A Refined Taste [Empire & Concerned Third Parties]

Inrok'eele'nuruodo hated low-crawling. Especially through vents that hadn't seen a proper cleaning since they'd been constructed over a decade before - at the very least. The Chiss inched forward stoically, however; he focused on putting one elbow ahead of the other and not on the inch-thick layer of grime that smeared against his armor enforced bodysuit. It was all in a day's work, really, he reasoned - gaining glory for the Empire and all that.

Secretly, Inrok'eele'nuruodo (or, as he was known on this side of the Ascendancy, "Keelen") was quite ambivalent toward the glorious Empire, as it stood. The only reason he wore an Imperial uniform, was because he'd been born cursed and because, when options had presented themselves, he had chosen to throw his lot in with aliens instead of the life of an exile (a life that statistically faced a very, very short span of existence). Here, low-crawling through a labyrinthine system of air ducts, he was at least compensated generously for his trouble, in excellent health, and alive. The alive part was of particular importance to him.

All the same, sometimes Keelen felt like maybe he'd made a pact with one of the humans' mythological devils. He truly did not care about the Empire's squabbles and had one of galaxy's other powers found him, he probably would have thrown his lot in with them just as readily. In short, Keelen was homesick and had been every day for the last five years. He'd had a wife, and a daughter, and a very promising naval career - and because of a genetic anomaly that he hadn't been able to control in a moment of sheer terror, he now found himself low-crawling through long-forgotten grime that he was also fairly certain included proof of rodents' passage. Some of which wasn't two decades old.

The ambivalence would probably have been uncovered in any other species, but Keelen had found that the humans and other aliens in the wider galaxy had no clue how to read a Chiss, even through the Force. His years of suppressing his Force Sensitivity, too, had made him a master at masking his true emotions. Several of the other Inquisitors he had trained with, had called him (quite unimaginatively) "Ice Man" behind his back. Where many - if not most - Force Users in the Empire ran hot on the emotional scale, Keelen ran cold. Or, so he was frequently told. From his point of view, he simply ran on neutral - giving nothing away, one way or another. It had served him well.

These and other thoughts, occupied him as he slithered slowly toward his destination. Keelen's mind was a marvel in compartmentalization - when he was alone, one part of his mind was mulling over his past, over his emotions, over the power they did give him the Force. Another, much larger part of his mind, was never not assessing his surroundings, studying other sentients, taking stock of all possible outcomes of the situations he found himself in. At present, that part of his mind was carefully parsing (for the upteenth time) the interrogation he'd concluded about twenty hours earlier.

There was mutiny afoot on Eriadu. From what Keelen knew of the planet's history, that was nothing new - not since the rise of the Galactic Empire thirty or more years before. But, the planet's rebel cell had been largely quiet in last decade. That lull had been deceptive and while Keelen never particularly cared for interrogations that got excessively violent, he had been pleased to finally crack through one captured rebel's spirit, to find out what they had been planning for today's triumphant celebrations.

The goal was a hostage situation, but the rebels weren't particular if it turned into an assassination. Keelen had worked the location and the target out of the prisoner, but the time table was a little sketchy. The parade had hardly begun on the streets outside, when he had squirmed his way into a second floor vent that was barely wide enough to accommodate his broad shoulders. An hour later, and he could finally hear the voices he'd been crawling toward all that time.

Keelen paused to catch his breath and to plan his dramatic descent from his position. He squinted through the vent slats at the room below him -

And raised a black eyebrow at the perfection of his timing. The mayor had just leveled a blaster at Moff Praetoffer's head. Keelen allowed himself a brief, but fierce, flash of his white teeth, as he anticipated the terror he was about to inflict on the unfortunate (and rather dimwitted) rebel leader.

Scuffed and dirt-caked black boots that had been perfectly polished hours before kicked through the vent, as Keelen swiftly hauled his not insignificant bulk through the unobstructed hole. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet on the floor below; his knees bent slightly to absorb the majority of the impact. The soles of his boots had barely touched the floor, before he'd thrown an open hand out toward the blaster-holding mayor. A simple tug through the Force and he could easily disarm the fool. With his left hand, he reached for the lightsaber hilt strapped to his thigh.

"I would rethink your intentions, Mayor," he said flatly, in a surprisingly soft voice that gave no emotion away.