It was easy to sneak into her old apartment building. For some reason, the French police felt that a tiny line of yellow tape saying "Do Not Cross" was sufficient enough to keep people from entering.
Unfortunately, Crawler was never the one to listen to authority. Especially the authority wielded by a ticker tape wannabe line. She let her vibroblade holdout slide delicately into her hands and she sliced the tape. As it fell gracefully to the sides, Crawler walked past them and up the stairs.
She walked down the hallway and stopped outside the door that was her apartment. Another tickertape guard was disposed of in quick fashion, and the mercenary walked inside. There, she was able to get a good look at the results of her intruders.
The first thing she noted was that the kitchen counter had been destroyed. Her explosives had specifically been placed in a corner where not a lot of damage would have come into the kitchen area. After all, once the explosion had hit the gas stove, it would have been a little hard to recover her stashes. The destruction of the counter was not from the explosion, but from something afterwards.
And it seemed that one of the stashes was gone. Crawler knelt down beside the remains of the kitchen counter and shifted through the rubble with her left hand. Nothing left from the backpack there, not even a caught fiber. She had a feeling that the bag that had been here was not in the hands of the French Police.
Not good, Crawler thought to herself as she stood up. She carefully made her way through the soot and ashes, trying not to leave any distinctive footprints. She made her way to her bed and knelt beside it. The metal framework was all that was left of the sleeping pallet, but that didn't concern her. She carefully pushed the framework aside and examined the floorboards beneath it. After locating the correct one, she took her vibroblade and dug it into the seam of the board and worked it up.
Pulling the floorboard aside, Crawler reached into the floor and pulled up a box. Sitting on the ground, she pressed the blinking red light on the top three times quickly. It made a quiet beep, and the lid popped open. Inside the box was a spare comlink, another throwing star holder and a few stars, as well as a few other odds and ends. She had lost most of her hardware back when Rouddim had left her for dead in the forest, and she didn't keep a stock on her bomber because it would be too inconvenient to get at.
Once she was restocked, she did a quick once-over of her apartment, but nothing else was determinable from the wreckage. Whoever had been in her apartment before it had blown was very good at covering their presence. She sighed in frustration and started for the doorway, then stopped, staring at the floor.
She looked at where the door should have been. The door was completely blown off its hinges and scorched to the point where it was almost unreconizable. However, where the doorway was, there was a straight line of scorched floor, as if the destruction didn't fold out into the hallway. After examining the door closer, she nodded in understanding that the door was scorched on both sides equally, the way it should be. So why doesn't the destruction continue out into the hallway?
She squatted down in the doorway and traced a line across the floor. Soot from her finger remained behind in the once clean spot. It's not scorch proof. And I know it's not been cleaned since the explosion cause it's too straight of a separation line...
Then it hit her. The person who had been in her apartment had known somehow about the bomb. They must have gotten out just in time and put up some kind of shield to protect themselves from the blast. But how in Hoth....
Jedi. She raised her lip up in a smirk. So, a Jedi has come to visit while I was away.
She stood and looked around the destroyed apartment again. What would a Jedi be wanting from her? Unless somehow they had found out about her origins, about her mission. But where could a Jedi have come from without her getting any warnings from Bob or the professor? Both had kept good watches on the air traffic between there and Terra...
Terra. Maybe they were already on Terra. Her mind went to the Terran she had left at the clinic a few hours back. If that one had been here.... She closed her eyes and pulled out her comlink.
"Professor."
There was a moment pause, then a reply. "I hear you."
"I think I've got a problem."