"Wait, the worlds in danger!?" she asked eyes going wide.
Of course that would be what she latched onto.
"Eh," I waved it off. "Sort of but it's manageable. Not your problem."
She sort of looked over me for a minute with a sort of quiet desperation before muttering, "I live on this world."
I rolled my eyes. "The world being in danger isn't exactly newy ou know?" I questioned casually. Playing off the danger as relatively minor in an attempt to lower her stress levels before the poor kid had an aneurysm. "Problems happen, people move in to stop them. String theory threatened to deorbit the moon a few years ago and now she's in the birdcage. The Cold War had enough mundane nukes pointed everywhere that one sufficiently itchy trigger finger could have sent us the way of the dinosaurs but someone stepped in to hold back anyone who tried. Heck a rogue meteor could come down and do the job the old fashioned way," I listed off, then stalled. "Okay, not really a good example of us stopping one of those so far, but I'm pretty sure we could manage it. Danger happens, people work to protect everyone from it. They don't always manage to succeed on the first go but someone steps in to take up the slack. That's just how the species survives."
"And you don't think I can help?" she asked.
"In this matter?" I questioned... "Eh... maybe. Honestly it might not even happen. Or happen soon anyway. I've set off a lot of ripples, and it was a contrived set of events that set everything off in the first place. The problem was stopped," I reminded. "At a cost I hope to avoid, but yeah the world didn't end," society was another story.
"And you don't think I can help," she signed.
"It's not-" I groaned, "Fine. Okay, if it'll make you feel better I'll give you the power point version. Two years from a very different set of circumstances then this, Jack Slash and his merry band of murderous psychos manage to drive a hero over the deep end... and it turns out that hero was holding back a lot more then anyone could imagine," I grimaced. "Now I'm not saying who, mostly because all of this is theoretical and probably butterflied away by now but I am taking preventative steps to keep all this from potentially happening."
"What kind of steps?" she asked a little hesitant.
"Well steps like talking to the girl who was turned into a living weapon. Not that you're directly related to setting off that mess or anything," I added in quickly. Before sighing, "Look, can we switch topics? You're dad is probably going to show up pretty soon and we only have so much time for me to answer questions."
She nodded, "Okay."
still she did seem at least a little less... well freaked out. Mission accomplished I guess. Hard part over.
"So... uh... what happened to me in the first timeline?" she questioned.
I winced, damn it murphy!