Judges, please note:
The following fiction shares the same title as Marick Arconae’s fiction entry: The Real Test: Marick. The concept was to write the same introductory scene from two different perspectives, and then branching off into their own narratives. We felt this would be a cool display of how stories can have more than one point of view and explore the Master-Student relationship. While both stories exist on their own and without this explanation, we figured it was fair to suggest that they are read in close proximity to one another.
Thank you!
The Real Test: Adem
There’s a science to almost all things, if you’re willing to look for it. I do favor looking for the romantic qualities of something, but it admittedly doesn’t get much done. Marick had been making it a point to instill this function-focused mentality into me lately, though I couldn’t tell you if it really took or not.
At the time, I found it hard to see much in the way of science or art in Marick’s callously calculated dislocations and twists of limbs that I’m certain the mercenary writhing on the ground wished were someone else’s right about then. I elected to stare elsewhere at an interesting patch of ground. He was the least fortunate member of a small, five-man patrol we’d managed to single out and ambush about a minute and a half earlier. I’d killed just one; he died of shock before Marick could get to him, due to loss of an arm at the elbow. The Shadicar had claimed two of the guns-for-hire, and our third man had peppered the squad leader to death with blaster fire while shouting “Wynning” at the top of his lungs. I hadn’t yet decided how I felt about Wyndell Tyris, I hadn’t even learned his name, but he certainly didn’t seem redundant from then on.
Marick had developed a reasonable and then confirmed hunch that the mercenary forces that had been blowing up Arconan assets for weeks were planning to compromise Bulkhead. I knew little about the place other than the fact that it was a prison facility we quietly owned, and that a mass breakout would mean the end of the Clan’s hidden presence here.
The way we moved through the streets, you’d think we were walking through the middle of someone’s nightmare, just passing through. The acrid stench of smoke swirled along Ol’Val’s ceiling, waiting to be vented out when damage control would start later. Marick explained that as far as the shadowport’s denizens were concerned, this series of attacks wasn’t especially different from others that happened with regularity between criminal organizations. Buildings explode every other month in a place like this, and we wanted to paint this situation in that kind of casual light. Even the port seemed eager to move on and bury the matter, and some carried on as if nothing was wrong.
I kept shifting my eyes between Marick and the other man, making the logical leap that he was at least some type of Human. What I couldn’t figure was whether he was similarly attractive as Marick by virtue of also being Hapan, or just winning the genetic lottery.
“Looking’s free, Grey, but a dance will cost you,” Wyndell quipped at me. “Good luck getting one out of him.”
I didn’t have a pronounced fondness for nicknames, unless I really liked the person making them up. Looking for context, I asked him “Why ‘Grey’?”
“Two reasons, first being that the color’s all over you, and second that I prefer it to ‘I-Don’t-Know’ for your name.”
“Adem. You’re…”
“Wyndell,” Marick answered for the other man, speaking the name as dryly as one would utter “taxes” or “coroner”.
Wyndell snorted. “Brother dear, I’m about as fond of my full name as you are of the rest of the family. Stick with Wyn, kiddo, you’ll like me better.”
“Half.” Marick clarified tersely, having anticipated my pending question somehow. It certainly explained some of the resemblance between two chronically pretty people. Truth be told, I already found Wyn to be a welcome reprieve from my Shadicar teacher’s consistent intensity. Also unlike Marick, he wasn’t almost blind in a dim room, just slow to see.
We had no intention of entering Bulkhead proper, via the conventional Naruba Investments corridor. Marick had also pointed out to me that the only way possible to escape from the prison is by way of the mines above. A number of intrepid prisoners were more than likely trying to find a way out, while Teroch’s forces were probably searching for inmates willing to help compromise Arcona’s presence. We’d find all of these groups in the mines before they could escape.
If you haven’t spent much time with Marick, I could understand that you might be concerned with the fact that I was following a night-blind man into the darkest place you could find on Port Ol’Val. I can tell you that if there’s one thing working closely with him and Atyiru has taught me, it’s that vision is half the necessity everyone makes it out to be. That being said, yours truly still found himself playing the tip of the proverbial spear when the mine entrance whirred open. We slipped through and sealed it behind us, and when I discovered that the lamp power supply had been sabotaged, we experienced the complete absence of light.
Now, Umbarans being so rare, we’re subject to some handy misconceptions about our vision in the dark, which Wyn promptly demonstrated.
“Sooo… Is this like, day time for you? How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Two, and I can also see inside your stomach and tell you what you had for breakfast a week ago.” Total lie. “Think of it like this; seeing into the ultraviolet spectrum lets me perceive the emissive glow of objects that have absorbed electromagnetic radiation, which-”
“I *glow*? Is that bad?”
Marick sighed. “The artificial lighting that runs through these mines has effectively painted the walls with harmless radiation Adem can perceive. He sees the light’s ghost, so to speak. Let him work, and do it quietly.” I always liked the way Marick would talk about my sight, and I wonder if he would have been a poet if he had the choice to do things over.
It only took a few minutes of passing through the yawning expanse of the tunnel to start finding the scenes that had led up to the events of the breakout. The mercs knew the entrances, no doubt thanks to intelligence leaks. I stopped for a moment to examine their path, where two dead workers lay slumped against their equipment. Their assistant droid was pacing and twitching, likely sliced for access codes and discarded. Wyn kept bumping into the droid while I described the scene to Marick.
“Only visible injuries are on the neck, significant bruising, skin broken slightly. Not very much blood. Don’t smell decomposition, likely to have died very recently.” I said. I find it easy to talk about corpses. Most Umbarans separate people from their bodies without much thought, likely why we seem so outwardly macabre.
“Garroted, and they didn’t see it coming since they cut the lights to this tunnel. Teroch equips his men well, if he went so far as to shell out on goggles. Let’s keep moving.”
We finally began to see light coming from the opening into the tunnel nexus, since the power grid for the mines was compartmentalized. I squinted a bit, but I imagine Marick welcomed his sight back. Something immediately struck all three of us as odd; we didn’t sense anyone alive in the room, despite it being the most likely site for cracking open Bulkhead. A few things still made sense, like how any miners in the room were already dead, killed in similar ways to the first victims. The gaping hole in the floor was also to be expected, with the drill responsible hanging from its machine arm above the opening. Anchors were bolted around the edge of the hole, with wires descending into the open Bulkhead cell block.
“Something wrong?” I asked the Hapan when he drifted past me, walking purposefully towards the hole.
“The opposite. This is all much too familiar.” He tested one of the wires, and promptly dropped down the hollow shaft, wordlessly bidding me to follow. I was halfway down the wire and letting go to drop to the floor, my legs girded for the landing by the Force, when I heard Wyn calling after me. Something about shattered femurs being part of my training.
I had barely landed before I saw the edge of the Shadicar’s cloak whip around the corner and out of sight. Marick generally didn’t move far ahead of me very quickly unless he was either trying to imply that I was too slow and needed to apply more effort, or that something was critically wrong that (for once) had nothing to do with me and he became single minded in the purpose of correcting that.
Although I needed to catch up, the scene I dropped into gave me pause. Eight bodies were strewn across the hallway, these dressed in dark grey (slightly better for hiding in the shadows from night-blind people) and sporting masks to conceal their faces. The goggles Marick surmised would have been used were either absent or smashed to pieces. While virtually all their eyes remained open, a few were strangled and their pupils lost color when the blood vessels in the eyeballs burst, making it difficult to identify all of them as Human. Curiously enough, only two of the eight men wore harnesses for extra blaster equipment, suggesting that only two were carried, and the rest wore standard wet worker’s kit. Vibroknives and the like. The ruined computer spike still pulled towards its former owner, who lay slumped against the wall with six holes burnt into his chest.
An educated guess at what happened suggested that the prisoners weren’t as predictable as their would-be liberators had hoped. They took advantage of the small space and their superior numbers to overwhelm the mercs, and took what guns they had. It wasn’t an altogether surprising result, given the conditions Arcona created in Bulkhead. Trap a bunch of criminals with knowledge of the Shadow Clan under tons of concrete and rock for years, light it poorly, and give them nothing better to do than exercise their bodies and nurse psychosis-fueled grudges. Fantastic idea.
Marick suddenly reappeared in the hallway, startling me like he usually did, I had just learned to suppress the reaction.
“You said this was a familiar situation. This has happened before?” I asked, expecting the usual fraction of an answer.
“Right. The last person to compromise Bulkhead was myself,” Marick replied dryly as he walked past me. Well, my, my, my, that wasn’t the answer I was expecting. “The man behind this is deliberately re-enacting the Trials of Loyalty I carried out years ago. He’s trying to draw me out.”
I exhaled sharply. I didn’t want any part of old grudges, but I couldn’t leave Marick to do this on his own. “Let’s go find a ringleader.” I turned to follow him, but found his wrist gently stopping me at about neck height.
“Not happening. Your concerns are in the port. The breakout was contained. Only fourteen escapees, they’re your responsibility and Wyn’s.” His rebuttal made me nervous, and quietly frustrated me, but I knew better than to argue with him. What good would I do against someone with experience tantamount to Marick’s anyway?
Before I could say anything else, he placed a hand on my shoulder. Touch, the gentle kind anyway, was also unusual from Marick. The only person I’d ever seen him touch gently was Atyiru, but it was also different with her, like watching silent promises being made. I imagine he may have been trying to reassure me, but it felt like goodbye. Not his fault, it usually feels that way. Another person I needed, gone. I swallowed air, and he disappeared in that same amount of time.
I turned my attention back to the dead. An object can be found in much the same way as a person by way of Force tracking, you just follow the link in the other direction. I pulled the mask from the face of one of the dead mercs, and placed my palm on his forehead.
Sometimes I verbalized my visions out loud. “Objective reached. Packages secured. Clockwork. Don’t like eyes. Two to one. It would be so easy. Too many hands. Wall. Floor. Broken teeth. Boot heels. Shouting. Hands are empty. Chirp, chirp, chirp. Chest, fire. I am riddled with holes. Not like this. . . Gone.” The last moments of his life matched up with my guess. I fixed my thoughts on the rifle that was once this particular mercenary’s only hours ago, wrapped the fingers of my mind around the link, and began to follow a magnetic pull down its thread.
Wyn was looking at me with a puzzled expression when I climbed out of the pit. “Care to tell me why my dear brother goes wordlessly into the dark without his seeing eye apprentice in tow?”
“I’m just slow,” I said. “If you were locked up for several years in a place like this and suddenly got a hold of military grade weapons in a mostly lawless port, what’s the first place you’d visit?”
“Brothel,” Wyn blurted immediately, “one that’s the perfect blend of classy and trashy. The kind of place that you can feel proud that you’re there but also like it’s not too good to be held up at gunpoint.”
“Loth-scratch Hotel?” I suggested.
“Damn, you can read minds too?”
---
I had been to exactly three brothels in my lifetime up until then, and they couldn’t be more different from place to place. The first made no illusions about its reputation as a den of iniquity, and it was a very strange place for a boy of about seventeen to be following his teachers on “talent recruitment” excursions for the troupe. (“Exotic dance” was the category we were looking to fill, excuse you) The second was significantly classier, and was a self described “cabaret”. (Having failed in the first excursion, a trio of Mirialan burlesque dancers we met there fit the bill marvelously)
The Loth-scratch was somewhere in between, and Wyn’s assessment of its character was reasonably accurate in terms of how likely it was to be held up by armed ruffians. The neon sign had just the right frequency of dysfunctional flicker, the building was appropriately run down but not decrepit, and the scent of glitterstim and cheap drinks swirled into a miasmic cocktail of oppressive aromas that helped the atmosphere positively radiate seediness. You could tell it was partially a hostage situation from the street, on account of the handful of people who had managed to slip outside being in apparent distress. This being Port Ol’val, it didn’t warrant fast enough response from (no doubt already busy putting out fires) authorities to create a standoff, and it’s awkward to call the police asking them to save the local cathouse. The magnetic needle of my mind was pegged towards the inside, so at least one of the missing rifles was present.
“Tell me, Grey; do you know the best way to slip into a house like this?” Wyn asked, the semi-rhetorical nature of the question given away by his face, excited to give the answer.
“Very carefully?” I humored him.
“Well, yes, but ideally you get in the same way you get out. Quickly, quietly, and through the window.”
“Sounds like you speak from experience.”
“Have a drink with me next time you run out on a fiance you never asked for, I’ve got plenty to share.”
“Stories, or fiances?”
“Can’t have one without the other. Now, to rescue some civil servants!”
Training with Marick means that entering a building through the third floor window is essentially like taking the stairs, if we were normal people. If it weren’t for Wyn being present, I wouldn’t think it was anything special, but it took him noticeably more time to bound between the walls and scamper up the climate control units of two adjacent buildings on the opposite side of the street from the Loth-scratch. We both took Force enhanced leaps across the gap when we were confident no one below would look up long enough to see us doing so. Aside from him having to scramble over the balcony a bit and quietly panting “Wynning”, it went off without a hitch.
The first of our quarry was moving through the upper hallway, visibly intoxicated, and I was ready to move behind the nearby bed to get out of sight, but Wyn stopped me. He gave me a wink, and his body began to swiftly disappear, melting into invisibility starting from his toes all the way up to his head until he was out of sight. I’d seen Marick do this countless times, but what I didn’t expect was to also disappear myself. The prisoner walked out of sight, having never noticed us, and we became visible again.
“See,” Wyn whispered, “I can do it, too.” He was the first Jedi I’d met since Siobhan who could share his abilities this way. I did my best to put the past out of my mind.
Wyn’s eyes shifted back and forth, and he leaned in to whisper further. “I’m going to show our friend in there the girl of his dreams. You just have to give him a bit of a push. We all need one every once in awhile, don’t we?” I nodded, and shifted across the room to the doorway in a liquid movement. Sure enough, the recently liberated thug started grasping at a specter hovering above the gap in the stairwell. I coiled the Force around my bones and sprung from the legs to tackle him from the back. He flipped over the waist-high railing, and loudly bounced between several flights of stairs on his way down to the ground floor. He landed on his back and sprawled out, very much unconscious.
You might be wondering why we were making so much noise after such a quiet effort of entering the building. After all, if that was the idea, shouldn’t we have gone through the front door? Marick had claimed that the most important advantage you have when hunting men like this is a psychological one. Sending a message that indicates your presence early on gives them time to consider things; your reputation, what you just managed to do to one of their men, the fact that no one noticed your entrance. In response to seeing one of their own injured, groups tend to adopt one of two strategies. Some spread out and try to find whatever it is that’s hunting them, but also isolate themselves and become vulnerable to being picked off, one by one. This group of prisoners decided they were better off bunching up in the main lobby and daring us to make a move.
We crouched on the second flight of stairs and watched the thirteen remaining prisoners huddle in a circle, looking for something to come pouncing at them from any direction. The working girls remained on the floor, close to the walls. I was pleased to see that two rifles were present, both the one unaccounted for, and the one I’d been tracking. The other prisoners were rather lightly armed, with only the occasional pipes and vibroknives. One, amusingly, carried a two-by-four as a makeshift cudgel.
Wyn nudged me. “How does giving them a nice show sound?” I gave a silent but enthusiastic nod. I definitely liked Wyn’s style by now. “I’ve heard the girls here are real monsters if you catch them on a good night, downright scary. How are you with illusions?”
“Decent. What do you have in mind?”
“Well, we set a scene. We already have our actors. You just make sure that the real girls stay put, and follow my lead on the matter of their stand-ins. Then, we play clean up crew.”
“Got a plan for that too?”
He tweaked some settings on one of his blasters. “Gotta learn to be a bit spontaneous now and again, Grey, just get them close. Not *too* close,though. Doakes and I will help them take a nap.” I elected not to pursue any line of questioning related to Wyn’s infamous “Double-D” naming scheme of his beloved pistols.
I shifted down the remaining flights of stairs, careful that the gaggle of panicked prisoners didn’t notice me. There were partitions between the walls and the main lobby, and I ducked behind them, warning the girls huddled there to stay put. I looked around the corner and up to see Wyn winking at me from the second floor, which meant we could start the show.
Projecting a very good illusion into someone’s head is difficult to do without a lot of practice and at least a little time to prepare. You’re fabricating a reality for a moment, and that difficulty is compounded when you’re trying to do it to a group of people. Thankfully, half was all I needed to cover. Wyn’s game was apparent almost immediately; from the forms of the hapless working girls sitting in the floor sprang monstrous versions of them, some transforming into nexu or wampa shapes hybridized with the bodies of women and slowly bearing down on the prisoners. I went for insectoid looks, which definitely upset the man with the blaster I tracked, since he fired numerous poorly aimed shots in a vain attempt to hit something that wasn’t there.
Wyn made his move. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, and he could reach it from the second floor. He leaped, wrapped his fingers around the metal frame and held on for dear life as he fired a blaster from his free hand at the prisoners. The thugs scattered as bolts burned into the floor, a shot or two managing to graze a couple of them. One made the mistake of approaching my partition. I watched his shadow grow until he was close enough to reach. My fingers wrapped around the cold, engraved surface of my lightsaber and it sprang to life in a yellow flash and a snapping noise. The blade burned through the paper stretched across the partition with ease, and pierced the former inmate’s elbow. My arms shuddered with a surge of the Force, and I punched through the rest of the thin wall to pull him through and throw him to the floor, smashing his face into the hardwood with a knee drop.
“Cut it!” Wyn called, dropping from the chandelier to the lobby floor, and he ducked behind another partition to avoid the prisoner with the blaster. I took aim for the chain that suspended the lighting apparatus, and hurled my lightsaber at it with telekinetic aid guiding its course. It spun rapidly, a “whup whup whup” sound emanating from it with every rotation, and sliced through the thin metal almost as easily as it did the paper. The chandelier plummeted down into the center of the room, and one poor guy wasn’t fortunate enough to escape it when it came crashing down onto his leg, trapping him.
I wouldn’t have time to summon it back, however. My mind was a live wire, and sparked to warn me of something unseen closing in from the left. I sidestepped a haymaker punch, shifting to my right. I carried the momentum of the movement and spun on my right foot to bring my left around, bending at my hips to raise it high and kick the prisoner in the back of the head. It was a hard knock, and he bumped into a column, but turned around and moved towards me. Now, he just looked angry. I took the initiative this time and rushed forward, this time kicking from the left foot. He managed to backpedal, and my right heel nearly brushed his nose. He wasn’t fast enough for the left foot that followed and crashed across his mouth a split second later. My body still parallel to the floor and held there by the motion, I kept the spin going and brought the Force-imbued right leg around again. My heel smashed into his temple with crushing force, and his limp form slid across the smooth floor before coming to rest at the fallen chandelier.
“Gun!” Wyn called, and another spark told me to duck the fast approaching bolts of plasma that were eager to punch through organs I needed to live. He was trailing me, and I ducked repeatedly as I ran around the circular room behind the partitions, the scent of burning paper hounding my every step. Thankfully, the prisoner’s volleys stopped when he made the mistake of turning his back to Wyn, and was quickly stunned by two well placed shots.
The sound of splintering wood and tearing paper preceded someone tackling me before I had the chance to recover. He brought me to the floor, and we rolled a couple times before I found myself on my side. He had one arm free from trying to hold me, and a distinct humming sound paired with a flash of metal told me it held a vibroknife. I cast my eyes to Wyn, who couldn’t help on account of being tied up trying to keep prisoners from getting close to him and making sure he wasn’t shot himself by the other rifle that remained in play. While my wrists were pinned, one of my hands was free to contort into a focus gesture, and I released a telekinetic push that knocked my aggressor clear of me for the moment.
I’d barely managed to get to my feet before my mental switchboard lit up again, and I moved just enough to let a blow meant for my head break across my back instead. The sound of wood clattering to the floor paired with looking behind me confirmed my worst suspicion; not only did I get hit, I was hit by the guy using only a cheap piece of wood as a weapon. Marick could never hear about this, and if Siobhan ever did, she’d never let me hear the end of it. I brought a hand underneath the clasp of my cloak and released it, pulling it off of my shoulders and throwing it at his face as fast as I could. Dirty, as tricks go, but at least he was blind now and I was embarrassed as it was. I closed in on him, placed one hand on the floor and then the other soon after, hoisted my lower half up and swung the weight of my entire body in a spin of my legs. Both of them cracked across his skull in quick succession, and when I was facing him again, I swung my right leg around to the left and into his ribs at high speed. I pulled my cloak off of his head when he hit the ground and tried to shake his blood, sweat, and spittle out of it.
Somebody calling about scalping me on account of unfinished business got my attention. Mr. Vibroknife challenged me again, undaunted. We were both panting, and I took the precious seconds the standoff offered for a moment to rest and optimize my body functions with the Force’s help.
I remembered some advice Marick gave me some time earlier. “When fighting someone using a blade, short ones in particular, you have to prepare yourself for the inevitability of being cut or pierced if you close in on them. Improvise to protect a hand so you can have one arm you are unafraid to reach for their weapon arm with.”
I wrapped my cloak around my left hand and wrist, and closed it into a mitt. Not a dexterous tool anymore, but a useful blunt one all the same. The guy with the knife surged forward, and I sidestepped to the left, grabbing the back of the knife and his hand. I heard the sound of fabric ripping, felt the blade shaking. My right elbow gouged into his eye, and I spun around to swing my wrapped left hand into his face. I prefer not to punch, too easy to injure my hands that way, and instrument strings are murder on broken fingers. I torqued his weapon arm behind his back and pulled until he dropped it, before kicking his back and calling for Wyn. Mr. Vibroknife walked into a single stun bolt, which hit him square in the chest, and he fell flat onto his back.
Wyn really was something impressive to watch, for all his grandstanding. Two assailants armed with pipes for bludgeons bore down on him from the same direction. In the span of my few free seconds of not getting whacked with boards, I saw him take both down, but this time without firing a shot. Wyn blasted the first man’s legs out from under him with a telekinetic burst. The other, he waved a hand at as a focus, and “reminded” the prisoner of how much he disliked his old neighboring cell occupant. Sure enough, the pipe was swung repeatedly, not at Wyn, but at the poor prone escapee’s exposed back. Wyn then pulled out a shiny orb, one of his glop grenades, and threw it at them. The grenade exploded on contact, covering both thugs in a thick adhesive foam and completely subduing them.
He grinned at me, calling “*Wynning*” once again. His face turned, and “Wynning--” turned into the warning of “--Gunning, gunning!” at about the same time the Force alerted me. We’d subdued one of the riflemen, but not the rifle itself. Again I had to run, then dove to the floor to knock over a table and huddle behind it. I tried to catch my breath. Where was my lightsaber? The knife was back in play too, when I saw it glinting out the corner of my eye from the left. The man holding it was wary of me, and waited for my eyes to move away.
Without moving my head, I called to Wyn. “My weapon? Seen it?”
“Glowbat, right. . . uh. . .” the answer came.
“Now, Wyn, preferably now!”
“Got it, here you go! I don’t want it!” I heard him grunt upon throwing the hilt as if it were a smoldering hot coal. His face had gone a bit pale too, but I did not have time to ponder why. I turned my head to get a fix on it when it fell to the ground, clinked, and rolled a few feet away. I knew the thug would make his move, so I reached out a hand and drew the lightsaber back to me with the help of the Force. It felt warmer in my palm now than when I held it last, and it *snap-hissed* to life just in time to swing it across my body and slice through the prisoner’s wrists, relieving him of his hands midway through his attempt to plunge the blade into my chest. I rose to my feet, focused my thoughts on his stunned body, and telekinetically flung him out the nearby window.
I’d like to take a moment here to acknowledge that, yes, the notion of non-lethally subduing someone with a lightsaber is pretty ridiculous, but it certainly has been done. Has been for thousands of years. Even as far back as learning under Bo in the troupe I understood that Jedi tried to approach taking someone down by degrees. Where words fail, take their weapon, and where that fails, take the arm that holds it, and if even that should fail, take their life. I’d killed, even in days as early as this, but it was never my decision to do so. Sometimes, one dies of shock from dismemberment, but that wasn’t my fault.
Even under Marick’s tutelage, I could never have resolve enough in anything I was doing or representing to be willing to directly take life the way he would. Where I would take a hand, he would take a head. He didn’t treat death lightly, or enjoy killing, that’s a common misconception about assassins. He didn’t treat death in any particular manner or light at all. Killing was a straightforward business transaction for Marick. Maybe the infamous *Deadheart* was to blame, but it was something about him that scared me. I could only hope for his sake that it scared him, too.
I reversed my grip on the lightsaber, the yellow blade held behind me and close to the back of my arm. Easier to swing in tight quarters, or move across terrain without hitting things. I saw two more prisoners in the rotunda created by the partitions surrounding the lobby. The first was blasting away with one of the rifles at a lovingly crafted illusory clone of yours truly, which Wyn had manifested on the other side of the room. The other was rushing at me with a splintered wooden scrap taken from one of said partitions. I charged the wall to his right at an angle and ran a few steps along it, carrying me over his shoulder. I twisted in the air and slashed through his weapon arm in a smooth motion. My feet hit the floor shortly after, and I rushed toward the still-distracted gunner with amplified speed, my body low to the ground to avoid the other thug with a blaster in the middle of the room. I dropped to my knees and shins, and the slick material of my bodysuit slid across the smooth hardwood without encountering much friction. Once underneath the rifle, I flicked my lightsaber upwards and sliced it clean in two, much to the surprise of the man holding it. I whipped my leg around and hit him in the back of the neck, sending him tumbling to Wyn’s nearby foot. He promptly planted a foot on that same neck and fired two bolts, thoroughly stunning the poor bastard.
“Mind your eyes, Grey!” Wyn called to me, one hand outstretched and the other occupied with a blaster. I buried my face and very photosensitive eyes in my cloak, still wrapped around my arm but my fingers having accidentally torn through it with amplified strength. I heard a few yelps close behind me from the working girls, but also a male one that was almost as high pitched. I turned around to see one red bolt collide with the thug’s knee, and then a blue one hit him in the chest and zap him into unconsciousness.
“That’s one former adventurer.” Wyn quipped, then turned his attention to the remaining prisoner with a rifle. He was panicked, firing at random in all directions, even up at the second floor for fear that either one of our phantoms or more monster prostitutes (monstitutes?) would rear their heads.
“You can. . . do the. . . honors.” I said to Wyn, between breaths, and deactivated the saber, figuring I was finally done.
“Perish the thought, my friend! He’s scared silly, doesn’t even see us. He’s the grand finale, the fireworks at the end of our show!” At this point, even I thought we were overdoing it a little, but I was too tired to be snide. “Besides, he’s out of stun range. Say, you’re not all that heavy, are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I thought it would be fun to throw you at him.”
“*Excuse me*?”
“Come on, it’ll be great! You get to know what Wynning feels like!” He took a knee and held out an arm. He reminded me of Bhan; she’d never take “no” for an answer either. So, against my better judgment, I humored him.
I could feel that he had a hard time holding even my weight when I stepped on his leg. Wyn wasn’t all that strong in body on his own, but I felt the Force in his arm when the equal and opposite reaction came, and I soon found myself flying backwards. I twisted my front to face the floor and then shifted my weight into a forward flip, my hand tight around the lightsaber hilt and thumb sliding over the activation switch. I was going to land short of him. My feet hit the ground at the end of the rotation and I carried the momentum into a roll. When I came back up, I was close enough to strike, and snapped the lightsaber to life. The power of the entire movement carried the blade straight through both of the last prisoner’s knees and cut his legs out from under him. They sailed a few feet away while his body crashed to the floor. I came to rest on one knee after the stroke, the blade still humming as I held it in front of me and my lungs sucked air.
“Though he be modest in stature . . .” Wyn’s voice rang in a singsong tone, and he kicked the only conscious prisoner, the one trapped beneath the chandelier, directly in the head as he passed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“. . .And. . . mild. . . in temper and. . .style of life. . .” I breathed as I continued the quote.
“His arm be almost as fierce as his wife!” we said in unison. “Summer’s Eve Soiree” was a popular comedy, but I wasn’t expecting to hear it from anyone even loosely related to Marick. Wyn was definitely alright. Gradually, some of the frightened girls around the rotunda got to their feet. He held out his hands and moved them awkwardly in an attempt to make a calming motion.
“Everything’s fine, we saved your. . . uh. . . place of business.” A cursory look around the lobby suggested otherwise. “Try very hard to forget everything that just happened, particularly the Jedi you just saw, maybe take a nice bath or something. . .and. . .I really, *really* hope somebody can pay for all this. You put an effort into it and. . . uh. . .it’ll be as good as new! No, better than new! Make a proper cabaret out of this place, and you’ll be way too classy to wind up hostages again, I promise!”
---
Hours later, Marick finally materialized at the spaceport. We caught up to him, and Wyn left us alone to talk for a few minutes. Besides, he was mildly tipsy after stopping for multiple victory drinks at half the bars in the port, and went on singing as he strolled along the dock.
I looked at the Shadicar’s face. “Fall down the stairs?” I asked. He wore a bandage over a broken nose, with scratches across his forehead and a split lip. Still, even facial injuries did little to mar natural Hapan looks, and it was likely to heal within a day.
“Something like that. You got here quickly.” he answered nonchalantly. The tension was gone, he was safe. I wasn’t interested in the details of what happened, and I don’t know how much he would have told me to begin with.
“I had some help.” I replied, producing a vial of Marick’s blood I kept in a thick casing on my belt. I had drawn one for each member of Shadow Gate, (some secretly, some by consent) and kept a few taken from people from as far back as the troupe. Marick’s blood was entrusted to me by the Shadow Lady herself, though I hadn’t deigned to inform him of that. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
A flash of something like a memory danced across his ice water eyes. “Don’t be. It’s the exact kind of tool I’d expect you to use.” A long silence drifted by. You can feel and hear the absence of wind aside from drafts on Port Ol’val. It’s a bizarre sensation. “You did well.”
“It was nothing special, really.” Taking compliments from Marick was as awkward for me as he was at giving them. It wasn’t easy to take pride in brutalizing and recapturing those men for reasons beyond Clan loyalty, though I suppose we stopped them from doing harm to people who had nothing to do with the Clan at all. I held fast to that notion.
“All the same.” Marick turned on his heels, but didn’t start walking just yet. For the second time that day, he placed a hand on my shoulder, and applied gentle pressure for a moment before he let go and walked away. It had significance, meant something. That in particular, I would never doubt about him.
I stood by myself for a bit, slowly breathing cold, dull, recycled air in and out. I knew I would sleep like the dead that night. Maybe even have a good dream. When I turned around, I saw Marick still walking a ways down the dock, Wyn trotting along close behind. They were still there, and that was the only thing in the galaxy that mattered, then.