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Too wide.
Too full.
The kind of smile that knew what was coming and had waited for it. The kind that had been grown for this moment.
The kind you wear when violence is a second language and you're ready to get semantic.
The Falleen screamed again. A mouth closed over his ribs. One twitch. Two.
Silenced.
The pheromones spilled. Begging. Bleeding. They hit the air like perfume mixed with vomit.
Usher inhaled once.
Stored the chemical data.
Then—
Reversed it.
Suddenly the air was thick with synthetic desire, but weaponized.
Every mind in the lounge buckled. Lust curdled into confusion. Into panic.
And the swarm moved.
The First Husk:
Flesh unspooled like rope from the Doctor’s side. Became a shape.
A mirror clone—skin wet, bones reconfigured mid-motion.
It sprinted straight at the first pair of troopers—blaster bolts snapped out—
One unlucky hostage was snatched into its chest like a shield to absorb the damage. They burst outward, bone-shrapnel precisely aimed at the guards. Two impacts. Screams. Silence. Infiltration. Digestion. Incorporation.
Their corpses peeled themselves up, dragging armor and guns along.
The Second Husk:
Dropped to all fours. Spines retracted. Knives extended.
It moved under tables, over ledges. One footstep — then a trooper dragged screaming into the smoke before they even saw the claws.
The Third Husk:
Did not add to the chorus of screaming.
It just looked back at Finon.
“Apologies for the interruption, where were we?.”
It sat down. Adjusted its cuffs.
Flesh thickened into tailored pinstripes.
A hat grew slowly, stitch by stitch.
The red tie tightened.
It crossed its legs.
The eyes were the same.
“Finon,”
it said again. Calm. Crisp. Voice honeyed, pleasant like nerve gas.
“Let’s try this one more time.”
Meanwhile—
The Final Husk erupted from the Doctor’s back like a flower made of knives.
Four now.
Perfectly in sync.
Perfectly mirrored.
Every motion rehearsed in millions of dead memories.
And through it all—
The music kept playing.
Mangled by alarms. Perfect.
Back at the table, the third husk sat still.
Hands folded.
“Who else has seen the Wayfinder?”
“Who else knows its resonance?”
“Where is the Wayfinder currently?"
Behind him, a head caved against the wall.
Behind him, a blaster barked.
Behind him, a new voice screamed.
The smile returned. Too many teeth
Location: VIP Lounge / Multipoint Host Interruption Objective: Dominate the troopers.Interrogate the heir. Infect the narrative. Tags: Razmir TezhynMauve
@Wayfinder Crew
Parvati was halfway through her slow hunt for Finon when the screaming started.
At first, it was just a ripple, barely a tremor beneath the bass. But she felt it. The music didn't stop; it staggered, like a drunk heel catching on the edge of a stair. The beat wobbled, the fog thickened, and the air soured with the unmistakable stench of fear. She didn't blink.
The fourth floor had been converted into a cathedral to indulgence- velvet thrones, laughing sycophants, rare glitterstim laid out like dessert trays. Everything pulsed with that syrupy kind of wealth that mistook excess for taste. Normally, she would've taken her time admiring the ruin. But tonight wasn't for pleasure. Tonight was about precision.
She moved like liquid shadow, hips swaying in quiet defiance as lesser things panicked around her. Voices cracked, glass shattered, and somewhere, a man shouted. The scent of expensive cologne was already mingling with the sharp, coppery tang of blood. Parvati exhaled slowly through her nose, unbothered even as the atmosphere turned hostile.
Of course, someone had to try and redirect her.
A brute of a man stepped into her path, visor blinking red, posture brimming with self-importance, and the unmistakable stink of cheap aftershave beneath his armor. He was a walking wall of durasteel, but she had never been impressed by walls.
"Ma'am, this level's compromised—evac orders are in effect. You need to—"
He didn't get to finish.
Her hand moved like silk drawn across a blade, smooth, practiced, inevitable. The knife slipped between his ribs with surgical grace, angled just right to silence. The sound he made wasn't even a gasp, just a soft exhale. She caught him as he folded, not out of pity but practicality, her fingers slipping his security badge free with the casual intimacy of a lover stealing jewelry.
"Don't ma'am me, darling," she whispered, twisting the blade just enough to be petty before letting his body crumple to the ground like discarded furniture. Blood pooled beneath his armor like spilled wine, and she stepped over him without ceremony, vanishing into the nearest velvet-curtained alcove.
The curtain fell shut behind her. She adjusted her collar, smoothed her hair, took one measured breath- and saw him.
Finon Delsteele, heir to power he didn't deserve, was twitching like a trapped animal. His smugness had dissolved, leaving only a pale, nerve-shot boy. But Parvati barely noticed him.
What caught her attention was the thing across from him.
It wore a man's shape, but that was a lie. There were four of them now, identical abominations peeling away from the same central horror. One smiled. One crouched in the smoke. One sat with unsettling stillness, posture perfect like a mannequin in a showroom. The fourth was fresh, still glistening from emergence, knife-limbs twitching like a muscle spasm made flesh. They moved in sync, like choreography designed to itch inside your bones.
The air shifted again, thickening with heat and rot, with pheromones and old, wet hunger. Alarms screamed beneath the beat, warping the club's rhythm into something feral. Around her, guests still fled in a stampede of glitter and heels, their panic smashing against the velvet opulence of the room like a tide. The shadows inside the alcove offered shelter, and she remained still as the chaos spilled past.
She watched. Studied. Calculated.
Her grip tightened on the stolen badge, thumb brushing its edge like a keepsake. If this creature wanted the Wayfinder, then it wasn't just a key or an heirloom.
It was a throne.
And she wanted it too.
So she stayed. She waited. Cloaked in shadow like silk, wrapped in stillness while the world tore itself apart just a few meters away. Somewhere, a tentacle screamed, high and wet and wrong, and a body hit the wall with a sound like a sack of meat.
Mauve tried to catch her breath, back against the wall, the lounge just up the stairs.
Up where he had gone.
The music in the lounge played on, but she heard the screams and a sound like wet cardboard pulled apart. Then the high whine of blaster fire. Lastly, alarms. New notes beneath the thudding bass.
She should leave.
She should run.
But she was no longer the scared girl, alone on the streets of Nar Shaddaa. That girl lived somewhere within her still. Within the Artist. The Curator. But not the spy. Up those stairs lay a scene she could already envisage in her mind's eye. So too did her most prized currency: information.
Mauve took in a breath, straightened her spine, and slowly walked up the steps, fiddling with something on her thigh beneath her dress as she did.
The scene that greeted her was mayhem. Sith troopers fired blasters, flashes of their superheated plasma bolts bursts of blinding red. Creatures she could not quite make out - her mind rebelling at comprehension as she stared at masses of flesh spiked with bone - swarmed under tables and into the soldiers.
The doctor sat with another man, seemingly oblivious to all the carnage around him.
A wave of musk rolled through the air. Her vision swam. Eyelids fluttered. Desire rose unbidden, a disgusting thing in that mess of blood and death. Somewhere, someone let out a moan.
"Ridiculous," she hissed through her teeth, struggling to shake off the simpering pheromones. And she, a Zeltron. Not resistant, no. But the men and women of Zeltros lived in deep waters, their emotions more tidal force and rip current than summer breeze.
It made for excellent swimmers.
The emotions flowed through her, around her, from her. The smell of vanilla and rose overpowered all other scents, as if all of them in the lounge stood in a field of lilacs, insisting upon those in the room that they stop a moment and be at peace. Be tranquil. Be calm. It mixed with the lustful notes of the Falleen's musk to become a languorous haze. Why carry a blaster? Were they not so awfully heavy? Why rend and devour, were they not beleaguered by the beauty around them?
Mauve raised in one hand what she'd hidden at her thigh. Not a gun. A simple small perfume bottle, which happened to be filled with a very specific, very potent form of enhanced, aerosolized Zeltron pheromones that had once sent even fully-fledged Sith lords into a smitten daze. She gave two spritzes into the air... and the resulting scent threatened to sweep them all out to sea.
She strode forward through it, toward the Doctor and the Debutante.
EQUIPMENT: WELDING MASK. PROTECTIVE SUIT. CUT DOWN BLASTER CARBINE. VIBROKNIFE. LIGHTSABER. LUCK. THE FORCE.
---
A Jedi would tell Vestra to trust in the Force. If she was doing what she was meant to, everything would work out, probably. Probably would've been good advice, too. Vestra Tane climbed. She had no chance of making the throw she needed to make from below. Height would help.
A few feet above the slag chute, now. The crucible was, give or take, thirty feet wide the long way? That sounded about right. Her hands found purchase on the rim of a another chute, and her feet were planted on the lip of a plasma vent. She leaned out, and with one free hand she started to swing the payload beside her, building momentum.
The hypothetical Jedi was right about one thing - Vestra had the Force on her side. She just wasn't the trusting type.
Take what you want. Take it, hold it, bend it into shape. To hell with "trust in the Force."
An inhale.
Senses sharpen - narrow, deadly, intense. Ambition comes into perfect, crystal focus. The alarms, the faint blaster fire, both fade from Vestra's perception. There is only the criminal, her desires, and the space between.
An exhale.
She had this.
Swing, swing, now, release.
The payload flew threw the air. Vestra held her breath for a half second when it snagged the top of the slag chute, spilled a few tibanna cannisters, and left them lying on the durasteel. It took her a second, but she realized that was lucky. It left her a fuse.
Vestra smiled, supremely self-satisfied, and unclipped her blaster from her belt. It was the same song and dance - breathe in, breathe out, pull the trigger.
I stood there appalled as the man produced a knife and started to command me that I would be killing my own manager. My mind raced as his words were settling in. If I didn't follow with this, then surely I would have been next. Maybe just fired and not allowed to come back? What kind of operation is this where the needless killing of staff members because of a minor inconvenience was warranted? I leaned down and took the knife from him when I felt a massive cold chill. A large presence just seemed to punch me in the gut. Like something that was not supposed to be here. If it was made from some other worldly thing. Turning around the meat-suits of the guards were controlled by an individual who was clearly not someone people wanted to mess with.
I stood there in silence as the... thing started to make demands of the man. Starting to take others and even bite off the finger of one of the corpses this thing controlled. His? words were deep and rich with a tone of multiple people. As if it wasn't really his voice. Just one he borrowed and made his own by force. I could feel it. As someone who... was very different from others, There was a near gravitational pull of this man. He was strong and filled with a malice not because he wanted. But because it was it's very nature.
I heard someone come in from the door again. A rather interesting zeltron woman. patron? I wasn't sure. But she started to spray something. Without waiting, I knew that this was not a situation I wanted to be in. My skin started to become rather pale and translucent. I held my breath and breathed in a shallow pace. Just in case my act of phasing wouldn't protect me. Holding the vibro-knife in my hand, I could clearly tell that this woman was going to more likely be on my side, instead of this... eldritch horror from the story books.
Taking a couple steps back, I did my best to hide the vibro-knife within my hand. Folding it against the back of my forearm as though I didn't have it. Using the other hand that was holding the tray like some kind of shield against my chest and arm. Sure, I wasn't some military or jedi warrior. But I knew how to take care of myself. Having lived on the streets for years, you had to. But this was way out of my wheel-house.
"I uh... I know nothing about whatever you are looking for Sir, Ma'am? This is my first day on the job. I have no prob-"
It was in that moment that a loud explosion shook the building. I knew not where it was, but I took that moment to take cover from these four demons. Throwing the tray in their direction like some kind of distraction before diving back and rushing over to the bar. Phasing through it and ducking for cover. Waiting for another explosion, when none came, I raise my head and tried to peek out and keep my situational awareness about me.
The Verpine walked away, shut her out completely as he focused on his gun and his job. Kivah let him get a few steps into the crowd before she tugged her ear. Someone was watching, and they'd be sure to route security his way. Even if he wasn't involved with an attempt at something nefarious, he'd smuggled in a weapon, a talking, mouthy, gun. So he needed to be seen to even without his ominous warning.
Kivah was raising her glass for another drink with a self-satisfied smirk, when the alarm sounded over the music, sending troopers scrambling and her drink slammed to the floor with a curse. This outfit was new! Now it was about to be totally ruined. Screams erupted from the upper levels even as she twisted an ear-piece into place to hear the forced calm of the lead security officer making call-outs and ordering movements. She only half-listened as she gathered the Force within her legs and jumped up the hollow shaft of the smelter to grab at the railing lining the third floor. Holding on, she turned, and lept up to the VIP level, using her natural agility and physicality to one-hand herself over the railing as she drew a lightsaber from under her coat with the other.
The dull red blade slid into existence with barely a whisper, the ghost fire crystal that served as its focusing lens muting its light and sound, even as a volcanic fire burned along its length. Pure chaos greeted her as wealthy partygoers fled or tried to defend themselves from monstrous attackers. A nasty grin spread across her face, baring her teeth as she let out a yowl of hate and rage that shook dust from the ceiling before she lept into the fray. The first monster she came across was using armored corpses to defend itself. Perhaps it expected hesitation, or for her to care if the troopers still lived, but Kivah had lived and fought on Korriban too long. There the undead were banal, Sith monstrosities common, and hesitation was a weakness where tempered aggression kept you alive. She executed a perfect double-handed strike that would burn a cut through muscle, bone, and armor where the creature would be. Mr. Usher
With the supposedly elite Sith Warriors on the vault, she just had to hold out until reinforcements arrived. And since the comms were still up, it likely wouldn't be long until then. Kivah intended to have the club pacified by then.
The explosion hit like a breath held too long. Pressure. Dust. Noise.
Chandeliers rattled. A wine glass cracked. Flesh pulled itself tighter into place.
Mr. Usher’s pinstriped husk did not flinch.
His leg crossed the other. Thumb circled the edge of his wine glass.
“We continue.”
The husks felt her coming first. The new one. Heavy steps. Aggression like steam pressure behind the eyes. One that assumed these muscles connected to the same mind were undead, unintelligent, and haven't dealt with many of her kind - or contained the memories of her kind after consumption.
Her lightsaber sang—silent to ears, but loud to memory. She swung.
The first husk fell.
Bisected.
Melted armor. Severed spine. Muscle screaming against fire.
For a breath.
And then—
It reached for itself.
Two halves pulled inward, nerve clusters stitching mid-air, arteries snapping like cables.
The torso became two.
Two became four.
They mimicked her stance.
Then they charged.
Kivah’s next swing carved another in two.
The mistake. It wanted that.
The split husk’s arms wrapped around her saber-arm mid-slice—unarmed, but still smiling—and another surged from the floorboards behind her like muscle from a wound.
She lept for the VIP lounge,
A textbook aerial slash.
Direct. Precise. Lethal.
It never landed. She never reached to lounge level.
Because the trooper corpses she’d stepped over earlier rose in perfect timing—its bones screaming beneath the armor—and spear-tackled her out of the air mid-strike.
Momentum turned against her. Her own trajectory fed her into the floor like a missile. The pinstriped husk did not bother to look outside of the room where the battle raged.
It was not even clear if it had seen her - but it did. Mr. Usher was not separate from each of these husks. Mr. Usher was each of these husks, and millions more across the galaxy, simultaneously.
Inside the VIP Lounge, he air was a war of chemicals.
The Falleen’s death-musk still drifted.
Mauve’s lilac storm pressed against it like a tide meeting ink.
Mr. Usher’s pinstriped husk inhaled.
For analysis. It was a pleasant scent.
The molecules drifted through artificial olfactory nodes. Memory cross-referenced the emotion.
Across the floor, one of the newer husks exhaled. The lilac tone joined its lungs.
Then it smiled, wide and very wrong.
“Finon,” the husk at the table said again. Calm. Patient. Clocklike.
A finger tapped the rim of the glass. Not for rhythm.
For attention.
“Where is the Wayfinder?”
“Who else has handled it?”
“Did your father ever open it while dreaming?”
A pause.
Then:
“If you answer falsely, I will make a record of that face your making and wear it when I track them down your next of kin.”
A new husk crawled across the ceiling out of the lounge like a wet chandelier spider. A ribcage unhooked, split open, and began copying the sound of Kivah’s breathing, just a little off-beat.
It was listening for weaknesses even as the exponential growth of figures swarmed the sith.
Inside the room, so too did the pinstriped husk listen for weakness.
The explosion rippled through the walls like a warning shot from a dying god. The velvet curtain trembled. Glass on a nearby table cracked from the pressure shift. Something above groaned- metal flexing, foundation remembering it used to be a forge.
Parvati stayed perfectly still.
In the chaos of shrieks and sirens, she listened. Watched. Catalogued.
The Zeltron's lilac storm was still thick in the air, battling the musk of death and the raw heat of detonated tibanna. The scent war was now psychological warfare. And yet, Mr. Usher sat there. Calm. Composed. Multiplying.
The Sith woman had tried brute force. It had made her a new entry in the thing's behavioral algorithm.
Useful to know.
Parvati adjusted her stance just slightly, eyes cutting toward the black recess in the wall beside her, a small maintenance panel she'd spotted moments earlier. Standard access point for VIP override. The kind of thing you never noticed unless you were trained to look. Or trained to own rooms like this.
She stepped closer.
The stolen badge passed across the scanner with a faint chirp. The console unlocked, soft lights pulsing to life. A list of security tiers scrolled past, locks, hatches, vault command nodes. The interface was clean. Expensive. Finely tuned.
She reached for it, but paused.
Her eyes returned to the room.
Mr. Usher hadn't stopped asking questions. Hadn't stopped growing. The way his husks absorbed, split, crawled- there was no limit in sight. He wasn't fighting to win. He was processing. Consuming.
And if someone didn't stop him, the vault wouldn't matter. The Wayfinder wouldn't matter. Nothing would.
Parvati leaned against the panel, crossing one arm beneath her chest as her fingers hovered over the interface.
Her mind moved fast now, faster than the panic outside. She didn't panic. She designed around panic.
There were only a few options:
Evacuation? No. She'd never make it past the husks.
Fight? Ridiculous. That wasn't her role in this mess.
Reroute vault lockdown? Maybe. That might isolate the creature, or at least slow it.
But... what did he want? Just the Wayfinder?
She could give him that. Or something like it.
If she accessed the vault controls, maybe she could open a dummy room, feed the creature bait while she isolated the real artifact.
Her lips parted slightly. Not a smile. Something more analytical. A quiet thrill.
She looked back at Mr. Usher's seated form, now surrounded by echoing monsters stitched from corpses and muscle memory. He hadn't seen her yet. Hadn't acknowledged* her yet.
But he would.
"Let's see if you can be reasoned with," she murmured, and began to type.
One hand on the console. One eye on the creature. One mind already playing five moves ahead.
If she couldn't stop him from growing, then maybe... she could contain him.
Or at least delay the end of the party long enough to walk away with the prize.
The pheromone-laced air proved wildly unimpressive beside an explosion that shook the lounge and the entry of a lightsaber-wielder onto the scene. Violence escalated quickly. Mauve looked around, her ears still ringing, and realized she was once again out of her depth. Should have known better. You can’t push adrenaline drenched combatants into just giving up and sitting down. Other things maybe but… it was too late for all that
Her battlefield was a garden party, not a literal one. Her weapon her wit, not a lightsaber.
Following the Doctor up the stairs had been foolish. Trying to intervene? Even worse. But even as she watched, the Doctor spoke to her.
She stared for a moment, nonplussed in the carnage, then her lips curved around a short, sharp laugh and she collapsed into a nearby couch - maybe it had even had some blood on it, she didn’t know.
“Anytime,” she breathed, chin slumping into a hand.
Mauve started to suspect she might not make it out of the lounge alive. Killed surrounded by .. leopard print pillows. Ugh. She picked one up and held it tight.
// this one's big so I'm including a TL;DR at the bottom for reference
RAZMIR 2nd floor
When the alarm klaxons ripped into the beat, Razmir leapt for the bar he'd been braving the crowd to reach. Behind the counter, out of sight of the fleeing crowd and undercover troopers, he ripped open a cabinet and began to feel around the bottom. In the days leading up to the event, some of the venue workers had turned out to be very bribe-able. Being paid next to nothing tended to have that effect.
After a moment of searching, he found what he was looking for tucked neatly underneath a tray of fruit. A dead-drop containing his gear. Holdout blaster, special gloves, whipcord launcher, and, most importantly, the jammer. He retrieved his items, and went to work on setting up the jamming field.
FINON DELSTEELE SON OF THE 1% VIP-lounge, top floor of the nightclub
Finon slumped back down into the cushions of his lounge, serving girl and manager long forgotten. The scene around him could only be described as complete and utter pandemonium. He'd been in scrapes before, had to witness his troopers put down seditious assassins. But this? This bordered on the descriptions of the divine hells from classic Corellian literature.
It was then that a blast wave rattled the entire lounge.
Much of the entrance to the vault was completely rent apart by the tibanna gas explosion. Duracrete hung lose, its steel beam and wire innards exposed like bone and veins. A quarter of the vault had been torn to pieces, much of the rest damaged, and the energy supply was faltering. The Wayfinder, sitting at the far end of the Vault, remained intact, protected by reinforced glass and energy shields. The shields, and lights inside the Vault, were sputtering and giving out.
The Wayfinder had become exposed.
The rest of the vault was filled with many more trinkets and riches. The room was sizeable enough to hold a modest collection, which now lay scattered and tossed about in the aftermath of the explosion. The more delicate pieces had been shattered, but many of the more resilient ones still survived, either in the rubble or in the deeper sections of the Vault away from where the explosion had hit.
From the dust that settled inside the Vault, emerged heavy footsteps and a red lightsaber. Zei'tener, Rageheart of Cinnabar, the second of the Wayfinder's defenders, stepped onto the edge of where the Vault had been broken open. The Karkarodon's wicked teeth gnashed with a desire to bring order to chaos...
Back to Finon...
The sight of the Cathar Sith gave Finon a second lease on life.
He could feel the adrenaline make his hairs stand on end. Years of heavy partying experience were, bizarrely, paying off tonight. His mind was muddled by a blend of spice, alcohol, pheromones, and terror, but he felt a desire to live, and more importantly to act.
Finon was the son of one of the wealthiest families in Sith space. That had always come with obligations beyond those an ordinary being might know. Among them, was that he always wore a special signet ring. It wasn't ordinary decoration, but a backup plan. Inside a hidden compartment within the ring's gemstone were affide crystals, a deadly poison that could dissolve in liquid and near instant lethal effects.
Finon fingered the ring as he watched the creature opposite him threaten to wear his face. He'd been taught to take the crystals in the event his continued existence could threaten his father's business empire. It was said to be his way out.
He turned the gemstone above his drink, affide crystals dropped into the liquid and instantly dissolved. With a shout, he tossed its contents towards the creature's face, then leapt away in an attempt to run towards safety.
The procedure to get the jammer working had turned out to be more complicated than he thought. An explosion had ripped through the upper levels in the meantime, and from the brief glances he'd taken over the bar counter it had looked like the VIP lounge had turned into a warzone. Raz hid the device away, where it could maintain a communications blackout throughout the entire complex for as long as the energy cell would last, somewhere in the range of two minutes.
With the jammer set up, he jumped the bar with the balcony as his target. A mass of people blocked his path still. Some attempted to push through to get out, while others still danced with wild abandon. Among them, troopers attempted to make their way up.
Raz aimed his whipcord launcher and fired to the other side of the crowd. With the high ceilings, he barely managed to clear them with a swing, landing him at the edge of the 2nd floor by the exposed center of the building. He only got a moment to aim before the troopers noticed him. He fired the launcher at the VIP level, the side opposite the freakshow warzone, and leapt into free fall with blaster bolts trailing him.
The whipcord pulled him along to the VIP floor, into the cover of the level's duracrete guardrails. On the opposite side of the floor, the chaos between what looked like flesh drones and troopers raged. A quarter turn on the circle floor to the right, the Vault had been exposed by an explosion. Rubble spilled onto the floor below, and an imposing figure with red blade in hand stood at the entrance.
Raz considered his options. Further below, he could barely make out the coat-wearing verpine braving the crowds. It was, perhaps, a gamble, but Raz popped out of cover to aim the whipcord launcher. He fired it so it attached itself a few paces ahead of the Verpine, then secured the launcher to the railing. The line was solid, and launcher set to withdraw. If the Verpine detached his end of the line and held on, he'd earn himself a fast-track ride to the upper levels. Razmir readied his blaster, just in case.
The vault is exposed toward the open central shaft running down the building
If you think of the top floor as a clock, it's about a quarter turn to the right, perpendicular to the chaos in the lounge on a top-down view
The Wayfinder is at the far back of the vault, other artefacts and riches are scattered around, feel free to snatch 'em up!
A Karkarodon Sith (marauder, fighter) guards the hole in the vault, the other Sith (human, sorcerer) is with the Wayfinder, while Kivah
attempts to bring order to the lounge
A jamming device is blocking communications for roughly two minutes, reinforcements will be delayed
Finon is attempting to poison Mr. Usher
, then makes his attempt in the general direction of Mauve
and Rin Aikawa
Parvati
has gained access to the internal systems and can start manipulating them
Razmir created a whipcord elevator for Xa'tra Yylix
to take
The crucible rattled. Vestra gripped the fixtures and dents that kept her clinging to safety, mask down, face pressed against durasteel. The sound set her ears ringing, the heat scorched her back. She had a split second to brace. This was it. She'd miscalculated. In a single nanosecond a gout of plasma was going to burn through her suit and boil the skin from her flesh and she was going to fall four stories and crack her head open like an egg and then she'd just be dead.
...Except she hadn't, and it didn't, and she wasn't.
The ionized Tibanna had licked the back of her suit, scorched her a bit, sure, but she'd made it. She'd pulled it off.
Vestra cackled. Once she realized she was alive, she'd skipped right over relief and gone straight to joy. She was a fething genius.
And then she jumped.
---
Vestra hit the slag chute with a thud. She'd blown the entry into the chute marginally wider, which made the jump easier, but it didn't make the landing any softer. Had that tooth always wobbled like that? She shook her head and took a few steps forward, rolling her shoulders and taking deep breaths. It didn't matter. The pain would help.
"Just want the Waystone and I'll be gone." She sounded downright friendly, given the circumstances.
A few more steps forward, and an inhale. Senses sharpening. She felt the Hunger, again, somewhere out there. Somewhere close, now that she'd allowed her mind to expand again. But she'd prepared for it, this time, and didn't retreat; the fear would help.
"You've got somethin' way bigger than me to worry about out there."
She didn't know who she was talking to. A Sith, by the feel of him. Her mind touched the surface of his, hissed, and recoiled. Something angry. Definitely Sith. Diplomacy probably wasn't worth it.
Feth it. Vestra started smiling. Not a pretty smile, not a friendly one.
The only chance she had to pull this off, she had decided, was to lose it. Complete abandonment of all restraint and reason, total disregard for her own physical well-being. Pure will. Pure emotion.
Her eyes bled sulfur, and she jumped, letting the Force drive her upwards further than her own legs could take her.
---
Zei'tener, Rageheart of Cinnabar, did not know quite what he was expecting to emerge from the crater. It had an active presence in the Force, but that raised only more questions. Too dark to be Jedi, too unfamiliar to be Sith.
It didn't matter, he decided. Its words meant nothing; it was an intruder. It was prey-
There was a ripple in the Force. He half-blinked, and the thing was in front of him, tall and lanky, eyes bloodshot and sulfur-yellow. It had a lightsaber in one hand.
Fascinating, briefly.
Zei'tener swung his saber at his prey. It was quick, focused aggression, efficient econony of motion - his own personal blend of the Fourth and the Second Forms, and one he had taken great pleasure in developing.
His prey had no such sophistication. It moved in jittery, erratic sputters, micro-bursts of Speed that allowed it to narrowly avoid death at the hands of the Karkaradon. It barely bothered to even swing its saber, and when it did, it was wild, sloppy. Its swings too broad and its parries too static. Persistent, though - Buried beneath his contempt, there was perhaps a single particle of respect for this particular piece of prey. Not that it mattered - it was walking meat the minute it breached the vault.
There was some little amusement in the prey's flailing, the hissing noises it made when he scored its limbs with the edge of his saber. But after only a few seconds of this he grew bored, and went for the kill.
A feint low. The prey takes the bait, predictably, and for its predictability it is deprived of its left arm - saved only from complete bisection by a burst of Speed with which it skitters backwards, howling in pain.
Quick, but futile. It charges forward again, its one remaining hand outstretched towards the Karkaradon's face, and Zei'tener responds with a thrust to the abdomen.
It pierced the...spleen, he thinks. The specifics of human physiology did not interest him.
The prey's fingers brushed his face as it took another step forward, and for this insult he twisted the hilt of his saber. With a flick of his wrist it would cease to -
"Sutta Chwituskak."
A red-hot bead of pain split his skull, and then there was only darkness and the void.
Razmir Tezhyn
Mauve
@Wayfinder Crew 
