Nearby, two patrons have just --

-- Wait, wait.  What is Alicia doing?  Is she walking over there?  That.  Is decidedly uncharacteristic.  She said she was on break for the indefinite and atemporal future.   And Ciara Beraen knows that Alicia Thorn, the new one, is way too reticent to just walk up to someone and introduce herself.  Unless something's up, which...might be.

She'll just be...

...Following behind Alicia, who looks to be a young woman in her mid-teens, wearing robes positively bedecked with arcane implements that look to have been hand-finished, as she asks the following: "...Um.  Excuse me, I don't want to be a bother, but...

"I was wondering - if I'm actually seeing what I think I'm seeing - if I could, uh, ask some questions about the lightsaber I...think you have?  Ma'am?  Only I really hadn't expected to ever meet anyone who had one without building a poor imitation thereof myself, because the physics are all wrong for it where I'm from to begin with, there's no...oh, excuse me, I appear to be rambling.  Um.  Hi, hello, hello."  She nods to the table, one by one.  "Alicia Thorn, I'm not from your universe I just saw it on TV - er, actually it would be holovids, wouldn't it - and anyway I really didn't see that much of it - so please do forgive me if I make a misstep in etiquette.  Or I can just go away if you'd prefer that.  I just.  Had to ask.  Because I think I'd explode if I could have asked a real live Force-user about lightsabers and then, uh, didn't.  They're just.  Really cool.  I mean they're actually absurdly hot in the sense of temperature but -  ...I guess the closest bit of slang I expect might be recognizable if I'm actually right would be 'They're really wizard' but I think that's more of an Outer Rim thing.  ...Erm.  Well.  Anyway.  Yeah."

...She trails off, now that whatever has dragged her through this conversation like a water-surfer getting whiplash because the only thing she has to keep her above water is the rope attached to the Jet-ski has subsided.  She's being painfully genuine, to all available methods of determination.

"...Alicia!", is promptly hissed at her by the woman who has just placed a hand on the young woman's shoulder, recognizing the other human at the table to be giving off some very similar vibes and radiating apology on her ward's behalf.

The -- Sith, she's obviously a Sith, for some reason it wasn't clear before but it is now -- raises an eyebrow at the girl as she speaks, and glances at the smaller droid when she's done, but answers rather than waiting for a response: "She's fine, it's no trouble. Did you want a textbook on them?"

She blinks as the 'is a Sith' nature of the person in front of her hits her in the face like a wet trout.  And then she processes the 'textbook' line, though she needs to first recover it from the ether it was lost to while she was catching up to the Sith thing.  (She carefully raises a 'one moment please', and that hand sweeps back to touch a small gem that's actually surprisingly well-concealed, inset in a silver fixture beneath her silver hair.  (It's modeled off of an Earthling earpiece, somewhere between the in-ear Bluetooth microphone-speaker things and half of an over-the-ear headphone, not that anyone knows besides her where her inspiration could have come from.))

"...They make lightsaber textbooks?"

"Of course they do, there aren't nearly enough specialists around to design them for everyone who needs one. And actually now that you mention it I want a kyber-growing manual - Love, do you want anything from the bar?" she directs at the droid.

"Another milkshake, please?"

"Of course."

"I was vaguely under the impression that...oh, wait, that was the Jedi doing it that way, some many hundreds years later, and I can't even begin to speculate when the tradition developed relative to --" Ruusaan, she cuts herself off before saying.

"Mm.  Spoilers, I suppose.  Not that you don't seem like a perfectly lovely person, but, uh, I kind of don't want to tell the Sith Empire anything about the future whatsoever.

"Anyway I'm kind of surprised about the textbook existing because my usual impression was of lightsaber construction being a particularly individualized affair.  ...Hey, Bar," she asides, with a subtle bit of magic to propagate her voice over, "do I still get Earth books at Earthling prices?"

"Textbooks wouldn't do me much good, being as I'm not still using their physics when I'm back where I came here from, but I have some words to have with Kuat Drive Yards and their fetish for ridiculously oversized spaceships.  ...That probably wouldn't work, actually, it's altogether too far away timeline-wise to throw butterflies at.  But if you want to get some looks at how my homeworld made artificial crystals of various sorts, I could probably share some of that and be confident that - if I was throwing butterflies around, they'd not be...universe-altering ones, I guess.  ...Like.  The future I saw was a fucking disaster for almost everybody, no matter which canon I consider, uh, most likely to be canon.  ...Though given that there's synthetic kyber crystals that's sort of a clue, unless there's also something about 'bleeding' them, which makes the future much more likely to be the badly directed cash-grab version.  Still, it wasn't 'the Force implodes' or anything like that.  And there's probably literally that in the cards if certain knowledge of any of the many things that are probably real in any given your-home-galaxy, ends up getting into hands that'll try doing something mind-bendingly stupid with it.

"...What year is it, actually?  Er, probably I should be asking what Republic year, if there's a difference.  The Sith are not often...protagonist-shaped, as a philosophy, which means I won't get a lot of stuff from the relevant perspective to datematch."

She shoots the droid a look, at the torrent of words, and the droid signs back I didn't follow it either. "I have no idea what year the Republic counts it as."

And then her being-a-Sith-ness... evaporates? folds away? She still is one, there's no doubt about that, it just doesn't seem to matter to anything anymore.

She looks at Ciara, clearly a bit confused by something that just happened there and turning to her for advice.

"You're going to want to try that again in Azeric, Your Highness.  I've had more exposure to your...  ...dialect, and I'm not sure I got it either."

"Mm.  Thank you.

"Right.  So.  In Galactic Basic, Azeric Common Tongue, or plain English, instead of the incomprehensible patois that I am reliably informed everyone seems to hear me speaking in when I make so much as the slightest reference to a piece of media.  ...I blame the holonet.  Corrupting today's youth, don'tcha know.

"I did mention the whole 'everything I know about your universe came out of a holodrama' thing, right?  I'm pretty sure I did.  ...Well it wasn't exactly all the one holodrama.  There were a few big-budget films, and then some half a century of everyone and their brother writing tie-in material that got increasingly bullshit from a starting point of 'the movies blew up a planet', and then in the latter half of that chunk of time you get people coming out with well-written, interactive, media - video games, not that the etymology will make any sense, but -

"Huh, I just realized that Earth just about has the technology to do live simulation of the blaster deflection, training, remote, um, things.  Not that we have any Force-sensitives who could make use of it, to the best of my knowledge, but the hardware's all there except for the repulsors, and I guess you could make do with a prop-driven drone if you were dead-set on having one to begin with instead of just doing it in software.  Aaaaanyway I was actually saying something.

"Video games.  Right.  So we come to the 'I might know some future that's actually relevant on timescales you might live to see depending upon what year it is', bits.  Because those video games are set some thousand-plus years before the movies and their absurdly huge spaceships from Kuat that just fucking irk me on a logistical level.  Nobody needs a spaceship big enough to have a noticeable gravity from mass, I fucking swear.  And I've mostly run into the games secondhand rather than playing them myself, but there's plenty of -

"Oh, this might help, do you know who's Grandmaster of the Jedi Order at the moment?  I'm not sure that I'd be able to find out enough about the Sith to know who's what when, even with the people who obsessively curate the encyclopedia, but it probably won't hurt to try looking whatever you've got up, either.

"...If Bar's giving me Earthling rates, at least; I might have to put my back in, if I'm trying to get random Earthling media at the same rates as Ciara.  She's native Azerosi, I am very much not, but there were...shenanigans afoot."

Has Bar given her a napkin?  ...Let's just see if that's so, real quick.

(This spell is different from the sound-projection one, because Order/Chaos doesn't actually have good ways to identify things without first approaching them the long way and she's not going to read other people's napkins; she, in deference to the Sith who is probably not going to like the feeling of Oneness her usual Light-based summoning trick has a tendency to leak 'round the edges, uses Death Grip instead, despite the way it kind of wigs her out a bit to cast 'Death' spells even though really they're just...Stasis spells, in a way.

(...It's a modified Death Grip, because she learned this from Ciara Beraen, and not the teaching line of Gul'dan, Ner'zhul, and/or Arthas Menethil, but she knows this spell first and foremost from her Death Knight character and she thinks she could actually cast the big version from knowing the small one.

(It feels a lot like a different subset of the Dark Side, come to think of it.  Where Order feels like willful command, Death is instead a determined fixation.)

She doesn't let reading the note stop her from rambling on about the bits that won't change, either.

"Um. Hm.  Right, where was I.  ...Attempting to figure out if I can figure out when you're from.  Right.  Right.  Hm.

"Anyway if that works I can talk about some historical bullshit probably."

The woman makes a bit of a face about the magic; the droid flinches too, and squeezes her hand about it.

"I don't know much about the Jedi, but I think it was... Shan, Than, something like that?"

"Sorry 'bout that, it was either that or 'oneness with everything', and I did not specialize in command of the numinous powers to preferentially get up and walk when I needed to fetch a small object from 'over there somewhere probably'.  Still, I'll, uh, forgo it in the future."

(And she should probably look at what the napkin she got...actually says.)

"...Anyway.  Rrriiiight.  If that's either of the Shans I know - Satele or Bastila - you're actually possibly going to hit a game's canon.  ...Fuck, what was up with what's-his-face...I can probably look it up, I guess.

"And really, from a narrative parsimony perspective - it's totally the time where shit's about to be the most fucked.  Though I'm not sure that this bar is in my Random Omnipotent Being's service area, actually, so who knows, maybe I'm not going to get plothooked into Saving The Galaxy, Tee Emm."

"...Ma'am."

...There's something that feels entirely unlike a gelatinous egg being cracked over her spine, as she contemplates her next line - but she's pretty sure she's right.  Because she knows exactly the feeling that Unearthly Insight would use to reach her...and she felt it, when she considered making that quip - going down that whole line of thought about narrative parsimony, in fact.  That it was going to go right.

"...Do I need to explain all that?  Because I can't quite put my finger on it, but I've got a knack for stories and something about all this is telling me I'm in one - and it's probably not mine.  Even factoring in the way I took myself Off The Rails quite more thoroughly than should have been possible, let alone plausible, given that canon in the doubly-fictional 'Roses of Villarosa' included precisely no visiting interdimensional bars by anyone, especially the 'canonical' Princess, who opened the same damn door at the same damn moment in world-time - or rather, I am especially concerned about being in another story, because I did this by ending up in fucking Milliways, Restaurant at the End of the Universe - which is a reference, yet again.  ...Which is to say, I smell executive meddling.  And I want to know if they drafted me as a quirkily comedic side character for whatever narrative I'm in - which, frankly, I am, compared to you-all, at least when I don't have my fancy hat on - to make me the butt of the joke.  Because if so, I have some words to have with them.  Mostly to do with not fucking doing that.

"...Say, are my swears translating?"

"They are." She seems to be trying not to laugh. "We aren't headed home anytime particularly soon, though, I don't think - Love?"

"Well, maybe. Let's see what she has to say about it."

Ooh, who's this 'she'?

...It's you, dumbass(affectionate).  Really, you've been a Princess of Villarosa for how long and it still hasn't sunk in that you're actually important now?

Alicia looks around for this mysterious 'she' for a good few seconds before she realizes that the 'she' she is looking for is most probably herself.

"...You're asking me?  I wouldn't get involved with the shit that's coming your galaxy's way unless I was getting paid in narrative fiat.  But it's your home and I don't know how much that factors in, so - if, knowing that things are going to go down the tubes, you want to invest in changing them - I could do no less than help."

"I don't know if I'd want to invite you to; we have only just met. But what I meant was that depending on what you have to say about the situation, we," she gestures at her companions, "might go back sooner than we were planning to."

(It is maybe a little weird that the droid rather than the human seems to be leading this particular group.)

No it isn't!

Like, seriously, notwithstanding that protocol droids make good party faces even when they're not in leadership positions, she's able to detect a romance when it's right under her nose - and this absolutely reeks of not just that but plot-significant romancing having occurred.

Not that she has to consciously process all of this, it's just that - this droid is Definitely A Person, no matter what the sourcebooks have to say about it - and she can therefore do whatever the fuck she likes, including lead and guide the party more actively than most droids would.

"Right.  I wasn't planning on inviting myself over anyway, just - arming you with knowledge.  So, does the name Revan ring any bells?"

"Yeah, from the histories - he was active about three, four hundred years ago."

"...Right.  Point two, is there an especially immortal Sith Emperor on the throne right now.  Because I'm not sure what the hell's up with him, not an era I've read much about - but it sure fucking is up, if I know anything about anything whatsoever."

"I don't have details either, but it's at least likely, Sith don't get immortality like that easily."

"Right.  With the timeline pinned down a bit, let's see what we've got...I'll be right back.  Oh, I can probably get your orders?  If you want."

She'll be right back from the Bar.  Once she's done assembling an absolute pile of what looks like datapads to the eyes of an average resident of Pradnakt's home galaxy, but is actually a bunch of Android tablets.

"Al-right.  We've got, Tenebrae aka Vitiate aka The Emperor cued up on here, Revan cued up on here because he's not dead yet somehow, Kreia also known as Darth Traya on here because her philosophy is stupid and she was entangled with Revan's shit, Satele Shan the likely present Grandmaster of the Jedi Order on here...  ...Actually we should probably cross-reference that with your sources --

"The dates are kind of fucked, unfortunately, because everyone knows you want to run your calendar backwards," she snarks - or perhaps kvetches - "and I could probably re-zero them to your present time with a bit of magic but I don't want to do that without warning.  That magic is particularly spooky.  Or I could proooobably script up something based on a known event like - " tap tappity tap glare - "Oh, for fuck's sake.  It's like they want absolutely nothing to be dated in reasonable numbers like time after a specific event that people would actually know literally anything about, Tho Yor Arrival calendar I'm looking at you.  Does Coruscant Reckoning even exist?  I think it at least ought to cover your timeframe, but it's so slipshod..."

Well, see, the problem is that with everyone on different planets there's no obvious standard year, and it's not like the Republic and the Empire are going to collaborate on setting a standard. (And the less said about the Hutts in this context the better, really.) But Daisy can translate the dates into something Lord Pradnakt will be familiar with, given a few datapoints to work with.

"Oh thank the gods.  Excuse me.  Thank the...

"Huh, who should I be thanking - Mysterious Narrative Forces?  Certainly not gods, Earth didn't actually have any that could be proven - probably not the Force itself or any of the people on Mortis - really, especially not them, I should probably put that on the 'long-term preemptively resolvable crises' list - and the Azerosi equivalent of divine beings wouldn't really have the right sort of influence, being as they're, mechanically speaking, bundles of Concepty λstuff, with an orderly interface."

Yes, she just pronounced an absence, reality will have to deal with it.

(These datapads are very unlike any Daisy's seen before, by the way - oddly well-provisioned, but then having a lot of those provisions worn through by often-needlessly convoluted programming - but their software isn't hard to pick up and alter, if that's what she's doing.  It's a language, after all, and she has Omniglot.)

"I'd suggest 'thank the Spirit', but I don't think she had anything to do with that in particular. Nine," she addresses the other droid, "do you want to read through these and give us a synopsis, please?"

    "Sure," he rumbles, and she slides the datapads over to him.

"...Sure, we can thank our respective Random Omnipotent Beings, that works.  ...What's yours like?"

Really, Alicia.

...Yes, actually.  Really.

"Surprisingly personable, compared to the Force at least. She calls herself the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed and she's fairly narrative-focused, I believe she probably did have something to do with you meeting us."

"Huh.  I just got a generic 'Will of the Multiverse', with a - mm, somewhere between penchant and obsession - for a particular genre of genre-parodying romance plots.  ...Um.  Two different genres, that is to say.  A type of novel that parodies a dating simulator and introduces the 'villainess' as a sort of character that exists.  Mostly as an isekai target.  ...Not sure which I'd rather, really.  On the one hand, I finally got to get some worldbuilding ideas that had been rattling around in my head for ages down on paper, and then actually make use of them, which was nice.  And I managed to mitigate most of the problems I could have, right out of the gate, by collaborating with the proctor to find a Heroine to work with - an alternate-universe version of herself, actually - and being picky about the plot.  On the other hand I am responsible for a kingdom and it might not be a wholeass planet but - I have no idea how anyone can stand that sort of power weighing on them.  At least, anyone with functioning empathy, which is rather hard to come by in the halls of power, as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure most of them bother to have any.  Certainly not the average Sith.  I mean, really, is that fan-theorized 'Peace is a lie, there is only suffering' thing real?  Because if it really always was passion, I have some complaints about the bit where -

"I'm just going to lay out this line of thought that's always been nagging at me and pay attention to the truth values afterwards.

"So.

"There is a difference, is the thing, between the path of the Sith, and the path of The Dark Side.  And we see this with Dark Jedi.  They're an inversion of what the Order teaches, perhaps - but they're still fundamentally of that Order's line of thought.

"And it has never made sense to me that the Sith order has always been so focused upon the Darkness, because that's what keeps breaking it apart.

"Passion can be for constructive use!  And yet the iconic Sith have a passion for control, and a passion for destruction.  And a passion, in the greatest and worst, for suffering.

"But you can construct something different from that.

"It's a Jedi line, but - 'Fear is the path to the Dark Side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hatred.  Hatred leads to suffering.'  So why, when the first Sith seized the Force, did they throw themselves upon the path of suffering!  Why is the focus always upon fear!

"Why not -

"You can flip it around.  Because courage is not the absence of fear, it never was - it is acting despite your fears.  And peace is a lie, when people suffer.  So to return to the Sith Code, to construct a brighter mirror of it," and she's gathering steam, dropping into full Dramatic Noble Speech Elocution -

"Peace is a lie, there is only passion.

"You must act despite your fears.  You must cultivate a passion for justice, for without justice there is no peace.

"Through passion I gain strength.

"Of course you do.  You gain strength because the passion itself drives you to develop the strength and fortitude necessary to act upon wrongs that are hidden in the dark.

"Through strength I gain power.

"This one...This one is tricky.  Because what is the difference between strength and power?  And yet, they are, or else the Code would hardly mention it.  Through strength of will and fortitude of mind you gain the power to act.  Not the power that seizes spoils, but the power that breaks chains, because -

"Through power I gain victory.

"There is an enemy of all life in the galaxy and that enemy is suffering.  That is what you wish to be the victor over, lest it consume you!  Workers of the world unite, for you have nothing to lose but your chains!  And indeed we see that in the very next line, because,

"Through victory, my chains are broken; The Force shall free me.

"And how many Dark-siders you've met were truly free?

"I'd say exactly none of them - not even the kriffing Emperor himself has gained true freedom, for all his so-called 'power'.  Because he is still chained by fear, and chained by greed."

Her voice is soft, as she continues.  "It is this last line, I think, that the Sith as they practice today most often forget.  Because we are not free, when a single soul is in chains -" and once more, passion takes her; "And this I know they have forgotten, for this Code was itself forged in the revolt against an Empire - built upon the backs of slaves."

She takes a moment, and a breath.

"So.  Yeah.

"...That just happened."  Another breath.  "Might need a minute.  Bit busy having.  Feelings.  And emotions.  And.  You know."

...Does she have a -

Beverage?  Yes.  She does now.

"...Thanks, Sia."

"And now, your Highness, you can continue having conversations that won't cause diplomatic incidents," she says, as she lifts the spell that placed Alicia on mute for the past minute-or-so of pacing and dramatic gesticulation - ever since Alicia started saying 'Certainly not the average --' and the woman who took over social handling for their counterparts started bracing for impact.

"It does sound philosophically interesting, I must admit, but really.  Do apologize.  You wield words like a knife and they've cut what you did not intend to."

"...And my apologies to you as well, ladies, gentlemen; it is, I've found, better to let her tire herself out than interrupt her mid-rant, but that's still no reason for her to have done it.  Nonetheless I ask your forbearance on her behalf; neither she, nor her...predecessor, were remotely adequately informed about how to read the room."

"..."

"...Ah.  Uh.  Yeah.  Uh.  Sorry."

She practically collapses inwards.

"It's all right," she says, more to Ciara than to Alicia, and then she turns to Pradnakt. "Ma'am, could you go get me that milkshake?"

"Of course, Love. Flavor?"

"Bar's made good suggestions so far."

"All right." She squeezes her hand one last time and heads off.

"...I think the best way to put it, really.

"Is that...

"I have had some issues.

"With the way the Sith were treated, by the writers.

"If you think it would be better that I go, I'll see myself off."

Despite the way she really doesn't want to.

Oh, Alicia...

"If you have questions," she puts a subtle bit of emphasis on the word, "I might be able to answer them, it's just a conversation I'd rather not have in front of my friend."

"I'm not really sure what I could usefully have questions about, given that - all we are, all we can be to eachother - is two ships passing in the night.  I have - too many obligations, and I doubt you want to follow me home; we don't exactly have space travel.  Though I'm working on it, I'll admit."

"...Alicia, you're typical-minding.

"...Miss...I don't believe we've had proper introductions, actually.  Well.  Regardless.  There's not so much time as to spare much for them, right now.  I'd ask, given everything, if there's anything that your lady would prefer us to know about her feelings towards these 'Sith'."

"I'm Daisy, this is Nine, and my friend is Lord Pradnakt. And... the thing I'd like you to know is that for all their bluster, Sith are victims as much as victimizers, and many of them are doing the best they can in the situations they find themselves in. Not all of them, and by all means I don't mean to give you the impression that they're safe, but my Pradnakt went into hermitude when she realized she was a danger to people around her in a way that wasn't proportional to the danger they were to her. She gave me the option to leave her when she thought I might want to, and made sure I had as much information as possible to make an informed decision with, even though it would have hurt her terribly if I had. She's spent the last eight years funding a library for a townfull people who would have killed her if they could - and as by far the main source of funding for that library, to be clear. These things aren't typical of a Sith, sure, but they aren't incompatible with Sithhood; it's important to her that she is one and she's not wrong that she is."

"...I know.  I know I haven't experienced the - pain and suffering, that the average Acolyte goes through, but - I've seen enough tales of life on Korriban, to know the way it goes.  And...For what it's worth, I hadn't intended to even throw that into question.  Your Lord is a Sith Lord I wish more Sith Lords were like.  I know you didn't hear most of it, but - that whole latter half of the rant, it was about ways to be a Sith, that - most of the people who lay claim to the title would disdain, but - I brought it up because I felt that Lord Pradnakt might appreciate...a way to peel apart 'being a Sith', and 'being a creature that feeds off of suffering', which is...more true, of the Dark Council, or the galaxy's present problem Darth Tenebrae, or the twisted malformation that Darth Bane will try to make of the Order with his Rule of Two, let alone the culmination of that in Emperor karking Sheev - who will be in your files under 'Palpatine' but I am not giving that man anything he wants, out of spite - some several thousand years later.  ...She's already not the latter, to be clear.  And -  ...I don't know if I'd have the ability to pull myself back from that brink, had I been through however many karking years of - living under such a constant haze of backstabbing, duplicitous powermongery.  That's what I think strength is.  So, if she thinks I think she's not a Sith, then let me be clear that I think she hews closest to what I would argue a Sith ought to be, ever since the original Sith species rose up in revolt against those who enslaved them and wrote the kriffing Sith Code.  ...Does that help, do you think?"

"It does."

"The other thing to keep in mind is that you can't have that kind of conversation at all, with someone like Lord Pradnakt, without establishing a relationship of trust first. If you try, you'll hurt them, no matter how you word it - in most cases they won't be able to hear you at all, you'll just be one more person with an unwelcome opinion on what they ought to be."

"...Oof.  Ouch.  Yeah, I deserved that."  She shakes her head sheepishly.  "I'm not used to this whole 'making friends' thing, most of my past friendships were, uh, made at me.  Still, uh.  I think I know how to properly apologize, when she gets back.  So...Thank you.  For the context, and your thoughts and your assistance."

"You're welcome." She looks over to see where Pradnakt is with her drink. "Did you have any other questions for me?"

She looks to Ciara.

No, she's good.

"I don't think so...but is there anything you'd like to ask?"

"I am curious about your 'Will of the Multiverse' situation, if you don't mind explaining it."

"I'm not sure how much there is to explain, but if you have slightly more specific questions I might have better answers?  It plucked me out of my universe and did Random Omnipotent Being things and I guess I've technically created a universe now.  Not really very exciting to have done, from the inside, though I'm honestly proud of the entirely divergent fundamental physics."

"Created a universe, huh."

Pradnakt arrives at this juncture with Daisy's milkshake, setting it in front of her and kissing the top of her head before settling herself back in her seat. "Who created a universe? And why are you still standing; go ahead and sit if you're going to stay."

"Me, but only technically.  I just did the basic physics, like, the fundamental particles and suchlike, and a little bit of the lore, for a single planet.  At a single point in time, for that matter.  And hell, I technically stole the conceptual axes of existence - the types of magic, in other words - from a video game, though I did tweak them some.  Though, y'know, the game didn't exactly bother to simulate atomic physics whatsoever."

...Sure, she'll grab a seat.

...Ciara nudges her before she manages to sit in it, though.

...She firms her posture.  "...Before I do grab that seat, though, I believe I owe you an apology, Lord Pradnakt.  It's - come to my attention that I ran my damn fool mouth, and in so doing both - overstepped my bounds, and implied something that I meant the exact opposite of.  And I'm supposed to be better than that."  Much like Pradnakt is supposed to be better than causing unnecessary suffering, but she's not going to mention that parallel.  She's learned her lesson.  "So I want to - clear the air, as was, and hopefully correct an erroneous impression I've given.

"...Could you, uh, turn off the thing where I can't give any weight to you being a Sith first, though, please; I think I can work around it if I have to but I also think it would be easier on the both of us if I didn't, for this part."

Pradnakt gives Daisy a questioning look; the droid pauses thoughtfully for a moment, but nods, and Pradnakt's Sith-ness reasserts its relevance.

"My thanks."  She takes a moment, steadies herself - dips into a bow, low, respectful, of one noble acknowledging another as an equal - and speaks, with a solemn gravity and formality.

"...Lord Pradnakt, you are the sort of Sith Lord that I would, in anything remotely resembling your position, aspire to be - and likely fail to, if I'm honest with both you and myself.  It is my honest belief that you are truer to the Code that forms the foundations of the Sith Order than every Sith Emperor I've ever heard of, and I have the utmost respect for the strength of will and spirit you have shown in - being, as you have.  I cannot think of a way to explain why that will not risk me putting my foot in my mouth again, but...  ...well, I know you wouldn't recommend it, and I haven't earned the right - but I would, nonetheless, trust my life were it in your hands, and... that is the highest form of regard I think I know how to give.  And it is thusly that I hope I might petition for your forbearance or forgiveness, as regards my hastily-spoken words, and their most vehemently unmeant implications.  ...Thank you."

Huh. "Apology accepted. And, here -" she takes a thumb drive out of a pocket and floats it over. "That's every edition of the lightsaber design textbook from the one I learned from until they stopped updating it, plus a couple related ones you might like. Bar's having a kyber growing workroom added to our suite," she adds, to Daisy.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  "Oh, thank you!"  Whether or not this contains any information useful to her future self, she is so excited to have actual lightsaber design texts from an actual Force-Sensitive.  She has dreamed of things like these.

She'll be right back!

"...I think she has decided she is going to give you an equivalent treasure to the one she feels she has just received; that may take a little bit, even with all the tricks she has for speeding things along.  Thank you, Lord Pradnakt; I haven't seen her this happy in - weeks, at least; perhaps ever."

"It's no trouble. So what was this about creating a universe?"

"Well.  You must first understand that I have no firsthand knowledge of any of this, only what my Lady has entrusted to me - but I do believe she'd share, because she has been, so I'll tell you what she's told me.

"It started when she got surprised by an angel..."

And she recounts the loose details of Alicia's story about coming to Villarosa - the surprise of it, the Angel and her corresponding human, Alicia's particular investment and involvement in fundamental physics - she's had no tutoring in anything but the very basics of arcane magic and the Light, and yet she understands so much of what moves the world that she's shared a few tricks with Ciara in her own specialty - admittedly, Alicia says she's stealing notes from that videogame again, but considering that the 'canonical' Princess's trick of commingling Light and Chaos magics to focus the latter in an intended direction was entirely of Alicia's own invention, posited as a logical consequence of the strength of Light as a weapon against demons - creatures of inherent Chaos - where Order was notably inefficient in countering its opposite...  She thinks Alicia deserves more credit for figuring things out.

She doubts that whoever built the game Alicia drew from for inspiration actually explained why the Anti-Magic Shell Alicia taught her was an ability that the 'death knight' she says she played could have possibly worked, let alone actually generate resources, and Alicia not only explained to her how to make the field, but also why it would work.  Ciara half expects that if Lord Pradnakt asked Alicia for ideas of how to use the...spirit magic?  Of her home universe in unconventional ways, she'd have dozens.  "She seems very enamored with your universe; I expect she's put a lot of thought into what she'd do in it.  She's a planner, when she's able."

Oh, hey, Alicia's coming back!  With what looks like a particularly fancy dataslate, being as it is bedazzled - and, to something of her own surprise, a crystal in her other hand.  "I have returned!  With gifts."

"Oh?"

"Yeah.  Some stuff that'll be - hopefully of practical use, no matter where you're going.  I was kind of torn on whether to focus on, like, the biggest differences you should expect to find if you're out adventuring in universe sheaves remotely like mine or inspired by mine or inspired by fiction written on mine, or just packing the damn thing full of every encyclopedia ever and trusting your collective abilities to use it effectively, or giving you the tools you'd find most useful to ruin Vitiate's entire existence, so I kind of did all of those at once and maybe recommend that you don't look at how all that closely because the universe might notice I'm cheating some of the numbers it runs and get a bit stroppy - not that I think that's likely, like, I look at my stuff all the time and it doesn't actually implode when I observe it, even the impossible things - but I'd rather be careful with the sort of knowledge that can upend worlds, so if somebody's poking it wrong, it might get more dangerous.  'Wrong' in this case meaning 'with intent to access something without authorization from the limited emulation of my decision procedure around catastrophic infosec', mostly.

"And then, uh, could you take a look at this crystal?  Because I'm looking at it and getting a whole lotta nothing-useful from my own investigations, even the ones that're jury-rigged to understand Earthling physics, but it's clearly something that is a thing somebody might need or want, or I wouldn't have it.  I'm confident enough in my spellwork to say that much is true.  I just don't know why it's shown up, or who it's actually for, because all I get from actually asking it is me slipping it into my hand with an absurdly cheeky wink!"

"If the universe were going to take offense at us doing impossible things we'd already have some problems, but I hear you, we'll make sure someone with danger sense is around if we want to do anything too strange." She teekays the crystal delicately out of Alicia's hand to have a look at it.

On initial examination, its most obvious physical quality is that it is purple - not blue, nor green, nor red, but a vivid, vibrant sort of purple, that almost shines with a light of its own.  The second most obvious thing is that it would fit in Pradnakt's lightsaber - like it was crafted with that in mind.

"That's a kyber, and - I suspect I'm meant to be taking it."

"Ma'am?"

Related to my prodigy-ness, she signs.

"Ah. Well. If that's all right with you?" she asks Alicia.

...She takes a moment to put her face back on.  It seems to have gotten stuck on 'mild surprise'.

"...Well, yeah, or I wouldn't have offered it over to you to begin with.  I kind of figured the odds were in Lord Pradnakt's favor when the divinations came up screwy - I wouldn't, don't need a kyber crystal qua kyber crystal to make the closest thing I can get to a lightsaber, under the physics I'm working with these days - I'm just nonetheless vaguely surprised there was anything approaching a clear answer when she looked, or - whatever led to this conclusion."  She turns her attention back to Lord Pradnakt.  "But yes, of course you can have it.  Clearly someone wanted you to rather a lot, if they managed to arrange this happening while possibly not actually existing in any real sense."  She shakes her head.  "Void bullshit.  I'd say 'not even once', but to be honest if I did I'd probably spontaneously combust from the sheer hypocrisy of trying.  I picked out the damn thing, revamped the entire field - and then gave myself an affinity for it.  That's at least three strikes, I'd say, so I'm definitely out.

"...Where were we?"

While Alicia was speaking, Daisy held out her hand for the crystal; Pradnakt looked only a little conflicted about turning it over. She has it tucked away in a storage compartment in her chassis, now.

"You might've had some questions about lightsaber design for Lord Pradnakt?"

...She hasn't really had a chance to look at the books yet, and with the way Ciara's looking at her she is not going to ask anything more about the specific crystal she just handed over, but - maybe if she talks about the Darksaber; that's cool and not going to change the face of the galaxy.  ...Well.  She's pretty sure it won't do that.

Oh thank the gods.  A nice, boring technical subject for Alicia to be Alicia at.  She mouths 'thank you' at Daisy; she might be able to do this all day, but she doesn't actually find herding cats enjoyable in and of itself.

They can talk about lightsabers, then; the Darksaber has a number of interesting properties that Pradnakt will want to hear all about, and Alicia if Alicia wants some tutoring on the basic principles of them, she can certainly provide.

"That should keep both of them occupied for a while, I think. Are you all right? It seems like you could use a break."

"A little bit."  By which she means 'more than she's willing to admit'.  "Getting Alicia through social situations without anything exploding always reminds me of why I don't like casting fire spells."

"Oh?"

"Mmhmm.  Because no matter how you cast them, if you get it wrong something explodes in your face.  Sometimes even if you get it right.  And Alicia is most definitely like elemental fire, in that way."

"That sounds familiar," she says, fondly. "It's been some time since I had to deal with it, though."

"Mmm?"

"My Pradnakt is pretty sensible, usually, but she got into a bad situation around the time she met me, and had to do some inadvisable Force things to get out of it, and it wasn't good for her mental stability. She's much better now."

"Mmmm.  I worry that Alicia has not had the luxury of time to recover from her own troubles, and given everything she's told me since - and everything she hasn't -

"I'm pretty sure that no matter how she tries to hide it, this environment isn't really helping with her problems either - but I couldn't budge her if I tried; she's - holding on to inherited responsibilities."

"The environment here, you mean? Or in the world you came from?"

"The world we came from, which - she is not going to let herself leave this easily.  Because she believes herself responsible for its woes."

"It's paused there, I assume?"

"As far as we know.  But if she leaves for real, it won't be, is our understanding; I might be the one that found the door, but - we're sticking together."

"I'm not suggesting she leave - or, I'm not suggesting you talk her into leaving now. You can just stay here, for as long as she needs, and see what she decides to do then."

"It's not that I don't plan to take that advice, but - I'm not sure that that's going to help with...

"Does it make sense, if I say she's haunted?  By...

"By her future, and her past."

"That I'm less sure how to help with - Lord Pradnakt has always been fairly good about facing what she needs to. There are books on that sort of thing, though, I'm sure. And poetry, if she likes poetry at all."

"It's not that she won't face it.  It's that when she goes looking...

"It hurts her, to try.

"But I'll certainly see if there's anything Bar can recommend."

"Sometimes things that hurt need to be done anyway," she nods. "Lord Pradnakt finds art and katas useful, when she comes to something like that; it's the creative outlet, and the physical exercise, and the feeling of power."

"Sometimes.  I just wish they didn't.  That I could help her face her memories and fears so that it doesn't have to."

She looks over at Alicia and Pradnakt, who appear to have gotten a whiteboard from somewhere.

"Because when she's happy like this you can see her, the sort of person she wants to be.  Rather than the ball of spikes she is.  She hates the way she reacts to things.  Says it's just completely without basis, entirely irrational.  And yet --

"If there's one thing she's made clear, it's that things happen for reasons.  So what sort of reasons were these?  That took a bubbly little kid and turned her into this...terrified, indrawn mess.  The other Princess - she snuck around the castle because she didn't want to be seen doing anything that the Queen would yell at her for.  This one, it's like she sneaks around because she fears she might.  Even when it's just existing.

"I'm not sure that makes sense, to claim is a difference.  But if I try to articulate what changed...

"This is what I come to.

"And then...

"At some point, I think she tried to - resolve herself to be seen, and damn the consequences.  But even that is just adding to the pile of...

"The things that go wrong, like when she said the thing you cut off earlier and all I could do was get her out of the way because actually interrupting would make her push back out of spite.

"Hurt people hurt people, she keeps on saying.  And I think she's been bleeding out for years with no-one to stop it, because - her heart might still be beating, but I think the tissue's necrotized.  She cares, but a lot of it is out of...

"Out of feeling that if she didn't put the effort in, she'd be obliged to put a preemptive end to the 'cynical sociopathic murderhobo' that would be - 'walking around wearing her corpse'.  Giving gods and fate the finger as she hoarded empty nothings for the pale emulation of the real sort of power she would have abandoned all possibility of ever having, in this pursuit.  And then there's the way that she seems to be fueling this decision with spite - and it gets everywhere, afterwards, reinforcing the pattern.

"And I don't know how to fix that.  Because it's definitely broken, that much I'm certain of.  Things are all tangled up.  Coming from the wrong places.  Going to the wrong places, and generating responses she wants to never have.

"But what can anyone do?"

"Mm."

"The very first thing they teach a new Sith, you know, is that they have to be on their own side, before anything else, always; Sith who don't do that don't live very long. And of course it's possible for that to cause problems - if a Sith doesn't happen to care about other peoples' well-being there's no way to get them to - but it did help, in our case. My Pradnakt was hurt, sometimes, by looking at her situation and facing what she really wanted and how far from it she was, but she was never scared to, she didn't have to worry about feeling obligated to do something she didn't want to or not do something she did, even when that hurt people. She didn't have to take someone else's feelings about it into consideration if she didn't want to. And, that's - she does want to do well by people, in the end; she's done a lot of thing she regrets, and one of the things I'm hoping for here is a way for us to make right some of the damage she's done. But I don't think she could have gotten to this point in her life, where she is stable and all right, without giving herself that freedom first. And most people have a lot less capacity to harm the people around them than Sith do."

"..."

"."

She clears her throat, takes a sip of water, and tries again.

"...How do they deal with people who think that their own side is, overall, the wrong side to be on?  If they do, at all."

"Not, ah, constructively, generally. For the people in question. You might have better luck asking elsewhere."

"...I rather figured that was the sort of answer you'd have for me.  Is there anywhere in particular you'd recommend?"

"Hm."

"I don't know if she's still here, but there was a witch from Discworld that we talked to earlier; if she's still around you might try speaking to her."

"...I'm afraid I don't know who that is."

"...Which one?"

"...You know them?"

"...Well, I know a few.  I'm sure there's more witches in the Ramtops than I can count on my fingers and toes.  Not even considering the Chalk.

"...It was probably Esme, though, if you two are talking about the thing.  And I cannot imagine her just sitting around in a bar.  Nanny Ogg?  Sure.  Magrat, maybe.  Tiffany - when she's older.  But...Well, if you want to unfucken my brain, you'd want the specialist in headology, all right.  And she's definitely not still here, I'd bet my bottom dollar on it.  Absolutely too much fuckery for her tastes.  I'm already surprised she didn't walk right in, take one look at the place, maybe get a bottle of something to go, which I have a vague recollection of being likely to be absinthe, and turn around to walk right out, with accompanying big stompy boot sounds.  But it probably would have worked."  She huffs a sigh, frustratedly.  "Which is why it's not going to ever happen, because nine times out of ten I don't actually get to have nice things.  Just things I should be glad enough for.

"That or she's standing right behind me and about to tell me to stop being such a fucking dumbass, and because it's her that might actually work - but that doesn't really fit the tropes.  And Discworld has the tropes.  Real live narrativium and whatnot."  This time the sigh is...wistful, mournful, tired.  "If my life was a story in a way that mattered, I'd know what the fuck to do about...  About...  Whatever is wrong with me.  But it ain't.  So I don't.  I don't get to live in the shonen anime where the power of friendship and feelings beats all.  Hell, I don't even get the predictable horrors or exciting fringe benefits of cyberpunk.  I'm just stuck neck-deep in the depressingly real unpredictability of reality, where you never know what political atrocity will be committed next Tuesday.

"...Well, I mean, you probably could, but like.  With far more staring into the abyss that is the depths of humanity's inhumanity to its own than anyone ever should.

"...I could probably explain exactly where my hopelessness of achieving a good ending came from, but I'm not sure it'd be useful to try; it's just...been a fact of my life for almost a decade that the people in power could suddenly try to kill me, and that's really the problem.  And anyway I've really been quite rude to Lord Pradnakt to duck out in the middle of a fascinating lightsaber discussion and I should probably get back to it.  But, uh, I hope that-all helps with whatever you're discussing."

She stops leaning in Ciara and Daisy's general direction, and returns to the conversation with Pradnakt with a "Sorry about that, I heard something I recognized, and Ciara looked - pretty lost, and I couldn't, like, not help her with that.  She's done - far more than she ought to - for me, and...well.  Least I can do is try to help her.  But we were talking about the cyclical pulse multiplexer schema?"

"She introduced herself as Miss Prisal, and she might still be around, it's just hard to tell with how time works here - she did mention she was intending to stay a while," Daisy continues smoothly.

(Huh.  Not someone she's ever heard of.  Weird.  But good?  Hopefully.)

She catches the look of surprise on Alicia's face, and can only amusedly and fondly shake her head.

"Perhaps I'll have to see if she's still here."

"Good luck," she offers. "She was out back watching someone set up a hot air balloon when we met her, if that helps at all."

"Alicia and I will have to go look, once yours and mine have reached a good stopping point in their lightsaber discussion.  Probably either when Alicia starts trying to build a working example as a discussion prop, or she runs out of ability to use words; she has the wanting-to-see-a-proof-of-concept look on her face and according to her it's much easier to do that when you can think things done instead of having to use your hands, so she's been doing rather a lot of it, but she's also starting to do the thing where her thought process won't stay still long enough to be transmuted into the spoken word properly - all you get is 'buts' and 'thens' and 'ifs' and hand gestures, and anyone trying to keep up with whatever she's thinking about is going to have to read her mind or guess.  And she says people really shouldn't read her mind in detail, because there might be uncontained infohazards in it, though apparently any amount of empathy is fine.  She said something about a use-mention distinction, and I promptly lost the thread of it, though Duchess Ophelia understood exactly what she meant.  ...Really, that's just more evidence you shouldn't; the Duke of Thorns' mind is a scary place to be understood.  I might have something of her ability to think corkscrews around people, but I'm not doing it on the scale of kingdoms and I don't ever want to try."

"Has she considered learning a sign language? My Pradnakt prefers one, for similar reasons."

"Well, she complains about not having learned one, which isn't not 'considering learning one', but most of the time she falls back to text.  I will certainly see if I can cajole her into trying it sometime, when the stakes aren't particularly immediate.  She has quite a distaste for ideogrammic languages, based on that time we had to translate something from Xinshi, but perhaps if we reframe the way words in Azerosi Sign Language work as not ideograms but shorthands...Which they are, in essence, anyway -

"...We'll see how it goes, I suppose."

"Good luck. I'd suggest you try Sith Battle Sign with her, it's meant to be useful even if someone only knows a few signs and you can do it with one hand full, but I'm not sure if there are any books on it."

"I suppose we'll see if Bar has any.  ...Thank you, again."

...And Alicia has run out of cogent things to say about lightsabers.  "Thank you for the discussion; it was really cool.  We should probably go looking for something that helps with our own problems, though, since we're here.  Seize the advantages we're given, and whatnot.  Maybe we'll see you around?"

"Maybe! I'm not sure how long we'll be here but we aren't planning on leaving just yet."

Alicia gives a brisk nod, as she and Ciara prepare to set off into the distance.  "I hope you find what you're looking for, all of you."

"It's been a pleasure.  Come on, I heard there's something about a hot-air balloon out back."

And on that note, they vanish into the crowd.