Lona and I walked down a hallway inside the TVEC building, after I had 'officially' discontinued the MG-42 and moved around resources and personnel to other projects.

  Unofficially, however, small batches of around a thousand for each kind of gun were created and shipped out onto the black market to gauge reactions from the bounty hunter community. If the results are promising, I'll move to limited production.

  One rather embarrassing problem I learned about clone armor was that they were slugthrower-proof/resistant. Turns out the entire set of clone armor I used for testing purposes was defective, hence why the Garand round tore through it like paper. Against plastoid armor that wasn't defective, they simply embedded themselves into the armor, or shattered into pieces against it if it was at a bad angle.

  Not exactly such a war winning weapon after I learned that. And man did I feel stupid when I found out my data was from defective fucking armor.

  Interestingly, I was having better luck with the Cycler Rifles, which were essentially just miniaturized railguns. They weren't the best at penetrating plastoid, only able to penetrate the thinnest parts when unmodified, but they made up for the lackluster armor piercing capabilities by being able to hit about as hard as a freight train. The force of the bullet caused massive internal damage without even entering the body in simulations due to how hard they hit. With aerodynamic bullets, however, their range was massively increased, and incorporating the same tech into all the other weapons could be done as well, which is a slightly terrifying thought.

  While we walked through the halls of the still under construction complex, however, I couldn't help but notice that Lona kept glancing at me in what looked to be confusion, curiosity… and wariness, which I thought was odd.

  "Something on your mind, Lona?" I asked.

  The togruta jerked slightly, but quickly recovered and looked over at me.

  "...W-what do you mean?" She asked.

  "You glance at me every three to five seconds." I elaborated.

  "I've just... never seen a droid like you, that's all." She quickly responded, averting her gaze from me.

  "I suppose that's fair, I am a prototype, after all. But that doesn't explain the confusion prevalent on your face, and the way you carry yourself like you expect an attack at any point."

  "I... don't know what you're talking about."

  I decided to test her, and turned to her rapidly, optics dialed up in an intimidating glare of light. Lona immediately backed into a subtle, and familiar, yet sloppy, fighting stance. She rapidly glanced around, and I could see how she coiled up like a snake, her muscles tensing as she readied herself to fight or flee. A sort of pressure seemed to permeate throughout the hallway, and my plating felt restricted as some invisible force seemed to layer itself onto me.

  "...You have some sort of training, more than a simple engineer can have." I observed.

  "I... have training in self-defense." Lona responded.

  "You keep hesitating when you speak, which does not help. And I doubt whatever 'self-defense training' you took included the normal stance that a trained Force Sensitive uses." I remarked, my rapidly forming thought turning true as the pressure on my plating seemed to double after I took a step towards her. I stopped and raised my arms slightly in a peaceful gesture. "There are many sects of force users across the galaxy that you could have learned that stance from, like the Nightsisters of Dathomir, the Baran Do Sages of Dorin, the Green Jedi of Corellia, and most prevalent and the largest in the galaxy, the Jedi Order of Coruscant. Am I getting close?"

  Lona looked at me with a myriad of emotions crossing her face, as her montrals and lekku twitched rapidly.

  "I'm not a force user." She snapped hotly.

  "The pressure currently making the outer plating of my chest and limbs compress .13 millimeters inwards says otherwise." I immediately replied.

  Lona's eyes widened fractionally, and the pressure immediately dropped. We stared at each other, tension so thick you could cut it with a dull knife, both of us still as statues. Finally, after around ten seconds, Lona seemed to come to a decision, and slumped out of her fighting stance.

  "Fine, I can't hide it with someone as observant as you, calculating my every move, word and action. ...Just arrest me now and get it over with." Lona said, her voice low as she held her hands out for them to be put in cuffs.

  "And why would I arrest you?" I asked.

  "Because you'll just stun me then haul me to Dooku if I try to escape. Because I'm force sensitive and I'm not as skilled as I once was, so I'd be easy to capture."

  I looked down at the togruta who seemed to be shrinking in on herself the longer I looked at her, pupils dilated in barely contained fear.

  "...You are mistaken. I have no interest in arresting you for simply being a force user. If anything, you have simply piqued my interest as to how a trained force user as young as yourself ended up on Telos, alone." I responded.

  Lona jerked up and stared at me, wariness clear to see in her eyes. I took a step back and gestured to a doorway to an empty conference room.

  "Shall we take this out of a public hallway?" I queried.

  Lona nodded stiffly, and the two of us walked into the room and sat down on opposing sides of the table in the center of it.

  "Before I ask any questions, I want you to know that I do things differently than the other officers in the Confederacy. This conversation does not leave this room, and I will say nothing of this to Count Dooku. You are free to tell me the truth, and I will not hold any of it against you. I am not going to harm you for simply being force sensitive, and if you choose to leave, I will allow you to return to your life as a civilian." I explained. "So... Who are you?"

  For a few moments, Lona stayed quiet, numerous emotions flashing across her face until it settled upon acceptance, and she sighed, eyes closed and head drooping until she finally spoke.

  "I am... or was, Jedi Padawan Lona Hys of the Coruscant Jedi Order." She explained.

  "How did you arrive on Telos IV?" I asked.

  "I've been a drifter for most of my life, floating from planet to planet doing odd jobs, and a little bit of mercenary work when I feel like it. I've been across quite a lot of the Outer Rim. Tatooine, Crait, Kessel, Ryloth, most of the bigger names. I ended up on Telos... five years ago, on a merchant ship from Jabiim. I came to like this place while I was here, so I decided to stay for a while, and eventually I got caught up with the anti-corporation rebels for a bit. Then you came, and our job suddenly became redundant with your hostile takeover of the big businesses. After that, I decided to put my sizable knowledge in engineering to use and joined the TVEC."

  "How did you end up as a drifter? More to the point, why did you not return to the Jedi Order?"

  "I... don't want to talk about it."

  "Fair enough. Your past is your own, as long as it doesn't come into conflict with future events. Although, if you decided not to return to the Order, does that mean that the time you spent there was not to your liking?"

  "N-no. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy my time there. I just… have a few problems with them now, since I've lived out here for most of my life and seen everything that they haven't done. I mean, I've been out here trying to make change, instead of kicking my feet up on Coruscant, haven't I?"

  "Good point."

  I tapped my finger on the table a few times and was about to speak when Lona spoke first.

  "Why does my past interest you?" She asked.

  "I find that learning a person's past can be beneficial in learning about who they are now. And I find that how a person carries themself says quite a bit about their experiences, and what they want in life." I explained after a moment.

  "Then what do you see in me?"

  "...When I look at you, I see someone who has experienced true hardship from living most of her life in the Outer Rim. Someone who has seen how far the Republic has fallen into corruption, and how they abandoned everyone here to pirates, the crime syndicates, and the Hutts, all while they sat in their ivory towers. When I look at you, I see someone who is practically begging for a chance to fight for what they believe is right in the universe."

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  "And you got all that from our brief conversation so far?"

  "Mostly, that and how you carry yourself as someone who has seen so much, and the pain and sorrow in your eyes that is plain to see even to a droid."

  "...I guess I have seen a lot of osik in my time. I do wish I could have saved that slave girl on Tatooine before..."

  Lona trailed off, eyes glistening as she no doubt remembered some memories she had repressed over the years. I slowly moved my hand over and placed it on her own, drawing her out of her memories and back to me after a gentle squeeze.

  "It is alright to mourn the past. But you must not lose yourself within it, or you will never see what is happening right in front of you." I said, trying to comfort the togruta.

  "T-thanks." She said as she dried her eyes, a small smile on her face. "...You're good at that sort of stuff, you know? I almost felt like I was back at the Temple, learning from Master Yoda for a moment."

  I let out a chuckle. "Being a droid means I have the entire Holonet at my fingertips. I think I can easily play a therapist."

  "But you don't feel like a droid." Lona mumbled.

  "What was that?" I asked.

  Lona looked at me, surprised that I heard her.

  "Uh, n-nothing." She lied. "Just an idle thought."

  "You said something, what was it? This conversation does not leave this room, remember?"

  Lona thought for a moment, but soon came to a decision. She looked me right in the optics, and her next words shocked me to the very core.

  "You don't feel like a droid, General Blitzkrieg." Lona said.

  "Impossible. I am a droid; I am not organic." I replied, trying to keep my voice even.

  'I'm a droid, there are no organic parts in me. How did she figure it out?!' I thought.

  "It has to be true!" Lona exclaimed. "You have a force presence, almost like an organic being's! Almost the same as a human's!"

  I stared at her for a moment, then leaned back in my chair, staring at the ceiling, mind racing as simulation after simulation started in my tactical computer. I had failed to account for me potentially having a force presence.

  "You aren't a normal droid, are you?" Lona queried after a few moments. "Droids don't have an organic's force presence, even if they haven't had a memory wipe in thousands of years. You can't be a normal droid. The only way you'd have a force presence is if you were human or another organic being, and I'm very sure we don't have that sort of tech."

  Thousands of simulations ran through my head, and all of them attempted to lay out my next move. Eventually, all of them were completed, and I knew what I had to do. Or rather, what I had to say.

  "No, I'm not." I acquiesced.

  The truth.

  "Then what are you?" Lona asked.

  "I was human… once."

  "Once? You mean you aren't human now?"

  "I still feel human but being a droid, it hampers most of the humanity in me. The lack of tactile sensations in everything but my hands still feels weird, even after nearly two months of existing here. I am working on something for that but..."

  "I wonder how a human managed to have his force presence placed into a droid. Unless it was one of those extremely rare hyperspace things." Lona theorized.

  "Hyperspace things?"

  "Well, there are asylums dedicated to people that have studied hyperspace too deeply. And there are... for lack of a better term, 'creatures' that sometimes exist in hyperspace. It's extremely rare, but it has been documented."

  "And you think that I could have been brought here by a 'hyperspace thing'?"

  Lona looked down at the table for a moment, deep in thought. Then, almost as if a physical lightbulb lit up right above her, she shot back up and looked at me.

  "I know! You might be what's called a 'planewalker'. A mythical extragalactic being that is brought into our universe through some unknown means, likely the Force. There were some really old records I saw that said something about rumors of a planewalker showing up right around the time of the Jedi Civil War." She explained.

  "How do you even know that?" I asked.

  "I might have snuck into the restricted section of the archives at one point." She replied with a sly grin. "Madame Jocasta might have been an ornery old woman, but she still needed to leave the archives at some point."

  Lona's mischievousness aside, the fact that the Corusica galaxy actually had a name for isekai bullshit was… slightly concerning. Although, I was a little bit more concerned about who exactly was here before me, if they even existed in the first place. They were rumors, according to Lona, and even if I started looking into it, I had never actually played any of the KOTOR games in my previous life. So, I wouldn't even know what was actually in 'canon' compared to what had changed here.

  But the fact that someone else had been thrown into the Star Wars universe -the very same one that I'm in now- was what surprised me the most. People in my situation almost never interacted with each other, and the thought that another 'isekai' had been in this galaxy before me bothered me slightly. Even though the chances of them being alive are absolutely going to be zero by now, they could potentially have left a holocron or something behind if they were force sensitive.

  If there really was someone from earth that ended up here like me, I needed to know if they left anything behind. Perhaps they kept some tech around from the Old Republic era that is 'lost' now.

  I filed that thought away and turned my attention back to Lona, who was looking at me like she expected an answer.

  "What?" I asked.

  "I asked if you really were a planewalker." Lona replied. "Because if you are one, then the one from the records could have potentially existed as well. But I'm guessing from how quiet you went when I mentioned rumors about one a couple thousand years ago, that I was right."

  "...You're right. I am a planewalker, albeit an unintentional one."

  "Awesome! Wait, really? How did that happen?"

  "I'm not too sure, to be honest. The last thing I remember from my previous life was driving home from work, but everything between then and coming online in my quarters aboard the Harbinger's Greed is fuzzy."

  "Maybe it's a problem from being dragged across galaxies?"

  "Possibly."

  The conversation lapsed into silence for a minute or so. I plugged into a table mounted port and surfed the holonet for the previous planewalker back in the Old Republic, but unfortunately it was mostly just a few forums filled with theories, or stories by a few fantasy authors romanticizing a mostly undocumented time.

  "So… do I get to keep my job?" Lona suddenly asked, pulling me out of my thoughts and the holonet.

  "You've just proven that 'planewalkers' are an actual fact instead of a myth, and your first thought after the fact is your job?" I replied after a moment to process what she asked.

  "Hey, don't get me wrong. I am absolutely ecstatic about finding out one of my favorite myths is actually true, but there's still a war going on, remember?"

  "True. Considering this entire conversation is heavily classified and personal for both of us, I believe it's in both our best interests if you're placed on the Finest Hour as a promotion in the near future. 25 has been bothering me for a head engineer anyway."

  "I think that's for the best. And considering both of us have a lightsaber, we could also spar and improve our skills. Or my skills, really. I'm pretty sure I haven't actually fought with my saber in six years."

  "You haven't fought with your saber in six years?"

  "Nope, I've always been too busy working to keep food on the table. I'm probably going to be horrible at it."

  "...I guess we'll need to rectify that then."

  "I guess, I mean I was never the best at dueling in the first place. I can take apart and rebuild a speeder engine in around five minutes but tell me to beat someone in a lightsaber duel and... well, don't bet on me is all I'll say."

  "So, you are less of a fighter than the Jedi currently acting as generals and commanders, and prefer your current job as a head engineer more?"

  "Pretty much, yeah."

  "Then I will not push you into combat until we are both sure you are ready."

  "...Thanks." Lona looked at me with a new light in her eyes.

  "You are welcome, Lona. Now, let us talk about a few new projects I have in mind..."