Chapter Text
Author's Note: The notes I took during the first few game sessions were rather more sparse than I’d prefer, so a lot of the finer details from the early games may be skimmed over a bit, or may be lightly fabricated to the best of my memory
It was a dark and stormy night… or at least, the air outside of the rain-streaked windows looked as dark as night, the yellow smear of street lamps reflecting dully from every sodden surface.
Qaa’shaa glanced up to the clock above the office’s only door. Its hands read early afternoon, much too early for it to be so dark. She sighed wearily. Some of these core worlds just weren’t nearly as nice as the hype, especially when your office was below the level where the weather was kept under artificial control for the benefit of the wealthy. But rent on Coruscant was no joke, and while the lower levels were cheaper than the glittering upper levels, the cases that had come across the boss’ desk lately hadn’t been extraordinarily lucrative.
The door chimes rang cheerily as a tall woman entered the small office. Qaa’shaa took the opportunity to observe the new arrival as she shook the rain from her jacket, and unwrapped the scarf protecting her coiffed hair. This woman didn’t look like their usual sort of clientele. She looked like she had come down from the uppermost levels. Everything about her radiated wealth and glamour.
Shooting a quick glance across the office, she did her best to stifle a grin. The broad shouldered blue Twi’lek sitting behind the desk opposite hers was openly staring at the woman dripping rainwater all over the dingy tile floor.
Qaa’shaa had known Yelbijo for a couple of years now. They’d both been hired on as junior partners when the boss had founded the little detective agency. It wasn’t so much that he was a ladies’ man, as far as she could tell, a pretty face always seemed to garner the same reaction, regardless of gender or species.
She bit her lip to smother a laugh as she watched Yelbijo duck behind his desk, ostensibly hunting for the pen he’d dropped while ogling the new arrival.
Clearing her throat, Qaa’shaa returned her focus to the woman. “Can we help you with something?”
The woman tilted her head, imperious and almost birdlike, in Qaa’shaa’s direction. She was human, and stunningly pretty, in the same way that very sharp blades are pretty.
“This is a detective agency, yes? I have a-” She faltered, but recovered quickly, “an issue that requires your services. May I speak to whomever is in charge here?”
Before she’d even finished speaking, Yelbijo was out of his chair and moving for the door to the boss’ inner office. As he reached for the knob, however, the door swung inward to reveal a dark haired Miralukan woman.
While she wasn’t a person of imposing physical stature, Ratis radiated the kind of presence that marked her as the boss. That and the fact that she had a private office, rather than a desk in the reception area.
Less than an hour later, Qaa’shaa, Yelbijo, and Ratis found themselves standing in the middle of a blood spattered apartment. The remains of its former occupant had been removed, but there hadn’t been time for a clean-up crew to arrive yet. From what they’d been told, “torn apart” had been the best way to describe the man’s cause of death, and the way the apartment looked, Qaa’shaa had little trouble believing it.
As soon as the woman had left their office, the trio had hopped a taxi for the city’s upper levels. The woman had given her name as Vivian Martine, wife of the late Roland Martine, whose blood now stained nearly every surface in sight. He had apparently been the head of a notable crime family. Vivian was concerned that going to the authorities to report her husband’s demise would land her in jail for a murder that she claimed she had not committed. So, if the agency could find proof of her innocence, she was willing to pay more credits than the agency had seen in months.
After taking a few quick image scans of the apartment, Qaa’shaa returned to the deactivated hospitality droid that sat crumpled against a wall near the origin point of the blood spray. A cursory inspection showed damage to the arms and upper joints of the droid. She swore under her breath at the slowly blinking green light above the droid’s processor that indicated the completion of a recent memory wipe and reset cycle.
Wiping her hands on her coveralls, Qaa’shaa turned to watch Yelbijo finish copying the drive from the sophisticated looking door camera.
“Hey, can you haul this guy back to the office, so I can try to recover his memory?” She jerked a thumb in the direction of the blood smeared droid.
Yelbijo turned at her request, brow furrowing as he regarded the helpless heap of metal limbs, but he only sighed, and scooped the droid up without complaint.
Ratis surveyed the room one last time, unimpeded by her lack of physical eyes, or by the wrap that covered the place where her eyes would have been, had she been born human. “I think we’ve gotten all we can here. Let’s go, before the cleaners or the cops arrive.”
Stepping out into the street and the gathering dusk, the sound of blaster fire erupted from several directions at once. Moving quickly, Ratis led her team into an alley that offered some degree of shelter from the flashing bolts that lit the wet night air.
As they retreated, Yelbijo and Qaa’shaa peppered their attackers with a few shots of their own. They didn’t stick around long enough though to see if any local security would make an appearance, choosing instead to make good their escape, piling hurriedly into a taxi that the boss hailed in the next open street.
On arriving back at the office, Qaa’shaa and Yelbijo hauled the damaged hospitality droid into the cramped workroom. Closer inspection revealed much more extensive damage than she had initially assumed. All of the droid’s limbs and joints showed signs of extensive stress fractures. Something had pushed this droid well beyond the limits of both programming and material durability. The possibility that their murder suspect was sitting on her work bench crossed Qaa’shaa’s mind, and not for the first time.
After cataloging the various signs of damage to the droid’s exterior structure, Qaa’shaa set the droid’s system to run a memory recovery cycle, in the hope of retrieving whatever information someone was attempting to hide.
Wiping machine oil from her fingers with a rag, Qaa’shaa ventured back out into the main office to confer with Ratis and Yelbijo.
Yelbijo was staring intently at the computer terminal on his desk, with Ratis perched on the desktop itself, peering over his shoulder at the images shifting across the screen. As Qaa’shaa joined them, she observed what must have been the door cam security footage that Yelbijo had retrieved from the apartment.
As they watched, an attractive but unfamiliar woman entered the apartment. Yelbijo forwarded through the tape until the woman appeared again, on her way out. The time stamp noted that she had been in the apartment for a little over an hour, and her hair looked somewhat less tidy on the way out than when she’d come in. As she left, the murdered man, still very much alive and well, could be seen appearing to scold the hospitality droid, though the reason is unclear, as the video has no sound.
A while after the woman’s departure, the hospitality droid re-enters the frame, appearing to answer a com call. A quick conversation ensues, before the droid sets the receiver down, and walks out of sight. A spray of dark liquid is visible through the grainy camera feed, and the droid returns, covered in blood. It picks up the receiver, seems to have another brief conversation, before hanging up the handset, and powering itself down, in the position in which we found it.
It would indeed appear that the droid may be the perpetrator that they’d been hired to find, but murder was typically not within the scope of a typical household droid’s programming.
Qaa’shaa retreated to the workshop to check on her patient, while Yelbijo and Ratis continued to study the security video for any additional clues or information, and began sifting through the recorded call log, to look for any possible information on the call that the droid received.
Quickly glancing over the datapad wired into a port on the droid’s back, Qaa’shaa noted that the wipe recovery hadn’t turned up much. There did, however, appear to be at least a fragment of some sort of implanted code that she immediately picked out as non-standard. Though her binary was good, this coding language was dense and unfamiliar. She suspected that this piece of code had something to do with implanted commands or command override protocols. Neither of which a household droid should normally have.
She disconnected the pad, and carefully checked that the droid was still powered down, and not connected to any external devices or power sources, before taking the pad back out into the main room to show the others.
In the meantime, Ratis and Yelbijo had waded through a substantial portion of the victim’s call history and voice mailbox. The call that the droid had received did not show any useful caller data, only an “unknown caller” error message. The only other piece of unusual data that they’d turned up was a message left on the victim’s voicemail that sounded like a mix of mechanical and digital sounds, all compressed into a single jumble of noise. It also showed an “unknown caller” error in the log.
Qaa’shaa kicked on a translation program on her pad as they listened to the cacophonous message. The program appeared to struggle to pick out any coherent threads from the incredibly dense layers of overlapping sound, but fragments of phrases and sentences began to appear. There appeared to have been a conversation that involved at least two participants, but the exchange was too fast and too compressed to get more than the most vague notion of it. It did, however, appear to contain a coded phrase, whose binary form stood out to Qaa’shaa as being incredibly similar to the piece of mysterious code that she’d been able to retrieve. The only word that that the translator had managed to pick out from that section: Kill.
An involuntary shiver ran down Qaa’shaa’s spine. Someone had definitely implanted the command to kill in that hospitality droid, and appeared to have done so via com call. Every residence and ship on the planet had access to a com terminal.
As the sound of the recording ended, leaving the group in uneasy silence, a small repeating sound brought Qaa’shaa out of her thoughts.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
She looked down at her worn work boots, to find a mouse droid, repeatedly running into her foot. It was the same droid that their landlord had provided when they’d first rented out the office, a simple older model that couldn’t do much beyond vacuuming the floors. Now, however, it seemed to be aggressively attempting to vacuum Qaa’shaa’s boot.
She reached down, plucking the droid from its tiny rampage, and flipped a switch to power it down. She took the diminutive droid into the work room, and deposited it in a steep sided bin, where it wouldn’t be able to escape, even if it managed to regain power.
If the implanted command was being transmitted via sound, playing that particular sound again within hearing of any droid could be an incredibly risky choice.