SW Gray Tales 36 : Premonitions IV

A/N: Sorry for the delay in update guys, I was kinda getting conflicted while writing the chapters, ended up burning through 3 drafts before finalizing this.

Good news is that next two days are weekend holidays! Now that I feel like having a better general direction, there shouldn't be hiccups.

And btw, in case of delays like this, should I post notice or would that be disappointing your expectations of chapter more than not getting the chapter?
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There was something extremely, criminally satisfying about building weapons out of parts that technically shouldn’t even exist in my old world. Like, here’s a capacitor I yanked from a speeder that definitely spent its last five minutes doing its best impression of a firework.

Here’s some repulsor-grade coil wire scavenged from a freighter docking array that smelled like molten plastoid on extraction. And over there? Structural braces trimmed down from a protocol droid’s femur—which, yes, is apparently a sentence I can say now. Point is: none of this was meant to become a weapon. At least not in the planet-of-origin sense.

But the rulebook had changed, and if the rules change, I change harder.

Everything was coming together with the same half-manic, half-meticulous care I used patching up Vasha’s prototype rigs. Except this wasn’t about parts requisitions or doing favor jobs for dock crews who didn’t believe in preventative maintenance. This was something else.

This was personal.

An engineering problem with extra aggression baked into it. Methodical intent, expressed entirely through math, coil configurations, and impulse capacitors that hummed like pissed-off bees.

And the best part? I had time.

Sleep inertia had completely folded Vasha—she’d faceplanted into her bunk after yesterday’s triple dock shift and was now buried under enough thermal layers to qualify as middling terrain on a topographical map.

She wasn’t budging. Not unless the ceiling fell in or the fire alarm sang a mariachi cover. Two years ago, she would’ve been up at dawn swearing at the municipal grid and dual-wielding caf mugs like she was in a standoff. These days? She actually slept. Deep. Safe. One of my few greatest acheivement of this second try at life in a fascist space empire novel.

It's the least I could do for all she had done for me. And I also kinda felt guilty for being such a little perv to her kinder-than-Mother-Teresa personality. (Through she was definetly more sassier...)

Anyway, peace and silence meant I had a very rare, very unsupervised window to raid the shop. And not under “optimize-the-surge-dampeners” supervision. This was full creative freedom. Which is another way of saying bad decisions were on the menu.

---

[Exactly one hour and at least one singed fingertip later]

The whiteboard was in absolute ruins. Three separate coil arrays battling it out across what used to be a reasonably clean corner. Two of them had been ripped apart and reevaluated five times, annotated with overlapping arrows and color-coded reminders that mostly devolved into passive-aggressive arguments with past-me. The third design was just labeled “MAX COIL DUMBASS” with a sad capacitor doodled underneath, mid-explosion, emoji x-eyes and all.

Technically? It all came down to coil count and power throughput.

More coils gave better magnetic acceleration and tighter shot precision, but not without frying your power core and eating up half the form factor. Go lean on coils, and you save on juice, get something more compact—stealthy, even. Just don’t expect it to knock over anything larger than a bird with a grudge.

And we hadn’t even gotten to the form factor debates. Rifle length? Fantastic control. Real precise. But also the kind of thing that screams ‘military project’ if anyone sees it outside a crate. Concealed sidearm? Lean, easy to stash, but I’d have to sacrifice a lot in terms of charge time, barrel distance, and raw kinetic output. I briefly flirted with a shoulder-mounted design, the kind of thing action heroes rip off motorcycles and wear during rebellion montages… but that idea died quick after I mocked up the frame and realized I’d be strapping half a railgun to my torso and pretending it wasn’t deeply comical.

What I really needed was a modular setup.

Collapsible grip. Swappable coil banks. Central capacitor housing, hot-swappable like a power magazine. Snap-fit components I could hide in a standard tool crate and get field-ready in under thirty seconds. Ugly? Yes. But functional. We were aiming for “workshop-core” here, not sleek sci-fi showroom.

Visually, it was kind of like if you took the Gauss Rifle from Fallout, shaved down the bulk by 40%, then replaced half the structure with scavenged parts and actual engineering logic. Less weird box gun, more "handheld rail-launcher that someone obsessed over at three in the morning.”

The recoil profile wasn’t shocking. Turns out, Gauss acceleration doesn’t hit like traditional combustion weapons; it’s not that sharp kick-back that makes you feel like someone just smacked your shoulder with a metal slab. It’s more of a sustained push. Like a ghost trying to shove you politely but persistently into the wall behind you.

Manageable, though. Especially when I threw in some stabilizers.

I’d ripped a couple of shock springs from an old swoop bike, each one still half-coated in brake dust and axle grease, which made them perfect candidates for a rear brace assembly. Added a pulser unit to the midline structure, modded a couple magnetic dampeners to absorb prolonged bursts. Also rerouted the flyback current on the capacitor bleed-line; the old loop wasn’t built for sustained fire and was melting itself half to death during the warm-up discharge.

The capacitor bank, meanwhile, was holding its own, though barely. I had it wrapped in a layer of heat-sink fins repurposed from what might’ve been an old navigation relay array. Unclear. Point is, it kept the whole thing from cooking itself alive.

Then came ammo.

And oh boy, ammo was a situation.

The shop was stuffed with little ferromagnetic gremlins—nails, screws, cable heads, bracket shards—but spraying random garbage down a barrel isn’t a strategy, it’s a desperate cry for attention. I needed ammo that could fly predictably. Retain momentum. Punch through something denser than drywall.

Shaped rounds were tempting—needles, flechettes, maybe even slotted darts—but designing a barrel that could reliably guide them without tumbling? That pushed the complexity up way too fast for a first-gen. Right now, I needed something symmetrical. Repeatable. Gravity-friendly.

Ball bearings fit the bill.

They were dense. Spherical. Consistent. No unexpected spin issues, no tumbling, no dumb surprises mid-flight. Fire them at consistent voltages and you got repeatable performance. Galactically available, friction-rated, and beautifully boring. All green flags.

Only problem? Half the bearings I had were made of some exotic aluminum alloy—probably engineered to withstand specific stresses in low-friction mag systems, but nowhere near hefty enough to thump someone off their feet. The ideal material would've been tungsten. Heavy. Dense. Mean. I was pretty sure I still had some scrap from a gearbox prototype we tore out of that bulk hauler last month. Might need to disassemble Vasha’s old lifting rig to get it.

Later problem.

The aluminum ones were fine for testing. Assuming I didn’t plan on accidentally boring a hole in the back wall and giving the Empire a straight line of sight into our workshop. Just needed the shots to fly straight for now. Damage could come later. That’s future-me’s problem.

Real talk though, it still annoyed me that a society rich enough to plate their starships in cortosis-laced alloys could not prioritize making decent, compact 3D printers. Like excuse me, you can build a megastructure the size of a moon, but I can’t fabricate a hollowpoint on-demand in my garage?

Deeply offensive, galactic tech standards.

Sure, fabricators exist, but they’re the size of a small apartment unit, half-organic, cost an inheritance, and require more paperwork than arming a freighter. Desktop CNC? Not a thing. Portable additive manufacturing? A pipe dream. The modern galaxy has anti-gravity hover-tanks but does not know the pleasure of a well-planned Fusion360 loadout and a limit switch that just works.

Add that to my list.

Introduce Ezra Branded Bras and Lingeries to the Galaxy.

Introduce 3D Printing.

Maybe kick the Empire in the teeth. Time permitting.

But one thing at a time. And whining doesn’t build weapons

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I set up a basic metal frame with adjustable coil slots and mounted the launch tube. Made a crude stand using spare stabilizer rods and one half of an old pipe-cutter. Not elegant, but stable enough that it wouldn’t fall over if I sneezed near it.

Power was routed through a set of inline switches connected to an old thermal detonator casing I’d converted into a capacitor bank. Fully drained for now—because charging that thing indoors while half-asleep was a recipe for sudden cremation.

Then came the classic test: copper coil, iron-bearing round, low-charge test fire. If it launched at all, I’d call it a win. If it lit the bench on fire, well, at least the fire-suppressor droid was nearby.

Charged it slowly, just a little. Enough to nudge. I held my breath, flipped the switch, and—

Thunk.

Three meters. Straight shot. Clean impact into the slab of dura-steel I’d propped against the far wall. The ball bearing flattened slightly on contact, leaving a neat dent. Not a massive one, but deep enough to leave a mark. Which, for a test on partial charge, was impressive. More than that—it was proof. The thing worked.

I found myself smiling. Not a triumphant grin or a victory pump. Just that subtle curl of satisfaction that came when things did what they were supposed to. The kind of satisfaction that didn’t rely on mystic revelations or ancestral trauma or eldritch soul wounds. Just raw function. Coils, wires, impact.

I reached over and ran a finger along the impact mark in the dura-steel. Clean, centered. A little scorched from residual heat discharge. Promising.

I stood there grinning like an idiot. Not bad at all.

Also, shoutout to the guy who installed sound insulation in the walls. That bastard had charged way too much, but at least I wouldn’t be disowned by the angry Twi’lek goddess currently dozing in the next room.

--

The capacitor bled power like a sulking teen draining drama from a room—slow, steady, and just loud enough to demand respect. Hiss of heated coils, faint click as the switches reset, and the light scent of ozone curling in the air. The bench still ticked softly from residual heat, a growing patch of warmth spreading beneath the weapon’s spine.

Coil casing wasn’t red-hot yet, but we were getting toasty enough to make heat sinks an unscheduled necessity. That old droid knee joint sitting on the upper rack? Yeah. Probably gonna rip that for parts later.

I made a quick note to strip the repulsor coils further too. Those superconducting loops from the defunct lift array weren’t just handy—they were a damn miracle. Minimal resistance, zero heat if you didn’t push too hard, and barely any energy loss during the pulse burst.

I had to hand it to the original engineers; they’d built tech meant to bounce freight like illegal chess pieces, and here I was turning it into a ferromagnetic meat processor. Progress.

Another bearing dropped into the cradle slot—clicked in with a quiet thunk that would’ve killed me with joy if I wasn’t already slightly jittery under the skin.

I bumped the charge up, just a twitch more current. Not enough to fry anything—yet—but enough to see what kind of bite the new configuration had. I lined everything up, checked my capacitor levels (still nominal), and fired.

Second shot hit hard—maybe too hard. Slapped the dura-steel plate like a passive-aggressive droid tech with overtime rage. Perfect dent. Cratered slightly deeper than last time. That brought a sharp grin to my face.

Third shot, measured again. This time I was noting it—trajectory line, impact curve, the slight curve to the right from barrel torque. I was already thinking of mounting an internal calibration coil to counteract the deviation. Could even wire a dummy gyro-feedback loop just to fake dynamic stabilization. The kind of stuff that said “I understand ballistics but mainly in the way raccoons understand locked fridges.”

I needed real data. Projectile speed over distance, recoil dampening force, drop-off curves at varying arcs. I’d seen holos with stormtroopers missing at six feet; I wasn’t about to join their prestigious dart club.

If I wanted this weapon to matter in the field, it needed an aiming system. Not just iron sights and sad hope of calibrated digital targeting.

Maybe a heads-up display mapped to my helmet’s HUD interface, with low-grade trajectory prediction. Arc calculations, lead timing, velocity estimation or even a basic red dot that aligned with the magnetic fields forming the launch vector.

Could fire ten times and hit nine, maybe even ten if I wasn’t texting during the fight. I could use small hologrid emitters for real-time overlay, sync up visual feed with the onboard minimodule in my current helmet.

Once the calibration data was tight enough, the system could guide my aim like a friendly ghost.

And hell, why stop there? Side-mounted stabilizer? Sure. But what about something better?

Shoulder mount. Like some masked mandalorian death-furry cross bred with alien-hunting Predator. Mounted coilgun, miniaturized, gyroscopically stabilized, slaved to my eyeline with motion prediction software from scav tracker drones.

One head turn, one killshot. That was a future dream, but marking it now. Prototype today. Homicidal exosuit tomorrow. We elevate in steps.

My brain slid right into the absurd next gear, gears clicking like automatic gunfire.

Why didn’t this galaxy already have this? Not just the cool shoulder mount, but any aiming systems.

Spaceships had manual turrets, for kriff’s sake. Like barbarian nonsense. Decades behind actual logic.

They were flying kilometer-long cruisers with artificial gravity and ions bursting from their sleek hyperfoil wings, but to shoot a tie fighter, some droid or organic had to sit in a ball turret and manually aim using their feelings and a targeting scope. What in the actual Sith-blasted, ancient-Gungan-bolt-action hell was that?

Auto-guided missiles barely existed except in military blocks, and even then they were dumbfire half the time, like they just kinda moved in the direction you said and hoped real hard.

You're telling me they could feed a droid a philosophical argument and have it pass the Republic’s citizenship test, but couldn’t shove one inside a missile casing and have it steer?

I added a new column to my “Tech This Galaxy Forgot” whiteboard, scribbling [Auto-Aim Systems] at the top in double underlined sarcasm. Same list I’d dumped repulsorlift foam stabilizers and proper 3D printers under.

Hell, I was about two sleepless weeks away from accidentally becoming the next Tarkin, in the "weaponized innovation" department at least. Atleast if I stopped having nightmares that I couldn't remember.

But for now, I’d start small.

One good COM link between the HUD and the firing array and I’d have a system better than ninety nine percent of what the Empire ran in the field.

I cycled off the capacitors, again, the quiet whine tailing down into silence. Those superconducting coils stayed impressively cool—with just the faintest warmth. All things considered, we were golden.

Which let me queue up my next project notes while I set up for a few more test rounds. Wanted to push the firing arcs across a few angles, get a noise profile, maybe see how big a dent four shots in a row would make.

I dropped another aluminum bearing in.

Next shot thudded square again. Slight spark. No ricochet. Perfect landing.

That’s when I heard her voice.

“Ezra?”

I froze mid-recoil compensation. For one millisecond, my brain attempted to shut down opening programs, cancel tabs, and fake innocence.

“Huh?”

“You making those banging sounds in the other room?” Vasha’s voice floated from the house half of the depot, groggy, half-curious, and one caffeine molecule away from giving a damn.

"YEAH! ITS ME, I WAS JUST HAMMERING SOMETHING!"

I moved fast but smooth. Prototype slid under a pile of old jumper cables. I yanked a tarp loose, dropped it over the stack, and nudged the steel slab—still bearing little crater scars—with the force, flicking a grease-stained cloth from the shelf to cover it.

By the time I stepped out of the workshop, I looked like I’d just been fiddling with...whatever-else-I-usually-fiddled-with. Probably a service droid’s spine.

She was stretching in the hallway, arms high, one sock on, the other dangling off a lazy foot like gravity couldn’t finish the job. Her sleep shirt hanging off one shoulder, and she dropped back onto the sofa with the drama of someone auditioning for a sabacc game called “stab me in the morning.”

The sofa creaked, gave a wheezy puff of tired upholstery, and she flopped her legs over the side with all the grace of a sack.

I resisted exactly eight comments about how bendy she was and focused instead on not looking incredibly smug and/or guilty.

She blinked at me slowly. “What were you hammering?”

“Oh. Just… fiddling with some defense stuff,” I said as I padded over to the kitchen unit and patched myself into the caf setup. “You know how weird Capital's been lately.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Defense stuff.” (She looked so cute when giving that glare-y pointy eyes...)

“Yeah. Robbery’s gone up six percent since they announced that new damn tax. And Jon mentioned his neighbor got his warehouse broken into last week.”

She propped her head up on her hand, squinting vaguely in my direction like she didn’t trust me but wasn’t awake enough to do anything about it. “Are you making another one of those shock-stick traps? I swear if I get zapped again walking past the storage corner I’m yeeting you off the roof.”

“Nope,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. “New idea. Just a prototype. Not live yet.”

“Mhmm.” She yawned again—long, slow, full lungs, slicer-level noise filtering out as a content groan. “You’re such a weird little gremlin. Tinkering at five in the morning while the rest of us just try to sleep like regular humanoids.”

“It’s after eight.”

“Don’t ruin my delusions,” she mumbled into the pillow she’d dragged onto the sofa like a makeshift pet.

I set the caf to steep a little longer and leaned on the corner of the counter, absently spinning a bearing between my fingers, thumb and middle flicking it up in tiny arcs.

Still felt jittery under the skin. Not the "haven’t-slept" jittery. The other kind. The staring-into-the-void-and-the-void-breathing-back kind.

The trick was not to hold onto it. Just keep moving. Keep building. Keep doing until the noise stopped, or at least quieted down.

Caf beeped. I poured mugs out. One for her, one for me, and took a slow sip. The edge of bitterness against my tongue was cleaner than everything happening beneath my thoughts.

Wasn’t nothing, what just happened in the workshop. It was just tech. Tangible. Measurable. It did what I told it. Didn’t dream, didn’t cry, didn’t whisper in half-memories.

No voices. No ghosts. Just speed. Force. Problem-solving.

I handed Vasha her caf. She blinked blearily, accepted it like a sacred relic, and cuddled further into the upholstery.

“No traps,” I repeated.

“Better not be,” she slurred. “Or I’m putting bleach in your next protein drink.”

“Noted.”

And that was that.

I watched her for a moment, the easy way she accepted my weird brand of paranoia, the trust that I wouldn't actually burn the place down around her. (Maybe not full trust, my previous shenanigans have kinda made her reconsider that...)

The unease from the night before hadn’t faded. It was still there, eating at my subconscious mind. But watching her, safe on the sofa, with the smell of caf filling the air and my secret project tucked away in the workshop… it felt manageable.

For now..

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A/N: Was the techno-stuff too much?