The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

[Runi Verin]

​

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
CORBOS, ESSTRAN SECTOR
OUTER RIM TERRITORIES
[member="Cerbera"]​

​

Her nose wrinkled at the sulfurous stench that greeted her arrival on Corbos, her new hand lifting to shield her eyes from the searing glare and rolling heat that blasted its way up the landing ramp as it descended. A hellish slice of landscape laying beyond the rapidly depleting cool shadows her vessel provided. Leave it to Cerita to build a base in an active Volcano. As if the woman wasn’t super villainy enough already.

‘Fierfek,’ she intoned silently, afraid that voicing it aloud would simply allow the oppressive heat to bake her throat even as it sought to char-grill her exterior. Her usual jacket was discarded before she even made her descent, the heavy spacer leather only exasperating the issue. Her flight suit stripped and tied around the waist for similar reasons, revealing a speckled and worn tank top that yielded full view of her new cybernetic addition (or replacement). Blasted thing still itched.

A familiar retinue of Qo’saarai Tuk’ata awaited her at the bottom of the ramp to guide her further into the installation. While she suffered from the heat, it seemed their alchemised grey-blue hides were almost impervious to it all. Judging from the way they curled their lips and slanted their shoulders, it seemed the pair were taking particular enjoyment in her discomfort. Karkers. They wouldn’t have found it nearly as amusing if she’d still had her beskad. The blade lost in the wreckage and mess that was Highpoint Station.

A third, larger and even more familiar specimen awaited before the doors.

“I see you, Verin.” Scarra grunted out in greeting, offering her what was perhaps the smallest of nods possible so that he could feign ignorance about it later if pressed. It seemed spilling blood together had earned her that much respect from the Qo’saarai pack leader. He gestured towards the doors behind him with a clawed hand, “Siqsa has been expecting you for some time. Not wise to keep her waiting.”

Too late to turn back now.

“'lek? If I was wise, I would've ignored the summons in the first place.” She muttered back dryly. “Fine. Lets see what the queen wants, then. Lead on.”

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Runi Verin"]

"Sometimes it surprises me you still have possession of your tongue." Scarra retorted equally dryly, before leading the way through the facility. It was large and felt even larger once they got inside. Elevators in both directions, dozens of Qo'saarai Tuk'ata patrolling about, some with errands, others pulling guard duty. Other creatures of questionable origins were equally present.

It seemed more like an embassy than a super-villain hideout.

They stepped into one of the elevators.

A pleasant tune sounded the moment the elevator started moving. "Your face was always ugly, but someone tried their best to rearrange it more." There was a beat of silence after that. "I trust you brought glory through the fight?"

Runi knew Scarra at this point- the creature had different standards of morality. A fight was a fight and if it was good, it was good and it did not truly matter what the context was behind it. He would not have cared about the civilians dead, her friends dead- the former fleeing and cowardly, the latter having bought themselves a place of honor amidst the dead.

She knew this.

 

[Runi Verin]

[member="Cerbera"]

She snorted softly. Both at the jab and the choice in music that began to filter through the elevator as it started to move. Classical jizz? Really? As if the cliche volcano lair and hordes of demonic sith beasts wasn't enough.

"I don't know much about glory, but he'll likely be pissin' blood for a few weeks." Probably less, knowing Ronan. She kept telling herself the wounds he inflicted on her were a small price to pay for having achieved her objective, yet the sound of her defeat still rang heavily in her ears. By all rights she should be counted amongst the dead. That would have to change by the time they next crossed paths. "And you? Find much glory guarding the secret lair of evil?"

The answer, if given, was lost as the doors abruptly pinged open to reveal a pristine laboratory that would be the envy of any coreworld facility, let alone here on the far reaches of the Outer Rim. Her gaze settled on the familiar form hunched over one of the work benches, their connection within the force practically humming in her ears now that they were in such close proximity.

Time to face a different music.

"I take it you didn't call me all this way for a social visit."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Runi Verin"]

"I have hunted and killed one of the great Ones, the Leviathan of Corbos." Teeth gleamed bright as the Tuk'ata smiled one of its toothy smiles. "Much glory, yes."

But Scarra did not follow Runi out of the elevator, instead opting to remain inside and then disappear into the heights again. Leaving the little human to her... appointment. If there was any pity within him he did not show it for the moment.

* * *​

​

"Mm." Cerbera hummed softly as the knife sliced away a touch more stone, letting the angles soften and become more pretty to the eyes. There was keen satisfaction there- to create, to advance, to twist and round the shapes to her own need.

"You sound surly, Verin. Are you peckish? I could have Scarra bring you something filling."

The offer was made without looking up.

Instead those amber eyes -- no irises, no whites, only that deep yellow. The last time they had met... she still had green, mossy eyes -- were keen at work. Roaming for imperfections in the stone cube she was slowly cutting with her knife. Not an ordinary knife, it never was with the alchemist. It wouldn't have been so easy to cut at the stone if it had been. Only once every corner was rounded out and pleasant to the touch, did Cerbera look up.

Eyes squinting.

"I thought we agreed that using your face to block punches was not an efficient strategy, Runi." Tongue clicked, showing white teeth. "I liked your face the way it was, darling." Now the Sith sighed and she shook her head slightly, letting the knife go and dusting off her hands instead.

"Go and sit there, will you? I will take a look at you in a moment."

Why could she not look after herself a bit better?

It was like finding your dog with its muzzle bleeding.

 

[Runi Verin]

[member="Cerbera"]

"Didn't rightly have much say in at the time." The salvager responded wryly as she took a seat by one of the work benches, casting a curious yet dismissive glance over the arrayed objects that had been arranged so neatly. Like their creator, it was hard for her miss the power that was radiating off even the smallest of trinkets. Objects of power. Alchemised and turned to tasks beyond her understanding. Dark purposes. She bit the inside of her bruised cheek, "I'd say you should see the other guy, but the karker weren't much too look at in the first place. If anythin' I probably did him a favour."

Those dark brown eyes turned from the table, fixing on the woman that busied around the lab before her. Narrowing slightly as she tried to get a read on her. At this distance, it was hard not to notice the changes and subtle differences in Cerita. Some physical, yes, but there was something else. Something that transcended the material visage of the alchemist that labored before her. As if a great darkness had been laid bare, the illusions that once kept it concealed scattered to edges of memory alone. It should have set her on edge, and there was a time when it perhaps would have. When she was younger and still painfully naive in the ways of the galaxy, still blissfully under the impression that the contrast between dark and light held any semblance of meaning. Back when her hands were less stained.

Hand, she correctly absently to herself.

"So what do I call you now?" It was a seemingly innocent question. Free from the edge that would have normally crept into her voice when faced with such a dark reflection of someone she'd thought she'd known. As far as anyone could know Cerita Sarova. "As I understand it, y'folks tend to like renamin' yourselves. I take it just plain Cerita ain't gonna cover it no more."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Runi Verin"]

When Cerbera did approach her the shrinking distance was taken with a certain quality of grace.

She glided more than that she walked.

There was finesse, calculated patience and completely self-awareness in every little gesture made. There seemed to be little left of the 'young' girl that Runi had known, no attempts at exercising strength through repeated prodding and reminders, no quips made (for the most part), no. Whatever had happened to Cerbera between the last time they had seen each other and now?

It had allowed her to claim strength.

"Why wouldn't it, darling?" Cerbera asked curiously as she leaned against the table with her hip. "You came to know me as Cerita and that privilege remains."

Odd, that.

Runi had known her before this and by all accounts this refinement should have been strange, completely fake and detached from who she was. But... instead it seemed natural. As if the alchemist had never been anything, but this. "Now then, let's see what we are dealing with here, yes?" She helped her slowly take off the articles of clothing that would prevent more in-depth inspection.

Those long, green fingers explored freely the bruises and cuts at the edges.

Experience, that's what Runi would notice. This was not the first time that Cerbera was handling check-ups like these. "Were you fighting in your underwear, Verin? Your armor didn't do much good by the looks of it."

A shake of the head.

"Who knit these cuts together?"

Cerbera was appalled and was wondering if it would be reasonable to skin that person for their lack of expertise.

 

[Runi Verin]

[member="Cerbera"]

There was a sharp intake of breath as those slender fingers probed the length and breadth of her wounds. A bit-down curse threatening to tumble past those scarred and split lips, eyes flashing with a spark of anger as she shied away from further prodding. Perhaps it was the lab setting, but she was feeling awfully like a specimen.

"I did the best I could with what I had to hand." Which might as well have been solvent and hot iron. Certainly would explain the lingering extent of her injuries. In her defense, proper medical care was difficult to apply when you only had one hand available at the time. "Forgive me if I ain't exactly the doctorin' type."

Truer words, never spoken.

"Doubt you called me all this way to play nurse, either." There was a note of bitterness in her tone. One that proved to be more bark than bite, seeing as how the salvager allowed the woman to continue her almost clinical ministrations. "Months without even a word, then some cryptic message expectin' me to drag my shebs all over kno---" Another hiss, teeth gritting and grounding on the edges of the words. "- known karkin' space. Better be good, s'all I'm sayin'."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Runi Verin"]

Cerbera shook her head lightly, before clicking with her tongue.

Most of her focus was on the wounds and scarring.

It was the essence of her- the perfectionist, she saw a flaw and needed to fix it. It didn't really matter what her original thought- "Oh, darling, did you miss me?" Cerita said softly with a smile, before grabbing the alcohol. "You could have called yourself, you know?" It almost sounded like the younger girl she had known. Almost as if focusing on this work pushed the darkness away.

For as long as it took anyway.

"I did want you to come for a different reason, yes. I have been slowly working on a little project. Figured you'd want to be there for it, seeing as you were interested in alchemy before?"

There was excitement in her voice as she started cleaning out Runi's wounds. Not very gentle, no, but there was clear experience and expertise behind it.

She knew what she was doing.

 

[Runi Verin]

[member="Cerbera"]

The vestiges of an indignant noise rumbled in her throat.

If there was one thing in this life Runi Verin was adamant about, it was that she didn’t miss folk. If anything, she had a tendency to go out of her way to avoid them. Throwing herself into the distant and less civilised reaches of the galaxy at times, plying lanes that few remembered let alone policed. Kark, it was how she’d ended up being involved in the rag tag group that eventually evolved into the Outer Rim Coalition in the first place.

No, she wasn’t the type hardwired miss folk.

And yet…

KARK!

She let out another hiss as the alcohol splashed against her half-healed wounds, teeth grinding together so tightly that they squeaked with an effort to keep a yell from erupting forth. Her hands tightened around the lip of the stool she was sitting, the metal letting out a sympathetic whine of distress as her new cybernetic bent and bulked the metal beneath her fingers. Why did the aftercare always hurt more than the initial injuries themselves?

“Interested? You mean when we were…” Her head rolled uncomfortably, neck taut with muscle and veins. Fierfek, she wasn’t a piece of meat to be poked and prodded, woman! “Caught in a karkin’ vault?”

She’d dabbled a few times since, of course. She was ultimately a tinkerer at heart. Tasting success and failure in equal measure as she tried to apply it back on the confines of the Boracyk. Nothing fancy or in the league of what Cerita was capable of producing, if those trinkets on the table were anything to go by, but enough to satisfy her natural curiosity and mechanic inclinations. There was a particularly nigh-indestructible wrench floating around in her toolbox for instance. Nothing that would come close to eliciting the excitement (if that word could even be applied) in the other woman's voice. Last time Ruin had heard it, in fact. Things hadn't turned out well.

“What are you working on?”

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Runi Verin"]

"Yup." Cerbera retorted in kind as she stared at one particular cut and decided it needed to be sewed together, than this mess of a glue job. Who used glue for this sort of thing?

Sometimes the Sith really didn't know what to make of the spacer across of her.

"It wasn't so bad- we got out eventually and nailed Gallows to the wall, didn't we?" The alchemist absently continued, while touching the meat around the cut. This time softly, but only because there was the very real risk of the glue suddenly undoing itself. "Going to have to open the wound again, Runi, knit it back together. Lie down." Her hands were already guiding her to settle down on the surgical table.

"You want something for the pain?"

In the meantime Cerbera began gathering together the tools for the job. "Oh, I know you are in love with all that ship stuff. So I started tinkering with an idea- what would you think of a hyperdrive that can pierce mass-shadows, let you escape interdictors, stuff like that?"

She made it sound so casual.

 

[Runi Verin]

[member="Cerbera"]

Gallows.

Her expression instantly darkened at the mere mention of the man's name. Now there was a karker that had got what was well and truly coming to him. Unlike the Mandalorian shocktroopers she'd felled onboard the station scant days ago, Runi simply didn't have it in her to feel remotely sorry for the blood price they'd exacted from the man in balancing the ledgers. The fact they'd been able to recover their stolen treasure horde, and more, in the process had simply been an unexpected bonus.

"I can take the pain." She replied sourly as she cleared the lab table before her, taken an almost exaggerated level of care not to overly disturb the collection of trinkets and artifacts. Pain she was willing to brave, the no doubt twisted fates these devices were likely designed to bring about, not so much. Besides which, while they had come along way from the suspicion and distrust that had marked their first meeting, there still had much further to go before Runi would be comfortable in letting her wits be dulled around the Alchemist. The roiling darkness that lurked beneath those pupiless eyes might have abated for now, but there was simply no telling when it would be back.

If it had even vanished in the first place.

"Just seal it up." She continued, leaning forward to rest her upper half on the edge of the counter. Short of clambering on top of everything, that was the best she could do. At least the conversation had taken a more interesting turn to distract her from the pain that was no doubt likely to ensue.

An alchemised hyperdrive?

Runi'd be lying if she said she hadn't thought about it. Even with her meager understanding of the ancient art, you had to be blind not to recognize the endless string of possible and potential applications for alchemy. Mundane and extraordinary alike.

"Sort of like a supercharged HIMS?" She frowned, brow lining as her mind whirring away at the problem. "How you gettin' it to bypass the problem of the mass shadow?"

Astronomical objects exited in both realspace and hyperspace at the same time, as did the gravitational pull they exerted. The mere presence of the latter preventing ships from transitioning safely from real space to hyperspace. To be able to simply bypass this was... A leap far beyond anything your standard HIMS could achieve.

"You'd have to jump through the gravity well. Somehow generate an independent trans-physical ripples and force the transition between the baryonic and tachyonic barriers. "

But that was almost impossible, right?

Short of finding out how to shove Jorus Merrill into an engine casing...

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Runi Verin"]

Fancy words for a scavenger and grease engineer.

But then Runi always had had the ability to pleasantly surprise Cerbera. One of the reasons why the alchemist had turned her eye on her in the first place. One layer after the other, but there was always another secret to uncover. "Mm, that's pretty much what it would need to do, yes." Cerita acknowledged, before returning to the table with her equipment sorted out.

Scalpel, nail and thread, the usual sort.

One thing that remained amusing to her was the caution Runi employed.

It was understandable, but by now she would have to know that Cerbera didn't need her unconscious if she wanted to hurt her. But the caution could be respected as a keen instinct of survival either way. "What do you know of Starweirds?" The question came curious as long fingers curled tight around her side, holding her in place with strength that was surprising considering that Cerbera didn't exactly look muscular.

She had always been stronger than she had any right to be.

The tip of the scalpel touched her skin and then it cut. Clean, sharp and to the point without any hesitation, just a firm line cutting open the glue patch job, before eyeing if there was any residual blood flow.

 

[Runi Verin]

[member="Cerbera"]

Enough to have them haunt her dreams on occasion. Nightmares forged from the memories of an abandoned station. Of halls stained in blood, littered with corpses and dismembered body parts. The sound of an otherworldly, eldritch scream of anguish and hate. No, sound was not the right word. You didn't hear their screams. You felt it in your core. Like nails on a chalkboard, scratching and picking at the frayed edges of whatever spiritual equivalent of a soul you subscribed to.

Yes, Runi Verin knew Starweirds.

She knew them all too well.

And just like that, she suddenly understood what Cerita was getting at. Certainly not the how. Her knowledge of alchemy was far too limited to work out the process required, but she could recognize the potential at least. transition between realspace and hyperspace unaided.

"You're going to imbue your drive with thei---- KARKIN' SCHUTTA!"

White hot pain lanced through her back as the scalpel sliced through the scabrous material that had formed over her wounds, the salvager letting out a low and angrily hot hiss of breath as she gripped the edge of the table. Embracing the Force to calm her mind and detach it from the pain, pushing herself to focus back on the the drive. Anything to distract from the amateur surgery that was currently being preformed. Even contemplating Starweirds was a better alternative.

"You're going... You're gonna try and harness their ability to shift.... Karkity kark kark, I'm not a piece of meat, you karkin' green-faced schutta shabuir! ... To karkin' phase through karkin' everythin'..."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Runi Verin"]

"Technically speaking you are a piece of meat." Cerbera calmly brought in, while finishing the cut with one smooth move and starting to clean out the edges of the wound with some anti-septic. Presumably that last part would cause even more cursing. But that had been expected... Runi always had quite the mouth on her after all, so there was little surprise there.

"Almost done, darling, just need to knit it back together again."

A nod after that as she started cleaning the needle with her full concentration.

"As for the hyperdrive, that is exactly right." It was an elegant solution if she said so herself. It had taken a while to figure out how to best capture those strange beings, then even longer to figure out a trap that would allow her to extract what she needed from them. Without killing them anyway. It seemed impossible to just extract their ability to phase and imbue the drive with it.

Sadly they needed to be alive and there for it.

"I managed to trap one and use their ability to our needs here. You like it?" That last bit punctuated with the tip of the needle jabbing in smoothly.