"Just don't wake it up. It's hard to get it to go back to sleep again, that's why we needed the skalds. Not that they were boring, but they did know some good lullabies." A soft, faint, but real smile played across Martha's lips at the memory. It was a lot easier to think about it now, she realized.

"And uh, no. Less...metaphysical than that?" she said, looking back at the man across the table. "See, I was in my second foundation year--this is 2008--and some seriously weird stuff happened at the hospital where I was doing my rotation...I met this guy. Another alien. And he was a time traveller, and I couldn't really let that kind of opportunity pass me by. So we travelled for a while, together. Iceland was one stop."

Couldn't let him pass her by, in truth. For fuck's sake.