Cold Comfort [Kelsie]

[Razelle Breuner]

KOLJAT PROCESSING PLANT, VENGARD
Nelvaan, Local Time 1924

There were very few things Razelle Breuner would have preferred to avoid more than being within the sovereign territory of the Eternal Empire. Breathtakingly illegal black ops inside allied territory was part and parcel for her position, of course, but if you got paid to remove wasps would you jump at every opportunity to strip yourself topless and shove your arm wrist-deep in a teeming hive? It was a necessary evil, as it turned out. Informants were difficult to come by in an authoritarian dictatorship with thought police and state-mandated militant patriotism. Sometimes you just needed boots on the ground.

Getting into the city had been a trick. Surveillance cameras, thought police, exceptionally large patrols... If it hadn't been for the substantial population of middle- to upper-class humans living in Vengard, two little birdies would have stuck out like sore thumbs. Talons. Whatever. Eventually, though, through elaborately contrived hijinks involving a hijacked speeder, two fruit pies, and the scores for the previous evening's Huttball game, they'd made their way somewhere within about a kilometer orbital of their objective. Inside a storehouse office overlooking one of the subsidiary Chromanin mining plants, Razelle sat in relative silence with a woman who was beginning to be something of a fixture in her life.

Outside was sheeting, freezing rain, so visual information would be limited from here. The second they went out, though, they risked exposure. As always, it couldn't be simple.

With a sigh, the rook tapped on her datapad to record what little they'd found so far. "Twenty processing plants in this stupid city and we manage to find the one without a single crystal." Razelle shrugged and turned around, leaning up against one wall of the office to look back at her partner. "Which might be exactly what we were looking for, honestly. Or it might be a fluke." The Eternal Empire's consumption of their precious crystal resources had taken a notable uptick in recent months, but there was no commensurate increase in visible Chromanin hardware. It had to be going somewhere.

Raz was a few moments from the gravest sin of speculation when she noticed that, quite unlike what she'd seen on their previous missions, Sylvan's head wasn't in the game. "Hey. Nelvaan to Hawk. Come in Hawk." She waved one hand towards the murderous ginger's face. "You look like you're a hundred lightyears away."

[member="Kelsie Sylvan"]

 

[Kelsie Sylvan]

Kelsie was only eight hundred forty-three kilometers, one hundred ninety-eight meters away.

She hadn't touched Nelvaan's surface in eight hundred years, and it certainly showed -- whatever had happened here had been fast and extreme, somewhat like the majority of the Eternal Empire's military. This city seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere. She'd recalled something about a mining town in the area, but that had been when one of the largest settlements on the planet was the secret facility she'd been training at. It'd been so long ago. She couldn't recognize this place, despite the oddly familiar imperialistic tendencies of the city's society. Part of her had missed it. Most of her hated it.

As much as she'd been raised to be perfectly obedient to the Empire, someone among the director's board must have understood that a spark of creativity and intelligence was required when it came to hunting and taking down Jedi. As the last generation of her program, the only one left 'incomplete', she hadn't finished her indoctrination, and her subsequent transition into an entirely different galaxy than the one she'd been made to operate in left a bitter taste. The freedom to pursue mission objectives however they liked, with the lack of familiar white-shelled support waiting half a system away. Now all she had was this blonde woman...

Normally when Kelsie thought about her squad it was when she was among the Dauntless commandos she'd trained. But Nelvaan, effectively her homeworld, brought back memories. She was starting to see faces. Even the rather distinct mug of Razelle Breuner was distorted into that of her squadmate, Evalyn -- the one that had died on a similarly frigid planet. She blinked, realizing that the woman was addressing her. An uncharacteristic frown came over her face. "I'm just... thinking. Chill." She shook her head. Distractions, just distractions. She was better than this, she had to be.

She looked away again, and for a moment actually did have her head in the game. "We don't really know what exactly we're looking for. Missy is still working through their primary security systems back at my ship, but with all this rain and interference I'm not really a fan of pulling whatever information she gets from here, assuming she even has any by the time it lets up." Kelsie had begun to assume that Missy could solve most of her problems, but something new always seemed to pop up. "I guess we just... look around. When the rain lets up we can check another one of the plants." The young woman glanced around the warehouse. "There's gotta be something in here..."

[member="Razelle Breuner"]