"Those things are all true. We're currently in Pennsylvania."

"Okay, this implies that at least various political figures are in place - D.C. being named after someone and the Louisiana Purchase having gone through and the argument about birds having occurred. When we get somewhere with Internet I'm going to see if versions of my parents and, more saliently, me, are around."

"Thaaaat did not even occur to me. You probably don't have a way to access Earth records or I'd ask you to see if there was a version of me in your universe when we made the sending-you-back experiment."

"I mean, if you'd have a particularly public existence I might be able to track you down, I have a lot of notes on how to conjure up various sorts of Earth information from nothing since I'm usually crippled on Earth itself, but I'm planning to look for my parents by virtue of the fact they were both public employees."

"I mean, I'm going to be a biologist and make groundbreaking contributions in whatever subfield I ultimately decide to go with, but an alternate version of me might have made different life choices."

"Well, apparently George Washington was a general and the first president in both cases, unless you're about to tell me that actually, here he was a Martian who conquered the fledgling republic and the place has been a tyrrany ever since. So I'm hoping at least one of my parents is where I'd expect them to be. Charlie more likely than Renée."

"General George Washington became the first president, yes sir. I don't know, I feel like...I'm more likely to make different life choices than someone during a charged period of history like the late eighteenth century. Or maybe it's just random egotism, whatever."

"Sure, and I don't know how all the various necessary conditions for a United States survive the existence of aliens and abundant forms of vampire and so on. In my world there were barely any summoners and they kept it low-key; in your world apparently they break into apartments and so on."

"Beats me. I mean, vampires and so on rarely do anything that would majorly impact the world stage--random college students are the farthest from 'underbelly of society' I've heard of getting preyed on. Not that I'm condoning preying on the underbelly of society, you understand."

"I do. But some people who went on to become public figures did spend time as college students. I mean, I didn't, but that's because when you get in on the ground floor of a field like daeva summoning you can skip it."

"That is true. But on the other hand, most of the B-Movie villains I've run into were human, and you have serial killers in your universe too, right?"

"Yes, but it's really pretty seldom they try to sacrifice people to things."

"Hadn't occurred to me to contemplate that particular collision."

"Also, chainsaws are literally the one melee weapon that needs to be reloaded. The first time I survived by managing to run and hide until he ran out of gas, and then snuck up on him while he was refueling the thing."

"Good for you."

"That one's the only 'human' incident that makes my top ten. It was my first time, so I didn't have as much of an idea of what I was doing."

"And now this is just routine? Are the cops going to recognize you?"

"Oh yes."

"They probably think you're some kind of vigilante."

"Oh, probably. But I've literally had a mechanic testify in court that the damage to my car couldn't have been deliberate one time."

"What happened to your car?"

"A belt in the engine wore out. I had to push the thing to the mechanic's, and apparently the wear pattern meant I couldn't have cut it and the grease patterns meant I couldn't have removed a good one and replaced it with a shoddy one."

"And then when you were stuck in the middle of nowhere you were beset by goblins or something?"

"That was the ghosts one."