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There is a bar. The bar is quite pleasantly outfitted, with booths and tables and a lovely fireplace with couches in front of it. The couches must be quite comfortable, because a young woman is sleeping on one of them as though it were the grandest featherbed. Or perhaps that's just exhaustion. She—and the other woman in this currently otherwise-empty establishment—are both plenty the worse for wear. To an inexperienced eye, it might seem only as if they had been out camping for a while, from the roughness of their clothes, but if you know how to look—that's the sleep of one who's found decent sleep a precious commodity for a long time. And her sister, the one whose eyes you can see—those are the eyes of someone who's found an unanticipated path out of Hell, an unexpected part in the Red Sea.
"Oh, sure--so could I, probably, given some time and ideally the ability to study various systems of government and how they work and how they're implemented. I suspect the ultimate answer will depend a great deal on factors I can't know right now, though, like what resources exactly will be available at the time and how much infrastructure the Sentinels have co-opted and how much they've straight up destroyed and who's available to run it."
"Yes. A difficult but not insurmountable problem, and very preferable to the problem of being overrun by murderous robots."
"I think most problems that people have are preferable to that one."
"Are there any doorlike things large enough to put one of your spaceships through? This place overwrites 'doors' but apparently this is a flexible category."
"I'm trying to think of more useful questions, but it's hard, without knowing more about what there is to ask about."
"My questions are generally on the order of possible ways to move things between universes on the relevant scale. What are yours?"
"I want to understand what this place is and how it might be useful to me, but I don't know enough to know where to start asking; and I want to give you useful information about my world, but I don't know enough to know where to start explaining."
"I don't really get this place very well myself, to be honest."
"Yes, that's another problem. Lack of obvious well-informed sources."
"So far as I can tell the main value in this place is less the place itself and more the people one meets. Although there are obvious exceptions; a couch is a much nicer place to sleep than some."