Private It's an Older Code... (Daiara)

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

THE POMOJEMA
LANDED ON YAVIN IV
UNCLAIMED TERRITORY

Commanding a ship, any ship, meant getting vast numbers of reports and alerts and updates, looped in on emerging situations. By virtue of being the closest thing to graduate school for Force-sensitives who learned toward the Dark Side, running the Pomojema was an order of magnitude more complicated. Ashin had never been much of a prophet, but once in a while a report pinged on her console or comm and she just knew, by instinct, that her whole day was shot to hell.

This particular report came from the security chief. At a ruined temple excavation nearby, advanced students on guard duty had encountered someone they weren't entirely sure how to handle.

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

Well this was inconvenient.

Daiara frowned at the vessel that loomed over her port hole. She had not expected to find the Pomojema in this corner of the universe and yet here it was, her tracker blaring its beacon on a bag moving inside.

"Feth," she cursed under her breath. Half of her artifact was now on there, stolen from her by the students she had fought with on the ground. She had not spent months on this key only to be deterred by a ship with big walls. She told herself that was all she'd find in there and sent a request to dock. Her fingers moved over the key pad mindlessly, dredging up only the memories that served her. She sent the entry code.

She could have tried to enter with more tact but there was no need. She use to be a student here.

No. She corrected.

Aradia had.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

The old entry code, after a brief conversation between Ashin and Security, worked. People came and went from the Pomojema over the course of years. There were processes for old affiliates seeking entry. Darth Daiara 's ship was given clearance to land in one of the Pomojema's smaller hangars. The space wasn't being used by other ships or by classes or research.

At this point the process was for someone from a short list of senior staff to meet the old affiliate. Ashin had a hunch. She chose to handle it personally, and alone, right there in the small hangar. Other than the lightsaber at the belt of her flight suit, she might have been anyone, or nobody special.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Daiara secured the first half of the artifact in the floor of the bathroom and let herself disembark. She made no attempt to hide her identity. She believed with all confidence that the students on the ground had not known who she was. It had been years.

She walked without a word to the person sent to greet her and held out her finger to be scanned. She said nothing. Her attention was already dancing fitfully down the hall.

Her sleeve fell back to reveal the smooth plains of her wrists. The ropey scars that had once marred her were gone. Her neck, too, was flawless and translucent. It was as if all color had been bled from her skin, but she was almost beautiful now...

And she was growing impatient.

"Why is the Academy here?"

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Ashin shifted: her face rippled into the one she'd worn when they knew each other. This body had its limitations, but its specific shapeshifting abilities were more than worth it. She'd used those abilities to make something like a normal life for herself and her wife, despite a long career that should have made that life impossible.

There was no justice in the universe, after all.

"Welcome back, Aradia. You've grown. What brings you here?" Half a smile. "Come to take me up on some old half-promise, or insist I still owe you one?"

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

Her attention tore from the hall to the person before her. A wicked jolt of shock shattered her impatience and for a moment losing the key no longer felt like her largest problem.

"No," she rebutted. She dropped her hand and squared off with the Ashin she use to know. Memories once again tried to come forward and she shoved them back with a snarl. She shared none of the woman's friendliness. It felt like a threat. It was a threat. Still, she did need something from this place. Guarded as she was, it did not occur to her to simply ask for it.

"I didn't expect you to be greeting hangers."

Ashin Cardé Varanin

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Aradia always had been a prickly one back in the day, even beyond the usual standards of emancipated Dark Side teenagers. In fact her aggression had typically ranked high across the breadth of Darksiders on the Pomojema.

"Not here for me, and you left nothing behind because you had nothing, of course. So what else would bring you aboard? What is there about the academy being here, at this excavation site, and that edge of...was that indignation, territoriality...ah. You think we found something and you feel like it's yours. Am I close?"

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

"--It is mine," She interrupted.

"I spent months tracking it down. I found it-- I had it-- and then your people came and got in my way-- they don't even know what they have!" She fumed, saying too much too quickly.

If this was anyone else she would have already have given up words, but there was something tempering her, and it wasn't just how dangerous she knew these halls could be if she declared herself a threat.

Use the relationship.

She forced herself to take a breath and smear a grimace across her face. "That's not to say it's not nice to see an old friend."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Ashin examined her onetime student at length, right there in the hall by the docking bay, taking in what had changed about Darth Daiara and what hadn't. The latter category included a default state of rabid aggression kept just barely under wraps.

"You remember I collect marksman rifles," she said, apropos of nothing. "I'm quite poor at sensing things, at the kinds of instincts that some Force-sensitives use to augment shooting, and adjusting a shot with telekinesis midflight is no straightforward prospect either. What makes me a good shot is simpler: my will is that the shot will hit. The bullet or the bolt would not disobey.

"But peers aren't bullets. A plain, presumptive expression of will won't sway any serious person in their heart, no matter how loud the complaint. Bargain with me as a peer, Aradia. We've always operated on that basis, have we not?"

 

[Darth Daiara]

Her nostrils flared under another slow, forced breath. She had learned that habit from Zaavik. She had even gotten better than him at it, in the end. She didn't see the ways his presence was still imprinted on her. She could hardly see anything over the fact that Ashin Cardé Varanin stood in her way.

She continued the slow breaths.

"Fine," she finally snuffed. "But peers call me Daiara. Not that pathetic excuse for a waif." She crossed her arms and willed the rest of the tension to leave her body.

"I did not know it was the Pomojema I was working against-- but it was mine until that crew of yours went and took it. " Her attention drifted fitfully back to the hall beyond them.

"I want it back. You can keep the rest of the dig. I won't interfere again. Just give it to me."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"Daiara it is," Ashin said without a pause. "And now we're approaching the foundations for a bargain. The offer not to interfere is one I take seriously. Whether it's enough to be a fair trade for what you're after — well, it depends what you're capable of now.

"And what object you want. At this site we've found three of significance, I believe, all forty-five-hundred-year-old Massassi. Half an amulet, a broken but possibly salvageable holocron, and a whip of sorts for commanding and training Sithspawn. Which one are you after, why do you want it, and what price are you willing to pay for it?"

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

"- I've already paid your price," She intoned icily. "And don't think I didn't notice your attempt to dismiss it. I fought your war-- I risked my life for you and you have not done the same. Don't insult me by pretending like any of those objects are more valuable than you-- you will give me them all."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"- I've already paid your price," She intoned icily. "And don't think I didn't notice your attempt to dismiss it. I fought your war-- I risked my life for you and you have not done the same. Don't insult me by pretending like any of those objects are more valuable than you-- you will give me them all."

"So far as I recall our bargain," said Ashin after a long cold moment, "it ended when I fought the New Imperial Order on Dorin, and unlocked the Krath ritual for you. I owe you nothing but a reminder of exactly how far your sense of entitlement will take you on this ship."

A deep old hunger yawned open in her heart, a hunger she held at bay daily. It had been a thing of shame and weakness once, but that was long, long ago. A web of crimson lightning lashed out from her hands to fill the corridor: not electricity, but a sizzling emanation that would drain life energy.

Ashin did not hold back. The girl Aradia would have been consumed in moments. Darth Daiara promised to be something else entirely. This was a test of how far she'd come.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Daiara snarled and stepped into the energy's path, drawn at a primal level to the power that was meant to consume her. It didn't. It barely buckled her knees, the woman resisting with respectable force as the bolts bounced off and crackled around her. Through the commotion she met Ashin's gaze. Her fury was gone, replaced by a sense of all encompassing elation.

She smiled through gritted pain.

"I am no longer your lesser," she managed to say, dark veins growing prominent across her skin. The resistance shifted, and for a moment the energy managed to turn back on Ashin and creep its way up towards the woman.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Draining life from another Sith Lord — and Darth Daiara was that or close enough — incurred the risk that they'd reciprocate if they knew how. In fact, since the oldest texts proclaimed that the only true way to learn this power was to experience it, an attack was, in some small way, a gift of knowledge. So when a portion of Ashin's life force crackled back toward Daiara in the web of crimson, it came as no rational surprise.

The physical jolt, however, was always a shock. It felt like a hollowness to the gut, a cold sweat, weakness in the knees, depression. Ashin's current body was a Mesinis'Kaita alchemical changeling. The Force Drain ripped at its control, warped its features. She felt her face revert to the body's baseline: chilly pale, with white eyes and hair, and sightly pointed ears. The red lightning skittered across that face with burning urgency; she felt like she'd been slapped.

In a contest of draining life, the important thing to do was hold on, outlast, ultimately steal more than you lost even if it took a while. Ashin kept up the assault. Daiara's claim required no other answer.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Daiara growled. Her knees wobbled. The power she had demonstrated already seemed to waiver-- like match stick lit in the wind. The energy she had front-loaded was quickly waning and the strength she took in turn was not enough to replace it.

The familiar cold slapped into her veins and drove her down to hear knees. She knew this feeling well, but even as she held on she couldn't spare more than a hiss. Everything she had learned to outlive these moments escaped with the air leaving her lungs. She had overcommitted and there wasn't enough of her left to adjust.

Her counter-attack snuffed. She broken under Ashin's assault. Name, identity, purpose-- all of it ceased to be as her life force ripped from her with no resistance.

Her body arched at Ashin's feet.

Ashin Cardé Varanin

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Draining the life from a Darth felt like a warm meal with eager room for dessert. Ashin stopped consuming, but it took effort.

She probed at her face with her fingertips. Daiara's counterattack had warped her Sithspawn skin, a wound that sizzled all up Ashin's cheek. She tried to twist her face back into its preferred shape. Things shifted painfully under the skin. A problem for another moment.

"There'll never not be fight in you. But you're getting in your own way. What do you actually want, and what choice will get you closest?"

 

[Darth Daiara]

Daiara laid there as an open wound in the force, darkness pulling the vitality out of the world around her. It sustained her in an unsatisfying trickle. It wasn't enough-- it would never be enough-- but truth be told she didn't even realize she was doing it.

The metal floor grew spindles of ice around her.

"I have outgrown the use for teachers." She pushed her torso up with a shaky hand, her veins dark and prominent against her greyed skin tone.

She looked up at Ashin with subdued frustration. Saying the words didn't make it true. She knew there would always be someone more powerful than her, and someone out there that could help. She just no longer trusted it.

She couldn't stop herself as she asked, "Would others have lasted that long?"

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"Yes. You didn't last especially long. But few could have done this in the process." Ashin tapped the wound on her cheek where Daiara's Force Drain had eaten away at her Sithspawn flesh. "You've always had the urge to harm despite the cost to yourself. It seems to me you're on the verge of making that an asset."

They were alone now, nobody in sight down the corridor: anyone on the Pomojema knew to keep their distance from a moment like this. Crimson pseudolightning still sparked and fussed across the bulkheads and the hangar door.

"I haven't had a teacher, with that power relationship, in decades. But that doesn't mean I stopped learning from anyone but myself. I surround myself with knowledge, with people who can do things I never could. What do your next steps look like? What are you trying to become?"

 

[Darth Daiara]

Daiara snuffed.

She would just have to try harder then. Holding out in defense was Aradia's tactic. The waif had given herself a limit and she never reached for more. She would not make that same mistake.

Even if it did leave her sprawled on the floor.

"What do you think?" She snapped, finally facing the question she hated receiving. "I came for that amulet because it is a conduit. With it I could have done more than wipe out your face." She tried to stand. The force screamed as she pulled and twisted its energy into her. Her breath puffed in a visible cloud around her as she clawed her way back to her feet.

She looked up at Ashin with hungry, hateful eyes.

"Don't tell me you didn't start here too."

Ashin Cardé Varanin