She winced, clapping her hands over her ears in an attempt to block out the terrible shriek that seemed to rattle the very walls. She stood slumped against the door, waiting for the monster to rip down the door and swallow them whole; but when it never came the Sith acolyte gulped down a few breaths to recenter herself. The next doorway along appeared to lead outside again, so they must have reached the top. That was good...right? They weren't dead yet, and as far as she was concerned that was something to be proud of. 

Aria inched forward towards the pedestal as Yerbol spoke, nodding her head in agreement. It was definitely the same alien as the one from the chamber, there was no doubt about that. Yerbol couldn't finish his latest musings before the weather drastically changed as the strange bat beast returned, it's eerie laugh floating towards them alongside the shards of frozen rain. 

Then it spoke to them, the voice sending cold shivers down her spine; it was far too pleasant in tone for something so horrifying to look at. 
[i]Great, it talks...[/i] she kept the snide thought to herself, thinking she would have been used to hearing nasty beasts speaking back at her by now from previous experiences. But this was different, it was flowing, eloquent speech, not the grating fragments of broken Basic that most creatures barely managed to conjure up. 

Aria bristled indignantly as it called them weak, stepping forward to glare across at the beast crunching on the ice crystals as casually as if they were having an afternoon snack and a chat. 
"Hey! We're NOT weak!" She snarled back at it, her grip on the hilts of her sabers tightening as her fury began to brew. "We killed all your little ice gremlins on our way up here, and we hardly broke a sweat!" Maybe that was a slight exaggeration of the truth, but she bet they could take this thing between the two of them. For that insinuation alone it deserved to have its ass kicked into oblivion. [i]I'll show you weak![/i]

Lifting her chin in a further show of defiance against this apparent 'protector' of the True Sith's domain, Aria sneered. "Why don't you come over here and see how 'weak' we are? Or are you afraid that I'll finish the job I started?" She taunted it, noting that it held its right rear foot awkwardly above the ground as if it were painful to put pressure on the wounds left by the pair's saber blades during their previous escape. 

Her gaze flicked from the monster to meet Yerbol's as he asked her for ideas  dropping her voice to a low whisper she told him. "Sensory overload. No eyes, means it's hearing and those pits on its jaw will be super-sensitive...make enough loud noise and it won't be able to tell left from right. Then we just hope those pits sense vibrations rather than heat or we're [i]kark[/i]ed because we won't be able to get in close enough without it still being able to find us. If it works, we dash in while its disoriented and hack the ugly son of a Rancor to bits before it knows what hit it." 

A typically Sith hack-and-slash approach to dealing with problems, but perhaps that's what these True Sith wanted, after all...