Private Don't Forget To Stop And Smell The Subglacial Pseudo Algae

[In Rhan]

Problem. The guardians of the vault were wearing power armor, making them immune to all of In's offensive options and the coma gas. It also made it incredibly difficult for Niysha and Tilon to handle them. Further, they NEEDED to get through these guys to get to the armory, and if they withdrew then In suspected that the power armored guys would follow. After all, the three of them were the invading element to which these five (now three) pirates were the effective antibody. It only made sense to In. It's what she would have done, anyway.

In scrambled for solutions. She finally realized that she had one when she glanced at Niysha. The truest solution of all, perhaps.

Rather than withdraw, In followed the armored pirates down while digging a roll of Fab-Grade Grav tape from her toolbelt. She tore of a strip as the first swung, keeping him between her and his comrades. By ducking under his swing, In was able to slap a patch of tape over his visor. When his arms closed to try and crush her against his body, she darted backwards just enough to step back in and place another strip of tape. And another, and another. Part dance, part pugilism, In reduced the armored pirate's visibility to only a couple glimpses of light between layers of adhesive tape.

He tried to click his visor up to open his helmet, but tape prevented it from sliding open completely. And while the coma gas was THINNER down here, it wasn't nonexistent.

She just needed to keep dancing out of his reach until he passed out or joined his friends in trying to climb back up onto the catwalk.

 

[Niysha]

Tilon took a reluctant swing and found the metal resistant. Doonium, nyix, a low-grade phrik alloy, something serious like that.

By ducking under his swing, In was able to slap a patch of tape over his visor.

The phalanx of cultist heavies continued to push on. As they were already being pushed back up the stairs they'd come down, Niysha didn't feel the need to retreat any more than strictly necessary. Instead she took her time from the back of the pack and waited, watching closely. In was slowly dismantling one of the men while Tilon managed to literally disarm the other... with some struggle. It seemed like, through either composite material or raw thickness, this wasn't a problem that would be easily solved by a few swings of a laser sword.

Niysha had already decided against that as her solution anyway. Resistant heavies were the sort of thing that one had to get creative to deal with. Sure, that creativity would eventually boil down to "hit it with a lightsaber," as many things often did, but the path she chose to get there required a bit more finesse.

When In had properly safety danced around the remaining power armored guard enough to thoroughly throw off any kind of visual access he had, Niysha focused slightly on his legs. The man inside's legs ended about three or four inches before the ground, which was good enough. Mass and momentum were the key to handling things like this, and the power cables certainly weren't plated thickly enough to be resistant.

The Miraluka ignited her weapon, focused hard, and found a rage point to draw from. Rage specifically was far more useful in combat than fear, so she concentrated intently on the frustrated inadequacy that she felt every single time she was in the same room as Valery Noble and leapt forward. With a quick twist, Niysha landed behind the remaining power guard and made two furious slashes to either ankle. As the suit began to wobble with its own gravity, she brought up her very obviously, could-not-mistake-for-any-other-color Sith lightsaber in a third slice, taking off power cables.

She finished by gracefully taking a step to one side of the big metal man and reaching out with her free hand as her saber hissed into dormancy. She gave only a single, minor pull with the Force, calling together the destiny of that armor's back and the deck, and it collapsed onto its back like a weighty, limp turtle.

With her contributions handled, Niysha took a moment to observe how the other two were handling the final guard, and parse whether or not she needed to help.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

In's tactic sparked embarrassment for some reason, and as Tilon got his lightsaber smacked from his hands by partially-resistant claws, he realized the reason just fine. The thing about a lightsaber was that when you had a hammer everything looked like a nail. In had handled this like a spacer in an authentic way. He'd tried the Jedi approach and found it, or himself, lacking.

Embarrassment wanted to turn to anger, and his mental image involved putting that saber through the zealot's faceplate. He was a Jedi Knight and these people were just—

No. Definitely not.

All this was as he backpedaled. By the time he caught his balance he'd settled the old stormtrooper rifle into both hands and sprayed some deterrent around. Nobody said his authentic self had to be good at this.

In Rhan Niysha

 

[In Rhan]

One of the armored pirates was succeeding in climbing his way out of the sliced section of the catwalk - and we couldn't have that. While Tilon's blaster rifle had a bit more punch than In's SC-15, she wasn't comfortable waiting for it to penetrate. Not while the encased man got closer to her business partner and romantic partner.

In took two great steps forward and leaped onto the back of the armor-clad pirate as he climbed the sliced catwalk, throwing her legs around his midsection and her hands over his visor. In wasn't a small woman by any means, but power armor was power armor - her ability to throw him off balance or weigh him down, she realized, was nowhere near as much as she'd reckoned. And it'd be relatively easy for him to just lean her against a wall and squish her against a bulkhead.

The Pantoran woman bore her teeth, scrabbling a screwdriver at he smooth visor - looking for a gap, a hole, anything she could exploit. Thanks to Tilon's blaster fire, she got it; a notch in the glassteel. In drove the driver in to the gap and wedged, yanking the screen open enough that she could get her fingers under the lip of the thing and pull back with both hands. While the power armor itself had enough motors and servos to resist her yanking, the motor that controlled visor-go-closed was NOT stronger than her.

"Tilon! GETTEM!" In shrieked, holding on to the bucking pirate for dear life.

 

[Niysha]

Niysha was sorely tempted to simply finish off one last guard. Two were already uselessly squirming on the ground without power, so what was a third? But by the looks of things, Tilon and In probably had him relatively well in hand. She decided to take extra effort to trust her team to watch her back, because there was something else that required her immediate attention.

They had been taking a very long, very loud time to handle three men. The corners of Niysha's sight swarmed with a dozen more. Down the hall in front of them, through at least two doors in their immediate vicinity, and at least two coming from behind. Whatever the problem had been a few seconds before, adding to that was "rapidly becoming surrounded." Niysha decided to focus on one thing at a time. Right now, that was getting the three of them into an area where they wouldn't be overrun.

She took stock of her surroundings. Stairway, hallway, three doors. Two of them - the nearest and the farthest from their position - had men inside trying to get out. The middle one, then, would be enough to keep them from being completely encircled. Niysha didn't know the code, but she did have a skeleton key. The Miraluka took off at a dead sprint, Huttball slid to a stop in front of it, then placed her hilt to the door and flickered it on and off. She was rewarded a moment later with a hydraulic hiss.

The path on the other side was someone's bunk, but it was currently quite empty. As she took in the whole room - all at once, as she had no other way of seeing anything - Niysha noted a very large vent in the ceiling with a grated fan... and that three men were approaching the door between her and her friends. In order to keep it closed, she'd either need to know the code (again, not in the cards) or otherwise break it. The latter was the easy option.

Niysha hurried back down the hall and placed her hand right above the security console. The situation was a complete panic, so that was an easy point to draw from; her body served as a conduit, turning the stifling emotional density in the air nearby into raw, crackling lightning. Just one or two sparks was enough to fully overload the lock, and the stench of ozone in the air reassured her that that particular door wouldn't be spawning any more adds. The other... would. Very quickly.

"Need to move, guys!" Her voice was about as loud as it got... which meant she might well have been drowned out by the screaming, crackling, whirring, sparking, or blaster fire. Hopefully, the two of them had managed to deal with the last power guard, because they were out of time.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

"Tilon! GETTEM!" In shrieked, holding on to the bucking pirate for dear life.

"Need to move, guys!" Her voice was about as loud as it got... which meant she might well have been drowned out by the screaming, crackling, whirring, sparking, or blaster fire. Hopefully, the two of them had managed to deal with the last power guard, because they were out of time.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tilon saw Nysh's nifty bit of utility trakata, and maybe that was what guided his instincts to do the same, which was the obvious move anyway if you were possessed of a certain pragmatism, which Tilon found that he apparently was. On-off, right through that gap that In had forced in the faceplate, and the man died and started falling. The death made a small, discrete, firm impression in the back of Tilon's mind, like pushing a button or maybe a faraway doorbell.

He was fairly sure he hadn't killed anyone here until now, for what was fundamentally a selfish mission against a morally palatable enemy. But regardless of motive, acting with less than full promptness in this moment's situation could and would have lethal implications. He had to act as quickly and efficiently as he ever had, to the limit of his honestly pretty significant training and experience, and save the reservations for later.

Not the first time he'd had that thought in the last five minutes. Not the fifth time either. This time it sank in better in a way that felt like maybe he'd put something important to bed.

As that last one clanked down dead, Tilon made sure In was disengaged, then hurried to join Nysh in the room with the fan overhead. He twirled his simple lightsaber up just so, the amber blade inscribing a cone, and an irregular half-spiral ovoid of protective grate sagged aside. The saber went closer to vertical and froze there, and the fan blades tore free to hammer around inside the shaft for a long loud moment. When the severed blades jammed and froze inside the ventilation shaft, the drive axis kept spinning. The hole he'd made in the grate - which was now sagging with the mass of those blades - gave enough space to get up there alongside the spinning fan head. Probably.

Was this actually progress? Debatable. But it was at least fast, loud, and transformative, and that combination had been known to work before.

 

[In Rhan]

In moved quickly, climbing up into the hole with a dancer's agility. She jumped, grabbed, and pulled until she was laying under the spinning fan head, trying to not get burned by sizzling fan blades.

In wasted no time in just tossing those back out of the vent.

"I think I can get through ahead! I'll be right down!" She called back to her team. Skinnier than both of her companions, In had little difficulty sliding herself belly-first into an increasingly tight HVAC disaster, though she did reach a point where she had to wiggle. A bit of mental orientation told her that after a hard right turn she was roughly where the armory was, or at least on the other side of the door they THOUGHT was the armory - and that idea was supported by the face that the ventilation grate was heavily armored.

The exact sort of heavily armored that would likely not be an issue if she had a lightsaber. Or a few more minutes and a plasma cutter. Though that second plan would require there NOT be a man with a very large gun on the other side of that grate, guarding the door and looking as though he were hyperventilating. Likely due to a combat steroid or the like, In reasoned.

After a moment's thought, In backed away from the grate, cupped her hands over her mouth, and gave the most unearthly, cursed, haunted-ship shriek she could. The heavily armored man turned and obliterated the grate with a fusillade of blaster bolts, and when the smoke cleared he felt brave enough to get closer... until a can rolled out. He reflexively fired on it, rupturing the spray paint and blinding himself in the process. In slithered out of the vent as quickly as she could after that, trying to weave around the man.

He got in a good shot despite being blind, kicking one of In's legs out. She nevertheless managed to dive and slam her hand on the controls, opening the armory door.

 

[Niysha]

Tilon's aura looked profoundly dented. Taking life wasn't something most people were prepared to do, so he could probably use some support. Niysha would have to bring that up to him later, when they were safe. Until then, she noted the exact problem and her immediately actionable solution: if people had to die, from now on, it would be her who killed them. She wouldn't be losing sleep over it.

More immediately relevant, In was making headway into getting them into their actual goal. Even after she disappeared up into the ventilation system, Niysha could still keep track of her pretty easily. She'd also committed the sound of In screaming in pain or shock to memory, so when she heard the first scream, she knew not to be too concerned. That was just her partner faking it.

The second, quieter scream after someone physically hurt her sent Niysha hurtling full-tilt around the corner, saber blazing.

The further door - the one she hadn't sealed - had spewed forth a half-dozen men. A wall of blaster fire stood between her and In, and she did not have time to deal with it at the moment. The two or three that caught her air on her way into the armory weren't hard to send harmlessly off into the durasteel walls of the corridor.

The few meters between the door she'd opened and the armory door In had opened were gone in a breath, and the Force was roaring inside her so loudly that she barely even felt her left arm strain as she hooked her way inside to preserve momentum. She sailed over In's prone from, tapped her feet to the ground long enough to shift into a crouching uppercut, and used the momentum to slice the man's blaster arm clean off at the elbow. The same motion carried Niysha into a spin, and she cleanly delivered her lightsaber to his center mass.

Focus. Improvise. This man was large and heavily-armored. He could attone in death for the sin he had committed against her partner in life. With a moment of breath, the Miraluka stood a foot or two back from the freshly-smoking corpse she'd created. She held out both of her hands - one still holding her lightsaber in a backhand grip that was much safer for her fingers - and consciously removed the knowledge of how heavy a full-grown, relatively large man. Without a soul, the matter that remained of him was much lighter, so it wasn't so difficult to sling his body outside and hold it aloft to provide a decent shield down the hallway.

"You're covered, Tilon!" Her voice was getting hoarse. Too much shouting today.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

The second, quieter scream after someone physically hurt her sent Niysha hurtling full-tilt around the corner, saber blazing.

The further door - the one she hadn't sealed - had spewed forth a half-dozen men. A wall of blaster fire stood between her and In, and she did not have time to deal with it at the moment. The two or three that caught her air on her way into the armory weren't hard to send harmlessly off into the durasteel walls of the corridor.

The Jedi had an anodyne term for variants of dismemberment and amputation: 'marks of contact.' Even defensively-oriented Soresu, the combat style that Tilon had trained at the most frequently, used the same term and the same goals. Most of it aligned with the Jedi philosophy of preserving life: you'd likely survive losing a hand or a leg. The rest came down to butchery or, if you liked, efficiency. So maiming and killing were muscle memory for him in a trained but mostly theoretical way, like learning a language as far as you could go before an actual conversation. And compared to that context, killing came with all the same nerves and more.

He'd killed before. Infrequently and only at great need. Seeing that body used as a shield gave him a wince, a pause, that he could not afford. A blaster bolt glanced off his lightsaber at a bad angle and, half-dissipated, hissed across the outside of his right arm. He had tricks of mind for handling pain, but they all took time. Just now he bulled through and joined the pair of them as the armory door opened.

He was the last one in and he slapped the controls, then remembered where the control pad had been on the other side and put his saber clear through the wall to knock it out. Breathing hard, he turned and got a better look at the armory.

A decent amount of the gear in here had been taken and used, in this incident or others. Trained manpower, at a guess, was the limiting factor for some of the fancier and more valuable material that remained.

Including, in what seemed like a maintenance bay, two suits of gleaming white-and-gold power armor.

"...either of you rated on things like those? I've done a lot of spacewalks but that's about it."

Shavvit, those could carry a lot.


In Rhan Niysha

 

[In Rhan]

In pulled herself upright and fiddled with the control to the door. Locked, sealed, deadbolted - for a moment, they had peace. It was something of a pain to do one-handed. Her right arm didn't seem terribly agreeable. Even a glancing blow from that power armor had been enough to dislocate her shoulder. Or at least, that's what it'd felt like.

Stupid. Sloppy. They were in over their head on what they'd assumed was going to be an easy run. Every minute they took meant that they got that much closer to the men near the coma gas waking up. Worse, things were getting increasingly chaotic - and that meant that they were less able to make the decision to not kill. Pulling your punches was a privilege of the advantaged, and their advantages were rapidly drying up. Tilon had taken a hit, her arm was out of commission. Unless In wanted to let things devolve into a full-on bloodbath (and it might be too late for that) then they'd need to move quickly. Preferably towards the exit.

"I'll take one." The Pantoran woman promised, getting to her feet. "If it's anything like a powerloader, I'll figure it out. If it isn't, I'll still manage." The slightly more serious timbre of In's voice and the way she moved across the armory with purpose suggested that she was attempting to take control of the situation, direct the team more efficiently. "It'll take them a few minutes to get through that door. Niysha, make sure nobody tries to get in through the vent like I did without our knowing it. Make sure we know what's going on out there. Tilon, I need you to load as much of everything you can onto that hoversled as quickly as possible. Every metal box, shelf, or container. I'll weld 'em together as you do."

It'd be a rickety tower of ordinance, guns, and tech - but it wouldn't move much, and that's what they needed. A mobile wall, a barricade, the fist of a juggernaut. "Niysha's more effective out of the armor. Tilon - I'm not as sure for you. You make the call." She added. "Once we open the doors, we rush for The Dancer. I'll take point in the armor with the sled. Pick up everything we can, we'll figure out if it's valuable later. Cause as much chaos as possible. Don't get bogged down, don't stop moving, and we all go home tonight."

A pause. "...do either of you know that trick in holofilms where they yank somebody's arm back into place? Is that a real thing? By the way."

 

[Niysha]

Casualties were piling up. So far Niysha was the only one who wasn't wounded, and two of their injuries were arms. That was especially bad, considering how much they needed them to Do Things. Despite everything she'd done to prevent it, every minute this went on, Niysha was faced with greater and greater evidence that she'd need to go loud, and loud was not her forte.

At the moment, though, at least she didn't have to take the lead. That was a small mercy. Instead, In had stepped up and sussed out a whole plan, as per usual. She was brilliant, and fantastic at clawing her way back from bad situations. Reassured that she and Tilon were in very good hands, Niysha deactivated her saber, dropped quietly to her knees, and steadied her breathing.

Rather than dissociating completely, Niysha allowed herself to slip into the currents of this nowhere ball of dead mass and electrical signals dotted with life and spinning rapidly through the infinite void. No matter how much power was running through them, doors and walls simply weren't as real as people, which meant that it wasn't difficult to pick out the eight men who were gathering outside with blasters trained on the door, or the half-dozen who had managed to cut through the path that Niysha had sealed off earlier.

No one had found their secondary path yet, but that was likely just a matter of time.

Niysha had been given a direct task, so her focus was pretty ironclad, but so immersed in the swirling Force around her, it was basically impossible to miss the fracturing lines of pain crackling through her companions. Without saying a single thing to indicate her intent, she quietly resolved herself to the task of circling the wagons. In and Tilon had been through enough today, and it would be very easy to focus everyone's attention with a scary red lightsaber and a bit of showy lightning.

Hmm... something was particularly bright over there.

After a minute or so of sitting quietly on the floor, Niysha pushed herself up and wandered over to a large pile of assorted, disorganized mess. She dug through the stockpile for a moment, then hauled out a mass of chaotic wires attached to the occasional projector and one janky old generator. There weren't any visible screens, so it would've been pretty easy to mistake for the pile of junk it effectively was. "Is this good for anything?"

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

"It'll take them a few minutes to get through that door. Niysha, make sure nobody tries to get in through the vent like I did without our knowing it. Make sure we know what's going on out there. Tilon, I need you to load as much of everything you can onto that hoversled as quickly as possible. Every metal box, shelf, or container. I'll weld 'em together as you do."

A pause. "...do either of you know that trick in holofilms where they yank somebody's arm back into place? Is that a real thing? By the way."

Having done his Jedi pain-management trick and loading the hoversled rapidly, Tilon paused. Shame spiked through him. He'd fallen prey to the ultimate in Jedi cliche: navel-gazing about the state of his own spirit while overlooking the real needs beside him. "I can help with that," he said, and he could; he'd had the training and more than once the experience, out on the raggedy edge of a whole different galaxy. This was a case where getting it wrong could hurt without helping, so he drew on the Force pretty well to bend probability in his favour and suppress In's pain, and torqued her shoulder just so. "Sorry I didn't lock in on this earlier. You've been carrying that around for a while."

"Is this good for anything?"

"Toss it on for sure-" Tilon broke off, broke from In's shoulder, and hustled over for a better look. "Shaaaaavit. That's the shield tech we were talking about, like the exact module. If we wind up needing to sacrifice the weapons sled to get it, this'd be the take. Shavvit, I hope they haven't breached their way to my ship yet. Can't imagine they'd treat a garden with much respect."

The door squalled. He was out of time to get into the other set of power armor. He fired up his amber lightsaber and resolved to have their back a little better.

"Chaos, right? Don't stop moving?"