The Nikto Menace

[Matsu Xiangu]

For the first time in a long time, Matsu had found a place within the galaxy. Maena had proven to be full of surprises - far more than she’d bargained for when first happening on the system. Trismegis had been first, a forest-world for which she had future plans. But the half-volcanic jewel of Maena, thriving in hidden crystallized pools of neon light, was home. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt that way, not even on Annaj during her days with the Fringe. Maena evoked the same feelings, but it represented a new chapter.

However, as with most pages turned, there were names one wanted to bring with them.

Irajah Ven came and went of course. With her interests in several places, labs on multiple planets, it was no wonder she moved between responsibilities and interests. Matsu was no different. While she was cultivating her own interests, her mind and powers reached towards Hutt space and criminal elements in all aspects. She was building a web of a new kind.

But she did not like Irajah Ven’s absence from it.

So she’d thought up a mutual venture, some journey during which they’d both relearn each other, and both benefit in the process. The message had been sent, the as-always open invitation going unsaid. But for the moment the Sith Lord sat curled on a couch in her office, bare feet tucked up beneath bent legs. Reports scrolled over her datapad, legitimate and otherwise, the latter hidden behind layers of encryption daunting in their complexity. Sighing, she opened another report on the Nikto menace boiling over in the 400 Levels. She and Six-O had been working on it, their culling no small secret in the City. Most things Matsu just ignored - the place would never be tamed, and nor did she want to. But the Kintan Kings were harming her interests, her property, her territory carved within the city. And for that she would not stand.

She was interrupted from her reading when the door slid open, one of her geisha droids moving silently in to the room.

“My Lady, an Irajah Ve--”

Lately, Matsu’s patience had worn thin with inferior droids. Perhaps Six-O was rubbing off on her.

“Yes,” she said, cutting her off. “An Irajah Ven does not need to stand on the ceremony of this place. Let her in.”

The geisha droid whirred away, and when Matsu thought she heard the footsteps of Irajah padding in to the room she put down her datapad, though she didn’t uncurl from the couch. It wasn't a gesture of disrespect in the slightest - simply of comfort.

“You’ll have to excuse the droids. They’re good at listening and killing things, but little else.”

She rested her chin on her hand, looking at the woman who had always struck Matsu with how she was smaller than the Lord who was always shorter than everyone else. And then she smiled.

“It’s been a while.”

[member="Irajah Ven"]​

 

[Kuzo]

She had been on Maena for unrelated business, but she had left a brief message for Matsu when she had arrived. She always did, though rarely expected her visits here to coincide with availability on the Sith Lord's part. They had barely flickered against each other's lives since Irajah had been murdered, but it was enough to maintain that there was a connection that mattered to both women.

"Not a single excuse is needed anyway," Irajah responded, amusement and warmth both in her voice.

Crossing the distance from door to couch, she moved easily and slowly, but without hesitation. Just enough respect to gauge Matsu's face, her body language and decide from there what was welcome.

It was amazing, she marveled as she closed the distance, just how much it felt like she had changed, and yet how eternal she was. Irajah had never worshipped Matsu as a goddess, as a force of nature. She had always interacted with her on the level of the real and grounded. It was perhaps one of the reasons Matsu had liked her- unafraid to laugh with, to argue with, even when she had in truth been weak enough to crush like an insect beneath her thumb.

That weakness was gone now. Gideon, a distant memory. So many of the things, the doubts, the fears, burned out of her by the Netherworld. But Matsu..... Matsu was the same.

Leaning in, she greeted her with a kiss, soft and warm at the corner of her mouth. Intimate without any undue presumptions after the time apart. Another flicker, life against life, that reminded the other she was still there. Alive.

She settled on the couch, finger tips lightly on her knee.

"Too long. You look well," she said with a smile. "I was glad to get your message."

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Maena was a planet larger than the average terrestrial body that one might think of. It boasted miles of terrain, more of it unexplored than explored. Much more. Only a small amount of the planet was officially mapped outside of the sphere of influence that was the New City and the Slums. It was impossible that those were the only two civilizations on that massive rock, that was undeniable. But they lived in secret, quiet and shadowy as the planet’s reputation. And Matsu wasn’t sure she wanted that to change. However, she’d left home because of an urge to explore and that trait had never left her, and so she’d at least mapped some of the outlying area.

That beach, for instance.

So much had happened on that beach. Jacob had first hit Maena’s soil and found his way in to Matsu’s training. That strange Muun had tested her incessantly. Aria had further fallen. And...a different Irajah had battled for Jacob’s life.

That woman seemed as much a stranger to Matsu as she’d been then.
Somewhere in the middle they’d known each other.

It was the same beach she’d been standing on when Irajah had died.

Even so, their interaction had an ease tainted only slightly by unintentional distance. The idea that most people never left their home planet was always wildly foreign to Matsu when it came up in conversation - she was always traveling, they were always traveling. She tilted her head slightly, following the direction of the kiss where it pulled a curve of a smile from her mouth as it drifted away.

The grin was no less sincere, though a huff of a laugh escaped her at the comment regarding her appearance. That was true - she looked well, too well. The Dark warped her inevitably as any other practitioner though it made her look more uncannily plastic - angular, demonic, too pale. She nodded, leaning against the back of the couch with one arm up against her, hands slightly intertwined in front of her. A thousand things to say swirled in her head, but she went with the most honest, the most sincere.

“I said a while, but...it’s too long. Time sits in between us. Luckily, that’s easily fixed.” She curled her legs back up underneath her, a sign of ease. “I was hoping you might be willing to help me with something here in the city. And maybe we can erase the time while we’re at it.”

[member="Irajah Ven"]​

 

[Kuzo]

Irajah had always been comfortable with monsters. Even from the first meeting, where Matsu had applied pressure in the form of necromatic manipulation, there had never been a rejection from Irajah. She had never flinched, never turned a disgusted or fearful look at the woman or her methods. She had accepted it as a part of her, as a part that could, at least for her, be perfectly normal.

Odd then, it had seemed to the monsters who had come to know her. Matsu. Carach. Reverance. And yet not strange at all, when history was considered. Raised by two monsters of her own, even if she didn't know it at the time, certain sensations, feelings, stories had been as natural as breathing. And Raj's natural inclination to move like water, filling the spaces left for her without pressuring for more, had meant that she slipped comfortably in with these denizens of the darkside without fear or disgust. Even if, before, she had been something far different from them.

Now, however.... so much of that divide had been filled by experience, pain, even death. And it allowed them both to walk across it into the middle in a way that had perhaps eluded before.

If they wanted to, anyway.

It seemed clear, however, that they both did, and Irajah smiled, tilting her head as the corners of her eyes crinkled with appreciation.

"I am glad you called me then- not just for your company, but because of course I'll help."

There was no need to point out that Matsu had helped her immensely. Perhaps not directly, but with support, with succor. With safety, when she had needed it most. From the smile on her face, it was clear that she was happy to finally attempt to balance those scales, even if just a little.

"What's happening?"

Her face sobered a little, offering the other woman her full attention.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

The Kintan Kings had dissolved some time long before the Empire. Truly, it could be considered a gang of antiquity, vague reference found among dissolved records ruined by the plague. But Nikto were a people that clung to their smallest victories, so long and so often pressed until the heel - or tail rather - of the Hutts. The Kintan Kings had been one such victory, a criminal cartel that had been wrested from the hands of the Hutts on Nar Shaddaa to be run by the Niktos themselves. It had been one in particular, called The Mountain, that had won particular glory.

Of course, they had faded away. Few criminal enterprises lasted like the Hutts. But their memory remained.

The Kintan Kings revival, detailed in the reports that Matsu slid to Irajah, retained the original’s penchant for violence and strong-arming. They’d found promise on Maena, a planet that was home to Hutt business but was too crowded and riotous to allow any one group supremacy.

Though they would, of course try. They had to better the try of their Elders, after all.

“Well…” Matsu began… She detailed recent events, the threat to her interests. The gang of Niktos hadn’t just started up their own enterprise but were viciously attacking Matsu’s strongholds and warehouses in deeper levels, actively seeking to undermine her presence. “So I’d like to send them a message - one that’s exceedingly clear. Maena is too wild to wipe them out entirely so we simply need to make them understand I am not prey.”

She smiled. “Sound fun?”

__________________​

Had Matsu not had access to the tunnels between levels, the unnervingly large hollow structures that ran through the floor of each massive superstructure, the journey down to the bottom half of the city would have taken hours, if not days, if not weeks. Most who lived down here never saw the sun - the journey up took too much effort.

As it was, the two women stepped out in to a street brilliant with neons in the reflection of puddles of condensation.

Most of those sitting on the street by the elevator hoping for the visit of some rich fop from the upper levels recoiled at the feeling of the arrivals, but one particularly desperate homeless man scuttled up towards Irajah, holding our rough hands in supplication. “Please miss, credits to spare?”

[member="Irajah Ven"]​

 

[Kuzo]

Remnants. Echoes. Yet such persistent little things, continuing to gnaw and bite in ways the disrupted and irritated. Irajah had no illusions that Matsu needed her help to deal with the insects, but such displays of pest control were always better with someone to share it with. It made it less onerous, less, to be frank, dull, to have the company. It was a different sort of house keeping, and Irajah was happy to keep her friend company on what they likely both expected to be a tedious task made tolerable by the company.

It was not the first time Irajah had visited the lower levels of Maena's undercity. She had gone with Reverance, one part training, one part investigation, and enough to introduce her to the places below. It was in some ways so similar to Coruscant, where she made her own home and work now, and yet the flavor of the two were radically different. She decided, as she stepped out into the street beside Matsu, that even if she were deposited in one location or the other, blind folded and disoriented, once deep breath would tell her which of the two were waiting.

She glanced down at the beggar, blinking slowly. It was a not uncommon event where she worked. It neither disgusted her nor invoked a sense of pity. Much like any other force of nature, the poor and desperate simply existed. There was no changing it, no fixing it. No difference to be made. So why waste the time. She gave him a brief once over, habitual- assessing for aspects that might be interesting to her work- but no. She had no lack of hungry, desperate beings to pull from back on Coruscant.

Firmly, she stepped away from him, forgetting him even before her gaze had fully left his. It was that, the clearness of it in her eyes, that made him shuffle back a moment later.

Finding a living colony of ants on the streets here would be of greater interest to Doctor Ven than the life of that beggar was. And he saw it in that moment.

"Their thugs shouldn't be difficult to find," Irajah commented easily, her attention split between Matsu herself and the rest of the view around them. It was not a question of if those men would lead them to where they needed to be..... only how and how quickly.

Half of the shops in this area had been boarded up. But only some of those were in truth closed to business. Irajah wondered how many were simply afraid, and how many were in bed with the Kings already....

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]