Chapter 7

Bad news. A padawan from my clan has died. Killed by a brotherhood of darkness sneak attack to force the master to lose control. Apparently, it didn't work as the master retreated to fight another day. It was the correct choice to retreat as the brotherhood of darkness usually attacks in mass but it shows me just how expendable a padawan is compared to a master. It wasn't fair, the padawan didn't choose to fight but rather followed their master in a fight that ultimately got them killed.

He was only fifteen when he died, the same age as me. The master picked up a new padawan as if nothing happened. After all, attachment leads to the dark side and if this Jedi master was anything to go by he didn't have a drop of attachment in him, he was a jerk, but a good Jedi. Are all good Jedis massive jerks?

I think the answer is a giant yes. I'm so proficient at healing that I'm allowed to take care of a patient's pain using the force and the common sight I see are masters teaching physically disabled padawans to meditate on the pain and heal using the force. It was the correct thing to do as it made my job easier and speed up the recovery of the padawan but when arms and legs are missing from a quick stroke of a lightsaber and the pain of having a mechanical one fused to your nervous system, the last thing I would want to hear was some guy who got you into the fight that had crippled you for life say "meditate". Talk about bad bedside manners.

Healing took a lot of my time but I still have time for my side hustle. A new interesting thing about my cheap healing rooms is they are trading at the stock market. Which is odd as it's a private business with zero shares and is completely owned by me. Someone was playing funny games with my bread and butter, unforgivable.

I had to hire a private investigator, turns out a young Hutt had started trading a broke company with the same name as my private business. The Hutt was using my good name to increase his shitty company worth, likely to sell once his stock reached a nice profit. The Hutt was only able to succeed because people who were willing to invest in my name were too lazy or stupid to check. It was a new twist on the pump-and-dump stock fraud, and yet when the fraud was complete and every lazy investor found out the truth, it would be me who would suffer. My good name will take a hit and I will be swamped by lawyers and angry investors, and it won't matter to them that I had nothing to do with it. I probably could get away with it just because I'm connected to the Jedi but I don't want people to know I own it.

I decided to handle this quietly.

The Hutts and their species are known as basterds. They seem to excel at criminal activities but fortunately for me, not all Hutts were big crime bosses.

Finding the Hutt should have been hard because of their nature but because the fat slug was the major shareholder in this fake company it was easy, I just followed the money. Thanks to the Jedi training in laws and customs I was able to find the paperwork and find some of the Hutt's other holdings. With that bit of tasty knowledge, I deployed my bee drones, each one flew to its place and waited for the Hutt to surface.

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In the meantime, I visited the Hutt's warehouse and stole everything, including some of the support beams. A nice bit of paperwork with the right stamps and seals opened doors with ease.

Bank accounts were harder to attack and not worth the time and potential counterattacks from banks but taking a page from the Hutt I started to take out loans in his name. Loans from the bank were out of the question but ordering specially made items from various artisans in Hutt's name only took a small down payment. I didn't expect the Hutt to lose any money from this but the more people chased him down in search of payment, the more hassle the Hutt would go through.

That was how I attacked an enemy that didn't know they were my enemy. A thousand cuts from unpredictable angles. Not enough to grab the Hutt's attention but enough to cause a little pain. Paperwork was the answer to cause enough mental pain to the Hutt that he would know that he was under attack but not know who, why or how many. Paperwork such as petty health and safety checks or foundation rot in buildings, stuff that didn't need me but would cost the Hutt time and money. It didn't matter if the Hutt was clean, the inspectors would likely find something wrong just so they could fine them or receive a kickback. That was the power of a corrupted system. Then it stepped up a gear when I put my class one droid and Protocol droids to work. The Hutt would be crushed under the many defunct laws that still held sway, all of the tiny crimes that held a slap on the wrist would pile up, and all of this was done using the corrupt nature of bureaucrat. Nothing illegal, just morally grey, with a hint of bastard mixed in for good measures.

It took less than two months before the fake stock was removed from trading. I don't know exactly why and I didn't care. The droids continued with the paperwork attack just so the Hutt didn't suspect the healing rooms as the instigators. It all went off without a hitch, the only downside was I never found the Hutt, I wasn't even sure if he was on Coruscant but I was sure he didn't even know who attacked him let alone who I was. There was a real possibility that if they did find out, they would back off quickly due to my connection with the Jedi. But it was best not to push my luck.

Not much happened after that. I upgraded my droids so that they could better run, organise and operate the vastly growing Bee's healing room empire. It used to be a new healing room that would be created once a week but now I couldn't keep up. New medical droids were ordered, delivered, and placed every hour.

The once simple single healing room that had a single medical droid had evolved into more advanced and stable. A waiting room that had a simple droid to pick up people's information and deal with payment, a battle droid that protected my property and a fleet of repair droids that made sure that nothing was broken for long.

All of this was paid for with the little profits that each healing room produced. A little from hundreds of thousands made me rich and it was getting better whenever a new healing room was created. The lower levels love them and that's where I made my profits. Who would have guessed that keeping people underground away from sunlight would make them sick?

Bee's Healing Rooms became part of their everyday life and with that, the nickname my mother had given me grew with it. If you lived on Coruscant, you knew the name Bee and the healing rooms attached to the name.