"That will work for me to write to you, but what if you have something to tell me?"

"Oh, then it won't work at all, I can make some phones for us, but the letter option is available if it ever makes sense."

"I appreciate it. And - I will, at least for a while, leave Haven City unharmed and let Baron Praxis know that I am ending our deal."

"Thanks, I appreciate that! Do you guys need anything in the short term?"

"Nothing you would find so immediately understandable that you could confirm it wasn't a weapon."

"No? No tasty non-person foods from your home planet? Why are you here on this one, anyway, I didn't get a clear understanding of the history."

"We would love the flesh of..." something unpronounceable to humans, "but I can imagine ways I could use it as a weapon. We were trapped inside a deprecated rift network by the Precursors, only for a curious young man to discover and open one of the gates. We were meant to languish outside time and space for all eternity."

"Wow. I guess if you wanna do some genocide and don't like death that might happen."

"In their defense it was not as long inside as out."

"I think all eternity would have wound up being pretty long! What exactly is a rift network?"

"A more powerful but less safe version of a warp network."

"Which is..."

"Warp rings are circular devices large enough for a person to pass through. When two are connected on a warp network, you go into one and out the other. The old rift network handled time as well as space; you could go in one gate and out the same gate a year earlier."

"...wow, that has, uh, probably a lot of implications. I assume I can't go to the right place and go back in time and see if I can talk the Precursors out of conquest?"

"Those gates, at those times, are not connected to the only gate on this planet. Even if they were, that is not what happened."

"It enforces a consistent history?"

"It is difficult to experimentally distinguish several possible theories that would explain the observed result that we have no records of anyone reporting having changed the past and seen those changes reverberate through the future. It might be that if you could go back, you would undo the war, and afterward you would remember a world where I had told you you were the destined peacemaker who had arrived to save us all from eons of misunderstanding and pointless losses and you went to play your destined role."

"...well, that's disturbing but not as disturbing as the eons of pointless losses probably. But I can't try it?"

"Not with this planet's gate."

"Okay, but how far would it be in a spaceship?"

"I do not know of any gates that are connected to the ones that would allow you access to the Precursors. The gate here would not require a spaceship to reach. If you wanted to find our old planet in the present - I do not know. We are lost."

"...I could try to find it, though it would be kind of a hassle."

"It is not a priority but it would mean a great deal to me."

"Has the planet got a name?"

"It has had many, although I'm afraid several are just various words for dirt. Perhaps you could try..." this short one.