Demons 4/?
Okay, I know that it's been ages and ages since I posted anything, but I swear I'm still working on this.
Title: Demons (4/?)
Chapter Title: Indestructible
Author: Soul
Rating: R. Just to be safe, there be bad language, killin’ and sexual situations here.
Words: 2, 147
Summary: Enara Vae gets roped up in a quest to save the galaxy as she knows it. What is up with that?
Disclaimer: Okay, so not mine, the plot isn’t mine, the characters aren’t mine, there are just random details that are mine, and some dialogue and situations that I’ll take credit for, but mostly, all LucasArts!
Chapter 1: Everybody Run Now
Chapter 2: Rough Landing
Chapter 3: I Think We’re Alone Here
Chapter Four
Indestructible
Enara stomped up to the bar and ordered herself a Coruscanti Brandy, on Carth. Knowing the bill would annoy him as much as he had annoyed her, her mood lifted quickly, and she soon set off to scout around the bar for anything, or anyone, that might make getting into the Under City, her main goal, a little easier. The someone turned out to be Yun Genda, an inebriated Sith patrolman who liked redheads and was a very, very lonely man.
Carth
Trask Ulgo. The name rang a bell, slightly; I ran it through my datapad, and came up with something. Ensign on special assignment, and bunking with Enara Vae. That was odd for several reasons, but I could definitely understand how I had touched a nerve; I had been around the corner from the pod bay, I didn’t take a single hit or come under any fire, personally, during that battle. Vae fought for her life; she watched Ulgo die, had to outrun and outsmart the Jedi that killed him. And even after a race to get to the pod bay, she nearly died crash landing on the planet. I was forced to admit getting this far hadn’t been easy on her.
“Sir,” the bartender nodded at me as he passed me the check. The total nearly gave me a stroke. Coruscanti Brandy?! What part of “limited credits and supplies” did she miss? I dropped a large pile of credits on the bar and went hunting for my partner.
I found her quickly. She was throwing herself at a snot-nosed kid barely old enough to pilot a speeder. “I do what I can to blow off steam,” Vae all but purred at him, she caught my eye over his shoulder and knocked back the last of her brandy. I scowled at her.
“I’ll say you have the right attitude,” the kid tried to flirt, and if that was his best shot, he was going to be a very lonely man. “I have to go on duty now, but some of us Sith are having a party after our shift, maybe you could come? I’d really like to see you again.”
The fact that he mentioned that he was a Sith did not escape my attention. Vae couldn’t have missed it either and the fact that she hadn’t blown him off made my fists itch. Instead, she reached up and caressed the kid’s face, and his knees wobbled. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
He stammered out the address and skipped away. And I moved in for the kill. Actually, I held myself together a bit better than that; I seized her by the arm and escorted her outside quickly and maybe a little more forcefully than I might have normally.
Once outside and under the cover of a dark alleyway, Vae threw me off; that woman is really strong. “What the hell was that about?” she demanded.
“I could ask you the same thing.” I countered. “Charging me for brandy and fraternizing with the enemy? You need to start taking this seriously, Vae!”
She glared at me in a way that would have made my mother proud. “Okay, first thing to put straight: you call me ‘Vae’ again, and I’m going to break your cheeks; seriously - bark at me one more time like I’m one of your little soldiers, and you’ll need your jaw wired shut. Second, you earned that bill when you shot your mouth off about the convenience of my presence, and it’s not like I can’t make that money back in two or three games of Pazaak so don’t get your shorts in a twist. And finally, what you called ‘fraternizing with the enemy’ was me securing an invitation to root around the apartment of clueless green Sith recruit because, correct me if I’m wrong but, neither of us have managed to figure out a better way to get past the Sith guard to the Lower City elevator yet, have we?”
“You want to crash a Sith cocktail hour to see if you can dig up something to get us into the Under City?” I asked her dubiously.
“Specifically, I want to lift their uniforms. They’ve got to keep them somewhere, and I doubt they do their drinking in them.”
I gaped at her for a moment. “Are you completely insane?”
“You know, you aren’t the first person to ask me that, so maybe I am, but either way, have you got a better way to get past that guard? Working over a drunken Sith recruit is one thing, but a sober gate guard is out of my scope. Sneaking past is way easier; all it takes is the uniform. And getting them will be a snap, think about it: It’s full face-concealing body armour, after a few drinks, no one is going to notice a Sith uniform leaving the room, and they certainly aren’t going to check to see who is wearing it.”
“This is so completely stupid…” I began.
“It’s positively brilliant?” she finished with a grin.
“Something like that.” I muttered grimly.
“Come on,” she trotted off happily, “that kid told me some hair-raising stories about disease running rampant in the lower levels, we should pick up some fresh medical supplies while we have the time.”
I ran to catch up with her, “Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“I don’t. But I also don’t want to die of a Garden Slug bite because I ran out of medpacks. Besides, how do you know what is and isn’t down there?”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“Can’t help it, I’m a born genius.” She smiled sweetly and stepped inside the medical building. Force save me, I was stranded on a Sith occupied planet with the most infuriating woman alive.
But Dr. Forn sure liked her. When she wandered into his medical facility he immediately dropped whatever it was that he was doing and asked to examine her, explaining that he had been the one to treat her in the first place. Vae - Enara, sat for an examination of her head, which Dr. Forn said was healing amazingly fast. He asked her how her bruises felt, she said she didn’t have any, this prompted the doctor to mutter quickly and quietly about remarkable healing rates, but neither Enara nor I could really make much of it. Enara asked him a lot of questions too, mostly about the mutation disease, apparently it did exist, Rakghoul, it was called, and about the Undercity.
“Did you hear anything about the Republic Escape Pods crashing down there?” she asked nonchalantly.
“I’ve, um, heard some rumours, the gossip travels faster than even the swoop bikes on Taris, you know, really keeps the Sith on their toes, what with checking every lead.”
“Yeah, and the Sith have really kept us on ours,” Enara made a vague gesture to herself. “It’s their handiwork that had you saving my life.”
“That a fact?” Dr. Forn tried to appear disinterested, but I could tell Enara was getting through to him. If the Sith tried to kill her, surely she couldn’t be working for them.
“Well, not entirely directly, I took a few blaster hits off their boarding party, and I lost a lot of comrades to them, I saw some of them die, and I sure was scared for my life, but the big thing that nearly killed me was when my partner over there and I blew up our ship so we could hide the coordinates of the escape pods that had already landed. Any of the boarding party that had access to a Nav console could find them and capture them. So we set the self destruct on a short sequence and we did a manual pod ejection, but it was all so fast that not all the proper safety precautions could be taken, and I got thrown around the escape pod like a chance cube.”
“Your injuries should have killed you, missy.”
“I’m still here, and the people who survived the trip to Taris have a much better chance of surviving the trip home.”
“Most of your ship mates didn’t survive.”
“Some did.” Enara replied stubbornly.
“That’s not what I meant. Come, both of you, I’ll show you.”
Enara and I followed Dr. Forn to the back into another lab, where five unconscious men floated in kolto tanks.
“They’re never going to move, or have any higher brain function again, I expect their last hours will be very soon,” Dr. Forn said sombrely. “These men were brought in from pod crashes across the city. If the Sith discover them, I stand to lose everything, but it’s my oath as a doctor to ease their pain.”
“Thank you.” I said over the lump in my throat. I hate losing men. It doesn’t seem right that they woke up, drank their caffa, sent holos to their families telling them that they were fine, they loved them and they missed them, and then their ship exploded. And after all this, I’m still here, with no family, and still alive.
Enara stared at the bodies, “Did they crash?” she asked quietly, there was desperation in her voice. I understood immediately; she wanted to know if overloading the Pod Nav had caused this.
“They were all shot down by the laser fire. We haven’t retrieved a single casualty yet who wasn’t shot down.”
“Have you retrieved a woman, who might be a Jedi?” Enara asked.
“We’ve only retrieved two women, dead at the scene, both in full Republic uniform, one Ensign, one Lieutenant.”
Enara sighed. “That’s the most positive bad news we could get, I guess.”
“This is going to be easier than I thought!” Enara whispered with delight. We’d been at the little Sith twerp’s apartment for ten minutes; Enara had introduced me as her socially inept mechanic. I was starting to understand that she did it to see if my heart would stop. “If even one of these kids is twenty-one standard years, I’ll give you my whole side deck! And they’re all drinking Tarisian Ale! We’ll be out of here in an hour and a half, tops. Just stay out of the way, and don’t drink anything!”
“Why?” I asked, not following.
“For the love of Zim, Carth! Don’t you know anything?” She ignored the glare I sent her. “Tarisian Ale is made from Sol grain, just like many other Ales, and powdered, fermented, Tach glands. The Tach gland somehow just barely made it off the Galactic Schedule of Controlled Substances, but rest assured, it’s still very much a narcotic. I could knock back my weight in Derallian Ale, but after my third Tarisian Ale, I’m a giggling fool.”
I chose not to comment on that and instead found a quiet corner and wait out the terrible situation I had found myself in: Enara was flirting with the twerp again, who was on his fourth glass of Ale. Young, obnoxious Sith girls tried flirting with me, but I pretended I couldn’t hear or see them, and eventually they went away. More accurately, one of them passed out on the floor at my feet, the other two passed out in the fresher. Eventually the Sith boys dropped too, including the twerp, who lasted the longest, I’ll give him that, but eventually collapsed on Enara.
“Well,” she announced, gingerly laying him on the floor, “at least the greasy rat didn’t throw up on me.”
“Kind of ruins the chances of a second date doesn’t it?”
Enara shuddered, crossing the room to a footlocker, “Please, everything about him ruins the chances of a second date.”
I laughed.
“Shhh! I doubt a meteor-hit could wake them but I don’t want to find out I’m wrong either.” The footlocker gave a small click and opened, “Done! Oh look at all the shiny things in here!”
Inside the locker were what was obviously the twerp’s uniform, a nice vibroblade, a couple grenades, a Zabrak Scout pistol, and a couple hundred credits.
“Damn, I’m good.” She said, pocketing the credits, and putting the pistol in an empty hip holster, “Do you want the vibroblade?”
“No, I’ve seen what you can do with one of those; you better hold on to it, looks like the whole footlocker was for you.”
“Not the uniform. I’ll swim in it; our Sith friend is much closer to your build than mine, and also, his money is going to the Free-Bastila fund.”
“You want me to wear a Sith uniform?” I demanded incredulously.
Enara blew a few stray hairs out of her face exasperatedly. “Yes Carth; I want you to impersonate a Sith trooper, to outsmart them, and allow us access to the Undercity. It’s all very tactical and I promise, no one will question your loyalty to the Republic.”
“Don’t patronize me, sister.” I grabbed the uniform and stuffed it in my equipment pack.