Quid Habes, Part I

Posted on Thu Mar 29th, 2018 @ 9:04pm by Thane & Amare

3,350 words; about a 17 minute read

Chapter: Chapter V: Unbound
Location: Red Raptor, Nar Shaddaa Spaceport
Timeline: Three weeks after the Battle of Jericho

Note: Quid Habes is Latin for "You Have Something"

OLD:

The silence in the cargo hold was broken as the door swished open. Coda's eyes snapped open from her rest and held her breath, completely on edge wondering if she had been discovered by the mercenaries. But there was something different about this presence that eclipsed those armored goons...something extrasensory. Something that assaulted her senses with such intensity and purpose that it felt like the very texture of the air itself was altered to make it harder to breathe. It was something heavy and imperious...something, or someone innately powerful.

Hidden behind the container, she closed her eyes, tightened her grip on her blasters, and mentally prayed to her ancestor spirits that she would survive this terrible night. She tensed her burning muscles, and made ready to make her move.

NEW:

The dark figure strode with long sweeping steps along the walkway to the platform, billowing wind whipping at the base of his large overcoat, catching its tails as its owner fought against the heavy rain and other elements tearing at his otherwise purposeful gait. Deep puddles splashed up at his boots as he walked forwards, but nothing was heard over the din of Nar Shaddaa's torrential downpour, a currently-unwelcome cycle in the Smuggler Moon's artificial weather system.

Tugging at the oversized lapels of his drenched jacket, the man halted his march at his destination, a YX-1980 freighter, offering a veiled grimace from within the confines of those very-same lapels as he entered the codes into his ship's boarding hatch, earning a few extra seconds' worth of soaking rain seeping into the grey tunic he wore beneath his coat as the door sluggishly whirred to life and opened to reveal the aged, but relatively clean, interior of the vessel.

Thane took a few heavy steps up the ramp into the vessel, quickly pressing his gloved hand against the control panel, poorly welded as it was, which was set into the wall beside him, prompting the hatch to close once again behind him. As it scraped its way shut, the artificial lighting of the Red Raptor flickered online in the cockpit the former Jedi now stood in, giving life to his pale features and clearly revealing he was seemingly alone for the moment.

He gave one final glance out of the front port before turning to face the corridor that led to the rec room further down. Again, it was in darkness, although he could smell oil in the air - Sev had likely been conducting some sort of repair work in his little workshop or cabin. Thane instinctively clenched his right hand with an iota of deep-set frustration, the prosthetic fingers that now made up the latter half of his digits being there, giving him one small piece of symmetry with his Mandalorian crewmate.

The Caanan Human withdrew the device he had purchased during his excursion, and went to place it next to the pilot's chair Sev typically claimed, but he paused for a moment, distracted by a sudden sensation he could not finger. Dismissing it, he put the device down. It contained new transponder codes, and whilst he knew the G2 unit machine that serviced the Raptor was more than capable of installing the new codes into the ship's systems, he was loath to ask the droid to do it; Sev was quite capable and willing. Much to Thane's amusement, and occasional bemusement, Rezer had become somewhat territorial of the ship's navigational qualities.

Thane ran a hand through his hair, squeezing some of the alien precipitation out of it as he moved to leave the cockpit, but again, that sensation caught his attention. Considering it now with greater concentration, he noted it had never gone, and it was unmistakably a presence. He let a hand brush over the electrum of his lightsaber hilt hanging from his belt.

He was not alone on the Red Raptor, after all.

He turned left out of the cockpit and walked towards the two cargo holds that had not been specifically claimed by any of the crew, icy blue eyes narrowing in suspicion and caution as his boots squelched along the metal surface of the ship's deck. Through his senses, it was obvious whoever this interloper was, they were also touched by the Force, the fear they were emanating not atypical for the denizens of this backwater moon. Unsure if it was a mere stowaway or some overenthusiastic Hutt enforcer, Thane unclasped his lightsaber and held it in his right hand as he pressed his offhand against the panel to the first hold.

The door parted, revealing a room full of mostly-empty containers and shadowed by darkness, bar the streak of light that followed. The creature's fear intensified immediately, and Thane gripped his hilt tighter in response, confident he had found his quarry. Stepping completely in, his eyes washed over the room and settled on one corner, where one larger crate was big enough to obscure the average humanoid.

Pointing his lightsaber towards it with a one-handed grip, he engaged his violet blade, casting an ethereal glow over Thane and the rest of the cargo hold. "Show yourself," he commanded, his voice crisp. Initially, there was no noise bar the humming of his weapon and the soft patter of water dripping from his overcoat.

The ignition of that saber produced a sound that made Coda's blue skin crawl. That strange purple light that filled the room and lit up the bulkhead in front of her...it was so unreal. Whoever this man was, he was far beyond anything she'd ever encountered. Every atom in her bones told her at an instinctual level that this was a caliber of danger far beyond conventional standards.

For that terrible moment, the instant after the man demanded her compliance, she was exactly in the position her father was in five years ago: back to the wall facing an impossible situation with just a plea for mercy as the only means of survival. Only this time, unlike her poor unarmed and peaceful parents, she was able to fight back with powered up blasters, one in each hand. If she was going to die, at least she would have the honor to die fighting.

"I don't want to fight you," she nervously managed to say in a feeble and fatigued voice that had almost none of the gravitas of the strange man. She added as she slowly rose up from behind her cover, "I just want to find my brother and go home." With trembling hands, she had her twin blasters aimed right at the silhouette of the man and his terrifying beam of pure energy breaking the darkness. She couldn't make out the entirety of his face, but she was bathed in a swath of purple light making her a very easy target.

Thane's eyes first widened and then quickly narrowed at the reveal of the stowaway - she was little more than a girl, a Nautolan only recently past her adolescence. Her skin's colour was tainted by the glow of his weapon but she was undeniably a blue example of her aquatic species. Her features, whilst drawn back in a visage of fear, were softer than those of the last Nautolan he had had the displeasure to engage with, Nala Sao. That was so no bad thing.

With a subtle wave of his left hand, he raised it and claimed both of the intruder's blasters through the force, reaching it up to clasp both by their narrow barrels. Although he sensed the verity of the Nautolan's words, he was not impressed by her trespassing - or pointing blasters at him.

"Your brother is not here, nor is this your home," he explained sternly, inspecting the blasters briefly before looking back to the woman. "Who are you and where did you come from?"

Although his instinct had first been to remove her, Thane's inner curiosity, as ever, got the better of him, which was only further incensed by the alien's natural affinity for the Force, unrefined though it was. A scowl threatened to play across his face as Aquar-shaped comparisons flashed across his mind's eye.

"Coda..." she softly answered. It felt pointless for her to give her full name if she was about to die. By now, her entire body was trembling after she was easily disarmed as if by magic or some kind of trick magnetic device from the man's hand. It didn't even occur to her that she had done something similar earlier when she fought her former owner, Brent Chisto. She was starting to wonder if the bedtime stories about the mystical Jedi she heard as a child were indeed the stuff of reality. Her family did come from a remote deep-water part of Glee Anslem after all. The "boonies" as some would call it. If this man was a Jedi, and that they were great heroes, maybe she could convince him to let her live just a little longer. It was the only hope she had left.

"...I was someone's property for years, and...I finally escaped tonight," she finished with a heavy sigh, keeping her eyes to the floor, feeling like she could pass out at any moment just from sheer lack of energy and sleep and an overabundance of high-intensity stress. "Please, I need to leave this place. All I ask is passage off-world. I can pay. I have credits. Just...don't kill me."

"Hm." Thane eyed Coda cautiously, although he did not doubt her words, tumbling as they were out of her mouth at a rate of knots. Purposely allowing a few intense moments of silence pass between them, he disengaged his lightsaber and returned it to his belt, then using that hand to activate the lighting in the cargo hold.

Watching as the swirls within the woman's large, amphibious eyes shifted to the new lighting, Thane took a step back to give her space to stand, but he placed her blasters within one of the pockets of his greatcoat. "Well, Coda," he continued, "we're not a passenger ship and we have no need of your credits." As the Human spoke, he found his senses dwelling on something more than the woman's own latent Force connection; on her person, there was something equally-attuned to the Force. It was a subtle thing, almost as though it were part of the intruder herself, whatever it was thrumming in resonance with her.

Inwardly, and for the umpteenth time since their quest against the Cult of Axion had begun (also, coincidentally, on Nar Shaddaa), he cursed Bomoor's Living Force and the sheer number of coincidences that seemed to seek Thane and his fellows out. For yet another clueless Force sensitive to have stumbled upon them, possibly with some artefact of unknown power, it defied established logic.

Then again, Thane mused, the girl's senses could just have easily guided her to the Raptor. To me. "Are you concealing something?" He asked, although his voice was not entirely unkind or accusatory. "An object, that is," he quickly added, realising how open the previous query was.

Besides her credits and mid-grade wrist computer, the only thing of any real value was the yellow crystal she kept hidden in her belt buckle hidden under her long tunic. How could he know about it? she wondered. She feared that if this man was indeed a Jedi, or one of those devil Sith from the legends, it would be impossible to lie to him. Nevertheless...

"I have nothing except my credits, this computer, and the weapons you just took from me," she lied anyway against her own internal logic. It was like her manipulative feminine habits from the club crept back onto her tongue out of nowhere at the worst possible time. Lying on Nar Shaddaa, after all, came as easy as breathing. Everyone did it. It was almost always expected. Sometimes it made you rich, and other times it could get someone killed. At least until now, she was lost somewhere in between.

Thane raised a dark eyebrow, noting the Nautolan had suddenly discovered some iota of confidence within her fear - maybe some shred of defiance within that light frame and from her recent emancipation. Unless it was luck, he could not help but admire her strength of will to both lie to him and to have escaped her old master. Of course, being able to touch the Force was often confused with luck.

"I don't believe you," he replied simply, rolling his shoulders as he clambered out from his drenched coat, revealing his dark grey interpretation of the Jedi garb - not that he subscribed to such teachings in any true way now, just as he would never identify himself as such. Placing the coat over one container, he rested himself on the other.

"If you show me what you are hiding," Thane went on, the edge in his voice dipping slightly, "I might be more inclined to entertain your request for passage." He leaned forward slightly and crossed his arms, hints of sarcasm creeping in to his tone. "I do enjoy a well-woven fable, you see. My life is otherwise ever-so-boring."

He left out the fact that if he truly desired it, he could simply take whatever she was concealing from her corpse, but even he found that too macabre, and silently quashed that grim consideration before it threatened to grow in strength. No doubt it would have pleased his Sith master, however. Thane decided to assess his flailing morality later, when not confronted with stowaway slave Nautolans.

Coda swallowed hard feeling pretty certain that she had no choice the moment she chose to stowaway on this man's ship. She looked down and brushed aside the lower middle split of her tunic to reveal her holster belt buckle. She moved a tiny latch on the side with a thumb, and a servo popped open a hidden compartment barely large enough to conceal a slightly fractured yellow kyber crystal. She took it and cupped it in her hands as tears started to form in her eyes. After all she had done to keep it hidden from slavers over the years, giving it up to a stranger was like losing a piece of her own soul.

Thane stepped away from his resting spot against the container, interest further piqued by the crystal nestled in the woman's hands, the jewel's irregularities glowing with an inner, mystical yellow light. As he had detected before, its subtle, rhythmic pulsations resonating within the Force with a tune almost entirely akin to hers. He also noted its colour, and once more found his mind wandering to the subject of Loren. In the space of just a few minutes, this intruder had brought his mind to two his most recent...

What? He queried himself. Failings?

"It's all I have left of my family," Coda said solemnly, drawing Thane's eyes back to her narrow features. "It's worth nothing to nobody except me. Why would you or anyone want this?" A burst of anger shot through her fear and sorrow. "Why?!"

He frowned at her outburst, but did not challenge it. "I understand that sense of loss," he replied, his voice sterner than before and not inviting any discussion of the topic. Even so, he extended his half-mechanical gloved hand and used it to close the Nautolan's own around her heirloom, purposely allowing tendrils of his own Force connection to seep through at the gesture, curious as to the effects and what he might see in return.

Coda never quite noticed it before, but her crystal truly had a life of its own, a connection to something far greater than she ever imagined possible. It was evident in the growing font of light flickering in its core. A strange warmth came from it, the kind she never felt before. A fire that surely should have burned her hands, yet harmless and tolerant to the touch. She looked up to meet Thane's eyes and finally see the full physiognomy of his face, but before she could take the full depth of his features, she saw something else, a great many things. The warmth from the crystal was instantly accompanied by a feeling similar to a quick electric shock. She gasped with a sudden fright, snapping her hands back, nearly dropping the crystal, but maintained her hold as she took a step back from Thane.

"What was that?" she asked shifting her glace between Thane and the crystal.

In that briefest moment of contact, he sighted something, too. The merest flashes of visions had flickered past his mind, making it difficult for him to truly piece together what had had glimpsed. As he tried to create something coherent in his mind, he was left with a few clear images.

One was clearly a young Nautolan girl, streams of tears tearing down her soft features in abject sadness and loss, her arms outstretched to other blue-skinned figures as blaster bolts tore into their flesh, the grim faces of three men contorted in sick satisfaction at their handiwork standing over them. Another, although equally as brief, showed him yet another woman, her head-tresses clearly identifying her species, standing alongside a dark-clad warrior, both she and the man holding lightsabers. The man's was violet, whilst the woman's was gold. They appeared to be standing in an oddly-familiar hall, decked as it was in finery, portraiture and velvet carpets.

Like the previous image, wisps of shadow billowed about and obscured the pair, but he could see that beyond them was yet another dark figure, his tattooed face and crimson laser sword making plain who the villain was. But just as quickly, the connection slipped away and the aged bulkheads and dim artificial lighting of the Red Raptor returned to replace the view in his mind's eye.

Having not lost any composure, Thane looked at Coda's recoiled hand, one icy blue eye narrowed more in vague consternation than the other. "What did you feel?" He asked softly, not making mention of what he had seen yet.

"For a moment, it felt...good," she said, staring at the crystal perplexed. "And then I saw you and...others."

At that mention, interest creased the aspiring Sith's brow, as Coda went on.

"A nautolan man dressed like you with a blade of light like yours, but it was golden-white like a star. He was all alone and surrounded by many red blades held by others dressed in black, yet he looked so...calm. He was even smiling. And...a woman. A human. I never met her before. She was very pretty, and...she looked so sad." She gingerly placed the crystal on top of the crate she was hiding behind earlier, and gazed up at Thane, deeply confused. "Who were they? They seemed so real. I felt like they wanted me to help them."

The Human watched as Coda placed the crystal on the crate, its empyreal light fading to its previous state, thinking both on what the woman was saying and his own vision of their joint attack against Axion, knowing that the setting for that vision had in fact been of the great hall in his ancestral home. Or at least, how he had tried to remember Vaarthul, despite what had happened there in his youth. As ever, Thane wondered on if what the Force had shown him was a possible future, or simply a representation of what could be, mere imagery of the like only the perverse celestial infinity of the Force deigned to impose upon those who could touch it.

He made a note to meditate upon it later, perhaps after consulting with both Bomoor and his holocron master. And to perhaps not dwell on Coda's vision of the woman, if she had truly seen into him as he had her.

"Come with me," he said to her, "and I'll explain what I can."

TBC

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