Came in:
Assassin Corvette
Wearing: General Purpose Shroud (Armorweave Catsuit)
Armorweave Jacket
Armed with: Laser Spear
DC-15s Recharging Commando Pistol
The Model 1 units, being the very oldest children of Darth Xiphos, enjoyed special rights in regards to the training of all subsequent models.
They would personally design the training courses that tested out and stressed the design of each new model, refining the training as more was learned. All Models of Nuetralizer pass before their scrutiny before selecting their tasks.
Some Model 1's, however, would single out individual models to train on more personal levels in private Family Guilds.
Catalina had been one such Model, selected to be the Personal Little Sister (One of Many) of the Model 1's known as the Green Stripes, the very oldest of even The Model 1 units.
The Green Stripes stuck out from the Model 1's. They joked less. Talked less. They were somber and taciturn, and Catalina had absorbed the mindset, living with her older brothers. Absorbed it more than even her other sisters.
Catalina walked on the burning sands of Tattooine, feeling no pain or thirst, despite it being the deep desert, at High Noon. She wore nothing except a dark green loin cloth and a dark green top that covered neither arms nor shoulders, her dark brown hair swaying in mild desert wind.
She headed towards the site where her brothers waited. They were dented, scuffed, scorched in places, but on their foreheads were three green chevron, and they each clutched a Cortosis Weave Durasteel Shield that bore the same three green markings along with a self built weapon, a Spear that used a Laser Knife as the Tip.
Catalina knelt before the head of the Group, Martin, the very second Model 1 to ever be activated. He was covered in various war paints, but the Chevrons were paramount.
"Elder Brother." Catalina said respectfully.
"Little Sister. Have you come to walk the Path of The Nuetralizer?"
"I have. I'll shall walk in the steps of my brothers and sisters." Catalina answered.
"A most joyous day it is then. For as all Nuetralizers, you are to kill!"
"What am I to slay? A Krayt Dragon? A Sand Spider?"
"To slay mere animals is no true glory to a Nuetralizer. No. Only the blood of Warriors can truly slake our particular thirsts. You shall kill a Warrior of Great Skill. You shall wear his blood and take his weapon. And such a warrior is to be found here, in these great canyons." Martin explained, handing her his Laser Spear.
"Find him. Return with his weapon, anointed."
Catalina cautiously took the spear, activating it's flat green blade, nodded and headed to the canyon he pointed to...
The Biot walked purposefully across the burning sands, wondering what sort of opponent she would face. She had trained for this, sang songs with her brothers for this...what foe had they decided to test her with?
Eventually she entered the great canyon and noticed markings of blood and skulls at the mouth of its entrance. She clutched her spear a little tighter.
She started come across more blood and signs of violence. A massacred caravan of water sellers.
Catalina knelt down, examining the torn up bodies. Claw marks.
She frowned but spotted tracks and began following them. She must not fail her brothers.
It took her over two hours of trekking before she found where she suspected her target was. An old set of ruins built into the rock face itself.
She steeled herself emotionally, and then ventured in past it's elegant outer facade.
The interior was marked by the presence of candles in carved out spaces of the inner rock. Catalina smelled copper.
The Biot almost didn't hear the hum. It barely gave her enough time to leap out of the way as a set of large claws mounted on a chain swiped at her nimble frame.
Catalina landed, guarding with her Laser Spear.
He wore a set of saffron robes, features obscured by the crimson mask of a dog. In his hands was a length of thick chain with three ornamental vibro daggers at the end of it.
Catalina angled her spear at him.
"Tell me, why did you visit such wickedness upon a mere caravan? Why are you out here?" she asked.
Her answer was a deadly fast whipping of his chained dagger that she didn't quite escape. The Daggers tore open her side partially, leaking blue Blood.
He actively spun the chain now. Catalina backed off. Whip Weapon. It would be difficult to defend against.
She was many times faster than an ordinary human, but in such an enclosed space, against such an unpredictable weapon, her Speed and Reflexes were advantages that we're almost totally nullified. There were only so many directions she could move, and the deadly reach of the chain weapon was also a factor.
Lightning blast crack twirls of his weapon caught her, raking open an arm, causing more blue blood and muscle to spill out, greatly weakening and limiting her strength and range of motion in that arm. She backed away further, and was jumped from above by another man with the face of a wolf on his mask, this one wielding a great Vibro Scythe.
Catalina activated her Dovin Basal Heart as the Scythe man swung. The Gravitic swell extended, barely slowed it, but it was just enough to allow her to dive in a baseball slide beneath the swing, using her spear to bat away the chained knives just barely, transitioning from a slide to a roll to a leap away from the chain weapon, though her damaged arm caused her to fumble a catch for a rock ledge and tumble to the ground, smacking her head open and opening up a cut on her skull.
Her brain's ability to think momentarily compromised, she dropped her spear and ducked under a swing, activating her Dovin Basal Heart once more.
The swing slowed just barely from the scythe, and she zipped forward, fist flying upward for an upper cut that staggered him and allowed her to grab his arm...only to be flung away as he was much, much larger and stronger, though he was cautious now, surprised at the strength of her punch.
Catalina whipped her body back up just in time to start back flipping away from the deadly swipes of the spinning chain until she unexpectedly somersaulted and transitioned beautifully into a spin kick that caught him square in the jaw at a perfect angle, twisting his head so fast at the wrong angle, the neck broke. She made contact with the ground daintily while he flipped onto it, lifeless. She grabbed his chain weapon right as the man with the great hand scythe swiped repeatedly and in a frenzy for her...
Catalina's reflexes allowed her to time it so that as one of his legs went upward as he made a step, she tossed the chain around his leg and yanked as hard as she could, pulling him off his feet and allowing her to grab the Spear...
...just in time to be brought to her knees by a series of vicious, powerful strikes from her Foe's Vibro Scythe. Her face was reflected in his evil mask.
Her Organic combat databases scrambled for a solution as her knees were driven ever deeper, breaking them a little more with every impact. No way she was standing. A roll would buy her another few seconds at best.
She had one play.
As the Scythe came down, Catalina let the mass of her spear slide through one hand, until it held the laser knife attached to the shaft itself.
With a quick press of a button, it's magnetic clasp released just as she let the Scythe sink into her opposite shoulder.
She tossed the Laser knife right through the mask eye and he fell backward, killed instantly.
Catalina pulled the Scythe from her shoulder, looking at the bloody, flesh and skull filled surroundings.
"That's what I hate about Tattooine..." she muttered, processing her first ever serious brush with death.
"Never a dull moment..."
She had brought her Elder Brothers the chain weapon and Vibro Scythe about six hours later.
She handed Martin back his spear and knelt as the green chevrons were applied to her forehead by her brothers...
Being a Faction's Gopher wasn't easy.
Just ask Catalina Io.
For her part, she was quietly aghast at the horror Xiphos had unfolded at Kashyyyk. But there wasn't much she could do about it. She had a schedule to keep as she stirred from the old memory deep in her Organic database as the alarm went off. Her forehead had the symbols of the Green Stripes upon them.
She had gotten into SJC space via having used transponder ID's she had purchased on the Black Market. It had blown the last seven months if savings. She had been promised she would be compensated...if she returned...
Catalina was here to conduct an extraction. Evacuate as many of the citizens as possible that had made it and then get the hell out of the system as fast as possible. They had set up an old number of gravity well projectors running on temporary generators on the most likely Hyperspace Routes the SJC would take for reinforcements to arrive at Crispor as quickly as possible. But that was only stage one of the plan to escape.
Catalina feared for her brothers and sisters. She had spent a night in one of the Chaplain Public Parishes, listening to them, particularly
Percival Io
talk. She was low level. She was a sister, but was told nothing more than what allowed her to do her assignments effectively.
Catalina had been here two days, called here on an emergency diversion. They had been damn lucky she had delivered her last bit of Cargo.
Catalina had at last gotten the signal to go and pick them up and had been scrambling for last minute checks before taking off in her Corvette, which had a good number of Weapons to make it interesting.
She would head on a leisurely route at first...after all...no reason they should suspect anything until the last second.
Meanwhile...
"Order all units to begin pull back and evac where
Caltin Vanagor
is..." one of the Model 1 Units Ordered near the top of the tower.
"He's destroying the walls..." one said. "He's taking out a bunch of our traps in them."
"He still has to walk on that floor, and under that ceiling..."
The one in command, typed in orders at a console, and just ahead and behind of Caltin's position, two shotgun traps would spring to life.
The one ahead popped from the floor, the one behind came from the ceiling., Both had three sets of a double barrel shotgun.
But these traps were filled with an absolutely horrifying form of ammo.
Glass. A Core of nails and metal chunk surrounded by a glass Shotgun slug.
The barrels erupted, sending out both large and small chunks of super heated glass and nails and metal bits at his face and back...
Meanwhile...
The Chaplain felt nothing as Finley's hologram showed the mounds of dead from the attack.
"It was perfectly okay to you to let the scar worlds burn to have your war with the Sith. The Order tries to pluck at your compassion by showing these images, yet your losses are but a pale shadow to what the Bryn'adul did." The Chaplain replied, pulling out a small holoprojection device of her own.
"I carry this image with me every day, Jedi
Filth..." The Chaplain snarled. "It's a still image of
what happened at Saleucami."
The image showed a city burning horribly and the dead literally in piles as far as the eye could see.
"You Jedi really do have a lot of nerve playing the injured party. Sure, it was a Sith World at the time, but the Empire was so busy fighting the Jedi places like this might have been less vulnerable if the Empire had time to catch it's breath. The person who took this watched the Bryn'adul crush his family under their feet. That's just
one city, full of a billion people, yet the Order
dares to cry and stomp about a single temple. As if you ain't got a whole planet full of Jedi somewhere or another."
The Chaplain only gave a faint eye roll she hoped would enrage
Finley Dawson on some small level as the Official expressed his nervousness.
"See what they do the moment you show even a little hesitance to do what they ask? He threatens to group you in with us. Prefect, if you recall..." The Chaplain said reaching into her kimono and pulling out the contract, walking over, and showing what the lawyers signed.
"This building in dispute was purchased under emergency, with the full waiver forms signed with absolute awareness that it was...oh my...
condemned for demolition...and thus the Government of Crispor is
not responsible for any death or injuries that result from our inhabitation of the structure for said duration of our stay...nor is it liable for the death and injury of those who willingly venture into the structure after us for any reason, including the early setting off if implanted charges...But none of this matters really, because in 21 minutes we'll be ready to clear out and we will be out of your hair, Prefect." The Chaplain explained.
The Prefect, while by no means calm looked like he had regained his footing slightly. Crispor had some form of legal out as he looked at that contract. And even if some parts might have been
VERY generous (Some might say Opportunistically Abusive) interpretations of local construction, zoning, and Legal and emergency procedures, there was no way he wouldn't tap dance for the Mandalorian God's themselves to make sure it
stuck.
He looked at her "21 minutes? You promise?"
The Chaplain nodded.
The Prefect looked at Finley, wondering what he would say.
"21 minutes isn't a long wait." he said out loud.
