At least she's not hogtied this time.

"Your optimism has always been one of your best traits."

"I've got a lot of best traits. That's also one of my best traits."

Soft smile. "It was a large part of why I loved you so much, despite my best judgment, when you were first my Danni."

Wiggle!

...Okay Sidious needs one last hug.

She doesn't object, just hugs her apprentice tightly.

Hug!

"See you in a while, then."

"See you in a while."

"Bye."

And off they go.

And Senator Palpatine turns her ship towards Coruscant. She has work to do - people to talk into this or that position, people to befriend or scope out, policy proposals to review, data summaries to read, diplomatic missions to plan for and head...

(And a judicial investigation Plagueis wants her to stick her nose into. Someone at the Black Sun syndicate fucked up, and a sprawling web of connections is being traced - to the International Banking Clan, to the Trade Federation, to others...)

To Naboo. Senator Palpatine's office isn't quite on damage control, not yet, but the King wants her to make sure no fingers get pointed in the wrong direction here. 

(She knows exactly where she wants suspicion flowing.)

Her office is involved just enough it isn't strange for her to be talking to people on the committees though, and she's successfully convinced the King to "investigate" a few of his enemies on Naboo for "conduct unbefitting of their office." They have their scapegoats.

(And Sidious has her excuse. Naboo is part of the investigative process.)

It's a big, sprawling thing. Easy for someone to poke and prod - and major enough to bring in the Jedi, too.

A young one, at least. Naboo isn't apparently quite central enough to this case to merit the attention of a full Jedi Master.

The padawan is polite enough to schedule a meeting in advance, giving her name as Elesse Vendar.

Her handmaidens handle her scheduling - and often handle her formal meetings and public appearances, honestly, given Senator Palpatine's official work is always done masked, as is traditional for a Naboo woman of her station. (Exceptionally traditional. The modern interpretation is effectively just heavy makeup, but, well. Palpatine's found benefits to casting her recruitment net farther than most do, and the mask removes the need for her handmaidens to resemble her that way. As well as the benefits to styling herself very traditionally even as she pushes a very nontraditional political platform, of course.)

This one though... Palpatine wants to handle herself.

She schedules her meeting with the padawan fairly promptly, though late in the day after Palpatine's other business, so she won't have to worry about running over. (And she schedules her meetings before this to be ones her handmaidens can take over. No sense running late, either, nor risking coming unprepared.)

Elesse is around twelve or thirteen years old, getting to be tall for her age, and harbors considerable strength in the Force. She's dressed in traditional Jedi robes and is five minutes early exactly for the meeting.

"Thank you for agreeing to see me, Senator."

"Thank you for your patience with our schedule," she says, tone smooth and friendly and wryly amused in a way that's mirrored in the Force - and that softens her mask, somehow, makes her seem personable even past the fixed expression.

(She feels like she maybe has a mild form of the sort of uncanny luck you see in pilots, the sort of borderline sensitivity that wouldn't be enough to become a Jedi Knight, but is enough to hand wave away an unusual insight and fortune. She's dressed in an exact copy of the complicated ceremonial robes they've chosen for the Senator of Naboo position today, the same that her handmaiden Salí has been wearing for Palpatine's other meetings.)

"It's no trouble. I'm sure you have more pressing demands on your time than I do."

She gives off the vague impression that she's smiling indulgently as she gestures for Elesse to have a seat on an armchair catty corner to hers before a low table. "I have quite a bit of help, fortunately - and you have quite a few tasks set before you, yourself."

"I try to focus on just one thing at a time."

"A philosophy that will bring you far." Small laugh. "Though sadly not always possible to achieve."

"You do what you can, though."

"The only thing anyone can do."

"Mm." She pulls her datapad out. "About the thing in front of us now, though. I just have a few questions about your office's financial records..."

She has answers, of course. Ones entirely appropriate to the public image of her office - not a hundred percent squeaky clean, but just smudged enough that it doesn't look too much like she's manipulating her records. She has thorough reports even down to who's treated her to lunch, to gifts she's received, not just on campaign contributions or the like. Enough data to give an entire team of investigators a raging headache.

The smudges are... Interestingly placed, more in what's not smudged. (This had been a massive debate among her handmaidens, a massive risk...)

It's not very hard to find out that Damask Holdings of the Intergalactic Banking Clan has its fingers trailing through Naboo's waterways. That Hego Damask had gotten involved in Naboo's politics near the beginning of a young Palpatine's political career. There's grumbles about it sometimes; Naboo doesn't like the IBC and hates Damask even more, and the scandal of King Tapalo's involvement with funding outside of Naboo has dogged him his entire career, and it now looms like a dark specter over his chosen successor, Ars Veruna, in the ongoing elections. That particular association makes the news in Naboo pretty often, sometimes even outside of the planet.

The IBC's money flows like oil through Naboo politics, and Palpatine's office is clean.

These records aren't the ones formally on file, which are mildly outdated and exactly as vague as tax reports by Senatorial offices can get away with - which is pretty vague, given that it's the Senate deciding how much they need to report. These are her internal records, provided to the Jedi's investigators in good faith to prove her office is uninvolved. The smudges link her in a few places to King Tapalo's scapegoats for the investigations into the wider allegations of corruption and criminal conspiracy, but not more than is to be expected given they share a home planet.

(This has every sign of being yet another thing the wealthier corporations will brush aside as a minor embarrassment, legal investigations tangled up in light years of red tape and eventually dying there, the Jedi unable to step outside of the narrow remit the Senate gives them, and a murky pall has hung over the heart of the Republic for generations... Investigations like this fail very, very often.)

Elesse is just a simple padawan, so it would be entirely forgivable if the subtler financial tricks of the Banking Clan that the Senator is writing between the lines of her explanation here went right over the Jedi's head. (But Elesse is still only twelve, so she doesn't perfectly control the tell-tale reactions that say she is in fact picking up just about everything Palpatine is laying down.)

On the other hand, she does have an exact copy of the official records on her datapad here, and would like to go over why these ones are differing. Just so she can explain it to her Master.

She can rather pleasantly point out the exact loopholes she's using - all entirely legal and above board, of course - that allow her to leave out massive chunks of this, or summarize oddly, or use assorted other statistical tricks...

(She lets herself settle into an almost teacherly tone. It's a bit hard to resist, and it's not like it contradicts her public persona - the Senator of Naboo has a responsibility to see to the political education of the next generation, after all.)

There's a few incredibly arcane uses and norms around the public law, that don't get discussed effectively ever, but that are, of course, entirely essential in an explanation about what she's doing and why her records are entirely above board. She skips past those with a quiet artfulness, draws attention away from them in a way that'd work perfectly well on most adults, let alone most preteens. (They're part of the clues, also, though in slightly different ways, pointing in slightly different directions.)

Elesse doesn't fight the misdirections. (She does make notes, quietly.)

"...Well. Thank you for your time, Senator."