I Will Wait [Korriban]

[Hazel Scheler]

It stood to reason that while under the employ of the Sith Empire ala Grand Admiral Bosch that exploration of the Empire itself was to be expected. Never loath for a bit of adventure, when the ships drew over the red planet of Korriban Ivy Lasranae looked upon it with a certain sense of hunger.

Perhaps it was the cabin fever. Perhaps it was a renewed need for travel after nearly two weeks of training withing the confines of a Star Destroyer. Whatever the case, when given a personal day and the schedule for the dropships, Ivy made sure she was on one of them.

The planet itself was a looming mystery to her. She knew, of course, that it was one of the birth places of the Darkside and its minions, the Sith, but how the planet was currently utilized was only something she could guess at. It occured to her as she stared out the small, round viewport watching the desert planet grow larger, that it was likely she was willingly walking herself into a very bad day.

"Steer clear of the Temple," an occupant of the drop ship said to the man seated beside him. A greenhorn, judging by the blanching of his face and the rigidity of his posture. "That's the hive for all the Apprentices. Rotten bunch. Spoiled brats, think they're a gift to the galaxy. Every last one of them. They'll pull their damned lightsaber and lop off your arm 'fore you can sneeze at 'em."


Ivy would have agreed, though she had no experience with fledgling Force Users. Her own fashioned a tale of tangoing with the Lords - both dances had left visible, tangible memories on her skin. The most recent of which still continued to glow a faint red on the edges of her face. She itched at them absently while she listened.


"Stick with me. I'm heading into the Trader's Port. There's a good cantina there. Might run across a Knight or two, but they tend to keep to themselves 'less you piss 'em off. Don' piss 'em off, buck, they won't be loppin' off just an arm. Likely to lose your head." The pilot grinned. Next to him the greenhorn shuddered, his face having gone a shade of green now.


"Where would one go," Ivy interjected after some hesitation, which caused the Pilot to jump slightly. She'd been so silent the whole ride she might as well have not even been there at all. An empty seat, a blank face amongst the ranks. This was how she preferred it - it meant less questions.

"...if?" he queried.

"if they were looking for, say, spare parts."

"Spare parts? To what? Did you snap the throttle of your ship again?" he sniggered.

Ivy sniffed over a frown, did everyone know about that? "To droids. I've got a mouse droid I want to fix up for my kid back home, haven't had a chance to stop anywhere for parts." A likely story, but a lie. She looked away, passing a hand through her hair. Ivy had never been a good liar, but the man didn't know any better so he was none the wiser.

"There's an old warehouse to the south of the Port. It's full of scrap. Antiques really, you might find what you need there."


An hour, a couple of credits and a rented speeder later the Mercenary was naught but a billowing trail of sand and dust across the wastes of Korriban, heading for the Trader's Port and that warehouse to the south.

 

[Hazel Scheler]

There was something very cathartic about the heat of Korriban. It didn't matter how fast, or slow as it were, one traveled across the rolling desert plains - the heat was always there. You couldn't outrun it, couldn't hide from it, couldn't ward it away. It settled into the lining of cloth and metal alike, seeped into the pores of your skin and boiled your blood from the inside. Ivy supposed it must feel a lot like the rage of a Sith coursing through their veins.

She'd heard all sorts of talk on the Admiral's ship about how the Sith were trained and the torture they put themselves through just to earn a shred of power, an iota of respect. The self destructive nature of the Darkside was something she had witnessed to the extreme, and while the mystical powers the Lords of the Force controlled were as intriguing as all the other mysteries of the universe, Ivy was content to sweat out her demons in the sun.

At the end of the day she knew what was wrong and how to fix it - water, shade, rest.

But there just simply was no fix for crazy.

She arrived at the warehouse sometime around mid-day when the sun was at its peak. Winds had picked up by the time she cut the engine of the speeder, and when she check the western horizon there was no doubt in her mind that a sandstorm was on it's way.

"Sandstorm on it's way," came the drawl of what she suspected was a man who had made a few poor decisions in his life to end up the keeper of the Imperial dumping ground. Either that, or perhaps he'd made a few wise decisions. Ivy supposed it depended upon who you asked, all things considered.

"What can I do for you, Captain?" grunted the man as he pulled the bay door shut behind her, closing out the blowing sand and howling winds.

Ivy did not bother to correct him on her title - she'd earned it centuries ago in a different time, different place. "I...well, to be honest, I don't really know what you can do. I came to rummage for a project, if that's alright."

"I suppose that would be alright, what kind of project?"

"Something that will keep me busy in my spare time so I can stop pretending to be social," the latter part of the sentence was said as she glanced around the aisles of junked, antiquated, broken, and likely downright useless things, "it would have to be small. I don't have a lot of space to work with."

"Well," the man rubbed at the beard on his face, "I've got a collection of old droids that need fixing. Protocol droids, astromech droids, slave droids - anything the Empire may have discarded. Wasn't too long ago that I sold a strange looking chair to some man calling himself The Archivist. The things people pull out of this heap..."

Wordless, Ivy followed the man through the rows of metal and jumbled tech. She followed him down an aisle of shelves hosting all manner of droids in pieces and in varying states of disrepair. The man mumbled to himself as he lingered further down, picking his way between stacks, pulling out the odd part every now and then. She paid him little mind, assuming that this was often how he spent his time alone, in a warehouse, in the middle of a desert planet ruled by Force-wielding savages.

 

[Hazel Scheler]

Picking up the odd carcass of metal, examining it, pulling it apart to assess the damages, and then placing it back in disinterest was a tedious task. One that filled the better part of an hour. Standing at the end of a cleanly-picked aisle, Ivy's hazel gaze panned from the right row to the far end and back up the left and gave a sigh.

It was amazing how difficult it was to find something when you had no idea what it was you were looking for.

"What did you find?" the man called and upon looking 'round for him Ivy blinked in slight surprise to find him standing atop the highest shelf of a unit in the next aisle, his head nearly in the rafters.

"An aisle full of things that I'm not looking for."

"Hah!" the man barked in laughter.

Was this a crapshoot? Maybe. She'd come in with expectations of swiftly and unwittingly knowing exactly what she wanted, or at the very least finding something on a whim. No such luck was with her this day, it seemed.

"Caffe?" she heard him query.

To which she replied, "please." Hands resting on her hips, Ivy followed his progress down a scaffolding and shadowed his footsteps across the warehouse to an office in the far back. As she walked through the doorway she found him leaning over a desk against the wall, fastening the locks on a window. The winds outside whistled a savage tune of a song that connected two worlds: the wild brutality of the natural realm and the fortified armor of the evolved citizen. How people continued to come here, to live and make their home here, completely eluded her.

The man was muttering something, and in some whimsical way Ivy pictured him an aged conjurer, summoning the storm by verse alone. Bringing about a reign of terror upon the settlement to the north as payback to all the years he'd been ostracized from society.

This is how Ivy remained so steadfastly anti-social since waking - because the people she met were never so enthralling as the people she imagined them to be.

"Hot-" said the man as he pushed a cup of steaming caffe at her and picked up his own, "pretty bad, too."

"Do you always tell the truth?" Ivy lofted a brow at him.

"Try to."

She considered this as she held the cup beneath her nose, aroma filling her senses, "Must make you a bit of an outcast here."

"Outcast? Lady, these people wouldn't know the truth if it ran up and bit them in the ass. Lying to one another is what they do best. Don't matter what comes out of my mout', I don't even need to say a word. They come for parts, they leave. In the thirty-some years I've been doing this you're the fourth person I've made a cup of caffe for."

"Small wonder it's so bad," there was a bare smirk on her face and he snickered at it. "Why do you stay then? Surely you could do more honest work in a place it would be appreciated. Profitable."

"I stay because dealing with liars is easy. Can always trust them to be dishonest. It's the normal people I can't stand, they make me look bad. Here I'm a Saint and I survive."

Because sometimes surviving was better than living, and if there was one thing Ivy could respect it was a person who could survive. She raised her glass to him and took a sip, grimacing, "...it's not that bad."

"You are the worst of liars," he replied.

 

[Hazel Scheler]

"What are they?"

An unexpected length of conversation had occurred during the time it took to let their caffe cool to sippable temperatures. Ever the studious sipper, Ivy was hardly half a cup gone, though her host had already poured himself another full. She was sitting in a chair that creaked and groaned in protest to everything she asked of it while he leaned against the desk that sat against the wall.

His office was much like his warehouse: full of things. Shiny, rusted, old and older yet - trinkets of some higher value to him than the junk sitting in the aisle beyond his office door. With her feet propped on a nearby stool, the woman motioned towards a shelf on the far wall, packed with what looked to be droids far more intact than all the others. There were two black melon-sized droids sitting towards the center, one leaning against the other, the latter seeming to stare down at her with an unblinking red lense.

"Eh? These? No, ah-these. Dark Eye Probe Droids. Old as dirt, rare as a Herkimer Diamond, but useful things. Hardy, too," he spoke with some amount of pride. Perhaps these were part of a personal collection.

Ivy peered at them and their gleaming metal casings, dropping her feet to the ground and leaning forward for a better look, "What are they used for?"

"Spy units, information gatherers. Curious things, created based on Sith technology ages ago. They have stealth armor that absorbs energy so they're near impossible to pick up on scanners. They can relay video, and thermal images and can be modified to carry assault weapons."

"How much for the pair?" Ivy had set her caffe down on his desk and risen to stand, her interest in them piqued inescapably.

"They're not for sale," the man frowned, "took me three years to find the parts necessary to fix them. Only one is operable, and barely at that."

"Well I'll save you the time and money finishing it up, it's no skin off my back to complete the task. Such a useful thing shouldn't sit on a shelf, don't you agree?"

"They're priceless. You couldn't buy them on the market today and you couldn't buy them on the market a hundred years ago."

"A job then."

The man eyed her and it seemed to Ivy he might've resented offering her caffe in the first place. No actions without consequences, as it were. "I don't have any jobs for a pilot, and what use would a Probe droid be to one anyway?"

"My skills extend far beyond flying a ship," Ivy's gaze hardened. Surely he could see it? She wasn't wearing armed and plated to the teeth for nothing. The man stared back, impassive, ponderous. "Any job," Ivy lifted a hand to point at him, "within reason. I won't give my life for something you only gave three years for."

"As like you shouldn't," he scowled and issued a derisive snort. He set his own caffe down and moved to another set of shelves where he produced what appeared to be a fang nigh as big as his fist. Without any hint of delicacy he threw the thing onto his desk where it collided with Ivy's cup and spilled caffe everywhere, "Get me the rest of this and the Probe droids are yours."

"What is it?" she looked at it warily, whatever the rest of it was, it had to be big and it had to be vicious.

"A fang of a Tuk'ata hound. A very meddlesome Tuk'ata hound that's been giving me grief for thirty years. It's old, it's smart, and last week it made a meal of my brother. I want it gone."

Lips drawing thin, Ivy leaned down to take up the fang, steeling her mettle as she wrapped her fingers around it, "Point me in the right direction," she said, glancing shortly to the Probe Droids sitting silently on their shelf, "and I'll find your hound."

 

[Hazel Scheler]

"You can't leave now!"

After purusing the lands on a hand-painted map, Ivy graciously thanked her host, drained her caffe, and made way for the bay doors of the warehouse. She paused at hearing the man's voice yelp through the building and his footsteps clap after her in haste. A glance back followed by a short why not? was all it took to garner an incredulous look.

"Why not!?" he sputtered, waving his hands around him, "The sandstorm, woman!"

Ivy considered this a moment, giving the echoes of howling winds a contemplative glance before she shrugged and pressed on, "I'm on a schedule."

"Take this then, at the very least!" he threw a leather sack to her and it landed in her hands with a fair amount of rolling weight, "Don't open it in the winds or you'll be drinking sludge."

She examined the bag and the contents within - a metal container of what she assumed to be water and face mask with broad tinted lenses. Ivy pulled the latter over her head, adjusted the lenses over the bridge of her nose and nodded back at him. With a heave the massive metal doors gave way to the force of a monstrous gale. The woman pushed out, against, and disappeared from sight in the whirling sands like one of Korriban's dark geists.


The remarkable thing about this speeder was it could operate in such inclement weather. The ingenuity of the advanced mind never ceased to amaze and Ivy pondered what sort of alterations had been made to the bike that remain unseen within its electronic guts. The engine's roar overtaken by the winds, she had to wipe the gauges clean of sand to be sure it had even started. Repulsors kicking in, she felt it lift from the ground, teetering against the storm. Weights on the underside helped to stabilize the balance while metal plates positioned appropriately in a point around the front allowed it to cut through the air currents.

Regardless of technology, one simply didn't ride a speeder through a sandstorm on Korriban. One commanded a speeder through.

Her destination took her south, much father than she'd expected. Far enough to land her on the outer fingers of the raging zephyr where the winds were not so constant, but painfully sharp and unpredictable. By the time she reached the stone column that marked the halfway point the skies were growing dark. Ivy couldn't be sure if she was losing the light of day or if the storm was on her tail, either way it made it far more difficult to travel. She pressed on, leaving a tracking beacon wedged into a rut of the stone.

It flared a blue light in the darkening red of the storm, flashing balefully at her back as the engines roared on.

Eventually her destination appeared in a rise of cliffs, a dark belt of stone that cut across the southern desert, remnants of a war that had taken place hundreds of years ago. An odd sensation captured the woman's mind as she raced the winds to the wall - it was as though she were driving through a scene of great bloody battle. There were no ghosts, not like the old tales you hear from the young pilots on the Admiral's ship, but there was a feeling. It was an energy of malevolence and greed, rage and wrath, victory and desolate, utter defeat. Ivy imagined herself within it as she drove on, commanded on, hands gripping the steering column bars so tightly they groaned but she could not hear it for the noise around her.

She imagined hundreds of cloaked figures, plunging, writhing, dancing, spitting a rain of blood and arcs of dark lightning. The roar of their desires matched by none, two companies clashed in the sands where dark creatures slithered in and out of sight. Set atop the rise was the invading party's leader: a lean man with a severe gaze and long black hair that stuck to his face from the sweat and the blood. A young girl of raven hair, slight and sprite-ish, waving a red-lighted blade to lop of the head of some hapless war prisoner. In the fields of sand below various ghouls tempered their rage by gutting their opponents, sated only by the taste of flesh and the scent of death.

The the left a woman in gleaming battle armor with hair of flame red rode in on a beastly mount whose scales glimmered in the merciless light of the sun. Lashes of white and red spun around her, tearing limb from body, flesh from bone, the putrid scent of burnt tissue was rank on the air. To her right a man of dark skin and massive stature rose into the air, booming voice issuing chants and curses in a language she couldn't understand - his hands were twisting the very strands of reality, conjuring powers of flame and raining them down upon his enemies.

The world shuddered then, a disembodied voice on the winds.

"Shih-!" Ivy blinked and all of reality came whipping back. The sands spun tirelessly around her and from somewhere a flash of shadow tore across her path. She felt the speeder strike something solid, buck and catch. Before she could blink she was in the air, tumbling feet over shoulders, weightless within the raging winds.

She was flying - a shadow passed beneath her - and then everything went black.