Saga - Legends B.S.P.A.W.S.I.D. - The ****-**** Physics and Wierd Situation Intervention Division (WIP)

CHARACTERS:
Agent Mitch Nifesta- Twi'lek Force Vampire. Galactic Republic security agent. Former RPF Adoptions staff with the I-5 entity.
Baille Harte- Corellian ex-Imperial V-Wing pilot.
Kate Todd- former NCIS special agent. NCIS
Toshiko Sato- former Torchwood operative Torchwood, and RPF Adoptions staffmember with Mitch and I-5.
Danny Hunter- former MI5 agent. Spooks
Owen Harper- former Torchwood operative. Torchwood

Right, I am merging the Mitch Nifesta and Baille Harte duo, and the non-Star Wars DANL (Dead Agents, New Lives) quartet, into a time-line ignoring, possibly trans-dimensional, group.

I was already toying with merging them for a "Bring Mara Jade Back From The Dead" challenge, but they can do other stuff, I guess.

 

Chapter One - The Gathering​

Sea Fort in the middle of an ocean

Kate Todd sat at the rough-surfaced wooden table in the isolated sea fort, looking at the empty chair on the other side of the rectangular bit of furniture.

Dressed in a freshly available white two-piece ensemble, rather than the Sheriff of Nottingham scarlet gown tied at the waist with a gold-threaded rope, that she normally had to make do with, off-shift, Kate was a female Anglo-American with shoulder length dark hair.

This was a strange and exhausting assignment, diving for bleached skulls in the central water inside the castle, bringing to the abbreviated stone ramp, and ferrying them up to the tower which contained a crystalline barrier that the sometimes cantankerous, elderly fellow known as the Doctor, had taken to trying to punch, bare-knuckled, mind, through.

Her Boss, I-5, felt that slightly better, less painful, progress could be made if the Time Lord was able to use the pile of skulls that were piled at the base of the fort, instead of his bare knuckles, though as far as she could see, if the material making up the barrier was harder than diamond by several magnitudes, bare fist or using a skull, you were not getting through.

She had been pulled out of a multi-person DANL (Dead Agents, New Lives) operation at the Umbrella Corporation's Tokyo facility, and a box that had materialised in the stone-paved dining hall, once again bore two bottles of red and white wine, stamped with the red-and-black Umbrella logo.

She had had short-lived fun setting the supplied food onto the table, cooked meats and steamed rice and vegetables; the whole repast had an Oriental air.

Sometimes she ate alone; sometimes the Doctor joined her, leading the hooded Claw Thing to the far end of the castle then scampering back here to buy himself ninety minutes peace to get a sit-down meal in, and a chat.

Kate had little idea from day to day whether her dinner mate would be a version of the Time Lord that remembered her, or a new one generated by the wierd-looking chamber elsewhere in the castle.
Obviously she preferred one who knew her, because they did not need to waste time on his understandably suspicious Q&A (question and answer) sessions.

The rough wooden door squeaked open, and the man himself rushed in, his expression brightening as his gaze alighted upon her.

Very slim, grey frock coat and pants, weathered face, and spiky grey hair.

"Ahh, Caitlin. Still here?"

She breathed a sigh of relief at the recognition. Any dinner partner was better than having to eat alone, but a partner that still recognised her was a prized event, no matter how often it happened. She didn't even mind that he refused to call her 'Kate'. "Doctor." Previously, only her parents and another doctor, 'Ducky' at NCIS, called her Caitlin.

He paused halfway to the table, catching sight of the fare. Bushy grey eyebrows went up. "You're supervisor is treating us today, isn't he? Are you leaving us, or more specifically, me?"

She frowned at him. "Doctor?"

"Oh come now, Caitlin." The Time Lord waved to illustrate his point. "Normally he provides simple stuff, pizzas, fish and chips, sometimes something he picked up at a fast food emporium. But this looks like someone actually took time to prepare it." He touched his crumpled white shirt with a bony finger. "Now, I am nowhere close to making an impression on the barrier, so it is nothing to do with me! And I doubt our hooded friend has a special date red circled on a calendar. So that leaves you."
He raised an eyebrow, appraising her. "And it looks like you have found some new clothes."

It was true. She had returned from her underwater skull collecting to find, in the sea-fort's basement room with the armchair and roaring fire, that I-5 had laundered and pressed her white A-line suit skirt (leaving the jacket to its own, repeatedly handwashed, devices), and paired it with a white knitted long-sleeved jumper, and folded both items over the arms of the armchair.

​

The Doctor approached the table, roving over the patterned porcelain bowls and rectangular plates with an interested eye. A hand plucked a greasy piece of green-brown meat from a bowl, and the Doctor made ah and oh sounds that drew a small smile from her as the burning morsel made its way to his mouth.

"I'd blow on that, if I were you." She warned, a dubious expression on her face as he popped it into his mouth, initially blowing out of his mouth to remove heat, then chewing rapidly on the meat.

"Gae King. Stir Fried Lamb with Ginger."

Kate bounced in her seat as I-5's voice burst up from her lap: "Kate?"

She brought up the hands that had been sitting in her lap, and laid one forearm on the table edge while the other slid the knitted white sleeve back to reveal her leather-strapped vortex manipulator, the device by which she and her DANL colleagues travelled and communicated with each other, and how they received instructions.

The Doctor scampered over like a Strider from the Labyrinth fantasy, and bent down so low over the device, that the former NCIS agent had to lean back to avoid a concussion.
"Is this the Big Man then?" He yelled cordially down into the device' microphone.

"Kate? Your voice has gone husky all of a sudden-"

"This is not Kate. As I am sure you very well knoor."

"Doctor." The disembodied voice acknowledged. "Pleased to finally hear from you. I wish you the best of luck with your endeavours."

"Thank you. And thank you for all the imported food by the way. Better than what I could scrape up by myself, even given your young lady's assertions that my own mind made all this up. Now," The 12th Doctor continued without pause, "Why are you taking ma Caitlin away?"

"It's only for a short while Doctor." I-5 assured.

"Why, only for a short while?" Kate queried, "I don't want to come back here." She glanced up into the Time Lord's ear. "No offense, Doctor."

He straightened and stepped back a pace, gesticulating as he towered over her once again. "Well, of course you don't want to, Caitlin. It is hardly the Crowne Plaza Changi, is it?"

"You have enough skulls to be getting on with, Doctor. You won't need Kate here collecting more from the waters for a while. Now Kate, another operation has come up, one that should last a few days, and for which I am bringing your whole team together, along with two other individuals, and some droids."

"Droids?"

"Robots."

"So, you can finish your meal together, before that stuff gets cold. Then collect together your things, both what you brought with you, that I supplied, and that the Doctor's mind put into your wardrobe. Then signal me, and I will beam you to the next location."

"I'm ready to leave now!"

"Now do as you are told. And another thing. One of the additions to the new team, will be the one that joined you and Tosh at Umbrella."

Todd frowned, recalling the childlike redhead who had materialised with them inside a locked armoury within the Umbrella Corporation's Japanese facility. "Baille?"

"She'll be there with her father, who doesn't know that I am secretly sending her on missions with you."

"That would explain why she was so excited to be around guns. I was tempted to hand her a Kleenex."

"I'll be needing you to keep schtum that you recognise her."

"Schtum?"

"He wants you to pretend not to know her." The Doctor stepped to the table and slid the two clean dinner plates apart. "I'll be Mother then, shall I?"

---

Aboard the Darth Unlucky Radiant VII Republic Cruiser


The lounging, tan robed, white male Twi'lek wrinkled his nose at a new smell that invaded his ship. "Mm. What's that fragging smell?" He made no move to investigate, either by rising from the sofa, or by extending his Force senses out into the wider ship.

Before him on the low circular table, two wrist devices, vortex manipulators, sat by themselves. One heavy on the tan leather, and the other in a dainty pink wriststrap and casing.

He was wondering how he was going to explain I-5 to his little girl.

The young woman that he had rescued from an Imperial execution cell at an orbitting facility over Christophsis only a few months ago, had run out on him as soon as they were in space, him aboard the 'Unlucky, her aboard the V-Wing starfighter that she had been captured in.

Her running was very likely as a reaction to him letting slip that her rescue came with him adopting her.

He had not minded her disappearing off his scopes, silently vowing to check up on her every so often to check that she was okay.

That occassion had come up faster than he anticipated, for within minutes, she had been pursued into the Christophsis atmosphere by a pair of TIE fighters sent after her, an occurrence that worried the Twi'lek because of persistent rumours that the planet's residents maintained a global defense shield that he expected her smash into, any second.

Turned out the shield had been down for maintenance, but up again soon after she and the TIEs were brought down by Christophis forces. The Empire had written off their pilots, but now, he had a kid in there.

The door to the corridor slid inside, revealing his girl, Baille Harte, and bringing the smell he had detected, full force into the room.

She wore the sleeveless black, armourweave-enhanced minidress that he had bought her for a recent undercover mission, a stormtrooper belt that she had painstakingly painted in dark colours to be more covert, and was covered head to foot in a translucent gunge that matted her auburn hair and was lumped down her arms and shins. Her knees and shins were stained with mud or a black substance, and colourful bits of flimsi were adhered to her - discarded wrappers and the like.

"What the frag did you do, crawl inside a Hutt?" Mitch Nifesta asked, his tone as horrified as his expression.

"You recognise the smell then?"

"Some you don't forget. Decomp', farting Banthas, Hutt slime." he glanced down at the table without seeing it. "Strange that all three of those could be associated with Tatooine," he mused, "wonder what that says?"

The shivering woman followed his gaze and froze, was that her vortex manipulator on the table?

She had hidden it under the mattress in her cabin. In hindsight, not the most sophisticated concealment, but she had never had the sense that the Twi'lek searched her room.

Nifesta glanced up and noticed her attention on the table. "I need to tell you something about myself, Honey, but first, how did your mission go?"

His niece, Samantha Irisa, a teenage jedi padawan that, four years into the Jedi Purge, he had mind-rubbed for her own safety and left on Pantolomin to be re-raised as a normal child by his old SGIS boss, had recently persuaded him that his brand of close care and supervision for Baille was detrimental to her wellbeing, and he should allow her to undertake missions for the Rebel Alliance and the Secret Galactic Intelligence Service that he was a veteran off, and Irisa was a new liaison agent for.

This visit to Nar Shaadaa was for one of those ops.

"I slipped into a slime trail, and could not get out in time to maintain pursuit. By time I crawled free to dry land, or what passes for it on a Nar Shaada street, I had to abandon the mission to get back home in time."

"Good g-" He looked up at her, blinked, then glared at her with crimson eyes.

"What?" She stared back, fearful. Does he know?

"You're...you're oscillating." His eyes widened as the obvious explanation, "You're shivering!" He sprang up and over to her, tearing off his robe and wrapping it around her shoulders, leaning down to hug her hard, though careful to avoid the Hutt slime. "Everything is going to be fine, Kitten." Out of her sight, he stuck his tongue under his bottom lip as self admonishment for his stupidity. Oscillating...pillock.

Mitch released her and gently turned her round to steer her back into the corridor. "A mission has come up. But first, bath time."

---

Moon Base Alpha (re-constituted), Lost Moon of Poosh


The remaining three agents for DANL, had sprinted along the wide, brightly-lit corridors in response to the easy-on-the-ears whung-whung alarm, and arrived through the sliding cream-coloured doors into Main Mission, the control centre for the re-constituted Moonbase Alpha.

Danny Hunter, Toshiko Sato, and Owen Harper stared up through armoured plexiglase windows at the starfish-shaped spacecraft twirling slowly, high above the moon’s barren landscape.

“Great, starfish aliens.” Danny grumbled, biceps bulging his olive-green t-shirt as he crossed his arms.

“Well, no gaurantee that the aliens themselves are starfish-shaped.” Owen pointed out, standing to the former MI5’ agent’s right, on the other side of the slightly shorter Tosh. “After all, we don’t design our vehicles to look like ourselves.”

“Good point.” Danny agreed. He did not feel the need to point out that this mollified him not the slightest.

“I outfitted one of the Eagles with a pulse laser,” Toshiko volunteered, the Anglo-Japanese woman mused aloud, referring the the lattice-bodied, blunt-nosed transport craft that they had found under the cross-shaped landing pads on the moon’s surface, “and we can control it remotely from here, as soon as we figure out how to get it to a launching pad.”

“Oh come on, Tosh.” Owen groused, nodding up to the visitors, “look at them! Looks like something out of that Independence Day film. Even a fleet of Eagles isn’t going to do more than give them a good laugh.”

“Uh-oh.”

Owen glanced over her head at Hunter, who had just uttered that. “A bit of a late reaction there, Dan old mate. Just dawning on you how utterly screwed we are?”

“New spaceship. Two o’clock. Much smaller than the others.”

The Torchwood operatives followed his direction, to see a vertical grey cylinder, but not tapiring to a point like Earth rockets did.
A fiery burst from rocket motors at the base of the craft slowed it’s descent to the dusty grey surface beyond the man-made, or Poosh-made structures outlying the main base structures.

Danny. You there? The new voice, a bit more bassy than what you would expect from human lungs, burst from the wrist-link on Danny Hunter’s arm, and his lifted it up to where he could speak into the microphone. “Yeah, I’m here. Listen, we are about to have some company.”

Yes…. Danny and the others looked on at the verbal hesitation. I am aware of that. A medium-term mission has come up, which will entail moving temporarily to a new base of operations, and having a new organisation structure. I want everyone to gather their things and whatever equipment or accoutrements you want moved to the new place, then place them on or near that sofa you like, that I got you.

“The rest of the team are here-” He advised, but Toshiko interjected that Kate had been missing for a few days.

Oh yes, Kate. The disembodied voice did not seem surprised by this. She is on another op’, but I am pulling her out and she will meet you at the new place. And Tosh, I would speak with you alone, please?

* * * *

Venator-class Star Destroyer


The brown-robes swished over furniture as the Twi'lek wearing it stalked through the two-room suite, checking to see if he was happy with it.

Large rectangular windows with curved corners, showed the upwardly angled command tower, the twin of the one he was in, about two hundred metres distant, and beyond the grey metal structure, th dark beauty of interstellar space.

The actual bridge should be towards the top of the other tower, from what he recalled, while some decks above his current location in Officer Country - officers' quarters - the equivalent of the bridge level would be Starfighter Command, or something along those lines.

Agent Nifesta had been on a Venator before, ferried to an active combat zone during the Clone Wars as an undercover agent with the Secret Galactic Intelligence Service.

It had been the vessel his neice, Ewlla Iillor, had been serving on, as an ensign or lieutenant, and she had subsequently gotten involved with his mission to locate and rescue a missing Republic General.

He had not had much opportunity to explore the capital ship though, it being war time, and him not being Republic Navy.

Nifesta paused in the living area to look around. Before him, between him and the window, he had a pair of blocky two-person sofas to the left and right of him, facing each other; with enough space between them for a low glase-topped coffeine table.

He dropped a couple of bulky bags onto the left-hand couch, and collapsed onto the other, resting his right arm on the side closest to the transparisteel so he could gaze out and do some sight-seeing.

The agent momentarily extended his mental scan enough to check where his kid was, and sensed her exploring right next door in an adjacent suite, a copy of his own.

Molly-coddling his adopted daughter was his greatest pleasure, but since this assignment meant living and working around others, he intended to tone that down somewhat, and the first step was to allow her to occupy that suite by herself.

* * * *

Baille pulled clothes and shoes out of the two sports bags she had been able to bring with her, shaking out the folded clothes and hanging them up in the closets in the sleeping area.
There were clothes hangars available, but she had brought five with her, just in case.

She had learned a lot about the relationship working with the Sith-I-5 entity.

He supplied clothes and equipment at his, its'?, whim, but best not to rely on him doing that. Big picture like this Star Destroyer that would be her home for the time being, he could handle, and it was probably safe to assume that it would be in perfect or near-perfect condition, but expecting him to remember the micro stuff like providing clothes hangars would be a fool's errand.

She took another shower, or at least, a shower, wanting to do some independent cleaning to move on from that disgusting experience crawling on her hands and knees through Hutt slime whilst passers-by in the dark Nar Shadaa streets chuckled at her predicament and went on their way.
The stuff had felt like the viscous lubricants that she had used to coat engine parts when she had been taking mecahnical classes in her efforts to become a starfighter pilot of the Empire

No-one stopped to help, but by the same token, no-one stopped to laugh. You never knew who else someone knew on that city-planet, so stopping to get yourself identified was a no-no. Smirk and move on. That was the name of the game.

Naked now, she stepped across the carpet into the bathroom with her soap and yellow dianoga-shaped bath-sponge.

With the riches ransacked or still to be leeched from the Wishmaster's various bank accounts, the Twi'lek had plenty of resources to buy this childish **** for her.
The Wishmaster had been the tyrannical home-owner, drug famer and gem-miner who had enslaved her and others on Christophsis.

Leaning into the glase-doored cylinder stall, she activated the shower and was pleased to see water start to drip from the multi-holed projector above. At least it wasn't a sonic shower.

****
Command Deck

The three that had come direct from the moon base, stared silently across the barely lit chamber at the two long rows of skeleton-like automata, barely visible in the wan starlight coming through large, recessed triangular windows to their left, standing against the opposite wall, then as one, drew pistols from wherever they were holstered or carried and aimed them.

Most of their movement was arms only, but it was enough to noisily trigger the lights in the ceiling directly above them, adjacent lumis flickering into newborn blue-white light also.

"Check out the floor." Owen warned, momentarily dipping the nose of his gun by way of emphasis. He continued covering the frozen robots.

Tosh and Danny glanced at the deck, spying twin dark gashes crossing perpendicular to their path. Lucky they had not chosen to walk over to examine the silent droids.

"Well spotted." Danny allowed, grudgingly.

"Thanks."



To be continued...