"When were those?"

"Delilah was the Archangel before Linus, and turned over the title five years ago. Alleluia was interim Archangel for Delilah early in her term when she had an injured wing but ceded the title when her wing recovered and went to take an unoccupied oracle post instead."

"Ah, yeah that's fairly recently in our post-warp history."

"There's no one else near us, right? Everyone our ancestors knew and fought with, dead. So that might have been a fine reason to postpone introducing yourselves to us."

"Yeah, you are pretty far away from most of our member planets and are in a fairly uninhabited region of space. We only ended up exploring near you once we de-tected signs of previous advanced tech-nology usage. The tech that detected that is pretty new."

"Is it leading you to a lot of places you'd passed over before?"

"Not many, you were the second such place we searched and the first turned out to be from an old forgotten war between species we already were in contact with. I think your region is the first one we've encountered that has had advanced interstellar civilizations completely wiped out by war?"

"Huh. I would have imagined it would be more common - what usually stops it short of that?"

"Major wars between interstellar civilizations are really quite rare, most of the time they aren't seen as worth it for either side. When they do happen I think it's almost never to the death? And even when it is, I think it's unlikely to result in all sides getting wiped out, usually at least one side is left in a position to rebuild relatively fast. Most of the time it ends in some form of peace well be-fore that point."

"Wars between mega-civilizations involving hundreds of planets on either side might be more common, but mega-civilizations are too new to be sure - we only know of three extant ones: the Federation, the Amalien Alliance, and the Borg. I think we have evidence that at least one other one existed in the past but we don't know much about them or where they went."

"Huh. I wonder why our ancestors' war was different."

"I don't believe I have background on your civilization's history."

"Our ancestors were at war, considered it a great evil, and decided to settle a new planet without the technology that they considered responsible for the conflict, installing a spaceship to pose as a god and kill us all if we looked likely to repeat their mistakes."

"We believe the spaceship is warp capable." he notes.

"But perhaps not a high warp factor, if they didn't get far from their starting point?"

"Yeah, our best guess is their technological development was directed towards advanced weaponry."

"I can see why a faction might have made those decisions against that backdrop."

Lucien can continue contributing as long as that seems helpful for Isabella. 

Eventually Isabella declares herself adequately caught up on the Federation overview and goes to settle herself into her new quarters.

Lucien stays behind with T'Mir.

"That went... better than I would have expected but I'm unsure how you found it? We bumped into a lot of the major disagreements between the Amaliens and Federation during that conversation." 

"I'm Vulcan enough to navigate a conversation without becoming offended even when the conversation is much more offensive than that one."

"Oh, I'm used to getting an impression of ... disdain of Amalien policies and culture from most Vulcans?"

"I'm not sure what Vulcans you've previously spoken to but if they let any emotion, even disdain, contaminate their demeanor, they weren't particularly skilled examples."

"Less demeanor and more how they engaged."

"Regardless, I'm interested in any thoughts you have on the Samarian situation - it seems plausibly quite important for the war."

"Does it? One ship, difficult to remove safely from its current location, equipped with an AI that is likely to be unhelpful."

"We're pretty sure the ship has weapons significantly more advanced than any we have and reverse engineering them could make a huge difference. The sensor system that brought the region to our attention was searching for a type of deflector piercing attack that we hypothesized could exist but are a ways off from developing."