Deskyl nods and takes another bite of her dinner.

Diana just, takes another slow breath, and then busies herself with eating.

...Despite the fact that her dinner's been sitting there for minutes and should've cooled, it seems to still be piping hot.  And there's subtle Force-ness happening around it.

Huh, neat.

    "Master Deskyl isn't familiar with that Force effect, ma'am, how does it work?"

"...Huh.  Does the Dark side not do tutaminis?  I would've thought that bending energy around would be easier for Sith."

    "It might be easier for Sith, she says, ma'am, but she isn't surprised that Jedi and Sith know different techniques, it's rare for you to have a chance to learn from each other."

"...yeah."  Oof, that reminded her of sad things.  Quick, a distraction!  "Like how the kriff you do the lightning; that's...I see it often enough, and I still don't know how I'd even really begin."

    "She can show you, if you'd like, ma'am. You won't be able to do it without switching to Dark, she says, but it might be interesting anyway."

"If she's willing, I'd certainly like to see it in a situation where it's probably not going to be used to try and kill me.  Should we maybe move somewhere less breakable?  There's a firing range over there," she points at it, "though it's small."

    "Here is fine, actually, ma'am. She has a close-quarters variant of the technique."

Deskyl punctuates this with a crackle of electricity that starts at the back of her hand and runs halfway up her forearm, leaving the area wreathed in tiny blue-tinged arcs.

Diana is fascinated.

She holds her arm out for Diana to inspect; the arcing bolts don't seem to interfere with her movement at all.

There is a mild but growing sense of wrongness in the Force, though.

...but, wait, why, Force, it's so pretty!  What's Wrong about it?

The way the Force flows through the effect is sharply bent in several places, to the point of being knotted in on itself, and... split, maybe? it's a bit hard to see, going every which way... and there are some very dissonant resonances set up within it. It definitely looks uncomfortable compared to neutral or Light techniques.

"...is that as kind of uncomfortable to do as it looks like to my senses?"

Diana's fiddling with the Force herself, now, because seeing if she can replicate something like this without it being...like that, has taken on the shape of an intriguing puzzle; hmm, what happens if she does...

-- chaos, but harmony --

this?

    "She says 'not really', ma'am. Though it is best to avoid letting too many Dark harmonics build up in any one place, that can get unpleasant."

The Force really does not want to be in that shape for her; every time she gets one bit of her effect going about the right way another part springs out of position. And it's not clear at all how she'd make the part that looks split.

"...what does extra-Light Force feel like to you?  My experience of dark is that it just feels, wrong, like, I could use so many mechanical metaphors but - it's badsounds!  You know what those are!"  Maybe if it's interlocking?  It doesn't need to be the same thing, just something that's a same-y thing, maybe if she tries this and that and these all at once it'll hold itself together rather than apart?  (Her face, when it is not talking, is scrunched up in a "looking very hard at this" expression)  This is complicated but she really wants to see if she can figure out a Jedi-shaped way to make the pretty lightning, it's so pretty, she wants so badly to share the joy of crackling sparks between her fingers with the pretty Sith lady and maybe she's supposed to feel bad about feeling absolutely any of that but she's so tired of trying to make herself let go of caring even if it's --

A dam, so carefully constructed, creaks, snaps, breaks, and the Force rushes through Diana in a torrent as - something -

changes

- and - something ripples around Diana's outstretched hand, not lightning made of pain, but something else, in a shimmering purple-green, and she's so happy but then every single emotion she has ever stuffed in a box comes back from the grave like a zombie craving vengeance and that's so much emotion that it rattles the entire ship in its unleashing, Diana barely managing to bend it away from her passengers and crew and controls in a shrieking gasp of strain as ionic aurorae flare and electronics flicker and fray -

and she's just, crying, now, though she waves off any offering of calm, because she "needs to get this out, it's been bottled up so long, can't not feel it, I'll, I'll be okay in a bit, okay?  Catharsis.  Needed.  I'm gonna be so kriffed up later all my coping mechanisms were basically 'shove it in a box' and that doesn't work now but right now I think I'm stable because I'm just, all adrenaline, and everything else cancelled out, but I'm going to be weepy over a whole bunch of things for a while; I have so much empathy, and I can't and won't stop feeling it and the Jedi Order can suck my dick if it thinks that's a bad thing to feel and maybe that's someone fucking up explaining but the way I was told it 'emotional regulation' was framed more like a failure than a success," and she pauses to take a breath, "and people are getting so weird about the Code these days too, it's all this 'there is no X there is Y' bantha dung, and who do they think they're fooling with that absolute osik?  ...Wanna go take over the Sith Empire, later?  'cause they still suck!  But now we can both beat them up in a philosophically relevant way!  And then unfuck the place!  Because something something strength something!  ...I think!  Dunno if I'm right!  ...Am I?"

    "She says the two of you should see how you do against a Darth or three first, ma'am, that's more likely survivable."

"Reasonable!"  Those are certainly some emotions she's continuing to have, in the background of this conversation!  "Which ones?"  She might be nonzero amounts of serious about that question and that's probably something that should be concerning her, but she's somehow not feeling that feeling, actually!

    "You're most likely to be able to defeat ones you can get information about the defenses of, ma'am. Of the ones she's heard of she'd suggest Darth Drawen or Darth Kinnet, or maybe Darth Tel - Darth Drawen manages kyber crystal manufacturing facilities and Darth Kinnet's factories produce most of the Sith's lightsaber electronics, and she's visited both; she knows less about Darth Tel, but he's involved in espionage and she expects you to particularly disapprove of his methods."

She makes a hmm noise.  "Strategically speaking, Darth Kinnet is perhaps the best target; he cuts off the supply chain to make Drawen's kyber crystals useful, and that supply chain can be reused to produce useful goods.  Darth Tel sucks but I'm not actually a Shadow, just a Guardian that's very, very, lost, so I doubt I have the right skillset to even find him, necessarily, even if I weight my chances of beating him in a straight fight slightly higher than Darths Manufacturing or Kyber, on the basis of 'torture is not actually very useful for maintaining physical conditioning'...Let me see if I can get in touch with some of my people, actually.  ...After I process a bit.  And you decide how much I should tell them about you.  I do think that I should probably not make major life decisions like committing to fight powerful Sith while the only reason that I'm lucid is that my brain chemicals are having an all-out brawl with no clear winner."

    "Yes ma'am. Master Deskyl has questions for you about the Jedi and the idea of letting them know about her, but that should also wait."

"Yes, quite."  Diana, despite her seeming resolve to just eat and then rest, still finds herself jotting notes on a flimsiplast (levitated in from her workshop) at the table, but they're mostly bullet points, stuff like

• Darth list by espionage status
• What am I even doing?  Not Sith like Dark but, emotional!
• Check kyber; things are different, may need to rehome
• BLASTERS.
• Training spar? Need acclimatization; need to determine what it means in field conditions, too.
• Full systems check; *something's* for sure gotten kriffed up, I just don't yet know what.
• Other transferable techniques? Don't know; there's always more depth.
• Does meditation still work? What abt. BM? Is that even testable w/ available?
• Need to figure out if Jedi will shoot me. That would be bad.

Eventually, the burst of energy runs out, and she sets off to go sob in her room for a while, giving R4 a teary hug when she spots him.  Apparently he's "the best droid, wait, um, best astromech ever."

Diana is in her room, now, and R4 is still trying to figure out what the kriff that was.

I think you broke my human.  Or fixed her.  I can't tell yet.  She's very weepy.  That's never been good to take as a baseline measurement.

    My Sith says she was putting off dealing with her emotions, and this isn't a surprising result - she should be better in a few days, or my Sith will figure out what to do about it. She expects it to be better for her in the long run, this way, though maybe pretty different from before.

...Yes, it does seem likely that things would be different. I hope they're also better.  She's been like that for years and years on end.