"There will be more time to talk about this later, Alanna," Thom said. She might want to talk about it, but Thom wanted nothing of the kind. "You've only just woken up and you're doing nothing but fret over me. I did survive ten years under His Grace's scrutiny, sister dear, I'm hardly going to let his magic get me now. You need to be shown to crew quarters, and there are a host of other things about this ship that aren't immediately obvious. The omnicomm, for example."

He saw how she looked at it like she couldn't figure the thing out, and took it from her without really asking. "It works just by touching the display. Most of the buttons look like what they do - see this one looks like an arrow, that takes you back. You can enter letters with this pad-" by the time she got around to getting Thom back to the important subject, he would have taken her through a crash course in omnicomm technology.