Paging Miss Taassaurra

[Adonis Inirial]

Adonis didn't look up from the datapad and flimsi prints in front of him, far too busy working his way through the meticulous morning routine that Lieutenant Ocasta had so frustratingly taken it upon himself to disrupt. It wasn't that Commander Inirial was averse to interruptions - his door was always open, and that was a policy that he wholeheartedly embraced and stood by. Over his years as an intelligence officer he'd become quite adept at multitasking, as well as working in dangerous environments under extreme pressure, so the Lieutenant's presence wasn't really a distraction, either. No, the problem was something else entirely.

"It's a three hour reconnaissance mission, Mr Ocasta."

There was a tiredness to Adonis' voice; not quite annoyance, but perhaps slowly making it's way there. The frustration wasn't sourced from the fact that Ocasta was quibbling over his orders. It wasn't that the Lieutenant was questioning his analysis, and the decisions based upon them. It was the fact that Oisin Ocasta was questioning himself. It was one of the most irritating aspects of having to interact with sentient beings. The vast majority either had a ludicrously inflated sense of their own importance and abilities, or instead woefully undervalued the contributions they could potentially offer to their unit, their command, and the Alliance as a whole.

From what Adonis had read in the man's service record, it was a chronic problem. Ocasta was an incredibly talented fighter pilot - talented enough to earn a spot in Rogue Squadron, back in the days when only twelve pilots at a time earned that honour. Yet, he undervalued himself, preferring to volunteer for lone reconnaissance missions that - unless they went catastrophically wrong - demanded almost none of his piloting abilities. His record described him as an observant and contemplative officer, one who rapidly earned the respect of his peers, and who had a keen sense for strategy and tactics. He should have made a fantastic leader, could have easily been commanding his own squadron by now; but he played it safe, refused to seize the opportunities that dangled in front of him.

Adonis wouldn't stand for that. Not only did it grate painfully against the Commander's sensibilities; there was a personal investment, too. Oisin had been his sister's wingman for a time, and Adonis had read enough Rogue Squadron mission reports to know that his sister's safety and survival was in part thanks to the Lieutenant. More than that, Carré described him as a friend; a friend from Alderaan no less, one of an ever dwindling number still out there in the galaxy. Ocasta deserved the benefits that came with the opportunities he squandered. Adonis would force him to accept them, whether he liked it or not.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

[Oisin Ocasta]

What could possibly go wrong? Where did Oisin even start?

He knew what Commander Inirial was doing. He could feel the way that he was being baited, and damn the man for actually succeeding. There was just enough of that Lord Adonis of House Inirial smugness sprinkled throughout the Commander's half-interested tone to insult Oisin's ego. It may not have been a particularly potent ego, but he was a fighter pilot after all; and Alliance pilots used their egos as a direct power source for their deflector shields. Belittling the situation, turning it into a situation so simplistic that it was absurd to protest it, was supposed to make Oisin surrender. It almost did.

This wasn't a simple situation, though. At least, not as simple as Lord la-dee-dah was making out. This wasn't climbing in a cockpit and cruising around space in a T-65BR for three hours. This wasn't settling down into that ever so slightly uncomfortable chair behind the helm controls of the Destiny for three hours. This was command. For three hours - longer, if anything went wrong - Commander Inirial was expecting him to sit in the middle chair on the Destiny bridge, and tell other people what to do instead of doing it his damn self. He had to fly a not-exactly-formidable Alliance light cruiser as close to the Imperial border as his clenched butt muscles would allow, scour every nanometre of the EM bands for transmissions and every photon and speck of space dust for other usable intelligence, and then get back to the station without being attacked, without causing a diplomatic incident, and without the ship developing a cataclysmic series of mechanical faults and system errors causing it to fall apart and or explode.

Oisin sighed, his shoulders sagging, knowing that this was a losing battle. An order was an order, and Adonis was entirely confident in his capabilities - which made exactly one of them. There was no point protesting, and yet, Oisin couldn't help one last desperate attempt.

"Are you sure there's no one on this entire station that wouldn't be better qualified?"

[Adonis Inirial]

Adonis let out the smallest of sighs, finally setting down the reports he was looking at to meet Oisin's gaze directly.

"There probably is," he admitted; no point lying or sugar coating that. "K'ohta'rrou Meorrrei is a lapsed starship commander. There's that new Hapan officer who just got assigned to the Novgorod. Jaden Luka has more command experience. There's officers on other ships, on the station's staff, even in the civilian population who are more qualified. Plenty of people have logged more command hours than you have, because you've logged almost none."

A frown furrowed his brow for a moment; he tried to imagine how someone like his father, or Vansen Tyree might have handled a crisis of confidence like this in one of their subordinates. He supposed Admiral Tyree rarely needed to; most of his officers were too intimidated to willingly show weakness in front of him. His father on the other hand would have strung together some sort of inspiring speech, that Adonis new he wasn't capable of emulating. Instead he played to his own strengths; stuck to the facts, the rules, the protocols.

"But none of them are the First Officer of the Destiny. None of them are part of the ship's crew. None of them are my second-in-command."

He leant back in his chair, and offered an emphasised shrug.

"The crew of the Destiny are my responsibility; their safety; their wellbeing. The execution of this mission is also my responsibility. And you know me, Lieutenant. You know that I would not risk jeopardising my crew or my mission by assigning an officer that I wasn't one hundred percent confident in. You will get this done, and everything will be fine. And if it isn't fine, you will still get this done. You're an Alliance Officer; you're a Rogue; and you're from Alderaan."

He let the words hang in the air for just a moment, hoping that at least a faint glimmer of inspiration had been yielded. There was no time to dwell, though; there were other matters to attend to this morning, and Adonis had every confidence that his efforts had been sufficiently successful.

"Now get the hell out of my office," he finished, with a slight suppressed smile, ushering Lieutenant Ocasta away with a hand before reaching for his comms reports again. "I have a meeting with Preita'rrou Taassuarra in five minutes, and you have somewhere more important to be."

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

Kiimiti Taassaurra sat on the small retractable bench built into the wall adjacent to Commander Inirial's office. She was early to the meeting, but that was by design rather than happenstance. Punctuality was one of the things beaten into you in the Trade Navy. It now came as naturally to the Preita'rrou as ironing a flawless starched crease on her uniform.

She knew Commander Inirial by name only. Considering how many messages she'd sent that were CC: Commander Inirial, they ought to be pen pals by now. Of course they were the sort of messages only really intended to go one way, so it wasn't as if she actually had rapport with the human. Goddess, she didn't even know what the man looked like. He was male and human and that was about it. With the rank of Commander, he probably had some age to him, maybe greying at the temples.

The doors opened to the office, and Kiimiti was on her feet. Only the man that exited didn't stop to regard her. He too was human and male, but he had that kind of look to him of a man with a lot on his plate.

[Adonis Inirial]

Lieutenant Ocasta might not have noticed the communications officer loitering outside as he bustled off to comply with his reluctantly received orders, but Commander Inirial did. In fact, Commander Inirial had been aware for the last few minutes that she was patiently waiting, thanks to the small screen on his desk projecting a live security feed from the area beyond his office door. The Alliance had offered to provide him with a yeoman to help with his administrative responsibilities, and to sit sentry outside the office waiting for anyone to arrive, but Inirial had declined. It wasn't like he was the sort of person whose attention was frequently sought; on the contrary, people were more inclined to avoid intelligence officers, for fear of what secrets they might somehow be aware of. As Adonis often pointed out, most people's embarrassing secrets just weren't all that interesting; but it didn't seem to make much of a difference.

Some people might have taken that avoidance to heart, but Adonis just viewed it as a necessary part of the job. Command was the same: that degree of distance it created between you and your subordinates. It was inescapable; but experience and tradition had helped to transform it into an asset and a hindrance. So, Adonis made do without an attaché; and that worked perfectly fine for him, particularly given his fondness for flimsiwork and organisation. Besides, with most people's suspicious avoidance, it wasn't as if there was an after-hours social life to prevent him from bringing his work home on those rare occasions where he didn't manage to multitask his way through it all in time.

Seeing that Miss Taassaurra was now on her feet, he quickly skimmed through the rest of the datapad entry, committing it to memory before he killed the device's power. The stack of flimsi pages were squirrelled away into a desk drawer; perhaps an unnecessary measure, seeing as how most of what he had been reading over had been submitted by Taassaurra or one of her colleagues, but it was a good habit to be in, and Adonis kept it up regardless. Satisfied that there was nothing lying idly exposed in his office, and taking a moment to ever so slightly adjust the angle at which the datapad rested on his desk, he leaned forward: not enough to see around the door, but enough to aim his voice in the right direction.

"If you don't mind starting a little early, Preita'rrou," he called, "You might as well head on in."

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

That was Commander Inirial?

Kiimiti's eyes widened at the sight, and she unexpectantly gawked before willing her lower lip to raise back up and meet it's neighbor. He was young. And handsome.

This would have been so much easier if he was old and ugly. Not at all willing to risk saying anything in her moment of shock, Preita'rrou Taassaurra decided to fake it till she made it by nodding, following the Commander in with his invitation.

This wasn't good. She was already nervous.

[Adonis Inirial]

This wasn't good. She was already nervous.

Adonis had plenty of experience in diagnosing people's emotional states. He could see anxiety and discomfort from a mile away, in the midst of a blizzard, while blindfolded. Assuaging those emotional states though? That was less his speed. He could manipulate those emotional states to his advantage, certainly; but putting a nervous officer at ease was a far cry from talking an Imperial comms technician into a bar and then into bed so that you could copy his ident card while he was sleeping off the impending hangover. This was why he thrived in intelligence analysis, seated comfortably behind a desk, surrounded by professionals rather than real people with emotions and problems to contend with.

He tried to emphasise how harmless he was, offering his friendliest, most charming smile. That only seemed to make things worse. Perhaps he should have dug deeper, dredged up more intelligence on these officers in advance rather than trying to tackle this in the more personable way of just inviting them to his office for a chat. Next time, he promised himself, making a mental note.

"Thank you for coming," he said warmly, gesturing to one of the seats opposite, not bothering to rise from his seat or do any of those typical knee jerk things that humans did to make a situation seem more formal and important than it needed to be. "Sorry to drag you away from your other duties. I hope I'm not keeping you from anything important."

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

She took her seat where he'd indicated, thankful at least that she'd be able to place her hands in her lap and not have to worry about the exhausting dilemma of what do I do with my hands. Kiimiti willed the sway of her tail to loop behind her legs. If it began to twitch, then at least it might be out of sight if not out of mind. The Preita'rrou took in a deep breath, holding it a beat, before letting it out slow - though careful to not make it a sigh, which could imply any number of things and might color the Commander's opinion.

He'd asked her a question. Fortunately it was the sort of binary question that you didn't need to say anything to answer. Keeping a salutary smile on her face, Kiimiti responded with a shake of her head.

[Adonis Inirial]

She wasn't talking. That was an unexpected trait for a communications officer. It was somewhat faulty logic to assume that comms officers were naturally good at communicating - after all, their responsibilities were more about listening than anything else - but still, it didn't seem illogical to assume that they were at least capable of it.

Which meant that Taassaurra was electing not to speak. There could have been all sorts of reasons for that. Adonis had met with Cizerack and Hapan officers before who seemed to perceive his male genes as an affront to their sensibilities. He'd suffered beneath the disapproving glare of Bothans from the SpyNet who found him too human and too Imperial for their liking. From the cursory glance at her supervisor's reports though, which Adonis had familiarised himself with as soon as he arrived, Taassaurra didn't seem the type to subscribe to either attitude. Her profile mentioned a slight speech impediment; that, coupled with the vibrant flashing Nar Shaddaa holosigns announcing her nervous demeanour suggested something a little more personal, and a little more benign.

How then did one go about making a Cizerack feel comfortable? As a male in her society, Adonis would be expected to have a subservient role; perhaps offering a drink, and acting more differential to her gender would help this feel a little less unfamiliar. Then again, the Cizerack also had a considerable amount of respect for status and hierarchy, and while it might feel odd for Taassaurra to find herself outranked by a man, that rank still mattered; trying to overturn that hierarchy might just make things worse.

He opted for reassurance through honesty instead.

"I've been reading the comm-tel reports you've been transmitting back to Bothawui for the last few months," he explained, manoeuvring past any forced pleasantries, trying to establish a comfortably professional scenario that the Preita'rrou might find it easier to relax in. "Now that I'm posted here on the station, I figured it would probably be for the best to get to know the comm officers I'll be working with. Put a face to the log stamp, as it were."

That information was good, but not necessarily helpful. It still presented a situation indirect enough where Taassaurra could avoid answering if she chose to. Instinct urged Adonis to ask a direct question; but somehow he suspected that turning the meeting into a surprise interrogation wouldn't exactly smooth things over.

"May I ask you a few questions about yourself, or would that not be appropriate? I'd like to know more about you, but I don't want to stray beyond what Cizerack culture might deem appropriate."

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

Why couldn't he be old and wrinkled? Better yet, why not a woman? Ugh, don't be ugly, she chided herself internally. Kiimiti swallowed that thought down, hoping even that little act didn't appear as nervous as she was. He wanted to ask questions - not about transmission metadata or about signal lag degredation or about dialect differences between mainline Mando'a and the patois on Concord Dawn. He wanted to ask about her.

He gave her an out, of course. And as much as the Preita'rrou wanted to take it, she couldn't. She might be nervous, but she wasn't dishonest.

"Wh-wh-wh..."

Can't even get the first word out. Kiimiti stopped trying to force it, and tried to look just over the Commander's shoulder. Just make the words already.

"...wh-wh-what do jyou w-w-want to know?"

[Adonis Inirial]

Adonis offered what he hoped was a gently reassuring smile.

"How about we start with work?" he offered, trying to proceed in small steps as best he could.

As he spoke, his attention turned to one of the drawers in his desk, preparing to unleash his emergency ice breaker. He'd intended to use this as a conversational lubricant later on, something to transition from work-based subjects to the more personal kind of queries that Adonis hoped to use to help profile and understand the officers within his sphere of interaction. With Taassaurra though, it seemed like he'd need to resort to such measures a little early.

Adonis wasn't entirely sure what was in the slightly grease-stained paper bag that Yon the Butcher had provided him with. He'd deviated from his usual morning routine to drop by Yon's Shop on his way to the office that morning, seeking out little tastes of home to serve almost as rewards for being forthcoming with their answers. This particular package was, Yon assured him, a popular mid-morning snack back on the Carshoulis Cluster - and, Yon had helpfully added, something fairly sensitive to human sensibilities. Apparently the Gand had enough experience with over-adventurous humans to be cognisant of the squeamishness factor when it came to sampling alien cuisine.

"Why the Trade Fleet, and why a communications officer?" he asked, carefully unfurling the paper bag and coaxing it's flaked, meaty contents out onto a paper plate. He kept half the contents in reserve, crumpling the bag closed again and stashing it back in his drawer, before tossing a first taste in his mouth and nudging the plate to within reach of Taassaurra, gesturing for her to help herself.

"Was it a career that was picked out for you, or is there some underlying passion for linguistics or cryptography that drove you to it?"

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

Kiimi's ears flushed in mild embarrassment at the sight of the little peace offering. It felt like when she was a cub and her teachers coaxed her to come out of her shell. She wasn't nine years old anymore, she was twenty three. It felt a little like regression to the mean. However, she'd swallow a little embarrassment in exchange for results, and so the Preita'rrou quietly accepted the salty dried dartfish fry, popping it in her mouth so that she could chew deliberately and try and make as little noise as possible from the crunchy snack food. Also it helped not to chew so loudly to drown out the question.

"jI had hjigh m-marrkss jin Unji f-f-forr xenol-l...xenoljingujisstjicss. A naturral earr jI g-guesss. jI took bassjic wh-when jI wass ss-ssjix cjycless old. Learrned Mando'a at t-t-ten. Prr-prrjivate tutorr, mjy motherr wass sstrrjict about m-m-mjy sstudjy."

Kiimi helped herself to another dried fish. It was helping at least. She hadn't run up against a wall, and as long as she looked at something interesting on the table, she felt a little more at ease.

"The t-t-t....Trrade Navjy...thejy coverred m-mjy tujitjion jif jI ssjigned a contrract forr ss-sserrvjice afterr grrad-d-duatjion. jIt'ss w-worrth jit becausse the worrk exp-p-p-perrjience...prrjivate companjiess ss-ssee that and jyou c-can get a njice j-job afterr jyourr sserrvjice jiss completed."

A smile. Not a grimace. A little genuine and disarmed smile.

"jI d-djidn't jintend to sstajy forr longerr than mjy rreq-q-qujirred two jyearrss, but jI got a p-prromotjion frrom Su'taun'rrou and jI d-d-d-decjided to sstajy on."

[Adonis Inirial]

Mando'a. Now that was a wonderfully opportune resource. He wondered how common it was for Cizerack to be familiar with the Mandalorian language, given the relative close proximity between the two races, in galactic terms at least. Were Cizerack ships regularly plagued by pirates and mercenaries speaking Mando'a at each other, or was Taassurra something of a prodigy? For all the political talk of cooperation and unity between the Alliance military, there was still a lot that the member worlds had not yet opened up about; the list of unknowns about what went on within the Carshoulis or Hapes Clusters was big enough to fill an analyst's nightmares for months.

Possibilities begun to unfurl in Adonis' mind, avenues he'd yet yet to consider. What additional languages were spoken by the station's security forces, the mechanics, the background staff? If he coukd compile some sort of database, nudge the duty shifts so that the staff who didn't look like they'd understand Mando'a, or Zeltron, or Wookiee were paired with the visitors of interest who might speak it under the pretense of false privacy -

He stopped himself before that maglev of thought travelled too far. Instead he dedicated a little more energy to reinforcing his smile.

"Well we're lucky to have you," he responded, as reassuringly as he could achieve. "Your reports thus far have been flawless; I wish all the commtel reports I receive were as thorough and detailed as yours. If you do ever find yourself looking to change careers, Alliance Intelligence would have to be utterly moronic not to recruit you in a heartbeat."

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

Kiimi's ears were lifted up by the high praise. The Cizerack Trade Navy wasn't exactly a provincial flotilla, but there was hearing praise from a galleon's Suun'da'rrou, and then there was hearing praise from a senior intelligence officer in the Alliance of Free Planets. It was like a backwater Jurru'graathi player getting scouted by the big leagues. Not that she watched sportsball or anything.

"Thank jyou Commanderr. jI'm f-f-f..flat-t-t-t..."

Pause. Back up. Try again.

"Thank jyou."

[Adonis Inirial]

Adonis let his smile fall a little lopsided; or more did not prevent than actively let. It was a habit that he couldn't quite manage to break: all those years spent practising forced and polite smiles back home on Alderaan had made faking it easy; but when a genuine urge to smile took over, it always seemed to tug a little to the left. Mother always told him that it made him look mischievous, as if he were up to something. Truth be told, most of the times his childhood self felt like smiling, it was because he was up to something; some mischief with his brothers or sister, some prank, some scheme, some stolen snack heisted from the kitchens with military precision. He'd been a trickster of a child back in those days: unable to live up to the distinguished trail that Pharos had already blazed, and more interested in the adoration of his younger siblings than the respect and approval of their Father.

He missed that Adonis. The lopsided smile felt out of practice these days. Maybe when Carré -

No. He killed that thought before it had the opportunity to linger. When Carré's baby was born, he'd still be half a galaxy away. He'd visit, of course, but it would be rare and sporadic. Military service would keep him away just as it had done when Benton and Carré were growing up. Just as it had done with Father while Adonis had been growing up. A soul-crushing prospect: a nephew to whom he would become a half-remembered stranger; but that was the job. That was the deal with the devil you made when you first put on the uniform.

"Do you have much of a family, Preita'rrou?"

The phrase tumbled out of his mouth before it screened itself before his better judgement. Quickly he adapted, steering it in a modified direction.

"What I mean to say; you said your mother was the one who encouraged your learning and linguistics. Is that an interest you inherited from her? One you share with siblings? Or is it just yours; something that makes you special?"

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

Was this a normal line of questioning, or was he still trying to put her at ease? Kiimiti snacked on another dried fish, considering how psychiatric this meeting would go. They were already at 'tell me about your mother', more or less. And getting a Cizerack started about her mother might as well be therapy.

"Mjy m-motherr demanded that jI fjind a sstudjy. Sshe wass l-l-lesss than enthussjiasstjic about m-mjy chojice. jIf jit werre up to herr, the rresst of the g-g-galaxjy would learrn Cizeri, not the otherr w-w-wajy arround."

Which put her mother, at worst, among the average for women her age. Kiimi shrugged in an act of dismissal.

"Sshe wass happjierr that jI j-j-jojined the Navjy. jI have ssjix ssjissterrss, and thrree of them sserrve and an-notherr one jiss jin the Academjy. Therre arre ssjix g-g-generratjionss of Taassaurra'ss jin the T-t-trrade Navjy."

[Adonis Inirial]

Adonis smiled a little more.

"Six generations?" he echoed, leaning over to grab a little more of the dried fish, to make sure Taassaurra didn't feel as if she was the only one indulging. He exaggerated the impressed climb of his eyebrow as he leaned back, contemplating that for a few moments as he chewed thoughtfully.

"Sounds like my family. I guess we were the black sheep as far as the noble houses went; never quite bought into that whole Alderaan pacifism thing. Nice in principle, but it's hard to keep peace without peacekeepers. My father, his father, his father... all part of the Judicial Forces, back when that was the closest thing to a navy the Republic had. Family legend said that there'd been an Inirial serving on a Republic starship every single day since the Ruusan Reformation, but I don't think anyone ever bothered to do the due diligence and confirm that."

His brow furrowed slightly, his eyes fixating on a point somewhere in the distance. "My father became an Admiral during the Clone Wars, and served on into the Empire. By eldest brother was Army, I was Navy, and we had two pilots and a Stormtrooper too. All military, save for two: one lawyer; one artist."

A small sigh escaped him. What had started as reciprocal sharing to help set the Preita'rrou at ease had stumbled into something more.

"All gone, save for my baby sister. They were all at home when Alderaan -"

He trailed off, that sentiment hardly in need of completion.

"Family reunion for my father's retirement. I was half-way across the galaxy on assignment, and couldn't go. Carré was flying manoeuvres in orbit when it happened; had a front row seat to the whole thing."

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

Kiimi's ears downturned at that reveal, and it had the way of sucking the breath out of things.

"Kosa."

What exactly did you even say to that kind of revelation? It wasn't like Kiimi's own history at all. At worst, she'd lost two aunts in the outer rim sieges in the War of Republic Aggression. Maybe even to Commander Inirial's kinfolk, though that thought was banished out of decorum.

She remembered hearing about Alderaan as a teenager on the holo feed. It was one of those things that you took with a grain of salt, because the Cizeri media wouldn't hesitate to color the Imperial regime as barbaric. Destroying planets, putting babies on spikes, what next? Her shock and outrage were deferred until years later, after the rest of the galaxy had moved on...well as best as you could move on from that.

"jI'm ss-ssorrjy."

[Adonis Inirial]

Adonis responded with the kind of smile that every survivor of Alderaan wore at some point. Almost everyone had some sort of story about the suffering the Empire could cause. Maybe it wasn't their own, maybe it wasn't even family, or a friend; but everyone knew it was there, even the ones who pretended it didn't. Inevitably, those stories were measured up against each other; and almost always the Alderaanian came out the winner. It was the last monument to their dead world: the collective sympathy of the universe.

The Commander pushed past it, drawing in a breath and throwing his shoulder into conversational progress. His smile found a way to seem a little more genuine.

"You're probably wondering why family even matters, right? Doesn't seem relevant. Isn't something that an intelligence officer wouldn't be able to dig up on his own."

He shrugged.

"I don't know how it is in the Cluster, but in most of the galaxy at large, intelligence officers are viewed with suspicion, and not much else. Couple that with a senior officer, and alien, and a male to boot, and well -"

The lopsided smile was back.

"- I imagine I don't seem all that approachable. I'm not going to try and be one of those officers who tries to be chummy and get on a first name basis with everyone; but when it comes to intelligence, trust is essential. Me trusting you to provide phenomenally detailed communications reports is easy; it requires no effort at all, that's what you've done every day thus far. But you trusting me not to pass any kind of judgement, to not roll my eyes when I read how thorough you've been monitoring cargo freighter comm traffic; you trusting your own judgement in knowing whether or not something is worth reporting; or you trusting that I will give you an honest answer to any questions you might have? Those kinds of trust take work."

Adonis reached for a drawer of his desk again, flipping through a stack of flimsi folders, in search of the aurebesh characters that matched the Preita'rrou's name. His head tilted to the side slightly as he read, tongue clicking idly against the back of his teeth until he found the file he was looking for. Drawing it out carefully, he let his eyes sweep over it for a moment, before handing it across the desk towards Kiimiti.

"This is the profile that Alliance Intelligence has compiled on you," he explained, careful to keep his words as reassuringly matter-of-fact as he could. "Everyone in the Alliance has a file like this somewhere, though most of them don't realise it; it's just a routine thing, part of keeping the Alliance's interests safe."

He allowed a moment for that thought to slowly sink in.

"I haven't read it yet. I will, because that's my job. What I do know is there's nothing in this file that Intel has decided I urgently need to know: if there was, I would have been briefed on it already; and you probably wouldn't have been assigned here in the first place."

Another thoughtful frown creased Adonis' brow. His hand reached out, tugging an ink marker from a neatly arrayed container on the corner of his desk, holding out both it and the file to Kiimiti.

"If there's anything in there that you'd prefer I didn't know, this is your opportunity to redact it from my copy."

[Kiimiti Taassaurra]

Preita'rrou Taassaurra knew enough from working in a posting with proximity to intelligence officers that what Inirial was offering her was a thing that was not done. It wasn't as if she hadn't thought about this ever since she was a cynical teenager either. The Kei A'i Reei were the whispers and shadows of the High Mother's court, and their level of secrecy and paranoia was infamous in it's own right. She'd grown up just knowing that there was a stack of flimsies in a massive vault with her name on it. Every time she had an overdue library pad. Every time she smoked jeeta in uni. Every one of the only six guys she'd ever slept with.

And then she was now in bizarro world, given the chance to not only read her own file, but to redact it at will? Once again cynicism made her consider whether this was just one in a hundred copies in the hands of key commands throughout the sector. But she was a grown-assed adult now, not a pimply conspiracy theory girl. And the truth, as she was now reading it, was that she just wasn't all that interesting.

A few finger swipes to pan the document. Her Uni transcripts. Grades. Family history. Military postings. A weirdly random set of hits on a HoloNet search that involved, among other things, a few dozen angry and bored rants about the fifteenth edition Baai'a Naakathee comics, which were the only thing that she ended up blacking out simply because nobody needed to know that she trolled some kids in a forum in all caps glyphs.

But that was it. Gee, it kind of crushed to get a glimpse of how dull you really were.

"That'ss the w-w-wejirrdesst thjing jI thjink jI've everrr d-done."

Kiimi returned the flimsi to Adonis, wishing that she'd just black the entire thing out so that she appeared more mysterious and interesting.

[Adonis Inirial]

Adonis left out a soft chuckle at that. He'd seen the faint disappointment that had settled onto her features, and had been genuinely pleased when she'd managed to find at least something to withhold from him. From her reaction, it hadn't seemed like the kind of stomach twisting guilt or embarrassment that some of her peers had expressed while reading over their own files, but the what didn't really matter. What did matter was the trust exercise: the fact that instead of Adonis seeming like some all-knowing intelligence officer who should be regarded with reluctance and hesitation, Kiimiti now felt as if she had at least some small amount of control over the secrets that were known.

"Back on Alderaan," Adonis began to explain, flipping the folder closed before returning it to his desk. "There was a saying: to undo the mistakes of the past, all you require is a historian and a pen."

It seemed strange hearing the words in his own voice rather than his fathers; the phrase had been uttered by the Admiral more than once to assuage Adonis' guilt over actions that could no longer be altered. It had always seemed so comforting back then, such an optimistic notion. As Adonis had grown older however, he'd begun to understand the darker side of that truth; he'd even seen it, executed as a core concept of Imperial strategy, rewriting Palpatine's atrocities into acts of heroism and mercy.

"If that's true, then congratulations are in order, Miss Taassaurra: you just rewrote the past."

A subtle, mischievous glint crept into the corner of Adonis' smile.

"You're practically a politician."