Elsewhere, Count Dooku stands before his newly acquired students in an empty Serennan hall.

"Today, your training begins. I require apprentices possessing of both great talent in the Force, and the slightest shards of sanity. Both of these qualities, however, are so rare that I have been unable to find anyone who possesses the both of them and is willing to train under me. And unfortunately, until such time as I have either stolen or exhausted my wealth purchasing access to a certain colleague of mine's research, I am incapable of granting the powers of the Force to anyone sane. So I shall instead have to try, though I do not expect to succeed, to beat some sanity into two people who have the Force."

"Your purpose is yet unknown. My own goal is one devoted to improving the galaxy, helping its people - don't give me that look. If you find altruism an insufficiently dark cause, then you may consider your interim goal to be proving yourself useful enough to my cause to avoid having me kill you and sell your bodies to the aforementioned colleague, which is at the moment the only guaranteed use I have for you. Hopefully I can find a better one, although it seems the only training you possess is in the realms of murder and perhaps basic espionage."

"Why are you trained as assassins? Why, of all the things you could have become, of all the ways you might have tried to achieve whatever it is you do hope to accomplish, have you settled on killing people? You have a level of power within you held by not one in a million people; you could easily enough spend your lives doing more. As an extreme lower bound, by generating enough energy - " he flicks his wrist, and a small bolt of lightning crackles between his fingertips " - to fund yourselves and several hundred others living comfortable lives. Slightly more specialized pursuits would be more in the realms of contributing to research; even just the resources of one telepath would be enough to enhance cognitive science to an incredible degree should anyone have ever thought of the idea. And those like myself have far greater ambitions than that. But instead, we find everyone with any real ability using it solely as a weapon, and regardless of whether they fight for justice or for their own advancement, they do not achieve it."

"What do you even want? Has the question even occurred to you? Do you expect your current path to lead you to it? This is an actual question, now, what are you looking for?"

"Power?" volunteers Ventress, after a moment of silence. "Wealth? ...power?"

"Freedom," rumbles Savage. "Escape from those who seek to control me." His gaze is carefully not directed at Ventress or at Dooku in particular.

"What is power even for, Asajj," says Dooku in the bored tone of someone who has had this conversation before at least a dozen times. "Is there any specific power you were hoping for, or is it just that the word 'power' sounds good to your ears. Have you made even the slightest effort to seize this power, or wealth, or whatever it is you're looking for - well, yes, I'm sure you've made effort, but have you done anything particularly out of the ordinary, or simply tried very hard to do well in school in the hope that it would lead to some vaguely defined power."

"You, Savage, are at least a little more specific. Well, you are no longer a slave to the Nightsisters; and should you provide enough value for me, I shall not force you to serve me beyond that. You now have more of a life ahead of you than you expected. What will you do with your freedom?"

"It doesn't matter," says Savage, internally wondering if Dooku is anywhere near being honest. "As long as I'm free."

"I would guess the answer is no, but would you go back to free the others?"

What kind of a question is that he is standing right next to a Nightsister right here even if he did want to which he kind of d which he certainly doesn't he wouldn't say it out loud - "No."

Ah. "Even so, you seem rather... limited in your ambitions, Savage. It seems that selfish values would not decrease, and in fact quite possibly increase, the amount that the quality of your free life should matter to you."

"There is a framework that a great many people seem to fall into, even if - " he turns to Ventress " - they conceptualize themselves as caring about getting more power. All too often, when they imagine changing their lives, it is solely in ways such as gaining freedom, or wealth, or even just status and prestige, and they do not even ask themselves if there is a way to transcend all that they know as life to begin with."

"If you want the power to do anything more than break those who are below you, all the weapons in the galaxy will be of no use to you, for those who are above you are not breakable by weapons. And if you want to defeat those who are presently controlling you, you are going to have to start challenging the forces that control even the most powerful among mortals."

"It is not that immortality is quite the only goal in life, and indeed it means little without something that you are living for. But I cannot imagine many things I would care much about, that I could complete within the blink of an eye that is a hundred years of life, nor in but a hundred hundred. And bringing about a future in which none have to worry of such things is indeed all that I currently aim for."

He brushes away the guise he wears, shakes away each drop of white dye in his hair, and tears away each wrinkle from where they are fastened somewhat looser, today, than usual. "My associate has bought me half a century of additional life already, at the cost of two others' lives. And make no mistake, that is a cost, Jedi though they may have been. It is not a cost that I will keep paying again and again indefinitely, and it has certainly not bought me anything near a satisfactory solution. We will all, should our mission succeed, soon have that chance to keep living beyond the shackles of death."

"You are not currently in any condition to contribute to that mission. We shall begin correcting that problem. I only wanted to ensure that you know that it is in your very best interests to cooperate, not out of threat but out of your very own self-interest, because this is what we are fighting for."

"Or, perhaps, not 'fighting for' - it matters not at all, how much we fight, how very hard we try to make things better, if we all die anyway despite our noblest efforts. What matters is that we succeed."

And then the training, if it could even be called that, begins.