Log:Infiltrating the Heart: The Dark Thrones
Rey infiltrates the First Citadel, and meets in to the leader of the First Order.
OOC Date: October 26, 2020
Location: First Order Citadel
Participants: Rey, Vahn,
The corridors of the First Order's Citadel loom dark and quiet. Stormtrooper patrols move through the at periodic intervals. The advantage that the wayward infiltrator has, however, is that no one knows she's here.
Or so she believes.
Rey appears from behind a shadowy pylon. She slips out into the hallway, listening to the Force guide her to where she believes she needs to be, what she believes she needs to see. She navigates the corridors, her steps quiet, her boots impacting softly on the shining obsidian floors.
This place... as foreign and new to her, is yet familiar all the same.
It takes her nearly an hour to get to the place that was calling to her, a small lift takes her up in to the Citadel's spires, and when the doors to the lift finally open, she sees it, the two thrones that sit atop the metal staircase, the two thrones that she and Kylo Ren were to rule the galaxy from.
If she'd agreed to the Emperor's offer. Rey steps out of the lift, she moves down the narrow floor that bridges the platforms together. The red lights along the bridge cast crimson hues against the whites of her flowing clothing. The entire time she walks, her eyes are locked forward, at the apex of the staircase in front of her, at the thrones and the three round windows behind them that show the dark sky of Coruscant's atmosphere beyond them.
A moment is taken to just let it all sink in, before Rey starts to walk toward the steps, raising her foot to tentatively place it upon the first, but she stops, when something tickles the back of her neck.
Rey sweeps her form around to look back the way she'd come from!
"Ominous, aren't they?" A male voice speaks out from behind Rey, him standing beside the lift doors, as though he'd been there the entire time, lurking in the shadows off around the lift's edge. His face is aged, his hair is mostly gone save for grey stubble along the sides above his ears. His features are sculpted, high cheek bones and piercing blue eyes.
His stare goes from Rey, to the thrones. "When I was a boy, I would've been terrified of a place like this." He says, voice low and deep. He takes one step toward the bridge that separates the platforms that they're standing on. "As an adult, at my age, now it just makes me roll my eyes." His stare returns to Rey then, their forms a good fifteen feet apart with the red lit bridge separating them. Her white cluthes are bathed in the red, while his First Order Admiral's uniform is black, and barely reflects it at all.
"Why are you here?"
Rey keeps her eyes locked on the older man, her body's weight is softly shifted from one foot to the other as if she's nervous and ready to react to his sudden presence. She knows who he is, she doesn't need to ask. She's just surprised he'd confront her, seemingly without any guards.
"I'm here for answers." Rey indignantly, but calmly, fires back at him. "This place called to me, I believed I'd find them here." Her voice grows a little softer as she gets a little more unsure of that now.
Vahn takes another step forward, his first step on to the bridge between them. "You flew to Coruscant, of all places, and slipped yourself in to this facility, to find answers?" The man asks, almost like he was impressed by this, or completely in disbelief of it. After a second of waiting, he speaks again. "Well? What did the chairs tell you?"
Rey's eyes were yet locked on to that of the Admiral's. She shakes her head very gently back and forth at his retort. "That I made the right choice, when I denied the Emperor the offer to take one of them as my own."
A shiver runs through her after she says that, like a chill in the room just swept over her body. A chill insinuating a faint and distant anger through the energy field of the Force.
It causes Rey's eyelashes to flutter as she glances down and away for just a brief second before her focus darts back to the Admiral's face.
"You did." Vahn sternly replies to the girl. "Your abilities aren't wanted here, nor is your presence in-general. You..." He trails off his words and turns to his right to put his left shoulder facing her. He looks up at the room's distant ceiling, angled and barely visible in the dark. "You... sorcerers are the reason we're all here. The reason we've been doing this for decades, generations really." His eyes come down again and shoot back over to the girl. "Sure, there'd be wars even if there were no Jedi. But, they wouldn't be like this. They'd be fought and won on the backs of the real heroes in this galaxy. The ones that don't..." He nods up past her. "Sit on thrones quite like these."
Vahn turns to face her outright again. "Why are you really here?" He now asks with a more interrogative stare. "You didn't come to gawk at chairs."
Rey's eyes look past the Admiral toward the lift that he's now blocking with his mere presence, and she considers leaving for a mere moment before she looks back at him as he speaks of the wars, the Jedi, then asks her the true meaning of why she came.
"I'm searching for a planet known as Byss. It's a mythical world, though I have reason to believe it's no myth at all. This place... was meant to be Emperor Palpatine's citadel after his victory at Exegol. A victory that I helped thwart." She narrows her eyes for just a moment at the Admiral.
"But I believed that if anywhere could confirm Byss' existence, or non-existence, it would be this place of nightmares that you've created." She says it with restrained spite, a clear disdain for the Admiral, even if they've never met, and know basically nothing of one another that wasn't born out of rumor and here-say.
"Place of nightmares." Vahn repeats with an amused smile making an appearance on his face. He looks from her, to the thrones, then back on to the girl. "Normally I'd refute that, but considering the room we're in... I'll let it slide." An inhale is brought in between the Admiral's lips and he shakes his head. "No, my dear, this place is a hammer and fire, for a society that was in dire need of being reforged. But..." He puts his hands behind his back, holding a military commander style presence, as he very much is standing between her and the lift that brought her up here. "I imagine the two of us disagree on almost every possible topic we could discuss. So lets move on."
"Byss." He says, as he lowers his gaze down as if he's processing the world's name inside of his head. "Byss, yes. One of Palpatine's... refuge worlds. It sits at the end of a very dangerous smuggler run, one that has been abandoned, of course."
"You know of it?" Rey asks, a look of hope upon her face now as she steps to her end of the bridge between them. Of course that hope fades rather quickly as she reminds herself of who she's talking to.
What are the odds of this man... divulging that information?
"I need to get there. Something is there that is waiting for me, and I have to find out what it is. It's imperative to the galaxy that I find it."
"Stop it." Vahn fires back at the girl, not really annoyed, just displeased with her efforts to try and reason with him, of all things. "You're embarrassing yourself. I know where Byss is, I know what's on Byss, and I'm sure you're going to regret going there." His eyes go up to the thrones once more as he motions up toward them. "You'll find more of that, there. A lot more of it, and much worse." His eyes again lower and go back to the girl across from him. He raises his right hand up and motions to her as he turns back toward the lift. "Come with me." He pauses, because he knows she's not going to want to. He levels his gaze, a stern, but forgiving expression offered to her. "We're enemies. You and I. But not right this second. Come with me, if you want to get to Byss."
Rey looks, unsure, of all of this, she glances back to the stairs that lead up to the thrones. One of those thrones was to be hers... and even though she denied the offer, it still calls to her. She can feel herself sitting on it, like another part of her is up there right now, resting upon its chilling surface.
Quite literally, Rey's eyes are on the Admiral with a look of confusion. "You're. We're..." She decides not to question it. She starts to walk across the crimson lit bridge toward the Admiral.
"Why?" She asks him as they move together now toward the turbolift.
Side by side, Rey and Admiral Vahn stand inside of the turbolift together. His eyes are forward as he can feel hers on him beside him. At her question, he has a cold and emotionless stare. "Because I want them to suffer."
The lift doors hiss and close shut, carrying the two back down into the heart of the Citadel.
