Lúka paced calmly along the Invisec street, feeling his surroundings as much as looking at him. The area felt disturbed; not by the violence at the bodega, but in general. Whatever had transpired, it felt like a ripple in an already stormy sea, and sensing for clues was like trying to follow footsteps through the scene of a stampede. This was not a well-kept part of the city, and it was heavily travelled, a cacophony of imprints and impressions led by the souls who passed through day after day. Signs of a scuffle, bootprints from fleeing feet, echoes of anger and conflict that had soaked into the duracrete; they could have been from today, or days ago, related to this or something else entirely.

It was a common complaint on Coruscant, however, which made law and order somewhat complicated to maintain. Bodies could be autopsied, bloodstains analysed, but so much of traditional police work was a lost cause before it even began. If the murder weapon wasn't there waiting for you at the scene, or the incriminating evidence not on the person of your suspect, then why even start to look in a city with infinite places for things to be hidden, or lost, or tossed over the edge into a thousand-storey freefall? Here on Coruscant, building cases was a process reserved for the famous and infamous: corruption, embezzlement, and high-profile homicide. For the rest of the citizenry? Unless you got lucky and stumbled across reliable digital witnesses, criminals were usually only caught in the act, not after the fact.

Realities like that made Lúka glad that as a Jedi, an Inquisitor, and a Knight, the burden of proof had never fallen on his shoulders. His task was to apprehend, to detain, to investigate, to interrogate. His priority, his objective, was to remove dangers from the equation, to separate the innocent from those that would do them harm, by whatever means he felt was necessary. For a Jedi, sometimes that had meant chasing the guilty from one end of the galaxy to the other. For an Inquisitor, that meant darkened rooms and amoral tactics. For an Imperial Knight?

A small sigh escaped him, as his attention washed gently across the surroundings, falling on the duracrete like the gentle attention of rain. The Knights were an enigma, to themselves as much as anyone else, a cacophony of interpretations with no certainty about whom was right. Send Lady Vissica into a situation like this, and the truth would be extracted by force, terror and chaos left in her wake. Send Lady Sturkov, and that that terror might become bodies. Lord Cain might have resorted to diplomacy, or felt shackled by protocol and due process in the interests of appearance. Others might have been more shrewd, or inclined to buy into the corruption of these lower levels, or any of a myriad other strategies - and all of them would be equally right and wrong; because the Imperial Knights themselves were a mosaic of contradictions. Each came from a different background, each interpreting their confusing mandate to succeed both the Inquisitors and the Jedi, to enforce through fear while also beating the drum of betterness and progress.

He supposed the Jedi had not been any different; not during the final gasping years of their existence, at least. It had not merely been the Clone Wars that drove the Jedi to war in the name of peace, or cultivated brutality among some in the interests of victory. That the Clone Wars had transpired at all fell on the shoulders of the Jedi's own mistakes: it was their aggression - which they were supposed to be better than - that had sparked the disastrous mission to Baltizaar that had supposedly driven Count Dooku from the Order; and the hubris of those who thought themselves better than the Code, and wiser than prophecy that had allowed Darth Vader to be cultivated in their midsts. It was the corruption of incorruptible Jedi that had given rise to the Dark Acolytes, to the Inquisitors, and to Vader himself, morality and decency torn asunder by the mistaken belief that the dark side was the answer.

Therein lay the impossible duality, that had plagued Force Wielders since the dawn of civilization. There was no question that the light side of the Force was good, and yet light could not exist without its companion darkness, and the interplay between the two led to corruption and chaos. The Jedi sought to stabilise that chaos by extinguishing the darkness, and blanketing the universe in peace and serenity. The Sith sought stability through dominance and control, seeing darkness as the natural resting state of the cosmos. Others attempted to rationalise the two, to seek balance in different ways. For some, that balance existed in themselves, seeking coexistence between the darkness and the light; but so often, those scales tipped towards shadow, and ended in corruption. The Imperial Knights, it seemed, had adopted a different approach: balance on aggregate, coexistence in the Force achieved not within individuals, but between individuals. Stability by average. There was logic in that, Lúka supposed.

Something whispered at him through the Force, the faintest trace of something in the water that should not have been there. His senses focused on it, the faintest smear of darkness, one stain among a myriad others on the duracrete pillar that supported an overpass a few storeys above the main thoroughfare. It was not a difficult trace to have overlooked - or underlooked, perhaps: Lúka Jibral was above average in height as humans went, but even for him the trace had been left above eye level. It was easy to miss, easy to forget that there were sentient beings on Coruscant who towered above the roughly human proportions that so much of the galaxy seemed to conform to. He reached, retrieving the Hush-98 from within his jacket, and tugging a small transpariplast slide from the base of the unit. A sample was collected, slotted into the base of the device, and then the unit activated, microphone orientated towards Lúka's lips.

"I'm sure you're busy extracting Cadet Hoob from whatever container he's managed to entrap part of himself in this time," Lúka offered into the device, fighting against the small smile that attempted to form at the recollection, "But I need a favour. Whenever you get the chance, I need a species profile and a midi-chlorian count on the blood sample I just transmitted. Thanks Doc, I owe you one."

The device was clicked off, and returned to Lúka's pocket, the message and the attached data transmitted off to the Citadel servers to wait until Doctor Xivelle had the opportunity to retrieve it and respond. It wasn't the most expedient choice, he supposed: he could have signalled Ivy, or Lapis, and respected a response almost instantly. Rationally, he told himself that it was a choice born out of subconscious caution, ensuring that any evidence in the case was collected via legitimate Imperial Knight channels, rather than his own off the books resources. The Knights were granted some degree of latitude in the ways in which they conducted themselves and their missions on behalf of the Empire - Lúka knew, for example, that Vissica had been cultivating her own resources in the criminal underworld, though to what extent he wasn't entirely sure - but this wasn't a Knight mission, and if the people of this district were to receive some much-needed justice, a certain degree of propriety was necessary. In truth though, the reality was something far simpler: he had needed assistance, and Anastasia had been the only choice that came to mind.

Barely three minutes had passed, and Lúka hadn't even completed his casual stroll back towards the bodega, before the data device on his wrist vibrated, alerting him of a new transmission. The smile threatened his lips again as he glanced at the characters displayed on the backlit screen, and he indulged it for a few private seconds.

Whiphid. Midichlorian count low. Sensitivity unlikely. - Dr. Xiv

A Whiphid. Disappointing. Lúka had been hoping for a Wookiee, if only as an excuse to practise his rusty Shyriiwook. On the data screen, he tapped back a quick message of receipt and thanks, before tugging the sleeve of his jacket back over his wrist comm, and setting his sights on the Coruscant Security van.