A Lesson in Agency

No matter how many people or regulations tried to convince him to call it Imperial Center, to Lúka Jibral it would always be Coruscant. It may not have been the planet of his birth, but it was hard to argue the case for anywhere else in the galaxy to be considered his homeworld. He had been raised here, awoken every morning of his childhood to the sight of the city's gleaming spires through the windows of the Jedi Temple. He had peered down into the depths of the shadowy canyons that lay between the towering buildings, hundreds of layers and levels of life and structure stacked on top of each other. His Master had described it as living archaeology: most civilizations would wait until a city was abandoned before they built upon the ruins, but no one on Coruscant had that kind of patience. If that were true, then descending down into the lower levels was like travelling back in time. The young Lúka had scoffed at the romanticised poetry of such a sentiment, but it had stuck, lodged in the back of his mind like a shard of shrapnel too thoroughly entrenched to be safely removed.

Despite being his de facto homeworld, Lúka had a hard time feeling as if he belonged here. In part, it was a symptom of his time away: a decade spent fleeing from the Jedi Purge, and two more secreted away as a covert operative for the Inquisitorious. In part, it was because of how much had changed: a temple ruined and then repurposed; a city that had once been a multicultural haven now cowering beneath the heel of the Empire's humanocentric regime. Perhaps the most significant part, however, was the fact that despite being raised here, Lúka had always been apart of it. The Jedi lived in isolation, venturing out of their golden towers only rarely to dispense justice to less enlightened beings. Much of Lúka's time as a padawan had been dedicated to the Clone Wars, travelling the galaxy to fight the very same battles that had flooded Coruscant's lower levels with refugees from a hundred different worlds. There was some solace, at least: trillions might live on Coruscant, but it was home to no one. Beings simply existed here, seeking a reprieve from whatever factors had driven them from their true homes, or waiting desperately for the first opportunity to scramble their way to freedom from it.

Lúka glanced upwards as the towering walls of the Alien Protection Zone rose up to surround them, watching as the thin ribbon of Coruscanti sky above faded into an imperceptible line. It was one of many regions of Coruscant that he had never glimpsed, let alone visited before. Apt, he supposed: most called it Invisec, the Invisible Sector, a walled enclosure created during the early days of the Empire as a refuge for non-humans fleeing danger and prejudice elsewhere in the Galactic City, and then promptly neglected by the authorities that had created it. There was no proof that the Protection Zone had been created to deliberately segregate aliens from humans, but it was an accepted truth. Everyone knew what the Empire was, and the differential value it placed on some species versus others; examples like Invisec were demonstrations of just how little the Imperial populace cared. The people here truly were invisible, deep enough in Coruscant's catacombs to be out of sight and out of mind.

Yet, the Alien Protection Zone was seen - or at least, it was watched. The Imperial Knights surveilled much of the Empire, for signs of dissent, disloyalty, and danger to the throne. A mixture of code, droids, and sentient scrutiny filtered through feeds and transmission streams from across the Imperial regime, registering certain keywords and scenarios, and flagging them for the attention of an Imperial Knight. For Lúka's collegues, their attention was required for insurgents, terrorists, and interstellar gangsters. For Lúka Jibral?

He let out a sigh as their speeder came to a stop against the duracrete landing platform, a respectful distance from the swarm of Imperial Center Security Forces agents bustling in and out of a seedy looking alien bodega. With a tired ache in the small of his back, he swung himself out of the driver's seat, and tugged the tinted pilot's lenses from his eyes, folding them closed and tucking them into a pocket. Whatever had transpired here, law enforcement had described it as the right kind of unusual to warrant Knight attention - and it fell to Lúka to provide that attention. Apparently, suspicions of a rogue Force User where his thing; this wasn't the first such incident that he had investigated, and he doubted it would be the last.

His vision strayed across to the passenger of his speeder, the halfbreed Cadet whose presence he had requested for an assortment of reasons. Company. Scrutiny. Familiarity. Lúka might never have visited the Alien Protection Zone specifically, but the beauty of the Empire is that they were wonderfully consistent in how their prejudice was applied. If you'd seen one Coruscant ghetto, you'd seen them all - and Onika Zepparah had the misfortune of growing up in one.

Lúka offered her a small nod, and a subtle, emotionless smile of reassurance.

"You ready for this, Cadet?"

Onika had spent most of the trip in guarded silence, watching out the window as the glittering stratoscrapers surrounding the Government Sector gave way to crowded middle-class residences, then huddled, sinking slums, and finally a vast industrial waste full of smoking factories and flaming flare stacks. It really didn't matter which direction you traveled from the Citadel, because eventually you'd see all the same things. Where other planets had landscapes dominated by mountains, rivers, and oceans, on Coruscant the city was the landscape, and the topography was more social than geographical.

Ever since the speeder had left the Citadel, it had been descending. Onika flinched as they passed through the massive-inward sloping walls that leaned over the outskirts of the Alien Protection Zone like the jaws of a trap, casting shadows that dwarfed all but the largest 'scrapers inside. Even the Chiba District didn't have walls around it - sure, the edge of the block was a breathless one-thousand foot pitfall into rivers of glowing waste haunted by junkworms and flesh-eating slimes, but that was anywhere. There were still trains that went through Chiba, even if only a tenth of them ever stopped there - there was actual traffic that connected it to other parts of the city, locals going to work in other districts, or outsiders coming for cheap Ryloth cuisine, or to satisfy more illicit appetites.

But this was different. The APZ was no more part of the city than a zoo or a prison. When Onika lay awake in her rack imagining where she might go if she could slip out of the Citadel, she'd sometimes considered coming here, disappearing among its millions of alien nobodies. Now she realized if she did come here, the Knights wouldn't need to bother chasing her. She'd already be caged.

She banished those thoughts when Lúka looked her way, afraid, and not without reason, that he might be able to read them. She thought of interrogation classes with Lady Vissica, both to strengthen her defenses and to mentally prepare for the investigation ahead.

"Ready as I'll ever be," she said, and then she grimaced and pulled her collar where it chafed against her throat. "Sir," she added as a guilty afterthought, because protocol still didn't come naturally.

She glanced out the window again to see a family of Gran stopping on the sidewalk, the adult holding back its children and watching the speeder with tri-stalk eyes as if encountering a prowling nexu. Her fingers tightened on the edges of her datapad in her lap. She knew that impulse all too well.

"People here don't trust uniforms," she said, and her own black jumpsuit burned over her skin.

"That's because uniforms are just clothes -" he countered quickly. It wasn't that he misunderstood the idiom, more that he simply rejected the premise. It was true that the Empire went to great lengths to hide individuality among the rank and file, even to the extent of having an upper and lower bound of acceptable height among the Stormtrooper Corps. Perhaps it was an effort towards continuity, trying to preserve an element of the familiar by echoing the identical nature of the Clone Troopers in what replaced them; a touchstone between the Galactic Empire and the Republic that preceded it. Perhaps Palpatine had simply wanted people to look at representatives of his Empire, and see only his Empire: an exercise in vanity, perhaps, making every generic faceplate a gentle reminder of the Emperor they all served.

Imperial conformity was a rule with exceptions, though. As soon as you ascended into the officer ranks, individually and recognition became important. Prestige became an essential tool for advancement, with progress through the ranks being achieved as much through politics as through service and duty. Everyone strove to one day forge a name for themselves that was as notorious and awe-inspiring as Thrawn, Tarkin, Tagge, or Tyree. People wanted to be feared, or respected, or both - and to achieve that, first you needed to be recognised. Even among the Inquisitors, the secretive and largely anonymous enforcers of Palpatine and Vader's rule, even among those first founding members who'd had their names stripped away to become a numbered Brother or Sister, there had been something undeniably individual, undeniably recognisable about each of them.

It was something Lúka envied, in some small way. No one who met Onika Zepparah would forget her: perhaps not for the reasons she might prefer, but none the less her species and circumstances made her somewhat unique. No one would forget an encounter with Alexia Sturkov, or Matatek Sel Vissica. But Lúka Jibral? Generically human, generically handsome, generically unremarkable Lúka Jibral? It was both a blessing and a curse, allowing him to go unnoticed both when he wanted to, and when he didn't.

"- and the person inside them is a stranger."

He took a moment to adjust the hang of his lightsaber and blasters, before turning back to Onika with what he hoped was a reassuring look.

"That's why you're here, Cadet. If we're going to make any headway here, we need them to look past the uniform, and at the person wearing it. Of all of us, you seem like the one they would find easiest to relate to, and who has the best chance of relating to them."

Onika's peach-pink lips pressed together into a line. Did he know how people felt about hybrids? Human hair, Twi'lek skin - her features told a story, one that everyone who met her thought they already knew. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful Twi'lek woman who was taken into the home of a wealthy Imperial, either willingly or unwillingly. If willingly, she was a collaborator. If unwillingly, she was just another victim in a long line of Imperial atrocities. Either way, Onika was a living reminder that there was nothing aliens had that the Empire could not take away. Even their children.

The Imperial uniform, in their eyes, simply meant that she had given up on them and chosen the other side.

"I'll do my best," was what she actually said. "But it won't be easy. Rule number one down here is, 'You protect your own.' If we're counting on them to break that rule, we might as well turn back now."

Even if it weren't readily visible from the subtle shifts in Onika's physicality, Lúka could feel the subtle reverberations of her discomfort through the Force. It was understandable, of course: the complexities of her biology versus the sociology of Coruscant aside, Onika was a Cadet, a rookie. She was an Imperial Knight in training, being brought to unfamiliar surroundings on the pretense that they should be somehow familiar to her, and being told that the success of this mission, this assignment, hinged on her ability to interface with strangers who would be at best suspicious and at worst hostile towards her simply because of who she were. It would be uncomfortable, Lúka had no doubts of that. But where would not be? Where in the Galactic Empire could a hybrid be sent where such factors would not be obstacles? Where in the Imperial military could she serve where she wouldn't incur such judgement from her peers, let alone from persons of interest to her duties? Lúka was not unsympathetic to the situation he forced her into, and yet her circumstances surrounded her on all sides with those obstacles, potentially for every facet of her career. In the grand scheme of things, it would be a disservice to her, and to the Empire, to waste time and delay her progress by taking things easy and dancing around those issues: she would have to learn to overcome those preconceptions and prejudices eventually, and now seemed a good time as any to start.

He considered her words as she spoke them; a valid point, to some extent.

"The Jedi used to tech the importance of perspective," Lúka countered, leaning slightly against the frame of the speeder as he conversed with his Cadet through the open hatch. "Everyone sees things a certain way: the galaxy, reality, truth, all of it. To them, it is a fundemental, unassailable, unshakeable fact. But, from a different point of view, everything transforms and changes into something entirely different. Our understanding and our interpretation is coloured and influenced by our experiences, our beliefs, and our perspective. Your truth, and my truth, and the truths of the people in this district, are bound to be wildly different, because our lives has been wildly different. Unity, and community, and agreement arise not because one of those truths is proven to be false, but by two people or two thoughts finding that common perspective that allows them to align."

His brow furrowed slightly, a glance thrown in the direction of the bodega as if he could somehow peer through it and regard every citizen of Invisec at once.

"These people may look at you, and see only another reminder of the invasions and violations that the Empire is responsible for. I know better than that. You know better. Our job, your job, is to help guide them to that certain point of view where they are able to see you differently. You say that their primary objective is to protect their own: protection is our mandate as well, but only once we understand who in this case needs protecting from whom. All we are here for, all we are seeking, is their point of view; their truth. Only time will tell what influence their perspective has on ours."

Truth, perspective, interpretations... Onika was fast learning that Lúka could turn any conversation into a philosophy lecture. Was that a Force power? She bet it was a Force power. Except she didn't see any telltale wisps of colored light curling around his temples, or his patrician jaw, or his deep, soulful eyes--

DAMN IT, Kyle. This mission was going to be tense enough without any reminders of that conversation over a pair of nerfburgers. She followed Lúka's gaze toward the flashing lights and milling uniforms surrounding the bodega, then carefully unfolded herself from the passenger-side bucket seat and stood on the damp pavement. Immediately she felt a few dozen pinpricks of attention all around her, too distant and diffuse to resolve into anything more specific than a cold prickle on the back of her neck, but she recognized the notes of surprise and suspicion, coming equally from the onlookers outside the perimeter and the officers inside it.

Come to think of it, it wasn't as bad as the average day in the halls between classes at Tarkin. At least none of these looks were personal.

She brushed them aside and squinted through the emergency strobes at the storefront itself. The front window was a crater of jagged glass with the remnants of hand-painted Huttese script. Smashed shop windows were usually a sign that you hadn't re-upped your protection money. But this window had been destroyed from the inside, and there was a heavy shelving unit halfway through it, with brightly colored food wrappers littering the pavement among shards of glass.

Onika frowned, and followed Lúka toward the scene.

On the run from Order 66, Lúka and his fugitive compatriots had spent a lot of time in the seedier parts of the galaxy. While that did have the benefit of making surroundings such as this at least passably familiar, all those endless hours spent in a grimy motel watching whatever crap flashed across the holo-box next conspired with circumstance to fill him with the urge to pull an ident card and flash his credentials at the Coruscant Security officers as they approached. Sadly, such things were not part of an Imperial Knight's typical effects - an oversight, perhaps, for those situations where a code cylinder was impractical, and a lightsaber lacked subtly. Fortunately, their arrival was expected, and one of the officers was already making his way in their direction.

"One of you is Knight Jibral?"

Lúka nodded wordlessly, taking note of the man who stood in front of him. While the caramel tone of his skin implied a heritage from some distant, sun-kissed world, his accent was all Coruscant, and the informal kind at that. To call him old would be a disservice, and yet by Imperial standards, his apparent status as a detective was far below what a man of his apparent age should have achieved. Had he served the Empire directly, Lúka might have expected incompetence, but the keenness in his eyes and his prudence in contacting the Knights suggested a man who knew what he was doing. Perhaps it was loyalty then that had stood in the way of his advancement: someone who felt that his place was here on the Coruscant streets, making the kind of difference that couldn't be achieved from behind a desk back at the Precinct.

"And this is Cadet Zepparah," he offered, in response to the question that the Detective clearly wanted to ask, but whose determined focus on Lúka only suggested a reluctance to inquire. "She is one of the Knights' more promising students, and a Coruscant native: better qualified for this case than many of my fellow Knights, in my opinion."

Lúka delivered the statement with complete certainty, and while it catered to almost none of the Detective's questions directly, he seemed satisfied enough to have been provided with any kind of explanation at all. He nodded, mostly to himself, pulling a notepad from inside his pocket and quickly scribbling down Onika's name for later reference. "Zepparah," he muttered quietly to himself as he sounded out the name; spelt wrong, no doubt, but that was a triviality that could be corrected later. Notepad and stylus tucked away again, he allowed - or perhaps forced - his attention to expand to regard both of the Knights this time. He opened his mouth to begin saying something, but apparently thought better of it. "Shall we?"

For a moment, Lúka contemplated the Detective's vague invitation, and his options.

"Cadet, accompany the Detective and review the security footage. I'm going to -" He hesitated, deliberately, acting as if he couldn't readily find the exact piece of pseudo-terminology that he wanted. "- canvas the surroundings. I'll meet you back here when you're done."

Onika resisted an urge to turn and gape at Lúka in disbelief. There was building someone up, and then there was putting her on a pedestal with enough rope to hang herself, and quietly walking out of scene. How much canvas do you think you'll need? she wanted to ask, but the snark died somewhere halfway up her throat. Even if Lúka wanted the cops thinking she was the brains of the outfit for gods-knew what reason, she'd better not push her luck.

"Right this way, Miss Zepparah." Onika snapped back to reality, or whatever twisted fantasy had taken its place, to see the detective beckoning toward a large, boxy speeder truck idling on its landing skids in the center of the police convoy. With a deep breath she squared her shoulders and followed, noting the look of strained patience on the man's face. Whether it was down to opening his crime scene to the Knights, or consulting a girl young enough to be his daughter, or just the ennui that weighs on the shoulders of a lifetime cop, she could only guess.

"You ever been on a crime scene investigation before, Cadet?" the detective asked, his voice pregnant with reserved judgment. Onika tried not to make a face.

"I've... been involved in a few investigations," she replied, a truth even Vissica couldn't deny. Detective... she squinted at his badge... Istrella arched an eyebrow and guided her up the loading ramp into the back of the truck.

Inside was a mobile command center with a bank of vidscreens on each wall, displaying feeds from mounted CCHN cameras, helmet visors, and the scanning crew that was already combing the scene. Istrella slid into a mounted stool at one of the consoles and punched up a grainy holofeed of overstuffed aisles in the bodega.

"The action starts shortly after sixteen hundred," Istrella narrated. "That's when the nephew gets off his shift at the hydrospanner factory over in Sector 197. Kid's got a history with one of the local gangs, the South Street Sarlaccs. Used to run slith for them, then tried to go straight."

The detective scrubbed forward on one of the dials beneath the screen, and customers zipped through the picture at hyperspeed until he found the timestamp he was looking for. The aisles were mostly empty until a tall teenage Weequay came slumping into screen, dressed in greasy coveralls and walking heavily after a hard day's work. He stopped at the counter to exchange greetings with the older woman behind it, then was nearly knocked off his feet by a smaller boy, ten or eleven, who had rushed in from off-screen and tackled him with a lunging hug. The two boys jostled together happily, and then the older one extricated himself and disappeared into the bathroom. A quick skip forward, and he stepped out again in street clothes and an apron, grabbed a broom, and began sweeping the floor.

Moments later, the front door slid open on the adjacent vidscreen, admitting two Klatooinians and a hulking Whiphid. The Klatooinians stood to either side of the door like guards, and behind them, strutting proudly on his long, muscular arms, came a sneering Dug. He prowled out of view of the door camera with the Whiphid shuffling along behind them.

On the next screen, the Weequay teenager looked up, and backed up as the Dug and the Whiphid invaded his screen, holding his broom in front of him like a weapon. They exchanged words, and even with a silent feed, Onika felt her skin prickling at the rising tension on the screen, like magma swelling under a frozen caldera. She folded her arms tightly, suddenly feeling chilly in her jumpsuit.

The first crack in the bedrock came when the Dug lunged forward and seized the boy's shirt in his clutching toes. The boy swung his broom, which was caught easily in the Whiphid's massive paws. The tusked giant snapped the broom handle like a straw and shoved the teenager in the face, sending him sprawling backwards out of frame. The two gangsters stalked forward with the unhurried assurance of predators trailing a mortally wounded prey. Onika clenched her teeth. She knew what happened next, because she'd seen the brutal aftermath of gang enforcers countless times in the streets of Chiba--

The Whiphid came flying backwards through the screen and careened into a shelving unit, knocking it flat and sending packaged snacks scattering over the floor. On the other screen, the Klatooinian sentries barked in alarm and rushed forward.

Another shelving unit flew through the air, sailing over the Whiphid on the first screen and intercepting the Klatooinians on the second. It blasted them through the storefront windows, spilling them into the street amongst a kaleidoscope of broken glass.

The Whiphid rose angrily to his feet, slipped on a packet of gumm-Ewoks, and was about to charge again when the Dug came flying at his face, flailing and biting like a mynock in a snare. Stunned, the huge alien caught the angry Dug in his hands, stared gormlessly for a tense moment, and then turned and fled out through the hole in the window, smashing it larger in the process.

The Weequay teenager stepped slowly back on-screen, visibly trembling. Then he turned and stared at the holocamera, eyes wide with terror, and shouted something at the front counter. The feed went blank.

Detective Istrella pivoted in his seat to find Onika staring, open-mouthed. "You ever seen anything like that before, Cadet?" he asked.

She had to remind herself to breathe. Where moments ago the air around her had chilled, now it felt hot and stifling. There was another one. Another like her.

And she was here to lead him into the same trap she'd fallen into herself.

Istrella frowned, losing his patience. "Cadet?"

Onika swallowed some moisture back into her parched throat. With a small voice, almost inaudible, she said, "Yes."

Lúka paced calmly along the Invisec street, feeling his surroundings as much as looking at him. The area felt disturbed; not by the violence at the bodega, but in general. Whatever had transpired, it felt like a ripple in an already stormy sea, and sensing for clues was like trying to follow footsteps through the scene of a stampede. This was not a well-kept part of the city, and it was heavily travelled, a cacophony of imprints and impressions led by the souls who passed through day after day. Signs of a scuffle, bootprints from fleeing feet, echoes of anger and conflict that had soaked into the duracrete; they could have been from today, or days ago, related to this or something else entirely.

It was a common complaint on Coruscant, however, which made law and order somewhat complicated to maintain. Bodies could be autopsied, bloodstains analysed, but so much of traditional police work was a lost cause before it even began. If the murder weapon wasn't there waiting for you at the scene, or the incriminating evidence not on the person of your suspect, then why even start to look in a city with infinite places for things to be hidden, or lost, or tossed over the edge into a thousand-storey freefall? Here on Coruscant, building cases was a process reserved for the famous and infamous: corruption, embezzlement, and high-profile homicide. For the rest of the citizenry? Unless you got lucky and stumbled across reliable digital witnesses, criminals were usually only caught in the act, not after the fact.

Realities like that made Lúka glad that as a Jedi, an Inquisitor, and a Knight, the burden of proof had never fallen on his shoulders. His task was to apprehend, to detain, to investigate, to interrogate. His priority, his objective, was to remove dangers from the equation, to separate the innocent from those that would do them harm, by whatever means he felt was necessary. For a Jedi, sometimes that had meant chasing the guilty from one end of the galaxy to the other. For an Inquisitor, that meant darkened rooms and amoral tactics. For an Imperial Knight?

A small sigh escaped him, as his attention washed gently across the surroundings, falling on the duracrete like the gentle attention of rain. The Knights were an enigma, to themselves as much as anyone else, a cacophony of interpretations with no certainty about whom was right. Send Lady Vissica into a situation like this, and the truth would be extracted by force, terror and chaos left in her wake. Send Lady Sturkov, and that that terror might become bodies. Lord Cain might have resorted to diplomacy, or felt shackled by protocol and due process in the interests of appearance. Others might have been more shrewd, or inclined to buy into the corruption of these lower levels, or any of a myriad other strategies - and all of them would be equally right and wrong; because the Imperial Knights themselves were a mosaic of contradictions. Each came from a different background, each interpreting their confusing mandate to succeed both the Inquisitors and the Jedi, to enforce through fear while also beating the drum of betterness and progress.

He supposed the Jedi had not been any different; not during the final gasping years of their existence, at least. It had not merely been the Clone Wars that drove the Jedi to war in the name of peace, or cultivated brutality among some in the interests of victory. That the Clone Wars had transpired at all fell on the shoulders of the Jedi's own mistakes: it was their aggression - which they were supposed to be better than - that had sparked the disastrous mission to Baltizaar that had supposedly driven Count Dooku from the Order; and the hubris of those who thought themselves better than the Code, and wiser than prophecy that had allowed Darth Vader to be cultivated in their midsts. It was the corruption of incorruptible Jedi that had given rise to the Dark Acolytes, to the Inquisitors, and to Vader himself, morality and decency torn asunder by the mistaken belief that the dark side was the answer.

Therein lay the impossible duality, that had plagued Force Wielders since the dawn of civilization. There was no question that the light side of the Force was good, and yet light could not exist without its companion darkness, and the interplay between the two led to corruption and chaos. The Jedi sought to stabilise that chaos by extinguishing the darkness, and blanketing the universe in peace and serenity. The Sith sought stability through dominance and control, seeing darkness as the natural resting state of the cosmos. Others attempted to rationalise the two, to seek balance in different ways. For some, that balance existed in themselves, seeking coexistence between the darkness and the light; but so often, those scales tipped towards shadow, and ended in corruption. The Imperial Knights, it seemed, had adopted a different approach: balance on aggregate, coexistence in the Force achieved not within individuals, but between individuals. Stability by average. There was logic in that, Lúka supposed.

Something whispered at him through the Force, the faintest trace of something in the water that should not have been there. His senses focused on it, the faintest smear of darkness, one stain among a myriad others on the duracrete pillar that supported an overpass a few storeys above the main thoroughfare. It was not a difficult trace to have overlooked - or underlooked, perhaps: Lúka Jibral was above average in height as humans went, but even for him the trace had been left above eye level. It was easy to miss, easy to forget that there were sentient beings on Coruscant who towered above the roughly human proportions that so much of the galaxy seemed to conform to. He reached, retrieving the Hush-98 from within his jacket, and tugging a small transpariplast slide from the base of the unit. A sample was collected, slotted into the base of the device, and then the unit activated, microphone orientated towards Lúka's lips.

"I'm sure you're busy extracting Cadet Hoob from whatever container he's managed to entrap part of himself in this time," Lúka offered into the device, fighting against the small smile that attempted to form at the recollection, "But I need a favour. Whenever you get the chance, I need a species profile and a midi-chlorian count on the blood sample I just transmitted. Thanks Doc, I owe you one."

The device was clicked off, and returned to Lúka's pocket, the message and the attached data transmitted off to the Citadel servers to wait until Doctor Xivelle had the opportunity to retrieve it and respond. It wasn't the most expedient choice, he supposed: he could have signalled Ivy, or Lapis, and respected a response almost instantly. Rationally, he told himself that it was a choice born out of subconscious caution, ensuring that any evidence in the case was collected via legitimate Imperial Knight channels, rather than his own off the books resources. The Knights were granted some degree of latitude in the ways in which they conducted themselves and their missions on behalf of the Empire - Lúka knew, for example, that Vissica had been cultivating her own resources in the criminal underworld, though to what extent he wasn't entirely sure - but this wasn't a Knight mission, and if the people of this district were to receive some much-needed justice, a certain degree of propriety was necessary. In truth though, the reality was something far simpler: he had needed assistance, and Anastasia had been the only choice that came to mind.

Barely three minutes had passed, and Lúka hadn't even completed his casual stroll back towards the bodega, before the data device on his wrist vibrated, alerting him of a new transmission. The smile threatened his lips again as he glanced at the characters displayed on the backlit screen, and he indulged it for a few private seconds.

Whiphid. Midichlorian count low. Sensitivity unlikely. - Dr. Xiv

A Whiphid. Disappointing. Lúka had been hoping for a Wookiee, if only as an excuse to practise his rusty Shyriiwook. On the data screen, he tapped back a quick message of receipt and thanks, before tugging the sleeve of his jacket back over his wrist comm, and setting his sights on the Coruscant Security van.