Devil In A Tight Dress
The soft hum of ancient processors filled the room, an unchanging rhythm that had become almost meditative after so many hours...no, days. Parvati hadn't left the terminal suite in longer than she cared to count. She was composed, as always, but the stillness around her had gained a certain weight. Not fatigue. Not quite. It was the pressure of obsession settling across her shoulders.
The monitor screens threw shifting lines of cold light across her face, refracting in the curves of her cheekbones and catching in the edges of her lashes like wire filaments. Blue, green, violet, data crawled across the glass in waves, painting her in the glow of endless queries, half-truths, and dead ends. She sat upright, poised, but even poised people eventually crease at the seams. There was a faint shine of oil across her collarbone, a smudge on one glove, an empty stim stick wrapper crushed beside the armrest.
She didn't care. Not yet.
She had been hunting Aren D'Shade- a ghost in the circuitry, a myth whispered, Parvati had heard the name in fragments: a transaction spike here, a flagged node there, system diagnostics that flickered and failed without explanation. Aren wasn't the sort of hacker that left a trail. She was the kind of woman who left voids where her footprints had once been. Dangerous and talented. Precisely what Parvati needed.
Another tool for the plan and another step forward. She would take back what was hers.
Information cost her dearly, from credits to favors. Even the most devout slicers on her payroll had turned up almost nothing. Not a face. Not an alias worth tracing. No safehouses, no known hardware signatures. She had begun to wonder if the woman even truly existed.
And then- a ripple.
A message board. Buried so deep in the Holonet it practically rotted in the dark. Obsolete protocols patched together with custom encryption, frequented only by paranoid geniuses and digital anarchists too stubborn to leave the past behind. Her droids found a pattern in the logins, something subtle. A repeated time signature. A non-standard routing key, it was barely anything.
But it was enough.
One trace led to another, and then came the rumor. Just a whisper, too fragile to verify, that Aren D'Shade had once served with the Sith. Parvati sat up straighter when she read it. Not out of fear or excitement but recognition. The galaxy was full of people who wore masks. Sith, Jedi, criminal. Some took theirs off and moved on.
Others kept them hidden, buried, locked inside, but they never really let them go.
Parvati didn't need the full story. She just needed the crack in the mask.
So she wrote something.
Not a threat nor an invitation. But a riddle made of implication. Buried like bait in a thread no one else would care to read. It wasn't addressed to Aren, but it didn't need to be. She would know. The tone, the precision of the reference, the digital scent, something in it was carved just for her.
[User: null.v0id]
[Post ID: #9851739]
[Thread: UOnceWoreRed]
[Timestamp: 03:47:12 // cycle_θ7]
---
they think you're clean.
quiet. sharp. untraceable.
but some masks crack under heat
and yours… flickered.
only for a moment.
an old reflex.
a word that doesn't belong in this timeline.
not a threat.
just a mirror.
if someone else saw it,
you'd have a problem.
maybe check the logs before someone scrapes them.
---
That had been days ago.
Now Parvati sat at the top of a ruined air traffic control tower, long abandoned by any authority worth naming. The windows circled the room like a crown- thick, reinforced glass stained with time. Through them, the broken skyline stretched far into the distance, a horizon of steel and silence. What remained of the city beneath was a sprawl of forgotten commerce and faded lights, its life now running through wires, terminals, and shadow trades.
She chose this place for its irony. Once a center of command. Now hollow and silent.
A small table sat at the center of the room, its surface immaculate. A glass of amber whiskey caught the fading light, casting long, rippled reflections across the polished floor. She sipped from it with leisure, her coat draped over one shoulder like a mantle. Beneath it, armor-threaded silks clung to her frame, elegant but functional, always ready.
Sable stood against the far wall, silent, cloaked in synthflesh and stillness. Her other droids had already hardwired the tower's network into a localized loop, rerouting any incoming signal attempts through recursive firewalls and synthetic decoys. If Aren tried anything clever, the system would bite back.
But Parvati wasn't preparing for war.
She was preparing for conversation.
The kind that only happened when two women who lived behind masks finally looked each other in the eye. And she was very curious what kind of eyes Aren D'Shade had these days.
Mistress of the House ⛧ The Velvet Guillotine ⛧ High Priestess of Vice