You Scratch My Back, Etc...

[Eryn]

Continuation from here.

Varik wasn't gentle with his captive. When they finally made it to the cockpit and she started beating on him, he hurled her to the floor and fired a stun blast into her back before she could get up. The only reason she'd remained conscious as long as she had was because he didn't want to carry her any more than he had to, but now he was starting to wonder if he shouldn't have just stunned her outright. He called for Kresh to keep tabs on the corellian, then sealed the ramp and dropped into the pilot's seat and fired up the engines. It was a long walk from here to his own berth, and taking a stroll with an unconscious girl over your shoulder wouldn't be received too well on a planet like this. It was attention he didn't need, so he'd rented out the berth next to his own as a precaution.

It was a short trip in the ship, pretty much just up and down again, and while it was mildly unusual, it still drew far less attention than the aforementioned unconscious carry. Once the ship had settled in, he hefted the girl over his shoulder and sent Kresh out first to check for any passersby. The coast was clear, so he made the short walk between berths and once again boarded his own, much more familiar, VCX-820 Escort Freighter. The ship was short on space, so the cells he'd had installed were little more than reinforced horizontal bunk pods. They were even enviro-sealed and could be used as survival pods in a pinch. Hard as hell to get open from the inside though, so that would definitely be a last resort.

After divesting her of her remaining weapons, an impressive number of knives secreted away on her person, he laid her out in the pod, stuck the nutrient IV in her arm, and sealed her up for the trip. With that done, he fired up his own engines and was space-borne within the next half hour. After that, all that remained was contacting the bounty placer for a drop location and to work out payment details.

Waking up from a stun blast felt a lot like waking up normally. Just add one blinding headache, a healthy dose of agonizingly painful muscles, dry mouth, stiff joints, and a dash of acute hatred for whoever shot you in the first place.

Eryn forced her eyes open, lids heavy, body unwilling to cooperate. In any other situation she might actually be comfortable here, surrounded closely by the pod's metal casing and long rectangular front window. Usually, she liked tight spaces. But she wasn't there by choice, and that alone was enough to set her nerves on fire.

She swallowed, blinking away the clouds in her mind. Hard to do with the head pain, but it was slowly subsiding. Eryn scanned the seal of the pod cover, pushing at it with her hands. She knew it was futile, knew there was no way to get out from the inside, but she looked anyway. A quick wiggle of her toes told her the knives in her boots were gone, though he'd left her shoes on, but he'd taken the blade from her forearm as well— he?

…He. HE. The hunter. The Blackstalker. [Member=Holden Tark]. And all the events of the past week came rushing back, overwhelmingly vivid.

"Tark," she winced in remembrance, closing her eyes and letting her head rest on the quilted interior. Images of the salvager hung in her mind, wounded and unconscious and alone. That fire in her chest flickered. Eryn clenched her jaw and packed them all up, tossing them in the back of her mind for later. She needed a clear head. Get out of current situation, worry about Tark later.
She'd been nabbed before by hunters and had always found a way to escape. No reason this time would be any different...right?

With effort, the fugitive rolled over, pressing a hand to the windowed side of the pod and squinting at her surroundings. The cockpit sat a short distance away, which told her the ship wasn't big (not good for her). Hyperspace swirled hypnotically through the viewport, bathing the cockpit in blue. Against the backdrop, the dark outline of a man sitting in the pilot's chair, and on the floor next to the seat…

Eryn's upper lip curled in loathing at the Blackstalker's dark, scale-armored back. "Hey!" She croaked angrily, hammering on the thick window with all her strength. Thud thud thud. "HEY! WHAT DID YOU DO WITH TARK?" So much for not worrying about him right now. Thud thud thud. "HEY. I'M TALKIN' TO YOU."

|- [Member=Varik Ryjin] -|

 

[Varik Ryjin]

The only reaction she got was a side-eye from Kresh, who otherwise made no move at all from his spot on the floor. His eyes then shifted from her to the man in the chair, as if wondering how he would react to her new wakefulness. The man himself was bent over a console, either reading or watching something on the screen that Eryn would be unable to see from her position. Without turning to look at her, he reached out to grab a small mic, then held it up and clicked it twice. The corresponding clicks answered from inside her pod, emanating from a comm unit attached above her head. He set the mic back down and continued composing his return message, hashing out those details he'd been wanting to finalize when they'd lifted off Atrisia.

His contact for this bounty was being unusually secretive, only giving out what little information he would need to reach the next stage of their transaction, and he didn't like it. Too often that kind of behavior meant things were not going to go his way, and he was honestly getting sick of greedy employers trying to double cross him. Trying to play a psychic never really worked out how they thought it would in the end, but he still hated having to go through all that trouble. It didn't help that most of the time he couldn't get clear thoughts either, mostly just emotion and intent, which meant he was still far from infallible. He'd been caught holding the short end of the stick more than once, and wasn't interested in repeating those experiences.

Point is, his gut was telling him there was something off about this mark, and the sooner he found out what that was, the better.

[member="Eryn"]

 

[Eryn]

She paused, craning her neck back, looking for the source of the clicking. It sounded like a comm. She spied something attached to the top of the pod. It WAS a comm. Eryn yelled at it. "Hello?" No movement from the cockpit. Growling, mostly in irritation but also in pain, she reached a hand up and over, scrabbling at the thing until it came free and jerked the comm unit down to her mouth. Her thumb found the right switches, and it crackled to life in her hands as she depressed the 'on' button.

"A push-to-talk?? Seriously? You got some kind of Dark Ages fetish or are you just too cheap to upgrade?" she snapped, sending the cockpit a glare. "...No, y'know what, never mind. What the hell did you do with Tark??"

|- [member="Varik Ryjin"] -|

 

[Varik Ryjin]

Finally finishing the message, he turned in the chair and stood, walking up to the pod then crouching so he was level with her. "You can't use these to hack the ship's computer. Binary comm signal. Slaved to these two handhelds, and only these two handhelds. Incredibly useful with tech-savvy targets. As for your boyfriend..." He inhaled slowly, making her wait for a minute before continuing. "He's gonna have one helluva headache if he wakes up." If. Not when. That should make her think twice. "Personally, I think you should be more concerned about your own predicament. Folks don't just put up an 80 million credit bounty for kriffs and giggles. Whoever wants you has a reason for it, and I can guarantee it's not going to be good for you."

 

[Eryn]

"Do you know how many people have tried this? Stood where you're standing and said the same damn thing to me?" She'd thought about running with his statement, sharing the fact that whoever turned her in for collection would die, but he didn't seem the type to be worried about that or get all gun-shy. Besides, preparing him for it wouldn't do her any good.

Eryn sneered at him through the glass. "You don't scare me. You're all alike. Overconfident, think 'cause I'm not tall, big, 'nd scaled that I'm an easy payday, right? Just makes it easier for me to slip through your fingers."
She kicked at the glass, gritting her teeth against the aching pain shooting through her body, her teal eyes sharp and daring.

 

[Varik Ryjin]

"Everyone's an easy payday. Even the big, tall, and scaly ones. You just have to know how to go after them." He settled into a seated position with his legs crossed, looking at her with a glint of curiosity in his eyes. "Most hunters do it wrong. They find a method that works well for a couple targets, then they start thinking it's good for all of them. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. You have to study them, stalk them until you know their next move better than they do." The Blackstalker appeared next to him, settling down almost daintily on the floor by his left knee. He reached a hand out and scratched beneath the scales behind its ears.

"Take you, for instance. All I had to do was give you nowhere to run, no means of getting out so you could melt into the populace like you've done a hundred times before. You're good at disappearing in the open, but you can't handle confined spaces." He stopped scratching and Kresh set his head down on the man's knee, content to simply listen and watch, knowing the young woman couldn't go anywhere. "Well, not unless it's a hiding spot. You sure did leave a lot of blood in that locker. You must have been passed out for hours. I'm surprised Tark didn't turn you in himself. Eighty million is a helluva payday for a guy like him."

 

[Eryn]

His last words hit a nerve, much to her astonishment. Eryn felt defensive words surge up through her throat, and she found herself mashing the comm button and spitting them at the hunter with a certain degree of hostility before she could force them back down. "It's not that hard to believe. Not everyone's out for themselves, not like you are. [Member=Holden Tark] knew I was worth something and he never looked at me like I was a payday. He was the first decent person I'd met in years, and you gunned him down like he was nothing. People like you are the reason this galaxy is rotting."

She paused, swallowing, eyebrows raised in surprise at the outburst. It was unlike her, very unlike her, and Eryn didn't like it. Then again, maybe it really wasn't. Living like she did, being stabbed in the back by people you thought were cool had become so common that she'd eventually stopped trying to see good people in the sea of bad. Her attitude became 'guilty until proven innocent, and even then, still guilty'. Whatever kind of person she'd been before adopting that mentality? She almost couldn't remember.

This hunter's sharp eye and intimate knowledge of her habits had her on edge, and from the curiosity in his eyes, he knew it. He was smart, too smart, and for the first time since crawling her way out of that grave all those years ago, Eryn wasn't entirely confident she'd get out of this one as easily as she had the previous times. She met his gaze with a defiant, set jaw and an angry flare in her teal eyes, looking more like her mother than she'd care to admit. "How'd you know there was blood? Tark cleaned it up before we left the ship. You're so keen to examine me? Let's talk about you, hunter. You and your scaly dog. Where the hell did you come from? No no, I'll guess, let's see… you're an orphan with no skill set who never knew his mommy, so you turned to bounty hunting because, credits, and you like the thrill of ruining other people's lives."

|- [member="Varik Ryjin"] -|

 

[Varik Ryjin]

"Wrong on all but one count, sweetheart. I do like credits, but the people that pay me are the reason this galaxy is rotting. I just do the work that needs doing." His stare was implacable as ever, none of her words seeming to strike a cord or make him twitch. "If it's not me, it'll be someone else, and this is what I'm good at." He shrugged, as though that settled the matter. In truth, he expected her to scoff and keep pushing, keep trying to apply pressure and find a weak spot. She wouldn't.

"As for the blood, how about you figure it out? You seem to consider yourself quite the sleuth, so you shouldn't have any trouble with that one. You might even say it's plain as day." His smirk gave away the joke. The lighting in the cabin was much closer to twilight or even early evening than it was daylight, considerably darker than one would usually expect. Neither he, nor the Blackstalker seemed bothered by it though, and if she thought back to the glow of the console screen he'd been using earlier, there would have been very little light illuminating his face. That, and his unconventionally vivid violet eyes. Not traditionally a human coloration. "Go on then. Examine away."

 

[Eryn]

It didn't take her long. Eryn rolled her eyes, looking a little disgusted at her situation. "You can see in the dark? Great. Fantastic, that's just…great." She studied his face with the expression of one viewing gory roadkill, now noting his eye color. He didn't look alien. His features were very human, in fact. Then again, so were hers and she wasn't fully human. "Umbaran mutt, then?"

An alarming thought crossed her mind, but Eryn kept the anxiety off her face. Not that it mattered much if he had the kind of powers she thought he might. Umbaran had telepathic abilities, from what she'd heard, and the idea of someone rooting around in her brain looking at her from the inside out was not appealing in the least. Her mother had taught her a few things, ways to keep 'influencers' at bay, but they weren't foolproof and didn't work unless you focused 'hella hard.

"Don't you lot have some kind of mind control abilities or something?"

|- [member="Varik Ryjin"] -|

 

[Varik Ryjin]

"Ooh, now wouldn't that be fun. Just imagine all the things we'd be doing right now..." The dark glint in his eye was not reassuring at all, but it was quickly replaced by a chuckle and a smile. "Please, if I could control minds do you really think I'd have had any trouble with your dear sweet captain?" He laughed again, clearly humored by her mild terror at the idea of being controlled by him, even though she was already entirely in his power. "You're not entirely human yourself, are you? You should have been out for another four hours. That's quite the metabolism you've got there." He gestured, indicating the IV plugged into her arm. "Maybe I should up your dose. Wouldn't want you wasting away in there, would we?"

He rose and bent over the pod, adjusting various settings she couldn't see. He chuckled again when she reacted to the IV, making a move to tear it out of her arm before hesitating. "Relax, it's just nutrients. If I wanted to put you out I'd use gas." He leaned down and watched her through the top window pane. "Which I might do if you start getting too energetic, so behave and you might get to be awake when I hand you over."

| [member="Eryn"] |

 

[Eryn]

She thought again about pulling the IV out as she glared at him through the glass, but odds were he'd just knock her out again to put it back in, and if she wanted out of this situation, she needed to be conscious. Usually, all she had to do was wait for the hunter to make a mistake. But this guy? Eryn was beginning to think 'mistake' wasn't in his vocabulary. She fought with his confident, violet gaze, stabbing back with hateful challenge. She was powerless in the pod and he knew it, signs of comfortable arrogance and impending victory on his angular face, and it made her hybrid blood boil.

It must have been obvious, too, because his smirk grew slowly, and Eryn was ready to smash her fists against the window until it broke when something caught her eye in her peripheral vision. A dim, flashing light on the main computer in the cockpit. She shifted a little, testing her strength. The pain was subsiding, slowly but surely. "You've got mail," she snapped, nodding towards the cockpit before returning her eyes to his.

|- [member="Varik Ryjin"] -|

 

[Varik Ryjin]

He turned his head to check the blinking light, even though the soft pinging was enough to verify her words, then looked back at her and raised the comm to speak again. "The trip will be easier if you sleep." Then he stood and returned to the pilot's station, placing the comm receiver on the console next to him. Whatever was in the message would be indiscernible to her from her vantage point inside the sound-proofed pod, and he was careful to keep his body language from betraying anything he didn't want her to know. This latest message did nothing to remedy his growing sense of unease about the client, and the more he read the worse it got.

Once he was through, he spun to face the controls as the ship dropped out of hyperspace then began preparations to jump to the new coordinates.


| [member="Eryn"] |