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The door opens, and into it goes a girl in her early teens. She's got her gray military pants on but just an undershirt on top, because her tactics teacher isn't a jerk about the uniform code and she got warm in the exercise room. But this is not the hallway out of her room. What the heck is this, Sue's dream bar?
...Well, if it's Sue's dream bar...
"Hey, is this Sue's dream bar?"
Yes. This is for you. A key appears.
That is indeed for her. She goes up to the corresponding room, checks it out, writes stuff in the notebook - wow, her handwriting is shit compared to the others', must be growing up with a desk - but there's nobody else here. She goes back down, gets Bar to give her a snack tray on Stella's tab, flops in an armchair by the fireplace with it.
autokinetic
whatamithinking
"Fair enough. I got a decent chunk of my languages from someone whose primary job is inventing interesting mechanical things."
autokinetic
"Nice. ...If your world is just an earlier version of mine, you might get attacked by nasty bug alien hive minds. Not too far out."
autokinetic
"They don't have mutants but they have better tech than humans of the time by a long shot and the hive minds foul up conventional combat telepathy something fierce. The hives are oriented around queens, if the queen dies all the other buggers fall over empty. They hit China first."
whatamithinking
"Aha. 'Foul up combat telepathy,' definitely good to know. Is it safe to assume sufficiently amplified telepathy could still function as an early warning system, if we know to look?"
autokinetic
"Yeah. If you see a big-as-fuck mind with a million times more moving parts than it ought to have and it is in space: it's buggers. But they're not chatty, either."
whatamithinking
"Got it. Not that we wouldn't have figured out something was wrong if we found something like that, but it probably wouldn't be findable before it became obvious through other channels that something was wrong, if we didn't know to look."
autokinetic
"They don't want to be your friends. If they're buggers, if they're like ours. I think someone noticed them before they came in, first time, and was trying to say hi, and if they managed to make 'hi' understood at all it didn't save China."
whatamithinking
"Ah. And at that point the confounding factor is whether we can convince governments of things."
whatamithinking
"Might well work. 'You should be scared of this thing and attack it' is something governments are often unfortunately willing to listen to."
autokinetic
"They got fought off, they came back and Mazer Rackham figured out the queen thing and nipped her ship to cripple their whole fleet, and my world we're getting ready for round three now."
autokinetic
"I'd offer to buy you fancy shit on my alt's tab, but it'd all be weapons and ships you wouldn't know how to use or maintain and most of it would probably be a little big for Bar to handle."
whatamithinking
"...What about blueprints? We do have a mechanical genius who's already reverse-engineered some stuff my sister and I have brought home from Milliways."
autokinetic
"Weirdly enough that might be worse, but could ask." She gets out of the lake, shakes water off her legs, steps back into her pants, and heads into the building. "Hey Bar, does a Raid class ship blueprint count as 'published'?"
It does not, says the napkin that is at the bar before they are.
"Yeah, little problem with how she distributes information-type stuff like that."
It does not, says the napkin that is at the bar before they are.
"Yeah, little problem with how she distributes information-type stuff like that."
whatamithinking
"I already knew that, yeah. Actually...Bar, is there any way you could tell whether my world has these Bugger things in it?"