The X-wing and Osprey land near a rugged city full of sand. There are dust clouds everywhere, and the buildings are in shambles. Rey, Luke, R2 and BB-8 are greeted by a hunched over, old Dug with a long, white beard.

“Luke Skywalker! My old friend!” the Dug laughs.

Luke walks out and welcomes the old Dug. “Thanks for responding to the signal. Rey, this is Viq.”

“Pleasure to meet ya,” Viq chuckles, “Say, has she been given the mist?”

Luke shakes his head, “You said the herd immunity would be enough.”

“Right, right.”

Luke says to Rey, “Viq’s a merchant with many connections and knows the place well. He’ll help us find Litha.”

“Ah... the young girl,” Viq says with sadness, “I have a good idea where she’s been taken.”

“Where?” Rey asks with worry.

“We’ll have to head into the city. But Luke, you okay with stepping foot in there?”

Luke replies, “I have to know how Tatoonie’s doing now.”

As they’re walking into the city, Rey whispers to Viq, “What happened on Tatoonie?”

Viq whispers back, “Something very bad. Living here is a death sentence.”

When they get to the entrance, a group of civilians, armed with chained weapons and blasters, is waiting around. They spot Luke and snarl.

“What are you doing here?” one of them hisses, and points his blaster towards Luke. Rey is ready to retaliate, but Luke tells her to stand down. She looks back at the civilians, who glare at Luke with the hellbent intent on murdering him.

“He’s just here to buy some power converters,” Viq says to assuage the hostiles, “Leave him be.”

An ugly looking alien without a nose spits at the ground. “Power converters are in another town. We’re outta them.”

Luke says, “Then I’ll be heading there.” The aliens continue to snarl at him. R2 follows Luke, and BB-8 whirls in sadness, not wanting to leave his droid friend. Rey tries to stop him, but Viq whispers to her, “He knows this is the right thing to do. He doesn’t wany any trouble. We have to focus on finding that girl.”

Luke turns around to leave, and Rey shoots a glance at him, hoping to ask him for answers. But he does not appear to want to give any. Dozens of questions race through Rey’s mind. How could anyone hate Luke this much? Not even Inimoni was this hostile, and they had blamed Luke for not being able to stop their centuries long war.

When Rey steps into the city, she sees a disjointed, misshapen landscape filled with broken buildings, bandits stalking them in the alleyway corners, and puddles of muddy water lying around. Broken glass litters the streets. Beggars lie in despondence and agony on the sand, warmed by only small flames. Orphans walk around, bleeding all over, asking for help. Rey tries to go help one, but when she does, she is overwhelmed by all the other orphans staring at her, waiting for help, too. Viq tells her that it’s hopeless and to let it go.

But it would only get more enigmatic. Rey starts to notice patches of bright green grass blending into the ground. How could there be any vegetation? As they step through, the grass becomes more and more prominent, and curled up flowers with faint colors even beginning appearing. Now Rey peers into the distance, and sees a titanic cloud of opaque smoke, obscuring a menacing, mountainous figure. She realizes what the grass is: a blight produced that is encroaching onto the desert land.

“So,” Viq coughs, “Wondering how I know Luke?”

“Y-yes,” Rey stutters, as she was just zoning out. “I have a lot of questions.”

“Heh, well we’ve got a walk. Luke was sent here by the New Republic. Since I knew the towns well, and Luke was just a farmboy who had never been to most of Tatoonie, I showed him around.”

They reach a stall where Viq rents a landspeeder. They approach the strange clouds of smoke, and when Rey emerges on the other side, she sees expanses of forests and meadows, a jarring sight that greatly contrasts with the desert just around them. The figure is about to be revealed. Rey’s mouth is agape with awe.

The figure is revealed to be a mountainous slug with wings, moping around in a dream-like state within the smoky clouds. It sits upon a meadow, and heavily armed guards with plasma lances and white, marble-like armor are protecting it. Surrounding the creature are hordes of humans, wearing well-kept and loose robes, casually relaxing and aloof. The humans saunter over to the behemoth, carrying jeweled chalices, and reach into the thick wisps of smoke; when they bring their hands out, their chalice is now filled with a sort of drink. Then they would graciously thank the behemoth.

The smoke floats near the landspeeder. Viq says something to Rey, but she can hardly hear him now. She starts to drift into a hypnotic, carefree state...

Suddenly, she feels someone shaking her and she snaps out of it. Viq is tossing her back and forth with one of his foot-hands. “Hey, I told you not to breathe it in!” The landspeeder finally passes through the smoke and leaves it.

“What was that?” Rey asks.

“That’s a Deira,” Viq says, “An ascended, derivative form of a Hutt. They branched off from each other eons ago.”

“I want to know what happened,” Rey says, “Tell me everything.” The merchant sighs.

[flashbacks are seen while Viq narrates]

“For millenia, a plague had ravaged our planet, killing many of the plants. Then, a few decades ago, this plague mutated to harm not just certain plants, but all kinds of life. Every species was affected by the plague differently, but on average, 1 out of 3 died. Just as all hope was lost, our knights in shining armor arrived. They called themselves the Sera, humans who worshipped the Deira, who provided the Sera with vast quantities of knowledge, infrastructure, wealth- all great things you could possibly dream of. In exchange, the Sera were tasked with finding and colonizing planets that contained the Xin, a resource that the Deira needed to survive.

The Sera had detected an abundance of Xin on Tatoonie, hidden in the ancient plant fossils buried deep within the ground, reachable through the long fungi-like roots of the Taloom Cacti. The only way to salvage this Xin was by saving the environment. The plague was hypothesized to not be some viral disease, but rather some parasitic, invisible wisp that invades life forms. Using the instruments of the Deira, they rushed to discover a ward to drive these wisps out, and miraculously, one- in the form of a certain type of Deira’s mist- was found. Tatoonie welcomed the Sera with open arms. To the joy of the majority, the plague was receding! Unfortunately, there was one minority group that had adverse reactions to the antidote: Tatoonie human natives.

The plague killed 1 out of 100 of humans per generation, but now 1 out of 4 of Tatoonie humans died from the antidote. Due to millenia of the Deira’s selective breeding, the Sera humans were immune to the mist’s adverse effects. To wipe the plague from carriers, it was required that every living being came in contact with the mist. To prevent the plague from spreading, no one was allowed to leave our planet without the antidote. The Sera estimated that it would take a few centuries to eradicate the plague, but given the birth and death rates, no species would die off. With the Deira, water was being farmed from moisture farms again, and even lush plant life was returning. The majority of the planet sided with the Sera, and so the humans were ignored.

But then, children of the Sera began disappearing. The Sera begged the New Repubic, whom they had close ties with, for help. After many of their politicians failed, Luke was sent to deal with the matter. He was informed that a radical group of humans, the Incendiaries, were using the children as leverage in negotiations to drive the mist away from humans. The humans had tried many means to plead with the Sera, but this kidnapping was the only method that had worked- the children, who were special carriers of the Deira’s resources, were too valuable to Sera society. They allowed a few humans to live in secluded locations; however, the plague would live on through them.

Luke understood the emotions felt by both sides, but was totally against the methods that both resorted to. In a noble, but idealistic, attempt to mend the two broken groups, he tirelessly worked to negotiate with leaders of the Sera and of the Incendiaries. The Sera, in their arrogance, believed the Deira’s mist was the only answer, and dismisssed trying to find other solutions. Luke asserted that this was not the only way, and if everyone came together to find a solution, they could find a different way to save the planet. Many Sera leaders tried to drive Luke away, but with the help of a group of young Sera scholars who looked up to Luke and his heroic legacy, Luke was able to stay.

Luke’s efforts were beginning to be realized- leaders from both sides were meeting and thinking of alternative methods to deal with the plague. But this diplomacy took too long, and so those who were against Luke continued to induce the mist into unwilling humans, or continued to kidnap Sera children. Luke was deceived by these people who broke their promise, but repeatedly asked for forgiveness and second chances. When the mother of the Incendiaries’ leader, Geoff, tried to leave her containment camp to visit her dying granddaughter who lived amongst the Sera, she was captured by Sera troops and was forcefully administered the mist. She died before she could reach her family. In his anger, Geoff ordered the murder of kidnapped children, hoping to strike fear into the Sera to force them to leave the planet. Instead, it did not go as he thought. The Sera retaliated by waging a war on the native humans, who were able to fight back by striking a deal with armies of exiled Mandalorians. Luke tried to stop the war, but he was no match for the hatred that had brewed on both sides. The New Republic, torn apart trying to deal with all the in-fighting on other, more important, planets, had already given up.”

Viq finishes, and Rey can only stare into the distance, with great sorrow in her face. It was worse than she had thought. It was worse than on Inimoni, where the two sides had a shared history that allowed them to come together. There was nothing good that the Tatoonie human natives and Sera could possibly share.

Viq continues, “But it gets worse. Only certain Deira could produce the mist. The Incendiaries, thinking that without the mist, the Sera would have no more power over Tatoonie, assassinated those Deira. However, it was soon discovered that both human progeny and young humans children exposed to the mist were producing the antidote inside themselves up until the age of 10. Unfortunately, the only way to drain the antidote out was by killing the kids. But with the help of atrocious propaganda, the Sera felt little guilt for farming these younglings.”

Rey jumps up, “Is that what they’re doing to Litha? We can’t let them do this!”

The landspeeder begins to slow down, and in the distance is a prison-like complex. The duo is hidden behind a rock formation. Viq tells her, “This is where she would be kept. We have to be careful. There are guards all around. I’ll tell you how to get into the civilian database.” Rey nods. She slowly sneaks into the complex, where there are no bars that let her see inside. Instead, people are kept behind fortified, metal walls, and cannot be seen- only their muffled pleads are heard. Rey tries to do everything she can to push them out of her mind, and finally reaches the database. She tries to search for Litha, looking by name, appearance, date of capture- everything she could to find her. But she’s simply not there.

Suddenly, she hears footsteps. She hides, and sees a guard on the corner. Then, she remembers a trick she had been practicing. She announces, “Soldier, this is your commander.” The guard stops in place and straightens himself up. “Yes, Ma’am!” Rey steps out in front of him, and continues, “You will tell me what you know of that girl named “Litha”. The one who had a mask on when she was recaptured.”

“Ma’am, when we first saw her, we couldn’t find her in the civilian database. She wasn’t in the Sera database either. So probably a bastard child that the natives kept hidden. She had trace amounts of the antidote in her; we couldn’t let that go to waste.”

Rey is disgusted by how little regard for life the guard and his superiors have. She says, “If she was Sera, you wouldn’t have farmed her, would you?”

“No Ma’am.”

Rey is moments away from striking the guard. But she manages to calm herself down. “Where is she now?”

“She was last seen in cell 86334. But, she might have been transferred. The next sacrifice is about to commence soon. But I’m not highly ranked enough to know where.”

Rey’s heart begins to pounce. It can’t be, she thinks to herself. “That is all. You are dismissed.”

Rey rushes to cell 86334, and opens the large doors. There, she finds no one. There is only a mask.

TATOONIE is near sunset. Outside of the city, in a heavy shade below a cliff, Rey walks over to Viq. Viq gestures to her, and she shakes her head, and tells him what happened. Viq sighs.

“I wish I knew where the next ritual is held,” Viq says with despondence, “But there’s too many of those ceremonial farms. She could be anywhere.”

“Can you try to find out?”

“I’ll try my best. Once I do, I know some Incendiaries who can help us. They’re still trying to save children from these farms.”

Rey tries to look up to the sky, wishing for hope. But she notices something is off. “I thought there were two suns on Tatoonie,” she asks.

“There still are. But the emissions from the war have polluted the sky. Now, we can only see one.” With great sorrow, Viq is about to leave. Just as he does, he says, “Oh, and Luke’s back. Just in case you wanted to see him.”

REY slowly walks over to a rocky plain, with only a few craters protruding. She finds Luke standing over a crater, staring at a unary sunset. As the two watch the sun set over in Tatoonie, Luke solemnly looks at Rey and says, “They said I wasn’t strong enough to take a side. But I just couldn’t let one of them hurt the other.”

Rey softly whispers, not sure if what she’s saying is right, “You were in a hard position. You did what you thought was best.” Her staff is lodged in the sand, and she leans on it for support as the weight of every word she chooses to speak bears down on her. The heavy sun beams down on her face, forcing her to be reminded of her own prison that she grew up on, Jakku. But even Jakku seems like a paradise compared to what Tatoonie has become.

Luke turns to her and says, “It’s what I think is right. But not what everyone thinks. For a long time, I’ve been haunted by what I had done. This whole war could have been avoided. I was called weak, cowardly... by those who thought I was an idealist. I thought I wasn’t. This whole time I’ve been with you, revisiting all these planets, I’ve thought about this a lot. And I’m starting to make peace. But there’s just something inside that’s holding me back, and I can’t push past it.”

“It’s not too late. We saved Inimoni. We can still save Tatoonie.”

“I want to. But not everything can be solved by a lucky deux ex machina.”

Rey shuts her eyes, and knows Luke is telling the truth. Then she says, “We can still save Litha.”

“I think that’s all I can do now.”