Private Hand it Over... That Thing...

[Meliant]

CORUSCANT - UNDERLEVELS
ABANDONED WAREHOUSE

Meliant only had to stand for a few moments before the gatekeeper droid popped out of the wall. It was nothing more than a single, long appendage terminating in an oversized photoreceptor. If you asked him to describe its color, "angry orange" was what came to mind.​

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It blinked once at him. "You call that a disguise?"​

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Meliant had a heavy black cloak draped over himself. Underneath was his typical armor: light and simple, duraplast, armorweave, Imperial-branded. This was all to say he looked suspicious at-best when viewed from a distance. Anyone who got close would see immediately that he was some agent or other of the Dark Side Elite. ​

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And why would it be otherwise? Almost everyone on this planet were too scared of the Elite, too scared of the Emperor, to question his doings. Usually.​

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"Don't lecture me. Open the door."​

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"Were you followed?"​

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Meliant looked over his shoulder at the dead street that had brought him here. You would never guess the Federal District was only a few dozen levels above them. All that was here was rubbish and rust, barred doors and broken windows. And yet Meliant smelled death on his heels anyway. Literal death: rotting flesh in a poorly sealed container.​

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He could guess who that might be.​

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"I already know you're not in there, you fool," Meliant snapped, "So what do you care? Open the door."​

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The droid seemed to consider for a long while, then it blinked again. "Fine. Sure. Make it quick."​

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The warehouse doors rumbled open and the gatekeeper snapped back into its hidey-hole. Meliant stepped over the threshold, paused again to glance behind him, then vanished deeper into the warehouse.​

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The doors did not close behind him.​

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Thorn ​

 

[Thorn]

Location: Coruscant, Underlevels
Abandoned Warehouse

A thing that time had forgotten, uncovered by the eagerness of contemporary progressiveness. From their own fixation and extension of willpower, they had unearthed a relic belonging to something that even the galaxy turned a blind eye to. No longer set in its place, no longer stagnant within the confines of what was thought to be a tomb.

History walked upright as a man, or what was once a man of less complexities before now. His armor shifted and thudded against metal and duracrete, his movements were methodical, disciplined like that of a soldier conditioned through experience. A wretched aura followed him like a black cloud, an anger and hunger more endless than a blackhole, more unknowable than what awaits beyond the Outer Rim.

A golden jaw glimmered with a foul, brilliant beauty as dying lighting fixtures flickered above the streets Thorn found himself in. He'd followed someone here, intrigued by why he couldn't sense them in the same way he could others. There was no flesh that lent living essence to his tongue, no scent of a soul that was like blood to a predator in the wild.

Instead there was the Force, twisted and strange, just as Thorn was.

There before him was the invitation of a door left agape. Like a maw awaiting morsels, and the darkness just beyond that the innards of a lifeless and long abandoned structure.

A voice - a thing mimicking speech spoke out in metallic, low bass. "...And so I finally found you. I've followed you for some time... watching." Heavy plating shifted forward as Thorn made entry into the warehouse. "...You intrigue me."

Meliant