Jawool alone

Chapter 1.

Like every little Jawa, Jawool had no particular mom, or dad. His whole clan was father, mother, playmate, and co-worker. Jawool excelled at the team repairing tasks, but what he loved most of all was the scavenging tasks. He was rarely chosen for the scavenging teams, though, because he would wander off. While he fit right in, handing vibra wrenches and holding gearworks together - contributing clever ideas that built on clever ideas to build droid monstrosities that never should have been, during team repairs, he would inevitably get distracted by a shiny something and fail to call the team in to join him and fail to respond to team calls.

What they didn't know is that Jawool had mild delusions of grandeur when he found something. "If I find it and I fix it, it's mine" Was not something Jawa culture taught. It was his own personal little mantra, and it would have seemed, he thought, completely alien to his clan-mates who knew believed "If WE find it and WE repair it, it's OURS"

And then they were gone. Where once he had a hundred fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, now he had no one. It was that independent streak that had saved hi, he supposed, but how he regretted it. If he had died with them all, he would still belong to the clan. But he was an orphan. For once, he was allowed to join the scavenging party. And, as always, he wandered off in search of something shiny that was all his own. But when no one came looking for him at nightfall, and the "Awk!" of sand people started to echo around the canyon, he followed his footsteps back to the Sandcrawler.

And he found the destruction. The annihilation of his clan and all their work.

Chapter 2.

We skip ahead 3 years. Mourning and scavenging what he could carry, Jawool made his way to Mos Eisley. He had some idea that he could join another band of Jawas on his way, but when he didn't cross paths with any and found himself in a Cantina, seeing all the Things that came into and left there that he had never seen before (and he had seen a lot of Things) the idea that if he could just get enough Things together, he could end the Empire single-handedly began to form. That the Empire was powerful because it had more Things than anyone else.

And this was how, wandering around, he discovered a light carrier, broken. He fixed it. He found it and fixed it, it's mine, he thought. But then its owner came up, asserting its ownership. This owner was  (Arlie's character?) and, fortunately, rather than blasting him, suggested that she could "buy" her light carrier back from him for a few credits (it should be noted that it was even fewer credits than she would have paid to have it fixed - he had never been in charge of negotiations) and a position as a repairer on her crew. She would find things and he would fix them.

She did not pay him well, but he had food and a place to sleep, and every so often, if he felt poor, he'd run about, claiming to "find" broken things on her ship and taking ownership over them until she'd buy them from him. Again, always for less than his labor was worth. It was an amiable relationship.

Chapter 3.

Jawool served with Captain Mokrel, a Mon Calamari, for 2 years, and acquainted himself with greater galactic culture. After this give and take with the Captain for 2 years, she wrestled out of Jawool, the beginnings of an idea that would form into his desire to build his own mercenary fleet and take his vengeance on the Empire. Not too long thereafter, the Coet Idea (Which is what Captain Mokrel had named his ship) came upon a hunk of space debris that they identified as the slagged remains of a number of T-16s not too far from what should have been a mostly-uninhabited planet. Captain Mokrel, with a grin, told Jawool, "Well, I can't find anything here. I'll take the Coet Idea downside for a bit of R&R. if you want to stay up here, you can use the pod. Don't know why you would though, since I can't find anything up here."

Jawool was no fool. Hopping in the pod and putting over to the mostly useless hunks of metal, his imagination lit up. Here were the humble beginnings of his mercenary fleet, he thought. Found and fixed, they'd certainly be really, truly his. And so he worked, cobbling together parts, building from the wreckage of a dozen forgotten, disabled, near-valueless hunks of metal, something that almost worked. And the day ended. And something tickled his memory. Some thought that was always near the surface, but got jammed down everytime it started to break through to his conscious thoughts. But he kept working, and he jammed it down.

But finally. Two days had passed. And the air in the pod tasted stale. There was still a lot left to do. But he could just barely fit the pod inside a cobbled-together almost-T-16, and guide it down with the pod's home-tracking system.

There was no smoke. Presumably there had been a column of smoke. Probably fire and screams. But all there was now was silence. The Coet Idea was less of a hollow shell than the slagged T-16s were. Jawool didn't want to look for a body, but a body confronted him. It could have been some other Mon Calamari, he supposed. Some other Mon Calamari who wore a crisp grey captain's badge on her left sleeve. Some other Mon Calamari who had struggled with a whitish blue fungus growing on her left flank. 

He walked past, willing himself to notice no more identifying features. And he kept walking, along the wave-slapped sand. 

Chapter 4.

For days, Jawool walked. By turns castigating himself for leaving his clan and vowing to never think of others as his clan again, because it hurt to much when they went and died on you. 

Eventually he came back to himself and realized it was irrelevant. Here he was, on a planet that, while clearly not uninhabited, seemed possibly inhabited only by Imperial Forces (for he never once imagined any but the Big Evil would be responsible for hurting him yet again)

He turned around and walked back to the destruction, steeling himself for the task at hand. 

He didn't know the burial customs of Mon Calamari, so he guessed as best he could. Paddling out on a raft made of insulation casing from the T-16's engine bay with the corpse of Captain Mokrel, he weighted her down a few of the smaller chunks of metal from the Coet Idea, and let her sink in what he hoped was an ocean.

Back at the ruined ships, he knew before he looked, but he looked anyways and confirmed that the components required for lightspeed were not there. And so.

Jawool spent the better part of a year there. And he made his T-16 (with attached Pod) into something monstrous and almost good enough... except there was nothing really to be done about making it light speed. It hadn't enough fuel to make it back into orbit for any more salvage operations, and even if it had, he'd been through those ships once already, and there was nothing to suggest any of them had been modded for lightspeed. He was stuck on this planet and a little afraid to draw any attention to himself. 

He spent his "leisure" hours pretending/practicing his piloting in the T-16, imagining taking on Star Destroyers (which he had never seen) and blasting them to bits in his tiny little sky hopper. He did a lot of imagining. Sometimes he imagined he could move bits and pieces around. More than once, he wished he had set a tool down next to him, and reached for it half-consciously to find that he had, indeed set it next to him. He must have done that with foresight, even though he remembered setting it down a few feet away.

The better part of a year alone with guilt makes one imagine some surprising things. 

Chapter 5.

Jawool slept on board his modded T-16. In a fit of frustration, he'd dubbed it Hubris, and painted the name on the side with the last of the stores of epoxy mixed with the dark sand for color. Regretting his inability to properly memorialize his expired friend, he'd later tried scratching it out and naming it simply Captain Mokrel. Now it was mostly an illegible mess. 

And he slept aboard the illegible mess.

A jolt in the night woke him momentarily, but his nightmares beckoned and he slept again. He dreamed of his clan. They were all on fire, but they were calm, fixing droids and putting together landspeeders that were made out of droids. Then he heard the screaming and watched from far away as they tore Captain Mokrel asunder and put her still-living limbs and head together with ship parts to make a monstrous part-droid, part-ship, part-person that screamed in agony and flopped about until it caught fire. He tried running towards it, with the idea that he could pilot it into the sea and heal it, but there was no sea only sand and besides, the more he ran the more shiny things to salvage cluttered his way. He was running in zero gee then, fighting with his whole self, but only churning uselessly against nothing. 

And then he banged his head. 

His limbs were churning against nothing. He was in zero-gee. And his head banged against the console. Where was he? In space. Getting pulled in by a tractor beam. He went to power up the ship and found it already powered. He had launched it into orbit? While asleep? While fiddling with controls, trying to escape the tractor beam, Captain Mokrel promptly died. Empty fuel cells. He watched himself get pulled towards a light freighter. It docked at an exterior port. The bay door opened without protest. He hadn't thought to jam them. And he found himself screaming in his native Jawaese at a very surprised-looking human. The human's mouth opened and closed a few times without sound as Jawool screamed about theft and the rule of fix it and found it and releasing the most horrible scents he could, when a hulking, furry beast bellowed back. It didn't stop Jawool, but it seemed to trip the human out of his surprise.

"What's a Jawa doing on a T-16 on the opposite side of the outer rim from Tatooine? I don't even need to ask. Scavenging like a vulture. You surely didn't scrag that hunk of T-16s, just found it. Well, sorry, little buddy. No honor amongst thieves. Well it's mine, and you took everything of value out of the heap. You can't do anything with it anyways. I got no problem with you. Stop screaming. Tell you what. I'll drop you at a port as a thank you for putting all the value in one place. Scream at them. I can't understand a word of it. This little T-16 is sturdy. Sturdier than it ought to be with what I left here. You got some skills, little buddy. Stop screaming."

And with that, the Wookie picked up the Jawa, carried him to a closet and deposited him there. 

And there he sat for a week.