Continuing to circle Xollen, the Dark lord noted the tremor in her fingertips, the tension in her muscles.  Oh, she was strong in the dark side, but her dedication to the warrior sects was so deep.  It was a waste, one that Darth Simetra chose to rectify - if only because there were other uses for the student.  She lowered her staff to the ground, and let the sharp tip of the crystal run along the metal of the cargo bay floor.  It scraped unpleasantly, and curls of metal coiled around the tip as it slowly followed the teacher.<br/><br/>"The<em>Jedi</em>," she hissed, her voice deepening to a near growl as she spoke the word, a cruel smile touching her lips, "practice acesiticsm because it protects them from the Dark Side....it divorces them from passion....pain...pleasure....<em>hate</em>."  She sent another surge of her potent emotions roiling over Xollen, forcing her to experience disgust and arrogance from outside herself.  "The way of the Sith is to<em>embrace</em>these potent things, make them our own...."  She finished her last circuit about the young human, leaving her circled by a line of damaged metal that circled back on itself in a second semicircle.<br/><br/>Simetra stabbed the floor in front of Xollen, and then drew another line in the metal, and finished it with a small flourish, cutting into the circle and ending the half circle.  "You are strong in the Dark Side, skilled with the saber."  Her voice shifted from a pleasant contralto to dark, rasping growls as she spoke, her emotions coloring the tone of her voice.  "But you would never defeat a Jedi master with all your skill.  Your anger and hate....it spills off of you, radiation from an open reactor."  Again the twi'lek stabbed the floor just in front of Xollen and used both hands to carve a deeper, more complex symbol in front of Xollen's foot.  "You will never defeat a Sith Lord, because of your hate and anger."<br/><br/>Stepping back, Simetra crouched, and touched the floor with her finger, her eye fixed on Xollen.  She half hissed, half growled, ancient words, words that might have come from the Krath, the Old Sith, specters long dead.  A bright spark of blue-white light erupted around her finger and she slowly carved a similar circle about herself, marking it just as she had marked Xollen's circle.  The difference was only in how she did the work....and now Xollen - to say nothing of the other students nearby - could suddenly Sense the deep, tacky, viscous pool of Simetra's passionate hate and arrogance, her disdain and overwhelming anger at everything and everyone in the universe.  It made Xollen's homicidal wrath seem positively banal.<br/><br/>As she rose, staff held in both hands lightly, she glared at the human woman with her good eye.  While Xollen's hate and wrath felt expansive, deep and powerful, there was sophistication in Simetra's passionate poisons, complex layers of how she hated, what types of anger she felt, her desires both.  All carefully hidden from those around here, until this moment.  Now it surged, welling up and filling her like the venom of her masters'.  "You have great strength in the Dark Side....but so will our opponents.  And they will take their strength from your hate, even as you feed upon it!"  Letting go of the staff with one hand, the teacher reached out palm up, and jerked her fingers into a clawlike motion, glaring at her student....and ripped the emotions she's given to the young Sith, away, just as she'd fed them to her.<br/><br/>"Now....how well can you keep what you take?"