EPISODE I: POLIS MASA

Before the Sith took power, she had never heard of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

And sometimes, she wished that were still true.

In fact, the more distance between a Jeotian like herself and a Jedi like him, the better.

To call her home-moon, Jeotis, an "ally" of the Republic was an ambiguity open for controversy.

Personally, she preferred the term "customer", given that the galaxy's most precious gemstones were mined and traded in Jeotian volcanoes of the Outer Rim.

Unavoidably, Jedi came with the deal.

It was good business.

And sometimes, bad business.

That's how she ended up on Polis Massa.

A naive lack of judgement behind a good business deal gone terribly, terribly wrong.

"I got a bad feeling about this," the Q2 series, retired battle droid had muttered, as he scanned the organics around him for any signs of a threat.

"Remember, Q2, we belong here. Just act natural. You know, like a normal droid? No one will ask questions if we don't give them a reason to," she whispered to her automaton friend, as they waited in line at the new recruit check-in. "No one's even heard of Jeotis here."

"Are you out of your orbit?" Q2 declared his passionate disagreement.

But the look from her that came slipping his way made the droid reboot his statement.

"I mean, are you out of your royal orbit, mi'lady?" he corrected himself.

"Next!" called the recruitment clerk.

She stepped forward, but Q2 pulled her back.

A bold move for a droid, but he couldn't just standby without making one last desperate attempt to make her see reason.

"Mi'lady, even a droid could tell you this is a terrible idea. You don't even have an advanced degree in medicine," Q2 objected. "Up until 56 hours ago, you couldn't even count out the correct credits to use the space port. Let alone practice medicine."

"Then I'll learn."

"Next, please!"

"Mi'lady, I implore you to reconsid-"

"Medical Lieutenant Lex Halo, reporting for duty," she blurted out her introduction to the clerk, stepping forward to hand him her identichip.

Making her droid's circuits fry in suspense, as he waited on screws and bolts for the clerk to raise an eyebrow at her, scan her counterfeit identichip into his astromech droid, and wait for the confirmation beep.

It couldn't have come any faster.

"Alright, go on in," the clerk waved at her. "Next!"

Making Q2 almost powered down under the godsend of that reprieve.

His mistress was safe. Their mission uncompromised.

As long as the real Lex Halo didn't show up, nothing could go wrong.

Because Lucky for lady and droid both, the Kallidah Archaeological Research Base was more interested in digging up dead planets than keeping up with intergalactic politics.

Work was agonizingly slow.

She rarely saw any patients so far out in the galactic middle of nowhere. The base so painstakingly isolated in the outer rim, away from all main hyperspace lanes, that not even the HoloNet News transmitted this far out.

She was completely cut off from the rest of the galaxy.

Because who would bother invading a dead-end asteroid belt in search of an antique battle droid and a girl from nowhere who'd never learned to drive a land speeder on her own, couldn't tell the difference between a scrubber droid and a sweeper drone, but could at least put out a fire fairly quickly on her assigned meal prep days.

Apart from that, she was happy (and safe) working on the base for a standard three years.

But after Emperor Palpatine's "Order 66", and the ascent of the Galactic Empire, everything changed.

.

"It's not my problem anymore," she whispered to herself again, a brutal war zone going on in her head, as she looked up from her work yet again. "I'm done with politics."

And dropping her eyes from yet another round of Republican refugees taking sanctuary on the base, she decided she was perfectly content to stay in the background with her medical beakers, ignoring the rest of the galaxy.

Q2 shot an unrepentant judgmental side-glance at her as he inputted his daily logs into the ship's database.

"Since when did you become a sit-and-wait type, mi'lady?" he muttered dryly.

And then her starburst hazel eyes dragged up to him from her work desk.

How dare he have the audacity to say to her the exact same thing she'd say to her in this situation.

"Since when did droids become so opinionated?" she countered. "Shouldn't you be droiding around somewhere?"

"Beep, beep, beep," he remarked sarcastically, sassily powering down his logs, and strutting his ego out of her hub.

Smiling, she shook her head and went back to work. "We've been stuck together on this asteroid for way too long."

But Q2 was right.

She wasn't the "damsel" to sit-and-wait.

And if the Empire was on the rise, then she must use all her many talents to make "unlimited power" absolute hell for their new Emperor.

.

The day she met Kenobi, she was carefully mixing together more antiseptic serum for the dizzying number of refugee troopers coming into the hospital with horrendous battle injuries.

And that's when she caught the faint but unmistakable scent of ashes coming up behind her in the corridor.

She paused over her medical beakers, suddenly heartbroken and homesick for her home-moon. Gutted by a sharp pang of loneliness and nostalgia that had been eating away at her for 3 merciless years.

Mustafar?

A wild guess, but she would've bet her life in a hand of Sabacc on it.

How could she forget all those bedtime stories about fire rats, sulfuric mines, and Nightsister covens?

Or those times when her father took her on "diplomatic business", and she'd hide in the storage units of his Luxury 3000 Space Yacht because he told her the "molten men" would get her if she wasn't quiet enough for him to finish his work?

Never in her life would she ever forget the hellish smell of incendiary magma, or the toxic stench of death in the planet's volcanic fumes that induced nightmarish hallucinations, or "shadows of the mind", if anyone got too close.

But to Lex, Mustafar was home away from home. Only a dozen or so lightyears away from her world, Jeotis.

So, there was no mistaking the lingering smell of fire on the Jedi's robes.

Only one question remained.

What business would a Jedi have on a notoriously Sithy, unforgiving hellscape like Mustafar?

If it hadn't been for such an anomaly, Lex would've never looked up at the man in sandy colored robes and a long brown cloak marching pass the glass walls of her hub.

Stinking of a campfire, with a slight volcanic tan, he looked as if he'd just crawled out of a magma core after taking on an entire Sith army singlehandedly.

"Lieutenant Halo," the midwife droid whizzed into her hub. "It's urgent. You're needed in pod B-6 immediately."

And when Lex saw the unconscious woman the Jedi carried in his arms, she snatched up her pulmonary resuscitation kit, a light pen, and a standard health pack before following the midwife drone to an intensive care pod.

But the moment she entered the room, "it" happened.

Lex saw a boy with sandy blonde hair, no older than 8, tinkering on some kind of droid part. He looked up at a girl dressed in a blue and gray tunic.

"Are you an angel?"

"What?" the girl was caught off guard by the question.

"An angel. I heard the deep space pilots talk about them," he said. "They're the most beautiful creatures in the universe. They live on the moons of Iego, I think."

"You're a funny little boy. How do you know so much?"

"I listen to all the traders and star pilots that come through here. I'm a pilot you know and someday I'm going to fly away from this place. I think my mom and I were sold to Gardulla the Hutt, but she lost us betting on the pod races."

"You're a slave?"

"I'm a person, and my name is Anakin."

"I'm sorry. I don't fully understand. This is a strange place to me...I'm Padmé... I'm glad to have met you, Anakin."

Lex took a second look at the patient on the diagnostic bed, and it wasn't until then that she recognized her face.

Senator Padmé Amidala?

Lex hoped she was making a mistake, but how could she?

What is this galaxy coming to?

But what did "it" mean?

Was she having black-outs again?

She hadn't experienced these spells since she was a girl, when her mother gave a special "nightmare tea" to make the visions go away.

Sometimes they were memories. Sometimes not.

But what could she call this one?

Padmé's memory...or hers?

"Senator, my name is Lex," she introduced herself, putting "it" out of her mind as she started her initial assessment of the patient. "Can you tell me where you are?"

But Padmé's answer was delirious, whispering fragments of words Lex couldn't piece together.

"Anakin...still...I know...there's..."

Anakin?

Clicking on her light pen to study the shimmering soft caramel brown of the patient's eyes, Lex's first guess for the delirium was volcanic gas intoxication.

"Her blood-02 levels are at 94 percent and dropping," she informed her assisting droid, who recorded the patient's vitals. "She'll need oxygen administration immediately."

"Her pulse has fallen below 55 beats," the droid warned her.

Lex felt her patient's life tapping faintly against her fingertips, following the bruises branded underneath the collar of her maternity tunic.

The swelling contusions around her carotid artery a grim sign that she'd been mercilessly strangled.

What monster could do this to a woman with growing life inside of her?

And turning to her equipment to increase oxygen distribution in the pod, Lex noted the line of Jedi and other planetary officials waiting outside the transparent walls of her pod.

Eager for any news about the woman beside her.

Q2 would blow a circuit if he was here, she thought. No pressure.

But her heart raced away at lightspeed.

She'd never been in a room with so many Jedi at once.

One small mistake was all it would take.

Yet despite her complicated past with Jedi, Lex vowed to do everything in her power to look after Padmé. Knowing that so many on Naboo depended on the senator to make a full recovery.

She had to stay collected, no matter how dangerous the game.

Lex breathed in deeply, closing her eyes to pull herself together.

She was good at shutting things out.

Focusing on the moment in the here and now. The rhythmic sound of her deep, slow breaths that induced her into a kind of walking meditation.

The chaos and noise around her quieting into muted murmurs as she exhaled again, opening her eyes, and concentrating on nothing but the intravenous water drip that needed connecting.

Blocking everything except one particular Jedi's gaze she couldn't completely shut out.

Since the moment she stepped into the care pod with him, his contemplative eyes had run into hers enough times to rule out coincidence.

Ever since "it" happened, in fact, he'd been watching her.

Did he notice "it"too?

It was hard to guess what was going through his mind, as Jedi were notorious for hiding such things.

But there were so many things about this stranger that drew her into a mystery.

Like how nothing felt very "stranger" about him.

Nothing more comforting than the assuring warmth in his face set on fire by the calm storm-blue eyes of this quiet Jedi Master gazing back at her.

Though she'd never seen this man, she felt a bittersweet familiarity about him that made her wonder if she'd known someone like him before.

Was that the reason he looked up at her again?

That hidden something in his eyes that felt to her like surprise...confusion?...sadness?...a strange nebula of so many unknowable auras that she wasn't sure what to make of his gaze.

So, Lex broke eye contact, turning back to the care of her patient.

"How did she end up on Mustafar?" she asked him, before she could rethink the question. "I'm worried the babies may be affected by the volcanic fumes on the planet. It's not safe for unborn children there."

And added to the thickening fog of unknowable auras about this Jedi was deep concern.

"How did you know we'd come here from Mustafar?" he asked quietly.

Lex paused, realizing too late that some things are better left unsaid.

"You have ghost burns from the lava embers on your robe," she picked out a satisfying enough explanation. "It was a lucky guess."

"And the babies?"

"What?"

"You mentioned younglings."

"Generally speaking," she went along with it, too late to backtrack now. "Toxic volcanic fumes are more harmful to unborn children."

Her hands were shaking, and she hoped he wouldn't notice it.

Mother of Kwath...How could he not notice it?

This was a terrible idea.

Q2 was right.

Why were droids always so inconveniently right?

"She'll be in good hands. The midwife droid will look after her while I'm gone," she made her excuses to the Jedi. "I need to speak to the lead physician about her condition. The droids will brief you with his orders as soon as possible."

And brushing pass the Jedi, she retreated into the corridor.