"Well, I guess you are less likely to get hurt unsecured in a helicopter than scaling the tower without a harness or anything, but it makes me SO nervous and also I think we might be in trouble with insurance or something if you did bump your head."

"I'm guessing even if I tell you I'm Thor you won't know who that is." This is inauthentic! The humans on Earth know his name! They have bad movies about him with less melodramatic family drama than he really has!

"...no, if you tell me you're Thor then I'll know that Thor is you. Is it?"

He can't argue with that logic and it annoys the fuck out of him.

"Yes, I'm Thor. What I meant was that I don't think you've heard of me before today. Which is weird, because I'm a god."

"What's a god?"

What the fuck???

"My father created an entire planet and breathed life into carved wooden statues so they turned into humans. I bring rain and defend humanity from monsters. I have a home you can get to by going over the rainbow. I routinely bring my goats back to life if they die. Sometimes I travel by flying chariot but not very often these days because I like my car and my truck. If you're human then I'm probably older than your grandparents. I saw the tops of clouds before airplanes existed. People like me are called gods."

The human's eyes go as big as saucers. The other non-pilot human in the helicopter drops his jaw as far as it will go. The pilot has headphones on and can't hear them, so he doesn't crash into anything at this pronouncement.

"Thank you about the monsters!" volunteers the one who's been talking to him. "You must be very good at it, I've never seen one!"

That should be sarcastic. Not really, it should be sincere, but it's very weird that it's sincere as far as he can tell.

"That is... usually... a good response? I am very good at it and that's why most of the human cities I know about don't have monster problems. I do a really good job of protecting the Earth I knew existed yesterday. But, uh, I got teleported to the parking lot of a Denny's and my phone didn't seem to be able to get a signal like it usually would on Earth, and, um." And that sounds like an insane reason to be so sure he's not in Ohio, but - he is not in Ohio. "And there's something kind of - weird - about how people have been acting, like the fact that people I've met since I appeared in the Denny's parking lot don't seem to have heard of me, that makes me think I might not be on the Earth I protect from monsters. So I have basically no idea where I am now and I'm wondering if this is a wizard's trick or some kind of LARP or - I really don't know what's happening."

It's weirdly refreshing to be able to explain this to some humans who are properly impressed and grateful and not need to worry about proving magic is real before he can say "maybe it's a wizard's trick."

"I would have told you wizards weren't a thing but you sound like you know a lot of things I don't! I don't know what a larp is either, my first thought was that it was larb, that meat salad you can get at some Asian restaurants, but I think that isn't what you said actually? It's actually pretty odd that I can hear you in here at all."

"It is! I wanted to be able to have a conversation, so I dicked around with the acoustics. A LARP is a game where a bunch of people play pretend, like kids do, only it's adults so they call it something more dignified. It's the same kind of thing, though. It stands for Live Action Role Play."

"They play what? Wow, I'm clearly missing something being child-free, I've never even heard of this."

Thor considers this. Thor considers the reaction to him being himself. Thor considers the Denny's wifi password. This place is very big, to be a secret human zoo that he's somehow never caught wind of, but there's basically no reason any of his other theories about what's going on should involve people being unable to contemplate that anyone might lie to them.

"I think," Thor says in a voice he keeps level only with noticeable effort, "that someone has done some evil magic to you that - changes which thoughts you can think, in a way that helps them and hurts you. I don't think I can explain it better, because I think the explanation is one of the thoughts you can't think. I can check if this is true, but only by - doing something that would activate the evil magic and make it change some thoughts. Would you like me to check?"

Blink blink. "Me personally? Why would anyone - oh, we're landing, hold on to something, maybe explain when the engine's quit? -"

He nods. He waits.

They touch down. The engine quits.

"Not just you - I think it’s everyone I’ve met since being transported here."

"You think someone did evil magic to everybody?"

"Whoa!"

The pilot takes off his headphones.

"Yes, I think someone did evil magic to everybody here - or maybe to this place - because... in places I'm familiar with, there's a forbidden art of speaking in a way that makes the listener know less. It's called lying. No one here has tried to do this to me, which I appreciate, but it's - you know how it's bad to walk up to a stranger and punch them for no reason, but good to understand punching and know how to deal with it, and some people like sparring and do it for fun? There's a version of lying that's like sparring - it's basically safe, it's fun for some people, and it helps you learn to defend yourself against the more dangerous version later. I have never met a whole city of humans who didn't know about lying before and I think someone who wants to hurt you did magic to you so that you wouldn't be able to defend yourselves if they lied to you and so that you wouldn't be able to lie to them. It's - similar to finding a whole city of people who can't understand the concept of violence at all - you see how that would be very concerning, right?"

"I sometimes know less after someone speaks! Like if they try to tell me about advanced math and I don't feel like I can even count confidently any more."

"Does it seem like someone's doing some further evil to us or just the one thing? If nobody understood violence that might be fine, if nobody did any."

"It'd make it hard to catch thieves and stuff."

"Oh yeah."

"I don't know. I think... it's hard to imagine why you wouldn't know about the magic if it were done with good intentions. I don't know if someone could come in and lie to you - I haven't tried, maybe the magic would stop me but maybe it wouldn't. I think if the magic would stop me, and if I can explain it well enough that you can actually understand, then it might have been done for good reasons. But if the magic wouldn't stop me, then I think this was done to you to make you better victims. That doesn't mean the person who did it is still around - they might have gotten bored or died. But they probably meant to come back sometimes and hurt people."

"Is this probably a thing affecting, like, a city, or everybody in the world?"

Having seen the view from up high, he's pretty sure they're on a planet that curves normally... or in an immersive hallucination of one. But that doesn't mean there's a magically honest China or India.

"It might be this whole version of Earth. I don't know. I could check. There are definitely people who aren't from this version of Earth, though - that's one reason I think someone probably comes back to kidnap people or something like that. There are a lot of people and monsters out there and I think you might be... defended by someone besides me, but maybe for the same reason why farmers defend their chickens from foxes."

"I've got a friend who went on vacation in Japan if that helps you check."

"It might help. Or I can go for a trip myself. Do you want to wait until we know if Japan is like this before you can decide whether you want me to test what exactly the magic is doing?"

"Well, I'm not sure it'd help if I asked her 'do people in Japan sometimes make you know less by speaking', since she doesn't speak Japanese..."

"You can test me if you need a volunteer?"