Lost in Happyland

[Cryax Bane]

"Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be?"​

Location: Happyland, Coruscant Undercity​

Hillocks of cadavers clothed in body bags lay motionless on dusty, broken hover gurneys. The smell of half a dozen different kind of antiseptics and freon hung in the air. The room was bathed in a dim flickering light that no one knew whose job it was to change. The Happyland Morgue was the point of no return for the mongrels and thugs of the Coruscant undercity streets. The men and women wheeled into this place were the sector's vermin. People whose lives were desecrated worse than their bodies ever would be.

The Happyland Morgue was also the new workplace of Cryax Bane, the ex-President of the Red Ravens Crime Syndicate, and it was a far cry from the luxury vessels in which he flew and posh high rises where he once played. The morticians who preceded him had been extorted into taking a leave of absence from their stations, and physically escorted out by Bane’s Verpine henchmen, paid for by the Coruscant Rotary Club. Just like that, the CRC morticians stoically took their place. Bane liked his new Verpine muscle. Aside from the crackling of their chitinous exoskeletons, they were nearly soundless, communicating with one another over radio waves. A few of them didn’t even speak Basic. These days silence was a bigger luxury to him than glittering neon dragons.

Stepping over an odd stain that caught the heel of his boot with a squeak, the Chiss pushed an empty container over to one of the bodies, a bound and barely-breathing Rodian woman with the middle of her torso opened in a rift. He plunged his hands into the chasm and scooped up the still-warm organs which sank through his fingers with a squelch. Hunched, he turned and plopped them into the cryogenic container. Cryax wiped the rich, dark wetness onto his apron and then clicked away on a nearby computer, tracking the inventory. A CRC mortician would soon come to sew her back up and dump her somewhere on the Coruscant undercity streets.

It was simple, rewarding work. The kind of work meant for someone with a less-analytic mind than that of the Chiss bent over his computer. But there were no major decisions to be made. No egos to placate. No need to nod your head frenetically like a marionette on a string, making agreements you didn’t want to make for the good of the organization. Bane appreciated the freedom of a wandering mind.

In a few moments Cryax’s mind wandered to the tourniquet snapped around his arm as he administered another stim shot. Then he returned to pushing his container across the room towards another body. His brow furrowed as he realized the man had died on the table, and was no longer ripe for harvesting. Perhaps he could still salvage a cooling organ or two.

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

A frigid gale swept through the mortuary with such resounding force that it send any loose parchments scattering like, well, leaves in a fierce wind. The air temperature dropped drastically, their breaths becoming visible in the sudden cold, and an unnatural darkness settled over the room as the artificial lights above flickered and dimmed to barely a spark. The darkness swirled and coalesced into the stone-cold corpse sitting so peacefully on the durasteel operation table in front of [member="Cryax Bane"]. The swirling mass of blackness then seeped into the clammy corpse, seeping into the pale flesh with zero resistance until none of the darkness remained.

Then... the corpse began to stir.

It started as a slight twitch in the fingers, the individual digits lightly tapping against the table before clenching into a bloody fist. The muscles were suddenly taken over by a mighty spasm, the body convulsing on the table wildly as whatever darkness seeped into the flesh began to assert it's control over the lifeless corpse with violent success. Then, the body fell deathly still, and the eyes opened to reveal, not the eyes of a man, but pure glowing violet orbs. With awkward jerky movements the corpse rose to a sitting position on the table, and swiveled it's head with an audible, and grotesque, cracking of the vertebrae as the glowing eyes settled to stare deeply at the no doubt startled Chiss.

"Hello, Cryax... It's been a long time..."

The voice, obviously mixed in with a whispering undertone, was freakishly familiar, and the rictus grin the corpse gave the criminal would no doubt allude to who exactly was speaking to him.

"Did you miss me? I missed you."

 

[Cryax Bane]

As a mysterious draft rolled across through the room, Cryax began to see his breath leave in puffs. Why was it so cold all of a sudden? Did someone leave the cryogenics room open again? The broken lights gave out a jittery flicker and then dimmed to a dusky glow, cloaking the room in shadows. Bane’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed at the body on the hover table in front of him. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but it seemed that something odd was happening to it.

First, the dead man's fingers began to stir. Each one bent with a crack, tapping out a staccato death march. Then, the body shook in a sickening dance of the dead, seizing and writhing as if electricfied until it sat up straight. Too straight. Its head creaked on its neck, turning at an impossible angle to talk to him. And then it spoke.

And it knew his name.

As the cadaver's jaw moved stiffly up and down, words tumbling from its mouth, Cryax’s body tremored. Faint vestiges of ancient Sith magic awoke and moved through his bloodstream, responding to the presence of their dark harbinger. The full control had been severed, but there was enough magic left to remind Cryax of how good it felt to spill another’s blood, and how delicious it felt to serve him.

Somewhere in his broken head, a voice screamed out. Vornskr.

The Chiss’ chest cavity heaved as his breath came in ragged gulps, then he swallowed audibly. There was no doubt that Bane was horrified and sickened by the sight, but his fear response had been broken by the events of late. The slaughter of his entire company of teenage slicers had snapped something inside of him and left him as numb as the bodies his hands dug through. He blinked his glowing alien orbs at the cadaver and then shrugged.

“Whatever you do, don’t mess up his kidneys.” Cryax said with the enthusiasm of a man resigned to marching the plank. “I have a high paying client needing that particular species.” A blue-skinned hand gestured to the body that Zambrano was inhabiting.

“Now what can I help you with, Kaine?”

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"A great many things, I believe."

The corpse said with a voice as cold as the grave, and awkwardly swiveled it's pallid legs to dangle over the edge of the table. It was obvious the spirit of the deceased Sith Lord was still growing accustomed to it's sheath of meat it currently inhabited, so it deigned to not stand for fear of collapsing onto the floor. The burning violet eyes, devoid of pupils, stared at the Chiss with dark mirth, and a haunting cacophony of laughter bellowed pass the fetid, pale lips that sounded more like a choking gurgle than an actual laugh, but the effect was all the same. "My minions have told me of what transpired between you and the Ravens, and it amuses me Cryax! It amuses me! Your own people gunned down like animals as you attempted to flee, and the people you once called family now hungry for your blood, and slapping a fat bounty on your head no less? It is glorious, indeed... A dark twist of fate for our favorite three-bit crime lord..."

With each horrid movement of the corpse's mouth and limbs, the joints crackled and popped audibly, a sickly undertone to the dead Sith's words. Still, what no doubt had been the most traumatic experience in the Chiss' life, besides perhaps his torture at the hands of yours truly, brought great amusement to Kaine, a detestable specter wearing the skin of a man long dead and insensitively mocking the misfortunes of the living.

"No doubt you will be hunted and hounded by those worthless Ravens... And while I would give no second thought about your pitiful life, there are other forces that drift between the world of the material and the inmaterial that find value in your hide, Cryax. So I have come to you, to offer you my aid."

An unexpected ally?

Quite.

[member="Cryax Bane"]

 

[Cryax Bane]

Despite the futility of firing at an animated corpse, once upon a time, Cryax might have panicked when faced by a vessel containing the life of Kaine Zambrano, and he might have scrambled for a blaster. However, when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. This version of the Chiss crime lord had fallen down a hole so deep, any light above was a far-off star in the darkness. Even the flashbacks of his capture and torture on Panatha no longer rattled him to the core. Lying bound on a stone slab, a sharp blade sinking into his blue flesh. His knees painfully grating on the cold floor, head down, lips sewn shut with synthetic thread. Those things might as well have happened to someone else. Cryax’s mouth tightened as Vornskr mentioned the recent events on Nar Shaddaa, but that was the only perceptible sign of distress as he addressed his former tormentor.

“You have a funny way of showing that you don't care about me, Kaine.” he said, dead eyes holding an edge of disgust. “I think you missed your little blue toy more than you would ever admit.”

A cleaning droid began to wipe the floor down underneath the table, where Kaine’s meatsuit had shed some blood. Cryax himself began to move slowly to another bound body, alive but drugged like the others. He drew the scapel in a line down the man’s chest as he talked. He had learned some new skills since his arrival on Coruscant. Now the Chiss seemed to enjoy a different kind of slicing.

“I have full protection from my enemies courtesy of the Wrath of the Dark Lord. What could the aid of a dead man possibly mean to me?”

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

The corpse chuckled again, and then with sudden great agility swung it's legs forward and propelled itself off of the table's edge to stand tall in the gloom of the morgue. The literal horror show was now mobile! Still, the creature's movements were awkward, sudden, and choppy as all hell. It strained to move faster than a crippled hobble, but luckily it didn't have to cover much ground in the morgue, and so quickly enough it appeared at Cryax's side. It licked it's grotesque lips as it watched the scalpel cut deep into the flesh, bringing forth a great welling of blood to the surface as the chest cavity was carved open by the hand of an expert, which surprised the corpse to some degree considering the cutter's previous experiences with having flesh be cut in such a manner. But perhaps those experiences have hardened the Chiss to the point of cold indifference to the marring of flesh, and that pleased the corpse.

"Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn't. The Netherworld, after all; is so very lonely... the only company the haunting hordes of the damned to moan and wail till you grow mad from the agony." He laid a single sickly hand on the Chiss's shoulders, the broken nails digging into the blue flesh. The corpse's body suddenly pushed itself up against Cryax's side, and a whisper passed the cracked lips into the Chiss' ear. "The Wrath's protection is considerable, I will admit, but I can teach you how to defend yourself. Before I was a Sith, I worked for Imperial Intelligence, and I carried out countless assassinations and field operations without having to call upon the Force, skills that I still possess to this day. I can teach you... for a price."

[member="Cryax Bane"]

 

[Cryax Bane]

Cryax was for all intents and purposes, as numb as an anesthetized limb, but even he wasn't immune to the revulsion that finally seized him when the Kaine’s decomposing vessel stood by his side, its tongue lolling around on its grey lips as it watched him cut into his victim. The Chiss’ hands began to tremble as the screaming inside his head got louder. The closer Kaine’s spirit came to him, the more the Sith magic surged inside him. He felt it rising up in the back of his throat like bile, threatening to unravel him.

As the dead man dug his cold nails into his flesh and brushed its lips against his ear, Bane shuddered. Even in a lifeless meatsuit, Kaine’s power held a seductive aura that stirred something in him. The screaming was suddenly deafening, and the scalpel dropped to the floor with a clang, leaving his faltering grip. Cryax closed his eyes and gripped the table with both hands, his chest rising and falling with panic. He was about to lose it.

“Whatever price you’re asking, Darth Vornskr, I am sure it is too high...” His whisper trailed off. The Sith magic protested inside of him. Frantically, It begged him to acquiesce to the phantom.

Deep down there’s a part of you that wants this, it said. Driven by Sith magic or not, you enjoyed slitting the throats of your enemies, just as you're enjoying slicing open these hapless live victims and removing their most vital parts. The monster inside you needs to be fed. Kaine can help it gorge. Say yes.

“...but humor me.”

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"No price is every too high for power, my dear Cryax."

The corpse whispered sweet nothings into the Chiss' ear, his putrid hand now trailing little circles of blood on Cryax's apron as he drug the tip of his index finger 'round and 'round across the fabric. The power flaring outward from the sack of meat he wore for a form began to cause immediate degradation in the already decomposing corpse, vessels bursting open to leak rivers of blood that began to pool and coalesce on the already gore-marked floor. The eye became sunken pits of pure violet, and the teeth began to fall out in twos and threes, clattering to the floor with an obscenely loud pitter-patter. Obviously such a form could not contain his power for very long, and the Dark Side was eating away at the body. He would need a new host or revert back to his incorporeal form, unable to communicate verbally, but still able to speak to Cryax with his mind. But that was no fun, and he longed for physical interaction after his damnation wallowing in the pits of Hell.

"However; you've already given me what I wanted, despite my full control being severed I can still.... Mhmmmm" For grotesque emphasis, the corpse let it's tongue roll out from it's mangled mouth and drag itself across the blue flesh of Cryax's neck. "Taste the spells I put on your body, the runes are still there... But dormant, sleeping... And I can feel the want, the need, burning in your body just by being this close to you... You can barely hold it back any longer, the desire... Give in Cryax, and you will once again know the pleasure of my company."

[member="Cryax Bane"]

 

[Cryax Bane]

The corpse’s misshapen lips tickled Bane’s ear, murmuring sweet promises of power. Power had been Bane’s drug of choice for the last few harrowing years of his Red Ravens Presidency. As illusions went, power was one of the more seductive ones to chase after. Until the Chiss finally realized that rather than power itself, he was frantically chasing after the fear of losing it. These days Bane craved a new high: freedom. Ironically, he had more of it on Coruscant under the One Sith’s thumb than he ever did in the Red Ravens. He had credits burning a hole in his pocket and no one else to answer to save for three enigmatic freaks like him and his own barely-breathing conscience.

As he waxed philosophic on the nature of power, the Chiss noticed that something was happening to Kaine’s vessel. Just when he thought the surreal experience could not get more grotesque, the body’s decomposition seemed to be hastening, and the parts inside began to pop, spurting blood and viscous fluids out of every orifice. Even worse, where it didn’t have an orifice, ones were created. A miserable grimace crossed Bane’s face as the melting corpse licked his neck, leaving a trail of formaldehyde and coagulating blood as it tasted his flesh.

"S-Stop," begged the Chiss in barely a whisper. It was a weak and unconvincing plea.

Frankly, Bane could not deny the ugly truth in Kaine’s words. An indescribable desire surged inside him, as the magic longed to be connected to its Master. Cryax’s hand closed around the scalpel on the table, and a microsecond passed when he thought he would plunge it right into the corpse’s vacant eye socket. Or maybe his own. He wasn't sure which. The sound of footsteps nearing the entranceway stopped him.

One of the usually stone-faced CRC morticians stood in the doorway, and the unbelievable sight of the Chiss entangled with a quickly rotting corpse, the long grey tongue pressed against his neck, released a visible wave of panic in the intruder. He rushed to his boss’s side and attempted to drag the dead man off of Bane, but slipped on the wet blood, prat-falling on the floor before the Chiss and the vessel. Pieces of moist, rotting flesh sloughed off and fell on the mortician as the man howled with fright.

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

The corpse perked a brow, whatever was left of it anyways, at the spectacle the mortician made when he entered the room. Truly it was a marveling display, one written right out of the comedies of old, but the man looked rather fit and in perfect health, much better than this corpse was of course. So, with little effort the spirit relinquished control over the corpse, which collapsed into a smoldering pile of ash and charred flesh upon the spirit exiting the body in what could be described similar to a phoenix being consumed by fire and being reborn from the ashes. However; instead of the body being reformed it was content to flop into a messy pile on the floor while the invisible spirit of the deceased Sith Lord simply rose into the air and then relocated to the nearest body, that being the howling mortician scrambled across the floor after his tumble. The spirit wormed it's way into the man's body, and unlike the corpse he faced resistance from the man's own spirit, but the Sith Lord's was far stronger and more malignant than the living man's, and he stood no chance as the dark specter contained the spirit already inhabiting the body and proceeded to replace it.

Now, the man's spirit was not destroyed, but rather contained and tethered to the earth much like he had done to Cryax's soul when he was placing the various spells and sigils upon his body and mind. Thus, after all was said and done, Vornskr's spirit snugly slipped into his new host and after a brief moment of adjustment assumed direct control. The eyelids shot open, and the eerily familiar violet light sprang forth from orbs hidden within, and the mouth curled into a horrible grin as he shakily rose from the floor to stand before Cryax. He flexed and rotated his arms, testing the fingers and his own strength, and then he placed a hand on Cryax's shoulder and squeezed roughly.

"A much more appeasing body, wouldn't you agree? No rotting flesh, and everything's right where it should be." Kaine craned his neck from side to side, popping the vertebrae audibly, before plopping himself on the edge of the operation table and idly swinging his legs back and forth in alternating motions while he grinned menacingly at the no-doubt startled Chiss. "Why don't you get up on this table, and we'll continue where we left off on Panatha, hrm?"

[member="Cryax Bane"]

 

[Cryax Bane]

Question: How does one make pillow talk with a decaying meat vessel containing a spirit of an Epicanthix Sith Lord? Especially when instead of pillows there are hard metal tables containing corpses waiting to be autopsied or cremated?

Answer: One doesn't

The feeling of unreality persisted as the Chiss found himself slowly dressing next to the possessed Mortitican, who now contained Kaine Zambrano's ghost. Before his hollow red eyes, the doomed man's flesh withered and peeled, shedding skin cells like a snake. The body was rotting from the inside out, no doubt due to the strain of being used as a container for such a wicked soul. It was obvious that the poor man would likely die once Zambrano left him. Bane ran his fingers through his sweat-slicked hair and turned towards the decomposing host.

"I suppose I can cross that off my bucket list," he said with a sarcastic chuckle. I mean, really, what does one say in this kind of situation? Text me later? Don't call me, I'll call you?

The Chiss narrowed his brow, looking directly into the other man's glassy eyes. The Sith magic within him welled up in anticipation of his question. He accepted that it was a part of him now, a living, breathing thing that was now blended with his molecular structure.

"Before we...um..." Cryax sheepishly gestured to the table. His feelings for the departed Sith Lord troubled him in ways he wanted to shove deep down into his psyche, or drown in liquor. How could his current situation make any man not do desperate things to help him try and forget?

"...you mentioned aid. What did you mean by that, Kaine?"

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

The plethora of feelings, sensations, and emotions nearly threatened to overwhelm and consume the Sith Lord's consciousness in the aftermath of what could only be described as wicked and sinful, but to others it might have been something more. It certainly was for Kaine, and as Cryax slid off of the table they had just shared, the now decaying man allowed himself a rather jovial sigh of relief as his tensions, built up during his entrapment in the fiery bowels of hell, were finally vented through a suitable outlet. Still, this was not the reason why he had revealed himself to Cryax, merely the musings of a man who had not felt anything akin to physical contact for what could be described as an agonizing eternity. He was here to bring Cryax into the fold, farther in than he was now as a member of the Coruscant Rotary Club, and make him into a suitable servant of not only the Sith, but of the Dark Side as well.

Groaning as he pulled himself up into a sitting position on the edge of the table, he watched as the cells that made up his host's flesh began to deteriorate and die, fading away as the corrosive power of the Dark Side devoured what it perceived as sustenance to feed the dark soul that commanded it. Soon, he mused, he would finally reclaim a mortal form and no longer need to feed on the vitality of others just to keep his spirit strong and able to mingle with the living for short periods of time. But that time was still far off, and thus he worked through proxies and hosts, and soon Cryax would become his most capable proxy yet.

"As it stands, you are pitifully incompetent in ways to defend yourself. You have no training in martial arts, and thus you will always be vulnerable against those that would harm you. Now, anyone can pick up a blaster and shoot, or swing a sword like a meat cleaver, but once you're bereft of such tools what do you have? Your body is the greatest weapon you can wield, since you are not blessed with the Force. Thus I have come to make sure you remain a capable asset, and I will teach you martial combat."

[member="Cryax Bane"]