"I bet it will!"

He eats lunch.

Lunch! "So do you have opinions on boyfriend-sharing?"

"He is utterly fascinated with you, it's been a long time since I've seen him even the slightest bit carried away - it's like winding back time fifteen hundred years - I suppose it's inevitable if you notice so much about people and then meet a really remarkable one -"

"It's a little fast but not in the - shallow way I normally associate with sudden infatuation? - But that's not really what I was asking you."

"If you two were to have the sort of relationship that he understands you to want, that would make me very, very happy."

"Aww."

He giggles.

"Thanks for coming to lunch."

"Of course! It's nice to meet you."

"You too!"

"Thank you for saving us all!"

"I assure you I feel appropriately egotistical about, uh, landing on you in a last-ditch effort to save my own planet."

"Well, you could've done that and then not arranged to save our world."

"I guess in theory but no not really."

"I hope most worlds are in less dire straits than these ones, we'll be stretched pretty thin if they're all in terrible peril."

"Be fairly catastrophic timing. Fifty years ago my world would have seemed fine! Even three years!"

"Were you starting to think about other sources, or did you think you had lots more time?"

"People were starting to think about getting to other planets. Someday. In a long time. I'm not sure how far off the technology would have been or if the other planets would have been hospitable."

"Can they be gated to, or is that impossible without getting there in the first place?"

"You have to physically travel to both ends of a gate. And the timing's a little delicate, too, they work by having a disappearance point on an object and peeling it apart at the right moment."

Nod. "Can they be interdimensional?"

"I guess that's not impossible, but I kind of don't want any gates in any locations the Enemy might at need choose to visit that lead anywhere not that."

"Oh, absolutely not while he's still alive."

"But yeah later on it would be fantastic. And the surfaces the gates are on are still mobile afterwards, I mean usually you install them permanently somewhere but you could pry them off and move them, so they wouldn't eat wherever they were when they grew."