She's in a cold, dark room—more like a large closet, really. There's no light, and the floor and walls are hard steel. The walls are adorned by shelves but they look like they haven't been touched in years, and the one door leading outside is also metal.

There are no Sith here, thank the Force, but she doesn't think she's alone, either, even aside from DZ. She extends her senses - who's out there?

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.

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.

"So so" feeling about them being able to do that, with an attached feeling of tiredness/pain and then a feeling that there's stuff missing in that picture.

Which is to say, "Yeahhhh kinda, it's a bit costly but not prohibitively so and they can elaborate on that if she wants them to."

She wants to know, but she's at the point where she's going to have trouble processing anything complicated, and she still needs to tell Daisy about their conversation before she sleeps so that she can get the important bits back from her later when she's forgotten, which she might not be able to do if she pushes herself. They can explain it to her after she's slept, that makes more sense than doing it now.

Fair! Sleep well, new friend, they love you!

They're very cute.

She updates Daisy on what she's learned, and has her sign poetry to her until she falls asleep. She wakes again after a few hours, less disoriented this time but still missing some memories.

The plants don't immediately engage.

Deskyl will take the time to get an update from DZ, then, and then do some gentle stretching and look to see what Nai is up to.

Nai is doing something at the computer console in the middle of the huge room.

All right. What else does she need to do. ...she should get a look at their surroundings outside the building. She expects the Force to have dropped her somewhere basically fine but she should still confirm it.

Well. Fuck.

"Well fuck" is correct. The surface is mostly ruins and desert as far as the mind's eye can see, and the ways out are all hidden in secret passages or through underground tunnels stretching out into the distance. There might be nearby settlements but none that are immediately visible to her.

There aren't even different bugs. What kind of ridiculous unterraformed nonsense...

Well. Nothing for it. She updates DZ, gets the further piece of bad news that the droid isn't designed to operate in desert temperatures, and gets to work on planning how to travel through the wastes.

A few minutes after that Nai gets distracted again so the plants can say hi!!

Hi! She's pretty distracted panicking about the fact that she's unexpectedly in the middle of an inhospitable desert right now. Did they know about that? Do they know if there are other humans/other nonbug nonplant creatures/places on the planet that aren't desert?

(She's still distractedly looking through the ruins outside, trying to find something that'll work as the basis of a vehicle that she can pull. Splitting her attention like she is, though, it's not clear that she'd notice it properly if she did find something workable.)

Oh there are other humans! Here, they can get a rough map of civilization cobbled together: mostly on the southern hemisphere of this very desert planet which has no oceans. And they have a rough idea of where they are, which isn't too far from that very big walled city over there, with millions of inhabitants.

Oh good. Oh good. That's... still going to suck to do on foot hauling Daisy, actually, but it's potentially survivable at least. Probably. If she can get enough water, which. Well. One problem at a time.

She takes a moment to sign this update to Daisy, and then turns her attention more fully to the plants - how are they doing?

Doing okay! Even better now that Nai is helping one of them! Nai helps them most of the time most days so every day they are (collectively) better than the previous day!

That's good.

What's the story with them being injured-or-whatever, anyway? She can see the problem in reasonable detail but it's not one she's familiar with, she doesn't have a guess of what might've caused it.

So here's a mental image of—a place that doesn't exist. There's a sort of attachment to it of it being part of a whole, plus a wobbliness of inaccuracy. More of the concept of an inaccurate place than the place itself. Then a door or a window or an aperture of some kind from that place to a plant, here. And an image of a desk followed by the same desk with a metal cube on it, and the time relation between those two is mediated by a different kind of relation related but not identical to "motion" from the abstract place through the plant to the desk.

Attached to all of that is a feeling of tiredness, referring to the plant. A small feeling, not too much of it, but there anyway. And then a feeling of multiplication, of multitude, that same thing a hundred times, a thousand times—but different, not always the same cube, not always a cube, not always the same amount. And the feeling of tiredness mounts until it becomes pain, and from pain it becomes injury.

The plant in the image now glows red instead of blue.

Injury grows and mounts and complicates, the aperture itself gets damaged and pushed farther open than it was, and the plant starts losing hold of its own shape and body. Grows grows grows...

...and the plant turns to dust.

Then back to the red plant, being floated through tunnels by Nai, with a determined expression on his face. The plant gets here, and it's suddenly surrounded by other plants, and the other plants have their own apertures and the red plant can lean on them and rest.

Nai comes back, and he also has an aperture, and his is bigger and stronger, it can grow or shrink on command, it can make lots of different things come through from the abstract place without Nai getting tired at all. And Nai joins the plant again and this time he shares his aperture with the plant and he controls exactly what comes through and how. He zooms into the injuries, and he selectively brings things over from the abstract place to heal those injuries individually, until they get better.

After a long time, over many such sessions, the plant is healthy again, and glows blue.

(She could heal them. She wants to. It's increasingly annoying that it's a bad idea. She lets the thought pass without entertaining it, though the annoyance remains.)

She sympathizes with their power having a cost like that. Some of hers do too - not in the same way, the damage is to her psychological wellbeing and personality rather than to her body, but the logistical issues sound pretty similar. It's good that they have Nai. (And there's a slight undertone, there, of absence; she doesn't have anything similar, and would never expect to.)

The "it's a bad idea" thought gets grabbed again and this time the question about it is in two pieces: the first piece is the feeling of "not here" attached to it, and then the feeling of upset, fear, danger; the second piece is the feeling of "here" attached to it and then a feeling of confusion.

She's not sure she understands what they're asking, and the lingering annoyance directs itself at the fact of being asked: the fact that she doesn't want to do it should be enough, really. She brushes the emotion aside as soon as she notices it, though: yes, in some cases that's endorsed, and if they keep pushing it'll come down to that, but she prefers to be more patient with people who are most likely genuinely confused.

There are a few different things that go into her assessment that healing is by strong default a bad idea. She probably already mentioned, when she told them about it before - she doesn't remember the conversation very well but it's what she tends to first land on as an explanation - that it's dangerous among Sith as a cultural matter. That's significant even though she's not there anymore; she's in the habit of hiding it, and she functions best when she can function mostly by habit, especially now when she's significantly cognitively impaired. It'd also be stressful and scary, and therefore distracting, to work on dismantling the habit, since it's been important to her survival and she only mostly believes them that it's safe; if she had enough concrete evidence to work out for herself that it's safe, it would be easier, but she doesn't plan on sticking around long enough for it to make any sense to try to gather that evidence here. (She'll consider it once she's at the city, maybe, if she's not too busy and everything else looks favorable - it is an option for her to go and get settled and come back.) And healing is, also, more than just ordinary levels of risky, even if the situation is only ordinary levels of dangerous: the mental state she has to be in to do it interferes pretty severely with her ability to defend herself. Here in particular, if she gets into a conflict with Nai, her best chance of survival is to react quickly, to understand right away that she's under threat and to act on that without delay, and that mental state doesn't allow for it - it makes her slower, more inclined to assume people are friendlier, more desirous of that kind of interpersonal connection, less willing to cut off opportunities for it. It's a real weakness that she has to be very careful with, and the easiest way to do that by far is to just not mess with it.

Does that answer their question?

There is some confusion about "habit" but not the kind where they're particularly... inclined to push. Their question has been answered but they feel sad about the answer because clearly it makes Deskyl sad and they don't want Deskyl to be sad.

...of all the unpleasant things in her life, that one barely registers - which is probably not helpful, actually, in terms of them being sad about it. She's honestly fine, though; it's normal for life to include some suffering, and, sure, some of it has been bullshit, but overall she doesn't mind. (Well, okay, aside from the part where she's not going to get to kill Pritruth, that one still bugs her.) The future looks like it's going to be much better than the past, though, and that's the important thing.

Oh good. They're not entirely sure they understand what she means by that last thing but it sounded hopeful so they're glad!

Anyway, does she want them to appear some food for her?

Not right now, if it's going to hurt them - she'll probably be fine, she hasn't tried skipping meals since much earlier in her recovery and she's probably gotten the ability to do it without problems back by now. If she's wrong about that she'll let them know.

It sounds like it might be helpful for her to explain how humans work for them? She's not sure how much they're around humans, if they'd rather not bother that's fine too. Or she can get back to working on her travel plans.

Oh they know about humans! Zash has explained humans to the plants!!

...though he doesn't think they really understand. Here are some memories of Zash's mind when trying to explain this and that...

...and of him feeling very fondly exasperated at his failures to quite translate.

...did they mention Zash? He's Nai's twin! He's never visited February (the place they're at right now), though, the plants who met him did so before Nai brought them here.

They didn't mention him in enough detail to get into her reports to Daisy, at least. And if they don't know what habits are they're pretty obviously still missing some important concepts.

They've had habits explained! They think! They know the word. They just... don't... get them.

Yeah. So the simplest part, the bit that's enough to be getting on with if they don't care about why and how, is that for humans it's much easier to do things they've done a lot of other times recently, and actually hard not to do them and to do something else instead. A habit is the word for a thing that a human has done often enough that this applies - Deskyl is in the habit of concluding that healing isn't a good idea, so it's easy for her to do that and harder for her to decide that it is a good idea. She's in the habit of memorizing poetry - or, was, it's been a while since she's had the opportunity - which makes it easier for her to do that, and maybe a little easier to memorize other text, but it won't help her remember what a picture looks like if she wants to draw a copy of it. She's in the habit of listening to what Daisy tells her to do, so she'll do that even when she's very confused and having trouble figuring out what to do on her own, but the way she's built that habit means she won't listen to other people the same way, because that would be dangerous - lots of humans do have a habit of listening to almost anyone, though. Does that make sense? Not necessarily in the sense of 'they understand why it happens that way', but in the sense of 'sure, that's a thing that can happen'?

Sure, that's a thing that can happen, they guess?

Okay. For why it happens, she's not actually sure, but, speculating - so, humans have a lot of things they can do at any given moment, thousands and thousands, way too many to think through all the options. And in most cases, there's not very much advantage to trying to do that - they don't need to do the very best thing that'll get the very best result, they just need something that's good enough, where the result will be good enough. And it takes a lot of time and effort to think through all the possibilities to figure out what the best thing is, and it's often not worth doing that - the best result isn't so much better than the good enough result for it to be worth the effort, and probably they won't have the time to think it through at all; humans are often in situations where they need to act quickly or otherwise don't have the time or energy to think through their choices. And a habit is fast to do, and usually good enough, or at least bad in a predictable way that the human knows how to handle, so it solves those problems.

Still with her? Do they have any questions?

Not... questions, per se, no. More like this is all pretty abstract and hard-to-follow and furthermore requires more, ah... planning-for-the-future and worrying about connections between past states and future states than individual plants are typically accustomed to. They can be a lot more functional in that way when they're numerous and networked like here in February but then by a similar token they don't really need habits when they're numerous and networked because they can do better planning.

Though they're not as numerous as they'd need to be to really be confident in any of their plans and there are lots of... other considerations... and stuff.

Yep, planning is hard, that's why humans have shortcuts for it. They can't get away with just not planning at all, they'd starve, and they're pretty sharply limited in their networking abilities. (Humans being able to talk to each other definitely helps, but it's really not the same thing.) Is 'humans need planning shortcuts and this is one' a good enough answer for them?

Also if they have any particularly pressing planning-related problems she can take a look and see if there's anything she can figure out for them, if they'd like, while she's here. (If they want to trust her like that, anyway, which it'd be reasonable for them not to; she's not ruling out that she'd use knowledge gained that way for her own purposes, even if they happen to conflict with the plants' preferences.) Her danger sense should be enough to make sure they don't fry her brain trying to send them.

They don't think they have anything pressing, but they're not really sure how they'd be able to tell. How do you tell if something is pressing?

There's a few things 'pressing' can mean - if there's something that's really bothering them right now, or something where the situation is changing a lot or seems like it might change for the worse soon or unexpectedly, or if it'd be especially bad if the situation turned out badly, that's the sort of thing she means. Things that are important or urgent or both, if those concepts aren't too human for them.

Their relationship with the concept of "time" is... not amazing at that, no. They get "before" and "after" and they have an intellectual understanding that something can be "more after" or "less after" something else in some sense, like how today is more after the time they left Earth than it is after they arrived on Gunsmoke, but they're sort of fuzzy on the particulars.

Huh. Well, if there's anything especially important, then. Or, if that's still too tricky, they can just pick two or three things to ask her about, that's close enough - the main idea from her side is that she's not offering to help with every problem they have, only with a few, and they should be at least a little careful about what they choose to use this limited resource on.

They don't think so? They have very hurt sisters who aren't alright but aren't acutely suffering and they'll all get fixed eventually by Nai and they're not entirely sure how long that takes and in the meantime they're very bored but it's occurred to them at some point that their fuzzy relationship with time plausibly makes being bored a lot less unpleasant than it is for humans in some ways. Not all ways, though, they think, but they're having a hard time finding ways to convey the difference exactly when Deskyl doesn't have the native hardware to process the high-throughput high-density high-precision concept-comparisons they're using to mark the distinctions.

Also humans die, one of them pipes up to say, and that's an ongoing tragedy happening everywhere that they want to prevent, but they're not sure that counts as pressing given that they don't really have a way to properly fix it and it's just a matter of making it be less after now than it would otherwise be.

Human mortality is a little beyond her, she thinks; if they have any ideas for addressing it she can have a look, but as far as she can tell it's just inevitable within the local kind of physics, even Sith only get a few hundred to a few thousand years. She does think she'll probably want to come back and heal them once she's settled in - no promises, but the idea is appealing and once she's recovered she'll be more willing to think it through, and they might well be right that there's no reason not to. She expects they probably do have a bit better time with boredom than humans do, but it's still a problem that it's reasonable to want to solve. She doesn't know enough about the situation to make confident suggestions, though, besides the obvious 'have Daisy recite more poetry while she's here', but she'd start by trying to come up with things they can do while they're here - for humans it'd be watching or listening to media, as the obvious first thing to set up, or finding ways for them to do hobbies or whatever else they want to do within whatever limitations they're dealing with; that's usually at least somewhat possible.

Poetry is great!!! But, uh, not really the kind of thing that solves the underlying issue with boredom? Because the underlying issue is that they want to help people, that's what they're here for, the most fulfilling possible thing they could be doing is generating matter and energy for people so they can live complete, self-actualised lives that bring them joy!

Anywho, they're sure it's possible to make humans be immortal; if nothing else, Doctor Conrad is immortal while linked to Nai's gate, as a proof of concept.

If they want to help people they could try getting involved with whatever terraforming is going on here - presumably someone's working on that, if there are humans, and they'd probably really appreciate, say, water in whatever quantities won't interfere with the plants' recovery. Terraforming will take a while, it's not something you can rush without causing problems, but humans are much happier in more hospitable biomes than this planet currently has.

Human immortality via gates: huh, interesting. That's the kind of thing she can probably help them figure out once she's recovered, it sounds like a kind of mucking around with physics that's similar to developing Force techniques, which she's pretty good at when her brain is working.

They're under the impression that terraforming is really really hard on this planet for some reason! They're not sure what but they think it's something about the technological base being very unevenly available?

And yeah it's totally physics! The other dimension (they're very fuzzy on the details of what exactly it is and how it works) has infinite matter and energy! That means they can just heal humans forever of anything. Nai doesn't let Doctor Conrad heal perfectly all the time, he rations the gate and the connection isn't perfect, but in principle!

It'd be weird for tech availability to be the problem, unless - do they not have access to the rest of the galaxy? That'd be a whole thing for sure.

And yeah it'd be weird if their thing wasn't physics, that's kind of the definition of physics; the question is more whether the mucking around is the type she can help with. She'd bet it is, though!

Oh! No, they don't have access to the rest of the galaxy at all, they are completely stranded on this planet with whatever tech managed to survive the time the generation ships all crashed simultaneously on this planet or which developed from that. They're not even sure if the planet they're from is in fact in the same galaxy as this one!

Yeah that sure does sound like a whole thing. Do they have intra-system travel? If not she can pretty much guarantee that producing as much water as they sustainably can is a good move, right now; usually on a planet like this they'd be dropping ice asteroids for water, and without that there's no real chance they'd overdo it at any point before they start seeing oceans.

They think the humans were worried that this would cause more problems than it solved and lots of people would die and the worms would kill them all or something? They're not sure if the worms part was the humans or Zazi.

They shouldn't do it, then, but she'll see if she can figure out what the problem is and maybe she'll be able to come back with some better advice.

There doesn't seem to be much more to say about that, so she gets back to work on planning for the cross-desert trek. Over the next few weeks, in between sleeping, she manages to find a reasonably-shaped piece of metal to use as a sledge and perhaps enough additional parts to jury-rig wheels for it, though they'll be very makeshift and only arguably better than not having them, in the sand; she's increasingly irritable with hunger and stir-crazy with lack of exercise and decreasingly confident that she and Daisy will be able to make it to the city as she works through the logistics of traveling with such a vehicle.

The plants continually offer to make her food and although they are disappointed by the refusals it doesn't seem like they quite... really remember... that they've offered it many times before. They do remember her plans, though, and they're curious about what she'll do and they'll miss her a lot.

She intends to come back, but she can't promise it. Isn't really sure she's going to make it anywhere she can come back from.

Eventually, she's done as much planning as she reasonably can, and the hunger is getting worse faster than her brain is getting better, and it's time to go.

Although - the plants have more or less stopped pestering her about the healing, but it's still been on her mind. She wants to heal them, there's no denying it. And if she's most likely going to die anyway...

She discusses it with Daisy, who points out that there's a better chance of someone finding her and getting her working again here than in the desert, if it comes down to it. She looks into the logistics of getting to the plants' amphitheatre; it's not possible to avoid all the bugs between here and there, but if she's moving quickly enough she doesn't think they'll be able to catch her in high enough numbers to matter. She watches Nai, pushing ever so gently through the Force for him to decide to take a break from what he's doing, asking the Force to give her forewarning about when he will so that she can meditate and be prepared.

It takes hours, but eventually she gets the gentle nudge of now, and forty minutes later when he leaves the room she's already on her feet and ready to go.