It was raining when Brant set down just outside of Dewlight. It was always raining on Auratera now, the clouds thick and black as if they were made up of something other than water vapor. Brant turned up his collar, wishing he had thought to bring a hat. His presence in Dewlight was supposed to be a secret, so he didn’t dare wear a Sith’s robe and hood, though he gloomily reflected that, too, would have been suitable for the constant downpour.
Gamely pushing past his distaste for the wet, Brant spent most of the first day scoping out the small city. He visited the governmental buildings, asked to see a record or two under the plea of historical interest, even signed on for a tour of the President’s Palace — anything, in reality, to get closer to his mark, though the actual assassination would have to come later.
He noticed plenty of dissidents as he visited with the locals, and he came to better understand why his master would want this district cowed. Too many muttered of the Sith and the Empire in rebellious tones, and, as Brant was learning the hard way, rebellion was best quashed with a hard blow with a heavy hand.
Still, the locals weren’t Brant’s concern. His master had given him one mark only and had warned him of not being seen and not leaving anything that would trace his planned crime back to the Dark Councilor. So Brant kept his vibroblades in their sheathes instead of putting them into the worst of the gossipers. Or for now.
He checked into a hotel as the color of the sky deepened, but he did not stay in his room that night. An assassination took proper reconnaissance, and Brant was soon back on the Presidential Palace’s grounds, this time in a non-descript cowl that covered his features. He tailed security details, sat on the roof of the servant’s detached home and listened to their gossip, scaled a tree nearby the walls and watched with Force-enhanced sight the family’s bedtime routine.
Still it was not the right time to strike, he sensed, and Brant returned to the hotel to sleep in past morning. Afternoon found him still in his room, occasionally sending for food as he formed a plan, sketching unlabeled maps on the back of the newspapers he only pretended to read.
Then, dusk fell, and again, Brant did not stay in his room over the night.
It was a small matter of enhancing his strength to leap onto the roof of the Presidential Palace from the tree he had staked out the night before. He took his time moving across the roof tiles then, dodging a maintenance droid and once hiding, cramped, behind a heater unit as a cadre of guards passed on the walkway below. He finally came to the window of his choice and carefully hooked his feet in the rain gutter above, dangling himself upside down before it. This window was only a small one, just barely wide enough for his shoulders, and nowhere near the President’s bedroom, but his recon had marked all the others as riddled with sensors that Brant had neither the skills nor time to slice into. Brant sliced into this window though, by literally taking out his smallest vibroblade and cutting a hole in the glass, pushing it through to land with a soft thump on the carpet beyond.
The window opened into an office — likely some foreman’s, for the walls were absent of art and the furniture was practical instead of ornate. Brant slowly pulled himself through the window, using levitation at the trickiest part, and then hung on the windowsill, his feet raised up off the floor, as he got his bearings.
A desk was a few feet away, and with another burst of Force-enhanced strength, Brant swung his legs in its direction, straining his core to pull himself upright once he found purchase on the smooth wood. It was something he had noticed while taking the Palace tour. The security guards clearly expected intruders to move about in a normal human way — that is, with their feet on the ground and walking upright along main thoroughfares. The Palace did not have nearly as many security sensors for the edges of the rooms, and practically none for the tops of tables, shelves, chairs, or desks. So Brant stepped and hopped between these, levitating with great effort when there was no furniture in his desired path, passing through the very tops of the doors like a spider, with his hands on either side of the frame.
It was tedious and tiring work, even with the Force to aid him. Still, the timing would play to his advantage, as the later in the night he stayed, the more of the mark’s family was likely to be asleep. In this way, he finally slipped into the President’s bedroom undetected.
Though the bedside lamp was turned low, Brant tugged a cover of sound and light over himself. The President, sitting in an armchair by the window, did not look up, and it was almost child’s play for Brant to pad the rest of the way to its back, slipping his vibroblade from its sheath with no more than a slight grinding sound. The Ithorian, who had been dozing or meditating — Brant couldn’t tell nor did he care — abruptly sat up at the sound, its left-side mouth opening to vocalize a query.
Brant took of advantage of that, stabbing his blade through the mouth and up into the creature’s brain. The former President jerked, raising one bulbous-fingered hand up before dropping it back again limply. Brant guided it to rest back in the chair with a hand on its chest, arranging it so it looked like it might have only fallen asleep. It wouldn’t be found until sometime after sunrise.
Or so was the intention. Brant was just arranging a throw blanket to cover the blood, when he turned and met the eyes of another Ithorian standing in the doorway.
They stared at each other for a long moment. This one was smaller, the eyes on their stalks level with Brant’s nose instead of towering over his head. The two eyes blinked, then it leaned to get a better look at the Ithorian behind him, querying, “Ayo?”
It was clearly a child, perhaps one of the President’s. Brant’s knuckles tightened on the hilt of his vibroblade. His master had said no witnesses, and there was only one way to be sure.
He felt oddly detached as he quickly slid out his second vibroblade, yet, as swiftly as he did so, he wasn’t ready for the sudden bellow of fright from the little Ithorian’s twin mouths. The sound crashed into him almost with the strength of a Force Push, rupturing his eardrums, or surely feeling like it could have. Brant forgot all sense of subtlety then, slamming both blades into the little Ithorian’s chest and twisting. The creature flailed as it went down, and he stomped on its head, pushing his boot through its mouths to choke it — or close enough, as the screeching soon stopped under the pressure.
It didn’t matter, though. Other voices, curiously soft-pitched as Brant’s ears continued to ring, were coming down the hallway, and his time was up. He jumped to the top of the armchair and balanced there, ungainly, again bringing a cloak of invisibility down around himself. Several guards poured into the room, but they looked confused as they saw the two corpses yet no signs of an intruder. One even walked to the window, disabling the security lock and looking out.
Brant smirked. It would be the alien’s last mistake.
He stood up, balancing on one foot as he spun himself around to start gaining momentum. Then he fell on the guards, using Force-enhanced speed to slit their throats before any more could cry out. The one at the window turned and fired a blaster his way, its eyes going wide as it shortly thereafter found itself speared on the end of his vibroblade. Brant vaulted off the falling creature’s shoulders, plunging himself through the disarmed and unlocked window. He hit the ground a little hard, but he ignored the pain in his ankles, sprinting across the grounds, leaping over the wall, and then disappearing into the night.
As planned, it was sometime in the morning before the bodies were discovered and the official alarms went out. By then, the Sith assassin was long gone.
A couple days later, a newcomer rocked up in the town of Fireseye, an hour’s travel (by speeder) east of Dewlight. They appeared to be some sort of hitchhiker, for they were more than a little scruffy, walking with a limp as they proceeded on to the spaceport.
“HEY!” they called to the woman managing the ticket line, pulling down a hood to reveal themselves as a yellow-eyed, dark-skinned male human. “I NEED A TICKET OFF-PLANET PLEASE,” he said, or rather yelled, near the top of his lungs.
The ticketmaster gave him an odd look, but she nodded amiably enough to his request. “That’ll be a hundred credits, sir, and please, there is no need to yell. Would you like a ticket for the morning shuttle or the evening shuttle?”
“WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU! SPEAK UP.”
“I said, do you want a ticket for the morning shuttle or the evening shuttle?”
“WHAT?? JUST GIVE ME A TICKET, ALREADY!”
The ticketmaster blinked a couple times. He must be hard of hearing. She pulled over a spare datapad, typing out her question and handing it to him, hoping he could at least read. This did seem to calm him, for he pointed at one of the words on the datapad and went on to yell, “YES, I WOULD LIKE THE MORNING SHUTTLE.”
But because he still held onto the datapad, the woman couldn’t exactly ask him the follow-up question. Leaning forward, she bellowed, “DO YOU WANT A WINDOW OR AISLE SEAT?”
“WHAT???”
“WHAT SEAT DO YOU WANT?”
“I CAN SEE THE DATAPAD FONT JUST FINE, YES. WHY DO YOU ASK?”
The woman sighed. Likely it wouldn’t matter which seat he got, and the other travelers in line were starting to get antsy. She quickly stamped a datakey with the code for an aisle seat and passed it to him, pointing out the correct terminal.
Brant gave back the datapad and passed through the gate, shaking his head at the odd manners of the ticketmaster. He was in a relatively good mood however: his mission accomplished, and by the newsholo he had watched earlier that morning (something had been wrong with its audio), the Ithorians were no clearer on who had murdered their President than they had been the night he had fled. Even the ringing in his ears from the little one’s bellow was starting to clear up.
Once the shuttle was in the air, Brant typed out a message to his master, before settling in to take a nap. The message was brief, only reading, “I finished the job. News was boring today. Going off planet for a while until the rain is sure to clear up.” He only hoped Hu’izei would understand what he meant by the last sentence, for the actual planet’s change in climate was not likely to remedy itself anytime soon…