"I think I'd like lessons on how to speak Basic to be readily available to anyone that wants them. Some amount of cultural loss is likely inevitable, but I think it'd be a pity for the entire language to fall completely into obscurity and disuse."

"I agree."

She smiles.

"There are a number of things I feel similarly towards, but I think Doctor Gelrath is quite enough of a headache for my security force to persuade me to moderation. I shouldn't tempt their wrath, their objections are well-founded."

"Well now I'm curious," laughs Miles.

"Of which part? Or is it simply a voracious and directionless curiosity?"

"Didn't you just imply that there are things you feel strongly about which you prefer to keep secret so as not to annoy your security force?"

Her smile turns sly.

"Did I? I surely don't know what you mean. The implication must be the result of a translation error, I'm afraid I'm not yet fluent in English. While my translator is very good, it is not without flaw."

"Regardless, I want to strike a balance between 'jealously guarding all my resources for personal gain' and 'fling all that I can to the proverbial wind.'"

"Very sensible."

"Thank you, I try."

"You're doing very well at it so far," says Aral.

"Thank you. I've had some practice. My disposition was a major factor in why Darth Occlus accepted me as an apprentice."

"That sounds like a story. Is it a story suitable for dinner conversation?"

She reviews her own history. If she removes the part about how she had to kill the insane wretch in the tomb...

"Yes," she decides. "I met her while I was in the middle of the Sith Academy Trials. I correctly expected the Trials to be dangerous, and conducted myself accordingly. I was - careful, methodical, logical. The first trial was set in a Sith's tomb, and it was built to unsettle the acolytes." For a brief moment she considers describing it. The terror of the unknown, the plague of self-doubt as real and imagined dangers intermingled in her mind. The race against her light's power supply and the silent search for a sword, only to find that it was in a large room with an obscene number of potential containers. Then, of course, the - well. She wouldn't call it murder, precisely. The attack of the maddened failed acolyte and her self defense.

No. She - doesn't want to talk about it. Not right now. Perhaps not ever.

"While I was not unaffected by the trial itself," she continues, with barely a pause, "I didn't let it affect my methodology. I focused on safety and secrecy over speed, and so I emerged completely unharmed," if slightly covered in blood, "but also late. So late, in fact, that when I had finished, all of the other acolytes had departed for the next trial. Occlus was speaking with our," she declines to use the word 'overseer' for the slavery implications she doesn't particularly want to talk about and instead goes with a painfully dry, "instructor."

Absently, she drums her fingers on the table, composing the event in her memory. "I had decided by then that I would not slink in last as if I'd failed, because by my standards, I hadn't. I'd prioritized my own safety over my instructor's approval, and I'd exited the tomb unharmed, despite the dangers. So I walked up to a Sith Lord and my instructor with my head held high."

(Of course she did.)

"The instructor was dismissive, but Darth Occlus was intrigued by - well, I think my audacity. So she asked what had taken me so long. I explained my reasoning. She approved of it. Then she removed me from the second trial entirely, because she was a Sith Lord and we were competing to be accepted as her apprentice. Instead I helped her in the library." Smile.

"Lucky you."

"Yes. Well, sort of. I did get the chance to research Force techniques while there, and avoid the second trial entirely, but the blatant display of favoritism had singled me out as Occlus's favorite. Which, in that circumstance, was a dangerous thing to be. My instructor and a number of my peers hated me from then on."

"This is the same one you annoyed with your competence, isn't it."

"Yes."

"Nicely done."