Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Private Asylum Denied

The Doc shook his head, but a smile crept across his features in spite of everything. "Maybe there's something to this whole 'will of the Force' thing," he said, looking up at Shai, "because I can't think of any other reason that you, a near-stranger, are doing all this for me on the worst night of my life." He was grateful, so, so grateful, and he hoped that would come across, but he was also puzzled, and a little in awe of the mercenary. Maybe an hour ago, she'd been part of the security force hunting him down. Now she was his only lifeline, the only reason he wasn't in CorpSec hands and his only hope for a future in which he stayed out of them. The change was dizzying.

But he'd always believed that anyone was capable of change, and of selflessness. Maybe that belief was paying off.

The street medic stood and followed her to the cockpit, sliding easily down the ladder. It had the look of a well-maintained ship; Wrangler-class light freighters were infamous for being cheaply made, meaning they always seemed to be falling apart and required constant maintenance, but Shai had clearly done a great job of keeping this one in working order. The mercenary turned to him then, asking a question he was ill-prepared to answer. The Doc chuckled nervously, running a hand through his short hair as his thoughts spun. "I was hoping you had somewhere in mind," he said, peering at the planetary map. But that'd been an assumption based on what she'd said earlier.

Smuggling experience didn't necessarily mean knowing where you could lay low on every planet you visited.

"Okay," the Doc said, the wheels in his brain beginning to turn. "I was, ah... Before all this, I was thinking I could lay low in Smogtown. It's a shantytown underneath The Wall, that huge Globex arcology, built around the utility and maintenance sublevels. CorpSec never patrols there, and there are only security cams around the utility substations, to prevent theft or vandalism. Otherwise, the Corpos don't care what goes on down there." After all, why would they waste resources on people they considered the dregs of society? They'd never hold down company jobs and make profits for the DireX Board, so they were effectively beneath the execs' notice.

The one problem, of course, was where to land. When the Doc had planned to make this trip on his own, he'd hoped to hop cargo trams and use maintenance tunnels to get there overland. It'd been a long-shot plan that could've been derailed by one bad encounter with a security cam, but it'd also been all he had at the time. Now the pair of them could get to Smogtown a lot faster aboard Shai's ship, but they'd need a place to park it, somewhere that wouldn't be immediately detected by CorpSec. The Doc zoomed in on the map, comparing it to the records stored in his cybernetic eyes... and snapped his metal fingers. Which was less of a snap and more of a clank, really.

"Got it," he said. "There's an abandoned industrial hangar a couple of megablocks away." He input the coordinates.

 
Shai waved his comment off about her kindness with a smile. "Trust me, the Force is real. I've seen some wacky stuff over the years. As for helping you... eh, I'm just a decent person, I'd like to think. And I made a mistake. I wanna make it right." she commented as they made their way to the cockpit.

As the ship drifted through the air, Shai let out a snort when the Doc admitted to thinking she knew of a place to lay low. He started to go through his plans and different options. It was likely more for himself than for her. Eventually he scoured the map for a landing zone. A location seemed to pop out to him and he quickly locked in on the coordinates. "Sounds perfect." she muttered as she steered the ship towards the coordinates. On the way there, an alarm went off in the cockpit. However Shai didn't seem fazed by it at all. If anything, she seemed annoyed by it. With a sigh she opened the intercom channel of the ship. "Baby! Coolant rupture on aisle four. Can you please go sort it out quickly?" she called out and an affirmative beep answered back to her. "This karking ship. I love it but I hate it. Then again, that's what happens if you cheap out on repairs and maintenance for almost a decade." she commented, glancing up at him with a smirk.

They arrived at the place in no time. It quickly became apparent that they were in arguably the worst area on the planet. Even the air smelled cheap and dirty. But the biggest problem was the warehouse. The roof had no access for them to enter. But a side door stood out to her that seemed big enough to fit her ship. "That door looks perfect. Can you go check if it can still open?" she asked him as she lowered the ship as close to the ground as possible for him to jump out.

As soon as the doors were open, she carefully steered the ship in and set it down. Power was cut and the ship's engines went silent. Shai got up from the pilot's seat and made her way out of the ship. She looked around a bit then back to the Doc. "Guess this is home for now. Luckily we got five star accommodation." she joked as she pointed to her ship. She fell quiet for a bit as she looked around then back to him. "Hey." she spoke up, wrapping her arms around him in a warm embrace. "Things will get better. You'll see. You'll be fine, this will all blow over eventually." she reassured him softly as she pulled back and looked at him with a warm smile.

Doc Painless Doc Painless
 
It wasn't a long flight to the abandoned warehouse, but it felt long. As the freighter dove between cloudcutters and descended past level after level of Denon's endless megacity, down and down and down, the Doc couldn't help but feel like he was being swallowed by some impossibly vast beast of metal and duracrete - or perhaps being cast into hell. The grim thought stuck with him. Maybe this was what he deserved, to be thrown out of civilized society and left at the very bottom of everything, amid the smoke and the heat and the grime and the people who dared not show their faces in the world above. They were his people now, because he was a terrorist and a murderer.

He was going to have to come to terms with that. The only choices were to live with it, or to die.

The cockpit alarm jerked the Doc from those grim thoughts, and he chuckled at Shai's explanation. "Good thing you've got the droid to help," he replied. He'd always liked droids, and went way back working with them. They were partners to him, not mere property, a view that had gotten him into trouble more than once. It'd been a large part of the trouble that had carried him to Denon, forcing him to shed his old name and face. In any case, he was glad that Shai seemed close with her droid, and treated it well. "Please" wasn't often in an organic's vocabulary when speaking to their mechanical helpers, no matter how tirelessly they worked to keep ships and businesses running.

Soon the descent was complete, and the warehouse loomed up before them. A couple of years earlier it had been owned by a construction company called Fority Fabrication Services, used to store countless bags of quick-set duracrete. But Fority had cut corners when building a hab complex in Baker's Row, and the place had collapsed, killing a whole lot of people. The cheap, faulty duracrete had been part of the problem, and the company had quickly disposed of the evidence. One of the Doc's first contracts on Denon had been hiring slicers to infiltrate Fority's offices and steal files that proved they'd knowingly done shoddy work, then tried to cover up their complicity.

Fority had ultimately been folded back into a parent company after a public outcry, and the warehouse forgotten.

Shai brought them in close, toward a side door that had served as a kind of loading dock, and the Doc jumped out to get it open. It wasn't difficult for his augmented legs to clear the gap from the ship's ramp to the warehouse platform, even without a running start. He leapt straight across and rolled over his shoulder as he landed, diffusing his momentum so that he didn't hurt himself. The button that controlled the place's huge cargo doors was rusted but intact. There was a security keypad beneath it, but the encryption was nothing to write home about; the Doc had a computer spike hidden in one of his mechanical fingers, and the program on it cracked the code in seconds.

The huge doors groaned open for the first time in two years, and Shai's ship was free to glide inside. The warehouse had been heavily climate controlled back in the day, to prevent the duracrete from getting wet and setting inside its bags, and the air remained as dry and still as a tomb. It wasn't exactly homey, just a massive, empty space except for the foreman's office in one corner, but at least there was no mould... and no lurking mynocks or duracrete slugs, common pests in the underlevels. Shai set down and came down the ramp to meet him, and he chuckled at her joke as he took in the space - and the enormity of what it represented for his life, so far from his old clinic.

Then Shai hugged him. The Doc froze for a moment, taken by surprise. Just hours ago, this woman - this mercenary - had been on the cusp of dragging him into a CorpSec cell, but then she'd fought to save his life, talked him off the ledge, flown him to safety... and now this. The street medic shut his eyes and sighed, gently raising his arms to hug her back. What a bizarre day, a day with lasting, far-reaching consequences. But if this change in Shai's attitude towards him was a permanent one, he had found something even more than an ally - he had found a friend. "Thank you," he whispered back. "I... I have a hard time believing that right now, but it helps to hear it anyway."

She stepped back, and he smiled in return. There might only be one upside to all this, but it was a really good one.

 
With a nod she gave him a light punch on the chest and glanced around again. ”Not gonna lie, you could probably set up a new gig around here somewhere. To get business rolling and all...” she commented as she glanced back at him. He seemed to be in better spirits now. But it would likely not last if she didn’t keep up the support.

And if she had to guess, she had an idea on how to keep his spirits up. ”But exploring and planning can wait. Right now I’m hungry, dying for another drink, and I’m guessing you’re not that far off either. Some come on.” she quipped as she wrapped an arm around his and dragged him back to her ship. ”I got these amazing burger patties the other day. Got cheese in ‘em and everything. I’ve been wanting to cook a few up and this is the perfect opportunity.” she continued as she led him up into the ship and closed it up.

Doc Painless Doc Painless
 

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