He steps well back from the edge. "I'm Bruce Banner and I don't know what Lawful means in this context but I'm not planning any crimes?" The mismatch between his semantic and conceptual vocabulary is like a raspberry seed stuck in his teeth.

Concern!!! 

"Are you on the Surface right now," she asks him, because you're not supposed to ask 'do you believe X'. It confuses people, makes them feel like it's a trick question. Believing just feels like X being what reality is. 

Layne is still so disoriented! He hates it when this happens. The last thing he remembers is holding hands as they reached the elevator. Usually he gets a good bit more than that, nowadays, he's been working on it with his therapist, but that was a really abrupt switch. 

He starts climbing. Tries to lodge in a mental note that if this isn't a real emergency, Antat should throw a pie in Veth's face later. 

"No, I appear to be in some sort of very large artificial underground space."

She thinks he's having some sort of neurological problem, probably, which is very reasonable of her but he doesn't think so? He knows what coming out of being the Hulk is like and what waking up from general anesthesia is like and this is very different from either one--no break in subjective experience, no congnitive impairment, just a hyperspatial inversion coming at him and then this place. Or the Tesseract completely scrambled his brain and all his perceptions are garbage but if so it's a very coherent scramble, the language has consistent grammar and everything.

"And you don't, um. Recognize it or anything? ...Do you remember how you got here?" 

Maybe he has her problem. The weird confusing embarrassing one that she still hasn't told anyone about except Layne, even though she knows this is kind of irresponsible, but she thinks she has it under control where it matters... 

"So, uh, I realize this is very implausible and I don't expect you to believe me but I think I teleported."

'Teleported' is a very Lies to Children way to put it, it conflates so many known or speculative phenomena, but most people don't care about the distinction between a hyperspatial inversion, a wormhole, and a scan-destroy-transmit-reconstruct even when it doesn't touch on (ugh) classified information.

"I didn't do it on purpose."

This feels so incredibly awkward to say but - 

"Teleport is, uh, a pretend thing. Not a Surface thing."

She has literally NEVER had to say that sentence out loud with her actual mouth to someone over the age of six and it's awful, it feels metaphorically like when her mother whacks at their family dog with a broom until he runs back to his kennel. 

Oddly enough, Ronda fronting Iskill is pretty sure this calls for Nuts. Nuts is...not very good at a wide range of things. But they're very good at picking up on - which other people are inhabiting a children's world. 

Giggle. "You teleported? By accident?" 

Aaaaaand back to the part of her that can act like a grownup, to deal with a really annoyingly out of place grownup problem. Nuts saw enough. 

"- I don't think it's that." 

"I don't think teleporting is scientifically possible." 

"There's a lot we don't know about physics yet." 

"There is so much we don't know about physics. I can go over the math of how it's possible if you're curious but I should at least call the people I was with and tell them I'm okay and where I am first." (Surely they cannot classify the pure theory. Some of it is already on ArXiv. He'll just avoid anything about which of the possible things happened to him or whose lab he was in at the time.)

Oh, nice, maybe this will be more straightforward than she thought. 

"What nation-state are you from, again? We can get you to a phone. And to an airport, if you want, but if it's anywhere on the Continent trains'll be a better bet." 

....Okay damn it she cannot help herself. "Or, consider, if you wanted you could switch Chaos for a bit and we'll show you a night in the Down Under here in Kast. We got the best ballpit in the world. Won an award and everything." 

Welp. 

"Sorry! No pressure or anything, if you're in a hurry." 

"I'm from the United States. New York City. And I kind of do need to get back soon, sorry, people will be worried." They might have managed to trace it but they also might not have, in which case they'll probably think he's in space somewhere and it's not actually clear if he could survive that, and separately a party with a bunch of strangers who want him to 'switch Chaos' is just about the worst possible idea. He pulls out his phone and checks it, but of course he has no signal down here.

Wow he hasn't even heard of either of those. Must be a teeny tiny place somewhere or other, that happens to run a groundbreaking physics lab - maybe it's the sort of place where they need Law underground and want to avoid collisions? They can look it up on the Surface. 

"All right. Let's take him up. I don't wanna dawdle down here if we have to front Law until this guy's sorted." 

Atlas absolutely agrees. Atlas finds fronting in the Underworld really really weird. 

"Ugh. Why'd we have to land in a cave. Oy, guys, steal some candles." It also feels REALLY WEIRD to say that with her Lawful half. "Tunnel's not lit and I'm not in the mood for a ritualistic rebirth through darkness or whatever." 

Candles are acquired! Nolita is, in a way, back on comfortable turf now. 

"I'm sorry for disrupting your party," he says sheepishly. "Also do mind explaining what 'fronting law' is?" Shit, if he asks too many stupid questions they're going to want to know how he speaks the language and that really can't be explained without classified stuff. He'll have to ration further stupid questions more carefully.

This gets him weird looks from all of them, but it's not like being rude to the stranger will help with anything at all. 

"Well, we're going to the Surface, right," Ronda explains. (Ennis is better at the general domain of "people stuff when Law is involved" but she's not going to switch fully just for that, she'll just try to pull a bit of that in.) "Where everything gets done, right, so we can't be leaking Chaos up there. ...Okay, you have to have a Chaos region where you're from. Is it an island?" 

"There are . . . places with more crime or worse law enforcement?" Probably everything they know about America is from TV and wildly exaggerated, and he's suddenly aware that he's representing his country and probably giving them all the impression that Americans are morons.

Nolita is so confused! She looks helplessly around to see if anyone else has a better idea what's happening; she's working on it but she still struggles a lot with feeling-out-of-the-loop. 

Nope she can't help either. What. Is this person literally a space alien wearing a humansuit.