One moment she is reclining in a hammock, halfway up a tree, resting her eyes while she listens to a novel.
The next minute she is reclining in a distinct lack of a hammock, halfway up a tree, in a bit of a panic.
"Aaaah!"
"I did last week, but my bank has also ceased to exist in the same universe as me so those will not be available as collateral. If you are instead looking for evidence of propensity to save rather than consume, I had around $3,145,728 saved."
"It was in a different regulatory environment, I don't think you have to worry."
"I'm looking for a loan or line of credit of around $16,384 to cover a few months' expenses, but might be interested in a larger loan if the terms are good. What can you offer me?"
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.)
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."
"That is adequate, thank you! Is there anything else I have to do or will you just put the money in my account?"
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.
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.
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."