In a different life, Mathus would have been a successful research engineer at a major corporation headquartered in the Core Worlds. In this life, Mathus grew up hard on the streets of Anchorhead on Tatooine. Orphaned at a young age, Mathus was burdened with a powerful intellect and no useful way to apply it. He slid into a life of thuggery and crime, until one fateful day when he attempted to rob a shop belonging to an old Rodian mechanic named Honwoo. Honwoo made no particular attempt to resist, but seeing young Mathus’s fascination with a partially-stripped machine on his workbench, offered to teach the young human how it worked. Six hours later, Mathus’s friends came by to see what had gone wrong and found him covered in machine oil, helping to repair a repulsorlift array.

Over the next few years, Honwoo taught Mathus the ins and outs of every machine that came through his repair shop. With no formal education, Mathus developed an unorthodox but effective approach that relied heavily on trial and error. He also found that he enjoyed tinkering and repurposing existing machines, turning them to a new purpose. For example, his customized shock gloves began life as power converters.

Most of Honwoo’s business had to do with the repair, maintenance, and reprogramming of Tatooine’s limited supply of droids. As a consequence, Mathus became a droid expert. His skills eventually came to the attention of a Hutt named Teemo, and Mathus was offered an impressive sum of credits to make his skills available at Teemo’s Mos Shuuta complex. Since his arrival in Mos Shuuta, Mathus has regretted his decision. The project Teemo has him working on is completely unsuited to his skills: Mathus' experience gives him the skills necessary to repair busted old battle droids, but he completely lacks the education to develope a scematic based on their design. And when Mathus attempted to leave, Teemo hinted that something bad might happen to Honwoo if he did...

Fed up and backed into a corner, Mathus has decided to make a break for it. First, he introduced some new code into one of Teemo’s droids, 41-VEX, to encourage the droid to try to escape, too. Then, he struck up a friendship with a scout named Sasha, intending to pool their resources and get off Tatooine.