KMC Forums - Chance meetings.

It smelled. The whole place was stinky! Foul odours filled his nostrils as he wandered cautiously around his new environment. It was quite dark in there and his eyes had a lot of trouble adapting after a life in the desert under the burning suns, so he wanted to be careful while exploring his surroundings. He was mainly using his sense of smell in his first survey, and he certainly did not like what he was finding. He could detect lots of smells, all of them disgusting of their own, waved into a repulsive mixture. Not that he wasn't used to putrid scents, what with his being a scavenger and having poked his snout inside rotten carcasses more than often. But the volatile substances to which he was being exposed here were beyond the normal range in the chemistry of corruption. Somehow the hot humidity, protected in here from the dry air that desiccates everything on the surface of Tatooine, was allowing something to ferment beyond the thinkable.

However, the objects around him, as he started to distinguish them, were mainly made of metal, ceramic, and plastic, interspersed with loads of computer circuits. He was no thinker, at least not the analytical mind that would realize that the non-organic objects around him could not be the source of those smells, but somehow his instincts told him he had not yet detected the main cause of the odour. They also told him he should not look forward to meet it.

He moved slowly, avoiding the sharp edges that could cut his little feet, and also distrusting the slippery surfaces that could make him lose his grip and fall noisily among all the debris. His long ears turned back and forth, ready to alert him of any suspicious sounds. He was surrounded by a desert-like landscape, with dunes of varied sizes extending in all directions. But it was not sand that these little hills were made of. They were piles of rubbish. He had seen rubbish like that on the real desert sometimes, but never in such quantities.

His eyes were slowly giving him more information and he could distinguish shapes that were somehow familiar, though here they were presented at an angle that somehow did not seem natural. He was even scared more than once when the face of an android would look directly at him from behind a heap of metal cables. Even though androids had never cared about his race, it was in his nature to avoid any moving object greater in size than himself. So it was intimidating to find one staring at him from so close a distance. Fortunately, everything in here was dead and inert, and soon he was stepping on heads without a second thought. He was beginning to get used to the new landscape and was soon daring to jump from pile to pile of clinking rubbish.

Now that he had regained his confidence, he just wanted to find a way out of there. It was obvious there was nothing edible around, so there was no reason to stay either. He kept moving in a straight line looking for the end of that place when he saw a light source on the distance. It looked like an open door to the bright, sunny wastelands outside. He observed it and noticed dark shapes going through it in both directions. It was going to be difficult to cross the opening while avoiding those creatures, whatever they were, but it seemed his only plausible course. He kept scurrying among the junk, but soon he had to slowdown his pace, as he felt a presence nearby. Finally, he was to find out the source of the hideous smell he was hardly getting used to. A meter-tall, dark shape was moving towards him, and from inside the hood that covered his upper part, a couple of bright yellow lights were looking directly at him. He froze, half hypnotized by the glare, trying to overcome the disgust produced by the odour, and the fear caused by the moving creature. Fortunately, the Jawa was not really paying attention and was just walking along a treaded path that others were also using in their busy activity. It just turned to his right and kept moving with the monotonous little steps that made its figure bounce briskly.

The scurrier felt relieved and was letting out a small sigh when he noticed the bodiless head of a robot that was poking from a heap of circuits, laying at a slight angle that made it look like it was just sleeping on a pillow of cables and memory chips. It was made of a golden metal that had not yet lost all its shine, and it was all rounded without any appendices poking out from it. Except from the bottom of its neck, that is, where a few broken connectors were showing. He would have not paid it any attention if not for the slight buzzing sound it seemed to produce. He just looked at it for a second, and was about to continue his stroll, when the metal eyelids opened and revealed two shining blue sparks that pointed at him attentively.

All his muscles tensed, as if by an electric shock. Then he was hypnotized by the robotic stare, and his body relaxed, while keeping his eyes fixed on the mesmerizing lights. Things started happening while nothing moved. Billions of flashes and shadows crossed his mind and somehow made sense, though he could not understand them. Sparks raced through his brain, searched for his frontal lobe and made indelible changes beyond the threshold of his consciousness. When it was all over, he suddenly had a purpose in life. He had never even known what a purpose was, never had a goal beyond finding food or satisfying his immediate needs. He had never thought that life could have a reach beyond that. Now, somehow, he longed to fulfill a task that he wasn't sure what it was exactly, but that somehow would make him feel great once performed.

The problem was he did not know how to get closer to his new purpose, and he would have to wait until the opportunity happened on him. He would live from now on in a perpetual yearning for a situation that he could not bring about by his own means. It would be a little bit frustrating, but somehow it gave him a new enjoyment of life.

All his hopes laid now on a sequence of sounds that were completely foreign to him, but that he kept listening inside his head: 'Obiwankenobi'. He just had a great desire to hear them coming from the outside world. Then he would be able to perform that other sequence that had been engraved in his brain. This one, a sequence of movements, also strange and senseless, but that he intended to perform without hesitation as soon as he was prompted to.

Now he felt a sudden urge to leave that place and start his search in the vast deserts of Tatooine. A new nomadic impulse was going to drive him from now on on his quest for a destiny that could mean a difference in the future of the Galaxy.