"Well.  I don't rightly plan to be doing anything remotely resembling minding my own business while the galaxy still has things like the Hutt cartels in it.  But I don't imagine they'd come bother a hypothetical you-but-Light that was minding her own business somewhere remote unless the rumors were very loud, or the rumors were of Sith, or a Jedi was already quite close for other reasons, or, I suppose, if the Force poked them."

"The other problem, and one that is likely a problem for you as well as myself, is that they only exile Sith, so far.  Nobody else.  And we both have people we've made promises to, here."

"The promise I've made to mine is that I'll do my best to keep them safe and free, but they'd rather I stick around, yes. What kind of situation would you and yours be happy with?"

There is a moment where Elcie and Kalbetis just look at eachother.

"...I would not be happy, separated from them."

"Nor I from my mistress.  I chose this."

"...I cannot just abandon them.  Not if I can help it.  And, well.  Now my head's screwed back on well enough that I can see how stupid I was being by trying to convince myself it was for the best that I let myself be taken, however begrudging I had been planning to be of the taking.  ...Too many would grieve me, I think, and I would forever regret leaving them bereft."

"Reasonable," cute, "but it doesn't tell me what you do want to do. I think that's our main operational constraint, aside from the Jedi."

"All that I have ever done, I think, has been in service of making the galaxy - or at least those portions of it I can affect - a better place to live in."

"Nothing I know of says we couldn't do that in the outer rim, or hunt slavers or something."

"And forever have the specter of touching the wrong person and vanishing hanging over us?  The Jedi do go out there, just not as much as they'd like."

"That, and I don't, actually, trust the Jedi nor the Republic to handle my holdings well.  That could go badly."

"...Mistress, she knows nothing about you."

"...Right.  I think that if they fuck things up in the transition from what I've done to things over the last couple decades that the impact could be felt over a multiple-digit number of star systems."

"...I do not intend to oblige you to care about that, at all.  But it is a factor in my plans, that I and mine have found ourselves responsible for worlds, and given that that's how things are, I'm going to need to take the risk of talking to the Jedi - too much could go wrong if I do not.  And I feel as though I should offer you the opportunity to benefit from that, especially after you have - convinced me I should do it."

"We'll want some time to think about it before we commit to anything long-term but we don't have conflicting plans, at least. I think it might make the most sense, if that's something you're set on, for you to take point on it and not tell them about me until you have a better idea of how they'll take it. If that goes badly any of your staff who do want to leave can come with us to the outer rim, we can at least contribute that much. Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Yes."

"...I think that's more people than you think you're offering to - host, though we do have evacuation plans - but I truly don't expect this to go so disastrously as to need to protect my staff from the Jedi, so it...  Should be moot.  And, yes, I'll keep the idea of there being another hopefully-nonhostile Sith out of things until they've at least accepted me."

Huh.

"I want to be non-hostile, at least. I shouldn't commit to that until I know that whatever they're doing isn't worse than death."

"...Yes, that rather is the question, isn't it.  I don't suspect that they would try to do such a thing intentionally.  Ninety-nine point seven percent of the time.  Jedi like their moral high ground.  But then there's things like whatever they ended up doing to Darth Revan, in that point-three percent of times where Jedi go and do something screwy.

"...I don't think this is going to be one of those times.  By all accounts that needed the entire High Council, to give false memories to one Sith.  It doesn't scale.  But I'd like to get an idea of the things you would consider fates worse than death.

"And I suppose there's always the thought that they could be teleporting all the Sith into a volcano or something, but that doesn't explain the construction projects."

She doesn't like being asked what she considers worse than death, and wasn't on guard enough to seamlessly hide that fact. "I wouldn't want to try to make a list, there's always some asshole out there getting creative. I don't think I have especially unusual tastes that way, anyway. And I don't think we know what they can and can't scale, anymore; I would've answered wrong about the teleportation, a year ago."

...She winces at the wince.  Pradnakt may in fact perceive her thinking 'Oh damn it all why did I ask that'.  "...Let's just agree that I was not in fact stupid enough to have seriously gone and asked that particular question, anyway.  Goodness knows I've seen - more than enough of the people who were pushing ...new and exciting... fates worse than death in my time.  ...Moving on.

"The teleportation is very likely our outside-context problem's doing, and I think most of our outside-context problem's thing is likely 'doing teleportation'.  I don't, actually, think that the Jedi had it in a distributable form at the time they launched this whole operation.  You would have seen a much different pattern if they could just distribute a technique like that.  But no, everyone cycled through the Temple, as if there was something they were protecting, or something critical to the process, there.  I'm not sure if they've since made it distributable, but it's not like I can walk in there and ask."

"I'm not sure we should be assuming that they only have one outside context thing, though, or that they can't teleport off and get more somehow. Maybe not, but I don't want to underestimate them."

"I think the current outside context thing is likely their limiting factor on importing more outside context things, but...

"There is also a limit to what we can plan for, and 'the Jedi Order is going to sprout several additional novel capabilities after months of having this one and not doing that' seems, to me, to be stretching things a bit much.  Still, there was that one instance of mysteriously-appearing archaeology, so they might have something else available if it wasn't just...  Teleportation cleverly applied.  I don't know the rules this plays by.  Clearly some of it requires person-to-person contact, and I think we can assume that there is a requirement to know where it is you're going if you wish to go somewhere specific...

"But if the Jedi do have some other outside-context capability, it doesn't actually look like they're using it - if they had truly reliable non-Force pericognition, precognition, postcognition, or even sufficiently complex prognostication, they should likely have found us by now - which leads me to believe that it's either not actually available, or not actually useful in what they're currently trying to accomplish.  Which is, I think, a good sign for them continuing to not have new things."

"Mm. I think we have differing underlying assumptions - I don't think the teleportation is happening via the Force, it wouldn't be this confused if it was. Which means we know less about it than we do about most things - if they have six out of context things and the other five have limitations that a Force technique wouldn't so that they're not useful ninety-nine percent of the time, I don't want to find out the hard way about the other one percent."