"Yes, thank you." A drunk man harassed her on the train but she wasn't worried about it, just irritated because it was distracting her from her book. 

"I appreciate your flexibility with our bureaucratic difficulties." He finds the hotel room, fumbles for a moment with the key card, figures it out eventually. 

Marian is both wondering if he has some kind of medical syndrome, she didn't notice a tremor or anything though and he's young enough that a stroke would be very surprising, and also cringing internally with secondhand embarrassment from the time she went home drunk with a boy and couldn't get her door open because she was using her bike lock key. 

Leareth greets her politely. "My name is Adam Martin. Pleasure to meet you."

The other two introduce themselves as well. 

This is so many people to have looking at her while she's being interviewed! ...Also there are really not enough chairs in this room, like, at all. Is the polite thing to - stand? The man called Adam is sitting on the bed but she super can't go sit there too, that feels completely inappropriate for a job interview. 

Will Jones has stepped into the restroom, murmuring something apologetic.

< - so,> he says, <uh, I don't think there's a non-startling way to say this. Earth is being invaded by aliens. And counterinvaded by different aliens, the kind we are.>

He steps out of the bathroom. <And we need help learning about Earth medical technology.>

Marian was just about to set her backpack down by the door, and drops it on the floor. There is a blue centaur thing that just came out of the bathroom! It's talking in her head! Is she hallucinating, did the drunk man on the bus slip her drugs somehow, is she having a psychotic break - maybe she's dreaming and the interview hasn't even happened yet, shit, what if she sleeps in and misses her train for the real– 

She pinches herself and doesn't wake up. Aaaaaaaaaah. Okay focus focus focus. Breathe. There's an alien who is maybe (hopefully??) a hallucination but nobody is dying so she can. Breathe. Figure out what to do. 

"Uh sorry I need a minute to..." Scream internally. 

This is very understandable. Though humans had so much science fiction about aliens hanging around doing stuff on their planet that he honestly expected them to be slightly less terrified about it. 

"- Areyougoingtokidnapme." It's not like asking will stop them and she's not going to try to run for it anyway, that thing has a giant sword-tail - not thing, person, probably still a he? do aliens have genders? Anyway she still would prefer to know even if it's kind of dumb. 

<No! We want to hire you to but if you do not want to work for us you can leave. ...also we do not have any urgent medical emergencies, we are trying to hire a nurse in advance of having those.>

"That's. Uh. Good to know. I guess." She looks around at the other people. "Are you even a real company. ...Wait, are you all aliens?" 

"We are humans but we are from a different world, called Velgarth, which has magic. Matirin's people came to our world instead of Earth by accident, so now we are allied." 

The extremely stupid thought Marian is having is 'no, you can't do that, that's being scifi and fantasy at the same time'. It's such a stupid thought though.

If it's a hallucination, it's a pretty coherent one, but it hasn't been all that long yet... Oh, and if it's a drug trip or a dream then she won't be able to read or write properly. Also if it's real then it's really important. Marian sits down - on the floor, because she feels too awkward about asking to take one of the chairs and it's right there - and digs out a thermos of coffee and then her notebook underneath it. 

"Can you tell me some more things about the war?" 

<There is a species of aliens that take the form of small, sluglike creatures called Yeerks. They can crawl into a person's head and take control of their brain. They have been running around the galaxy attempting to conquer worlds in this fashion. They are infiltrating Earth in secret. Their intent is to enslave all humans and use them to conquer the galaxy. 

My species is called Andalites. We are responsible for giving them the technology to leave their homeworld in the first place, and now we are trying to save the galaxy from them.>

"Uh, sorry I hope this isn't offensive, but why did you give brain slugs technology?" She's trying to think through whether that's even biologically plausible. 

<The person who did that had very poor judgment and did not expect them to launch wars of conquest and thought that with more technology their lives would be less tragically constrained. They betrayed him and killed him and fled with our stolen ships to take people as their slaves.>

She nods. Takes a deep breath. 

"...I think if Earth is actually being invaded by aliens then I want to help. But also it seems more plausible that this is a weirdly coherent hallucination than that there are actually multiple different alien species with space travel, one of which takes over brains - any species brains? how does that even work? - and also magic is real too. So, uh, if you can help me think of ways to test that..." She fidgets with her notebook. "I think if you just keep saying things and making sense, I'm going to gather it's probably not that someone slipped me LSD on the train." 

She's out of words to say and so twists the top off her coffee thermos just to give herself something to do. Not that she really needs any more caffeine. Her heart rate is thrumming around at least 150 bpm. 

<Not any species.> He sounds...approving. <They need to have electrical signals sent through a carbon-based physical substrate, and they need to have all their brain in one place in their body plan.>

"Huh. Are there aliens that aren't carbon-based? Or that have more than one brain?" She vaguely remembers reading some sci-fi about silicon-based lifeforms, but embarrassingly she can't remember chemistry well enough to guess if it makes any sense. 

:I like her: Leareth sends to the others, also approving, though his face and body are completely impassive. 

:Leareth the humans here find it creepy when you do that: 

<There are aliens meeting both of those descriptions, and we are aware of this limitation of Yeerks because Yeerks attempted to infest their populations without success. They also do not typically infest species that are unintelligent, because the Yeerk uses the faculties of the host and is very limited if the host is.>

"...Huh. How did they evolve that way, if they're not smart unless they're in a brain that's smart - did their planet have another intelligent species? Uh, or did they not evolve, did someone - bioengineer brain slugs, eww..." Marian is a nurse and not easily grossed out but foreign bodies should not go into brains nope nope nope.

<Their planet has a species with whom they co-evolved, we believe.>