He smiles a little, not disapproving of her curiosity. "It's all right. It's not like you're asking for 'fleet secrets or anything." And encouraging asking questions is something he's trying to cultivate in his own students at the moment, so he can hardly turn down the practice anyway.

"Klingons are humanoid but generally a little bigger than humans, with sharper teeth, and ridges on their foreheads, like this," he says, using his finger to trace a line from the bridge of his nose to the crown of his head, indicating how far the ridges go. "Romulans have pointed ears and green blood, but other than that, they're pretty much identical to humans on first glance. They're actually an ancient splinter faction from humanity's oldest allies, the Vulcans, so it can be hard to tell them apart."

She condensed her own people's war down enough for an outsider to understand, so he tries to do the same here. "We didn't encounter them at the same time, but territory's a big part of it, yeah. The Romulans were already conquering an empire, so explorers from Earth were seen as rivals vying for the same space. The Klingons were kind of doing the same thing, but they didn't care so much about the territory as they did trying to prove their, ah, might was superior to ours."