No one, no one, no one...

...hundreds upon hundreds of people, all within a single enormous room.

Aliens! And, also, ow, she shouldn't really be exerting herself like that. They may have noticed her, though? It's hard to tell - they're quite alien aliens - but she gets the impression that they're reacting to her attention. [Hello?]

Hello!!!! Oh this is a new person!!!! Hi new person are you [~] these people? (Here's a list of all people. No, really, all people. All of them human.) You feel slightly [≠] from all people but they're not sure exactly how. You are also not [=] to these two specific people—identical twins, male, one of them with platinum blond hair and the other with a brown undercut under a more natural-looking blond, both with glowing blue eyes, the latter hiding those eyes behind yellow-tinted shades, the former entirely nude (but with weird white-and-blue glowing skin and no genitals) and the latter wearing a signature jacket (long, puffy, bright red) over black form-fitting trousers and shirt, the former perfectly healthy and the latter missing his left arm and having a chrome teal robotic prosthetic—and they are feeling confused about what other types of people there are.

Also, all of the hundreds of them are talking to her at the same time and not, exactly, cooperating about it. It's a cacophony of psychic sounds.

Ow. She shuts down her incoming telepathy channel, practically on reflex against the cacophony.

[I'm going to sleep for a while and we can try this again afterward,] she sends, cautiously, after a minute. [I'd prefer not to be disturbed, and for nobody else to know that I'm here until I agree to let them know.] And she'll ease her telepathy channel open just a bit, listening to one of the louder aliens in particular, to hopefully get a response.

That they can definitely cooperate with respecting. They will not look in her direction for a few hours and not while anyone else is looking at them.

She appreciates that.

She sleeps.

(DZ waits quietly, as instructed. She doesn't have much to do, and that's fine. She's worried, about their new situation and her ability to do her job in it - she doesn't have the resources to take care of even the most vital of her master's physical needs - but that's not her responsibility to handle, so there's nothing to do about it but worry, and not even very much of that.)

Deskyl wakes again after a few hours, disoriented in the dark, her memories of the events of the day lost. But DZ is there, and Pritruth is not, and she's safer than she's been in months, so that's fine, if startling.

DZ fills her in on her previous interaction with the aliens, and she's more cautious when she goes to speak with them, this time. (She probably can't hide that her memories are gone, even if aliens might be unfamiliar enough with humans to miss that there's something very wrong with her mind in general. She won't point it out, though.)

[Hello again,] she sends to a cluster of six of them; she thinks she can get away with speaking to more than just one, even if communicating to the whole group at once seems unwise.

There is no reply, this time.

Okay.

She extends her other senses, trying to get a feel for the physical structure of the place and anyone else who might be present; she won't be able to see much about their minds, this way, but she can at least get a feel for how many people are here, and their species and physical condition.

The hundreds of aliens aren't actually extremely close to her. Between her and them there is a maze of corridors and rooms and dead ends, some suggesting that this place used to have many purposes that were long ago abandoned. Relatively speaking, very little of this place looks occupied. They are also very underground.

The room with the aliens, however, is enormous. The aliens themselves seem to be inside individual tanks filled with some liquid lining the walls of the huge room. Along the center of this room is a metal walkway going from one end to the other, with doors leading back into the complex on either end, and lifts at regular intervals that can take one to see any of the individual tanks should they wish to. The aliens themselves are shaped like round bulbs atop a thin stem, about as tall as a short human female. They don't vary much at all, in appearance, but any.

That room also has someone else—a tall humanlike alien, entirely nude, a male frame but no genitals—floating slowly between the tanks.

(Also, most rooms here seem to have yet a third kind of alien, insectlike and winged, the smallest ones no bigger than a mosquito and the largest ones as long as fifteen inches.)

The tank aliens don't seem to be in very good shape, either, ranging from 'basically fine' to 'not, technically, dying'. She's not quite sure what to make of it - presumably if they'd mentioned being in trouble she would have told DZ; maybe this is some sort of medical facility? The lack of medical staff is odd but maybe this species prefers droids for their medical care or something. She notes to DZ that she'd like to ask them about that, when they're in contact again.

The lack of humans, or anything that looks like human support facilities, is also concerning; Sith or not, she's going to need to eat eventually. She extends her senses farther - there's almost certainly something, the Force wouldn't've put her somewhere unsurvivable.

Stretching her view out farther eventually reveals some signs of habitation: a single kitchen, a bedroom, both very tidy. Its occupant(s) is/are nowhere to be seen.

Farther out: there he is, inside an large room, using a computer. Human, this time, wearing white, various metal contraptions attached to his body. And sharing a tank in this room, several other of the bulbous aliens, floating lazily in the liquid.

Mm.

She can get to the kitchen, but not without the bugs noticing her, and it's not clear how sapient they are exactly, but she judges them at least smart enough to notice her and report to someone. Plus with only one human around it'll get obvious pretty fast that someone else is taking food, even if she can pull it off without being seen. So her options here are to make herself known, or to take whatever travel supplies she can get ahold of and leave.

Are the nearby aliens still unresponsive? What if she tries the farther group? It's a bit of a stretch but she can talk to them at least briefly.

Still unresponsive.

(The tall humanoid alien starts to float towards one of the bulbous aliens, specifically. One that glows an ominous red.)

She doesn't have anything better to do if the aliens aren't speaking to her right now; she'll watch and see what happens with the tall alien.

Tall alien stops in front of the tank, places both hands on it and rests his forehead against it, and then... glows. Except for his face, hands, and feet, which looked human, most of his skin was paper white with faintly glowing blue lines that look similar to those on the skin of the bulbous aliens; when he does this, though, the whiteness and blue lines stretch to cover everything, and he glows much more intensely.

Simultaneously, the alien in the tank unfurls, the bulb opening up like petals to reveal a more humanoid body plan within. Vaguely female humanoid, with long thin arms and fingers and eyes too large for her face. She floats down to where the tall alien is and touches the glass from her side, matching him.

And one second after that the aliens are back in her head.

Hi hello are you alright, vague feelings of regret, a projection of the memory of her asking that they not let anyone else know she's here associated with a feeling of "this has explanatory power" and an associated mental image of the tall alien (with a fractal of memories and thoughts and feelings too dense to be properly analysed).

Legit to want to wait 'till he's distracted!

[I'm fine!] She's not thinking of it as a lie, but this isn't really true; she's certainly in about the best condition she's been in in the last six months, but only because the last year has been so awful - she's nearly died four or five times, and the in-between bits haven't been very good either. In objective terms, she's dealing with some fairly significant brain damage, and it's only fine in the sense that she's used to it and not very bothered by it by now, and much too happy about having escaped to care even if it did bother her. [I'm worried about how I'm going to manage here, though. Can you tell me about [the tall alien] and [the human] and [the bugs]? Especially how they might react to me and [Daisy] being here?] She's noticed that the tall alien seems very angry, and that the human isn't in very good emotional shape; she doesn't have much of a read on the bugs yet, they're too alien and too diffuse. Daisy, on the other hand, she has lots of feelings about - she loves her, she's in love with her, but she feels very complicatedly about that; she doesn't think it's safe, particularly, for either of them but especially for Daisy, and she's not confident in her guess of how to do right by her, but on the other hand the default situation for her, at least where they were before, was so much worse that there's no possible way that just leaving her be could be the best option.

Did she want a cacophony of voices answering each part of her question individually via a flood of memories and feelings attached to them and associations between them? Too late that's what she's getting.

She's braced for it this time at least, but no, that's not what she wanted, ouch. [Slow down, please, I can't hear you that way.] Also they could probably really hurt her but she's definitely not going to say that; they're cute but that doesn't mean they're not potentially adversarial.

They can pluck the thought about hurting her right out of her head and attach a feeling of regret to it while showing it to her. Slowly. After that there is some quick conversation between the aliens before they decide on a single one of them being point alien.

Feelings of delight at acquaintance! Ineffable mental handle attached to a mental reference to this one specific alien. Feelings of confusion attached to a mental image of Deskyl and Daisy analogised to a mental image (from the point of view of a human) of an empty room connected (using a past-to-futre relation) to another mental image of the same room containing someone (who isn't Deskyl but who has Deskyl-and-Daisy referents attached to them in the feeling).

Then another alien pipes in to the first alien with a mental image of Deskyl's questions and a feeling of calling attention to it, and the first alien sends a feeling of agreement and then presents the question to Deskyl again with a further questioning feeling overlaid on top of it.

Oh she does not like that they can casually read her mind like that. Not that she thinks this means they should stop; her strongly-held opinion on nonstandard senses is 'of course people get to have those'. But there's definitely a sinking feeling in her stomach about it; feels like being in danger. She ignores that, though - it's not an immediate danger - to focus on the rest of the message.

She thinks they're asking how she got here? She doesn't remember - she doesn't remember lots of stuff, and really doesn't like people knowing that, it makes her look weak and that's dangerous - but according to Daisy (good, lovely, loyal, trustworthy) she teleported them in a panic when Pritruth (horrible, rage-inducing) and some goons (ugh) were trying to take her to do the mysterious harming thing again. It's not very surprising that she could do that, in a panic, since she's a Sith, but she can't count on doing it again and would have to either be in a similar situation or do a lot of work to even have a chance.

About her questions - she's not exactly human, but if they know about humans that's mostly the kind of creature she is. (The kind of creature she is is a Sith; Sith are primarily derived from humans and the process changes their biology a bit, among other things.) She needs to eat and drink and sleep and so on, less so than normal humans but still some, so if she's going to stay here she needs a way to get food and water, and if she's going to leave it's a good idea to have some food and water to bring with her in case it's hard to find in other places. She asked about the other people here because that's relevant to getting food and water safely; she doesn't know how they'll react to finding her here unexpectedly. She can handle a fight if she has to (and she's definitely assuming there's a risk of one if she's noticed, and that it goes without saying that this is the case), but she'd prefer to avoid it and prefer to have information about her potential enemies' capabilities beforehand if it's not avoidable.

(Daisy doesn't need food or water; Daisy isn't biological. She hasn't sorted Daisy's energy needs out yet but the resources she needs for that are already available, she'll just need to do a little bit of destructive remodeling to the room they're in. Or if there's wire somewhere that they can direct her to, that also works.)

The alien... doesn't, quite, follow the whole explanation, but her sisters are paying attention too and they can cobble together an understanding after a bit.

Let's tell Deskyl about the tall alien! Tall alien has a phonetic name (Nai) and a mental name (ineffable). Some humans have also called Nai "Knives" (mental image of what knives are) and he's adopted it as a moniker to match his [complicated definitions of personhood as a mutable thing] x [Nai's self-concept].

(Even while trying to be slow, the alien still communicates in pretty dense information packets. They're all formatted in the same way as her regular thoughts—that is, mostly memories and mental images with associated feelings and relations—but they'd probably be interpretable pretty easily if it werent for the fact that she presents those concepts as whole units and then moves on to the next thing.)

Anyway! Tall alien is the same species as the bulbous aliens ("plants" is what they call themselves) but kinda different, with a little bit of human spliced in (though not in a "genetics" sense, more in a "grab a plant and then change it a bit to be more human using complicated interdimensional matter and energy creation stuff). He has more and better access to the dimension the plants fetch matter and energy from, and he uses it for casual matter creation, telekinesis, and regeneration. She catches Deskyl's thing about "fighting" and feels very sad about this! She does not want Deskyl and Nai to fight. Also she thinks that if Deskyl and Nai fights Deskyl will die because here are a bunch of memories of what Nai can do:

• Telekinesis of himself, easily.
• Telekinesis of a whole building, with somewhat more difficulty.
• Generation of a dizzying number of flying blades with barely a thought.
• Very fine control of those blades, "hair width" "milisecond" precision would be an understatement of how fine.
• Being shot at by machine guns and healing nearly-instantaneously.
• Being exploded and healing quickly and not becoming incapacitated in the meantime at all.

If Deskyl is a different kind of human maybe she can deal with that! The plant doesn't know. But Nai is very powerful and very deadly.