Nearby, two patrons have just --

-- Wait, wait.  What is Alicia doing?  Is she walking over there?  That.  Is decidedly uncharacteristic.  She said she was on break for the indefinite and atemporal future.   And Ciara Beraen knows that Alicia Thorn, the new one, is way too reticent to just walk up to someone and introduce herself.  Unless something's up, which...might be.

She'll just be...

...Following behind Alicia, who looks to be a young woman in her mid-teens, wearing robes positively bedecked with arcane implements that look to have been hand-finished, as she asks the following: "...Um.  Excuse me, I don't want to be a bother, but...

"I was wondering - if I'm actually seeing what I think I'm seeing - if I could, uh, ask some questions about the lightsaber I...think you have?  Ma'am?  Only I really hadn't expected to ever meet anyone who had one without building a poor imitation thereof myself, because the physics are all wrong for it where I'm from to begin with, there's no...oh, excuse me, I appear to be rambling.  Um.  Hi, hello, hello."  She nods to the table, one by one.  "Alicia Thorn, I'm not from your universe I just saw it on TV - er, actually it would be holovids, wouldn't it - and anyway I really didn't see that much of it - so please do forgive me if I make a misstep in etiquette.  Or I can just go away if you'd prefer that.  I just.  Had to ask.  Because I think I'd explode if I could have asked a real live Force-user about lightsabers and then, uh, didn't.  They're just.  Really cool.  I mean they're actually absurdly hot in the sense of temperature but -  ...I guess the closest bit of slang I expect might be recognizable if I'm actually right would be 'They're really wizard' but I think that's more of an Outer Rim thing.  ...Erm.  Well.  Anyway.  Yeah."

...She trails off, now that whatever has dragged her through this conversation like a water-surfer getting whiplash because the only thing she has to keep her above water is the rope attached to the Jet-ski has subsided.  She's being painfully genuine, to all available methods of determination.

"...Alicia!", is promptly hissed at her by the woman who has just placed a hand on the young woman's shoulder, recognizing the other human at the table to be giving off some very similar vibes and radiating apology on her ward's behalf.

The -- Sith, she's obviously a Sith, for some reason it wasn't clear before but it is now -- raises an eyebrow at the girl as she speaks, and glances at the smaller droid when she's done, but answers rather than waiting for a response: "She's fine, it's no trouble. Did you want a textbook on them?"

She blinks as the 'is a Sith' nature of the person in front of her hits her in the face like a wet trout.  And then she processes the 'textbook' line, though she needs to first recover it from the ether it was lost to while she was catching up to the Sith thing.  (She carefully raises a 'one moment please', and that hand sweeps back to touch a small gem that's actually surprisingly well-concealed, inset in a silver fixture beneath her silver hair.  (It's modeled off of an Earthling earpiece, somewhere between the in-ear Bluetooth microphone-speaker things and half of an over-the-ear headphone, not that anyone knows besides her where her inspiration could have come from.))

"...They make lightsaber textbooks?"

"Of course they do, there aren't nearly enough specialists around to design them for everyone who needs one. And actually now that you mention it I want a kyber-growing manual - Love, do you want anything from the bar?" she directs at the droid.

"Another milkshake, please?"

"Of course."

"I was vaguely under the impression that...oh, wait, that was the Jedi doing it that way, some many hundreds years later, and I can't even begin to speculate when the tradition developed relative to --" Ruusaan, she cuts herself off before saying.

"Mm.  Spoilers, I suppose.  Not that you don't seem like a perfectly lovely person, but, uh, I kind of don't want to tell the Sith Empire anything about the future whatsoever.

"Anyway I'm kind of surprised about the textbook existing because my usual impression was of lightsaber construction being a particularly individualized affair.  ...Hey, Bar," she asides, with a subtle bit of magic to propagate her voice over, "do I still get Earth books at Earthling prices?"

"Textbooks wouldn't do me much good, being as I'm not still using their physics when I'm back where I came here from, but I have some words to have with Kuat Drive Yards and their fetish for ridiculously oversized spaceships.  ...That probably wouldn't work, actually, it's altogether too far away timeline-wise to throw butterflies at.  But if you want to get some looks at how my homeworld made artificial crystals of various sorts, I could probably share some of that and be confident that - if I was throwing butterflies around, they'd not be...universe-altering ones, I guess.  ...Like.  The future I saw was a fucking disaster for almost everybody, no matter which canon I consider, uh, most likely to be canon.  ...Though given that there's synthetic kyber crystals that's sort of a clue, unless there's also something about 'bleeding' them, which makes the future much more likely to be the badly directed cash-grab version.  Still, it wasn't 'the Force implodes' or anything like that.  And there's probably literally that in the cards if certain knowledge of any of the many things that are probably real in any given your-home-galaxy, ends up getting into hands that'll try doing something mind-bendingly stupid with it.

"...What year is it, actually?  Er, probably I should be asking what Republic year, if there's a difference.  The Sith are not often...protagonist-shaped, as a philosophy, which means I won't get a lot of stuff from the relevant perspective to datematch."

She shoots the droid a look, at the torrent of words, and the droid signs back I didn't follow it either. "I have no idea what year the Republic counts it as."

And then her being-a-Sith-ness... evaporates? folds away? She still is one, there's no doubt about that, it just doesn't seem to matter to anything anymore.

She looks at Ciara, clearly a bit confused by something that just happened there and turning to her for advice.

"You're going to want to try that again in Azeric, Your Highness.  I've had more exposure to your...  ...dialect, and I'm not sure I got it either."

"Mm.  Thank you.

"Right.  So.  In Galactic Basic, Azeric Common Tongue, or plain English, instead of the incomprehensible patois that I am reliably informed everyone seems to hear me speaking in when I make so much as the slightest reference to a piece of media.  ...I blame the holonet.  Corrupting today's youth, don'tcha know.

"I did mention the whole 'everything I know about your universe came out of a holodrama' thing, right?  I'm pretty sure I did.  ...Well it wasn't exactly all the one holodrama.  There were a few big-budget films, and then some half a century of everyone and their brother writing tie-in material that got increasingly bullshit from a starting point of 'the movies blew up a planet', and then in the latter half of that chunk of time you get people coming out with well-written, interactive, media - video games, not that the etymology will make any sense, but -

"Huh, I just realized that Earth just about has the technology to do live simulation of the blaster deflection, training, remote, um, things.  Not that we have any Force-sensitives who could make use of it, to the best of my knowledge, but the hardware's all there except for the repulsors, and I guess you could make do with a prop-driven drone if you were dead-set on having one to begin with instead of just doing it in software.  Aaaaanyway I was actually saying something.

"Video games.  Right.  So we come to the 'I might know some future that's actually relevant on timescales you might live to see depending upon what year it is', bits.  Because those video games are set some thousand-plus years before the movies and their absurdly huge spaceships from Kuat that just fucking irk me on a logistical level.  Nobody needs a spaceship big enough to have a noticeable gravity from mass, I fucking swear.  And I've mostly run into the games secondhand rather than playing them myself, but there's plenty of -

"Oh, this might help, do you know who's Grandmaster of the Jedi Order at the moment?  I'm not sure that I'd be able to find out enough about the Sith to know who's what when, even with the people who obsessively curate the encyclopedia, but it probably won't hurt to try looking whatever you've got up, either.

"...If Bar's giving me Earthling rates, at least; I might have to put my back in, if I'm trying to get random Earthling media at the same rates as Ciara.  She's native Azerosi, I am very much not, but there were...shenanigans afoot."

Has Bar given her a napkin?  ...Let's just see if that's so, real quick.

(This spell is different from the sound-projection one, because Order/Chaos doesn't actually have good ways to identify things without first approaching them the long way and she's not going to read other people's napkins; she, in deference to the Sith who is probably not going to like the feeling of Oneness her usual Light-based summoning trick has a tendency to leak 'round the edges, uses Death Grip instead, despite the way it kind of wigs her out a bit to cast 'Death' spells even though really they're just...Stasis spells, in a way.

(...It's a modified Death Grip, because she learned this from Ciara Beraen, and not the teaching line of Gul'dan, Ner'zhul, and/or Arthas Menethil, but she knows this spell first and foremost from her Death Knight character and she thinks she could actually cast the big version from knowing the small one.

(It feels a lot like a different subset of the Dark Side, come to think of it.  Where Order feels like willful command, Death is instead a determined fixation.)

She doesn't let reading the note stop her from rambling on about the bits that won't change, either.

"Um. Hm.  Right, where was I.  ...Attempting to figure out if I can figure out when you're from.  Right.  Right.  Hm.

"Anyway if that works I can talk about some historical bullshit probably."

The woman makes a bit of a face about the magic; the droid flinches too, and squeezes her hand about it.

"I don't know much about the Jedi, but I think it was... Shan, Than, something like that?"

"Sorry 'bout that, it was either that or 'oneness with everything', and I did not specialize in command of the numinous powers to preferentially get up and walk when I needed to fetch a small object from 'over there somewhere probably'.  Still, I'll, uh, forgo it in the future."

(And she should probably look at what the napkin she got...actually says.)

"...Anyway.  Rrriiiight.  If that's either of the Shans I know - Satele or Bastila - you're actually possibly going to hit a game's canon.  ...Fuck, what was up with what's-his-face...I can probably look it up, I guess.

"And really, from a narrative parsimony perspective - it's totally the time where shit's about to be the most fucked.  Though I'm not sure that this bar is in my Random Omnipotent Being's service area, actually, so who knows, maybe I'm not going to get plothooked into Saving The Galaxy, Tee Emm."

"...Ma'am."

...There's something that feels entirely unlike a gelatinous egg being cracked over her spine, as she contemplates her next line - but she's pretty sure she's right.  Because she knows exactly the feeling that Unearthly Insight would use to reach her...and she felt it, when she considered making that quip - going down that whole line of thought about narrative parsimony, in fact.  That it was going to go right.

"...Do I need to explain all that?  Because I can't quite put my finger on it, but I've got a knack for stories and something about all this is telling me I'm in one - and it's probably not mine.  Even factoring in the way I took myself Off The Rails quite more thoroughly than should have been possible, let alone plausible, given that canon in the doubly-fictional 'Roses of Villarosa' included precisely no visiting interdimensional bars by anyone, especially the 'canonical' Princess, who opened the same damn door at the same damn moment in world-time - or rather, I am especially concerned about being in another story, because I did this by ending up in fucking Milliways, Restaurant at the End of the Universe - which is a reference, yet again.  ...Which is to say, I smell executive meddling.  And I want to know if they drafted me as a quirkily comedic side character for whatever narrative I'm in - which, frankly, I am, compared to you-all, at least when I don't have my fancy hat on - to make me the butt of the joke.  Because if so, I have some words to have with them.  Mostly to do with not fucking doing that.

"...Say, are my swears translating?"

"They are." She seems to be trying not to laugh. "We aren't headed home anytime particularly soon, though, I don't think - Love?"

"Well, maybe. Let's see what she has to say about it."

Ooh, who's this 'she'?

...It's you, dumbass(affectionate).  Really, you've been a Princess of Villarosa for how long and it still hasn't sunk in that you're actually important now?

Alicia looks around for this mysterious 'she' for a good few seconds before she realizes that the 'she' she is looking for is most probably herself.

"...You're asking me?  I wouldn't get involved with the shit that's coming your galaxy's way unless I was getting paid in narrative fiat.  But it's your home and I don't know how much that factors in, so - if, knowing that things are going to go down the tubes, you want to invest in changing them - I could do no less than help."

"I don't know if I'd want to invite you to; we have only just met. But what I meant was that depending on what you have to say about the situation, we," she gestures at her companions, "might go back sooner than we were planning to."

(It is maybe a little weird that the droid rather than the human seems to be leading this particular group.)

No it isn't!

Like, seriously, notwithstanding that protocol droids make good party faces even when they're not in leadership positions, she's able to detect a romance when it's right under her nose - and this absolutely reeks of not just that but plot-significant romancing having occurred.

Not that she has to consciously process all of this, it's just that - this droid is Definitely A Person, no matter what the sourcebooks have to say about it - and she can therefore do whatever the fuck she likes, including lead and guide the party more actively than most droids would.

"Right.  I wasn't planning on inviting myself over anyway, just - arming you with knowledge.  So, does the name Revan ring any bells?"