The news was bad, delivered with the cold, efficient detachment typical of the Jedi Temple. A Padawan from my former clan had died, killed in a Brotherhood of Darkness sneak attack.
"Padawan Tethan was lost in the field on Nadiem," Master Tera Sinube announced during our morning healing instruction, his tone calm and clinical. "He served the light and is now one with the Force."
The primary objective of the attack was not the Padawan, but the Master; the Sith like darksiders intended to force the Master to lose control, to succumb to rage and grief. Apparently, the tactic failed. The Master, calculating the odds, made the correct choice and retreated to fight another day. It was the correct tactical decision, as the Brotherhood of Darkness usually operates by attacking in overwhelming mass, but the incident clearly demonstrated just how strategically expendable a Padawan was compared to a Jedi Master. It felt profoundly unfair.
The Padawan didn't choose the fight; they merely followed their master into a conflict that ultimately cost them their life. He was only fifteen when he died, roughly the same age as I was now, give or take the planetary rotational differences. Within a matter of weeks, the Master had selected a new Padawan, proceeding as if nothing significant had happened. After all, the Jedi gospel states that attachment leads to the dark side, and if this specific Jedi Master was anything to judge by, he didn't possess a single drop of attachment. He was, by all accounts, a magnificent jerk, but he was also undoubtedly a good, effective Jedi.
This experience forces a profound question: are all truly effective, "good" Jedi massive jerks?
My ongoing experience in the Medical Corps suggests the answer is a giant, resounding yes.
I am now so proficient at Force Healing that I am routinely allowed to take the primary responsibility for managing a patient's pain using the Force. The common, maddening sight I witness is Masters instructing physically disabled Padawans to meditate on the agonizing pain and use the Force to accelerate their healing.
It is technically the correct thing to do, as it makes my job easier and significantly speeds up the Padawan's recovery, but it lacks all human empathy.
"Young Initiate Ban," a Jedi Knight told me while I focused the Force on a Padawan who had lost a hand. "Keep the pain manageable, but let him feel the Force's guidance. He must learn self-control through discomfort."
When a young person is missing arms or legs from a quick stroke of a lightsaber, and facing the excruciating prospect of having a mechanical limb surgically fused to their nervous system, the absolute last thing they want to hear is some callous, uninjured guy who got them into the fight tell them, with a serene look, to "meditate." The bedside manners of the Jedi Order are appalling.
Healing takes up a substantial portion of my time, but I still dedicate significant resources to my side hustle. A new, deeply irritating development has occurred with my network of cheap healing rooms: they are apparently being traded on the galactic stock market. This is bizarre, as my business is a completely private entity with zero shares issued, entirely owned by me. Someone, somewhere, was playing funny, unforgivable games with my bread and butter.
I immediately hired a private investigator a small, discreet droid I had modified to perform such tasks and quickly discovered the perpetrator was a young Hutt. This slug had started trading a financially broken, unrelated company that happened to share the exact same name as my private medical business. The Hutt was using the sterling reputation of "Bee's Medical Care" to artificially inflate the worth of his shitty, defunct company, likely planning to sell his stock once it reached a nice peak profit.
The droid investigator's report flashed on my personal datapad:SUBJECT: GURG THE HUTT. TRADING ENTITY: "BEE'S MEDICAL CARE (GALACTIC HOLDINGS)." NOTE: STOCK VALUE INFLATED BY 450% BASED ON PUBLIC REPUTATION OF TEMPLE-AFFILIATED ENTITY.
The Hutt was only able to succeed because the people willing to invest in the name were either too lazy or too stupid to perform basic due diligence and check the actual company's balance sheets. This was a new, audacious twist on the classic pump and dump stock fraud. The moment the fraud was complete and the lazy investors found out the truth, it would be me who would suffer. My hard earned good name would take a severe hit, and I would be swamped by lawyers and angry investors. It wouldn't matter to them that I had nothing to do with it. While I could probably get away with it unscathed, solely due to my connection to the Jedi Temple, I didn't want my ownership of the profitable empire publicly exposed.
I decided to handle this quietly, entirely outside of Jedi oversight.
The Hutts and their entire species are famously known as galactic bastards, excelling at every form of criminal activity. Fortunately for me, not all Hutts were massive crime lords with legions of enforcers. Finding the specific Hutt should have been difficult because of their secretive nature, but since the fat slug was the major shareholder in this fake company, it was surprisingly easy. I simply followed the money trail.
Thanks to my comprehensive Jedi training in laws and customs, I was able to quickly find the public paperwork and identify some of the Hutt's other physical and financial holdings. With this bit of tasty, actionable knowledge, I deployed my latest generation of Bee drones. Each one flew to its assigned location and waited patiently for the Hutt to surface, monitoring his movements.
In the meantime, I paid a quiet visit to one of the Hutt's identified warehouses and systematically stole everything of value, including some of the structural support beams—just to be an absolute menace. A nice bit of counterfeit paperwork, stamped with the correct, official seals of various Republic departments, opened doors and bypassed automated security systems with ease.
Bank accounts were harder to attack and not worth the time, effort, and potential counterattacks from bank security droids. Instead, taking a page directly from the Hutt's playbook, I started taking out loans in his name. Loans from major banks were out of the question, but ordering specially made, highly customized items from various artisans and small businesses in the Hutt's name only required a small down payment, which I provided.
"I need a thousand durasteel bathtubs, custom-fitted with gold-plated jets, delivered to this address," I coded a messenger droid to deliver to an eccentric Coruscant artisan, along with the Hutt's (fake) credentials. "Urgent delivery required."
I didn't expect the Hutt to ultimately lose a significant amount of money from this, but the more people who chased him down in search of payment, the more hassle the Hutt would have to endure.
That was the core strategy for how I attacked an enemy who didn't even know they were my enemy: a thousand small, frustrating cuts delivered from unpredictable angles. Not enough to immediately grab the Hutt's full, focused attention, but certainly enough to cause continuous, annoying pain.
Paperwork was the key to causing enough mental anguish that he would eventually realize he was under a systematic attack, but he would never know who, why, or how many agents were involved. I filed paperwork such as petty health and safety checks for his buildings and structural integrity reports citing foundation rot.
"Report filed: Structural Integrity Alert," I typed into a Republic bureaucratic terminal, using forged access codes. "Note: Evidence of rampant mold and vermin infestation at coordinates [Hutt warehouse address]."
This was stuff that didn't require me to break any laws but would cost the Hutt vast amounts of time, money, and stress to resolve. It didn't even matter if the Hutt's properties were structurally sound; the inspectors would likely find something wrong anyway, just so they could impose a fine or receive a quick kickback. That was the hidden power of a deeply corrupted system, and I knew exactly how to wield it.
Then, the campaign stepped up a gear when I put my Class One Protocol droids to work. They meticulously trawled the Republic's legal history for defunct, obscure laws that still technically held sway. The Hutt would be crushed under the weight of countless, petty infractions. All of the tiny, individual crimes that usually resulted in a slap on the wrist would pile up into an unmanageable bureaucratic avalanche.
All of this was accomplished by exploiting the corrupt, greedy nature of the entrenched bureaucracy. Nothing I did was technically illegal; it was just morally grey, mixed with a generous hint of calculated bastardry.
It took less than two months before the fraudulent stock was quietly removed from trading. I don't know exactly why the Hutt backed down, and frankly, I didn't care about the specifics. My droids, under strict orders, continued with the low level paperwork attack for several more weeks, just to ensure the Hutt didn't suspect the profitable healing rooms as the instigators. The entire operation went off without a hitch.
The only downside was that I never actually encountered the Hutt. I wasn't even entirely sure if he was still on Coruscant by the end, but I was certain he had no idea who attacked him, let alone who I was. There was a real possibility that if they did find out about my Jedi connection, they would back off quickly, but it was best not to push my luck and remain invisible.
Not much happened on the financial front after that. I dedicated myself to upgrading my droids so that they could better run, organize, and operate the vastly growing Bee's Healing Room empire. It used to be an achievement when a new healing room was created once a week, but now I couldn't keep up with the demand. New medical droids were being ordered, delivered, and placed in new facilities every single hour.
The once simple, single healing room that relied on a single scavenged medical droid had evolved into a more advanced and stable franchise model. Each facility now featured a waiting room, a simple Protocol droid to collect patient information and process payments, a battle droid for property protection against any lingering gang threats, and a fleet of repair droids that ensured nothing was broken or non functional for long.
All of this was consistently paid for with the small profits that each healing room produced. A little bit of money harvested from hundreds of thousands of transactions quickly made me rich, and the profits were escalating dramatically with every new healing room created. The lower levels desperately needed them, and that is exactly where I made my fortune. Who would have guessed that keeping people underground, away from natural sunlight and fresh air, would make them perpetually sick?
Bee's Healing Rooms became an essential part of their everyday life, and with that success, the simple nickname my mother had given me grew into a massive brand. If you lived anywhere on Coruscant, especially in the lower levels, you knew the name Bee and the affordable healing rooms attached to it.