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Flic's prized droid goes missing only to return several months later with a new 'unique' modification.
Classic Sci-Fi fan fiction with a twist. In the first draft I made the protagonist a man, the droid a woman and used mostly conventional/boring heterosexual relationships. Then it came to me in dream that it would things would be more interesting to make nearly all of the characters female and set it lesbian dominated world.
I hope you enjoy.
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My name is Flic Varm and I own a moisture farm on Tatooine. The farm is situated outside a little outpost 200 Km north of Mos Eisley. The farm has been in my family for years. My grandparents were all brought to Tatooine and enslaved to work on the grand old, 10,000-hectar municipal moister farm that kept Mos Eisley wet by their old master way back in the days of the Republic. Both my mother and father were born here.
When the Republic fell, my father and his friends on the farm decided they didn't like being slaves, so one night they decided they had enough and killed their masters. Come the next day, they split the grand old farm up amongst themselves, and my father was the new owner of a moister farm.
Over the next thirty years my father—with the help of my twin sister Jackie and I—helped grow the business into a sizable operation. We expanded the moisture farm to nearly two thousand hectares, which gave us enough water to set up a profitable fruit and vegetables business on the side. At the time, the Imperials had their hands full with the Rebellion, so they never bothered us much. And early on, my father cut a good deal with the Hutts to provide them with all the fresh fruits and vegetables they could eat at a fair price.
When Jabba died and the Empire fell, things got a bit iffy again. Everyone and their womp rat wanted to seize power, but this time my sister and I stepped up. We helped organize a syndicate of local concerned business owners like ourselves to make sure things didn't get out of hand. Later we helped broker an off-the-books agreement between the New Republic and the Hutts that allowed trade to keep flowing between our little part of Tatooine and the rest of the Galaxy.
When my father died, my sister and I inherited the farm. My sister had always hated the place and wanted to go see the galaxy, so I bought out her half of the business and helped her set up her own shipping business out of Mos Eisley. She now owns five ships, employs a crew of twenty and has never been happier.
As for me, by the time my fortieth birthday rolled around, I was neck deep in work. I just bought an adjacent 1,500-hectare moister farm from an older lady whose husband had died a few years back. All of her children were off planet and the few farm hands she had weren't the best. She approached me about selling, and even offered me great terms, because she knew all the work it would require to repair her neglected systems.
And she was right. The farm was a mess. Most of her pumps and equipment hadn't seen any maintenance in years and all of her bots were old, disorganized and badly programmed. A couple of her farm hands were alright, and I kept them on, but most I had to fire.
I had been working 18-hour days for about a month just trying to plug all of the leaks and was just about to set about with the gargantuan task of updating all of the pumps' software when my wife Teela saw that I was drowning.
With my sister Jackie's help, together they bought me a brand new R2 astromech droid. It was beautiful. All blue and chrome, and amazingly smart. It instantly understood what I was trying to do with the new farm. Within a week it had single handedly reprogrammed and updated all the thousands of pumps, processors and bots needed to keep the new farm going. Once it finished that, it did the same for my old farm and then it set out to develop a strategy on how to integrate both farms. In R2's first month alone, she had increased over all water production by 35%, which is huge on a desert planet which really shouldn't support life at all.
In fact, things were going so well that when a couple months later when my sister asked if I wanted to go out on a supply run to the next system over, I jumped on the offer. I hadn't left the planet in years and now, thanks to my beautiful R2 unit, I could take a vacation.
A few days later, I was sitting in the co-pilots seat on my sister's ship with a drink in hand while we jumped through hyperspace. I loved it. It was so nice to get away from all the sand, dust and responsibility.
By the time we made it to our destination, 18 hours later, I was good and drunk. The place where we landed was nothing special. It was a grubby little space port, clinging to a rock on the edge of the galaxy, but the locals were friendly enough and the alcohol was good and strong. We had to wait a couple days to organize the return loads, so we headed over to the local cantina.
Over the next three days we drank, we swore, and harassed the locals. It was exactly what I needed.
On the morning that we were about to leave I got a message from my wife. An unseasonably large dust storm had kicked up and had engulfed much of the North. As a precaution, R2 had shut down all of the nonessential production on the farm until the storm blew over. Otherwise, she said "things were fine, don't worry and enjoy my trip."
Much later that day we jumped back into the Tatooine system. "Holy Shit!" Gasped Jackie on first seeing the size of the dust storm that had engulfed much of the Tatooine's northern hemisphere.
When we landed it was very late, and the sky was unusually dark as the dust blotted out the stars. I fired off a quick message to my wife to let her know that I was back on planet. She didn't respond, but it was very late, so I didn't worry about it. I then put in a call to my R2. Droids don't sleep and I was wondering how such a big storm had affected operations.
My communicator emitted a horrible error buzz that hurt my ear. "Error. User not found." I read off the display.
"That didn't sound good," my sister said as we left the ship.
"Huh? I can't get ahold of my R2."
"Probably the storm. Something that big could easily taken down the comm network," said my sister before she turned to her own droids and began issuing orders.
"Beep, beep, beep," rang my communicator.
It was my wife, "I didn't mean to wake you up, I was just calling to let you know..."
"We have a problem," my wife cut through my chatter. "The new farm just got raided."
"What?" I gasped. "Are you okay? What about the crew?"
"We are fine. No one got hurt, but when that huge dust storm hit, someone made off with a bunch of controllers, pumps, pipes, several of the worker droids and..." she paused, "and your R2."
"What? Who? Have you...?" I sat down heavily on one of the crates that was being unloaded.
"We don't know. There weren't any Jawas in the area. They didn't smash anything up like the Tuskens like to do. If I had to guess it was some of the old farm hands that we fired."
I hate to admit it, but I was a little in shock. I loved that little droid.
Since it was late and the visibility was still bad between the space port and the farm, Jackie insisted on sending me off with two of her women to fly me and my land speeder home.
I really don't remember much of the trip back to my farm. The desert was dark, and the trip took a lot longer than usual. It was nearly dawn by the time we got in.
When we arrived I ran straight for the little charging alcove I had set up for my little droid in our kitchen. And there it was, empty. I would never admit it to anyone, but I cried.
The next month was hell. I was suddenly back to 18-hour days trying to fix all the damage that the raiders caused. From dawn to way beyond dusk, I spent all of my time plugging leaks, reorganizing equipment, and calling in all the favors I could for spare pump equipment from every moisture farmer I knew on the planet.
The one saving grace in all of this was that my now long gone R2 had pulled together an amazing strategy to merge the two farms and all I had to do was implement it.
Months passed and things eventually got better. I eventually managed to fully integrate the two farms which help free up a good deal of resources which helped plug the gaps caused by the loss of equipment. Plus the winter was a little cooler than usual which helped us bring in more water than ever. We also found a couple older droids that we managed to get up to speed on my R2's strategy.
My wife even promised to buy me another R2 when we finally got some more money.
Months later I was down in the pump house enjoying a stiff drink while I watched the reservoir slowly fill when my communicator went off, "Beep, beep, beep."
I checked the number, but I didn't recognize the caller. "Hello?"
