Private Interview #817 - Codename: Point Guard

[Serina Calis]

"Credits make the rocks go around."

Tags - Raef Malstadt



The office was cold by design.
Not sterile—sterile implied something that could be touched, altered, violated. No, this room was immutable, a monolith carved out of silence and pale stone. The walls, smooth and unmarred, swallowed echoes instead of throwing them back. Even the hum of the atmospheric regulators seemed to hesitate here, cowed into submission.

Serina Calis stood at the viewport with her back to the door, the vast emptiness of Polis Massa's barren surface stretching out beyond the transparisteel. She let the silence wrap around her like a second cloak, heavier and more suffocating than the one draped across her shoulders. One hand rested lightly against the small of her back, the other dangling at her side in calculated ease. The posture spoke: unbothered. unthreatened. inevitable.

The datapad resting on the obsidian desk behind her flickered faintly with the next candidate's dossier. A mercenary. Another soul dragged across the stars by hunger, ambition, or desperation—no different than any of the others. No different, unless they proved otherwise.

Serina allowed herself a slow breath. Preparation was not a matter of reviewing facts. She had already read the file twice, memorized the particulars, mapped the pressure points, the fears, the ambitions buried between the lines of military jargon and past affiliations. Facts were for bureaucrats. Control was forged in the unseen spaces between facts. In the way a voice cracked under pressure. In the way a gaze faltered when presented with a temptation. In the way loyalty could be grown, if one simply planted the right seeds of desire and watered them with carefully rationed approval.

She would not waste words today.
She would not plead or persuade.
She would offer an opportunity dressed in the thinnest veil of choice.
And if they were wise, they would leap into her orbit before they realized the gravity that had already caught them.

Serina's reflection in the glass offered a cold, amused smile—thin, knowing, cruel.
Another blade for her arsenal.
Another pawn for her board.

A soft chime sounded from the wall panel, signaling the arrival of the next candidate.
Serina did not move immediately. She let the moment stretch, a silent lesson in patience and in power.

Then, slowly, she turned, each motion liquid and precise, and drifted back toward the waiting chair behind the desk. She sat with a grace so effortless it demanded attention—and contempt for those too foolish to offer it.

The door hissed.
The game began.

 

[Raef Malstadt]

Do you see the things I see?
​

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Tags: Serina Calis

He shouldn't be here... yet here he stood. He had already lost so much, yet he was still willing to wager his soul. For as many good things he's fought for, remembered, held close, a bottomless pit still greedily begged for more of the destruction crafted by Raef's actions.

An act of self-cannibalism, his dregs of humanity falling away to reveal an unsightly, ichor covered yearning unsatiated with any and all aspects of life. He was a good man breaking down, but good men don't do what he does. They aren't standing in the position that would damn him to himself; however, he would not flinch at the idea of being consumed by the very thing that kept him alive. He would not waver for the mere existence of goodwill and self-pity.

He needed to eat, he needed to live. For as much flesh that Raef has traded, some of him still remained intact. He was still a person.

Fully clad he stood before who would be assumed as his potential employer, surely she had heard the clanking and weight of each step he took before arriving; pristine, neatly secured, well-adjusted. His visor gleamed in the light of the room, his features slightly obscured, yet a soft pale yellow glow from his cybernetic eyes could be seen every so often.

"Here to talk business." He shifted his left shoulder, slowly taking in everything about the office. "Nice place, I guess."

He shouldn't be here. He knew better than to deal with her ilk, yet he came all this way. What was it he was truly seeking? A glimpse of the other side? Succumbing to a darker desire? Even he didn't know. There was a strange feeling in the air, something creeping into his ear and whispering deeper thoughts and want - a want for power. Credits would never be enough, this he did know.

He shouldn't be here...

 

[Serina Calis]

"Credits make the rocks go around."

Tags - Raef Malstadt



Serina did not rise to greet him.

She remained seated, legs crossed neatly at the knee, her hands steepled in front of her mouth as she regarded the armored figure through lowered lashes—an appraisal more clinical than curious. The silence after his words stretched, deliberate, sharpening the tension in the room into something palpable. Only once it began to cut did she lower her hands and speak, her voice the slow, silken draw of a blade sliding from a velvet sheath.

"You are here," she said, as if noting an inevitable consequence rather than greeting a guest.

"That alone tells me more than any dossier could."

A faint smile—not warm, but precise—touched the edges of her mouth. She did not return the compliment about the office. She did not acknowledge it at all. Flattery, intentional or not, would find no purchase here unless it served a purpose greater than itself.

"You seek business," she continued, tone still languid, but each word carved with an artisan's care. "Very well. Let us speak plainly, mercenary."

Her gaze sharpened, twin knives of cold intellect gleaming beneath the soft fall of her lashes. When she spoke next, it was not as an employer offering a position. It was as an architect offering a place in the construction of an empire—and demanding, without saying it, that he understand the gravity of the offer.

"I require those who can carry burdens heavier than flesh. Those who can kill without apology—and bleed without complaint. I require precision without conscience. Loyalty without the illusion of camaraderie. Strength... without the self-deception of righteousness."

She paused, letting the words settle over him like a fine ash—neither approval nor condemnation, merely a statement of requirements as immutable as the stones of Polis Massa itself.
Then, a slight tilt of her head, almost—almost—curious.

"And you, Raef," she said, voice dipping slightly, wrapping itself around his name with a subtle intimacy that made it feel heavier, somehow stained by being spoken aloud, "stand before me hollowed by losses you will not speak of... and yet still hungry. Still willing."

Her fingers moved and traced a slow, deliberate line along the edge of the desk, the only movement in the frozen tableau between them.

"You are not the first broken man to stand where you do," she murmured, a hint of something darker—something almost tender—beneath the cold formality of her tone. "But broken things can be reforged. Or they can be used as they are—sharp, jagged, dangerous. I have uses for both."

Another pause. Another moment offered to let him stew in the implications.

"I will not offer you empty promises of redemption. I will not insult you with false brotherhood. If you take service under me, you will serve the interests I dictate, without hesitation, without protest. You will be fed, armed, paid well beyond the currencies most men trade their lives for. And when you die—and you will die, should you endure long enough—it will be in service to something far greater than yourself."

Serina sat back slightly, the gesture subtle but unmistakable: the predator giving the prey a chance to step forward—or to flee.

"In exchange, I offer you purpose. Brutal. Pure. Free of hypocrisy. The final luxury for men like you and I."

For the first time, she allowed a hint of real respect to color her gaze—not soft, not inviting, but sharp, a swordsman's respect for a rival blade.

A recognition of what Raef was—or what he could yet become.

"Speak," she invited, voice dropping into something low, something that thrummed with the unspoken promise of future chains—or future ascendance. "Tell me: are you here to eat your fill... or are you here to be devoured?"

Her smile deepened, a slow, exquisite thing that offered no hope of mercy.

Only inevitability.

 

[Raef Malstadt]

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Tags: Serina Calis

Forget it all and throw away the life that he barely held together, the pieces anyway. A shell desperately convincing itself that something was still there, that not everything had spilled out; hollow and used, Serina was very much correct in her observations. There were many men like himself, many others that had paid a price either foolishly or well aware.

Raef wasn't too sure which one he was to become. This choice would be something he couldn't simply walk back from, should he let the foundation of who he once was crumble into dust, and let something new be built in its place.

Among the bones and rotted, broken promises of a life that no longer wanted him, Raef still clung to the falsehood that he could somehow actually atone through penance. No matter what was done, or will be done, it did not excuse nor erase history. The light that he thrashed around in the dark to find was never there, only his mind coping and defending itself.

"Well if there were ever a time to call an interview awkward, this is sure it." Raef sighed, his tongue pressed to his cheek as he slowly shook his head, regarding Serina momentarily before inhaling and holding his silence for a few seconds longer. "There's no comfortable way to accept your offer." His eyes darted to the ground briefly before shifting back toward the Sith.

"I've lived a life of honor, and then I lived a life of shame. Not too sure you'd know that too well, no offense. I'm not here to insult you with petty comments, but I am in this moment, beside myself."

A deep exhale escaped him, slightly modulated by his helmet. "As a mercenary, you meet plenty of other broken bastards. That much is true. You've seen your fair share of them, and for the record, no, I don't hold myself in the same regard as most of them. I get the job done because I'm good at it."

A pang of heartbreak rippled through him as he uttered those words. They were probably right about him, how much of a coward and a disgrace he is. Those he used to serve so courageously.

"I kill because I know nothing else. Wasn't trained for anything else. I knew a long time ago that I could've stopped after I was dishonorably discharged, but part of me refused to keep it there. I needed to get back, even if it was alone."

A cold chill ran up his spine as he paused himself from speaking further. He looked to the ceiling, eyes focusing on nothing as his thoughts raced and swirled - memories like viscera, a slurry of crimson and the crunching of sinews and bones. There was a knack for violence being called from the recesses of Raef's mind, a taste for the heat and burning air that conflict creates.

He looked directly at Serina.

"I'm here to feast."

His eyes lit up into a feverish, deep yellow. Not with the grace of a golden shine, but with a maddening depth that threatened to swallow any who gaze long enough.

 

[Serina Calis]

"Credits make the rocks go around."

Tags - Raef Malstadt



Serina regarded him with the stillness of a creature who had no need to speak first, no need to rush to claim a victory already unfolding. She watched as Raef wrestled with himself, bleeding out his confession in pieces—torn between shame and defiance, despair and savage yearning.

When he finally looked at her—truly looked at her—and declared his intent, the faintest narrowing of her eyes was her only visible response.
Approval, perhaps. Or calculation.

Slowly, with the solemnity of a priestess anointing a willing sacrifice, Serina rose from her chair. Every movement was deliberate, measured to the beat of some silent, inevitable drum. She came to stand before the desk, not towering over him, but drawing the distance between them into something taut and electric.

She spoke, her voice low and cool and heavy with intent.
No bluster. No theatrics.
Only the quiet, merciless beauty of truth.

"Then you understand more than most."

A pause, as if she were granting a moment of honor to the gravity of what he had just given her. Then she continued, each word a blade honed to surgical precision:

"There is no redemption. No sanctuary. No absolution waiting in the stars for men like you—or for me. The galaxy demands from us what it would never demand from the meek: our strength. Our ruthlessness. Our capacity to endure what others cannot even bring themselves to name."

She circled the desk slowly, her movements smooth as a tide inexorably closing in. Her hands remained clasped lightly at her back, her posture composed, her gaze sharp enough to cut through armor and hesitation alike.

"You were once an instrument of others' ideals," Serina said, voice soft but unmistakably hard underneath. "You bled for causes you believed in. You killed for promises you trusted. And when those causes rotted—when those promises withered—you found yourself cast aside, as all tools eventually are."

She came to a halt beside him now, close enough that the whisper of her presence stirred the air between them, yet she offered no threat. Only a mirror: a reflection of everything he was, everything he had lost, and everything he could still become.

"Good men do not survive in this galaxy. Good men are devoured by it, chewed to bone by the very principles they cling to."

The faintest hint of venom—beautiful, necessary—curled into her next words:

"Useful men, however… useful men endure. Useful men carve their own meaning from the ashes of what they once worshiped. Useful men eat, and in eating, they become something greater than what was ever promised to them."

She let the silence settle again, heavier this time, a mantle draped across his shoulders whether he wished it or not.

"And you, Raef," she said, savoring the weight of his name once more, "are ready to feed."

A slow tilt of her head, a gleam of iron respect in her eyes.
A recognition.
A coronation.

"Under my banner, you will not be asked to justify yourself. You will not be asked to pretend remorse for the things you are made to do. You will be given tasks that require blood, and cunning, and an absolute divorce from the illusions that shackle lesser men. In return, you will be paid. You will be armed. You will be elevated beyond the reach of the petty gnawings of regret."

Her voice dipped lower still, almost a caress now, coiling around his fraying soul like a serpent promising both death and deliverance.

"You will not be mended, Raef. You will be sharpened."

She stepped back at last, granting him a final moment to breathe, to feel the magnitude of the precipice he now stood upon.
And then, with the cold finality of a guillotine's fall, she extended her hand toward him—not for a handshake, not for camaraderie, but as an offer of pact, of binding, of inescapable transformation.

"Swear to me," Serina said, voice now a scepter of command, "not loyalty of the heart—for I have no use for broken hearts—but loyalty of action. Swear to serve without hesitation, without sentiment, without weakness. Swear, and the feast you crave will be endless."

The room seemed to narrow around them, the cold white walls becoming the unseen witnesses to a moment neither of them could undo.
Her hand remained outstretched, patient, inevitable.

She did not offer mercy.
She offered purpose.

 

[Raef Malstadt]

---

Tags: Serina Calis

A deep craze set within his sockets and he could feel the familiar warmth of tears welling up behind his eyes. His mind raced and twisted as every part of him tried to pull away, hide and cower in the dark from darkness itself. It coiled around his soul like a prey animal caught within a snare, losing the fight - losing the willpower to resist.

Her words were like a high - encircling his thoughts and shaping them, his ability to trust his own judgement lost in a haze of self-disgust and yearning for the bittersweet otherness not afforded to him due to his long dead oaths.

This was ascension, was it not? Was this not the inevitability of the path? For men like him, both before and after, this was what the warrior's way afforded his spirit. Damnation, no escape, embracing the solace of sleeping eternally within the dirt one day. It is the only peace he will come to know. No other door will ever open to him again, and the only way is forward.

How many others stood exactly where he did? How many of them received the same rhetoric?

It didn't matter now. Between one and one million, he would rise above them all because he felt he could.

Because if he cannot inspire a life of honesty and peace, then the only thing left to do is to take it forcefully.

A brief flash of his life before all this struck like cold steel, all the faces of those he swore to be good to. One by one they began to melt away, fade into an incomprehensible amalgamation of everything that was trapped inside, twisting in on itself and writhing. Their voices merged into nothingness and everything at once, his own name being screamed out in anger and sorrow.

The voices fell silent.

"You will not be mended, Raef. You will be sharpened."

His nerves sparked alive, burning under his skin. Even the limbs he had lost were resonating with intensity within his bones - flesh nonexistent yet haunting where it had once been. Once again looking upon Serina with that same deeply rooted madness, he took one step forward, quietly exhaling to himself.

"I accept..."

He tore at himself, but the struggle was no use; like an ant to a giant, his self-loathing was no match for bloodlust. He drowned in himself, but through this a necessary and forced evolution was underway.

Raef Malstadt was truly dead now. Or perhaps he was only just now waking up.

Alive... for the first time.

 

[Serina Calis]

"Credits make the rocks go around."

Tags - Raef Malstadt



Serina did not smile.
She did not celebrate.
The outcome had been inevitable from the moment Raef Malstadt set foot inside her domain.

Instead, she lowered her outstretched hand with a slow, graceful precision, folding it neatly behind her back once more, as if she were sealing away the transaction they had just completed—not with pomp, but with iron.

"You have made the correct decision," Serina said, her voice smooth and bloodless, the final note struck in a symphony of his undoing. "Understand this, Raef: from this moment forward, your life is no longer your own."

She stepped back behind the desk, her movements flowing like ink spilled across a page. With a single flick of her wrist, a small holoprojector embedded in the desk flared to life between them, casting a cold blue light upward to illuminate the next stage of his descent.

"There is no ceremony. No pledges spoken over broken blades or banners dipped in blood. You have sworn yourself by deed—and that is the only oath that matters."

The holographic display shifted, cycling rapidly through images and files—maps of the Outer Rim, lists of names, dossiers marked with Sith Assembly seals, troop counts, supply lines. Pieces on a board. Lives to be moved, sacrificed, extinguished.

Her tone did not rise; she offered no rhetorical flourishes, no grand speeches about destiny. She simply presented reality—crisp, exact, remorseless.

"You will be folded into Polis Massa Group 77—an auxiliary force attached to my Directorate's external operations. You will serve as a detached agent: executing assignments requiring discretion, force projection, and psychological pressure beyond the capacity of traditional military units."

The files shifted again—now a series of contracts, financial accounts, encryption keys, all already prepared. Already awaiting him. The precision was unnerving. It suggested—no, it proved—that she had planned for his acceptance long before he had ever walked into the room.

"You will answer only to myself or designated proxies. Your chain of command will be simple. Your objectives will be non-negotiable."

Another faint flick of her hand, and a personal datapad slid across the surface of the desk toward him with the faintest scrape of metal against polished stone.

"This device is keyed to your biometric signature. Within, you will find your first orders, travel authorizations, and advance compensation. Additional armaments and upgrades to your equipment will be made available upon successful completion of your initial assignment."

She let that settle—then, finally, the faintest tilt of her head, a razor-sharp nod of acknowledgment.

"You are not here to heal," she reminded him, her voice so soft now it was almost a caress—but one delivered with the edge of a scalpel. "You are here to be forged. And I expect you to prove that the alloy of your new self will not break when tested."

A pause.
Her eyes, cold and pitiless, locked onto his—those fever-bright, newly born things flickering behind his visor.

"You are expendable, Raef," she said without cruelty—only with the solemnity of law. "But expendable does not mean useless. If you make yourself irreplaceable... if you devour the enemies set before you with the same hunger you showed today, you will find there is no limit to the power I will entrust to you."

And then, at last, a final gift—if it could be called that. A sliver of dark iron respect, more valuable than any sentimental offering.

"You have chosen well," Serina murmured. "Now see to it that I never regret my investment."

She pressed a fingertip lightly against a control on her desk.
The door behind him hissed open once more, revealing a dark-uniformed officer standing at attention beyond the threshold—waiting to escort him to his next station, his new life.

Without waiting for Raef to speak further, Serina lowered herself back into her chair, the folds of her cloak settling around her like the closing petals of a black iron flower.

The interview was over.
The forge had claimed another soul.
And the galaxy would bleed for it.