"Rise and shine, Gearhead. It's time to be about our business."

The black and grey droid hovered out of the crate that I'd just cracked open, after a few moments to finish starting up its systems.

"Finally. I thought that I'd be stuck in there forever. So, what is it this time? Industrial disaster? Plague? Radioactive dust cloud from a hypermatter reactor exploding?"

I smiled and shook my head at the droid's dry sense of humour. "Nothing so exciting, Gearhead. Just setting up a clinic on Tatooine, in the Outer Rim. Doing some everyday good for everyday people."

"Ugh, you never take me anywhere good."

"Uh huh. Now put those manipulators to use and start unpacking the supplies. You never know when the next patient is going to arrive, and I don't want to have to go hunting to find cardinex because the myocaine was in its spot."

"And you add insult to injury by having me do the work of a labour droid. Very well – I wouldn't want you to have to sell me for scrap to make ends meet out here."

I whistle tunelessly – another thing that Gearhead will complain about – and join the floating droid in sorting through the supplies that were delivered in the crates. Gearhead is a GH-7 medical assistance droid, and he worked with my parents through a variety of disaster zones. To tell the truth, he's become something of an adrenaline junkie, and I wouldn't be surprised if he causes trouble for me if he gets bored. Probably nothing serious, though. I hope. Hm, I might have to find him something interesting to dissect and analyse. Tatooine is far enough into the Outer Rim that it's entirely possible that the flora and fauna have traits and compounds of interest, and that's the other thing that will keep the floating droid busy and satisfied.

I'm definitely not going to go out of my way to find a sarlacc for him to analyse. I bet there's one in the Dune Sea somewhere by Jabba's Palace, but I'm neither equipped nor trained to deal with that kind of threat just yet. Not to mention that I have no inclination to go wandering aimlessly around the Dune Sea, looking for a giant hole. They took vehicles to get to the sarlacc's pit, and thanks to the wonders of movie magic, I have no idea if they were travelling for five minutes or for five hours.

"Medic!"

I freeze for a moment – a small tank of cardinex, ironically, in hand – and then spin around, to see who has come barging into my barely-open-for-business-if-you-squint-at-it-right clinic. For a second, I wonder if I'm in the right timeline, because my memory flashes to A New Hope, and Han Solo's shooting of Greedo. It takes a moment to remember that this is Mos Espa, not Mos Eisley, and there hasn't been a single stormtrooper to be seen. That, and this particular Rodian isn't dead yet, and it looks like there's still time for me to do something about the blaster wound in them besides flip a coin and apologize for the mess.

"Get him on the bed, there!" I ordered the human that was half-carrying the stumbling Rodian after only a moment's hesitation. "Gearhead, activate the bio-sterilization field." Blaster wounds are serious business – there's a lot of energy being suddenly deposited, and flesh tends to not appreciate that. There's a significant amount of burnt flesh around the impact site, and now that the Rodian is close enough for my Force techniques to sense out his condition, it's not hard to tell just how close to death he is. "Wound is pretty fresh. Am I going to have to worry about someone following you through that door to finish the job?"

The human shook his head. "They got a piece of Rolado, but I got them solid. No complications, doc."

"Hmm. Good. I hate being interrupted while I work." To be honest, I have no idea if it's good or not. I don't know if this Rodian and his human companion are the vilest scum on this planet, or altruistic heroes to put the Jedi to shame. To be honest, it doesn't matter. The Rodian – Rolado – is my patient, and that's all that matters. That means, until I'm done fighting Death for him, nobody else gets to butt into that fight. And the Rodian has more than a fair chance of survival under my care. The blaster bolt got him in the gut, which is always complicated, but with Gearhead's help, I can get the wound properly debrided, check the internal organs for any additional damage, close him back up, and apply a bacta patch to speed the healing process – not to mention my own use of the Force to accelerate his body's own natural healing processes.

"So, uh, doc—"

"Did you also suffer an injury in that fracas? Perhaps to your head? Dizziness? Loss of consciousness? Perhaps you have a subdural hematoma?"

"Uh, no, I didn't get—"

"Then what is your explanation for not hearing me when I said that I hate being interrupted while I work?"

Rolado's human companion wisely takes the hint and stops trying to distract the medic saving his – friend's? companion's? – life. A few minutes later, and I'm running my hands through a sterilizer to ensure they're clean, post-surgery.

"Now, your friend is going to live, thanks to my skill and your haste in bringing him to my door."

The relief is clear on the human's face. "That's a lucky break for me. I'll get you a split as soon as I have him turned in."

I can feel my face freeze, and I turn to look at the human. "…turned in?"

The human nods, still smiling. "Yeah. The name's Jido, and I'm a bounty hunter. That Rodian is worth a good pile of peggats to me – so long as he's alive."

A memory flashes through my mind's eye. He's no good to me dead. This man is clearly no Fett, for better or worse, and while the employment of bounty hunters by Darth Vader certainly doesn't incline me to trust or even like them, on the Outer Rim they may be the only kind of rough justice available to people.

"He's a criminal, then?"

The human shrugs. "I didn't ask, the Hutts didn't say."

Or instead of justice, he just could be a more expensive version of a criminal enforcer. I remind myself that, first of all, I am not a Jedi – the lack of a lightsaber is a dead giveaway of that – and secondly, that my existence here in Mos Espa, running something resembling a real medical clinic, is dependent on the sufferance of the local criminal power structure-cum-municipal government. Throwing my plan out the window at the first possible sign of injustice is not a good life choice. I don't think it would even count as an interesting life choice, considering it will most likely end with me face down in a ditch. Well, if Tatooine actually had enough water to have ditches, anyway.

"He'll need to stay here overnight, so I can be sure there's no complications and the bacta is taking well." I frown, still not terribly happy about the situation. "Although if you're just turning him over to the Hutts, he might well wish that I hadn't done such a good job." I look the bounty hunter up and down. He's dressed to fit in on the planet, his clothes made of solid, rough-wearing fabric. The holster for his blaster pistol is slung low, and tied off to his leg to stop it from flapping around when moving about. He looks reasonably professional, but something about him – some mix of personal instinct and a smattering of Force awareness – tells me that he's not as experienced as he looks to be. "First bounty?"

"What?" The man sputters a bit. "No, I've done, uh—"

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. "Don't worry about it, none of my business anyway. Leave me your com code, never know when I might need a bounty hunter. Especially one with 'uh' many bounties under his belt. How'd you find my, anyway? I was still getting set up."

Jido seems more than happy enough to move on from the subject of his experience, or lack thereof. "Bartender at a cantina not too far away mentioned there was a new medic in town. Happened to be not too far away when we got ambushed."

"Convenient." I nod agreeably, while simultaneously reminding myself of Rule Zero of Living in the Star Wars Universe – there is no such thing as coincidence, only the Force. Now the question was, did the Force want me to get further involved with whatever story was playing out here? Or was this just the Force taunting me for thinking about how easy customers would be to find in the Outer Rim, by throwing a blaster wound through my door before Gearhead and I have even finished setting up shop properly? I can't blame the bartender at least – I've already taken advantage of that particular source of intelligence myself, and I was planning on doing some quiet word-of-mouth advertising through them anyway. "I haven't gotten a lot of furniture in yet, but you can use that bed until Rolado's ready to move." I nod towards the other medical bed that's already been assembled. "At least, assuming no more emergencies stumble in my door before you leave." Even as I'm saying that, my eyes are drawn to my front door, wondering if the Force would just take that as an invitation to double down. Fortunately for Jido's comfort, the door remains shut, and I turn back to sorting out my clinic, while Gearhead monitors the patient.

At least my senses tell me there's no implanted slave beacon inside Rolado, waiting to explode, so I'm not sending back an escaped slave to his master. On the other hand, I also suspect that if there were, they wouldn't have sent out a bounty hunter to retrieve him.

The next few days are, thankfully, quiet. Once I pronounced him safe to travel, Jido departed with Rolado in tow, returning some hours later to give me a portion of the bounty money. Apparently, bounty hunting pays quite well, as it was a more than reasonable recompense for my services and expenses – even if I still felt somewhat morally conflicted about the matter. In the meantime, my clinic has grown steadily busier with more pedestrian concerns, mostly the normal health concerns of a population living in a frontier town with limited resources. Given the experience that Gearhead and I have in dealing with emergency health care in disaster zones, it's not particularly challenging. I've also made a point of accepting a certain amount of barter for my services. If someone has extra food, well, I eat food too. Paying me in water is almost better than peggats, on Tatooine. And Gearhead appreciates the extra electronic components that occasionally come in just in case he needs spare parts. What we don't need or can't use, I can trade in turn I expect. I'm also wagering that, Force willing, it'll pay some dividends in the process of my plan – see again, Rule Zero of Living in the Star Wars Universe. That aside, it's already paying dividends through Healer's Boon.

While I lack a way to measure my attunement to the Force directly – again, no handy game interface to be had – I nonetheless have an internal sense of it growing, each time I use the Force to accelerate the natural healing of my patients. Naturally, I've been using it on every single patient I've had where it would have any effect. It's a subtle thing, especially if they don't have any obvious injuries – and if they do, it'd probably be written off to it being a slightly above average lot of bacta. It certainly doesn't have any deleterious effects, and they've already agreed to be treated by me, so I don't feel any particular ethical dilemma about not mentioning that I'm also treating them with the Force. Since I'm not sure if I'm in the 'original trilogy' branch of Star Wars where the worst use of the Force is the Emperor's lightning, or if it includes things like being able to pull Star Destroyers out of orbit with telekinesis, or rip open hyperspace wormholes across interstellar distances, I'm also willing to file it under self-defence and leave it at that. Given the techniques I started with, I'm pretty sure my depth of power matches up with a starting character. That means while I could probably stomp any regular person into the ground without breaking a sweat, going up against a significantly more trained combatant – and I'm talking just a Jedi Knight or even a senior Padawan, never mind someone like Darth Maul and WHY did I choose to start on Tatooine again? – is probably going to be challenging at least. I won't know for certain how that'll work out until it happens though, given the reformatting of my character to suit this universe. In the setting that Aethaen was derived from, even weapons typically did damage based on the person wielding them, including guns. That would make blasters relatively harmless to me – but I doubt it's true, and definitely not something I'm going to count on. I had also developed a company that had it's own separate power level track for calculating the effects of technology it built, rather than the power level of whomever happened to be handling it at the time, and I wouldn't be surprised if whatever powers brought me here and reformatted Aethaen took advantage of that if they needed a reformatting route to make my powers match up properly against this universe.

Speaking of techniques, I also proved my theory that the pricing for converting the sparks of potency into new or upgraded abilities was still based on combat efficiency as per Aethaen's origin. While I already spoke Galactic Basic as befit my origins in the Core, one of the most common languages here on the Outer Rim, and on Tatooine in particular as a Hutt-controlled world, was Huttese. Which, naturally, Aethaen had no mastery of. So I had spent five precious points of power, and could now curse out criminals with the best of them – particularly useful with some of my more obstreperous patients. People out here respected a doctor that could out-swear them.

When my door opened next, I knew that my quiet days were at an end though. Not because the person who came through was one of the obstreperous patients – in fact, I doubt my new-found proficiency in Huttese invective would be useful at all with her. No, because that person was unmistakably Shmi Skywalker, holding a very young Anakin.