Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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At the Bottom of a Bottle

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Attn: [member="Scherezade deWinter"]
  • Rundown Cantina
    Somewhere in Confederate territory

The ancient and decrepit holographic projector flickering in and out of life in the corner, showed an image of some newscaster droning on about the latest developments on Nelvaan, following the overthrowing of the Eternal Empire by the Jedi regime which now took its place. Through the haze of alcohol, the bad music buzzing out of some speaker and the cacophony of noises in the cantina, the lone man leaning against the bar counter managed to hear some of what was being reported on the news.

In their infallible and infinite wisdom, the Jedi regime had decided to scale back the military and shut down many of the weapons factories on the planet. Coupled with the creation of several bloated welfare programs, the decision caused the planet's economy to take a tumble off a cliff, inflation and unemployment skyrocketing practically overnight as thousands of factory workers lost their jobs after the dramatic downscaling of the military-industrial sector which was the lifeblood of Nelvaan's society.

The lone man simply shook his head, a deflated look in his eyes as he unceremoniously decanted the remaining contents of his bottle into the glass in front of him. "Bartender," he called, voice gravelly and tired, as if he had been running a thousand miles. "Another bottle."

The little cantina's lone employee hurriedly complied, throwing fearful glances at the man. Beneath the coat he undoubtedly stole from somewhere, the man wore the clothes of a prisoner, torn and bloodstained, slitted, cat-like eyes glowing gold beneath his disshelved mane of silver hair. He had the look of an escaped convict and a dangerous aura of violence hovered around him, like a powder keg that could go up at any moment and for any reason whatsoever.

The fingers that gripped the half-empty glass of brandy ended in long, deadly claws that looked like they could disembowel a man with little to no effort.

The bartender's fear went completely unnoticed by the stranger, who, in his current state, could barely count the people in the building and couldn't care less about what any one thought about him. He was lost in his own thoughts, what little attention he allocated to the outside world being solely focused on the bottle of cheap brandy in front of him. Using treachery and underhanded tactics, the wretched servants of the Lightside had usurped his Empire in the span of a few days, turning the Viceroyalty against him with lies and undoubtedly, bribery and blackmail, pulling the wool over the eyes of his supposed political allies and ultimately deposing him, putting their own henchmen in his place.

Now they were busy destroying the careful balance he had forged during his rule over Nelvaan, balance which insured that society on the harsh world could keep functioning and were driving the planet into the ground. Weeks ago, there had been governmental purges, hundreds of governmental officials being sacked, some detained, on charges of 'Darkside corruption', accusation which these Jedi loved to throw at anyone who followed a doctrine other than their wretched Lightside pacifism and beliefs, adherence to which they had made mandatory under their new law.

Of course, for all their talk about justice, the Jedi had no qualms about attempting to secretly eliminate him by having him detained and sent to a private prison outside of the Confederacy. He was too much of a threat, they said immediately before attacking him. It hadn't gone so well for them, though. His would-be captors were now dead. And he, was here, on some planet who's name he couldn't quite conjure up out of the alcohol-induced haze which clouded his mind, a problem which he addressed by refilling the now empty glass in front of him and taking another long drink.

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[member="Darth Tacitus"]​

She hated being this close to the ORC border. Ever since that smell happening, the day she'd shown up on one of their planets drunk and ended up being arrested after the detective who arrested her admitted that he knew she hadn't done it, she'd steered clear of that place. Only once had she actually gone into their space after that, to help them fight against the invading Sith. It was not a mission she had taken on with any joy; for all she cared, they could rot in hell. But that mission had uncovered some important information that she'd yet to do anything with. For instance, that the Sith Emperor knew who she was and that she apparently was a thorn in his side. It was strange news since Scherezade was pretty sure she'd never done anything against the Sith Empire, even before their NAP agreement with the Confederacy, but you never knew. Her kill list, even if counting only those she killed directly in melee combat, was too great for her to remember who was actually on it. Even faces were wiped from memory to make place for things more important.

The job was simple. Go to this place, get that information, send it to another place, disappear among the crowd. Usually, extraction was immediate, but because the information she'd gotten was so jumbled up, her orders were to stay put until they found a way to unscramble it, for fear a second trip would be required. So, Scherezade went to where one could always effectively disappear – the slums. And in every slum, one could easily find a bar or cantina where air was replaced with smoke, where the patrons showered in cheap booze, and where the ladies were even cheaper than the booze in question. Scherezade loved places like that. Especially when she was itching to fight. There was always some damned fool who thought he could take her, whether it was because she was human, a woman, had a pretty face, or she provoked him into doing it.

But this… Something was different here, and she knew it the moment she entered. For Scherezade was a Blood Hound, and that not only meant that she could tell what people's species and in some cases their bloodlines too, but it also meant that she had everyone she met's unique scent pinned down. And while she would never be as bold as to lie and say she remembered all the scents, there were more than enough people whose distinctive smells she knew well. Too well, sometimes. And this was one of them.

The first time she had come across him, she had not yet come into her Blood Hound abilities, and had not known who or what he was in terms of the blood. The second time, she had not cared. The third… Had not been her. That had been her sister, inside her own body, who had been manhandled and then treated like chit, because the man thought she was herself. It had been well over a year now, maybe even more, since he offered to adopt her, to train her. An offer she had so direly needed, an opportunity to come back to life. But the price… The price had been too high. He had wanted her to eventually kill the man she loved, as vengeance for what he had done to her. Scherezade had run away from him because of that. Because she knew she could not.

What had come after that were months of being a drunkard before she at last tried to take her own life. And failed miserably at it. But he didn't need to know that.

And here he was now. She did not need special abilities or the Force to smell the liquor on him. To understand what that slump of his back meant. And she remembered. She remembered every word he had said to her that night.

"That, Kainan, is nothing more than a weighted ball chained to your ankle," she said as she sat down on the high bar char next to him and pointed at the murky contents of his glass, "It will not help you deal with your pain, in fact it will do the exact opposite. Intoxicants only ever make you weaker and more susceptible to the things that gnaw at your heart."

Smiling sweetly at the bartender, she signaled for her own drink. "You also smell like piss and chit. Krakking Force, couldn't you take a shower sometime in the last few months?"
 
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Attn: [member="Scherezade deWinter"]
  • Rundown Cantina
    Somewhere in Confederate territory

He threw one glance over his shoulder at her, before turning back to his musings. A few moments of silence followed as his mind fought through the haze of alcohol to find and form the appropriate words for a response. The smallest hint of an ironic smile formed in the corner of his mouth, though it did nothing to banish the empty look in his eyes. "I know," he said to her, the words slightly slurred. A clawed hand reached out towards the shelves on the wall behind the bar, accidentally knocking over the impressive pile of empty bottles he had collected in the few hours since he stepped through the cantina's doors.

Reaching out through the Force, he focused on one of the empty glasses on the shelf and pulled it to him, something which the man who shattered a crashing Star Destroyer could normally do as easily as breathing. But the ragged drunk which slumped in the chair, was the barest hint of a shadow of that man. Instead of settling into his waiting hand, the glass shot out like a projectile, barely missing the head of some other customer a few tables back. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman screamed. "Let's try that again," the drunk said, a look of concentration on his face as he pulled a second glass, this one slipping from his telekinetic grasp a few inches away from his hand. Somehow, it did not shatter upon the hard plasteel surface of the bar.

He poured the remaining contents of the bottle into the empty glass, then placed it down in front of the girl, a gesture of his hand inviting her to drink. He noticed she had made some comment about taking a shower, though he didn't catch the exact words. "No such thing as showers on a slaver barge," was his response. Last night, a slaver ship crashed down on the planet with no survivors. Upon inspection, authorities had found the corpses of several Jedi onboard and had concluded that they died when their attempt to rescue the slaves had somehow went awry. Whole affair had made local headlines and was all over the news until a couple of hours ago. Kainan knew that the truth about what had happened aboard that vessel and why it crashed, was entirely different from what the local authorities believed.

Because they abducted him illegally, the Jedi had to charter a less reputable ship to transport him to his destination. They took every precaution they could think of, capturing him by somehow drugging his food, then fitting him with a voidstone collar for the duration of the journey and keeping him in chains. Neither that, nor the questionable slop they served to the 'merchandise' aboard the ship as food, had stopped him in the end. He managed to pull off the classic trick of enraging one of the slaver guards to the point where the Gamorrean felt like stepping inside his cage to administer a well-deserved beating.

Uninformed about the nature and identity of the prisoner they were transporting and left unattended by the two Jedi which had been assigned to oversee his transport, the ship's crew were unprepared to deal with such a thing as a Sith Lord, even one half-starved and chained to a post in a dirty cell for weeks. Ultimately, he made his way to the ship's bridge, killing everyone along the way, including his Jedi captors, who were busy threatening the ship's captain with something, when he tore his way in. Something did go awry, though, in the form of a stray disruptor bolt which killed the pilot and destroyed the ship's main control console.

For all their preaching about the sanctity of life, it seemed these particular followers of the Lightside had no qualms about working with the worst scum of the galaxy when it suited their interests. Of course, he did not waste his breath trying to tell Scherezade the story. In his current state of inebriation, it would have taken him hours to even form the words. And if he was surprised to run into her, here, at the literal tail end of the universe, he showed no sign of it.

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[member="Darth Tacitus"]​

Scherezade remained silent as she stared at him making a fool of himself. Breaking bottles, glasses, making a woman scream. Where had the Darth vanished to, why had he left behind a man that could barely even count as bottom feeder with how he was behaving? Where was the man to whom control, including self-control, was holier than almost anything else?

"You're not on a slaver barge, butthole," she pointed out. No. Wherever he had gone to, between that and this place, he could've had the time to shower.

Grabbing the bottle from him, she showed no shyness as she drank directly from it, emptying half its contents without as much as a blink. Her months as a drunkard had had their effects on her body. She had yet to find the point at which she became drunk these days. Most of the time, she gave up on drinking at all, choosing instead of savor it for exceptional moments. Exceptional moments like this.

Slamming the bottle back on the table, the Sithling sighed. How times had changed. How the situation was now reversed.

"So you show up like a drunkard on some backwater planet," she said, "you smell like piss and chit and don't think I can't smell the blood of others on you as well." Did he know why though? No, she did not recall telling him that she was a Blood Hound. But, she supposed, it did not matter, "So what the krak happened to you? Did you get dumped by some woman and go on a rampage trying to work it out? Do I need to grab you by the beck of your neck and throw you into a lake so you'd stink a little less?"

Displaying much more control than he did, Scherezade moved her left hand in the air, throwing open a cabinet door with the Force, and then called something that was meant to be good whiskey to them. Good whiskey in a place like this usually meant that they'd watered it down with water and not by peeing into the bottle directly.

Scherezade offered Kainan the bottle and leaned closer. "Well?" she asked, ready for him to start speaking. Once he actually said more than a single sentence in one go, she could consider her options more carefully.
 
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Attn: [member="Scherezade deWinter"]
  • Rundown Cantina
    Somewhere in Confederate territory

He felt his anger rising at the gir's tone. Taloned hands closed into fists, gouging deep gashes into the cheap plastic of the bar counter, blood seeping between his fingers as the unnatural claws bit into the flesh of his palms. The bartender took a step back at the display, his skin losing a few shades of color at the sight of what, he was sure, was a drunk Sith in a volatile mood, who could probably tear the entire cantina and everyone inside, to pieces in the blink of an eye. He'd seen the holovids, like everyone else. He saw what Force wielders did to Coruscant, it had been all over the news and even now, years later, the fear was still very much alive in the hearts of many.

Instead, and perhaps to everyone's surprise, the Sith Lord just sighed, slowly shaking his head, the anger beating back some of the alcohol-induced haze that had gripped his mind. "You think all this is about some woman?" he asked, something like a mixture of sorrow and disappointment in his tone. "How very little you know about me. And how much less you understand."

He lifted his head, his cat-like eyes boring into hers. "What do you know of what its like to devote your entire life to a cause? To sacrifice everything for an ideal, a higher calling and to bear the responsibility of fifty million lives, if not billions more?" he asked her. "Oh, no, Scherezade, this isn't about some woman. This is about being one man fighting to hold back the tide, about shouldering a burden you can't even begin to imagine."

"Or what, did you think that I've sunk two decades of my life into building the Eternal Empire, just for wealth and power?" the Sith Lord said, too tired to put on the mask that concealed from the world just how tired he really was. "If I wanted that, I could have simply built up my businesses and bought any politicians who got in the way. It would have been easy. But nothing worthwhile in life is ever easy."

His eyes scanned the room, regarding the cantina's terrified occupants with a contemptuous glare. "Look at them all, so blissfully ignorant, living their happy little meaningless lives with no concern beyond the immediate satisfaction of whatever whims fly through their minds at the moment, unconcerned about the future and anyone else beyond themselves. They have no idea about what's coming for this galaxy, or what it will take to stop it. But I do," he said, a slight tremor in his tone, betraying his worries. The indomitable Sith Lord who stared down into the face of death like it was nothing, who faced the hulking, burning mass of a crashing Star Destroyer and sacrificed his life in a most horrible way without flinching, was worried.

"I sunk two decades of my life into raising an army the likes of which the galaxy has never seen, building a fleet that can stand against any threat that dares challenge it. I shouldn't be here, yet here I am," he said, his tone rising as resentment and anger built up, coursing again through his veins. "Yet here I am, all because of a bunch of hypocritical Jedi and self-absorbed politicians corrupted to their bones. A bunch of sniveling, short-sighted cowards is what they are, all that they are."

Oh, he would rebuild the Empire. He would rally his people and drive the Hand of Light from his planet, dealing with them once and for all with the swift, mathematical brutality that had become so characteristic of him and his nation. But it was clear to him that he couldn't rely on the Confederacy, at least not on its current government, even one bit. Tanaab had made that fact clear. The willingness which Metus and Srina had shown to throw away the lives of his men, all for the sake of the precious sensibilities of the Silver Jedi, had completely shattered his faith in them and their ability to rule. No, if the Empire was to remain with the Confederacy, then a new government was needed. One more... malleable towards the Eternal Empire's goals and needs. Perhaps he should have a chat with his power-hungry brother. It wouldn't be the first time Tacitus had rigged an election. That would have to wait until later. Right now...

Once again he directed his gaze to the Sithling beside him. "Tell me, Scherezade. Where do your loyalties truly lie? What do you believe in?"

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[member="Darth Tacitus"]


Scherezade followed Tacitus' movements carefully, noting the changing colors of the barman. She sighed then, and waved the man away, tossing him a few credit chips as she did so. "This should cover your entire inventory twice over," she shrugged, "Best leave us be. The walls will still be standing when you come back tomorrow. That much, I can promise. Take the others with you if you ever want them to come back too."

Taking another drink for herself, she said nothing as Kainan continued his monologue. Even in his drunken grief he insist on insulting her, on trying to appear as though he was some form of a superior. She grumped. The only thing the silly man had on her was more years of being actually alive. On everything else, long debates could be held.

By the time Tacitus motioned to the others in the cantina, they were making their last moves to leave, taking with them their drinks and credits. Her chips had paid for their drinks as well, and not a single one of them was, sadly, too drunk to pay for his own.

"So everything you believed to be true turned out not to be so, things you had vested your hopes and plans in have crumbled, and now you're in a dank cantina somewhere being drunk out of your mind," she summarized his tale of woe for him, "Gee, doesn't that sound familiar. Should I berate you around as you had done to me when the shoe was the on the other foot? Should I try to manipulate you into terminating the Vicelord and his lap poodle?"

Scherezade rolled her eyes. The parallel lines were so thick that even a toddler could paint with crayons between them.

"Let's put the cards on the table," she shrugged, "Your army isn't much to write home about. Maybe compared to what they were before you, they're amazingly amazing now, but if you took them against the Sith Empire or any true galactic war and not those silly skirmishes the Confederacy has done against the Mandalorians knowing full in advance that they were going to win no matter what, you're essentially a stack of playing cards with pointy sticks. I don't know what those Jedi did to you, but if you'd built your army properly and they were better, you noy only shouldn't have been her, you also actually wouldn’t. So let's stop finger pointing at how everyone else is so wrong."

Leaning back in her chair, she downed another mug of hot cream. This one had a touch of honey in it. Ugh. Why?! It didn't need to be sweetened, the dairy sugars that came with it naturally were more than enough.

Where did her loyalties lie?

Scherezade sighed. "When we were first introduced, my aunt told you of my title and planet," she explained, "Nearly everything I have done since, has been to protect it. I don't go there, because if I'm followed, that would be me in danger. I'm not strong enough to protect it. Basically, I'm not even worthy yet. My sister thinks I'm wrong, but she doesn't understand it. I was recruited into the Confederacy and the Mandragora before I could remind my brain that it knew how to read and write but when I realized I'd become part of an empire – and yes, the Confederacy is an empire, no amount of pretty words shall ever change that – I decided to stay here and prove myself. This has, thus, failed. Spectacularly. So here I am, talking to a drunk butthole in the middle of nowhere, instead. You're the butthole, in case you missed your que.

So where to my loyalties lie? My home planet. First. Forever. Always. What comes after that… The Confederacy is disappointing in more ways than one. My second loyalties may soon enough change."
 

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