The One that Got Away

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

Master Savan,

If there's one thing we share, apart from ambition, frustration, and a certain tenuous relationship with mortality, it's a love for the upper hand, so I suspect you'll understand the anonymity of my approach. I also suspect you'll take it as a frustrating and possibly entertaining challenge. Though you'll make no headway in tracing this message, I intend to offer you opportunities to discover my reasons for contacting you, make avenues toward those within my sphere of influence, turn my knowing or unknowing associates to your own advantage, or insulate yourself against further contact, as you see fit. I find such possibilities add spark to any relationship.

We've met before, but it's been a regrettably long time. The means of this message's delivery don't allow for a response. Should you be interested in further contact, a woman named Selka Ventus will be having dinner on the cruise liner Boca Ranui within the Transitory Mists in one week's time. Miss Ventus is a piece on my gameboard, though what role she plays is up to you to determine; I suspect you'll find her interesting.

Most sincerely, and with apologies for the Fontana affair,

Velok

 

[Onrai]

Boca Ranui, Transitory Mists, Dining Room

Circe had questions. Many, many questions. Why? Because she was there and stole Velok's Aleph, which she still used on occasion. She also was informed that he had fallen and that he had been trapped by the young prodigy and former snuggle buddy known as Aleidis Ijet. The question of how he had escaped from that was perked in his head - though perhaps it was someone who had stumbled upon the false creator of the Vinithi's equipment. Or perhaps he truly had found another host.

Whatever the case, she was currently here, at a table for the cruise's formal first-class dinner. Across from her seat was a placard marking the name of the woman she was supposed to contact.

For now, she would simply wait patiently.

[member="Selka Ventus"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

Selka did a double-take at the sight of her name on a placard; she tapped her escorting waiter on the elbow. "Never mind about the table for one," she said, "it looks like I'm expected here."

"Of course, Miss Ventus. My mistake, naturally."

"Don't worry about it. Thank you," she added as the waiter pulled out the chair for her. "Some R'alla mineral water, please."

"Of course." The waiter, a trim Selonian, turned to Enigma. "And anything for you, Miss...?"

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"Vantai. I'll have a glass of water as well." The last thing one needed when dealing with Velok or any of his agents was to be even the slightest bit intoxicated. Ordinarily, this wouldn't have been an issue had she still been in her Vinithi body. But the last thing she needed to do here was rot the liver of this Vahla body out.

Once the waiter left, she gave a smile to the woman in question, looking her over with a good deal of intrigue. "So a little birdie sent me a note sometime back, and the trail just so happened to lead me here, though for what purposes I have truly yet to fully comprehend." She paused, taking a sip of her drink nice and slowly.

"I believe you know who it is I'm referencing, Miss Ventus?"

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

The corners of her eyes tightened fractionally.

"I think I do, Miss Vantai. And when you leave, please tell all of them that I will not be supporting them publicly. That's simply not in the cards, and if they can't see the validity of my reasoning, well, Miss Vantai...between you and me, I'd start looking for a new job if I were in your shoes. If they're not willing to compromise on that, then they're not smart enough for my business-"

She cut off as the waiter returned; as he departed, she sipped the R'alla mineral water and leaned back in her seat.

"If their little clandestine dabblings make them feel like they get to judge the way I do business," she said precisely, "then they're exactly as stupid as they look."

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"I was more or less referencing a certain questionably living individual responsible for countless alchemical experiments of... intriguing quality." She paused. "Though I am curious as to who you're referencing... Company troubles, it would seem?" The name Selka Ventus seemed familiar, and she seemed to recall having interacted with the woman a good once or twice before, though not the context of those meetings. "I was surprised that he found a way to get a hold of me. The last time I'd heard about anything related to him, he'd gotten trapped in something there was no way out of."

She sipped her mineral water gently and cautiously. "He was a very intelligent person. Wiser and craftier than myself... and someone he taught of things long forgotten. And here I am having been led to you by his message... What connection have you to him, if I may inquire?"

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

"Alchemy, male, trapped -- I can think of a couple of people who fit the bill partially or wholly. But let's assume I know who you're talking about; I can keep multiple possibilities in mind well enough." She downed the rest of her R'alla water. "I've generally found that people of that sort are good contractors for specialized research."

The Selonian waiter reappeared. "Are we ready to order?"

"Jakobeast prime rib, aged, eighteen ounces. Hapan salad on the side."

"Very good. And for you?"

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"Peppered nerf steak with greens and gravy." She smiled as the waiter left to fulfill the orders of both women. "That's quite surprising... I recall hearing that this individual fell to a young Ghostling Jedi Master. Surprising, considering that Whipids are quite bulky individuals. If he managed to survive being trapped in that amulet, though..." She pondered over the situation. If the amulet had been broken, could his spirit have escaped and possessed someone? Possibly even the woman in front of her? It was a bit unusual for Velok(or whoever was impersonating him) to direct her to this woman specifically.

"I know that you're affiliated with the individual I'm referring to. Also, your playfulness in dodging around the question is wonderful. I haven't had a conversation like this in years."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

"If you are what I think you are, read the truth of these two statements: His spirit is not in me. I've never met him."

Both entirely true.

 

[Onrai]

"I'm admittedly a tad confused... What do you think I am?" Circe raised an eyebrow to the woman in front of her, unsure as to what Delka had been interpreting her as. "Curious."

For some moments, she waited, taking another sip of her water before looking back at the woman in question. "Well, Miss Ventus, what sort of business pursuits have you been engaging in recently? I'm intrigued."

[member="Selka Ventus"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

"I think you're a Sith, Miss Vantai," said Selka blandly. "Straightforward enough.

"As for my business, I've served on the Board of Directors for Silk Holdings for the last five years or so. Before that I was interim CEO; it's entirely possible I'm about to be named interim CEO again. The war wasn't kind to us; we're strong as a company, but we've had our personal losses. Currently we're focused on bacta, kolto, and starship construction; we're pioneers in high-end hyperspace technology and affordable active countermeasures. And you? What business are you in?"

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"That's fair enough, though I would assume that you yourself have similar capabilities, being able to tell that sort of thing right off the bat." Truthfully, she didn't know, but comparing the woman's power to herself seemed somewhat appropriate.

"I'm currently not doing much special, though I do run day-to-day operations at Emeritus Industries, over in the Omega Protectorate. The company's owners prefer to remain enigmatic, delegating a good portion of things to me. I wish they'd become more involved, though... Emeritus has made some things for the Protectorate and export customers, but not much to really grow and expand with. That's what's most frustrating." She was eager to hear more about what Selka did.

"What more can you tell me about the sort of things Silk deals with? Also, wasn't that once Jorus Merrill's company?"

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

Selka shook her head. "I've never been trained in Sith arts, Miss Vantai; I'm just an AgriCorps washout with a few reasons to be angry and a few more reasons to keep my cool. As for you being a Sith, not many would speak well of the individual in question, or know that much about him. A leap of logic, but a small one.

"Emeritus Industries? I've heard the name, and I know you make starships, but off the top of my head I can't recall the details. It's a long galaxy away from the bulk of Silk's business, apart from the HALCYON interstellar trains all throughout Protectorate space. And Fringe space, and former Moross space, and so forth." She smiled faintly. "The roads must roll, as they say. Between interstellar mass transit, hyperlane construction, and hyperspace experimentation, yes, you could say we remember our roots, though Captain Merrill hasn't been part of our corporation for years now."

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"Such would make sense." She nodded in response to what Selka had been discussing. The particular fields of research were intriguing, but it was certainly the latter that caught her interest specifically. "Hyperspace experimentation? Do tell... I've been considering starting up some hyperspace-based experiments, but haven't really decided on what aspect to focus on. Is there anything in particular you choose to focus on regarding that line of work?"

Perhaps some business could be made...

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

"Silk takes pride in selling the fastest stable hyperdrives on the market. Our Rassilon-class elite starfighter has a point four; our Pathfinder-class, which is frigate-scale but operable with a crew of two, has a point five. We sell the Silkworm hypertransit package, which is a fully stable point five coupled with a navicomputer that includes hundreds of highly encrypted proprietary routes. And of course there are the HALCYON space trains, a system that involves skyhook elevators and directional hyperspace cannons." Selka offered a smile that almost reached her eyes. "And that's only what Silk has made public. We've also done a number of specialty projects that I'm not allowed to talk about. Suffice it to say, anything you need in the hyperspace department, Silk can deliver."

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"Have you ever considered developing a rift device? You know, something that could create a stable hyperspace wormhole between two individual points in order to allow for smoother travel between them?" She took another sip of her water. "Such a device could have many practical benefits of successfully developed, though. Direct travel could prove to be quite beneficial, particularly for shipping and the like." She hadn't had any experience on manipulating hyperspace, aside from the company hyperdrivees fitted into most if not all fighters and starships. Selka trumped her there, certainly.

Then again, what did she know? She was a ship expert - not the best person to talk with hyperspace about.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

"Well, here's the challenge. We can do point-to-point stationary jumps so long as nothing's in the way -- that's what the HALCYON system is -- but it's not very efficient within the limits of current technology. HALCYON winds up being equivalent to about Class Four, which is fine for system-to-system mass transit and cargo, but for longer stretches, speed's a factor and directness is a factor too. I can tell you that we've done research beyond that, and we're farther than most people have come, but we're still a far cry from true hypergates -- near-instantaneous travel, regardless of what's in between the start and endpoints, like with Gree and Kwa technology or with Force Storm wormholes. Our most promising research so far involves studying randomly occurring natural wormholes when we find them."

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"Have you considered the potential use of a device to artificially generate wormholes connected via a pulse sent on a certain frequency through hyperspace?" The wormholes' creation would be somewhat easy, but ensuring that both holes were connected would certainly be a different story. Aside from copious quantities of testing, there was no verifiable way to determine exactly where a probe could end up - and ensuring that a wormhole opened and closed in the same location could prove to be exceptionally difficult.

"I thought about such sometime back, but we had some financial issues and couldn't move forward with the project."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Enigma"]

"Frequency of what kind of projection? Hypercomm, subspace, electromagnetic?" She'd been neglecting her food; now she tucked into it, pondering the problem. Not the kind of thing that could be solved by a couple of barely-educated ornamental executives over lunch. No, pondering this was about considering which of Silk's physicists and design teams would be best suited to this, and who could be spared from what."

"If you're thinking subspace, we've been doing some work in that department. Subspace comms are shorter-range than hypercomms, and we're fairly sure we can take a step back of sorts to build a subspace drive. It'd be very slow -- equivalent to class fifteen or twenty, maybe a little better, but immune to interdiction."

 

[Onrai]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

"We were thinking more along the lines of a hypercomm transmission, stabilized through a connection routed across the holonet. That would seem to be the only way to create a stable connection between devices that can then be grown into a hyperspace wormhole. Probe testing is, from what I can tell, the only way to determine if a connection properly exists between devices." She paused, pondering over the further potential of such a development.

"A subspace drive would be interesting to work with. I'd certainly replace the backup hyperdrives we currently use with it, were it proven to be so capable."