"You're right," Tisarwat allowed, with a sip from her tea, "there are worse places, and, yeah, a few years. My fleet captain back home sent me here for the school, and I was stuck here after that, for a while. It didn't really help that there was a whole...time displacement thing, where versions of my fleet captain and my co-lieutenant were both here, but not from the same timeline. Once that got straightened out and the timelines equalized, we were able to get back and forth much easier, but my fleet captain still things I can somehow serve her better here."

Or, as Tisarwat figured was more the truth, stay out of her way better.

"I'm from space, by the way," she added, as if to get that out of the way, because she knew how these conversations tended to go. "A highly advanced civilization that no one here has ever even heard of. But I've heard of the places you've mentioned. Does that mean you're from this world? Or, at least, a version of it?"