Transgression at the Crimson Flux

[Allu'rah Danan]

Daesha took noticed the giant of a man starting to pick himself up, and was momentarily filled with dread when his gazed fell on her. Her fear was short-lived though as the brute backed off at a gesture from Deacon. Her good eye widened in sudden realization that that beast of Human must have been one of Deacon's employees. Well frack. Apologies would have to wait until later, as farewells and final exchanges were in order at the moment.

"I imagine I'll be heawing fwom you soon Chaya," Daesha said with a smile and a nod. "An' thanks fo' da smoke. Been a while since I had one o' these. Wreal tweat. I'd like one o' them business cards o' yours as well if you don't mind." Stretching to reach for it, the Togruta accidentally bumped her side on the edge of the table and from her lips drew a hiss followed by a short string of explicatives in her native language. Dark black and blue bruising was already beginning to show through the snowy white skin on her flank where she had been kicked. She imagined her eye and cheek looked much the same. Even though she knew she shouldn't, especially after dropping one of his goons, she turned the man beside her and hoped for his sympathy.

"Deacon? Do ya think you could bwing me back to my ship?" the Togruta asked timidly. "I know it's a lot to ask, but a lone woman in de Undecity who's alweady been beat ta hell makes awfully easy pickings fo' muggers an'... well, an' worse. I haven't got enough fight left in me tonight to fend all of 'em off." Daesha hoped he would help her. She hadn't yet known him to be cruel. She had gotten down to the Crimson Flux on public transit, and had been intending to take it back. She hadn't intended to have the snot beaten out of her by a kriffing ogre.

 

[Saint]

Nodding towards the Pantoran female, Deacon replied simply as he shifted to the side of the table, rising to stand, "I'll send 'im right along upon receipt of your request Miss Talavara." Giving her a cordial smile, he extended a hand towards Chaya as he added, "Best of luck Miss Talavara. Been a pleasure meeting you." He didn't add that he hoped for her success as he should very much like to have her on his team. She seemed smart enough. Now all that was left was determination of her capability.

If she could pull this job off, then clearly it would be a win for them both and the Crime Shadow would be able to add a competent hand to his operations. THAT, in his mind, was the biggest potential payout of this whole ordeal. It didn't hurt either that the blue Pantoran was easy on the eyes as well, though Deacon wasn't about to mix business and pleasure so soon off the bat, especially with one who was seeking placement within his organization.

It was -most- important to select individuals not from a personal desire, but rather a professional one. Currently however, he had no worries of such interference. The Pantoran thus far had seemed to be entirely business-oriented with a sharp mind and an authoritative tone. Both would serve her well within the Black Sun. Besides, Deacon was looking at a promotion soon to Crime Lord at least, if not Sector Overlord.

If he were promoted to Crime Lord, then he himself would need to select a Crime Shadow of his own. While he had one individual in mind already, it seemed that maybe, just maybe, Miss Talavara here would give the other individual a run for their money. Again, they'd all have to wait and see just how -this- operation went before making decisions and conjectures about the future.

While giving his aide a hand out of the booth, Deacon turned to gesture for the brute who seemed to be sulking at the bar. Having done so, he addressed Daesha as he replied to her inquiry, "Sure Daesha. We can spot you a ride back." Smirking over at Genghis as the mountain of a man approached, he added, "I'll let you ride shotgun as well, so you don't have to sit in the back with Meathead 'ere." Chuckling lightly, he began to move along, making his way towards the exit.

 

[Miranda]

Chaya gave them both an affirmative inclination, handing over a holocard to the Togruta for contact's sake, assuming that she would be able to contact her when the time came. "The pleasure was all mine, I look very much forward to working with both of you.", with that she lifted the hood of her cloak and placed some credits on the table to cover her expenses. She then slipped away into the humming crowd of the Crimson Flux, exiting to its lower levels to begin surveillance for her project.
She was suddenly outside. The night air hit her face unexpectedly.
Lights bled into the canals and the converging passages of the club's 'basement' and warehouse levels. They ran thick and gory with dim incandescence. Shifts changed and working hours ended and switched. Retinues of exhausted smelters and foundry workers, clerks and starport dockmen and numerous reprobates trudged from factory and offices and alley stalls through the lower level byways of the Crimson Flux. The platforms were full of tired, boisterous argument, cigarillos and booze. Steam cranes worked into the night, hauling exotic cargoes from offworld ships. From the various dockings along the large metal promenade that ran underneath the club striking Weequay stevedores yelled insults at the human crews on the jetties. The sky above Coruscant was smeared with cloud and smoke from this far down. The air was warmer than expected, and smelt alternately lush and foul, as biochemical merchandise and waste coagulated in thickening flows.
So...the warehouses have their own private docks. They're completely open to the rest of the city. Not confined within the main walls of the club. Chaya ran an internal dialogue. She figured this would be most opportune...easier than she first anticipated. It would only be a matter of rigging up some fake cargo to be delivered, get some access and delivery codes, hack the warehouse security, and be in and out without question. Now all she needed to do was locate the crates. She took out a small omniscanner and began inspecting each warehouse for the merchandise.

 

[Allu'rah Danan]

Daesha smiled sheepishly up at man, relieved that he had agreed to take her home. "Thanks," she said, pushing herself out of the booth. She also left a few credits on the table. She had no intention of giving them their towel back. Her skin was already damaged enough, she wasn't going to mess herself up more by applying ice to it directly. As they picked their way out of the Crimson Flux, Daesha had a hard time matching pace with Deacon. Her limp was rather pronounced this evening, a proper match to the man she had stabbed not half an hour ago ago. It was hard to tell which one of them looked worse for wear. One one hand, there was him with coagulated blood crusted in his oily hair and all over his face both from the blow to his head and the bite to his face, which was swollen in a manner not unlike her own. Both of them had to hobble along to the speeder, the difference being that the Togruta was used to the twinge in her thigh, and her gait was a little more even. On the other hand, even though Daesha had cleaned up the blood covering her, she had a lot more visible bruising than Deacon's brute. Part of that may have been from the considerable amount of skin she was showing anyway. Even though she had won the fight, albeit by cheating, she was sure she would be feeling its effects much longer than the body guard.

Daesha tossed the last of the cigarillo to the duracrete and ground it out under her boot heel before getting in the speeder beside Deacon. "Just try not to stop too suddenly," she said as she gingerly belted herself in. "I really appreciate this. And I'm sorry for picking a fight with one of your men. I probably would have dropped the issue had I known."

 

[Saint]

Shaking his head lightly, Deacon waved off the apology with a dismissive hand as he replied, "No need. A'least now I know Genghis' capabilities." Looking into the rear view mirror and eyeing the brute in the back seat, the Crime Shadow went on, "Seems someone over-estimated their skills an' abilities in their application. Eh Genghis?" Deke's glare into the rear view mirror was not one of understanding nor forgiveness.

Nope. With a shifting glance, he nodded lightly towards his aide whom was sitting alongside the brute. A look of confusion came over Genghis' features as he glanced at the much smaller, much slimmer human female to his left. She had boyish features and he (along with everyone else) had assumed that she was only an aide to the Crime Shadow. Turning his attention back to his boss, Genghis inquired, "What's -she- gonna do?"

Rounding a corner, Deacon replied simply, "End your life. I don't take kindly to liars an' posers in my organization Genghis. If you say you're a bodyguard, then you're a bodyguard. Not some thug wanna-be who gets his ass handed to him by a Togruta with a limp." The large brute began to protest by gesturing towards Daesha and proclaiming, "But boss, she Cheated!! She..."

Just as he began to go into further explanation, the aide simply laid her hand upon the brute's thigh as something of a dark energy glowed about the contact between the two. Genghis stiffened up severely, unable to move or anything as his life forces were simply drained from his body. Stating simply after a few moments, the Aide spoke up as she stated, "It is done." With that, Deacon banked the speeder hard to the left as his aide opened Genghis' door...

 

[Allu'rah Danan]

When she heard Deacon pass judgment on poor Genghis, Daesha's head whipped around in shock. "No Deacon, don't! It was jus' a lil' scuffle, tha's all," she pleaded with him. "He's right, it wasn't a fair fight. I did cheat. I..." Sensing Ghengis go rigid, the Togruta watched in horror as his life was snuffed out so easily. It appeared to take the aide no more effort than blowing out a candle. The speeder took a sharp turn that jarred her body, and when she looked up the aide was pulling the door closed, with no Genghis to be seen.

"Deacon, pull over. I'm gonna be sick..." Daesha said weakly. She could already feel the bile rising in her stomach.They pulled onto a walkway, and she managed to stagger a few yards before falling to her knees and spilling her stomach contents over the duracrete, much to the displeasure of a few passing pedestrians. Pale, wide-eyed and shaking, she looked back over her shoulder at the two humans remaining in the speeder. "What is she?" Daesha finally managed to ask. She began trying to get to her feet, and it was obvious as she stood that it was extremely difficult for her. The Togruta pointed at Deacon, staring at him with disbelief and asked in a trembling voice, "And why did you that? Firing him would have been enough! Maim him to teach him a lesson! But... but that..." She was unable to say anything else. Her eyes watered. It felt like she couldn't breathe. She fought to work a breath into her lungs, inhaling deeply, but it just wasn't enough. Blackness was creeping in around the edges of the gasping Togruta's vision. She had almost stumbled back to the speeder when she collapsed, and was out cold before she even hit the ground.

 

[Miranda]

Chaya had circumnavigated all the levels of the Crimson Flux on only a couple of previous excursions, committing a map to memory of each segment in relation to the corporate mass. It took her roughly three hours to diagram the warehouse district underneath the nightclub and still she wasn't completely certain on the location of the merchandise. There had been too many bystanders, commuters, workers, bodyguards, crew, too many witnesses.
So in the much later dead hours, as she made her return towards the warehouse district again, this time she was unseen.
She walked without hurry along the warehouses' less salubrious byways. She picked her way past the trapdoors cut into the durasteel, stayed in the shadows close to the blistering walls. Behind her, its tower unlit among the Coruscant spires and masts, she could see the derrick of the Crimson Flux.
The flat flanks of the alleys swept up beside the sewers like the side of a canyon. From deep within the warehouses, behind their metallic skin, there were the vibrations of unceasing industry. There were retired starships on the docks, gripping their platforms like knotted toes. Chaya walked in their shadow, and heard the quick skin-sounds of flying rodents above her.
There were thirty or forty feet of crates and steel between the warehouses and the cliff-face of the Coruscant abyss. The Pantoran saw the lights and shadows of late-night speeders in the sky, weak shifting rays spilling over the warehouse guardrails from the lanterns of the sentinels patrolling the docks.
The merchandise signature lit up on her omniscanner; this was the warehouse. Code: 73-CU-573-VT. She committed it to memory.
Chaya emerged from the shade of the resting cargoes. She removed her shoes, tying them to her belt. When no one came, and there were no sounds, she dashed to the curving edge of the target warehouse, and slid suddenly into a small breach in its sidewall. She was as quiet as she could be in the echoes. She climbed to the side of a mechanical crankshaft, and into a service hatchway, long forgotten, but she had known it was there from earlier schematic insight.
It took minutes of effort to break the scab of age, but the woman finally managed to pry it open, to make her way along the crawl-space into an enormous, silent engine room, abandoned a long time ago to the dust.
She crept past the forty-ton cylinders and huge, ignored engines. The chamber was a maze of walkways and colossal pistons, thickets of gears and flywheels as tangled as a mechanical jungle.
Neither dust nor light stirred. It was almost as if time had been bled dry and given up. The woman hacked the outdated terminal of the forgotten service entry door, then stood motionless. She remembered the layout of the warehouse. She knew where she would have to head, where they, her team, would have to head later, past the guards.
It was in the nature of the woman's profession that she knew a few brutal and silent methods to dispatch the guards, but she doubted very much they could protect her here - sorely outnumbered and outgunned. She would have to wait for her infiltration team. But she knew a way in and out now. Hopefully the others would prove useful after this point. With a sigh she backed down the tunnel into the service hatch and slinked back into the shadows of the docks.
Now the fun begins.

 

[Saint]

Deacon quirked a rather sinister grin as he glanced over at Daesha once she had re-entered the speeder. True enough, he didn't have to have the man killed, but his blatant incompetence and misrepresentation had led to the Black Sun obtaining a reputation of weakness after the altercation between him and the Togruta here, and THAT, wouldn't do at all. No it would not. Swift and harsh action was required to make a statement, and that's exactly what the Crime Shadow had done.

Certainly, his next bodyguard applicant wouldn't be so foolish nor unskilled as to have his ass handed to him by some pilot with a limp. He nearly began to offer Daesha a small explanation, but as she had passed out in the passenger seat, his words would've been wasted on air. Glancing back in the rear view mirror at his assumed aide, Deacon complimented her with a smile, "Well done Blythe. Well done... an' thank-you."

She wasn't one to get her hands involved in the Black Sun's dirty work, but she did have an interest in Deacon's overall health and well-being. Upon arriving at his apartment, the Crime Shadow went around the vehicle and hefted the Togruta up into his arms, carrying her up to his room, the aide joining him. Laying her out on a couch, he turned towards her as he added, "Le's let 'er sleep. Care for a bite t'eat?" With that, he made his way into the kitchen, stirring through the cabinets to see just what he had.

 

[Allu'rah Danan]

Daesha groaned and stirred a bit when Deacon laid her down on the sofa, but she was still again a few moments later. She certainly had taken a beating this evening. While she was no stranger to death or violence, it had been the shock of such a dispassionate execution that had incapacitated the Togrutan smuggler. She had always been suspicious of 'sorcery'. While she had come to expect it of the Jedi, she had certainly not been anticipating Deacon's assistant to be some sort of witch. What's more, she had never seen someone use magic to kill another person like that, as though the victim was afflicted with some form of life-draining hex. It had all been too much for her to handle.

As she lay there, Daesha's breath gradually became deep and even as she transitioned from a state of mere unconsciousness into true sleep. She fidgeted occasionally, and every so often would mutter some nonsense that was probably in her native language, but would likely just be gibberish to the two humans present.

(OOC: I'm happy to have her sleep right through the night. Are you two happy to go to next morning?)

 

[Miranda]

THE NEXT DAY:

There were very few clouds that morning. The sky was hard and empty.
Chaya was not going to the Crimson Flux docks. Not yet. She walked afore, through the industrial hulks that surrounded her apartment. She took a route towards the little tangle of dockside vessels punctured with cantinas and diners scored with alleys. She had a certain jovial air in her stride, her hips shifting unconsciously as she made her way through the plazas.
She was surrounded by duracrete and tarred beams. The sounds of the factory ships and the immigrant freighter vessels ebbed behind her, losing her in the twists of the cityscape. She was excited that the time for her project had come so fast.
Tonight will be the night.

Chaya could see the masts and orbiters and rocket systems of bounty hunting ships dominating the skyline, landing to claim their remunerations; taking-off on random voyages. Cruisers sailed like submersibles-to-dock through the city's metallic rigging. She descended to Vos Telium Market and made her way over its little terraces and scaffolds accosted by vendors and jostled by early shoppers.
She closed her eyes momentarily, and imagined herself amidst the organisation of the Black Sun. Her time had arrived. If everything went according to plan, her life would be transformed.
Chaya felt her resolve waxing, and she walked more quickly.
In the clockhouse district she almost became lost in the unfamiliar environs. She referred carefully to her datapad then made her way along winding walkways stretched out over the lower levels of Coruscant, and across crudely reconfigured droidshops and repair stands. This was a rather quiet quarter. Even the air coursing up from the abyssal lower sectors seemed subdued. This was a neighbourhood of back-alley mechanics and tech-apothecaries and gear workers. The electronics scientists of Coruscant.
In the office at the top of one of the quarter's spires, Chaya looked out from the imperfectly cut window. She could see across the restless shipscape of the docklands to the horizon that seemed to pitch gently with the movements of the city-planet. An illusion of eternally moving sky traffic and chemical haze.
A Kaleesh tech-merchant emerged from a backroom and greeted her, "ah...welcome friend, what brings a beautiful Pantoran such as yourself to these dingy parts? Looking to purchase a droid? I have a verrrry nice --", Chaya abruptly cut him off, "No, thank you. I seem to have busted my omniscanning device last night, I need it repaired. You are Axeelas Krett right? I've heard you are a virtuoso with tech-equipment."
The Kaleesh gave her a curious glare and nodded gently, "I...can fix it, omniscanner you say. Hmmmm. Let me take a look at it for you."
Chaya took her scanner out from a satchel and placed it on the merchant's desk. He inspected it with a keen interest, made a few clicking noises with his mouth and then nodded, "yes...yes, seems you have burnt-out one of the secondary rrrrouters on this thing. 250 credits. I can have it to you by the end of the week."
Chaya arced a brow at the alien creature and sighed, "I'll give you 500 credits if you can have it fixed and operational by this afternoon. I require it for my profession, my boss will kill me if it isn't working. You understand of course."
She placed the credits on the table in an attempt to persuade him. The Kaleesh's eyes widened and he grinned that customary affable smile that was prone to the merchant caste, "very...good, yes yes...I can fix it for you, give me a few hours and your contact details and I'll call you when it's rrrready."
His peregrine accent was like liquid, and the roll of his [r]s reminded Chaya of Saleucami and its inhabitants with their exotic linguistics.
She wrapped her cloak around her and closed her satchel, then exited out into the mercantile backwaters of the district, making her way towards the markets, where the pungent smell of fish and hot oil wafted and made her stomach speak.

 

[Saint]

((I'm down, and what ^she^ said. Will edit later.))