A short-haired woman in outlandish clothes falls from a point six inches below a ceiling, and onto a hapless bystander.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."