My brain did a hard reboot.
Wait, I'm crying?
I brought a hand up to my face. Sure enough, my cheeks were wet.
"Why am I crying?"
Vasha's brow furrowed with concern, her eyes softening as she sat beside .
"I don't know, sparkplug. I ca in and you were just sitting here, completely still, with tears rolling down your face. I thought... I don't know what I thought."
She looked genuinely distressed, which in turn made feel like an asshole.
"Oh. Uh." I scrambled for a plausible excuse that wasn't 'I was visiting the star-ghost of my past life inside my own brain.'
"I was just rembering sothing. There was... a really chubby loth-cat. I used to play with it in the past. It just went away one day and didn't return."
It wasn't false. I did miss my cat. Loved that girl, even though she, for reasons as unknown as the breast size of Shmi Skywalker, kept shoving her butt in my face first thing in the morning.
Vasha's expression softened, her lekku drooping slightly in sympathy. "Oh, sparkplug. Losing pets is hard."
She gently wiped a tear from my cheek with her thumb. "When I was little, I had a pet glow-beetle. Nad her Sparkles."
"A... glow-beetle?" I asked, montarily distracted from my own mories.
"Yep! She was beautiful. Had these amazing purple markings." Vasha smiled fondly. "I kept her in a little terrarium in my room."
"What happened to her?"
"My brother ate her," she said matter-of-factly.
I blinked several tis, processing what I'd just heard. "He... what?"
"Ate her. Said he thought she'd give him glowing insides." Vasha shrugged as if this was a perfectly normal childhood incident. "He was disappointed when that didn't happen. Threw up for days, though."
"Your brother... ate... your pet beetle," I repeated slowly.
"Twi'lek children can be very experintal with food," she said, patting my shoulder. "Don't worry, your loth-cat probably just found another ho. Much better fate than being soone's glowing snack experint."
I stared at her, horrified. "Vasha."
She gave a solemn little nod. "It was a rough week."
Another beat.
Then I snorted. Couldn't help it. A laugh slipped out before I could stop it.
She smiled, brushing a thumb under my eye to wipe away what was left of the tears.
"See? Better. Just don't go having tragic animal mories without , alright? I'll help you find the missing toy. Or avenge the beetle."
"Deal," I said, my voice cracking slightly.
She gave my hair a final, gentle ruffle before standing up.
I sat there, the lingering warmth of her touch mixing with the faint, surreal image of a heroic beetle farting defiantly to the end.
I decided that was enough. Enough philosophy, enough taphysics, enough soul-searching for one day and enough of getting your pet eaten by brother.
My brain felt like it had run a marathon through the fifth dinsion. Ti to wrap it up.
...
...
Fuck Fuck Fuck
I jolted awake for the second damn ti in as many nights, heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to punch its way out of my chest.
Sa breathless panic. Sa disorientation where I couldn't tell if I was in the shop or back in that fucking cellar.
Except this ti, Vasha was right there.
Her arm was still draped over , her lekku tangled with mine, her breath warm against the back of my neck. No cold empty space. No frantic search across the mattress. Just her familiar weight and the steady rhythm of her breathing, sa as it had been five minutes ago when I fell asleep.
So why did I feel like I'd just run a kiloter uphill?
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to shake the feeling. It wasn't a dream I could rember—it was like waking up in the middle of one I'd already forgotten, with only the emotional hangover left behind. That sa awful, naless dread that made my skin crawl and my pulse race. And weirdly, the first thing my brain latched onto in the panic? Vasha. Always Vasha.
I lay there for what felt like forever, willing my heart to slow the hell down. Eventually, when the adrenaline started to fade but the unease wouldn't, I carefully peeled myself out of her grip. She barely stirred, just mumbled sothing unintelligible and rolled onto her side, still half-asleep.
The shop was dark and quiet except for the low hum of the power converters in the back room. I shuffled to the kitchen area—more like a corner with a sink and a rusty old water dispenser—and filled a cup. The cool water helped, but my hands were still shaking slightly.
This was the second night. First ti I could write it off as stress or bad spice rice. But twice? In a row? Sothing was definitely wrong, and I had zero clue what it was. No vision. No warning. Just this... feeling. Like I'd missed sothing important, but I couldn't rember what.
I leaned against the counter, staring into the cup. Is this what Force premonitions felt like? From what I rembered of the movies and comics, they were supposed to be more like... videos. Clear images of sothing bad happening. Not this vague, emotional fog with no context.
Or was it even that?
Maybe my brain was just misfiring after two years of pushing Hyper Perception too hard. Or maybe it was just stress. Or maybe I'd finally cracked under the pressure of pretending to be a kid while feeling like an adult trapped in one.
If not for those reasons, then why did it happen again? And why did it always center around her?
I shook my head, trying to clear the thought.
Maybe I was just making reasons to make it look like I was ignoring an so very obvious flag to progress the story? Hah, as if.
I finished the water and set the cup down, rubbing my face. I wasn't that dumb...or maybe I was.
But whatever this was, I had a feeling that it wasn't going away. And the worst part? I couldn't even tell Vasha about it. How do you explain to soone that you keep waking up with your heart trying to escape your chest, when you don't even understand why it's happening yourself?
I glanced back toward the bed where she was still sleeping peacefully. Just seeing her there, safe and sound, helped a little. Not enough to make the palpitations go away completely, but enough to make it bearable.
I padded back to bed, sliding carefully under the covers so I wouldn't wake her. She shifted slightly, her arm finding its way back around in her sleep. I let out a slow breath, trying to match her rhythm.
I didn't know what the hell this was. I didn't know why it kept happening. I didn't know if it ant anything at all.
--
Morning ca late.
Or maybe I did.
Hard to tell in Capital City, where the sun shows up about as often as an honest politician. Everything outside the depot looked like a grayscale depression filter had been applied—buildings half-covered in rust, sky sitting at a solid tier-five pollution level, and the sound of so poor bastard already yelling at a cargo droid for being ten seconds late. Classic.
I didn't feel tired exactly. Just... slow. Emotionally sluggish. Like my brain was still buffering from last night's episode of "Panic Attacks, but Make It Existential."
Vasha was still asleep beside , wrapped around like a warm, sleepy octopus with perfect lekku placent. Which, under any other circumstances, would've been cause for a little internal celebration. But right now, the warmth felt heavy. Too close to comfort, not enough distance for clarity.
I gently disentangled myself, slipped out of bed without waking her, and padded barefoot toward the workshop side of the depot. The floor was cool against my feet—probably because the heating grid was being temperantal again. Add that to the growing list of things I wasn't emotionally equipped to fix right now.
I spent so ti ditating, the old way, without any force bullshit or anything. Just and my mind, and the utter silence of the morning.
Deep breaths...deep breaths....
Dammit. It wasn't helping.
My head felt very ...clogged, if i were to say so with lack of correct words to describe the feeling.
My mind kept going back to the feelings of last night and the night before that, the palpatations and pounding in heart.
I couldn't concentrate for fucks sake. I tried diverting my mind to more interesting stuff, like the ridiculously exciting inner world I'd stumbled into. The raw, fundantal nature of the Living Force; the binary star system of a mashed-up soulscape living rent-free in my head… it was all there, a cosmic playground of questions begging to be answered. A place full of taphysical puzzles and poetic existentialism and possibly the Force equivalent of a nuclear reactor ltdown.
But I kind of felt a strange sense of overwhelming-ness. Using hyper-perception made aware of myself more than I normally was, but it also asked for a level of focus, espesicially when I am using it to look into myself and the very nature of Force.
My brain kept defaulting to a two-second loop of static. Not the good kind either. Just fuzzy noise and background dread.
I knew that I just kept trying to reason my way around it. Maybe it was just sleep deprivation, or the ambient paranoia of living under an empire run by raisin-faced cryptocrats, but the feeling didn't fade.
It also made afraid to continue on the new path I discovered yesterday, if not for anything else than just the danger of diving into the void while distracted, tired, and still ntally reeling from whatever eldritch crap had crawled across my emotional radar last night felt like a bad idea. Like flying a speeder with half the engine duct-taped together. Sothing was gonna catch fire, and it was probably going to be my frontal lobe.
I'd seen enough ani to know that poking that kind of thing recklessly usually ended with dramatic screaming and a character design overhaul. I didn't have a guide. No old space wizard to tell what the blue one ant. No datapad with "ntal Architecture for Force Idiots" scribbled in the margins.
So, like any self-respecting overthinking Force-adept with imposter syndro and insomnia, I avoided the problem entirely.
I went to build sothing.
My corner of the main workshop was exactly as chaotic as I'd left it last night: tangled cables, blinking motivators, three open toolboxes I kept forgetting to close, and a power coil in the corner still sparking quietly like it resented being born.
Everything here had a purpose, even if half of it was to act as moral support for the half-functional junk on the shelves. It didn't ask questions. It didn't whisper cosmic riddles or radiate ancestral trauma. It just sat there, waiting to be turned into sothing useful.
That was what I needed. Not wisdom or visions. Hell, not even answers at the mont.
I just needed sothing simple and straightforward. Screws, wires, and asurable results without any soul-diving or force lectures. Just a task with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And also, preferably, sothing that could shoot people.
I wasn't paranoid, I told myself. I was preparing. Two back-to-back nights of waking up like I'd just survived a ship crash were enough of a warning—even if they didn't co with a handy holovid of doom.
Whether it was so weird artifact backlash, my brain leaking side effects from Hyper Perception, or a subtle Force premonition that hadn't learned to use its words yet, it had put a very specific urge in my chest:
I needed a weapon.
The spear-axe thing I'd bought? Yeah, no. That wasn't a real weapon. That was a glorified USB drive for warrior mories from a Force cult that didn't even label their training arcs properly.
Last ti I "used" it, I got tossed into a full-sensory beatdown and woke up with a phantom stab wound and no practical skills gained. It was like downloading a kung fu tutorial and getting jumped by a professional instead. Or like trying out your new VR porn and realizing that you picked up the 'Being Railed By the BBC' instead of being the BBC that railed.
Cool artifact, great potential, awful short-term ROI. Besides, the damn thing was taller than . Looked impressive, sure, but it wasn't going to help in a back-alley mugging unless I had ti to deliver a monologue first. To satiate my inner feeling of insecurity, I wanted sothing actually useful.
After much thought, I decided that lee was out, at the very least for now.
I didn't have the muscle mass to swing anything heavier than a frying pan with confidence, and even then, only if the target stood still. Could I stab soone if I had to? Sure. Aim for soft parts, hope they scream first and stab second. But that wasn't a plan. That was a panic button.
If not lee, than ranged it was.
And the Empire—credit where credit's due—did a great job making sure people didn't carry weapons that ca into the categories of blaster and stuff. At least not openly. Blaster sale and possession were banned in Capital City under so "civilian compliance doctrine," which basically translated to "only stormtroopers and corrupt security goons get the fun toys." So, no store-bought boomsticks for .
But that didn't an I was out of options.
Because this galaxy, for all its sleek starships and fancy sabers, still had a physics for good ol' fashioned kinetic energy.
Guns, or more like its Star Wars equivalent - Slug-throwers.
But I didn't have gun powder and off my mind, I could maybe find so chemicals that were available and could be possibly used to make compounds that had similar nature to that. Highly combustible in small amount, but it was still dangerous, both personal safety wise as well as chances of getting into ISB's radar.
But that wasn't all there was, was it? Like they say, when in Ro, do as Romans do. I was in sci-fi universe, the least I could do was create weapons that would suit the occasion.
The kind that launch hunks of tal at terminal velocity using electro-magnetism instead of combustion. Gauss tech. Coilguns. Railguns if you're feeling spicy and suicidal with your power grid.
A railgun was out in my case for being too power-hungry. The small power cells we stocked couldn't handle the continuous current load required without lting into an expensive fire hazard.
But a coilgun, essentially a gauss weapon with sequential magnetic coils that accelerated an peice of tal to high velocity—was way more doable. Still dangerous, still punchy, but within range of our existing parts.
And unlike plasma weapons, I didn't need exotic components or hyperreactive fuel. Just so good copper wiring, decent capacitors, a reliable trigger circuit, and so form of projectile. Preferably ferromagnetic, but I could make do with anything dense enough to do damage. Bolts. Bearings. Screws. Improvised ammo. That was the fun part.
Not to ntion, room temperature near-superconductive electro-magnetic material used in repulsar-tech and small-size power cells holding damn lot of electricity ant that my Guass Gun is gonna get a big fucking upgrade compared to its Earthly brothers.
Hell yeah!
---
A/N: For as self-aware he seems, Ezra loves planting flags doesn't he?
Vote my brothers and sisters, an new week is upon us.
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