First Reply Baby Driver

[Dia Secura]

"Get her! That's mine!"

The deep, guttural voice of the Herglic gangster rang out over the crowd, causing more than a few heads to turn. Dia wasn't inclined to turn her head back and check if she was being chased. She could hear the rush of footsteps, a dozen voices shouting in languages she didn't understand as the Herglic's underlings charged through the crowd and after her. In her hands, tightly clutched to her chest, was the subject of all the trouble: the stereo from the Herglic's airspeeder. It was a nice model, and it would fetch her a pretty credit.

And how was she supposed to know that she had broken into a gangster's airspeeder?

Up ahead, she could see an airspeeder idling just above the ground. It was impossible to make out the person in the driver's seat, but right now, the Twi'lek didn't care. That airspeeder was her best chance at escape. And best of all, the fool had left the passenger side window open.

Unceremoniously, the little Twi'lek threw herself through the open window; she writhed and wriggled into the seat, breathing heavily as she turned her wide, panicked eyes on the driver. Time to play up the damsel in distress angle.

"Please!" she begged. "Just drive, please!"

 

[Lilith Nytehand]

Wearing: This

Armed With: Clerical Error

She had only stopped a moment to investigate a strange noise in the engine. It had been a slightly frayed coupling, easily fixed.

She had acquired this speeder a few days ago, getting a cheap model as she had the means to upgrade it to her liking.

She hadn't bought cheap either. It was an old muscle racer, red with white stripes. She had accidentally opened the passenger window ac while adjusting her seat.

So when a woman literally crashed in through the window, it had come as a bit of a surprise.

But the look of fear in her eyes told her all she needed to know: she was dead if she was caught.

"Hang on!" Lilith Nytehand replied to Dia Secura , pushing the controls full throttle my and rocketing forward. With other gangsters muscle racers in hot pursuit...

"Mind telling me what you're running from? I'm sure I can help." Lilith offered as she piloted like a maniac.

"I'm good at helping! See?!"

 

[Dia Secura]

Tagging: Lilith Nytehand

Under any other circumstances, Dia might have copped a little bit of an attitude with the other woman. Right now, however, survival came first. The driver's crazed piloting threatened to throw the petite Twi'lek around the cabin like a rag doll, and so she quickly strapped herself into the passenger's seat.

"Gangsters! They're trying to take my stereo!" Dia cried out, still holding the electronics to her chest. It wasn't a lie, not entirely. She had stolen it, fair and square, after all. She reached into the pocket of her vest, yanking her holdout blaster out and firing blindly out the window behind them.

One of the other airspeeders slammed into the back of theirs, and Dia grunted as her fivehead forehead slammed into the dashboard. Now, she was pissed.

"Please tell me you have guns on this thing!"

 

[Lilith Nytehand]

"Your stereo?!" Lilith exclaimed in exasperation as she weaved through traffic as the gangsters fired SMG'S and rammed them.

"I'm getting shot at, my new speeder, which I just fethin' acquired, just got smashed up from behind--"

Lilith drifted around a corner and the pilot that rammed her couldn't adjust fast enough and slammed into an advertising sign, while the others still kept up.

Lilith was horrified when Dia Secura pulled out a blaster and started firing.

"Don't shoot! Are you nuts?! We're in traffic! One of your bolts hits anyone in the traffic lane you could cause a massive accident! Then you're on the hook for murder if anyone dies because of that!"

Lilith swerved expertly into a less crowded traffic lane, keeping low to the ground to minimize the damage to others her actions might cause.

Then one of the gangsters in the other vehicle fired a concussion rifle at her door, blasting it off.

"That being said..." she trailed as she drew her machine pistol and veered the vehicle violently in a one hundred eighty degree arc, the gears now set to reverse in the traffic lane but at the same deadly speed that Lilith used before, still expertly weaving around the vehicles of innocents even as she unleashed a volley of fire that blasted open the chest of the gangster that had fired on her, causing him to violently tumble out of the passenger seat and flop lifelessly onto the road. A second blast hit the pilot of the speeder chasing them in the skull and caused him to veer into a lamp post.

"Feth getting blasted apart..."

Lilith swerved around as she heard police sirens blaring. Now police and gangsters were chasing them.

"So that's what a three star wanted rating feels like..." she grumbled.

"That stereo had better be worth ten million credits!"

 

[Dia Secura]

Tagging: Lilith Nytehand

"Don't shoot! Are you nuts?! We're in traffic! One of your bolts hits anyone in the traffic lane you could cause a massive accident! Then you're on the hook for murder if anyone dies because of that!"

The Twi'lek took a moment to glare at the woman in the driver's seat, her painted eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. Had she really jumped into the car with a total square? It figured. Just her luck.

"What are you, a freaking cop?" Dia spat, trying to lean out the window to get a clear shot.

Of course, her unlikely savior seemed to have her own plan in mind. The sudden reversal nearly sent Dia flying out the window, a disaster only prevented by the seatbelt cutting into her chest; she hollered in terror as she ducked back inside, clutching the panic bar for dear life. This was getting crazier with every passing second.

And when the sound of sirens reached her earcones, her heart sank. No way in hell was she going to go back to prison over a damn stereo.

"Just-- Shut the hell up and take the tram tunnel!" Dia shouted, pointing through the windshield at the tunnel up ahead. There probably wouldn't be any passing trains at this time of night, but hopefully the gangsters and cops alike would think twice before following.

And hopefully they wouldn't slam nose first into a train.

Hopefully.

 

[Lilith Nytehand]

"The tram tunnel?! The tram tunnel is suicide!" Lilith protested as she frantically swerved around and through obstacles.

The back of her car was pelted with police blaster fire.

She sighed, before doing a violent swerve into the tunnel.

"Then let us hope...that I am wrong..." Lilith muttered. (Reloaded: 90 XP)

True to the guess Dia Secura had made, they didn't follow.

However...

There was a really big fast approaching light ahead.

"Hold on...this is gonna be stupid close!" Lilith exclaimed, trying to time it for the opening to the various electrical maintenance stations.

Just as the train approached Lilith gunned it, barely clearing the gap between the train and safety, and crashing head first into a wall on the service route.

This of course affected her Cybernetics, and her skin rippled for a few moments until the pale, dark haired woman Dia had been yelling at was replaced by a woman with much more exotic features .

Doctor Camille Stalk stirred from the crash, still in Lilith's black suit.

She looked at Dia in confusion.

"Who the hell are you, and why am I in a crashed vehicle?"

 

[Dia Secura]

Tagging: Lilith Nytehand

As they careened headlong into the tunnel, the light of the oncoming train reflected in the pupils of Dia's dark eyes. In times like these, when death was fast approaching, the Twi'lek couldn't help but see her life flash before her eyes. One disastrous decision after another played out in her head-- running away from home, getting tied up in Xaqi's business, seducing and killing a man for a little plastic keycard... None of them were very good.

Dia screamed at the top of her lungs, her own high-pitched shriek ringing in her earcones before the driver sharply pulled the vehicle to the side. The collision forced the Twi'lek's forehead against the dashboard once more, a splitting agony spiking in her skull, and for a moment, she was quiet.

"Ah... Feth..." she whimpered, lifting her head slowly. Dia spat out a globule of blood. She had bitten her tongue.

She looked to her side, at the stranger in the driver's seat. Who was now... another stranger entirely. Was she hallucinating? It was entirely possible. Dia blinked several times to see if the vision would clear.

It didn't.

"Lady... I don't know what the hell your deal is..." Dia groaned, unlatching her seatbelt. "But you're... probably gonna wanna follow my lead..."

She could still hear the sirens, distantly. Dia opened the door to the speeder and stumbled out into the maintenance passage, stereo still clutched to her chest.

 

[Lilith Nytehand]

Camille stumbled out, head swimming. Ever since she had found out she had had most of her body replaced by Cybernetics without her knowledge her life had been a nightmare she couldn't awake from.

It was bad enough waking up days later after you lost consciousness, but it was made substantially worse that a lot of the times she woke up it was in the aftermath of something crazy violent.

She hated Lilith Nytehand. She hated being forced to be Lilith.

"AHHGGGG! RAT! RAT!" Camille squealed in displeasure as a rat went over her feet.

"Oh gross! This place is so dirty! What the hell happened? What was Lilith doing?" Camille asked she followed the strange woman clutching a stereo. Her voice was notably much lighter sounding than Lilith's.

"Did I cause a crash or something?! Did I kill anyone?!" She asked fearfully. "Oh man, oh man, I don't need this!"

Camille let out little squeaks of disgust as she followed Dia Secura away from the sounds of cops running down the tunnel after the train passed through it.

"This is some serious bullchit! Just Grade A." she complained until they were momentarily in a safe hiding spot within the tunnels.

System Re-Initialized.

Camille's skin rippled, and was overtaken by Lilith's pale, sharp faced features.

"Okay." She called out, hands going to her hips.

"What's so special about the stereo. You got five seconds to answer. I wanna know why my ride got trashed..."

 

[Dia Secura]

Tagging: Lilith Nytehand

As they walked through the darkened access tunnel, Dia made a couple of decisions about the woman-- or women-- following her. The first was that she didn't much care for Lilith. The second was that she cared even less for the neurotic, fearful, nervous woman that replaced her. The Twi'lek narrowed her eyes at the woman's fearful outburst over a goddamn rat, of all things.

It was almost a relief when Lilith finally replaced her once more. Almost.

The diminutive Twi'lek came to a stop against the wall, back pressed to the cold, clammy brick. She still held the stereo firmly, unwilling to part with her prize.

"Listen, lady. Ladies. Whatever," Dia grumbled, her dark eyes harboring annoyance as she shot the other woman a look. "You got way bigger problems than me and my stereo, I'll tell you that. You just happened to be at the wrong place, wrong time."

A beat.

"And it's a really good stereo. Hi-Fi. Y'know how many creds I can get for pawning this thing?" Dia remarked, holding the stereo up and shaking it to emphasize her statement.

 

[Lilith Nytehand]

"I happened to be at the wrong place?" Lilith snapped. "Me? Motherfether, you jumped into my ride, you get everyone who's pissed off at you shooting at me. And you got the cops on our ass. And my hair is ruffled! I hate ruffled hair!" Lilith replied.

"If anything, wrong place, wrong time describes you. Because if I hadn't come along, you would have been fitted with duracrete shoes and tossed into the closest body of water."

Lilith rolled her eyes as Dia Secura held up that stereo the way a squirrel might worship an acorn.

"I got my ride smashed up for a stereo. A stereo that is barely worth four hundred credits on a good day."

She went over to examine it.

"Hey... there's something in here..." She said, her X-Ray vision mode examining the device.

"Huh..." She muttered.

"They were a little aggressive for a stereo...the gangsters at least. I think you're in deep, kid. Gangsters would normally never do what they did out there. With so many potential witnesses..."

Lilith looked up at Dia. "You won't last two hours on your own. Guess I'm staying with you. You owe me at least twenty credits for bailing you out, and be thankful I've not decided to charge you the full one hundred for the inconveniences I've experienced this evening. So where you gonna hawk this piece of junk?"

 

[Dia Secura]

Tagging: Lilith Nytehand

Barely four hundred credits? Barely? To Dia, such money was a literal lifesaver. It would put food in her belly and keep her alive for a week or two. She was starting to suspect that she and Lilith ran in very different worlds, with her slick outfit and souped up speeder. Ire and jealousy flickered in Dia's heart, her painted eyebrows furrowing, and she opened her mouth to give the woman a piece of her mind--

Only to be distracted when she pointed out something inside the stereo.

Dia looked down at the stereo, somewhat confused. It did feel a little heavier than normal, now that she thought about it. After a moment, the Twi'lek kneeled down to the ground, popping the external casing off after a moment of fiddling with it.

Vials of glitterstim rattled around inside. Each one worth way more than the stereo itself. Dia's eyes brightened, and she let out a little victorious woop.

"Lady, are you kidding me?" She asked as she shoved the glitterstim back inside, closing the stereo up. Just in case. Could never be too careful. "This much glitterstim? If I give you half--" which was very generous by Dia's standards, but the sight of that much potential cash had left her feeling light-headed-- "you can buy a whole new speeder!"

She turned around, proceeding further down the access tunnel. "C'mon. I know a guy. At least, I think he's a guy. He's a Dug. But he'll buy anything!"

 

[Lilith Nytehand]

Lilith nodded, and her night vision mode began to process a safe way forward, and she also spotted a municipal computer terminal with a primitive keyboard interface and touch screen.

"Those gangsters you stole from will be scouring the underworld for anyone you could sell the glitterstim to. If we're going to reach the dug we have to do it quickly..."

Lilith left out another part of her analysis. The gangsters had likely spread her face around. By the time they reached the dug, the buyer might not want such hot property. The Gangsters might even be waiting.

Lilith despised gangsters.

Going over to the municipal computer, she wirelessly interfaced with it, downloading the local maps.

"Let's go, I got a quick route out of this place. I'm Lilith, by the way. What's your name?"

Dia Secura