Desert Sand & Power Plays (Fringe Dominion of Sabarene)

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Spencer Jacobs"] [member="Jared Ovmar"]

"I'd like to think I still have enough pull to bring a backwater into the Confederation without raising eyebrows. If eyebrows are raised..." She shrugged extensively. "Then there's not much point in being a Grand Admiral, is there. Plus that's what I have you two for. High Councilor! Arbiter! Former absolute rulers! Something along those lines. If the three of us can't make something useful happen, I don't know what will. I'm aiming for...a fortress. Building a fortress. Something with enough transceiver capacity to monitor that whole frontier."

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

A man stepped foot into the arena, he wasn’t wearing anything interesting, a leather coat, jeans, blaster tucked into its holster and a cigarette perching prominently from his lips, until Khaleel spit it out and crushed the but under his foot. At least he would be able to say that he had crushed something beneath his foot this day.

He wasn’t kidding himself about his chances, Merrill was… well you couldn’t even compare it between leagues. It was like a baby fighting a Goddess, but she was his employer so what she said went.

Another foot stepped into the arena and that was that, point of no return and all that. Quietly he studied Rave, trying to think up any tactic and failing miserably, so Khal simply sighed and decided to at least try and not make too much of a fool of himself.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Khaleel Malvern"]

Rave didn't much enjoy being shoehorned into fighting one of her employees. Frankly, she was fairly sure Malvern thought this match was her idea, and felt some pressure to face her. Where it had come from remained a mystery.

Or perhaps this was something akin to what male privilege felt like.

Class privilege maybe?

She resolved to be a little more careful how she threw her weight around, then promptly forgot the resolution and brought the bokken down off her shoulder. She advanced across the sandy arena, weapon raised before her in one hand.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

Khaleel blinked as his employer started to walk across the field with the cane, of sorts, raised above her head. Had it been anyone else it would have looked silly, possible preposterous, perhaps a little of both, but with her? It seemed annoyingly intimidating, the thief quickly grabbed for his blaster, aimed and shot a few times at her.

Perhaps he would even hit her.

Maybe.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Khaleel Malvern"]

A bokken wasn't a lightsabre. Blasterfire glanced off the alchemized wood, leaving a thin patina of char, but she couldn't catch all his shots. That kind of absolute invulnerability to blasterfire was for Jedi, or at least people who hadn't spent their entire lives doing something useful. One shot clipped her left shoulder with bruising force; another slammed into her gut. She set her feet with a grunt, alchemist's senses flicking through the Force-imbued tikulini leather and verifying that it was unbroken.

Then she kept walking.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

Khal set his jaw and kept firing at Rave. He was forgetting who he was here, in the streets there ain’t no mercy for women, girls, there was no male privilege, underestimating the other sex would get you knifed rather quickly, besides this ain’t a normal woman at any rate.

This was the Rave Merrill.

And so he kept on firing, there was still some ground to cover and perhaps he would be able to incapacitate her before she came at him with that big stick of hers, somehow he doubted it was a regular stick.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Khaleel Malvern"]

She set her teeth in a grin and got to work, bokken blurring around her as she advanced step by step in a zigzag. She focused on handling those bolts that jeopardized her extremities; the alchemized tikulini leather only covered her from hips to neck and shoulders. Plasma spray from broken bolts splashed heat over her skin. More than a few bolts slammed into the leather, warming and bruising her but failing to penetrate the Myriad Singlet.

She kept walking.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

He kept shooting, aiming exactly at those extremities. Which didn't mean a lot really - Khaleel was hardly a battle-hardened veteran with eagle vision who could hit a target from thousands of miles away.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Khaleel Malvern"]

It became more difficult to keep up with the wide spread of fire as he compensated for the direction of her focus, so she ran. She sprinted the last few steps, zigzagging furiously, her bokken flicking away his shots. A few more glancing impacts staggered her at the wrong moment, but she pressed on, lunging in and to the left, aiming to pass him right side to right side. Her bokken slashed down for his near shin, then came up for a decapitating cut. If it hit, she'd pull it, but the paralysis would take hold regardless - if it hit.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

She scored a hit and the peddle integrated into the bokken zapped him on the shin, quickly incapacitating his right leg (or at least the direct area around the shin) Khal wasn't exactly the quickest guy around, but even he got the basic jist of swordplay - least after watching Merrill train for a bit and picking up some tricks.

He didn't think, just acted. The Lazy Eye in Khal's right hand lashed out towards the upcoming bokken, deflecting it, and immediately pulled the trigger a few more times, trying to hit the woman point-blank.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Khaleel Malvern"]

Among the many reasons that Rave had filled the galaxy with the products of alchemy, one ranked fairly high, as Kaine had discovered on Teta.

Using an alchemist's creations against her generally didn't go so well.

A trio of blaster shots chewed into her tikulini singlet, scorching it away from her belly and shoving her half a step. Her ooglith cloaker -- her fake skin -- began to scorch too; she didn't feel it. Now that she was close enough to recognize the gun as one that she'd made personally, it was a fairly straightforward matter to make the handgrip tingle oddly in his palm, a vibration that could become a burn. Overt, basic Force use tended to wash over a Lazy Eye, but she'd alchemized every molecule of that terentatek-horn grip, and it responded to a thought.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

The moment the gun started heating up in his hand Khal knew something was wrong, very wrong at that, it had probably something to do with the woman fighting him, the creator of the weapon. Perhaps some fail-safe, maybe some force-magicka stuff, probably. Khaleel wasn't an especially testosteron-filled alpha male with something to proof, when his hand started scorching he did the only thing that made sense to him. He threw it at the Witch, Phrik housing first and follow up by him throwing himself at her.

Not in a 'Please take me, I want you'-kind of way, of course. But he realized that besides that blaster? He didn't have anything to fight with and that stick gave her an advantage if Khal tried to fist-fight her. So instead he attempted to make it a closer fight, negate the stick out of the equation.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Rave"] Merrill

She caught the gun on the bokken, or tried to; she hit the barrel, and it slammed into the part of her belly and side where Sig-gas-powered blasterfire had chewed into the tikulini singlet. A rib cracked audibly, and then he was on her, bearing her down to the sand, her bokken floundering off to the side somewhere.

She'd meant to be sporting, she really had, but he was quite a bit bigger than her and she was in quite a bit of pain.

Lightning. Lightning everywhere.

 

[Lucianus Adair]

His physiology wasn't particularly fond of this type of climate, but it was far from killing him. Even so, he'd have traded his presence here to be on a ball of ice, if preferences were to be told; if there were any grumbling to be had, he kept it swallowed down - he was supposed to be here. So here he was, icy eyes affixed to a datapad in hand, carrying the look of a man perpetually on task. It was largely by virtue of the long hours one of his kind could keep that the Confederation ran even half as well as they did. Which still was not as well as they could be. He was, after all, only one man.

One man being tailed by one little-used assistant. One eager-to-the-point-of-annoyance assistant. The fact that he had staff because of his position was something he blatantly ignored, a large percentage of the time. Perhaps if he worked less from the comfort of his own abode, and showed up in the offices a little more often...

"Where's Lucianus Adair at? He's always good for a fight. Tell him he can keep his shirt!"

[member="Ahani Najwa"]... well, that brought a snorting grunt out of him, to be called out by name. For now, he didn't answer, having caught the sight of a gathering of a few people who were rarely up to nothing, talking amongst themselves...

"No 'raised eyebrows' on my part, Grand Admiral," he interjected, coming alongside the threesome, his focus still mostly on the 'pad, "so long as I remain informed..."

He then lowered the 'pad, pale blues looking to the three of them, [member="Ashin Varanin"], [member="Spencer Jacobs"], and [member="Jared Ovmar"].

"...involved, and consulted."

Three words, emphasized - at least two of them had been there the last time and attempt was made to slip something right from under his nose.

 

[Dissero]

He'd missed the talk and hullabaloo about the placement of certain Fringe individuals concerning seats. Frankly, Dissero didn't give a damn where he sat. So long as he had a good view, good food, and good company, there was little the Archivist could ask for. For an event and spectacle, the welcoming committee was top notch. Dressed casually enough in his typical Archivist robes and tunic, he'd brought along [member="Verie Lacroix"] for the simple pleasure of meeting more of the Fringe dignitaries and getting her a bit more space-time under her wing.

Their seats were much to his liking - an open front row box, spacious, a small table built into the wall separating them from the fighters field. They put their coats down, ordered in a bottle of wine and some light food faire. Given there to be some time before it all arrived, Dissero opted for a walk to explore, stretch his legs, and as always - overstep whatever intangible boundaries there might be, smugly.

The man happened upon the VIP box housing the Fringe High Councilors and guests; [member="Ashin Varanin"], [member="Spencer Jacobs"], [member="Jared Ovmar"], and one or two others. He paused only briefly outside the curtained entry, peering in only long enough to potentially catch an eye and offer a winking grin before pressing on. Eventually he found his way to the Royal Box - a place curiously easy to find when one was as acquainted with such things as he. [member="Darth Vornskr"] was in there sharing niceties with the one whom appeared to be in charge of everything, [member="Manu Xextos"]. Dissero had never formally met Vornskr face to face, but he'd heard rumor the man had set a bounty on his head a few years back for all the grief he'd brought upon the Sith Empire. It was quite likely he'd made off with a few of Vornskr's pieces, too. But that was the beauty of Pulling a Rudrig. You just go all-in.

There were guards. Of course there were guards, why wouldn't there be? And he without an official invite.

Dissero cleared his throat intentionally loud to garner some attention, "The name's Lord Dissero. Head Archivist and Master of Vaults of the Fringe Confederacy," titles that may or may not actually be real, but if it got him a moment... "I have some business to attend to with Lord Xextos."

 

[Darth Carnifex]

Unlike [member="Manu Xextos"]' crown, Zambrano's was made of a harsh black wrought iron that signified nothing other than the dictator's egomania, inset at several points by deep crimson rubies cut into a hexagonal pattern. The Emperor of the Epicanthix people had forged his own crown before he had even begun his campaign to claim the throne of Panatha, and unite the various independent holdings within the Pacanth Reach into a singular entity led entirely by himself. Such was his ways, already assured of his total victory before he had even begun to make his first strike, and his certainty was never put into question as he trounced the meager and woefully underfunded military elements in the Pacanth Reach. Now the Reach was a powerful, if but small, empire with billions of well-armed and well-trained Epicanthix soldiers, a plethora of ground assault vehicles and hovercraft, and a slowly growing armada that already included at least nine Star Destroyers.

"The progression of Novruvk* is going according to schedule, and while my people were initially weary of yours, they have quickly become allies and dare I say rivals in quite a short amount of time."

For a moment, Kaine diverted his attention to the arena floor as both of the monarchs settled themselves into their respective seats, and hankered down as the festivities began to commence. Already the first match would prove to sate the Epicanthix tyrant's constant hunger for conflict and violence, as it happened to be that [member="Rave Merrill"] would be facing off against [member="Khaleel Malvern"], the latter of which Kaine had no prior interaction or knowledge of. However; the former he had known for quite a long time, both being a beneficial ally and a merciless foe on various occasions. Kaine dimly recalled their bout on Empress Teta, in which Kaine was technically considered the victor, although he did not consider that a true battle as he had with others. Although, he faintly wondered if she was sore about him taking off her arm like he did, and the thought brought a amused smirk onto his face.

"Mhmmmm, I am pleased. I could watch these two fight for hours."

*Novruvk roughly translates to 'New Land' in Epicant

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Lucianus Adair"] [member="Spencer Jacobs"] [member="Jared Ovmar"]

"Glad to hear it, Lord Adair," said Ashin, leaning back, her arms stretched behind the headrests of the chairs that flanked her. One held Spencer; one held nothing more impressive than a day bag. "Consult with us for a moment. We've had our eye on the ancient fortress on Vassek, the old crusadeworks on Lorta, the ashfall cities on Ryoone -- shoring up the rimward border. What are your thoughts?"

 

[Arage Bao]

Oh right, she was a Sith.

At least that would have been his thought if he wasn't quite in a bit of pain himself. This was probably the right time to mention that the leather coat Khal had been wearing at the beginning of the duel was a Cater coat. Which was probably the only thing that prevented him from expiring right there and then.

Which didn't mean that all of the lightning was absorbed by the leather article, far from it. Straddling her, Rave's arms were beside Khal's torso, some of the lightning missed him, some of it got absorbed, but the blunt of it touched his unprotected parts, most notably his legs where the coat had been dragged up from the tackle maneuver. Pain was a persistent schutta and it was in this moment that Khal went from a man simply trying to prove himself and not look like a fool, to a mutt backed to a corner of death.

Fight or Flight was a real thing and adrenaline was coursing through his body. Anyone intelligent would have used it to flee, run away, but there was a reason why Khal had been called the Bloody-Nine and sadly it didn't involve big brains.

And so he did what every animal backed into a corner, afraid of dying and not smart enough to run would do. Khal attacked.

He slammed his forehead downwards in an attempt to crush her nose, while his jeans melted and with them the surface of his legs, Khal didn't plan, he wasn't thinking anymore, he was reacting in an attempt to end the fight swiftly.

[member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Khaleel Malvern"]

Rave was, it had been noted, really small. His forehead couldn't quite reach her nose; instead it struck her forehead with a clack and a flare of light. The electricity stopped.

"A little much, Malvern..."

Her flung-out arm, flat against the sand, still held the bokken. She rotated it in her hand, a grip that would have put the concave edge toward the enemy if she was in a proper stance. The cutting edge equivalent faced the sky-

She bent her elbow, wrenched using her wrist, and brought the paralyzing edge down at his back and side.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

Khal grunted as the stick hit him across the side, paralyzing most of the lower-parts of his torso.

"Ain't a miracle worker, ma'am. It was either that or..." and he put the barrel of the blaster on her temple, during the scuffle Khal apparantly managed to get a hold of the gun again. The Lazy Eye isn't made out of rubber, the thing wouldn't have bounced off into the sunset anyway.

"...shoot you in the face. Wouldn't look good on my résumé, call it a tie?"