"We're still serving Serenity, yes. Her identity is secret. She's chosen to live as an ordinary human on Earth, so the most important thing we can do to keep her safe is to ensure that no-one who would target her is able to find her."

"We do remember life on the Moon, or parts of it. Our memories returned last year, when Serenity reawoke the power of the Silver Crystal, but there are gaps where we still don't remember things."

"And why has she chosen to live in secret?  Are her enemies too strong?  Does she not want to anger other nations?  Or what?"

There's one even bigger question to ask here.

"Do other people reincarnate too, or just you?"

"That's a very controversial question that people have been arguing over for a long time and I don't want to claim to have an authoritative answer on it. Although some of the other people who died in the same battle as us definitely also reincarnated, including some of our enemies."

"When the princess was reborn, she got a new family on Earth. She grew up with them for fourteen years before regaining her memories. She regained her memories of the Moon last year, but she still has her memories of her life on Earth as well. It's natural that she doesn't want to abandon it."

(Moon is going to look towards Rinn to see if she's enjoying listening this conversation of if she looks like she'd welcome being approached to start a different one.)

So this reincarnated Moon Kingdom isn't much of a kingdom after all just yet.  Just like Alorica isn't much anymore.

(And reincarnation?  He guesses he'll see when things come to it.  He's got far too many responsibilities in this life to be thinking that far ahead.)

Rinn is visibly excited about the princess and Moon Kingdom.

"Do you have your own palace -"

She abruptly stops.  Something's up with her language.  She's thinking of something like the great sprawling houses of upper-class families in Alorica (where she was living herself till the invasion), but the word she naturally chose - well, to start with, as soon as she thinks about it, it doesn't sound like she's speaking Erlic at all!  But after that, "palace" feels like it has connotations of explicit kings and queens and all sorts of other things that don't feel anything like Alorica where the families are regularly playing against each other in elections.

"- er, house?  And what's this language and how do I suddenly know it?"

Mercury presses one of her earings and an AR visor drops down from her tiara. She examines Rinn, Parrolan and Jerach through it.

"It looks as though there's a lingering effect from the black crystal device that lets you speak any language that the people you're talking to can."

"The language is Japanese, which is what most people speak around here. I don't think people are likely to read anything into your speaking it. I suppose since you look foreign people will take it as a sign you've put in the effort to learn the local language."

"Oh, that's handy!  Does it look like it'll last a while?

"I, er, I think I remember hearing of Japan somewhere back in school?  I remember Old Earth doesn't have as many languages as it used to - are there still a lot of languages now?"

"Thousands, but a lot of them are dying out. The translation effect looks as though it's designed to last indefinitely, absent disruption."

"Well, that's convenient," says Jerach.  "I do speak several languages, but not sure if any of them would be spoken here already... hey, got an idea!"

He pauses a moment, thinking about the languages he knows, and picks Espanyic.

"Rinn, kay yaresay haver in est Terra?"

* Roughly, "What do you want to do on this planet?"  The Espanyic language, though no one present here realizes it, is descended from Spanish; no guarantees are made for the phonetic accuracy of this transcription.

"Yaro vahr a est -"  She pauses, realizing she's speaking yet another language, and blinks.  "Wow, nice spell!"

"We do, as you were asking, have a palace on the moon, which brings us to the important practical question of where you're going to stay. The Moon Palace does seem like it might be the best option, although there are other possibilities if you object to staying on the moon - I expect there's plenty of people who'd be willing to host you as a favour to us."

"Ooh, you do have a palace?  But - it'd be so fun to see Earth -"

"I would like to talk to someone who knows about current manufacturing techniques... of course, perhaps your 'magic' would be relevant there..."

The quotation marks are clearly audible.  Parrolan is a man who didn't give credence to any of the legends of wormholes until he found himself falling through one, and is still certain everything he's seen is explainable by physics.

"So a manufacturing engineer? K.O. University isn't too far from here, we can take you to the engineering department."

"Is that the place to learn more about the magic you've been using?" Rinn says, connivingly.

"... does your 'magic' do anything about materials analysis?"

"It does."

"I've got a sample of this mysterious metal the Tenevri are using on their spaceships.  We think they're somehow using it to be able to find ships in hyperspace and pluck them out of it - which we thought was impossible at any reasonable scale.  So, we need to find out what this is."

"It's called mithril.  You know anything about mithril?"

"I haven't heard of mithril except in a fictional context, but I have a Silver Millennium computer with inbuilt sensors and analytic software much more advanced than anything we have in the modern day that I could scan it with to see if it can figure anything out."