So a Timetraveller and a Merc Walk into a Village

[Aver Brand]

[SIZE=14.6667px]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzw34HKjfjU[/SIZE]​

There were only two good reasons bad men ever came to Tattooine. The first was to put their credit-laundering affairs in order, courtesy of a legion of corruptible and equally bad bank managers. (Similar, but different from the fortress-like security offered on Muunilist.) The second was when they needed a body without a name and a face that nobody would miss. Attached to a good pair of hands, most like, hands that could pull a trigger and put a hole through a man at two hundred feet and not bat an eye. Hands that could strangle as well as they piloted a ship or handled a speeder.

Now, if these bad men were especially smart, they only came when they needed both. You might call these folk… efficient.

Aver quickly concluded her business with the bank official. It was in both their interests to spend as little time in each other’s company as possible, though their motives were vastly different. The manager, a clever and slippery eel, knew a predator when he saw one. With his intimate knowledge of the food chain, a decision came easy. The merc, on the other hand, simply had no patience for red tape.

“Hurry up, padboy.”

He clearly remembered her saying that, and how the tone infuriated him at first. Another look at the woman reminded him why he wasn’t running his mouth back at her, though.

Head to toe in black armor, even on this hellhole of a planet. How she was still alive, he didn’t know; didn’t want to know. There was enough weaponry on her tall frame to arm a small battalion and still have arms to spare. Didn’t exactly instill you with the confidence for backtalk, people like her.

She walked out his door a whole seven minutes after she’d walked in. The only difference between then and now was the couple million credits washed clean of blood and spice that stuck to chips like napalm.

Play with fire and it’ll burn ya. That’s what momma used to say. Now then, momma’s been dead some thirty years and you're still kickin’. See who’s laughing now, you ole queen!
And he counted the bribe money, and spared her not another thought.

Aver Brand, for her part, kept a low profile. Her getup was a standing invitation screaming I dare you, fether, try your luck, and it worked like a charm. When she walked into the local watering hole, the afternoon drunkards cleared like cockroaches, scuttling away to their dark corners with their decade-old bottles of grog.

Slow-like, the woman sat down on a barstool, tilted her head.

“Tell me, barkeep. Any local monsters I can take off your hands?”

[member="Ferian Adair"]

 

[Ferian Adair]

Perception of monstrosity was in the eyes of the beholder, yet he was unlikely to consider himself a monster, when there was no companionate guilt present. Rather, an excellent exemplar of his genes in their full breadth and depth, a predator imbued with vast intellect, and lacking in concern for morality - this was the anachronistic entity whose true name was long-lost to time and dust outside of his psyche, and buried beneath aeons of identities within it. A scraping’s worth of acquaintances would place his current identity as one Ferian Adair, without further knowledge as to what such a name entailed in a sector or two of the galaxy, some eight hundred years prior, give or take, but none of them could say where it was that he had gotten off to, or what, exactly he was up to.

The residents of a deep-desert isolationist village that had taken the place of an abandoned outpost could answer those questions in detail, but couldn’t answer to any asking of his name, or what he was... or they would, but they couldn’t answer to anything, even if they wished to. No tongues wagged; there were no tongues, save his own. A pitiable, but necessary precaution that had ensured his experimentation would go on as long as possible, and provoke only the most minimal level of attention in fear, rumour, and the barely noticed absence of representative barter in the nearest city, town, or settlement. Despite this, the ordeal was a test of his still-limited patience, as the results he sought were less immediate than desired. Still, months of trial and error had yielded results - his power was growing, yet no candle could be held to what he once was. Not yet.

On the whole, while deaths were not minimal, the populace had only reduced by just shy of half, which was a marked improvement from last time over a millennium prior, though that ‘experiment’ was for different reasons. Of note was that there were no burials, yet no remains (go on, then, deduce), but no matter what was done, it would be only a matter of time before someone with more curiosity than sense, or perhaps a lost soul, would happen upon the village. And then? Then the situation would change, and only then.

‘How’ remained to be seen.

[member="Aver Brand"]

 

[Aver Brand]

The barkeep grunted.

Aver grunted back. It was a very productive conversation, for she was, after all, fluent in Mercese. Though it largely consisted of hand-signs and grimaces that no merciful god would wish upon facial muscles, the language did have its own set of noises. On a good day and with a deep bottle, they even sounded like they might be human.

But you could never be sure.

It was a good thing, then, that Aver wasn’t human. Not literally, and certainly not figuratively.

Not one to waste time, she appropriated a speeder as soon as she set foot out the door. The suns still hung high in the sky like some malevolent incarnation of death, dead-set on slowly cooking everything below in their own juices. Not very pleasant, as far as deaths went.

It was a good thing, then, that Aver used advanced technology. The wonderful invention of thermal regulators had been a mercenary’s best friend since time immemorial.

Kicking up dust and indignant screams, the woman sped off into the desert as the navicomputer updated with the general coordinates. The area was impractically large to start with, but where technology failed, there were other paths one could thread.

It was a good thing, then… well, you get the idea. Once she hit the location, the merc tugged on the Force. The Force made obscene gestures in turn and tried to wiggle out of it, but Aver would have none of its lip. After a few stern, if vulgar exchanges, they both agreed to make their interaction short and sweet.

In one word, efficient.

Feth, did she love efficiency. And a careful approach. Those grunts had been borne out of fear, which wasn’t a common thing with obdurate, backwater criminals the likes of which passed as ‘populace’ on Tatooine. If something had put the guy on edge, Aver was taking no chances. To that end, she powered down the speeder a click away from the village – because the navicomputer did have something marked as a ‘settlement’ in there – and continued on foot.

A well-armored ant crested dune after sandy dune, the dull gleam of black phrik screaming in defiance at the twin stars observing from zenith.

The sight opened before her with all the grace and presence of a washed-up actor well beyond his prime. The ‘settlement’ – a generous term at best – was little more than a huddled group of ramshackle huts leaning drunkenly against one another. Some seemed to be more hole than wall at this point, eaten up by the ravenous erosion of wind and sand. Gnawed right down to the bone, with strings of flesh still clinging to the sun-bleached white beneath.

If she weren’t quite as glacial in composure, Aver might’ve entertained a shudder down her spine. But what-ifs serve no-one. She wasn’t. She didn’t.

What she did do was grab her pistol and blade. Rose to her full height. Stepped forward. Licked her chapped lips, inhaled, and called out.

“Anyone home?”

In her defense, she had been the Hand, not the Voice.


[member="Ferian Adair"]

 

[Ferian Adair]

Ecstasy waned at the voice, a snap and wet crunch giving the ensuing silence no quarter, void-eyes slipping open to half. They watched, the bipedal things, the once-human things, where they were once forced to do so. Some still cowered at his eyes and in his presence, in this state, but most were stripped of reciprocal feeling, by now. Eyelids lifted, revealing the full darkness that looked upon the broken forms of flesh; one of their own crumpled to the dirt floor from his hand, and they swarmed around it.

The words echoed in each mind, a seeming collective, and he exited a hut at the far end of the settlement, the group filing out with the shared burden of a once-living thing, he turning towards the other end of the village and the rest making for the opposite direction, bound to do as the will dictated. Boots shifted the sand in what passed for the only street, a trail of marks that never held, and he replied.

The voice crawling over a psyche was one thing, but to have it fill in by way of ears was quite another, a further layer of sickening detail, the icing on an acrid presence not constructed of anger and pain, but something ancient: an oily char of unsullied evil. He was unkempt, with no need to maintain a sociable visage, and deeply tanned down to the belt-line, from these months under the twinned gods of the sky. Eyes laid on the vision in armour, the sight of plate, pistol, and blade stretching his lips in opposing directions, at once moistened with a slow probing of his tongue.

[member="Aver Brand"]

 

[Aver Brand]

Creepy voices were all fine and well, but Aver karked a timetraveling sorceress on the regular. She didn’t startle.

Not at that, at least.

It was when [member="Ferian Adair"] strolled into view that her blood ran cold, and for a moment, the mercenary stood pinned in place. She’d traced that face and all its marred features a thousand times over, branded them into her memory forever. She would recognize him with touch only, or from miles away, or in pitch-black darkness.

It was arresting to see His lineaments warped so unnaturally over the bones of another creature.

Then years of dancing with death washed over her, strength and fortitude and a will forged on corpse-strewn battlefields. Her spine straightened, her grip shifted on her weapons. Aver Brand was unafraid.

“Boring, probably,” she replied, settling firmly behind her glacial mask. One problem at a time, and she would resolve the issue of clone-like resemblance. Soon.

“If you’re not… too busy,” she gestured at the trail of wetness dripping into the sand at his feet, “I’d talk to you over a drink.”

The skull painted over her visor contorted into a malign grin.

 

[Ferian Adair]

It was a moment, nothing but, and the moment informed well on the bypass of mask and flesh - her unnervement was his, and gone as soon as it came; later, he would know how, and why. Soon.

"A drink..."

The ink drained away, tendrils receding, leaving nothing save inhospitable frigidity in the colour of his gaze - an unnatural, pale ice of blue - in place of abject nothingness. A gaze that followed the gesture back to whence he had come, tailed by short deliberation. He recalled a former student that had taken to terming her creatures in a none too dissimilar situation to this one as 'toys'. He'd thought it childish, at the time.

He would need to bathe. He turned heel, and went back into the settlement.

"...perhaps, if you could assist me with a matter?"

He beckoned for her to follow, his stride possessed of all the straight-backed, upstanding grace it lacked on his approach in the other direction; the broad swath of his back faced her, offering a detail that few in this age had the privilege of seeing in the purplish markings that ran the course of his spine and disappeared beneath the unkempt shag his hair had become. Beneath most perceptions: the thrum of dual hearts resonating their cadence out to the surface in the nigh-unnoticeable vibration of his flesh.

"This, all of this," he said, pointing out the details of his time in this pitiful gathering of abodes, coming to a stop, facing [member="Aver Brand"], "it would be unwise to leave it to be discovered, would it not?"

He focused on the unintelligible murmurs of the things, past the end of the structures.

"Given time, things here may regain their voices, in a manner of speaking, though they may never regain a semblance of undisturbed intellect," he said, in explanation, turning partway towards where the things were, "the other possibility being that they may simply devour each other without my direction, when hunger overtakes in the coming days."

He then turned back to the form in black phrik.

"As satiating as it would be to watch, if we are to have that drink today..." he trailed off.

 

[Aver Brand]

Her guard didn’t falter as she fell in step with him, some fifty paces behind. With his types, it was best to keep some distance, just in case something snapped. See, there were different types of evil in this galaxy they all (mostly) called home. Aver Brand was an accomplished representative of her ilk, true.

But.

She didn’t torture innocents for pleasure. She didn’t bathe in the blood of virgins. She didn’t live in a spike-riddled, gloomy residence filled with screams and their echoes. She didn’t perform vicious experiments on whole settlements to satisfy her curiosity, let alone to escape a spell of tedium.

In a word, her evil was mundane.

This creature before her, marked by purple symbols and moving to a doubled beat of heart; this creature was different. He oozed malice like a tank leaking nuclear waste. Of the two, the tank was the safer option.

“You need help cleaning up.”

Aver drew nearer, hands still firm on her weaponry. Her voice was as flat as her temperament, despite the keen edge of her awareness. Emotions – especially negative – were like glitterstim for sadists, and they pursued them with the same glint of addiction in their eye.

One of the squirming, writhing forms on the floor let out a pathetic moan, as if to corroborate her thoughts.

“The quickest way would be to torch the place. Or blow it up, if you’re partial to smoldering craters.” She gestured to the destitute huts around them, grinning. “This place needs an upgrade either way.”

[member="Ferian Adair"]

 

[Ferian Adair]

He'd ducked into the nearest hut, and returned with a knife. While there was any number of methods to go about it, all without a touch, to physically end a life granted the most naked and potent power; though he could tear out a throat, the ends of his fingers were not suited to the task after these few months that lacked in grooming and fastidious hygiene. He had, in the minutiae of a blink, overtaken one of the things, seized it by the chin, and pulled a clean line across its neck by the time she had ceased speaking. The resultant gurgling faded in the time it took to release the thing from his grasp.

"I am..." the fresh corpse shifted the sand, and the sand for its part drank of the cut, "...impartial to explosions."

He moved towards the next one at a normal gait, sloughing blood off the blade with a flick of the wrist.

"When they are all like that one," he said, "then 'torch the place', as you say."

With another head wrenched in his grasp, Ferian glanced over his shoulder at the masked, phrik-encased woman.

"I assume you have a name?"

[member="Aver Brand"]

 

[Aver Brand]

“Sure I do,” the mercenary replied and slipped the combat knife back into its sheath. Her fingers wrapped snugly around her slugthrower instead, its weight familiar in her grip.

A blaster would be more modern, of course, but it would also be too clean for the kind of cleaning they were doing here. Dirty work required dirty closure. The cleansing lick of flame would come after, when everything lay dead and bleeding, so that the parched soil could drink its fill.

Aver started shooting, rhythmically and methodically mowing down the stumbling wretches.

[member="Ferian Adair"] blinked from one deformed creature to the next within the space of heartbeats, snapping necks and slitting throats with the ease of lifetime practice.

“So do you, no?” She shrugged as she reloaded her magazine, smooth and quick. “You ask me, names matter frak all, but if you want…” she put a bullet through the neck of the last man, sending him sprawling over the crest of a dune.

“You can call me Aver Brand.”