So named because it is located one thousand, three hundred, and thirteen levels from the core of Coruscant, Level 1313 is distanced from the politics of the upper levels. Overlooking the chasm burrowing further into Coruscant’s core, one can watch freighters transporting their illicit cargo between levels. One misstep would send the careless careening into the bottomless pit, or aid the local gangs in staging “accidents.”

Weathered duracrete forms the retainer along the chasm wall, built in concentric rings that descend down an untold height. Strengthened with solid durasteel braces, maintenance has not been needed this far into Coruscant for a long time. Nevertheless, droids pre-programmed to fill in the cracks and crevices that might form in the walls float on repulsorlifts without drawing attention from the criminal gangs. The gangs themselves are focused on their next smuggling operation or struggle for control over Coruscant’s scum-filled underbelly.

Scudi Ferria hadn’t been to Coruscant before. It was something of a culture shock for her. Still, Level 1313 was more like New Raxulon than most of what she’d heard about the planet so it would make a good enough base. Scudi had been sent here by her new boss, a Kaminoan by the name of Archenksov. He had asked Scudi to scrub some data from a few databases. It was a simple enough job, though why she needed to come to Coruscant was a bit of a mystery. There was certainly more modern technology than she was used to dealing with, but as a travelling mechanic she could fix or adapt pretty much any piece of technology she came across. Droids bustled around the level, carrying out various tasks for their owners. Those would make valuable tools if Bastion ever went down. Scudi was a little paranoid at the best of times, so her boss sending her into the Core Worlds reeked of an ambush. But who would be caught in the trap?

Scudi wasn’t exactly known for her physical prowess. She was more of a brain than a brawn type of person. Maybe that was it. Perhaps she was being set up to learn how to deal with situations she couldn’t avoid. It was no doubt a fruitless endeavour, and Scudi had a very particular set of skills, skills she had acquired throughout her life. It would be interesting to see if the person being used to teach her a lesson even knew what they were doing. Scudi continued to keep her eyes focused on her datapad, looking for any vulnerable systems she could take control of. It would at least add some mental stimulation into an otherwise dull mission.

Something, or rather someone, caught Scudi’s attention. They were undoubtedly brave, to have two lightsabers so visible down on this level. The manly figure appeared to be no taller than six foot tall, and his hair could’ve been more neatly presented. But it was the lightsabers Scudi focused on. These weren’t some standard issue like she’d seen in the Combat Center, whoever this man was, he had funds to throw around. That was something Scudi could use. Setting down her datapad, the Chiss motioned for the lightsaber wielding Human to join her. He didn’t seem to take notice, so Scudi motioned again, a little more urgency in her movements. That managed to grab the attention of the man, who proceeded to walk across the duracrete surface to Scudi.

“I know why you’re here, do you?” Scudi probed, hoping she could resolve this without violence. Archenksov would either be mad or proud that she managed to avoid having to waste a potential resource. She picked up her datapad in her right hand as she stood to face the man.

“Someone has been tampering with databases, removing me from them more specifically. I was told the culprit was on this planet. So I’m here to make them regret getting involved in my business.” Baelor responded, unsure if this much taller woman was who he was looking for or if she at least had information.

“I can give you the answers you seek and a whole lot more, will you walk with me?” Scudi slid a hand over Baelor’s right shoulder as she spoke, the Human looked at her with a look of surprise on his face.

“I will come with you, but don’t try anything, or you’ll regret it.” Baelor took Scudi’s hand off the back of his shoulder and awaited her next move, already knowing what his would be.

“Very well then, follow me.” Scudi had hoped Baelor would have gone along with it a little more, even if she figured he wasn’t at all interested. But this was life, not like shows on the Holonet, of which Scudi was an avid watcher. The black-haired Chiss turned away from the lightsaber user and made sure to walk with a little bit of a swagger, she may have failed to calm Baelor completely, but as long as his mind wasn’t focused on harming her, she’d be alright. Scudi pulled her datapad in front of her and brought up a map. There was a nice little spot she could use to form a gap between them if things went south.

Scudi suddenly saw a lightsaber fly past her. Baelor was close enough he could have surely hit her, perhaps he had anticipated her attempt to escape and sought to throw her off her gameplan. The lightsaber’s hilt struck the access panel, bringing the door down and leaving Scudi with a need to improvise. But improvising required time and that was something Scudi didn’t have. She tried to run, but the Jedi leapt over her, blocking the way she had wanted to go. Scudi took out her saberstaff and ignited it. By now, the lightsaber Baelor had thrown had returned itself to his hand. The mercenary stayed on the defensive, allowing Baelor to come at her, it would save her some energy, for all the good that would do her. Baelor had the upper hand, a vastly more experienced combatant, he aimed his blade at carefully considered angles. Scudi had no choice but to back away, she was up against a wall as her feet shuffled backwards as quickly as they could. Scudi was trapped, and with lightsabers ignited she wasn’t going to make it out of Level 1313 without significant wounds if she made it out at all. Knowing this, she deactivated the saberstaff, prompting a look of confusion from the Jedi.

“If you must harm me, which I get the feeling your primal urges are saying you do, how about we set weapons aside? After all, surely you’re smart enough to realise I’m more valuable to you alive than dead. Sure, you can get added back into those databases I erased you from, but that’s just the start of where we could go. What do you say, no weapons?”

As the words left the Chiss’ mouth, a shiver shot down the Jedi’s spine. It was like someone was rubbing an ice cube down his back and it made the man strecth out to his full height in an attempt to shake off the alien’s awkwardness. This wasn’t his first interaction with a Chiss and with the girl seemingly more robotic than her peers; Baelor knew he was going to hate every minute of this.

“Enough.” Baelor was firm as he continued, taking a moment to extend his right index finger from his hilt and point it in the girl’s face. “I don’t want to harm you, so don’t make me.”

“Hard to believe that when you shove weapons in my face.”

At the slightest twitch of the Jedi, the girl recoiled in horror but was held in place by the wall. While one might have expected the knuckles of the man to be planted in the soft tissue of her stomach or to smack into her helmet and send her ears ringing, they were instead drilled into the girl’s hand clutching her staff hilt. The force of the impact smashed the weapon from the girl’s grasp and it rattled across the ground, skipping towards the edge of the platform. In turn, the girl cry out in pain before falling to her knees. Before she doubled over herself, Baelor noticed the girl grasp the limb with her other hand and buried it deep into her stomach.

For several long moments, the Jedi stood over the girl as she sobbed. A deep sigh escaped the man as he deactiviated his weapons, and rolled his eyes, before looking out towards the chasm that Level 1313 encircled - wondering how such a superfical blow could cause this nonsense. When the crying had softened, with the girl still clutching her hands into her stomach, Baelor noticed she had started to rock in place and hum some unidentifible tune as if it were a comforting mechanism. Quickly growing tired of this hassel, the Jedi crotched down beside the girl and tugged off her helmet so he could be firm without raising his voice.

“Listen, I warned you not to try anything. This didn’t have to go this way, but I’d be willing to end this here if you tell me one thing - who sent you to delete my accounts?”

An unintelliable whimper was all that Baelor could make out from the girl before she went back to humming that damn tune.

While Baelor was a champion of the Force and held true, as much as he could, to the Light Side; situations like these were the most challenging. A sense of frustration quickly replaced the chill down his spine with a heat of annoyance that rose into his cheeks and burned. All he really wanted to do was grasp the girl by her hair and pull her head up so he could get his answer and move on. But his commitment to the Light Side stayed his hands, for the moment.

“Tell me, please.” The Jedi changed tactics for a softer tone. “And I will leave you alone.”

Another unintelliable response from the girl could have sent the man’s blood boiling, if it hadn’t been already. Noticing that the girl was directing her voice towards her stomach, where she held firmly onto something, was enough for the man to justify to himself another show of strength. One of the man’s lightsabers quickly found itself clipped upon his belt again, freeing that hand to grab a palm full of the girl’s jet black hair before reeming it back. A more convincing cry of pain came from the bitch this time and she immediately raised her hands to the Jedi’s grip in a futile effort to stop his pull. And it was at this moment that Baelor saw the comlink that was being clutched in the girl’s left hand.

“Who were to talking to?!” Baelor barked. “Were they the one that sent you?!”

“I can’t say!” The Chiss plead, grabbing the man’s wrist with both hands but continuing to be lead around the platform by every firm tug he made.

“Tell me!” The shouting of the man could be heard echoing back from the far side of the chasm. “Or I will leave you here broken!”

With no further response from the girl but her sobs, Baelor stopped pulling on the girl’s hair for a moment and let his gaze fall upon her crimson eyes for a moment.

“Imagine what the swoop gangs will do with you if I leave you like that...”

“I can’t...” She sobbed, when Baelor motioned to begin pulling again she was quick to cry out “It will make me unworthy!”

“Is your worthiness to them worth your life?” The Jedi said releasing the girl’s hair and unclipping his second lightsaber. “Is that the kind of people you want to work for?”

It was at that moment a heavy clang sounded from the sealed door. As both heads turned to see who was interrupting, smoke and sparks followed an explosion that vapourized the door. After a very tension moment waiting for the smoke to clear, a shiny B2 Super Battledroid emerged.

“Don't tell me this is a friend of yours?!” Baelor scoffed with a growing smirk .

Scudi looked up at the brute and followed his line of sight to Bastion. It was about time the droid showed up. For a supposed “Jedi” the facade of caring about her well-being had evaporated awfully quick. It reminded Scudi of a type of person she’d done her best to avoid encountering. A bully. Scudi saw the man’s gaze locked on Bastion and began shuffling herself away, she needed time to regain her composure. She knew that Baelor would come back to her, and he’d be just as brutish as he had been previously. Barring a miracle, she’d have to take more of a beating and then decide how easily she was going to give up the truth.

Scudi slowly inched herself away from the upcoming confrontation, doing what she thought was a rather good interpretation of someone who was severely wounded. It wasn’t convincing at all, luckily her blushes were spared by the fact Baelor wasn’t looking at her. Bastion was running his servos off while firing. The resulting bolts had varying degrees of accuracy. Most were in the general area of Baelor and were parried away harmlessly or caused the Jedi to manipulate his form into avoiding them. The odd shot or two came flying harmlessly past Baelor and over Scudi’s head. The Jedi was coping a little too well.

The mechanic didn’t want to see Bastion broken down for her. She needed to help him out. While her saberstaff was still out of reach, the Chiss still had her blaster pistol. Granted, she was far from an expert markswoman but it would have to do. Drawing the blaster in her favoured left hand, her blue index finger just shy of pulling the trigger while she moved her arm up and wrapped the rest of her fingers around the metallic grip. Making sure to support it with her other hand, Scudi was as ready as she was ever going to be to make her move.

The Chiss’ index finger squeezed the trigger, causing a bolt of intense plasma to hurtle towards her Human attacker. It whizzed past the man, avoiding both him and Bastion. The distance, though it was essential to her continued survival, meant she wasn’t going to be accurate as Bastion but then, she hadn’t been made for combat.Scudi fired a few more times, each successive shot becoming more accurate as she adjusted her arm’s position. Still, she hadn’t managed to land the shot, the Jedi was clearly a practised hand at deflecting blaster bolts. She would need to preserve herself and Bastion through other means. “If you want information, come and get it. I’ll tell you who hired me. You may not like it, but I’m no fool. I’m only getting out of this place alive if you allow it. It was never personal, just business.” Scudi wasn’t a supreme orator by any stretch of the imagination but she found honesty went a long way.

Baelor noticed the droid stopped in its tracks. He’d doubted the woman while she was speaking, she had been unwilling to give him the information so far, why the change in tune? The droid. It must have some kind of sentimental value to her. Or it could contain data she needs The Jedi considered a few theories as he approached the woman, who was sat on the floor but had at least dropped the blaster to show she was being a woman of her word. Baelor had the upper hand, he would make the most of it. Only this time, he’d be sure to get the information he wanted. He deactivated the lightsaber he’d been wielding and put it alongside the other saber on his belt. Baelor’s right hand was then primed like a compressed spring before it was unleashed into the side of Scudi’s skull.“I’m getting rather tired of asking, who told you to purge me from those databases?” The man asked of the woman, who had to plant her hands onto the durasteel to prevent her head crashing into it. He almost regretted it, the Light was telling him he shouldn’t have done it, but he needed to make sure she would be honest with him.

“It was a member of the Brotherhood’s structure. They wanted you purged so that they could come to you with an offer to work for them. You being for lack of a better term, dead, was so that you and your actions couldn’t be traced back to you, or your patron. Before you ask, I don’t have a name to give you—” Scudi was interrupted by having her hair pulled by the Taldryanite once more. He waved his other hand and said something about her telling him the truth. Scudi felt like she couldn’t refuse, though she did her best. “If you’d let me finish, I don’t have a name, but I do have an alias. The person who hired me told me to call them Domitian. I don’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all, will you please let me go now?” Scudi had started out angry, but had become more desperate and pleading as she progressed through her response.

Baelor stood over the defenceless woman. “I will have my family’s contacts begin chasing your information. While they do that, I think you’ve earned yourself a nap.” Baelor balled his right hand into a fist and viciously struck the woman in the side of the head he’d hit previously, rendering her unconscious. Baelor pulled out a comlink of his own and entered a frequency before placing it on his right ear. “I need you to find out who uses the alias Domitian, that’s what the woman said the person who’d hired her used as an alias.” A voice on the other end confirmed it would do so immediately. As Baelor walked away, he guided the saberstaff over to the woman, whose droid stood over her unconscious body. She’d face consequences Baelor was sure of it.

The words were hardly out of the Jedi’s mouth before the droid lifted it’s right arm and produced a wrist blaster aimed upon the Jedi’s center for mass. Reactivating the lightsaber still clutched in his left hand, Baelor sloppily connected the orange blade with the oncoming assault while fumbling for the hilt that had been reclipped to his belt. With it’s distinctive sound, the lightsaber quickly ignited which cast it’s blue hue over the determined face of the Warden.

Rearmed, the Warden’s slow march towards the repeating fire of the B2 seemed defiant as each bolt from the droid was deflect away or left to pass harmlessly by the Jedi’s created sphere of influence. When the Jedi was able to push to closing on half the distance of the droid, the B2 engaged it’s basic forms of strategy and began to withdraw back into the corridor it came while keeping up the rapid rate of fire. Baelor, however, paused his advance to make note of the Chiss woman; who had used the diversion to gather and put on her helmet but was now running to collect her lightstaff.

The Warden’s next move took a fair bit of calculation.

As the B2’s repeating blaster fire kept the Jedi’s arms moving as he batted away bolt after bolt, Baelor focused on the pattern that his arms were creating while taking in a sense of the combatants around him. Then came the opportunity on the third sequence of the B2’s fire where with just a slight tap of his blue blade the bolt was bounced over the Jedi’s shoulders towards the clicking sound of hard leather on the durasteel floor behind him. Yet, through all his concentration and the use of the Force, it only took the girl’s cry of pain to let him know to expect the meaty sound of a body collapsing to follow.

A glance over his shoulder left the Warden with the image of the woman clutching her blackened and smoking ribcage.

Through this the B2 kept up it’s assault, but when it’s master collapsed in agony; the droid abandoned it’s strategy and began charging forward. The sight was all too familiar for the Jedi, and likely for many of the last several generations of Jedi. These B2 droids were the cause of death for many good men and woman over the years, and even though the Clone Wars had long ago became history - these droids were still used to hunt the Order today.

A painful moment was recalled by the Warden, reminding him of those that were lost in the strike on Meridian station. Friends that were taken away from him by the Collective’s use of these droids…

Raw emotions fed Baelor as he, too, started to advance on the droid. Abandoning his defensive deflections, Baelor drew on mystic energies to strengthen his leaps forward which continued to launch him out of the droid’s aim as he darted back and forth across the plain of the battlefield - closing in upon his prey. Once the man came within striking distance, what could have been done in a single, solitary swipe of his blade was instead used as a means to release the man’s pain. As the heap of metal collapsed to the ground in several piles, Baelor’s arms twitched with guilt as he marched back towards the moaning Chiss.

“All of this could have been avoided.” Baelor started, kicking the woman’s lightstaff over the edge for good measure before clipping his lightsaber hilts back onto his belt. “Instead, just like those sadistic bastards you serve, you thought you could pull a fast one over me, eh?”

“Well - look what happened, Chiss. Instead, you have left here with a hole in your side and your droid nothing back a pile of ash.” Pacing back in forth, Baelor seemed unnerved. “Now I have to wrestle with what I’ve had to do here today, but none of you seem to have to go through. Why is it always us Jedi that have to be the one’s responsible for putting the galaxy back together?! Why is it us that have to provide the largest sacrifices?!”

The last bit of his speech was aimed at no one in particular as he shouted towards the ceiling. For several moments the man just looked tired and stressed as he gazed at nothing above them and finishing with shaking his head before turning back to the woman.

“Who am I kidding?” Baelor again asked no one in particular. “I’m no Jedi. The Collective has made it clear no one wants us anyways, so why bother?”

It was at this point that man pulled the hatchet from his belt and crotched beside the woman again.

“I’m no longer going to pretend…” Baelor stated plainly before he smacked the blunt side of the weapon against the ground. “Tell me now who sent you, or I’ll make my transition to the Dark Side complete - starting with using this on every joint you have.”

After several long drawn out moments, Baelor raised the hatchet above his shoulders and it was finally at that moment that the Chiss moaned.

“Archenksov.”

“Thank you.” Baelor was quick to respond, but that didn’t stop the hatchet from being brought down hard on her ankle.