Anstat lies flat on his stomach, right at the mouth of a ventilation tunnel just barely wide enough for him to wriggle through, looking out into a vast hollow shaft, stone-lined, fifty metres across, rising another three hundred metres or so to a glassed-over roof and sunlight, descending almost bottomlessly below.

He isn't not supposed to be there, though mostly this just amounts to 'getting here was annoying and inconvenient and if he'd been spotted there would have been a FIGHT.'

The main Underworld drop-shaft is lined by a spiral staircase, and has a number of much smaller side-shafts, connected but glassed in, with elevators sliding up and down. Every twenty metres or so, there are open platforms cut into the rock, and doors and tunnels leading outward. The levels aren't, quite, all distinct; often they're sort of diagonal-to-each-other, half entangled with higher and lower platforms.

The shaft is lit, but VERY variably. Some platforms have strings of electric lights; others have optical-fibre bouquets spraying random coloured light in all directions; some have sparkly balls to reflect the glow of excessively bright spotlights. Some levels only have oil-burning lanterns, or even candles. A few are entirely dark. (The tunnel behind him, where his friends are also stretched out in a row nose-to-toes, is pitch-dark.) Some of the levels are playing music very loudly; right now the songs from above and below are almost perfectly blended together, a bizarre yet beautiful auditory tangle. 

A hiss behind him. "Did you find the eyehole." 

"Is that Aya or Nuts? I can't see your face."

Today is absolutely not a Trashfire day so it's not him. 

"s'Aya, you moron, I can't believe you've known us ten years and you still can't tell." 

Grin. "That's our Aya, all right. I found it. Pass up the supplies?" 

A giggle, sudden and high-pitched. "I'll have to pass them up your butthole to get through. Butthole." Giggles. 

"Oh, hey, Nuts. I want the one who can do logistics, though." He waits. 

From the very back, a voice whispers. "Hey, Noli, can you hear what–?" 

"They're getting the bungee." Nolita sounds kind of tense, but not horrifically so. 

This entire excursion is mainly for Nolita's benefit, which is why it's not a Trashfire time at all, and even Anstat is being pretty tame by his standards. Veth is making sure to stay median enough to keep track of that and not let the Chaos get too out of control. 

(Numeria thinks this is b O r I n G, but she's behaving about it.) 

"All right. You've got the goodies?" 

"I have the goodies. ...You're, uh, sure this'll go over?" 

"We are literally throwing candy at people, how could it not go over." 

Four bungee cords are slithered up into Anstat's hand; this requires a lot of contorting, on both Anstat and Aya's parts, eliciting more amusement from Nuts. 

Four bungee cords are firmly, thoroughly, meticulously tied to the sturdy metal loop mounted just behind the mouth of the tunnel. Anstat-Layne can't go median for this but Anstat is, by long necessity, pretty good at logistics despite being the Chaotic of the pair. He's focused and doesn't goof off at all. 

"Psst. I'm going for the drop. Goodies?" 

Goodies! She is really prepared for that part! She's been rehearsing it mentally. 

Goodies are pushed into Anstat's hand. 

The bungee comes with a clip, the really thoroughly overengineered kind that Lawful constructors use on the Surface.

Veth can take credit for that part. She reckons it was worth spending actual money to calm Nolita's nerves for today. 

Clip is clipped! 

aaaaaaand 

the DROP!!!! 

Anstat free-falls, past the overhang - they picked a spot right above a widening, for this reason, the same thrill with less risk. He squeals with glee. Manages to, with perfect timing born of long practice, start his throw so that he sprays brightly-coloured candy right into one of the sloped levels. 

Trashfire makes a brief bid to jump out right away and fall on top of him even though he said not to, because CHAOS, but Aya stomps on that. 

She follows the plan - Aya approves of plans even if Trashfire thinks they're lame - and waits until Anstat has thrown all of his candy and stopped bouncing around on the end of his tether and has managed to pull himself up to the nearest level. 

He sits on the platform, legs swinging about the depths, grinning in pleased satisfaction. 

Her turn! 

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Have candy from kids, strangers everywhere! 

Most of the candy goes where it's thrown but some of it vanishes into a rift of sparkling blue light! The rift distorts the space around it; nearby objects seem to ripple like a reflection in a wind-stirred lake. Then the whole thing turns itself somehow inside out and dumps a bespectacled man in a lab coat onto the floor.

"What the fuck," says the bespectacled man.

"Whooooooooa! That's trippy! How'd you do that, dude?" 

Aya's shout fades in and out of audibility because she's bouncing up and down on the end of her bungee leash. 

The man is lying on an uneven stone floor in what more than anything resembles a candlelit cave. There are vague Stone-age-aesthetic finger paintings on the walls, dimly lit by flickering candles burning around the periphery. 

There's also absolutely no railing or fence of any kind guarding the dropoff into what appears to be a BOTTOMLESS PIT. 

Trippy is right. Who built this place? And what sort of bizzarity is going on in it now?

"Accidentally!" He shouts back to the bouncing woman. "Where am I?'

Aya is pretty sure he is OBVIOUSLY joking and she's not going to fall for it. 

She stops bouncing and ends up a couple of levels below him. "Keep at it, dude!" she yells up, before hauling herself into the lower level. 

There's something or other happening down there but that's always the case, it's the Underworld. 

"Psst," Numeria hisses, nudging the other girl forward. "s'your turn." 

"...I'm scared. I don't know if I can do this." 

"'Course you can." 

And Numeria leans into the Chaos. "Oy, if you don't I'll push you. And win. I'm bigger." 

That gets a weak giggle. "You calling yourself fat?" 

"Nah, just calling you a wisp on the wind. Go on." 

Nolita grits her teeth - tries to feel for the Chaos inside her but it's hiding - so she goes for sheer teeth-gritting discipline instead, she knows how to do THAT. 

She lets out a tiny squeak as she pushes free - 

- and falls the rest of the way in utter silence, one hand locked around her harness and the other full of candy that she's forgotten to throw. 

She remembers on the bounce, though, and because she's steeling herself to time it right, she flings it before she sees the man on the platform. Right into his face. 

"Oh no I'm so sorry I'm sorry I didn't mean–" 

That will NOT stand unchallenged.

"Nolita!" Trashfire booms from below. (He's practiced, hard, to get his voice that deep. Vocal lessons and all.) "Nolita, you will shut your trap or I'm gonna shut it for you." 

Bruce flinches at the faceful of candy and then flinches again at the raised voice. "Uh, sorry for barging in on this--" he looks around and takes an optimistic guess "party? If someone can just explain how to get to the airport from here I'll get out of your hair . . . " 

Bruce is thinking that he got fantastically lucky. Given the power of the Tesseract it's a stroke of luck (or a deliberate choice) that he landed on Earth at all and not at some random point in the solar system, and on top of that he's not in the ocean, and not in the wilderness, and he's somewhere they speak Eng . . . no, actually, he appears to have picked up another language, and not one he recognizes. It doesn't seem related to English or Portuguese or German or Latin or Japanese. That's awesome except it means the Tesseract edited his brain, which is creepy as fuck and he should get himself fMRI'd as soon as he gets back to New York to find out what else it did.

Nolita, being median to begin with, doesn't have to fuss around with switching to summon the right response. 

"...You want to get to the airport? I - uh - mister, are you...all right–" okay okay what do you do for someone in the Underworld who seems like they might be disoriented to time and place, "- can you tell me where you are and what the date is?" 

- oh and you also get help. That part's important. 

"Hey!" she calls. Raising her voice is always effortful but it comes easier now because it's both Allowed (everything is allowed here) and also Correct. "Hey guys! I think - something - problem–" 

Unfortunately, she gets Trashfire. 

"Ha. Aren't you funny." 

Then a peal of giggles. "Tag not it!" 

Shucks. 

"Hang on, Noli, I'll be right there!" 

Numeria is the one who jumps - which helps a lot, Veth hates heights - but, by the time she's bounced twice, it's mostly Veth, median, in control. 

"I have no idea where I am, I" wow his actual explanation of how he got here is both implausible and classified, shit "am super lost. It's April 11th New York time?" Neither "April" nor "New York" is easily translatable and the creepycool brain dump doesn't seem to have come with a calendar package so that last sentence is an awkward linguistic salad bowl.

Oh dear this guy is super not oriented to time and place. 

"Guys! I said we have a problem!"

There's a right tone of voice to use but she's not very good at it. She starts hauling herself up her bungee to reach the man, though. 

For fuck's sake. 

This calls for Atlas, and Veth is super ticked off about it, with her current architecture it's easy to shift back and forth from median but she needs a whole ritual for getting all the way from Law to Chaos in a way that doesn't hurt. 

Atlas has reflexes for this, and in a split second it's Veth!Atlas fully in control. It feels a bit like a bucket of water over the head. 

"Just hang in there, Noli - I'm coming up - hey guys, cut the crap down there and help us out!" 

Ronda rolls her eyes, but shifts easily to Iskill and starts climbing. 

Anstat stays where he is, legs swinging. "I dunno, man. Sounds boring?" 

"I'm sorry." She summons the Voice. "Layne. Layne. I need you, sweetie." 

Ack. What. 

"- where the fuck am I?" 

"Somewhere random, right now. I'm sorry, love. Get your ass up here." 

A little out of breath, Veth!Atlas reaches the stranger's ledge. 

"Hey. I'm Veth fronting Atlas, Lawful. Can you, um. Maybe move back a bit from the edge or something?" 

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. 

There are a lot of things that no one knows, yet. 

(Most people's Law personas tend less curious, less open-to-novelty, than their Chaos sides. Layne's never had this. He considers it one of his best strengths.) 

"...Um. So. It - sounds like you might be from somewhere...else." Who knows where?? Not him!!! He's starting to worry it won't even be findable in the Records. Which is going to give Veth conniptions, if he's right.

Wow.

"I'm - sorry, I'm trying to figure out where to start and what order to go in. Um, right now we're in the Underworld. Which is Chaos. We don't have rule of law here. 'Crime' isn't a thing. Uh, things are still pretty tame on this level, because someone decided to round up a lot of friends and mount defences a few levels further down to keep hooligans out of their nightclub. And," a flash of a grin that's almost but not quite Antat, "because we're boring squares up here and what'd the hooligans even want to bother with us for. But really soon we're going to get to the Surface and that does have law and you really shouldn't do any crimes, our reporting is second-highest in the nation." 

"I'm not going to--I don't want to do any crimes but it occurs to me that I don't know what the laws are here, is there anything I'm likely to run afoul of other than 'don't injure or deceive people or mess with their property'?" Like, for example, being in the country without a passport or any form of identification or permission to be here. He's probably going to catch some shit trying to get back into the US, but once he's somewhere on his phone's network he'll call Coulson and Coulson will do mysterious government person things until Bruce is back where they want him. It's the closest thing he's seen yet to an upside of being considered a military asset.

"If you generalize 'injure' to all the ways of harming people that aren't literally picking fights, I think that should mostly get you through? You'll be with us. ...Also, I mean, don't - randomly leave your clothes on a fence and wander around naked singing, or stand in the subway doors so they can't close, or knock over all the cereal in the grocery store - but it's not illegal to delay trains or whatever, it's just rude." 

He seems so freaked out! Veth tries to smile reassuringly at him. "Hey, you'll be fine. You're with us." 

"If I make this face at you it means quit it, whatever 'it' is." 

Oh dear, facial expressions. He misses his tiny cabin in Brazil. "I'm going to try to avoid inconveniencing people in full generality. More than I already have, I mean. Also, I don't think you ever actually said what country this is?" 

"Country is Nahara. City is Kast." 

"Northwest on the Continent. Oh, which over in Siarra they call Lohnor." 

". . . I think I am worse at geography than I thought I was." Or whatever the Tesseract did isn't handling proper nouns intuitively and those are all unfamiliar names for very familiar locations and he's going to look like he's never heard of Asia.

"Let's just get you topside where we can pull out a map." And he leads the way. 

They walk for a while through a dark rough-cut tunnel lit only by flickering candles, and then emerge through a curtain of - is that vines - no they're fake vines, carefully and lovingly made of silk and embroidery floss and some other materials - 

- into a much larger corridor where every single surface of everything is coloured in gloriously colourful graffiti. A different group of teenagers, these ones wearing masks that hide their faces, are working on a new section. They're hanging off ceiling harnesses to do it, laughing and shoving each other so they sort of bounce around against the walls. 

"How are you on stairs? We're thirty levels down but it's faster than waiting for the lifts." 

"Aww, you're not even going to suggest he climb the fireman's pole?" 

"I cannot climb a fireman's pole but I can climb a lot of stairs. But I might be disappointingly slow at it." Also, wow, thirty flights down is impressively deep. This whole place is super interesting and he would have a good time exploring it if he was here as a tourist with a suitcase and a plan.

They follow the corridor and end up coming out on the spiral staircase, looking back out into the huge mineshaft thing! The way the stairs are set up, a huge gently looping circle rather than switchbacks with about one rotation per level - though the levels continue to be weirdly offset and sometimes sloping, rather than lining up the way storeys in a building would - makes it feel a lot less like a slog.

And there's a view! Some sort of extremely weird improv or performance-art piece or something is being staged in a screened in, triple-height level a little above them, with various people wearing mostly body paint and tights, assembling their bodies with the help of some hanging silks and other accessories to make - a tree with its branches waving in the wind, which then gradually and creepily mutates into some sort of shark... 

Then they're around the bend from it, and can see a - classy bar patio, overlooking the depths? The clientele there are older, forties to sixties. Most of them are sitting, or lounging on a giant beanbag-bed-thing in the middle. One woman who looks about fifty is hanging from a chandelier for some reason. 

Up and up and up. 

Up they hike. Bruce has the physique of someone for whom physical activity has mostly consisted of miserable grade school gym classes, and his legs are going to be in open rebellion the day after tomorrow, but he keeps moving on a combination of nervous energy and not wanting to embarrass himself any further. The performance art is a nice distraction.

All of them are a lot younger, of course, and Layne and Ronda in particular are clearly in very good shape; Ronda actually skips up and down the stairs ahead of the group a couple of times (when Nuts slips out, they're hyperactive.) 

Nolita does start flagging when they're still ten levels down. 

"Piggyback?"

Awww. 

And then they reach the surface. 

There's a weird frosted-glass full height turnstile sort of thing. 

"I'm guessing you don't have any weapons," Layne informs Bruce, "but if you do, lockers are here." He gestures. 

"I got a spare lock if you need to stash drugs." 

"Why would he have drugs on him? He was at work when he got yoinked here." 

"Banned items topside are - weapons aside from a couple of approved defence-only ones if you have a permit. Any non-prescribed mind-affecting drugs. Umm, am I forgetting anything obvious? Lots of people change clothes here but you're fine." 

"What's the rule on pocketknives?" He pulls a multitool out of his pocket; it has a knife and a couple screwdrivers and pliers and a file and a tiny saw. If he doesn't lose it here he'll have to mail it to himself before he flies home.

Layne frowns at it. "...Iskill?" 

"Needs an exemption. Which I would say he could totally just fill out in the lobby before we get on the train, but he wouldn't even have a base profile, would he?" 

"- I think it's probably fine to get a one-off under me, but we'll need to bother the help desk guy. I don't think he'll mind." She glances mildly at Bruce. "Just please don't poke out anyone's jugular with that if I'm gonna cosign your exemption under my base profile." 

"I won't. It's just for opening packages and fixing loose screws and stuff. Sorry about the extra paperwork." (If she knew what was wrong with him she'd be less willing to trust him, but having a knife doesn't actually make him any more dangerous. He still feels like a liar.)

"Then let's do it!" 

She takes his hand and pulls him to the turnstile with her. And they step out of the Underworld and onto the Surface. 

He looks around to see what the surface is like! He should at least be able to get a sense of what time zone and approximate latitude he's in.

"Actually, I just realized--would you cosigning my exemption mean you would get in trouble if I did anything illegal, even if it didn't involve the knife? I don't want to cause you problems if I, like, fill out a form wrong later." 

They're in a really big indoor space that looks like a weird cross between a train station, a mall, a community centre, and - maybe a fancy hotel, because some of the spotless brick walls on either side definitely have balconies attached to cute little apartment units. The ground level is packed with stores. There's a spiral escalator leading to some sort of roof space. There are two different hallways leading off; both of them have screens above them with updating departure schedules for trains headed to various unfamiliar place-names. There are doors, with signage that's also perfectly legible to Bruce, pointing out how to find the drop-in preschool and daycare or the fitness centre or several maybe-government-departments like the 'Office of Education' or the 'Office of Shipping.' 

Everything is astoundingly clean and organized-looking and uncluttered. Well-maintained, like it's either newly built in the last five years or at least refurbished and renovated frequently.

It's also - oddly minimalist? Not trying very hard to have character? In the place they just left, everything was trying very very hard all the time to be artistic. Here the vibe is clean and functional and not much else. This is most marked around the storefronts; there are signs, clear and easy to read, and what are probably recognizable logos - they all seem to be stylized solid-color shapes though - and a few stores have blown-up posters of what they're selling in addition to just displaying it out front, but there aren't advertisements, per se.

There are a lot of people around, but it doesn't feel too crowded; everyone seems to be mostly following lines tiled into the marble floor, resulting in a very orderly procession. 

"Nah, exemption's specific. And I'm not worried anyway. You don't seem like the type to make negligent mistakes in documentation, and accidents are fine, you just fix it when you notice." She says this like it's incredibly obvious. 

The problem isn't solved yet but the part that might actually have been dangerous, getting a disoriented person out of the Underworld back to Law, is done. Also stepping through the turnstile is almost an automatic cue to shift to median, apparently regardless of who she's fronting at the time. Atlas is pretty new, and usually already off for the day by the time Veth reaches the actual Underworld portal, so there haven't been opportunities to check this much before. 

"Are you really integrated? Or just really Law-leaning?" Ronda says curiously. "Just, I haven't seen you leak Chaos once. Even down under. It's impressive." 

Bruce goggles touristically at the Surface stuff the same way he did at the underworld stuff. It looks really nice; definitely not American architecture choices but they clearly have a solid economy and know what to do with it. The total quarantining of all art into the anarchist (?) basement levels is very weird, and also now that the contrast is available the implications of the implied lack of rule of law down there are making him retroactively nervous. 

It's getting weirder and weirder that he hasn't heard of this place. They're not one of the questionably-sovereign tiny island nations, or for that matter Singapore with its stereotypical cleanliness, because they mentioned being on a continent; maybe they're one of the Eastern European states that change names every time you look away? Actually, that's a worrying thought, maybe he time-traveled. He gets distracted trying to figure out if it's possible that he traveled more years than light-years or if that would have made the hyperspatial inversion unstable and almost misses the woman's question.

"Um, I'm not sure I understand that question the way you intended it, but I think I am a fairly lawful person most of the time? Especially in unfamiliar circumstances." The question makes him tense up a bit, and not just because of the confusion. It would be very strange for her to recognize him and know about his problem and even weirder to mention it in euphemism while not seeming scared or angry at him. Clearly she's just noticed his lack of desire to take advantage of the anarchist art basement. He tells himself that very insistently and relaxes. Mostly.

Nolita gives him a sympathetic look. "I get it."

"It's got advantages. If I'd teleported by mistake to the biggest Underworld on the continent, Anstat would nab the next week and I'd have so much explaining to do later." 

"Come on, guys, focus. Let's get our stuff. ...Who had the order this time again?" 

"Right. Um, one second..." 

Shift to Nuts, who does a little dance while reciting, "Ronda, Layne, Veth, Noli." 

"Thanks."

Veth forges over to a bank of lockers. Unlike the lockers underground, which were at least vaguely similar to literal high school or changing-room lockers, these ones are clearly higher-tech, with touch-screens for entering keycodes. 

Veth enters a string of numbers, very fast. (She doesn't explain this to Bruce, because you don't tell people your passwords, but the group uses their birthdays and randomizes the order every time.) 

She scoops out a cute embroidered bag - her mom made it - and dumps the ID jewelry into her hand, tossing them out to people. She and Layne and Nolita have rings; Ronda has a bracelet. 

"You've got some sort of ID on you, right?" Layne says to Bruce. "If you were at work." 

"Yeah, I have my driver's license. No passport, though." Looks like they do everything with chips here, which is cool but not going to help with the bureaucratic clusterfuck.

Blank look. "- Huh. I thought everywhere standardized that database at the last roll-out." 

"Let's just go bother the help desk, they can actually look it up." Veth leads them back across the room, apparently unconsciously following one of the floor-lines, the others falling in behind her. 

The help desk is tucked into an alcove beside the hall leading to the train platform. It's open rather than screened in. The woman at the desk has a notepad, but there isn't much else in the way of paper visible.

She's playing with a fidget toy, and doesn't stop when they approach, but her smile is apparently genuine. "Layne, right? I saw your mother at the potluck last month, she looks well. What's going on?" 

"We...have a really weird documentation problem. And some related problems." He nudges Bruce forward. "This guy isn't from the Continent at all, far as we can tell. He - had some sort of physics experiment mishap and ended up in our Underworld. We're trying to get him home." 

"He wha–" She stops herself. Blinks. "I'm sorry. Of course I'll do my best." 

"Also he's got a pocketknife on him and I said I'd cosign an exemption here's my ID." Veth sticks out her ring. 

"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?”

"So you have--different names for when you're on the Surface and when you're doing chaos stuff?"

“Yeah. Uh, not everyone does it, and it’s - not always one-to-one, right? And most people are more fluid about it than I am with Anstat.”

"Huh. Back home some people have different names for the Internet, but it's less formalized. Anyway, good news and bad news. The good news is, throwing me at an alternate timeline would take enough power that the people who were with me will have been able to trace it--assuming they didn't all get thrown into alternate timelines right after I did. The bad news is that I have no idea when or if they'll be able to reverse it, so I should plan on being here for long enough to need a legal identity and a job and stuff." 

And he's going to have to tell everyone. Before he gets addicted to being looked at like a normal--well, at least a harmlessly weird person.

The woman at the help desk pops out her earbud and stands up. "That's - I'm so sorry. Sounds like the plan for right now is we run you through the onboarding that's standard if someone was, uh, born down in the Underworld and wants to set up here. I...expect you'll have a different set of, well, adjustment needs, but we'll figure it out. I'll try to get the time-sensitive bits moving while Laylie comes down." 

Glance around at the four teenagers. "Before I put in a request for housing, any of you up for sponsoring him? It usually goes better and I'd expect the same reasons apply here." 

"I can't, sorry." 

"I'll call my parents and check. We've got a spare room free. Uh, can I use your phone though, I don't take mine down here." 

"- Yes, of course." 

A little clear box with a spare earbud and some sort of auxiliary control-screen are passed over. 

"That's--that's really nice of you but I'm--I don't want to impose," Bruce says to his own feet. He doesn't know what he should be doing instead, other than telling the truth or getting out of town or both.

"Hey, no, you don't have to worry about that. Her mom adores having houseguests. Especially if they need help getting re-settled." 

The help desk woman is busy hunting around in another cabinet. After a moment she stands up, holding a sort of necklace with a plain medallion-like pendant, which she holds up to the same chip-reader that Veth presented her ID to, then ducks out around her desk.

"Here. I've just made you a placeholder profile, so you'll show up in the computer systems. It'll probably get migrated properly later, but for now - here, hold onto this." She offers Bruce the medallion. "Temporary identifier." 

He takes the medallion, stares at it, doesn't put it on.

"Thanks, but--I really shouldn't. Honestly I shouldn't even be in the city. I'm--not a good person to have around."

This is not a complete explanation and he knows it, but he's run out of words and needs a bit to line up some more.

This gets him confused and very doubtful looks from the teenagers! 

"- Well," the help desk lady says with slightly-forced cheeriness, "why don't we go inside somewhere and talk about that? Laylie should be here any– oh, here she comes." 

Laylie turns out to be a blonde woman in her forties, dressed in a style that, while not actually that similar to the Earth 'smart business casual' look, is nonetheless clearly conveying the same vibe. She walks fast, looking a bit busy and harried, but as she reaches them she slows, tilts her head in a slow deliberate way, and then seems to suddenly shift her entire focus onto Bruce, radiating something like intensely maternal competence. 

"Bruce Banner, right? I'm Laylie. Region coordinator." 

"Please to meet you," he lies.

"Well, let's go sit down inside somewhere. Follow me." 

She does not especially give him a chance to object, just smiles warmly and starts ushering the group down the train-station corridor. 

Veth lingers for a moment, having a murmured conversation into her earbud, then pops it out and returns it to the desk lady, catching up at a jog. 

"Mom would love to have you!" she tells Bruce, grinning. "She's fascinated. Says Dad will want to know absolutely everything about your world. Hey, any chance you know much about medical practices there? Dad's a doctor and he does research so he'll be extra curious." 

"Oh, very good!" Laylie tosses it. "Thank you, dear. And you are...?" 

"Veth. This is Layne, and Ronda, and Nolita." 

"Sounds like I owe all of you some gratitude. Good work taking this on so smoothly." 

Bruce would love to compare interdimensional medical practices with Veth's dad, that sounds awesome, but none of them are going to want him in their house once he manages to explain everything properly so he just mumbles something vaguely affirmative and follows Laylie to wherever they're going.

She swipes her own ID ring to open a door in the side of the big main corridor, which leads into a smaller hallway, and shortly later a door into an...office? Lounge? It's not quite a layout or aesthetic that matches anything standard on Earth. There's a small table with comfortable chairs, but also a giant beanbag-on-the-floor furniture item in the corner. There's a skylight, which cleverly makes use of mirrors to relay a reflection of sky, despite the room clearly having multiple storeys above it before the roof. There are potted plants, glossy and healthy; one of them is a climbing vine that extends onto a trellis on the wall. 

"Have a seat." She pulls out a chair for Bruce. "And - one moment. Would you feel more comfortable talking to me with the others all here, or only some of them, or in private?" 

He sits down and twines one leg around the chair leg."They all ought to know." And they're marginally more familiar and less frightening than Laylie but that's kind of pathetic so he doesn't say it. Instead he addresses the tabletop with the speech he spent the walk here assembling.

"The event that brought me here wasn't my first weird scientific accident. And the other one made me--dangerous. When I get too angry, or seriously injured . . . I turn into a giant mindless green rage monster and attack anything around me," he finishes in a rush. It sounds utterly goddamn stupid, said out loud, but he hopes they'll believe him if only because he would have no possible reason to say it if it wasn't true. "I should have warned you sooner. I'm sorry."

This does not actually get much of a shocked or horrified reaction from most of them! Ronda in particular mostly looks intensely curious. 

Laylie meets his eyes, levelly. "Thank you for telling me. That - must have been difficult and frightening for you. Especially since - hmm, strong emotions or physical injuries are a very standard trigger for involuntary switching, for people who are very split, but it sounded like your 'Earth' doesn't have nearly as much awareness of those concepts?" 

"- Wait. Backing up one second. You literally shapeshift when you go Chaotic?" 

"Yes. I literally shapeshift. And it's not--I don't do silly pranks and throw candy. I tear down buildings and crush people. I can avoid risky situations but it's never perfect, I can never be sure, so I need to live somewhere there are as few other people around for me to hurt as possible." He's pulled his other leg up into the chair with him and his hands are laced tightly on his knee.

Ronda's entire expression suddenly shifts. She's watching him almost hungrily. She licks her lips. 

"We'd rack in so much if we take you down to the gladiator pi–" 

"Ronda," Layne says, sharply. 

She goes very still for a moment. 

"- I am so sorry about that." 

"- Veth? Are you all right?" 

- where is she - what's she doing in this room - who are any of these people and why does it feel like she knows them -

"...Veth?" Layne reaches for her shoulder. 

"- Huh? Uh, sorry, I spaced out for a second." 

She is really hoping that's all she did because aaaaaaaaah. 

Layne gives her the piercing look that means 'we'll talk about this later'. 

Laylie sighs and waits for the teenagers to sort themselves out. They're young. Accidentally leaking Chaos in incredibly awkward circumstances is pretty normal and expected, drawing attention to it will just embarrass them more. 

"Bruce? Listen to me. It's all right. We'll figure something out. Maybe that means somewhere out of the city, but I'm not jumping straight to that. Having to set things up to make it easier for certain people not to leak Chaos on the Surface is - well, it's not usually quite as high-stakes but it's something we have experience with." 

Everyone freaking out is very reasonable. Him in a gladiator pit would be the worst possible idea but they seem to understand that.

"I'm--very glad you want to help me. I was able to be part of society, at home, mostly. I hope I can eventually do the same here."

He remembers Tony Stark, in New York. It's good to meet you, Dr Banner. Your work on antielectron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage-monster. Remembers him showing off the suit. I can fly. Can you fly? And the unspoken real meaning, I can stop you if I have to. You're not the only line of defense.

"I'm sure you will." She ducks her head, not smiling but still radiating motherly reassurance. "Can you - go through a list of all the times this switch happened by accident? And what triggers you use for doing it on purpose?" 

He lists off incidents, softly, haltingly. The initial gamma irradiation. The argument that first made him realize anger could trigger it. The time he got shot in the head (he hopes they don't ask how). The two times in Brazil. "And I don't know why I would want to do it on purpose."

She listens, calmly and patiently. 

"I'm sorry. That all sounds like pretty much the worst circumstances imaginable for exploring Chaos. I can understand why you didn't want to do it on purpose! But - it's important, right. One of the best ways to reliably avoid triggering something by accident, is to have enough practice at doing it on purpose." 

A pause. 

"Anyway. I think you're low-risk to stay with Veth and her family, especially given that now we're all aware of the issue and can take measures to avoid tripping it for you. All right?" 

Veth nods. Doesn't seem concerned or scared. "We'll be polite and non-threatening and no one's going to pick a fight with you. - I mean, on the Surface in general no one's going to do that, but especially in our house, Mom would throw such a fit." 

She's heard all that and she still wants to let him stay at her house. "Really? Thank you. If it's okay with your parents I mean." He is not at all sure he would be that nice to a stranger, even a nonthreatening one, and it makes him feel like a parasite. "I'll try to get my feet under me soon."

"I'll call again and check, but yeah, I can't think why it wouldn't be." 

"You can borrow the phone in the room next door, if you want. Bruce, in the meantime, why don't we go through the basic census info for you? Educational background and medical history, at least, those are the top priority for now." 

Nolita is starting to fidget a bit. 

Layne can guess why. "Hey, listen, we've both got an exam tomorrow, so if you've got this covered, we'd better head out." A smile at Veth. "See you tomorrow?" 

"Sure, see you tomorrow." 

"I'll stick around. Perks of not being in school, no more exams ever again!" 

"Not to mention you practically live at my place anyway." 

Laylie ignores the banter, focuses on Bruce with that same intense aura of 'I have this under control' as before. 

"So, what was your field of study?" 

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." 

"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."

Slippers are obtained for him. They're beige and fluffy on the inside and slightly too big but stretchy. 

"Dinner's in a couple hours, my husband's running late at work. He may have his brother over, if that's all right with you? Pevas used to live with us when the children were little, he's part of our family." 

"Uncle Pevas is coming too?" Elix lights up. 

"If he can get away from the office, you know he's busy this year." She turns back to Bruce. "I'm Cassea, by the way. Leaning Lawful, right now, but I'm pretty integrated, so no need to keep track of another name." 

"Does your Chaos you who's dangerous and scary have a name?" Elix asks Bruce. 

"Pleased to meet you, Cassea. I look forward to meeting your husband and Pevas." Then to Elix, "Well, yes. He's called Hulk."

"Ha. Nice one." 

"Elix, honey, don't be pushy. Bruce, please don't be shy about telling my son to stop being nosy, if it's too much. Anyway, would you like to sit down with us for some tea and snacks? ...Oh, Ronda, you're here too! Sorry, didn't see you. There's a bag in the laundry-room of your things that got mixed in with Veth's laundry." 

"Aww, thank you, Second Mom." 

"You're welcome, hon."

Cassea leads the group of them down the hall to an open-concept kitchen and dining room, which opens onto another, much bigger deck in the backyard. This one is a bit less tidy; there are two enormous oak trees in the backyard, and a smattering of fallen oak leaves on the deck furniture.

"Bruce, you can help yourself to anything in the snack fridge - it's that one." The kitchen has two narrower-than-usual fridges on opposite sides of the stove and sink, rather than one standard-size one. "I mean, you can also poke in the ingredients fridge if you want, but I like cooking from scratch so it's mostly not, uh, especially in edible forms yet. Do you have any dietary restrictions, by the way?" 

"I don't want to be an inconvenience and I don't have any health issues but I prefer not to eat anything that come from animals for personal reasons." He hasn't actually been a houseguest anywhere other than with family for more than a night or two since he went vegan and somehow managed not to realize how embarrassing it was going to be. He really needs to get a job as soon as possible.

"Right, right, of course." Cassea doesn't seem judgemental at all, just sympathetic and curious. "I can do a plants-only dinner, I have some of that new brand of not-beef that's made out of - gosh what was it -" 

"I think it's the one made out of that really cool fungus they found in the Underworld down south?" 

"Ewww, I don't want mushroom-meat, can I have something else Mom?" 

"Seriously, Lixie, it's not mushrooms. Different thing. You ever paid attention a single time in biology?" 

"Shut it. It's basically mushrooms."

"Kids." 

(The kids immediately shush.) 

"- Anyway, Bruce - we can do that, but is your objection more about fundamental-dignity," (this is a single word in their language), "or unpleasantness for the farmed animals? We don't have good neighbourhood meat, here, not since the Atters went and retired on a farm, but we've got neighbourhood eggs and goat-milk - if you want to see for yourself we could take a walk over and I can introduce you to the neighbours...?" 

"I'm alright with eggs and milk if the animals are living good lives, and fungus beef sounds fine too." Plenty of his neighbours in Brazil had goats or chickens, and it was nothing like the factory farming that turned his stomach in America. There are a lot of people he wouldn't have wanted to say that to, for fear that they would decide a rule with exceptions was no rule at all and they could just hand him whatever and lie about it, but Cassea seems to get it.

"Makes sense! Why don't you go sit outside with the kids - oy, Elix! can you clean off the deck chairs? - and I'll bring you guys some tea and snacks." 

Veth leads the way out onto the deck. 

Bruce helps Elix clean up the deck chairs, unless this consists entirely of returning things to proper locations that he doesn't know what they are.

Elix is pretty good at giving helpful instructions, for a kid who looks about twelve! Mostly cleaning up involves brushing off leaves, though at one point Elix darts back and grabs a cloth to wipe some bird-crap off a table. 

Cassea brings out a tray with a teapot, cups, and some attractively arranged crackers and toppings. 

Ronda settles herself onto one of the lounge chairs. 

"So. Should we try to set you up with someone?" 

"Ronda! He's avoiding the Underworld." 

"So? Sometimes people go on dates on the Surface too." Glance at Bruce. "...I can stop if you'd prefer, though." 

"I appreciate the thought but I'd rather focus on getting acclimated and finding a job and so forth."

"I guess that's sensible of you and all." Elix fidgets for a bit, then smiles brightly at Bruce. "Does your world have badminton? Badminton's great." 

"We do have badminton! Which is pretty weird given that we have thousands of years of divergent history. Do you have baseball and basketball and football too?"

"We have basketball! And 'kickball' but I don't know if that's the same thing as football. I've never heard of 'baseball', how does that work?" 

"We have a thing called kickball and two things called football and they're all different! Baseball has a big field with four points in a diamond, and one team is scattered around the field and throws a ball at one member of the other team, and they're supposed to hit the ball with a stick as it's coming at them and then run as far as they can around the diamond before the other team can chase down the ball from where they hit it to and tag them out with it." 

"Having two things that're both called football is so silly! Do they not standardize words for things in your world?" 

The doorbell chimes in the distance. 

"One moment, let me go talk to your father." Cassea slips out. 

"Sometimes people try to standardize words for things but we have a lot of different countries and languages and dialects and everyone wants to keep their way of saying things. How many languages does this planet have?"  

"Oh, lots! But the one we're speaking right now is pretty much the standard global one, for trade and government work and all that. I think there are still a handful of nation-states where it's not the first language most people learn as kids, but - not that many." 

"There are loads of languages in the Underworld! Lots of them are ones that people made up for fun when they were writing a story, though, and then some got popular." 

"Bruce! This is my husband, Dale, and his brother Pevas." 

Dale strides forward, looking delighted. "Bruce! I heard you're a doctor back in the world you're from?" 

Pevas just nods. 

"Pleased to meet you! I am, yes; I heard you wanted to compare our world's medical practices?"

"I do!" He grabs a seat and leans in toward Bruce. "What's your specialization?" 

"I never had the self-discipline to pick one!" he laughs. "I was a practicing GP for a while but my research was mostly on aging, and I kept up with the journals on a lot of things. How about you?"

"Fascinating, your world sounds very different on specialization! I practice mainly on the medication management side, with folks over sixty for the most part, though I'll get referrals every so often for young people with chronic conditions that are more common in the demographic I see." He ducks his head. "Oh, and I also lead a research team. Right now we're looking at a few different preventative care initiatives." 

"Oh, interesting--we don't tend to have dedicated medication management people, outside of a couple things like pain management; mostly people specialize by organ system. What sort of preventative interventions?"

"A couple of recent drugs being trialed for slowing aging processes, actually! Other than that, it's pretty much all neighbourhood planning and how that correlates with lifestyle differences that have downstream effects on health. We're running a big longitudinal study on whether urban noise and poor noise-isolation in houses correlates with stress-related illnesses like heart disease years later." 

"Neat! That reminds me of a study I saw on zoning laws, neighborhood air quality, respiratory illness, and cognitive function . . . " 

Bruce is happy to go on exchanging nifty results for quite a while. The emerging pattern seems to be that Earth has fast drug discovery but a harder time getting together a large representative cohort and keeping track of the participants for times on the order of years.

Dale is rapt! 

Their world definitely doesn't have much problem doing huge representative cohort studies over long periods of time! The way Dale talks about it makes it sound like a lot of the relevant data is being collected in a centralized way already, just for bureaucratic and medical-system tracking purposes, and it's not much additional hassle to pull particular chunks of it for research. They do consent for participation in studies, like Earth, but for the purely observational ones this is basically just 'sending a mass email with a yes/no checkbox'. 

Drug discovery on the Surface is slower than Earth. A lot of drug-development work actually happens in the Underworld, but from there it tends to be a long process to get adoption on the Surface. Though it does mean that the very early drug trials, purely looking at safety in humans, are generally skipped. The Underworld doesn't have good data collection, not the way the Surface does, but word gets around, and the Surface usually won't consider testing a new drug unless it's been used by thousands of people without any scary anecdotes popping up. 

Pevas is a lot more taciturn than his brother; he mostly listens, occasionally scratches some shorthand notes with a tablet and stylus. 

"What do local government structures look like on Earth?" he eventually asks Bruce, during a lull in the medical nerdery. 

"So, different countries do it a lot of different ways, but it's pretty common to have a mayor or a town council or both. A lot of stuff in the States is a combination of elections and 'whoever most wants to make sure something gets done'. And then some countries the smaller towns have all the elders making the decisions sort of collectively."

"How fascinating! That would be - predominantly a Chaos style of making decisions, here. Myself, I'm on the city council for Kast. Planning to run for the Head of Finances position, this coming year." 

"And here I can be grateful that the world has all sorts. His job sounds unbearable to me." 

"You could bear it just fine, if you tried. And I could bear yours if I had to. I am grateful neither of us has to settle for work that's merely 'bearable', though." 

"Yeah, same here, except for how I'm, heh, between jobs right now. I don't think I'd be cut out for government at all."

"Fair enough. Most people are not." 

"You've got a nice wide range of experience, though, it sounds like. Are you looking to see patients directly, or focus on research?" 

"I'd prefer something in research; we seem to have similar enough tech trees that I should be able to catch up pretty quickly."

"I'm sure you will! You seem very quick to land on your feet." 

(Elix is clearly bored by all the adult conversation about jobs and stuff, and is trying to engage his sister in a whispered side conversation.) 

The porch door slides open. "Dinner's ready! Come on in, everyone." 

"Thanks," he says, and files into the dining room with the others.

Dinner is a stew-type dish that almost resembles chili, except for prominently featuring eggplant. The fake "beef" is reasonably convincing texture-wise, and the dish itself contains plenty of other flavour sources. 

Dale mostly monopolizes the dinner-table conversation, asking more questions about Earth's health care systems and medical training institutions. 

Bruce can explain so much about Earth academia and also about how healthcare works from the patient and provider ends at various levels of national economic development. He freely admits that parts of it are total clusterfucks. How has this planet dealt with the thing where patient handoffs suck and are dangerous but long shifts also suck and are dangerous?

"It's a difficult tradeoff! Most inpatient centres are standardized on twelve-hour shifts for bedside providers, now, but there are two staggered shift schedules. 6 to 6, am or pm, and another cohort working 10-10. We did an extensive study and mistakes are lowest if people work two or three shifts back to back, and if their housing is less than a ten-minute commute from the hospital and they're not doing childcare or other household work when they get home between two shifts. So most hospitals have housing nearby, temporary dorm-style and also family homes, and a lot of support with childcare. We have software designed for keeping nursing assignments as similar as possible day-to-day, since that cuts down on handover errors; it's a tricky optimization problem but, you know, what are computers for if not that? Doctors and medical trainees have a buddy system; they'll trade off days and nights with someone they know and have especially good rapport with, and the one on-call for a given timeslot will make the decision whether they're missing important patient context and need to wake their buddy to check. But adequate documentation addresses a lot of that, and computers changed everything for that too. All the data collection that can possibly be automated, is, that saves a big chunk of staff time." 

"That's pretty cool! I haven't done any big-hospital practice myself, so I don't really have a sense for what that would feel like from the inside, but it sounds good and the extensive computer support can only help. How about the research systems, how do you go from an idea to a funded experiment to a publicly available result?"

Dale is happy to get into this! It all sounds pretty smooth, logistically; their patient database is standardized and shared across the entire continent, with built-in support for including patients in various research studies. It doesn't sound like they have much trouble at all getting enough volunteers. Funding is a constraint, but the government has a generous budget line for it, and in the past couple of decades, some Underworld mad scientist types are suddenly wealthy enough to fund significant efforts on their own. 

Cassea eventually declares that this is more than enough shop talk. "Bruce? Would you like me to show you the guest room, so you know where it is for later?" 

"Yes, thank you. Sorry for the excessive shop talk." He has never been able to refrain from doing that, no matter what planet he's on.

"I'm not blaming you! Entirely my husband's fault." She pats Dale on the head. "Anyway, follow me." 

The guest bedroom is upstairs. Again, it's a spiral staircase, with a pretty tight radius but the stairs are 'carpeted' in some rubbery not-carpet material that feels soft underfoot and also offers lots of grippiness. The top of the stairs has, not a door exactly, but a sort of velet-curtain-like barrier that provides surprisingly good sound isolation; the kids' conversation downstairs is suddenly muffled and sounds twice as far away. 

The hallway upstairs has real carpet, a beautiful rug rolled out on top of what looks like hardwood floorboards. There are a few pictures on the walls. 

This planet has really good soundproofing tech and that's great. He looks at the pictures as they go by.

One of them is a really good vaguely-Impressionist-style portrait of Cassea. There's a photograph of the family together, both children a few years younger than currently. Beside it is what looks like a crayon drawing by a child of - probably also the family? Then there's a watercolour painting of a landscape, a beautiful bluff with a gnarled windswept tree growing on it, overlooking an ocean. 

Cassea notices him looking, and smiles broadly. "Veth painted that. She used to love painting, she's...stopped, lately." The smile dims a little. "Anyway, here's your room." 

The guest room has a door which offers EVEN MORE thorough sound isolation; when Cassea opens it and shuts it behind them, they're suddenly in near-total silence. One wall is almost entirely a window - no, sliding glass doors, opening to a teeny private balcony that overlooks the back yard. It's currently dimly-lit, though, with twilight fading into dusk. Cassea fiddles with a panel beside the door, flicking on various lights - some bright ceiling-light panels that are almost like true daylight, a string of fairy-light-esque globes strung around the perimeter of the ceiling, various lamps that seem to come with sliders for brightness and colour. 

"What's your bed preference?" she asks him. "The mattress is on the firm side but we've got a spare topper, if you like it softer." 

"Firm is fine, thanks. Cool collection of light fixtures in here." He thinks vaguely that he hopes Veth's schedule problem or inspiration problem or whatever her trouble is goes away.

"I'm glad you like them! Spare toiletries here." She pulls open a drawer and shows him a neatly organized and varied spread of everything you would find in a hotel room plus a lot more things like 'sleep mask' and 'lip balm'. "Spare linens and nightclothes in the wardrobe - the clothes are all one-size-fits-all, for unexpected guests, we can take you on a proper shopping trip tomorrow." 

"Thank you so much!"

 . . . Now that he's looking at a bed it's suddenly salient that he's several hours of jet lagged and has mostly been running on nervous excitement and curiosity. "Is it alright if I go to bed now? I'm kind of not used to this time zone yet."

"Of course! That's absolutely fine. Bathroom is down the hall that way, it's the one with the curtain instead of a door, should be easy to find. You're welcome to raid the fridge if you wake up early and want something to eat. Sleep well!" 

She heads out. 

He briefly ponders why you would want a bathroom with a curtain instead of a door (ventilation?) then decides this is a problem for Tomorrow Bruce and goes to bed. He's kind of expecting to lie awake for a while worrying, but instead he passes out immediately and doesn't wake up until the sun rises or someone knocks on his door.

No one bothers knocking on his door! 

There are blackout curtains for the windows, but Bruce didn't close them before going to sleep, and as the sun rises, light seeps into the room through the ordinary curtains. Birds twittering outside the window are just barely audible across the double-paned glass, and if anyone else in the household is awake, it's impossible to tell through all the soundproofing. 

In that case he will figure out the shower controls, discover to his quiet delight that the spare clothes have printed labels rather than itchy tags, and head downstairs to see if anyone else is awake and can help him get set up with a tablet.

Cassea is making breakfast, singing to herself. 

And Elix is at the dining table, doing something on a tablet that might be homework or might be a game of some kind, hard to tell. 

"Bruce! Did you sleep well?" 

"I did, thanks! When one of you has the time, I heard there was a spare computer I could use to look up stuff like when my doctor's appointment is?"

"Oh, right, yes! I'm so sorry, I should have thought of that. Guess we don't exactly have a standard checklist for people arriving from another world! Elix, sweet, can you go get your Dad's spare tablet from the storage area?" 

"Moo-om. Do I have to. I'm practicing." 

"You can put it on pause, can't you? Which I can't do to these eggs." 

"I can go look for it if you don't mind me poking around in there. Or just wait until you're free."

"My son is perfectly available. Elix, you could show him your attic setup?" 

"I guess I could." Apparently this is appealing enough to compete with practicing. Elix pauses his tablet and hops up willingly enough. "Follow me?" 

"Sure. What were you practicing?"

"It's a new game for spatial skills! You need to fold or unfold things in your head in order to solve the puzzles in the maze and know what way your character should go, and it's on a timer, and -" 

Elix chatters about his spatial skills game, almost without pauses for breath, the entire way through bounding up three flights of stairs and swarming up a ladder to a trapdoor in the ceiling. "Here!" 

Sounds like a nifty game! "Ooh, a trapdoor, fun." Into the ceiling with him.

It's an unusually nice attic! It's finished, though not painted with anything more than plain grey primer; there's no exposed insulation-foam or boards or any other hazards for a small child, and it looks like it was probably set up as a playroom at some point. It's currently mostly stacked with boxes on one side. 

The other side has...some sort of complicated bizarre-looking contraption; it resembles a blend between a weightlifting rack, one of those electric massage chairs that show up at airports as a novelty, and an...ergonomic computer workstation? There are gloves hanging from wires, currently draped respectively over two halves of one of those ergonomic keyboards, and a number of other straps and Velcro bits, also dangling wires. All the wires snake together underneath the chairbench part, joining into a sort of umbilical cord that goes...somewhere...probably that box... 

Elix is bouncing with suppressed glee. "Dad and I made it!"

He bends and reaches, tenderly and lovingly, for a box resting at the foot of the chairthing, which, when opened, proves to contain what's recognizably a VR headset. 

"It's for working on the virtual-online Chaosworld! ...There's not very much there yet but it's a work in progress!" 

"Oh, wow, that's so cool! What senses and motor outputs does it support?" A virtual chaos world? Despite, or perhaps because of, his disinclination to all things chaos, he can see the potential and it's impressive. He can also see that he could easily spend the next several hours tinkering with the setup, but 1) it is not his, and 2) he has important life stuff to get done first.

Elix is delighted to explain! He flits around pointing out different wires-from-velcro-straps that do motion detection. The system detects movement in all four limbs and also turning your head! They're working on adding a stirrup-type setup and shoes, so that you can "walk" and feel appropriate pressure in your feet, and with more thought they might even be able to cover "different textures of ground to walk on." Currently the way to "walk" is to sort of fake the walking motion by moving your knees up and down, which has more verisimilitude than the previous version which was 'use the control on the joystick.' 

He surfaces after several minutes of talking nonstop. "- Oh right I'm supposed to get you a tablet one sec–" Elix darts across the room and dives into the stack of boxes in the other corner. 

Bruce has several ideas for getting different ground textures, the most promising one being loosely based on those Earth toys with all the pins where you can make an impression of your hand or your face or whatever, but yes, tablet, good idea. Time to see how differently general-purpose computer UIs turned out, which is also pretty exciting!

Elix digs out a fairly generic-looking tablet screen; it's about the size and thickness of a magazine, matte grey, with a flip-back cover like a book, and also a clear plastic roll-down cover that doesn't appear to impede using the touchscreen. 

"Okay let's go charge it!" He bounces back over to the ladder. 

Unfortunate how it doesn't fit in a typical pocket, especially when traversing a ladder, Bruce thinks as he follows Elix back down, though there's a lot to be said for nice big screens.

"Has this planet managed to agree on a single kind of charging adapter? Mine hasn't."

"For these, yes! Took five years of arguing about the standard before they picked one to roll out and imported this sort of tech from the Underworld. I think the Underworld still has about twenty different kinds of power-charging." 

"I guess it would, wouldn't it. Does a lot of stuff get, hm, beta-tested down under like that?"

"Yeah! That's where everything good comes from! For tech stuff, anyway. It's sort of a new thing, I guess? A hundred years ago there wasn't nearly as much stuff being invented."

"Yeah, technology on Earth has sped up a lot in the past several decades too. We think it's a mix of greater population, greater wealth so that population can afford to spend more time inventing things, and a couple of innovations that make more innovation easier."

"Huh, cool, makes sense." 

The standardized charging station turns out to be wireless; it's a flat black panel on one of the walls, apparently magnetic, with a couple other tablets of different sizes stuck to it. A cord trails from the bottom of it into the wall. 

"This is the really fast sort of charger," Elix says brightly. "There's portable ones and ones you can just plug into your wall sockets, but all the new-built houses have the central-installed kind now. It'll be good to use in - ten minutes, probably. Let's go get breakfast?" 

Breakfast is on the table. It's scrambled eggs with wilted spinach and shredded cheese mixed in, with crackers and fruit on the side. 

Bruce noshes on fruit and checks his recently installed vocabulary for anything that looks like the name of a caffeinated beverage.

His recently installed vocabulary informs him that the tea being steeped in a pot right now is very mildly caffeinated.

Other than that, it...sort of seems like caffeine is considered a drug rather than a beverage in the usual sense? He seems to know words for caffeine pills, or powder or liquid that can be added to beverages in standardized doses, and also the equivalents for a few other stimulant-type drugs. 

Well, shoot. Maybe they think caffeine addiction is degenerate or something. Admittedly it kind of is degenerate, if far from the worst thing Terran grad students get up to. He'll have a cup of tea when it's ready and consider it an opportunity to back off on his tolerance a bit. It's not like he's likely to pull a lot of laboratory all-nighters this week.

And after that: computer!

Dale is pulled in to help with this! He logs in - using an alphanumeric password but also his thumbprint - and then very rapidly navigates to some sort of back-end-settings area, and tells it to wipe the tablet of all his base profile information and links. 

"...All right, we'll need to do some of this manually, but Bruce, you should have a profile set up at all? Did you get fingerprinted yet, that'll make this faster to set up but if not we can open a chat with the admin side and they'll help out." 

"I did get fingerprinted and have a base profile set up, yeah." He wonders if fingerprint scanners are better here; on Earth they're kind of crap but a surprising number of people would rather use them anyway than type a password.

Then this process should go pretty straightforwardly! It takes less than five minutes, and then the tablet is associated with Bruce and he can set up any or all of various different kinds of login-verification. (Dale mentions that people tend to go for more or less security depending if they're doing sensitive work on that particular device; the base profile itself contains relatively little nonpublic information, and there are options to place extra verification-locks on viewing or editing things like medical data.) 

Once he's in, he can go look at the various pages of his base profile - mostly not filled in yet - or go on the Internet, or look through various specialized software that he could download. (All of it seems to be free.) 

He reuses his Earth laptop password (the fifth through twenty-fifth digits of pi), makes sure he knows where and when his doctor's appointment is, then looks up an elementary civics curriculum on how the government works and the latest issues of the most prominent scientific journals.

Their internet is very straightforward to search! It - seems to have less on it, in a way, or at least it's not turning up any personal blogs or social media-type sites in response to the search. There are various government and organization-sponsored sites, and one that seems analogous to Wikipedia but noticeably higher in writing quality and completeness. All the sites he visits have clean, simple layouts and no pop-up or banner ads at all. 

It has the same feeling as the lobby area by the exits from the Underworld, of being a place mostly devoid of art. 

The civics curriculum he can find lays out a democratic local leadership system that sounds not-obviously-dissimilar from Earth's, and various regional and state-level elections; the main difference is that full-population referendums are more frequent, and a lot more effort seems to have been put into making voting low-friction and efficient. 

There are lots of scientific publications online! None of the ones he turns up seem to be paywalled, although some want him to register for free in order to view the full texts. The other noticeable difference is that the language used in the publications isn't especially formal. 

Referenda are good. Informal-language journals are disorienting and then cool, like someone with a really unfamiliar accent.

The lack of ads and paywalls makes him a bit nervous that he's being charged per website, so he should look that up too.

This information takes a few tries to look up, it seems like it's not among the top frequently asked questions, but eventually he can find a page on not-Wikipedia that lays out a summarized timeline of the Internet being set up on the Surface. It's been fully tax-surplus funded and free to use since its inception. Which was, apparently nearly two decades after the first private networks were being built in the mid-Underworld. 

Awwwwww that's so good! Freedom of information with no distracting commercials! The total split between the Law and Chaos internets is kind of inconvenient but he can see how people would like it that way, especially if they were used to it.

If he has more time before his doctor's appointment he'll look for biology or physics research job websites and see what sort of work he could get if he persuades the local credentialing system he is approximately who he says he is.

Oddly, they don't even seem to have academia as an institution that does research; at a glance it looks like there are small vocation-specific schools or colleges for individual fields, scattered around, but that a lot of people pick up their skills on the job. Once he's landed on the right keywords, he can find several government-run or multinational organizations that employ researchers, and a number of for-profit companies with openings in their R&D departments.

The latter in particular don't seem to prioritize degrees or formal credentials that hard; they want references and onsite, hands-on work trials instead. A handful of them actually have pretty detailed descriptions of their multiday interview/trial process, along with links to resources for brushing up on some of the prerequisites they'll be expecting. 

He can't reach his references but interviews and work-trials are as accessible for him as for anyone; he will happily tabsplosion between the prerequisite resources and more journal articles until it's about twice as long before his doctor's appointment as he expects he would need to get there in the absence of unknown unknowns and then head out.

The clinic he was booked at is in the same neighbourhood as the house. The map, which he can pull up easily on his tablet by following a link in the appointment booking itself, shows a layout with a spoked-wheel set of local residential streets and the neighbourhood amenities - grocery and retail stores, government office, community centre, clinic - in the middle. The map has a window in the corner with a prompt suggesting he can link it to his bicycle or scooter and get directions as he rides, but it's also a very straightforward route. 

At that distance, he'll take the time to walk so he can sightsee a bit and get a better sense of the layout than he would whizzing by on a bicycle. It's very convenient that he doesn't have to wait for a train at any point.

Everything continues to be very clean and easy to navigate; he doesn't even really need the map. The houses are tall - most three storeys, some apparently four or five - and skinny, packed pretty closely together, but most of them have little lawns out front. Well, mostly gardens. The locals don't seem to be fans of manicured grass. Around half the houses have roof gardens as well. Climbing ivy is a common choice of decor.

The centre of the 'wheel' has a sort of ring-shaped road around a cluster of much taller buildings, surrounding a courtyard with a fountain and wading pool and a children's play structure. There's very detailed signage pointing out what's inside which building, and an interactive digital display screen with a map on it. One of the buildings is a warehouse of some sort; a steady stream of...delivery drones?? appear to be leaving through an upper-floor landing bay, carrying packages. 

The doctor's clinic is in the building next to the warehouse, on the third floor. 

Bruce continues to think this place has good urban planning to the point where he's curious how old the city is. Also delivery drones are just great. He heads up to the clinic and does whatever their sign-in and intake-paperwork ritual is.

There mostly isn't one! They have all his information from his online profile; the clerk/reception just asks him to log into the Wifi on his tablet and tap a button from said profile confirming that he is, in fact, himself, and then directs him straight to a room to wait.

"Feel free to grab something to eat or drink, if you like," she adds, pointing out a snacks-and-beverages counter. 

Oh, neat! He gets some water and hangs out reading until it's his turn.

He's not waiting very long! The clinic seems to be very efficiently run, and within about three minutes a young man comes in and introduces himself as a “junior medical assistant”, and then asks a MUCH more detailed set of questions on all of his past medical history including family history, before calling in a young woman, apparently a trainee doctor, who does a physical examination and orders some screening bloodwork and scans. 

“This is just one-time, to get your baseline,” she explains. “You seem very healthy. Are there any concerns you’d like to bring up?”

"Was there anything in my files about the, uh, the shapeshifting?"

She frowns. "Yes, I did skim through that. It's...pretty far outside my training, honestly, it's not exactly something that happens normally here! For the aspect that's more, um, related to the degree of divide you have with Chaos, as opposed to the physical aspect, it probably makes sense to refer you to a therapist? I need to talk to my supervisor about who she would recommend."