The buildings are taller than Metropolis's, and the streets are narrower and don't have cars.

Well that's weird! If it's a vision or illusion it's a good one. Did he get transported somewhere? But where? Is it something experimental? Did he accidentally time-travel at some point in the last ten minutes? Have aliens kidnapped him again? Do any foreign countries have cities like that? 

He glances over it with x-ray and telescopic vision before getting lower, looking for signs and people and cultural landmarks and evidence that someone's screwing with him.

The people are visibly human, mostly various shades of brown with very few Asians. They are doing an array of normal things: teaching children, running shops, working in factories, treating the sick at a hospital. There's rather a lot of crying and more people biting themselves than he'd expect. 

...and over here someone seems to have taken hostages. 

Why are people biting themselves! He should figure out what's causing that right after he figures out where he is which he'll do right after diving into action to save the day. (Some situations are pretty much always clearcut.)

You don't want the bad guys to notice what you're doing before you've done it, that's how you get dead hostages. How many hostage-takers, how many weapons, how many hostages, does he have a clear enough path to use heat rays or is he relying on super speed here? The victims are top priority but if there's only one or two aggressors it'll go faster to just take them out.

One hostage-taker, three hostages, aggressor has a gun and two knives. There are... what are probably police?... out in front, all of whom are wearing brown robes.

One of the police officers is talking to the hostage-taker over the phone. "--the guy got shot in the leg at the beginning of this thing, but all kinds of unexpected things can happen in a stressful situation like this, yeah? You’ve done a good job of keeping the peace. No one else has been hurt. Everybody here is proud of you for that. Let’s see if we can get everyone out of here with no one getting hurt, okay?"

Is this... what is this? Do they know this guy? Should he not be interrupting whatever that is to arrest this guy?

Well, the most recoverable option seems to be removing the weapons. The hostage-taker feels the gust of wind and his gun disappearing in the same moment. The door is open now. There's a brief purple blur and then his knives are gone too.

"SOMEONE TOOK MY GUN!" the hostage-taker yells. "You STOLE it. WHY DID YOU STEAL MY GUN."

...why is the door open, thinks Brother Hope, who would definitely be thinking I'm not paid enough for this job if he hadn't taken a vow of poverty. 

"I don't know what happened to your gun," Brother Hope says, "but if I thought someone had stolen my weapon, I would feel mad and scared. Yeah? You're relying on that to feel safe."

The hostage-taker sniffles.

"I wonder if we can think about some other things that will help you feel safe," Brother Hope says. "Do you have a self-care* box at home? Should I send someone to get it for you?"

*The Language's connotations for this term are much less like "Instagram" and much more like "running water."

Now seems like a bad time to interrupt the brown robes. He was thinking about removing the hostage-taker, but they've clearly got something working there, and jumping in again might make things worse. If the hostages are in danger he's getting them out, but they don't seem to be. Maybe he wants to find out where this guy's self-care box is and then run over and grab it for him. He could smooth things over and introduce himself while also having some fun with it.

The other brown robes are sitting near Brother Hope, drinking tea. He can catch bits of conversation. 

"--don't know how the hell he got a gun, what the fuck is the Weapons Control committee doing, sitting around with their thumbs up their asses?"

"You could go out for it next year."

"Fuck that--"

"--it's going to be Colorado for him, he has priors."

"Man. Poor guy. One bad day and you're hoeing peas in a monastery for the rest of your life."

"Could happen to anyone--"

Meanwhile, Brother Hope has gotten the hostage-taker to say his address and the location of his self-care box. (It's under his bed.)

Zip zip zip figuring out local address standards zip zip zip house bed box zip zip zip back. The guy they sent to retrieve it hasn't made it a block.

Hostage-taker seems volatile, guy on the phone seems stressed... what if we give it to the brown robe who's heading off to the house. He lands nearby, not directly blocking the path but not about to be missed, friendly disarming smile on his face. "I think this is the box you're looking for?" he says, holding it out.

Blink blink blink. 

"...what," he says. 

"You were headed over to that man's house to pick up a self-care box. This is the box." He says like everything about this is entirely reasonable.

"HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT."

"Well, it was right where he said it was and it looked just like I'd expect a box like that to look." He holds it out. "I think you're supposed to be taking it back over there, now? Or I can do it if you need a minute."

Unable to process this particular information, the brown robe bites their wrist hard. 

...You know what he is just going to get the hostages out one two three and then leave the self-care box in front of its owner and close the door. "Everyone alright?" he asks the hostages, calm and gentle in the way you're supposed to be in these situations. "It's okay, you're safe. I hope that wasn't too startling."

...the hostages all break into tears. One of them starts hitting themself; one throws themself on the ground and rocks back and forth; one pulls at their hair.

Brother Hope, who was selected for this job because of his high scores on emotional-regulation assessments, says, "excuse me, soulbearer, who are you?"

"...Superman," he says, more than a little nonplussed. "Sorry, this isn't... the usual response I get when I try to help out. Uh. Are they alright?"

One of the other brown robes is gently guiding the hostages. 

"Being taken hostage is very stressful," Brother Hope says, "and then you... teleported? Which is a violation of the conventional laws of physics."

"Maybe I went a bit too fast," he says apologetically. "I really didn't intend any harm. Is there anything I can do for you guys that won't, uh, freak everyone out? ...One of your guys started biting himself a minute ago, should somebody go make sure he's okay?" He steps out of the way so a brown robe can get by, to avoid confusion about whether he somehow thinks he is the man for that job.

"Oh, they'll be fine with just a bit to calm down," Brother Hope says very soothingly. "Can you normally go that fast?"

"I can. It's not actually breaking any fundamental laws that I know of? If I try to go faster than light I just time-travel." Humble sheepish grin.

Blink. Blinkblink. 

"...I'm sorry, I'm not a physics monk, but I think there are several reasons that we don't expect humans to be able to run faster than humans normally do."

Brother Hope is very confused but he has had a lot of training in how to react to confusing situations; his voice is being reassuring and soothing and saying agreeable validating things while his mind is going WHAT.

"Oh, I'm not human! And I'm also not running. Here, let me--" He flies in a loop and touches back down.

O.o o.O O.O

"We didn't know that people who aren't humans existed," Brother Hope says calmly. "Or-- we knew about dolphins and primates and neural networks on computers and so on."

"I'm not sure we knew dolphins are people, so we're even!" He suddenly takes a more sober tone. "Sir, I'm sure you have a lot of questions, and I'll be perfectly willing to sit down with you and discuss what's happening here. I know I've got some questions of my own. But there's a very upset man in that building who still needs apprehending, and some people out here who've had enough excitement to last them the month, and we really ought to deal with that first."

"We are dealing with that," Brother Hope says. "There's an entire monk team on this hostage situation, and because I'm the most skilled, I'm handling the most unusual situation."

(In fact, a woman in brown robes is talking to the hostage taker and escorting him to a car.)

"Well, you know better than me which things you're needed for," he says. "This really does seem like the kind of conversation it's better to have sitting down, though, and maybe once we're somewhere less... public. I've got to admit, I'm getting a bit skittish about the reactions people have been having when I say or do something unexpected." Why is everyone so upset about him. Why are they so upset in general. The part of him that detects evil plots is reporting back a lot of indistinct concern.

"That seems like a good idea," says Brother Hope. "Normally I'd take the train back to the church and request a small meeting room but I don't know if that's appropriate for your species."

Things which have been trained into Brother Hope until they're reflex: People Need Different Things. 

"That should work just fine. I'd offer to fly ahead and save you the extra train ticket -- if your trains use tickets -- but I'm concerned it might cause more disruption."

"Let's not have people unexpectedly br-- demonstrate previously unknown aspects of the laws* of physics until we are prepared to explain it to everyone."

It occurs to Brother Hope that he might be insane.

"May we be quiet on the walk to the train? I need to pray." 

*Lit. "word"

Superman nods and is quiet.

He is kind of eye-catching even walking quietly next to the monk, what with the skin-tight brightly-colored costume. His cape has a tendency to billow.

Ozytopians are jaded by people who make odd dressing decisions, especially if they're walking next to a monk. Maybe he's going to talk to children. 

Brother Hope takes a deep breath and centers himself. He runs through a few of his favorite litanies and prays, quietly, for guidance. 

Is he psychotic? He's certainly believing things that don't seem to reflect consensus reality. But from the evidence he has, that this man breaks the laws of physics-- no, doesn't break, that's blasphemy, the logos never changes, it is the same across all of space and all of time, only our knowledge of it changes-- that this man breaks the best current models of how physics works is simply the most accurate hypothesis. Other people responded the way he'd expect them to respond, if this was true. Sister Kutka took over the hostage-taker and left him to handle the unforeseen event, as they'd trained. They had not encouraged him to go speak to his spiritual director.

He could be doing a more complex hallucination of all of his experiences. But this kind of all-encompassing delusion is not known to happen to psychotic people; it could be dream-logic, but if that's the case everything he's experiencing is wrong. That kind of utter skepticism is a known red flag which everyone in the Teachingsphere has been trained to avoid. Unless you have specific reason not to, you trust the evidence of your eyes and ears about what's happening around you. To do otherwise makes delusion even more likely. 

He centers himself again. So there is a member of a nonhuman sapient species who can do things previously believed impossible, and Brother Hope is making first contact. Brother Hope is good at his job, but part of that is that is that he doesn't have any delusions about how good he is at his job; he's the best peaceful-resolver-of-stressful-situations in the city, but he's not nearly good enough at it to work at a prison-monastery, and it's far from obvious that this is the appropriate skillset for this job anyway.

Of course, it's far from obvious that it isn't, especially on short notice.

Brother Hope prays for patience, slowness to anger and quickness to forgive; he prays for the ability to step outside himself and to understand the ways that the aliens may be different; he prays for kindness and compassion; he prays for the ability to notice whether his skills are the ones needed, and get in someone else if they're needed, without desire for fame or to push off a terrifying responsibility on someone else; he prays for any skills he might need he is not wise enough to ask for. He reminds himself of his favorite sages and imagines their response to this situation. Finally, he prays: thy will be done.

Train. Boarding procedure. Seats.

"Before we get to that meeting room, could you fill me in some on what kind of place I've landed? If you're done praying, that is." Superman is also pretty confused, but this is a lot more old hat for him, and he can pick up a ridiculous amount just from looking around, his questions aren't pressing in the same way. (He's looking around the city for anything that looks like mad science or supervillainy or conspiracies or really anything that might be a clue in the event that this entire set-up is the product of some evil scheme. Also taking in the sights.)

The train boarding procedure is in fact pretty similar to what it is in Metropolis.

"You've landed on a city in the Teachingsphere? A pretty moderately-sized one, we're not that important. It's called Appleseed."

"And what is the Teachingsphere?" The name is suggestive but what it suggests could be anything from a set of local alliances to -- he looks skyward for signs of life -- okay, at most a global empire, but that's still a wide range.

...Wow, Mars looks different. That's not relevant to anything right now.

"It's the set of towns which have discovered the true teachings of the logos, as opposed to the rest of the world, which is currently mired in ignorance."

"Is the logos your, uh, god? You seem a lot more like a man of the cloth than the cops from where I'm from, I've got to say."

"Oh, no, the logos isn't a god! It created the world and guides us in our hearts."

"Huh!" That sure sounds like God but it seems like bad form to come into a maybe-theocracy and immediately argue points of faith. "What are its teachings?"

"Someone once challenged the Teacher to summarize the Teaching standing on one foot. He said that it was to believe things that are true with your whole heart and mind and soul, and to hold all sentient beings in compassion including yourself. --Of course, like most stories of the Teacher, this was probably a later creation attributed to the Teacher for additional credibility. But it's still a nice story."

"Those seem like good principles to me!" He has so many different smiles. Recently he's been switching between friendly and inquisitive ones. "Is the Teaching a big part of life here? Where I'm from a member of law enforcement would've taken me to the police station before a church."

"What's a police station?"

"Well, it's where... the police work. The police prevent or investigate crimes and help maintain the peace. A station would have, well, offices and holding cells and a room for questioning and so on. If there's someone handling a hostage situation it's usually a police officer. I work with them a lot."

"Oh, in the Teachingsphere peacekeeping monks do that. Also investigation monks? It is very weird to think of those as being the same job, they're really quite different skillsets."

"You mentioned physics monks earlier. How many jobs are done by monks?"

"Monks are maybe five percent of the population? Less than ten percent, certainly. We do government, peacekeeping, rituals, spiritual direction, academic research, contemplation of the logos..."

"It still sounds like a broad set of people! I suppose you don't really distinguish between secular and religious authority, then. Are monks selected and governed by the church?" Is any of this the reason behind all the terror and sadness here? He sure hopes not. The monks seem nice enough.

"I suppose? You normally discern a vocation in upper school, with the help of your Virtue teacher-- who is a monk, of course, all teachers are."

This still isn't really clearing up what a monk is, which is frustrating, because he might either need to defeat or team up with them at some point. "What is it that makes someone a monk? Is it their disposition, or a set of practices, or what career they have, or who funds them...?"

"Well, you take vows of poverty and temperance and service and trustworthiness and so on, and then the church* pays you to do the kind of work you want a trustworthy person without conflicting incentives to do."

*A different word than the one for the building; literally "the people cooperating for the common good"

"There are people on Earth who take similar vows! I don't know any that handle government work, but I can see how those are traits you would want people in those positions to have. ...This may seem like an odd jump in topics, but are there people in the Teachingsphere who don't follow the Teaching?" Because the reason monks aren't in charge of everything in America is because they believe in religious freedom, and if he has to pretend to convert at some point to avoid getting driven out on pitchforks he will but he's going to be grumpy about it.

"It's illegal but not very illegal, it's like drug use or self-harm. You just have to talk to a spiritual director once a year and give them a chance to convince you not to. I do spiritual direction for criminals myself."

Self-harm isn't illegal where he's from but drugs definitely are. He hopes the slap-on-the-wrist approach is an improvement. "I haven't spent much time in places with a state religion. Do visitors or immigrants need to convert from their original faiths?"

"We don't normally take immigrants that aren't converts, but this is an unusual situation. We'll have to figure out how the logos manifests in your home universe."

"I probably won't be staying permanently," he says apologetically, "I have responsibilities back on Earth. But I will be happy to stay here for a while before that, and then establish diplomatic relations between our worlds and leave you a signal device that can contact me." Or give one to somebody else, in case the Teachingsphere turns out to suck, but nobody needs to know up front that you think they might be evil. "What would I read if I wanted to gain an understanding of the logos?" That is ideally easy to locate using x-ray and telescopic vision. He's never tried reading a closed book on a bookshelf while in a moving train before, and there's a chance it'll give him his first case of motion sickness, but there's no point in not trying.

"Probably The Beginner's Guide to the Logos, people I know who do missionary tours recommend it."

Superman may notice that this train is labeled the QUIET CAR and there are signs that say USE OF A QUIET CAR WITHOUT A QUIET CAR PERMIT IS ILLEGAL AND MAY RESULT IN A FINE. The people in this car are more chill than those on the street, though one is crying quietly. Someone is reading a book called Calculus: How We Understand Change that has a sticker on it saying "Plain language edition! Recommended for those with IQs of 80 to 90." 

It has been reasonably quiet. He's been tracking the crying person but not trying to help, he keeps messing up here and this is honestly one of the least concerning displays of emotion he's seen today. The person with the book is surprising but he thinks he approves of whatever's going on there. "Does the logos encourage, er, intense displays of emotion?" he does ask, in case the answer is 'yes, that is one of our core teachings'. ...Self-harm is illegal. He's pretty sure he's witnessed several people self-harming. That feels like some kind of clue.

(His gives up on locating and reading a copy of The Beginner's Guide to the Logos when it starts looking like more effort than it's worth. He can always do that once he's in an actual church and not on a moving train.)

"You're not supposed to be carried away by your emotions or to repress them," Brother Hope says. "You're supposed to unify your emotions and your reason in order to find wisdom."

"Would you say people in this city usually succeed at that?" He's not trying to sound skeptical really he's not it's just coming through a bit anyways.

"Well, we're not all saints, but we do better than people in the rest of the world."

"Huh."

"If I flew around the entire planet, looking for people from all kinds of places, what kinds of things would I see?"

"Mostly small villages, not larger than a few hundred people, very poor. Occasional cities on trade routes, full of garbage and disease and violence. Occasional atrocities."

"Even the Teachingsphere must have some garbage and disease and violence." There's something about this he doesn't like. The major options so far seem like either the Teaching sucks but is masking that with racism and propaganda or they actually are above-average and their world is just worse than modern-day Earth. Or maybe they're weird aliens, or maybe they've actually figured out something important and humans should be having more breakdowns, or some other thing, you should always be on the lookout for signs that some bizarre thing that would never occur to you is happening.

"Of course, but the cities elsewhere are really bad. We have garbage services and don't just have refuse piling up everywhere."

"That's always good." Gonna have to doublecheck all of these claims both here and abroad later. Right now he's developing a beef with the curvature of the Earth.

"You mentioned saints. What do those look like?"

"Oh, well, they're naturally much better at emotional regulation and distress tolerance than normal people. I tested 'saint' myself, that's why I do deescalation, you don't want someone who's going to bite themself when they're overwhelmed doing deescalation work."

"...I'm not used to there being a test! Usually the people we call saints are only sainted after they die. I suppose if you're measuring the highest potential for good rather than the holiest lives lived there's a lot less chance of getting it wrong." He's not clear on the fine details of the selection practice, actually, you don't get many Catholics in rural Kansas and it's usually not a very pressing part of helping them out. He's been to the Vatican before but the topic didn't really come up, which at the time he was frankly grateful for. ...Is Superman a saint here? He really hopes he isn't. He likes getting recognition for his good qualities but getting declared a living saint crosses some kind of line.

"Oh! Holiest lives lived is a very different thing, that's called a 'sage,' and of course you wouldn't call someone a sage until they're dead. It creates a weird relationship with them. For that matter, every few decades we have to have a big committee meeting and argue about which people should be removed from 'sage' status because we've learned more about ethics and it turned out they were Bad Actually. --Last I checked, sages are somewhat more likely than average to have below tenth percentile emotional regulation and distress tolerance? Of course some of that is that it's easier to figure out what sagely behavior is if you're below tenth percentile emotional regulation."

"You know, I don't know enough about holy people to know how good at emotional regulation they are. They're good at avoiding sins and talking to God and they do many good deeds and are willing to die for their beliefs, which might call for a different skillset, though I'm not sure it's, er, an opposed one. When I return to my Earth I will recommend you some priests."

"I'd be very grateful! We're very interested in learning new things about what the logos commands. That's probably one of the most valuable things about meeting people from a new world."

It's their stop!

That's a very religious outlook. He supposes he is talking to a monk.

He will gladly follow Brother Hope off the train and politely greet anyone else they need to interact with on their way from there through the church to an appropriate meeting room.

Brother Hope takes him to a small meeting room!

It has absurdly comfortable chairs. These are some amazingly comfortable chairs. Something which is recognizably a variant of the Serenity Prayer is on the wall. 

"Have you made first contact with aliens before?" he asks.

"...Well, I did some exploring in my teen years, and a few of the species I encountered hadn't heard of aliens before. We couldn't communicate very well, but I helped them out where I could, and tried to leave on good terms with their leaders and planetary protectors. But the more significant story, I think, is from when I was a small child.

"My real name is Kal-El. I come from a planet called Krypton. Krypton was a rather advanced planet, full of genius and technological wonders, but it had a flaw -- an instability in its core would eventually cause it to explode. My parents, Jor-El and Lara, were scientists who realized the death of Krypton was approaching, and tried to warn Krypton's leaders, but many people refused to listen and the few evacuation attempts failed. In a last ditch effort to save any part of Krypton, they placed me in a prototype rocket just big enough for one passenger and sent me in the direction of the first inhabited world they could find, a planet called Earth.

"Sometime after my arrival on Earth, I came to a rural town and revealed myself to the world as Superboy. I spent about a decade based there, performing good deeds and super-feats at home and abroad, and then moved my focus to a city called Metropolis a few years ago, where I've been operating as Superman.

"The press has always interested in me, of course, and I've told them just what I'm telling you now, but Earth has had its share of heroes and villains, people with remarkable abilities, and even with people from other worlds -- I was unique, I think, but not unprecedented. I've visited alternate Earths, sometimes ones where I didn't exist, but as often as not they were similar enough to my own world that I didn't realize what had happened until well into the visit, sometimes after I left. Not always, though. I think that may be what's happened here."

"Interesting! We don't have any aliens or people with remarkable abilities. I wonder if that's the point of divergence."

"That could be! The heroic tradition goes back to Hercules, so our worlds must have diverged long ago."

"I don't know who Hercules is, so it must!"

"He lived in ancient Greece!" Anyone's guess whether that existed here. "Let's see, what else do you want to know?"

"I don't know what Greece is either. --What have you found out about the logos? It's very exciting to have an independent source from which we can check our work, so we know if we're overlooking something or have been carried away by fads."

"...Well. A lot of people believe a lot of different things. I can't speak to the creation of the universe, since viewing it through any means would have terrible consequences, but scientists generally agree that it began as a single point and then rapidly expanded and cooled after that, and theologians generally agree that this was put in motion by some kind of Creator. I know a spirit from the reality next door to ours who's commanded to enact vengeance and root out evil by a Voice that he identifies as the same entity, and I, er, mostly take his word for that. As for guiding us in our hearts, I think most people would identify that with their moral center, and a lot of them would identify it with the Creator, but there are also pantheons that many people used to worship and some people still do, and they guide people too -- I work with a pagan hero, and whether or not her gods are the same thing as the one God that most people in my country worship, when Athena grants her wisdom or Hermes grants her swiftness or Hercules grants her strength I believe they speak to her the same way. And my people, Kryptonians, worshipped a god called Rao in much the same way. There are dozens of gods in India I could hardly begin to name, and things like universal oneness that I'm not sure I can do justice. And, well, even within all these traditions there's a lot of variation." He rubs the back of the neck. "I'm sure this must sound odd to you."

"It sounds like you have a lot of competing visions of the logos? Rather than just one," he says. "I wonder if the superpowers caused that somehow. --Oh, it's very important to check in on your farms and make sure the animals are okay, it turns out that farming that creates enough meat for everyone involves torturing animals. Unless it's beef, beef is okay."

"That wasn't much of an issue" growing up on the Kent farm "the last time I was around a lot of livestock, but there's been a lot of innovation in meat farming recently. I can look into it."

"It's possible the superpowers do affect that! It seems like it'd be a lot harder to argue that gods exist when they're not making people their champions or handing down blessings and curses."

"It's considered blasphemy to say that the logos performs miracles-- it arranged things the way it wanted them to be arranged at the beginning of the universe, and we don't know better than it how things should be."

"...That is a fascinating take. I suppose it's a matter of what you think a miracle is. And, er, what theory of time you subscribe to."

"The logos never violates the laws of physics. I confess I'm not a physicist myself and don't know anything about theories of time."

"That... might be true in my world. Scientists have never been able to provide a robust explanation for how physical laws produce gods or magic or divine intervention or the nature of other planes but there have been some recent discoveries about the fifth dimension that seem promising, and... and, well... I'm sure given time we will discover things that make the stranger things about reality fall into place." He can feel an understanding of cosmic events just beyond his reach but it's so blurred and dreamlike that it was almost certainly hidden for a reason, if it wasn't just a passing fancy. Probably one of those things he shouldn't talk or act on or think too much about, in case it momentarily snarls the timeline. Just like his entire understanding of chronophysics, unfortunately. "I don't know much about causality myself, just that the guys working the numbers tell me it's a lot more complicated than it looks."

"I'm sure your laws of physics are perfectly mathematically consistent and will be understood with time!" Brother Hope says. "Maybe we can have some monks help, if that seems like a good idea."

(This is a very normal situation. Visitors from other planes are normal. Everything about the world is normal and it is blasphemy to think it isn't; if you're the one who thinks quantum physics or alternate dimensions are weird, you're the one that's mistaken.)

"I'm sure they will appreciate the chance to collaborate." He kind of suspects based on the everything that Earth's scientists are more advanced but, who knows, maybe they're skewing things and this is actually a really poor area.

"All right, so you have more experience than we do in first contact. What are the best practices?"