"Oh. Do you play sports? Warning, if you give him the slightest hint that you like sports, he will never ever leave you alone about it." Ronda says this fondly, though. 

"Unfortunately I am completely hopeless at sports. I would appreciate the scooter lessons though."

"Oh, good, I won't be completely outnumbered on the 'hopeless at sports' front."

The two girls keep up the lighthearted chatter with Bruce for the rest of the train ride, which covers a LOT of ground - most of the way has an excellent view - and takes about twenty minutes. They ride the Yellow line through a downtown just as impressively dense as anywhere in New York, which transitions into a still-dense but much more residential neighbourhood of tall condo buildings interspersed with trees and canals. Eventually they disembark at the North Spoke, a much smaller nexus of train lines, and transfer to the Pink line to ride another four stops. 

Veth's stop is in the middle of what looks like a park or botanical garden or something, and is much less crowded, with only a trickle of people leaving the train alongside them. She leads the way down the staircase (spiral, again, the city seems very fond of spiral staircases) to the ground-level patio area, and heads to unlock her scooter from a rack. 

"Ooh, you're in luck! If you don't mind a bike that's a little small." Ronda points at the public-scooters-and-bikes rack. The two bikes are, indeed, apparently sized for 10-12 year olds, but look to be in perfectly decent condition, with adjustable-sized helmets clipped to the handlebars. 

Ronda herself heads to grab one of the electric scooters, which are painted a pleasant forest-green shade to match the bikes. The way to unlock them from the rack and borrow them also seems to involve her tapping her ID bracelet against a little panel. 

Bruce gets a helmet on and sized correctly and taps his ID on the corresponding panel. He's kind of expecting an "insufficient funds" message but this is the easiest way to find out.

Nope! It cheerfully unlocks the bike for him. 

"This way," Veth says, pointing at a bike path that cuts across the gardens and then arcs into a bike bridge over a nearby road. She waits to check that Bruce is ready, then swings herself up onto her scooter and zooms ahead. 

Looks like either they're taxpayer-funded or he owes the city a few dollars; he'll figure out which later. He perches on the slightly-too-small bike and pedals after Veth; after a bit he finds the motor control and decides not to try to get used to it while in motion and following someone.

It's a pleasant and peaceful ride; the bike path joins up alongside a road, but separated from both that and the pedestrian sidewalk by dividers. The dividers have ivy tastefully growing on them. (It's pretty notable about the neighbourhood that, pretty much anywhere it would make any sense at all to have plants, there are plants.) 

This area also seems residential, and a bit more suburb-y, with some single-family houses and some duplexes or semi-detached units. It's a bit less - colourless in its aesthetics - than the mall atrium and train stations; the houses aren't all the same colour or design, many appear to have been renovated or modified. Most of the houses have gardens out front, with varying degrees of effort applied, from 'unmowed lawn of tall grass and clover' to 'intricate flower beds'. None of them have driveways; every so often there's a sort of cutout in the road and a handful of recognizably-cars parked, but not very many. 

"And we're here!" Veth coasts to a stop and hops off her scooter. 

Her parents' house is one-half of a three-storey brick duplex, with a little porch out front and two cute tiny balconies on the floors above. There's a very tall maple tree in the yard. It's on the 'lower-effort' side for gardens; there's a rosebush that seems to have been mostly left to itself, and a small lemon tree in a pot. 

The quantity of plants is very cool, and the fact that they're all species also seen on Earth is some evidence for the "alternate timeline" theory over the "carefully selected different Hubble volume" theory. Bruce parks his bike next to Veth's scooter and follows her, suddenly remembering to be nervous about meeting her parents.

She leads him up to the front porch and opens the door, which is apparently unlocked. "Mooom! We're here." 

A voice from down the hall calls back. "Just a minute, hon, I'll be right over." 

Bruce takes a look around at the porch, though his calibration data on what houses look like is a mix of "college dorms", "rural Brazil", and "Stark Tower", so it's not like he's likely to notice any subtle differences from Earth houses.

The porch has a rocking chair, and a little side table with a couple of nicely-bound paper books and some sort of e-reader on it, both in a sort of deliberately-rustic style. The vestibule just inside the front door has a handmade knotted-rag rug and a coat tree that looks like some sort of "make furniture out of random junk" art project, both adding a touch of lived-in-ness that the train station lacked. Everything is tidily organized. 

Footsteps patter down the stairs. 

"Veth? Mom said you made a friend in the Underworld and brought him– oh! Hi! I'm Elix." 

"Hello, Elix; I'm Bruce. I don't know how much you've heard about how I got here, but your parents are letting me stay over for a bit."

"Mom said you teleported from a parallel universe by accident and also you have a 'Chaos problem' but that it'd be up to you if you want to tell me." 

"Yup, parallel universe. The problem is that if I, uh, leak chaos I'm unusually likely to do something really dangerous, and it's unusually hard to get me to stop, so I need to be extra careful about not doing it." He hopes that's the right balance of enough information for the kid to be informed but not enough to terrify him.

"Ooh. So you can't go to the Underworld? That sucks. Are you gonna see a therapist about it and get better? Veth's booooooyfriend has a problem where he can't remember things between Law and Chaos -" 

"Elix. Please." 

To Veth: "I, ah, take it I'm not supposed to have heard that?" To Elix: "I will see a therapist about it and I hope I will be able to get better."

He's very sweet. She smiles at him. 

"Hang on one second!" More footsteps, and then a woman with a clear family resemblance to both of the kids arrives. "Bruce, welcome. Shoes off, please, they go in the cabinet right there. Do you want to borrow some slippers?" 

Shoes: in cabinet. He hopes his feet don't stink too much after the thirty flights of stairs. "Some slippers would be lovely, thank you."