"Of course, we'll get you an account set up with some money for incidentals."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. We're happy to postpone everything else for a few weeks if you need to attend to Deskyl, or we can just have our conversations with you and let her rest, whichever works for you."

DZ signs to Deskyl; Deskyl considers the room for a moment before nodding.

    "I'll be available."

"We can email you a list of things people are curious about which don't require engineering."

She nods and gives them her account information.

And when she and Deskyl and lunch are all in their suite again, people want to know about Sith magic and about how and when droids are made and about all the tens of millions of planets and about their languages and about the kinds of polities they'll encounter when they're wandering the galaxy.

She answers! The common Sith powers are as she described in the meeting, and she goes into more detail about them; she also expands on Deskyl's personal powerset, explaining that she's a sensory specialist (the hearing problem is congenital for her; she'd patched it with a persistent Force effect, which the attack destroyed, and when she's recovered enough she'll be able to replace it; unfortunately she can only replicate the effect for other people when they're close to her) and can do some fancy things with lightning above and beyond the normal ability to throw bolts of it. Droids are made in factories, usually to a company's design but sometimes to a customer's specifications. She doesn't know about all of the tens of millions of planets, but she can tell them about the famous and important ones, and the Empire (Sith are totally greys, shading into blue at the upper ranks; Deskyl is a remarkably green one) and its ongoing war with the Republic (she makes a point of reassuring them that there's no reason at all to think that they're near the battlefront, or likely to be of interest to either side; if they were going to have that problem it would have happened already), and the general political situation between them and the Hutts (stay away from Hutts, seriously). She can produce translation dictionaries between Tapap and Basic and Tapap and Huttese, too, limited mostly by her typing speed.

The Tapai would like to know how they can make sure their colony planets are not of interest to the warring parties either, and what they're warring about, and the sign language Deskyl uses, and how long humans have been colonizing planets, and what other nifty technology might be available besides ships and robots.

Well, to understand the war they'll have to understand Sith culture, which - well, it's the kind of clusterfuck they'd use as a cautionary tale in blue schools, more or less. (She assures them that Deskyl is very pacifistic for a Sith.) Given that, the best way to avoid their attention is to avoid them; it should be relatively obvious when they start getting close, and then they can just stop expanding in that direction. Humans have been colonizing planets for all of known history; they aren't even sure what planet they originated on any more. Deskyl would prefer not to share her sign language at this time; it's not in common use, anyway. She can give lots more examples of technology, but points out that Deskyl's specialty is lightsabers, which aren't useful to anyone who isn't a trained Force-sensitive; there isn't very much that she can give them useful schematics on without taking the time to reinvent at least part of it.

They are so relieved to have got a pacifist Sith. Are the Empire and Republic expanding such that they might meander towards the Amentans on their own eventually? Are there polities they can safely make friends with?

The Empire has the Republic effectively surrounded, and is very focused on them; there's no way of knowing what will happen in a hundred years, but then, there hardly ever is. Her knowledge of other polities is unfortunately quite limited - aside from the big three they're generally too small to bother learning about unless you're working with them - but it's possible that they'll have friendly neighbors.

She looks up pocket everythings, and orders a pair of them that have their schematics available for Deskyl to compare to what they get.

Friendly purple brings up their package along with the next meal.

Signs of tampering?

Looks like it was sealed at the shipping facility and has been bumped around but not opened since.

Good.

DZ installs some extra security software, just in case, and sends Peka a message.

Hello again. We're in Iantep; Deskyl's resting a bit before we get started on spaceships, and they've agreed to wait until we have a planet lined up to start on robots. We have some money, too, how much do you need?

Rest of the credit is 3,000 tap. They're keeping you completely quiet, nobody's heard anything.

We can do 3,000 tap. And they haven't said anything about telling the public about us yet, I expect they'll at least wait until Deskyl is recovered.

There's a money transfer for 3,500 tap along with the message.

Thank you so much!!!

Thank you for helping us. It's a good thing you found us first - you should have seen the look on Deskyl's face when she found out just how bad things are for reds, and I doubt we would have found out on our own.

Do you mind if we keep in touch? We might have more questions for you.

I don't mind. I'm still stuck in the army so I might not always be able to answer fast.

Aww.

We've been keeping you a secret so far - they know we talked to a red, but not who - but if you don't need to be, we can ask about getting you out, if you want.

Depends if you can definitely convince them you'll be mad if I suddenly disappear.

Deskyl will definitely be mad if you suddenly disappear, I don't think it will be hard to convince them. We'll wait to tell them who you are until we're sure it's safe, though.

(She has a few changes of clothes delivered - all black - and an embroidery kit, and a few likely-looking books of poetry, and an art book full of photographs of sunsets from around the world.)

I'd rather be home with my baby now we don't desperately need the extra money.