She smirked, and her head tilted a bit to her right. There was a faint trace of blood in the air and it was growing stronger. Phaedra wasn't going to outright glare at Peter, or confront him about it, but he was very hurt. Bruised, to be exact. The blood was coming up closer to the surface of his skin.
"This isn't going to be particularly reassuring, and unfortunately I've gotten very good at saying it, if that gives you an idea how many times I've had to do it...."
Briefly, she looked away from Peter. They'd done a lot of staring at each other, but she needed a moment to compose the words.
Then she looked back.
"We aren't on Earth anymore."
She let that sit a moment.
"You, me... everyone here--there are others-- we were kidnapped. Some of us have been here a very long time."
There was sadness in her tone at that. And she was mentioning this first because it was important that Peter understand that their captors were strong enough to take people like her, like him.
"We get shuffled around a lot to different planets. Once we were on a spaceship... Our captors aren't human. They're aliens. And as much as I really wish I were making this up, I unfortunately have a lot of evidence to back this up."
She sighed.
"The other people here aren't strictly human, either. Some are, but they tend to have a higher level of understanding of things like us. They know we exist. There's somebody here that claims to be a god, too."
It was a lot to process. For the first time in a very long time, Phaedra made her expression as soft as she could.
"We've been taking care of each other."
Sort of. Phaedra was still very much an outsider. "Sort of. That gets complicated now and then."
Her eyebrow arched. She waited for the inevitable questions.