Miranda
SWRP Writer
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- Jun 14, 2011
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Gangway to egress to alley to avenue to the first slumping markets that clawed ascending from the abyss. It had been night forever. The bazaars that encrusted the sewer's plummeting edge had grown like fungal blooms around her in the dark. Chaya lurched. She pitched in a yawning current of sentient detritus; criminals, riffraff, urchins.
In front, her Gossam rickshaw driver tugged miserably at his rudder and the vessel corrected. Light wallowed as the lantern careened. The Gossam was afraid of her. She leant out from the lounge of the small vehicle across the murky weight of the crowds, peering back into thoroughfare shadows.
Over the oily thunder of the skyward foundries and the peregrine crooning of merchants and the shifting trudges of aliens, nightclub sounds were building. Alloys reverberated with bass and walls hammered and floors oscillated to fill space; the tens of clubs and cantinas had become hundreds, thousands; they transfused and expanded backwards from the markets and shed scintillant, fluorescent light from all across the Coruscant underbelly.
They surrounded her. They were growing. They were towering, and swelling, and roaring, their slanted roofs of durasteel, their walls of unyielding permacrete.
The rickshaw turned to confront the promenade that loomed suddenly, immense, stamped on the cityscape. Its fluorescence welled up around the streets like bruise-blood. Uscru. Its neon towers flared up in conflagration. Chaya was reduced. She was compelled to worship the colossal presence that had silted its way into presence at the conjunction of vast undercity routes. It was a monstrous pollutant, a villainous stench, a corrupt seed that bulged into poisonous tree with buttress roots extending to every corner of the Coruscant inferno.
It was not the current of the crowds that pulled her, but the undercity itself, its fat gravity had sucked her in. Indistinct shouts, here and there the bronchial rasps and shucking of beasts, the profane clashes and thundering of industry as huge machinery trenched. Skyrails marked urban anatomy like annealed arteries. Rust-red and bleeding walls, hunched temples like primitive things, clotted mazes, culs-de-sac, sewers swamping blackened sidestreets like pluvial sepulchres, a forlorn urbanscape of tangle, crushed metal, old medbays, phosphorescent placards, starships and metallic wraiths that lifted cargoes from the abyss.
It is too late to flee.
Lantern wires stretched limp across the avenue, held fast by unseen supports and dribbled with cloudy aggregates of alien phlegm. They hummed like hydroharp strings. Something scuttled overhead. The rickshaw Gossam hawked fetid spit into the sewer puddles. His gob dissolved. Narrow streets emerged. Chaya looked south and then east, her eyes following lines of lamplight surged away and consumed by the nightland. Cranes reared from the dusk like skeletal fingers, here and there they jolted, keeping their twilight crews in their wake. Chains swung deadweight like broken limbs, fracturing into phantasmal motion where cogs contracted and flywheels burst.
The Gossam murmured to Chaya and told her where they were. She did not acknowledge him. She knew. The Crimson Flux, a brutalized maw of depravity and crime (one of many in the underlevels). She alighted from the rickshaw and tossed the cobalt skinned saurian driver several credits for fare, and with that his frail form was once again enveloped in the riptide throng of the masses.
Chaya followed the club's neon outlines toward its colonnade, tracking the arches that anchored it to the other buildings, like a limpet to rock. She stalked in the shadows of the building's west alley, her fuliginous cloak tugged at her as she settled her purse close to breast. That is what protected her in such a place, that, and the illusion she had cultivated. An inner anguish that had brought her to Coruscant. To that underscape dreamed up of blood and bone, a conspiracy of industry, violence, and transgression, steeped in history and eclipsed power, the badlands beyond any reckoning.
Sparking a cigarillo she inhaled a gray cloud vehemently and sighed, glanced down at her chronometer and eventually made her way past the bouncers of the Crimson Flux. Once inside, Chaya touched the club's host on the shoulder, "table service...I'll be over there", she inclined with her head to a corner booth and proceeded.
A full vista of the club's central level sprawled before her. Who could say how long the senses of the Mynock or the eyes of the Nexu would require to ascertain the totality of such a nightscape? Or whether in a savant instant the ostensibly confused would shift into envisaged insight, shapes and colours and objects falling into some perception as an ordered and discernible pattern in relation to the unified environment? Her surroundings, through her eyes, did just that. And while she scrutinised the outlay of the Crimson Flux, she waited impassively for the others to join her...
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