If asked, the General could not have answered coherently why he did not kill Nan. He could not explain it well to himself either. He had spent a while grumbling to himself before making his proposition to Nan, and it all felt rather strange. Perhaps he did know why he had let her live, but he did not like to think about it. Her words, those, of course, were the reason. She had a death wish and that puzzled and upset the General. There was something horrible about it and he shied from thinking about it too long. Well then, what? Did he think he could help her, he who had never helped anyone?

In any case, for the first few weeks, both the General and the scientist regretted their agreement. They both decided on one condition—they could be as hard on each other in their respective fields as possible. They were not patient teachers. They were even worse pupils. Both whined and complained incessantly. They were lazy, obdurate, and rude. Neither had expected the task to be as difficult as it was. Grievous had never thought he'd be somebody's personal trainer and Nan could hardly believe that he had never taken pre-calculus or practiced trigonometry. That was baby stuff for her, the basics that underlie the basics.

Nan was unhappy with everything. She liked to sleep at least nine hours a day. Grievous banged on her door at 6 AM. They went to a large, empty room. Nan yawned and muttered something inappropriate. She knew fifteen languages and could curse like a native in all of them. Grievous eyed her hopelessly.

"We've got a big problem," he said.

"The time?"

"No, look in a mirror, fatass! I won't let you lift a weapon until you can lift yourself. Now, let's start somewhere. Run around the ship by the main hallway. I'll be watching you through the cameras so I'll know if you take a break."

"But that's over three miles!"

"Now, you orange rodent!"

Nan jogged off. A third of the way through she was down to all fours and soon collapsed. However, she held one paw up in the air with a certain finger outstretched. Grievous joined her and yelled at her until she got up and tottered off again. He had to kick her along but eventually they made it around. Nan whined that she was being tortured and lay down like a limp rag.

"Tortured?" Said Grievous. "You'll know when you're being tortured! Now take me to your room. I've seen what you eat and I'm putting you on a diet. There's high fructose corn syrup in your veins."

Nan groaned.

"Is there also corn syrup in your ears?" Asked the General. "Get up and go!"

Nan led him to her room, which was a sticky mess. Grievous ordered droids to take away all her junk food. Nan stood in front of her dresser protectively.

"This drawer is private. It has all my secret papers."

Grievous ignored her and pulled it open. It was full of candy bars. He ordered the droids to dispose of all junk food in the cafeteria, even the butter. He suspected Nan would just stuff herself with pure butter if she was out of options.

"What am I supposed to eat now?" She asked.

"What did your mother teach you to eat? What did you eat before you locked yourself up in that science facility and started to live out of a vending machine?"

"Fruits, nuts, berries, roots, bugs, birds, anything really."

"You ate bugs?"

"I used to really like a good millipede."

"Order yourself some decent food. I want to see a salad for once."

"It's not fair! You get all your amino acids from a tube and you don't have to exercise and…"

Grievous suddenly got very angry and swatted Nan across the back of her head.

"Of course I don't!" He snapped. "You don't realize how lucky you are. You've been rotting away in your stupid lab, letting your body deteriorate like a sack of rubbish. If the Republic attacked your facility, you and all the other lousy scientists would need to be saved because you're good for nothing weaklings. You have so much potential. You were given powerful muscles to use them, not to sit slouched day after day at a computer crunching formulas. It is a disgrace not to use what you have."

Nan rubbed her head and pointed at the mattress.

"I've got a secret stash under there."

She needed a new mattress. The secret stash had melted. During the second half of the day, Nan took over as instructor. She found a blackboard, a projector, and a room with a screen. She needed to tie the screen to a chair with a piece of string to keep it down. All the technology in the universe and still bits of a string are always involved.

The General stalked in. He glanced at the blackboard and asked, "What are all those numbers?"

"I like a good bit of linear algebra. Multiplying matrices can be so relaxing. I'm sure this will just be a refresher for you…"

He didn't know what a matrix was. Bit by bit, Nan had to slide the level of mathematics back. He did not know any calculus. He could not give the formula for the volume of a sphere off the top of his head, nor did he know why anybody would want to. Long division of polynomials? Huh, what? Nan finally realized that his knowledge of math was incredibly rudimentary. Though he was surprisingly good at doing percentages in his head, he was not prepared for more complex functions. Nan wanted to bang her head on a wall and he wanted to do that for her too.

So she began with circumference problems, angles and arcs, and solving for the unknown. The simplicity of the problems and their glaring, obvious answers made Nan quite mad when the General did not get them. She could not understand why he could not understand. She used the word "obvious" every other sentence. She sent bits of chalk every which way when she vehemently wrote the correct answer. She threw the chalk at Grievous when he repeated a mistake he'd just made. The only reason he did not kill her was because he felt like she had a right to get even with him for the morning's exercise. At one point, though, he did start to complain miserably.

"This is all too hard, Nan, why does anybody need to know this? I've been fine all my life without knowing this stuff about the, what are they called, supplementary angles."

Nan threw some more chalk at him and said, "Of course it's hard! It was hard for me too, once upon a time. You don't realize how lucky you are. Like you've just said, all your life you have not needed to know about this, but has that made you any happier, any richer? You've been wasting your brain on this ridiculous army and Dooku's woeful schemes. There are scores of information out there that are, believe it or not, unavailable to some people. You can learn so much and then have astonishing conversations with people that open your mind to the mysteries of the universe."

Grievous hated being told that he should be thankful for what he had, but he'd just told Nan the same thing. He asked Nan to repeat the last part again.

The second day was harder for Nan than for the General because she woke up feeling like she'd been hit with a bag of bricks. She whined and didn't want to leave her bed, but Grievous bundled her up in her blanket and carried her to a room with some weights. He tossed her like a sack of potatoes onto a mat.

Here are some examples of the things he yelled at her: "Stop moaning! Don't you look at me like that! Do I need to start shooting at you to move faster? Put that donut down! In the garbage, not in your pocket! I don't care if you're seeing spots! Don't you dare lose consciousness!"

The only thing that kept Nan going was the thought of how she would make Grievous suffer in the afternoon. These are the sort of things she said to him during "class" (that would have gotten her fired if she was a real teacher): "If they took your brain and put it in a horse, it would still be a horse. There are stupid questions and they're almost always asked by stupid people and I'm looking at one of them. If you can't manage kinder-chemistry, you shouldn't even be allowed to mix sugar and water. Hello? Hello? Do you have at least two brain cells rubbing together underneath that metal forehead?"

Nan was going to turn his brain into soup, metaphorically, though she also considered it literally. At night she fell asleep imagining how she would make stew out of his brain, the only kind of stew one could make out of him. She would sneak up on him while he was asleep (he did sleep, and could even do so from a standing position) and jab through his evil yellow eye!

On the sixth day, Grievous said, "I know you want to make brain stew out of me."

"How?"

"The last time you blacked out you dribbled and kept repeating those two words."

He didn't get it easy, either. Nan started quizzing him. Suddenly, things got serious. Grievous found himself staring at a paper covered in red ink with a big fat F on it every few days. It was so disappointing, he wasn't even sure why. Surely it didn't matter? But the grade tormented him. He started to feel that there were not enough hours in the day to do his job and study everything. Luckily the war was going slowly at the moment and there were few conflicts. One day Count Dooku ordered Grievous to meet him at his base but then made him wait for a while. Grievous used the time wisely and read some chapters from Nan's gen chem book. Dooku thought he was hallucinating when he spotted the General with a book. He didn't really ponder it, though. Crap only knows what he would have thought if he knew the truth.

They got used to the new schedule after a while. They started to seek out each other's company even when they weren't having a lesson. Nan continued to sit up on the bridge on a bucket and tried to take an interest in the war. She made fun of the other military leaders and Count Dooku. Her jokes were always apt and Grievous laughed despite being anxious about insulting his boss.

"Why must you be such a groveling sycophant to him?" Nan asked.

"It's better than being dead."

"Is it, is it really?"

Nan started to get antsy. Without her favorite occupation, snacking, she had a lot of time and energy to spend. She started running around the ship even without Grievous egging her on. She told droids to run and chased them. She climbed about the shuttles as if they were tree formations. She pranked the General once she realized he wasn't going to kill her for it. One time she scattered a bunch of beads under his feet. He didn't trip like he was supposed to and turned around to laugh at her.

"Ha! My feet don't have a large surface area so I didn't slip on these beads!"

Not looking where he was going, he stepped on the banana peel she had also dropped and slipped and fell on his back. He intended to get revenge for that stunt. A few days later, Nan ambled after him, in a frolicsome good mood.

"Can I ride on your foot?" She asked.

He pretended to humor her and let her stand on one of his claws. When he passed a bathroom, he quickly pressed the button to open the door and kicked her in. There was a scream and a splash.

The day came when the General got back an exam with a B on it. He felt so surprisingly good about it, and it was rare for him to feel good about anything except the death of an enemy.

"You can teach after all, you lab rat," he said.

Nan jumped on his desk and twirled around. Perhaps all the math had heightened his powers of observation, but he noticed the difference.

"You can button your lab coat!"

Her fighting was still not up to par, but she could duck, dodge, and jump good enough to avoid getting hit all the time. She felt pretty confident and wanted to see some real action. When she heard that Grievous was supposed to attack an enemy ship and try to kidnap several Jedi, she asked to come.

"I don't need a bag full of lead bricks around my neck!" He said.

"I do not weigh as much as a bag of lead bricks…not anymore," said Nan.

She did the sensible thing and stowed away on his ship when he left for the battle. After he'd boarded the enemy ship with a bunch of droids, she followed. She had no clear idea of what she was going to do. Help, that's all. Kick Jedi ass, perhaps. She overestimated her abilities to a large extent. There was shooting, crashing, and fighting all around her. Nan was fearless and probably crazy so she did not run back to the ship. She felt alive for the first time in years.

After seven minutes of running and dodging lasers, Nan got trapped behind a group of droids that were advancing on some clones. One clone threw a bomb, but it didn't roll far enough and exploded far enough away from the droids (and lucky Nan) to just throw them all backwards. They landed on Nan in a pile of busted metal. Most of them got stuck together and Nan got stuck under them.

Meanwhile, Grievous encountered a problem. He'd walked into a trap! There was supposed to be only one Jedi on the ship, Mace Windu, but Skywalker, Kenobi and Ahsoka were also there. Windu was occupied with a large batch of droids but the others advanced on Grievous. He decided to beat it. He turned off his lightsabers and scrambled. The Jedi gave chase. When he passed a pile of busted droids, he suddenly heard Nan calling for help. He didn't stop immediately, then skidded to a halt. What the hell was she doing here? Oh, why ask? She'd obviously disobeyed him.

Droids were covering him, but the Jedi were getting closer to him and even closer to Nan. Of course, they didn't know she was there and even if they saw her, they wouldn't make the connection. But what should he do? Grievous had certain rules and attacking two Jedi and a skilled Padawan was against them. The desire to run was strong. He could barely stand in place. He had to run, he always did so. He'd return to the Despair…alone. It was thinking of that big empty ship and having to continue as he'd done before that prompted him to make an unexpected decision. Plus, who would teach him calculus if Nan got captured by the Republic?

The astonishment on Obi Wan Kenobi's face was plain to see when he saw the General coming back toward them. Grievous spun all four of his lightsabers in an impenetrable cone around himself and forced the Jedi back from the pile of busted droids. He slashed through the metal pinning Nan and yelled for her to grab on. She jumped on his back just as Skywalker smashed him into a wall with the Force. Nan just barely avoided getting crushed. That didn't stop Grievous for long and he ran again, with Nan holding on like a fur scarf. She was not at all put off her game and could not understand why they were running.

"Come on, let's get them! I'll take the ugly one and you can have the other two! I can totally take him!"

"Nan, with all due respect, you couldn't even take a pile of broken droids."

Mace Windu joined the other Jedi and even Nan had to admit the odds were not in their favor, if they ever had been. She had snatched a blaster from a droid while she was chilling under the pile and shot haphazardly at the Jedi. Perhaps only her bad aim saved her and Grievous. The Jedi scattered from her wide shots and Grievous got behind some droids that had not been destroyed. He reached the takeoff platform and threw Nan into a small spacecraft, then jumped in. Within seconds they were off.

"We should totally have taken them," persisted Nan.

"And then what? The droids are expendable. We are not. It was a trap. They just won't stop trying to capture me, it's really annoying."

"But you're the best. I'm sure you could have knocked all four of their heads together!"

"I'm the best? Maybe with lightsabers, but they use the Force against me."

"The Force, huh? I wonder if that could be changed…"

Grievous took a circuitous route back to the Despair. Count Dooku contacted him and he pushed Nan under the seat so she wouldn't appear in the hologram. The Count was not pleased that Grievous had lost another droid army and had many unhappy words for him. Still, even the Count had to admit that a trap was a trap and there wasn't much else Grievous could have done.

It was many hours later that Nan remembered something she should have done. She found the General in his cabin.

"Do you still want to go take them?" He asked.

"Not right now, but I'm working on many plans. Actually, I just forgot to say thank you for saving me back there."

"Oh. I nearly didn't."

"I noticed. But thanks anyway."

"What is it that I'm supposed to say? I don't believe anyone's ever thanked me for anything. Right, you're welcome."

A few weeks later, Dooku was out for blood and called Grievous and various other leaders to the surface of a planet he had recently tricked into joining the Separatist cause. The inhabitants had figured out that Dooku was full of crap and hidden in some caves, where they used guerilla tactics to keep taking out droid armies.

"I will not stand this insubordination," said Dooku. "These people pledged their support to us and now they have rescinded it when we haven't even burned a third of their villages yet. I want all of you to use whatever tactics you will to get them out of those caves and make them pay."

This happened outside next to some trees and rocks. Dooku went on and Grievous got bored. His eyes wandered and he noticed something black moving amid the undergrowth. It was a millipede. Hadn't Nan said she liked a good millipede? Grievous nabbed it, whacked it over a rock to stun it, and put it in a pocket of his cloak. It started to rain and Dooku moved the meeting back into the ship. One of the commanders had an idea involving fire bombs to get the people out of the caves and they discussed it with interest.

Maps were taken out and the strategy was accepted by everybody. Grievous accepted it too, since he hadn't bothered to come up with a better idea. He was thinking about organic chemistry, which he had just started with Nan and liked it quite a lot more than advanced math. Then he noticed something moving in the corner of the room. The millipede had gotten out of his pocket! Uh oh, he sensed that this was going to bring trouble. The millipede crawled closer and closer to Count Dooku until it started creeping over his shoe. Then Grievous couldn't see it anymore. Perhaps it had crawled over Dooku's foot and was now under the table. Dooku got up and pointed at the mountains in the distance.

Suddenly he squeaked. It was probably not a sound he'd ever made before and the assembled admirals and captains were surprised. It was a long squeak too that started loud and trailed off.

"Excuse me, gentlemen," he said and walked off in a funny, bowlegged way.

Grievous related everything to Nan when he got back. Nan was not upset that she didn't have the millipede to snack on, especially after where it had been. They laughed so hard it hurt.