Many religions of his homeland are baffling-- okay no Lev does not even want to begin the daydream half-formed from that thought. 

:Every worldview in our society disapproves of suicide. Except Cascadians. Cascadians like suicide because keeping disabled people alive is expensive.: His disapproval is evident in his thought. :It's not that restrictive for women? It's mostly about keeping them safe. Women want different things than men do.:

He thinks. :My first thought is 'you can't offend women as long as you behave reasonably,' but then I remembered that I shouldn't assume your definition of reasonable and mine is the same anyway. You probably shouldn't talk to people in the library anyway, you can't pass as a person who is from here, someone's going to mention television and you're going to be like 'what's a television'. Fortunately, the norm in libraries is mostly not to talk. I should give you headphones, anyone who tries to talk to you while you're wearing headphones is being really rude and you can gesture to your ear and glare at them. You should avoid touching people you don't know as much as you can, but anything you can reasonably do by accident doesn't cause offense. You should usually leave about four feet between you and anyone else, but if there isn't an empty seat far away from anyone it's okay to sit next to them, and you can pass people if there's not a lot of space. Say 'excuse me.':

Leareth may catch the interesting sensation of Lev running through everything he remembers from his anthropology classes to try to think of more norms that differ between cultures.

Leareth does notice Lev's mental search. He is intrigued by the idea of literal classes on cultural differences. He also notices, distantly, the pattern of half-cut-off surface thoughts. Probably this is due to some other baffling cultural difference – something to do with religious norms? Lev has to have actual trauma from growing up in a world under the dominion of an evil God, Leareth can't see how anyone could not. At some point maybe he can think of a tactful way to ask about it, but there are higher priorities. 

Leareth adds a few more lines to his napkin-list, and stands up. :Noted. I will do my best to avoid missteps – oh. I would generally read the surface thoughts of people nearby, in an undercover situation. It seems very likely that, as nobody in your world is Gifted, no one will be able to detect passive mental probes. However, if you would prefer I not do this for another reason, I can refrain:

:That seems like the best option. We should take you to my house to get clothes and then drop you off at the library.:

Leareth approves of this plan, and will follow Lev for a while and keep thinking.

He follows Lev outside to his car, and they start moving very fast again, and a period of time later that Leareth isn’t quite sure of because he’s busy mapping out a research agenda, they stop at another building.

Lev takes him inside his house, gives him a pair of jeans and a shirt like Lev's and privacy to change, shows him headphones, and then takes him to the library. 

Leareth finds the clothing strange, but comfortable enough. 

At the library, with headphones in place to ward off conversation from strangers, he fills in the gaps in Lev’s explanation of ‘computers’ by skimming nearby surface thoughts. He will start with the general historical background of the main nearby nations that Lev mentioned; he’s especially intrigued by the description of Cascadia, but unsure how much to expect censorship and misleading information.

About thirty years ago, there was an attack during the State of the Union address, which was when the president of the United States of America was addressing Congress (the legislative body). Nearly the entire government died. The Gileadites, the most popular sect in the country at the time, took over and made the country a theocracy. In the chaos, Cascadia-- the area of the country with the strongest political disagreements from Gilead-- seceded. The Gileadite government responded by dropping nuclear weapons on the three largest cities in Cascadia, which killed two million people. 

The general sentiment of the documents he finds is that this was clearly justifiable: after all, it was a war, and the American government had used nukes in World War II and everyone agrees that that was justified because the Imperial Japanese were awful. While Cascadians are nowhere near as bad as the Imperial Japanese, they are definitely awful. Their government murders the old and the sick and unwanted babies. Women are trafficked into sex slavery and gestational slavery. Children are addicted to drugs and their lives are ruined; Cascadia is the primary source of drug trafficking into Gilead. Babies are bought and sold like they're objects. The nuclear family has been destroyed: homosexuals can get married, and men can marry as many wives as they want, and children commonly have as many as five legal parents. As you'd expect from the previous two sentences, children are often neglected and abused without anyone who is especially responsible for them. Pedophilia is basically socially acceptable, and children are routinely raped by adults. Christians are persecuted and imprisoned for simply trying to leave out their beliefs. Anything would be justified to destroy a society this awful. 

In the chaos, Mexico, Deseret, and Hawaii also seceded, and Canada acquired Alaska. Mexico and Deseret seem to follow different forms of the Christian religion, with different beliefs. Deseret also has socially acceptable pedophilia and rape, but the sections on the evils of Mexico and Deseret are mostly devoted to their heretical beliefs and oppression of true Christians rather than any of their laws. 

Canada's population has not quite halved in the past hundred years. Their current total fertility rate is a little more than one. There are various attempts to discuss what they should do about this crisis, but Canadians seem to find most of the proposals deeply objectionable, as they prefer for women to be educated and have careers before having children, and don't want to traffic women into gestational slavery. This is, Gileadite sources claim, proof that following God's law gives you the best results; He commanded that women be mothers first because following His will makes societies work best.  

Lev sits in a corner of the library. 

Okay, so, Leareth.

..............having a very attractive man vow to save him from Hell within half an hour of meeting him is extremely extremely attractive. Leareth was reading his mind so presumably he saw-- which aaaaaaaaaaaaa-- but fortunately he doesn't seem at all inclined to comment so maybe they will just both pretend that Lev is not same-sex-attracted and everything will be fine. 

Except Leareth will keep making faces. And Lev can do some of the things he's trained himself to do-- keep his eyes on the floor and shut down his thoughts-- but the problem is not really Leareth's face, it's the whole thing where Leareth is the sort of person who vows to save strangers from Hell, and if Lev is going to keep interacting with Leareth he is going to keep having a crush on Leareth and his emotional purity is going to go out the window.

...This is possibly not the most important problem here. 

Lev has been acting mostly on impulse so far. Mostly he's been trying to preserve his options. Once Leareth has been introduced to the Eyes, it will completely eliminate all chance of keeping him secret, so it makes sense to hide Leareth until he's sure of what he wants to do about it. Unfortunately, now is the time to think about what he wants to do about it. 

Leareth wants to start a single-handed war against God.

On one hand, this is pretty much the most obvious sin you could imagine. It's the sort of sin you'd have the villain commit in a particularly unsubtle children's science fiction novel.  It's the literal version of the thing that sin is, at its base. Sin is choosing to have something else be more important than God. Sin is deciding you know better than God does. Sin is rebellion. Sin is Lucifer saying to God: I will not serve.

If Lev were a good Christian, he would be calling the Eyes now and get Leareth arrested.

On the other hand, Lev is... not a good Christian.

He knows what happens to people who are caught by the Eyes. He can... avoid thinking about it most of the time. His job is interesting, it pays well, and he has an opportunity to understand how people work that people outside the Eyes would never get to experience. When he's in the flow and thinking about how to break people he can almost manage to think about them as hypotheticals, thought experiments. Almost a game. Understand a person as well as you can, so you know exactly what will make them break. 

(The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.)

He... does not want to see Leareth begging for mercy. He does not want to watch Leareth crawl. The man is, it is obvious from a short acquaintance, brave and noble and proud; to make the man weep for forgiveness would be like defacing a sculpture, or destroying a mountain.

Lev is going to go to Hell. He is intellectually proud. He simply cannot be sure of what he hopes for or certain of what he does not see. He knows God exists, but he cannot have faith in anything. It is not that he has doubts. It is that he is doubt formed into a roughly human shape, and he cares more about his mind than about God. 

God is going to win. You don't win a war against an all-powerful, all-knowing being. God's perfect justice will be served, and Lev will be tortured for all eternity. But that will happen no matter what he does. So... he might as well do what he likes. He is not presently particularly invested in fighting a doomed war against Heaven, but he wants to be friends with the sort of person who would. (However perverted the desire becomes, at its core it is a desire to be friends.) And he wants to understand Leareth's magic, and Leareth's world. And... it is a treacherous sort of hope... but while you do not win a war against an omnipotent being, in one option he is definitely going to Hell no matter what, and in the other option he only has to be fundamentally wrong about everything he believes in order to not go to Hell. Which is not that big of a speculation. After all, a few hours ago he didn't think magic existed. Lev expects he is fundamentally wrong about things quite a lot. 

"Sorry, Jesus," Lev says quietly. "If You wanted a different outcome, You shouldn't have made me."

Leareth is deeply unsure what to think.

The main issue is that he doesn’t know how far to trust the information sourced from Gilead. The biases are going to be woven in and he doesn’t have enough context yet to recognize them.

Gileadite society seems to be run in a not-unreasonable way, in terms of maintaining population under the constraints they face. Leareth is less convinced of Cascadia’s depravity; at worst, the Gileadite depiction of their choices would seem ill-advised in a world under reign by an evil God.

...Leareth would, under usual circumstances, be able to make some headway on reasoning out the likely biases and accounting for them. These are not usual circumstances. He feels increasingly as though his head is full of glue, and...okay he should probably find Lev soon while he’s still capable of basic navigation inside a library.

He finds Lev in a corner. “Can we go,” he manages. 

"Yes. Did you get the answers you wanted?"

“Some. Maybe. Not sure. I wish to ask- Later.” Leareth shakes his head and reaches out with a mental probe. :Something feels wrong. Cannot think. I need to rest: 

He should probably ask Lev what he concluded during his private thinking time, but that sounds like a complicated conversation. And from his brief glimpse of surface thoughts, he suspects he can guess the answer.

:Maybe being in a world without a lot of magic isn't good for you. We can go back to my place, you can take my bed.:

This seems like a good plan.

:I will require more information on a number of subjects: Leareth sends as he follows Lev toward the door. :No offense, but I do not trust your government’s sources to be unbiased. Especially on matters of, well, your God and Their goals, which will be especially key to ou- to my plans: He almost says ‘our’, but Lev hasn’t, in fact, stated his intentions yet.

A thought occurs to him. :Lev, I suspect the other nearby nation-states to at least have different biases, which might allow me to triangulate better toward the truth:  He pauses, unsure, and then forges ahead, keeping his mental probe resting on Lev’s mind to gauge his reaction. :Cascadia in particular. Is there a reason I - or we - could not go there to directly consult their sources?:

:God's a He. --It's going to be hard to get us to Cascadia. Legally, to leave the country you have to have certain paperwork and pay a vacation fee that they'll refund when you return. You don't legally exist, so you can't fill out the paperwork. And they'd probably just deny my vacation fee outright because I'm an Eye and they're afraid I'd defect. We could hire a coyote, but that's expensive, and we don't have anyone on the Cascadian end to make sure we get a reputable one. And if we get caught both of us are going to go into a black site prison and never be seen again.:

Leareth thinks for a moment. Tries to. Thinking is still mysteriously difficult.

:I can use magic?: he suggests. :If we can travel to near a border, I can cross while concealed by an illusion, if you give directions, and then I can raise a short-range Gate to bring you over. I ought to be able to manage that from reserves alone once I have rested:

:That should be possible but it might take a while for me to get the time off work.:

:I understand: Leareth shakes his head, still trying to clear it. :It is not yet a finished plan in any case. I...should perhaps not be finalizing plans when my mind is like this- oh: Dawning fear. :Lev, if it is lack of magic, I am not sure it will improve with rest: 

It’s a very unpleasant thought, because what is he supposed to do about it? He can’t leave - not without murdering a dozen strangers for blood-power; he has a feeling Lev would disapprove and he wants, needs, Lev’s alliance for his plans here to succeed-

:I did not ask: he sends. He’s being so disorganized today. :Your conclusion. Are you in?:

:I don't expect you to win but I don't want you to be tortured and I'm probably going to Hell either way so... there's not exactly much to lose. --You should try resting either way before you worry about it. Is there something else you can do to get magic back?:

:...Yes, but it is not very ethical and I would prefer to try the obvious things first: He closes his eyes, checking. :My reserves do seem to be replenishing. I think my magic is not so impaired, it is more...the ability to hold a thread of thought: He shrugs. :I did attempt what turns out to have been a shockingly long-range Gate earlier today, and have not really rested. Sleeping ought to help:

"Do you want to head back?"

“Yes, I think that is a good idea.”

More cars!

Lev presses a button on the car, and music starts playing. A woman's voice is crooning about how she's washed in the blood of the Lamb. 

Leareth rubs his eyes. He probably isn’t hallucinating the music. “Lev, what is this song about?” Surely not blood-magic, which as far as he knows has never been a phenomenon in Lev’s world until his own arrival. “Is it cultural context I am missing?”

Oh Christ he's going to have to explain salvation to Leareth. 

"So six thousand years ago, everything was perfect. And then humanity disobeyed God and brought sin and suffering and death into the world. Ever since then, humanity has been fundamentally twisted so that we choose evil rather than God. In order to reconcile God to us and let us go to Heaven, God incarnated as a human being called Jesus Christ. He was tortured to death on a cross, and after three days he came back to life. Now, as long as you have faith in Him, you will be saved and go to Heaven. The song says 'washed in the blood of' because her sin has been made clean by Christ's blood. The Lamb thing is a metaphor: in Judaism, the religion that God used to teach us about him before Christianity, lambs were sacrificed to get rid of sin."

...What.

Leareth sighs and leans back in the seat. “I think that perhaps I need to reason about this when I am better rested. Currently all I can conclude is that your world’s metaphysics makes no sense.”

He stares out the window at the blurred scenery racing by. “I am going to want access to primary sources on this. Is there a sacred priesthood that communes with God and keeps His lore. Oracles? Or original records, I suppose, that would do as well.”