The Upheaval of Society

[Sebastian Thel]

Theme Music​

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The morning broadcast brought news of another planet conquered by the might of the Sith Empire. From his hotel room, Sebastian Thel peered between the ajar slit parting the curtains to the feint ray of moonlight disappearing behind skyscrapers. The broadcast gave way to a jazz melody to subdue the citizens of Mirial, a planet which had been divided by war only a few years ago. Pausing every so often to watch the door, Sebastian diverted his attention to his reflection in the mirror and shaved. His alarm clock beeped and caused him to jolt. He had given the sun no time to rise.

In the living room, a frequency meter was attached to the radio. The device ticked away and sifted through the Imperial broadcast for any suspicious signals. Every so often, Sebastian paused to listen to the ticking. His eyes shifted from one side of the room to the other as he slid the razor over his cheek. The seconds turned into minutes and he swallowed paranoia. A noise from outside the window caused him to jump, almost slicing a layer of skin clean off his cheek in the process. He set the razor down and walked into the bedroom.

With a layer of shaving cream covering half of his face, Sebastian crept across the carpet and gripped the drapes. The frigid air pierced his skin. He shivered in his shirt and shorts, watching condensation float on the air above his mouth. Reaching forward, he slid the drape backwards and peered onto the road below. The sun still had not risen and nobody was out, save for a derelict speeder parked across the street from the hotel. Upon looking closer, Sebastian could see that there was somebody sitting inside. The mathematician held his breath for as long as he could, then exhaled.

"I knew it." Sebastian said to himself. The warmth of his breath clouded the window before his nose and he gently closed the drapes, only hoping that the man in the car had not seen him.

Biting in his index finger in thought, Sebastian rushed to the bathroom and washed away the remnants of the shaving cream still covering his face. His hair was still damp from the shower he had taken, which he dried off with a towel, then combed. Rubbing an ointment into his chapped lips, he returned to the bedroom and repressed the urge to look outside of the window once again. The jazz track ended and the broadcast returned while the meter collected the data.

Inside of the austere room, Sebastian opened a drawer and slipped into his suit pants. He buckled his belt and pulled a knitted waistcoat over his shirt, then found his socks and shoes. Once dressed, he walked into the living room and sat at his desk where the meter ticked away. A sheet of paper displaying redundancies and frequencies in the transmission was printed out from the reader, presented in numerical form for him to pinpoint discrepancies in the waves.

Fluctuations in the signal stood out to Sebastian, which he immediately deduced as code. Adjusting his glasses, he clicked his pen and circled several groups of numbers with repeating patterns. On a clean sheet of paper, he isolated the symbols and formed them into groups depending on their frequency. Organizing the most frequently appearing numbers into an equation, he reversed the function of the cipher, which brought him back to the letters the numbers represented. On a new page, he organized the variables and marked the amount of times they had appeared in the text.

A knock at the door sounded and caused Sebastian to jolt in his seat. Gripping the armrest, he stared at the door intently before managing to pull himself upwards. He crept across the length of the living room and gripped the handle, then turned. Upon opening the door, he was greeted only with the sight of the morning paper on the floor. He picked up the paper and locked the door, then brought the paper to his desk and sat down again.

Going back to the variables he had collected, he tried to organize them into words, only to be met with the frustrating realization that the plaintext had been written in Mirialan. Rather than attempting to decrypt words in basic, he decided to search for names which would be written the same in both languages and found sources of several shipyards mentioned in the text. Satisfied with his results, he placed the newspaper on top of the desk and flicked through for any articles including the same names.

On a few pages away from the front, he found what he was looking for. An article covering missing patrol ships in the area, as well as Imperial shipments which had been stolen across the route to Mirial. For the length of the morning, Sebastian had failed to rely on the network to avoid being traced. He would have to risk opening his communications. Grabbing a portable device from his hand, he opened up the network to the Saraaisash. The channel patched through and he received the voice of an operator.

"This is Agent Sebastian Thel reporting." The mathematician said, his voice low and cautious. "I'm tracking a rebel cell operating on Mirial." As he spoke, he gathered up his notes and filed away his workings out in his briefcase. "They are responsible for stealing Imperial shipments and are using the radio to exchange messages." His eyes shifted across the length of the room as he spoke. He picked up the device once more and took a breath, before speaking again.

"Send an agent to the restaurant of the Finlen hotel, Thel out." The message terminated with a pop of static. With a sigh, he walked into the entrance hall and slid into his coat, leaving the comms device in his pocket. He placed the newspaper on top of the notes in his briefcase, them flattened it down with the lid.

Grabbing his gloves, Sebastian scanned the desk a second time to make sure that all his notes were gone. After looking at the clock and anxiously waiting the arrival of the agent in the restaurant downstairs, he left the hotel room and locked the door. The comms device heavily in the inner pocket of his coat as he leaned against the wall. Under his arm, he held his hardcover notebook. He clicked his pen repeatedly and exchanged a smile with the housekeeper as she walked by. The feeling of being watched grew ever present.

[member="Mercurius"]

 

[Mercurius]

Despite it being early morning, the gloom permeating the streets had grown. Every tall window in its long and canted roof-wall faced east, designed to catch the dawn but doing bad work with the dusk. The shadows in the restaurant deepened til light, dark, and the table’s black lacquer were all one: the same muddy shade of useless.

Off-duty Mirialan soldiers congregated at the bar side. The sound of their drinking echoed quick and dull in the narrow restaurant space. The server spoke to the bearded bartender behind the bar. Looking Agent Marves way, the bartender paid him a short bitter look — the same as he’d offered since the fellow Mirialan had checked so sudden into the restaurant, ten minutes ago.

“…Do you intend to order food?”

“Thank you, no. Wouldn’t decline another cup though…” Marve fished three loose credits from the front pocket of his coat and set them on the tabletop. Dark and engraved with the face of the current head of the Mirialan council.

The server sighed and looked back to the bartender who moved to fashion another cup of Corellian red for the guest. Nodding, she took the coins and bustled away.

Except them, and the hidden workings of the kitchen, the restaurant space was near empty. Marve was practically alone. No full-fledged solitude, this – no time to put down roots – but a solace all the same. The sweet middle difference between loneliness and being alone. One rushes in and round you, closing like cold water til you’ve struggled too long and it makes you breathe what it’s made of. The other you fall back into, waiting, welcoming, sometimes warm.

The server was back. Marves jaw tensed and his teeth clenched. Colour in his cheeks, he nodded to her, raising his eyebrows into something that might stand in for a smile. She poured his cup full of Corellian red and moved to leave again.

"My regards to the owner, he has quite the stock of fine wine." In a past life when Mirial was not the war torn ruin it was, this restaurant would've been one of many beautiful establishments that welcomed spacefarers from the nearby port, now it was but a dismal shadow of its former self. Fortunately the owner did not serve any of that urine the Sith occupation force called beer.

[member="Sebastian Thel"]

 

[Sebastian Thel]

The communicator beeped inside of Sebastian's pocket. Swallowing a gulp, he clicked the pen for a final time and slid his hand into his pocket, where he left the pen and received the communicator. Upon pressing the button to display the holo-screen, he saw an alert from the intelligence network confirming that they had received his request and were in the process of dispatching an agent by the name of Marves. The squeak from the wheels of the housekeeper's trolley echoed from down the corridor and Sebastian turned to face the opposite direction. He smoothed down the front of his coat and walked towards the elevator at the end of the hall.

A man wearing a hat pressed the button to open the elevator doors. Picking up his pace, Sebastian quickly followed him. Apart from the housekeeper, he was the only other person present on the floor. Before the doors closed, the cryptanalyst slid in beside him and pressed the button for the restaurant floor. He held his notebook under his arm and his briefcase in one hand, the weight causing his palm to sweat. The elevator traveled to the next level and the other man stepped off, leaving Sebastian alone. When the doors opened at the level which housed the restaurant, he was greeted with a feint jazz melody.

Recognizing the same notes which had played on the radio before he had lift, Sebastian tilted his head curiously as he scanned the few guests sitting at tables. Although most of them were Mirialan, he assumed the agent he was looking for to be human. A waitress gave him a discerning look, before he approached her and parted his lips to speak.

"I am expecting a man by the name of Marves." He inquired, remembering the name which the intelligence network had sent him. The waitress did not need to know who the man was, only his name. "Please let me know when he arrives." Sebastian finished and looked anxiously at the door.

"Oh, he's here already." The waitress replied and pointed to a Mirialan man seated in the corner. Surprised, Sebastian raised an eyebrow in an expression of suspicion.

"Right, thank you." Creasing his brow in further thought, he nodded in thanks and walked towards the corner. The lines of Sebastian's mouth turned downward and remained fixed in their position as he approached the table. He sat down cautiously, never taking his eyes off the man's own. Sebastian set his notebook on the table and opened it to the most recent page, where the ciphers which had lead him to the stolen shipments were listed. A long pause held the air between the two men.

"You're very early." Raising an eyebrow, Sebastian pulled his eyes away from Marves and clicked his pen. "Considering I only contacted the intelligence network less than five minutes ago." He failed to hide the suspicion in his tone. Scanning the page on his notebook where he had collected the ciphers from the transmission, he passed over the page to Marves and reached down to open his briefcase. Just as the waitress arrived, Sebastian unhooked the latches and set the lid on the floor.

"After some breakfast?" The Mirialan woman asked, her clipboard balancing in her hand. As he leaned down to face the floor, Sebastian's glasses fell clean off with a clatter.

"Oops!" He exclaimed, suddenly breaking the tense atmosphere. Collecting his glasses in haste, he slid them back over his ears and sat upright to face the waitress. "No thank you, just coffee." Nodding, he procured the notes he had been working on in his room and placed them on the table. The waitress nodded in return and left. Staring at the floor for the moment, Sebastian regained his composure and slowly turned his head to face Marves.

"Alcohol at six in the morning? Goodness me." He exclaimed as he noticed the beverage in Marve's grip. Sebastian did not drink himself, not for any moral reason, he simply did not like the taste. He paused as he organized his notes, then folded his gloves neatly on the table.

"I must say, your heritage is unexpected." Sebastian said as he looked back to the sets of numbers he had prepared. "Intelligence did well to send a Mirialan agent, perhaps you can help me figure these out." He gestured towards the list of codes written in the notebook. "These ciphers have been encrypted in the Mirialan language, so I can't decode them." Brushing back the strands of hair which had fallen around his eyes from leaning down, Sebastian pointed to the page with his pen. "Just by looking, do you notice any repeating patterns in the text?" He inquired. The heating in the restaurant caused him to sweat and he removed his scarf.

[member="Mercurius"]

 

[Mercurius]

"It doesn't pay to be late my friend, wouldn't you agree?" The Mirialan agent responded teasingly, he looked down into his cup, A long finger traced around its rim as he offered the human a look of amusement. Tardiness in an organisation like theirs did wonders for an aspiring agent who wanted a career long term. With enemies on all four sides of the Empire, efficiency is a must if they wanted order for the foreseeable future.

“We've been having this little problem for a while.” Chastened, sipping at the bitter wine, Marves cut to the heart of the matter. “Just bits and pieces here and there since relative order returned in the wake of the battle on Mirial. Imports arriving, but short a little of what’s been ordered. A supply ship here, a patrol cruiser there. Pirates perhaps? Or corrupt elements within? I—… i can't profess to know much, with rebel activity reduced i've been practically pushing paper since then...”

Marves leaned forward and reached for the paper with his free hand, taking a close look at the text taken from the transmissions. "Some of it is garbled but from what i can make out, it mainly concerns something about redirecting resources south west? i was of the impression that Darth Ophidia and her agents had dealt with the remnants of the Mirialan rebels." His voice was weary but sated somehow. " Evidently not as it doesn't appear to address any servant of the council of Mirial."


[member="Sebastian Thel"]