The pilot's grip on her most recently acquired bottle tightened until her skin squeaked. "For starters," she began tersely, a crimson tether of mutual outrage chaining her eyes to those of her opposition, "Where do you get off saying there's no way of knowing if the many-worlds interpretation is accurate? I'm here, aren't I? And barring your ridiculous 'telephone portal' nonsense, or whatever false word you invented, the only mechanism for that would be a bridge across the higher dimensions between my timeline and this one, as the likelihood of this merely being another planet populated with human beings in my own universe is so utterly improbable it would make H.G. Wells spit blood!"

Relt tried to settle down a bit, ignoring the raucous cricket hooligans of intoxication as they urged her to violence. "But let us ignore your crass ignorance, and return to the original point of contention. You posit that it is not true time travel, but a form of dimensional travel. Now, with the theory that time itself is but a dimension, you are simultaneously correct and incorrect. Hellfire and damnation, man, walking across the room is dimensional travel; it doesn't mean I haven't moved from one end of this tavern to the other!" The woman stood up, then immediately sat back down. She thought about this for a moment, berated her inner ear into cooperation, and managed a shaky stand once more.

"Simply because such travel does not change the state of time as it is for your future does not mean it is an absence of time travel. The organization of the cosmic whatever in which an uncountable range of universes are constantly splitting and dancing around one another is structured this way precisely because of things in the vein of that garbage paradox you've so petulantly lauded. While killing your own grandfather is possible without negating your own existence, it does not mean that travel backward, or indeed forward, in time is impossible. Merely highly improbable and very difficult and likely not worth the effort."

"Besides, even if you cannot change the future from which you originate, does not mean that it may be better to remain in the new future you create. It's the same people, merely reflected through a different prism. Who knows? Perhaps there's a version of you in some other universe that isn't an insufferable prat with the intellect of a headless goose." Relt took another drink, content in the knowledge that she had won, and stubbornly fighting the drunken impulse to remove her shirt and vest and begin striking people.