He does the backwards compatibility chain dealie to hook up his computer.

(The soldier at the door thinks this is fascinating.)

And he looks some things up and supplements the skeletal Internet with some conjuration and concludes that his parents exist but have daughters instead.

"That's actually a little surprising. I don't know how I'd have expected alternate Earths to work but you'd think if they don't have the same people they'd get off track quickly. Who was your president in 1998 -"

"Clinton."

"Matches. I'm not sure if there's anyone else it's reasonable to expect you to remember offhand from 200 years ago."

"I can look them up," Cam points out, waving his computer.

"Fair enough, okay." He lists ten more people, some of them famous.

Cam looks each one up. Most match.

"Fascinating. Not the weirdest alternate dimension we've had interactions with, but definitely weird in a different way."

"Do you encounter alternate Earths much?"

"There's the world without shrimp, which is reportedly like this one except it does not have shrimp. This is the first we've interacted with, though."

"Shrimp don't affect much? Like at least with daeva and all your local magic you have the fallback that it's not general knowledge, or in my case wasn't till a specific event."

"I'd still expect vampires to affect more things than shrimp - did you have a crime wave in the 1990s? That was politically and culturally significant and it was caused by vampires!"

"Lead poisoning," says Cam, shaking his head.

"Lead poisoning? How do you lead poison enough people to have similar effects to vampires? You'd need to -" he bites his lip - "I actually can't think how I'd do it. If our entire air force dropped fine lead dust on all the cities full-time for a decade I don't think that'd do it."

"Paint and gasoline."

"Huh.

So there are a lot of books that reference - not very precisely, and not very confidently, but it's a recurring myth if it is one - some kind of balance of power between the forces with any interest in human interests and the forces of evil. I am never sure how seriously to take that but 'there'll always be a crime wave in the 90s' sounds like something you might see in a universe with balancing sorts of forces.

That's really terrible."

"You - didn't lead paint and gasoline in this universe? Or just see a much reduced effect of lead poisoning?"

"I think there's some lead in paint, I'll look up more about it. Might be traces in gasoline too. I've never heard it mentioned as affecting crime rates. It's also possible the effect was just swamped by the vampires."

"Perhaps. In my world it was a matter of kids growing up exposed to lead paint hitting prime criminal years in this decade."

"Humans are responsible for a pretty small share of the murders in this world, as far as we can determine. It only takes a couple of serial killers per town for that to be nearly all of your murder and places like Sunnydale had a couple dozen before we moved in."

"Maybe all the lead painted kids are going out at night, raring to commit crimes, and getting eaten."

"Vampires are particularly hard on the rebellious teen demographic."

"Well, that's depressing. Maybe get the lead out of your paint and gasoline anyway."