Excerpts from private datalog
35:2:23 22:27
How? How do we make sense of tonight?! Betrayed by a friend, nearly all lost now, covers blown… seems all we have is sheltered here in this van. Can hardly think straight, but I must try and make some order of it.
Fox… no right words. Traitor? Friend? Martyr? Helpless thrall? My heart screams the first, but the look in his eyes and way I saw him treated through my drug-addled fog… I don’t know. Frak him! I want to both put a bolt through his head and mourn with him over what I’m sure he’s lost. I know which choice the others would call out for, so perhaps just as well we likely won’t meet again. I can’t even talk about his party of betrayal, it hurts too much… it happened, it can’t be changed.
And Larness! Or Agent 63… take your pick. I wish I’d “tripped” and broken a few of his appendages on the dance floor… maybe that would have slowed his plans down. His, and that Inquisitor (what else could he be?) friend of his… frelling mind-fracker.
It seemed so real! How much of it was? I think the drugs must have knocked out my subconscious control over my powers, I couldn’t help but catch pieces of what seemed to be Swift’s own dreams as I lingered in my own stupor. A cliff’s edge, a stage… and… did he MEAN that? Was it the drugs speaking?!
(I’m glancing over at him as he’s hunched over Larness, bracing himself against the van’s walls, but… now’s not the time. We need to focus on the immediate if there’s to be any chance of a future. But I think I have to know…)
Then a kaleidoscope swirl, Athion kneeling in front of me, a (deadly-feeling) lightsaber in my hands, Madar (unrest his soul) holding a gun to her head and spouting off about my lack of courage meaning all the Firebirds would die, and that the dark side was calling me… then his fingers flexed, my arms swung, Madar’s head rolled, and suddenly I was looking in to my father’s deeply saddened eyes.
Jolted awake, dark figure with a double saber looming over Swift’s battered body, a command to me to talk joined with the obvious threat. I tried rank & serial number, but gods help me! In the end I was weak and gave Athion’s name – not like she hadn’t already betrayed me already.
Mayhem – Dash, Merlyn, Sprend, Tor, and Xenrad were in the room, Xenrad and the Inquistor were fighting, and all I could think was to grab Swift and run (retreat is a tactic!). My thoughts were swirling, and it was so easy to just reach into my friends’ minds and order them to “run!” Almost… intoxicating?
Panic – scrambling through the compound, firefights at the entrance, more pain and death, and now we have Larness bound up in the van with us as a result. I wonder if he knows how close he came to death, if Swift hadn’t gotten between him & Sprend? I’m glad he did though, Larness may have valuable information – and I WILL get it out of him.
How could I have ever wanted to be an Imperial commander? Would I have done these things if I’d stayed? How much of the dark is in me? I’ve seen it glimmer at times in Swift’s eyes, and I fear it’s been echoed in my own… I will NOT let us fall down the dark path. How we will be any different than the bastards who did this then?
Right, deep breath. Hard enough to type this up in the back of a van careening through the city with a large Madar-shaped dent in the front…
And what now? Swift says Compatriot has some kind of plan, but if she doesn’t come through quickly I’ll be grabbing his comm and giving her an earful. We’ve got to get away for a while somehow… but I don’t want to just hide. I want to FIGHT. I’ve seen the Empire’s full true colors now, and feel ill about my past with it… I’ve seen what they’ll do to those I… well… love, in various ways… to get what they want… it won’t stand. It CAN’T. I WILL give my all to protect those huddled with me in this van, we WILL get to a future scrubbed free of the Empire’s bloodstains, and somehow, somewhere, somewhen, we WILL manage happiness.
Frak. Worked up again. Time to turn this off anyhow, Dash is slowing the van down, time to unload, heal… and begin striking back.
