Log:Sith Empire: Black in Thought

Sith Empire: Black in Thought

OOC Date: January 31, 2022
Location: Carkanis
Participants: Sith Empire: Tamsin Cas, Tarq Najjic, Imani, and Darth Ferren as GM

Carkanis, known to some as Alpha Prime, is not a hospitable place. The primary settlements founded by the First Order's progenitors are located in the best-suited areas to build, but even those can only be described as harsh and forbidding all these years on. The landscape is rugged and barren, everything cut in shades of dark grey, and just off the coast the city runs right up to, a stormy sea rages, its water more black than blue. Even the light here is a weak blue cast by the system's cool star.

It is here the new Sith Empire has come in secret, seeking a scalpel where a hammer will not do.

The Grimoire glides over the monotonous terrain, stealth systems engaged. Their pilot sits in silence, the black beetle helmet he wears impossibly reflective in the low interior lighting, bringing the shuttle in to a quiet landing a safe distance away from a tall, narrow structure isolated from the rest of the city and shipyard, a sharp tower of black. There's a landing area at the peak, but of course that would give away the game, and so they settle down here on the rocks instead.

Ferren is not with them, but he gave a task to complete: come here, steal a First Order ship, escape with it intact. Surely nothing could go wrong.

"I didn't think I would be back here so soon." Tamsin, who watched the approach through the viewport of the shuttle, had already donned robes and mask. This was how she was known here. She had come here often enough, that she was a known quantity and, perhaps, would still garner the same respect, deference, or fear. Whether the news of her defection had made it on to this place that so many of the Knights had abandoned and forgotten, well, they would know soon enough. "Perhaps we should be looking for one of the personnel transports that move the workers between the city and the shipyard."

"As long as I don't have to fly anything, I'm happy to help with whatever," Imani says as she slides her helmet into place, and quickly double checks that her weapons are all in place. Yep, they're there, she's good. "Is bigger better? Do we need bigger?" She has no idea.

The tower is their target, this isolated and remote location far enough away from the main drag for a ship to land unquestioned, for a small team to enter and exit before a larger force could arrive to stop them.

It stands tall and narrow, overlooking the sea, a low adjoining construct butted up against the base. The path towards it is rocky but not barricaded, and attempting the door will reveal it is unlocked.

The bottom floor of the outbuilding appears to be a sort of living quarters, empty of occupants though filled with material goods and personal possessions as if they only just stepped outside. Rations stock a shelf on one side of the room, freeze-dried and vacuum sealed for near-eternal stability. A metal table stands in the center of the space, a heavy pick-axe stuck into its surface in a manner unlikely to be suggested in its owner's manual. A door to the rear leads ostensibly to the tower itself.

"It was. I didn't see any way of infiltrating a space station without subterfuge, when I imagine one of the options would be simply to destroy the base itself as a last resort. And hanging in space deprives us of any chance to approach undetected in any of our normal vehicles." Tamsin would not go to far as to say Ferren had liked her idea. or had even taken inspiration for the mission from it. Once the team was down on the ground, Tamsin frowned, hidden behind her mask, as she made the approach to the door. "I can feel...something, inside the tower, but it comes and goes, like a living ghost. Touching my awareness for a moment, and then gone again." That did not stop her from stepping inside, her movements careful, as silent as it was possible for her to be.

Tarq's gaze rises to examine the tower as they approach. "Sense it as well. Never felt its like. Should either be there or /not/ be there, but this /is/ only place Tarq Najjic is certain had ghost, once." Of course it would Carkanis.

He follows just behind and to the right of Tamsin, his catlike step a reminder that, before all of this, he was just a thief. A second story man. His lips are pursed as he enters the tower.

"I don't sense anything," Imani states the obvious here, because she clearly cannot. This is a power beyond her fathoming, but she's still here, still trudging along with these lunatic force users. At least until she dies for it, and she probably will. The pair ahead of her are quiet, catlike in their movements, but Imani is... just not. She's armored, it's not absurdly heavy armor, but heavy enough to be protective which means she's not able to move as quietly, and then there are all the weapons. So. Many. Weapons. It's one of the weapons that rattles noisily to possibly alert the thing that's there. Unless it's not there when she rattles. She has no idea how any of this works.

The bottom floor has a story to tell, though what it is feels disjointed and erratic. Half of the room is tidy and organized, but then the metal table in the center is askew with that vibro-pick stuck in its surface. Looking closer might tell more, but the door to the tower itself is just beyond, alluring in its cold grey simplicity. Something beckons from behind that blank face... but surely it's a trick of the light, or the nature of any portal. They are meant to be crossed.

Still, a cold, damp draft drifts insistently through the room, wrapping around legs and sliding stealthily between layers, chilling and clammy. The crashing of the waves down the shore filters in through the stone and metal walls, repeating endlessly.

"Why precisely are we looking for a ship inside this tower?" Tamsin's logical mind wanted to know. But, her logical mind did not stop her from following the orders which had been given to her, and she proceeded ahead, "Allow me." Tarq was the better defender, though Imani could do well for herself. Of the three, perhaps the doctor was the most expendable. "Something is not right here." But was anything right anymore? No, it had not been for too long. Especially not here, in this place that was no longer their place.

While Tamsin goes ahead, the Kuati lifts the vibro pick up, sets it flat on the table, and looks over the point. He taps the fluid on the end of the pick, then stares at the hole it left in the table. He sits on his heels, examining the ground beneath the table. He reaches out to touch that dried liquid, too.

"Tarq Najjic sees dried fluid. Enough from pick to pool on the ground. Viscous. Pooled thicker in the middle." His finger breaks through the surface and it's wet underneath. He pulls his finger out to examine it. He inhales, lips curling. "Sticky, oily, organic. If is blood, where is body?"

Imani eyes the weapon in the table, but she has so many of her own that she doesn't inspect it too closely. While Tarq sees to that, she steps forward to look over the door. She thinks it's a door. Her gaze sweeps up and down the presumed portal, an unseen frown settling on the lips of the usually cheery murder machine. "I have no idea how we're supposed to get through this. If there's a through to get here. One of you might have to do your whole..." She doesn't finish with words, instead concluding the thought by tapping a finger against the side of her helmet a couple of times, then making a wiggly motion with all of the fingers of that hand.

A crash disturbs the calm inside the room as an object comes shattering through the thin window facing the sea. At first, it's only resolved to the eye as a twisting mass of grey as it begins to writhe in the air, slamming first into the table, then the ceiling, then flying at Imani, clawed feet grasping. Shrieks rip through the leathery flapping as the creature voices its discontent and confusion, bouncing off the armored woman and falling to the floor where it thrashes in a tangle of wings, a hideous amalgam of teeth, claws, and grey scaly skin, dragging itself through Tarq's oily organic puddle and becoming coated in... whatever that is.

As if on cue, the door slides quietly open, revealing the tower's interior. Dark, shadowy, the only light coming from far above and through the open door, a cylindrical staircase leading upward made of grated metal stairs. The floor is grated as well, the central pole the stairs wrap around disappearing below into darkness, and the crashing waves and slow grating caws of the distressed creature echo back as warped facsimiles.

As the door opened, Tamsin stepped through, but coming up short as she caught sight of the grating that was covering the floor. Her eyes narrowed, as she focused her attention on the room, moving achingly slowly, as she tried to path a way to make it to the stairs without the possibility of plummeting to her or their deaths. She frowned, as she began to make her way along the grate, "Tarq," Yes, she was ignoring the flapping screeching creature, "Is there some way you can secure that chain so that it can't be pulled one way or the other as we move? Without touching it?" They were supposed to go up, so, Tamsin would try to go up.

As Tamsin spoke, she gestured towards a chain that was just visible by the spiral stairs leading up into the heights, and down past the grating that made up the floor.

One moment Imani is fine, checking out what is rumored to be a door, the next something is flying at her and she's thrown off of her feet. There's a garbled sound as she hits the ground flailing, trying to push off whatever the thing is. She's quick to scramble back when the thing flops off to be terrifying elsewhere, taking a moment before she jumps to her feet and pulls a weapon. She doesn't attack yet, but she's ready to if there's the need.

"On it." Tarq raises his hand in a pinching gesture. The chain doesn't move. It wasn't moving before, but it still isn't. He's right by the freshly-opened door. "Imani, am little focused right now; what /is/ that thing, and is it absorbing from that goop? Sounds like ghost story. Powered - by - /blood/." His voice drops. "Or whatever that stuff is."

The smallish creature in the adjoinder never gathers itself, never gains some sort of stability, instead flopping and flapping in the crusty ooze, an amorphous mass of leathery wings and pointed bones. It launches suddenly aloft once more, colliding almost immediately with the table above it, hurtling out from beneath towards Imani once again. Something about the thing seems familiar, a sad tinge to its wild, erratic fury, a scent of smoke, a touch of the unhinged, a flash of a horseshoe mustache and ponytail as it wings at her FACE.

In the tower, that sense of there-and-not is localized.... it seems to come from far below, from beneath that grate that is the floor, that thin veil between their feet and whatever lurks in the darkness. Surely nothing of consequence, surely the chain is an afterthought of some kind. The stairs leading upwards, grates themselves, do little to visibly separate the Sith operatives from the floor below, and the overlapping grates almost seem to disappear as the foot is finding its next step, tricking the eye into believing the stair has vanished. The higher they climb, the more unnerving the effect becomes, and the dim light above grows stronger as they approach, an eerie, pulsating luminecense.

That is, until the stairs are abruptly blocked by a gate of metal bars, a primitive lock of dark, obtuse grey metal hanging from a chain wrapped around the final bar and the central pole.

Tamsin, who, seeing Tarq secure the chain, began to make the climb, paused, though hopefully not so quickly that Tarq, should he be coming up behind her bump into her and send them both off the stairs, turned to look back towards where she could hear and see the creature flapping around and trying to vent its misplaced range on Imani. Her lips compressed, still hidden, as she reached out with her will, a bracelet of force clenching around the creatures neck, snapping the bones there. "We're making enough noise as it is, and I'm fairly certain none of us are supposed to come back spoiled." Then, she began the climb once again. Hopefully that was no one's pet.

Up the steps he goes, still holding that chain in place. Up and up and up, with the steps pulling their disappearing act. Until finally, faced with the gate itself, and the lock the chain and the central column are attached to. "Mmm. If am very, very careful, maybe." He ignites his lightsaber, and the red blade slices carefully through the lock and carelessly through one of the pieces supporting the stairs. "Bugger. Tamsin! Hold up stairs for me, please!" There's a creaking, wrenching sound as the stairs start to twist under Tarq's weight. "Maybe can reach past, hold gate for you, after you hold for me? Anyway- do not want to fall into- whatever that is."

The thing comes at Imani again and something about it makes her freeze. She sees what is likely a familiar gesture by now and -- far too late -- she holds up a hand to shout, "WAIT!" The thing is dead, and she leans over it trying to get a clearer look at the face she thought she saw. "Errod?" she asks softly, the words carried through her helmet so the others can hear. She doesn't have /time/ to investigate this though, she tries to make a quick swipe to close the eyes if there are any visible, then turns to run for the stairs. It's not a graceful run, she's been thrown by what she thought she saw, and either that, or just bad luck, has her foot catching on a stair and taking a header right into the steps in front of her.

The sullen atmosphere in the tower shifts as the creature, that thing spawned by this sullen world, falls twitching to the floor, folded in two by Tamsin's will. The wind begins to howl, whipping through the broken window in the adjoining room and rattling the tools hanging on the walls. The waves redouble their intensity, lifting upward to dash themselves with fury upon the rocks, spray vaporizing in the air.

Inside the tower, from far below there is a bubbling, a gurgling, and the sense that there is nothing, then something, solidifies on the side of /something/.

With Tarq's attention off of the vertical chain that runs the length of the tower, the rusty links quiver with a spray of coppery dust as the length is pulled suddenly, incredibly taught, and with a gritty rush the sound of metal moving over metal rings loud in the tower, echoing infinitely against the round walls.

And with each downward pull of the chain, the grate floor at the bottom of the tower moves upward, rotating as it consumes the stairs two at a time, chasing Imani's ascension.

On the other side of the gate, the light has continued to intensify, on its way past comfortable, casting the tower interior in a garish, haunting light that draws every shadow darker and longer, washing out the colors to near monochromatic.

Tamsin's blank-faced mask turned towards Tarq as his saber ignited, and cut through one of the stabilizing posts of the stairs. "Just go!" Tamsin did not move further up the stairs herself. Instead, she focused all of her will on keeping the structure stable, pulling the pieces of screaming metal back together, so that Tarq and Imani would have the time they needed to escape up into whatever was waiting for them at the tower's pinnacle. Whatever it was, quite likely, it would be better than what was waiting for them (her?) below.

Up the stairs Tarq goes. "Don't stop, Imani!" The floor is coming up, and he takes the steps two at a time until the brightness stops him from seeing well, and he regresses to normal stepping. He raises his forearm to partly cover his eyes, to no avail. "Seeing - shapes." He blinks a few times. "Eyes need a moment. Still feel no life."

And so, like the Phantom, with his cape pulled partly over his face, he ascends, deactivated lightsaber in his free left hand.

Imani doesn't have time to reflect on what she saw, who it may or may not have been, the world is crumbling beneath her and she's trying desperately to get up these stairs to more stable footing. "What is this place?" she asks in a strangled voice as she continues on upward. "What is that light?" No one has any answers yet, she knows this, but she's asking them anyway, because if she can ask questions that means she isn't dead yet. Probably.

As their eyes adjust to the blinding light beyond the gate at the top of the tower, the upper room solidifies into outlines and figures, all lit by the superbright light emitting from the ceiling.

A human form sprawls here near the stairs, a dark sticky stain spread across its back, and another rests in a chair on the other side of the room, head lolled over the backrest, sightless eyes set on the light. That blinding light. Both are dressed in grey uniforms, or maybe black. The light is so bright it's hard to tell.

The sound of the chain moving over the pulley is deafening and constant, a pale blur there where it attaches to the ceiling. The ratcheting upward movement of the grate floor below them is accompanied by that presence, that thing that lurks beneath it, that even in the garish light cannot be seen.

The light, the light, there is no escape from the light- except for there. There on one side of this room, a square of blackness. An opening out to the outside, to the landing platform, to the thing that brought them to this place. To the ship!

It's little more than a troop lander, but it will fly. It must fly. It has to fly or they are stuck in this tower. The ramp is open, down, inviting in its dimness.

Tamsin could feel it, whatever //it// was, coming up behind them, rising like a tide, and she drew her saber, the blade igniting like crimson bleached almost to white by the fierce light shining on them, "Go, get to the ship!" She could see it, briefly, vaguely, but she lingered, just a moment longer, as she sent the saber flying, guided as much by her will as her desperation, the blade slicing through the chain before it flew back to her hand, snapping back down into the hilt. What was don was done, and she turned, hopefully with still enough time to escape. If not, well, it had been a good run, hadn't it?

"What is- no. Mystery - comes - with /us./" Tarq lifts his right hand from flat down to flat forward, and the two bodies, one from the chair and one on the floor, jerk upright to match it. He leads the way up the ramp of the ship, setting the corpses down in the main troop-transportation cargo/passenger area. Then he drops into the pilot's seat. "Let us see. What - do - we - have - here."

He touches his earpiece. "Tamsin, am starting ship. Get to safety, will be /right/ above you."

Imani isn't looking for stuff, she isn't trying to solve mysteries or fondle bodies with her mind. All chains remain unsliced. She is focused on the mission now, getting a SHIP, and getting out. The ship is there, and she's quick to board it, and then... you know, wait. Because she doesn't fly. No one wants her to try. It would end badly.

As the team makes their way out onto the landing pad, the full fury of the sea is manifest: the waves, enraged, beat against the rocks all the way up to the tower's base and adjoining structure. Water crashes over the roof of the squat room, and salt is thick in the atmosphere, blending with the rain that pelts the landing pad.

When Tamsin attempts to stop the grate's momentum by cutting the chain, for a moment it seems she's succeeded. The links part as the lightsaber's blade severs them, dropping away with eerie silence while the ascending floor grinds to a halt.

Then the first of the tendrils press up through the grate, extending slowly upward with unsettling rigor, pitch black even in that searing white light. They stretch across the floor, slithering slowly towards that exit.

When Tamsin hops aboard the ship, and it finally lifts upward away from the tower, away from the light, away from the horrors inside as a wave washes up and over the tower itself, toppling it in a show of might and fury, collapsing in a seething heap of stone and miasma.

Tarq's piloting takes them higher. The ship's filtration system blasts cool, fresh air over them as they out into the bland, decaying grey of Carkanis, out into the dim bluish light of Alpha Prime. And if they steal a glance backward through the viewports, they can see, still standing just as it was before, the black tower and its small adjoining structure, the front door unlocked.