FicWad

“Shmi Maakaruna Skywalker Lars: Dreaming Flowers Raining in the Desert”

01.) Home: Shmi was eight and a half when her family was seized and made into slaves, so she can vividly remember the planet on which she was born, if she just concentrates and casts her thoughts back before the time when the pirates came and shattered her life – home was a world with gravity just a little less and the oxygen content of the atmosphere just a little greater than those on most planets inhabited by humans and near-humans (inspiring a certain feeling of health and lightness of being and even euphoria in those raised on worlds closer to the norms for Type 1 atmospheres and Class M planets or satellites); with an overall hilly, mountainous terrain, rising in a seemingly endless panorama, fold upon fold upon fold, from the bedrock of the world; with an enormous sun that was deep red, the color of a great quantity of recently split (just clotting, not yet drying) human blood; with seven moons, like great multicolored jewels, hanging off the horns of the world’s towering mountains; with long winters and extremes of temperature in the brief springs and falls, brutally cold nights plagued with snow and ice-storms giving way to extremely warm and sunny days that melted the leavings of the storms and resulted in brief but violently beautiful explosions of blooming flowers all along the rushing rivulets of runoff; with huge tracts of largely pristine forested wilderness scattered across the rolling hillsides and lower slopes of the mountains and ice-girded seas to the extreme north and south of the nine linked (both by natural design and through the creative ingenuity of the world’s sentient settlers) major continents scattered across or near to the central girth of the planet; and with small settlements dotting the coastlines, sprinkled seemingly at random across the hills, and occasionally planted in the valley folds or perched on the lowest of the jagged summits of the mountains – and she also knows, from her research, that it’s extremely likely that she’s remembering the Colonies Regions world of Albairlann (a planet remembered most as a way-stop for colonists and explorers from Core Worlds like Alderaan, Chandrila, and Grizmallt on their way to new homes out past the Expansion Region in what would eventually become known as the Mid Rim and the Outer Rim Territories); yet, no matter how hard she thinks or how deeply she concentrates on remembering, she cannot, for the life of her, recollect or reconstruct any kind of logical reason why her parents would have been leaving a comfortable (not to mention profitable!) home (she remembers a good-sized combination farm and ranch, riding for hours across or out around their property on enormous domesticated chèrvines – large but graceful and oddly delicate-limbed four-legged, thickly-coated equines with branching, crystalline horns – with her mother or her father seated easily on the saddle behind her) to seek a new existence on some frontier world in the dangerous (and all too often lawless) Outer Rim Territories.

02.) Family: She regards family as something unutterably sacred, and that is one of the reasons why she quietly but vehemently loathes and privately damns to the furthest reaches of hell all slaver-gatherers and slave-traders, for she remembers how hard her parents fought – to try to drive off the pirates, to try to stay together, to try to keep her from being taken away from them – and how devastation over being torn violently away from her parents and being sold into slavery stole so much of her life from her that she didn’t even notice the hell she was being thrown in to until it was already too late, and she knows, with the same kind of certainty that she knows both the frailness and the strength of her physical body, that there are few worse things that can be done to a sentient being than to steal both family and freedom away all in one fell swoop.

03.) Lesson: One of the first things she learned, as a slave, is that those who are most able to afford to show basic decency and compassion to other sentient beings unfortunately also tend to be those who are the least likely to do so, for while she meets many kind and good decent beings who are either slaves or else so poor and indebted to others for their continued survival that they are essentially the next best thing to being owned by others, almost without fail, the beings she meets who have wealth and comfort enough to have no need to really work in order to survive are cold, distant, selfish, self-centered, greedy, petty (sometimes to the point of viciousness), and, oftentimes, apparently lacking in fully functional consciences and, thus, simply offhandedly outright cruel to others: it is a lesson that she never forgets, and one that, eventually, makes her determined to try to counter at least some of the darkness in the galaxy, by being as kind and giving to others and as content with her own lot in life as she possibly can.

04.) Gift: She was born with a . . . gift, a talent that she knows lets her do things that aren’t really natural, things that most other (normal) beings can’t do and would probably be terrified at the very thought of others being able to do – especially regarding the way she can read most sentient beings and understand them and what makes them tick so well that she can usually reach out to each one and instinctively know just where and how to apply pressure for any kind of response she might want or need of that person (usually, having a certain specific response to her or to those around her, such as not registering her presence at all, or maybe seeing her and deciding that it’s not worth it to bother her, or perhaps even seeing her and promptly deciding to be more agreeable or sympathetic and less likely to lash out at her or anyone else who might happens to cross his or her or its line of sight), using a combination of her actual physical body (including the way that she holds and moves her body and how she speaks and what she says, both verbally and nonverbally) and that part of her mind that holds the gestaltian impression of that being to nudge at that being’s mind and will, applying certain very specific kinds of pressure to particular points where that being is weaker, more vulnerable, more open to manipulation, and so cause that person to (temporarily, usually) either have a (slight) change of heart or else experience slightly altered perceptions, meddling just enough to ensure the continued safe existence of herself and (when she can) those around her – but she remembers just enough about her parents (about the way that her mother always seemed to know what others were thinking and how they felt and why and just what to say, to make someone upset either calm down or feel better, and the almost uncanny rapport her father had with all sorts of animals, domesticated or otherwise) that she’s fairly sure her gift is part of her inheritance from them, so she’s determined to never allow herself to be bullied or frightened into giving it up (not when so little of her family has been left to her!), and it’s a good thing, because honestly, looking back, she’s not at all sure she would’ve survived her childhood, otherwise.

05.) Time: After the pirates seized the ship and made everyone on it into slaves, to be separately sold off to the highest bidders, she spent the next few years bouncing back and forth from one Outer Rim system to another and another and another, usually as a house slave, often as another, older slave’s fetch-and-carry girl or personal combination laundress/maid, but she was so busy mourning for the life she’d lost and the parents who were stolen from her that she hardly noticed the passage of time, and so it wasn’t until she was about eleven or so and her body decided to betray her to womanhood, the so-called lady wife of her present owner abruptly demanded that she be sold, for casting doe-eyes at the woman’s youngest son and trying to make him desire her (though, in truth, Shmi thought nothing of the boy and would never have accepted anything from him that he might have wanted to offer that did not begin with her immediate emancipation and include a proper courting), and the dealer that she was sold to was then raided by pirates in the market for flesh toys and house servants for the Hutts that she actually woke up enough for it to really sink in that she was still alive . . . only to immediate and desperately wish that her life would have been truly taken from her, after all.

06.) Savior: All she really remembers about the nine months in the slave pens of Tatooine are fear, grief, pain, hunger, thirst, darkness, mind-numbing horror at the evil surrounding her, filth, sickness, hiding, more pain, the near impossibility of being able to keep sufficient focus (in the midst of such crushing darkness) and enough energy (with so little real nourishment at hand) to continue to drive away all of the animals who wore human (or at least humanoid) form and thought to find pleasure in her suffering, and the shining figure of her unexpected savior, the sudden influx of blinding light highlighting the woman’s angelic form in a liming halo of white as she bent down over Shmi’s horribly undernourished and shivering form, easily lifting her bodily up out of the dark squalor of the shallow hole she’d finally felt forced to crawl away into, to die, and declaring, in a voice of furious thunder, “I will take this one and no other, damn you!”

07.) Escape: To keep slaves from attempting to escape, they are embedded with a tracking chip containing an explosive device that, if triggered purposefully by a Master who’s discovered that a slave has attempted (or seems to be trying) to run, can promptly (and sometimes quite messily) end that slave’s life; there are ways around the consequences represented by such devices, for one ingenious, powerful, and determined enough to escape, of course, but as a child Shmi believed her parents’ frantic promises that they would find and free here, and as an adolescent edging into adulthood, well . . . Pi-Lippa never activated her owner’s chip, as she did not believe in the use of such barbaric devices: it is her gratitude over being rescued her and her love of the woman alone (despite her occasional fears and doubts) that continue to tie Shmi to Pi-Lippa and her hotel.

08.) Exist: Tatooine – a desert world with three moons in a binary star system in the Arkanis Sector of the Galactic Republic’s Outer Rim Territories, largely inhabited by Hutt gangsters and various of their criminal associates and hirlings (who engage in all manner of unsavory activities, from gambling to drug manufactoring and exportation, and from weapons running to the buying, breeding, and selling of slaves), bounty hunters, pilots, slaves, (generally poor) local settlers who mostly farm moisture for a living, with other (legal) activities including used equipment retailing and scrap dealing, and two known nomadic sentient indigenous species, the Jawas and the Sand People (also known as Tusken Raiders and Ghorfa), somehow or another scraping a living in the deep desert. The planet itself lies along the 5709-DC Shipping Lane, a spur of the Triellus Trade Route, which itself connects to the Sisar Run, and is, moreover, not far from the Corellian Run, meaning that it is surprisingly well-positioned for trading operations, but then, that is precisely one of the major problems of the world, for the Hutts covet Tatooine for its ideal position among some of the major hyperlanes and shipping routes of the galaxy, and their grip on the resource-poor planet is, therefore, merciless – though technically a member world of the Republic, is, as Shmi soon learns, in reality run by the Hutt crimelords and gangsters who have settled there and made it an unofficial part of Hutt Space; thus, sadly, the Republic and its laws (including those guarding and guaranteeing basic sentient rights, like the law barring slavery) essentially do not exist, on Tatooine, making life on the planet far different than it otherwise would most likely be, for many of its residents.

09.) Master: Pi-Lippa is much more a second mother, or a very young grandmother (or perhaps a kind and quirky aunt), than a master, and her softly warm presence in Shmi’s life allows light to filter down and illumine places in her heart and soul that have remained shuttered over and dark for years; yet, the fact remains that she quite literally owns Shmi, due to the endless badgering and worrying of her family (who, though not concerned enough to actually do much of anything to help her themselves, fussed and fussed and fussed at Pi-Lippa, because of her gradual but as yet incurable wasting sickness, until they finally wore her down enough to make her agree to purchase either a slave or an indentured servant of some kind to help her with the running of the household and the overseeing of the hotel), and, though one of the first promises Pi-Lippa makes to Shmi is to free her, when she is legally of age (something that occurs at sixteen, on Tatooine) and therefore able to own and inherit property of her own (and, thus, will hopefully no longer be in danger of being preyed upon by evil men or animals wearing human-seeming faces), and Shmi hates to be cynical (and, worse, to be ungrateful) enough to doubt that her kind mistress has every intention of fulfilling that promise, Shmi still never quite manages to completely banish the fear that, like a piece of valuable property, she will instead end up being passed on to another master – one not nearly as gentle or intelligent or humane as Pi-Lippa – when the wasting disease finally claims her owner’s life.

10.) Disorder: The wasting disease that Pi-Lippa suffers from isn’t really technically a sickness: it’s a genetic disorder that combines gradual degeneration of the nerves and spinal column with a gradual weakening of the limbs and loss of muscle control that eventually leads to paralysis and which, unfortunately, is so extremely rare that no cure, as yet, has been discovered for it; thus, even though there are treatments for the various symptoms (at least to a certain extent), the fact remains that the disease will eventually prevail and extinguish Pi-Lippa’s life, though hopefully that won’t happen for many years yet to come.

11.) Chance: Pi-Lippa’s children were all artificially conceived, in such a way that they would take after their father most, genetically, and so not be in any danger of inheriting her disorder, and, while Shmi understands, intellectually speaking, that this was done to keep the children from suffering, she can’t help but think sometimes that perhaps it might have been better if it had been left to chance and at least one of the five children had actually inherited the insidiously creeping disease, so that it would be real enough to them that they would have to feel some kind of genuine worry and compassion for their uncomplaining and far too gracious mother, whose sheltering of them from her increasing discomfort has, Shmi suspects, encouraged her family’s casual attitude of self-centered, heedless selfishness.

12.) Push: Being able to push others – to be able to sense the shape of someone’s mind and soul enough to know just how and where to apply pressure, to be able to get them to do or not do certain specific things – was often the only thing standing between her continued life and a truly awful death, as a newly made slave, and at first its seems . . . wrong, somehow, to use it here, if it isn’t a matter of life and death, but Pi-Lippa’s family expects certain things of their mother and of the combination hotel and cantina, in terms of profit, so she really has no choice but to use her gift, offering small, subtle nudges of suggestion and persuasion here and there, smoothing ruffled feathers and soothing unsteady tempers and spreading quiet satisfaction and contentment and ease in her wake, as she passes among the ranks of their guests and patrons, building up the hotel’s reputation and profits and helping to ease Pi-Lippa’s burden of worry.

13.) Plan: Supposedly because they cannot definitively prove when her birth date falls, the lawyers tell Pi-Lippa that they cannot draw up or process emancipation papers for Shmi until such a time as three different qualified Healers all attest to the fact that she is without a doubt at least sixteen full years of age; yet, though the date the Healers arrive upon is practically her seventeenth birthday, she doesn’t mind so very much (at least not at first), as the very fact that Pi-Lippa has insisted on getting that part of the process involved in getting all of the paperwork that must go in to setting her legally free done when she’s still only twelve reassures Shmi that her own truly does plan to see her freed . . . eventually.

14.) Rare: There are certain things on a desert world that are, quite simply, rarer than others: they’re fairly lucky, in that high quality leathers and furs, wool products, and a relatively decent range of fabrics made from natural fibers (ranging in quality from a very sheer and fine gossamer or gauze to fabrics that mimic light weight silks, cottons, and even linens to fabrics that mimic heavier twill, canvas, denim, etc.) aren’t among those rarities (given the prevalence of banthas, cu-pas, dewbacks, eopies, rontos, and other such hardy, large herd animals and beasts of burden); however, unfortunately, finding local plants and minerals that can be successfully used as dyes on these fabrics is often a whole other matter entirely, with bold colors in the cooler hues being particularly hard to come by without resorting to expensive off-world trade; thus, though Shmi has a definite weakness for the cooler colors (loving the greens of growing plants, the pale blues and deep indigos of water and sky, even the rare violets of off-world exotic blooms and the soft purples of dusk) and even Pi-Lippa agrees that shades of bright, thoroughly saturated turquoise and deep aquas are among some of the most flattering colors for Shmi, she more often than not finds herself clothed in some shade or hue of umber, burnt orange, red, yellow, amber, golden-brown, or sandy tan and beige, with splashes of bright fuchsia pink and deep mauve occasionally breaking up that more earthy-toned palette, and, even though she truly does dislike nearly all of those somehow shabby seeming, dusty shades of brown and dull, dirt-colored beiges, she merely sighs and wears them, for she knows that the more earth-toned hues give her a more dignified air (more closely matching the decor of the hotel, as they do) and that the fabric of her clothes is far finer than Pi-Lippa really has to buy, and that she’s lucky to have an owner who actually cares enough about her to know what colors she loves and looks good in and will occasionally buy her a lovely head-wrap, scarf, or dressing gown in one of those colors, just because she knows that the colors will please Shmi.

15.) Girl: Since she is a bright girl who learns all manner of subjects with ease, retains and comprehends knowledge effortlessly, has hands and muscles that understand precisely how to move to get the maximum amount of work accomplished with the absolute minimum of effort and maximum amount of grace, and is, moreover, blessed with a long, supple, slender limbs, a soft but lovely voice, shy dark eyes in a classically lovely oval face framed by luxurious dark hair, and a thousand other small physical details that all add up to a single incontrovertible fact of undeniable beauty, sometimes Shmi can’t help but wonder (even though her pessimism makes her feel ashamed of herself) if Pi-Lippa is being so very kind and gentle to her because she truly does feel sorry for her and (as she constantly insists) considers her to be a part of her family, or if the gentle kindness of the older woman (who is increasingly sickly and unable to manage all of the work involved in running the combination hotel and cantina) is prompted more by the charm and undeniable graciousness that Shmi brings to the hotel as she quietly and uncomplainingly takes over the process of running it – essentially single-handedly managing it all, by the age of thirteen, and quadrupling its profits fairly easily, by the time she’s fifteen.

16.) Witness: You hear and see things all the time, when you’re a slave – even when you’re a slave who’s essentially running one of the most upscale and well-to-do hotels in one of the more civilized cities on an Outer Rim world like Tatooine. Perhaps especially then, actually, given some of the more . . . unsavory residents of Tatooine, and their even less reputable methods of gaining wealth – things that other beings might not necessarily want others to have knowledge of, and, if you’re very smart and even more lucky (or talented, as the case may be), you’ll be able to avoid drawing unwanted attention to yourself long enough to get clear of any really dangerous situations, but you have to be able to make yourself forget some things, if you want to be able to keep from doing or saying anything foolish, and Shmi finds that the most difficult task of all, for she’s forced to bite her tongue about so many crimes and injustices that there are days when she cannot help but wonder if her relative comfort and safety (and, thus, Pi-Lippa’s peace of mind) or even her continued physical existence is really worth the price of the damage being inflicted on her heart and soul by all the horrors that she’s being made to bear silent witness to, thus.

17.) Distraction: She can’t decide if she initially pushed too hard on someone too cursedly stubborn to easily change or not hard enough on a personality inclined to maleficence, but either way the fact remains that Pi-Lippa’s youngest child, Loucester, seems to think it is his personal mission in life to make Shmi’s life as difficult as possible, and there are days when she finds herself sitting alone in her private rooms, crying helplessly, driven to distraction by his nitpicking and endless list of demands and apparent inability to do anything himself at all right and constant blaming of her for his shortcomings, and wishing she could just pick up and leave without having to fear that he would take immense pleasure in setting the law on her heels.

18.) Good: She’s fairly certain she could have been a good Jedi, if only she’d been brought to one of the Order’s Temples at a young enough age, but unfortunately she’s fairly certain that she would’ve already been considered too old for the Jedi Order even as early on as when the pirates first seized her and her parents, or else she would have figured out a way to either get a Jedi’s attention (so she could be found and freed and accepted as an initiate in the Order) or else to run away to Coruscant or another world with a strong Jedi presence, to free herself from this trap.

19.) Dream: She has dreams, sometimes, about people she’ll meet later on, or events that will later occur, but they don’t happen regularly enough or have outcomes consistently enough like what she dreams to really be of much use for anything that could actually help Shmi better her situation (though she has been able to avoid some nasty customers and to prevent a couple of potentially very serious accidents in and around the hotel, by heeding the warnings in her dreams) and no dream of hers ever warned her of the pirates who stole her and her parents and tore their family apart, so she doesn’t really pay them too much heed, since other aspects of her gift are generally of so much more immediate use.

20.) Reputation: There are two races of sentient beings native to Tatooine, so far as anyone knows – the Sand People (or Ghorfas, as the historians and anthropologists call them), also quite commonly (and rather pejoratively) known as Tusken Raiders, who are essentially human-sized and human-shaped, though they’re also so reclusive (and so hostile, to those who aren’t members of their tribes) and body-shy that they wrap themselves in layers upon layers of rags and robes (including masks of various kinds, often quite strange or fearsome in appearance, that inevitably include goggles or visors to shield the eyes of the Sand People from the harsh Tatooine sunlight, a constantly open mouthpiece covering the area between the nose and jaw, a moisture trap around the neck to help humidify the air taken into the lungs, and two pipes that protrude from beneath the mask, presumably to facilitate breathing), leaving no skin whatsoever exposed, meaning that it is quite impossible to tell for sure what they truly look like, leaving most to assume (partially because of their dislike of the often human or near-human settlers; partially because most other sentient beings who know of the Tuskens and their rather brutal reputation as bloodthirsty raiders and reavers who attack, rob, and slay as many settlers and even Jawas as they possibly can, prefer to believe that the desert nomads are of such an alien race that they have no biological ties to any of the other sentient species of the galaxy) that, though roughly humanoid in form, they are in truth some kind of non-human species wholly alien to humans and near-humans; and the Jawas, short (generally just under a full meter in height, though a few rare individuals, quite possibly afflicted with some kind of hereditary disease causing increased growth, occasionally reached a meter and a half in height), roughly humanoid beings with a reputation for being untrustworthy (for their tendency to steal anything and everything they could and to often sell their salvaged and/or stolen goods at inflated prices), rodent-like scavengers as likely to tear a perfectly fine machine apart for its various component parts as to figure out how to use it, who, as they never go without their deeply hooded robes in the presence of strangers (remaining covered up at all times, much like the Sand People), are largely a mystery, as a species, to the rest of the galaxy, though xenobiologists have discovered, through the study of corpses and skeletal remains, that Jawas appeared to be gaunt, rodent-like creatures, with shrunken faces and yellow eyes – and, even though they are the natural owners and inheritors of all that is Tatooine and should be given the same rights and privileges as other sentient beings are, in the Republic, they are instead both largely dismissed by the rest of the galaxy as “primitives” and “savages” and generally regarded by all of the other sentient beings who reside on the planet as vermin and sub-sentient nuisances that the world (and the galaxy) would be better off without, meaning that they are generally hated and feared (the Sand People) or intensely disliked and distrusted (the Jawas) and accorded no real rights within the Republic (save whatever they receive from their own kind or can successfully demand of others, on Tatooine): all things considered, Shmi’s not really surprised that they don’t particularly care for outsiders (nor, in truth, can she, as a slave, really blame them for their shared tendency to steal from off-world settlers who are, after all, quite literally, stealing their world and its scarce bounty away from them), and she wonders, sometimes, what kind of awful reputation the off-world settlers (especially greedy monstrosities like the Hutts) probably have among the indigenous residents of Tatooine’s deserts.

21.) Mysterious: Tatooine is a mysterious world, in some ways, and she cannot quite ignore the presentiment that there is some strange mystery to this world that, if uncovered, would forever change life as it is known on the planet – an intuition that often grips her in such a tight hold that she finds herself standing before windows, looking out towards the open desert, peering into the distance as if her eyes alone might somehow be able to pierce that veil of mystery and so discern the truth – but (unfortunately for her own curiosity) she herself is too busy and too constrained by far to even think about seriously trying to uncover that mysterious secret for herself, so it is a lure that she is forced to ignore, despite the occasional longings of her heart.

22.) Freedom: The longing for freedom manifests in strange ways, sometimes: an unabashed love of sunrises and a trembling dislike of sunsets; an inability to suppress laughter in the face of a violent gust of wind and a strange desire to laugh and sing and spin herself dizzy-sick amongst the whirling dervishes that presage the coming of a storm; a love of stories and news of what is happening on other worlds, far from the Outer Rim (the further away from Tatooine, the better!); even an affinity for anything and everything that flies and an uncanny ability to pilot that leaves veterans (even and especially nonhumans far better suited for racing) staring gape-mouthed and pale after her, stunned and wondering at the fact that she hasn’t smashed herself into a bloody lifeless pulp but is instead grinning at them maniacally with breath-stealing joy gleefully writ large in every line of her vividly alive body.

23.) Reason: As far as she can tell from what she has been able to piece together about it, the Jedi Order is ridiculously short-handed of fully trained Masters and Knights and expected to be able to do far too much for the relatively few overall numbers contained by the Order (Force or no Force to help them!); this is the only reason why she has not come to hate the Jedi Order, for failing to find a way to enforce all of the Galactic Republic’s laws – including those guarding basic sentient rights and forbidding slavery – for all of its citizens, even those stuck on a gods’ forsaken, desolate, Hutt-controlled Outer Rim Territories world like Tatooine.

24.) Civilization: If any place on this whole cursed desert planet is at all civilized, it’s Bestine, and she’ll be the first one to admit that she’s incredibly lucky to have been singled out for rescue by Pi-Lippa and brought back to this little metropolis with her, to the Dylena Hotel (and cantina); yet, she’s never quite been able to bring herself to trust the veneer of civilization, can’t at all trust her own seeming good fortune on a world as hard and dangerous and lawless as Tatooine to last when nothing else good in her life has ever lasted, and increasingly finds it next to impossible to trust in promises for an eventual emancipation when she knows that time is running out and can vividly recall the hardness in the eyes (and hearts and thoughts) of Pi-Lippa’s family every single time any of them have turned in Shmi’s direction, so she does everything she can, in her spare time, to learn as much as she can, even if it means soiling her lovely hands in the practice of a trade that would make Pi-Lippa press her lips together into a thin bloodline line of disapproval.

25.) Influence: Unless Pi-Lippa is in pain or in danger and she thinks she can do something to ease that pain or destroy that danger, Shmi refuses, on general principle, to use any part of her strange talents on her owner (though this does not, of course, mean that Pi-Lippa’s family is off-limits): everyone else, though, is fair game, and, though she’s not entirely sure that it works as well when used in such a manner, she often finds herself moved to try to use her most often used gift on various of the hotel and cantina’s visitors, not so much to push them into an immediate action (or lack thereof) as to instead influence them, over the long run, towards a different kind of behavior and attitude, affecting the areas of their minds and wills that touch on personalities all too often primed for violence rather than logic or serenity and inclined towards unnecessary risk (gambling, drug use, etc.) and hedonistic, self-centered pleasure rather than anything at all constructive, attempting to plant whispers of suggestion and subconscious commands to steer these (potentially quite dangerous and/or self-destructive) beings away from violence, crime, selfishness, and towards true calmness, contentment, happiness, usefulness, even true goodness of character, in her own small way, thus, trying to make her world a better place . . . whether the residents of said world would particularly want it that way or necessarily strive it make it so of their own free will or not!

26.) God: She’s heard it said before (most often by beings whose hearts and minds are clouded either by fear, envy, or hatred) that the Jedi use their preternatural powers as an excuse to play God, using their connection to the Force and their ability to do things that other sentient beings simply cannot do in order to impose their rule, their judgments, on the rest of the sentient beings of the galaxy, lording over everyone else as if their connection to the Force somehow gave them the right to demand that everyone else live according to their laws, their notions of what’s right and good (in the process conveniently ignoring the fact that the laws the Jedi impose are those of the Republic, not the Jedi Order, and that Jedi actually tend to keep mostly to themselves, when not called upon by the Republic to protect it and help keep the peace and ensure justice – as often as possible – within its borders); and yet, though she knows that such accusations are inherently flawed (and, as often as not, made by those who only wish to cause trouble) and that the Jedi are only doing as much as they possibly can to obey the will of the Force and to protect the existence of law and order and justice and peace and democratic free will within the confines of Republic space, sometimes she can’t help but compare herself to the Jedi . . . and to wonder if her all but constant use of her Force-powered talents are as justified (or as selfless) as the Jedi Order’s use of the Force, even if she is as careful as she can be to only use them for purposes of protection or to try to help people or stave off violence.

27.) Retch: She neither appreciates nor enjoys the way that Loucester has taken to looking at her, since she turned sixteen, doesn’t like him and doesn’t like the look in his eyes, which makes every nerve in her body scream of wrongness and danger and the need to run and hide, and she does her best to simply avoid him, whenever he visits his mother or the hotel, but she’s a busy girl and she’s not careful enough one day (or maybe he’s been stalking her, waiting for a moment when he knew she couldn’t duck away and hide) and it takes everything in her to bridge the gap between her thoughts/feelings/sense of self and his and to push just where and how much is necessary, to make him have second thoughts and not just let her go but decide she simply isn’t worth the trouble of molesting and so truly leave her be, and Shmi stumbles away from him, afterwards, staggering drunkenly, feeling sickened, violated, stained, /unclean/, to fall to her knees in the nearest ’fresher and retch and retch and retch until there’s not even bile left to come back up and she’s forced to remember the loving smiles her parents used to trade, sometimes, over her head, to keep herself from going after the nearest sharp object and trying to gouge the darkness of that man out of her mind and soul again.

28.) Bad: She knows that something bad is going to happen and not just because of her growing cynicism – she has evil dreams and is oppressed by such a rapidly increasing sense of lowering doom that she feels as if she’s being slowly suffocated by her own helplessness – yet, for all of the warnings her gift tries to send her, in the end, there isn’t a single blasted thing she can do, either to help Pi-Lippa or to try to save herself from the consequences of her owner’s death, a little over a month shy of the date when the Healers had agreed they could testify she was at least sixteen and, thus, legally old enough to be emancipated.

29.) Interest: She pushes Pi-Lippa’s family (including Loucester) as far as she dares (as far as she knows she can, before she shoves her way so far into their minds that she’ll causes them permanent damage), and yet still they decide to sell her, even though Pi-Lippa’s will clearly specifies that Shmi is supposed to be freed, if she had not yet been emancipated at the time of Pi-Lippa’s death, and given an inheritance including twenty-five percent of the hotel – controlling interest, considering that each of Pi-Lippa’s five children were only left fifteen percent each . . . an amount that, by blatantly ignoring their mother’s will, they all managed to fatten up to twenty percent apiece – times are so dark, though, that she decides she must grasp at what little joy she can, and so she supposes, at least, that it is a kindness that they’ve had the courtesy to sell her off to someone who resides in another city, rather than simply selling her to one of the more . . . disreputable of the hotel’s clients

30.) Example: Being made a combination part-time secretary and part-time mechanic for a small group of . . . freight carriers . . . isn’t too terribly bad, she supposes (anyway, at least the owners and pilots are all nonhumans, so she doesn’t have to use her gift to get them to avoid assaulting her), and her new owners aren’t too clear on her former station or situation, so she doesn’t have to put up with either their pity for the way she was essentially robbed by Pi-Lippa’s family or general ugliness for having had hopes “above her station” (as a slave), but she’s not too terribly sure that the operation is entirely legal or truly transporting innocuous freight, like mail orders for small merchant businesses, and so she worries that someone will take notice and do something that will ruin her owners’ business – a fear that, unfortunately, proves all too prophetic, when, not quite a year and a half after being jointly bought by the business’ owners, one of the many steward-lieutenants for the Hutt gangsters who essentially run Tatooine notices the company, takes umbrage at the notion that a black market operation has been running unnoticed essentially under his very nose, and decides to make a rather bloody example of the kind of fate that awaits those who try to operate illegal operations outside the bounds of Hutt rule.

31.) Luck: It’s essentially sheer dumb luck that saves Shmi, for she’s out on an errand that’s taken her all the way out across town (Mos Zabu), to pick up some food and other supplies for the operation, and so she misses the slaughter and is merely rounded up afterwards, along with all of the other remaining “assets” of the company, to supposedly make up for all of the profits her owners have been siphoning off of the Hutts: she spends most of the next decade bouncing from one new Master to another, never staying in one place for very long, pushing with all of her might to get away from the ones she suspects are involved in more shady, illegal dealings before she can get caught up in another attempt at someone’s idea of an example for how one should properly work with the Hutts.

32.) Pass: Her technical skills get called on more and more as the years pass, rather than her more managerial and secretarial skills, and yet, paradoxically, she has less and less cause to pilot, and she soon becomes extremely tired of fixing various machines and/or programming shipboard computers rather than actually getting to use them.

33.) Cry: Shmi misses the Dylena Hotel (and cantina)– misses Pi-Lippa and the unexpected little gifts she often used to leave for Shmi in her rooms (where she could find them, after a day of work); misses the guests and the stories and news of other places they used to bring with them; misses the smiling, chattering girls they hired locally to do almost all of the cleaning and laundry (even in the family’s own private wing of the hotel, where Shmi had her own suite of private rooms) and help with the cooking and serving as well as the hotel’s booking, and they way they always had time to share a joke or a story and a laugh, the way it was always so easy to help soothe their worries and make things better for them; misses the gossip-prone kindly older women (often mothers or aunts or cousins of the maids and laundresses) who cooked and cleaned in the cantina and kept the books and records for both the cantina and hotel and were so full of stories and always had a witty folk-saying or a morale-lifting or lesson-giving story about someone they’d once known or known of, to help others deal with any and all of the problems that might come up in their lives; misses the (mostly but not always nonhuman) good-natured, talkative fellows (some young, some not so very young) who carried bags and helped guests arrange travel and served drinks at the cantina and could so often be found lending a hand (or a set of strong arms) to the cleaning and serving girls and the cooks; misses the way her days and nights were often so filled with work and with learning that she had no time left to think, to dwell on the past or wonder about the future, or to worry about things like whether or not she would have a roof over her head, plenty of food and water to slake her thirst and fill her stomach, and sufficient, good-fitting clothes to wear to keep herself covered enough to feel protected both from the elements and the prying eyes of others – and there are nights when she simply cannot stop the tears from coming, though there are few things she hates to do more than to cry.

34.) Alone: The older Shmi gets, the more often she seems to have to push people to get them to leave her alone, but the less effort she seems to have to exert in order to get them to do it, and she wonders if she’s really getting that much stronger (or that much more skillful, in the use of her gift) or if that many more sentient beings simply have an interest (that’s noticeable enough to be irritating and even potentially threatening but not quite persistent/obstinate enough to be truly dangerous) in an obviously adult human woman than had been the norm when she was still an adolescent or a child.

35.) Evil: When she begins to near her twenty-eighth birthday, Shmi starts to have bad dreams that she cannot fully remember, upon waking, dreams so evil that the bits and pieces she can recall fill her with such fear and horror that she finds herself shunning food and sleep and starting nervously at shadows, so much so that, after a few months, her owners finally notice her wanness and order her to visit a Healer, concerned that she might be coming down with something.

36.) Pregnant: She’s so stunned to discover she’s pregnant, a month after her mandatory visit to a Healer, that her bewilderment makes her reflexively push so hard at her furious owners – who, evidently, have secretly been planning to auction her off (for purposes of deflowerment and of breeding) to the highest bidder(s) at the end of the year, since she is still a virgin and a good and hardy worker (and therefore good breeding stock) and so consistently attracts the notice of both men and others (being physically attractive for a human female) – that they come to believe her so completely when she claims that she’s never been with a man that they promptly attempt to sue the Healer she went to, certain that the man must have somehow knocked her out and then tampered with her when she was unconscious.

37.) Innocence: In an effort to prove his innocence, the Healer insists that Shmi must undergo a series of tests, to prove that she’s either telling the truth or else lying about never having been with a man, but the tests do nothing but prove her story, for her hymen is thick and unbroken and extensive examination proves that she’s untouched by anything large enough to leave discernable trace evidence behind – a fact that the Healer attempts to use to prove that Shmi is just a medical anomaly and that he never touched her, either physically or surgically – and so the Healer ends up getting blamed for her condition anyway (even though she’s honestly not sure if she believes that the Healer truly did something to her) and her owners get to use the small bit of notoriety she and they have garnered, thus, to sell her for an outrageous sum to someone interested in finding out just what, precisely, the Healer put in her, sheerly for the novelty of it.

38.) Glitch: There is a slight glitch in the autopilot program and the result is a slight accidental overshooting of the small jumper’s landing coordinates . . . and a crash landing just nasty enough to finally (after over a year of pregnancy) send her rather suddenly into labor – a labor that, by the calendar, is far overdue for a human norm child, and yet also one that, according to test results of the Healers, seems to be a few weeks premature – a labor that goes so badly that her current owner ends up having to pay for her to have a last minute cesarian, after the baby gets tangled in his cord and turned about backwards . . . a procedure, as it turns out, that he’d been intending on ordering anyway, not so much to safeguard her and her child but rather to continue to preserve the state of her unbroken hymen and her tenuous claim to fame as a virgin mother, in hopes of eventually being able to auction her off for a higher price or to at least fetch a higher than usual bid whenever the time came to purposefully breed her.

39.) Burn: She is forced to push so hard to keep her new owner from trying to take her baby away that she accidentally seems to burn out some vital part of his ability to make any kind of decision, and the fool gets himself killed only a few days later, dithering about how best to get out of the way of a pair of rampaging banthas, which unfortunately means that she and her baby – her beautiful little boy, who looks absolutely nothing /like her but who shines and shines and /shines with the energy that the Jedi call the Force and which she knows powers her various gifts and allows her to push others, making him even more precious than he already is in her eyes, just for being her child – are passed on to someone with no real use for them and so eventually end up getting auctioned off . . . thankfully together, but not so luckily to one of the steward-lieutenants of Garadulla the Elder, an important Hutt crimelord (oddly feminine-natured) on the planet, with a highly fortified palatial residence in the spaceport city of Mos Espa.

40.) Default: They end up the Hutt’s property more by default than anything else: Gardulla the Elder goes through a lot of stewards and bosses, with the properties of each “failure” either ending up absorbed into the Hutt’s extensive holdings or divvied out to the next appointee; she has recently turned thirty-one and Anakin is just over a year old when they become the property of the Hutt proper.

41.) Protection: The Hutts, Toydarians, t’landa Til, Yinchorri, Falleen, Dashade, and Snivvians all number among the relatively few sentient species who have built-in protection of one kind or another that keeps them from being overly susceptible to the kind of mental manipulation and persuasion generally effected by her particular talents; fortunately, though, this is a problem that she can generally fairly easily work around, since she almost never comes into direct contact with Gardulla or any of her Hutt relations or indeed anyone else who’s specifically resistant or even immune to her Force-powered gifts.

42.) Power: Anakin is . . . a sweet baby, a loving little boy, an extremely eager to please (and even more eager to be lauded and petted and made much over, for his eagerness to please) child, and it bothers her, sometimes, how frightened she occasionally finds herself of him, of the sheer amount of power contained in his small body.

43.) Create: Anakin has inherited such a ridiculously multiplied and magnified version of her abilities, her talents, and so little of her looks, her nature, that (despite her own lingering doubts about the decision to place the blame for her condition with that specific Healer), as the years pass and his abilities grow by prodigious (almost frighteningly huge) leaps and bounds, she finds herself wondering, sometimes, what it was that the Healer could have done – what the lawyers all insisted he must have done, despite his heartfelt and rather indignant protests to the contrary – to create such a child as this from out of her.

44.) Tolerance: As he grows, Anakin pushes Shmi in a way that is and is not like the way she affects and controls others – pushing and shoving and testing limits and boundaries over and over again, as if trying to discover the actual shape (and dimension) and physical limitations of her love for him, her tolerance of his neediness and desire for constant reassurance, manipulating her into a state of perpetual readiness to shower him with unconditional love.

45.) Instinct: Anakin is eerily gifted with machines, a pilot so gifted and natural that even those who know nothing of the Force swear that he pilots by feel and instinct alone, as if he can sense the presence of barriers, problems, obstacles, dangers, as they approach, gliding around them effortlessly as if the future were a canvas spread out before him, showing him the safest and quickest of all possible pathways to take.

46.) Bet: She is both relieved and, in an odd way, disappointed, when Gardulla loses her bet to the Toydarian junk dealer and she and Anakin end up being forfeit on the gamble – relieved, because she fears so much that Anakin will be hurt or killed, racing for that slimy bitch of a Hutt; disappointed, because the Toydarian obviously expects them to work in his expanding salvage shop and she’ll miss being in charge of such a great part of so very large a household of servants as she has been, at Gardulla’s fortress, and there will be no one and nothing really to act as a buffer between her and their new Master, save for perhaps his customers.

47.) Sweat: She has . . . dreams, sometimes, about her son, sometimes good – like the ones where Anakin is all grown up and happy and smiling fit to split his face in two and standing intimately close to an equally joyous, boyishly handsome, oddly ageless man with an air about him that nevertheless somehow marks him out as being older than her son, both of them cradling a baby close in the gentle yet unwavering support of their arms (one with hair as brilliantly bright as a rising sun and one with hair as smolderingly dark as a setting sun) – and sometimes so hideously awful that she wakes in a cold sweat, too terrified even to scream, fire and destruction filling her eyes until she can see nothing else but death and darkness, taste nothing but the bitter ashes of devastation and murder and betrayal.

48.) Bite: Watto, the typically blue pot-bellied little Toydarian, is almost all bark and no bite, but he’ll occasionally lay into Anakin verbally for some (usually unintentional) piddling little slight or minor mistake or small infraction or another, and it breaks her heart to see her little boy wilting before such a barrage, unable to do anything to slow or stop the flow of scornful, hurtful words and generally helpless to do anything afterwards to help make things better, either, given how stubborn and proud her son can be.

49.) Smile: When Anakin is nine, she finally gets him to tell her not only about the various (largely singular and mostly unimportant) prescient dreams he often has, but also about the recurring ones that always seem to put such a huge smile on his face, and she’s both surprised and more than a little disconcerted to discover that he’s dreaming of Jedi.

50.) Storm: She knows that something momentous is coming – she dreams of water-blue eyes in a leonine face and a black shadow that wields a blood-red double-blade of lurid light – and she knows, also, that powerful forces are about to clash over her son, and she only hopes that she and Anakin will be able to weather the coming storm together.

51.) Shadow: Her son insists that there should be another, much younger Jedi with Qui-Gon Jinn, when he finally strides boldly into their lives, and her own dreams concur, giving her the sight of a familiar boyish face (handsome and oddly ageless in a way that makes her think of the stories of the Jedi of old and their Dark Jedi nemeses, in the days back before the Sith, when human adepts of the Force lived easily over a thousand years and yet never aged a day past their physical primes), slightly sun-bleached red-gold hair mussed from a playful tousle from her grown son’s long-fingered, enormous hand; yet, instead, there is a strange, gangly-limbed, orange-skinned amphibious creature (sentient, from what she can tell, though the Jedi does not seem to entirely share that opinion) and a girl on the cusp of womanhood with a world of pain in her dark eyes and impatience and frustration like a dark cloud looming over her, darkening her innocent beauty into something almost sinister, and Shmi would be sorely tempted to refuse these strangers help and clutch her son tight to her, if only to keep him safe of the shadow, but Anakin is determined to make a go of it, especially once he finds out that they have a damaged ship being guarded by others of their party, including a Padawan learner of Qui-Gon’s, and she can’t quite bring herself to refuse her son’s argumentative pleading . . . not when the Jedi’s calm blue eyes are fastened so steadily, so expectantly, on her.

52.) Strange: There’s something . . . strange, about this young girl, Padmé Naberrie, something that feels . . . not quite right, to Shmi, an aspect to her story (as a handmaiden – a combination maidservant, lady-in-waiting, and guardian companion – to this young, relatively newly crowned Queen Amidala of Naboo) and her explanation behind her accompaniment of the tall Jedi Master that just doesn’t ring true, to Shmi, and so she wonders, at first, if she should worry that the girl means the rest of her party some kind of harm, but then it occurs to her that, if things truly are as desperate for Naboo as Padmé certainly seems to believe they are, then this mysterious Queen Amidala might be experiencing grave doubts as to whether or not the Senate will be able to do anything quickly enough to free her people and her planet from the (illegal) oppression of the Trade Federation, and that Padmé might, therefore, simply have a second agenda, given to her by her Queen, to watch out for anyone and anything that might potentially be used to the Nabooians advantage, whether or not Qui-Gon Jinn and the Jedi Order (or indeed the Senate itself) might necessarily approve, and she stops worrying about the strange sense of wrongness to the teen’s story and starts quietly hoping that the girl and her Queen will find whatever or whomever it is that they need, to take their planet back and free their people.

53.) Attention: Qui-Gon’s attention and his interest in her and her son is extremely flattering, and, unfortunately, it isn’t until after she’s told him her life’s story, shared with him the miracle of her child’s fatherless birth, and taken him to her bed to prove her story with the reality of her virginal body and her blood on the sheets, that she begins to fear that she may, perhaps, have mistaken the nature of his curiosity.

54.) Unravel: Qui-Gon is such a slow, gentle, attentive, thorough, virile, strong, unselfish lover that she finds herself imagining him freeing her and her son and taking them with him when he leaves, taking Anakin to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant for training and setting her up in a small but comfortably appointed and cozy home somewhere near the Temple, so he and her son can come and visit her every once in a while and she will be able to easily return the favor, and it isn’t until after he’s drifted off to sleep and murmured another person’s name in the midst of his dreaming that her own idle dreams start to unravel, though it isn’t until the following day, after Qui-Gon obvious dismissal of her and his concentration of Anakin makes it increasingly clear that he considers the freeing of her son a much higher priority than her own freedom (indeed, a higher priority even than the fulfillment of his mission, to guard Queen Amidala of Naboo and see her safely to the capital world, so she can tell the Senate of the illegal invasion of her world by the Trade Federation), that she actually begins to believe that she might truly mean nothing to the seemingly kind and wise Jedi Master.

55.) Predicament: Shmi is so shocked over the prospect of being left behind (abandoned like a worn out part that no longer has any real use) that it takes most of a month for her predicament to really sink in, and it isn’t until after word of the battle on Naboo and Qui-Gon Jinn’s death has reached Tatooine an no word has been sent to her of her son that she truly beings to comprehend both the self-centered nature of the man and the selfish nature of the Order that has stolen her son away from her.

56.) Miss: Anakin’s friends – Wald and Kitster Banai especially – all miss Anakin so much and yet are so sure that he must be doing well on Coruscant, in the Jedi Order, and be learning how to be a Jedi Knight, so he can come back to Tatooine and free all the slaves, that she hasn’t the heart to tell them that there’s been no news and that her son could have been killed in the battle that claimed Qui-Gon Jinn’s life, on Naboo; thus, she finds it an extreme relief, to be able to distract herself (at least a little) by starting a recording of her life, on Tatooine, in a datapad journal for Anakin, both to remind him of how much he’s loved and missed and to let him know that she truly has been alright, since he left, and that he made the right decision, in decided to go.

57.) Package: Despite both the welcome distraction of her new journal and her new friend, Cliegg Lars (a new customer at Watto’s store who has made it a point to visit her several times, and who seems, in a way, to be trying to court her), and her own near-certainty that she would know, if something truly bad ever happened to Anakin, Shmi is near to panicking outright when the package sent by Obi-Wan Kenobi in his former Master’s name finally arrives, not only with word of her son’s safety (and his apprenticeship, to Obi-Wan), but also the means for her to secure her freedom – something she embraces eager, with Cliegg Lars’ help, along with that good man’s name.

58.) Slide: Cliegg Lars is gentle and witty and smart, under his slightly reserved (some might even say taciturn) exterior, a man surprisingly well travelled, startlingly well educated, and even more shockingly literate (not just well read but exceedingly wide read and well versed in any number of subjects, from art to architecture to agriculture to the societal mores and values of several different galactic species and their cultures, subcultures, and countercultures), for a moisture farmer on Tatooine, and Shmi finds herself to be puzzled by him, intrigued, charmed, bewitched, and challenged at every turn, such that falling in love with him is not so much a sudden plunge but rather a gradual and inevitable sort of slow but steady slide, like an object being pulled by stages, centimeter by centimeter, down a slight incline by gravity’s generally unnoticeable but nevertheless unavoidable universal force, reaching the bottom of that slope and arriving at the fullness of her love for the man after he and his son have helped her win her freedom from an uncooperative (but greedy and, thus, fairly easily tricked) Watto.

59.) Catch: There are those who would not consider Cliegg Lars to be much of a catch, as a husband, she knows – though he is a fairly tall man, he is neither dark nor all that particularly handsome (being, instead, stocky and somewhat plain, with faded, greying brown hair, light blue eyes, and a slightly oversized nose); though he’s less than a year older than Shmi is, grief and many years of constant exposure to the elements of Tatooine have aged him more than his years; and, though he is a successful moisture farmer and has more money than might be expected even for such a successful farmer, due to a highly successful business he co-owned while living on another world, he is not what most sentient beings would deem truly wealthy – but Shmi thinks it entirely possible that having Cliegg walk into her life might well be the best thing that’s ever happened to her, yet, and she unabashedly regards him as a gift a treasure, all wrapped up in one.

60.) Mom: Owen Lars is a high-spirited, sweet, slightly shy, gallant boy who reminds her so much of her own son that her heart aches a little every time she sees him, and hearing him casually but lovingly refer to her as “Mom” for the first time is a joy so poignant that it nearly reduces her to helpless tears.

61.) Love: Beru Whitesun is everything she could ever want in a daughter, and she finds herself embracing the girl and her wonderful extended family – including a pair of honorary (unofficially adopted) siblings from off-world whose presence makes Shmi tingle and feel giddy and flushed with warmth and power and reflected love, a young couple she’s entirely unsurprised to discover hail from Coruscant and the Jedi Temple (by way of Alderaan, in the girl’s case) and are strong in the Force, though she’s pleasantly surprised to learn of their connection to the young Jedi Knight and Sith Killer who has become her son’s Master and apparent close friend and ally, in the Order – with unaffected, unadulterated pleasure and satisfaction.

62.) Moisture: Moisture farming likely seems a strange concept to those from water-rich worlds, but on Tatooine it is an absolute necessity for those who don’t possesses wealth enough to be able to import water from off-world (as the Hutts and their highest-ranking employees do), and, as Shmi soon discovers, for those who concentrate solely on water recovery and conservation and who needn’t use the vast majority of their liquid wealth on the raising of food crops, a surprising amount of money can be made – far more for those ruthless enough to simply collect water and peddle it to merchants and residents of the cities, though the water that must go to the raising of crops yields resources equally (if less expensively, since food products generally weigh less and are therefore less expensive to import from off-world than liquids such as water) in demand in all of Tatooine’s settlements.

63.) Mechanics: The mechanics of moisture farming are surprisingly simple, straight-forward, and easy enough to maintain that she supposes even the scavenging nomadic Jawas and the Sand People must be able to operate and keep windtraps (silksteel devices – often quite large in size – meant to be placed in the path of a prevailing wind and capable of precipitating moisture from the air caught within it, usually by means of a mechanically-induced, distinctly sharp drop in temperature in the surface area of the trap), dew collectors (egg-shaped devices, usually about four to five centimeters in both width and length, made of a durable chromoplastic that turns a reflecting white when subjected to light and reverts to transparency in darkness. The collector thus forms a markedly cold surface on which dusk and dawn dew will precipitate, and are often used to line concave planting depressions where they’ll provide a small but reliable source of water for growing plants), and dew gatherers (workers who reap dew from the leaves and stalks of plants, using a specialized scythe-like dew reaper with attached cache-pocket for the holding of moisture), if not moisture vaporators (relatively simple but sometimes finicky devices for the harvesting of excess atmospheric humidity, comprised of any number of tall, slender, refrigerated pipes – sometimes one, sometimes as many as twenty – kept so frigid that, when hot, moist air comes into contact with one of the tubes, the humidity immediately, naturally condenses into droplets of pure water, which then runs down the tubes and into that vaporator’s underground storage tanks. While a properly maintained, single-piped moisture vaporator can usually collect enough water to sustain three average humans, regular maintenance is generally required, due to the delicate nature of the machines, and patch-in droids are often used as counterparts to the vaporators, with the droids translating the binary language that the moisture vaporators “speak” for the benefit of the operators . . . which is precisely the reason why Shmi is uncertain whether the Sand People or Jawas are actually able to operate moisture vaporators, given the tendency of the Jawas to simply take machines apart for their components and the Sand People’s apparent aversion to technology), given their continued survival, out in the wastelands of the deep desert.

64.) Desert: Tatooine is regarded as a desolate, hard, ugly wasteland by most of the galaxy, including many of the sentient beings who call the world home; yet, though it is not the world of her birth and she misses the cool and damp of her first home (and occasionally dreams, wistfully, of snow), Shmi has to admit that the desert has its own kind of allure – clean and harshly lovely, in an eerie, mysterious sort of fashion – and the longer she dwells with Cliegg’s family in the desert, the more easily she can appreciate why so many of the strange religions fo the galaxy seem to have deserts or other such savage wastelands as their birthplaces.

65.) Differentiation: She just falls within the five percent range of differentiation that allows for a medical classification as human norm (and is well aware of the fact that Anakin is essentially such a borderline case that he could be just as easily and accurately classified as near-human as he could be as human norm), but she honestly has no idea that she’s pregnant (given that her periods have always come irregularly, no more than once every three to four standard months, and often tend to be so slight that she honestly mistakes the coming of one for spotting leading up to the event itself) and even less notion that the pregnancy is . . . complicated by some rather more exotic genes that anyone in their right mind would ever classify as simply human, so she’s stunned speechless to learn that she’s not only carrying another child, but evidently has been unknowingly carrying it ever since that night with the Jedi who took her firstborn child away.

66.) Bleed: She likely never would’ve known she was carrying at all (until the actual birth), if not for the fact that, roughly half a year after her marriage to Cliegg, she began to spot even more irregularly than normal, every two weeks, and then to bleed like a regular woman might (once every twenty-five to thirty days, or five to six standard weeks), after a month of such spotting, and became so concerned (after two months of this highly unusual, regular bleeding) that she actually voluntarily sought an appointment with the local Healer, worried that there might be something wrong with her, for she carried the child so lightly and the child was so small and slow to develop that she hardly showed at all until after she’d gone to the Healer, when she’d been carrying for well over nine months – nearly a full year of what would, eventually, end up being a thirteen-month-long pregnancy – and she remained fit and slender, with only a slight thickening of her waist and torso, right up until the day when the child would finally come.

67.) Afraid: She’s afraid to tell Cliegg, at first, not at all sure how he’ll react to such unexpected (and rather strange) news, but aside from a brief period of startled surprise and a heartbreaking expression of hope on his face for another child of his own, he takes the news shockingly well, even given the eventual diagnosis of a near-human child much more fit for a largely water-bound world than a desert planet like Tatooine.

68.) Birth: The birth is both terrifying and terrifically difficult – after waiting for so many days for it to happen and seriously beginning to fear that she might simply carry this child under her heart for the rest of her life without ever brining her forth, the birth pangs came, bearing down on her with all the rapidity and all the unstoppable violence of a sudden sand storm – proceeding at a pace so breakneck that there is no time to take her in to the city, to the Healer, only dumb luck in the form of the visiting presence of Darsha and Lorn Pavan providing someone (Darsha) with enough medical experience and talent for healing on hand to truly help, and the sheer force of the birthing pangs and swiftness of the birth so drains her body that, in the end, even Darsha (aided by both her husband and their unofficial apprentice, Beru Whitesun) cannot channel enough of the Force into Shmi’s swiftly draining and weakening body to keep up with the amount of energy that Shmi is spending on her child and fears that they are going to lose her, before the birthing is done: it is, Shmi will later attest, an act of sheer stubbornness on her part – a refusal to turn loose her husband’s gripping right hand – that anchors her to the world, not only long enough for the baby to come, but thoroughly enough for her to be able to marshal her own flagging energies, to reach out to the Force and add her own feeble (but evidently scale-tipping) contribution to the herculean efforts being made to save her, and so feed her failing body enough energy to keep functioning and even start healing from the traumatic birth.

69.) Fair: Her little girl – Qui-Gon Jinn’s child, whom she and her husband resolutely name Shachaimma Srimahala Skywalker-Jinn Lars – is born with the same kind of shockingly fair complexion and coloring and vivid blue eyes as Anakin; yet, her hair is that color of blonde that you can tell (just from looking at it) will darken, over time, to at least a medium (if not darker) shade of brown; her flower petal pinky-pale skin lacks the darker undertones of Anakin’s skin, which promises a ready ability to turn gilded-golden in sunlight, after a time, rather than simply and only burning; there’s something about the shape of her long face (with those oddly straight eyebrows and that softly dimpled chin) and generous mouth that make Shmi think, somehow, of the girl’s father; and her seeming inability to thrive in such a water-poor environment is a thing wholly of her father – a near-human who must, so far as the Healers can tell, have hailed from either the water-rich Mid Rim world of Hydaria (which rests almost on the border between the Mid Rim and the Outer Rim Territories), or else from one of the binary water-drenched worlds (both of the double planets rather prone to an abundance of cold rains, colder oceans, and swamps, and both also rather unfortunately prone to attempts to make war on each other and/or on various sections of their own populations) of Thorad and Shada (the binary system of which is positioned just on the other side of the border between the Mid Rim and the Outer Rim Territories, and which was, moreover originally populated by colonists from Hydaria), given the baby’s genetic profile – not to mention something so utterly serious that they being to have to think about getting the baby off of this desert planet almost as soon as she’s been born.

70.) Children: She never realized how much she loved children until she had Anakin and never truly knew how much she wanted to be able to have more children until she met Cliegg, and it nearly breaks her, to discover that, between the hurt her body took from Anakin’s premature birth and the far more serious damage inflicted on her from Shachaimma’s far too rapid birth, she will never be able to conceive and carry another child to term, no matter how much she might want to or how willing her husband might be to welcome more children into their family.

71.) Wife: Cliegg’s first wife, Aika Mariet Lars, died while carrying their second child, taking the half-formed baby with her, and it hurts her husband almost as much as it does Shmi, to even think about sending her baby away, but neither of them can bear the thought of running the risk of truly losing her, and Aika’s younger identical twin sister, Ytessia Mariet Sedarman, is willing to take the girl in and raise her as if she were her own child (while her husband – Cliegg’s best friend, Harleigh Stigurn Sedarman – promises to make sure that the baby will know where she came from and won’t forget her real family), so, in the end, they really have no choice but to go ahead and send Shachaimma away, to the Sedarmans and the Core World of Ator, not if they want her to survive her childhood.

72.) Bitter: She does not want to be bitter or cynical or pessimistic (to her, that would seem an act of giving up, giving in, to the relentless pressure of her hard life and this harsh world), but it’s difficult, sometimes, to avoid the thought that Qui-Gon Jinn simply used her as a way to get to her son and that he wanted to use her son (by arguing that he was this “Chosen One” of ancient prophecies) to somehow gain a victory and an exalted standing or something of some sort over his Order’s ruling High Council, and it is also sometimes more of a battle than she would like to admit, avoiding the feeling of having been cheated, not only of her son, but also of the daughter Qui-Gon inadvertently (or so she assumes – so she would like to think, anyway, that being the lesser of possible evils) gave to her, not to mention any other children that she might have been able to have, if not for the hideously difficult birthing she went through, with Shachaimma.

73.) Busy: To help distract her from her sorrow and her (occasionally quite dark) thoughts, Darsha and Lorn advance the pace of her unofficial training until, between the daily chores she has to do around the homestead and the moisture farm and the various tasks that her teachers set her, she is kept so busy that she often lacks time even to make new journal entries, instead falling into bed at night to sleep the sleep of the righteous and exhausted, and this continues, without abatement, for a little over two years after the day she and Cliegg sent the baby away (placing her reluctantly in the gently cradling arms of Ytessia Sedarman, who, with her husband, had come to Tatooine gladly, in order to safely retrieve Shachaimma), until finally, one day, she wakes with no heavy pall of grief weighing her down so heavily as to nearly smother her, and she knows that, though she will always miss Shachaimma and regret the fact that she has had to send both of her children away from her, so that they might have better lives than the ones that she would’ve been able to give them, here on Tatooine, she could not, in good conscience, have done differently, and, thus, is ready to put aside her bitterness and guilt and continue living her own life.

74.) Variant: Irregardless of whether he specifically hailed from Hydaria, Thorad, or Shada, the fact remains that the variant of near-human that Qui-Gon belongs to has huge, highly developed reservoir-like lungs that allow submersion in liquid safely, on a full breath of air, for easily up to an hour and a half at a time, highly dense fat (in comparison with which the fat of most marine mammals would be considered lightweights, even those hunted in either the days of antiquity or else on more primitive worlds for the fuel oil that could be rendered from their fat. An ounce of fat taken from one of these near-humans would burn, if set alight, quite easily for thirteen straight hours, with an exceptionally small amount of smoke smelling naturally of evergreen pine and cold, fresh lake water) that provides both a great deal of natural insulation against cold and a surprising amount of natural buoyancy, in water, and a curious metabolism that causes maturity in roughly half the time that human norms generally require (individuals tending to pass into adolescence after about half a decade of age and to be fully grown or nearly full-grown, fully fledged, functional adults most generally after roughly a decade – eight to twelve years – of age), but which, afterwards, as if to make up for such a truncated childhood and adolescence, slows to the point where the rate of age is approximately only half the rate of human norms, meaning that while one of these ten-year-olds may appear to be a twenty-year-old, a seventy-year-old will be in the same approximate shape, health, and show the same overall wear and tear of age as a forty-year-old human norm; thus, Shmi’s girl barely seems an infant before she is a toddler, only just a toddler before she is a child, hardly a child before she is an adolescent, and even more scarcely an adolescent before the still images and holos sent to them start to show a mature, beautiful young lady with hair the color of raw new dark honey and a smile and disposition just as sweet, making it strange, indeed, to compare images of Shmi’s daughter with the many stills and holos that Obi-Wan sends her of her son, and realize that her daughter appears to be of an age with or perhaps even a little older than Anakin, even though he’s over eleven years older than Shachaimma is.

75.) Oddity: The longer she resides on the planet, the more she is aware of the fact that Tatooine is something of an oddity, as a world – there are, for example, persistent legends detailing it as a former luxuriantly water-fat and fecund world, ravaged by the fury of a technologically advanced alien (to its indigenous inhabitants) species that sought to enslave the planet’s native population and was in some way thwarted or insulted and, in any case, frustrated to the point where the result was the essential destruction of the world’s richness and its people’s way of life, rather than simple subjugation; yet, no records of the world as a spoil of any of the various Sith or Dark Jedi uprisings can be found within the Republic’s substantial histories to substantiate such a claim, and the preservation and repetition of such a story from a time period so far distant as to predate the various squabbles of the Republic is widely considered to be improbable to the point of impossibility, so most scholars dismiss such legends as idle fancy, though there are others (such as Shmi and many of the actual residents of the planet) who find the legends to be the most logical explanations for some of the world’s otherwise inexplicable peculiarities, including fossil records and salt pans pointing to the prior existence of vast amounts of vegetation and numerous large bodies of water (both saline oceans and freshwater lakes) scattered across the planet, the existence of thick layers of surprisingly rich soil, buried several meters (sometimes hundreds of meters) down beneath the largely silica, silicate, and granule flint layer of dust comprising the desert sands, the existence and occasional discovery of vast underground (often frozen) aquifers as ridiculously deep depths below the planet’s surface, as if some violent action once nearly succeeded in cracking the world open, allowing the water to drain down into the depths, etc. – and the more she wishes that there might be some way of truly plumbing the depths of the many mysteries of the planet.

76.) Expensive: It’s a good thing Cliegg’s moisture farm makes as much as it does (even if it makes far less than it might, because of the food crops they also raise), because she insists on paying for as much of her youngest child’s things as she can, and her daughter has far more expensive tastes than she would have ever expected: luckily, since Obi-Wan has flatly refused to accept anything from her in her son’s name, that leaves more for other purposes, or otherwise she might occasionally be truly worried about continuing to adequately make ends meet.

77.) Boy: She feels sometimes as if Obi-Wan is another son of hers – she could not love the boy more if he were a child of her flesh, she’s certain – and is so glad and grateful that he is the one who’s apprenticed her boy (and not Qui-Gon!) and that Anakin has such a wonderful example of a truly good individual to look up to that she occasionally finds herself tearing up, when she thinks about how incredibly lucky Anakin has been, especially when the young Sith Killer is once again modestly downplaying his role in the successful completion of yet another mission and lauding Anakin’s increasing skills, as a Jedi.

78.) Company: She enjoys her little chats with Obi-Wan immensely, of course, but she loves it even more when he makes his calls to her while in company – often accompanied by that utterly charming Prince Bail of Alderaan (whose devotion to Obi-Wan she finds extremely touching), or that terribly wryly funny and entertaining Sabé (whose love for Obi-Wan she finds at once both highly romantic and horribly sad, given his inability to properly return the sentiment, because of his devotion to the rules of his Order), or sometimes even that thankfully no longer quite so grim and anxious but every bit as lovely Padmé Amidala (whose wistful inquiries about Shmi and her family always leave a pleasantly warm feeling in her heart but also always trigger a lingering sadness for the poor lonely woman-child and her seeming determination to have no one, if she cannot have Obi-Wan) – for she learns much more about both events in other parts of the galaxy and Obi-Wan himself (not to mention Anakin’s latest amusing antics) when there is someone else in the room with Obi-Wan, distracting him from his attempts to be careful of her sensibilities and not worry her about the kinds of places he and her son are most often sent away to, on their missions for the Order.

79.) Information: Between Obi-Wan and his friends, the news she and her husband get from both Beru’s honorary family (who, unsurprisingly, still have contacts and ties back on Coruscant, as well as in various other places scattered across the galaxy) and her daughter’s foster family, and the occasional chatty but highly informative letters, comm calls, news articles, and holo recordings she receives from Anakin’s good friend (and Sabé’s replacement, as Padmé’s primary decoy), Dormé (who, because of her closeness with Shmi’s son, struck up an acquaintance with her about a year after the birth of her daughter, and sometimes sends her information and news reports unbiased by Obi-Wan’s careful diplomacy and the political agendas of his close friends), she is probably one of the most (if not simply the most) well informed and up to date (concerning galactic-wide current events) individual on Tatooine, and it gives her a great deal of pleasure, thinking about all the things she finds out, essentially for free, that the Hutts and their ilk must either pay for or else go without the knowing of.

80.) Instruct: Of all the many wonderful things she’s gained from knowing Cliegg, sometimes she thinks that coming to know Darsha and Lorn – two strong Force-sensitives who found each other under the most desperate of circumstances and yet (because of both their willingness to work together and Obi-Wan’s assistance) were still able to survive those circumstances, despite the best (or perhaps it might be more accurate to say the very absolute worst) of intentions on the part of at least one Sith Lord (and possibly the both of them), and who, moreover, having found each other, chose to remain together, Darsha Assant not only willingly deciding to leave behind a promising career in the Jedi Order so that she could become Darsha Pavan but also choosing to break with her old Order’s traditions (as well as with the Order itself), even so far as to being to instruct her husband in the use of his gift, training him and continuing on her own path of learning to the point where both of the Pavans likely could have easily passed as Jedi Knights or even Masters, but for their unabashedly passionate attachment to each other and to their children (shared apprentices to their parents, all) – whose friendship with the Whitesun clan is such that they have quietly helped two of those girls (Beru and Macoolia) master their own intermediate sensitivity to the flows of the Force enough to be able to shield themselves and to be able to protect themselves against many threats, and whose generosity is such that they have even taken Shmi under their collective wing, despite the distance between their homes (with the Lars homestead situated on the Great Chott Salt Flat, on the outskirts of the Jundland Wastes, far removed from the nearest city, Anchorhead, and the Pavans essentially living on the same property as the shared business – the Sidi Driss Inn, a thriving combination hotel and cantina, with a small but handy and also quite profitable moisture farming operation on the side – they run with Beru’s sister, Dama Whitesun Brunk, in Anchorhead), teaching Shmi things about her various talents and the source of her power so wondrous that she relearns her joy with her son’s apprenticeship with the Jedi and unlearns her small resentment for having been left behind, is one of the finest gifts that Cliegg has given her.

81.) Danger: Shmi can sense the danger approaching long before any physical signs of the approaching storm of destruction become perceptible, and so she quietly goes about the process of making sure that her family is safe and their neighbors (such as they are, in a place so removed from Anchorhead) know to be wary and watchful for the coming raiders; yet, this is no normal band of casual bandits, no group of angry adolescents and unmarried men from among the Sand People seeking to prove their worth to their tribe via the strength of their arms and the purity of their anger and hate for the settlers from the stars who have (as the Sand People see it) landed on their world without permission and illegally encroached on (and even, in some instances, taken over) their territories, disturbing the desert with their scattered settlements and occasional cities, and so, in the end, Shmi is the one who is caught unprepared, unaware of their shared purpose as a band united by the promise of easy profit, if only they focus all of their rage properly on one specific are and one very particular woman . . .

82.) Strong: She’s strong enough that she could have escaped from any normal group of mere bandits, but these hirlings (chosen from amongst the most vicious of all the many tribes of Sand People) have with them another very specific individual for hire, and the power of this creature’s pain and hatred is so overwhelming that Shmi cannot even maintain enough of herself to fight off the combination of debilitating drugs and the muffling dark pressure of the woman’s furiously powerful mind to cry out to Lorn and Darsha or even to reach out across the bond she’s woven with Beru, to call for help or issue a warning.

83.) Lucidity: Moments of lucidity come and go, bright flickers of awareness in which she casts out helplessly for someone strong enough to free her from the oppression of this dark (Dark!) creature (unnaturally pale for a desert world, ghostlike and vengeful, like a spirit desperately in need of being laid to rest), telegraphing her pain and fear over and over to the one least likely to be able to reach her, subconsciously promptly by hateful whisperings to reach out again and again not for her searchers but instead for her son, parsecs and light years away as he is.

84.) Window Dressing: The beatings are perfunctory, mere window dressing for a certain scene being staged, and Shmi is kept so thoroughly drugged that she is almost wholly unaware of the damage being inflicted on her body, far too preoccupied with the mental agonies of the tortures being inflicted on her by the pitiless fury of her true captor, her dreams haunted by a nightmarish white mask of grinning sharp bloodstained teeth and a waterfall of blood-red hair over ghostly, corpse-white shoulders, her endlessly screaming psyche priming a trap specifically designed to tip a very particular individual away from a path of Light to a road steeped in Darkness.

85.) Destruction: The approach of Shmi’s desperately frightened and even more desperately determined son breaks over the land like the growing roil of a thunderous and swelling quake, the potential for great destruction still technically leashed but nonetheless stirring the firmaments like the leading edge of a ripple of shockwave, threatening to explode in an untamable frenzy of violence, and yet, though Anakin reaches out to her with all of the frantic, ungentle power of a force of nature incited to fury and unleashed, she is unable to sense him, to reach him, to warn him of the fact that she is bait in a trap meant specifically for him, a new drug in her system so potent that she is insensate to everything save the painful gloating of her hateful captor, taunting her with horrible visions of impending doom.

86.) Pain: She wakes with the unnatural suddenness of one primed by a series of exquisitely timed drugs, placed into her system like a string of bombs on a sequential timer, consciousness flooding her mere instants before an unnatural agony of nerve-induced heat and pain explodes in her body, leaving her whimpering and cringing and entirely unable to concentrate, for the haze of pain (not that she would have been able to reach out to Anakin anyway, for the dulling blanket of a Force-sensitivity-suppressing drug still weighs her down, smothering her mind with a great howling nothingness where always before there’s been the gentle glowing wonder of the warmth and life of the Force and all the minds of those tied to her by its power), barely able to focus enough to even recognize her son, at first, as his dark-clad shape swoops down upon her, flinching away from his shadowy form and crying out in fear, unable to stop shaking even as he gently reassures her, his long-fingered hands reaching out after her restraints, fumbling in horrid desperation to free her, recognition and understanding coming only just in time for her to begin to acknowledge her son and to declare her love for and trust in him and not nearly quickly enough for her to try to issue any kind of warning, much less to save herself from the bite of the poisonous dart fired by a vindictively smiling and hatefully accurate Aurra Sing, the deadly venom so exquisitely timed that she cannot even finish telling Anakin that she loves him before the life is agonizingly torn from her body and her spirit tumbles out of the lifeless shell enclosing it into a whirlwind of darkness, confusion, and fear.

87.) Help: Somehow, Shmi senses Qui-Gon’s familiar presence, and turns automatically to call for his help, buffeted and bruised and so disoriented by the pounding waves of sickened fear and pain and mindless fury constantly breaking over her (smashing into her and rolling her over and over and over again, like a body being battered and thrown about by the merciless action of the treacherous crosscurrents of a hidden riptide) that it doesn’t even register, at first, that she no longer has a living body, but his attention is so wholly focused on her son – though his presence seems weak and uncertain, like a rapidly flickering light in the midst of a windstorm, a sense of insubstantial fingers scrabbling helplessly after something that cannot be grasped, sliding past and through but never quite touching what they seek, like the graceless, hopeless fumblings of a man seeking to touch a mirage – that he senses her not at all, and she is left alone, helpless and confused and frightened, unable to even make her son hear her cries of terror or horrified dismay as he hurtles himself through the camp, ravaging the bandits in a senseless slaughter that extends even to the children and dumb beats, his rage making him like a rampaging animal, so that he is unable of making any distinction between the innocent and the guilty.

88.) Darkness: She can see him, somehow, when he comes back to himself, collapsing in on himself like a storm that’s exhausted its fury, becoming more and more her son again with each passing moment, as the darkness drains from him, but it isn’t until her weeping child turns to wrap her lifeless body lovingly in a clean cloth (miraculously untouched by all his raging) that she really understands why he cannot hear her cries or how truly strange it is to see when one no longer has any physical eyes, and the horror that crashes over her, when she realizes she cannot make him aware of her and hasn’t the strength to follow him, as he takes her body and goes, is such that a sort of darkness rises up to swallow her, too, and she swoons down into its blanketing embrace just as if she still had flesh to faint and could still be claimed, thus, by unconsciousness.

89.) First: The first time she rouses, weakly, from the darkness enveloping her, it is the bitter note of someone else’s horror and pain and grief that wakes her, and she sluggishly rises to find an anguished Beru and (of all people!) a painfully guilt-wracked Padmé Amidala marooned in the midst of a sea of slaughter, gazing helplessly upon the destruction surrounding them, unable, at first, to bring themselves to perform the duty they have forced themselves to come her to do, and so bury the victims of Anakin’s uncontrollable fury and pain over her kidnaping and murder.

90.) Burial: They mean well, of course (it is painfully obvious that they have nothing but the very best of intentions), but they nonetheless do a terrible job (piss-poor, even, as some of her more colorful former owners might very well have said) of what they’ve come to do, armed only with individual shovels and hundreds of large (sized to be able to fit at least thrice about a full-grown man), soft, clean clothes for the wrapping of cast-off corpses, unable to understand that it requires either stone coffins, cairn rocks, fire, or some combination of the three to truly remove a corpse from the ravages of the desert and its animals, and Shmi knows, with a kind of choking horror, that all the care Beru and Padmé Amidala are attempting to take, in the burial of these Sand People, will soon be for naught, especially since the two young women lack the strength and tools necessary to try to deal with the banthas and other animals kept by this tribe and also slaughtered by her son in his terrible rage.

91.) Mind: She tries, with a kind of mindless desperation, to reach out to Beru, to contact her, to latch hold to her somehow and reestablish their bond enough to allow her to leave this horrible place, too, when Beru and Padmé Amidala leave; yet, though she manages to brush, once, against the painfully familiar warmth of Beru’s mind, the suffering she finds blazoned there fills her with such pain that the darkness once again rises up to claim her, and she sinks back down into it helplessly, unable to summon enough strength to even begin to try to fight it off.

92.) Secret: In their pathetic attempts to give the slaughtered Sand People some kind of measure of respect and dignity back, by burying their remains, Beru and Padmé Amidala actually uncover a secret so vitally important that it has been carefully guarded and kept quite literally for upwards of five thousand years, ever since the first explorers from the Galactic Republic found and landed on the planet, though they, in their fearful haste and near-overwhelming grief, hardly even notice what they’ve discovered: Shmi, though, who cannot escape from this awful place and so has no choice but to see the bodies surrounding her, recognizes the truth, and is seized, momentarily, by a wild burbling explosion of hysterical laughter, as she gazes upon the uncovered faces and forms of individuals who are distinctly like and yet unlike human norms – their builds more robust, somewhat squatter and more compact, with long collar bones leading to short, bowed shoulders and extremely muscular arms on top of roundly barrel-shaped and slightly flaring (almost bell-shaped) rib cages leading to long, wide pelvises and relatively long, thickly-boned, slightly bowed, powerful, fatigue-resistant legs terminating in broad, strong, dexterous feet; their heads slightly yet quite noticeably larger (with a distinct kind of protuberance at the back of the skull), with low, shallow foreheads, broad, projecting noses, slightly projecting mid-faces, an essential lack of any kind of real protruding chin, small chewing teeth set off by large, powerfully viselike incisors and canines, prominent, trabecular (spongy yet pronounced) browridges, and, overall, low, flat, elongated skulls; their hands and fingers noticeably broader, longer, thicker, with large, round tips to the fingers; everything about them speaking (despite their somewhat shorter stature) of more strength, more power, a greater cranial capacity – their mysterious race revealed, thus, not as some alien humanoid species (as has, for so many years, been assumed, given the reclusiveness of the Sand People), but rather as a race of distinctly near-human sentient beings.

93.) Fact: There is something terribly ironic about the fact that, now, when she has some of the knowledge necessary to begin plumbing the depths of Tatooine’s many secrets and mysteries, she is even less able to attempt to try to do so, bound at she is to this one particular spot.

94.) Time: Time very quickly ceases to have much meaning for her, unable as she is to reach anyone, and so weak that her few frantic efforts to either raise her son or Beru or Darsha and Lorn or anyone or else to somehow leave this charnel house and return home makes a kind of darkness rise up to claim her every time she does much of anything that requires all that much of an expenditure of energy: rotting, wind-desiccated, sand-shredded corpses are quickly replaced by polished bones that are, eventually, found by other Sand People, who (unsurprisingly) deem this hellish nightmare of a place a haunt of angry ghost-demons demanding sacrifices to placate their rage and so stop them from wrecking similar havoc on other tribal encampments; thus, periodically, she is delivered new corpses, new bones, new bodies on their way to becoming desert offal and wasted wind-bourne spilt moisture, the site of her death lavished not only with jewelry, art, and stolen goods gathered by successful raiders, but with death and pain, the agony of the victims chosen for sacrifice endlessly afflicting her, suffocating her with their suffering and terror and anger, terrorizing her with their desperation and horror, until she feels stupefied and stunned senseless as an animal with unreasoning suffering and rage and swims in a kind of endless dark roil of mute agony, dumb suffering, too overcome to even try to fight anymore.

95.) Brace: She is attempting to brace herself against the outpouring of agony of yet another sacrificial victim when she is stunned to see the face of a perfectly human – if intricately tattooed – male revealed by the rough hands of the Tusken Raiders, stripping away his desert robes to ready him for the torture that will eventually send him screaming to this death, and even more shocked to hear such an outpouring of vitriol (in Basic, between snarling, grunting, howling noises in the native tongue of the Tuskens) against the “cast-out filth” and “accursed infidels” and “blood-cursed, water-spoiling bandits” who, apparently, make up the lone tribe of Tusken Raiders who insist on the necessity of propitiating the demon-ghosts who haunt this place by bringing riches and blood sacrifices to spill upon these sands – a tribe that, according to this plainly furious man (obviously an adoptee of another clan of Sand People), are considered by others of their kind to be traitorous and sacrilegious thieves, criminals, renegades, and animals deserving no better than that they be struck down where they stand (their blood allowed to seep into the sands of the desert so that it cannot pollute any other member of another tribe), a fate that they have managed to avoid only by allying themselves with evil forces that have invaded and desecrated the desert, bringing with them weapons and powers too strong for the other tribes to stand against, without a strong leader to unite them all (a leader that this man fervently prays will come, soon, and free their world of the weight of darkness that oppresses it) – and it is then, in that moment, that she begins to suspect that most of the Sand People are nothing at all like the monsters that most of the settlers assume them to be . . . and to fervently wish for the coming of this holy leader, so that he (or she) might, perhaps, free her from her suffering, as well.

96.) Journal: In the far too few moments of reprieve that occasionally (not nearly often enough!) come, when the Sand People have been finished with one round of sacrifices and left again for a long enough period of time that their return with a new round of sacrifices to placate this place’s supposed demon-ghosts draws near enough for her to almost be able to hear the sound of the unhappily complaining banthas approaching, Shmi hopes that Beru or Owen or someone will find the datapad journal she’s been keeping since shortly after Anakin was freed and taken from her – a journal she had with her, when she was taken, and which she’s fairly certain she had the presence of mind enough to throw towards the mushrooms growing around the vaporator she’d gone to check on, when she was kidnaped – and that Cliegg will not only view it (and, hopefully, take some comfort from the record of her life and of their life together) but have sense enough to pass it along to Obi-Wan Kenobi, so that it will reach Anakin, as she always intended it to do.

97.) Calm: In the brief moments of calm, when Shmi is not dwelling on the lost journal that she wishes will be found and passed on, so that it may do some more good, in this world and another, she regrets her arrogant assumption that she would be able to handle any danger that might come her way alone, rather than reaching out to her friends, Darsha and Lorn, for added support and help; she misses her husband’s smiles, his tender touches and warm embraces, and hopes that the family will have been able to somehow unite around him and bring him back far enough from the brink of grief to realize that she would be devastated if he allowed the loss of her to undo him; she hopes that Beru and Owen will have married and begun to fill the Lars homestead with the laughter and love of growing children; she misses being able to help Darsha and Lorn, as they work together to instruct their young children in the ways of the Force; she worries about her son, and prays to the Force and every good thing in the galaxy that Obi-Wan will have been able to help him recover from what happened to him, in this awful place; and she hopes that she will one day be able to figure out how to leave this place, so that she will no longer have to experience the pain that so often saturates the very air of this terrible place.

98.) Sensation: The longer she is trapped in this place, the harder it is it is to hold on to her sense of self enough to fight back from the pall of darkness that claims her with each new sacrifice of this renegade tribe, and the more and more fragmented her thoughts become, in the brief periods of calm, so that she may, perhaps, begin to think of her beautiful daughter, Shachaimma, and to wonder if she ever married that nice young man who so obviously wished to court her, and then abruptly find herself remembering her wedding night, with Cliegg, suddenly find herself lost in the sensation of her first soft, sensuous kiss, from Qui-Gon Jinn, find herself remembering her wedding gown (the softly clinging fabric, so light and sheer that it took two layers, to be decent; the gown itself tailored to her slender form with princess seams, cut low enough in the back to show off her shoulder blades but high enough in the front to completely cover her breasts, all of the seams and armholes and hems covered with intricate embroidery depicting flowers in shades of blue, indigo, purple, red, orange, yellow, pink, even faintly green, amongst the greener stems and leaves and vines, with a long, full skirt, its top layer covered with embroidery at the hem and seams, and long, full, sheer sleeves that bared her shoulders and had small loops near the top of their wide, trailing ends, to go up over her thumbs, to keep all of that fabric – fabric that was so thick with embroidery that one could hardly tell the fabric itself was sheer, without getting right up on it – from falling up to her shoulders when she raised her arms: that gown had been worth nearly enough to ransom a slave’s freedom . . . and it had been paid for entirely through the generosity of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who’d insisted on paying for it and refused to take no for an answer), and then find herself smiling over a memory of Obi-Wan (being startled into a hearty laugh by Sabé), wondering if Padmé ever found someone else worthy enough of her loyalty that she allowed herself to fall in love, wondering if Dormé and her son are still friends, wondering if the galaxy is still in such horrible turmoil and the Jedi are being (unfairly! The systems that can afford their own police and militia forces should be taking care of their own problems, blast it, not making the ridiculously overworked Jedi do all of the work of protecting the sentient beings of the galaxy!) called on to somehow single-handedly fix everything, wondering if she will ever leave this place, wondering, wondering, wondering . . .

99.) Shock: It’s like . . . a shock to the system, a jolt of pure energy, like the electricity harnessed and used to jump-start the hearts of the dying, and, for a few precious moments, she can clearly and quite effortlessly remember who she is, and what, and where, and why, without any of the confusion and fragmentation of thought/memory that has been plaguing her lately, but the clarity is short-lived, soon swallowed back up by the fog of darkness permeating everything around her, and she slides back down into her stupor only to be stunned and galvanized again, when another, even greater shock rocks the Force and the galaxy, as her son and his beloved cleanse that ocean of Light of the taint that has been choking it, in the process blasting away much of the evil and sickness permeating this place and giving her room and awareness enough to begin to try to fight to reach someone again, so that she won’t be trapped her alone again.

100.) Sun: Shmi can sense the approach of her son and his beloved just as if she were still alive, with a physical body, and they were a twinned rising star, a binary sun breaking across the horizon in a flood of warmth and light and life, their combined power washing over her gently but insistently, unignorably, bathing her in an increasingly flagrant rush of energy, power, tingling heat like the radiance of light from a pair of life-giving suns, and hope rises in her like the sap might in a plant awakened by such life-giving light and warmth from dormancy to an explosion of frenzied growth, until she finds herself awaiting their coming as eagerly as anyone long winter-bound might wait and watch and hope for the arrival of spring, convinced that, if she is ever wants to be heard by anyone or truly wishes to ever be free of this terrible place, Obi-Wan and Anakin are the ones who are going to be able to help bring it about . . .