Boost Let Tomorrow Never Come | Artefact Heist; ATTN: Underworld & Sith

[Parvati]

VIP FLOOR — MURDER ON THE DANCE FLOOR

The explosion had rattled the lounge like a dying star. Parvati felt it before she saw it, through her heels, through the trembling panels underfoot, through the sharp shift in air pressure that made her ears ache. Then the shockwave came.

Lights flared. The floor stuttered under her weight. A scream of plasma and bone burst out from the vault's direction, a violent detonation of the Dark Side so potent it felt lived in, like being slapped by memory.

She stumbled- not from fear, but calculation- bracing herself against a smoking panel as pieces of ceiling rained like confetti. Kivah, no doubt. The Cathar was a sledgehammer in a velvet box. Useful, loud, expendable.

Parvati's smile thinned. Too many rats making it to the cheese.

Her stolen datapad vibrated with alerts, doors jammed open by debris, biometric logs flickering, an atmospheric gauge reading combustion in one corridor. More bodies were entering the floor: the insectoid merc, Xa'tra, leaving trails of blood and fire. The Zeltron- Mauve- moving through smoke like a sequined shade. Razmir. Vestra.

All zeroing in on her prize.

The Wayfinder.

Parvati exhaled slowly through her nose, steadying herself.

Enough finesse.

She slipped the spike back into the terminal and pulled up what remained of the Blackout Masque's command shell. The system was unraveling, good. That made it more pliable. She didn't need control anymore. She needed chaos with intent.

With a few flicks, she changed the parameters.

Query accepted: Randomize All Door Protocols.
Trigger Event: Presence Detection.
Override: Pathfinding Subroutines- Cancelled.
Combat Targeting Matrix: Obscured.
Visual Target Profiles: Masked.
Fail-Safe: Removed.

Every door on the vault level now opened and closed not with security clearance, but on whim. Movement triggered proximity sensors, but those sensors no longer understood who was friend, who was foe, or who was merely unlucky. Some doors locked entirely. Others began to cycle violently, opening halfway before slamming shut again, as if the building itself were trying to chew through intruders.

Cameras spiraled into nonsense, creating false echoes of movement. Droids, if there were any guarding the vault, were now locked in looped protocol purges, forgetting who they were meant to protect.

If it worked as she hoped, no one would have a clean route to the Wayfinder except her.

"Let the stage burn," she murmured, adjusting her coat, voice low and calm amid the alarms.

She pressed forward, weaving through the carnage with the grace of a shadow skipping stones. Hallways roared behind her- Vestra's resurrection, Razmir's potion gamble, Kivah's wrath, but none of it slowed her. The chaos had become her cloak. The vault schematics on her pad flickered with warnings, but she was almost there.

Parvati stopped at the edge of the final corridor before the vault chamber.

Smoke drifted from a scorched vent. The lights overhead blinked like dying stars. Far ahead, the glass chamber that housed the Wayfinder shimmered like a mirage- still untouched, still hers.

A body stirred behind her.

She turned, just enough to catch a glimpse of a familiar silhouette, Mauve, possibly, or someone worse. Parvati didn't wait to find out.

Mr. Usher Razmir Tezhyn Vestra Tane Kivah Xa'tra Yylix Mauve C-127 Sidewinder Eaton Waters

 

[Kivah]

alt-J - Left Hand Free

Doors were much less of a problem once you had a universal key like the one Kivah carried still quietly ignited in her hand. The one door between her and the vault had been cut away from its frame and blasted inwards in less time than opening it conventually would have taken. Now she, and a hoard of others were gathering in the vault, causing her fur to bristle and stand on end as her tail stiffened. She wasn't surprised there were this many people willing to act against the Sith Order, just that they'd managed to get this far in the chaos seemingly without a plan.

Kivah edged away from the door and along the vault's wall, saber held across her body in a defensive stance, ready to catch a strike or blaster shot. In the distance there was the thump of an explosion, followed by shots echoing up the central shaft of the smelter turned club, and she smiled. "Even should you fight your way through me and the remaining guards, more troopers will soon be here to shoot you down. Fighters on patrol and standby will swarm the sky, shooting down anything fleeing without prejudice. Turn and run now, or die too stupid to recognize the trap. Or did you really think we'd allow a wayfinder to be carted out of its ship, vulnerable across a planet, to sit in a nightclub vault for a night out partying? Are you stupid?" She hissed rhetorically. "It's safe in hyperspace at this very moment, waiting to be summoned back." Her little spiel sounded good, it was the smart thing to have done, what she'd recommended be done. Though the smart thing to have done wouldn't have been letting a spoiled brat take the key to Sith space out of it in the first place. As if there weren't hundreds or even thousands of inhabitable planets he'd yet to see inside its borders.

Her eyes shifted from one to the next, gauging who would break and who was likely to attack first. No, better to keep the momentum of the fight on her side, hopefully the chanting Sith still guarding the vault had had enough time to pull off whatever it was he was trying to accomplish. Kivah sprang at whomever it was furthest into the smoky vault, swiping at them with her lightsaber, it's fiery after-images leaving a streak of fire burning through the air as the Cathar spun around them further into the vault, and closer to the treasures she was to protect. Her free hand thrust forward, sending forth a wave of energy as if tying to push the others from the vault.

Tags:
Xa'tra Yylix | Parvati | Mauve | C-127 Sidewinder | Eaton Waters | Rin Aikawa | Vestra Tane
Razmir Tezhyn​