No matter how many people or regulations tried to convince him to call it Imperial Center, to Lúka Jibral it would always be Coruscant. It may not have been the planet of his birth, but it was hard to argue the case for anywhere else in the galaxy to be considered his homeworld. He had been raised here, awoken every morning of his childhood to the sight of the city's gleaming spires through the windows of the Jedi Temple. He had peered down into the depths of the shadowy canyons that lay between the towering buildings, hundreds of layers and levels of life and structure stacked on top of each other. His Master had described it as living archaeology: most civilizations would wait until a city was abandoned before they built upon the ruins, but no one on Coruscant had that kind of patience. If that were true, then descending down into the lower levels was like travelling back in time. The young Lúka had scoffed at the romanticised poetry of such a sentiment, but it had stuck, lodged in the back of his mind like a shard of shrapnel too thoroughly entrenched to be safely removed.

Despite being his de facto homeworld, Lúka had a hard time feeling as if he belonged here. In part, it was a symptom of his time away: a decade spent fleeing from the Jedi Purge, and two more secreted away as a covert operative for the Inquisitorious. In part, it was because of how much had changed: a temple ruined and then repurposed; a city that had once been a multicultural haven now cowering beneath the heel of the Empire's humanocentric regime. Perhaps the most significant part, however, was the fact that despite being raised here, Lúka had always been apart of it. The Jedi lived in isolation, venturing out of their golden towers only rarely to dispense justice to less enlightened beings. Much of Lúka's time as a padawan had been dedicated to the Clone Wars, travelling the galaxy to fight the very same battles that had flooded Coruscant's lower levels with refugees from a hundred different worlds. There was some solace, at least: trillions might live on Coruscant, but it was home to no one. Beings simply existed here, seeking a reprieve from whatever factors had driven them from their true homes, or waiting desperately for the first opportunity to scramble their way to freedom from it.

Lúka glanced upwards as the towering walls of the Alien Protection Zone rose up to surround them, watching as the thin ribbon of Coruscanti sky above faded into an imperceptible line. It was one of many regions of Coruscant that he had never glimpsed, let alone visited before. Apt, he supposed: most called it Invisec, the Invisible Sector, a walled enclosure created during the early days of the Empire as a refuge for non-humans fleeing danger and prejudice elsewhere in the Galactic City, and then promptly neglected by the authorities that had created it. There was no proof that the Protection Zone had been created to deliberately segregate aliens from humans, but it was an accepted truth. Everyone knew what the Empire was, and the differential value it placed on some species versus others; examples like Invisec were demonstrations of just how little the Imperial populace cared. The people here truly were invisible, deep enough in Coruscant's catacombs to be out of sight and out of mind.

Yet, the Alien Protection Zone was seen - or at least, it was watched. The Imperial Knights surveilled much of the Empire, for signs of dissent, disloyalty, and danger to the throne. A mixture of code, droids, and sentient scrutiny filtered through feeds and transmission streams from across the Imperial regime, registering certain keywords and scenarios, and flagging them for the attention of an Imperial Knight. For Lúka's collegues, their attention was required for insurgents, terrorists, and interstellar gangsters. For Lúka Jibral?

He let out a sigh as their speeder came to a stop against the duracrete landing platform, a respectful distance from the swarm of Imperial Center Security Forces agents bustling in and out of a seedy looking alien bodega. With a tired ache in the small of his back, he swung himself out of the driver's seat, and tugged the tinted pilot's lenses from his eyes, folding them closed and tucking them into a pocket. Whatever had transpired here, law enforcement had described it as the right kind of unusual to warrant Knight attention - and it fell to Lúka to provide that attention. Apparently, suspicions of a rogue Force User where his thing; this wasn't the first such incident that he had investigated, and he doubted it would be the last.

His vision strayed across to the passenger of his speeder, the halfbreed Cadet whose presence he had requested for an assortment of reasons. Company. Scrutiny. Familiarity. Lúka might never have visited the Alien Protection Zone specifically, but the beauty of the Empire is that they were wonderfully consistent in how their prejudice was applied. If you'd seen one Coruscant ghetto, you'd seen them all - and Onika Zepparah had the misfortune of growing up in one.

Lúka offered her a small nod, and a subtle, emotionless smile of reassurance.

"You ready for this, Cadet?"