SW Gray Tales 17 : A New Venture

I am extremely sorry guys, I had thought that I had uploaded the latest version on here, but it was an previous version of it. I have corrected it. There wasn't any change that would affect the story, its just change in what mc was working with.
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Vasha's dockyard job was steady, but just barely hanging on. She worked on droids—mostly astromechs and cargo haulers—and the quota system there was absolutely brutal. Miss one repair goal and boom, instant pay cut. The stress was constant. Like background noise. Thanks to my Hyper Perception, I was always picking up on it, even when I didn’t want to.

And something I’d figured out over time? Astromechs actually weren’t that pricey. Around 5,000 credits got you one, which was a pretty sweet deal for a machine that could out-navigate most starship computers. The protocol units were the more pricier bunch.

Speaking of droids, I’d thought about grabbing one myself, maybe a smaller model like those BD units that Cal Kestis has. But honestly? Not worth it.

No encryption was truly safe anymore. With quantum cracking and brute-force tools floating around the black market, having a droid follow me everywhere just meant carrying a walking security hole. Memory wipes were an option, sure, but wiping a droid’s brain every week felt all kinds of wrong. Like giving your pet a lobotomy every time it learned a new trick.

So yeah, no droid buddy for me. But that wasn’t the main issue right now.

Vasha was getting crushed by her job. It was better in past, but as days went on, with Empire’s policies, industries were getting more and more brazen in worker’s exploitation. One delayed repair, one bad motivator, and her entire day went sideways. The pay cuts were rough, but it was the stress that really wore her down as her quota kept increasing. I could feel it pouring off her every night when she came home, completely wiped out.

Starting her own repair shop sounded like the obvious fix. No quotas, no boss breathing down her neck, just her skills and her rules. The work might be erratic, but repairing premium stuff would fetch enough to cover the irregularities. Sounds easy, right?

Yeah, no. The startup costs were nuts. Rent for a workshop, parts inventory, some kind of advertising—it all added up fast. And not to mention, if one wants to run a good looking premium shop, just not an run of the mill trashy one, it needed serious investments.

Most of her credits already vanished into rent, food, and keeping the lights on in our tiny apartment.

My eyes drifted to the busted-up protocol droid sitting under the tarp. Even half-dead, it still had value but it failed in comparison to what it could felt as an fully working model. If we could bring it back to life we’d be looking at a decent pile of credits, even if sold as second-hand stuff.

And that was just one piece of junk. Places like the dockyard tossed out stuff like this all the time. Droids that didn’t boot, fried chips, "hopeless" hardware. It went in the hands of 2-3 technicians and if none could get it working, it went straight into the compactor or got sold for pennies.

I’d been sitting on an idea for weeks. My Hyper Perception was basically a cheat code when it came to repairs. When I looked at a circuit board, I didn’t just see it—I felt it. Every wire, every pulse of energy, the little currents flowing through invisible channels.

If something was broken, I could tell exactly where it stopped working. No tools, no guessing. Just instant clarity.

Now stack that with psychometry. Most techs had to guess what went wrong. Not me. I could touch a burned-out motivator and see how it worked yesterday, last week, whenever it last ran right. Then compare it to now and find the exact moment it failed.

As long as it was within a two-meter range, I could figure out almost anything. Not bad for a seven-year-old with zero formal training.

My only real limit was size. Starship engines were too much. But droids, datapads, home appliances? Total breeze.

I looked back at the protocol droid. Vasha had been stuck on this thing for months. Maybe it was time to try something new.

“Hey Vasha,” I called over my shoulder, “can I mess around with your droid?”

She stopped chopping vegetables at the counter. “The protocol unit? Why?”

“Just curious. I’ve been reading about protocol droids.” Which wasn’t totally untrue.

She wiped her hands on a towel and gave me that look—half amused, half worried. The one she used when I talked about “grown-up” tech. “Go for it, kid. Just don’t zap yourself on any of the live wires”

She didn't told him that she had removed the power cell through. Being cautious is always better when working with electronics.

___

I didn’t go full space-wizard on it. Not yet. Rule one: figure out the problem before trying to fix it.

While Vasha cooked, I parked myself at the workbench with her datapad. It had the full schematics for the D-series protocol droid—famous for its fancy translation software and, apparently, how easily it got wrecked by careless dockworkers.

I kept checking the diagrams, then comparing them to the actual mess of a droid in front of me. The datapad showed neat, color-coded lines. The inside of the real thing looked like someone tried to fix it with a wrench and zero clue what wires even were. More of a disaster site than a repair job.

Vasha called me for dinner. I put the datapad down, my head still full of converter specs and logic circuits.

The rest of the evening went like usual. I ate, helped clean up (my official job title was “Head of Washing Department”), and then did the whole sleepy-kid routine. Threw in a big yawn—it wasn’t even fake. Digging through broken tech with my brain was actual work.

"Alright, Mr. Assistant," Vasha said as she took my bowl and ruffled my hair. "Time for bed."

I mumbled a "goodnight" and curled up on the couch, pulled the scratchy blanket over me, and shut my eyes. I listened as she moved around, cleaning up. Then the soft slide of her bedroom door.

Quiet.

I waited. Counted the steady sounds of the building’s systems. One hundred. Two hundred.

Then I opened my eyes, wide awake.

The seven-year-old had clocked out. The engineer was on the clock now.

I slipped off the couch, bare feet making no sound on the cold floor. Quick stop at my backpack for the glow rod, then I was back at the bench. Dragged the stool over, climbed up. My feet didn’t even reach the floor.

I clicked on the glow rod. Soft light spilled over the droid’s wrecked body and the datapad.

I smiled.

Time to fix this thing.

——

The night became my personal training montage. No dramatic music or lightsabers, just me, a busted droid, and a head full of Force tricks. Most of the work happened inside my mind, slow and careful.

Syncing Hyper Perception with Psychometry was tricky. Simple things, like a river stone, were easy. Its past was just being a rock. Its present? Still a rock. No surprises.

But a circuit board was different. Unlike a rock, its structure wasn’t uniform. Every component had its own texture in the Force. Capacitors felt pressurized, like they were holding something in. Resistors were dense and sluggish. Processors were layered, complex, beyond my understanding.

I wasn’t trying to figure out how they worked yet. I just needed to learn what "normal" felt like. A baseline. Before I could find the broken parts, I had to know what unbroken looked like.

My first task was archaeology. Vasha, ever the pack rat, had dumped every related component into a duraplast crate—her official junk box.

Retrieving the parts required stealth. The droid’s detached arm was heavy, and metal clinking in the silent apartment sounded like an alarm. I moved like I was disarming a bomb, placing each piece on a blanket to muffle the noise.

Luckily, Vasha slept like the dead. You could set off a thermal charge next to her and she’d just mumble about engine backfire. Strange, given her stories of pirate raids on Ryloth. Maybe she’d moved past it. Good for her. Better for me.

After an hour of tense, slow-motion Jenga, everything was laid out. The floor looked like a droid chop shop—torso on the workbench, limbs arranged neatly, head staring blankly, loose circuits scattered between them.

I sat in the middle of the mechanical wreck, took a deep breath, and got to work.

Time to feel them up.

Not in a weird way.

I focused on one section at a time, using Hyper Perception to check its current state, building a mental library. Learning each part’s feel so I could spot the broken ones later with Psychometry.

Once I had a sense of the individual pieces, I planned to reassemble the droid and examine it as a whole system. Only then would I use Psychometry to trace the failures.

I got so absorbed that the outside world faded. Speeders, apartment systems—just background noise. My universe shrank to this sad, broken droid.

The first part alone was exhausting. My head ached, stuffed like I’d crammed a galactic encyclopedia through a mail slot. I leaned back against the couch, the Force buzzing under my skin like a low-grade fever. A glance at the chrono confirmed it was almost five in the morning.

Pale light crept through the blinds.

Panic hit. Vasha would be up soon. Maybe in an hour. Maybe less.

That childish fear of being caught after bedtime took over. The engineer in me clocked out. Sleep-deprived Ezra was in charge now.

I scrambled up, tripping over a disconnected leg. No time for gentleness. I scooped arms, legs, head, and loose circuits back into the junk box with muffled clunks. The datapad shut off, the glow rod stuffed under the couch like contraband.

"Later, buddy," I whispered.

Then I ninja-crawled to the couch, flopped under the blanket, and was out before I got comfortable. If Vasha found me like this, I’d say I had weird dreams about droids and starships.

Close enough to the truth

…

The alarm in my head—aka the part that remembered I was supposed to be a normal seven-year-old—buzzed at the same fake-o’clock it always did. I peeled my face off the couch cushion, wiped the drool, and sat up like I hadn’t spent half the night communing with a suicidal protocol droid.

Vasha’s bedroom door creaked. Bare feet on duracrete. Here we go.

She swooped in, all sleepy smile and rumpled lekku, scooped me up like I weighed less than a ration bar. “Morning, glowworm.”

I dangled in her arms, toes kicking empty air. “Morning.”

She leaned in, eyes half-lidded, aiming for that spot on her cheek she’d designated Official Smooch Territory. I braced for impact. This whole daily-cheek-kiss thing? Total import she’d picked up from some holodrama. At first I’d dodged like a Jedi in sparring practice. Lasted almost a month. She just kept tilting her head, waiting, until I caved out of pure social exhaustion.

She tapped her cheek. “Payment, please.”

Sigh.

Fine. I puckered up like I meant it—because apparently that mattered—planted the tiniest, driest kiss on her lekku-scented cheek.

Smoooch.

“There,” I muttered, cheeks burning. “Debt settled.”

She grinned, set me down, and ruffled my hair so hard I almost face-planted. “Best part of my day.”

I shuffled toward the ‘fresher, muttering about emotional blackmail and the tyranny of affectionate Twi’leks.

Vasha disappeared into the fresher, door hissing shut. I took my turn after her—lukewarm water, soap that smelled like recycled jungle—then padded back out feeling halfway human. Or halfway whatever I was.

She already had the heat-stove on, skillet warming. I grabbed the crate we used as a step-stool and parked it next to her so I could reach the counter. My job: crack the two shuura eggs without getting shell in the pan. Her job: everything else.

“Easy on the wrist,” she reminded, flipping her lekku over a shoulder. “Little circles, not karate chops.”

I rolled the eggs like she taught me, tapped, split. No shell. Victory.

While she stirred, I snuck a look at her portion. Before I’d landed here, she’d skip breakfast, just pocket some leftover protein sticks for lunch. Now she plated a full serving and actually ate it at the table with me. The change made something warm crawl into my chest.

Breakfast really is the cheat code for keeping a body running.

We cleaned up, she kissed my forehead—another marshmallow stamp—then grabbed her tool satchel. “Back at sunset, star. Don’t make a mess of the apartment.”

Can’t promise that ehehe.

Door whooshed shut. Quiet settled in like a blanket.

I rolled my shoulders, turning to face the workbench and the junk box in the corner. Today felt lucky. Could’ve been the eggs.

Now, for round two.

I went back to the junk box and started pulling everything out again, undoing my panicked cleanup from the night before. This time, there was no need for stealth. I laid the head, torso, and all four limbs on the workbench in a rough approximation of their correct anatomical positions. Boy, this was going to take some time.

…

…

I bolted the limbs onto the torso and clicked the head into place. Not a repair—just assembly. Now it looked like a complete corpse instead of a dismembered one. Progress.

Another round of Hyper Perception. Getting familiar with the gestalt of it. Trying to understand a whole droid this way was like downloading the HoloNet through a dial-up modem. Impossible. But I didn’t need understanding—just familiarity. A warm-up before the main event: psychometry.

I’d learned early that psychometry works better on whole objects. A single part gives you a memory, sure, but it’s like hearing one side of a drunken argument. The whole thing? That’s the full bar fight.

And my skills had improved. Before, touching something meant getting blasted with its entire life story, from raw ore to my fingerprints. Now? I could filter. Skip the boring origin story and jump straight to the dramatic finale.

I placed a hand on the droid’s chest plate. Just a test flight. Skimming the surface of its past. Not hunting for the failure yet—just feeling. The hum of its last moments. The jolt of a power surge. The clatter of frustrated dockworkers poking its guts.

Fast-forwarding through a recording, sensing the texture of time without drowning in details. The real challenge? Layering Hyper Perception on top. Not just seeing the past, but feeling every circuit’s state in that past.

A few hours later.

Good news: I got Hyper Perception and psychometry to work together.

Bad news: It was a bitch.

The two abilities didn’t fight—they merged into a hurricane of information. Hours of practice just to keep my brain from short-circuiting. One part of my mind anchored in the present, the other flung through the past. Easy in theory. In practice? Like juggling lit thermal detonators.

And then—oh yeah—the droid had no power cell. Vasha, ever the safety nut, must’ve pulled it. I spent half an hour elbow-deep in the junk box before finding it tucked away like contraband.

Six exhausting hours later, my brain felt like a wrung-out dishrag. But I finally had the full picture. And the horrifying truth of why this droid was scrap.

Lawd, this thing was fucked.

It wasn’t one big failure. No, that would’ve been too kind. This was death by a thousand papercuts.

The big stuff? Solid. Logic boards, limb actuators—just a few dings. The real killers were the tiny, sneaky bastards:

A micro-fracture in the power conduit, so small you’d miss it unless you were Force-sensitive and slightly obsessive. Random energy hiccups, frying nearby circuits like a bad game of Whack-a-Mole.

Resistors—some weak, some fried, scattered like bad teeth. Individually harmless. Together? A symphony of failure.

The wiring. Oh, the wiring. Melted nodes, frayed connections. Not enough to kill a circuit, just enough to make it forget words mid-sentence.

Dozens of these gremlins, each fixable on its own. But add them up? The dockyard technicians including Vasha might have took one look and stamped BEYOND ECONOMICAL REPAIR.

Can’t blame them. I almost did the same.

Through Vasha did see some hope in getting it working, so now, let’s see what we can do with it.