[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?]

['Exactly what I did' would be easy, but that probably won't send me back. It'll take some work to reverse the transit, I don't know how much until I've gotten a chance to sit down and work out some math. Getting that estimate might take a day or two, depending on how efficiently I can work on it.]

[Okay, but more like weeks or like years? And will anyone be trying to get you back from your end?]

[Probably weeks or months on my end. They'll be trying to get me back but our one person with a targetable teleport was off planet so it might be a bit.]

[Okay, weeks or months is definitely faster than getting an eclipsed to try it. How many planets are you guys spread out across?]

[Only the one.]

[...so where's the person you mentioned?]