Wearing:
Gladiator Armor
Armed with:
Five Rings
Objective: Protect Civilians, slaughter Maw scum.
Configuration: Lynda (See Bio)
Days prior...
She hadn't been able to do anything when Coruscant had been hit.
She had spent two days buried in the rubble, no way to escape, useless during that invasion. All she had felt was fear. Not just of the idea she was about to die ignobly and anti-climatically, but of the idea Laertia Io had been completely right to turn her back on the Jedi and side with WHOEVER didn't want to see the Galaxy turned into an ash heap at the hands of complete psychopaths.
After all, what greater sign of failure of policy was there than to have the Maw strike at the very heart of the Galaxy, slaughter tons of Jedi, and shatter apart the Bastion Accords in one fell swoop?
Laertia had been absolutely right. Both about how short sighted the Jedi's focus had been on the tenth Sith Empire, as well as the fact the NIO would turn their backs on them. She had been right about ALL of it, even after the horrific crime she had committed at Rhand and Lynda had been too blind, too naive and too kind-hearted to accept just how brutal the situation was.
After all, it hadn't been a democracy or the Jedi that had saved the Galaxy from the Bryn'adul. It had been an imperialist power and pissed off Nuetralizers whose mental architecture had been derived from both her and her sister Vera Mina (who, shockingly, was
delighted to be an aunt) that had finally crushed the Lobsters and delivered a long overdue comeuppance. That should have been
Democracy's fight.
Democracy's victory.
And the Jedi had been nowhere near the final battle.
No one knew how she had survived with practically zero oxygen for two days, in the dark. She hadn't bothered to explain. She had only begun immediately volunteering for rescue efforts. She had pulled out a lot more dead than she had alive. Children, mostly. She had managed to save only a few lives. On the seventh day, she finally worked up the nerve to leave the worksite. She went to her apartment.
It was ravaged, like practically everywhere else on the planet. Her pets were dead. Impaled on spikes. Armory was trashed and looted.
After weeping in horror over the deaths of her rabbit and her turtle, she had cremated them, and then checked the reflec coated space under her burned floor, and retrieved her main weapon and armor sent a transmission to SIA:
NO CHARGE FOR NEXT BATTLE AGAINST THE MAW.
She sat in the burned ruins of her home in shock, full of real, seething hatred for the first time in her life. Not just at the Maw, which was a given, but towards the Alliance as well. Towards the Jedi.
She had wanted to be one of the heroes so badly she had overlooked the failings of the side she had chosen. Failings Laertia had seen clearly. As she looked across the ruined city, bodies still being pulled out, she lost all faith in their methods. She knew they would have no answer save naked survival at this point. The Jedi were likely going to have to fend for themselves.
Everything they had struggled for had proven to be a fat sack of chit. Their age of peace hadn't come about. Things were worse than
ever!
She couldn't believe she had trusted them more than she had trusted the killer instincts her own mother had given her, more than she had trusted the killer instincts of a woman who had done everything possible to fight the Sith when Mythos invaded Atrisia.
Lynda felt totally alone until she smelled a familiar scent from far off, getting closer.
Lynda tensed. It was
her...
Lynda didn't move as
Vera Mina
walked into the burned room. Lynda spared only a glance. Vera looked prim and proper as ever in her white dress. Lynda was still in her medical scrubs.
"I came as soon as I heard you had been found...why didn't you try and get in touch?" Vera asked.
"We uh..." Lynda paused, her databases letting her recall the horror in perfect detail. Unfortunately.
"We've been pulling mostly corpses out..." Lynda said, staring at her sword. "Most of the survivors die before we can reach them."
"You were buried two days under rubble, and your first act upon being freed isn't to contact your family but to try and dig others out. I did call out Mother for giving you too much empathy. Many times..."
Vera sat next to Lynda, spotted the tiny urns of her two pets.
"I'm terribly sorry..." Vera said.
"You don't even know the meaning of the word. You weren't built that way..." Lynda replied emptily.
"I've been getting better about that. Trying to..." Vera assured her. "You should leave..."
"The Alliance?" Lynda asked.
"I think we've seen how well their policies work. What their softness cost them. You don't owe them anything..."
"I owe the innocent people here something..." Lynda said. "What's the point of being able to do what I can do if I don't use it to help them?"
"The Alliance is a sinking ship, now. The Maw took a piss on its front porch then set the roof on fire...if this isn't a sign to jump ship, what is?" Vera asked. "The Alliance locked up it's own defenders because an infiltrator pressed for it. He operated right under their noses. And the Defenders should be ashamed for obeying such a suspicious order.
Vera looked out on the city.
"The Alliance, and the Jedi never seem to ask why they deserve to survive. They think that just because they are a democracy it's a given that their lives are deserved. But look at them now: all nestled in the center of the galaxy. Totally removed from reality until it came to their doorstep."
"Are you saying the Maw is right?"
"No. I am saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. But you know I'm right now, don't you. Your lip isn't curling in disgust like it usually would when I make these sort of arguments." Vera said slyly.
Lynda said nothing.
"The Old Republic had its day. And it was cast down by Sidious, proving the Old Republic way of doing things didn't work. The Alliance copied it so hard they ended up repeating all of its worst mistakes, showing to the whole Galaxy that they learned nothing from history. The Maw might be irredeemable, but they are not wrong in calling out just how incompetent, entrenched, and overall corrupt and stagnant the Major factions are. Maybe they deserve to fall. Maybe these people's loyalty should be placed with a government that isn't willing to be soft fighting the monsters who did this. Maybe the people themselves have to stop being soft, because the Galaxy doesn't allow for it anymore."
Lynda was silent.
"Would you want Karlie to stop being soft, and start being a killer like you?" Lynda finally asked, standing up with her armor.
Vera had no answer as Lynda walked out.
Present.
She lived for vengeance on the Maw. She had jumped on the first transport, eager to avenge her murdered pets.
Lynda, for the first time in her life, was nearly blind with rage at the Maw animals. She didn't want to understand why they felt as they did. She just wanted to kill them all as much as she could. She didn't want to stop until they were ALL dead. Coincidentally, this is how the second great rampage against the demons of Hell began, because somebody went nuts seeing the head of their rabbit impaled on a stick.
In the terrible moments before she decided to make an emergency exit out of the gunship flying over the blazing battlefield, she totally understood, with terrible clarity, why Laertia Io had betrayed The Jedi.
Her suit Repulsors kicked in, allowing her fall to slow and transition to flight as she dived down on the troops of
The Mongrel
as they surged towards the city after
Marlon Sularen
had rained death from above.
Lynda crashed into a large band at high speed, her sword impaling one of the larger ones, sending him into a crowd of others.
The others were not given a chance to react as her sword edge was already dashing through more limbs. The odds of surviving a direct melee encounter with Lynda were very low--low enough that even the Black Knight didn't like her odds against Lynda.
Lynda felt a sort of insanity come over her as her lethal Katana whipped about, cleaving through the cheap armor of countless savages, many augmented with cybernetics but still having no answer for one of the most Advanced HRD's ever created...
Lynda ignored a rifle shot to the chest that exploded her heart, which normally would have stunned her, but Lynda, filled with human rage the likes of which her databases couldn't quantify, fought through it, her sword ripping into him as she flipped and spun with her blade, only a few bullets and bolts catching her torso, grazing her face as she aggro'd the Maw, her killing spree cutting into them.
Was this how Vera felt? Lynda wondered that as she sub zeroed one female savage by ripping off her head and spinal column and using it as a club to instanty kill another, expertly deflecting bullets and bolts with her high tech sword, screaming at them in pure murderous hatred as she cleaved through their bodies, metallic fangs bared as the Maw savages got reintroduced to the wrath of an Atrisian Royal House...
