Chapter 6.

D’RYN KEPNEG

Dee-Rhine Kep-Neg

deep below the more respectable levels of Coruscant, Jedi apprentice D’Ryn Kepneg crept through the bowels of the plant-wide city. he was on a mission, find the slavers and eradicate their filthy trade on the planet. it had been his master’s task but his master had been betrayed and died in a trap. Now it was only him, he had stopped checking in with the council after they had stopped looking for the murderers.

D’Ryn stalked unseen through the smog-choked corridors of yet another deserted auction house. Misery and death coated the place like slime. some kind of infection had sprung up among the recent shipment of slaves from off world. Bodies were stacked like packing boxes along the wall, their rotting faces beseeching him for help. Anger swamped his vision, he fought it down.

“Don’t feel shame at your feelings, accept them, don’t let them dictate your actions.” Master Watanade had said. D’Ryn stopped and took a holo-recording of the death and misery that had been left behind. once his stomach had settled he pressed on searching for clues.

nothing. how can this many beings be sold as produce and leave NOTHING behind. no traces of DNA not a single track, no litter, just bodies. this was the work of a very large and well-organized group. D’Ryn suspected Hutt involvement of some sort, no one else could have such a profound reach among the scum that traded in lives. He finished his scans and swept out of the three-story chamber. His black robes billowed behind him, they had once been white but the smog had long ago stained them black. He didn’t mind, black allowed him to hide with ease this far from the sun. the robes did little to hide his skin, the mostly oxygen air tinted it gold. all of his people had such an allergy, just as the Chiss did. that was about the only thing they had in common with the distant relatives.

Long ago his ancestors had left their homeworld of Csilla. They had been the First Chiss colony, The Lost Colony, that’s what the Chiss called them, simply a footnote in their early history. Their ship had been built for deep space exploration and colonization, in the very first days of the Chiss’s race for the stars. the ship had a catastrophic navigation failure in Hyperspace. It had overshot their planned coordinates by over 500 parsecs. The system they emerged in was dying, the sun had degraded to a white dwarf, barely capable of keeping them alive. They had settled on a moon in a stable orbit around the fifth planet, Csilla Minor they named it. The planet was a gas giant but it emitted more heat than the sun, enough for their small moon to have a breathable atmosphere, extremely heavy in trace gasses and methane. The air would have been toxic to any other species. Even they had needed to alter their own DNA slightly to adapt until they were found by their people again.

For a thousand years they lived, all technology slowly degraded. Only the barest essential equipment had survived, even that had eventually failed. The learning machines had been preserved the longest, but even they had stopped working when the power supplies had been exhausted. The colony had never been meant to go so long without some kind of resupply from the Homeworld. Finally, nearly 1,800 years after they had been lost, Humans had found them.

the shock had been enormous, aliens had found them before their own people. and to add to that their genetic modifications had unforeseen side effects. In oxygen-rich environments, their skin lightened towards the hue of burnished gold, their hair faded until it was white, and their eyes gleamed the color of freshly minted gold coins. Giving them a very striking appearance, but their own people rejected them Humans thought their coloring was beautiful and striking, but their own people deemed them so strange and twisted that they had more in common with the other aliens than their own people. In the end, they had not been welcomed back into the Chiss territories.

Turning to the alien species that had rescued them from living as stranded primitives, They re-named their species and Moon, Nurupla after the two main families of the colony. Resigned, they joined the rest of the galaxy to make their own way.

D’Ryn followed the only path left to him, he let his eyes drift out of focus and opened himself up to the force. Pain assaulted him, but he did not shrink away. Misery dragged at him, he did not let it slow him. Anger swamped him, and he did not allow it to drown him. Agony, hopelessness, vengeance, all these things clawed at him. He rode them like a boat in a storm, tossed and battered but surviving. Sheer will kept his mind his own until he excepted the emotions around him, they calmed enough for him to see clearly the energy flows. Through the negative energy pouring out of the caverns, he found them. A path, blacker than black it burned a path that the lesser miseries shied away from. Oily, it clung to anyone that passed through it, tar-like. D’Ryn shivered as he followed the path that everyone else avoided. anyone with even the faintest force sensitivity would subconsciously stay away from it. He had never sensed such evil, it had to be stopped. as quickly as he could D’Ryn ran along the path, the lightless trail seemed to reach out to grasp at him, it sucked at his feet and clung to his robes. mile after mile he wove through the bowels of Coruscant, the warrens that never end. fighting with each step he slid off the corruption that tugged at him as best he could.

after hours of moving through the shadows and filth, D’Ryn stood breathing easily on a ledge. below him just above the layer smog that ringed the planet’s surface, a pair of guards frisked everyone who passed through a pair of double doors. Pain and suffering practically seeped off the building before him. he opened his sense and studied the structure. two guards and another inside, people locked in rooms, higher the levels had less and less misery, at the top a black spot withered and snapped on the top floor.

Yup definitely the right place, D’Ryn force pushed off the ledge and sailed across the gap between him and the guards. time slowed as he fell into the flow of the force. he studied the guards with all of his attention focused on them. He recognized them, they had been there when his master and he had been ambushed! he landed in a crouch in front of them, his lightsaber crackled to life. It caste a harsh white glow around him.

“Guilty ” he whispered. the guards opened fire even as he rose from his crouch, he deflected one of the blaster bolts back at the guard as he surged forward it struck the Klatooninian in the shoulder causing it to spin and collapse to the ground. With a practiced twist, he pivoted under another bolt and decapitated the other guard. D’Ryn checked around him for any other threats but any spectators had the presence of mind to flee. the Klatooninian growled savagely as it tried to pull out a disruptor pistol with one hand. D’Ryn walked past its struggling form, without looking down he casually he cut off it still working arm and stabbed it in the chest. Lightsaber still lit he walked through the doors the other guard cowered behind her desk. he studied her, the Human was tainted by the darkness around her but not yet gone.

“GO.,” he said. She ran out the door without looking back. D’Ryn stepped into the lift, and it sped upwards. as he reached midway up the tower, the lift slowed and stopped. Alarms started to blare, gas pumped into the lift tube. D’Ryn sighed, some people never learned new tricks. He slipped on a breathing mask to filter out whatever the Hutt was trying to kill him with this time.