Beyond - Legends Sokolniki's Edited Challenge

Going to put my Edited Challenge posts in here. They will mostly be Post Endor unless otherwise designated in the pre-entry explanations.

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Early April Edited Challenge Round #1

Requirements:
A domesticated animal (pet)
An alarm going off
A spilled beverage
Approximately 250 Words
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Picking up Strays​

OC Entry - Shortly after Endor, Ren'Vhan goes to Coruscant to discuss training a force sensitive that colleague Rushtean recently recruited.​

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In red robes, Ren’Vhan waited impatiently for his caf to finish pouring from the concession machine. Beside him in less conspicuous green Corellian attire, Rushtean let her raven black hair hang over her left eye. A pair of civilian clothed guards stood nearby.

“It’s nice to see you’ve finally cooled off after Endor,” observed the woman.

His steaming cup of caf finished, the robed man picked it up and turned towards the spymaster, “So what exactly do you need me for.”

“You can still be a bore though. Well, like you, I’ve made a habit of picking up strays… But one has a talent for picking up strays of his own,” she replied with that twisted smile of hers.

As he brought up the cup to his face, a loud screech came from the wristlinks of the guards as one shouted “Perimeter breached!” One of the guards shoved passed Ren’Vhan, spilling the hot drink all over his face.

He absorbed the heat from the beverage to avoid being burned and turned to whatever spooked the guards. One was falling to the floor, blaster in hand as a large spiky maned Narglatch was leaping over him and directly at Ren’Vhan.

With the energy he had absorbed from the caf, he held up his hand, causing the beast to stop mid air inches from his face.
On the creature’s back, a young boy turned his head towards Rushtean. “Rush, look what I found! Must have been abandoned recently!”

The panting beast opened its mouth and licked the spilled liquid from Ren’Vhan’s face with its massive tongue.

At the sight of the display, Rushtean teased, “Awe, I think he likes you Renny!”

Ren’Vhan’s eyebrows twitched in irritation.

 

Great use of the prompts and a funny piece

 

The post-Endor galaxy is just full of indignities, I see… Sounds like the ex-Jedi hunter has more than enough to keep him from boredom. “Rennie” indeed. And the narglatch! I think the eyebrow twitch may become a permanent feature...

 

A Hunt in the Woods

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Emperor's Hand Reantis Halcyon is with Inquisitor Rushtean on a little hunting trip in the woods. It's open season on enemies of the Empire.
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A young blond woman paced impatiently under a tall tree, her arms crackling with electrical energy, cooking the yolk from the eggs that had cracked on her shoulders when the Rodian high above threw a small bird’s nest down at her. It was bad enough that she had been tracking the man for four days in the wilderness. Her hair was unkempt, her pants muddy and her tunic covered in tree sap, dust, and now yolk.

“Rushtean… Please say I can burn down the tree,” she pleaded to her companion digging through the man’s nearby campsite.

“If the intel’s intact,” came a woman’s voice. “Then you can burn him to ash for all I cared, young Reantis.”

This prompted Reantis Halcyon to smile wickedly as she stared up to the Rodian who made the mistake of looking down briefly at that moment and now climbed higher with renewed terror.

“Curses… the datapad’s broken,” came the woman’s voice as she stepped out of the tent in her red robe. “Sorry to say it, but we need to get him down in one piece.”

This bit of news prompted the younger woman to snarl angrily until the Inquisitor revealed a pillow and a mischievous smile.

“So we’ll have to burn down the tree,” Rushtean said in a sinister tone. “Would you care to do the honors?”

She built up energy in her hands and directed sparks of electricity to strike the pillow, igniting it before the other woman threw it up and propelled it high up into the tree with the force. After a few moments, the fire took hold and the Rodian let out a terrified shriek as the sound of snapping branches signalled his retreat down the tree.

Smiling, Rushtean noted, “Poor lad doesn’t even know he has a better chance with the fire.”

 

How absolutely cool to read about another Hand and an Inquisitor teaming up.

 

Goodness that was an unexpected genre!

But well done indeed.

 

Inquisitor Diplomacy

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Rushtean's been assigned to retrieve a child prodigy to better benefit the Empire through proper training. Because the parents' survival is a preferable outcome, she resorts to diplomacy.

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Rushtean lowered her hood as she sized up the two people standing defiantly before her. She couldn’t blame them, she had essentially barged into their house and commanded them to hand over their juvenile son. The father, his hair dark and his shirt and pants as white as the armor of the stormtroopers standing to either side of her. The mother, clinging to their son from behind her husband was wrapped in a towel that didn’t seem quite as white, seeming so slightly yellow that it would have been hard to tell had she not been contrasted by the clothing of the man between the two women. The young boy himself clung to a plastic rancor figure in his fear.

“Look, Mr. and Mrs. Taloreau… I’m a very busy woman, and I seem to have caught you at a bad time,” she said in mock diplomacy. “Why don’t you just hand over that darling little boy, and you and I can both be on our way.”

The man gritted his teeth. No doubt he’ll bide his time to think of some way to get out of this situation, most likely by asking the most obvious question.

“And if we don’t,” asked the man.

The Inquisitor turned her eyes to the young man and gestured towards him. The boy shrieked as his toy was pulled from his grip and flew across the room and into her hand. She held it out to her right as she said flatly “Trooper, if you will.”

She kept her eyes on the family as she heard the scream of the soldier’s E-11 blaster rifle. The bolt flew past the family and struck the wall behind them, triggering a twitch of her eyebrow. Rushtean tilted her head back towards the trooper who was now backing up, his weapon level around his waist. The woman asked with a menacing tone, “Shooting from the hip there, soldier?”

“Uh… ma’am…”

Before he could explain himself, she drew the rancor figure forward before throwing it back at the soldier, spinning around as she unleashed a telekinetic wave with her left hand, launching the figurine into the man’s chest. He let out a high pitched scream as he fell back, his breastplate cracked. The remaining stormtroopers raised their weapons on the family as Rushtean paced toward the fallen trooper, coughing hoarsely as he reached up to his chest.

Gesturing to a nearby aquarium, it soon shattered as she forced the stones to slam into the glass and towards her hand.

“Ma’am… please,” he pleaded between coughs. “I’m sorry… please.”

She kneeled down beside the man, the collection of stones still floating before her palm. “You are an embarrassment to your fellow troopers… and to me.” She lowered the stones over the cracked portion of the man’s armor.

“No… please… ACK!!!”

The stones pressed down against the cracks, shoving the sharp edges through the body glove beneath and into the skin. Blood began to seep up through the cracks, engulfing the stones as his coughing gained a distinctly wet characteristic. He reached up to try to pull her hand away weakly, and then after a few moments, his remaining strength faded… along with the coughing.

She stood back up, the fear filling the room was not that of her troopers having seen their comrade killed by her hand. Rushtean felt a pang of pride in their cold professionalism as she turned her head to where the terror was emanating from. As fish continued to flop on the floor around the family, her smile turned twisted by the joy she took in killing one of her own men. “To answer your previous inquiry… that’s what will happen.”

 

Riveting use of the prompts and a very intimidating display from the Inquisitor.

 

I'm enjoying these short glimpses into the Invidious Intent continuity. Rushtean is especially interesting in this latest installment because of what we see in the one previous (where she's the "responsible adult" trying to keep a raging firebug newbie from blasting everything, if mostly for practical reasons.) She's very gleeful in her use of deadly Force here, which is not at all odd for a dark side Force-user -- but does seem more... self-indulgent than we've seen her before. It has me wondering whether this is set in a more aggressive phase of her life, or whether she's got a bit of sociopathy going on -- something such that she wouldn't let it interfere with work, but terrorizing people is an end in itself. So when she can get away with it, out comes the torturing of bystanders for kicks.

Such fantastic scary people! With way too many stories (fan or pro), the evil characters have been beaten to death with the Boring Stick. That may be accurate to real life (lots of murderers and such really are monotony on toast when you get down to their personality), but it sure makes for dull reading. It's nice to see a cast of "villains" so diverse that I can't always predict when, where, or how they will be horrifying.

Good luck with the challenge, by the way.

 

Ooohhh that gave me chills!

But it was very well done

 

Rushtean's a character I plan to really have fun with. I once did a multiverse roleplay and was at the time the roleplay group's foremost expert on Magic: the Gathering lore, so I handled writing the parts involving the lore characters from that universe... among them was one very interesting character named "Braids". As a Dementia Summoner, she could literally pull creatures from her own imagination and bring them into the real world as corporeal beings. This involved entering the physical manifestation of her own mind, an act that would invariably drive the Dementia Summoners into madness, but she was unique in that she managed to retain some degree of restraint and self control, understanding of the consequences of her actions in regards to whether or not they would make her life or that of her superiors harder than need be, but still quite willing to kill at any time that it would bear no ill effect on her or those she worked for. I thoroughly enjoyed portraying her back then and decided to base Rushtean's character on her in regards to being creative in how she carries out her work, being sadistic, but also being professional about who or when she kills. If they need someone alive and cooperative, she'll find ways of intimidating or bribing them to achieve the preferable outcome. If she finds that whether or not someone is taken in alive would have no consequence... she'll have a little fun with it. With the hunting trip, she was uncertain as to whether or not the datapad would have the info she needed, so she needed to bring the Rodian in alive. Unfortunately for the Rodian, if it is later found that the info needed could be recovered from the datapad, he'll be left at her mercy (Whom would likely decide to let Reantis have her way with him). In the Diplomacy story, she knew from the beginning that she needed the boy alive, as well as to keep both parents alive and cooperative. Intimidation was the most likely to produce favorable results, but her stormtrooper, having missed at point blank range, hurt the terrifying image of the Empire. In order to restore that image and stomp any thought of resistance from the father's mind, punished the stormtrooper fatally... she took great joy in it, because if she's going to do it, she may as well have some fun with it. You will see more of this in the later parts of the story, and the origin of her sadism may surprise you.