Wandering Wolf
Location: Bonadan - Vergeworks
The Vergeworks looked different when you expected to leave it behind. Not because anything had changed. The same freighters crawled through the smog choked sky. The same factory stacks belched smoke into the atmosphere. The same crowds flowed through the walkways beneath a thousand flickering signs. Somewhere nearby, metal screamed beneath a cutting torch.
Ace sat at the small desk pushed against the wall of his safehouse, datapad balanced in one hand while the fingers of the other drummed against the surface. Figures scrolled across the screen, shipping manifests, credit transfers, ownership records, and names. Too many names.
The Vergeworks had always belonged to somebody. Corporations, syndicates, local gangs, anyone strong enough to take a piece of it. For a short while, it had belonged to him. Not officially. Nobody would ever find a document with his name on it, but enough people knew who settled disputes. Who paid for repairs when infrastructure failed or made certain shipments arrived where they needed to go.
Ace had spent months turning the place into something that could survive without him. Now he was making sure it actually would with just a few more signatures, transfers, and quiet arrangements.
The Republic would never know any of it. As far as they were concerned, Acier Moonbound was a former Sith. A criminal. Maybe a terrorist. Maybe worse. None of them would care that half the maintenance crews in Sector 9G had work because of him. Or that the food shipments reached the lower residential blocks on time. Or that the local gangs had mostly stopped shooting each other over territory. That wasn't how history worked.
Ace leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his eyes. It was funny, when he was younger, he'd spent years dreaming about leaving Bonadan. Now he was sitting in a safehouse trying to make sure it didn't fall apart after he was gone.
The corner of his mouth twitched. Mira would've laughed at that, the thought lingering longer than he expected. Mira, Red, Tessk, the orphanage, the scrapyards and the endless noise of Sector 9G. Everything started here. Looked like everything was ending here too.
The datapad chirped softly as another transfer finalized - that was one more thing crossed off the list. Ace set it aside and stared out the narrow window overlooking the industrial maze beyond. Evening lights glowed between towers of rusted steel and duracrete. The city hummed with the same restless energy it always had.
For a few moments, he simply listened. To the engines, the machinery, the millions of lives moving through the Vergeworks. And beneath it all... something familiar brushed against his senses. A presence, not threatening or hidden, but it was approaching.
Lysander von Ascania