Leareth's first thought is that, from a purely storytelling perspective, God's book is very badly paced. His second thought is that from the strategic side, God's plot is bizarre. Not in itself surprising; gods are like that. 

Leareth is very familiar with the concept of blood sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, even. The bloody death of 'Jesus Christ' must be conceptually similar, in some sense, to a Final Strike.

"You said that God, incarnated as Jesus, died as a sacrifice for your people's sins," he says slowly. "I...am still confused about how exactly this accomplished His goal. Did He need to die in order to create Heaven, or open a door to it? What was the working that the sacrifice fueled, and why was God's death as a human the best means to obtain the necessary power?" 

"So, it's not about power, per se. It's . . . a metaphor that gets used a lot is a criminal gets brought before a judge and found guilty, and he's going to be thrown into prison, and then a benefactor shows up and volunteers to serve his sentence for him so he can go free. Jesus took the punishment we deserved for our sins on himself. Heaven already existed, but humans don't deserve to go there, but because of Jesus' sacrifice we're allowed to anyway, if we accept His gift by relying on Him as our savior."

"...In your society criminals can have a benefactor take their place and serve their sentence instead? How does that accomplish any of the goals of a criminal justice system? Crime deterrence and the harm reduction aspect would be compromised." 

"Oh, yeah, no, the human justice system doesn't work like that at all. Only divine grace works like that."

Leareth nods. "Please give me a moment to think." He skims through his notes, and then closes his eyes and tries to put his thoughts in order. He really hasn't been approaching this in an organized way, and it's time to step back and reassess. 

"Bruce," he says finally. "I...realize that I am still missing information, and so I am not quite ready to conclude that your God is straightforwardly evil."

If the claims of omnipotence are false – perhaps they're propaganda, intended to reassure human mortals that they can trust God over His enemy Satan, and Bruce's God really does only have the power to save humans from Hell and instead bring them to His Heaven if they pledge loyalty to Jesus Christ – if this is the case, then the existence of Hell might be less damning. God might truly be doing His best to protect His people, under adverse circumstances and with limited resources. However, even in that case, His best is clearly, obviously not good enough. Someone needs to step in. 

If God does have unlimited power over Bruce's world, and could choose to defeat Satan and destroy Hell at any time, and is instead choosing to carry out some sort of millennia-long game with the mortals of the world...

Then Leareth's path is even clearer. 

"I am, however, nowhere near convinced that He is worthy of your love," Leareth says, "much less mine. Your world is...bizarre and confusing and most likely has very different metaphysics from mine – the part where God is Goodness is an example," assuming that isn't just another piece of propaganda, "and so I must better understand how things work before I make any plans. Nonetheless. I am ready to conclude that the situation here is unacceptable, whether it is the fault of your God or of this 'Satan', and that I wish to take action to change it. Even if Hell will be destroyed when this 'Judgement Day' comes, it has been two thousand years since Jesus Christ made that promise. That is already far too long to wait."

He looks into Bruce's eyes. "You, also, find the God of your world difficult to love. If I choose to intervene, will you help?" 

Bruce needs a minute to think as well. He's terrified of Hell, for himself and for the unknown number of people already there or heading there. But he's also terrified of doing anything about it, of becoming one of those people you see on the news who get blasted by fire from heaven or eaten by suddenly-appearing snakes and going to Hell sooner than he has to.

But, he asks himself, what else is there? He's already damned. If he doesn't do anything, he gets to keep his head down and go to school and get a job and . . . what? Enjoy his three score and ten years of dread and die alone and burn forever anyway. If the end of the road is the same either way, why not do something beautiful and meaningful and doomed while he's still capable of doing anything?

Beautiful and meaningful and doomed, or pathetic and meaningless and doomed, one or the other.

"I . . . I want to help. If you have some way to get people out of Hell, if there's something I can do to help, I want to. But I'm just a kid with borrowed magic. What help could I possibly be?"

"That," Leareth says, "is what we need to figure out. I am not sure either, but we have not considered the problem for even five minutes yet."

He glances at his notes. "The first way that you can help, I think, is just in being an ally who I can trust." Leareth isn't completely sure that he trusts Bruce, but he's seen the boy's thoughts. No malice there. Perhaps a teenager won't make the most reliable agent, but it's what he has to work with. "We need to understand the limits of your God's power – I am almost certain that there are limits – and the relation between God and Satan. Neither is our friend, here, but perhaps they might be played against each other. We must better understand how your magic works, and the limits on it – whether, used in clever ways, it can be much more powerful. Also, we ought to experiment with how my magic works, here, and whether it can be combined with yours in ways that will be harder to combat." 

Leareth leans back, smiling slightly. "Our first step, then, is to lay out our research agenda and our current uncertainties. Do you think this is something where you can help?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I can help with that." He grabs paper and pencil. Just having one other person around who knows he's damned and thinks the thing to do about it is something other than "try to love God more" makes everything feel . . . not exactly better, but less closed-in. Like wanting to act isn't automatically foolish.

He starts writing a list of research questions. Questions about God and Satan and how they interact with each other and the world, questions about Leareth's magic and about demon magic and whether Leareth's apparent ability to speak the demon language can be exploited for anything.

Leareth half-watches, smiling to himself. He was pretty sure this was how Bruce would react, and he's pleased that his prediction was right. 

He starts absentmindedly reading the book-for-children about Jesus. 

It's . . . yeah, absent-mindedly is a good way to read it.

"So, you probably have a better idea of priorities here than me, but it seems like one thing it would be relatively easy to investigate today is whether you can come up with modified versions of spells by changing the wording."

Leareth takes a moment to think. 

"That seems as good a place to start as any," he says. "An especially high-priority question on my side is whether any of your magic, or other artifacts in this world, would allow me to access greater magical power. In my world, mage-energy flows and pools naturally, and can be used by a powerful mage such as myself – here, I have only the fuel within myself. Experimenting with your spells seems to be a good avenue for that question, as well as for the question of increasing your power." 

"Does the fuel you have build up indefinitely like a savings account, or build up to a fixed maximum like a battery, or are you going to run out with no way to get more?"

"...The middle one," Leareth says after a moment. "My personal reserves could be considered as a pool, which can be filled to a certain point, and then emptied by use. If drained, it refills gradually simply from food and rest – more slowly here, since your world lacks a base level of ambient mage-energy, but I was nonetheless able to replenish my reserves overnight." A pause. "What is a 'battery'?"

"Oh, it's a device for storing electrical energy. If you have lightning, it's like that, but smaller, and batteries can release it slowly over time instead of in a big burst. Does your world have atomic theory, because a proper explanation involves talking about parts of atoms. But let me do a demo first." He fishes a flashlight out of a desk drawer, turns it on and off a couple times, and starts taking it apart. "This thing is the battery, it makes the energy flow through a circuit of wires hidden in the casing, and when it flows through the lightbulb it heats it up to white-hot so it glows."

Leareth stares at him. 

"You can store lightning?" he says finally, half-incredulous. "You can put lightning in that small cylinder, and then make it flow through a wire – without killing anybody – and instead of coming out as lightning it comes out just as light? And you do all of that without magic?" 

Leareth shakes his head. "Atom... That is, tiny indivisible parts of matter? I would not say that my world has this theory. I have it, but...no more than that, really, I understand little of the details. Your world has scholarship that says these 'atoms' are divisible and have parts?"

Leareth wants to know everything about it. Now. Or ideally yesterday. 

"This battery stores a lot less energy than a single lightning bolt, but yes, it's the same principle. And yes, atoms have structure, let me draw a diagram . . . " and Leareth can have a massive infodump on atomic theory and electrical engineering to the level of a bright high school student who reads for fun a lot. There are a lot of parts where Bruce has to look things up or signposts that there's more he doesn't know, like the details of AA battery chemistry and why electrons repel each other and why some materials glow when white hot but not others. Also, Bruce looks the happiest he's been outside of when they were doing magic experiments.

Leareth is very, very pleased. He takes a lot of notes and plans to ask Bruce for some of his textbooks later.

Then there's the mention of nuclear weapons. 

"You have," Leareth says, "weapons that can obliterate entire regions? That any human can use, without requiring the use of magic? That is...far more powerful than anything that exists in my world – it would take a hundred or even a thousand Adept mages calling Final Strike in synchrony to replicate." 

"Yes, nukes are . . . a big deal. It takes, oh, probably dozens of people, to authorize using one, and it's only ever been done once, but, yeah."

"Your world is better coordinated than mine, then," Leareth says. "I am impressed." He hesitates only a moment before asking. "Are there still 'nukes' currently in reserve? Where are they?"

He isn't sure whether energy released purely as heat and light can be converted to mage-energy, but maybe that doesn't matter – in his world, he has the power to make some large explosions, but not here. He's planning a war. Always a good idea to inventory the weapons available, even if they technically belong to other people. 

Bruce follows his logic, goes right back to being filled with dread, but says, "There are some, yeah. The US military and the Russian military and a couple other militaries have them. Mostly in silos in secret locations in the middle of nowhere, I think."

Leareth is fairly sure that, given the ability to read minds, he can find out the location of said silos without too much difficulty inside a week.

"Thank you," he says. "Moving on – we were talking about your magic." He glances at his notebook, which is already half full. "Do you own larger pieces of paper? We may at some point wish to draw diagrams or other representations." 

"Uh, big paper no, sticky tape yes. And I can show you the rest of my spells if you think that's a good place to start."

Leareth has to take a moment to unpack the translation of 'sticky tape', a very straightforward object which doesn't quite exist in the same form in his world. 

"I approve of that plan," he says, preparing a fresh page for notes. "You can describe the spells and then demonstrate?" 

"Sure thing. Prestidigitation, the one I showed you, actually has a couple of different incantations." He demonstrates lighting a bit of string on fire, making his window dusty and then cleaning it again, making his pillow unnaturally cold to the touch, turning it blue, and making a little illusory bird fly around the room for about ten seconds.