Matuscarantos

  I awoke after eight and a half glorious hours of dreamless sleep. Never had I slept that long before. This simple act, so normal for some was now my most treasured experience. After becoming a Technomancer, of course.

  After putting myself to rights, and grabbing my things. I headed down stairs to the mostly empty cantina, I was left with an important question. What now? I ruminated upon this issue as I turned in my chit for a breakfast of eggs, and zucca pig bacon. A hot cup of some kind of tea was served with the food, but failed to aid in my thinking. I kept getting distracted at how wonderful normal food was. What would the premium treats taste like?

  No, no, one problem at a time. What next?

  Long term goal: get a starship. It didn't have to be particurly big, maybe enough for four people. So I'd have room for... guests or friends, if I could ever find any. If I wanted a ship, I needed credits, lots of them. We were talking hundreds of thousands of them.

  So middle term goal: Earn tons of credits. My best bet for that was to get out into the wastes and find the abandoned pces. Salvage old wrecks, and maybe, just maybe, find a few rusting droids to cim. I even had a lead on an old abandoned moisture farming complex that was waaaay out there. The middle of no where, and sure, I'd have to watch out for Tuskens, and worse. But it was a pce to start.

  I'd heard that the farming complex out that way, went under, shortly after the Hutts started hauling in water from the edges of this sor system. Huge chunks of ice bigger than cities, that were processed in orbit. The water was shipped down to the 20 Great Arcology Cities. They'd been doing this for a couple hundred years now and it'd started to change the pnet, most people thought that the old methods of farming just weren't needed anymore.

  Of course, that didn't mean I couldn't use those old ways to carve out a niche for myself.

  Used to be the humidity in the air was often less than 1%, which always made me wonder how moisture farming could even work. Now the average humidity was between 3-5%. Still cracking dry, but the native pnts and animals were already propagating much faster as a result. That's why living outside the Walls was so dangerous. But that also meant it'd be a little easier to draw the water out of the air.

  It was something to aim for, but I'd need a speeder to get out there. Probably a few more turrets too, for protection. I'd need a decent scanner for the speeder, so I could find the pce. After all, it could be buried under the sand.

  What else? Supplies for a week or two. Some better clothes, with a nice mesh undery to help keep me cooler out there. Maybe some armor. though I could hit the local scrapyards for a couple of days and find most of what I wanted. Save the credits, for the supplies I couldn't magic together.

  That was a good idea. Speeders were getting junked all the time, I should be able to find enough wrecked ones to put together one functional unit. The problem being I didn't have my cart any more, though of course, I could certainly throw a new one together in an hour or two.

  I nodded to myself, my pns set for the next couple of days anyway.

  I talked to the day staff and rented out the room I'd used for a few more days. It was a hundred credits for the week, but I could make that back soon enough.

  Where to start? Probably the Brasco cn scrapyard. It was close, no access fee, and the amount per weight was 1 credits per ten kilos. Sure, it was owned by a Hutt family, but the sves there were nice people. The trash there came from a better district in the city than what they got out at the Heap. Yup, a tiered trash system. That's the Hutt's for you.

  I could probably find almost everything I needed there. It's where I found my EE-3. So armor wouldn't be out of the question. Sure I could've sp together something myself. But I'd feel better repairing something made by an expert. Plus, without some thermal protection, armor was just an expensive way to convince the suns to kill you.

  After being scanned, which generated a list of what I entered with, the sves waved me inside.

  I have to admit being able to scrap for my own ends was fun. I dug through everything, and soon found enough to build my new cart.

  Bigger was better. I built the bed of the cart out of bondite, I went with light weight ps-steel for the walls and roof. 4 meters long, 2 meters wide and 2.5 meters tall. I found eight wheels, found a motor and power cell for each. Fit some controls in. I spped some lights on it and in it, I put in a proper seat. My trusty arc welder got a proper workout. I stepped back on looked at the makeshift vehicle. It was ugly but it was a vast improvement over my st cart.

  Looking around to make sure no one could see me, I used Repair on the makeshift cart. Since everything was already functional, repair helped by merging everything together better. It looked factory new now, still boxy though.

  Now then, while I was looking for parts for the cart, I'd found over a dozen junked speeders. I pulled out three different engines that should work after a quick once over. Then I grabbed all of their Repulsorlift units, control modules, Logic circuits, Power cores, and so much more. It didn't matter if they weren't working right now. Well over a thousand kilos of useful scrap went into my cart. I'd even grabbed a few things to fix up for sale. I'd need some time to put it all together, but I knew a pce where I could rent some storage.

  I rolled out with my loot, which tuned out to cost me 200 credits, for 2 thousand kilos. I hadn't thought I'd snagged that much as my new cart wasn't bothered by the load. Awesome. That should be more than enough to get started on the speeder and earn some more credits. After all, I'd probably need a few more trips to the Scrapyards to fully deck myself out.

  Next, I drove over to Zear's Pod Garage. Since it was off season for Pod racing right now, they weren't very busy.

  Zear was a Toydarian that owed me a few favors, and he rented me an isoted workshop for 50 credits a day. I could even lock it up, at night or when I went for more scrap. Though now I kind of regretted spending the credits on the room back at the Dizzy Rancor. To me fair it was probably better to eat and sleep there.

  Looking around the workshop, it had all the tools and equipment I needed to put my own speeder together.

  I loaded up the hopper of the garage's auto smelter, If my eyes hadn't deceived me I should have enough of the right materials in this haul to put together a durasteel frame. Certainly not enough to build the whole chassis out of it, though. While the smelter was working I went over the engines, I needed two for the speeder and the third was for a hover trailer I was going to build.

  If I could get most of the systems on the engines working, Repair should be able to take care of the rest. Scan pointed out all the problems with the engines. I had the first engine up and running before the auto smelter finished the first batch of Durasteel.

  The rest of the day and the next, saw me finishing the engines and welding together the frame. I'd gone with a ftten cone design, very distantly inspired by the old Correllian Stardrive Fsh speeders. Of course, mine would be far more rounded off, and armed to the teeth. With whatever scary weapons I could find. Maybe I could even dig up a shield module or two.

  On the third day, I was poking through the scrapyards again. The junk was good today and I found a major score, an old and half melted MS-4 Twin bster cannon. I'm sure my cheers of exhiration could've been heard from orbit. I was going to put that baby to good use.

  I worked and worked. When I wasn't working, I was selling. Over the next week I spent almost 600 credits, but I made over 3000. My Scan and Repair abilities leveled twice and my Summon ability leveled once. Things were looking up.

  And at the end of the week, I allotted myself, I felt ready to face the Jundnd Wastes.

  It was past time to go hunting.

  Matuscarantos