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.

She's definitely not going to be able to communicate [ineffable] to Daisy, which means she's not going to be able to get it back from her when she inevitably forgets it. It's not particularly risky to ask the aliens for it again, since they already know her secrets (the sinking feeling never really left, but it intensifies when she thinks about that), but she separately doesn't really like the idea of asking them, asking for that kind of help is an intimacy she's not comfortable with at this time. She'll just have to be prepared to do without it.

She agrees that she probably can't beat Nai in a fight; it doesn't sound like there's any way to kill him or even incapacitate him. There's a chance she could survive a fight with him, depending on whose telekinesis beats whose and who gets the drop on whom (and she does have an advantage at that; as a sensory specialist she's nearly impossible to sneak up on), but there's no way of knowing the former without trying it - if he were a Sith she could guess based on her impression of his power level, but he's not and she can't - and she really doesn't want to try it.

That means her best chance of getting food is sneaking around; the main complication to that is that the bugs will notice her. What's their deal? Are they dangerous? They look pretty smart; do they communicate with, for example, Nai? Are they friendly with him?

Oh man that's complicated. Let's start with trying to explain what exactly their deal is.

So here's an image of a human brain, then here's an image of a neuron with a relationship to the former of the "that is made of billions of these" kind. Then here's a comparison relation:

neuron : individual bug :: brain : [x]

X is a person.

However, there's a complication.

Here's a mental image of a glass of water (or rather, of the water contained in a glass), and then a mental image of an ocean—this planet doesn't have any but these plants have been around since Old Earth—plus another comparison:

glass of water : [x] : individual human :: ocean : [y] : ???

Humans don't have an equivalent to y, and that breaks the comparison to x too, because just like it makes no sense to think of an ocean as being made up of many individual glasses of water it makes no sense to think of y as made up of many individual xs.

Does that make sense?

Sith have something that could be that, or at least similar, in the form of battle meditation. Deskyl has only done it a couple times, to learn how, but it's like this, with the lead Sith at the conceptual center of the group coordinating many other lesser Sith or mundane humans (or both, but she's only abstractly aware that that's possible) into what is in some sense a new temporary creature that's made greater than the sum of its parts by improved communication and coordination between them.

She's curious how similar this is, but finding out really isn't her priority right now; it's mostly relevant to things that might come up once she's figured out how to get food and water.

The plants attach a lot of uncertainty to this feeling but they feel like that sounds probably pretty similar? Though they do have questions related to, say, the intersection of two people within that culture; can those be a person too? Can you have a person that is a little bit of each of the people inside that group?

Oh, right, other questions she asked, what were they again... right.

Here's a memory of numerous bugs coming together into a vaguely humanoid shape and then using fine control over electromagnetic fields to project a sort of "holographic" human-like form. It looks like a white-haired child except for the slitted pupils and the strange fleshy growths around its neck (and occasionally other body parts). That is an x, and hereabouts they go by the phonetic name "Zazi the Beast" (no mental name). Then here's a few memories of this person having a conversation with Nai: some positive, some negative, sometimes Nai kills some of their bugs, and the overall feeling here is "they talk, they collaborate sometimes, they fight sometimes, the bugs do not feel at all threatened by Nai and this irritates Nai".

As for whether they're dangerous, here's an example of a minuscule bug entering a human's airway, then here's an example of a slightly bigger bug envenoming and then killing a human (acompanied by a deep feeling of sorrow that is not altogether volitional), then here's a non-flying sand worm the size of a van, and then here's a non-flying sand worm the size of a medium-sized city district.

(Sith can but generally very much don't meld and flow into one another like that; she actually personally has that problem with mundane humans, too, a little bit, if she reads their minds too much. But yes, they can thoughtshare about this later, practical issues right now.)

Her conclusion is that the small bugs aren't particularly dangerous to her - she's more or less immune to poison, and would notice something with a mind trying to get into her no matter how small it was - and that a big bug might be dangerous to her in some cases, but not necessarily very dangerous, and she expects to have at least a slight advantage in this terrain on account of being more agile and possibly more able to go through walls.

The fact that they talk to Nai is a problem, though; that sharply constrains what she can do without being noticed. She wants to think on it and observe the situation here a bit more but she suspects she's going to end up making a speedy dash of a trip to get whatever supplies she can and then get out of here before Nai has a chance to object.

What's the deal with the thing he's doing, by the way? Is that the usual way he ends up distracted?

Yeah, that is the usual way he ends up distracted, at least when he's in the compound. As for what he's doing... here's a mental image of a plant emitting red light and writhing with an associated feeling of pain and damage and then here's a mental image of a perfectly healthy and happy plant emitting blue light instead. The thing Nai is doing is slowly taking a plant from the former state to the latter. This is not a full explanation but as an overview it is accurate.

She could heal them. It would be very satisfying; there's a deep sense in which healing is what she's for. She lets the thought pass without entertaining it at all.

Does he keep to a particular schedule with his healing? How long does he spend at it at a time, about?

First question gets a feeling of negation. As for the second question, here's a timelapse picture of the sun going around from sunrise to sunset with a picture of Nai awake and doing things all day long and not stopping to sleep, then here's an image of Nai healing a plant, plus the timelapse day, plus an "analogy" relationship with an ice cube tray that has 20 slots, only 16 of which are filled, as well as a feeling of this being an approximation.

So, no set schedule but he spends most of his time at it, possibly in very long sessions but she's not sure she's interpreting that correctly. That sounds pretty workable.

(She's not jealous, exactly, but there's definitely a sense of longing there, when she thinks about being able to spend time that way. It's a bit harder to ignore than the thought she had about being capable of healing, but she's still managing it.)

That's all the questions she has for now - she's a bit concerned about whether Zazi will be able to interrupt Nai when they notice her, but without anything to do about it if they can, it's not really worth asking about. Do the plants have any questions for her? Ideally not in an overwhelming jumble.

They show her the memory of her feelings of longing there and attach a feeling of interest and confusion, there.

Ah, yeah, that's... so before she was a Sith she was a different thing, more like a human but with the potential to be a Sith or other things like Sith that she knows less about, depending on what she learned to do with her potential. She was a little special even for someone with this kind of potential, because it wasn't just vague and unformed; she especially has the potential to do healing, without needing to learn how or anything, as part of what she is.

Doing healing requires interacting with the Force - the thing the vague unformed potential allows her to do - like this, leaning into it, guiding it a little, but mostly letting it do its own thing, gently. The way Sith interact with the Force, in contrast, is like this, forcing it into specific patterns and pouring energy through, in a way that's not exactly violent but not really not violent, either, and in any case very different. They're fundamentally incompatible ways of approaching it, requiring very different states of mind, and Sith can't learn to heal. She can still heal - it's too fundamental to what she is for her to ever lose the ability entirely, she thinks - but getting into the right mindstate is hard, and she has to give up some of her Sith capabilities to do it, and that's dangerous; if she's attacked while she's in the healing mindstate rather than the Sith one she'll quite possibly die.

Also, Sith are hostile to the faction that uses the Force in the healing-compatible way, as a cultural issue, and one of her co-apprentices would, she thinks, have killed her exceptionally painfully (she doesn't manage to avoid remembering some of the torture she's seen, here) if he'd found out about it. Plus probably a lot of other Sith would have taken it as an excuse to kill her, too. Which is... well, she's not there any more, so it's not an active problem, but she still has complicated feelings about it that she doesn't want to deal with, and admitting to being able to do healing makes it harder to avoid that.

On the other hand, denying what you are hurts. But it's not a big part of what she is, and it's mostly pretty easy for her to ignore - the ability does come with a natural sense for health issues, but Sith don't get sick often at all, injured Sith tend to either recover quickly or die, and she hasn't been around non-Sith much in the last several years, plus the aforethought thing where Sith themselves can't do healing, so it doesn't come up often - so it's been easier for her to ignore it than do anything else. She's not actually very happy with that, but she's even less happy with the idea of letting that pain lead her to make a stupid mistake that kills her, which is her default assumption of what would happen if she tried to do more with her healing than just secretly patching herself up after fights.

They fetch this default assumption out of that explanation and request elaboration.

Because: utter, unthinking terror.

...uh. They okay? (She's fine; handling extreme emotion is an important skill for Sith.) They should maybe not ask about that one.

(They can dig around in her head for the source of her terror, of course, but like most very traumatic experiences, the memories are a jumble of disorganized, disorienting impressions: shock and pain and fear; sense memories of being touched, held, hurt; the smell and sound and taste of another person's presence; the violation inherent in even the gentlest of unwanted touch, and other violations worse than that; the awareness of someone taking pleasure in her distress; the bone-deep certainty that she can never, ever be safe in a world that contains this.)

After another moment of reorienting, she picks her way through thinking about the issue without lapsing into emotion: She's... not good at... being willing enough to do violence, so that people will leave her alone, which comes up all the time in Sith society. Very bad things have happened, because she's not good at that. (She skims across the surface of utter, unthinking terror again, thinking about it even abstractly.) Choosing compassion is the kind of thing that counts as not being good at it, it makes her look weak and that encourages people to threaten her. So is choosing to do something that makes her vulnerable - it's not just that she loses some of the Sith capabilities that make her able to defend herself, while she's healing; being in the healing mindstate affects her judgement, during and afterward, to make her much worse at even wanting to defend herself, which feels good in the moment but is horrifying in retrospect. Every time she does something like that, she risks the terror-inducing thing, and she might get away with it in any given instance, if she's very careful and very clever and very lucky, but given the magnitude of the potential consequence (much worse than death, death doesn't scare her like this), it's not a risk she's willing to take under most circumstances, even if she can't see a specific reason not to. Very few things could be worth that risk, she feels when she thinks about it from this angle. She does still want to, from the other angle, but that desire is part of why she's bad at keeping herself safe and she expects it to lead her straight to disaster if she gets into any kind of habit of giving in to it.

The plants are having many reactions to this and having rather a lot of trouble organising all of those reactions into an understandable communication stream. They request patience.

(Also, the extremely obvious very-hard-to-miss emotional reaction is deep, searing pain and sorrow for her. They grieve everything that's happened to her, terribly, and see it as an unfixable wrong in the world that it happened.)

(They also grieve everything that implies about the others around her and others from wherever she's from, but less sharply and starkly; they have a harder time conceptualising of people they're not, right then and there, interacting with.)

She's not in a rush; she could use a minute herself, actually.

Stand up, warrior...

Yeah, yeah this does seem like it calls for poetry.

Stand up, warrior; you are not yet finished.
Beaten you may be, but broken?
Angels have fallen from greater heights
and survived, so why shouldn’t you?
Never mind what you are made of;
you are more than this flesh that binds you.
There is nothing you have to fear
that should not fear you a thousand times more.
Your heart is a galaxy, and your soul is lined in stars.

You are something extraordinary, my dear.

[source]

It's less about the words, to her, and more about the feelings they evoke - the too-familiar despair, and the strength and pride that survive even within it, and the swirling image of the galaxy to remind her that no matter how bleak things are, beauty and meaning are everywhere, including within her. It's not the most apt, at the moment, but it's been a vital touchstone and comes to mind easily regardless.

What else...

Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
      Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
      I am the captain of my soul.

[source]

Another favorite, one that comes to mind without much effort. This one is more apt; she may have to hide her ability to heal, but she'll never lose it, no matter what the circumstances are. It hurts - she's bloodied, metaphorically speaking - but she's surviving, on her own terms, without giving it up, where if Sith society had its way she'd be nothing more than a Sith, or dead.

Spend all you...what? She remembers the poem that line is from, she thinks, but... what?

She asks DZ to recite it for her, since she's not sure she remembers it properly - DZ has thousands and thousand of poems memorized, and that's not, actually, a thing she loves about her specifically, but it's still very good.

Life has loveliness to sell,
     All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
     Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
     Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
     Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
     Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
     Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

[source]

...yeah, fine, she also feels that way, a bit. It would be good to let her worries go and just live. It just kills her if she does it, that's all, and she doesn't want to die.

That's enough poetry for now. If the plants need more time she'll spend it figuring out the least useful bit of wire to cut out of the wall for DZ's charger.

Well this was a problem because, see, the plants are now extremely excited about poetry. That was beautiful, they're echoing those images between themselves and at each other and riffing on them to build more elaborate works of mental imagery and it seems like they may have entirely forgotten about their line of questioning from just now.

(But also there is at least one plant grabbing the whole "it just kills her if she does it" thought and being very vehement about how that is NOT TRUE. In addition to cooing over the poetry.)

These aliens are very cute. [There's plenty more where that came from; if you have computer access we probably have time for] Daisy [the droid to translate it and give you a database dump before we go. Though I guess it might not be the same without someone to interpret it.]

She sees the assertion that she won't die of doing dumb stuff here, but she doesn't believe it. She's not inclined to get into an argument about it, though.

...also she's going to need to sleep again soon, probably. Annoying, that.

...didn't she just wake up though?

Yeah, that's why it's annoying. She's recovering from the mysterious harmful thing her master kept doing to her, and that means she sleeps a lot. It doesn't respond much to healing, she's tried. Hibernating would probably fix it but the situation here isn't safe enough for her to spend three days entirely vulnerable to whoever might find her, so that's not an option, and she's just going to have to wait it out. At least she is getting better, she and Daisy have been worried that her recovery would level off while she's still seriously impaired - the memory issues are from the same thing and her attention span is too wrecked for working on engineering or complicated Force stuff - but so far she's been lucky.

Oh.

Does she need anything? To help with recovery, like that?

Just rest, mostly. And Daisy thinks she does worse when she skips meals, but there's not much to be done about that.

She'll be fine. The situation is good for now.

Mental image of an empty table, then mental image of the table with food on it, with a time relation between them and a "via plants" metadatum attached to the time relation overlaid on top of a mental image of the room Deskyl is in.

It's surprising that they can do that! She certainly won't turn them down, though she's not actually hungry at the moment.