Bruce has degrees and publications in physics and chemistry and biology and medicine and nuclear science and climatology and computer science! None of the institutions he has credentials from or the journals he's published in are at all accessible from here, but he can list them all off if she wants to know anyway.

She writes it all down! She smiles encouragingly and asks a handful of followup questions, including if he’d like to be put in touch with some relevant local scientists and institutions in those fields. Surface-based ones, anyway. She informs him that quite a lot of scientific progress nowadays happens in the high Underworld, but for the obvious reasons she doesn’t have standard contact information for those people. He ought to be able to get it via word of mouth if he wants to. 

He would love contact information for Surface scientists! He should stay out of the Underground but if they have an internet and it has Underground journals on it and he's allowed to read them he will do that.

"They have a decentralized Web - the original one, actually, our Internet happened decades later - but for the most part it's not directly linked to the topside Internet. A lot of the best research should be in the archives, though, since so much Surface R&D references it these days. Hmm, for now I'll put some names and contacts in the shared-documentation file in your base profile, and you can check it out once we set you up with a personal computer of some kind. I'm not a techie but I'm guessing whatever you have won't be compatible with our systems." 

She gets out a flat tablet-screen thing from her shoulder bag and inputs some things. Apparently via some sort of OCR setup rather than a keyboard, because she scribbles it with a stylus pen on the screen and the words snap into printed text afterward. 

"All right. Medical history? Obviously the, uh, gamma ray incident - how long ago did that happen? Any other serious side effects? I'm also not a doctor, you should see one here as soon as possible but I'll put the basics in now." 

The gamma ray incident was six years ago and didn't do anything normal. Other than that he's nearsighted and has had his wisdom teeth out and he's vaccinated for all the common Earth diseases but he should get vaccinated for all the local ones pronto.

She'll schedule him to see someone at the nearest medical clinic to where he's staying. "Which is - hmm, I'd better go find out if Veth got her parents' approval. One sec." Laylie stands up, sticks her head out the door. 

Veth is standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall. 

"- Wha...? Oh, sorry. Parents are fine with having him as a guest. Uh, you can scan my profile and get the info?" She sticks out her ring. 

And that seems to be everything! Laylie fiddles with a couple more forms and spreadsheets on her tablet, asks if she can record his fingerprints and get a photo to cross-reference with his temporary database profile - her tablet can do both - and then asks if he has any questions before she sends him off with Veth. 

"Do you keep records of everyone's fingerprints, or just oddballs'?" He asks as he's inputting them. And then: "I think I can figure most stuff out from the internet. Is job-searching mostly done online or does it involve going places?"

"Everyone's. It's a backup since most people don't take their ID rings with them into the Underworld, and they might, for example, get injured down there and need to be identified at a hospital topside. You can decline if you want, but most people have it on file." 

And to his job question, "it depends on what? If you're looking for R&D positions, I think the initial application and screening is usually online, and they'd only ask you to visit in person if you were a strong candidate." 

He's fine having his fingerprints recorded. "I guess I'll see whether I can get any R&D positions with a completely unverifiable resume. Thanks for helping me get documented; honestly, you're handling this a lot better than my home government would have."

"Awww. Thank you." She smiles at him again. "I wish you the best of luck with anything. If you want to get in touch again for any reason, my contact will be on your shared-notes profile when you get access to that." 

"Dad has at least two extra tablets lying around, we can repurpose one for him." Veth looks over at Bruce. "Feeling ready to take the train over, or do you want to, uh, sit somewhere and get more acclimatized first?" 

"I'm good to go, but could I maybe get a quick description of what your trains are like? I've been on trains and subways before, but I don't know how they'll be different here." Trains are generally loud and crowded and involve awkward interactions with homeless people, and none of those are pleasant but none of them are a particular risk either, except for how anything that did happen would be worse in a confined space.

"Want me to pull up some pictures?" 

Laylie doesn't wait for confirmation, just starts doing this. 

The pictures she shows him are: a raised skyrail-type setup, photographed picturesquely from a distance against the sunset. A few pictures of trains on the inside - one that's more an architectural sketch, one that looks like a demo picture of a stationary, empty train car, one full of people. The layout mostly isn't that different from subway cars on Earth, except that there are a lot more seats, often including a second level accessible by ladders. The cars are well-lit and also have a lot of windows. The interiors are clearly designed to be easy to clean, maybe somewhat at the expense of the chairs being comfortable - in at least one of the pictures of an occupied train car, a couple of passengers have visibly brought cushions or folded blankets to sit against. It does look very spotless, though. Almost no litter. 

So, the neatness of Japanese subways plus the relative spaciousness of American subways. Nice. "Okay, looks like no big surprises. Thanks. I'm good to go." 

"Great, let's head out! I told Mom to expect us in the next hour." 

She politely thanks Laylie for all her help, and leads the way out to the train-corridor. "- Bruce, you should put on your temp ID so you don't lose it, you'll need it to swipe on and off the train." 

"Is your mom gonna make the special guest dinner? I hope she does the meatballs, they're my favourite!" 

It seems to be a busy-ish time of day; there are a lot of people streaming down the corridor into the train station, and once they reach the main platform, headed up or down stairs to deeper or higher platforms, or over arched catwalk structures to adjacent platforms. This is clearly a major nexus of a LOT of train lines, as also shown by the enormous digital-screen map and apparently live-updating schedule being displayed on a wall. 

Veth squints at it. "Six minutes, no rush. We need to head up and left, Yellow line." 

There are, again, a lot of people using the stairs, both up and down, but like before it's very orderly. The clean polished-cement floor has lines painted on it, like the inlaid-marble lines in the atrium earlier, and people are following those, mostly avoiding any risk of random collisions with rushed strangers. 

Up, across, and they reach the relevant platform with three minutes still to spare. It's...very quiet, is one of the main noticeable differences from an Earth subway system, at least one in America. The space is oddly non-echoey given its size, like it's been carefully built with sound-dampening materials, and people are talking but keeping their voices low. The other difference is that there's plenty of benches for seating, currently three-quarters occupied. 

Veth doesn't bother to grab a seat since they won't be waiting long. She sways from one foot to the other. "So? What's it like compared to back home for you?" 

Bruce puts on his ID tag and checks out the maps so he'll be able to get places without a guide later. Once on the train he grabs a seat rather than try to balance through starts and stops. 

"The train? It's very clean and quiet. I like the traffic pattern guides on the floor. And it's larger than I'm used to; do most people here take the train rather than driving personal vehicles?"

"In the city? Yeah. You can drive if you want, there are roads for it, but I think nearly everyone who does lives outside the city itself, or it's their actual job, like truck-delivery or taxis or whatever. My dad's best friend from school lives in a ranch out of town and he drives in when he visits, but even then he takes the train if he's going downtown. It's just less stressful, right, you know exactly how long it'll take and when you have to leave to get somewhere at a given time." 

"My dad rides his bike allll the way to his office, but he's weird." 

"- Oh, right, I should ask - are you comfy riding a scooter? There are public ones you can borrow, but I don't know if you're more used to bikes, and those run out a lot sooner in rush hour. I guess you can ride behind me on mine? Or we could just walk, it's half an hour." 

"I've never actually ridden an electric scooter before. I should learn but maybe not while people are trying to get somewhere and I'm slowing them down. I can definitely do a bike if there are any left."

"Sure, that works. I bet my brother would have fun teaching you."