Targets

[Cedric Grayson]

Things could have gone better, but then they could have gone a helluva lot worse too.

Darius watched the scene through his macrobinoculars. A portly man in a grey cloak was standing on a podium overlooking a crowd of hundreds. He was getting up in his years, with a long mane of curly white hair and a beard to match. His intelligent brown eyes peered out at the crowd with what one could have mistaken for fondness, though Darius knew the violence that bubbled beneath that facade.

This was Gorian Dern, a rather popular political officer that organized crackdowns on locals resistance cells on Serenno. This was the man that had made entire families disappear because of suspected anti-imperial sympathies. He wasn't dangerous because he could pick up on the Resistance's movements - he was dangerous because he placed no value on the sentient life he rolled over in his pursuit of them.

The loyalists loved him: everyone else was terrified of him. Darius sat comfortably aside in his corner of apathy, ready to bring Gorian in for his crimes, try him, and be done with it. He could only hope the bounty that the hutts had placed on Gorian for his crackdowns on the local spice trade hadn't been picked up by any hunters. The Resistance needed Gorian alive, lest another of his sycophants rise up to take his place after his disappearance.

They needed to know where the other political officers were stationed on the planet before Gorian could be killed, and Gorian himself was the only man they knew that had this knowledge.

Thus it was that Darius had come alone to one of Serenno's outer cities. While a team would have been nice, their numbers were simply too low to spare any men for the task. Alone, the Jedi Knight wandered down from his perch atop one of the buildings toward the plaza below. With a hand on the lightsaber hidden within his coat pocket, he approached Gorian through the crowd...

[member="Natassia Traxen"], [member="Rina-Jan Getchell"]

 

[Rina-Jan Getchell]

Over the years, Rina-Jan had been to numerous planets in the galaxy. She'd been to snow-scapes where the wind howled for days, to city-scapes where light glistened against windows like diamonds, and she'd been to jungles. Terrible, miserable, humid, damp, miserable jungles. Where mud stuck to your boots, rain came down so hard it'd bounce back up at you, and you'd be sweating through your shirt before you were through the morning. It sort of went without saying that the bounty hunter wasn't a big fan of jungles. At least if you were somewhere that was cold, you could keep putting on layers to stave it off. When it came to being hot, you could only go so far before local authorities wanted to lock you up.

"So what do we have here?" She muttered to herself as she tucked her sunglasses into the collar of her armor and raised up her macrobinoculars.

Four hundred meters away from the rooftop where she'd parked the rented out speeder, Rina-Jan could see over a great deal of the open court. The crowd seemed inert despite the noise, as if the sweltering humidity was sapping their morale. When here eyes settled on the one and only Gorain Dern, she was just in time to catch the fat fellow blotting at his forehead with a handkerchief on his way up to the podium. She estimated the range when he came to stand at the podium: 427 meters. Then when she was sure on that, she tossed the binoculars aside and retrieved her rifle from the speeder's back seat. It came to settle on the edge of the speeder with the stock mounted firmly in her shoulder.

Her position put her at least partly behind her target. That meant she could see out in a way roughly similar to how he would view the crowd.

Which mean that she caught the glimpse of a figure making his way rather purposefully through the crowd.

It was enough to draw her attention. To settle her crosshair on the advancing man's center-mass as she puzzled out just who he might be.

No real armor to speak of? Hiding something in his pocket?

Either an assassin or a jedi, and either way a threat to her taking the bounty.

With another curse she turned her point of aim and fired a snap-shot for the political officer. But her aim was off as the top of his podium exploded in a shower of metal fragments and dust. The shock was enough to send the poor man falling back onto his ass where he was promptly shielded from her view by guards swarming to help him and lock down the stage.

"Well isn't that just karking perfect . . . "

---

[member="Natassia Traxen"], [member="Darius Sedaire"]

---

 

[NT-6922]

This wasn't how she saw things happening. The job sounded perfect: she would hinder both the Resistance and the Empire, two factions she wanted to see burn into ashes. Knowing that trying to take the shot with a sniper would be risky, she managed to fool the security detail and planted an explosive charge onto the podium before hastily retreating at a reasonable distance. The blast wouldn't kill the attending crowd... at least, not a lot of them. Not that it mattered that much to her.

Her gunship was hidden in a nearby hangar she rented from an acquaintance, less than a click away from the veranda she was sitting onto. Looking through her helmet's binocular system at the situation unfolding below, she let a grin come to her face as she saw her target standing onto the podium, unaware of the bomb awaiting there. Taking the detonator in her other hand, she waited, knowing that although the explosive charge was timed, she would have to manually activate it: and it seemed very likely, as she took a quick look at the buildings and covers that had a good view on the stage. And such was her surprise as she saw that someone was perfectly positioned to cap the fething politician onto a nearby rooftop! Zooming in with her binoculars, she quickly analyzed the situation: armed with a weapon accurate enough to smoke her target, Natassia reacted quickly, although not in the most adequate manner, jamming her thumb onto the detonator.

To her horror, the explosion did not kill her target, leaving her in a hard situation. Now that the security detail was on full alert, she'd have to do her work the hard way.
Groaning, the armored figure stood up from her seat and opened the case she had brought with her, pulling out her M82 out and putting the magazines in the front pouch of her armor. Going back to the veranda, she inhaled deeply and jumped, deploying the glider wings after a few meters of her fall. Despite her speed thanks to the light weigth of her armor, she knew that her rival would have a dozen opportunities to shoot either her or the target - but it was the only way she saw to quickly close the distance between her target and herself.

[member="Darius Sedaire"]
[member="Rina-Jan Getchell"]