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Casual Erl’ose (One Shot)

Erl’ose (Redeem)

Closed: One Shot
(Not Kaggath related)

(This story was inspired by the song “Spring” by Rammstein.)


Location: Taris, Lower and Upper City

Cygnus had grown weary of the gutters of Taris. Weary of trying to at least see a glimmer of starlight while laying on his back in the streets. Weary even of spice and glitterstim failing to dull the pain of his recent wounds. He didn’t exactly know how to correct his current predicament…but for the first time in months it dawned on him he could pull himself from the dregs of society if he truly wanted to. This miserable night without so much as a blanket to clutch as his wounds throbbed finally urged his resolve.

Thus he decided to spend the arduous process of healing in minor luxury. Not much, just a bed, doors, and running water. Naturally, he couldn’t afford such a place with his limited income and drug cravings, but he did have many rich contacts that owed him a favor for smuggling their art assets.

A human scoundrel that called himself simply Wraith answered his hologram and offered Cygnus the door code that would allow him two days in an apartment suite in the Upper City. Pain, exhaustion, and a rising din of voices plagued his every weary movement to the Upper City.


The suite was intended for guests, its design was minimalist, yet functional, modern, and immaculately clean. Cygnus certainly approved of the stark black walls contrasting with hints of white trim and flooring. While only a single bedroom, bathroom, and living area, it was certainly spacious and boasted two floors divided by a gleaming spiral staircase. The living area was wide enough to double as an art studio, and the bedroom on the top floor held a strange coziness despite its stark black walls and mahogany floor. Sky windows allowed for natural lighting, with only a few minimal lights to stave off the shadows. The apartment was located at the top of one of Taris’ gleaming spires, it’s possible he’d even climbed this same tower.

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However the details of this haven he wouldn't know for some time. His failed vision quest to Hapes wounded more than just his body. He’d been thrust into a maniacal misandrist society, tormented by Force-induced hallucinations that left Nagaian phrases carved into the flesh of his left arm. Then came an assassin wearing the illusion of his sister, who’d assaulted him with borderline sexual advances, and drained him of the Force, at least for a time.

He was so weary he didn’t even bother to frantically search the room for hidden cameras and microphones, to seek the number 7 to confirm his reality, and even to light up a cigarette. Rather he stood stock still, as immobile as the pale statues of Hapes, frozen mid-stride, the ball of one bare foot locked in place, with his rucksack slowly slipping off one shoulder. The door didn’t even properly close.

Shipsbane had to close the door, and cooed in distress. The gizka gnawed at the edge of Cygnus’ cloak and squealed, panicked to find his Master in such a strange state until the raven chased him away, croaking insults at the reptile. “Stupid frog. Boy is sick. Leave boy alone.”

He didn’t move an inch from that position for 8 hours. When the raven cawed in an attempt to rouse his catatonia he’d blink and might flex his fingers, but showed no true consciousness. This extreme cataplexy was well documented in some forms of schizophrenia, yet it only rarely manifested in Cygnus.

It had taken every reserve of his strength to survive and return to Taris these past few days, to crawl out of that cavern where he learned the lessons of loss, uniquely delirious with blood loss and drained of the Force. But he’d managed to find a small band of Hapan males willing to render basic aid, but there didn’t have the luxury of bacta.

He passed himself off as a wounded civilian. The puncture to his abdomen was inflicted by a hostile blade, as for the gouges in his arm, he needed to fake sanity enough to weave a story that a female had tormented him and carved his flesh. If the medics suspected his madness they must have racked it up to being shell-shocked. He needed to fake sanity long enough to find a way back to the only planet he considered home in this galaxy.

Now that he’d returned and found shelter, he was free to suffer. At least catatonia wasn’t as painful as psychosis, he had minimal awareness of what was happening, and no perception of time or discomfort. There wasn’t anything to do but let the episode run its course. When his mobility at last returned, he stumbled onto the floor, his every muscle shrieking in protest from being held in such unnatural stillness for so long.

“What happened?” He questioned his service animal, astonished it was now midday and the gorgeous cityscape of Taris was shimmering in the sunlight. The view in this suite was certainly beautiful.

“Went still, boy!'' The raven grumbled and began to pick through the contents of his rucksack, riffling through sketchbooks, paint, and brushes, ration packs, illicit drugs smuggled in deceptive containers before finally picking out a blister packet of tablets, which the bird tugged into his hand.

They weren’t antipsychotics, but rather barbiturates which also served to cease seizures and cataplexy attacks. Knowing their value in his plight he choked down a single dose and struggled with his shrieking muscles to stand. He headed for the washroom and wondered if the reflection lathered in sweat, dirt, and rust-colored bloodstains, sleepless hallows for eyes that long-neglected eyeliner and lank black hair were truly his own. At least it was not bloated and squirming with maggots.

He contemplated the spacious bath, and couldn’t recall the last time he’d had the luxury of a shower much less a bath, like most of the homeless he resorted to trying to keep clean in public restrooms. He ran pleasantly warm and fragrant water to half full, disrobed, and slipped inside, hissing at the sting of water on his still healing wounds. He rushed to scrub the dirt, grime, and blood from his flesh and hair. Within 15 minutes the barbiturates took effect, and he fell asleep with his head cradled against the edge of the bath, and rail-thin form curled into a fetal position. The actual rest finally began to restore him. Upon waking, he sensed something had shifted within him. He could feel the stirring of the Force again, yet after the test and mania he’d endured….it had changed. Still a subtle, quiet thing. It wasn’t forged of sparks of lightning, or dramatic Sith magic…but something new had unfurled within him.

He found his clothing had been carried off by a housekeeping droid, and it had left a pair of simple black trousers, and a matching shirt instead. Not his preferred choice of clothing but he didn’t possess any other clothing. In the bathroom pantries, he found first aid that the field medics were lacking, including several bacta patches. He placed two on the wound through his back and abdomen. He settled for merely placing a fresh bandage on his left arm. He wanted the string and the scars of those wounds, his foils. He paused just long enough to style his hair in his preferred fashion, find a black trench coat in one of the closets and slip his daggers under the sleeves. He didn’t feel like his usual self in this guise, yet he did appear a bit more humanoid, and for his purposes that was preferable.

He had no destination as he began to wander the pristine streets of Upper Taris. In his clean, plain clothing he didn’t exactly blend in with the elaborate fashion, but he also didn’t draw undo attention to himself or the raven at his shoulder. The voices were faint for the
moment, so he didn’t have any guidance safe for his desire. The aching in his muscles was fading, the agony of his abdominal wound ebbing away with the blessing of bacta.

Desire led him to seek out the familiar ledges and crevices that were ordinarily used for maintenance and often utilized by artists and vandals like himself. Within minutes he was scaling higher and higher among the maze of spires until finally reaching what he perceived to be a dead end. He knew a prime spot for a new piece wasn’t much further, but a portion of the ledge he needed had crumbled, and the cracks looked quite fresh as well. This whole wall might be structurally compromised. Leaping from this
distance was too risky. He inched over an arched window frame, before spying another possible way forward. The opposite building contained a narrow fire escape, with three heavy chains dangling several feet below it. The chains could be used have been by painters or window cleaners, he wasn’t sure but they existed, their gleaming surface practically begging for his hands.

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have attempted this jump, even with augmentation from the Force. Yet that new untested power was burning to be unleashed, and while he didn’t fully understand what the power was, the chance to test it was far too appealing. He leaped horizontally toward the chains, and with his typically predominant right hand, he projected the Force to manifest. And it did so by swinging the chain forward a few inches, a minor manifestation of telekinesis. Minor but that movement was all he needed to grasp the chain and use it to pull himself on the perch of the fire escape.

Using pipes he reached the roof of his intended destination. The particular area was over a hundred feet from ground level, and the rush of Tarisian life still flowed around him. Speeders still shot around in semi-orderly veins, and gilded bridges provided passages for swoops and foot traffic.

A nondescript building with a blank stretch of whitewashed wall was directly before him, and also within plain view of the passing citizens. He was confident in his abilities to hide, yet he could not hide the art he planned to free from the empty white wall. He would have to rely on the populus not caring to look at another nondescript building, and painting in measured increments, enough so that any curious passerby might not take notice of a patch of graffiti so long as they didn’t see it being painted with a phantom hand.

He’d seen a vision in his vain grasps of sleep between this moment and his disastrous vision quest.He kept dreaming of a jagged coastline, littered with massive, alien-shaped, and salt-smoothed masses of driftwood. Beside him a turbulent ocean churned, and seafoam glided effortlessly over the ever-shifting sands of this wild shore. He didn’t possess any clear memory of visiting such a shore, but that was the beauty of his condition, mere belief was reality. He believed it was a real place, a place where he could feel the wind tearing around his hair and cloak, the rasping of sand across his skin, smell the brine of the sea, and hear the howling song of the wind.

He donned his gas mask, opened his bag of spray paint, and began to trace the jagged shore in steely grey. For the next few hours, he worked in intervals, thus far none had noticed him nor paid any mind to the art shaping on the facade. He’d have to renew his Force-assisted cloaking, as it was still quite a taxing ability to keep, but he was growing stronger. He’d removed his gas mask for a clove cigarette when a sudden commotion roused his interest.

To the north, on one of the pristine gilded bridges, a human man stood in plain sight, outside the railing and onto the exterior structure where only vandals willing ventured. Perhaps 50 feet below him Cyngus heard dozens of shouting voices…some pleading with the human to turn away…and others pleading for him to jump.

“Bird, Is this real?” he asked of his raven.

The raven cawed seven times, the number of reality.

Intrigued Cygnus perched at the edge of the roof and watched the masses begin to gather, and the distressed man vacillated between creeping closer to the edge and drawing back in fear. Wrestling with his mortality. Without conscious thought, Cygnus felt a hatred smoldering like an ember in his chest.

What did that human know of mortality? Did he wake each day on alley streets? Did he wake not knowing if he could trust his reality? What suffering lead the human to the bridge? Had he lost a wager, a job, a romance? Could it possibly compare to the suffering Cygnus endured?

Sp’ri, du naar! Erl’ose di!” he hissed in his native language. “Jump you fool, redeem yourself!”

But the human did not, he just kept weeping, edging forward and cowing away. But the crowd was swelling, and while there certainly cries for the man to step away…a growing number of voices were screaming. “Jump!”

Sp’ri! Sp’ri!!” Cygnus' high and lilting voice cried yet it merely mingled with the din of others.

Cygnus’ thoughts raced again. That man had never even seen his own flesh rotting in the mirror. Never tasted maggots writhing in his throat. How dare this man treat life so carelessly, to beg for death only the shy back from the brink. Terrified of the void that consumed Cygnus for an eternity. Not many knew that if you were to witness someone fall into a black hole…due to the extreme gravitational distortions you would never see them fall. They would merely hang, suspended and spaghettified, haloed blinding light forever. That was how Cygnus saw the tormented stranger; a soul perched on a precipice of oblivion, wondering if the event horizon would destroy him.

And Cygnus desired nothing more than to be the force that pushed the man into oblivion.

He pulled the Force around him again, silencing his footsteps, blurring from sight, and now he could feel his own Force signature fade slightly. That…that was new. The lessons of loss must have embrewed him with new powers. Fragile still, untested….but present were once only voices existed.

He crawled across the edge of the roof, made a careful leap across another, then another, and used a gutter to slowly pull himself closer to the bridge. He swung his legs forward to give himself the most momentum as he leaped and landed on the guilded bridge with only a faint vibration of sound.

The cacophony of the crowd roiling below drowned out the vibrations and jabbed Cygnus’ senses like thorns, yet his intention remained unbroken. He felt curious pricking sensations across his back and arms. Like something was trying to jut through his skin.

He knew without examination what they were…pin feathers! The start of glorious wings! Of course, there were not, merely curious tactile delusions that his raven wasn’t near enough to dissuade.

His skin ached with phantom feathers, and his heart pounded with an emotion he believed was unique to the Nagai race. He didn’t possess a Basic word for it. It was best described as a sudden, all-consuming rage of pure murderous intent. It was well known that the Nagai would kill upon a mere whim if it pleased or amused them, and that whim consumed Cygnus.

Moh’dwiss was the Nagaian translation.

And the crowd was screaming…”Jump! Jump! We want to see your guts! Jump!”

He wondered deliriously if his presence was influencing the shift in the crowd if they were feeding off the darkness of his presence, their minds melding to his desire.

There weren’t, they merely gave into the crowd mentality, but he wouldn’t understand that.

Cygnus waved his hand, manifesting another newly felt power. One that he believed would manifest as an incompacating dizziness within the human man. And a moment later, the man that now shied away from the edge began to stumble drunkenly, yet it wasn’t enough. He merely leaned against a beam and shook his head. Tears rained from his cheeks, and he sobbed to himself.

“I….just wanted to leave the office! I wanted to appreciate the view…” he mewled as the crowd swelled with fervor.

"Entt’as mi nicht!” Uttered a disembodied voice behind the man, Nagaian for “don’t disappoint me.” but the man wouldn’t have known that. He startled, his equilibrium again wavered. He had no defense against the assassin's barefoot lashing out to strike him in the back. The man didn’t even utter a cry of surprise as he plummeted to the unyielding duracrete 50 feet below, his arms briefly pinwheeling in a desperate attempt at flight, but succeeding only in making certain his head struck the ground first. In just a matter of seconds once human flesh lay burst across the pavement, an overripe fruit that erupted flesh, organs, and bone fragments.

Cygnus only regretted that he was far too high to feel the spatter of blood.

“You will witness true horror.” he mocked the body, which now the crowd was shrieking and writhing away from. Given the man’s condition, one could assume Cygnus believed in some sort of afterlife, one where the fools that wasted life would be tormented by its loss.

The crowd dropped their facade of bloodshed, and then their interest when peace officers came to clear the scene. By then, Cygnus returned to his mural, and then the Tarisians were so consumed by the spectacle they didn’t bother glancing at buildings.

Brief thoughts of the human had slain occupied Cygnus’ mind. Did the victim want to just see the view? Too bad, he was peering into a black hole and Cygnus just gave him a nudge. Perhaps the human's consciousness existed in the depths of the black hole but from a spectators point of view…his body would linger forever on the event horizon, mangled and distorted…but never fading.

With impassioned hands, his newest addition to the Taris’ cityscape took form, hue, shade, dimension, and shadow. With as much realism as he could manage in his chosen medium, he’d painted a storm-battered coastline. Waves swelling and churning across wailing rocks, trees bowing to the howl of the wind, but not breaking. This coast had weathered thousands of storms, and what could not survive the wrath was polished by the hands of the sea and cast back onto the sand. Given a new purpose. The scene was rendered in Cygnus' chosen color scheme of white, grey, and blue, and with hints of green and brown. What the piece did not explicitly state was that in this vision, the storm was abating. And any that dared to walk this unpredictable precipice of land and sea would surely find rare treasures lurking along the shore. The tempest brought forth bounty.
Perhaps they would find the enlightened soul of the man he’d kicked into the void. If he’d truly walked this shore in life, he knew the sand, the driftwood, the trees, and the waves would all be singing.

He scrawled his intitals on the bottom, as well as the title of the piece.

Erl’ose (Redeem)


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Morning broke by the time he returned to the apartment. His clothing was laundered and his datapad was flashing. Deneb had called him seven times. He couldn’t help but feel a wave of disgust surging through his flesh at the memory of the disgraceful illusion the assassin wore. He couldn’t face his sister at the moment. He merely sent a text-based message, saying he was safe seven times, then finally allowed himself to contemplate sleep.

Months had passed since he’d felt the simple luxury of a bed. He could scarcely believe its presence. He savored the luxury of a mattress, pillow, and clean sheets briefly with the company of his sketchbook to record a few frantic distorted hallucinations before falling into slumber with pencils and erasers scattered across the ebony sheet.

Once his two-day stay was over, Cygnus found he didn’t want to pack his paintbrushes and books. He’d gotten quite accustomed to spending the nights smoking spice with the window open, the stars dazzling overhead. Stars that remained no matter if the galaxy was stagnating or throbbing with the wounds of war. He’d traced their patterns in his sketches, and formed constellations of his own. He liked having his makeup on the counter, liked the running water and plumbing. He even liked purchasing food and making it himself to ensure it wasn’t poisoned. Small things he couldn’t easily have while homeless.

Thus he devised a plan. Wraith was going to return, and ask him to aid him in another job with minimal pay but plenty of glitterstim. He could resell the glitterstim, but he was not a drug lord that could triple that money and he possessed no desire to be. But he might be able to deceive the human into believing he’d been turning a profit. The human scoundrel greeted him with a false smile. “Ah, Dreamer, my old friend. Did you find the lodgings to your taste?”

“Indeed, Wraith. In fact, I wish to purchase it. I searched the market value on the apartment, and I believe you’ll find the estimated value plus 7% interest here.” Cygnus’ silver eyes burned as he spoke and handed over a stack of credits. In truth, it was only 300 credits, all he possessed, but he’d invoked mind tricks upon the scoundrel who counted the credits in the amount Cygnus quoted.

“Been selling some of those stims, eh Dreamer? Smart lad, keep a little
for yourself and sell the rest at triple the price! Yes, this is quite sufficient for the property. I’ll have a deed drafted within 48 hours.”

The art smuggling job was simple enough, and Wraith didn’t notice the vast discrepancy in the money Cygnus gave him. Wraith was a bloated parasitic human that existed only to pull more wealth and valuables to him. A bit of shortchanging he was unlikely to notice. The deed was signed, and for every night he had the luxury of resting in his bed, he planned to look up through the skylights and lay transfixed under the stars.
 

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