"Nice to meet you too," says Mark. "You look like shit. And that uniform's fresh out of Stores - what happened to the clothes you arrived in? Not so filthy that they had to be stuffed down a waste chute on the spot, or it'd show, you're not freshly washed. I doubt the good captain demanded you appear in uniform so forcefully that you went and had one made up on the spot. No, I'm going to go with 'discarded as incriminating in some way'. And you didn't have a Service uniform with you to change into when you got here. All together, this rather spells 'undercover agent', and one whose clothes would make him if he appeared in them before unauthorized persons. That suggests a military uniform to me. Some mercenary outfit, probably. With your insubordination problems I can't imagine you working for one very long without getting summarily shot, so you probably command them. Well, that was easy. Pay up, Ivan."

Ivan hands Mark one of the raspberry cookies. (He then also waves one at Miles as an attempt at consolation.) "I did not help, I swear."

"What, were you expecting him to take after me? And he hasn't had your scope of adventure as an outlet. He does this sort of thing all the time, although that one was particularly impressive."

"Oh my God. You didn't think to warn me that he was some kind of psychic?"

"He's not psychic! He laid out his non-psychic reasoning for you right then and there."

"His reasoning was pretty fucking psychic!" exclaims Miles.

"Remind me to recommend you some books while you're here, Miles."

"...What?"

"Probably wants you to read Sherlock Holmes."

"Is this related to that museum I saw advertised on the way here...?"

"Yes. Yes it is."

"Mark is a big fan. Th'title character does the 'psychic' thing."

"I grew up practicing the skill on, well, you," Mark explains to Miles. "And sort of incidentally on everything else in sight. But like I told Ivan earlier, it's going to be impossible to hide things about you from me. I know you too well."

"He can mimic you damn well. Absolutely uncanny. I can tell, though, pretty sure I could even do it without context, he likes me more than you do."

"He has reason, it seems like. And how did you end up rescuing him, exactly?"

"Okay, now this is the interesting part, and I'm not completely sure you'll believe it."

"Spit it out, Ivan."

"It involves time travel and I am really not sure how to start!"

"...At the beginning?" suggests Miles. "Before the, um, time travel happened?"

"Right, before that I had a completely ordinary work day, this was a few months ago, I opened the door to the office to leave and there was not a hallway there. Instead: time traveling bar - Mark, help, you are the only other witness."

"I was five years old at the time," says Mark. "I went to sleep just after arriving on Earth and woke up standing in the middle of an empty bar. Ivan walked in soon after, and I went up and was very rude and belligerent at him, and for reasons that elude me he was very patient and kind in return. When it came out that I was your clone, he promised to rescue me. Then I woke up back where I started and forgot it had ever happened, until he made good on his promise - later that same day, from his perspective, a dozen years from mine."

"You were five, what was I going to do, yell at you? Anyway, yes, that, that was a better summary than I could've produced, thank you. Nobody else knows this part, I came up with other excuses to give to Galeni and I think he was very distracted by the involvement of his father and didn't nitpick too closely."

"And you are serious about the time travel and this is not some kind of elaborate joke," says Miles.