I'm good at shooting people, cracking wise, and pretending to know how to fight.

Complete pandemonium lasted for at least a few seconds; both Mira and Atton were well-versed in the best ways to remain calm and continue on, but the tremors rolling through the complex were something else entirely.

What snapped Atton back to reality was motion -- upward motion.

His eyes widened as he clung to the wall. "Mira!" he called. "It's a ship! It's a karking starship!"

Mira spat out an unprintable curse. "That's what they've been powering?!" she hollered.

( Must be why there's a team up top. )

[[ establishy. ]]

"Poor frizzled idiots."

Atton watched the shuffling figures pour into the back of the transport ship. It'd taken them days, not just to guide those people through the tunnels, but to keep them from snapping and getting violent with each other.

It was a mess.

"Yeah. I hope we can get them back to normal," Mira said pensively. She was leaning against a rock, and her face showed every inch of the last few days' worth of sleep deprivation. Atton imagined his did too, but he had a hunch he was used to it more than she was.

"Nah, that part is easy," Atton said. "It's dealing with whatever Brianna thinks a deprogramming cycle looks like that's the bad part."

Even Mira's huff in response sounded tired.

"Whoever did this is still out there," she noted.

Atton swallowed. "They were using these people like batteries," he ventured. "It reminds me of some of the druk Revan was messing around with near the end."

"So they're gonna come back, probably," Mira ventured. "This battery was almost empty when we got there."

Atton rubbed at his face. "Give me five minutes to sleep before we get into that, okay?" he muttered. He dug into his pocket. "I should call Sparkle before he loses it."

"And I'll go debrief Mical."

"See? You get all the fun jobs."

[[ can be open to comms and phone calls. ]]

They'd been walking for a long time. The cold was a distant ache in Atton's stomach, a familiar but unwanted old companion that had popped back into being the second they slid down the hatch.

That had been hours ago. And it was dark.

"Stop," he said. He flashed his glowlight at the wall, frowning at the metal threaded through it. "This? This looks familiar." Beside him, Mira stopped as well, holding up her lightsaber to brighten the wall further.

"You see these patterns?" he said, gesturing to where they started, high up, just below the ceiling. "It's not exactly their tech - but I saw the same thing near the engines on their ship."

"Huh," Mira said. "So maybe you weren't making that up."

Atton pulled a face at her.

"Have you met you?" Mira threw back at him, rolling her eyes. "Okay, we found something. This is as good a place as any to camp out for the night."

( Atton wasn't in the mood to complain. )

[[ establishy ]]

Scouring the small mountainside compound for an entrance they knew had to be there had taken most of the previous day. In the end, the solution had been simple: much like how the massive Sith structure laid buried in the mountain below, so did its entrance.

And that meant a long trek through a foreboding cave, cave creatures screeching, and something strange and cold curling around Atton's ankles. Crawling up.

"Why is there always Dark Side poodoo lurking around in caves?" he muttered, squinting at the walls, illuminated by the brilliant yellow light of one of his lightsabers. "We weren't like this. Strictly clean, well-lit hubs of evil for Revan's Sith. I'm starting to think we got an upgrade."

( You're just angry someone's going to make you clean your boots. )

[[ nfb, nfi ]]

"There's less of them than I thought," Mira observed.

The lightsaber in Atton's hand shut off with a hiss. "Still plenty of them," he said, "But no, you're right. We're definitely dealing with the dregs here."

He stepped past her, towards the massive console that took up most of the cave wall. "This system's ancient, too," he said, his fingers sliding over the controls. He'd barely even need to slice this, it came apart so easily. "Is it just me, or is there something off about these Sith?"

"Like they're not real Sith?" Mira leaned casually against the back wall, but Atton knew what she was doing: taking stock of their surroundings, counting entrances, bodies, and sounds. "Yeah. If these people are actually Force sensitive, I'll eat my jacket."

"Well, I'm in," Atton said. "Downloading data..."

Then there was silence. Or for as long as there could be in a room with him and Mira in it, anyway.

"Why are you even here?" she asked, after a few minutes had passed. "You haven't come back for anything besides emergencies and whatever it is you do when you're doing your me-time laps on the border of known space." Beat. "I don't want details about that last part, so don't even think about it."

Atton's brow creased in a frown. "That's a great way to talk to the guy who came out here to save your ass," he said.

"To back up my ass," Mira returned. "It didn't need saving. I plan ahead."

A loud sigh filled the space. "I'm here because you need me."

"Since when do you do anything for anyone else?" He could hear Mira's jacket crinkling as she crossed her arms. "Wait, wrong question. Since when do you let on when you do something for anyone else? I've never seen you do anything helpful without doing a big song and dance about how your arm's getting twisted into it. If we're not actually twisting your arm."

"Fine, next time I won't do anything," Atton said irritably. "It's not like I'm having the time of my life, listening to Mical guide everyone though oh-so-grave Council meetings about Padawan toilet training."

"I think you just don't know what to do with yourself," Mira volunteered. "You're in a holding pattern. And coming out here is one of the things you know how to do."

Atton jabbed a file at random. Angrily. "You know, if I wanted a shrink, I'd go to the really creepy one back on Fandom who probably strangles kittens in his spare time."

He could just about hear the eyeroll. He ignored it. "Whatever," Mira said, pulling away from the wall. "Just do me a favor? When you implode again, keep me out of the splatter zone."

She didn't mean that.

Probably.

Atton yanked the storage device out of the console. "We're done."

[[ nfb, nfi. ]]

The expedition to Gyndine had left yesterday afternoon. Today, they had news. It was not good news.

"I saw him, Mical," Mira reported over the comm. Her voice was muted. "I know I did. Three shipyards out here have been hit in the past week. All massacres. My instincts are telling me he was there for at least one more of them. I know his handiwork anywhere."

Mical rubbed at his forehead. "When you say massacre," he began.

"I mean everybody in here is dead," Mira said. "Not that I'm going to cry over Hutt-spawn or anything, but... it's ugly."

He heaved a sigh. "What about the shipyard you entered this morning?"

"The one where I saw him? Yeah, that one's okay," she said. "We managed to flush out the gang that was clearing the place out. But he wasn't moving with them, at least not this time. I just caught him sneaking out an airlock."

"So we're not certain he's with them," Mical said slowly. "He may simply be tracking them. Much like ourselves."

"Maybe." Mira sounded dubious.

That... wasn't good. Mira was many things, but her instincts were almost always correct - it was only the details that took her time. Mical ran a hand through his hair. "Please keep me apprised," he said quietly. "If you saw him this morning, he cannot have gone far. Can you sense him at all--?"

"It's Atton." That one came quick. "You know what he can do. If he doesn't want to be sensed--"

"--he won't be sensed." It was a rare day that compelled Mical to exact unnecessary violence on anything, but he did now kick the wall, and-- "Ow."

"What was that?"

"... Nothing." Mical squinted down at his aching toe. "As I said, please keep me apprised. May the Force be with you."

May the Force be with them all.

[[ can be open for he who is here. otherwise, establishy! ]]

Atton gave the stick one more swing in the air to get some of the remaining tension out of his wrist. "Okay," he said idly, "You can take a break now."

Hey, Atton had started breaking a sweat. And while Sparkle wasn't the complete wet blanket he'd been months ago, he figured the guy was doing just a little worse.

"You know," Mira said, leaning against the doorway, "You could just give him a Bothan Stunner and be done with it instead of trying to play Captain Hardass all the time."

He rolled his eyes at her. "Stunner to the genitals isn't going to work on everybody, you know."

"Of course I know," she said idly, "But it's a start!"

[[ for sparks! ]]

Atton should sell the Hawk. In fact, he should've sold it already.

He'd come this far already. He'd cleared out his apartment, gotten a haircut - about as short as back when he'd been in the Republic army - and gotten a longcoat to replace the jacket he'd have to dump.

There he stood, outside the Hawk, humming a particularly jaunty Trandoshan rock tune about waking up to find someone you loaned your ship to died in a crash, and everyone else on the planet assumed that meant you'd died, so now you didn't have to come in to work or anything.

He felt better. Light. Not beholden to anyone or anything. Which was good. He'd missed that feeling, even if it was just a nice coat of paint on a speeder wreck.

Just... maybe if he got the Hawk's codes changed again. Gave her a nice paint job. Maybe moved some pieces around... no one would notice, right?

( There was a brush of a familiar Force presence... )

[[ NFB, NFI ]]

"Okay, I see the targ--choo!"

Mira turned her head slowly to look at him. "Can you maybe not get your sick all over my mission?"

"It's just a stupid Earth cold," Atton muttered, rubbing at his nose. "It won't kill you."

"No, but it's disgusting, and I couldn't trust your sense of hygiene before you started hacking up microbes everywhere."

The truck they'd been watching slid closer into view, the large lamps of the outer complex battering down on its sides. It had all the right markings. "I'm not going to sneeze on you."

"You know, you should thank the Force this didn't kick in until today," Mira said, turning her attention back to her electrobinoculars. "No way you could've pulled off that stupid hardass routine yesterday with you sneezing like a bantha cub all over the place."

"Can we just kill this guy and get this over with?" Atton muttered. "Because I really didn't ask for your input."

"No, we're not going to kill this guy and get it over with, because there's no reason to kill this guy just to get it over with," Mira said, rolling her eyes. "I didn't bring three gas grenades just to watch you 'prove your virility' by cutting the mark's head off."

"Fine, whatever, knock him out, then," Atton said irritably. "Can we move?"

Mira had already gotten up and vaulted off the cliff down to the ground below before he could even get that last sneeze out. Stupid cold. Keeping a system from tipping over into an all-out war over a karking trade route was bad enough without getting overloaded with Earth germs, and yet. And yet.

[[ establishy, idk. ]]

The first thing that came to Atton's mind out of the inky darkness was pain. It was that terrible kind of headache that you knew wasn't a hangover but felt like the worst one imaginable, pounding in on his skull like a herd of stampeding bantha while some deranged nerf herder hit the bantha bell over and over again.

Which was 1) terrible, because it meant someone had hit him over the head and it sucked, 2) good, because feeling it meant that whoever had hit him over the head hadn't figured out any of the six or so compounds that could knock a Jedi on their ass, or at least the dosages, and how terrible was it that Atton could rattle this off when he couldn't even open his eyes yet, and 3) ... it wasn't good, because this meant he'd been unconscious for a while.

When he finally managed to pry his eyes open, he had to add a 4) ugh, because he'd drooled on his leg in his sleep, and a 5) this stunk, because whatever room they'd been dropped off in had clearly been occupied by a bunch of animals before them.

"Mrgh," Atton said, which he hoped conveyed numbers one through five to the equally tied-up person sitting next to him.

Except for the drool thing. He was kind of hoping she hadn't picked up on that one.

[[ for a certain npc! ]]