanks by the way."
"You shouldn't have cut so many corners with the safety valves." She mocked.
Rolind, to be fair, didn't know what Vera really was, had not planned for this in any way. He could not have known what would happen by opening the Box.
The box contained one hell of an heirloom alright. A Vong UnMasquer, grown pocket sized.
When Vera caught site of the creature, she turned pale from shock before the reaction started.
The flesh on her face started stretching and tugging every which way on her face as she shook, flesh violently tugging everywhere in different directions under her dress.
White Blood oozed out of overstretched eyelids. She tried to stand, but the shock of an unexpected encounter with an UnMasquer had caught her totally off guard. Her Flesh was an Ooglith Masquer. Rolind was too stunned to do anything as the Android continued to shake, its flesh pulling violently in two different directions, until finally, the Biot let out an unholy shriek as her flesh completely tore itself off the slimy, chalk white artificial humanoid, dress and all. It howled unnaturally in pain as electrical sparks erupted across its artificial muscles, cooking some of them.
Rolind saw the fangs though, and the fangs are what compelled him to order his droids to open fire.
The biots torso was blasted open by multiple cannon bolts, shredding an arm. Meanwhile, her masquer had caught fire and was already burning up, along with the dress.
The biot collapsed nearly torn in two , one of its limbs blasted off a skinless milky white body, seemingly dead with a final shriek.
Four hours later.
He had put the remains in the nearby industrial freezer, and then sat in a corner in total shock, trying to figure out what to do.
He had panicked, and shot her dead. Or it dead, whatever the hell it was. No one would believe it hadn't been on purpose. Hell...to some extent it
had been on purpose.
Killing the feared Lawyer Vera Mina would get him a death sentence.
But as soon as his shock wore off, just as he was trying to think about covering up the crime, a light bulb went on.
Vera's skin had reacted to that Unmasquer, and her whole flesh had erupted in sparks as she was shot to pieces.
With a start, Rolind realized she was some sort of illegal Android.
If she was an illegally made Android...then her whole case against him was null and void...and you couldn't go to jail for killing an illegal droid...
Excitement and Hope, the first he had experienced in weeks, swelled in him. He could get his old life back, and he could countersue the familes of all the miserable worthless feths who'd died due to his laziness into oblivion. It was a win! A total reversal of fortune!
He stood up, all he had to do was contact the authorities! That was literally all he had to do to end this.
He needed to get to the comm station. It was on the other side of the incredibly large platform, and had been chained off, most of the high end electronics taken already, but it still had an emergency distress beacon...
By the Gods, he'd
chew through the chains if he had too!
Rolind began laughing madly as he sprinted out of his office...
Meanwhile...
Unfortunately for Rolind, his own corner cutting on the rig, from everything from the safety valves to the very electronics he now desperately needed was again about to bite him in the ass.
See, not fifteen minutes after sticking her skinless body in the freezer, the power had failed.
Slowly, everything had stitched back together once it dethawed. The heart came back first, and with it, consciousness.
Its processors were still malfunctioning however at the moment, so it could not regrow its skin, and thus was unable to fight.
But that didn't mean it could not kill him.
When Rolind commanded his droids to shoot the chains off the lock, madly climbing the tower to the comm room, all he found, to his horror, was the smashed up emergency comm equipment and a message written in white blood:
I tried to do this nicely.
NOW I FETH WITH YOU.