Brawling Over Pebbles

[Ashin Varanin]

The Cularin system had seen a number of Jedi and Sith temples, history suggested, both before and during the Dark Age. In modern times, the Republic had tried to rebuild, as had the Confederacy -- possibly. Now just about everything was wreckage, as far as Shambleau could see. And she didn't even have to trust her eyes on that one, or her nascent Force senses. Ajira had provided her with a Mandalorian handheld scanner, a bulky thing, and it concurred: this place was a mess.

Scanner in a two-handed grip, Shambleau slunk through the rubble at nightfall. She'd timed her landing by force of habit, but also by judgment. She kept a running tally of hours left until sunrise. Should any other treasure hunters interfere, she'd have sufficient time to handle them before daylight became a problem. Not that she'd loaded for bear: her two lightsabres would be enough for most threats.

The scanner picked up a crystalline matrix, deep in the layered rubble of a collapsed academy wing. But not far away, it also picked up a lifesign...

[member="Luca Thorne"]

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Lady Shambleau"]

After months of planning the Triumvirate had launched itself in a big way. Full assault on Ruusan and the surrounding systems to snatch them away from the failing giant that was the Union, but that was just the beginning. Agents were being sent to neighbouring sectors - some publically as diplomats, to feel out possible relationships and some more… covert.

"Target?" Thorne whispered through the comm. They were four in total: demolition, sniper, tracker and him, the jack of the squad.

"Nope."
"Non."
"Target acqui- nevermind, just an oversized rat, over."

"Acknowledged." They weren’t the most professional, yet. But that was why they had been assigned to him. Someone had to get them in line.

Rifle at ready Thorne entered the next room. Sith Academy, overrun with all manners of filth and ransacked to its very foundation. He doubted they would find anything of use here.

But something or someone was out there.

There. The faintest of sounds. Almost like a cloak ruffling softly in the air. He decided to enforce comm silence for now, last thing he wanted was to give his position away by whispering.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Luca Thorne"]

Not one lifesign; instead, the sensor contact resolved into four. A squad, or an adventuring crew, and fairly close. Shambleau's stomach growled.

Her flexible armor stayed with her as she flowed into her true form, her Mikan form, and slipped through a gap overhead. She nestled into a nook that no human could fit, coiling her tentacles. Her first instinct was always to find a safe place, and from there...

An ancient Pius Dea incantation rolled through her mind, and a Force Shadow took shape. She saw through the shadow's eyes, urging it on through the rubble. If any of the four were Force-sensitive, they would see the shadow as a Force vision that looked much like her: tentacular indigo madness. Non-sensitives would see nothing, and that was the hope. Fear had its uses, but stray weapons fire was a thing, and Shambleau was far more interested in watching these people at close range. The shadow was the ideal tool for such tasks.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Lady Shambleau"]

She was partially in luck then. There was only one latent force sensitive on the squad and that was the tracker, who at this precise moment was on the outskirts of the temple and scouting the surroundings.

The other three were very not force sensitive.

"Think I saw something, Thorne. Keep on your toes." Luca didn’t reply, but was getting a bad feeling. He felt like he was being watched, just that particular itching feeling on the lower blade of his shoulder.

But as far as he could see there was nothing around.

Which didn’t mean there wasn’t anything there. Stubbornly he kept on his trudging, feet for feet.

Then his sensors picked something up.

A multiple something bouncing off a surface and finally resting on the ground. The HUD gave him a vague direction, eight ‘o'clock and… up? That couldn’t be right.

Luca decided to circle, exiting the hallway by the way of a door to his left and entering a room adjacent to the source of the previous sound.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Luca Thorne"]

With the shadow's sight overlaid on her own, Shambleau compared the sensor readouts to the Force-based remote view. The fourth man, the one who'd claimed to see something, wasn't with the rest, but nor did he have any kind of a sight-line on her area. That was one worry down, and the timing said interesting things about the fourth man. The problem, though, was that the other three soldiers had heard her. And they were certainly soldiers.

She allowed the Force shadow to dissipate; it had served its purpose, and she needed her attention focused on the here and now. She could easily reach half a dozen other hiding spots and escape routes, slipping through crevices that no humanoid could navigate, but such movement would make noise. Her tentacles could dislodge pebbles -- probably the source of their current alert. That meant she needed noise to cover her movement. Telekinesis might do, but she worried about dislodging too much rubble and causing some kind of collapse. She had no gear that could create noise at a distance, not wedged in here like she was. That left only one possible source of noise.

Another Pius Dea curse rolled through her head, designed to inflict sudden and debilitating pain. She selected the lower leg of one of the three nearby men at random -- the fourth was too far away for her. Right about now, intense screaming should be filling the air, and she could move to another shadowed nook that led deeper into the stacked rubble.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Lady Shambleau"]

As fate had it Shambleau randomly picked the lower leg of the demolition expert. A grizzled women in her fifties, years ago an explosive went off while she was trying to dismantle it - most of the punch was absorbed by her protective suit, but some of the shrapnel got stuck in that same leg. Lots of surgery left a lot of the nerve endings dead or removed altogether.

All of this to say was that while the woman was screaming at the top of her lungs from the pain, leaning heavily on her other leg, but she wasn’t incapacitated completely, yet.

The screaming came from the North-West wing. Too far away for Thorne to get there in time for whatever was happening.

"Check up on her, Thad."

"On it, boss."

His helmet re-calibrated its sensors. The screaming was casting echoes all over the place, so he tried to filter out the sounds over a certain threshold of dB and see if that would give him something.

For now Thorne kept on creeping towards his prior destination, until something gave him a different idea.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Luca Thorne"]

As the woman screamed, the men reacted, and the team leader adjusted his sound pickups, Shambleau moved. Still in her native Mikan form, she slithered from her ceiling nook and dropped to the floor of what had once been something like a room. Within moments, she dropped through a gap in the floor, into a broken old pipe or utility access shaft. It bent, but air moved enough that she doubted it was totally blocked. She headed in the direction of the crystalline mineral signature and the associated, overlapping energy signature. If a holocron really was buried in here, she meant to secure it and leave. She wasn't quite hungry enough to try shucking a commando or two. Not yet, anyway.

Whether she'd been seen or not, though -- that was the question. She kept the sensor node and the lightsabres coiled in her tentacles, ready for whatever; sometimes she took a glance at the screen as she moved. The spell and the screaming would wear off shortly, and with it her audio cover. For the moment, the bent subfloor conduit was her shelter.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Lady Shambleau"]

Just the tail end.

A blurry mass of purple, tentacles and… things launching itself from up-above into a gap in the floor they were on. Something told Thorne that diving in face-forward would be the worst mistake of his soldiering career, so instead he opted for the less direct approach.

He didn’t want to throw in a fragmentation nade, simply because they hadn’t explored those sub-basement levels yet.

A big enough explosion could cause damage to anything worthwhile down there and without proper visual, he wouldn’t even have the luxury of picking his target before throwing the explosive in. Second option: flashbang, he wasn’t certain it would have any effect, of course.

But loud, ear-piercing noises and disorienting flashes of light could give him an option.

So a few moments after the thing disappeared into the gap a flashbang nade was thrown in after it.

Bang.

He counted until three and then chucked a CryoBan ‘nade right after it.

Just to be safe. Last thing the soldier wanted was to start climbing down, just to start wrestling with tentacles. The mental visuals weren’t all that pretty.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Luca Thorne"]

Ahead of Shambleau, the pipe continued to warp, perforated and crimped by whatever impact had collapsed the stone walls. She could see in the dark like most nocturnal species, but this deep in the wreckage of a temple, even her sight was vague. The troopers in their helmets likely had the advantage so far as sight went. Then again, they didn't have the Force. An impression flooded her mind as she circumnavigated a rent in the metal, but she was in no position to react. She could outrace any humanoid in confines this small, and the grenade just wasn't close enough for an instinctive tossback. Light and sound roared, a tangible shockwave amplified by the near-horizontal pipe. Eyes squeezed shut without effect, blinded and stunned, she tumbled through the ragged-edged gap. Sharp metal scored her armor with bruising force.

She hit the floor of a cramped chamber that used to be a room. An instant later, a wave of bitter cold washed out of the pipe. Maybe ten metres separated the dorsal gap where he'd tossed the grenade and the ventral gap where she'd fallen through. Her goal had been to get closer to the presumed holocron -- the crystalline mineral signature coinciding with the energy spike -- and she'd done that. Blinking away a diffuse afterimage, she picked up her lightsabres and the durable sensor. The overlapping signatures were right on the other side of the wall, and the fighter's lifesigns were back in the room where he'd tossed the grenades at her.

Maybe he would try to come at her through the pipe. That could be entertaining. In the meantime, there was another lifesign even closer, not directly above her but close enough. And she could hear shuffling through a gap of some kind.

She stretched up a tentacle, grabbed a leg, and yanked it into a conveniently leg-sized hole with bone-cracking force.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Lady Shambleau"]

The flashbang roared, the CryoBan screeched and one soldier dropped down the gap and landed on the surface of the horizontal pipe. It was dark again, the helmet and his own modified eyes filtered and cleared out the image in front of him, but still dark. Nobody here, but the icy frosting on the pipe. No detached limbs either.

So she had escaped that particular fate.

Luca crept on. Silently - though, he had the feeling their target was less than focused on her physical senses and more on the magical ones - the ventral gap was passed and circled.

He didn’t have a good angle on it. Whatever the thing was… she could be waiting for him right there and then. But as always Thorne’s decision was made for him when a second voice continued the screaming of the first.

Distinctly male.

“Aaaaaaaah” did the flowery voice sing as his leg was almost being torn apart. The sniper was being held by the demolitionist for now.

Luca emerged from the ventral gap and his training took over the moment he saw the situation at hand.

Purple blob with tentacles. Said tentacle was pulling at a leg.

Why did he get himself into these kind of situations?

The blaster rifle rose up and plasma shots were rapidly fired in the direction of the blobby alien-thing.

Blob. Blob. Blob.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Luca Thorne"]

One tentacle still wrapped firmly around the shredded leg that protruded from the ceiling, Shambleau whirled as another combatant dropped down into the tiny chamber. Apart from the thigh-sized hole currently occupied by the leg, and the gap in the pipe where the man had just entered, the broken chamber had no viable exit that she could detect.

A blaster rifle roared at close quarters. Lightsabres snapped to life in two of Shambleau's tentacles, deflecting the flurry of bolts in all directions. Smoke and blaster plasma filled half the tiny chamber in fractions of a second.

Specifically, his half.

He couldn't have known, of course that she was sentient, let alone that she was Force-sensitive, let alone that she had lightsabres and the training to use them. Deflecting one gun's fire wasn't terribly hard. Harder, though, since it was fully automatic and at point-blank range. She couldn't keep this up for more than a few seconds. Fortunately, since a good chunk of his blasterfire was headed right back at him, she probably didn't have to.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Lady Shambleau"]

Eyes widened as the tentacle blob suddenly revealed not even one, but two lightsabers and started using them to deflect the plasma bolts away from itself. Not just away from itself, but in his direction. Instinct was still working and said instinct told him to keep firing.

Not every single one of them found their way back to him. The ones that did were soaked up by his personal shield, not without its own discomforts. The heat started to rise in his immediate surroundings.

He couldn’t keep this up.

Above the blob the leg was still hanging in there. With her attention refocused on sending back the hail of automatic fire the stress on the limb was less than it had been before though.

Another gun barrel appeared in one of the tinier gaps. It started to fire upon the blob, the owner of the leg desperately trying to get its leg back.

Luca rolled away to the left as his shield stopped working: it had soaked up too much energy in too short a time.

He only had a little cover left, but his options were starting to decrease exponentially.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Luca Thorne"]

First one bolt, then another and another, slashed past Shambleau's defenses as she released the leg. Her flexible armour took the worst of a torso hit, but one of her major tentacles writhed in pain. As the leg withdrew, she anchored her tentacles and scrambled up through the head-sized gap with inhuman speed. One of her lightsabre hilts snagged crosswise in her haste, and fell down into the chamber with the man. Well, crap.

One of the other soldiers, seriously injured in the leg department, was crouched awkwardly, blaster rifle aimed through a small gap in the floor. Off balance but moving fast, Shambleau lashed out with her remaining lightsabre at point-blank range. No finesse, just a straightforward lateral chop that should cleave the gun, the hand that held it, and the torso behind that hand. This was the soldier whose leg Shambleau had just worried like a nexu with a nuna. Blasterfire chased her up the gap, but just now she was too busy trying to kill the more immediate threat. That, and she had to make sure that others of the squad didn't come up behind her in the seconds that elapsed while she resolved this situation. A handful of dark and Mikan-accessible gaps and breaches marked this hall and nearby branches; she took stock of that in the back of her mind, trying to figure out the best escape route by instinct. Not that escape was her long-term plan, but this was all about finding positions of advantage, moment by moment. Ideally, for example, she'd just trapped the man down in that chamber: unless he wanted to get friendly with her dropped lightsabre, to get out he would have to ascend into the crumpled pipe, crawl ten metres through an icy pipe, then pop out several rooms away from here where he'd sent down the CryoBan.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Lady Shambleau"]

The nearly-crippled soldier fell backwards as suddenly the big blob of purple pushed its way through another gap and assaulted him, this saved his life, but sadly left his blaster still decapitated.

He immediately went for his side weapon. But that soldier was the least of Shambleau’s concern.

Because there had been two soldiers in this room. The nuna being harassed by the nexu and the demolitionist who he had been looking for - when she had started screaming like a crazed person.

Said demolitionist hadn’t been waiting.

The moment the purple mess climbed up, her shotgun whipped up as well. It roared as concentrated plasma blasted out through its barrels.

So Shambleau had one wounded nuna with a side weapon aiming at her, a demolitionist with a shotgun shooting at her, and then there was the third thing.

That familiar sound of a lightsaber suddenly igniting underneath her.

It hummed and then sizzzzzzed.

Whilst she was busy, Thorne started to dig through the wall that separated him from the holocron.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Luca Thorne"]

Shambleau dropped bonelessly, and the shotgun roared overhead, spattering against the edges of someone’s energy shields. The heat of the bolt’s passage toasted her pretty good, despite the flexible armor around her body core: these people had better protection against their own fire than she did. At an animal level, she needed to get out of this corridor; at a tactical level, that sounded like a very good idea.

On the other hand, like Hell were three stormtroopers, one seriously injured, going to take down a Mikan Ke’dem operative at point-blank range.

Their energy shields were a challenge, preventing her from simply breaking their necks with her tentacles lest she risk burns. But she’d drunk deep at the Valley of the Jedi not long ago in desperate need; she’d trained and fought her way across the galaxy and beyond; she’d hunted bipedal meat her entire life.

A twist of the Force aimed to shove the shotgun inexorably upward, muzzle first. The first pistol shots met her upraised lightsabre and went straight back the way they’d come. Those were the bare minimum defensive responses. Her return stroke was a crippling Pius Dea incantation, a pain aura that should encompass and incapacitate all three in the room. Maybe the one with her lightsabre, too, though how he’d detected the holocron she had no idea. She dug as deep as she could afford, conscious that the situation could change in seconds. By hitting them with whiteout agony, though, she hoped to forestall their options and give herself a moment to finish them off with her sabre.