Private Grand Designs

[Artas Tel Alam]

VOLIK - BLASTED CANYON
MEANINGLESS SHADOWPORT

Artas was fuzzy on the details. Something about a prototype shield generator. Some do-goody limpdick smugglers were trying to sneak it through Maw space. Probably to get it to the Galactic Alliance.​

​

And now Artas was going to stop them. Not because he really gave a shit about who gave what to those Jedi-loving republicans, but because Qora asked him to - and being that Qora was a nice lady, Artas was obliged to get things for her.​

There's a weequay guarding the shut heavy doors to the landing bay Artas needs to get into. He actually hears Artas stomping towards him and looks up, frowning, from his smartlink.​

​

"You need somethi-"​

​

Too late. Don't ask approaching scary men questions. Just defend yourself.​

​

Artas Tel Alam gives him one quick punch. Square in the face. The smartlink clatters to the ground. The weequay's eyes lose focus and he stumbles, backwards, into the dirty wall behind him. It's the only thing keeping him upright.​

​

Stunned, but not for long. Artas lifts him by the throat holds him up just briefly, and then slams him into the ground. Thud-smack. Whatever air is in the weequay's lungs exits promptly in one big gasp. He sputters a couple times and is then quiet. Beautiful.​

​

Artas takes a moment to look over the weequay and, satisfied, turns and crushes the smartlink with the heel of his boot. Smartlinks are bad for you. Ruins your attention span.​

​

There's a control panel for the door. Artas examines it and considers punching it. His hands flex at the thought. But he has a better idea.​

​

"Qora," he says, craning his head to look back down the hallway, "Come open this door."​

​

Pause.​

​

"Please."​

Qora Tel Alam​

 

[Qora Tel Alam]

Ohhh, a please.

And they said manners were superfluous. If you asked Qora she would say they were charming.

The deft knocking of boot heels heralded the otherwise quiet approach of Qora Tel Alam. She peeled from the shadows of the hall and strolled to meet Artas with a small but pleased smile on her face. Holding eye contact, she bent at the waist to pluck a key card from the fallen weequay's hip, yanking on the zip-tie until it broke and snapped back with a petulant thwap.

"Of course, darling," Qora stepped over the body and deftly swiped the card in her hand through the command pad reader.

Booooop.

The locks on the door clacked in response. The door whirred open.

"If only the key to your heart were so simple," not that she didn't enjoy a challenge. Cuffing him gently on the chin with the card, she winked and gestured for her brave, handsome, honorable meat shield to lead the way, "after you."

 

[Artas Tel Alam]

Qora Tel Alam

"Oh," said Artas. He usually didn't give the people he thrashed too much thought after the thrashing. His mistake. Instead of saying that he said, "But I like watching you work."​

​

Which he thought was a great deal smoother. "I'm a complicated man. If you want simple, you should talk to..." Artas Tel Alam trailed off, apparently failing to think of someone or not liking the options he had conjured, "Actually don't talk to anyone else. I will be simple for you."​

​

So simple. Like a boulder. No. An amoeba. Yes. The doors to the hangar bay parted with a slow, groaning sound. Artas led the way as requested, grinning with confidence. A pockmarked freighter squatted in the middle of the hangar, its main loading door open. Crates were scattered around the room in small clusters.​

​

Dozens of them.​

​

"Did they unload it?" Artas frowned to himself and rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. Where would he start?​

 

[Qora Tel Alam]

That tight-lipped smirk persisted as she followed after him, amusement rolling off her in nearly visible waves - except it wasn't amusement, it was simply the over saturated lighting of the hangar keening on and fading out as they moved through the space.

"Simple is," Qora began as she took in the mess of crates, her eyes narrowing at the pithy display of disorganization, "as simple does."

Hmm ... this would take forever if they were to break open and search each one. The subject of the heist had to be here, somewhere, but it behooved them not to dawdle. There could be other sentients afoot.

"There must be a manifest and documentation of the shipment on the freighter," shifting electric blues to glance up at her companion, Qora offered him a brow shrug and stepped to the freighter, then up the cargo ramp and into the hold.

 

[Artas Tel Alam]

Qora Tel Alam

A manifest. That would be better than manually opening each crate. Not that Artas Tel Alam would have a single problem doing so. It would just be tedious.​

​

He snagged Qora by her shoulder before she could march up the ramp into the hold, "No, too dangerous. Wait here."​

​

There was no telling what was aboard. Smugglers. Droids. Smugglers and droids with guns. Too risky, and Artas fancied himself more gun-resistant than Qora.​

 

[Qora Tel Alam]

Not wholly unexpected. The gesture garnered him a look, an arched brow, and a soft, dark, demure smile, "Of course, darling."

He could be a blunt, surly man but he was her blunt surly man and who was she to deny him the opportunity to crush a few skulls while enacting the most honorable chivalry there was. She would wait out here.

All alone.

With the crates.

This was normally when Qora would commence her customary time-passing whistled ditty, but so boldly announcing their presence seemed rather counterproductive to their present snooping about. So instead she moved to the nearest stack of crates and prised the top one open. Inside she found rather costly looking goggles nestled into packing-fill. Qora reached a hand to it and her nanites surged forward from her limb to encompass the piece of tech, thousands and thousands and thousands of teeny, tiny little bionites peeling it apart piece by piece until nothing remained where the goggles once were.

The surge shifted back up her arm, along her shoulder, smoothed over her face like a mask and reassembled the goggles over her eyes, now fully integrated into her tech control.

A mechanical whine sounded as she powered them on and began to play with the settings as a child would a new toy.

 

[Artas Tel Alam]

Qora Tel Alam

Within the confines of the freighter, Artas Tel Alam conducted a symphony. It was an original piece, dominated by the shouts, yelps, and whoops of his enemies. And then the crashing and smashing of furniture as he dished out a merciless bludgeoning. It was punctuated sporadically with the blast, boom, kachow of poorly, hastily aimed blasters.​

​

After several moments of silence, Artas emerged from the loading bay again, now holding an old, clunky datapad. The screen had a severe crack running up the middle and someone's tooth was lodged in the casing. Not his.​

​

"Qora, I got the…"​

​

Artas stops as he notices the new goggles. "Oh. Are you having fun?"​

​

It pleases him so to see her entertained. And also to see her in general. Artas takes the tooth between thumb and finger and gently plucks it out of the datapad, then flicks it away.​

​

"I have the manifest."​

 

[Qora Tel Alam]

"Do you know that I am?" Qora replied brightly, dark lips split wide over bright whites. The occules adjusted at her whim, spinning and whirring through various vision settings.

Infrared.

Ultraviolet.

Gamma.

Nightvision.

X-ray.

She turned to look at Artas, sifting through the various layering options. Her grin settled into a pleased smile - but of course she was never displeased when gazing upon the brawny man.

"Perhaps not as much fun as you..." she remarked as the black-light setting highlighted all manner of blood spatter and stain on his figure. Qora held out her hand for the datapad, taking it gently as her bionites swarmed the goggles over her face, peeled them apart to their smallest elements, and dispersed. They shrank away from her face, surging down both arms to overtake the datapad where she made the necessary connection to its databank within and extracted the information without ever having to turn it on.

An electric blue light shone from within her eyes as they unfocused while she mentally perused the files.

"It's in a crate marked EK836..."

 

[Artas Tel Alam]

Qora Tel Alam

Artas nodded, sage-like and terribly solemn in his introspection. "Good." Qora should always have fun. Even if he did not necessarily understand any of the weird techno-wizardy-things she derived fun from. Like those silly little goggles.​

​

"EK836," he repeated, and thoughtfully rubbed his jaw. "I can find that."​

​

Artas Tel Alam started off in one direction, bending over to read the stamps on the bottom half of each crate. The Qs were in this pile here here, which were followed by the Rs, and then the... Artas switched directions then, realizing he was traversing the alphabet in the wrong direction. He skipped several stacks, then mercifully found the Es.​

​

He stared at the pile for a minute. Some crates were half as large as him. Others were as small as a gravball. Artas frowned and began to scan their labels. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. One by one he picked up crates and tossed or kicked them aside, sending them careening about the hangar-bay as he searched deeper into the stockpile.​

 

[Qora Tel Alam]

Qora chose a location directly behind the Sith as he filtered through the stack of crates, tossing and throwing and shoving them hither-tither. The consistency in which the man could lob various boxes of various sizes, who would smash mightily on the ground some distance away was inspiring in the way feats of strength tended to be for her. Qora was by far the weakest of the Tel Alams, physically speaking. Even with her biotech enhancements and nanites, this particular Gudjoti's power remain in the metaphysical. The technopathical. The acumenical.

Why, if Artas had so much as accidentally tossed a crate at her with any amount of force, she'd quite definitively crumble under the force of it. It was all rather thrilling and most certainly a large portion of what made him such an attractive specimen. Wasn't just his dashing good looks and charm, but the fact that he would quite literally break her with one hand if he so wished.

Exhilarating in bed, to be sure. She shuddered just to think of it.

But let's not get distracted, Qora, he was nearly to the end of the pile and had yet to produce the proper crate.

Then a crate went sailing overhead and her occules honed in on the flash of the ID stamp: EK336 - Qora held a hand up towards it, stopping the crate midair. This one was not especially large in size ... big enough to stow an infant into, she surmised, but while Artas came to the last box with some hint of frustration at not finding the correct one, Qora narrowed her eyes at the crate presently hanging in the air above her.

She gestured, slowly turning the stamp to face her, and carefully set it on the ground. Closer inspection showed that it was not, in fact, EK336 ...

"It's this one," she said as she stooped by it, "the lettering has been worn off."

"Hands up!" and suddenly there were guards and mooks. Guards and mooks armed to the teeth.

"Oh..." Qora blinked, "I don't suppose one of you has a prybar we might borrow?"

"I said hands up! Get away from those crates!"

 

[Artas Tel Alam]

Qora Tel Alam

Time flies when Artas has fun. So, too, do crates. So it was actually not surprising that he missed the relevant one. "Oh," said Artas, still holding a fully loaded crate nearly as wide as he was tall. He was still debating whether he should throw it, just for fun, when mooks rushed into the hangar, waving their guns around.​

​

Artas narrowed his eyes. He barely even heard whatever it was they shouted. Already thinking. Plotting a course. He counted five little chiss (but then, everyone was little to Artas Tel Alam), armed with their signature weapons. Artas did not know what they were called, only that they were apparently special.​

​

Qora was too far away from him for his tastes. And now that he had launched so many crates, there was hardly any cover. That settled it. Repositioning first.​

​

"Put the crate down!"​

​

"Okay."​

​

Artas Tel Alam hurled the crate at them like it was a sporting event. Most things were sporting events for him. He wasn't sure what they expected. The crate was wide enough that it slammed into three of them at once, leaving them… Well, unable to fire. He didn't bother to assess the exact damage. Artas reckoned some things broke - probably not the crate, though.​

​

Blue bolts shot through the air towards him, courtesy of the two still standing. But Artas was already mobile, dead sprinting for Qora. They scored some hits on the surrounding cargo and the hangar walls.​

​

He got to Qora Tel Alam. He did not stop. Instead of colliding, he grabbed her deftly by the waist and swung her over his shoulder, continuing his sprint around to the other side of the vessel. Someone shouted chiss profanity. More blaster bolts chased after them, splashing the hull of the freighter.​

​

They continued firing at the part of the ship they just rounded, probably too startled to do anything else. Satisfied that they are safe for now, Artas sets Qora back on her feet - very delicately. "Did they shoot you?"​

​

He pats her down without waiting for response, searching for scorch marks. On finding none, he said, "Okay. Good."​

​

Artas already has his lightsaber in his hand, somehow. He peaks around the corner of the ship and immediately shrinks back when a blue bolt smacks the durasteel right in front of his face.​

​

He looked back to Qora. "Wait here?"​

 

[Qora Tel Alam]

Oop!

Qora would have liked to maintain some form of ownership over their target crate, but Artas had nabbed her bodily up before she could do so. Honestly, this whole exile business had been an enthralling test of ingenuity and instinct. Before, in their home galaxy, she'd had access to all manner of technology. Even a full suit of armor that would have made excursions and disagreements such as this a droll affaire.

She was beginning to think that this far more difficult approach was far more fun. At the very least it was netting her a great deal more attention and care from Artas which was a win in her book any day.

Did they shoot you?

"I think-"

Okay. Good.

"-not." Qora smiled. She was a small target, luckily, which made the chance of common rabble actually hitting their mark rather a bit narrow.

Wait here?

"Until the sun swallows me whole," she replied, eyes widening briefly as he narrowly missed having a third eye added to his forehead via blasterbolt, "be careful, luv." Off he went to prove once again just what an asset to the family he was. One to mind her word, Qora stood patiently for several moments, her backlit eyes roving around the immediate surroundings before coming to land upon the ship she presently used for cover.

Hmmm...

Venyxa was the acrobat, but Qora had her ways of getting to where she needed to be. Reaching up, the sectioned scales of her light armor shifted and melded across her arm, forming an attachment to the hull of the ship. Her other arm followed suite, then one foot, then the other. A few moments later and Qora righted herself, nanite armor morphing to form magnetic soles on her boots.

She walked the underside of the ship and began her ascent up the hull.

The rise in blasterfire told her more mooks had shown up.

 

[Artas Tel Alam]

Qora Tel Alam

If the sun (any sun!) so much as laid a finger on Qora Tel Alam, much less swallowed her whole, he would-​

​

No, Artas reminds himself, that's just a saying. His lightsaber snaps to life in his hand and he roars unintelligibly as he leaps into the fray. Maybe there was no distinction to be earned from slaughtering these nobodies, but if there was an opportunity to get out a good battle cry, he had an obligation to take it.​

​

Bolts whiz by him in a flurry he barely bothers to process. They bend around him or he slaps them off course with quick swishes of his lightsaber. It doesn't matter. Artas Tel Alam has sunk deep into his warrior's instincts. He vaults over small crates, darts between or behind the larger ones.​

​

They try to back up at that point, put some space between them and the red juggernaut threatening their lives, but it's too late. Artas is already too close.​

​

He lungs from peon to peon with broad, powerful strokes of the lightsaber. Artas has a working motif in lightsaber combat: you should only ever need to swing once. Chiss are halved and chopped in various configurations - sometimes Artas cleaves a weapon in two along the way. One of them fumbles for a vibrosword, but Artas chops his hand off and runs him through.​

​

Just as Artas kicks him off the end of the lightsaber, the blast doors on the opposite end of the hangar shudder open. Another Chiss waddles out - weighed down by powered armor and a severe looking slugthrower chaingun carried in both hands.​

​

There's always slugthrowers. Nothing is ever this easy at the end of the day.​

​

The chaingun opens up. Brrrrrrt. Shell casings fly out of the minigun like a jet of water from a hydrant. Artas has taken his chances with slugthrowers before, but the spray of bullets makes this one a less-than-ideal matchup. So he dives gracelessly behind the biggest crate he can find and lets power-chiss start chewing through that instead.​

​

He's debating what his next move is when he glances up, and notices Qora standing on the hull of the ship.​

​

She's too far away to hear him, but the movement of his mouth indicates something along the line of "what are you doing."​

 

[Qora Tel Alam]

Qora did not answer him. Did not even see the Sith mouthing the words. Absorbed, almost literally, in her present endeavors of integration with the ship, the only answer Artas received was that of the ship's engines whirring to life. Standing just before the viewpanes of the ship's cockpit, Qora conducted its systems as a Maestro might a musical ensemble.

Black arms hooked at her side, blue eyes overbright, a cascade of hot blue-white electricity jolted from the Sith's figure and down across the ship, washing over the glimmer of its shields. Qora raised a hand and the ship slowly lifted off from the ground.

The chiss in the commando-armor paused in confusion, watching dumbly as the ship slowly did an about-turn to point its nose directly at him. A nose upon which an odd looking person stood, smirking broadly. Qora lifted her other hand and pointed it at him, blaster-style, and mouthed three words: pew pew pew.

The forward offensive guns of the ship targeted the walker and promptly filled it full of plasma holes. They shifted, then, to the entrance it had clanked through and laid waste to the doorway and structure. Occupied. No admittance.

"Artas," Qora's mouth moved but her voice sounded from the comm system of the ship, "I've a ship if you've the crate."

This would be much easier than calling OHANA in and waiting for their pick-up. Plus they could strip parts and resources from this to fix up their new home. Win-win.

 

[Artas Tel Alam]

Qora Tel Alam

Artas watched, dumbfounded, as the smuggler's ship slowly rotated around and blasted the chiss in the power armor. Qora Tel Alam was a wizard. It was easy to forget sometimes. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and poked his head out from behind the crate, just to make sure nobody else was going to shoot at him.​

​

There was no one left. And if there had been, they probably had run off.​

​

"Yeah," Artas Tel Alam yelled back, "Let me go get it."​

​

His lightsaber snaps back into its hilt. Crate. Crate. Where had he left that crate? Artas briskly retraced his steps and, upon finding the offending crate, began to drag it back to Qora's magic dragon spaceship. That is: the new location of the loading ramp, which had been scraped and mangled along the floor.​

​

He dragged it in, durasteel scraping loudly against durasteel.​