"I'm sorry, I'm distracted from my job by how incredibly weird you are and it's difficult to be professional when you have no idea what's going on and it involves alternate universes. I'll probably recover in a couple of minutes and be able to look at loans for you."

She was really hoping he'd assume 'ceased to exist in the same universe as me' would just mean 'ceased to exist'. She really doesn't want to lie to these people!

(If she were being properly virtuous here she would be avoiding deliberately misleading them but that would make her life so much more difficult while she's still figuring things out and getting oriented! She does not want to commit to being a famous visitor from another reality if she can avoid it.)

"I'm sorry, I know I am weird relative to most people you're likely to meet here and I talk in confusing ways sometimes. I also ceased to exist in the same universe as my great-grandfather when he died, and my favorite childhood cold dessert place when it went out of business. It just the sort of thing that happens sometimes! Usually less surprisingly and life-changingly than when it happened to my employer and my bank within a week of each other, but."

(Was that crossing a line? That was kind of crossing a line.)

He looks so confused! "If your bank just...closed down...where is your money now?"

"Inaccessible to me! Which is why I would like a loan."

Headshake. "So - you don't have a bank anymore, and you don't have a credit record, and you have millions of dollars that are inaccessible to you, and you don't have a job but expect to get one, and you think you're 97th percentile for -

- do you perchance suspect you speak any languages I wouldn't have heard of. My theory is that you work for the secret FS government project on Central Island whose representatives speak a different language to make it harder for them to accidentally tell everyone exactly they work on but it's considered rude to ask about that directly since it's secret for national security reasons!"

"I suspect I do, but that is because I was raised in an obscure country that no American I've met has ever heard of and not because I work for the FS government, which I do not."

"Huh, okay. Well - I can get you $20,000 at 5%, to be repaid monthly in $500 increments unless you refinance."

"That is adequate, thank you! Is there anything else I have to do or will you just put the money in my account?"

"You have to read out the agreement to repay." He passes it to her.

She reads out the agreement, assuming it's not very complicated. If it's very complicated she will want to read it carefully and silently first.

It's not very complicated. She agrees to make her payments, or renegotiate the loan first. If she doesn't do that she will be in default. They can take money from her bank accounts or from her wages if she's in default, subject to certain restrictions*, and other potential creditors will ask about defaults.

*Garnishing of her bank account can't leave her with less than $125 and garnishing of her wages can't reduce them to less than $300 in a biweekly period, and garnishment for child support or court fees gets priority over private creditors. 

Then she will agree to pay! And this will cause her to have money which can be exchanged for goods and for services! Like apartments! And drugs! Starting with the apartment. She checked some listings at the shelter so now she can just... go back to the shelter to send them an email? She should acquire a computer. While she's emailing apartment managers she will also search for an electronics store.

There's a Best Buy and a Radio Shack on the street not too far from the shelter. 

She will investigate both, Radio Shack first in order to test her hypothesis that store names are somehow not considered contentful, and it will not be a literal shack selling nothing but radios.

It's not a literal shack! A sign on the door informs her that they started in a shack but have now gotten a normal storefront and kept the name for recognizability. In addition to radios it sells electronic parts, lots of electronic parts. 

She is pretty sure her comparative advantage in this world is not building a computer out of transistors. She'll try the Best Buy even though it probably won't actually have optimal goods for sale.

Indeed it doesn't but it does have computers, and a sign that reads 'price matching guarantee: if you find the exact same item cheaper somewhere else, we will undercut them by 10%! This doesn't end up getting used very often but it means that our people whose job it is to go check if anywhere else is cheaper are incentivized to try really hard at that!'

"Hello! I want to buy a portable computer and a tutorial in how to use it."

"Oh, I'm glad you're not just looking, we get paid on commissions so I irrationally resent everyone who comes here and doesn't want to buy things. I'm going to try to sell you a more expensive computer than you probably need but in my defense expensive computers are extremely cool and will let you play video games and stuff."

"I am unlikely to buy an expensive computer unless the expensive computers have noticeable-to-me superiority at basic computing tasks. The only ones I can think of that have nontrivial hardware requirements are networking and text-audio biconversion but I'm not a computer person so I might be wrong about that. Depending on price I might also want a non-networked computer and portable data storage? Alternately, I could be upsold on computer hardware if there are hardware-intensive video games, but I would need to be convinced that I wanted to play those video games first."

"Cool, in that case let's spend five minutes in the video games aisle so you can look at some demos and see if you're actually going to be willing to spend a couple hundred dollars for better hardware for video games, they're basically the only thing that's worth getting better hardware for aside from wedding photographers. I guess some people work in computing-intensive industries but I assume they get computers from their jobs, they don't show up at Best Buy."

She is curious about whether these people have invented fiction, and what sorts of hardware-intensive video games they have if they haven't.

They have not, judging by the video games aisle, invented fiction. They have immersive underwater/Grand Canyon/International Space Station/rainforest self-guided tours, and lots and lots of puzzle games, and some caring-for-simulated-critters (the box: they definitely do not have any kind of subjective experience but you'll likely relate to and empathize with them as if they do!). 

When in Rome.

"I think these mostly suck and the ones that seem interesting don't look hardware-intensive. It was worth checking but I want a cheap computer."

"I'm disappointed but not surprised," he says, and gets her a cheap computer.