[The Short Fic Weekly Challenge Thread!]

I haven't written fanfiction in a million years, but I'm back to playing swtor after months away, and I have an agent who's tickling my fancy and I spotted this thread so....

 

Anyway, so many fun stories here! I've decided to join in Also, this story might have gotten away from me *just* a tad. It's a long one, 2300 words.

 

So...hello all!

 

Prompt - What's In A Name/Advice (both of them!)

Title - Seventy-Four

Class - Imperial Agent (Zenian)

Words - About 2300

Spoilers - None to speak of, really, as long as you know what code name the agent gets.

Set somewhere in Act 1-ish. Not related to the main plot or its characters.

 

 

 

A Rodian screams in the corner. Her hulking Gammorean attackers drag her away, ham-fists tight on her spindle-arms. Her lip bleeds.

 

Cipher Nine tries not to see. Two years, eleven identities, and seventy-three kills out of the Academy, Nine is not the righteous patriot she was at twenty-two. She’s battle-hardened, now, and she’s always been cool-headed. It doesn’t take a lot for her to stride past, screams no different to her ears than the clang of aging shuttle engines or the mutterings of jittering junkies.

 

Nar Shaddaa is a rotting world, and no amount of angst on Nine’s part will eradicate the stench. That kind of lesson is hard learned, that small kindnesses can lead to mission failures, big failures. The kind of failures that will land you dead. Or worse—the kind that will land you at the mercy of the Empire, glory to its dominion all the same.

 

Nine isn’t here to rescue starving Rodians. She’s here to recover an agent. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

“Please, lady, please,” a pale twi’lek says from the street corner. His teeth are rot, his eyes are rimmed with red and flies, and weeping sores pick a winding trail down his lekku. He reeks of piss and sickness. “Just a couple o’ credits. C’mon, lady. Please.”

 

Nine ignores him, too. As she walks past, deep sobs wrack his shallow lungs. Fat tears stain dirty cheeks. Nine’s own chest gives a sympathetic twinge. He is aching and desperate. Wretched. She thinks about killing him on the way out. It would be the biggest kindness she could give him.

 

He might make his red sand money reporting to some Hutt when times are good, though. Or the Republic. They don’t have a lot of influence in this sector, but they’ve been making a play for power of late. Someone might notice. Someone might see.

 

Someone might always see.

 

So Nine digs her fingers deeper into her favorite black leather jacket, ducking her chin between its high lapels. Escapist tendrils of ink-black hair creep in front of her ruby-red eyes. Her whisper-quiet feet carry her to a dim, smoky cantina, its less than savory patrons spilling onto the street. Nine slips among them. She shifts her feet in her boots, feeling the vibroknife against her calf. She wears her blaster on her hip—she doesn’t mind if others know that she’s armed, she just doesn’t want them to know about all of her weapons. Besides, the knife is quiet. Nine likes quiet.

 

“Juma,” she says to the bartender, tossing him a credit chip and a scowl. She’s a gangster, tonight. Dirty face, modified blaster, twitchy hands. Lots of eyeliner. It’s an easy disguise, one that she’s used a lot. She’s good at this.

 

No. Not just good. She’s the best.

 

The drink comes at the same time as a baby-faced human with a gang tattoo on the left side of his neck, his shoulder-length hair swept into a stubby ponytail behind his head. He gives her a beaming smile with his too-white teeth and his too pretty face.

 

“Well hey there, lovely. I ain’t seen you ‘round here before,” he says. “Name’s Jaden.”

 

He’s too charming by half. Too sweet, too young. Nine lets herself pity him for the barest of moments. A flash of real emotion, and she’s back to her hardened affect. She’s working.

 

“Well, I haven’t been around in a while. Name’s Lena,” Nine says. She lifts a dark brow at him, and glances from his eyes to the chair next to her and back to those wide, blue eyes. She sees the recognition, and the relief. Then, for a long second, she sees his fear. She smells it, wafting above all the sweat and smoke of the dirty cantina. His identity slips for too long. No wonder Keeper sent her in for extraction. Jaden isn’t stable here. He isn’t in control.

 

If Nine has seen it, others have seen it. If others have seen it, ‘Jaden’ doesn’t have a whole lot of time to get away.

 

“Buy you a drink?” Jaden says, slipping into the barstool next to her. He’s back to flirtatious eyes and big grins. Perhaps there is hope for him, yet. Leaving for a tryst is a good reason to make an exit with a stranger.

 

“Hmm. You could do that,” Nine purrs. She presses the glass to her lips, but doesn’t even let herself taste the rancid drink. Juma juice is Zen’s usual order. Cipher Nine thinks it’s vile. Those kinds of disconnects make the disguise easier. Nine is wearing her Lena-skin, and Lena drinks juma juice. Or at least she pretends to. Nine doesn’t drink on jobs unless she absolutely has to.

 

“Could do that? Got a better suggestion?” Jaden asks.

 

“Way I see it, we’ve got a couple of options. We could sit at this bar for a while, you could buy me drinks, and I could drink you under the table. Then we’d go back to my place, pretty thing like you. That sounds a little sloppy, though, and indirect.”

 

“And the other option?” Jaden says. He leans forward, putting his hand on the back of Nine’s stool. Nine paints a mock grin on her face, and whispers into his ear.

 

“Or, we could go back to my place right now and see where the evening takes us.” There’s a pair of Nikto in the corner, glaring at them. Nine doesn’t like the look in their eyes or the slant of their blasters. Jaden plays with her hair for a moment, as though considering his options, but Nine puts a hand on his leg. To the casual observer, it might be a seductive move. She digs her nails through the rough fabric of his pants. “I don’t think you have time to consider your options.”

 

Nine doesn’t wait for him to answer. She grabs his hand and abandons her drink, dragging him back into the relatively fresh air of the Nar Shaddaa night.

 

“Stop dragging me, ‘Lena.’ I’ve got everything under control, if Keeper—”

 

“I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about, babe, but if you want to get to my ship tonight, you’ll follow me quietly. Got it?” Nine snaps. Idiot boy, talking about Keeper ten yards away from a cantina crawling with Hutt lackeys. Crawling with the people he’s been spying on.

 

“Seriously, we can slow down. There’s no—”

 

“Shut. Up.” Nine keeps her feet moving and her face forward, but the Nikto from the cantina are following behind.

 

She puts her hand on her blaster.

 

Left, right, two flights up. Where is her speeder? Too far. Her landing pad is too far. Her heart rate remains steady. She’s been in worse spots. Much worse.

 

She passes the same Twi’lek from before, his sobs still heaving in his chest. She’s almost back, almost there. Almost, almost—

 

“Hey, Lena. Haven’t seen you in a while,” one of the Nikto says. The taller one. Jeedo. The short one was T’wagu. Nine has met them before, but not here. It takes her a moment to place them. Kessel. She knows them from Kessel.

 

Kessel did not go well.

 

“Hey, boys.” She does not hesitate. Her knife comes out of her boot. It lands in T’wagu’s throat. Jaden, for all his faltering bravery, shoots clean, and Jeedo falls to the ground. They weren’t bad guys for gangsters. Nine had almost liked them, once. A moment of emotion, a twinge of regret. Then nothing. She is empty as a dress-form, existing only as the meaty insides for her many identity-skins.

 

Jaden curses. He does so loudly and verbosely and in several languages while Nine grabs her knife and pulls it from T’wagu’s scaly skin.

 

“This is bad, this is really bad. Sithspit. Shavit. You’re—what am I gonna do? Ked’ro is going to know, shavit, shavit, shavit! I’ve made an enemy of a Hutt, and I’ve only been an agent for three frakking months. I have to get off world, I have to—”

 

“Look, kid. Jaden. Jaden.”

 

He keeps babbling, though, keeps cursing. He’s stuck. He’s panicking. He’s too green for failure.

 

“Mik,” Nine says. At the sound of his real name, the boy stops. “I’m taking you to my speeder, and then you and me are going home, you hear me? We’re going home.” This still isn’t the kind of alleyway where you speak words like “Dromund Kaas,” not if you want to walk away with your life.

 

Mik nods silently. Nodding is good. Silent is good.

 

#

 

The Phantom casts bright light throughout its holds and decks. Agent Mik Nauten sits cross-legged on his temporary bunk. Hyperspace streaks by his window, and his hair drips clean refresher water onto his borrowed shirt—Imperial gray, of course. Glory to the Empire, of course. Glory to the nation that made this too-young broken boy, may she conquer all her enemies with the stolen innocence of all her brightest youth.

 

“Hey,” Nine says, rapping lightly on the door frame. He looks up. Without his dirt-and-grime mask, Nine can see the freckles on his cheeks. He’ll need a specialized medical droid for the tattoo removal, but his Watcher will see to that. He looks like a boy named Mik again.

 

“Five,” he says. The word echoes off the metal and wood walls of Nine’s beloved Phantom. Its minimalist aesthetic feels cold for a moment, empty compared to the rough-edged emotion in that single utterance. “That’s my count. I’ve killed five people now. Five people are dead because of me, and none of them were the monsters I’d thought they’d be.”

 

Nine knows that feeling. Was it only two years ago that her count had been as low as five? Five had been a hard number. Ten had been harder. Fifty was the worst. Fifty is when the girl that used to live inside Cipher Nine died, the one who once wore pigtails and pink dresses, the one who made crowns of wildflowers in the summertime, the one who bore the name her parents gave her. Terraz’enia’naverrod.

 

She hasn’t heard that name spoken properly in years. When she entered the academy, she became the Imperial-friendly Zenian Averrod, and even that fiercely competitive, sharp-tongued patriot is gone. Zenian Averrod died first. Somewhere around fifteen kills. Maybe she limped along until twenty. It’s hard to be a patriot when you spend your whole life as the underhanded shadow of the Empire, the knife in the dark.

 

“The monsters are easy, and you’ll find some,” Nine says. “The thrilling heroics come around occasionally.”

 

“I always thought…I thought the thrilling heroics would be more common. They’re not, are they? I wasn’t trained to be a hero. I was trained to be a blaster on legs.”

 

It’s a sharp truth. Zenian has already been cut by it. Nine doesn’t feel the sting.

 

“Listen, Mik. You aren’t a Watcher. You’re a field agent. It’s not your job to know the big picture, and it’s not mine either. Sometimes…sometimes when you’re in there, when you’re talking to people and knowing them--even if you knew before--that big picture gets lost. The best way to deal with it, the best way to get through it is to just put your head down and do exactly the job you need to do. If that job is stealing weapons, steal weapons. If that job is killing a good person, you kill that good person. Stop being Mik. Build a self that would do what you have to, and be that self.”

 

“What if I don’t want to? What if I want to be Mik?” His eyes well with tears, but his voice is steady. Nine hears all that raw emotion, all of his loss and hurt.

 

“You don’t get to be Mik anymore. You don’t get to go back.”

 

“Can you really kill people without feeling anything? Can you really just put yourself away like that?”

 

“Someday…someday you won’t have to put Mik away anymore. Mik will just be gone. It’ll be easier, then.”

 

“Easy? Is whoever you were gone? Will all the kills blend together? Will I lose count?”

 

“That was a lot of questions,” Nine says.

 

“That wasn’t a lot of answers.” He stares at her with steady defiance, his shoulders still hunched.

 

“Get some sleep. We’ll be back in Kaas City tomorrow afternoon.”

 

Cipher Nine leaves Mik alone, and picks her way back to the cockpit. She can hear Kaliyo scurrying around the cargo hold somewhere, and from Mik’s room she imagines she can hear a soft sob.

 

He is broken, surely as that twi’lek junkie with his sores and his stench. He has the Empire to rebuild him, though, the same Empire that tore him apart. When they solder him back together, he will be scarred and hollow, but he will be stronger. That’s how it works. That’s how it always works.

 

An hour later, Mik knocks on the door of the cockpit.

 

“Cipher Nine,” he muses. “What’s your real name?”

 

“You just said it. It’s Cipher Nine.” Her word’s ring true in the sterile air, but Mik shakes his head.

 

“I don’t want to forget how to feel compassionate.” He and Nine lock eyes. He looks barely old enough to drink in a Cantina. He’s barely younger than Nine. He’s so much fuller than her. Some people fill up as they grow old. Not Nine. Probably not Mik, either. They’ll drain out of scars left by too many kills, their souls leaking through holes in their skin.

 

“It’s seventy-four,” Nine says. She speaks with the same steady cadence she always uses, her unmasked voice. It sounds hollow. “T’wagu makes seventy-four. You’ll lose yourself, but you won’t forget your count.”

 

“Seventy-four is a lot.”

 

“Yeah. Seventy-four is a lot.”

 

Mik settles into the copilot’s chair, and Nine stares out the window. For a split second, she is Zenian, she is Terraz’enia’naverrod, she is a girl who used to laugh. She is a girl who used to ache.

 

She feels the weight of seventy-four lives. It is a bittersweet agony, the kind that makes a person feel alive.

 

 

[/Dantooine Lore]

Dantooine is also mentioned in A New Hope--Leia says that the rebels are on Dantooine. It is a very different place from Tatooine, where Krayt Dragons live.

[The Empire and your personal Morality]

Didn't look at the spoiler, but the tag has me thinking that maybe it's time to go back and finish out the IA storyline.

[The Empire and your personal Morality]

I will say that I object to many of the main objectives of just random quests on the imp side--when the dark side option is to kill an innocent and the light side is to take them back to the empire so they can be tortured and their people exterminated...yeah. That kind of thing gets to me. I was playing an agent who is "something of a patriot", trying to make someone honorable in war--but there was no motivation for her to stay. What she *really* would have done after seeing the realities of what the empire was doing was defect, but as you cannot change factions she's pretty much been rotting on Tattooine while I run around as a Jedi.

 

Though, I will say that there are some things on the Republic side that leave me scratching my head too--it feels a little silly for a Jedi so get all holier than thou about killing prisoners--directly after slaughtering dozens of his lackeys without batting an eyelash.

[Mandalore of Kotor2]

There is also an unused texture in the game of Mandalore with his helmet off and it is Canderous with a beard.

 

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mandalorenohelmet.jpg

 

Which I always thought was ridiculous. Who wants hair on your face when you wear a helmet all the time?

[Getting Started in RP?]

Thanks for the info, Venarive! I may just end up on Nar Shaddaa tomorrow night. The tip about not taking control is a good one--without a GM I could see where policing that sort of thing could turn into an issue. Again, thanks for the response, I appreciate all the good information!

[Kira, the Jedi Knight, and Padawans in TOR]

Well, at least it's not just me

 

And yeah, SW is much, much creepier. I'm playing both Jedi classes as female toons, so at least there's no hot-for-teacher thing happening there. Still feels weird to be someone's "Master" when they already have a Master and you very recently her peer rather than her superior.

[Getting Started in RP?]

I'm new to MMO's in general, so I've really just started to get the hang of things like general codes of conduct and how to actually be useful in a group. I have not, to this point, done any RPing, but I chose this server because I knew that it was something I wanted to try in the future. I'm not totally new to RP (just RP in an MMO setting). I played some D&D with friends in high school, which was a great time, and we still do every once in awhile when we have enough of the old crew together. By the end, we had a pretty established set of adventurers who had been together for a long time--we fell in love with dwarven lumberjacks in backwater towns, we fought with each other, we dealt with the deaths of beloved NPCs (as well as two long term partners in crime), we burned down no fewer than seven breweries, and, of course, we crawled through dungeons and slayed dragons. We only played a couple times a month, but I miss having that RP experience. I'd like to find a little bit of that somewhere again, and my hope is that I could find it here.

 

What I'm really asking, is how does RP work in the MMO world (or at least on this server in this MMO)? Do people tend to establish a regular group with characters that get to know each other? Is Cantina RP pretty much what's out there? If you approach a group of RPers you don't know, is that bad internet etiquette? Do people tend to RP a new character every night, or are these fairly established back stories? To get involved in a long term RP do I have to join a guild? Is that a big time commitment? Is there opportunity out there to RP through some Heroics and Flashpoints? (because nothing brings people together like killing something really, really big.) From players who have done both, how different is the RP experience online from RP in a D&D setting? Are there any specific tips for making the transition?

 

Sorry about all the questions, but I am way outside my RP comfort zone--which pretty much involves a group of dudes I've known since middle school, a table, some Mountain Dew (and/or beer), some Doritos, and a whole bunch of dice. I'm trying to figure out how all this works, so any tips/info I can get would be much appreciated!

[Kira, the Jedi Knight, and Padawans in TOR]

I apologize if this has been explained before, but I'm a little confused by the way Padawans work in SWTOR lore.

 

Kira is Master Kiwiiks' Padawan, and has been since she joined the Order. This makes sense to me from the standpoint of my general knowledge of how the Master/Padawan relationship works. She then goes on a mission without Master Kiwiiks (on Coruscant with Jedi Knight). This also makes sense to me. But then Master Kiwiiks just kind of leaves to do some different stuff without so much as a "hey, look after Kira for awhile, will ya?", and all of the sudden the game is seems to think that the Jedi Knight is Kira's Master. Or is Master Kiwiiks still Kira's Master, and the JK is just borrowing her? Has the JK just kind of hijacked her by suddenly referring to her as "my Padawan"? Did I accidentally space bar through some important dialogue? I am confused.

 

This passing around of Padawans seems to be common in TOR. Both the JK and JC are just kind of sent to Tython for the end of their training, never to be contacted by their former Masters again, presumably because the PCs were poor company and/or their old Masters were amnesiacs and forgot all about them.

 

I haven't finished either story, so maybe this odd aspect of old republic era Jedi culture is explained in some way, but it seems to me that the bond between Master and Padawan is still supposed to be there--we see it in the way Kira interacts with Master Kiwiiks, in the way the game seems to *want* you to interact with Orgus/Yuon.

 

I'm just really confused by this strange dynamic. Am I the only one? Do you imagine that these situations are exceptions rather than the rule, or are all Padawans supposed to be passed around like frisbees, without so much as a periodic holocall of "hey, I hear you're risking your neck every day for the Republic. How's that going for you?"