The man - boy? person? - who walks in, sights Stranger standing in the middle of the room and freezes. He's wearing an unassuming but clean dark blue work uniform and a backpack that must weigh a tenth what he does.

He holds up a hand. "I'm Agario. I'm supposed to be demoing something to Levtir here in" he glances at a prominent digital clock on the wall "about a fourth of an hour. This is Conference Room Two?"

The other man in the middle, wearing a slightly-rumpled brown vest and red sash over a frilled shirt, holds up his hand in return.  "Areli Eddin, Lector.  I thought I'd nodded off in the Green Library, but... then I woke up here?  Are you guests?"

Agario blinks, seeming to fully take in "Areli"'s appearance for the first time.

"This is the R&D wing of Ikkeh headquarters in Eastern Aineh." He pulls a lanyard out of his shirt, on the end of which there is a plastic tag engraved with his likeness, a barcode, and a number. "Your ID?"

He reflexively taps a small patch sewn onto his vest, which shows a picture of a golden laurel wreath. 

"The what?  I've never heard of - wait, did you perhaps grab the name of East Avinyah from the eighth century?  But I didn't know we were doing this sort of cooperative project with anyone?"

Agario is not wearing things in very many of the holsters on his utility belt, but he is wearing a gun. His hand goes to it and stays there.

"Put your hands out", he says, watching carefully.

Areli notices the gun for the first time, and his eyes go even wider.  He puts his hands out.

Something weird has happened.  Maybe magic.

"This... isn't the History-Monk Holt, is it?  And you wouldn't recognize the city of Niota?"

With his other hand, Agario reaches into one of his other in-use holsters and pulls out a little plastic radio device. He presses a button on it. "Yeilsi?"

A muffled voice comes out. "Agario?"

Agario is holding "Areli"'s eyes. "I'm in Conference Room Two. There is an unexpected person here, names himself as 'Areli Eddin Lector' but cannot produce an ID, strange clothes, does not seem - oriented to place or time, or something. I'm armed and he's showing his hands."

Muffled radio voice: "I'm sending Dar, Ashwusmei, and Viki for now. Stay on the line."

"Acknowledged", Agario says, and presses another button, which sticks. The radio static stays on, this time. On the other end of the connection, Yeilsi audibly starts calling people, re-explaining the situation, and ordering agents to Conference Room Two to handle an intrusion.

Agario re-orients to "Areli". He simply stares at him, not deigning to dignify the lunatic's rambling until he starts talking sense.

Well, everything else here looks more like technology than magic.  Of course, that doesn't have to be a technologic radio - not that he'd know how to tell the difference even if he could take it apart - but he'll act like it is until he sees something else clearly magic.  Even though he'd really feel better if this man had an undetermined magic device rather than a gun.

"I'd like to help resolve this...  I don't suppose you'd recognize the non-interference pledge from the Order of History-Monks?"

". . . No, I wouldn't. Care to explain why it entitles you to be in the middle of Ikkeh headquarters without authorization?"

"A lot of groups let us watch because of it, because we've promised not to do anything except keep records for the future.  But believe it or not, I don't know how I got here."

"So the Order of History-Monks is an archival endeavor, and your story is that you just fell asleep somewhere else and woke up here."

"Sort... of... yes.  Do you have a better explanation?"

". . . You are a manic psychotic who convinced yourself you had some kind of business here, you are a suicide bomber with a manifesto you know will get read if you blow up a chunk of this building, you are a not-very-wise joker with a talent for pentesting who thought it would be funny. Explanations where you are an unstable element who broke into the building yourself are less complicated than explanations postulating that someone else, for unknown inscrutable reasons, expended a lot of effort to make it look exactly like you are an unstable element who broke into the building yourself, and are therefore more plausible."

Agario is now leaning heavily toward explanations where "Areli" is not-very-wise.

"A suicide - what?  You have those!?  I was going to ask why you're so concerned about people wanting to break in here, but I guess I first need to ask why people want to kill themselves blowing up anywhere!"

"For the notoriety, of course? For you or your ideas. It's not like it happens every day around here, but it's also not every day we get someone with no authorization showing up in the middle of the building, apparently having bypassed all our" state-of-the-art "best-effort security, and talking deranged nonsense."

What is "Areli" playing at . . . ?

"What's that patch on your vest supposed to mean? The one you pointed to when I asked you about ID?" His fingers ready on the gun.

"But there're so many better ways to get your ideas out, like, oh, hosting a speech-ring --"  He throws up his hands.

"This patch?  It's my name-symbol, like people would wear different leaves or twigs back before they could make regular nametags.  Yeah, a patch like this isn't really less difficult, but some of us History-Monks like making the nod to the tradition."

Agario does not have much time to puzzle over how Areli and maybe his whole cult are apparently either actually crazy or smokescreening with a guise of insanity - Dar and Ashwusmei enter through one set of doors, Viki through another, and all three draw on the guy in the weird clothes. They've got their modified pilot's helmets on, thick one-way glass over the face, and Agario sees the subtle cues that they're body-armored under their uniform shirts. 

"Come with us," says Dar, and gestures through the door he and Ashwusmei just left. Viki, staying trained on Stranger, moves toward the other two.

Okay, now it's gone from a fantasy novel to a techno novel.  At least if he can go by aesthetics.  Maybe this secret project building is working on inter-universe technological travel?  Maybe!

He follows.

For two minutes, he is led through mostly-vacant (evacuated?) halls passing open machining workshops and casually arranged but really high-tech chemistry labs, finally to a little thickly padded (soundproofed?) room with dimmer lighting than the conference room they left. One of the men (?) tells Areli to sit on a stool in the middle of the floor, ties his wrists to it with something tough, abrasive, and plastic. Another presses a button in a little tiny speaker-and-control panel on the wall. The third, still aiming at Areli, says "This is our old anonymous communication room. You can't see the person on the other side, they can't see you, although that part isn't relevant to this particular talk - just the part where you can't see out. Yeilsi, today's security manager, is on the other side right now. He can talk to you; his voice will come through this speaker distorted. You can talk back, he'll hear you distorted too, although that part doesn't currently matter."

"Understood?" comes a voice through the speaker, much lower than Yeilsi's was but comprehensible.

"I think so.  Hello; I'm Areli Eddin."

This elaborate setup is a point in favor of their being prepared for people from other worlds with strange dangers.  Though he's not going to mention that, of course; it'll either confirm their guess that he's crazy or make them even more worried that he knows their secret plans.

"Y'all can exit," says Distorted Yeilsi, apparently to the gun squad, because they leave, locking the heavy door behind them.

"Hi. We want to let you out, because it's inconvenient for us to be keeping you here, but first we have to be confident of how you got in and that you haven't done us any harm or prepared to do us any future harm, that we don't know enough about to mitigate or reverse to the greatest extent we can.

I have just personally scanned through all the security camera feeds in the hallways surrounding Conference Room Two for the past two hours. Three other people entered, met, and left, but there was no hint of you. Explain this."

"I wish I could.  I believe I'm from another world.  I'm a Lector in the Worldwide Order of History-Monks.  I fell asleep reading in the library - long story - and when I woke up, I was here.  No idea how; I've never heard of anything like that happening in real life."

Several minutes pass, and then Distorted Yeilsi asks Areli to repeat his claim. It sounds like there's someone else in the background?

He does.  "I don't know how I came here.  I believe I'm from another world - I'm a Lector in the Worldwide Order of History-Monks; I fell asleep reading in the library; when I woke up, I was here in this building.  I've never heard of anything like that happening in real life; I thought I was somewhere else in my world till none of you had heard of the History-Monks."

In retrospect, the gun should've also been a clue - but not that strong of one; there're a few people who wear them for show.

"Thank you.

We have you on record, now, and I have just ordered a genetic sampling kit. It should be here in a few hours. We don't have the equipment here to genometype you, but the lab is taking a rush order and we should know whether you're really from a never-before-heard-of human population within 48 hours. Oh, and have your genetic print. Care to change your story now?"

Yeilsi isn't sure what to expect. Clearly the creepily competent intruder is lying out of his ass, but not in a way that actually stands to gain him anything. Is this normal? Yeilsi's worked here for two years and has only had to deal with one other apparently-intentional intruder (as opposed to pompous ID-loser), who was in fact just a perfectly sane and normal pentester looking for a bounty, which he received.

Yeilsi supposes that it doesn't matter whether the intruder's story is at all plausible if he has them set to blow, but anyway most of the building is evacuated now, they found squat in the conference room, and how could he have planted explosives or chemical weapons without showing up on camera.