There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re sayin’.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I can’t explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.
*
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re sayin’.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I can’t explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.
*
A grudge is a powerful thing. Once a man is possessed by it, he will never be free of it. Though it may fade from his mind, it will never leave. I cannot, not until balance is achieved. He will not die peacefully until he has his revenge. To allow a scorned man to live is to invite death.
~ Tutor annals
***
To say it was through a series of unfortunate events that had brought the girl named Vega to Coruscant would be a gross understatement. Her whole life had been a series of unfortunate of events. However, looking at the last year, things had been decidedly more unfortunate than ever before. As she lay, feeling her consciousness slowly slipping away from her, she recalled the months gone by. Captured by Hutt drug lords, she had become a slave to their every whim, only to be cast out into some godless desert for her errant behaviour.
After stumbling through the wastelands and finally finding an inhabited town, she had been strung up, accused of murders she did not commit. It was with an acute awareness of the irony of her actions that she had laid waste to the town of Ben’ma, before returning to the desert from whence she had came, once more in search of civilization. Fortune shone brightly upon her, as she managed to stow away on board a ship, escaping the harsh wind and sand – only to find herself leaping right into the fire.
Collapsed from exhaustion, she awoke to find the ship in flames. The two man crew was now fifty percent smaller, and the entire vessel was filled with the intoxicating smoke of the drugs that it had been carrying. With the ships controls no longer functioning, the pair were plucked from their doom by the staff of the Astral Astoria. However, at first welcomed, the girl and her co-passenger, known only as Joe, were quickly marked as criminals, a logical assumption to make given their ships cargo.
In spite of her protests, the girl was deported from the ship to Coruscant, where she would be sentenced for her crimes – while Joe, on the other hand, managed to escape into the vast halls of the Astoria and remains there to this day. It was there, on Coruscant, that she found herself dredging through these memories.
At first she had been confused as to why the prison staff had drugged and bound her in her cell, but after pouring over her thoughts for almost a week she had come to realize the truth. Although she had arrived here only on charges of drug running, she would leave with many more convictions. Years ago, she had been associated with hit men and mercenaries. While she did not make herself a particularly well known name as an assassin, she had killed enough people to cause a blip on the radar of the local law enforcement. To say the least, her criminal record was substantial and warranted more than just a smack on the wrist.
And so she lay. Occasionally a guard would walk past her cell and peer through the small, barred window in the door, commenting on how they found it baffling to think that she was a mass-murdering, drug-dealing sociopath. One thing they didn’t even entertain a thought of, however, was that fact that this sociopath had, over her years as a mass-murdering drug-dealer, acquired a good many friends.
She was, as much them, entirely unaware of the events that would soon transpire. Events outside of all of their control. Events which, in actual fact, would only worsen the situation at hand, thus adding to the already monstrous list of exceedingly unfortunate events surrounding the life of the girl named Vega.