"Mars has moons?!"

"It does! Two of them, Phobos and Deimos. And I don't actually remember the dates of the Napoleonic wars off the top of my head but everything else there matches. Hmm . . . Invention of the telephone in 1876? American independence July 4th, 1776? Battle of Hastings in 1066? Do I know any historical events in years that don't end in 6? Uh, Columbus landed in North America in 1492?"

"Check, check, check, and check, and the moons match up too." He pauses for a moment then says, "if you are going to perform a ritual to summon Gol-Goroth please don't, it's a much less good idea than it seems."

"I don't know who that is and I'm not planning on inciting any more summoning rituals until I have a way better idea what's going on and how to get people back home. Are you saying you have prior interdimensional summoning experience, because that would be amazing."

Internal screaming.

"...yes and it was not what I would call the most pleasant experience."

"I'm sorry." Bruce should hurry up and invent the IRB so there'll be something stopping him from doing any more stupid unethical shit For Science.

"This one doesn't have any horrifying mouth monsters so it's looking like an improvement so far. --Alternately, I have finally had a complete psychotic break, but to be honest this is also an improvement on the asylum."

"No horrifying mouth monsters on this plane that I know about. . . . I can't provide evidence that your sense data are reliable because anything I did would just be more sense data, but having them be coherent and consistent for several days worked pretty well for me. Do you want to help us advance the state of science here, conditional on here existing?"

Ah! A question with an expected answer! Those are very reassuring. "Yes."

"Awesome! What sort of thing are you most interested in?" 

(If you asked him straight out whether every human being has a favorite subfield of science or engineering, Bruce would recall that some of them do not, but he isn't going to remember that without prompting.)

"I... was an anthropology grad student?"

"What's an anthropology."

Bruce initially assumes Lev is going to answer that, but when he doesn't, Bruce goes with "it's the study of human cultures and how people live and stuff, right?" And potentially useful for explaining why you shouldn't conquer and forcibly "civilize" anyone, no, not even those people.

"Yes, that. --I am on kind of an unreasonable number of drugs which I assume you cannot make given your apparent tech level and am probably going to experience withdrawal in the next few days."

"Oh. Shit. I'm sorry and do you have any idea what they were or what withdrawal symptoms you're likely to get."

"Uh. Pills? Of assorted sizes?"

"Do you know what symptoms they were treating or what the side effects were? 'Mind your own business' is a totally reasonable answer, I'm just hoping to hit something in the tiny fraction of pharmacology I know anything about and I will absolutely butt out if you'd rather."

"Psychosis. Because I believed in a giant mouth monster that tried to attack me."

"I guess that's better than mouth monsters being a common thing everyone knows about. I'm currently mega agnostic about everything because I don't have a model that predicts . . . any of this. Anyway, uh, I don't know a lot about antipsychotic withdrawal beyond that it probably won't kill you but probably will suck. Sorry."

From what he's heard, being on antipsychotics in the first place is no picnic either, but neither are real or hallucinatory mouth monsters, so it sounds like Lev is fucked coming and going in both worlds. Which really puts Bruce's longing for a hot shower in perspective, doesn't it.

"What's an antipsychotic?"

"Anything that gets prescribed for psychosis, basically. I guess in your time they might have called them something else, and for that matter it's probably not the exact same set of drugs as it is in my time even if they overlap."

"...there are mouth monsters? The past few weeks have really led me to question my atheism."

"Same hat. I wish any nonhuman beings trying to interact with us would just show up and talk like normal people! Except that's probably racist or three-dimensional-ist or something."

Grimace. "No. No, you don't wish that."

Sigh. "No, not if it would just give them more opportunities to be awful. Anyway, what do you want to do now?"