"Hey, hey, no rush. Intent noted." She looks over at Bruce. "Full name and date of birth? I'll see if I can find you that way, first, we should have nearly everyone as of last census." 

"Bruce Banner; December 18th, 1980." Again he has to loanword December, because he knows the names of the times of year in this language but not the exact mapping or whether there's any lunar-calendar weirdness. Or for that matter whether this country counts years from the alleged birth of alleged Christ or from some other thing.

She gives him a didn't-parse-that puzzled look and asks him to repeat himself. At which point she doesn't look any less puzzled, but she patiently inputs something into her computer, tongue between her teeth when she flips to a manual text field. 

"Uh, how do you spell 'December'?" 

...It is immediately apparent to Bruce, when he actually thinks about it, that their alphabet phonetics do not, quite, match up. 

"Hmm . . ." he quickly checks his phone, which still has no signal, which explains the lack of scared and/or annoyed calls from Coulson but also means he can't look up the consensus transliteration. He makes up something that should lead people to pronounce it mostly correctly and hopefully won't make anyone wince about illegal consonant clusters.

She puts this in. She's looking very perplexed at this point, but not really annoyed about it or any less friendly. 

"Show me your ID?" 

She peers at his driver's license. 

"- Uh, you're from...where? I don't - I can't read any of this, sorry. Is this card, like, twenty years old? The file doesn't list anywhere that uses this format." She's popped up a window with what looks like a spreadsheet of outdated-various-paperwork-layouts. 

"It's English; I'm from the United States of America." Which, maybe he's being an America-centric chauvinist, but it's surprising that none of the people who helped him get up here seemed to be familiar with it. "I'm not surprised you're not set up for the format. It's not supposed to be used for international travel; it's just what I had on me."

Polite quizzical look. "Hmm. Why don't I pull out a map and you just pick it out for me?" 

She flips open a drawer behind her desk, tugs out what initially looks like a very thick laminated poster, rolled up - when she unrolls it and taps it against her console, though, it turns out to be some sort of flat flexible electronic screen. 

It displays a map. The map-projection isn't the most standard Earth one, but the continents are recognizable.

She points; a little star lights up. "We're here. Kast, in Nahara." 

Kast, in Nahara, appears to be pretty close to where San Fransisco ought to be. 

There is no United States on the map. Almost all of North America is shaded in light green, which the legend to one side claims means part of the Continental League of Nations, and it's internally divided up with dotted lines into a couple of dozen variably-sized segments. Which do not in any way correspond to US states. 

"Oh dear." Bruce frowns in concentration. He had dismissed the possibility of a timelike jump as unstable, but there wouldn't be a risk of paradox if he was in an alternate timeline that had already diverged. Or he could be way the fuck off in another Hubble volume, someplace where infinite galaxy-monkeys with infinite typewriters had duplicated continents and species and technology. Either way, the Tesseract is a lot more powerful than they thought, and he's not getting a plane home today.

Bruce looks up from the map. "I'm sorry to keep being so implausible, and I can come up with ways to test this hypothesis so I'm not just asking you to take my word for it or anything, but I think I'm from a different Earth."

"I knew it! You are a space alien in a humansuit!" 

Iskill takes over again, looks slightly mortified. "Sorry!" 

"I study physics," Layne offers. "It's - not obvious to me that that's any more weird than a physics experiment teleporting him around the globe." Glance at Bruce. "Could it be time travel? We should figure out if our histories line up at any point, past or future." 

The poor help desk clerk is looking kind of overwhelmed. "I - I'm sorry - I don't think we have a protocol for this! I'll call the area supervisor, she can...figure out how to help you." 

Bruce nods apologetically at the help desk clerk and turns to Layne. "We should definitely rule out time travel. I don't think I'm in my past because I'm from this continent and there's never been a polity of this shape at this tech level, but it's possible I'm in my future? Did you have, hm, a Roman Empire, a Great Wall of China, Jesus, Mohammed, the Aztecs, Christopher Columbus, Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon?"

"Huh! Neil Armstrong - was that specifically his Chaos side? Weird!" 

"I haven't heard of any of those things," Nolita says quietly. "There was a Great Wall down south for a while? But then Law annexed the Chaos region along the continental bridge and now it's just underground like everywhere else." 

The clerk pops in some sort of wireless earbud and taps her computer screen, apparently making a phone call. 

"I also don't know of anywhere on Earth that has such a clear distinction between Law and Chaos. Either in places or in people."

He's going to have to tell them, if he's going to be here long enough to be a serious risk. He wants to have a little more understanding of this place first, and of how easy it will be to go live a very boring quiet life somewhere relatively unpopulated.

"Huh. How well does that work? I mean, how do people - get a chance to grow and explore and all that, and also keep it, uh, contained safely? Feels like everyone'd be either really repressed or just kind of a mess, but...I don't know, I guess things could work really differently." 

"Maybe everyone's just really median, like Noli?" 

"You just--try to grow and explore in ways that don't bother people? If someone feels like society isn't letting them be who they want to be they can go live out in the country where their nearest neighbor is a mile away and then it's pretty easy not to bother anyone. Also there are people back home who think we should have more laws and people who think we should have less; maybe having it different ways in different places with easy travel between them is better. But I think a lot of people would feel unsafe somewhere there weren't laws against theft and violence and stuff."

"It's not like you get your stuff stolen very often? Only happened to me once, and I figured out who he was and filled his locker with ball bearings." 

"It was SO funny!" Nuts mimes someone skidding around and starting to fall over. 

"I don't think 'it's against the law' is even the main reason people don't steal each other's stuff for no reason? I don't know, is it for you? For me, Anstat just doesn't think it sounds cool. He tried it once, to check." 

Bruce thinks about what might happen if he unexpectedly slipped on ball bearings, if his head hit the floor while shocked and afraid, and turns noticeably paler. "Uh, no, I--I still wouldn't steal things if it was legal, just--I mean, I've never needed anything badly enough to be tempted to steal it. Also, can you explain the relationship between you and Anstat?"

“He’s my Chaos part?”