"...are you crazy? How old are you -"

"Thirty eight but I'm mature for my age."

She splutters. "You're nuts." She is going to go find somebody to call whoever one calls about crazy leaf-eating people.

"What is it with you people and your loony torture authorities. I didn't pick leaves the trees needed."

"Oh my god calm down the CIA is not listening to your teeth - stay away from me -"

He goes back to his books.

She talks to a librarian and the librarian declines to call any loony torture authorities and comes out to him. "Excuse me."

"Can I help you?"

"Someone said you were... eating leaves? And sounded like you might be having some... trouble."

"Where I'm from leaves are nutritious and if you've been working all day and gotten carried away and forgotten to eat you can grab a handful and get a perfectly good snack that way. That is clearly not true here, so I'll have to get a job if I don't want to chase down squirrels - I assume your squirrels are normal amounts of edible -"

"...I don't know how edible you expect squirrels to be," says the librarian. "Where are you, ah, from?"

"It's called Valinor. I haven't run across any books with references to it and the first person I spoke to hadn't heard of it and the lights in the sky are different so I think I may be in an alternate universe."

"...Did you have some kind of cape-related accident?"

"Maybe?" He sends her his memory of the moment of arriving in Baltimore.

She is startled. "- you're a cape yourself, then?"

"No, in Valinor everybody can do that and I'm perfectly normal, I'm just not from here."

"Does the Protectorate know about you?"

"I hope not, because apparently they torture people to death and I am scared of that, it sounds unpleasant."

"...no they don't."

"Well they definitely advertise that they do. Or maybe your species is different in some relevant way?"

"...they don't advertise that they torture people, to death or otherwise."

"Where I am from, if you lock somebody up, then they will experience steadily increasing adrenaline levels and eventual loss of capacity to control their own body and after a few weeks of intense unpleasantness they will die. Does that not happen to people here."

"...no."

"That is lovely for you. I have no reason to expect I've changed by landing here, so if your authorities decide I did something wrong or might've done something wrong or am crazy or anything like that then they will torture me to death and I guess it helps a little bit that they won't realize they're doing that but not very much."

"Look - what's your name -"