The Republic has fallen.
In the final days of the Clone Wars, Chancellor Palpatine died under mysterious circumstances. With the Senate struggling to retain a sense of unity, it was the perfect time for the Separatists to strike. And strike they did...
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Ahsoka sat frozen by the window, watching as the austere grey building, the most famous of those that housed the Onderon slave auctions, loomed up like a square mass of rock out of a sea of faces. Waves of buyers and simple window shoppers rippled around it, flowing leisurely between tents flying brightly colored flags from systems where slavery was legal – Zygerria, Rhea, Kessel, several of the Hutt worlds – and dozens more she didn't recognize.
Those tents were the independent contractors, the ones who'd been deemed too new to the game or too unreliable or too lacking in affluence to gain a spot in the building itself. The true danger lay within, as Ahsoka knew only too well.
Still, she couldn't look away from the crowds, the tents, and the fenced-in holding areas where slaves huddle together, waiting to be sold. Every now and then the guards or a merchant would unlock a pen and drag a trembling creature out onto a podium to undergo inspection from a potential buyer. The airspeeder was near enough now that she could hear criers yapping their prices and fine quality.
They were moving too quickly to catch individual faces unless she squinted, but at a glance she could single out those who'd just been forced into slavery from those who were being sold for the second, third, fourth time. The new ones struggled against their chains as they were led into view. The older ones wore listless, vacant expressions. Repeated jolts of electricity spiking from their trackers directly into their spinal columns had drawn every last drop of defiance from their veins. She had one just like it that she could dimly sense buried in her chest if she went looking for it.
These were people who'd lost any and all hope that things could change, or who would soon have it taken away from them. To them, unspeakable horrors were commonplace, and torture a fact of everyday life.
As the airspeeder banked left and slowed to land on one of the platforms built into the side of the auction house, Ahsoka's eyes locked onto a flash of movement below. A Twi'lek male with pastel blue skin was putting up a fight.
The Zygerrian manning that particular booth barked something vile in his native tongue and drew an electro-whip as the Twi'lek reared back, writhing against the attendant hauling him out by the arm and the other who had a hold on the chain around his neck. He was young, definitely not fully grown, but strong enough to give them trouble until the whip cracked, and golden sparks slithered over his body. Then, bleeding from the burn and barely coherent, he was pulled to the nearest podium and chained to the pole at its center.
And whipped again while the waiting crowd began bidding.
Ahsoka's fingers dug into the curtain still clenched between them, to the point that even with their careful trimming her sturdy Togruta claws were in danger of tearing the fabric. She wanted to shut her eyes, or look away, but it was like she was in a dream or a memory. Her control was gone. There was only the smell of singed flesh in her nostrils, the electric heat of the whip on her back, and the Force roiling in pain just beyond her collapsing mental barriers–
