"Hm..."

Older droids are unstable and erratic, he was always told. Older droids have personalities? Wipes remove them?

This is a pretty troubling thought!

"I'm safe," she reassures. "Pradnakt wouldn't have kept me if I wasn't."

"No, it's... Philosophical ramifications?"

"...ah. Yes," she asserts.

He's quiet and thoughtful.

It's not like slavery is unheard of. No Hutt would say it's wrong. No droid-owner would say making droids do things and occasionally wiping them is wrong.

...He would hate hate hate being a droid.

"That little piece of information has given me a lot of stuff to think about."

"It did Pradnakt, too. She'll be happy to talk to you about it, if you'd like."

"I don't talk about thinky things very much."

"Okay."

"There is going to be some philosophy as part of your training, though."

"I mean, I think about things... I just don't talk about them. Nobody seems to appreciate it." There's a bit of a scowl there.

"Well." The droid's grin comes through clearly in her tone. "You're with us, now; you'll find that's not the case any more."

"...She's very scary. You're scary by association. Maybe that'll go away."

The rest of the trip passes quietly, probably.

Possibly.

It's a long trip; a little over four hours, all told. Around halfway through it, they turn from the main road onto a tiny trail, barely more than a game trail or goat path, and shortly after that they begin passing artwork, metal worked into the stone and cliff faces beside the trail, or stone worked into metal, arranged to catch the light or in a few cases with their own light sources, all in Pradnakt's familiar abstract style.

...He takes photos, that's probably what he's doing with the little bundle of wires and chips he fished out of his backpack.

Daisy doesn't comment, but does begin slowing slightly as they pass each piece.

"I like that one particularly," he says of a sculpture that's slightly reminiscent of a crashed ship embedded sideways in a section of cliff.

"That one was an interesting technical challenge," she reports, "it took a few months to figure out how to get it to support itself like that. Good results, though. My favorite's still ahead." She points it out when they get there; a delicate lattice of metal, anodized blue, shaped to suggest smoke flowing over the brown stone it's set in.

He nods at it and snaps photos, but, "Did you make it hollow and put struts inside?"

"Mmhmm. It's still pretty heavy, though, she needed enough of a base for the detail work."

"Wouldn't do if it took repulsors to stay up. And I would have thought this one would decay."

"A few of them are meant to decay. That one won't, though, the treatment that turned the wire blue protects it, and she did a few other things like that to it too."

He keeps asking about the sculptures the rest of the way. Mostly about how they were made.

Most of them are straightforward, but she explains the ones that aren't - a chemical bath here, a complicated balance of metals with different densities there, a carefully built heat sink to provide an updraft and a hidden fin to catch it in another case.

And eventually, they round a bend, and the Sith's home comes into view. He'd probably imagined something more impressive; in reality it's a cluster of small adobe buildings - two houses, a garage, and a fourth building that he doesn't get a good enough look at to figure out what it might be before it's hidden behind the larger house - and a dusty yard containing a tree and a well tucked up against the larger house, a large freestanding sculpture of the sort that the Sith occasionally sells, and a small fire circle ringed by rocks. The Sith herself is sitting on one of those rocks, reading something on a datapad, and doesn't look up as they approach,

"Lord Pradnakt. Here I am."

"Very good. Daisy will show you to your quarters," she nods at the smaller house. But rather than moving to do that, the droid signs to the Sith, who reacts with a pleased smile. "Perceptive, good. As a reward for figuring out Daisy's secret, you may have a treat with dinner - meat with the meal, or ice cream or fruit for dessert afterward, or tea with it."

He reacts slightly to the word 'may'.

"...Wasn't that hard to guess. Meat I think. And I like most of the art."