Rishi sat motionless in the middle of the Temple of Woe and concentrated. She was remembering the lecture she had never had with Trystal. The idea of a full day of classes in memory stuffed into your brain allowing you to learn from it and recall it for later study amazed her.

She had put the Force away and worked on her innate psionic abilities, abilities Jerrod knew she had but never trained her on because he planned on exploiting them when she eventually challenged him to supremacy. Now she was being taught to hone them, to use them.

She found her center again and calmed, unlike her Force abilities these abilities worked backwards, when she hated or was angry her Force based powers were strong, but her innate abilities were worthless. When she was calm her Force powers were weak but her Innate powers were easily focused. Still, she had a lot of work to do.

She could feel the emotions of the men outside in the compound, those guarding the gate. They could only think of drinking and...she blushed. She could not understand this penchant men had for chasing women. She could still remember walking in on Brutin in his office, fully five other people sitting in chairs speaking with him and it had taken her a few moments to realize the girl in his lap, Bastian, was moaning because his hand was up under her dress.

She had sat there stunned as he touched her body and she reacted and in front of everyone as if it were nothing. Only Dpoc seem disturbed by the display and as he stood up to make his leave she found the strength to flee.

She had to shake her head to get that image out of her head. She centered herself again and ran through some exercises. She could not think about how this would add to her power, she would lose control and be take to centering herself. She did that a lot.

But the stress was gone, she no longer had to prove herself, she no longer had to kill Jerrod. Hex had accepted her back with open arms and forgave her for her emotional outburst. She was no longer hell bent on proving that she could overcome and succeed, she just did.

And since Trystal showed up and helped her she didn't just center herself for training. She was centered.

Verishia stood there watching Trystal wink out and then she closed her eyes and concentrated. It would take her all of ten seconds to end this game using the Force but that was not the point of the test. She had studied hard using psionics without tapping the Force.

She picked a woman out of the crowd, she knew it was not Trystal, that would be too easy for a test, so she probed her using the skills Trystal taught her and then smiles. A blank slate. Simulacrums designed to act like Trystal but not think like her.

She went to the next one in line and started off probing, it was so difficult this way, a new set of skills being used but she continued forward, putting all of her energy into finding Trystal and proving to her that she could do this.

Two more went down in slow agonizing moments of focus, her thoughts still chaotic as she thought about things outside the training, the Legion, Hex, Brutin, none of these people should have intruded on her thoughts but she couldn't help but allow them to interfere and then push them away.

Time passed, she was not sure how long but it was this point that she noticed she was getting better, that things were easier to do . Repetition was the key and she went after it with a vengeance. When she finally got good enough to do it without much effort she stopped and stood there, watching the simulacrums walk back and forth. She had gotten into a routine with the scanning, now she had interrupted that.

She smiled as she jumped right back into the scanning, her skills improved enough for her to do it, now she had to finely tune it. Time passed and she started to get angry, there was a stadium full of Trystals marching around and finding the right her was a needle in a haystack search.

She stood her ground and went one after the other, searching, scanning, cursing and practicing until she was sure she had it down without thinking about it.

Finally she managed to locate Trystal and scan her, the look of triumph on her face as Trystal turned to look at her and the stadium wavered around them and a sudden rush of weakness pushed through Verishia as her mind re-established itself back in her body. She was starving, thirsty and tired, her Sith meditations had allowed her to put herself into hybernation so that she was at a considerable advantage but as she blinked her eyes and focused on the Temple Chronometer she realized a week had passed.

A week!

As the scene of the Sith arena materialized around Verishia's mental avatar, Trystal's avatar padded down the steps onto the sands to stand before the Sith woman. "Well well, it's been a while Sith. I was actually starting to wonder if you had forgotten about me." A low laugh and that same smirk followed the words as Trystal started to circle Verishia, looking her up and down.

"Well, I suppose you've grown some in ability since the last lesson. This time however I thought I'd explain the method to my madness. Everything around you, including me, is being projected into your subconcious mind by the device I gave you. My mental imprint is stored, but unlike your holocrons, I don't have a spirit essence. I'm just a complex psionic computer."

Finally Trystal walked over to sit on the side of the arena. "As for the training itself, some of it might not make sense at first, so stick with it. I'm using a modified form of the training programs used for Khyrolii children, so many of your tests will seem like games. If I have you playing dodgeball or lifting weights, remember that even though it seems like physical training, it's all in your head, literally. The computer will be translating everything you do in here into neural impulses, essentially re-wiring your brain with new skills."

"Alright, last time you learned how to brush another mind and recognize specific signatures. Finding the active mind among a legion of blanks was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Now it's time to find a specific needle, in a stack of needles. Hide and seek time again, only this time all of my clones will be thinking, so you have to learn how to scan the surface thoughts, to listen to a mind and recognize which one is the right me." With that Trystal stood up and walked behind Verishia, right into the middle of an army of exact duplicates, and as stated, whenever Verishia touched any of these minds, they felt like a real mind.

A handful of the Trystal clones at the front of the crowd turned to Verishia and spoke at once, "I hope you ate a good meal before coming in here, because this time it might take a while to find the right me. Here's a hint though, my real self enjoys fish for lunch."

And with that the entire crowd, some hundred or more clones, began milling around and talking at a low hum. The noise quickly built in volume until it was a nearly deafening white noise. Verishia now had to find the one Trystal that was thinking the right words to pass the test.