"I...was lucky enough to be able to prioritize control, in my learning.  And unlucky enough to be operating in environments where that control was sorely tested from the jump.  The man who would have thought himself my Master, out of the Academy, had a thing for Falleen, and, well, I stepped into a dead man's shoes rather quickly after some... intimately justifiable self-defense.  I had time enough to brace for what I needed to do, it's not...  Something that was ever fragile - but...  Let's just say that while I did decide to be there, it wasn't a happy choice.  Just the least bad of several bad options."

"Huh, that explains some things." She proceeds to answer Rafiik's confusion, obvious enough in the Force. "It's Sith custom that when one of us kills another, they inherit everything that belonged to the Sith they killed, including their title and any projects they had going on. So when she killed her master she took over what he'd been doing."

    "Is that common?"

"Yeah, it is - more Sith are killed by other Sith than by anything else."

    He's understandably horrified.

"...Still better than Korriban, karking somehow.  That planet's cursed.  Probably to do with the giant tomb complexes.

"...You know what's karking funny about getting promoted thusly, when it's not one of the reasons I can't bear an apprentice, is that I actually did turn out to be better at his job."  The humor is probably only funny if you've been marinating in a cutthroat environment like this for your entire life, but there's nonetheless a dark amusement she finds in that fact.  "...This title came a bit later, almost by accident really."  Except there are no accidents in precognition.  "But, yes, that's...  Mm.  It's a fact of life.  I do wish you hadn't had reason to know it.  Staring the reality of the Empire in the face...

"It's not for the faint of heart, and while yours is strong, it's not meant for that."

"Yeah, I... yeah. Force."

"What am I even supposed to do with that?"

"I wish I knew.  I can't yet promote myself to Emperor and dismantle the whole damn system behind me or anything, and I've been trying to get there for years.  I can barely protect what I have built despite it."

"I mostly focus on doing the best I can for the people closest to me. The rest of the Empire is going to do what it does whether I worry about it or not, and if I'm worrying about it I'm less effective, not more."

    "I guess." He's clearly not satisfied.

"Mm," Pradnakt says. "On our right, the frozen river," she recites, distracted, "where the drowned lay asleep; on our left, the rocky mountain, so precipitously steep... We do the best we can, I guess."

[source]

"...We do the best we can, for we can do no less; we do the best we can, for we can do no more."  It almost sounds like a quote, but it doesn't seem familiar.

Except that it does sound familiar, sort of. Pradnakt shoots Kalbetis a questioning look, but signs later and just says "well put."

Rafiik changes the subject, asking what model of droid Medea is, and they keep to lighter topics for the rest of the dialysis.

When they're done, an hour later, Pradnakt warns Rafiik that he might not want to look, and turns her attention to the room at large. Several of their patients have injuries consistent with having been in fights or having been physically subdued, and all of them have the more minor wounds and confinement-related issues typical of people who've been in a Sith's care, plus minor to moderate malnourishment in several of them; she singles out one in particular as having an unusual micronutrient issue that isn't being treated yet and flags down the nearest med droid to tell them.

"I can't just heal everyone," she explains to Rafiik, who has opted to watch her assessment. "Usually I'd be able to - do Jedi usually learn that? - but if I did that here I'd be making the alchemical changes permanent. I'm going to have to unpick the alchemy first, and that's going to be probably at least half an hour in the simplest cases and a couple hours each for the ones who are further along, assuming he didn't make it intentionally hard to undo. That's what we're going to need your friends for; this could pretty easily be a couple weeks of work if I had to do it myself and we'll have other problems if we try to keep people sedated that long. But with the meditation artifact we can work together on it and it'll go much faster."

    "Can I help? I know a little healing. We learn some but not that much."

"That's fine, I'll show you what to do. The very first thing I need to do is go meditate, though, I can't heal at all when I'm Dark-aligned."

    From the look he gives her, he's not exactly surprised that she's claiming to be able to do something that's supposed to be impossible, but he still wasn't expecting it.

"Yeah, it turns out that when you're a prodigy the Force can be very insistent about you being able to do your thing. Anyway, I'm going to be about forty minutes at it - do you want meds for the pain, or do you want to just stay nearby, I have a thirty foot range on the anti-pain effect."

    "I'll, uh, I'll take the meds I guess?" He should, on principle, not be taking drugs from a Sith, but letting them directly mess with his blood isn't exactly less dangerous, and holding onto an effect like that during what's got to be a difficult meditation has to be a pretty big ask.

"All right. And if you want something for anxiety tell them I said you shouldn't have the kind that's hardest on your liver but the other ones are all fine, I'll be able to patch you up before you get any side effects from them."

   "...okay." What.

"Anything else before I go?"

"We will all likely be learning some things that one or the other of us thought were relatively impossible - or, well, at least incredibly improbable, given how the Force is...  Itself -- to do with what we knew of the Force, in the near future," Darth Kalbetis idly muses in Rafiik's general direction while her Force presence Does The Thing Again.  "I certainly have no prodigious skill in healing, but it would be remiss of me to not be of as much help as I can, given especially that I rather dragged Lord Pradnakt into this mess because of the Force's meddling."

"Don't worry too much about it, if it hadn't been you it would have found some other way to pester me. This is hardly the first time it's done it. - oh, Rafiik, the battle droid over there has a lightsaber repair kit for you; as far as I can tell yours is fine but I know I'd want to check it for myself if someone had gotten their hands on mine." She waits another moment  for someone to come by with a hypospray for him and takes her leave.

Well, she did just use it as a breaching tool which would be insanely dangerous if it was going to explode, but, precog, and Rafiik certainly isn't one - so perhaps the caution's wise enough to give.

(She'll see herself out as well, unless Rafiik wants her to stay for some reason.)

He wouldn't have kicked her out but it's fine, he's fine, he can be left alone in a Sith's warship with a set of hand tools, this is a perfectly reasonable situation to find himself in with the Sith's full knowledge and consent.

It only takes him twenty minutes to check his lightsaber over - it would have been faster but the pain meds aren't doing him any favors on that count - and then watches the droids work until the Sith come back.

Why would she be concerned?  She knows he isn't going to do anything harmful with them.  (And that her medical staff are quite good at their jobs.)

Regardless, there are other problems to attend to.  "...This patient, I think, from a triage standpoint - or this one if you want to start simple."

"The simple one, since I need to show you what to do."

There's something off about Pradnakt now that she's back from her meditation; she seems flat, not distant but not engaged, either. She does seem ready to get down to business, though.

Yes, that is quite odd and quite concerning, if she's being honest.  She'll have to work on something for that.  When she has the time.

(Even her bag of tricks can't stretch eternity into an instant, and the way this looks seems like it might require pedagogy.)

"Very well then."  She offers the lead in a meditative Force trance, easy as breathing.  "Show me."

So here's how it works. In Healing as with any Light technique, the Force user is by default just a conduit and power source, offering a fairly minimal amount of direction and guidance, with the tricky part being providing enough smoothly-flowing power for the Force to do what it does; trying to guide it trades off against providing suitably smooth power and, in most cases, makes the whole attempt untenable. (Dark techniques have something like the opposite problem: power isn't hard to come by, but the wielder has to provide all of their own guidance for it.) Here, the Force's natural flow through the body has been corrupted, and letting it flow as it wants to will enhance and progress the alchemical change; the Force has to be guided against that corruption and back to its natural flow, with enough power to disrupt the inflicted pattern. Pradnakt's prodigious skill can provide effectively arbitrary power, and providing the guidance isn't overly difficult in a technical sense - though Rafiik and the other Jedi are going to have more limited practice with it than either of the Sith - but it takes quite a lot of attention and judgement to determine at every moment what the Force should be doing and make sure it's doing that rather than anything else.

...Yeah, this is why she's been mainlining medical textbooks in every spare moment - because this skill is fairly old hat to her, she does, if not precisely this thing, a deeply analogous meditative practice, every time she delves the future - but it is her knowledge that is somewhat lacking in any field but a very specific sort of gender transition that she was both confident and desperate enough to self-test and has not repeated since, because that was kriffing dangerous to do without a spotter.

(Darth Kalbetis thinks she knows nothing useful about bioalchemy, but that doesn't actually mean she's holding herself to a reasonable standard when she does that self-assessment.)

Pradnakt herself is also right here, at least in the sense that the result of her thirty years of experience at observing the flow of the Force through bodies is at the metaphorical fingertips of everyone in the trance.

That is good and useful and she wishes she could make a holocron of it, in those few moments of being between problems where she's not busy Focusing On Helping The Patient.

(Pradnakt is not particularly capable of having objections to things right now, so the fact that she wouldn't object to that idea doesn't mean much.)

Rafiik ends up riding the Siths' coattails a little, watching what they're doing and working alongside them in the same sections; it's still useful, and as the project goes on he gets a little bolder about doing things on his own.

Darth Kalbetis finds a simple joy in nudging Rafiik little bits of work to do as she and Pradnakt tackle the critical issues, slowly building up to letting him handle one of the last, minor problems nominally on his own if he seems to be getting the hang of it.  (The pain of everything to do with Sith Empire apprenticeships is buried deep, but there's still the ghost of heartache to it as she does.)

As they get to the end of the work that needs to be done on this patient, Pradnakt pauses to assess the other two: mental fatigue isn't in her remit, exactly, but it has physical correlates that she can check on. They'll benefit from a few minutes' break between this patient and the next.