Ark'ik awoke, his carapice covered in sand, and groggily remembered Quinn insisting on piloting an atmospheric vehicle to Jabba's palace against all -- including Ark'ik's own -- counsel to the contrary; but as the brash pilot insisted, "If it moves, I can ride it!"  And ride it Quinn did, directly into an unexpected sandstorm that caused him to crash as Ark'ik leaped off the doomed vehicle.  Now, as Ark'ik slowly regained consciousness and his multi-faceted eyes regained their vision, he saw a giant, spidery form loom over him, and he fainted from panic.  He awoke an indeterminate time later in a dark cave, its walls lined with roughly hewn shelves on which sat scores of large, bulbous bowls containing an orange fluid; in each bowl of fluid floated a brain.  Ark'ik shrieked in horror and enormous robotic spiders emerged from the shadows and surrounded him, each with a large bowl containing a floating brain hanging from its metal thorax.  Through the circle toward Ark'ik calmly walked a bald, monastic human clad in a red robe who identified himself as Claren.  Claren hushed Ark'ik and told him to rest, that his brother B'omarr monks had rescued Ark'ik from the sand and brought him here, and that he had healed Ark'ik.  As Claren spoke, Ark'ik saw that the monk's mouth never moved -- he was communicating with Ark'ik telepathically!

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Meanwhile, Choree Kie and T-101 followed the throng of revelers out of Jabba's throne room toward his sail barge, where they would travel as honored guests to the Great Pit of Carkoon to witness the execution of the self-proclaimed Jedi Luke Skywalker, Captain Solo and the Mighty Chewbacca.  Bib Fortuna instructed a cadre of guards to escort Choree Kie and his droid to the upper loading platform so they could join Jabba in the luxury accommodations, and the guards led them through the labyrinthine palace into a dark and desolate corridor, where they halted their escort, turned their weapons on the pair and surrounded them.  Out of the shadows emerged Eekey Weekey, Choree Kie's Sy Myrthian arch-enemy, his head now cleared of Ismail's Force-induced fugue and filled with a murderous plan of revenge.  Drawing his knife, Eekey Weekey and the guards he had paid to help him descended on Choree Kie and T-101 in a tempest of vibro-blades!

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Elsewhere, Ark'ik told Claren that he needed to find his companion Quinn, from whom he had been separated, and asked Claren where "here" was.  The monk explained that they were in the B'omarr monastery, which, to the monks' chagrin, doubled as the palace of Jabba the Hutt, who had confined them to the lower levels.  Claren and his brothers eschewed affecting the physical world in any way, and were therefore unable to escape their pen; Claren himself was the last of the "embodied" monks, the rest having gained enlightenment to exist only as brains in fluid, some in their robotic spider-walkers.  Claren explained, telepathically, that he too wished to achieve enlightenment, and that he could earn his disembodiment by helping Ark'ik find his friend.  Claren led Ark'ik through the labyrinthine caverns beneath the palace-temple until they happened upon the droid pool -- more of a torture chamber for robots -- overseen by the sadistic supervisor droid EV-9D9.  EV-9D9 sicced a team of mindless drones on Ark'ik, instructing them to seize him and bring him to "the master," Jabba the Hutt, and activated dangerous ceiling cannons and crackling power couplings to thwart the Verpine's escape, and an alarm to warn Jabba's guards.  Thrashing and pulling "jugular wires," Ark'ik managed to incapacitate the drones, finally casting them into the power couplings.  Ignoring EV-9D9's empty threats, Ark'ik held the supervisor droid at bay with a plasma torch as he deactivated the alarm and fled down the last corridor to the outside world.  EV-9D9 had one last trick up her bolt sleeve, and opened the grates that lined the ceiling of the corridor, raining sand down on Ark'ik and Claren.  Ark'ik fled, buffeted by sand, and reached the end of the corridor just as the sandy deluge dropped its full payload.

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Meanwhile, after a bloody battle, Choree Kie, repeatedly skewered by vibro-pikes of the hired palace guards, struggled over the blade in Eekey Weekey's hand, driving it into his skull.  T-101 delivered a well placed shot with his blaster to the same headwound of the savage Sy Myrthian, and Choree Kie finally delivered a crushing death blow with his meaty fist.  The guards turned tail and ran, and Choree Kie, desperate to find Boba Fett for the loot the Mandalorian had stolen from him, accompanied T-101 to the exit, a cave mouth on the side of a high cliff, outside of which Jabba's sail barge was berthed.  As they boarded the barge, they saw, from another cave mouth some distance away and above them, a deluge of sand pour out and cascaded like a waterfall into the rocky abyss below.  From a dune atop a ledge just outside the cave mouth, they saw a Verpine head emerge and cough up sand.  Inside the upper tunnel, only the top of Claren's head poked out from the mounds of sand.  A dozen robotic spider-walkers surrounded him, buzz-saws whirring at the end of their spindly arms to finally bring their embodied brother to Enlightenment.