Location: Lola Sayu - Outside the Citadel
When the Sith decided to pay a visit to the Citadel, Jartris saw the opportunity to pursue an agenda more of his own. He had recently learnt that a man named Gareel Zum was imprisoned there. Gareel Zum was a serial murderer, but he was also, as it happened, a poet. Some two decades ago, a movement had sprung up that had come to be known as Sadistic Poetry for its nonchalant, often light-hearted depictions of violence and its consequences. Jartris figured it was a way of dealing with the prolonged period of warfare the galaxy had found itself in. Surprisingly popular among soldiers and veterans, it seemed to provide catharsis for those who had seen the horrors in their gruesome reality. Gareel Zum had been a preeminent, if always mysterious, figure of this movement, but had not published, or indeed given any indication of his existence, in ten years. The reason for this disappearance, not widely known, was that he had been convicted and imprisoned in the citadel. Had people known that this particular Sadistic Poet, unlike the rest of them, was probably serious, they might have read his works quite a bit differently.
Jartris remembered a short one:
To recognise the murdered
girl I won't endeavour.
By her tattoos it's Mildred,
but by the scars, Ginevra.*
He was not impressed, but was prepared to consider that it might have lost in translation. In any event, it was his intention to get hold of the man and secure a new volume of poems to be published by his house. Not that the Sith had any intention of actually freeing him. Gareel Zum was a psychopathic Snivvian who, as far as Jartris was concerned, should have been killed at birth after genetic diagnosis, together with all other defective individual of his kind. That the Snivvians persisted in raising such children was, to his mind, pure madness. He certainly had to be confined in some way, but that was no reason his work should go to waste, as it did here, where the responsible people naturally had bigger concerns than poetry.
Jartris had his trusted pilot approach Lola Sayu from the debris field and then follow the surface closely, hopefully undetected, until the Citadel was reachable on foot from their position. It would take him a few hours, but the Sith didn't mind, and he would not allow his ship to get closer until sufficient chaos had erupted to make nobody pay attention to the little transport. The
Limiting Factor was, again, living up to its name.
***
Jartris surveyed the rocky desert he had just walked through. It was only the planet's strange atmosphere that gave it its uniform purple tinge, but its real colours were a mixture of purple, orange, and much grey. The mauve sky was occluded by greyish-white clouds, and the tendrils of a strong wing reached him to pull on his dark grey robes. Despite this, it was rather warm, perhaps from the head that the planet's ruptured crust released into the atmosphere. It was an inhospitable place, and Jartris wondered whether it even hosted non-microbial life. He disapproved of the colour scheme, too.
The citadel was located on the other side of the ridge below which he was sitting. He was growing impatient, but knew that others were on their way and was determined to wait for them to make the first move.
[member="Kor Vexen"]
*My silly translation of a poem by Oleg Grigoriev that's much better in the original.
