"Hello!"

"How have you two been? Settled in alright?"

"Yes, thank you sir."

"And is Deskyl feeling better? What was wrong, that took so long?"

"We aren't entirely sure - she was attacked by another Sith, but none of the techniques we're familiar with have these effects. She expects to recover completely, though."

"So this is not a known side effect of teleportation?"

"No sir. Teleportation isn't something Sith can usually do, but it doesn't seem to have harmed her at all."

He nods. "So, you said there were lots of people who are Sith with the same powers and the others are—Jedi?"

"Yes, sir. I don't know as much about the Jedi; the Sith empire is at war with them. But their powers are mostly the same, only weaker."

"So is your war mostly decided on the basis of something other than powers?"

DZ confers with Deskyl. "The Jedi are better organized and better supplied, sir. But the Sith are stronger and more technologically advanced, and probably have more resources overall; she expects them to win."

"And why haven't they yet?"

    "Wars between spacegoing peoples are more complicated than wars on a single planet, sir."

"I suppose they must be. Why are Jedi weaker?"

"Force powers can be fueled by emotions, or not. Jedi don't fuel their powers that way. Sith do, which makes them more emotionally unstable; similar to your capes, though somewhat worse on average. Deskyl in particular is very calm for a Sith."

"And more emotions means more power? It's strange for so many people to have the same abilities."

"More powerful emotions create more powerful effects, yes sir. And it's strange for us that your powers are all different - the Force is one thing, even if Sith and Jedi use it in different ways; there's no reason for them to have very different abilities."

Deskyl interrupts to sign briefly to DZ.

    "Deskyl is impressed with your Protectorate; even with capes being more stable than Sith, it must be hard to keep that many of them working together. She's curious how you manage it, and particularly what that means for her, since she's roughly the same type of person."

"I'm not totally sure. I'm a clerk who's been told to ask questions and picked for my, ah, remarkable incuriosity." He isn't upset by it; it's a fair description.

    "All right. Please forward the question to someone who can answer it; we don't have a secure email account, yet, for answers, but we do have one." She gives an address.

"For what it's worth I don't think it's a secret?" He writes the address down anyway. "People are also generally wary of mindreading, especially from a system so different than the one here, where we can have no guarantee that our defenses would hold up."

    "That's understandable. Deskyl doesn't make a habit of it - it takes quite a lot of focus - but of course you only have our word on that."

"Yeah, that's the problem. Can you think of any way to verify whether our defenses work?"

Deskyl considers this for a few moments, but shakes her head.

    "She doesn't know what your defenses are, but she suspects that they don't; it's not something humans at home can usually defend against, either."

"Not even other Sith and Jedi?"