"Aaaaaaaaaa!" says the hapless bystander.

"Sorry! Sorry - I -" Checking, do they speak English, yes, he's about to speak English - weird accent - "- hello, I apologize."

"You fell from the ceiling."

He speaks English with a Latin accent.

"Yes, I'm confused about that too." She still has her cane; she collects it and wobbles to a standing position, looks for a place to sit that isn't where she landed after she tumbled from his lap.

They're in a study! There are a variety of plush armchairs. 

"I have no idea what's going on and yet I sense it is somehow Ashley's fault."

"I don't know who that is."

"Ashley is my husband, he's a naval captain. --If you don't know who Ashley is, why were you on my ceiling?"

"I think I didn't actually contact your ceiling per se, I think the portal opened slightly below it, or I'd expect there to be ceiling material injuries associated with the process." She looks up. The ceiling's uninjured.

"...What's a portal?"

"Uh, last year, some portals leading to other planets were discovered, it was pretty big news? This one seems to lead to the bedroom of an English-speaking human being but we already knew it was different from the others."

"...I am pretty sure I would know if portals leading to other planets were discovered."

"Is this Earth?"

"...yes," he says, in a tone of uncertainty about what the other options might be. "You're in Londinium, Anglia."

"Well then apparently you wouldn't in fact have heard of - wait, say that again."

"Londinium, Anglia."

"Where is Anglia?"

"It's an island off the continent of Europa."

"List some other countries in Europa for me please."

"Sarmatia, Gallia, Bithynia, Noricum..."

"Huh."

"I assume a strange dominant did not invade my house for a geography lesson."

"I do apologize about that, I tripped, I was not the intended would-be first contact party which you can tell because I'm not wearing a spacesuit. If you care to show me out at least for the time being I won't stop you. However, the portal will continue to open near your ceiling, so whenever they figure out how I got through it any followup they attempt will come through this room and I would like to go home one day."

"It's fine, I'm married to a reasonably understanding husband, I'm not going to be ruined."

"...wow. What year is it?"

"2065."

"Since when?"

"The founding of Rome."

"We start counting 753 years after that, assuming we identify the same event as the founding of Rome, which may not be accurate, and I'm from 2011 in our years."

"I hope you can understand why I'm very very skeptical of this."

"Lemme show you something."

She pulls her smartphone out of her pocket. "Do you have these?"

"What in the name of the twelve immortals is that?"

"My phone. Please don't smash it, whatever they're trying to get through to me from my end of the portal is gonna take more than an hour to work and I'd like to have it. Would you like any numbers multiplied or to listen to some alternate universe music or anything, there are limits to what this thing can do without infrastructure."

"Yes, I want to listen to alternate-universe music. How do you even-- there's no musicians--"

"Deceptive year numbering aside we are farther along than you!" She taps her phone. Scrolls past a few things in case they're diplomatic disasters and winds up on a string quartet of Elenaor Rigby and hits play.

"...there's. A string quartet. In your rectangle."

"There is a recording of a string quartet playing this song in my rectangle."

He's quiet for a moment. He might be listening to the song. Then he says--

"So you translate the string quartet into some kind of information, and put it in the rectangle, and then the rectangle converts the information back into sound waves?"

"Yes, precisely, very good."

"That seems very useful. You could record books for people who have an easier time following things when they're heard, and lectures and plays for people who weren't there. And you could have people send talking letters instead of the normal kind, if the rectangles aren't so valuable that you want to keep yours with you."

"It's used for all those things, though conversations are usually done in real time, we can send sound long distance as it occurs. 'Phone' is short for 'telephone' and that was the name of the precursor technology behind this one, which incorporates other functions on top of that. The information can be moved - usually duplicated, not removed and transported - without the physical devices accompanying it, or it can be copied onto physical devices that are designed to be physically toted around for transfer to another device."

"The future sounds wonderful."

"It's pretty cool. Anyway. My name is Isabella Swan, pleased to meet you."

"Leo Burton. The pleasure is all mine. I work for His Majesty's Intelligence Service."

"I work for Big Apple Cognition, if we're swapping careers now. Figurehead monarchy or real monarchy?"

"The Senate currently has more power than the king but that is mostly because the king is too ill to exercise it. --I mentioned my career because it seems like I'm the sort of person you might want to make, what did you call it, first contact with."

"I'm not actually confident that an intelligence agency is the first place they would have wanted to go but they're not here and I am, so sure, I'll take it. Do you by any chance have some food, by the way, I'd been about to go get lunch and you seem to be a human organism who probably eats food I can digest."

"We can go down to the kitchens and have the cook make you something."

"I'd appreciate that. I'd offer to pay you back for it but I don't carry cash and suspect it would not at this time be valuable cross-portal unless you know a very particular sort of weird shopkeeper."

"--Okay, first rule of etiquette, don't do that."

"Exchange money for goods and services?"

"Offer people money if you're their guest, or imply to them that the things they give you aren't gifts that they're happy to give. Lack of hospitality is blasphemous. It's the sort of thing that stirs up the wrath of the gods. I'm an atheist and I'm twitchy about it." 

"- okay. I mean, I wouldn't do that if someone invited me to their house, but I literally fell on you. I will bear in mind that it's a broader custom here, thank you."

"If someone came to my house in the country, I'd offer them food and a place to stay for the night no matter what, because-- you have to do that."

"I'm really glad you're an atheist because I don't think this religion is practiced where I'm from and if it is I don't know about it, so I haven't the first idea how to be delicate about asking what else I need to know. Tell me, please. After arranging food, I'm very hungry."

The cook makes up a plate of cheese and fruit and bread and cookies. 

When she's started to eat, Leo says, "what gods do you worship, then?"

"I'm an atheist too, but monotheism is popular." Om nom nom bread and cheese and fruit and cookies.

"What's monotheism?"

"Belief in exactly one deity. For some reason it is still called this even when people consider it very important that the deity in question is also tripartite in some weird way."

"I don't think we have any of those. It is obvious to everyone that there's more than one god, because there's more than one religion."

Okay it's time to cheat with magic. She covers for her lookahead by contemplatively chewing, then goes ahead and actually says, "I'd been under the impression that when you said you were an atheist, you meant you were of the belief that there are no gods at all."

"There aren't, but it would be even sillier to believe that there's only one god, when everyone else's reasons for believing in their religion are as good as your reasons for believing in yours."

"I think among monotheists it's popular to believe that all monotheists are attempting to worship the same entity but in different ways and everyone else is wrong about it, and maybe they think polytheists are being deceived by other non-deity supernatural entities or genuinely have worse reasons or something, I haven't extensively studied the epistemology of religious people."

"We do the first thing too. Many of the gods' epithets are actually the names of gods from other cultures that we incorporated into ours, and it's popular even today to do correspondences-- that such-and-such a god is actually Bacchus, or Mercury, or Juno."

"We remember those names, we name planets after some of 'em, but I don't think anybody still worships them - the Norse pagan deities still have a little tiny bit of a following, the Roman ones not so much. Also in non-planet-naming contexts we often use the Greek names."

"That's strange. Don't you have your own gods to name planets after? --I guess if you only have one then you wouldn't have enough names."

"Yes, also people usually just say 'god' and don't refer to him by a proper name. Naming planets after Roman deities is like making a fiction reference that everyone will get that is equally inoffensive to everyone, kind of, because they're from old and well-known mythology and nobody ascribes significance to them anymore besides thinking they have cool names and cultural baggage."

"...Man, I'm an atheist, and I still feel uncomfortable about 'nobody ascribes significance to the gods anymore.'"

"Well, apparently here none of the religions I've heard of as modern going concerns were ever invented, or at least haven't made their way to Anglia popularly by 2063 - is Anglia on a large island between mainland Europa and a smaller island?"

"I'll get you a map."

The country names and lines are different, but the map is recognizably of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Instead of the Americas, there are chains of variously sized islands.

"It's a little out of date because of the war."

"What war would that be?"

Leo points to Gallia, which is spread over most of Europe and a little bit into Africa. 

"Cyrus, the emperor of Gallia, is trying to take over all of Europa."

"Name doesn't ring a bell. Well, not everything's gonna match. Is this an immediate danger, like, is it at all likely someone will storm this house?"

"In general, no, the fighting is on the Continent. In this house specifically, you can observe that when a strange dominant fell from my ceiling my thought was 'oh, this is Ashley's fault somehow,' and judge from that how likely you are to encounter Cyrus's spies, gentledom adventurers, and other such people."

"Noted." Is anyone going to show up in the next hour?

No one other than a very attractive black man whom Leo refers to as 'Ashley.'

Probably safe. "Gotcha." Om nom nom.

"I feel like I ought to ask questions about the future but now that the opportunity has come up I can't think of anything."

"It can't be actually the future, it's clearly an alternate universe situation - maybe you just meant the future of technology - let's see, we have airplanes! Vehicles that fly through the air very fast."

"...Thaaaat sounds absolutely terrifying."

"Surprisingly enough, flying is really boring. You're shut up in a metal tube wearing a seatbelt crammed in pretty close quarters so more people can fit in one such tube at a time, there are windows but even looking at the tops of clouds gets samey, and if there's any exciting weather it just feels like being rattled around, not like really flying."

"I was referring to the part where you could put cannons on it and kill people."

"Oh, yes, that also happens. Well, not cannons, cannons are obsolete."

"...I am very sorely tempted to tell you to go back through the portal and then never to tell anyone that you existed."

"I cannot go back through the portal, I don't know how I got through it in this direction in the first place. And it seems unlikely my end of it will want to just leave it alone."

"If you give Anglia a two hundred year head start on killing-people technology it will try to become the new Rome and many, many people will die."

"Then they probably won't do that unless they discover some compelling economic reason to do it - I'm not trying to paint them as saints but there's not a really clear incentive to make cannons obsolete through this portal here."

"If you send us books of natural philosophy we can probably handle the applying-it-to-killing-people part on our own."

"I unfortunately do not have our current policy towards developing countries involved in warfare with other developing countries particularly well-researched."