"I guess."

"I would like to explore your place of origin, sometime perhaps."

"That'd be fun."

"Are there any other differences you've noticed?"

"There's more, like, secret stuff going on."

"I can see that, if there's only two factions who don't interact in peace, that there'd be less need for secrecy, yes."

"There are some smaller players who try to remain unaligned. The success they have with that varies."

"The smaller nations sometimes struggle with that here, yes, especially when the great five start edging towards war."

"The independents are mostly traders, occasionally rogue mining colonies. If they're not strategically valuable or a credible threat, it might not be worth the effort to rein them in."

"Though operational secrecy could still be a concern, if they have contact with both sides."

"This is true."

She settles back a bit, silent for a few long moments. "How does - moving between places even work, if it's such a large scale?"

"We have starships, that move so fast they would cross a planet in much less than a second."

"That seems incredible to me. But I suppose the first shinobi must have seemed similar..."

"Normal depends on where you're standing. For us it's odder that you don't have a shuttleport."

"I suppose that is true, yes," she says.

Sasuke tilts his head, apparently recovered somewhat. "What's a shuttle?" he asks.

"They're like smaller ships carried by the big ones that go back and forth between planets and the ships."

"There's no natural up and down in space, so it doesn't really make sense to have a top and a bottom on the ship, which makes it hard to land."

Itachi nods, but Sasuke does seem really curious about that.

"Have you ever, mm, considered what it might be like to fight underwater?"

"I have fought underwater, yes."

"That's a lot like how fighting in space works. Anyone can move in every direction, and you have to defend the full sphere."

"Likely leads to interesting tactics and strategies..."

Tasara nods. "It's an entire field on its own." She explains some of the more common formations and maneuvers with an accompanying lightshow; the Marqt bloom, the j-turn, Striock's defense.

That's interesting to both kids, at least.