"Do you need anything else, or should I head back home before my mother notices I'm gone?"

"If you have any books, I can get started on learning your language. But only if it's no trouble; it doesn't sound like it's urgent."

"I don't even know where I would get a book."

"All right. I can learn from listening to people talk, it'll just take longer."

Carlos leaves! In the morning, he returns with a limp and a friend. 

Deskyl is asleep, still or again; DZ's eyes flicker on and she gets up to offer him an arm to lean on. "Are you all right?"

"My mother noticed her furs were gone."

"Oh dear."

"Wow, that is a machine-person," the friend says.

    "Yes; I'm DZ-12Q, you can call me DZ." She gets Carlos to a seat, and goes to wake Deskyl: she shakes her, very gently, by the shoulder, and she comes awake immediately, obviously irritated at being woken.

What do you need?

    The boy is hurt. Can you do a partial healing?

Deskyl sighs, and closes her eyes for a moment. Not even slightly, she reports. All or nothing.

"You don't have to heal me," Carlos says, "I've had worse."

"Say," the friend says, "do you kill people's villainous parents in general, or just the ones that need killing?"

Sith, she signs again.

    "It's more idiosyncratic than that," DZ explains. "Sith for the most part do just as they like; she'd need to know more to know if she was interested. And it should probably wait until she's more recovered, in any case." She signs along as she speaks, for all but the last sentence.

"Oh, are you guys fae?" the friend said with interest. "Carlos said you were from farther away from the Other Place. I didn't know the fae had machines, though."

(She goes back to signing, keeping Deskyl appraised of the conversation.)

"I expect we're not, sir; I'm not sure what that is."

"Anyway, you should definitely kill Cruella," the friend says, as if discussing the weather, "but please don't kill my dad. I know he's an evil vizier and all, but the king is kind of, uh. Bad at his job. --My name's Jay, by the way."

Deskyl makes a face.

    "She doesn't promise anything," DZ translates.

"Yeah, I know," Jay says, "heroism and all that, if someone's creepily mind-controlling the king you gotta kill him even if he's creepily mind-controlling the king into setting reasonable tax policy."

This gets another face.

    "They really don't know about Sith, Ma'am."

Deskyl huffs lightly and rolls her eyes.

   "Not many people would call a Sith a hero," DZ tells Jay. "And for good reason; they generally very much aren't."

While she's talking, Deskyl gets up and joins them at the table.

"You said they were heroes," Jay says to Carlos. 

"I thought they were!"

"She's dressed in black."

"They were nice to me! They wanted to kill my mother!"

"Deskyl isn't a very typical Sith. I don't want to speak for her, though."

Not a hero, she reiterates. Just don't like seeing people suffer.

"Everyone wants to kill your mother, Carlos."