"Thank you!" She coos at the baby again, says 'baaaby' to herself (in the north dialect, not English, though she quickly catches herself and adds it in English too), smiles at the lady, and heads out. 

Leareth updates the Andalites within his Mindspeech range on this. 

Bank of America will make a bank account for temporary residents! They need proof of address and a form of government iD (usually a passport.)

Can they use this ID card? She left her passport at her friend's house but if they can't use her government ID from Ethiopia then she'll go get it and come back. (Nayoki is reaaaally hoping the bank teller hasn't ever seen an actual Ethiopian ID or in possession of a book of what they all look like or something; if Leareth were doing security here they would definitely have precautions like that.)

She's staying with her friend and this is her address but she doesn't have proof, unless the address written on a piece of paper counts. (It's a real house number although it's in a different town just in case the bank teller knows people here, if asked she has a story for that.) 

"For proof of address we can use bills sent to you at that address, pay stubs with that address listed, or a state ID that lists it," the guy says, sounding bored. He has definitely never seen an Ethiopian ID and has no idea what they're supposed to look like, he'd have to ask his manager if that's good enough.

"What kinds of bills?" She thought 'bills' meant money so that's confusing. "I am still waiting to get my state ID." 

"Uh, credit card, utilities, TV, whatever. Or your lease, we can use your lease." A lease, from his thoughts, is a house rental agreement.

"Thank you! I will come back with that later." 

Nayoki smiles at him and leaves again.

:Utilities are like water or electricity that you have to pay for and TV is a box that makes illusions: she sends to Leareth and the nearest Andalite. :I am not sure what the bills for them are though. Apparently they have the house address on them: 

<Maybe we can go through the trash and try to figure it out.>

Leareth is still illusioned and can go collect some trash. From context, bills are...maybe something sent with their mail system? Because that goes by house addresses. 

These people throw away so much stuff. There's greasy food wrappers and crumpled pieces of paper and a book titled '1995 TV guide' and a bunch of cigarette butts and an old pair of shoes and a lot of mail, including notices of overdue credit card payments and car payments and student loan payments.

...Do these people just buy things and never actually pay for them? Leareth brings just the mail back to Nayoki and they sort through it. Probably if you want to open a bank account, doing it with a piece of paper that says you owe someone money and haven't paid it back yet isn't the best look, but maybe they can at least figure out what the bills should look like and make one that doesn't have 'overdue' pasted all over it. 

Nayoki thinks that a credit card is something you get from a bank, so probably she shouldn't have one if she doesn't have a bank account? Maybe she can have a car bill. 

She nabs the TV guide too, it looks intriguing as a source of cultural context. 

Andalites can do mockups of those bills which don't claim to be overdue. They are unsure why people buy things and don't pay for them, you'd assume that the financial system would want to avoid this outcome.

, 
The TV guide informs her that at 7pm on Sunday there's America's Funniest Home Videos on ABC, 60 Minutes on CBS, Space: Above And Beyond on Fox and Dateline: NBC on NBC. At 8pm there's Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman on ABC and Murder, She Wrote on CBS and The Simpsons followed by Married With Children on Fox and 3rd Rock from the Sun followed by Boston Common on NBC.

Andalites are pretty sure that they can figure out how human TVs work and catch the transmitted data and run a human-TV emulator on the shuttle, which seems like a pretty good source of cultural context actually. What show should they try to do it with. 

Leareth wants to see the space one! 

Nayoki will put in a vote for the one about Superman because it contains the word 'adventures' which sounds fun. 

Space: Above and Beyond is a drama about the members of the United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry, 58th Squadron, stationed on the space carrier USS Saratoga, which is bizarre because the Andalites hadn't realized that humans had a "Space Aviator Cavalry" or a "space carrier". It might be propaganda?

The Space Aviators are fighting aliens! Their colonies in other solar systems have been unexpectedly attacked and destroyed by aliens called "Chigs", which have FTL while the humans don't. They're being supported by the Silicates, a group of androids built by humans who rebelled against their creators and went to live in space. In desperation, the humans have taken to creating genetically engineered supersoldiers who are born fully grown and ready to fight in the war.

<I...am pretty sure that this did not really happen.> says the Andalite who set up the television. 

"I think this is fiction. It is very enthralling!" Nayoki is delighted. 

Leareth had been expecting it to be a show about the science humans have on space and is mildly disappointed, he's pretty sure none of the 'science' mentioned it in is real at all, it makes very little sense and also the characters' actions aren't especially making logical sense to him, which he thinks is a serious flaw even in fiction. 

Maybe Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman will be better?

In Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman, Clark is secretly also Superman, a person with lots of magical powers (they're starting in the middle of Season 3, so all of his powers and how he got them is not well established) who goes around doing heroics. Lois knows that Clark is Superman but has reservations about their relationship in light of how he kept the secret from her for so long. They are working past their issues and planning to get married, except that Lois has actually been REPLACED WITH A CLONE by the evil Lex Luthor.

Leareth is at least expecting this one to be a story and not a treatise-in-illusion-format so he's not offended by that. It's so interesting that humans have stories about magical powers when as far as he knows the real kind don't exist at all! 

Clones are under-explained and he's confused. "Do humans actually have these...copies of people?" 

<I do not think they have the technology for it but they might; they are not very far off, if no. Raising a person with the identical genetic material to an existing person does not actually make them a copy of the first person in personality and interests, though many traits are heritable. If your world has identical twins you have a reference point for the degree of similarity. If you made the first person in an artificial womb and can similarly make the second one under identical conditions then the two people will be even more similar, but still not identical. I do not think humans have artificial womb technology yet; that is more difficult than cloning.>

"We do have twins, yes. Do Andalites have artificial wombs?" His Healers are going to find this so fascinating. 

<Yes. It is not objectively very difficult.>

"Huh."