Joan dips her chin and slants him a look that will pass for coy if you've never met her, but beneath the lowered lashes, her eyes are appraising and shrewd. "Tea it is, then."

There is a small part of her that wants to tell him that it would have to be extremely secret to be above her classified status, but it is only a small part, and one that rises and rankles because she's far from her world, far from a place where she's earned respect and the power that goes with it.

She pushes it back down with the other things she won't permit herself to think about. "My skepticism's less of the supernatural than of this place in its entirety. The more time that passes, the more I have to accept this as reality. And if I accept that this is what it appears to be, then nothing else is too incredible to be true. But I still expect it to be a bizarre dream every morning when I wake, or the side effects of something I was drugged with during a tribal ceremony I attended out of politeness."