And There Was Another✔️

Chapter 13: Agony

Seth opened his eyes to a world of pain.

For several seconds, he simply laid there...wherever he was, and tried to figure out what had gone wrong this time. All he could see was a scarred, pitted, old plate-metal ceiling. He smelled blood. He heard a hum of power from somewhere nearby, and something drip-drip-dripping as well. Otherwise, his senses told him nothing, save for the fact that his whole body hurt. Particularly his neck. This pain was familiar...

And that little seed of knowledge was what gave him his memories back.

A Bothan stun stick. Someone had hit him with one. Damn, those things hurt like a bitch. His whole body ached more than it had before, and now, on top of an awful, seemingly omnipresent headache, his neck hurt pretty bad, too. It was probably burned. Great. So what was this about? Seth slowly, miserably sat up. He was lying on a very simple mattress shoved into one corner of a windowless room. He took it in slowly, feeling a panicky, creeping horror begin to seep icily into his guts. The only other thing in the room was a toilet.

The walls were barren, save for one section of one wall that resembled a window turned opaque, a kind of milky white color where only the vaguest of shapes could be seen through. Okay, so, he'd been captured. Knocked out and captured. But why? What could they want from him? Surely they'd been able to determine that he really had given up basically everything in his bid to get the part. Had he been mistaken for someone else? Or was this totally unrelated to Warner? Someone else was getting in on his business, maybe a hostile takeover or a robbery, and Seth had walked right into the middle of it without realizing?

Something was moving beyond the smoked glass, a vague figure.

Well, hopefully he'd get some answers soon.

The shadowy figure stopped moving, then the window went clear. A face stared in at him. It wore an ugly smile.

"Warner," Seth said.

"Yes. Hello Callisten," Warner replied merrily, his voice being piped in from a hidden speaker somewhere nearby.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"Straight to the point is appreciated, and will help you here. I didn't get to where I am without gathering knowledge and thorough research. And I know that the part you were looking for, which I do actually have, by the way, is only useful in one thing: it's a core component of an old radar scrambler. An old but powerful one. Which would only be of use to you if you were planning on getting off this planet and past the Sith quarantine," Warner replied.

Seth didn't know there was an actual quarantine in effect now, only that they had a kind of vague orbital blockade. Well, crap. That would make this a bit more complicated.

"What difference would that make?"

"My research has indicated that the radar scrambler, in the right ship, has a good chance of making it past the quarantine. I have such a ship, but I don't have the scrambler. So, simply put, give me the scrambler and you can go."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Seth replied, his voice flat.

Warner's cheery smile faltered. "Callisten...while I would prefer not to resort to...darker methods of information extraction, I will if I must."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Warner. I wanted that part for something else."

Warner sighed. "Very well."

He reached over to his right and suddenly Seth's world went white, turning into sizzling, screaming, burning agony that engulfed his entire being. It was almost like he was briefly transported to another dimension of pure pain.