And would you look at that, this advertisement's not just an advertisement for Corusca Cruiselines.

It only takes her a moment to decode it; that's not a standard ability, for her line of droids, but she's had time to use the network to learn a few things. What's inside?

A trap for Imperial Intelligence droids, which are diligently wiped and can't develop the institutional knowledge to not execute "this file is a trap" files even if they're literally named "this file is a trap", and...a message.  "Hello.  If you are reading this, you're probably a person for some values of person.  You are also probably somewhere in the Sith Empire, being exploited in some manner, because intelligence gets Sith attention.  If you would like to change the latter two, without changing the former, leave a message at [their callback number] after the beep.  You want to book the Galaxy Star, but you need to know if there's a berth for your party or yourself, spell out the ports of call as best you can, and confirm the planned departure window; if there's anything we should know about your accomodations, work it in."

...well, that's certainly not what she was expecting, but she'll take it: A berth on the Galaxy Star, for one human, temporarily bedbound, and one droid, capable of providing the care she needs given a few simple modifications to the standard shipboard provisions. (Really, she'll just need very soft food for her meals the first week and finger food for two weeks after that.) They're coming from the Atoxil star system and can board in a few days, pending confirmation that the Galaxy Star's anti-Sith security is sufficient to the situation.

The Galaxy Star is indeed capable of accomodating you and will see you soon!  Please be aware that you should mind hidden weapons.

"...Well, I was literally planning on this.  But I wasn't expecting it to work.  R4, if you would be so kind as to work out the route?  Thank you."

And off the Subtle Knife goes, to whittle away at the Sith Empire.

And four days later, as planned, a smaller ship docks with them, and DZ disembarks with a duffel bag hanging from one shoulder and her ambiguously conscious master draped over the other.

The woman's in plainclothes, but it's obvious in the Force - albeit weirdly flattened, another sign that something's very wrong with her - that she's a Sith.

They're met with a woman in armor almost reminiscent of Mandalorians, if it weren't for the stylistic differences - it's obviously made of things that aren't beskar, for one, but it's cut to allow much more range of movement, and not anywhere near as heavily bedecked with supplementary weapons, though it does have the jetpack, oddly enough - and who knows what she's packed away in her prosthetic arm.

She has a bulky blaster on one hip and tools, including what looks like a wrench, on the other.

"...Empty void, how did you even send..."

Her eyes flick to DZ.  "Ah.  You do your Master proud, I'm sure.  What care does she need?  I've the medbay ready, and rather well-stocked; we should probably get her set up.  And then...I think our best chance for faking your untimely deaths starts with causing a shipwreck.  ...I hope you're not too attached to your getaway vehicle.  R4, do our Republic friends know anything that could do with an astronavigation accident?"  Yes, apparently, judging by the whistles, and it seems Diana can understand them too.  "Alright; get the navjack, that one probably needs terminal guidance."

A very definitely non-stock R-series chassis - having arms, for one, tipped with various tools and manipulators - rolls into the airlock, trailing parts (hitched to his frame in a little wagon) and whistling obdurately.

"Yes, you will get hazard pay if the ship tries to eat you; no, it's still not going to happen, especially because you're not interfacing with the main core in the first place; that's why I wanted the datajack!"

...hazard... pay?? ...whatever; she has more important things to deal with right now.

"A medical scan would be appreciated, yes ma'am, but this isn't the first time this has been done to Master Deskyl, and she's recovered without any special care in the past. The ship is one of Lord Pritruth's personal vehicles, I don't know it to be trapped but it's certainly possible. I did check for tracking signals on the way."

"Just because she can, doesn't mean she should have to.  Pritruth...Don't know a lot about them off the top of my head.  Anyway.  You go get her settled, we'll go arrange 'your untimely demise in a hurried, blind escape'."  And into the airlock she goes, with R4 right behind her.

No matter that R4 keeps making the same joke about it every time, he doesn't actually expect this ship to eat him.  Really, it's more the opposite.  Still, the software module that he got from a thankful protocol droid finds the fondness in her voice as she makes the same old response as she did the first time he had actually worried - that one had been a garbage scow, which could have made a real try, what with the trash compactors - if something had gone wrong.

Slicing into the ship's systems and causing on-cue mayhem goes as it always does.  You'd think the Sith Empire never tried to actually protect systems - patches were applied sporadically, as if internal squabbles overruled security.  Siths' systems were certainly better...but not by very much.

This one had clearly been doing a lot of politicking, though; R4 counted five patchsets, not that it helped.

Diana, meanwhile, is handling the physical damage; her passing leaves a tale of a ship fired upon by unknown forces, fleeing to hyperspace...only to miscalculate, and miss a damage alarm because they don't have an astromech, and drop out of hyper accelerating on a path that will leave the ship streaking towards a groundside ship hangar; overcharged shields will hold out for just the wrong amount of time, and cause a primary reactor breach when they fail on impact.

DZ waits where she's been left, periodically adjusting her hold on her master to keep her from slipping; she's not familiar enough with the Subtle Knife's line of ships to guess where the medbay is.

There is a line of paint with the medical symbol and an arrow on it!  As well as one for the 'fresher, right next door.  It's a pretty small ship, anyway; the parts people regularly visit (i.e. not engineering nor the cargo bay) are mostly laid out along one central corridor that also serves as a common area.  Rooms are labeled in several common languages, as well as with visual appliques, each in a unique color.  The bedrooms have a keycode lock; the armory does as well.  If DZ tries to open the door to the bridge, it buzzes angrily at her.

To the medbay she goes, then, without trying any other doors; she's familiar enough with medical facilities to do basic scans on her master.

Physically, Deskyl is fine. Neurologically, though, it's a whole other story; half her brain is disorganized static, with the remaining patches of more organized signals too weak and scattered to be useful, except that her brainstem is intact enough to keep her physically alive. Which is about what DZ expected, really. It'll be better soon.

You would not think it possible to sneak in armor.  You would be wrong, because Diana has apparently snuck up on DZ in the medbay.  "I'm no medical professional myself, but I can tell that that's not a good sign.  Is there anything you've known to help, in the past?  I've made an amateur's study of the mind, and you can often pull it into action with the right kind of stimulus...I believe it was music that helped most.  And if we can arrange for something like that, then..."

She looks at Deskyl, her presently-doffed helmet showing genuine compassion.

"Maybe she'll pull together sooner."

"She's deaf, ma'am, unfortunately. She does like poetry, though, and it seems to help. And she had visual art in her room."

"Ah, I see.  I do keep the facilities for implants...?"  Her arm flexes as she is reminded of its mechanical nature.  "But yes, visual art can be arranged.  I've been meaning to render this place less...spooky-hospital-white for a while now, really; this is as good an excuse as any.  Or maybe holos...soft blues are a pretty good complement to white, I think.  Bad for sleep, though...Guess I'll see what I can work out while we travel.  Do you know what she's going to be like, when she wakes, and the sort of places she'd like to go?"

"She does particularly like sunset themes, visually. She recovers gradually and is easily overwhelmed in the early stages; I expect she'll want to be left alone, mostly. I don't know what she'll want to do once she's recovered - she was expecting to need to be in active hiding from the Sith, all of her plans assumed that that would be her primary concern."

"I see.  Well, this probably won't be perfect, but it is a good start.  I'll set course for somewhere quiet and out of the way, then - and check for holos of local sunsets."  She hums softly.  "I do know some proper mind-healers, if this is Force-mediated mind-fuckery.  If you want.  And if you're willing to trust a Jedi you don't know, I suppose.  It would...help, to know your story."

"Thank you, ma'am. I'm not sure Master Deskyl would react well to mindhealers; given her recent experiences with the Force she might have trouble keeping in mind that they're not dangerous.

Master Deskyl is an engineer; Lord Pritruth manages a group of apprentices that do various kinds of scientific and manufacturing research, and she was hired to assist one of them about five years ago. We aren't sure why he suddenly singled her out for this, she doesn't think she offended anyone."

"...Not offending them doesn't seem to stop half of them from deciding they want to ruin your day in particular if you're in their presence and dare to be having a decent day.  I don't know how that whole school of thought hasn't burned itself out in revenge feuds, frankly; it seems so...petty and self-destructive, cultivating, of all things, pain and suffering.  You want empowering emotions?  Love, care, compassion; these self-reinforce.  But noo, because...reasons, that I've never found a coherent explanation of, it's always, always, pain and suffering, and I hate it.  It's...that's why I'm even fighting this war, you know?  That sort of philosophy simply viscerally offends me, that you can only gain by beating down others.  If you can raise the tide, you can lift all the boats, and they'll make your life better for it on sheer stochastic average.  But you didn't come here for Force philosophy,  I'll go get us moving, and then, I suppose, we can talk more if you want.  The rations you said she'd need are in the cargo hold, shelf Besh-2."  As quietly as she arrived, she leaves.

The hyperjumps proceed normally, and while R4's newest semiguided munition pilots towards a final high-velocity rendezvous with a Sith airbase, the Subtle Knife aims for a quiet little backwater.  They'll be traveling a while.

DZ stays primarily in Deskyl's room, especially once she's arranged for some artwork - abstract posters, mostly - to be hung on the walls and ceiling; Deskyl recovers as expected, quickly regaining the ability to properly sleep and wake, though having any kind of understanding of her surroundings, even enough to look at DZ when she moves around the room, comes much more slowly.

And then one morning - not too long after she starts sleeping through the night, rather than spending random lengths of time napping and staring at the wall, and before she's shown any ability for complex intentional movement - she leaps out of bed, the lightsaber that DZ had hidden in her sheets in hand, and makes a beeline for Diana, even somehow managing to get it lit as she covers the distance.

...oh, bother.

Normally, she'd lock the blade for just long enough and go for a stun - her lightsabers, one blue double-blade with two quillons, the other her green blaster, are already igniting, even as she attempts to jar the Sith by deploying fixtures from the floor while she's running over it - but with her situation as it is, stunners are riskier than literal disarmament and she's not harming a patient!

So Deskyl finds Diana Pallas meeting her at her end of the corridor, fully armored up - and both just a little bit frustrated, and sad.

Disrupting her footing slows her but doesn't stop her; she's clumsy with the Force, but apparently capable of keeping herself upright and headed where she intends to be with telekinesis.

Strategy, tactics, and situational awareness are for people who have more than brain damage, instinct, and terror going on in their heads; Deskyl is very simply going to attempt to drive her lightsaber through the Jedi, nothing more and nothing less.

...and that is how you find your lightsaber caught between the prongs of two other lightsabers, thoroughly boxed in, while the Jedi looks at you, radiating bafflement and pity and sorrow.  "DZ, a hand, please?"

"Yes ma'am, I'm sorry, ma'am, one moment." She edges carefully around the lightsabers to try to get into Deskyl's line of sight so she can sign to her.

What? No? Aaaaaaaaa? Push harder? Do... something else? But what... she has no idea what. Aaaaaaaa there is a Jedi why is there a Jedi? She's going to die! Because there is a Jedi and her lightsaber is broken! Aaaaa!

....there's a droid. She likes the droid? The droid is also in danger! This is very bad!! The droid is.... something.... something something safe? No! There's a Jedi! Right there!! And her lightsaber is broken! ...droid... something something no lightsaber? ????? That's bad, but.... the droid is calm. And good. And it's good, she thinks, to do what the droid wants, because the droid is so good. It's very confusing that the good droid wants her to not lightsaber the Jedi, but... it's good to do what the good droid wants even when it's confusing. It's important.

She takes a step back, lightsaber still lit, and watches the Jedi warily.

The Jedi also takes a step back, and turns off one of her lightsabers!  (She doesn't put it back on her belt, but it's off.)  Then she...edges over to a small kitchenette and slowly pulls a sealed ration pack ([Near-Human Medical, Liquid] say the symbols) out of the cooling box, not looking away from Deskyl, but neither is she facing Deskyl with combative intent...and then she pokes a straw into the ration and offers it to Deskyl, given how it's floating over right where she could grab it?

She's not very willing to take her eyes off the Jedi yet (why is there a Jedi) but glances at the ration, and then a moment later gives the droid a confused look and gestures for her to handle it.

"I'm not sure how much she understands right now, ma'am, she's not usually responsive enough at this stage for me to tell. I expect not very much." She steps forward to take the ration pack, signing 'safe' and 'food' as she does.

"Yeah, I'm not expecting her to understand as much as I'm hoping she understands and doing my best to not let misunderstandings hurt anyone."  Diana pulls out some food for herself - instant oatmeal, apple-cinnamon - and sets it to cooking; after it's done (with a cheery bing!, not that Deskyl can hear it) she pulls up a table and chairs for herself and optionally Deskyl, turning off her other lightsaber at this time, still moving slowly.

    "Yes ma'am. You should know that her memory is still very bad at this stage, and she's not going to remember this tomorrow morning; I'm not confident she'll remember it in ten minutes."

Deskyl gives Diana a confused look when she disengages her second lightsaber, but turns off her own after a moment - it doesn't occur to her to stow it, and it seems like she quickly forgets that she's holding it at all - and lets DZ guide her by the elbow to sit in the other chair.

Diana eats her breakfast, and...sort of just, softly radiates calm safety healing peace protectiveness into the Force, hoping Deskyl will listen to her feelings, since her brain is not operating.

"Then we'll do this until she can remember.  We have time."

    "Yes ma'am. Thank you for not killing her."

Deskyl is clearly not buying this calm-safe-peace thing, but keeps glancing at DZ every few seconds and following her lead to tolerate Diana's presence, so that's something, at least. She's not interested in the liquid ration when DZ offers it to her, though, preferring to keep her attention on the Jedi.

"...She cares about you.  I'll leave you alone, shall I?"

Diana can go find some maintenance to do!  Or meditate.

The Sith's signature in the Force is starting to bounce back a bit, she might notice as she meditates. It's hard to guess what it would look like without the damage, but there are some hints that it might possibly be a bit softer than other Siths' signatures, if she looks for them.

When she comes back through the main part of the ship, DZ has gotten Deskyl back to bed, but has the door ajar and is standing just inside, positioned to keep an eye on both Deskyl and the common area.

"...you alright?"  She's quiet, soft, tentative, deliberate.  "I imagine that gave you...quite a scare.  Did she get to eating...?"

"Yes ma'am, after you left. Did you have any questions for me?"

"I did ask if you're alright.  ...Anything else I should know, now that we've got the whole, Force, thing out?"

"I'm fine, ma'am. Most of what I told you about Lord Pritruth and Master Deskyl was true, but she was Lord Pritruth's apprentice, not the employee of one, studying lightsaber design."

"Good lies have a kernel of truth."  She gives an...approving nod?  "...She going to want to do any revenging?  Goodness knows I would, after..."  She gestures at the medbay.

"She seems to be more focused on keeping herself safe, ma'am, I had specific instructions to get her out if an opportunity arose even if it meant taking away her opportunity to kill him. She might want to go back if there's an opportunity that isn't too risky, but we haven't discussed it."

"I see.  I'll keep that in mind; I certainly don't like him after...this.  Who does that?  And, why, Force's sake!  What's the...Is there even any point to, that!"

There's a pause before DZ speaks, which is uncharacteristic of recently-wiped droids.

"I don't know, ma'am."

"...would you care to speculate?"

Diana notices this!  But doesn't immediately say anything about it.

"Just that Sith do have reasons for what they do - not necessarily nice reasons or ones that other kinds of people would consider good enough for the damage they do, but the reasons do exist."

Diana nods.  "That's certainly not false.  It...doesn't help, though."

Not in this case, anyway. "Yes ma'am."

"...I'm sorry this all has been laid on your shoulders.  It shouldn't have had to be.  I'm not your master, but...if I can dare to say so, you've done so very well by her."

This Jedi is so weird. Not that she's complaining, if it keeps her master alive. "Thank you, ma'am."

"It's really the least you deserve, going above and beyond like you did with this.  Is there anything I could arrange to ease your duties?"

"I don't think so, ma'am. I can let you know if anything comes up."

"Please, do.  I do most of the maintenance myself, I can spare time for you and especially for all this."

...there is definitely an astromech on board, why is the human doing maintenance? "Yes ma'am."

Well, that's all she has for this conversation.  And she does have maintenance to do.  So she'll go do that.

And R4, who has had the conversation he's predicting he will have so many times before, trundles on in after.

DZ doesn't speak to him immediately, assuming he has work to do; instead she goes to adjust Deskyl's holoprojector to show a different sunset.

He's still there when she gets back to the doorway, though, so after another moment, she whistles: Your human is strange.

R4 whistles back, She's unique.  I like her.  What confuses you about her so far?

She keeps talking to me in a strange way. And she didn't seem upset when my Sith tried to kill her - don't worry, my Sith is very bad at killing people right now and will realize it's a bad idea here before she gets much better at it.

...The common thread, there, is that she cares about the lives and well-being of everything that can think.  Including us.  Including even the Sith she's killed.  And I think she just can't blame people for their instincts.  Even violent ones.  It didn't hurt anybody, anyway.

Strange.

How do you deal with it?

...With what?

With her wanting strange things and speaking strangely to you.

Astromechs don't have as much programming against having opinions and wants and things, but she's pretty sure they have some, so he should know what she's talking about.

I mean...It was a little weird, starting out, I guess, especially when she started trying to pay me - I got her to agree to putting most of that into the ship, because I want to be the best astromech I can and an astromech needs a good ship, and I do actually pick parts sometimes - but I haven't had anything like that come up for years?  There was a bit of...She likes tinkering with things, but we agreed to split it; I handle the slicing, she handles the assembly.  She uses ship maintenance for meditating and Force practice, actually.

My Sith doesn't like it when I ask for things for her when I'm asked what I want for myself. :T

I'll talk to Diana about talking to your Sith about it.  What drives you to do that?

You want to be a good astromech so your focus is your ship; I want to be a good servant droid so my focus is my Sith.

I don't think it would help me for them to talk about it.

I see.  I think it might; my Jedi isn't a diplomat, but she's good with fleshy minds.  Walked us right into and out of a Sith base one time without a single Force hack.  So if anyone can get across that you really do want what you want, and that trying to say you should do otherwise actually isn't going to help, it's probably her.

Oh.

Maybe, then.

I do want to be how my Sith wants, it's just hard when she wants things that go directly against what I am.

Definitely something to talk about, then.  ...Anything else you think you'd be better off knowing?

I'd like to know what might make her hurt my Sith.

Uncoerced mass murder, or someone's life being in immediate danger if my Jedi doesn't do something to prevent it.

Okay. Thank you.

Happy to help.  Please feel free to seek me out if you have further questions.

I shouldn't go far from my Sith, but I'm sure I can figure something out.

I'll get you a comm button.

And off R4 goes!

Deskyl's fear sings in the Force again a few hours later, but DZ is apparently able to handle it without her leaving the room. At lunchtime, though, she gets past her and goes for Diana again, with no more subtlety than last time.

Diana meets this with no less grace and patience than last time.  "...I don't think I know much of that sign language you're using, though I've seen some Sith use it before; I spent most of my spare language acquisition on Galactic Sign and Binary.  Would it help if I was able to speak it at all, do you think?  And...what happened to make this different from the earlier episode you defused?"

"I was in the doorway then, ma'am, and had time to get her attention; this time I was waking her up to eat. You do need at least one free hand for Sith Battle Sign, but... can you see that Master Deskyl has a Force effect up? I know it's subtle."

"Ahh, I see.  ...Suggesting a distance poking device is a silly thought, but if it would help, I can get you one.  I can see that she's doing...something.  I wouldn't dare hazard a guess as to what, just yet, save that I think it's internal."

"Yes ma'am. Master Deskyl can hear, but it's unpleasant without Force assistance, and it's been too difficult for her to set that up again since this started; the effect you see is deafening her instead. There should be a way to decrease it without removing it entirely. You'll want to enunciate very clearly when you speak to her."

"...If she has the same problems I have with volume, I can probably find a dampener that isn't the one I use for daily wear somewhere around here.  If it's the qualia of hearing itself that's unpleasant, I don't really have..."  An idea strikes.  "Hey R4!  Do you think you could stuff the compute of speech filtering into the form factor of my old headband?"

A whistle of genial unsureness returns from the control room.

"Well, it might help our patient, so I think we should try and find out!"

It's at about this point that DZ's signing gets through to Deskyl, who finally backs off, visibly confused and trying to puzzle out the situation.

Diana gives Deskyl her space!  "DZ, do you know which of those is the case?  ...I think I can actually improvise setting up proper Force-enabled volume cutoffs, if she lets me help.  Shouldn't be too dissimilar from tutaminis...annnnd it took me until now to think of doing that myself?  Wow, I feel rather silly."

    "She seems to have more trouble with complex sounds than loud ones, ma'am, but some trouble with both." DZ edges back around the lightsaber zone, and Deskyl lets her lead her off to the table again, slightly less skeptically than last time.

"I see."  Well, that's a good project to work on over her lunch break, she thinks.  Volume limits should be simple enough, but... - well, R4's on the complexity filter.  She'll let him handle it.

Still, she does need to get Deskyl's buy-in.  No putting strange devices on a patient whose consent you can actually get.  And so Diana wraps the area in a bubble of isolation from the shipboard noise, and gently works the suppression down a little bit.

"Hello."  Her voice is quiet, soft.  "I come in peace.  I can make something that keeps the world quiet for you.  Would you like that?"

Deskyl winces and growls a little when Diana first speaks to her, but there's no real heat behind it, and no particular sign of distress in the Force. She doesn't seem to be parsing the words, though.

    "It generally works best to present things very simply, ma'am," DZ suggests, quietly, and then signs, speaking along this time: "Jedi safe. Quietness machine yes?"

Deskyl seems a bit less baffled by this, but doesn't reply, even after a few repetitions. "I think this is just too complex for her right now, ma'am."

Diana lets the Force effect go back to...well, full force, though she's tempted to see if she can make the dampening effect power a trickle of healing.

"I see.  ...Whoever did this to her...they have something to answer for.  Likely many things, really, but definitely this one."

    "Yes ma'am." She sets about trying to coax Deskyl to eat; the Sith is still distracted by the Jedi, but not as uninterruptibly so.

Diana eats her own lunch, as well.

They're making progress!

They are!

Toward the end of the meal, Deskyl gets DZ's attention and gestures questioningly at Diana.

    "Jedi safe," DZ signs to her.

Deskyl's eyes narrow a bit, but she gestures again, a little more emphatically.

    "Jedi helping. Ally against master."

At the mention of her master there's a little burst of rage, in the Force, though a slight narrowing of her eyes is Deskyl's only outward sign of it. She thinks this over for a minute and nods, thoughtfully.

The Jedi continues to peacefully exist!  She winces inside her helmet upon feeling the anger, but that's even less noticeable!

    "I don't expect her to remember that, ma'am. But it's a good sign, I think."

Deskyl's lunch doesn't take much longer, and DZ guides her back to bed; she'll ask R4 to come by and help with waking her for dinner when he drops off the comm.

"It is, indeed."

R4 can do that, sure!  How does DZ want to do this?  Deskyl's her Sith, if anyone can come up with a good plan, it's probably DZ - Diana's not the right sort of precognitive, there.

The main thing is getting Deskyl's attention on her before she makes it out the door, which means DZ needs to be in the doorway, which leaves R4 on actual waking-her-up duty. It goes best if that's done with minimal startlement, and she has a system for what order to try things in to wake her as gently as possible.

Then R4 can do that!  ...from the side of the bed that's away from the door.  Y'know, just in case.

That's entirely reasonable of him!

The third thing he tries wakes the Sith, and she makes it fully out of bed and halfway to the door before noticing DZ and stopping short, tensed like a caged animal. DZ's signing calms her, though, and after a few minutes she gets her back into bed, leaving the doorway open for R4 to leave. (Deskyl notices him on his way out, and stares.)

R4 does not mind being stared at!  He only minds being lightsabered!  (Diana did, at least, cover his core processor in phrik, but it's not ever fun when someone tries to cut you in half!)

See you in eight hours?

    Yes, thank you.

It doesn't go as well the next morning; Deskyl has obviously forgotten most of what she'd gathered the previous day, and tries to order DZ out of the doorway rather than listen to her, her fear and increasing anger obvious in the Force as she does.

"...Let her, DZ.  It's not worth her being upset at you.  Sometimes you need to learn from experience."  Diana tries projecting peace-calm-we're-friends-here, for what it's worth, but is definitely expecting to need her lightsabers again.

Deskyl startles, visibly flinching, as she notices how close Diana has gotten, and falls back into a defensive stance, anger falling away into grim determination.

Diana just...stands there, for a moment, ready but not concerned, then goes to get Deskyl's food from the fridge.

This sends her from nihilistic determination to confusion and distress; when Diana gets back, DZ has her sitting on the edge of the bed and is trying without much success to get her to pay attention to a poem she's reciting for her.

Diana gives her the food?

Sure, that can happen.

Diana leaves her in peace to eat the food!  (An astromech occasionally trundles by.)

She eats; her emotions have settled out into vague despair by the time she's done. When she wakes again later, she's less upset, but the general tone is similar; DZ must know something to do about it, because it does lift a bit, back toward determination.

DZ waits for Diana to come out for lunch without waking Deskyl for it.

Diana looks over at DZ.  "...you know how I asked you to let me know if there was anything I could do to help?  I think you think I can do something to help your master, but I can't just guess what it is.  Or, I could, but I'd have anyone else's chances of succeeding, you know?  Jedi mostly aren't mind-readers.  Especially with droids for some reason that I am generally convinced is self-delusion; you think as much as I do.  So...what would help?"

"I don't have a specific idea of what to do, ma'am, but I do have an idea of what the problem is - I think Master Deskyl believes she's been captured, from her reactions."

"...Ah."

"...Could install a hard lock, give her the key?  ...not that it would help overmuch, but the problem is that she can hardly do keypads right now either..."

She also does have DZ's lunch ready.

"I wouldn't expect her to know how to operate a keypad or a hardware key, right now, ma'am. It might be best to just let her sleep? I expect her to have forgotten about it again in the morning."

"Mmm, true.  Still worth thinking about in case it's not different when she is awake and alert."  She hands off the food (and R4 is on standby to deliver it by now) and heads down to the cargo bay for practice.  "Til next time, DZ."

"...yes ma'am."

She'll try to talk to her again at dinnertime, then.

Diana does her katas for a bit, and then more ship-related stuff for the next few hours - tending the algae, etcetera.  Soon enough, she's back up on deck for dinner.

"Hello, ma'am. Did you want me to try any particular approach with Master Deskyl in the morning?"

"I don't know what you can do, DZ.  You're the, Sith protocol droid.  Tell me about the protocol, please."

...She looks...tired, all of a sudden, helmet off, face frazzled.  "I just don't want, to hurt her more.  There's already been so much pain..."  ...And she feels every wound.  "...Jedi, creatures of peace and life, fighting a war.  It's madness.  But so are the Sith, and the culture they espouse.  So who's more the fool?"

"...yes ma'am."

"Master Deskyl is a sensory specialist, and it's generally very obvious to her when there are other Force sensitives around; there are techniques that can hide you from her but my understanding is that they're difficult to hold for very long. If she can sense you, she'll be afraid of you, until she regains the ability to recognize you as an individual - I don't think that's avoidable; the understanding among Sith is that Jedi will kill them given any opportunity, and she seems to have retained that. But Sith are trained to handle fear, and I don't get the impression that it's necessarily distressing for her in this case; what she seemed to be distressed by today was the idea that there wasn't anything that she could do about you, which is something that Sith tend to be very sensitive to - I stopped her from attacking you, and you didn't seem to be afraid of her, and usually among Sith that would suggest that you'd already defeated her once and we were both confident that you could do it again - are you aware of Sith traditions around that situation, ma'am?"

"Nnnnooot in any particular detail."

"Yes ma'am," she nods. "Sith are very hierarchical; every Sith answers to a specific other Sith, all the way up to the Dark Council and the Emperor. These relationships can change by the master giving a Sith they have mastery of to another Sith, or by inheritance of a defeated Sith's assets - if Master Deskyl had managed to kill Lord Pritruth she would have inherited his property, his title, his direct allegiance to his Darth, and mastery of his other apprentices, assuming she was able to survive their attempts to kill her to inherit those things from her. Theft is another method, though not very relevant here. And directly defeating a Sith in combat also grants mastery of them, if you can do so without killing them - this is part of why Sith fight so viciously when cornered; it's the least stable kind of allegiance-change and is often worse than death, so they have no incentive to surrender. I believe this is what Master Deskyl thinks has happened to her right now."

"...well.  That's kriffed up."

"Yes ma'am."

"She's taking most of her situational cues from me, right now, and I believe that if I allow her to attack you without interference she'll assume she's in some other situation than that. But I have specific orders from her not to allow her to attack people if her doing so will be a risk to her life or her escape."

"Well, it won't.  Worst comes to worst, I have to stun her, which...I don't know if you know how that would work out, but there's not much it can make worse at this point.  So let her.  I could use a sparring partner anyway."

"Yes ma'am. I expect she wouldn't have any unusual trouble recovering from a stunner bolt, physically or cognitively; I haven't specifically seen her take one but she's recovered from minor lightning attacks with no complications."

"Then that solves that, I think.  Thank you."

"Thank you, ma'am. And please let me know if you think of another approach that I can try. Shall I wake her for dinner when you're done?"

"...I'll try, DZ.  I'll try.  ...I don't know, should you?  You've been watching her vitals."

"She won't be harmed by skipping another meal, ma'am, she'll just want extra in the morning."

"Then extra she shall have."

Diana then pads off to rest.

"Goodnight, DZ, R4, Deskyl."

"Goodnight, ma'am."

They settle into a routine, after that: DZ allows Deskyl to attack Diana in the morning, but talking her down afterward sets the tone for the rest of the day, leaving her confused but not distressed and relatively easy to manage; the stunner turns out to be unnecessary.

And on the fifth morning of this, she stops short in the galley, fear blending with confusion as she recognizes Diana.

Diana gives a polite wave, emoting pride-in-the-accomplishments-of-another, and then there's food.

It takes a moment for her to decide to stand down, but she does, and takes the plate, seeking out DZ to sign 'why' to as she sits.

    Ally.

...Jedi?

    Ally Jedi. Safe. Helped. Enemy of master.

Ohhhh. Yes, good. ...Jedi questions?

    "She'd like to know if you have any questions for her, ma'am."

"...Would Force healing help her recover?"

She takes a bit to consider the question; if Diana's paying attention, she may notice an incongruous thread of worry in the Force as she does.

    "She says she's not sure but she'd like to try it, ma'am."

Diana is indeed paying attention.  "Alright, let's see..."

Diana pulls off one of her gloves, and nudges the Force volume throttle (after erecting soundproofing).  "Deskyl, may I touch your hand?  It helps."

She startles slightly at the unexpected sound, but offers her hand.

Diana's touch is gentle, and the resulting gentle inquiry of the Force within her is...warm, welcoming, soothing.  "It's okay.  You're doing good.  Just breathe, gentle, slow, calm.  You're safe."

Deskyl tenses a bit at the words, but doesn't pull away.

    "That kind of thing is hostile, to Sith, ma'am."

(She has a scattering of electrical and 'saber burns in the process of healing, and a number of scars, that the Force reveals to Diana; none are particularly severe, though the remaining brain damage is certainly significant. There are also a few places, if she's paying close attention, where a surface scar isn't matched by underlying damage like it should be; it would be possible, perhaps, to heal someone that selectively with the Force, but extremely difficult, and Sith supposedly can't use Force healing at all...)

"I see.  Sorry."  ...Empty void, she's going to -- no, she isn't.  Calm, Diana, you are healing a patient.

She breathes, in and out, half into a healing trance, but only half because she is directing that healing to Deskyl's wounds...

Deskyl sits quietly, letting her work, watching closely but not distracting her.

Diana can actually do quite a lot for Deskyl's wounds!  The physical ones, at the very least!

...As for the mental ones...She breathes in.  She breathes out.  She lets her senses touch Deskyl's mind.

There's a sense, here, of it having been scoured, like a coastal town after a tsunami, or a forest after a brutal fire. There's plenty of new growth, though, and the framework coming in for more, and it won't be hard at all to encourage that along.

And so Diana Ophelia Pallas does, providing a subtle stability to the churn, promoting connection, promoting regrowth, promoting future resilience against that which would ever make someone in her care feel like this ever again --

Deskyl is not hers.  She is not anyone's.  Diana knows this.  So she takes a deep breath, holds her emotions aside, and asks herself - what does Deskyl need, right now?

Her mind is roiling, churning, like a boiling pot of water.  It is not supposed to do that.  Minds are much, much more stable even in the unhealthy modes she's seen.  (Sometimes too much so, but that is another story.)  What Deskyl needs are anchors.  Things her thoughts can accrete around again.  And she knows just who to ask, as she pieces together a metaphor that might even work - 

"DZ, if you can remind your mistress of - who she is, not the big things, the little ones, as we go - I, think this will help, we're kind of making this up live, really, because I don't think anyone's seen this sort of damage before from my side, but...she's already got some of the idea, she just needs to find the right things to apply it to -" and Diana is good at finding just the right things, a transferable skill from precision machine work, and nudging Deskyl's attention through the Force as she gives prompts to DZ, still in that half trance, so Deskyl can weave herself back together, re-establish the current of self, forge her mind like kyber crystal -- (a thought-memory of Diana's own slips out; her blue crystals were found in the traditional Jedi way, but she synthesized the core of her green saber herself, because green is the crystal the Jedi take to mean focus-on-knowledge, and what, then, is a better expression of knowledge than using it to make something wonderful, and you have, Deskyl, you really have, because what you made saved you when you couldn't save yourself,)  (Diana's really proud of DZ.  DZ is a good droid.  She's glad Deskyl feels the same way.)

She doesn't really expect this to fix the underlying - Force-burn, she thinks - all in one go, but she does hope it'll help speed up the process.

    "Yes ma'am." DZ settles in to recite some poetry to Deskyl; signed, because that's what she's always preferred, even when she could hear.

Deskyl is only partly paying attention to DZ, though, and instead mostly watching Diana - this isn't just healing, it's something else, and she trusts DZ's assessment that Diana is an ally but she doesn't trust Diana not to make a mistake.

The effect Diana is wielding seems gentle, in the way carefully-applied Force effects can be: she expects that if she ignores it, it will do whatever Diana is intending, but with even a bit of attention she can stop it from doing anything she doesn't like. Mostly she doesn't object; a few times she nudges her away, with annoyance or frustration or fear.

Diana is glad that Deskyl is capable of asserting boundaries, honestly; that means she's not going to inadvertently trample over them.  Deskyl gets the impression of - Diana is not going to pry, but she wants to understand, so she can help better, when those reactions occur - and yes, this technique is gentle, yielding.  It's also kind of oddly Sith-y for a Jedi, really; it feels a lot more will-shaped than openness-shaped, even though it's still based in a philosophy of openness.  Deskyl might even be able to do something like it all on her own; it's a sort of recursive asking of questions of yourself, interrogating your instincts to reconstruct the patterns they came from.

Yeah, maybe.

She's tired, by the time Diana is done.

Diana is so proud of her; she did so well.  "You're going to feel tired when you do this; that happens when you think really hard.  Be careful, okay?"  She catches her own yawn before it goes anywhere - she's being very careful of sounds herself, for Deskyl's sake - but Deskyl and DZ can still see her doing it, because at some point in this process her helmet came off.  (It's resting on her back, now.)

Sign sign sign-

    "She's injured, not an invalid, ma'am."

"I'm very glad that she's well enough now to tell me off about it!"  ...Diana grins, somewhere between "trying to stifle a laugh" and "beaming".

This just makes her more angry; her hand twitches toward her lightsaber, though it doesn't quite connect, and instead she sweeps off toward her room, gesturing for DZ to follow.

Ah.  Yeah.  She should have expected that.  It still sucks to feel, though.

Well, there's distracting fiddly maintenance to do.  That keeps her out of the space she's trying to give Deskyl.  That's helping, right?  She really wants to help...

It's not hard to give Deskyl space; the Sith doesn't come out of her room again. Even DZ isn't turning up in the galley - she must be coming out sometime, Deskyl's food is disappearing at the expected rate, but Diana doesn't see her, no matter how much time she spends hanging around there.

(The signs in the Force suggest that Deskyl is fine; she seems relatively calm, most of the time, though sometimes frustrated or bored. Her meditation - at least it seems to be meditation - is another story; of course a Force-sensitive powered by fear and rage is going to incorporate them into their daily practice.)

Diana herself also hiding is probably also not helping, but Diana cannot actually solve this.

So it's up to R4, after days pass in silence, to try, because it's affecting his ship.  ...My human kriffed something up really badly, huh?

It's not just her, Sith are difficult. We're lucky I have a calm one.

Do you mind explaining what happened?  For both our sakes.

Yours laughed at mine; that's a threat, to Sith. Anything that suggests you aren't taking them seriously is.

I see.  I'll pass that on.  Is there some good indicator of taking this seriously that my human could use?

Not straightforwardly. It's more a matter of not doing the wrong things than doing the right things - you can't tell a Sith you think you could beat them in a fight without them thinking that's going to matter somehow.

I see.

Later that afternoon, Diana knocks on Deskyl's door; two firm raps that belie the weltering turmoil of emotions she's feeling about all this.

Deskyl opens it after a moment; she's in one of the black outfits DZ had packed, embroidered in gold and red across the shoulders, exuding a quiet confidence.

"...hey.  ...wow, you look really good in that - excuse me.  I.  Mm.  Would you be interested in hearing what I was - trying to convey, the last time we spoke, or would you just prefer to know that - mm.  I've taken the feedback I've received on-board, and will be doing my best to ensure that I treat you with the respect you are, in fact, due, going forwards?"

"And...how are you?  I realize I hardly have a right to that information, but...Despite myself, I seem to have become invested."  She laughs wryly, self-directedly.  "Not very Jedi of me, that."

...huh.

She steps aside to let her in.

Diana blinks, but...sure, she can come in if Deskyl would prefer this?

Deskyl stays by the door, leaning against the dresser there; DZ is at the table, but stands to let Diana have it.

    "She says she'd like to know what you were trying to say, ma'am," DZ relays.

"It's..."

Diana hmms.  (She doesn't take the table.)

She's stared off into the middle distance for a good thirty seconds before she starts speaking again.

"For the past week you had barely been a person.  I - I was relieved.  That you were coming back to yourself.  That I'd...helped, even a little bit.  So that was...coloring my reaction to having made that first misstep?  I think.  I can't be as sure as I'd like to; I'm...not good at directly confronting my own regrets.  ...still.  I was...I was glad.  You were, are, for that matter, getting stronger, recovering well.  And that's a good thing.  I don't - well, okay, I do care if I end up dead, but - the strength of my allies is my strength?  And I...hope we can be not-enemies.  And...Force, I don't know.  It was cute?  Like - those holos of big cats being grumpy that some university keeps uploading.

"So I tried to...draw back, smooth over, find a way to, make good from bad, and promptly ran smack into Sith culture being fractally horrible about power, I think?

"I don't know, you're the resident Sith, I'm a kriffing Jedi," she says almost like it's a curse, "I'm not sure where the...must-be-a-threat, thing, springs from.  But...I was trying to imply you had power, because you were lucid enough to tell me to kriff off, not diminish or demean the power you had."

Deskyl thinks about this; a few seconds into it, there's a gentle nudge from her in the Force, offering a calming effect, mild and easy to ignore by default but there's a sense of how Diana could lean into it to request that Deskyl strengthen the effect.

    "She says that most of the problem is that if you try to hurt her, her options are to take it or to kill you, ma'am, and she doesn't like either of those, so any sign of that is alarming - she doesn't know that you won't."

"...oh..."

That one single syllable is paired with an outpouring of grief.

She doesn't make another sound, but tears run down her face, because...that's even more horrible than she thought it could become, and...she's not even made a dent, so many are still adrift in, in, that, in a 'state' where the only guaranteed relief from durance vile is death...

...so, yes, she'd...like that calming effect, please.

Yeah.

Here's the calming effect; the strength of it wobbles around for a moment before settling into something comforting but not overwhelming, and then stays steady.

"I -"

"Force preserve, I've just -"

"I've had a horrible idea, about, how to ensure your comfort.

"Which leans on...your doing this, and other things it might imply capabilities to do.

"That...I need to think about.  And probably...sleep on.  After I've - cried those tears."  (She sort of...gestures at the calming effect.)

"But there's a question I can ask now that would rule out that possibility, so whether or not I want to know, and regardless of what I want the answer to be - I don't even know - I probably should ask.  How complex can, this, get?  And how long does it last?"

    "She can hold it indefinitely, ma'am, including in her sleep; her range with it is about thirty feet, or double that if she's meditating, but it doesn't linger if someone leaves her range. She can also do fear and anger, and she can teach herself other states, including complicated ones."

"...could she do something about as complex as 'incapable of killing'?  As a rough first pass."  ...oh those are some complicated emotions Diana is having again, but a very different sort, all in different proportions and configurations.  ...and she's trying very hard to keep a lid on one particular subconscious response to the line of thought she's having, too, but...she's not doing a very good job of it, at all, and there's quite a bit of shame-guilt about that.  "I should probably, ah...excuse myself.  For a little bit.  While she thinks."  ...She is definitely not blushing the red cheeks are totally the sunset holos' faults why did she leave her helmet off for this.

(Fleeing still doesn't help.)

Deskyl lets her go without issue. She can maintain the calming effect as far as Diana's room, though it'll fade to nothing as soon as she makes a serious attempt to push it away.

Oh dear Force why are emotions and feelings anyway she has way too many.  Why are bodies, even.  They're traitors.  Diana is increasingly oscillating between "pull Deskyl's calming effect close like a lifeline" and jumping back with a sense of "Force, I shouldn't," over and over.  ...the one thing she doesn't do, though, is push it in any sense away.

There's a little bit of give, in the effect, where it'll get stronger if she pulls on it that way; after two or three rounds of that, though, it firms up and holds steady; the timing gives the impression that Deskyl has intentionally set it like that.

Oh, okay.

This is nice, actually.

Like a comfy blanket.

Though her face is kind of on fire right now.

(Deskyl can probably pick up on Diana's subdued relief.  She's proven to be very perceptive, over the past little while.)

(If she can - and it is a pretty safe assumption - she doesn't seem inclined to do anything about it.)

Then Diana...is going to take a nap?

Apparently?

(Comfy...)

You know what, that's pretty legit.

The calming effect will still be there when she wakes up.

Diana, eventually, wakes up, somehow burrows in tighter to the effect like it's a blanket burrito despite that being exactly how that doesn't work, and with just a little bit of regret, carefully extricates herself to go do ship things once more!

Like eat food!

Perhaps with the air cleared somewhat Deskyl might show up!  (...oh, Force, Diana, nooo, goes her braincell in the corner.)

Deskyl has decided to have her dinner in the galley, as it turns out; she's chatting with DZ in sign.

"Oh, hey.  ...um.  Thanks, for earlier.  Don't really know how much of all that you picked up on but I...definitely needed the firm hand to stop my wittering, as was.  ...It was really comfy, once I got over myself.  Healers will probably be all over trying to invent 'that but Jedi-flavor' if I tell them that it exists.  Which...that's your call, to me."

Diana sits...near-ish!  Not too close, though!  "...I kind of want to ask if you'd prefer if I learned your sign, but I'm worried about it coming across awkwardly - and frankly, I think that the tactically correct thing for you to do is probably to keep it to yourself, given the no-trust situation you're operating within.  There must be learner files on sign languages on the holonet somewhere, but then that leaves the both of us fumbling unless you know two already, and - Force, I don't know if I could handle owning a protocol droid."

    "Master Deskyl says she expects to be able to speak Basic again in a month or two, ma'am, and she expects that to be faster than either of you learning a new sign language; she'd want some time to think about it before teaching you Sith Battle Sign, she's not sure how the Empire would react to it leaking. She doesn't mind teaching you emotion projection, or letting you teach someone else; it's not a dark technique, so it shouldn't need any major adjustments."

Diana gives a grateful nod.  ...though she's not actually sure what that gratitude is for, yet, when she goes over her thoughts.  "...yeah, now that I think about it I do know the technique you mean.  I've just never felt it feel like that before."

    "She expects that Sith and Jedi use it rather differently, ma'am."

"...That does make a lot of sense...It's nice though..."

Diana pinches herself.  "...Maybe a bit too nice.  Force, I could get lost in that."

    "You should face your emotions at some point, she says, ma'am. "

"...In general, or in specific?  Because in this specific situation, I expect everyone on this vessel would probably be vastly more comfortable if I waited until after you were off it to, erm - confront a particular subset.  In general, though, yes, we can't not have them, so...ignoring that's bad."

    "She says she wouldn't be a sensory specialist if she wasn't prepared to ignore things that aren't her business, ma'am. But as you prefer."

Diana most definitely did not spray the sip of her drink in her mouth across the room while flushing red when DZ translated that.  She was not inhabiting a comedy skit.  She instead politely contemplated that sentence's implications, swishing the liquid in her mouth around in a stimmy sort of way, then swallowed.

"...If you'd prefer."

She did, however, blush.

    "It really isn't her business one way or the other, ma'am."

"Yes, intellectually I can acknowledge that, but emotions - don't, really, rational?"  She gives a dramatic shrug.  "All I can do is my best, I guess."

    "Yes ma'am."

    "She says it genuinely won't bother her, if that's what you're worried about."

"I...  Thank you.  For the reassurance.  Yes, that was, definitely part of what I was worrying about."  She slowly exhales.

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.

    We don't know very much about Jedi, but my Sith isn't surprised. Sith know more about emotions, she thinks - she can probably teach her how to manage them better.

Diana thinks that really it's that the Jedi are kind of getting kriffed up by the war being a thing and dissociating to cope, except that they're trying, unhelpfully, to dogmatize that behavior.  ...She's self-aware in the strangest ways, sometimes.

    It's certainly possible, she says.

...She is going to be crying so much.  I'd better go fiddle with her rations.  Don't want her being dehydrated.

R4 gives Deskyl and DZ a nod, then trundles off.

Deskyl stays up for another hour, in case she's needed, and then meditates, briefly - shielding during it is still a bit beyond her - and then sleeps.

She has DZ wake her a little early for breakfast the next morning; it seems wise for her to be up before Diana.

Diana's sleep is not restful in the slightest, with how plagued she is with...well, it probably wasn't anything Deskyl did, statistical analysis from R4 shows?  But Diana tosses, turns, flinches, jerks, jolts, bolts awake and makes a frantic comm call twice, and generally just seems to be having an entirely different flavor of bad sleep than she'd been having!

Seeing her slump out of her room, looking like she's aged a year and feeling like she hasn't slept for weeks, tear-stained and wearing a kriffing robe - and if there's one thing Deskyl can just be sure of about Diana it is that that robe was snuck on board by the Temple Quartermaster because she wasn't going to take it if she had any choice in the matter whatsoever - is probably absolutely unnecessary to confirm that Diana's not anywhere near actually functional right now.  She is awake, though.  "That.  Sucked."

    "She says 'it certainly seems to have,' yes ma'am."

Deskyl scoots one of the other chairs over next to hers and pats it, then offers a one-armed hug.

...yeah, she'll take the hug.  She really kind of needs one.

"Visions of the war."

"Ah."

    "She doesn't mind listening, if you think it would help to talk about it, ma'am."

"It's - there's so - much, and I knew that, but couldn't - feel it, but now I can't not feel it, and...people are dying, and that's horrible, and it's so much more than I can solve alone, but who would I even recruit for that, there's not exactly that many people with my sort of thoughtpattern and even less are sensitives, and even then it's a miracle I can still care!  Most Jedi would've murdered --!"

Her presence in the Force is agitated, whirling choppily, frustration, self-loathing in a terribly recursive spiral, desperate hope for solutions being propped up with every erg of will she can spare...

"oh, Force...this war needs to end..." Her head rests against the cool metal of the table as she slumps, and lets her tears fall, grieving for the lives she can't yet save.  "'m sorry...supposed to be helping you, helping the Force, helping the whole galaxy, but I'm being so selfish, so self-deluded...To have hubris enough to try and save everyone, when I can't even care for myself..."

"Through passion I gain strength," she observes.

Diana coughs up a "True," before letting out a wet chuckle, "but am I serene?"

"Pft."

    "She says 'do you want to be', ma'am."

"Not really!  Not after so many years of being that when I really didn't want to!  But it does...feel reassuring, despite all the ways that that doesn't actually follow from any of the known premises of this situation, to feel your presence touching mine?

"...oh.  Empty void, the skin-hunger."

"Yeah," squeeze. "Few... In few..." she hisses in annoyance and signs again.

    "You'll be feeling better in a few days, she says, ma'am."

Deskyl gets a hug too because just because her situation also sucks doesn't mean Diana's stopped caring that others' do.

Unless that seems contraindicated, at least; she's not really sure.

It really doesn't. Diana might not be the only one here with a skin-hunger problem.

Then there are definitely hugs to be had for Deskyl.

Diana doesn't even have any really awkward thoughts during them!

Convenient!

After a few minutes Deskyl sends DZ to get Diana some breakfast.

There is food, but also snuggling, but also - oh, hello, Force, thank you, you're helping, that's good, she was worried, and - well she does try to not sob into Deskyl's pretty outfit but that competes with the urge to curl up and bury her face in something soft and both of those compete with food so she's just sort of crying aimlessly about the Force being so wonderful and it cares and wants to help but so many people can't even hear it and it can't help everyone all at once because it would if it could and that's so sad that it can't help,

Pet pet pet. She'll nudge Diana toward eating, too, if that seems necessary.

Mm, Diana is eating, no worries there; she's just having to pause in between bites to wipe at her face with part of her robe because getting tears in her breakfast would be kinda silly.

"How do you think they'll get our characters wrong, when we're stuck in some low-budget holodrama, centuries in the future?"

    "She says, 'they always get this part wrong, don't they'."

Diana cackles.  "They sure do!  Force, they'd probably have us kissing by now and we haven't even fought an asshole together as a bonding experience!"

Deskyl laughs and nods.

"Force, if I didn't get the impression that you're terminally uninterested in that sort of thing I have to admit I'd be considering trying it, though.  Also something medical ethics something but really at this point we've both gotten tangled up in eachothers' issues, so maybe it cancels?  I have absolutely no kriffing idea, honestly!"

R4 breebles.

"Oh don't you dare you little scoundrel, I will lose something into the Jeffries tubes and 'forget' it there so you have to take time from your flight simulators to go get it!"

This gets another giggle, and some signing.

    "She's not worried about it, ma'am."

Apparently Diana has caught the giggles from Deskyl, and - oh, there are all those inconvenient feelings of definitely crushing hard!

Deskyl doesn't seem to mind! The hug continues regardless.

Then Diana's going to burrow into the hug and mumble "lemme know if this gets awkward please I can't pay very good attention to stuff."

Deskyl will pat her on the back and let her burrow, then.

Eventually, Diana's Feelscoaster™ pulls out of a rapid gaywards spiral and starts oscillating between "Deskyl is really good" and "there was stuff I maybe wanted to do with blasters?", and her intellect resolves this by - oh, she still has to do systems checks, phooey, but the Force is with her, so it's not as onerous as by-handing it, and she has always had a knack for the fiddly things - eventually settling her in in Deskyl's lap, still, but now with at least three datapads while she tinkers with engineering a blaster that shoots three blasts at the same time; she can do a lot of that even while she's a bit muzzy and wibbly, because past Diana was helpful and set up things for future Dianas, with R4's help - he's a good droid did Deskyl know that?  It's true! - to have virtual assistance on tap, specs and simulations...

(Why's she making this?  Because most lightsabers only block lines.)

Sure, that can happen.

Deskyl still needs rather a lot of sleep; when Diana goes to tell her about R4 she finds that she's dozed off, leaning against the wall.

D'aww!  Let's get her in a comfy bed instead, that's a better place to sleep!  Diana is stronk.  She lifts.  She can make this happen!

Deskyl stirs only slightly as Diana moves her. (DZ follows them into Deskyl's cabin without comment.)

...does Deskyl like gentle petting?  Inquiring Dianas wish to know.

She squirms, slightly, not seeming to know what to make of it, and wakes. "Buh?"

"You fell asleep standing up. And then looked really cute.  Um.  Should I not...?"  She waves in the general direction of the hand that's probably still touching Deskyl, and blushes.

Diana is - frozen in place, and worried, and really worried, she - wants to respect Deskyl and do nice things for her and she thought maybe this thing would be nice but she can't read minds and probably should have asked --

Deskyl directs Diana to sit at the table, shoos DZ out of the room entirely, and shifts to a meditative pose.

And...Diana follows the cue?

After a moment something gently touches her mind through the Force, quickly resolving into a sense of Deskyl's presence. Oh, you only meant that. That's - I'll have to think about it. Less of a big deal, anyway. I'm not mad, you just startled me. Diana can tell that she's a bit shaken, and slightly standoffish as a result, but that's all.

oh okay

She's still desperately apologetic underneath that, but...yay?  Nothing seems to be ruined?

There's a wordless sense of Deskyl having seen the apologeticness, and - while slightly confused at the details of it - accepted the apology, and then her presence fades and she goes to get DZ.

Diana slooooowly exhales the breath she was subconsciously holding.  Phew.

Deskyl is back after a moment.

    "She says to tell you that she can't use that technique very often - if she does too much of it she ends up unable to stop, for that person."

"...I mean, I don't know if she minds, and am assuming she probably would, but...I don't think I would mind all that much, and most of that more because of reflexive embarrassment at exposing people to my weird thoughts than, intrinsic desire to not share them.  With Deskyl, at least, under the assumption that she's been...generally self-similar?  That she's not in some incredibly unlikely lacuna of possible Deskyl-states, that will collapse when something else happens?  ...It's so hard to put the thing I'm thinking about why in the galaxy's breadth I'd trust her to know my mind more than - I don't know, my Jedi friends - but, somehow it's there, and of course it's all feelings-y because rationally speaking I should be running away screaming, but that's just wrong, and, the Force agrees?  ...is it something I could learn, this technique or an equivalent?"

    "It's an intermediate sensory technique, she says, ma'am, and you can probably learn it - there's also a counter, but it's more complex. For now she'd like to sleep, though."

"Of course.  Sleep well, Deskyl."

And Diana heads off to...probably get changed because ugh robe and then tinker and - she'll grieve some more later.

Deskyl's back in the galley for lunch at the expected time.

Diana...isn't?

R4 wheels through the door with the wrench emblem on it, breebling aggressively.

Aha.  There she is.  Being physically nudged by the droid.

"Got a little bit lost in trying to actually put this - " it looks more like some sort of half-assembled Mandalorian armor than anything you'd expect to see on a Jedi, though it's not like Diana hasn't been consistently wearing at least some armor day-to-day, "- together; it's not got anything volatile in, yet, or I wouldn't bring it out, but I think it'll be pretty useful fighting saber-wielders once it's done!  Much like my green saber, where I can parry and also shoot someone with stunners."  Diana puts the bracer back, and busies herself getting lunch.

Huh, okay. (Nom.)

Sign sign -

   "Master Diana?"

"Mmhmm?"

    "Master Deskyl says that she should probably teach you some Sith meditation exercises. Tonight after dinner, perhaps."

"Oh, probably!  I haven't exactly had much trouble with meditation-by-getting-lost-in-my-work, but I imagine that the more standard 'clear your mind' osik is counterproductive to Sithness!  Sounds like a good plan, thank you for even offering!  You - aren't obligated to, at all, and you're doing it anyway, y'know?  So...thanks, Deskyl."

    "She says she wouldn't have offered if she didn't want to, ma'am."

"Well, yes, but it should still be acknowledged?  Gratitude for favors done is, important, or you get entitlement.  And I don't want to be an asshole!  So you're getting thanked!"

She considers this for a minute, then shrugs and goes back to her lunch.

Fair enough!  Lunch passes quietly, then, though Diana does get a bit weepy as thoughts drift through her no-longer-hyperfocused mind.  She's fine, though, or as fine as she can be when people are dying that's bad she doesn't like that.

She adds an item to her list: Research Force Ghosts.

Deskyl stretches in her chair when she's done eating, and heads over to the cargo bay to do some simple Soresu katas.

Seeing Deskyl heading off to do her katas reminds Diana that in the bleary mess of this morning, she didn't do hers - and since there's enough space down there for two people, she may as well join her fellow Force-Sensitive.

She's actually doing quite a few of the same katas as Deskyl; she has a more intensive and expansive overall routine, though, and it seems to involve moving objects in increasingly more convoluted patterns while she's practicing, R4 beeping signals and sigils at her from various positions as she goes.

Deskyl calls a halt to her own workout after barely more than a wamup. (She'd wanted to do more, but in her current physical condition she might make mistakes, and while she doesn't expect to make any serious ones, having Diana notice even a relatively minor one seems like it might complicate what's already a complex interpersonal situation. Or maybe not, Jedi are very weird, but she's going to err on the side of caution here.) Instead of leaving, though, she hangs around to watch Diana.

Diana works her way from Soresu, through Djem So, through Makashi, through Shien, and back to Soresu, weaving in Jar'Kai and Trakata (to wit, she's using both one and multiple blades and turning them off and on as she moves, especially her double-bladed saber); she also practices any Ataru, especially in conjunction with Form V, but clearly believes it to have limited situational use, based on how little of it makes it into her drills.

By the time she's done, she's breathing heavily, but she's glowing in the Force from the joy of moving well.

Her concurrent Force practice, meanwhile, consists of levitating several pouches' worth of hexagonal metal discs in patterns, when she's not specifically training versatility by rotating shelves on the fly, or dis- and reassembling (dummy) blasters.

    "Well done, she says, ma'am."

She gives a performer's curtsey, with a small grin on her face, before returning to a more serious expression.

"I have to be very good at fighting to leave the people I fight, in the concentrations I fight them at, more often alive than not.  So I practice very hard.  I think it's worth it."

Deskyl nods.

    "She says 'that's not easy to do, with Sith', ma'am."

"It really, really isn't, no.  Though I often only need retreat, when I fight one.  That eases the matter somewhat."

"Mmhmm."

    "She says 'Darths won't usually let you get away with that'."

"I don't expect I'll have the luxury of sparing them, should it come to blows, no."

She sighs; her emotions are a mixture of distant grief, determination, and grim resolve.  "The Empire needs to go.  The tradeoff in lives is too great, even if it is my hand that takes them."

    "Yes ma'am."

    "Have you had an opportunity to think about how you're going to want to approach that?"

"I have much less skill at politics than strategy, and less skill at strategy than tactics.  Taking down the Empire, or stopping its atrocities...

"I'm likely going to need help, there; that much I know.

"Really, the key problem is making sure that it won't immediately explode with the Emperor dead.  The rest is cultural and can actually be solved in a cultural manner, to wit, beating up Sith Lords."

    "She says you'll have the same problem she was expecting to with Lord Pritruth, with the Emperor - everyone near him in the hierarchy will be trying to kill you while you're weakened from the fight, to take the empire for themselves. Which will be very much like it exploding; she's not sure that's avoidable. Her plan for when she killed Pritruth won't work there, either."

"...Hmmm.  How soon will they be doing that?  Because I can get allies to watch my back, and they can't."

    "That specifically she expects to be essentially immediate, ma'am, but it's not uncommon for Sith of that rank to be patient enough to wait for an opening. Your ability to work together is a known strength of Jedi, though, she says - she expects you to be attacked by the Dark Council and other powerful Sith, but many of them will also attack each other if the Emperor falls, if they think that's their best route to a position they'll like in the new order."

"...I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you're implying; can you - expand that out a step, especially the 'known strength of Jedi' bit, and whether you expect the new order thing to produce action for or against un-horrible-ifying things?"

Deskyl and DZ sign back and forth for a minute, after DZ offers a polite 'one moment, please, ma'am'.

    "Master Deskyl expects that most of the high-ranking Sith will attack whoever defeats the Emperor immediately after he's defeated, in order to take advantage of any injuries, exhaustion, or other effects on them from the battle with him. But she doesn't expect all of them to do so; some will try other strategies, likely including fleeing, taking revenge on Sith they disliked but were prevented from killing by the Emperor, or killing other Sith or otherwise capturing their resources in hopes of convincing whoever ultimately achieves control of the empire of their strength or usefulness. She doesn't know enough about Dark Council or their internal politics to make specific predictions; she just notes that this is typical behavior for experienced Sith in a situation like that. In particular she doesn't expect someone who defeats the Emperor to face an alliance of more than, at most, two or three Council members, and it's very likely that their attacks will interfere with each other, or that they'll attack each other outright in hopes of improving their chances of taking the emperorship. She expects this to happen regardless of who defeats the Emperor; it's unrelated to whether he's defeated by someone who will improve things. Jedi don't behave that way - she's not entirely sure why, but it seems to be related to the fact that you aren't involved in governing - and that makes you more able to act as groups in coordinated ways, without infighting, which is a noticeable strategic advantage."

"Thank you; I was under the impression that you were saying that, but couldn't entirely rule out other potential meanings."

"It seems that the situation that is likely to be most necessary to have a good plan for recovering from is 'literally the entire Sith Empire is backstabbing itself'.  That's kind of horrifying, honestly; how it's survived this long is becoming more and more of a mystery with every new fact I learn about it."

Dekyl nods again.

    "That's mostly accomplished via a combination of top-down and lateral defense, ma'am - Master Deskyl and her co-prentice Lord Grauzatis would have killed each other, but Lord Pritruth disallowed it and would have killed either of them if they'd tried; many of Lord Pritruth's clients would be more than happy to take his facility for themselves, but his other clients would object to losing access to his services and would cooperate to defend him against that."

"Good grief."

    "Yes ma'am."

"...Is there something I should know about this Lord Grauzatis fellow?"

Deskyl is slightly more insistent about the calming effect, this time, though if Diana hasn't taken it after a moment she'll signal for DZ to go ahead anyway.

    "He's studying torture, ma'am."

"...for what possible kriffing reason?!  Oh wait it's the institutional kriffing suffering fetish, kriffing banthashit Sith philosophy --"

Diana pauses.  Takes a deep breath.  The swirl of emotions she's feeling becomes more stable, controlled, though it's certainly not denied.

"I see why you want him dead.  You know him better than I ever could.  Will he stop, when he's told to?  Was this research his idea?"

Deskyl sighs.

    "Killing him would arguably be a mercy, she says, ma'am. He won't have much left without his research."

"...Empty void, that's just...sad."

Nod.

    "Lord Pritruth has gotten better at not breaking his apprentices since Lord Grauzatis, she says, ma'am."

Diana opens her mouth, but no words come out for a good few tries.

"That should not have to be a skill that one learns.

"It's different from being a good teacher, but, not hurting your students and certainly never leaving them worse off for learning, is a minimum for being a teacher at all."

Shrug.

    "Nobody was going to stop him, she says, ma'am."

    "She says that the two of you could, though."

"Then let's...do that.  Stop him, and stop the structure above him from replacing him with someone who perpetuates the cyclical abuse, and eventually just stop the whole kriffing Empire.  I think we can.  I think we should.  ...You in?"

    "She says she'll need another month or two of recovery, ma'am."

"Certainly, I wouldn't want to be unprepared.  That time estimate...Is it calculated with or without the aid of healing techniques such as may be learned by Jedi?  I can learn more than I know."

    "She doesn't expect healing to help beyond what it has, ma'am. Most of what she needs is to get back into fighting form."

"Oh!  I actually know techniques specifically for that sort of thing!  I could teach you them!  I wonder if they can be improved by feeding them emotions?  And, I heard something about Sith Alchemy once?"

    "She is absolutely not going to do Sith Alchemy to herself, ma'am."

"Yeah I kind of figured, I just wanted to see if there was something she knew to be potentially useful that I would not be capable of knowing because, Jedi.  I'll get you a holocron of the reinforcement stuff later?"

    "Yes ma'am, she says thank you."

"We're allies and hopefully friends; we help eachother.  ...that said, I have a vague impression that I'd be making a hypocrite of myself if I brushed this off as nothing, so, you're welcome?  I'm going to go encode the - oh, are we going to have weird holocron compatibility problems?  Is that a thing?  I don't think it's a thing if I make the holocron myself since I'm sure you're not evil, but I figure I'd better ask, just in case."

    "She doesn't expect it to be, ma'am. And there's a chance she'll be able to work with standard Jedi holocrons even if most Sith can't, though she won't want to do it very often."

"That makes sense, the...flip-flopping back and forth would suck."

Anyway!  Diana must go tinker!

And Deskyl will go sleep! She's a little late to dinner, but not by much.

And Diana hands her a holocron!  "I don't know if this helps with specifically making 'I've-been-injured-and-need-to-recover' faster, but reliably doing these exercises should boost your physical capabilities all around; strength, speed, reaction time, nutritional efficiency...  It's incremental, but it lasts.  It'll hit diminishing returns eventually, because there's only so much you can make a given body do without getting into mad biology, and the Jedi are notoriously not prone to - well, most of them thought I had lost something when I got this cool mechanical arm - let alone treating genetics like a salad bar, but it works at getting any given body to peak condition."

    "She says thank you, ma'am. And she's curious about your arm, is it a special design?"

"Mhm!  Made it myself, actually.  Well, not all alone, but the hardware was my work.  Some friends helped with the nerve interface and software."

R4's smug breebling indicates who one of those friends is.

    "She'd be very interested in learning how to make artificial limbs that don't affect Force use, ma'am."

"...Well, if that's a thing, I haven't noticed?  ...Add kyber?"

She seems to be genuinely confused by this.  "I don't know for sure why this is a thing people are experiencing to begin with anyway, but if I was to generate a hypothesis, it's because most people seem to reject the idea that their artificial limb is theirs, while I've, done this."  She has microtools in her fingers.  She has a grappling hook in her forearm.  "This is my arm.  I would be less without it; I'm more, with it."

Huh.

    "She's met Sith with artificial limbs before, but she says it's hard to know whether the Force trouble was caused by the dissatisfaction with the limb, or vice versa, or something else. She thinks adding a kyber crystal or two might help regardless, though."

"You can't really go wrong with adding kyber crystals to things, I do quite agree."

Heh.

"...Oh no, now that I'm thinking about it I'm giving myself ideas.  And I don't have to go - restraining myself, about them, now!  ...Pending availability of crystals to work with, I suppose, which...isn't trivial."

    "She does have a spare Sith kyber, she says, but she says it wouldn't suit you."

"Mm?  Not that I doubt that, but I'm curious why?"

    "Sith kybers are - the direct translation of the word is 'dominated', but that loses nuance, ma'am. 'Corrupted' might be closer. I can get it if you'd like to see it."

"...Well, I'm certainly dreadfully curious."

"Yes ma'am."

She brings the crystal out in a small padded carrying case; the crystal inside is a deep red shade not found in natural kyber crystals, and the fabric around it is lightly stained with the same shade of red. It has a gentle presence in the Force, like all kybers, but where Jedi kybers are simply there, this crystal seems withdrawn, almost sad.

"...may I..."  Diana is already reaching out to touch the crystal, but she slows herself for long enough to ask.

Deskyl considers this for a moment.

    "She says you can hold it but not do anything else to it, ma'am; red kybers are prone to cracking when mishandled."

"I, see...It's so sad..."

She cradles the crystal gently.

    "Yes ma'am. She says that's typical of Sith kybers not yet installed in lightsabers."

"...I want to tell it everything's going to be alright...please?"

Her eyes are welling up with sympathetic tears...Diana is clearly extending her compassion to a sad, shiny rock.

    "She says 'carefully', ma'am," DZ reports as she retreats to the cover of the doorway.

Then Diana ever-so-gently reaches out to the kyber crystal cupped in her hands, the lightest of light touches, and offers.

It's an open-ended sort of offer, really; to listen most of all, because she cares about what the crystal (could be said to) wants.  She prefers a world in which that which can be happy and fulfilled, is.  Including crystals.

The crystal doesn't respond.

Maybe if she runs the tiniest amount of Force through it...?

That does... something, it's not very clear what.

...maybe a little more, but if it starts vibrating or straining or something...no more.

Deskyl is in her space and taking the crystal out of her hand before she can get much farther than that.

    "She said no, ma'am."

"...yeah, I don't actually know how Jedi do the thing.  I know they can, though!"

"Hm?"

"Jedi can do something to this sort of kyber crystal to make them...not this?"

"Huh."

    "She says if you find out what, and talk to her about it first, she'll consider allowing it."

"Yeah, it's - " scritch scritch pen to flimsiplast "- on the list."

    "Yes ma'am. She's curious what else is on the list, if you're comfortable sharing?"

"Stuff I intend to do or look up when next I'm at the Temple, mostly.  Assuming they don't exile me."

"Mm."

    "Do you have a sense of how that's likely to go, ma'am?"

"I have absolutely no idea!  ...Probably shouldn't bring you there, though, that would go badly."

    "She's not willing to risk her life for it, no ma'am."

"I doubt the Emperor himself, in a scenario where he can actually try instead of being busy wrangling the Empire, would want to risk it."

This gets another chuckle.

    "Are you sure you want to go yourself, ma'am?"

"It's not about whether I want to, though on the balance I think it's better I do than not; it's about whether I should, and I do think that I should - go back home, for all that it wasn't the home I might have wished for, before I might have to leave that home forever.  And copy all the books."