A Promise Due

[Jairus Starvald]

You know how the nights can get these days, cold, dampy, a feth ton of wind every once in a while. The point I am trying to make is that it ain’t a fun day to get kidnapped. Sadly Aerin didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter, a promise had been made and ya know how I get about promises made. Gotta fulfill em anyway you can. Look, I know what you are thinking right now, Sith Lord, fulfilling promises, keeping you word, yeah yeah. Stereotype number one, but hear me out here.

Ya only arrive in this world with two things, your world and your dignity. You lose the later the moment you realize ya didn’t get any clothes with you for your trip and so you are left with that one thing. That one abstract notion of honor that binds all real men together. Your word. It is that sudden realization when you sit at night with a drink in your lap and a cigar perched between your teeth that you truly realize what that means.

Most men feel this instinctively, they realize the importance of their word given and that is why men are all alike in one distinct way. We don’t give out our word freely or eagerly for that matter, we are taciturn in our approach of promises, because we realize we ain’t getting it back. Dust in the wind. Words uttered and no longer traceable through the ebbs and flows of time.

She would find herself strapped to a chair, every fiber in her being was hurting, hell of a beating had been given to her as a matter of surprise. Drugged, no sleep given and in an environment of foreign dissolution, how would she react? What would she do first? Scream? There was no one around, seemingly. Try and get out? Plausible, her shackles were strong, but electronically locked.

Gotta love the new developments in futuristic design, if she had enough training in the art of manipulating the electrical and droidical, she might just have enough time to get her locks off and go for the door. It wouldn’t be locked… which was strange.

All in all, she wouldn’t even realize this was a promise due. That she had asked for this herself, because it had been months since her pleasant evening with the Lord Ovmar. Time passed and she had lost hope to ever realize her dreams, her Sith Lord Gent had disappeared and nobody knew how to find him.

In due time she would realize the lesson in this exercise.

 

[Siyndacha Aerin]

She never forgot.

That one meeting promised to effect a change in her life that had been a long time coming, one road that she hadn't been absolutely certain of until then. She had went to a world with the intent to simply sit herself at the head of something aged and enduring, and had come away from it with a furthering of her thinking and a much more informed opinion of a man that she had met before everything had slowly begun to change. It had seemed like ages between the first meeting and the next (how many years had it been?), just as it had seemed so long since he had made her a promise... and left her waiting. For months. At first she assured herself, and she had clung to that assurance as days turned to weeks, and weeks morphed into months. At some point along the way, self-assurance soured to anger. No-one had ever seen her so incensed, but then... never had she wanted something as much as this.

Never did she expect what had come to pass, nor did her mind make the connection when her head rolled into consciousness and her body came alive with a deep, painful, aching soreness that memory was either absent for or too presently sluggish to remember the cause. She hadn't been off in the land of unawareness for very long - a handful of moments at most - and as she groaned, cringed, and her body whimpered at the slightest movement, fuzzy images slugged over her psyche, dropping vague reminders that something had occurred, and that this was the first clarity she had in... well. When? Why? One particularly potent, errant memory flashed up and she shrunk back from it visibly, the haze of the still-waning drugs in her system skewing her perceptions, and her body screeched at the motion. A moaning sob simply couldn't be helped. Awareness was a fragile and tender thing, but consciousness was enough to drive her to the most distinct and true feeling to her character in the face of this wholly unfamiliar and uncontrolled state of self - anger, and it welled up fast.

There was a certain quality of anger that some were privy to. While an unfortunate percentage were given to a blind rage, others gained clarity and seething focus. She was the latter, her hands balling into the tightest, most palm-piercing fists that her sluggish, pained form could manage, a pitiful, dry-throated roar scratching and squeaking out of her, tail-ended with a hot tears. She jerked her arms, but for reasons unknown they wouldn't move as they should. Fists unfurled into shaking hands, and she forced her head up, and eyes to focus. The world shifted sharply, and her eyes squeezed shut. She laid her palms flat, and tried to push herself up, only to be greeted by a digging edge of metal into her arms. She slumped back again, eyes staring at the source of the hard edge while the very dim darkness tried to shift before her eyes again, mind trying to grasp just what it was seeing. Wheels turned a bit better moment by moment for every mote and effort of concentration, and soon enough clarity dawned.

Shackles... and what of that steady green light? That wasn't there a moment ago... at least, she thought it hadn't been. What did it... electronic shackles. It wasn't long after that when she put two and two together, and a somewhat derisive approximation of a laugh slipped from her dry throat and mouth at the realization: this could be easy, and whoever or whatever had done this clearly didn't know what she was capable of. She laughed again, a more sustained sound, livelier, but it devolved into hacking coughs, and it was several moments before the coughing ceased. Licking futilely at her lips, she refocused on the shackle on the left, her awareness greater than it had been several minutes before. She squinted, the old and familiar presence of the Force slipping through her, and finding the anger there. That was different. That felt so different, but there was no use for semantics here, and she just turned her increasing attention back to the shackle on the left. She felt it, her awareness slipping into its inner workings, seeing the construct for what it was, its strengths and its weaknesses... and she exploited the most critical weakness in an offhand guess that, perhaps, she could drive her seething anger into it, and indeed, the lock failed, smoked, and popped open with a click.

This caused a significant amount of laughter, a dried sound with an admittedly delusional quality that once again ended in a round of coughing before she did the same to the shackle on the right, and the process of laughter eliciting a wheezing pulmonary response. Once her lungs and throat calmed from the distress, she tried once again to push herself up from what she had come to realize was a cold, hard chair, and this time was successful... at least until she wobbled and sunk back into the unforgiving piece of furniture a moment later. A breath in, a breath out, her silver-blue eyes taking in the doorknob that she'd noticed at some point in her wriggling, jerking and cringing. Again, she pushed herself up from the chair, and pressed palms into her eyes while the dizziness leveled enough for her to lift her head, open her eyes, and look at the door.

One wobbling step after another she crossed the barely-lit room until one hand slapped on the doorknob, and she turned it, and it... turned? Confusion hit her for a second (she had most assuredly expecting the thing to be locked), then a laugh pealed out of her while she still gripped the knob. Then anger rushed in at this entire ordeal and she wrenched the door open sharply, making quite the bit of noise in the act...

...and stalked out of the room.

[member="Darth Carach"]

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Siyndacha Aerin"]

…right into the laminanium-plating of the TA4 Ultra Battle Droid that had been standing guard outside of the door. The moment it opened and her nose touched his back, the droid whirled around with a roundhouse kick trailing behind his frame.​

Sindy would have to react fast if she didn’t want a mouthful of droid foot, but at the same time… how much energy and concentration did she have to pull this off?​

It was almost as if Carach just wanted her dead or was extremely unfair in his testing.​

 

[Siyndacha Aerin]

[member="Darth Carach"]

Concentration? Yes, that was getting better with each passing second. Energy? Oh, not as much as would have been ideal, but adrenaline? Of course. She recognized this droid for what it was and what it was capable of - it was her business to know, and she knew that given the assumed nature of this facility, and the state she'd found herself in, that this droid was not friendly; she took a few quick steps back, stumbling right back into the room she'd just exited, enough to see the droid turning sharply with a swinging kick.

She ducked.

That foot met the door frame, instead of her head, and the door frame for its part suffered less than she would have in its place. The leg passed, the time of advantage arrived, and she took it, bringing to bear the breadth and depth of her knowledge of this machine; she closed the distance on purpose as the back of the droid came into her field of vision, and commenced with the laying of hands, palms flat against the laminanium-coated plates. Then she invaded in a breath, achieving near-ecstasy at the contact, her own blitzkrieg flashing through system after system, running the roads that gave her access to simply... decommission, shut the droid down, or at the very least severely incapacitate it.

~// Accept my will or be bricked, roboto-san. //~

This was child's play, she had been speaking the language of their roots since she was not tall enough to reach the cookie jar without a precarious climb.

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]“[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px]Ditampa, sensei[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px].” [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px]the droid whirred about, retracting its leg and assumed a more subdued state, kneeling and his - well, for a lack of a better word - head, to indicate the respect he was suddenly experiencing for [member="Siyndacha Aerin"].[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]And then it awaited further orders without daring to say another word.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]~~~ [/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]It could be assumed that on that day Sindy and Carach met in his throneroom, words had probably been exchanged. His low baritone voice would have hummed softly, teasing and seducing her in kind while offering her an opportunity. It would have been explained that this had all been a test, and that she in fact had concluded it successfully, but this opportunity would be the real test for her. [/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]Because her offered to train her, teach her everything that he knew and more, to turn her into a weapon, to turn her into something… worthwhile.[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]It could also be assumed that she had accepted his offer, which brought us from the [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px]there[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px] to the [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px]now.[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px] [/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]~~~ [/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]Leg snapped up, his body rotating clockwise with his right leg acting like an axis for the movement, it was firmly aimed at her neck - trying to crash into it, and make it snap. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]Outside of the training sessions Sindy and Carach had [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px]interesting[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px] interactions, witty, amusing and most of the time pleasant in every sense of the word. But this did not carry over to the training, where Sindy would maybe get the feeling that her Master was trying to [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px]kill[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6666666666667px] her.[/SIZE]