"Stories in the Sand" is the fourth short story in the anthology From a Certain Point of View. The story, written by Griffin McElroy, focuses on the point of view of a Jawa named Jot.

Plot summary[]

In the Western Dune Sea of the planet Tatooine, the Jawa Jot daydreams about starships in the uppermost deck of his clan's sandcrawler. Jot had discovered the compartment by accident while working an intake shift, sorting the metallic debris that the sandcrawler sucker up through its powerful magnetic maw. Jot regards the uppermost deck as his hiding place. Jot is small even by the standards of his species.

Within his safe space, Jot watches footage played by the Storyteller, a modified astromech droid with a second brain. Jot had found the Storyteller during a scavenging hunt. Jot is particularly fascinated by footage of the Storyteller's former owner, a bounty hunter who perished when his starship crashed on Tatooine. Over time, Jot would develop the habit of taking the memory cores of other droids that the Jawas had picked up to play what was recorded on them before he wiped the data.

Around the time of the Secret mission to Tatooine, one of Jot's kin acquires an R2 series astromech droid in the canyons outside of Mos Eisley. This droid turned out to be R2-D2, who was part of Princess Leia Organa's delegation. Following his usual routine, Jot loaded R2-D2's memory core into the Storyteller to view the droid's story. Jot witnesses several pivotal events from R2-D2's operational history including performing repairs on Queen Padmé Amidala's starship, racing through the Geonosis droid foundries, Padmé and Anakin Skywalker's wedding, and the battles of the Clone Wars. Jot was mystified and enraptured by R2-D2's life. He then witnesses Princess Leia's message to Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Despite not understanding basic, Jot senses that the droid has a special role to play in history. Deciding to be a participant rather than a passive observer of history, Jot ejects R2's memory core intact and secretly installs its back into R2-D2. Jot resolves the following day to lead a salvage team and to find a starship in Mos Eisley or Anchorhead so that he can travel the stars and write stories about each and every one of them.

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