"Whatever it is, make it quick," a female voice called.

Seth took that to mean he could come in and opened the door. It opened smoothly enough, though it creaked loudly as it did. He slipped into the shack and took it all in with a sweep of his sharp gaze. A cot and small table tucked into one corner, a small chemical toilet and what might have been a makeshift washbasin across from it. (Looking at the toilet made him realize he had to piss very badly. He ignored that, too.)

The other half of the shack sported a battered metal table, a tall, slim, dented locker, and an old plasteel cylinder. The occupant was presiding over the table, making repairs to what he recognized as his own armor. Silver and tan Republic mod armor. She was a twi'lek, wearing a formfitting black jumpsuit over a deep blue skin. She wore heavy boots and had a dagger on one hip and a blaster pistol on the other.

She glanced at him. "Oh, you're up. And you're welcome."

"Thanks for saving me," he replied, a little stiffly.

Saying thank you, even when it was completely justified, had always been difficult for him, even from a young age. It wasn't until he was older that he realized just why he was so uncomfortable with this simple and reasonable act.

It was like a tiny surrender.

"You're welcome. Sorry about your friends. I'm Nova," she said, turning back to his armor.

"Seth," he murmured. "Can I have my armor back?"

Now she stopped working on it and turned fully to face him. "Planning on going somewhere?" she asked.

"I was hoping you could tell me where a good place to go might be," he replied.

"Afraid there aren't too many of those on Taris, at least not down here," she said.

"I need to confirm that I was the only survivor. There should have been at least two other people in that pod with me," he said, only remembering seeing two other soldiers getting into the pod, them turning to face him, raising their rifles as he materialized through the smoke, then lowering them upon recognizing him as an ally, beckoning him closer.

Then the world turning to white-hot pain.

"There were three bodies in the pod," Nova replied, "all of them wearing armor like this. They were certainly dead." She paused. "I'm sorry. I thought you were dead, too, but you weren't. Just burned badly and knocked out." She paused again, now looking frustrated, and she seemed to be trying to temper herself, calm herself. "There was kolto in that pod with you, Seth. Do you have any idea how rare kolto is down here? It's as crucial to us as a pressure suit in space. I had to use almost all of it to keep you from dying, and to bring you at least up to fighting power."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because you owe me for that. For saving your life and putting all that kolto to use. You're a veteran, not some rook fresh out of the academy, and I'm guessing you've got skills to match. I saw your scars. I desperately need another fighter down here," Nova explained, staring hard at him now, holding his eyes with her intensely blue ones.

"I don't intend to stay here," he said, worrying that she was asking him to join their wretched little settlement beneath the city.

"Neither do I," she replied. "Will you help?"

He considered it for a moment. He couldn't stay here, he had to find some way off of Taris, or, at the very least, some way to get in touch with the Republic.

"I need to get off Taris," he replied simply. Not exactly a no, but definitely not a yes.

"Don't we all?" she asked. "But that isn't an answer."

She stared at him. He stared back. Finally, she sighed. "I don't have time for games," she said, "so I'll just make you a deal. I know a way that we can get off this planet, even with the damned Sith blockade fleet in orbit."

"That's a tall order," Seth replied, suspicious. "And even if you had access to that, then why haven't you left?"

"Because it's not ready yet."

"What is it?"

"I'm not telling you, not yet. You're just going to have to trust me," Nova said, crossing her arms, her voice hardening. "The deal is this: you help us out, we help you escape Taris."

He studied her. Despite her hard demeanor and gruff manner, he didn't sense any deception from her, and he'd gotten good at reading people. No, Nova was desperate, but not because she was trying to deceive him, at least he thought so.

Well, what choice did he have?

He could leave, strike out on his own, but he knew nothing about this world. There could be anything down here in the Undercity. And although he was indeed up to fighting power, as Nova had put it, he certainly wasn't in tiptop shape. Even now he felt weakened, exhausted, starving, in pain. As much as it pained him to admit it, he very likely needed Nova, and Seri as well. But maybe most important of all, underlying this like hard bedrock, he did feel the call to help these people, because this was a place that stank not even of poverty, but of true misery, true hopelessness. Could he walk away from that?

No, he didn't think he could.

"Deal," he said finally.

She relaxed, though only slightly. He had an idea that trust came slowly to Nova. But there was something he had to do first, partially for logical reasons, partially for personal. "I want to get to my pod before we do anything else," he said.

She nodded. "I was thinking the same thing. I salvaged what I could, but hauling your heavy ass back here meant I had to leave a lot of it behind," she said.

"You dragged me here by yourself?" he asked.

"Yes," she replied simply, then stepped over to her locker and opened it up. A suit of basic combat armor, faded red-orange in color, hung there. She began to pull it on.

She must be strong.

Seth moved silently over to the table and looked over his armor. It looked like crap, but clearly she'd made some repairs to it, and it would get the job done. He began pulling the scratched silver armor on over his new, or strictly speaking old, clothing, wincing at the raw pain it elicited from his abused body.

"How bad was I?" he asked as he worked, trying to ignore the pain.

"Bad," Nova replied flatly. "You would have died had I not been there and there was not a good reserve of kolto in the pod with you. I had to patch that armor up a great deal, as whatever fire you encountered burned through it. Your back got the worst of it."

He grunted, knowing that to be true as he finished getting the chestpiece on.

"You hit your head pretty hard, too. Seri wasn't sure you were going to make it."

"Glad I did," he muttered, although even he felt like that was said sarcastically. Not that he'd meant it come out that way. Nova didn't comment. Had he wanted to die in the battle aboard the Spire? This far into the war, it was hard to say.

Right now, he wasn't sure what he was feeling.

But that wasn't anything new, was it? And at the end of the day, Seth knew that he had to, above all else, act.

So that was what he intended to do.

Finishing pulling on his armor, he reflected that he at least felt calmer, a little better. Having a clear objective, even something as simple as getting to his pod, had begun the process of smoothing his frayed nerves and rattled brain. The two of them finished pulling on their respective suits of armor. As he finished, Seth's hand fell to his hip, his holster that came with the armor's belt. It was empty. He sighed softly.

"Where's my pistol?" he asked.

"I didn't have a chance to grab any arms," Nova replied curtly. "Just medicine and some water. But here, you can borrow one of mine for now."

She passed him a simple old blaster pistol. He accepted it, and the two energy cartridges as well, and checked it over. The power level looked good, the sights looked fine, despite its battered, old appearance.

Was anything new or fresh down here?

He supposed not. The Undercity seemed to be a world of hand-me-downs and old refuse. "What kind of hostilities can I expect?" he asked, his mind latching onto the needed details of the situation at hand.

"Bad ones," Nova replied, passing a large backpack to him. "There are creatures down here called rakghouls. Very dangerous. Besides the fact that they're fast and have big claws, you get cut by one, there's a decent chance you'll become infected with a virus that turns you into one. And fairly quickly, at that."

"Damn," he muttered, feeling a real shiver of fear tremble down his spine. He'd been shot, stabbed, beaten to a pulp and, now, set on fire. He'd lived through a few bad viruses, puked his guts up more than once. It kind of came with the territory. But a virus that turned you rapidly into a monster? That was a new one.

He shrugged into the backpack. "There's no cure?" he asked finally.

"Supposedly there is, but I doubt we'd find it down here, even if it does exist," Nova replied bitterly.

"How long have you been down here?" he asked.

"Me? Two months," she replied. She finished pulling on her armor. "Come on, this is their down time. I think the rakghouls mostly sleep around now, so we need to take advantage of the situation while we can."

He nodded and finished securing his own gear, pausing the grab a sword from the table he'd been eying as he'd geared up.

"You mind?" he asked.

"No," she replied, and left the shack.

He slipped it into a sheath, then tied it off to his belt. He practiced drawing the sword a few times as he headed out, then secured it and began moving after Nova. He sighed as his previous realization at how bad he had to take a leak resurfaced. "Hold up," he said awkwardly.

Nova stopped, twisting around. "What?"

"I, uh...need to piss," he muttered.

She laughed. "Just go behind the shacks. Hurry up."

"Got it."

Feeling strangely embarrassed, he moved back behind her shack and found a small alleyway of space between the back of the shack and a wall of metal and wood and other random bits of material that looked like it had been built up over generations. He saw a whole mess of stuff in there, different colored metal, what looked like the hull of a fighter jet in one area. Trying to ignore the weirdness of the situation, Seth relieved himself, taking longer than he thought he was going to. He supposed he'd been holding it in for over a day and a half by now. Finally, he finished up and headed back around, rejoining Nova.

The humor he'd seen earlier had left her face, and as he looked around the settlement as they made their way through it, moving between makeshift lean-tos and haphazardly constructed shacks, he knew that good humor was probably as rare as kolto down here. As he looked at the denizens moving slowly around the area, Seth found himself coming up against a vast mental wall. He simply couldn't imagine living down here for his entire life. He'd grown up in poverty, but closer to what Seri had described the Lower City above them as.

This?

This was...something else entirely. This was despair. Bleak, melancholic, desolate despair. Had any of them even seen the sun before? Had they felt rain? Or a breeze? He was willing to bet that they hadn't. And that was just...

Soul crushing.

In a way, he found that somewhat absurd. How many atrocities had he seen? How many lives had he taken? Witnessed taken? How much of the horrible carnage of war had he looked at? And yet here he felt vaguely ill at the notion of someone who had never glimpsed the sun or felt the deeply comforting patter of chilled rain on their face.

Maybe that hit to the head had done more damage than he'd initially assumed.

Or maybe he was just sick of all this crap.

He caught up with Nova. "Are there any other threats besides the rakghouls?" he asked.

"People," she replied. "Sometimes the Sith come down here for whatever reason, although it's pretty rare. The gangs come down here, too. They're the biggest threat. They grab exiles for slavery occasionally, or to sell to the Exchange, or just use us for target practice."

Seth felt his control slip a notch, that eternal ember of anger that seemed to smolder always at his core flaring. He clenched his fists and reigned in control.

"Seri said you hurt people," he said.

"I do. Anyone who threatens us. I kill the gang members where I can find them. The main gang call themselves the Dreks. They're the only ones that really give us any trouble. They're stupid, but there's a lot of them."

"Got it."

"Other than that, nothing else I've come across. But you should be wary anyway. Just treat the Undercity like a live battlefield and you'll do fine...here we are."

They came at last to a large mesh gate that looked like it was made of pretty stern stuff. It was a good twelve feet tall, roughly in line with the wall on either side of it. A man and a woman, both of whom looked fairly tough among what he'd seen so far down here, wearing basic combat armor and holding blaster pistols with swords on their hips, stood by the gate.

"Going out, Nova?" the woman asked.

"Yep. We're going back to his pod for more supplies," she replied.

The man, in the meantime, had moved over to a makeshift ladder lashed to the wall beside the gate. He climbed up it slowly.

"Hope none of the other assholes have gotten there," the woman muttered. She looked at Seth. "I'm Sally, by the way. He's Zacden."

"Seth," he replied.

"I'd tell you that you're lucky to be here but, well...you're here," she said.

Zacden reached the top of the ladder and spent a moment surveying what lay beyond. "It's clear," he said, moving back down.

"I'm hoping to leave Taris," Seth replied to Sally.

"Aren't we all?" she replied dismissively.

"Well-"

Nova bumped him as she stepped closer to the gate. He glanced at her. "You wanna open it up?" she asked.

"Sure," Sally replied, turning away.

Nova looked at him and gave a short but hard shake of her head. So, for whatever reason, she didn't want him mentioning...their deal? An escape plan? He just faced forward and remained silent. There were questions, but they could wait for now.

The gate began rattling open, sliding slowly on a track along the wall. Seth felt a strange calmness settle over him like a familiar tunic. Nova was right. He was going into a battlefield, and he needed to treat it as such.

Although he felt that he was crap at a lot of things in life, fighting was at least something he knew how to do. And more than that, staying alive in a hostile environment. So he took a moment to check over his armor, his weapons, himself, once more.

As soon as he felt certain, he began walking out of the gate with Nova.

Once they were clear, it rattled shut behind them.