"It does! And yes, it is. Getting a language out of someone's head still involves getting something out of their head, so I make sure to ask permission first, but it's sufficiently non-invasive a lot of people will say yes."

"Yeah. I'd maybe want some languages but I don't think I can make a gap for you."

"Even if you could, it might be wise to wait until you were ready to go back inside. Milliways has security that is apparently sufficient to keep patrons from doing nasty things to each other, but I don't think it extends out here, and you've known me less than an hour."

"Good to know. But I can't. I can make a gap for my best friend, but his power's pretty harmless and noninvasive even when he's trying to use it in a fight and I can still only do it when I'm in a decent mood and not if I'm mad at him or anything."

"Oh well. It might be a little hard to explain why you could suddenly speak, say, German as it was spoken almost two hundred years ago anyway."

"It'd be a decent foundation to update to modern German, and besides, suddenly learning a bunch of languages for fun isn't too out of the ordinary for my school. We're genuises, and in humans intelligence generalizes most of the time."

"Fair enough. I got a decent chunk of my languages from someone whose primary job is inventing interesting mechanical things."

"Yeah? What's new and happening in mechanical things in the nineteen eighties?"

"Well, there's a jet, and a telepathic amplifier, and holograms."

"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."

"Good to know. I will definitely let people know to keep an eye out for that."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Ah. And at that point the confounding factor is whether we can convince governments of things."

"Yeah."

"Might well work. 'You should be scared of this thing and attack it' is something governments are often unfortunately willing to listen to."

"Yeah, well, if it gets them to shoot the buggers out of the sky so much the better."

"Yeah. I'm not arguing with that."

"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."

"And that's why you're in space military academy."

"Yup."

"Sucks. Well, hopefully we can nip that in the bud if we have to deal with it."