Private Welcome To The Family

[Darth Virelia]

"Criminal Connections."

Tags - Enric Hask

Lexrul's skyline wore its money like jewelry. Razor-thin spires cut the night into orderly columns of light, each window a ledger, each hover-lane a vein moving liquid capital. Down in the warrens between respectable towers—where air recyclers coughed and the holo-ads flickered in colors they never meant to—someone had shuttered a bill-exchange and sold the sign for scrap. That was where she waited.

Darth Virelia sat in the dark behind the teller's cage, the bars gleaming like a grin. Her armor hummed quietly, violet filaments pulsing under slick black plates as if some predator heartbeat lived beneath the lacquer. Neon bled through the front security grate and laid a false dawn across the dust.

The room smelled of old paper, ozone, rain that never quite made it down this far. She had left the counter drawers open and empty as a statement—no illusions here but hers. Above, a coin-sized camera nested in a vent was enough to read breath on glass; a second watched the alley mouth, disguised as a dead glowfly. A third was not a camera at all, just a sliver of mirrored phrik that told her where the narrowest sightlines ran and which beam would kill the first fool through the door if she flicked two fingers right.

She knew nothing about the one she was meeting. That was delicious.

An aspiring criminal mind. A mind. She found herself smiling at that, at the sheer audacity implied. Most who reached for her were supplicants or dreamers. He had sent no dossier, no calling card, no rumor fattened by braggarts in a bar. He had simply requested a time and offered a location that did not choose him back. It felt like a move from someone who understood the difference between theatre and ritual.

She had set the space as a thesis. A single chair in the center, not facing the door. A glass on the counter—empty, dry—placed precisely on a ring of old spill, the imprint of what had been. A briefcase sat under the chair, latched but unlocked, full of nothing except the echo of the first mistake a greedy man makes. Beside her, a steel-edged ledger lay open to a blank page. Tests hid in plain sight. There is no better mirror than opportunity.

Outside, sirens lilted through the rain. A freight lifter howled as it knifed upward. A thousand transactions closed with polite chimes in the buildings above, all of them thinking themselves the world. Virelia listened to the living static, to the wires singing low, to the tug of currents no ear could hear. Lexrul was about appetite with rules. She was interested in what happened when appetite wrote its own.

The time came and went, then circled back like a patient hawk. She waited. Her excitement was quiet, clean, almost ascetic. The unknown is the sharpest taste. It promised the only two outcomes worth having: a future or a lesson.

 

[Enric Hask]

He was late.

Hask made lateness a blade, never an accident. The city wanted to measure him in ticks and credits, wanted him punctual like a well-oiled lift, and so he denied it that satisfaction. By the time he came, the hour already felt bruised, overripe, as though it had waited too long on the vine. He stepped through the grate with rain clinging to his shoulders like a second coat, the Lexrul drizzle giving him the faint shine of something dredged up from the gutter and polished just enough to pass in the light.

His eyes tracked the room once, not hurried. Slow, deliberate. Like a buyer tasting wares. The empty glass, the single chair that demanded obedience, the ledger left open to absence. He smiled at the precision, the intent, the theatre of it all. A set piece, carefully staged, as much a performance as a trap.

First his gaze settled on her, then on the violet filaments crawling like veins across blackened armor, on the pulse of something alive under lacquer, a predator heartbeat made into costume.

"Nice stage," he said at last, voice pitched low and dry, as if he had swallowed gravel and found the taste amusing. "But you don't know yet if I'm audience, actor…or critic."

He didn't sit. Not yet. He let the silence stretch until it felt like a second participant in the room, taut as wire, a silence that had teeth. He watched her watch him, curious which of them would name it first. For Hask, delay was ritual. Patience was proof. And sometimes, the longest answer was the sharpest.

Darth Virelia​

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Criminal Connections."

Tags - Enric Hask

The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Approval, maybe.

"I like critics," she said, voice easy, unforced. "They prove the work exists."

She didn't tell him to sit again. She leaned one shoulder against the bars, palms open on the cool metal, posture loose in a way that still read like readiness. The violet threads in her armor pulsed once, slow as a thought. She tipped her head toward the door without looking.

"Your two outside can stop pretending to be gutter statues. They're fine. This block is mine for the hour."

A beat, respectful, letting him own the space he'd claimed by standing.

"I'm Virelia," she added, simple as a handshake. "Thanks for coming. And for being late on purpose. It says you don't bend to clocks you didn't set."

She stepped to the counter and nudged the dry glass toward the edge with a finger, then let it sit there on its ring like a coin on a thumbnail. A quiet click sounded somewhere above as one of the eyes in the vents blinked and went to passive. She made a point of the courtesy.

"Name?" she asked, looking at him rather than writing in the ledger. "The one you prefer tonight, not the one the city bought."

The rain ticked a soft code on the grate. She glanced at the single chair, then back to him.

"Stand if you like. Sitting makes some people feel staged." A wry beat. "You're not wrong about the room. It's theatre. But theatre is honest. Honest in the way that only some can act."