soft epilogue
.............................CONTINUUM OF FELUCIA
FELUCIA | KWAY TEOW OFFENSIVE | HOJO BASE
ARMOUR | LIGHTSABER
WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS
Maynard Treicolt // Eldaah Aderyn
<"I'm not giving them anything...">
<"I'm gonna take it all away.">
<"Anything her and these depraved Sith find precious, I'm going to make burn, I'm going to make them suffer. If they want to take my men, the people who trusted their lives to me and butcher them like animals for everyone to see...then justice will make its due.">
After the strong conviction of retribution he’d laid out for the defense of his men, the murmured, almost muted yeah in response to her plea didn’t give her much confidence. But she’d promised before not to stand in his way when he was focused on doing what needed to be done. And tonight, protecting those that were important to him needed to be done. He needed to prove this wasn’t a Jedi goose chase.
And in that infallible proof, the Sith captain never stood a chance. Once the escort was downed, everything else took on an accelerated sort of speed.
Touching down the bottom of the turbolift shaft, a sense of distant familiarity crept in to assuage its way into her psyche. Eldaah continued to stack her insults at the Treicolts. First, the manipulative ploy. Second, the slaughter of good men. Third, the uncannily contemptuous location she’d drawn the pair to.
“Oh good, this is a lab..” Loske murmured, mostly to herself while Maynard led the charge to claim Eldaah’s head. An existential sort of dread lingered about and she forced her focus forward doing her best not to assess the structure and what they were working on inside. It’s concept wasn’t too unlike her origin on Kiffu. Just increasingly creepier and significantly more organic in design.
She took a deep breath –– the cold air tasted like metal shavings and the sterile, out-of-the-box smell of long-chain polymers –– and let it out.
“I hate this.” She whispered again to herself, as if admitting all her reservations would inevitably steel her nerves. It helped a little.
They were moving too quickly through the scientific hell to appreciate details, but even glimpses of bioengineering made Loske’s skin crawl. Espies of strangely glowing water basins and containers were enough to roll chills down her spine. Tubes with anamorphic shapes shadowed within, low moans and groans of experimental expression -– muted and drowned out by the liquid they were contained in. Wall-sized cylinders filled with sorts of clear, bubbling gel. Suspended inside were dozens of oddly shaped organisms, with wires and tubes running from them to a bank of humming equipment stacked nearby. The entire perimeter was outfitted like this. Many of the shapes contained looked like an unlikely hybrid of flowers, fruit peels, and embryonic winged creatures. At the speed they were running, Loske couldn’t recognize any from the index Frank had warned them about a month ago before they touched on Felucia. Nor did she care to find out.
She wanted to smash them all. Tear everything in here apart before it manifested or got the chance to grow. In her frenzied observation, she made a careful note not to touch anything with her bare hands, lest it trigger another reaction similar to Dantooine’s immersive experience. Except this time, she feared, it might be more personal. A pool of memories she didn’t want to dive back into. Not here, not now, not ever again.
Fwwoooming to life, her golden blade arced out from her grip in a horizontal spiral that cored through the grotesquely immoral display lining the walls. Aqua ichor deluged from the fractured glass, breaking through and spilling out to the ground. The stacks of technology that her blade cut through sparked and sizzled in protest before flickering out of electric life.
“I hate this so much.”
<"Your ride's over, Sith.">
Well-timed, her hilt snapped back to her palm at the end of the hallway and she skidded to a stop alongside Maynard. Destruction of the experiments seeped out behind them, one side of the laboratory sputtering out incapacitated.
Further conversation wasn’t necessary. Maynard was right, they didn’t have time for this. While they were here, their men, his men, were claiming the capital and facing whatever horrors existed alone. The Sith had been trying to exert control this entire time. If Loske wanted to hold up her end of the bargain, she’d have to aid in taking the reins and put the Sith on the backfoot. Which meant...attacking first. Her free hand pulled a telekinetic surge of the spilled liquid behind her, intermingled with tendrils of wires and electricity and forced it to splash forward into the chamber the Sith resided. The benefit, she thought, to not using Force-born lightning meant the likelihood of it being dissuaded by an equal Force technique was less likely. She’d learned that trick from Alekto.