Oh no. Was it something she said...?

Diversion time.

"Where we come from, there's an animal called a vesti. It's small and round and furry, and a lot of people think it's cute. But the thing about vesti is that they are very good at getting into places they shouldn't and they travel in numbers. So once one gets inside, more are bound to follow. I was on a secured military base, and it was absolutely infested. You had to check your boots in the morning to make sure one hadn't nested in them overnight. We tried exterminating them more than once but they just kept coming back. One time, the base commander was making an address, and one dropped out of the air vent right onto his hat. He didn't notice until one of the soldiers burst out laughing, it was almost a court-martial on the spot. After that he put a bounty on them, but somehow a rumor got started that the corpses were being sent to the mess to be turned into hamburger."

He smiles very slightly.

"Sasuke sometimes has trouble talking," Itachi explains, softly. "But things like that happen here, too. I suppose people are the same."

"There's surprising amount of things that stay the same about people, for how different they can be."

"I'd be interested in hearing more about the people where you're from, sometime," she says off handedly. 

"That's... a broad subject."

"It would be here, too."

"One of my friends on- where I stay when I'm not on duty, she's very into whatever the latest fad is. The last time I was home, it was this sort of group astrology thing. You get all your friends to put in their birth dates and places, and they draw a correspondence between everyone that predicts your collective romantic and financial fortunes. We got a 'bad luck' result and then she stopped talking about it."

"Does that actually work?" Itachi asks, while Sasuke smiles slightly.

"Almost certainly not."

"I know some shinobi who have superstitions. It seems strange. That kind of thing is more popular with civilians, though."

"It's a way of finding order, I think. A bit of control or certainty in an unpredictable world."

"Perhaps it is enough for them, then."

"Also it can be, uh, just fun to think about. Like a game."

"People are odd."

"Suppose so!"

"What other sort of things do they do for games?" Itachi asks, feeling Sasuke's attention start to wander.

"Well, there's lot of different kinds of video games. And pocci is pretty popular; there's a couple interstellar leagues. That's a sport where there's two teams and two balls, and you try to move your ball into your opponent's goal, but which ball is yours changes so sometimes you have to switch from attack to defense really quick. And also you can't touch the ball with any part of your body above the waist."

"What's a video game?" Itachi asks.

"A game you play on your digi or another computer."

"Computers are that common?"

"Oh yeah. They're everywhere."

"And they are capable of communicating? It seems likely that alters culture in ways people from our world would have trouble imagining."

"I guess maybe? Computers have been around literally forever though. So it's kind of weird to think about how they might have changed stuff."

"We're not able to easily talk with each other, and we have limited abilities to store information, and we must rely only on our own minds for calculations, would be the biggest changes I would predict."