Private Afraid of Heights

[Veyla Tass]

THRONEWORLD
90X ABY
OBJECTIVE: MISCHIEF​

Dull, red eyes drifted across the gilded halls of the Throneworld. They took in the gaudy so-expensive-it's-cheap-ness of it all, all the trophies and spoils of war and all the mismatched aesthetics smashed together into one gigantic, tacky monument to Mercy .

Veyla Tass tried her best not to scowl. After all the work her crew'd done to get her up here, it'd be embarrassing if she got spaced for not looking impressed enough. Beneath the oversized sleeves of her workwear, she thumbed the splice that Rax had given her. Its specific purpose escaped her, but then, her job was to stick it in a terminal somewhere and then get out with it again. She tried not to let the unknown bother her.

Tried, but failed. She broke away from the crowd of menials she'd trailed with for a time, headed towards a maintenance hatch that caught her eye. And, as she descended into the darkness, she thought; the hell are we getting out of this?

Could they pull in a profit, if they got the right info? Was Rax thinking about credits? A racket big enough to swallow the whole Core wouldn't notice a few million going missing every year, and if they could be patient -

She ducked her head to avoid a loose-hanging wire, only just able to make out the sparks jumping from it underneath the oily black smudges in her vision.

No, there wasn't any ambition in embezzling, not even in the seven digits. And to pitch Vey a plan as dicey as this, Rax must've been feeling pretty damn ambitious.

This continued for some time. Her crew could sift for military intel, maybe? But what would they even do with that, feed it to the Republic? Ugh. As much as she wanted to burn Mercy, she wasn't a snitch, and neither were any of her crew.

In the blackness beneath Throneworld's halls, the Sith relied more on instinct than sight to navigate. The darkness was comfortable, though. It reminded her of...Force, seven, eight years ago, when she was barely four feet tall, snooping around the guts of her neighborhood's water treatment plant.

After some length of time wandering the tunnels and bickering with herself, her hands brushed the rusty metal of a ladder rung, which she grasped idly. Then, in the low light she made out a handful of aurebesh symbols engraved on a cold, slate-gray placard near her face. She still struggled with Basic, but she could read, at least, the top two words:

Library Access.

Vey clicked her tongue, and rolled up her left sleeve, then bit down on the flesh of her wrist until blood stained her teeth.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

She lifted herself up onto the ladder, and started climbing.

Cassilde Vortayn​

 

[Cassilde Vortayn]

While Throneworld's preservation gardens stood head and shoulders above the rest of the monstrosity of a station as the best place for the illusion of an escape, the library had its uses.

Of course, like every other place here, it couldn't be normal. It couldn't be a standard library, with standard flimsiplast volumes and holobooks; no, that would be too pedestrian, and it was illegal to feel, or be an ordinary person here. The library was instead, much like the gardens, a grand chamber of preservation, left behind by the previous tenants, more a galactic archive for the apocalypse rather than a place to enjoy knowledge.

Unlike the gardens, and much to Cassilde's chagrin, it was an incredibly low-lit library. It might have felt like a cliché: the Sith Covenant and their Throneworld, bathed in dim light that offended Hapan eyes.

She had been discovering that the gloomy ambience likely stemmed from Firrerreon biology. She was discovering this because she was in the middle of a particularly dry survey text about the Firrerre System and its inhabitants. Maybe dry was the wrong word. Academic would have been polite. Mind-numbing would have been accurate. Still, informative nonetheless, and probably why the Empress was allergic to a good lamp or two.

Still, a dim library? Absolute nonsense.

Cassilde sat at a desk, overdressed enough to feel superior in the plum number, with the book open and her glow-lamp beside it, helpfully illuminating the knowledge. Alongside it sat a station-issue datapad she wasn't really using, because station datapads created logs, and logs were proof, and while the Hapan imagined that Mercy was far too busy committing violent atrocities to even care what her vassal was reading, it still paid to exercise a modicum of caution.

Just a modicum, as she doubted this was approved downtime, or even that she was supposed to be in here. Cassilde was a healthy blend of paranoid and bold, taking enough precautions while refusing to sit and stagnate as pet cupbearer.

Then a noise.

In the corner.

Suddenly, it didn't feel like a healthy amount of paranoia. She thought she was alone. The Duch'a felt her heart have a small frolic in her chest as she swivelled on her seat to the source of the sound. The lamp was swung around, pointed at the source of the sound. Heavy. Metal. Hinges.

A hatch?

Cassilde stood and closed the book, placing the datapad on the top of the cover. Her face had already adjusted on instinct, the soft smile appearing, one that was pleasantly surprised rather than startled and moderately terrified. The hand not on the lamp smoothed down silk, while the other that wielded the lamp stretched out to illuminate the visitor.

Who even entered a library through a hatch?

"You're either very lost, or very much not," she called out with the correct amalgamation of levity and scolding, deciding it was better to pretend as if she belonged here rather than anything else.

---

Veyla Tass

 

[Veyla Tass]

"You're either very lost, or very much not," she called out with the correct amalgamation of levity and scolding, deciding it was better to pretend as if she belonged here rather than anything else.

...Chit.

Only half-stood up, Veyla tensed, looking guilty as sin, and for a fraction of a second she was frozen.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. She was Sith. Force-awful at it, but even then, she should’ve sensed someone nearby before she’d even started climbing. If she’d been focused, hadn’t been moping so damned much, she might’ve.

Instinctively, and before she’d even turned around, she reached for a knife that wasn’t at her waist, because of course it wasn’t, because what did a maintenance menial need with the kinds of knives Veyla carried around? So she spun on her heels and -

And was near-immediately disarmed.

No armor. No visible weapons. Importantly, as she reached out with the Force, little in the way of power, either.

Just a woman in a library. A very rich looking one, in a very expensive looking dress, but still just some person. And that made sense to Veyla, in the moment. Based on her very limited exposure through the medium of holodramas, gorgeous, overdressed high-society types were frequently found browsing libraries.

Suddenly the acolyte found herself acutely conscious of the aesthetic distance between the two of them. When was the last time she’d washed her hair?

“I’m…”

Force, she was a bad liar. She held her hands at her side, and as she scrambled for an excuse for her presence, jagged, poorly-cared-for nails dug into her palms.

“Here on maintenance. One of the terminals is booting people when it shouldn't.”

A knot started to form in her gut. Oh, hell. She was going to die on this ugly fucking scrapheap, wasn’t she?

Cassilde Vortayn​

 

[Cassilde Vortayn]

The lamp was trying.

The lamp was failing.

Cassilde saw a slightly brighter silhouette of a woman reaching for her waist. Never a good sign in polite society when somebody's first reaction to you was to reach for something, and this was far from polite society. It was barely even impolite society. In fact, it was barely society at all; Throneworld was some kind of wretched stew of social hellions.

However, she did not need the light to hear, and what she heard was entirely unconvincing.

Maintenance, indeed.

It wasn't fair to the other woman; how was she to know the person in the library was a consummate court professional, practised at hearing every hesitation and every unsure syllable in each word spoken?

"Oh, good," Cassilde replied, indulging in the lie for the time being, "I've been pretending the terminals don't exist; I'm quite useless with them. Would you be able to show me how to use them properly?"

Was it cruel to call a bluff? Maybe. Would it be fun to watch the woman feel obliged to live inside of her own lie for as long as possible? Also maybe. She had been deprived of Callamar court games for so long now.

But first.

"You'll forgive me. My eyes were made for daylight, and this place was made for the opposite," she continued, voice growing a shade warmer as she held up the lamp as proof. "Come. Let me see you properly."

---

Veyla Tass