Coronet City

*Syren scanned the room, sipping the rum. People came, very few went from the bar. She closed her eyes and let the Force do the seeing for her. Listening to the will of the Force was always a strange sensation. It felt similar to all of your nerve endings suddenly being on fire to a cooling presence guiding you where to look and listen. Each new person passed glowing with some strange light but not one she was apparently looking for, until she found it.

Syren opened her eyes to look at the man pulling away from the bar with a bottle of Corellian Ale.*

"Sithspit, you're still alive." *Her oath came out louder than she had expected, and she was somewhat surprised to see Atton Kaelan in a bar years and parsecs far and away from Anobis.

*Syren looked the man up and down for a moment. How long ago was the battle on Anobis? Was that even the last time she had seen Atton? She quickly scanned through the odd bits of memory she had strung together.* "I'm going to ask a really awkward question," *She paused thinking a moment about how to word this, * "Am I dead?"

*Syren did not feel dead, but if she suddenly were, she imagined that she would end up in the scuzziest bar on one of the most irritating planets in the galaxy as part of her afterlife solely to be haunted by figures from her past that she had utterly failed.

Or maybe she wasn't dead, perhaps people never died in the galaxy and it was simply an illusion... well that was hopeful... but maybe not.* "Nevermind, don't answer that. How've you been, not dead and all?"

*Syren knew about cheating death, so she nodded and took another draw from her rum.* "Given that I'm not entirely sure that I'm alive, I'm going to hedge with the classic, I've been better." *She was being chatty, this was not the classic pattern for her. But then again, she had mostly lost her mind for the umpteenth time, so it was quite possible she was not feeling herself. She found herself staring at Atton, not fully knowing what to say. In the end it was a lame,* "You're a normal human, right?" *Because if anyone could ask awkward and untimely questions, it was Syren.*

*Syren sensed that he had run empty so she edged the bottle of rum towards him.* "Well if you have the normal human lifespan, then either I was very much dreaming this morning, or I am reliving a memory now." *She picked at her glass,* "You ever have the feeling that someone is just picking and choosing the worst moments of your existence and writing it down, where you have to perform the same daunting task over and over again, without any real satisfaction when it comes to a close?"

*Syren took a drink,* "Yesterday I was feeling my planet burn to the ground around me, and the day before that I was holding a child dying of plague in my arms trying to console her, last week I was witness to this planet exploding..." *Her eyes scanned briefly around the room, she was not alltogether sure, but it seemed like people had edged away from her table and the barkeep was seconds away from calling CorSec, which was something he probably had never done in his life.

*Syren quirked an eyebrow then looked down at the bottle of rum.*
"Oh right. Alcohol has a psychotropic effect on you guys." *She considered this for a moment,* "Lucky bastards. It's like sugar water to me." *Then she did a slight double-take,,* "Be Careful with that, it is a tad stronger than you might be used to..."

*She leaned back against the wall and sighed deeply.* "I shall assume that you have never experienced the wonderful sensation of reliving your life in random scraps and moments as you go about the business of your day." *She considered getting up to grab another bottle of liquor, but thought better of it, after all it didn't do anything to her. To be honest, she preferred bars to get a handle of her empathy. It was hard to shut out the noise of a large city like this one, at least with drunk people you could commiserate. Now if she could just a get a handle on this whole being out of a time line thing, she might be on to something big when it came to understand the Force.*

*She shrugged.* "It certainly wouldn't be the first time." *Concentrating was becoming difficult. She wasn't quite sure what it was she concentrating on either. Was she trying to keep this moment from ending? Was she trying to keep the incessant voices of everyone else from overcoming her own mind? Was the Force being insistent that she needed to move on to another call from the future... or the past? "I just don't know when I am anymore."

*Syren sighed again and felt that fuzzy feeling start to wash over her, a signal that the she had lost the concentration battle for... something. "Do you feel tingly?"

*Syren stood up and walked to the bar with another credit between her fingers.* "What's your poison Atton?" *As she reached the bar a long and loud siren began to belt out from somewhere in the city. Syren looked first to the bartender, then around the room, until finally settling onto Atton's face. "You hear that right?

*Syren moved towards the door, forgetting about the Corellian Ale, but leaving behind the credit.* "What's on this street besides the Spaceport?" *She turned to the bartender and caught his eyes. The man was a shrewd business man, you didn't last long in this part of Coronet if you weren't, but his eyes glazed over as Syren reached out through the Force to brush her will lightly against his own.

Syren's suggestion pulled images to the front of his mind. She mentally flicked through them quickly. They were human thoughts, distorted to her, but images of the streets on this side of the city. The Spaceport was an obvious target, as well as several fronts for money laundering, there were one or two smaller establishments on both sides of the street, and a large industrial building. Syren thought that it looked a bit like a laboratory. The last image was a CorSec branch office.

She released her grasp on the Force and so the bartender. The process took matter of heart beats, and she was out the door.

The siren blared in the street, and the sounds of CorSec responding to the disturbance were on the wind as well. Syren stopped, standing perfectly still as she dived into the Force again. Her senses sharpened, sound and smell became painfully keen. There was something on the air that seemed so familiar, but she could not quite place it. Then there was the subtlest wisp of and swish of a clicking sound that Syren was all too familiar with.

Syren tried to wrench her senses back to their normal volume as time seemed to slow down. There was a near deafening explosion down the street coupled with a blinding flash, followed by a massive shock wave that rippled through the buildings along the road and pushed Syren physically back into the side of the building where she crumpled to the ground in a heap, a trickle of bluegreen blood dripping from her nose.