Manic Monday

[Sinistra]

The life of a manic depressive is a long, winding roller coaster of highs and lows. Sure there are meds out there to help shave the tops and bottoms off the mood swings but as anyone who has suffered lived with mental illness can tell you, there is one irrefutable fact.

Mental illness lies.

We believe it when it tells us we are worthless, we believe it when it tells us that no one loves us. All these things, Sinistra could live with. She was driven and she had sacrificed much to claw out the existence she had.

The lie it told her was that she didn't need her meds.

So she would skip a dose and she would feel ok. And it would tell her that she didn't need it anymore, that she was cured, even though she knew there was no cure for her bipolar states. But she listened anyway.

She hadn't really slept more than a couple hours in 2 days. She couldn't sleep. She was just too full of life to slow down. She felt like she could see the infinite beauty of light and color that stretched beyond all time and space from the top of a skyscraper on the smuggler's moon. She had dove off of three different ones that night, laughing wildly as she hit the bottom of the street level each time, crouched and cackling through her vocoder.

Obviously a force user. Obviously mentally ill. No one wanted to approach the masked figure rasping with a mechanical wheeze as it climbed mega structures and base jumped without a parachute. That was asking for trouble they didn't need.

[member='Triam Akovin']

 

[Cassus Akovin]

Suffice to say, Triam didn't have a very good relationship with the Hutts. One too many unfulfilled contracts too many, and for a lot more than she was worth as well. Hutts had long memories, and although her contract expired years ago with Popo, it was unlikely the greedy bastard forgot her promise. So it was a pretty rare sight to see her not only in Hutt Space, but on Karkin' Nar Shaddaa. It wasn't under the Cartel however, managed by the Techno Union... which in her opinion wasn't much better. She served as a mercenary for them once on Geonosis, and has regretted it ever since. The Techno Union was at least at one point just another puppet of the One Sith... no different from the Primeval save for a different flavour of lunacy. For her to be on Nar Shaddaa, her business must have been extremely compelling to go through that effort.

Or at least, it would have been until that happened.

She was driving in a speeder through the city landscape, probably speeding a bit, and grumbling about traffic as she was on her way to her rendezvous. As she sipped through one street, and took a sharp right turn, by coincidence some suicidal idiot base jumping off of buildings landed on the hood of her speeder, and nearly caused her to wreck... and then with the strange mechanical cackling, the jumped up onto another building, as a result pushing her speeder out of control on a crash course for the side of a building.

Before impact, Triam let go of the controls as she cursed over the din of screaming speeders, and activated her jump pack, blasted in the opposite direction of the speeder, probably endangering herself as she passed through traffic. A moment later, her three phantom finger cables launched from her hand and landed on the side of a building, zipper her up to a perch. Once settled, breathing heavily as the speeder exploded below her, her eyes scanned the sky with her HUD, looking for a targeting solution for that... thing that landed on her speeder.

"Kark..." She breathed deeply, feeling the adrenaline rise in her. It may not have been an intentional attack, but it felt like one, and now the Relentless was pissed. A moment later, she identified a figure climbing on the side of a building. It immediately began to scan for bounties. The target was too far away to identify, so she took it upon herself to go find out the more personable way.

She began climbing the structure in a similar manner to the target, albeit less supernaturally nimble. Hopefully she was fast enough to catch up, or perhaps her gifted target might notice a survivor climbing after her.

[member="Sinistra"]

 

[Sinistra]

She should have been paying attention, but of course, she wasn't. She was too intent on scaling another modern mountain of this bustling, dirty homage to corruption and criminal empires. Lights, glass and steel combined in a hypnotic landscape of energy that goaded her to keep moving, to catch the tail of the tiger and hang on until she passed out from exhaustion. There were no people in this city that she could remember. They all seemed as mannequins to her, barely moving as she sped past them, too busy with her own manic urges to even register than she should be wary of what she was doing. Or whom she was doing it to.

She made it to the top of one particularly large building and paused on the edge, arms outstretched, the wind billowing her cloak, skirt and sashes out behind her. She could feel the pressure of the air rushing against her, and she almost wanted to take the mask off, to feel the cool fingers of free fall in her chocolate locks. There wasn't a view in the galaxy that could dizzy her head but in that moment looking down, she felt in-comprehensively small and insignificant. A speck on the face of a moon, spinning through the galaxy, spinning itself in a timeless celestial dance that would turn for aeons until all of this was forgotten. Nothing in her would last forever except the legacy of her deeds.

It was a poor time for her mind to wander down philosophical lanes, but she was ill equipped to stop it. Too soon, her mood would crash down into the depths of depression and despair. Right now though, she was made of stars.

[member="Triam Akovin"]

 

[Cassus Akovin]

It was at this time that Triam's Relentless pursuit was finally catching ground, and the woman was close enough to be identified... or at least, should have been. Unfortunately her scanners sending data to her luxurious stealthship parked in a parallel orbit to Nar Shaddaa of Nal Hutta, did not relay anything specific. It wasn't anything out the ordinary, it was a big galaxy with lots of people. But perhaps after a weapons scan she could determine at least what kind of enemy she was facing.

A lightsaber was detected.

For how rare it was supposed to be being force sensitive, she seemed to run into them far more often than the average individual. Granted, Triam was far from average, but coincidences like these made it seem ironic most of the people she knew and fought had at least some inkling of sensitivity to that mystic binding force she could never understand. Of course, all of this was said as a lightfoil - a literal mimicry of a Jedi's signature weapon - hung from her belt, thus making it ironic also that she assumed the lightsaber weilder must be force sensitive.

To her credit however, this individual was also base jumping off of buildings and scaling them effortlessly. As crazy as she was, not even Triam would do that if she had the ability to. Three Phantom Finger cables latched onto the edge of the ridge her target was enjoying, and zipped up over onto the breezy roof. Standing up from a kneeling position, she turned to the figure as her scanners strained to find some monetary justification for assailing them or at the least capturing them.

"Hey..." She called out simply with her voice amplifiers so as to counteract the wind muffling, "You wrecked my ride, wench."

[member="Sinistra"]

 

[Sinistra]

The wind whipped around her as she turned to face the voice behind her.

Wench? Her? A wench?

Sinistra's attention was firmly now on the geared up figure behind her, too much darkness and not enough attention to be spared to know that she wasn't alone on the rooftop before being verbally assaulted but what could conceivably be a woman. Sinistra was not ready to give up her manic high, she needed to fly, to feel the pull of the ground as she pushed through the air on the way down to oblivion. She had been laughing earlier, clutched in the arms of madness.

Whoever this tin can might turn out to be, she was being a buzzkill now.

"Piss off."

Sinistra whipped her right arm out at the woman the way a mother would shoo a child away from her, but she had also sloppily called on the force and sent it careening in a push at the general direction where the woman was standing that was not even close to being square on to actually do anything of importance to the newcomer. She was trying to scare her, although had she been thinking clearly, she would have wondered how the woman got up there and taken a different tact.

Too late now.

[member="Triam Akovin"]

 

[Cassus Akovin]

Triam stood there for no more than five whole seconds before the woman's hand extended outwards, suddenly finding herself accelerating backward over the edge again against her will. Only a momentary yelp escaped her before her Akovin Hand anti-fall system immediately picked up her new falling velocity, using internal repulsors to decrease her decent just as her left hand grasped onto the ledge stopping it completely.

That was reason enough for her to at least give a moderate ass-kicking.

Gritting her teeth in anger, a short burst of her jump jet propelled her over the edge once more, and while in mid air her hand shot forward and summoned three gnarly cables towards Sinistra, the electrified Phantom Fingers. As she came down, she would assumedly pull the Sith Lady backwards with a rapid tug of her arm, assuming the cables were able to latch onto anything. If not her other hand held a blaster pistol, and she'd shoot at the rather rude Sith woman.

"Kark you too, queen."

Speeders buzzed below, totally oblivious to the tussle that just started on the roofs above them. It would be a shame, if one of them were to... fall. Let's see where this goes, shall we?

[member="Sinistra"]

 

[Sinistra]

She had turned away from the distraction, her mind already back on the illuminated skyline of glass and colors. The winds sweeping past on the tops of the buildings was loud, and with the buzz of it in her ears though the mask, she wasn't listening for the sound of a jet pack. Indeed, it only registered as the sound of a jet pack when the three cables grasped onto her. Well, two at any rate, the third hit her cloak, gnarling up in the billowing material as it fanned out behind her. The other two cables hit her right arm and right thigh, so that when Triam jerked hard, Sinistra was too surprised to do anything except fly backwards.

The darkside in all its glorious magical existence seemed to be failing the Sith Lord to her discombobulated mind. In truth, no matter how great her connection to the force, she was forgetting her all too human limitations. After so many hours of not sleeping, her reflexes and ability to respond in a crisis were severely eroded. She could not focus on anything much more taxing than jumping off a building and stopping her fall, but truthfully she was so physically exhausted that her cognitive functions were much slower. Another jump might be her last were she not in the clutches of a very cross lady with a jetpack now.

Try as she might to fight back, her foggy mind could think of little as she hit the ground hard, her head striking the roof while star burst in front of her eyes. It took a moment for her to think about arming herself. Her right arm was jerked firm by the cables, so she reached for the black hilt on her left hip, which she happened to be laying on. The clip released it to her grasp and the red blade sang to life, swinging wildly at whatever had caught her right arm.

[member="Triam Akovin"]

 

[Cassus Akovin]

The Sith Lady became a maniacally thrashing toddler with a lightsaber, slashing repeatedly against the magnetized cables. They held her for a short time, but the cables were not designed for more than a single strike of resistance. Landing on the roof top, Triam pulled out her blaster pistol and aimed. Firing blasters at lightsabers didn't always work considering their abilities, but considering the present condition of the current target, it was of no consequence to take the chance that it might work.

She had no real intention of killing her, but a Sith could survive a few blaster scars, right?

The force knows they deserve more.

Even as she did that, she grasped the silver cylinder hanging from her own belt and activated the silver-yellow thread of The Relentless Blade, and pointed out from her body. After a moment or two of activation, the blade ion blade finally materialized. It wasn't often she got the chance to use her light foil, considering she wasn't exactly skilled with it, but she needed the experience some how.

Plus, it would make it easier to apprehend her target if they kept on being a push over.

[member="Sinistra"]