"Welcome to the Inquisitorius," the robed man said, solemnly. "Your training now begins in earnest. Your old name is gone. You are now the Two Hundred And Eighty Third Brother."

283 frowned, then raised his hand.

"So… this new job," he said. "There's not… a lot of actual work involved, right?"

"...yes, there is," the robed man replied. "Why would you think otherwise?"

"Well, there's not that many Jedi, right?" 283 said. "Not left, anyway, not after fifteen years. And there's a lot of Inquisitors. Hundreds."

"No," the robed man said. "There's about… twenty of us."

"Then how do the numbers work?" 283 asked. "I thought it was rank. You know, someone dies, everyone above them goes down a number, someone gets promoted to a lower number and it all rebalances."

"Do not be a fool," the robed man told him, dismissively. "If that was the system then you could have a conversation between Fourth and Fifth Sister, and then halfway through they would become Third and Fourth Sister. It would completely mess up all our record keeping and lead to people getting the wrong laundry. It would be a disaster."

"Then how do the numbers work?" 283 said.

"Recruitment order," the robed man told him.

283 frowned.

"...um," he began. "If you've recruited about five hundred of us, and there's only twenty left, where do all the others go?"

The robed man shrugged slightly. "Darth Vader, mostly," he said. "He is extremely irritable and short tempered, intolerant of failure, and his definition of failure is expansive."

283 was looking very dubious.

"What?" the robed man asked. "Surely you knew this was coming."

"I did not know this was coming," 283 replied. "I didn't have the least idea, in fact! This is making me rethink the whole thing – you're telling me my life expectancy is about four months!"

The robed man shrugged, indifferently.

"You are part of the Inquisitorius," he said. "Your old name is gone. You cannot return to your old life. We are your life now."

283 drew his weapon, and the robed man looked at it with amusement.

"What exactly are you going to do with that?" he asked. "You will work for the Inquisitoris, or you will be hunted down by Darth Vader as a traitor."

283 frowned.

"So what you're saying is, I have a choice between working for you and getting a head start," he said.

The robed man's mouth opened, then he stopped and frowned.

"...I want to find the flaw in your reasoning, but I'm having trouble," he admitted.

AN:

Did anyone tell Vader he wasn't supposed to purge those ones?