Private Under The Hood

[Darth Virelia]

"Dungeon Delving."

Tag - Zee Caromed


The sky above was a constant bruise—metallic blue with veins of corroded red, like the atmosphere itself still remembered what it had been made to forget. Centuries of death. Rebirth. Death again. No matter how many towers they raised or sectors they cleared, Taris remained a wounded world.

Darth Virelia walked through the market square without a hood, face exposed to the sunless light that filtered through the smog, her presence announced not by armor or banners, but by the silence that followed her like a veil. Even here, in Mandalorian space, where warriors prided themselves on not flinching from power, people gave her room. A ripple of instinctual unease passed through the crowd—a shuffling aside, a sudden interest in vendor stock, averted eyes.

She didn't need fear. But she permitted it.

Her boots clicked softly on duracrete still stained with chemical rot. Her cloak, a deep, austere black trimmed in violet piping, whispered behind her with every motion. No fanfare. No entourage. Just her. Moving like a scalpel between organs.

Taris had changed. A little. Enough to be annoying.

The Mandalorians had done what they always did—paved over memory, poured credits into infrastructure, declared the world theirs by virtue of conquest. But the bones were still here. And she could feel them.

They whispered to her beneath the streets. Ancient catacombs. Rakghoul nests long turned to dust. Sith shrines buried beneath refineries and sports arenas. And deeper still, the old places. Places the Jedi had collapsed and buried, not with reverence, but fear. Those were what she had come for. That was where her work would continue.

But first, she needed a few things.

The street vendor was watching her. Not staring—Mandalorians rarely made that mistake—but watching, like a sentry might observe an unmarked crate ticking in the corner of a room. He was older, scar running from the brow through a cybernetic eye, pauldron etched with clan symbols she didn't bother reading.

She stopped at his stall anyway.

"Repulsor clamps," she said, voice like smooth obsidian scraping against intuition. "Variable tension. Magnetic isolation core, low-friction pads."

He blinked, didn't ask for a name. Just turned and started pulling items from the rack.

"And thermal ropes," she added, eyes flicking over the display with surgical calm. "Three coils. The compact variant."

The vendor nodded. "Delving, are we?"

She looked at him then. Truly looked. Not with eyes, but with the quiet pressure of intent. He tensed. Good. That meant he could still feel.

"There are places in this galaxy," she murmured, "where even fire doesn't wish to go. I plan to ask why."

He handed her the gear in silence.

She didn't haggle.

From there, she passed through the alleyways behind the open plaza—low-lit, wreathed in steam from exhaust vents and sizzling moisture in the air. Here, the underlayers of Taris bled through—grates exposing the chasms below, where rusted support beams groaned in quiet protest. This part of the city didn't pretend to be alive. It simply endured.

Which made it more honest than most.

Virelia moved without haste, but with direction. Her next stop was a supply node listed under a shell company—one of her own. Taris was Mandalorian space, but it was also old space. And old space had gaps. Forgotten access shafts. Back doors. Once, long ago, someone had stashed sensor-blocked crates beneath what was now a meat processing plant. She had inherited the key.

A faint whir of repulsors overhead drew her gaze briefly. A Mandalorian patrol swooped low on jetpacks—four soldiers in burnished red and bronze, armed and watching. Not confrontational. Not yet. Just observant.

She offered no salute. No motion at all.

Let them wonder.

Her thoughts drifted, just for a moment, to what lay ahead. The ruin wasn't on any modern map. She had triangulated it from Sith records, Jedi deletions, and seismic inconsistencies. It was older than even the Rakatan presence here, if her instincts were correct. Not just a tomb—an axiom. A wound in the Force stitched over with time and fear.

She would tear it open.

A hiss of pneumatics as the storage door unsealed before her. The interior lights flickered to life—old, yellow sodium lamps illuminating rows of gear, tools, and databanks. Quiet. Untouched. Just how she had left it.

Virelia exhaled, just once.

Her hand ran across the edge of a crate, fingers trailing over the embossed sigil of an empire long dead.

"No more delays," she whispered.

 

[Zee Caromed]

Caromed had held terrain in Taris for centuries. Not in the overt way that made sense to most. They did not control the police forces, they did not collect taxes. They had outlasted a dozen regimes, including some actively hostile to their existence. Though in the ancient years Caromed had borne the symbol of a nexu as their symbol, in modern years they'd labelled themselves with drengir - a subversive, malicious, hardy plant with a well-refined taste for meat. None could argue that this was not appropriate. If nothing else, a weed was the perfect face for a clan that had lingered on the verge of extinction for generations without dying.

The patrols in the sky were Mandalorian - Verd, if Zee had to guess, or Vizla. The man at the shop had been Caromed. The flow of information was unequal by design. Trust was not earned.

The mysterious woman from nowhere planning an excursion somewhere dark and private? She'd barely registered as important, even to a clan of largely force sensitive warriors. You didn't live long on Taris by sticking your nose into other people's business. That hole in the ground, though. That specific hole? Well.

The daughter of Petra Cavataio lived mere kilometers away. The hole was known to the clan. They kept eyes on it. Darth Virelia hadn't been worth much more than a note of consideration before she'd gone that way. Not that she wasn't a threat, but simply because Caromed wasn't in the business of getting involved most of the time. They maintaned hospitals and safehouses.

Zee also didn't like to get involved directly. He was, however, the closest representative of Caromed's authority in this district. The line of inheritance did not stop at his mother - her legacy was his to bear.

He'd detoured through the streets of Taris, moving swiftly through the claustrophobic hairpin alleyways through a combination of familiarity and hoverboarding skill. Met up with a team that he instructed to establish a respectable perimeter. Entered the ruins and tracked the passage of a single woman though the steps left in radioactive dust and the achingly familiar presence of the dark side. Zee was not powerful in that way, but the opression and passion of it had always felt a bit like home.

"Looking for something to take home?" The soft-voiced human called out from some distance away, stepping off of his board. He kept his beskar-ika openly displayed at the small of his back. For once, he wore a lightsaber on his hip. It didn't feel like his, even if it was. "Or are you out looking for a little trouble tonight?"

​

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Dungeon Delving."

Tag - Zee Caromed


The voice echoed down the corridor like a ripple through old blood.

Virelia did not startle. She was kneeling beside a shattered monolith—something once carved, once sacred, now smoothed down by time and water and heat. Her fingers were coated in dust, tracing symbols that had long since forgotten what they meant. But she'd remembered for them.

When the words reached her—low, casual, far too measured to be a warning—she did not rise immediately. Instead, she finished her gesture, slow and deliberate, pressing her palm flat against the stone. There was a sound beneath it, just barely audible. Not mechanical. Not quite alive.

She stood.

Black cloak falling around her like a curtain. Pale skin faintly luminescent in the half-light of the ruin. Eyes glowing faintly violet now, as if stirred by whatever lay buried below.

Then she turned toward him.

Her gaze drifted over the man—not hostile, not yet—but deeply, visibly amused. Not the sharp amusement of cruelty, but something darker. The kind of satisfaction that came when someone finally showed up to play the game correctly.

She looked him over, openly now. The lightsaber. The beskar. The tone.

"You came wearing a blade that doesn't belong to you and a question that assumes I need trouble to find me." A pause. "It's cute."

She took a single step forward, the dust curling around her boots like ash responding to a breeze that hadn't touched anything else in years.

"But if I were you, I'd save the smooth introductions for someone who still knows how to blush. I came here for something that can't be bought. Or buried. Or ignored."

Her eyes narrowed slightly. She tilted her head, half-curious, half predatory.

"So. Are you here to test against what's waking? Or are you just the polite messenger boy, come to ask the dangerous woman in the dark to behave?"

 

[Zee Caromed]

"Ma'am, if that qualifies as 'smooth' to you?" Zee chided gently. "You need a higher quality of suitor. Not me, of course. Somebody who can match and appreciate your very clear... energy." He explained, encircling the intense woman in his perspective by drawing a little circle around her with one painted fingernail.

As much as Zee felt that the lightsaber wasn't his, it did belong to him. His mother had made her position on this very clear - and he feared her reprisal more than just about anything else. The narrow band between the two spheres of 'things he could do make her actually upset' and 'things he might conceivable ever willingly do' almost entirely revolved around the Force and the implements related to it. He didn't feel the lightsaber was his, but he sure wasn't about to let it belong to anyone else.

It was an annoying position to feel himself forced to take.

"I am, in fact, the polite messenger boy." Zalke replied without an ounce of shame or reservation. The fact that he was of an age with the blonde was irrelevant - Zee had essentially no attachment to the trappings of power or masculinity. A challenge to either meant nothing here, out of view of all but the most miserable souls - with both parties quite aware of the power disparity between them. Zee wasn't helpless, nor was he without his tricks - but he wasn't a Darth. "There are people important to me on this planet. There are resources critical to the efforts of my power base. It would hinder my plans to have a calamity here, and it would damage the resources of my allies." Zee summarized, taking pains to provide a Sith context to his desires. No threats, no fear, no games; simple facts.

"I would like you to behave, though I cannot force you to." Zee summarized quietly, kicking his hoverboard into his hands. He flipped it around and sheathed it at his back, offering a crooked smile with a hand on his hip. "I won't waste your time by threatening you with things somebody else might to do you. And I think that trying to appeal to your better nature might just inscentivize you further - it's showing my throat, in a way." The slender human added. "But we're still talking, which I think means I present something interestesting on principle. I'll double down on that."

​

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Dungeon Delving."

Tag - Zee Caromed


The boy was honest.

That was the first thing she noticed—not his posturing, or his playfulness, but the absence of obfuscation. No cloak of bravado. No theatrical anger. Just a calm, articulate delivery of stakes. It was so rare, it almost felt like provocation.

She studied him.

Not his weapons. Not the saber that wasn't his, but had been given—a legacy chained to obligation. No, she watched the angles of his posture, the fluid way he stood without posturing. The casual rebellion in his cadence. The unguarded pride in not being the monster people feared he might become.

When she finally spoke, her voice had softened by a single, deliberate degree.

"You speak plainly. That's a gift. And a weapon. Few know how to wield either."

Her head tilted ever so slightly.

"If you wanted to impress me, you should've lied better. The truth is far more dangerous."

A faint curl of her lips—not a smile, not quite—but something close. Like the beginning of a door opening somewhere far below sea level.

She stepped closer, slow and sure, until they stood in the same circle of stale, sacred air.

"I believe you," she said, gently. Almost kindly. "About not wanting a calamity. About protecting what's yours. That's respectable."

Her gaze lingered on his lightsaber—not with threat, but curiosity.

"But the thing is... calamity is often the only thing old places respond to. Sometimes they need blood. Sometimes they need want."

Her hand rose, not toward him, but to the air between them—delicate, like brushing dust from a tapestry.

"And sometimes," she murmured, "they need someone who doesn't flinch when shown a throat."

A long silence stretched. Not tense. Just heavy. Full of the weight of what they both understood.

Then she stepped back.

"You may observe, if you like. But stay above the threshold when I descend. If what sleeps down there wakes... I won't shield anyone who isn't already mine."