Fun (?) Rey Facts from Before the Awakening
Rey’s section of Before the Awakening starts least a year before the events of The Force Awakens. I’m omitting most of the plot details the story, in case you are inspired to read it, but here’s some stuff that struck me.
The long wrap she wears seems to serve both to protect her mouth (and eyes, at this point, because as of the start of the book she doesn’t have the goggles yet) from the sand, as well as hands when she grabs metal that’s been in the sun for a while, like gloves.
She mentions trading her previous set of googles for “two portions, barely enough food to silence her stomach for a day”; in the movie, we see her get ¼ portion and ½ portions for various days hauls, so, like, yeesh, Rey. That poor girl is regularly starving.
Most of the scavengers on Jakku work in teams, but Rey never, ever has; she starts interacting a little more with two people over the course of her story & is very very prickly about it at first.
Over the course of her section of the book, she finds a complete ship that no one’s found yet, and her biggest fear is finding a dead body on it; she doesn’t, but she does find a bunch of rations, and a bed, which “was far too soft. She ended up on the floor.”
Literally everything she owns is due to her scavenging and trading for it (like the generator she uses to power her little home), or building it herself (the speeder: “She’d had the speeder for years, built it herself as she had so many other things, and as much as she could allow herself a sense of pride in anything, she was proud of that.”)
She has workbench where she takes fixes up a lot of the stuff she finds, because “Unkar always paid more for things that still worked.”
SHE ALSO PUTS TOGETHER A COMPUTER: “using pieces scavenged from several crashed fighters over the years, including a cracked but still-usable display from an old BTL-A4 Y-wing”, AND finds a bunch of data chips, one of which is a flight simulator.
So whenever one of the (DAYS-LONG) sand storms traps her inside her little AT-AT home, she uses the simulator: “She could select any number of ships to fly, from small repulsor-driven atmospheric craft to a wide variety of fighters, all the way up to an array of stock freighters. She could set destinations, worlds she’d never visited and never imagined she would, and scenarios, from speed runs to obstacle courses to system failures.” She’s been doing this for long enough that she purposefully programs the simulator to throw EXTREME SITUATIONS at her, to keep it challenging, but she’s had so much practice she pretty much aces them.
Like, “with a perverse sense of determination that she would not allow herself to be beaten by a machine that she herself had put together with her own hands, she learned.” OH REY.
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