will you sink down to me?
She felt like she was stalking Kamino's deep oceans again. There were obviously a lot of differences between the memory and her chronic, Coruscanti circumstances—notably the lack of a tail and the fact that she was not the meanest fish in this duracrete sea—but one similarity stood out.
She had staved off falling into a cycle of marine-like vertical migration for nearly a year, whereas on Kamino it had been almost a 27-hour process. It seemed that the Sith and Maw's invasion, not the encroaching light of a science sub or an unusually sunny day, had finally breached her relatively new, nonexistent water column. It left her but one choice, as it always had: dive. Get away from the Light, embrace the Dark.
Although she didn't want to do the either, she heeded the former. It'd be a matter of time before the Order figured out her—their—secret. Then it wouldn't matter that Damsy, that Kai, had fought for their collective home. That Arisso and Ridy had prepared the Reef for those affected by the violence. They'd all be bodies burning in the public streets. Something you loved could still poison you.
In squaloid form, she had scales and blubber to keep her warm at pressured depths, but in the underworld as a human there was no such comfort. Her ragged, off-white hood did little to keep in either the stale artificial heat pumped through the levels or her own body's. Hope slowly leeched from her soul, osmosed into the destitute atmosphere all around her as she walked down E Ave 917.12. The more Damsy actually paid any sort of attention, the harder it got to ignore the bantha that someone had smuggled into the underlevels. Except that bantha was her and her people. That someone, just her.
As she pushed on with no mindful purpose, she dialed up her squaloid hearing to eavesdrop on a conversation between two humanoids standing under the awning of a run-down storefront:
"Have you heard those stories comin' outta Veshok?"
"How could anyone not? They're all over the web."
Indeed, anyone with holonet access and a brave constitution would know the folklore:
Haunting songs coming from the abandoned factory in the dead of night.
A wandering white phantom that no one had seen in some time.
Curious teenagers braving the dark only to return to their families an EEG blip or two away from brain death.
Damsy had found time to read them all. Though every iteration of each story got more farfetched, she could always see the unadulterated grain of truth at the heart of the narratives. Still, it was getting out of hand. Word hadn't reached the Jedi yet—as far as she could tell—but it would soon—she could feel it even without the Force. Call it survivor's instinct. The Sanctorium Sithspawn had run into quite a few actually-Sith-Sithspawn since the had been released; to Damsy's grave disappointment, she and the others had not once been able to pull their unkinned kin from the Dark. As if the Siren Shifter needed one more reason to hate herself. Considering the state of the underworld, the Jedi would surely take even the storytelling of smugglers and spiceheads seriously.
She needed to do something.
Soon.
