Hunger finds Manaan

[Darth Odium]

A ship, not unlike any other, drifted through space. It's black tattered hull, a relic from another time, held no running lights nor signs of affiliation. The black carbon scored battleship did not look alive....and yet its engines flared as it came into view of the oceanic world.

People, if they could still be called such, moved mechanically to the silent orders of their master's wicked mind. His black oily presence permeated every crack of the ship and forced those aboard into silent submission. He stood calmly among them on the bridge, black unblinking eyes boring a hole in the azure jewel before them. A violent ache filled him as if a black hole had replaced his very soul and it demanded sustenance.

His fingernails dug into his palms as he fought for control, the promise of a meal that would end the ache for a little while filled him with impatience like a starving child looking at pictures of banquets.

"Soon" he told himself as the ship drew nearer. He would be in range soon.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Darth Odium"]

"I... feel something," Selka said.

Across the open-air office -- white, gleaming, with a view of the sea, like everything nice here in the rebuilt Ahto City -- her Selkath aide raised his head. "You seem surprised," burbled Dificul. The Shasan Adept glanced at the door, verifying it was shut. "What do you mean. Is it the Force?"

"I think so." She cleared her holographic desk with a wave and rested her elbows on iBorg's quarterly sales figures. "But it doesn't feel like I'm waking up again." Was that a hint of tension vanishing from Dificul's shoulders? Was he relieved that his employer -- once a Sith Master with a deep affinity for Force Drain, the woman who'd euthanized the Progenitor, rebuilt Ahto City, captained Silk Holdings, absorbed the personality of Velok, and blackmailed half the Order of Shasa -- was not getting the Force back? If so, she couldn't help but resent that. Losing the Force had taken the spice from her life, and though it had lessened the demands of her Force Drain addiction, it had also removed all possibility of satiating that demand. An itch she could never scratch.

Dificul set his datapad aside and came to stand by her desk. "Clear your mind," said the Shasan Selkath. "It is simple advice, but it is what you need." He set about shifting papers and datapads away until the desk top was empty. "What do you feel?"

Selka's head tilted. "...hungry."

 

[Darth Odium]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

The large ship continued it's blind course toward the blue planet. Its clouds drifted over the world as it grew in the viewport and Odium slowly began to draw strength. This would stop the pain, the soul deep aching. This would give him time to think of more than feeding for a time. He needed it or so he thought.

Lights flashed on the communication suite as the world began to notice the ship entering their sensor range. He began feeling for life, any life, as they drew near and found it in the form of other ships queued up to enter the atmosphere. Like a coiled viper he lashed out for one after another as they drifted into range and one by one the ships stopped responding as their crews simply died quick silent deaths.

"Closer" he demanded through telepathy. "Now!"

Soon the planet would experience horror to satisfy the desires of one monster.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Darth Odium"]

"Ms. Ventus," said Dificul, "there's a comm alert you should know about."

"So much for clearing my -- oh." A shiver ran down her back. "Orbital traffic control."

"Yes. How did you-"

Erida. Not even Dificul knew that she'd been there, that she'd participated. "Evacuate. Evacuate everything and everyone. Assume you have less than half an hour, and for the sake of the Force make sure to keep the evac ships away from the vectors that're going dark. Get my Rassilon prepped. Something's up there that only I can handle. And...message the city leaders. Tell them the Sith are coming back for blood. Get Silk on the horn; they'll be prepared for evac this time around. Nobody evacuates Ahto City better than Silk Holdings."

Dificul, to his credit, took the series of verbal sledgehammer blows without a flinch. "And where will you be?" he said neutrally.

She stretched out to the Force; as ever, since her severing at least, she felt nothing. She pressed a hidden button on her desk, and a bent lightsabre ascended from a hidden compartment. "Hoping and praying, old friend."

"They'll ask how you know."

"If I'm right, their ships are going dead without weapons fire. There's only one thing that does that."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

+Manaan
+Ahto City
+Sub-Dock 987/DW

Wharf Overseer Officer Adra, accompanied by laymen Qoural, Firax, and a junior office clerk named Shasa, all exhibited the same Selkath nervous habit of tweaking their jowl-tear drops and humming in thickly phlegmatic tones. Sub-Dock 987/DW, the 'Krill Ledge' pier workers had been referring it since six successive generations of operation, wafted with a cold zephyr coming off the salt waters, whistling down the emptied landing jetties and vacated boat launches. Firax jumped when a brassy klaxon railed aloud.

[Second shift...] Shasa conversed with herself, tightening and uncurling he webbed toes inside their boots.

[You think he found the nest?] Qoural looked over at Officer Adra.

[They must have found him, at least.]

[...Hey. Hey, you see that...?] Firax pointed.

They fixed on a table of bubbles venting up through the salt brine. Air pockets burst against the water surface tension in sticky pops, the waves now broiling. A hominid shadow was kicking its way towards the end of a long pier, drifting up through the slate light, limbs propelling against the liquid suck of a faint undercurrent tugging on their frame. A naked arm shot up and took hold of a rusted duralluminium rung, and hauled out its weight until it could fix a bare foot on the pier's cracking duraplast edging.

[Well, come on, don't leave me to this alone.] Shasa scolded the slow males, scooping her feet up to keep from tripping against her own lanky gait. Her colleagues jaunted up to her shortly and joined with the human pacing towards them from the sea, wiping plankton detritus out of his eyes while hefting a bundle tied up in his off-hand. Shasa was about to gurgle their shared relief at his reapparance; 'till she noticed the altogether gory sight he was holding strung up in his fingers.

[Oh.] Adra put it succinctly.

Half a dozen bald skulls covered in broken and opalescent scales, severed at the throat just below the third cervical bone dish, bleeding-red gill filaments draped and choked in blood the colour of gruel, were dropped at their feet. Overseer Adra gulped; it was always unsettling being witness to physical destruction belonging to a living form other than a common shard-tuna.

Seydon of Arda snorted more seawater out of his nostrils and regarded his employers. For his swimming jaunt, he just dressed down to a pair of thin slacks, with a notched harness belt replete with spare rebreather tanks and a kit pouch fixed with bait-spoor bottles, a sammum bomb, and silver-steel wire spools. The hatchet at his hip looked greasy still with its application of necrophage oil to the axe-head. Tall, powerful, albino skin and hair shocked white as ash and snow, the Dunaan cut a foreign and bothering presence. Pink scar tissues corded over his torso skin like so much Manaan coral.

[Is... That all of it?] Adra asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, it ought to be. Spotted where they had built a nest out of an old docking module left abandoned below sea-level. Managed to collapse that. If there was anything left hiding in the dark, they'll starve out by the week's end.”

[So it's done.] Shasa let out a breath, shuffling her long fingers through her wet-suit pockets.

“You won't have anymore drowners coming round for your dock muscle,” Seydon assured.

[All the same,] Qoural snorted. [It's triple shifts until we make up for the week's losses.]

Shasa slid a platinum data-chit to her Overseer, who traded it next into Seydon's waiting hand. The Dunaan regarded the credit voucher, satisfied and anxious. He pocketed it on his belt and made pardons while stepping through the Selkath, strolling for the cold wharf block. He needed to dry, re-dress, and be to the Relentless before it went 19:00 local. The sum taken for a half-dozen drowner heads would be enough to pay for sublight fuels and take a restock of his rapidly emptying ship larders. Just so he could make the next transit to Jabiim in relative comfort.

[...Didn't the shift bells already sound off?] Seydon heard Shasa ask.

...It was throatier tonal warble that was sounding from public broadcast speaker phones, mounted in the sea wall rising up behind the Krill Ledge to the higher food and product manufacturing levels rowed in Ahto City's floating megastructure. Doppler echoes were muffling and dampening an automated drone-message, that sounded out for thirty seconds and lasted for six. The Dunaan looked back at Overseer Adra: he'd never encountered any Selkath that could drain the colour from their scale-hide. The officer blinked giant, wetly black eyes, and turned to his employees.

[That's... That's the evacuation call.]

Firax, Shasa, and Qoural regarded him blankly and almost stupidly.

[That's the city evacuation siren. We... We have to go. Right now. We have to make for the emergency vessel ports.]

[Mister Adra,] Shasa interrupted him.

[Yes? Shasa, what is it? We do not have time. We really don't.]

[Will we be able to get our families back together?]

Adra shuddered. [Shasa, I really don't know. Just make sure you have all your ID's in hand and kept up with your savings. Mister Seydon, we - ]

The Dunaan was already gone. Clothes and his mobile armory stuffed up under an armpit. Racing bare foot up the long stairwell corridors circling upward toward the public docking platforms. As psychically blunt as he was, the dark embers of cold fire in his heart and mind that kept him connected through to the grey and black facets of the Force were beginning to resonate sympathetically. Something bad, very bad, titanically awful was coming. He'd board the Relentless. Maybe find what it was.

...And maybe stop it.

[member="Selka Ventus"] | [member="Darth Odium"]

 

[Darth Odium]

[member="Selka Ventus"] [member="Seydon of Arda"]

The icy grip of hunger tightened in his chest as he ran out of ships. The blue flouresent streaks of sublight drives at full burn added to his frustration and served to fuel his hateful heart's desire to kill. The air on the bridge rippled as he tossed his head back in a silent roar that was followed by the helmsman being grabbed with an unseen hand and rent from his station and left in a tangled mass against a far bulkhead.

Red flecks danced over his glossy obsidian optical orbs as he lunged for the late helmsman 's station, green-black cloak flaring behind him as his steps echoed in the now dead silence of the bridge. His too large hands flew madly over adjustments and to the accelerator thrusting the metallic handle forward with enough force to bend the lever. This was not an option. He needed this. He would not wait, not again. His dry cracked lips peeled back as a grutteral wet noise resonated within his throat.

Too fast, they had reacted too fast. They were warned! The short sighted Sith were to blame. They betrayed him. It had to be them. Good! Prakith and their dark whore would be next!

"Master the engines will explo..." the quaren began before the crimson blade of Odium's saber staff flashed and split him from crook to crown.

"If you're weak get off my ship!" he exploded to each mind telepathicly resulting in a mad dash of many from the bridge.

He turned back to look at Manana and began to stretch out for it in the force. His control of the living force wound in him began to slip and it began to feed off his own crew before he could push it back toward the world. He focused on the southern pole and probed for life any life but he was still just out of reach. The bones on his armor glowed as he used the dead force users for a very important spell and then pulled his hood up to wait in anger. A few more kilometers. Just a few.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Darth Odium"] [member="Seydon of Arda"]

The Rassilon's engines howled unhealthily, courtesy of an abbreviated preflight. It was one of the most expensive, maneuverable, glamorous, and powerful starfighters in the 'verse, by any objective measure. It didn't deserve this treatment. Look how well it was doing, dancing between aimless ships. Fully functional ships, ambling along on courses gone random at the edge of a merciless grav well, their crews and passengers dead.

Dead, like Selka could be if Odium turned his attention to the Rassilon.

She wet her lips and touched the comms. Behind her, the transports of the Order of Shasa, iBorg, Silk, and the Ahto City Selkath were scattering on vectors that kept them hundreds of kilometres away from the dead vessels. A tightbeam link connected her starfighter with the inbound ship. The death ship.

"Odium, this is Selka Ventus. This is my home. What can I give you to turn you away?"

A forlorn hope, that. They'd once killed a world together. Such a valuable bond.

 

[Allyson Locke]

Location: Dingy hotel room -> Manaan Hanger
Theme: Night Vision ~ Lindsey Stirling

​

She finally felt him. It had taken a few weeks, but the vision she had repeatedly seen was finally playing out in the present time. Meditation was key to the force visions, especially the ones that she was currently having after having her force connection rehabilitated. They came in quick successions, fragments at first playing things out of order. His face though was the one constant through each and every vision. Fists clenched against the tight fabric of her slacks as she could feel his hunger – which awoke something inside of her. Standing from her corner of the small room, she tucked in the white shirt and strapped the thin leather belt around her slender waist. Hanging off the belt was a small leather pouch containing seeds from the harrowbane plant and her lightsaber. Slinging the jacket over her shoulders she fluffed the collar pulling blonde hair from it and tucked it away into a ponytail. Everything held significance, she played out the vision to the letter, if she strayed from it would it change the outcome? She had seen different scenarios played out, but each and every one of them started with her doing this and in this small run down room.

Leaving it quickly, she made her way towards the hangers of the planet. He was moving quickly and there wasn’t going to be a buffer to stop him. Spencer wondered if she should warn the planet, but who would listen to her? She wasn’t recognized as a Jedi and would quickly be labeled a Sith – which never was a good thing when you were trying to do the right thing in a situation. Deciding that if she headed him off at the hanger she would be able to buy time for the civilians.

​

Footsteps were heavy as she continued down the main street heading towards the hanger. That night with Ashin as she discovered that the woman had given in to the hunger of the Force. Everything that they had built was put into jeopardy. Spencer and their daughter were alive by way and will of the Force – this meant that they were probably more delicious than a huge bantha steak to Ashin. Nodding as she walked thinking about everything, Spencer gave Ashin credit – the woman was a lot stronger and stubborn if you will. They weren’t out of harm’s way and they wouldn’t be any safer if Odium was gone, but it would give Spencer a chance to help Ashin fully come back from what he reminded her of.

Inhaling deeply she jogged up the stairs and entered the hanger where in her vision she had seen him arrive. Opening her hand, the lightsaber broke free from its clip and entered her hand by way of the force. At the door of the hanger, she knelt down and waited. Her eyes closed as she focused on his energy, that dark and hungry energy that swirled searching for something to feast on. Tilting her head to the side, her vertebrate would crack and pop. Odium would have plenty to eat on this planet – and that would either consist of her fist or her lightsaber.

Mind focused she allowed her being to be seen through the Force, the pure and vibrant energy of the Force swirled around her and acted as bait to the Force hungry beast.

[member="Selka Ventus"][member="Darth Odium"][member="Seydon of Arda"]

 

[Darth Odium]

[member="Selka Ventus"] [member="Seydon of Arda"] [member="Spencer Jacobs"]

His fingernails dug into his palms. Drops of slimy black liquid beaded on olive skin and dripped ever so slowly onto the durasteel deck. The voice, he knew the voice. He reached out, his wicked mind at the edge of breaking, grasped for her.

"No, no....wait... Gah it hurts." he felt dead ships, "there. There you are Selka...." he said as he found her mind and began to speak, "you're....you're broken."

He broke away and reached for the world in the force. He could feel it now. The brush of sweet vibrant life. So sweet, so perfect, and he would ruin it. Ruin it if he wasn't stopped... The Hunger pains screamed in him, his heart no deeper, his intestines gripped with pain and doubled him over.

"Too late...!" a voice whispered in his ear, "You'll never be rid of this. You'll never be free."

"Kill me..." Odium's begged the voice, "kill me! Kill me kill me kill me kill me!"

Only fading laughter came in reply as he stood and looked to the fighter containing the woman.

"Selka" he typed into the console in front of him the mute afraid to let the terrible glare into the woman's mind while he was so hungry. "Do you have the emblem?"

The presences of power on the planet drew his hunger. It may be too late to stop....

 

[Seydon of Arda]

There was a taste in his mouth and it washed nausea down his throat: an acidic crush of gravel and ash, bile wretch, and flesh rot. It was the stench of an abattoir killing floor that'd left a fresh slaughter to go bad, and the cockpit deck hummed with unseen insect chirring. Visual artefacts played on the console hololith plates, bending, cutting, or else distorting gauge readout dials. Ghostly apparitions showed in every steristeel reflection: the braying, screaming phantoms of gaunt and starved faces, so hollow-eyed and voracious their emptied ocular sockets were devouring up the shadows. Seydon would blink, clear his mind with a fast, iron-clad thought exercise, and watch in turn as spectral hallucinations wormed back into his sight and roared a forsaken threnody in his ears. Local spacial reality was buckling under an aching weight of soulless appetite. Even to his blunted mind, the Force was ripping wide, becoming a gangrene sore festering with maggot spectre's clawing invisibly in death.

Seydon gently levered the console accelerator, coaxing power and speed into a wide nozzle-array mounted on the Relentless' broad aft. Impulse power came from a pair of twin-mounted solar ionization reactors further tuned under the aegis of Jorus Merrill's exceptional shipwright and mechanical authority, interlinked to the bleeding-edge advanced Angel Eye sensor suite package, a rare T-2000 Otherdrive, the meaty C15 Hypertransit navicomp, tractor shrouds, countermeasure modules, and cap drains parsed below the outer hull skin.

At one quarter forward drive, the vessel had swiftly broken Manaan's orbital apogee and swung free of its satellite clouds. Sensor nets locked to a broad, wheezing sublight drive signature leaking heat into the void. He could see it chugging on a failing glide, retching fire where faltering internal systems caused power junctions to combust and burst, shuddering hull breaches hissing faint vapor clouds as vessel protocols struggled in sealing each life support leak. Through the canopy viewscreens, it was a coasting absence of starlight, wreathed in gossamer vapour clouds. Glare from the engine backlit it's uneven hulling with hellishly carmine detail. Scoring across the stern nose and ventral plating hinted at an unreliable null quantum field generator. Running lamps were dark. Quills of broadcast antenna's flaked with rust wearing and wore stress cracks and fatigue warping. An ancient porcupine of a vessel, a relict specimen that had escaped some anti-matter hell and drove at Manaan like a black dagger.

Seydon rolled and yawed around, angling his vessel lateral search lamps, stroking a hard-light beam across the bristling cruiser's medial sectioning. He spotted distant boarding umbilical docking bridges hanging limply by robotic berthing arms. Possible entry and egress points. Seydon was about to pilot the Relentless and come round for a boarding pass, when a console hololith blew up a transmission scan return. A second ship had come to a pause before the approaching cruiser, setting off broad comm hails, trying to invoke a reply. In spite of it's corpse-like countenance, something on the command bridge was bothering to give them an answer. The Dunaan shunted power and broke into full impulse, tacking a line for the cruiser's slowly twisting bulk.

[member="Darth Odium"] | [member="Selka Ventus"] | [member="Spencer Jacobs"] (Mizz Cool Beans)

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Spencer Jacobs"] [member="Darth Odium"] [member="Seydon of Arda"]

A transmission came back, a line of text scrolling across her HUD.

Selka? Do you have the emblem?

Somewhere, she knew, the Force was in a roil, but she couldn't feel a bit of it. These few words were all she had to go on. She swallowed and glanced at the bulge in her flight suit's thigh pocket. Her backup plan had one shot. Reloading the thing took an invocation to Velok. Selka doubted she could sincerely pray to herself.

Odium had seen it coming. And it was possible, just barely, that he welcomed it. She'd touched his mind when they killed Erida together. She'd felt anguish to match the hunger.

"I brought it," she said into the comm, eyeing the larger vessel that had joined her approach to Odium's ship. The IFF said Relentless, and that rang a quiet bell. The ship looked like the one Je'gan Olra'en had used; a limited production model, and not something she'd paid much attention to during her tenure as Silk's CEO. A rare ship model, certainly. Expensive and nasty and twenty times the size of her expensive, nasty Rassilon.

"I'm heading for your hangar, Odium."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The Rassilon broke its anchored station and began running up an approach vector toward's the cruisers underbelly. Seydon watched after its flitting shadow under the monster-ship's black glare. Captain Merrill made a point mentioning that no two of the elite-class voidfighters were the same, owing to an ingeniously modular framework that still supported blistering firepower, speed, steering agility, and shield defences that winked cheekily even at capital vessel broadside cannon fire. This one, stamped with the bright ochre product 'shield' of Silk Holdings Inc., clipped past his port and made time towards a darkened hanger bay carved into the cruiser's hulling.

He slowed on the Relentless' thruster output, pitching her long, winged profile towards the farther supply umbilical ports protruding along the ventral line. Most ships-of-the-line possessed docking buoy droids and automated guidance systems to lead freighters and shuttlecraft in. The Dunaan had to opt for manual steerage, somehow comforted that control was directed strictly through his paired joystick yokes and the engine, retrothruster pedals providing squeezes of thrust and breakage. His hands twitched, swinging the Relentless' wide aft tail and scooped wings a hundred-eighty degrees, lining up the small and mostly secondary docking access airlock to one umbilical that still looked serviceable.

The proximity was causing the hallucinatory insect chorus pealing behind his ears to chirr louder, its foul Force aura making the blood vessels in his nose open and bleed thinly. Seydon cocked his wrist and goaded his ship to starboard closer, tapping a console switch toggle. Outside, the airlock bridge shuddered and began extending towards the umbilical. He killed all thrust, arresting the Relentless to match the cruiser in momentum, sliding out of his seat to mount down an entry ladder into his supply and armoury chambers.

Winterfang's chilly steel was all but aglow as light trembled out of the scabbard head. Seydon wondered if anything aboard could sense it's approaching, avalanche cold.

[member="Darth Odium"] | [member="Selka Ventus"] | [member="Spencer Jacobs"]

 

[Darth Odium]

[member="Seydon of Arda"] [member="Spencer Jacobs"] [member="Selka Ventus"]

The force burned in his olive green chest as the planet drew into range. The long hilt of the saber staff slides from beneath his robes as he stepped to the helm and ignited one end of the weapon. The snap-hiss and following hum of energy a small comfort to his hunger wracked mind.

The blade split the air and scorched a path through the delicate guts of the console and locked the ship on a crash course with the planet below. The blade extinguished like a blown out candle and he walked to the center of the nearly empty bridge. He was in range now and the hunger was too much to deny.

He stretched out, first his green too large hand and then with the force and again focused on the northern pole, as bitter cold reached his skin. He was running out of time. Power of unseen proportions swelled in him, the sickly sweet touch of darkness wafting off him like the smell of rotten meat from roadkill. His black armor, adorned with bones, simmered like heatwaves over concrete as he began to drain life from the planet. His body shuddered under the weight of the force as slowly the planet below began to die. It would take a long time to drain the world but Manana was dying.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Seydon of Arda"] [member="Darth Odium"] [member="Spencer Jacobs"]

The big Silk cutter moved to dock, not far from the hangar bay that yawned open to take Selka's Rassilon. With the eyes of someone who'd made ships her business, she estimated the quickest modes of connection between the bay and the airlock. Alone, her odds were minimal. The hero on the Relentless, whoever he might be -- and who else would board a falling starship, if not a hero or Selka Ventus? -- could benefit from the Velok Emblem if he wasn't too plucky or destined or something. If he looked especially farmboyish, she'd have to weigh his odds against hers and choose accordingly. Heroes had their uses, half the time.

No circle of stormtroopers came to welcome her. The hangar bay was a wreck. She climbed out and opened the Rassilon's cargo hatch, eyes in the back of her head. Metal latched shut around her lower arms and legs, over the flight suit. Up there, on the hangar's upper level, a half-open hatch looked like it might put her close to the hero's airlock. Her Razorhawk maneuvering system flared to life, accelerating her toward the hatch like a Mando with a jetpack, strain shrieking in her joints. She disengaged the Razorhawk as deftly and quickly as she'd turned it on.

She padded through the corridors, making for the airlock. Unlit sabre in one hand, Velok Emblem in the other.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The air-lock bridge mated its connection to the umbilical and rasped a tough note of squealing, resistant attach threads. It sent ripples shaking down through the cramped debarkation chamber, rattling into the Relentless, enough to upset her steadied velocity and buck the decking. Seydon centred his balance, watching a status screen bolted to the bulkhead wink through diagnostic scanning, as it attempted contact with the ancient computer systems managing the opposing ship. Pressure equalization was a long time coming, and even then the Dunaan noticed frost creeping up the hatch skin like a rash of winter cold. The hatch finally slid up into its servo-motor housing.

The bridge to the death-vessel was a long tunnel of creaking durasteel leaking air from pinhead breaches and covered in a skein of hoarfrost. Seydon had Razorlight drawn, held in a light but pinched grip, rolling his wrist out of habit. He stepped out, crunching over the ice, ducking under curtains of bulbous icicles dripping from ceiling ring-girders. Inside the umbilical was only a few degrees warmer than the full void exposure outside. Here and there were he palmed the rime off the metal, were signs of jerry-rigged torch cuts attempting to stave off the progressing metal decay. This ship hadn't seen a dry-dock or even emergency servicing in decades, possibly centuries more.

At the umbilical's far end, leading inward, was a second hatchway. It denied Seydon entry as he approached: a pert and slurring security protocol interface, arranging alien syllables that ground together. His reply was wedging his sword into the frame jamb and prying the hatch aside.

Inside smelled like grave earth. Dust had seeded to the floor in inch thick carpets, stirring up under his soft footfalls. Between his nose and tongue, Seydon could detect trace amounts of foetid methane and hydrogen sulphide gas, hinting at the death idling in the shadows where infirm or exhausted crew members collapsed, died, and decomposed. A decade long process. The rot in the air lingered still, clinging to the grime smeared across the hulling panelling and crusts of foreign organic matter running up the stanchion girders.

He walked in the dark. Illumination came through cracked viewports running along the veranda decks. Old blood twinkled like rubies on the walling, at times suspended motionless where grav-plating under the walkway had failed. Manaan was distant and elegaic, a blue sapphire crown cloaked in marble hurricanes and onyx thunderheads threading with platinum lightning. Seydon paused, watching his reflection stare back, framed by the planet. ...Something was tickling at his cerebellum. Nothing cerebral so much as soulful in feeling. It was familiar but vague as deja vu, like a face seen once in a crowd that stole up on him years later. Was this how Rosa experienced or coped with her greater sense of perception? The presences grew, welling, becoming a steady thought-stream instead of a bare trickle.

Seydon felt her impression: a tenuous balance of opposites closed in by a femininity that refused to let adult trials diminish her young heart. A calm nova. A placid tsunami. Snatches of electric notes played in his ear, and a sympathetic smirk curled up his smile. Whatever aboard that was piloting this careening tomb wouldn't make landfall without contest. Severe and killing contest. He paced a littler faster into the shadows, following dim floor map plaques tied to trembling pipes. The bridge was three decks up and five hundred meters to the command tower. Sightless things followed him in the rafter ducts, breathing and sucking back their drool. ...There'd be contest for him too.

[member="Selka Ventus"] | [member="Darth Odium"] | [member="Spencer Jacobs"]

 

[Darth Odium]

[member="Spencer Jacobs"] [member="Seydon of Arda"] [member="Selka Ventus"]

Fetid air, barely perceptible to him now, clung to the ship like fog to a mountain valley. His arms crossed as he faced away from the bridge entrances. His saber staff rested on his biceps as his now lifeless eyes stared at the planet that filled the view port. The first traces of outer atmosphere began to shake the vessel of death as it careened toward the world below. Gravity tugged at the ship as its engines flared and died sending rippling quakes through the already tattered hull. The Nautolan's mind raced through his long existence, life was no proper description any longer. He was not impressed with what he saw. His existence was death, pain and death.

Flames licked at the hull as the ship raced on toward what would be a devastating collision with the ocean world. It wouldn't kill him, a knew that, no such luck could find him, the bridge was too strong. He felt the dead in the ship and began drawing them in. Hundreds of souls would never find rest in him. His few creations would be hunting the corridors now, some simply mad from his attentions others manipulated like [member="Mornhun"] and sent into madness by the process. All of the survivors would be freed on the planet. Even if he fell to this place they would need months to scrub his prints off this world.

 

[Shadowheart]

[member="Darth Odium"]
[member="Spencer Jacobs"]
[member="Seydon of Arda"]
[member="Selka Ventus"]

Location: Hunting A Certain Blonde
Objective: Cash In Big Time

Sometime ago​

Roman sat at a kiosk, scrolling through some jobs, none of them really mattered, but a few did catch his eye.​

A blonde, something about being a forceuser, whatever that was, made him wink at the screen.
"Bingo."​

He made a gun with his finger, and acted as if shooting the screen, accepted the contract, though it was kinda old, and sat himself up.​

"Hey, Karlo, get me a ship."​

"What kinda ship?"​

"One that can hold a prisoner, oh and some snacks."​

"Roger that."​

​

A day later, Roman was on a light freighter, looking up more on this blonde, finding out she was actually quite known throughout the galaxy.​

"Huh, never heard of ya doll, but that's okay, you dont know me either. Now, where the hell are you?"​

"Karlo?"​

"What?"​

"Any intel on where she might be?"​

A few moments of silence later, Roman spoke up again.​

"Karlo?"​

"Shush, I'm looking."​

"Oh, sorry."​

Again, another moment of silence.
"Alright I got something. A few witnesses say they saw a woman looking like this blonde on Manaan."​

"Thanks Karlo."​

"Did..you just thank me?"​

"Yea? Why?"​

"Cause, you never are polite."​

"Jeez man, I'm not that much of a jerk. Smell ya later, going hunting."​

​

​

​

PRESENT TIME​

​

"We're all misguided beings, living by the days." A man spoke behind a red helmet as he walked around a corner in some muggy hotel. "You see, I live for the seconds, wasting no time." Roman was talking to no one in particular, really just talking to "hear his head rattle" as some had said before. Roman Redd was not all there, sadly to say, and that was just fine by him. The Vahla were a black leather jacket over some light armor, with two blaster pistols in his hands set on stun were set on live. See, Roman was here for a certain bounty, and was totally unaware that the one who had made the bounty was coming to the same spot. Roman went by the name Shadowheart, not something he chose, but something he earned, and as Shadowheart walked, something at the back of his mind told him danger was coming, sever danger, "Of the bad, nasty kind." He said out loud.

The stalking took sometime, but he was certain he was on her trail.

Roman knew the woman was here somewhere, but where? "Excuse me. have you seen a hot, blonde babe run by here?" He said as he snatched a man with a mechanic suit on by the arm.

"Wha..what? Yea, that way." The mechanic pointed up to some stairs. "Now let me go ya freak." Roman released him, and shook his head. "That's not nice. I'm perfectly normal like you." He aimed the blaster at the man's chest, fired once, and watched the man fall out, knocked out. Roman looked up at the stairs, and clicked his tongue. "I hate stairs."

Making his way to those steps, Roman found himself feeling a strange, and powerful presence, unsure what it was. Roman was not knowledgeable on what the force was, so his sensitivity was something of a mystery to him. He probably wouldnt have cared too, if he found out. "By the seven hells, do these stairs go on forever?" he complained, but saw the door coming up. He would stop at it, and knock on it, yelling out loud, "HELLO? IS THERE A PRETTY BLONDE BEHIND HERE?" He opened it, and stood with his head cocked. "What the hell are you doing?"

 

[Ashin Varanin]

On Falling Ship: [member="Darth Odium"] [member="Seydon of Arda"]

Others: [member="Shadowheart"] [member="Spencer Jacobs"]

Time was, she'd have Force Drained her way through the occasional shambling horror, but she no longer had that option. Nor was she armed in any serious way; her lightsabre was of less utility than it had been. It cleared the path well enough, but only if she kept moving. To that end, she had the Razorhawk. She zipped down long corridors, blew past impromptu cordons, chopped as she went, and used turbolift shafts to great effect.

It didn't take especially long, though it was touch-and-go tension all the way, for her to reach the bridge. She wet her lips, invoked the Velok Emblem in her hand, and instantly felt the futility of her meagre attempt. There was no reason her desperate attack should succeed. Desperation and dramatic tension did not guarantee success, not in the real world. But just like the Emblem crippled underdogs, it would cut off Odium from the weight of his own legacy's mantle -- and his connection to greater things. To the Dark Lord she'd once served.

"Hello, Odium."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The cruiser was beginning to torque around like an auger bit, dropping into an ungainly re-entry angle, planing sheets of heat-atomized duranium carbon mist off its hulling. Seydon listened to plodding detonations pop and implode along the outer levels. He stuck onto a length of exposed plumbing jutting like a rung out of some wall panelling, briefly swept off his feet as air pressure dropped and was sucked back down the long, frigid corridor he'd been traversing. The bodies of dead, scaly things, with exposed rib-cages and bellies so gaunt they wrapped against spinal cords, went careening out of sight, dragged by void suction. Eventually, plating just large enough snapped free from its bolting in the ceiling overhead, spinning about in free fall before it was snatched and got caught in a hallway portcullis. Labouring life-support protocols finally squeezed in power borrowed from secondary systems, and slammed insulated blast doors down into place to prevent further leakage.

His sense of equilibrium was roiling in his ears. A cluster of waiting turbolifts was found in time, of course powered down and blinking emergency strobe lights. Seydon read an emergency read out on a digital plaque by one of the summoning keypads, grousing under his breath. Crew and passengers were recommended to take the evacuation stairwells in the event of a ship-wide crisis. Distantly, he could pick up the sounds of broadcast antennae and decorative finials snapping off the cruiser's blistered, armoured skin. The Dunaan ran up to the stair entrance, ramming Razorlight into the seam, jarring the hatch aside. Beyond and inside the curling well, was unlit shadow that somehow gleamed in his eyes, the way frost and dust glitters in airless streams under distant, vacant starlight. Seydon mounted up the first steps with a grip on the nearest handrail: most primary support systems on board were probably due to fail sooner than he thought. If gravity went but reinitialized, it'd mean a hard, plummeting death.

Finally, four decks and too many levels above, he opened up onto a landing and transferred to wider entry hall. Warm light was spinning down, coming over an angled stepping ramp. It lead into the wide panorama viewfinder belonging to a once resplendent command bridge, the brushed durasteel and finely welded plating now burnished with rusting corruption, hosing and cabling dangling from the ceiling in intestinal collections, as broken monitors in the recessed crew pits below spat corposant and white-bright sparks from below. Manaan's achingly deep blue revolved around the cruiser's nose, now glowing hot and trailing fire.

A hungry shadow stood outlined in the streaming light. Nearby, a slighter and more desperate figure, palming something wooden and carved in one palm, the other nestled on a finely machined blade hilt. She'd said something at the man... the thing... the hunched over presence bleeding out hunger and ghostly screams, just barely perceptible but loud enough to keen and chill their bones. Seydon might have recognized the lady's face from passing glances at Fortune 5000 holomags, or the once-in-a-while interview broadcasted on news report networks. There wasn't time to ask how, if at all, she knew the Hunger. There wasn't time much for any conversation. Seydon greeted the scene tapping Razorlight's whet peak into the decking with a final, ringing clang.

[member="Darth Odium"] [member="Selka Ventus"]

[member="Spencer Jacobs"] [member="Shadowheart"]