"And not just about you running a couple people over with the landspeeder, I mean the fun secret."

Oh.

Well, if he already knows, then Palpatine will use the Force to throw Damask out of the landspeeder and run him over.

...why is this not working, come on.

Plagueis slows the speeder to a stop, clutches onto Palpatine's hand, and leaps away by a margin of a hundred or so meters.

Oh, no.

"Okay, look, I know I might not have been doing exactly what the Jedi say, but - "

"I'm not a Jedi," says Plagueis with a smile. "My name is Darth Plagueis, the last surviving Sith Lord in the line of Lord Bane, and I'm here with what will most likely be a job offer."

Palpatine will kneel in a fraction of a second. "I'm sorry my lord I wasn't trying to - the Sith are still alive, I didn't think anyone - I thought I was the only one who even cared anymore, who even wanted power - I thought I - I thought you - I can be your apprentice?"

"That," says Plagueis, "depends on your answers to a few questions of mine. If you try to lie, I will of course know."

"First off. What exactly is it that makes you want to be a Sith Lord?"

Well, hopefully he doesn't need to lie. He doesn't know much about the Sith, only what little he's managed to recover from rare artifacts and scraps of unfiltered history, but he's pretty sure that for once in his life, this is someone who actually cares about the same things as him.

"For power. I mean... we're not everyone who we could be. We're people, with all the flaws that people inherently have, and... I mean, I am better at fixing my flaws than most people, but it's not enough. It wouldn't be enough just to be better than everyone, even, it wouldn't be enough to be perfect in every way but one. And I don't think I could ever be perfect, but if I could be... the Sith are the closest I can get. They have the power, the strength, to make me better, to make my life the greatest way it could be, to make me worth more - "

Part of that sounds right, and part of that isn't even close.

"Power's not a goal in and of itself," says Plagueis. "Power means the ability to achieve goals, the strength to be able to do anything you want, be anyone you want. And it's of course a worthy subgoal, but what would you do with power?"

Palpatine pauses for a few moments, and oh no he said something wrong in front of the Sith Lord he needs to say something right - "Anything I wanted. I mean... I don't know exactly what, but I could take over the galaxy, I could - I could live forever."

"Yes, living forever is something we all want. Taking over the galaxy - what for? What would you even do with a galaxy?"

"...well, obviously having a galaxy is better than not having a galaxy? And if I lived beyond trillions of years I might need planets' worth of space and materials for computing, like, to simulate me if I was hosted on a computer, or whatever I was built of by then, and also probably a bunch of backups just in case. I don't think I've spent much time thinking about exactly what I would want to do with eternity; obviously there are a bunch of fun things I've come up with but I'm sure once I've enhanced my intelligence I can come up with better ones."

This one's at least looking for the right things in a sense, at least he cares about immortality and becoming stronger and smarter and all that but he doesn't seem to care about anything else.

"Most of this seems to be centered around you. What of the rest of the galaxy?"

"Well... they'd be working for me, if they were still alive? I'd probably keep some alive, there are a few things you need other people for. And if I took over the universe with people then they'd probably get some space of their own, although I don't want to - " Oh is he worried that Palpatine wants to kill him? But every Sith Lord kills their master! "Obviously I would still have loyalty to those who had helped me!" he stammers out. "Any Sith who took over the galaxy with me! I wouldn't betray them!"

"First, that's a lie," says Plagueis, who is not actually able to read his mind, but can still guess pretty well what he's thinking.

"And second, it appears you don't have much concern for... morality."

...that's a trick, right? It's obviously some kind of trick.

"Morality's not real?" he replies, hesitantly. "It's just what people come up with to try to make other people want to help them, it doesn't actually matter."

"Really."

"Well, I certainly don't mean to postulate some sort of... objective morality, whatever that would even mean. It's not even consistent for there to be something that people overall should do, without should being defined in somewhat arbitrary terms. Each individual has their own goals, and they each try to accomplish those, and there's no larger framework in which one's goals are somehow more correct than others, I'll grant you that."

"But suppose someone's inherent goals contained morality? Suppose someone truly did want to help all people that exist, and it wasn't because they were confused about philosophy and following what other people said, it was because they genuinely cared about others?"

"People don't actually care about that, they're just following instincts and trying to signal that they - "

"You know, I find it a little amusing, how in your great cynicism, your quest to see what's wrong with other people, you've turned around and tried to establish your own sort of system in which there's one true kind of goal and the people who do other things are worthless. I am aware that most of the people professing that they care about others are wrong about a great many things. That does not, in fact, mean that it is somehow inconsistent to care about others."

"As it so happens, there do exist people who value the greater good of people as a whole, and while there might not be some objective reason that you should care about that, it is an entirely self-consistent value that one might have."

"And it was actually one of the main purposes of the Sith Order, and yet just because the Jedi have branded the Sith as evil they have, in what I assume was an accident but is still extremely effective, managed to associate Sith with evil even in the minds of potential Sith themselves. And so lost people like you who could have been my true allies don't care about other people because they think that's only what Jedi do."

"I - so you're saying you care about helping people. And I don't, because I've what, been trained to think morality is for idiots, and so you're going to - you - " Can he fight back in any way. Probably not, but he should at least try...

"Calm down, I'm not actually going to kill you. I am quite upset that you value only yourself, but I am a Sith Lord; my emotions are tools and nothing more."

"But..." and then he stops talking before he can finish his sentence because he really doesn't want to say it.

"You're wondering why I would want you around, given that our values have such strong differences? Why someone good would want to recruit someone evil?"

Frightened nod.

"Well, first off, no matter how opposed they may be in stories, there isn't actually that much of a discrepancy between the good of the galaxy, and that of any individual. Across all possible values, they're indeed very similar. Even if you have no regard for the wellbeing of the rest of the galaxy, we agree on a few things, such as, for example, that I should share my secrets of immortality with you."