"Makes it a bit less fun."

"I'll be more creative in my puzzle design next time."

"Appreciated." Elesse starts stretching.

She does a few stretches as well, though not quite as extensive. "Stick to just physical skills first run?" she asks, off-handed. "No equipment or anything." Like the Force, for instance - though they're (just barely) close enough to the Temple they likely could get pretty blatant without drawing that much notice. 

"I'll do my best to keep up." Elesse is in fact a Jedi, she doesn't super need to worry about being subtle about using the Force.

She could pretty easily pretend to be a Jedi as well, so long as they don't run into anyone who'd expect to recognize every padawan. Still - "Would you rather level the playing field?"

"Not until I know whether I'll need the handicap."

"Then let's get started."

Away they go!

Elesse does decently for an amateur, making up for a lack of more technical skill with generalized athleticism and Force-guided instinct.

Lily provides guidance as they go, too, including why she's choosing this particular path - there's a point that involves clambering down a complicated, deeply engraved facade, where she says, "It's easier to climb up at speed than down, which is good for a race," plenty of times she points out good paths or more often bad ways to get from point A to point B - 

And then they get to where she thinks will be a good starting point (a landing pad for speeders), a level below where they met but mostly the distance is horizontal since that's apparently easier, and she says, "Let's rest a bit - and there's somewhere I wanna show you, but it's not a great place to race from."

"A scenic overlook?"

"There's some even down here." She points out where they can get even further down - it requires inching a little bit along a narrow ledge until they reach a combination of a metal grill and a sturdy set of pipes at the end of the closed alley that they can use to climb down. Fortunately they don't need to go far before they're moving to the side onto an empty balcony, the windows and door leading into it boarded up with sheet metal. There's an open corridor cutting into the building at an angle, totally dark. Through it there's another deep balcony, another set of boarded up doors...

And a dizzying plunge of the city into the depths, a yawning chasm lit by a rainbow of neon lights, their diffuse glow catching on wisps of smoke. There's a roof over them, some building or another bridging the gap and strangling all hints of sunlight. A waterfall glints across the way, its murky waters picking up glimmers of light on its way further into the depths.

There's people down here, amazingly enough - mostly foot traffic on a spider's web of walkways, supplemented by a few speeders zipping through the obstructions.

 It's an eerie vista, at once zagged and soft, wholly unreal. 

"You don't often think of the underlevels like- this."

Small grin. "Pretty much what I thought." She takes her backpack off, setting it by the corner, and sits down at the edge. "I didn't know this was here either, not until I was scouting this week - my teacher suggested I come here." More quietly: "I think she was trying to make a point to me."

"A reminder to look beyond the surface?"

"...No. Or - not really. I..."

"Dunno. I've always thought that, just, people are miserable, right? The galaxy sucks. People die pointless deaths of hunger, of disease, of crime, of wars, all things the Republic keeps pretending don't happen while the rich busy themselves with just... Stupid shit. And even the rich are miserable. And no one knows how to fix it, no one's coordinating, no one knows their place, so we need someone strong, someone who can take charge and coordinate, tell everyone what to do and how to fix things."

"She - you know her. She just wants freedom for everyone. And she told me to come here, and then she told me to go talk to people, pretend I was doing a school report or something stupid like that. And people don't like being hungry, they don't like being sick, they don't like crime, but they don't want to move. They don't want some idiot surfacer coming in and telling them how it's done - turns out it's actually really easy to get people to talk to you about their lives and what they want. And they don't want to be coerced, especially if some dickhead is saying it's secretly good for them."

"...My previous teacher said... Things I didn't like him doing to me were for my benefit. It was... Weird, to think I'm both unusual - I don't feel like I know my place - and... Normal, or at least fucked up in a normal way."

"What do you mean by your place?"

Awkward shrug. And, as she looks out over the vista before them - away from Elesse - she says: "I don't really know, which is kinda the problem. Just... What I'm supposed to do. My fate, why I'm even alive, the right place in the galaxy for me - where I fit." 

"I never... Fit, not where I was born. There was always something wrong with me. I felt like... There had to be something else, you know? A place, a way I could be right."

She pauses for a moment, then, abruptly: "I tried to join the Jedi, once I realized it was an option - I didn't really know I could use the Force, not yet, but I knew they were the only ones who could take me away, and something felt... Like I should try. The person I talked to said I was too old. My oldest brother said if he dropped me off on the Temple's front step and I lied about knowing my family they'd have to do something with me, and I was a skinny kid who starved herself for some semblance of control so I looked half my age and I could've lied about that, too - my brother was just trying to get rid of me so I couldn't challenge his inheritance, he would've as soon dropped me off this balcony, but back then I was young and stupid and believed he was trying to help me escape - but my father caught us."

"Then Damask found me and said he could show me where I belong. He was also fucking lying."

"I'm sorry you experienced that."

"...It sucked, yeah. But it's the past. My family's dead, I'm away from Damask - and I've got my teacher, now. She says she can't tell me where I belong, but... She's helping me figure things out."

"For... whatever it's worth, I think that everyone- everyone who thinks about it- has to find their own meaning of life. Their own purpose. I don't think anyone is born already knowing where they fit."

"You were raised as a Jedi, though - how is concluding you're already in the right place any different from knowing it your whole life?"

"I haven't, uh, finished deciding the Jedi is the right place for me. Not everyone gets Knighted."

Slow nod. (So much for Vader's insistence that Elesse won't fall and Fidela has nothing to be jealous about... Palpatine isn't going to push, though - she likes Elesse, but she still doesn't know if she wants to share.)

"It's good they let people leave."

"If you can't leave, it's not a choice to stay. And then it's just a prison."