Entry Fourteen – Days after Geonosis, Eighty-Six
I gave Takul his list, may I be forgiven. I still want to vomit every time I think about it, but if the Republic believes in the necessity of victory enough to negotiate with the Hutt Clan, with Jabba himself, how can I balk when the burden descends upon me? I doubt I will ever view this choice with anything but regret, but it is done now. I have to move on, events continue apace, I cannot become frozen. Small solace though it is, I did extract a concession out of this arrangement. I now have full freedom to utilize the Mutaratak laboratory as I wish. Auspices aside, the facility is a fine one from a technical standpoint and I can only hope that its resources lead me to a breakthrough.
Though he balked at first, I have managed to train Dee-Dee on the most common treatment options for everyday ailments not in his database for the more prevalent Bucket populations. With his help, I was able to convert this into a programming patch and arrange for distribution among the droids in the frightfully fragmented medical network. It will take some time for this information to propagate, and the lack of formal publication means that some professionals will not trust it, but it should help, and the ability to refer patients elsewhere should reduce the burdens on my little clinic. I desperately hope so, I need more time to research, uninterrupted hours to consider complex problems. For now the fungus, which I have learned is officially known in the Bucket as the 'Mutli-Species Cephalic Integument Abrasive Delamination Fungus' or MSCIADF and colloquially called 'Miscaf,' is my number one priority. We are going to become the very best of friends, and then I will tear it to shreds. I feel no hesitation embarking on this project. It is the right thing to do, all the moreso now. A vaccine to eliminate this chronic problem would save billions in treatment costs and restore tens of millions of lost working hours to support the betterment of the underworld, and the war effort, every year.
If the Separatists are winning the war so far, and despite the claims on the news it could be argued they are, at least part of their success is attributable to ruthless efficiency. We dare not discard democracy as they have, but perhaps other means to bridge the gap can be found. There are thousands of species living here in the Bucket, and any one of them could hold the key to victory. I will not let illness hold back their potential.
Takul, to my considerable surprise, is eager to assist me on this project. Any possible cure would drastically cut into syndicate profits, both in the sale of medicines and in the sale of narcotics to serve as distractions from daily miseries. In a perhaps ill-chosen moment I made this point to his face, absolutely explicit. He did not disagree at all, but instead claimed that the way of the crime syndicates is not the way of the Mutaratak. Truly, I do not grasp how any such division could be meaningful.
Information on his species is decidedly limited. Even the Jedi Archives hold a mere handful of entries, and no proper xenobiological profile. The species is from the distant Outer Rim and all access to their homeworld is controlled by the Trade Federation. They are not known to travel widely, though I found a two-thousand year old note from a Jedi Investigator suggesting that individuals are not unknown in the private retinue of many Hutts. As a matter of official record their modest colony here in the Bucket, and their pharmaceutical business, does not exist. The municipal zoning database claimed their laboratory is used for 'chemical waste decontamination.' The listed owner is one of the endless shell companies that clog the database. Morne taught me to recognize the signs, apparently there are nearly ten false businesses for every real one down here. It is obvious enough why they are here, Underworld Police case studies claim Coruscant refines and ships more finished narcotics than any other planet in the galaxy, but how they arrived and why they chose to come here remain a puzzle. Perhaps Takul will let something slip in time, but for now he is explicitly opaque with regard to his people. I doubt I will much like the answers.
As hard as the choices have been here, I fear others have been confronted with worse trade-offs. Word from the frontlines of the war is miserable. Too many friends have sent out horrible laments keyed to a single word: triage. There have also been casualties, which I feel I should have expected but each one is a hammer blow to the gut all the same. The loss of Jedi Knights in battle is one thing, I mourn but it somehow doesn't hurt much. Tragic though it is, it feels like an inevitable part of the process. In war, some warriors shall fall, that is the nature of conflict. Healers, by contrast, are supposed to be respected, held inviolate. There are laws! Our enemy, heinously, has discarded this rule. Field aid stations and medical frigates have been attacked and destroyed, and the Republic has been forced to conceal the location of regional medical centers lest they too suffer assault. This is barbarism unequalled since the armies of the Sith last marched.
I suppose the foe, with an army of droids that incorporates no wounded, feel they have nothing to lose. Certainly such atrocities have not yet stirred many neutral systems to take up arms on behalf of the Republic. The Jedi way may be to forgive, but I cannot help but hate such heinous actors. Truthfully, mere months ago I would have called the very concept of civilized warfare a poor joke. Now that it has been discarded I find I miss it terribly.
I do not want to think about how many more friends will not come back. Even bargains with traffickers are better than that.
Notes
The existence of obscure species in the Star Wars galaxy is a funny thing. There are really only a few dozen species that show up with any sort of regularity, while most others are one-offs known from a single character in all sources. How this actually works in practice is curious, considering that the Jedi Archives should contain thousands of years of records including ethnographic studies. One is forced to presume massive levels of historical data loss at points (Legends canon is explicit about this, the new canon mostly implicit), which would allow thousands or even millions of species to avoid any real detailed study. The Mutaratak are one such, as they make a pint to avoid notice by legitimate authority due to their particular predilections with regard to neurochemistry.
Jedi casualties during the Clone Wars are difficult to gauge. We know Jedi died during the conflict, and in TCW we even see the occasional death on-screen, but there's no good measure of the overall numbers and all of the principle characters are super-competent Jedi Masters (plus Anakin and Ahsoka) who have to be way to the right of the survivorship bell curve. The scope of the losses is therefore difficult to reckon with.
Separatist attacks on medical centers are well established in TCW.