Beauty is Pain [Matsu]

[NightSister]

Point Nadir​

​

Glancing over her shoulder quickly, Scarlett took a second to fix her hair before building up a wave of power and using it to push herself up in a Force-assisted jump. Closing her eyes as she jumped - she was standing in between two buildings with a very small gap, and if she veered off to one side it could get messy - her momentum stopped just as she managed to wedge herself between the walls in a comfortable sit. A few more goes, and Scarlett would be just below the uppermost window of the huge, tall building, eyes just able to peer over the windowledge. Hopefully she was still in good enough shape to wall sit for a little while.

Scarlett was currently doing what she did best - acquiring intel for large paychecks. This time round, an anonymous businessman wanted to know all about some mysterious aristocratic lady living in Point Nadir and was happy to pay good monet for it - it never failed to astonish and amuse Scarlett how much more the rich were willing to pay simply for having the extra few credits. She had arrived in the Shadowport just a few hours earlier, and had cautiously wandered through the streets of dimlit nightclubs and flashy casinos for a little while before going into full tracker-mode and started searching for clues. This job was made easier by the fact that in such a lawless neighbourhood, nobody cared whether the lady asking around was hoping to deliver the woman a present or sell her into slavery. It soon became clear that if this woman knew somebody wanted intel on her, she didn't care, for tracking her had been easy even by Scarlett's ridiculously high standards.

With any luck her elusive new target would be home soon, and when she did Scarlett would be waiting with bated breath and perfect hair to find out what made this woman so interesting.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

For anyone who’d known her for any length of time, Point Nadir was somewhere between perfect and unexpected. Bustling and busy, the asteroid was as close to her preferred ecumenopolis as might be expected. Filled with all manner of scum from the obvious to the hidden, there were thousands of corners to explore and find something hideous. Her illicit trade in organs and corpses was well-tolerated and hidden. But at the same time, Matsu preferred something more high-life than Nadir usually offered. Grimy and dirty, it was criminal through and through. For a woman who’d once been Empress of Coruscant, it was a sordid place to call home.

And yet it was home.

No one was home when Matsu swept back in to her penthouse, an enormous thing of glass and titanium - post-modern and clearly decorated by her. Neither of her companions were much for interior flair, but she was all about clean lines and horridly beautiful art. The guards bowed low when she walked inside but she paid them no mind, walking through the front room overlooking the plunging city streets down, down, down - dizzyingly high, a deadly drop.

She paused.
Something didn’t feel right.

Looking around the room, nothing as out of place. Guards could be fooled but Matsu did her best to pick the cream of the crop to guard her home and she doubted they’d let someone within the apartments. And yet still…

She moved to the edge of the room, crossing cybernetic arms over her chest as she stood in front of floor-to-ceiling windows, looking at the city outside. Nothing was immediately obvious, and yet she couldn’t escape that nagging feelings that something was off.

“Damien,” she called, looking over her shoulder when one of the guards she’d passed materialized in the doorway. “Release two of the probe droids - the small ones, the wasps. I want a sweep of the top level of the comet.”

“Yes, my lady,” the guard said while dipping to a bow and disappearing, leaving Matsu to turn her head back towards the view.

[member="Scarlett Orion"]​

 

[NightSister]

Peering over the edge of the window, Scarlett soon saw the woman enter her penthouse and was able to see right away how she ended up with a spy on her tail - from the lavish decoration of her home to the clawed fingers of her cybernetic arms, the woman had one of those menacing auras that with enough experience one could spot from a mile away - though perhaps it was harder to pick out on Point Nadir, she reasoned; maybe that was why she wasn't wafting about a mansion in someplace nicer. A Sith? She wondered, trying to see if she could spot weapons laying about. Dark Jedi? At any rate, nobody would get razor-sharp claws on their hands without the intention of using them, so clearly she was dangerous. And rich. Very rich.

Just as she was analysing the woman and her guards for weaknesses, she saw the guard nod his head respectfully and leave the room. What did that mean? Had she been spotted? Scarlett was right below the window, so if she'd been spotted it would've been no trouble to just yank her up with those claws - Scarlett squirmed at the thought of those metal talons digging into her skin - meaning that she was safe at the moment, but if the woman was as powerful as she appeared then perhaps her attempts to mask her Force-signature hadn't been enough to fool her.

If she was a rich clawed lady living in a criminal city who suspected somebody's presence, what would she do? Oh - kark. Droids. Would they be the kind that blasted intruders on sight? Or did she prefer to do that herself? Scarlett flinched again as she thought of the claws. If the woman could simply disappear to another room, then Scarlett could've slipped in until the droids disappeared, but evidently she liked to remain overlooking the city. A sense of power, authority - had she been a ruler of some sort at one point? Alright, rein it in now Scarlett, you're trying not to get killed, remember?

Stealth and evasion. That was how espionage worked. Stealth had failed, so she would have to evade the droids until they went away. Only when that failed did one fight. Scarlett craned her head round to the building opposite - no windows on that side, and she couldn't scale a flat wall in the time she had. She considered simply shooting the droids - surely in such a place as Point Nadir that happened all the time - but decided against it.

Out of the corner of her eye, Scarlett saw two droids being let out of a window in the front, one of them floating around to the wall she was perched on. Panicking, her footing slipped and she dropped, only managing to extend her hand and use the Force to cushion her landing a second before being flattened. She landed sprawled on the ground, her hair obscuring her vision. Thinking quickly, as the droid became visible through strands of hair Scarlett slightly shifted her position into a more awkward angle, hoping that she would appear on the footage as a dead body dumped in a corner. Surely those attracted little suspicion in such a place as this.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

One of the two droids followed quick movement out of the corner of its scanner, zooming downwards in to an alley built ramshackle high above the lower levels of the city. Point Nadir felt unstable at best and deadly at worst, impossible architecture built in to unforgiving space-rock. It was dark where the thing it had seen had fallen and by the time it had gotten there nothing was moving. There was a single body sprawled out on the ground and the droid paused, a high-pitched whirring sound escaping it as it started relaying information back to its host. A small beam of light cascaded from the end of its metal abdomen, lighting up the corpse as if it were some escaped criminal caught in the run.

And then it hovered.

It was there for ten minutes, waiting for some sign of movement. It slowly rotated around the body, waiting for some sign of life or something untoward. Its whirring grew louder and louder, nearly deafening whenever it came closer to the corpse’s head. The pulse jets that provided it flight fluttered the girl’s hair in their face, the insect-droid drawing close to see if her eyelids moved in surprise or fear.

But droids such as these were flawed, incapable of independent thought, and therefore - eventually - it flew away to find more evidence of an intruder.

A story or so above, Matsu had withdrawn deeper in her apartments. The stretch of glass from which she’d overlooked the city revealed simply the view of her richly decorated home, ostensibly vacant. She was a busy woman and therefore she left her droids to their work - if they found something, she would peel herself away from her work to deal with it.

[member="Scarlett Orion"]​

 

[NightSister]

Scarlett remained very still, trying not to flinch as the droid came closer and closer towards her while emitting a loud whirring noise that made her want to smack it into the wall. She ran through a list of potential scenarios in her head; if she played dead until the droid left, chances were she would give up before it did. Taking into account that it may or may not shoot her on sight if that happened, that one was off the list. If she took down the droid, she'd have a brief but indefinite time to make her escape - and that was assuming the woman even went after her. It was the option that was least likely to result in her death, imprisonment or torture - there was just one problem. Never, in five years of professional espionage and five before that of digging up secrets with her girlfriends, had Scarlett ever abandoned ship before the job was done. So what if the job in question was a creepy lady with clawed hands?

With that in mind, in one rapidly executed move Scarlett reached out and grabbed the droid and hopping to her feet before it could float back up from its position close to the ground, crushing it with her steel-toed combat boots - the gun would've made too much noise. Alright then, she thought, blowing a strand of hair out of her face, what now? Assuming the woman hadn't been watching the footage from the droid through a screen or something, she still had a short window of time to find a safe position from which she could continue her task. She would be in less immediate danger if she disappeared into the city to find someone who would talk, but logically that had a higher chance of her being caught before acquiring what she needed to know.

A few minutes later, and she was crouched on the very roof of the apartment, trying to decide which window would be safest to peek through. The building was very wide, so statistically neither window would expose her, but statistics had a funny way of being meaningless at the worst possible times. After a moment spent slowing the pace of her rapidly thudding heartbeat, Scarlett rolled over to the opposite side that she had just been on and wedged herself between the walls to see whether she would need to sneak in to get information.

That was when she remembered the second droid.

She was in no position to grab the droid before it had reached its owner - there was only one option. With one hand on the wall behind her to steady herself, Scarlett grabbed the pistol from her belt and shot the droid down in two shots, cringing at the loud noise. And she had really hoped she'd live long enough to afford access to the VIP clubs on Zeltros.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

The screech of a droid suddenly offline rang annoyingly through the room, causing Matsu to immediately drop what she was doing to move towards the camera read-out allowing her to see what had happened. Rewinding the footage from the first droid - a silent death, not immediately registered as the chip inside of it had been destroyed - showed a corpse suddenly bursting to life to bash the wasp-droid to pieces. Corpses reanimating were not outside Matsu’s realm of experience of course, but this one was too smart. She was just about to check the other droid’s feed when the sound of blaster fire far too close to her home rang out from near the front room.

Forgetting entirely about the feed, Matsu turned on her heel and and started sprinting towards the huge bay of windows overlooking the city. Light on her feet due to her small size, she probably didn’t make all that much noise until she was right on top of their hiding place, her hand pressed up against the streak of oil on the glass where the droid had exploded. Her metallic fingers drummed against it as she pushed it open longways, almost as if entering a closet were she not about to stop of a precipitous drop.

Something dashed out of her vision directly below, and her eyes swirled with amber at the excitement and rage an intruder on her territory brought with it.

Pushing the window open the rest of the way, she dropped down, using the Force to land delicately on a tin roof top and then dropping to another to get on the level on which she’d seen the interloper. Crouched like some beast she scanned the surrounding area for any particularly intense feeling of panic or the need to evade since the person who’d destroyed her droid had made an exceptionally quick getaway. She latched on to something like outrage - maybe someone knocked down in the haste of the stranger’s escape? - and ran for it.

It was two alleyways and a street later when Matsu thought she’d caught up, a street vendor screaming in shock when she whipped around a corner with her eyes wild and something like murder etched on the high planes of her demonically distorted face. No one followed her to Point Nadir and she would not allow this creature skulking about to leave alive. The woman she’d startled simply pointed down the alleyway, cowering behind her stand while waiting for Matsu to go away.

The Sith Lord pressed her telepathic communication on everyone in the alley and close enough to hear as she continued her chase. “If you let the woman trying to escape get away from me, I will kill everyone you love. Stop her.”

[member="Scarlett Orion"]​

 

[NightSister]

Through the closed window, Scarlett could hear a sound alerting the woman that the droid had gone offline and a second later saw her advance towards her. Had she looked even marginally less terrifyingly murderous than she did, Scarlett might have considered staying to try and extract intel through reverse interrogation, but it was clear for all to behold that the moment she caught up to her, Scarlett was a dead woman walking.

As she dropped down in one clumsy, rapid movement that came even closer to killing her than the first time, Scarlett felt the soar of emotion from the death-eyed woman as rage met excitement. Vengeful, she couldn't help but observe. Definitely a Sith. Hopping to her feet as fast as she could, Scarlett tucked away her handgun and broke into a run.

More than one person screamed abuse at her as she knocked into the bypassers in a desperate attempt to lose the Sith, which unfortunately made her that bit more traceable. The only way she could think of was to get back to her starship and leave before the woman could identify it, but as a precaution she had docked it at the other end of Point Nadir and she was closing in fast. Ducking into an alleyway, she called her saber to her hand to avoid being caught off guard.

Just then, the echoes of a telepathic communication reached her mind - the Sith was forcing the surrounding citizens to turn on Scarlett. Something told her that she could and would carry out her threat if Scarlett wasn't stopped. Were Scarlett a nobler person, she might have given up the chase to save the locals, and were the Sith a nobler person doing so might even have let her get away with her life, but it was clear that neither of the two were the noble type. However, Scarlett had a sense of impending doom that told her that even if she made it out, her escape would be short-lived, and she didn't need countless lives needlessly on her conscience. Ugh.

As the crowds turned to face her, Scarlett remained unmoving, raising and activating her saber to keep from being swarmed by the masses. Her fingers trembled ever so slightly as the woman neared, but she stayed where she was. If she was really lucky, her crime would merit torture over immediate death. Which was without a doubt the most surreal thought Scarlett had ever had.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Point Nadir was presided over jointly by the man and woman Matsu had chosen to make her partners. (Chosen. As if she’d had a say over her feelings in that regard.) Those two however, had ditched the mantle of Sith for something shadowy and illicit, something criminal - just the kind of people Nadir would accept to control the asteroid-city. Matsu was an interloper accepted only because she did not interfere with the pirates and mercenary criminals that called it home. And because she would crush anyone who raised a fist to her within her own, to dust. The people turned away when she prowled forward, the spy in her sights and their task complete.

She circled like a panther, sizing up her meal. Matsu was not one for toying with her food, far more liable to cut it down and get to business than poke and prod. If she were less interested in the stranger’s reason for being near the Sith Lady’s apartments she may simply have sliced her through the middle and left her corpse for the more desperate to slip in to their greasy stews. But as it was, her propensity for curiosity halted that hastiness as she came to a halt behind the woman.

The sound of her lightsaber igniting echoed up the walls of the buildings to either side of the street, its heinous red glow crackling in time to its hum. Her lightsaber was unique, taken off the body of a Sith Lord she’d bested on the Omega superweapon. Unlike other blades it emitted searing heat as an unstable by-product. She’d been delighted the first time she’d used it and her opponent lit on fire at its kiss.

Its hum grew closer as she spun it in her palm and used it to encourage her new friend to walk forward, back the way they’d both come.

Once back to her apartments, Matsu chose not to go back up to the cushy surroundings of the main living area, but down towards the laboratories where she played at being God with her undead creations. Unlike the rooms above, this place was dreary and dungeon-esque. The hallways were dizzying, but eventually she stopped outside one room in particular. “Since you like spying on people you have no right observing, let me show you some other interesting things.” Though she left the door closed for the moment, she raised the window laid within it to reveal a cell full of shambling undead, their heads turning at the sudden sliver of light from the window. All of the sudden they’d slammed themselves up against the door, their teeth audibly clacking together as they snapped at the stranger through the glass. Blood and pus-filled rot oozed from holes in their faces, their eyes milky with decay but somehow still staring right at the woman on the other side of the window.

“Tell me who sent you, or you’ll get an even closer look.”

[member="Scarlett Orion"]​

 

[NightSister]

And there she was. Scarlett waited anxiously for the crowd to dissipate and the killing blow to strike - the woman's lightsaber literally looked as though it were covered in blood - but no such execution came. Did that mean she was to be interrogated, or tortured? A simple flick of the saber indicated for Scarlett to follow: had an entire crowd not just been bent to her will, Scarlett might have taken the bait and engaged in a duel, but she had been given a second chance to make it out: she wasn't going to put it to waste.

Visibly flinching as the crimson blade nudged her along, Scarlett reviewed her options. Since she hadn't been immediately killed, there was still hope, but very little. Despite this, the fact that she was still breathing had left her in an eerily calm state, as though while her mind had registered the impending danger her body had not yet done so.

Finally, they stopped outside a room reminiscent of a dungeon, the woman drawing her attention to a cell full of - things, zombies or monsters of whatever the appropriate turn was. Ugh. Scarlett fought the urge to take a step backwards.
"Right," she said as the woman said her piece. Where others might ramble or beg for mercy, Scarlett assumed a completely casual tone as though they were the best of friends, catching up in - well, a zombie cell, but that was irrelevent. "Firstly, nice place. And fancy - uh, whatever...these are," she continued, gesturing at the creatures staring at her behind the glass. "Second, I would just like to point out I've done nothing I had no right to. I didn't break in, I didn't steal anything or take pictures - I mean, there's the droids, but come on, you could break those things just by throwing an egg at them. If anything, you should really thank me for alerting you to your lack of good security. But I've broken no laws, if you cared at all."

Still appearing relaxed, Scarlett turned her gaze from the zombies to the woman commanding them, which wasn't much better but made her seem more genuine. "Now, I'll be honest here - nothing in my policies says that people have to tell me who they are or why they require my services, so more often than not I'm dealing with anonymous clients." Catching sight of the woman's expression, she backtracked: "But, I am a spy, I can probably narrow it down for you. I know that it's a he, but his secretary is not, and if he has a secretary that means that he's rich. So not a Jedi - oh, and I got the idea that he really doesn't like you. Got any enemies? No? Okay...I got the call from an anonymous transmission, but if you really like, you can try and trace it. My datapad's in my starship and my starship's beside that big casino at the other end of the comet, it's a Lethisk-class armed freighter with a red stripe."

Trying to restrain herself from fiddling with her hands - despite having been totally honest, the little habit of hers was a recognisable sign of lying - Scarlett continued. "I'll tell you what - why don't you get your, uh, zombies here - wait, do they find the term offensive? Well, whatever you call them, they can babysit me while somebody fetches the datapad. If you don't find what you want, then go ahead and let them do their thing. And if you do, I can leave without, y'know, dying? How's that?"

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]