The ambush does startle Rafiik back to himself, a little. "The... Sith Lord...?"

"Will not be troubling anyone further.  Rest, Padawan."

He has questions, but he wants so badly for this not to be his problem anymore.

He rests.

There we go.  That's much better.  It calms the knot of Darkness entangled with his body, too, that he's not pushing.

"...He's asleep, thank goodness."

She speeds up a little bit, wanting to get off this planet and back to the Cloak and her well-equipped medbay before some new complication arises.

There aren't going to be any complications with Pradnakt right here, but that isn't an objection to the plan and she has no trouble keeping up.

"The poison's bespoke," she tells Medea when they get there. "Which doesn't mean you won't be able to do anything about it, just don't waste time trying to figure out what it is. At least one nasty metabolite, too, and I think there's a second one I'm just starting to see." She describes what they're doing to his liver and intestines in detail only a medic will appreciate. "And he's growing a new spleen variant from the alchemy but it's not functional yet, I'm not immediately worried about it."

It's rather full.  The transport bays of the Daggers are already slated for use to lay out extra beds, for the rescues that are in less of a messy condition, biologically speaking, and they're packed tight on the ride back up.  Medea's latched on to the ceiling for space.

There's clearly a reason for that artifact to be necessary, suffice to say, given how long it might take for Pradnakt to unscramble every patient one by one on her own.

"It's not wasted time if by knowing its structure we can figure out what it's doing, and I've got comms with the mainframe on the Cloak for simulations - but noted, Lord Pradnakt, thank you for the information.  He hadn't been dosing anyone else with anything recently enough it's live, at least, and we've actually recovered a lot of his notes.  Might be in there.  How do you feel about dialysis?"

"I've never seen it in action before. I expect it'll help."

"Ah.  Not what I was asking, since we don't actually know anything about the particles or metabolites in question like whether they'd filter out appropriately on the equipment we have.  Kalbetis -?"  A terse, stressed, 'Maybe', from the Darth who hadn't looked to be paying close attention to the medical jargon, and she continues, "So.  The principle of dialysis is to run the entire kriffing bloodstream through an external filtration unit, when the body's extant systems aren't working properly.  We don't know if this poison will filter out in a chemical or structural filter.  Therefore, can we do it with the Force."

"Mm. My Force options are to keep him with me for however long it takes his system to flush the poison - I'd say at least six hours and maybe closer to twelve - or go Light and brute force it. He'll be fine either way - I don't actually think this would kill him even if I stopped the anti-poison altogether - so it's mostly a question of logistics."

"Yes, those are your Force options.  Mine are somewhat broader, but I don't have the Healing senses to do this by myself.  Yet."  She seems intensely frustrated by that fact.  "If I supplied the technique, could you supply the targeting?"

"I'm not actually sure he'd consent to that."

"I'm not either, but he's in our care and he's been poisoned by something that's doing who-knows-what to his system and all of it bad.  Filtering it out so that we can avoid further problems if you can't keep this technique up for twelve hours or through the transition -

"It's the best option I think we have if we want to actually be able to do anything to help anyone else, and they need help too, not just him.

"If he's upset about us using the Force to heal him, even if it wasn't Force Healing, then - at least he'll be well enough to be upset about it, damn it all."

"Twelve hours isn't even hard, this is the same technique I've had on myself for the last two decades. If I lose it during the transition it'll be for a second or two at most and I'd bet I won't, I don't lose my other techniques."

"...Still, from a triage perspective, we can't afford to tie you to constant maintenance of one patient like that - he's the only one who'll be worse off in minutes otherwise, but there's others who need care on the scale of hours that you're our best and only fit to give.  So as much as I want to not deal with the thorny consent issues of treating unconscious patients, I don't think we can afford it.  Not at the price we'll pay."

Rafiik stirs at the impassioned words, and starts to sit up.

Pradnakt puts a hand on the back of his shoulder to steady him, still staring Kalbetis down, and then seems to remember that letting herself get angry is a very bad idea right now, lowering her shoulders and subtly shaking out her limbs. That done, she squats down to Rafiik's eye level: "How are you feeling, kid?"

    "You're a Sith."

"Yep. We were the closest ones to care about your alchemy problem."

    "...alchemy? ...my Lord?"

"None of that. I'm Lord Pradnakt but you can call me Pradnakt or Dusk, and that's Darth Kalbetis," she nods indicatively, and Rafiik's eyes go wide as he looks at her. "You're as safe here as we can make you but we're still trying to figure out how best to fix the poison and what Tuscias did to your biology."

    "I'm still poisoned?" He's clearly confused.

"I have a pain blocking technique, that's why you can't tell. We have drugs if you'd rather I not mess with you but I'm stopping the damage, too, and we don't have anything for that yet."

    "I don't... you're..."

"...In every group of people, Rafiik Vidarra, there are outliers.

"I rather suppose that Lord Pradnakt and I form the Sith Empire's quota.

"Not that I don't have motives beyond absolutely despising the pointless waste of life that Tuscias was perpetrating - the artifact you found, and we recovered, is much more dangerous than you'd know and can't be safely left to exist, as far as I'm concerned - but I do rather despise pointless wastes of life.  Unlike far too many others I could name, who almost seem to think it the point of being Sith...  But I digress.

"You're still poisoned, and we were discussing potential treatments other than 'wait twelve hours for things to work their way out semi-naturally'.  There are other patients who have had...  That..."  She gsstures at and in the Force, indicating the tangled knot of bioalchemical fuckery, "affecting them for rather longer than two days and one poisoning, and while that situation's...  Stable for now, the probability of something going horribly wrong gets absolutely untenable past the six hour mark."

   What.

"We're weird," she translates, "and think Tuscias was bullshit and his project was a waste, so we killed him - you don't do this to people. Now we're trying to figure out what to do about what he did. I have some healing, sort of - if you've heard Sith can't, that's usually true - but we've got like thirty people to take care of and she thinks I can't take care of you the way I want to without letting them get hurt. She has something else she can do if I let her borrow my healing sight, but I think you'll want more privacy than that, I'm picking up kind of a lot about what you've been up to the last few weeks." (He blushes bright red and looks even more alarmed.) "And I do think I can take care of everyone, especially if you're awake and can walk around. She is a precog but I'm really not seeing how this could go that bad."

    "I'm... uh... she's probably right? If, uh..." His eyes dart frantically back and forth between the two Sith and he belatedly decides he'd rather not get into the middle of this argument, actually.

"If you're okay with her knowing I can't deny that it'd be easier."

    "I don't... you're Sith?"

"If you want some time to think about it, I can go help someone else, you just have to stay kind of close to me."

    "I guess?" He doesn't actually look any less stressed about this option.

She kind of saw Pradnakt's response coming when she spoke, but it's still surprising to her that Pradnakt can pick up that much detail from merely knowing the present state of a biological system.

"...I was not expecting Force-assisted dialysis to be that...invasive, when our medic suggested it might be helpful.  I don't, for that matter, expect it to provide me new information.

"...To be honest, that lothcat has already been dumped out of the bag just from this conversation."

The problem with the other patients - some can't not-attack and some will wake up.

(Seeing all the details is different from just knowing about it, especially to the one being seen, but she doesn't actually want to get into a fight here; she keeps her mouth shut.)

(She should probably not, at this point, be surprised that Kalbetis doesn't consider 'so kill them' to be a reasonable response to the patients' situation, either; she doesn't know how the Darth has managed to avoid internalizing that most of the time you just won't have the resources to save everyone.

Maybe it's a precog thing.

She signs an acknowledgement, anyway.)

"It's, uh. I guess it doesn't matter? Go ahead and do it." Sure it's embarrassing but that doesn't mean he's going to let people get hurt about it, assuming this isn't some kind of Sith trick where they're just messing with him.

(It kind of is a precog thing, even as she'd be particularly confused at Pradnakt if Pradnakt mentioned this theory.)

(She has to make choices about which lives to save all the time.  It's just that nobody sees the missions she can't afford to launch, because she can't afford to launch them - and she's very good at tipping scales, otherwise.)

"Medea, if you would...?"

The medical droid hanging from the ceiling like a large metallic bat produces a couple of bits of sterile tubing, a one-way valve, and some needles.  The rest is up to the two Sith.

(Unless Pradnakt allows Rafiik to join the meditation, and Rafiik does - which Darth Kalbetis isn't precisely expecting but could be pleasantly surprised by, in some sense.)

She does think to offer him her hand, after a moment; he gives it and her a deeply concerned look before gingerly taking it, and she pulls him in to watch.

She really does get an astounding amount of detail, anywhere she's looking; she's making a reasonable attempt to keep her attention away from the places Rafiik would presumably rather they not see, but she sees not just the burns and bruises from Tuscias' lightning and the cell damage from the poison, but the remnants of a muscle strain he picked up a few months ago sparring with his master, the slightly uneven muscle development that indicates how he wields his lightsaber, even the faint wear on the soles of his feet in the process of turning into callus and the way his nervousness is slowing down his digestive system and sapping his appetite. The Force flows through all of it in varying degrees of harmony or disharmony, with the twisted knot of Dark that sustains and protects the new alchemical organ as obvious and unwelcome as a bantha in a bookstore.

(It's very cool to get to see, actually, the terrifying splotch of Dark in his midsection aside. It's pretty weird that he's not more freaked out by that, actually.)