Thread: [ the apprentice ] [ newblood x Niksis ]

Zyra Th'lea fingers wove through dried strands of long, dark mahogany colored hair. She braided the strands together, creating a series of decorative and ornate braids along her head. She really had to make an impact tonight she had been recovering from a particularly rough evening several nights ago here on Coruscant. As the scrappy daughter of a conquered crime family, she was unfortunately pretty. The woman, somewhere in her mid twenties, was a dancer in the grimy underbelly of the overpopulated world, dancing on bar tops and in cages to keep lonely and uninteresting men entertained. She had the frame for it lithe and tall, strong and soft. The florescence of the underworld served her well, reflecting enticingly off of her dark hair and cream colored skin. Blasting music and idle chat of her workplace, a seedy bar, lulled her as she worked, weaving hair up and out of her face. Something ripped her away from her focus - a humming that wasn't familiar to her. It felt eerie and wrong, this humming. Zyra slowly stood from her stool facing a mirror, exposing her little piece for the evening a pair of leather pants and heeled boots, a mesh tank top over a matching leather bralette. Her hair was braided back, exposing the bruises and healed cuts from a bar brawl several nights earlier that had really taken her value down. Commotion in the bar. Zyra couldn't help but want to investigate a good fight. On teetering heels, she took steps from behind the backstage area, passed where other dancers had stopped displaying their writhing bodies to loud and intense music to watch as troopers entered their hole-in-the-wall. Zyra watched with her arms wrapped around her middle as an overwhelming sense of dread rolled over her. She took a step backward as she watched, sensing the urgency coming from the other onlookers around her. She was well aware that this location had served as a geopolitical hot zone at times, but this seemed different somehow. Before she could really register what was going on, the young woman was in the thick of what appeared to be a search. Troopers shone lights in girl's faces, prompting her to pull her eyebrows together in question. Out of the corner of her eye, Zyra spotted a friend being forced to her knees with blasters pointed at her head for getting too rough in response to the storm trooper's interrogating. Hey, let her go! Zyra demanded, fist raising and clenching. Her long, black nails dug uncomfortably into the palms of her hands, nearly breaking the skin. The blasters in their hands crunched and popped, destroyed on her whim. Zyra's eyebrows raised and her jaw unhinged, a hitched breath unable to make it through her plush, red painted pout out of shock. She knew she had just outed herself and put a target onto her back. Suddenly troopers swarmed her, pushing through bar patrons. Zyra raised her hands in surrender, circled entirely. She swallowed, filling herself with bravado. Her chest tightened, feeling cracking and buzzing within her very soul as he neared. Zyra's emerald green eyes were focused on the ominously blacked figure as he neared, looking into where his eyes should have been without the mask. She swallowed hard, arms still raised in surrender. She had no idea what she had just done, but this was not the first instance of such a connection to something greater than herself. She had lived her entire life knowing that there was something within her that was untapped - and more terrifyingly - untamed. Eyes were unblinking as the dread increased, now standing chest to chest with him. She knew who this man was, and she had the sense that she was about to die by his infamous temper. She was quiet, simply lifting her angular jaw and keeping still.