Plagueis is insane, she thinks, sometimes, when she isn't so near him the thought risks surfacing to his awareness. He's completely batshit insane -

(to think he sees her as an equal. That they can be partners and allies and even friends, that reenacting the exact same lessons she suspects he was taught with, that transforming her admiration and appreciation and fondness for him into pure loathing was, of course, a necessary step.)

- to think she was the best tool for this job.

Or, well, she probably is, technically. She's just way more of a best tool than Plagueis should be bothering to spend on Gardulla the Hutt. There's something about Gardulla, about Tatooine, that she's watched guide Plagueis's intuitions more than once. He's strengthened Gardulla, supported her in founding her pod racing circuit, funded her and at the same time nudged her enemies into place to destabilize her, someday. His gaze goes farther afield when he does this, Palpatine thinks (knows), to the echoes of his little prods into his plans, tracking the results of his premonitions only that far.

Plagueis isn't very inclined to question his intuitions in depth. To look at the Force, and ask himself, so how are you betraying me today?

(There's a crack, there. An opening she can destroy him with. Not yet - and she's learned to listen to that little voice, the one that bowed to her family's will (another collection of wasteful idiots who made enemies where they could've forged tools) until, suddenly, violently, she didn't.)

This mission is below her abilities. Every mission - every errand - she's done the past year is. She'd lashed out at Plagueis, foiled one of his plans out of the same spite that led to her undermining her father at every turn, and, well. He'd punished her at the time, and he's still punishing her.

That doesn't mean she doesn't hate milk runs, especially when she should be focusing on shoring up her position in Naboo, on helping with King Tapalo's reelection, ingratiating herself - she knows Plagueis is going to nudge her into an ambassadorial position after, she's not dumb, and she resents that even as she understands it rationally, even as she craves so much more.

She hates this mediocre middle ground.

(She hates that 'not yet,' too. She hates a lot of things, a lot of people.)

And she hates Gardulla of the Besadii somehow even more than she hates Plagueis, at least in the current moment.

Gardulla hardly seems to mind giving her more reasons!

"If Magister Damask wants me to go so far out of my way, he can send someone better than a some whelp to say so," she's saying right now. "With better offers."

"Your Excellency," she says after biting back the first few retorts that spring to mind, "The Magister's proposal will bring great profits to Tatooine and therefore to you - this is no mere favor we ask, but an opportunity we offer."

She snorts, a loud sound that vibrates through her entire slug-like body. "Do not presume to tell me what will or won't benefit me, slave. I have dealt with your owner longer than you've been alive - and I'm well aware that the Magister has been courting Jabba."

"I'm no slave," she snarls, instead of anything polite or on script.

Gardulla smirks, a cruel lilt to her voice as she says, "Aren't you? Your leash might be held loosely, slave, but you jump to the Magister's beck and call like a thing trained - and one well trained, at that."

Fury boils under her skin, crackles through her fingers - she can't unleash it, not here, not fully - 

But, oh, does she want to. 

"I believe time spent on this backwater has dulled your memory of civilization, Your Excellency," she says instead. 

Gardulla just laughs. "All of civilization is chains, slave. The only question is which master holds the final leash."

"It will never be you," she says, with the weight of a premonition. 

She's amused, still. "And neither will it be you. Your chains will bind you more tightly every day."

"We'll see."

(They won't. She'll make sure of that.)

Gardulla leans back, waving an indolent hand. "I suppose we shall."

"You're dismissed for now, slave. Go along and tell your master you've failed." Smirk. "We have signal boosters, if your comm can't reach from this backwater."

"I'll let you know if I do end up needing anything, Your Excellency," she says, with the most sarcastic bow she knows how to perform.

And she turns on her heel and leaves.

She has a room here, so long as she's on Plagueis's little errand, but she doesn't go back to it immediately. She looks around instead, a bit subtly. 

Gardulla's fort is busy with slaves and traders and visiting dignitaries and petitioners...

Very few people who work for her seem to be anything other than a slave, once Palpatine's been watching for a while. Most of them aren't marked, but... There's a common resonance to them. 

Not just that they're all pretty by the standards of their own peoples, though they are that. Even the ones who carry themselves as if they've been broken, even the ones with visible wounds - those, too, must have once been proud examples of everything their people admire.

Gardulla doesn't keep her second generation slaves very long. That, too, shows - and, as Palpatine watches, a hierarchy emerges. The ones at the top might have been born to slavery, perhaps, at least more often than the ones at the bottom. All the slaves are encouraged to - and frequently do - control and report on and demean and harm each other. 

It's a commonly accepted fact that brutal masters tend to inspire uprisings from desperate slaves, no matter how hard they bring the boot down. Gardulla's notably sadistic even in company that highlights the most horrible people in existence. 

She doesn't tend to have problems with uprisings very often. 

Palpatine's not entirely sure when she transitioned from observation to planning. When she bent the minds of those in the corridors she ghosts through to look away, to pay the predator in their midst no mind at all. 

She wants a lot of people dead, and, well. 

Gardulla's the one in front of her. 

She needs to find leverage though, a gap to fit her fingers into...

There's an undercurrent thrumming through the fortress. It's subtle, slow - almost hard to spot, except for how it isn't, for how people's shoulders tense and hike up near their ears, for the little bursts of activity, the clear lines of stress in people's faces...

She wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't looked pretty close, but, now that she has - 

She's not the only predator in this fortress, her premonition whispers to her. 

Huh.

(Maybe she can complete more than one objective here...)

She starts looking specifically for the source of the undercurrent. 

Hard to find! 

...Except there's a slave who's trying a bit too hard to hide her Force sensitivity. She's pretty, with clear skin and well-kept black hair. Tall. Well-fed - it isn't malnourishment nor overwork nor disease that kills Gardulla's slaves - and therefore her age isn't very hard to estimate. She's nearing the end of adolescence, probably at most a decade younger than Palpatine. She's painfully easy to notice, draws the gaze and then constantly pushes it away. 

She's not trained, probably, not in the Force, but little ripples spread from her as she moves, as she lowers her head or says this or that quiet word. Nothing so obvious as fights breaking out in her wake - and, indeed, if Palpatine couldn't see the currents of the Force, she'd have trouble identifying this slave as at all involved in any of it. 

Interesting.

She nudges the slave, a quick prod at the edges of her mind, still mostly hiding herself. 

- And she turns, and she looks directly at Palpatine. 

But only for a moment before her gaze goes somewhere else as she keeps moving. (Her attention is still firmly fixed on Palpatine, though.)

Huh.

She starts making a little game of stalking the woman.

Yeah she one hundred percent can tell Palpatine's doing that. Unfortunately for her, she's not very good at vanishing once someone knows she's there. 

Instead, she cuts into a less trafficked part of the fortress, coming to a stop once she's in a storeroom with no one near. Her back's to Palpatine, her shoulders tense. 

She steps in - gets quite uncomfortably close to the woman's back - 

And closes the door with a negligent wave of her hand, even though every door here should require a code or chip to manipulate. 

She risks a glance back, gaze only briefly struggling to land on Palpatine. The tension spreads from her shoulders through her entire body. 

She leans in and murmurs, "Does Gardulla know you see things others don't?"