Alle Laufen
Mid-Levels, Coruscant
Bitter.
That was grit in a nutshell. Crack open the nut, and it was like taking a hunk of crusty, polluted beach and shoving it into your maw. Beyond bitter, she might have said chemical, or metal. Definitely always metal in the aftertaste. Blood or ulcers, maybe. Didn't do any harm worth mentioning, and she liked the way it slightly numbed her mouth and cheeks, always took that to mean that it was working.
A few minutes and it would be. Proper. Sam liked when it first hit, when the world came into focus, and everything else went by the wayside. Alert. Aware. Fucking fast.
Sam's organic thumb was still pressed up into her gums as she walked down the service walkway, caught between two towers. Artificial rain was pissing it down somewhere up at the top, and now in the mid-levels the funnel had finally come in. It dripped, trickled and otherwise bucketed off ledges and lips with no consistency, leaving some patches dry as a bone and others under a near-torrential sheet.
The job had gone alright at least by Sam's estimations. Hit job on an arms dealer who had either been doing too good or too shit a job to warrant getting mercenaries set upon him.
Intel had been off; the bastard had five guards, not three as promised, and that changed the plan. Or, it had changed Sam's plan. Became a bit of a fracas. Not that it mattered; the target was dead with a new credit slot for a throat, and so was his muscle, smeared across the shop like too much jam on too little toast. Didn't stop Ossa from being pissy about it. Sam's head had already dropped half of what the Togruta was pitching a fit about as she cleaned off her blade. She still had a fragment of the exchange in her head:
-have bled on my case. Again. It stains the lining and it does not come out. Is there even a point explaining to you why-
That was about all she kept. From where Sam was standing, yeah, they were only there to make one body and instead came away having done six, but they hit the target. Some jobs were messy, but it was still a job done. More cleanup, but they'd still get paid. They would move on to the next one. Didn't need much more thought than that.
She rounded the corner, where light and sound hit. Neon lights smeared across her vision, causing Sam's eyes to squint as the grit still went to work in her bloodstream. Foot traffic was still high despite the time of night, and the food stalls were in full flow. Frying oil, dozens of different short-tempered chefs shouting out in a dozen different languages. Speeder traffic overhead. Transit rattling down the line. Loud place, Coruscant. Too loud. Felt like somebody opening a fist on the inside of her skull. She missed the backwaters sometimes, even if she couldn't remember their names.
There was an unspoken berth around her as she walked. Like the locals had taken one look at her: the shaved head, the hard-carved face, the unblinking red-rimmed eyes and thought, 'no, not today'. Or maybe it was the litany of scars that made it look like she was a part-time piñata. The off-centre nose. The battered ear. The junkyard cybernetic arm that hung from above the elbow, no plating, just exposed guts and prison ingenuity.
Could have been a lot of things. Could have been nothing. Probably wasn't nothing.
As Sam came to a junction plaza, where four streets diverged into a large square for aimless milling about, she picked her spot on a bench and parked up in the centre.
Tilting her head backwards, the mercenary caught all of the lights of the buildings that reached out to the skies at once. The grit kicked in better, settling blurs into shapes, lights into signs and advertisements, and made a little more sense of the world. Except, she couldn't read a single fucking word, so really it was all just neon illumination. Bright noise. Like everything. Loud.
After a period of time that was largely unclear, Sam looked back down again and realised the real reason the locals had probably avoided her. The blood. Her tank top was black, so it hid the worst offenders, but the drying smears along her arms and shoulders were decidedly on display. Most of it wasn't hers. Some of it was. On closer inspection, her red was trickling from the join between flesh and metal on her arm. It was what it was. The arm was anchored to the bone, and the pain limiter had been removed because hitting at full power was more important than preserving herself. Must have whiffed a fat fist in the fight and sent the whole joint and humerus pulling, tearing the skin and trying to wrench her shoulder damn loose from its socket.
She never regretted it. Not once. Never in fucking doubt. All the pain, the torn flesh, the dislocations, the whatever else was a worthy price for the hit she could deliver.
Didn't need much else.
Bitter.
That was grit in a nutshell. Crack open the nut, and it was like taking a hunk of crusty, polluted beach and shoving it into your maw. Beyond bitter, she might have said chemical, or metal. Definitely always metal in the aftertaste. Blood or ulcers, maybe. Didn't do any harm worth mentioning, and she liked the way it slightly numbed her mouth and cheeks, always took that to mean that it was working.
A few minutes and it would be. Proper. Sam liked when it first hit, when the world came into focus, and everything else went by the wayside. Alert. Aware. Fucking fast.
Sam's organic thumb was still pressed up into her gums as she walked down the service walkway, caught between two towers. Artificial rain was pissing it down somewhere up at the top, and now in the mid-levels the funnel had finally come in. It dripped, trickled and otherwise bucketed off ledges and lips with no consistency, leaving some patches dry as a bone and others under a near-torrential sheet.
The job had gone alright at least by Sam's estimations. Hit job on an arms dealer who had either been doing too good or too shit a job to warrant getting mercenaries set upon him.
Intel had been off; the bastard had five guards, not three as promised, and that changed the plan. Or, it had changed Sam's plan. Became a bit of a fracas. Not that it mattered; the target was dead with a new credit slot for a throat, and so was his muscle, smeared across the shop like too much jam on too little toast. Didn't stop Ossa from being pissy about it. Sam's head had already dropped half of what the Togruta was pitching a fit about as she cleaned off her blade. She still had a fragment of the exchange in her head:
-have bled on my case. Again. It stains the lining and it does not come out. Is there even a point explaining to you why-
That was about all she kept. From where Sam was standing, yeah, they were only there to make one body and instead came away having done six, but they hit the target. Some jobs were messy, but it was still a job done. More cleanup, but they'd still get paid. They would move on to the next one. Didn't need much more thought than that.
She rounded the corner, where light and sound hit. Neon lights smeared across her vision, causing Sam's eyes to squint as the grit still went to work in her bloodstream. Foot traffic was still high despite the time of night, and the food stalls were in full flow. Frying oil, dozens of different short-tempered chefs shouting out in a dozen different languages. Speeder traffic overhead. Transit rattling down the line. Loud place, Coruscant. Too loud. Felt like somebody opening a fist on the inside of her skull. She missed the backwaters sometimes, even if she couldn't remember their names.
There was an unspoken berth around her as she walked. Like the locals had taken one look at her: the shaved head, the hard-carved face, the unblinking red-rimmed eyes and thought, 'no, not today'. Or maybe it was the litany of scars that made it look like she was a part-time piñata. The off-centre nose. The battered ear. The junkyard cybernetic arm that hung from above the elbow, no plating, just exposed guts and prison ingenuity.
Could have been a lot of things. Could have been nothing. Probably wasn't nothing.
As Sam came to a junction plaza, where four streets diverged into a large square for aimless milling about, she picked her spot on a bench and parked up in the centre.
Tilting her head backwards, the mercenary caught all of the lights of the buildings that reached out to the skies at once. The grit kicked in better, settling blurs into shapes, lights into signs and advertisements, and made a little more sense of the world. Except, she couldn't read a single fucking word, so really it was all just neon illumination. Bright noise. Like everything. Loud.
After a period of time that was largely unclear, Sam looked back down again and realised the real reason the locals had probably avoided her. The blood. Her tank top was black, so it hid the worst offenders, but the drying smears along her arms and shoulders were decidedly on display. Most of it wasn't hers. Some of it was. On closer inspection, her red was trickling from the join between flesh and metal on her arm. It was what it was. The arm was anchored to the bone, and the pain limiter had been removed because hitting at full power was more important than preserving herself. Must have whiffed a fat fist in the fight and sent the whole joint and humerus pulling, tearing the skin and trying to wrench her shoulder damn loose from its socket.
She never regretted it. Not once. Never in fucking doubt. All the pain, the torn flesh, the dislocations, the whatever else was a worthy price for the hit she could deliver.
Didn't need much else.
