"You only care about laws if they're enforced with torture?"

"Pretty much? If you were torturing people that would suck and I'd try to figure out if I had some kind of angle on getting you to stop."

"We're... not torturing people. I think if you don't like torture you should probably help make not-torture work okay for getting people to be decent to each other."

"...What does people being decent to each other have to do with laws?"

"That's what laws are... for... like not killing people? She said she mentioned the not killing people one?"

"...I thought laws were about things like... theft, murder, adultery, lust, entering America without permission, existing while black, resisting arrest, drugs, mispronouncing things...?"

"Vanda Nossëo doesn't have laws against existing while black - that's also a police not being good at their jobs thing - or about mispronouncing things, which I think you must have misinterpreted somehow, or lust or adultery, which early 2000s America doesn't have laws about on any Earths I knew about this morning... most parts of Vanda Nossëo have laws against theft, some parts limit who can go into them, all of them forbid murder."

Shrug. "I didn't spend that long in America, I know what's allowed in Hell a lot better. But I also don't see how it's not being decent to people for me to go home and live in the park with my friend instead of being trapped in a horrible warped forest. Maybe it is somehow but you know what, I don't see how and I've decided to make a habit of not believing other people about right and wrong."

"If that were illegal in some part of Vanda Nossëo, which your Earth isn't since it's newly discovered by us, then it'd be because people wanted the park to not have anybody living in it. I mean, if they didn't let anyone live there. If they just didn't let you there it'd probably be because you weren't allowed in their place in general."

"It's possible I don't know what the word 'decent' means but I - " He shakes his head. "I don't know, what does it mean to be decent to people?"

"Well, uh, I usually start with not murdering or torturing them, and then follow up with letting them have their stuff and decide what to do with it themselves, even if there's a bunch of them and the stuff is a park."

"No, I mean English isn't my first language and I was taught it by demons who might have taught it to me wrong on purpose to fuck with me, and the thing you're saying doesn't make sense."

"- I have no way to tell what language you're hearing when I talk, because of how the translation magic on me works. Do you want to... look up 'decent' in a dictionary or something?"

"...Sure. Fine."

He looks it up. "Conforming with generally accepted standards of respectable or moral behavior," he reads.

"...Oh. Fuck. Thank you. Anyway, I don’t think I care about that if there’s no torture involved and I don’t know what this was supposed to be leading up to."

"I don't really have a way to make you care about it but if you break laws you will get in non-torture trouble and this will limit your freedom of movement and resources."

"I already have no resources and I'm only here in the first place because I am looking for a place I am allowed to sit that won't get me pestered about how I should be in the horrible forest instead and that also isn't the horrible forest, has a consistent enough geography that it would be even slightly sane to draw a map of it, and doesn't have any torture. I do not care if that involves being chained to a wall. I wouldn't care if you gave me to the yeerks. You can't threaten me with anything you're willing to do."

"...okay. I'm going to get you an apartment. You can sit in it." He does some device things and gives him a key card. "Take that moving sidewalk to the green offramp and then elevator up to the seventeenth floor, your room is the Pelican Room, got a picture of a pelican on it."

"Thank you." He takes the key card and takes that moving sidewalk and so on to the Pelican Room.

The key card, waved in the vicinity of the pelican-adorned door, lets him into a nice little apartment with loosely pelican themed decor, like someone didn't want all the rooms to be the same and started picking random birds after a while.

The important thing is that it doesn't belong to anyone who can reasonably pester him to go to Lórien instead. He gets onto the nearest soft surface without even pausing to shut the door or take off his shoes.

The hinge is attached to a spring apparatus that makes it close by itself. The room has no comment on his shoes.

Meanwhile (a word which here means "not happening at all") in a precognition, Vanda Nossëo's explorers find Hell. It doesn't even slightly resemble any secondhand memories Ristrell picked up, except in that it's also located in a vast cave system. There's a vast tall sprawling city of stone and bone housing a decadent royal court that routinely hosts cannibal feasts (it's... okay? worse than expected? it's something, anyway, because their victims simply cannot die even of being eaten). The city is decorated with sculptures and abstract murals. The murals are painted in human blood. It's not clear that it's ruled by demons; it seems to be an unusually unpleasant human polity.

No, sorry, that's not where they would land. Can't imagine why the last precognition suggested that would happen. When they look into the future again, they see something else.

Vanda Nossëo's explorers find Hell. It doesn't even slightly resemble any secondhand memories Ristrell picked up, except in that it's also located in a vast cave system. There are glowing rocks and strange plants and it is definitely ruled by demons and the only other animals are - well, maybe they were all humans once? Each of them some number of humans? They're warped and terrible and exist only to be injured and broken and remade as a collection of pieces of art catering to some very inhuman sensibility.

No, sorry, that's not where they would land. When they look into the future again, they see something else.

This time, Vanda Nossëo's explorers find Hell. It doesn't even slightly resemble any secondhand memories Ristrell picked up, except in that it's also located in a vast cave system. Instead of sending them on, it traps them. At least some of the people there are lucid enough and friendly enough and educated enough to talk multiverse maps. There are safer places to try to aim for, or so they say, not nearly enough of them but some. There's Earth (not adjacent to Cube) and the Bastion of Peace (not adjacent to Cube, either) and the Dead Republic (likewise) and...

Here's this lovely totalitarian dictatorship on a beautiful desert island archipelago. It's adjacent to Cube and from there they can reach the Dead Republic, which isn't horrible at all, just a whole new world with over ten billion inhabitants for Vanda Nossëo to make contact with, and they know which of the several hells calls itself Purgatory. They have a brief summary of issues escapees tend to have - questions are bad, coming or going; names are fraught at best; they generally won't eat or sleep, sometimes won't drink; they're sometimes genuinely loyal to their demon masters. They think Vanda Nossëo should establish diplomatic relations with New Jerusalem.

New Jerusalem is going to be easy to get along with. It's mostly a vast grassland with a few very big cities. Food is free. Wifi is free. Some limited housing is free. They've dealt with refugees from hells before; they have a residential facility for refugees from the specific one in question. Their major problem is - well, they get all the dead babies. All the dead babies. And on their Earth people have souls from fairly early in pregnancy. But, hey, they've got a bunch of information about all the hells which they're not super interested in declassifying but will admit to having written down.

And incidentally the local magic is great at redirecting incoming teleportation away from private areas, the demons can be destroyed by Disappear magic or temporarily disabled by black holes, and the locals have their own way of going between worlds that seems to mostly or maybe only work in their own neighborhood.

Okay. Is there a safe route to New Jerusalem? What is the adjacency layout of this neighborhood?