Broken Spark

[Aela Talith]

Concordia
[member="Sam Rodarch"]

The sound of the hammer striking the anvil rung out with several thousand sparks hitting the floor and crackling out of existence. The sound was met with another, then another in a seemingly endless clash that continued on and on as Viktor slowly beat the heated durasteel into a thin metal place.

One hand was tightly wrapped around the handle of his hammer, the other gripping a pair of tongs to keep the plate in place. His eyes carefully watched the metal warp and shift, curving into the desired shape until it was at an almost concave angle. When he lifted into the air there was a satisfied clap behind him, the sound of his latest master congratulating him on a job well done. The burly man walked around the anvil, smacking Viktor on the shoulder and then pointing to a nearby machine. A nod came from the young man, followed by quickly placing the plate into the machine.

"Good."

The old man said.

"These things can't be made by the droid's, the older machines just don't have the schematics anymore. Now you only need to make ninety nine more."

A jolly laugh came from the man, though Viktor frowned slightly. The idea of making nearly a hundred more of these plates wasn't something that he was looking forward to. He'd already made eleven of them and that had taken him the better part of an hour. This wasn't why he had come here, this wasn't why he was on Concordia. The old man had promised him the secrets of Beskar, had promised to teach him how to make their armor and weapons...yet so far nothing.

He frowned slightly. "Okay."

That was the only response he could give, anything else would be disrespect.

"I'll be back in a little while. When I return I expect progress. Don't let me catch you working on your own projects."

Viktor frowned slightly, bothered by the implication, mostly because he had no projects of his own. He had come here to learn one thing and one thing alone, been here for three weeks and hadn't even started on it. That fact bothered him more then anything else. A heavy sigh escaped his lips as the old man left his forge, attention returning to the small balls of durasteel that lay in the corner. He picked one up and rolled it into the crucible.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

It was her third loss on the trot.

A still swollen eye, a cut lip and a foul demeanor (more-so than usual) made such a thing evident. Her mood was to be expected, in the cutthroat world of underground shockboxing a loss meant one thing and one thing only.

No payday.

Down at the bottom of the barrel losers didn't get paid. The prize only went to the victor. It added that element of desperation that made everything more exciting, made the fighters more desperate and the fights themselves more unpredictable, which of course made the bookies a lot more credits. Making money was priority, the shockboxers were an afterthought.

The door to the local metalsmith opened, and for a moment Sam just stood there, casting a broad shadow into the shop.

During her last bout her worn pair of shockboxing gloves had perished, or at least the right one had. Really it was just a scuffed glorified gauntlet at this point, and not having that shock rendered half her offensive moot.

This was the only place she could go.

Brom the smithy and her dad, Jaspar went way back, back before their troubles and he was one of the only friends that their family still had. He always had time for a small favour, more important a small free favour.

Nobody was manning the front of the shop (which was the usual), so for a moment Sam just loomed in the doorway before limping her way towards the back towards the sound of hard, hot graft.

The woman wasn't in the mood for surprises, the previous night's straight jab to the face was surprise enough for a life time, so when she saw somebody other than Brom working through the back, she was, well, rather perturbed. A scowl appeared upon her face (although it might have been hard to tell with a still half-swollen eye) however she didn't mince her words.

“Who the krif are you?”

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

Viktor half jumped out of his skin. He hadn't expected to hear from Brom in quite some time, at least an hour, so when he heard a woman suddenly say something, and something rather rude at that, the young Smith somehow managed to fumble the metal tongs and drop the piece of durasteel that he was working on.

There was a loud clatter and clang, the heated piece of metal bent and warped against the duracrete ground and Viktor let out a curse. "Darn!"

The piece of metal would not have to be re-fired, re-shaped, and then probably worked on for the next ten minutes. His head shook from side to side as he scooped the tongs up from the ground and picked up the piece of metal. He chucked the bent metal into furnace again, throwing it to the fires in hopes that it woudl at least melt down properly and anything that had stuck to it from the floor would simply burn away. It was foolish really, mostly because something could explode within the fire, but he wasn't really thinking at the moment.

Finally Viktor turned to the woman who had interrupted him.

"I'm Viktor." The young Smith said simply as if that would entirely explain everything. "Who are you? You're not Brom's daughter are you?"

Viktor had yet to meet the young woman that Brom called his daughter, mostly because he was rather protective of her and Viktor assumed Brom wanted to keep her away from...well him, even though his intentions would never be anything like the man suspected.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

Startling the man gave her no respite.

The fact of the matter is that she had come to see Brom, and at that moment in time, Sam was in a very fact of the matter kind of mood. She had no desire to dilly-dally around on some wild smithchase, no, far from it.

“His daughter? Am I kark!” Rodarch replied, clearly very offended.

It wasn't a favourable comparison, for Sam wasn't exactly the biggest fan of Kaia. In fact, she thought the woman must have been adopted because she was so far flung from her father in terms of personality that it was the only other option. Rodarch had often taken to call her Miss Fortune, one because she was an advantageous little witch and two, anybody who got in her way encountered nothing but misfortune.

“I'm a family friend,” she said gruffly, accustomed to not giving her name out because of the unfortunate connotations of her Clan name.

Right hand kept balling into a fist and releasing again, her blood pressure was likely a point of concern that this time, or perhaps all of the time. She wasn't a woman of trust and besides this man's name, she wasn't sure if he could at all be believed.

“Viktor, huh? What you doing back here, and where's Brom?"

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

Viktor eyed the girl, looking at her with some amount of suspicion. Brom had never met any friends of the Smith, or anyone that the man called a friend anyway. The Giant of a Mandalorian was truly grand with everyone, welcoming them as though they were family, but oddly enough he called few of them friend. Viktor supposed that was because of the way of this place, everyone was a bit distant, a bit distrusting. The young smith apprentice didn't like that part of this world, it was...very different form home.

"I'm Brom's apprentice." He volunteered almost gleefully.

"He's teaching me to smith Mandalorian Iron in exchange for some work." The young man pointed towards the forge. "It's a technique that's rare among even the Mandalorians, something that most spend entire lives trying to learn, but once you master it you're set for life. Not that I really care about the money or anything, I just love the craft and..."

Viktor continued on for some time, reminiscing about his time as an apprentice under other Blacksmiths and learning to forge Phrik as well as other materials.

It was clear that Viktor wasn't even half as shy as Sam about volunteering information, in fact it appeared the young man was a bit of a blather mouth. That wasn't often a quality discovered here, especially in the men. Mandalorians were known for their stoic nature and stern silence, Viktor seemed entirely enthralled with the subject that he was speaking about and ignored any such stereotypes...probably not for the better of Sam's blood pressure.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

Sam wished that she hadn't asked.

It felt like he had been almost bursting to tell somebody about working under Brom, which was no real surprised, he was an absolute beast of a smith and could back that claim up with his work as proof.

The shockboxer just stood there, her beat up expression a blend of impatience and annoyance. It wasn't that she wasn't interested in smithing, wait, no that was true, she wasn't at all interested in smithing. I mean, undoubtedly the tools produced in the trade were invaluable but still, the process of making them just didn't tickle her fancy. At all. Like, not even an iota.

Wait, was he still talking? Bloody hell.

Eventually Sam actually cut into his story and enthusiasm, for fear that the man wasn't going to stop talking about his passion. After all, she was rarely in the mood to be talked at, and that wasn't even taking into account her mood at the time.

“Okay! Okay! I believe you!”

From first impression it seemed like the guy was Brom's adopted son. Would have been a much better fit at least.

“You got any idea when he'll be back?”

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

"Oh." Viktor said suddenly, surprised that she had interrupted him, but not offended either. In fact his expression had seemingly changed from one of mild suspicion towards her to something akin to meeting a member of the family. This lips had broken into a wild smile and the the squint of his eyes that had been there earlier disappeared entirely. He almost seemed ready to hug her, or perhaps that was just a bit of an exaggeration.

"Not really." The smith's apprentice said with a shrug. "He said a little while."

He chuckled slightly. "But you know Brom."

Viktor made a move as if to punch Sam's arm in jest, but the glower he received from the young woman was enough to make him take half a step back. He looked around for a moment, as if suddenly realizing that there was just a spot of awkwardness hanging in the room. That was quickly overlooked however as the young man once again began to open his mouth and speak.

"Do you need help with something?" He asked almost a bit too eagerly. "Repulsor Axis snap? Armor needs fixing? Crushgaunt's feeling a bit loose?"

The last one sounded almost hopeful, as if working on such a project was a dream come true.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

Well, he was certainly enthusiastic, she had to give him that, not that she had to give him anything, the guy just took it and sprinted off with it.

A little while made an assumption for some kind of errand, which surely didn't mean too long. Maybe an hour or two at the most, but was it worth staying or just coming back to grab him at another point in time? The distinct danger of this guy talking to her remained pretty high as long as she did.

Sam couldn't help put shoot an automatic warning glance at Viktor as he shifted towards her, despite his generally jovial expression. A clenched fist at her side let him know that she was beyond ready to gub him in the jaw if he tried anything funny. Not that he would, didn't seem like that kind of guy, but you never really knew.

“Yeah, I do.”

Silence hung in the air for a moment, as they both stood there like chalk and cheese, completely unsure of what to say to each other. She wasn't exactly the talkative type and well, him, he was far too much. However, then he offered to help.

“Shockboxing gloves are done,” Sam replied gruffly, holding up the pair for Viktor to see, “the right one's lost its shock, the left one is just knackered,” she continued, throwing the weaponised gloves at him so that he could inspect them.

“I can't fight with these.”

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

Viktor stumbled backward slightly, instinctively dropping the tongs that he had been holding and reaching out with cupped hands to catch the gloves.

He didn't know the girl very well, nor had he ever even heard of shockboxing, but he assumed that the devices were special to her and thus dropping them would likely be a very bad idea. His fingers lanced around them, curling barely in time around the gloves to secure them from crashing to the ground. A bit of torn metal cut into his palm, a wince crawling over him as he felt a sharp needle like pain in his palm. He frowned slightly, but quickly lost interest in the minor wound as he began an inspection of the odd weapons Sam had tossed towards him.

Where he came from in the Outer Rim they had no such thing as Shockboxing. There were fights of course, even a few that were organized, but with shock gloves? That was entirely unheard of. The Smith frowned slightly, bringing up the gloves so that he could inspect them at eye level. The girl hadn't been kidding when she'd called one of the knackered, the metal was bent and broken, wires were poking out, and the other one wasn't much better off. "Hmm."

The wordless wondering passed from his throat.

"Where'd you get these?" Viktor turned away from her, bringing the gloves under the large light in the middle of the forge. "How old are they?"

From the looks of the metal the damned things were downright ancient, same with the wiring. He was no expert on the latter, but it would have been a lie to say that Viktor hadn't played with an electric panel once or twice...though maybe shockboxing gloves were a bit out of his league.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

She caught the man's brief wince, and almost felt bad for not warning him about just how damaged they were. Sam had been caught by jagged metal time and time again, a pity they weren't protruding in a more advantageous manner for a fight.

What? It wasn't like other people rigged their gloves. Being fair, honest and noble only got your ass beat.

“Bought them used and cheap,” she replied to his question, watching him wearily with one good eye, “don't know how old they are, probably older than me,” Sam continued, approaching in an almost predatory side-step, wanting to see exactly what he was doing to the tools of her livelihood. She definitely didn't have the credits to buy a new pair and she wasn't planning on taking out a dodgy loan to buy new ones.

“If you break them I'll break you.”

Maybe that was a bit rude. The guy seemed all right, perhaps a bit enthusiastic but she sincerely doubted that he was planning to trash her gloves.

“...sorry,” Sam then mumbled awkwardly in a ham-fisted tiny apology, “...how bad is it?”

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

"They're already broken." Viktor commented as he inspected the gloves further, noticing that one of them was actually still sending tiny sparks from one wire to another. He frowned for a moment as he looked at the thing, apparently not having heard Sam's threat at all.

In truth, he hadn't. This was what he did, what he had always wanted to do. It wasn't quite smithing, but then again nothing in the galaxy was quite what Viktor had imagined it to be. he knew that Brom did something like this all the time, worked with Crushgaunts and other half electrical components. So what if these weren't crushgaunts, they were still something more than a regular pair of old gauntlets. He frowned for a moment and looked over towards the bit of scrap metal that lay in a pile towards the corner of the room.

He mused for a second.

Brom couldn't get mad at him for helping a family friend...right?

"I can fix this." Viktor stated confidently, almost a bit too assured. "Though..."

That was perhaps overstating his abilities a bit, but he knew that at the very least he could make the things work again. As far as he was able to see the Shockgloves worked on a fairly simply design. There was a powersource enclosed in the wirst of each gauntlet and that powersource linked up to small studs within the metal that set off the power when the studs were depressed. He could have made a pair of these things easily enough, or so he thought anyway. "I bet I can make new ones."

He offered as he slowly turned towards Sam.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

“Helpful,” she muttered sarcasticly, as the man stated that they were broken. That was like, the one nugget of information that Sam didn't need to know regarding her gloves. Could they be fixed? That was the thing she needed to know.

Then it struck her, a feeling of shame that swirled alongside a stubborn pride.

He said he could fix it, even said he could make new ones, but there was a distinct snag in such ideas. Payment. Brom fixed up her gloves to the bare minimum for free on her insistence. Pride and stubbornness got in the way of letting the smith do any more than that. She couldn't pay him, it didn't feel right.

Of course, with proper gloves might come a better chance of winning her fights, of making some credits that could have been used to pay him back.

But debt felt like weakness. Like she was a leech. Like she couldn't get by on her own.

“Just forget it,” Sam blurted out bitterly, approaching the middle of the forge where her gloves sat, “look, I'll level with you, I don't have credits. Brom's a friend and all, but I can't afford a proper fix and I definitely can't afford a new pair from scratch," she frowned at the broken gloves, moving to pick them up, "I'm just wasting your time.

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

Viktor gave her a confused look, as though Payment hadn't even entered his mind. Back home things were a bit different then here, then most places in the galaxy. Their community wasn't a big one, and more often then not the smith fixed things for the locals free of charge. In return the locals made sure that the smith and his family always had enough to eat and was comfortable enough that he wouldn't wander off planet. That was the way of things in a place where nearly everybody didn't have enough to actually worry about things like debt. Viktor's planet was still very much stuck in a barter system, something that had developed when their original colony had been abandoned by the Republic.

"You don't have to pay me." Viktor said flatly with a shrug.

"We..." He looked around. "Just have to replace what we use."

The apprentice gestured towards the scrap.

Of course in the excitement of events Viktor had completely forgotten about the task that had been assigned to him by Brom, something that would very likely come back to bite him in the ass. The truth was though that Viktor was more then happy to have a real project, something that he could actually think about and wasn't just mindless manual labor. He'd never created a pair of shockboxing gloves, and the challenge of making something new? That was worth more than any credits.

Though then again, maybe he was just a simple fool.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

Rodarch bit her cut and swollen bottom lip, and not in a cute 'will you kark me' kind of way. It was more akin to frustration and conflict. Genuine favours were hard to find on Concordia, oh sure, Clans looked out for each other but for everybody else it was a completely different story. Honour was Concordia's disguise, but not its truth.

Favours came with strings. Terms and conditions. They were often unsavoury too, bloody, usually somebody was going to get hurt. However, this guy didn't come off with those vibes, not at all.

“You're…you're not from around here are you?” Sam asked quietly, her features scrunching up as she did.

There was a definite hesitance, which was probably unusual to experience for an outsider. After all who would turn down a favour? Wasn't kindness universal? Apparently not. Her world lacked trust, it lacked faith, it was a world that picked you up just to kick you down again.

“Look, if you're fine with it then I'm fine with it but I owe you one, right?”

That was more of a firm insistence than anything.

Replacing a small amount of scrap metal hardly evened out the score. Then again, he was an apprentice, maybe he'd make a terrible pair of shockboxing gloves. Of course, sometimes terrible gloves were secretly great, jagged gloves that lacerated as well as shocked. Of course, sometimes terrible gloves also exploded and took your hands with it.

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

"Nope!" Viktor said all too happily. "Not even close."

He slowly moved away from the girl, setting the gloves down on one of the brighter hearths and shifting the things away from the fire so they wouldn't being to melt. The weapons would be used as sort of a template, an example that Viktor would be able to work off of. In theory this wouldn't actually be all that tough, he was just making regular ol' gauntlets after all and then...well then everything else would come later. He frowned for a moment as he began to inspect the scrap metal.

Beskar? Would he chance it?

Brom had shown him a little bit of Beskar forging, though not how to actually make the metal itself yet. He could rework it though, that was easy enough, any idiot could do that. He frowned for a moment and reached towards one of the broken and dented armors that a Mandalorian had left here weeks ago. He looked at it, then to Sam, and then slowly slid the piece of metal into one of the larger crucibles that hung by the fire. The large cup like device was slipped into the superheated flames. "Outer rim."

He began to speak of himself again.

"A little planet called..." He thought for a moment about when he had met Brom. "Well, you've probably never heard of it. No one has."

Viktor shrugged as if it didn't even matter. The young Smith loved his homeworld, more then most did, but he had come to understand from his travels that most hadn't even considered that a colony could survive that far out in wild space, much less produce smiths like him.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

Was he rubbing it in?

For a moment Sam glowered at the very chipper man, simply envious of his bright outlook of life. He carried himself like a man who had never experienced misfortune. That could have just been a thought in the realms of 'grass is greener'. No existence was perfect.

“Lucky you,” she rumbled lowly, observing him at work.

His assumption was also right, Sam was hardly educated in the realm of the galaxy. Perhaps in another time line where her name wasn't mud she might have been out there amongst the stars, steeped in blood and glory on a proud crusade, but this was not that time line.

“You're probably right,” Sam admitted, choosing not to be offended by his assumption of her lack of knowledge.

Beads of sweat began to dot the woman's head, a side effect of being in a forging area. It was hardly a cool environment, but also a side-effect of something else. Cheap battle stims. Most everybody in the shockboxing scene used them, problem is, with the amount of poor scum fighting for their meals it created a market for cheap basement-made stims. Works at the time, after effects suck.

“What do you think of Concordia then?”

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

He shrugged, watching the metal slowly melt within the crucible. "Dark."

That was the truth of it.

Once upon a time Concordia had been a lush and bright planet of agriculture and vital life. Now? Now it was little more then a bare rock. Eons again rare minerals had been discovered here, and ever since then the planet had been mined out to such a degree that it was hardly recognizable to it's original state. The industrial mining caused dark clouds and none-too pleasant atmosphere in general, something that reminded Viktor of old stories his grandmother had told him.

"The people are good though." Viktor said as he slowly wrapped his fingers around the handle of the crucible. "Most of them anyway."

He smiled at her. That wasn't exactly the truth, but it was more than a little obvious that Viktor preferred to look on the bright side of life rather then dwell on the darkest aspects of the universe. He shifted slightly, waiting for the metal to completely pool into one solid bath of heat. Beskar stayed mostly together even when melted, unless one heated it up to insanely high temperatures. He would wait until just before that happened, and then slowly pull the crucible free.

There was an audible singing tone as the liquid metal touched the air, Viktor waving the girl back as he wandered towards one of the forms Brom kept in the corner of the room. It was originally made for Crushgaunts, meaning these would be slightly larger then the average shockboxing gloves, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. "Everyone's different though."

 

[Sam Rodarch]

Well, he wasn't wrong.

However the dark that he referred to was a different shade from the dark that Sam knew. He referred to a physical aspect of Concordia, the industrialisation, the pollution. An oppressive atmosphere that fit perfectly as the backdrop of her life.

The darkness that she knew came represented in a life outside of the Clans. Oh yes, on the surface it came down to honour and blood, conquest and glory but affairs were drastically different outside that existence. Isolation and shame came with little support, it was do, die or run. Shedding blood wasn't a badge of honour, it was a mark of losing.

Rodarch craned her neck slowly, painfully before snorting, “Wish I could see it through your eyes. Doesn't sound half as bad.”

She approached him, having little understanding of what he was actually doing but a vague idea. Sam had never actually watched Brom work, he usually just shooed her out so that he could get on with it. He was a kind brick wall of a man but his business was his life, and he took it very seriously. The young woman liked that aspect of him.

“What's your home planet like?” Unlike Brom and Viktor, kindness didn't really come through Sam, it sounded more like an interrogation than a friendly question.

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Sam Rodarch"]

There was a lull as he waited for the metal to cool. "Small is the best way to describe it."

Viktor began to speak, a certain nostalgia entering his tone.

"Everyone keeps to themselves most days, unless they go into town. Most everyone works on a farm, usually trying to grow as much crop as they can before the winter hits. Everyone supports one another, well...except for a few but no one really pays attention to them." He shifted and looked towards Sam. "We're not a big community, most people don't even have a speeder, rather they use droids for harvesting and animals for transporting. I think a lot of people would call us backward."

That was something he'd heard once or twice.

Viktor himself couldn't operate a speeder, or most modern technology at all in fact, but he was handy enough with understanding how it all worked. When he'd first left though even starships seemed...scary. It was an admission that he hadn't wanted to make, but in the end making it had made him a stronger person. "It's nice though. Untouched by pretty much anything."

Calm. Peaceful.

Not like everywhere else in the galaxy.

 

[Sam Rodarch]

Perhaps she shouldn't have asked.

Not that she didn't want to hear about where he was from, the idea of another place was nice to just ponder about, even if it was for a single moment before the realisation set in. His home planet was naught but a fantasy to her. For him it existed, for her it did not.

Her swollen features moved from a scowl to a frown, a certain sadness held in her downcast eyes as she stared at the floor for a few seconds. Well, until Sam realised how pathetic she must have seemed and snapped out of it.

Up by the bootstraps.

“Sounds real nice,” Sam replied, voice slightly hollow as she attempted a vague smile at the man.

In reality it probably wasn't her own idea of perfection, but rather just a 'somewhere else I'd rather be', like something out of a holovid. Backwards maybe, but idyllic definitely. Peaceful. Calm. Friendly. Where people looked out for each other and supported each other. It was suddenly no surprise where Viktor got his demeanour from.

“Do you miss it?”

---

[member="Viktor Kull"]