[Wow. Okay. Uh, there's stuff in between.]

[Yeah I don't think this planet's a featureless flat plane or anything. I can navigate enough to run through a forest at that speed, and I can just skirt around any major settlements. But a plane sounds simpler?]

[I'd think so, yes. I can, conveniently, get you a ticket even if you don't legally exist.]

[Oh, nice.]

Possibly someone in or working for government, too, then.

[What does getting on a plane involve?]

[You'd get Jackson or his dom to drive you to the airport, tell the staff at the counter you're a 114 and have them print you a boarding pass, I guess get directions verbally from employees since Jackson says you're not literate in English, and then sit in an uncomfortable chair for a few hours and I'll meet you at my end.]

[Sounds easy enough.]

[Cool, I'll get on that. What's your name?]

[Family name Haruno, given name Sakura.]

[Okay, I'm going to give that to the airline as Sakura Haruno because that's the local ordering. Apparently Brian can give you a ride to the airport.]

[Thank you. Everyone's been very helpful.]

[Welcome to Earth, glad you find it hospitable.]

As wryly as telepathy will communicate: [Better than the last alien civilization we met.]

[You've met more?]

[Yeah. Not friendly. Very long story that sums up to 'our planet has a resource they wanted, retrieving it was destructive, they did not consider our species worth acknowledging, we kicked their ass.' We are now playing extreme catch up, both technologically - we didn't win with pointy sticks and rocks but we may as well have as far as power gap goes - and trying to figure out the best way to get a unified planetary defense in case they come looking for their - we think independent project runner, not someone who would be reporting back often. And definitely before they send an actual military force. Luckily we think we have time...]

[Wow. What did they want?]

[Pretty sure they were after something that's causing our planet to have the magic system it does - this planet not having that system supports that theory, since it means our system is definitely localized.]

[Might mean they want to steal our moon or something though.]

[Yeah, I don't know what they're interested in. They already had our magic system, though, they were - acting like our thing would be a power source or something.]

[Huh. And they don't have ours?]

[I don't think so, but we didn't exactly compare notes.]

[Fair enough. Uh, do you have any idea why you speak English.]

[We're pretty sure we're not native to our planet - like I am not a person who looks at bones but I saw a report from one that our species and a few others appear really suddenly in the... Record of really old stuff we don't have writing about. And our written records go back only a few centuries, except for like one thousand year old stone tablet. Human bones do show up old enough that it might be weird the languages aren't mutually unintelligible by now if our population split off from yours somehow, though. We do though have multiple languages which really are not at all related to each other with no idea how that happened, so my vague sense might be very wrong about how languages evolve.]

[There are places on this planet with shared Internet access where they have thick enough accents I'd expect Jackson and his dom to have a hard time understanding you, so I don't think you being a weird secret human colony extracted from Earth quite explains it, but it sounds like it's probably part of the puzzle, we do have an archaeological record here.]

[Possibly, yeah.]

[Weird. Uh, how hard do you think it would be to reproduce the transit?]