"Congratulations.  ...You shouldn't have mentioned the Trial of Insight at all, if I'm not allowed to know!  Now I can start deducing things about it!  Like it involving illusions!

"But it's probably fine, honestly.  I still won't know when it's happening, which is the important bit.  ...Probably; I can't be sure of whether that matters, really."

"So what have you been up to?"

"Same as you, but on Tatooine.  ...It...The mission went well, but I worry that it should have gone better than it actually did.  Not necessarily because of anything I did or didn't do, once everything started happening, but - they didn't put Master Windu in the vanguard, and Master Trebor is dead because of that.  And I saw that coming, erm, metaphorically speaking, not literal visions - and just...didn't speak up.  And I should have."

"I feel like that's too much of a burden to put on yourself? Like, from what I've heard, you did pretty well. Even if you didn't do everything completely perfectly... I don't think it has to be your responsibility whenever anything goes wrong."

"No, I suppose it doesn't.  But I still feel bad, because - at least if I had spoken up, and maybe been dismissed, it wouldn't have been in my hands to this extent.  ...Even though it really should have been in Master Windu's."

"What was happening? Why do you think Master Windu wasn't... wherever you're saying he should have been? I don't actually know much about the details of the mission."

"So General Syndulla, from Ryloth, took operational command; he spun out a pretty decent plan of police action, where he and two Jedi had to go and talk to Jabba, the Hutt, in his palace.  And defend themselves when Jabba inevitably attacked.  Except he didn't take Master Windu, who's really good at fighting, as one of the two inside-the-palace-when-the-fight-starts Jedi."

"Huh. Then where was Master Windu?"

"In the reserve."

"I mean, there might have been a good reason, but yeah, it seems like it would have made more sense to have put him in the front."

"I'm coming back to Coruscant pretty soon. Are you going to be heading there?"

"I think that's the plan."

"Great!"

"Hey, what is Master Windu like? He seems like he would be a pretty tough teacher."

And then a slight wince as his brain starts reminding him about how Qui-Gon was an amazing teacher, but now he's gone and nope he is not thinking about that right now.

"He is really tough.  But he's really good at what he does, and what he does is a lot of what I need to learn.  Not all of it.  No one can know everything or be everything, and - you must be careful, to not place people on plinths, and look up to them like they are perfect.  This way lies a subtle but disastrous mode of failure, for the person will not, cannot, live up to the image in your head.  People are always people, and we all have our flaws.  Myself included.  ...But I digress.  A lot of what I think I'll need to know...It's the lightsaber, it is combat.  And Master Windu?  He invented Vaapad.  He's an expert.

"And as for why?  ...I feel like there's still something looming.

"That there's people out there who just won't...let the galaxy keep spinning, if they aren't in charge of it - who still have the power to make that implicit threat stick.

"And maybe it's the Sith, or maybe it's some other dark-siders; maybe it's some conspiracy of the Dark Side itself...

"But there's going to be another fight, before all this ends, before I can put down the sword I've taken up.

"And as much as I wish I could make it so, I don't believe it's going to be won with words."

"Yeah. The dark side's not usually the kind of thing you can just talk to and convince to stop being evil. Doesn't matter how tough it is, it's worth it if we're fighting the Sith."

"I think there's a small, but pointed, distinction to make, there - it's worth it if we are fighting for good ends.

"Not that I think the Dark Side lets its wielders truly have those, but perhaps, someday, that might change.

"But the point is to - always be mindful of the cause for which you draw a weapon, and make sure it's truly something you'd spend lives for before you do.

"...Most things really shouldn't be."

"Well, yeah, but the Sith are evil, so... it is a good cause. Because we're getting rid of them."

"Palpatine?  Definitely evil.  Count Dooku and the other guy - not the assassin - ...there's a very convincing argument that especially Dooku is just potentially misled.  The Dark Side has agency, and so does the Light, and so does the Force itself.  And...even though I'm certain that the other definite Sith has committed crimes he ought to make much more direct amends for than he has, he's doing it because the Dark Side promised him an end to death.

"He will never get it from that source, and ought to know better.  But that's why I say misled, rather than evil on the face of it."

"I mean, sure, the dark side is trying to tempt them, and trick them, but it was still their own choice to listen to it. They're killing people so that they can take over the galaxy. I think that goes beyond just misled."

"I believe neither Dooku nor the remaining Sith Lord actually give a damn about ruling the galaxy, for all that Dooku's...ego, has him thinking he'd be the least bad person for the job more often than not, I'm sure.

"The ambitious one was Palpatine.

"Or...No, that's not exactly correct.  All of them have ambitions - but I don't think any but Palpatine had ambitions about ruling the galaxy.

"It just doesn't really track with what we've seen recently.

"And we don't know how much of Palpatine's plans remain - I'm sure there's more than I'd like that someone's using - but.

"Yeah, killing people is wrong, but a civil war will kill billions more than they have hurt, even if it's not one they masterminded.

"That's the problem of astropolitics.  Sometimes, the powerful escape justice because of the power they have, and there's nothing to be done but believe in karma."

When Dooku hears this (which will be a few days later, when he's going through various data collected by his bugs in the Jedi channels), he'll toss his device aside in disgust. He'll pick it up a few minutes later and continue listening; he of course recognizes the importance of strategy over emotions, but he at least was disappointed enough to have thrown it to the side in the first place, which is quite something, as Dooku's hatred for others has gotten to the point where very little can disappoint him. But this was a bitter reminder that however intelligent this child may be, she's still far more oblivious than he might have hoped. Really, she's talking about karma? This is the smartest Jedi in the Order?

Some people might be a little more charitable, when it comes to this. If they were to consider the ways in which karma might be considered a valid idea, it would immediately come to mind that, even if there isn't literally a magical higher power of karma, it's a useful heuristic. After all, it's often incredibly difficult for someone to see the specific consequences of their actions; someone who hurts others for what they see as their own benefit might only be calculating the first-order effects that will happen very soon, but won't recognize that over the years, this might alienate others and cause them to gain ire from the people around them, who would have otherwise been far more valuable to their lives than the immediate benefit they might get from their selfishness. So karma might be very helpful for someone to keep in mind, not as a literal belief, but just as a reminder that the effects of selfish actions are predictably less beneficial than what people usually expect. This should have been an obvious point. But Dooku doesn't think of it.

Nor does he think of the idea that the Force institutes its own form of karma, even though to some that might be obvious. On the one hand, this is because Dooku doesn't actually believe the Force to be sentient. It really doesn't make sense that midi-chlorians could have some sort of a collective consciousness; it would be far more likely that the apparent legends of the "will of the Force" are just imprints from particularly strong Force-users. (Of course, if he had heard about Mortis, that would have been different, but unfortunately for him, any conversations on that subject were locked behind the doors of the Jedi Council, which now has much stronger security than Obi-Wan's simple communicator.) But still, he would put maybe a 20% chance on the Force being sentient, which one might think would be enough for him to consider the concept of karma as maybe something he might want to look out for. But Dooku doesn't think of it.

So why doesn't Dooku hear Kina talking about karma, and wonder if maybe she has a point? Well, a little of it is that the specific subject is one he has a bit of an aversion to; it sounds like the sort of thing Yoda would go on about, and even though he is aware that technically Yoda saying something does not make it more likely to be false, he still is a little biased against anything from that source. But more generally...

Well, Dooku just... doesn't do that.

He doesn't listen to people saying something that sounds wrong, and ask himself if maybe there's a good reason that thing is true anyway.

He just hears it, and it's clearly wrong, so he moves on.

If Count Dooku has one major flaw, it's... well, the obvious answer if you were a Jedi would be that it's a pretty massive flaw that he runs around killing people, but he's quite sure he's justified in that. But that one flaw of Dooku's, that he might even be willing to admit, if you put it the right way...

Well, it comes from how Dooku's spent his life being the smartest person around.

He was smarter than his family. He was smarter than his friends, to whatever extent he had any. He was smarter than his teachers. He was smarter than the Jedi Master who is typically considered to be literally the wisest being in existence, and it wasn't even close. Even the Sith he's met, who at least were capable of holding up the other half of a conversation with him some of the time, were never really all the way at his level.

And of course that isn't a bad thing. Being more intelligent would of course be correlated with getting more things correct, with achieving more success; what else would it even mean. But he's missing something that most people have learned, that they've incorporated into their basic intuitions. When other people are wrong all the time, when he can see the gaping holes in any argument they even try to mention, Dooku's never had any point where he's had to notice to himself that actually no, he was wrong, they were right.

And so he doesn't even check.

Most people have experience arguing, with others and with themselves, thinking about each of the many possible answers and figuring out which, if any, is right. And if Dooku had ever met someone more intelligent than himself, had ever realized that oh, they were right, he might have been able to do that to himself, might have been able to realize to himself that just because the most obvious argument supported something didn't mean he couldn't actually have been wrong. He might have been able to ask himself the obvious questions that he would ask of other people's points, seen the obvious flaws in himself. But that's not a reflex he's ever really been trained into.

Intelligence shouldn't have led him down the wrong path, at any point. More intelligence should have been strictly superior to less. But if he wanted to get onto the right path, he should have been putting it towards figuring out what that path was, instead of coming up with cleverer and cleverer arguments, arguments that nobody could have stood a chance at refuting, for why he should have kept going exactly the way he already was.

And so, just as always, Dooku will hear what someone else says, and he'll notice that there is an obvious refutation, and he won't even think of doing the same thing to the point he just made.

Of course, he'll never notice that he has this particular tendency, even though he spends his whole life noticing flaws in others. Because that would require piercing his own thoughts with the same rigor that he applies to others, and that would never happen.

And yes, he might have been willing to listen, if it was phrased exactly the right way - just because the supporters of an idea aren't very smart doesn't make it false, so you have to use your own power evenhandedly, to evaluate the real truth; you've spent so long being smarter than others, that you haven't built up the mental rigor for challenging yourself that is essential if you want to become stronger. But nobody has ever said that to him, not in those same words. People have said you're too overconfident, or you need to be more willing to consider that other people are right, and of course neither of those have possessed the same sharp eloquence that Dooku's own words have, and so he'll dismiss them as being obviously incoherent, and won't even try to build them up into anything stronger. Dooku would have noticed this dangerous habit, had he been staring at himself from the outside, but he's not, and so there isn't anyone there to tell Dooku he's wrong.

Right now, Dooku is in the middle of carrying out an idea of his, and if anyone else had told him to do so he would have noticed how risky of an idea it was, but he came up with it himself so he's not going to notice, and so on. That idea happens to be recruiting dark side apprentices from Dathomir!

"Count Dooku!" says Talzin, queen of the Nightsisters, as he steps from his ship, and she somehow manages to make it both friendly and subtly threatening. "We have selected only the finest of our Nightsisters and Nightbrothers for your consideration."

A warrior emerges from the shadows. Which is actually kind of surprising, given that they're in an open field with no objects that might cast shadows, but come on, this is Dathomir. He stands several feet taller than either of them, and his head is adorned with yellow and black markings and several sharpened horns that seem substantially larger than might naturally grow.

"I present Savage Opress, brother of Darth Maul, and the strongest warrior on all of our planet," says Talzin. The indicated warrior will accompany this with a loud roar.

Dooku is sure he is supposed to be impressed.

"I will, ah, take that into account."

"So, I am quite grateful for your offer, but I actually was thinking about several other qualities beyond just brute strength. You see, to be a truly great Sith, one has to draw power from sources other than just one's fists-"