Chasing Specters: Eight by Ten

[Zelenka Lassiter]

Ord Vaug. What a miserable little planet. Or at least it was as far as Zelenka and quite a few others were concerned. Each could care less about the exotic species of plants and creatures that dominated the rain forests. No one paid mind to the brilliant colors the rolling hills were decorated in, no one admired the beautiful sunsets that would occur right after a storm when the clouds started clearing. Quite simply...they never saw them.

Their world instead was dominated by gray walls, gray furniture, gray ceilings, gray uniforms. It caused the mind to ponder if it was meant to sap any sort of spirit out of an individual. In one particular cell however, the color could not ever fully be drained. Not from the Zeltron who lay on the cot, staring upwards, wondering in that moment what exactly the sky outside looked like. Was it night? Was it day? Cloudy? Clear? Somewhere in between it all?

Days had become impossible to gauge, they simply merged. And so it was perhaps a fool's errand for Agent Lassiter to begin to even estimate just how long she had been incarcerated. Her best guess placed it all somewhere just shy of a month. A barely noticeable fraction of her sentence. A sentence she was serving for a crime she did not commit: Conspiracy to assassinate Moff Kentor Sarne of the Kathol Sector. While the thought of killing Sarne had always been a pleasant one the truth of the matter was that Lassiter never had the intention of assassinating the man. He was far more valuable to Intelligence alive. And as infuriating as it was that they had gotten that completely wrong, the fact they were still referring to her as some anarchist member of the Qektoth Confederation redeemed the situation somewhat. Her actual identity and purpose had remained safe throughout it all.

All in all it was minor consolation for her situation. It left some silly hope of extraction/rescue to occur at some point. Perhaps it was that hope that kept the Zeltron woman from losing her mind. Hope and whatever music could be called to the forefront of her mind from memories were after all, her only accompaniment. Apparently the guards had learned rather quickly on to keep anyone from speaking to her and moved her to solitary confinement.

Hazel eyes moved from the ceiling to look to the door on the opposite side of the small room. Her stomach was beginning to protest the lack of food she'd received in what was most likely a day, and the slot in the door showed not even a hint of being about to open to deliver what was desired. A moderately annoyed huff left the woman before she returned her gaze back to where it had been and once more allowed herself to run the last two years through her mind as she had done so often before.

[Zelenka Lassiter]

It's a horribly drab thing to have nothing but your thoughts to occupy you. A month had merged slowly and miserably into a year and pressed onward. Her good behavior had earned her the right to leave her cramped little cell and spend time with other prisoners at certain aspects of the day. The guards however, kept a particularly close watch on her which made attempting to suss out the weak points in security rather difficult. An escape on her own terms was nearing the impossible. Not that the agent hadn't considered that fact the moment she had been placed there, but a year was hardly long enough to resign yourself to the fact that the gray walls were going to be all you would see the rest of your life.

Provoking a riot seemed an option at first, at least it would cause enough of a distraction between the guards and inmates that some actual valuable information about the prison building itself could be gained... but then consideration that most of the prisoners were political in nature and often ended the day by crying into their shoddy pillowcases... this too seemed a bit of a stretch.

What she was able to find out though, was that the building she was in was not the entirety of the prison, in truth, the entire planet had been dedicated to it. The building that had become her cage was meant to protect certain prisoners from the more violent criminals that were left to fend for themselves in the rain-forests of Ord Vaug. It seemed like a rather strange arrangement to Zelenka, but then again... so did the entirety that was the Imperial machine.

When not attempting to contemplate escape or how it was she managed to get herself into this position, Zelenka was forced to wonder about the state of the galaxy and found that the lack of information she could procure infuriating. She wondered if the Alliance had made any vast triumphs against the Empire, if perhaps the wonderful impossible had happened and perhaps they had been overthrown. On better days she often thought that surely, by now, this was the case and that Ord Vauge simply had not been liberated yet...the Galaxy was a large place, after all. On worse days her thoughts turned much darker, leaving her pondering if any of those she had called friends and allies were even alive any longer. The unknown made it all the worse.

Yet somehow, more often than not, her mind was in favor of the optimistic point of view, knowing that one day if she was unable to remove herself from the prison planet, that remaining members of the Alliance, possibly a new Republic at that point, would be the ones to set her free.