Maris Fero
Riff-raff, Street Rat.
== DENON - Inner Rim ==
The newcomer had arrived on Denon for the first time mere hours before, but with each passing moment, she seemed ever more at peace with the place. Even half a galaxy apart from her presumed planet of birth, some aspects of the worlds and cities crafted by humanity and infested with every character and classification of such societies were nonetheless familiar enough to read, if one was a keen enough observer of people.
And the stranger was an obsessive observer first and foremost, everything from street signage to gang marks to inexplicable wear patterns was noted and, with the keen mind of unbound curiosity, the observer questioned the purpose of each. She stopped, where she could, to overhear the disconnected conversations of complete strangers, listening to each new interaction whilst she feigned interest in newsboards, holonet uplinks or glancing over the wares of street vendors.
The street slang and local twang were a pleasant distraction wherever she found it, and it wasn’t long before the changeling was repeating the conversations with other street vendors, asking for directions to toward the ‘Seven Corners’ in the nasal timbre of a teenager she had observed arguing with her boy a street or so back, that same pout on her lips as she selected something to eat from the kiosk. The stratification of the population was nothing new to the arrival, her own world had been built on similar foundations of oppression and injustice, though her own oppressors had rarely even considered the existence of the underclass that lived beneath the cloud of toxic smog.
Here, at the very least, there was no visible cloud of choking, cloying mist, though it was night now the woman imagined that in the day she might even have spied the sky between the tallest buildings that surrounded her in every direction. The taste of the air was less harsh than home, but with the same dry heat that felt familiar. There was a comfort in the verticality that surrounded her, only relatively recently had she learned to loathe horizons, wide spaces were unnatural to the observer and her own sense of direction keyed more easily with the hyperurban sprawl and the cyclopean architecture. The urge to climb was unmistakable, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she would not resist her inclination for long.
Denon would be her new playground, her new territory, the hunting ground.
It had been on Coruscant that she had first heard of Denon. Dado had called himself a Shadowrunner, or he said he had been before things fell apart. He had spoken of the Corpos, the struggle, the other individuals like himself and his former associates. Eventually, with some encouragement from his mysterious new friend with the false name Amrissa, he told her about Darkwire.
Dado had been part of something, a hacker specialist on a mission that had led him, along with his friends, to Coruscant. He had resisted the urge to share details of the operation they had undertaken, but it was clear even reading from his body language alone that the endeavour had not been a success. She had seen the palpable loneliness in him; Truth be told, she had preyed upon it for some time. Eventually, his defences waned enough under _Amrissa's charms and the story was laid bare; The loss of his comrades, the failure of his mission and the corporate setup behind the mission that meant he was not able to return to Denon, framed for a murder he did not commit.
At first, he had been both genuinely hurt and confused when the recent object of his obsessions had offered to buy the identity of one of his dead compatriots. Enough credits and the names that could get him transport to the Outer Reaches with no questions had been enough to make the Shadowrunner bend his moral outrage. And so the stranger had a new name, Amrissa became Erisa Adler casting off her old name for that of his dead friend. Her accent even seemed to shift, a bizarre mimicry of his own habits, not all that unlike the voice that matched the dead woman’s name.
As a serpent might shed her skin, he thought with a shiver, revealing another beneath.
And she wouldn’t stop at that. Erisa only responded to her new name, even going so far as to insist that he imagined Amrissa. Whilst Dado worked on faking the new records and identity documents, the changeling voraciously devoured every article and report on Denon she could find. The hacker felt more uncomfortable around the woman with each passing day, all the while she became increasingly uncanny in her fluency and habits, at least superficially.
He had been more than happy to split ways with Erisa when the time came and had actually recoiled from the parting kiss she had made to share with him, displaying all of the apparent authenticity of old friends parting. She actually looked hurt.
This den of iniquity was just the crucible she needed to work through the rage and confusion that had followed her for so long, the chameleon mused as she noted the gang marked youths in the nearby alley. Home was where the heart was; Home was wherever the struggle led. Denon was home, for the reborn Erisa Adler, at least until she found the answers she was looking for.
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