THE ARGENTE SPARK
The GALACTIC REPUBLIC has stood for thousands of years, guarded by the JEDI KNIGHTS. But these wielders of the mysterious FORCE are not the only ones that can use that mysterious energy field. While some historians know of the extinct SITH that opposed the Jedi in the ancient history of the Republic, fewer know that other sects of Force-wielders still exist today.
On the planet TATOOINE, in the wild frontiers of the OUTER RIM of the galaxy, many consider even the Jedi themselves to be legends and stories. A lawless planet, where gangsters and slavery run rife, and the powerful crush the weak under their heel.
And now, disembarking from the ship that brought him here, AETHAEN D'ARGENTE, has just stepped foot on the dusty surface of the planet, the first step on his mission to change the future of the galaxy. …
I stumbled on nothing as I walked away from the docking bay – no, not docking bay ninety-four, this is Mos Espa, not Mos Eisley – and shook my head, muttering to myself, "I think I prefer the opening crawl on a theatre screen, and not shoved directly into my head. Hopefully it's a while before the next episode begins."
I take stock of myself, shifting a large duffel bag that I am carrying over one shoulder. I know its contents like I packed it myself – and I suppose I did, in a sense. Unlike a movie where you have to catch up as you go along, I've been dropped into this universe, this story, with not only my own memories, but the memories of Aethaen D'Argente – or I suppose I should say, myself, as he is now me, or I am now him. If this continues, I'm going to need some extra pronouns to keep everything straight. In either case, I not only have the memories of the life I last led, complete with memories of excitedly watching the Star Wars movies in theatres, but I also have the memories of Aethaen living in the Star Wars universe. That's why I know that the planet Tatooine belongs to the Tatoo system, in the Arkanis sector – information I don't remember learning in my prior life, but which Aethaen is comfortably familiar with, having recently booked passage to this dust ball. It's also why I remember growing up both on Earth, and on Alderaan.
Yeah, Alderaan. That hit me like a fist to the gut. It's one thing to see a planet be destroyed by a super-laser on a movie screen. It's another thing entirely when that planet is a place you remember spending years of your life on. That is, when your parents actually brought you home. Originally, when I created Aethaen, his parents had been medical professionals – a doctor and a nurse. That was still true here – except as Alderaanian doctors, they travelled the galaxy, heading to various hot spots around the galaxy, treating people in disaster zones and on less-developed worlds. And Aethaen – or rather, I – had accompanied them on many of those trips. It certainly explained why the Jedi never found me, despite being from a Core world - because I was definitely a Force-sensitive, although I wasn't certain off-hand what degree of strength I had in the Force. I know my parents knew something about it. They were medical professionals, and it was a relatively simple blood test to check a midi-chlorian count. I suppose since they took care of me themselves, it was also relatively easy to keep it from being reported to the Jedi.
Anyway, Tatooine – enough woolgathering about a disaster I hoped to prevent. I picked this planet as a place to start for a reason, and I'd better get moving. With my belongings all in order, I got moving again. I can't just track down the Skywalkers and interject myself into their lives without looking like some kind of creepy pedophile – I need to get myself established first. One thing about what is essentially a frontier town, there are always people that need doctors and medicines, and never enough of either to go around. While my youth and apparent inexperience would be a detriment to me trying to open a medical practice on a Core world, things are not so difficult here. Sithspit, I won't even need to show a license or prove my education to anyone. People around here tend to learn not to ask too many questions.
I spend the first day exploring Mos Espa on foot. Saying that it is hot and dry is severely understating the situation, and when even a slight wind comes up out of the desert, kicking up sand, I begin to sympathize with the older Anakin's rant about how he hates sand. It really is coarse, and really does get everywhere. I leave a merchant stall richer by a few truguts to get myself a piece of fabric to protect my head from the sun and sand – back in my prior life I would've called it a shemagh, and while the pattern is different, it's effectively the same, another example of convergent evolution separately generating the same result because of the similarity of environment. A few hours spent in the dim, and blessedly cool, cantinas around lunchtime nets me not only lunch and relief from the sun, but also information. I learn a bit about the local Hutt organization – they're essentially the local government out here, by the eternal principle of 'might makes right', so I'll have to deal with them sooner rather than later. Trying to do an end run around them will only come back to haunt me one way or another. Some inquiries about places to get good deals on equipment also nets me another useful piece of data – the location of Watto's junk shop. I'm not entirely sure if Watto has already come into ownership of the Skywalkers, or if they still belong to Gardulla, but I know that's one place I'll definitely be visiting in due course of time.
Being governed by mobsters would not generally be my choice in life. It's not something I ever had to deal with in my prior life. The closest I ever came to being exposed to that class of individual was watching movies about Prohibition-era mobsters in black and white – and the Hutt enforcers carried weapons significantly more dangerous than Tommy guns. That said, they did have a certain level of efficiency in their operations that was lacking in more bureaucratic organizations. Perhaps it was simply due to them being leavened with the flavour of violence? A few examples pour encourager les autres could probably have a strong impact on some civil servants in my past life too. More than anything else, there was the appropriate theatre to be observed – I had to acknowledge their power and authority, and in return, I would be allowed to run a business with a minimum of hassle. Little to no paperwork, just make sure the 'fees' were paid on time, and a little coin up front to prove I was serious and buy the approving nod of the local henchman in charge of such things.
With 'kissing the ring' done, it's not long before an unoccupied building – nothing particularly fancy, just one of the countless dome-roofed adobe buildings of Tatooine – is abandoned no more. I unload my duffel into my new living quarters, pull my comlink, and arrange for the delivery of several crates of goods that the ship that delivered me here unloaded. While I had never done anything like this in my previous life, I had watched my parents do this countless times. Disaster zones aren't just places where medics go – they're also zones of opportunity for criminal organizations. There are profits to be had when people are desperate, both in financial terms and in others. More than once I watched my parents talk us out of being recruited into various criminal organizations, and I watched – and helped, when I was older – them set up clinics both short and long-term on various planets across the galaxy. It made me feel a bit wistful, doing this without them, and I took a moment to thank them in my mind for the valuable life experience.
While I wait for the crates to be delivered, I sit down on the raised platform that will be my bed as soon as I have something softer than adobe to put on it, close my eyes, and breathe slowly, relaxing myself. I focus on my abilities, and I become aware of a list. It doesn't appear in front of me, I don't have some kind of game interface that I can physically interact with. It's a kind of sixth sense – or maybe a higher number, given my Force-sensitivity. The reformatting of Aethaen did a real number on my expected abilities. When he was last in play as a fictional character, rather than as a living breathing human that I was incarnated as, he was a human doctor that had the ability to use spiritual and psychic energies to heal people – including using micro-scaled telekinesis to perform surgery without tools, construct custom medications by molecular assembly from raw materials stored in custom vacuoles in his own body and from the environment, be aware of the condition of all life within a one thousand meter radius bubble, split his physical form into three identical copies that can each act independently, resurrect the freshly-dead even if their body has been vaporized, and numerous other capabilities, not least of which would be the ability to fly under his own power and modify his body to survive in a vacuum.
Yes, there were a lot of reasons why I chose this character – healers should never be underestimated.
However, the powers that be, or whatever it is that put me where I am now, were not so kind as to simply give me everything that Aethaen once was. Frankly, it would've been kind of terrifying if I did have all of his capabilities, since I would've posed a significant out-of-context problem to both the Jedi and the Sith, and disrupting the Skywalker story would've been the trivial work of an afternoon. What they did give me was Force sensitivity, a few Force techniques centered around awareness and healing, and, most importantly, a way to progress and add to my collection without flying to Coruscant and pointlessly asking for Jedi training despite my age. The system that Aethaen came from focused a great deal on the development of individual techniques, which would be paid for by 'tech days', primarily accumulated through the character being played and used. And, as I've gone about my business in Mos Espa, I've felt something in the back of my head, a feeling of some potency being accumulated. And, with the awareness of the list of powers I have now has also come a quantitative measure of that potency. In fact, as I consider it, I feel it grow again, a thirtieth point of potency joining its brethren in the reserve I have. Thirty tech days would've been enough for a good basic technique, nothing that would let you crack a planet in half, but certainly something useful. And there were certainly a lot of things that had practicality in everyday life that were inexpensive, given the system's focus on relating the price of techniques to their effectiveness in combat. Hopefully that bias has transferred over here. With already having some basic Force healing techniques available to me, I know I'll be able to do a basic job of things as it stands. Given what I've been able to sense of myself, however, I don't think I have a lot of depth of Force power, which is probably the other half of the reason why my parents were able to keep me from the Jedi. If they had been aware of me and taken me, I'd probably be in one of the Jedi Service Corps by now, not being powerful enough to be a Jedi Knight. With that in mind, I focus myself, and reach out towards those points of potency that I have compiled, pushing them together while focusing on one of Aethaen's most key techniques that I did not already gain. The system that he originated from was heavily tilted towards combat, and that was how characters grew in strength, or power level, beside the development of more complicated techniques through the expenditure of tech days. Aethaen being a healer and of a more pacifistic bent, this wasn't really a practical option for him. So came the technique of Healer's Boon, which was quite simple – for every person he healed, he gained a slight increase to his strength, typically significantly less than a fighter of his strength would gain from fighting with another of equal strength. And in that gaming system, for balance, I had never applied it to the numerous people that Aethaen healed in the background.
Here, I had no such compunctions.
I felt suddenly empty, as the pinpoints of light disappeared, and instead felt a sense of REFORMATTING. Describing what exactly that is like is difficult to do in words. It felt somewhat like how I imagine it would be to use your right elbow to clean all the earwax out of your left ear canal. Not painful, thankfully, but excruciatingly alien. Fortunately, it passed quickly, and with it, the list of powers I had expanded. I exulted as I perused the new entry that had appeared.
'Healer's Boon: Every time you employ Force powers to heal a sentient life-form, your connection to the Force deepens slightly.'
The key to unlimited power was mine. Now I just needed customers. Fortunately, on the Outer Rim, that shouldn't take long.