Palatial Congress, Part III
Posted on Fri Oct 19th, 2012 @ 12:18am by Axion & Nala Sao & Thane & Berry & Trey†
Edited on on Fri Jul 26th, 2019 @ 1:30pm
1,165 words; about a 6 minute read
Chapter:
Chapter I: Web of Fate
Location: Grogga's Palace, Nar Shaddaa
Timeline: Late, Day Two
Kip was using his remotes to view the battle and direct teams from a distance using the bank of holofields he'd had set up. He turned to one where Grogga's image lay and winked, "Thermal count shows we've destroyed half of his men and we're not even to the halfway point. But," he touched an image and several purple dots moving into the palace well ahead of the others, "the Darksiders are already in, as is the Jedi, as expected."
+Where is the Jedi?+ Grogga asked.
"In the main vault," Kip replied with a feral grin.
+Just as you said he would+ Grogga murmured +Why?+
"Because you had a Sith holocron in there and this Thane is in the process of Turning," Kip replied. "It made the most sense that as soon as one of them got close enough to feel it, they'd go straight for it."
+A precious artifact+ Grogga replied darkly.
"And one you can hire a Sassin to retrieve later," Kip replied. "You knew this was a war and you knew this is how I was going to wage it. You want to survive, keep your assets as intact as possible and be able to crawl out of this and back into business with minimum downtime. I'm making that happen."
+What about Zorbo's?+ Grogga asked.
Kip turned and made a quick manual inquiry on a separate off-network console and waited for the text response. He got it a moment later. "Look out your window," Kip replied and turned back to waging a war.
Casino Zorb
For the last month, as slaves and employees and droid left and re-entered Zorbo's beautiful hotel, they had, of course, brought it a bit of the outside with them. As they did the air scrubbers removed the pollution and stink from them and helped clean them up so they were less offensive to the guests.
Of course, that didn't necessarily take care of what they brought in their nooks, crannies and sometimes, the very thing they went to fetch.
During the first third of the war with Grogga, the hotel's automated environmental system had sounded an alert and reported atmospheric leaks in many of the outer-skin facing suites. Then, in some areas, the building caught fire while in other structure deficiencies suddenly showed up causing the flooring, walls or ceiling to begin to groan and buckle from strain!
Guests evacuated as the seeming disaster began to propagate, outer surfaces buckling and allowing the outside environment in and the overworked scrubbers overheating in the process of trying to cope and then failing. Like a gigantic beast that had one vital organ poisoned, the rest of the organ failed one after another and the entire structure of the massive creature began to die and fall apart.
Grogga's Palace
Grogga was chortling and then laughing maniacally on the holo as he watched the Hotel crumble.
Kip turned to his lieutenants in the field and gave them final orders, watching as his targets were moving and where they were moving. "Time for me to go deal with the internals directly. You know what to do. Stick with the plan and you'll survive to work. Deviate and I'm not going to be responsible, get me?" He saw them all nod in the pickups and then he hit a contact, shutting down his central console. In a few minutes, it would destroy itself and leave no trace of him or what it's functions had been. even now it was eating itself from the inside out beginning with software.
:Time to go: he alerted Ef through his transceiver.
:You're in your window of opportunity: Ef agreed.
See, in all the time he'd been here Kip had never been able to find the kaiburr and as such he knew Grogga had them hidden in a sensor-baffling area where nobody would be able to scan them. The problem was that it took someone with access to the force to find them and Grogga knew that, so he hid them well and made it hard to get to. Kip had accounted for lightsabers and their users' ability to go straight through most structures to get to what they needed; hence Thane's maneuver.
What he had needed was someone who could do that for him and now, he had several. Oh, what he was planning was dangerous to no end but then, when you only had mikoosh, you made mikoosh stew with them.
The presence Thane could sense was above him, at least thirty feet above into a balcony-like arcade - as well as several more eyes peering at him. It did not take a connection to the Force to realise it was a trap; someone had known he would be coming this way, and whether or not the shard was now in here was irrelevant. He had no intention of being riddled with blaster fire.
Calling upon his power to quicken his speed and reactions, Thane was just quick enough to throw himself out of the way of a hailstorm of successive shots, a myriad of different colours painting the room as he called upon the Force to try and blast his way through into the next room and out of the Vault. With the thickness and security of the walls, the first blast did nothing but cause a large dent and some damage about the area, forcing the Jedi to duck away and behind a large, ornate statue of unknown origin.
Holding his lightsaber firm, he could feel the strong Force presence shifting and moving away and towards the centre of the complex, where Grogga would presumably be. With the heavy dark side energy he was experiencing from both the holocron and the presence of Axion's Cult, Thane was unsure of this figure's true allegiances, but right now, it truly did not matter.
With a primal howl, he jumped from the statue and charged towards where he tried to damage the Vault's wall once before, once again drawing on the Force to break apart his barrier. Whether the holocron's energies were seeping into him, or the fear of being ripped apart by the blasters was fuelling him, the wall blew open and he hopped through, finding himself in a corridor as richly-decorated as the rest of the palace. Busts of long-dead figures that Thane only sometimes recognised from his hours trawling through the Jedi Archives in pursuit of knowledge, and at this moment, he was still more interested in catching Axion unaware. If he could not find the Kaiburr shard himself, ending Axion's life would achieve a very similar goal.
As the presence he had sensed remained in his mind, he followed it forward, and closer to the centre of the carnage. With every quick step he took, Thane could hear the sounds of battle ever-clearer, as well as sensations of death and pain. It only urged him on more, eager to find his friends and end this quickly.
TBC
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