The first thing resembling a safe route goes from Cube to the totalitarian archipelago that is merely a human amount of totalitarian and then to the Dead Republic and then Earth and all the afterlives are adjacent to Earth.

Is the archipelago at least in a world with normal enough physics that they can establish a teleport outpost a trillion miles away?

It’s not that big. They might be able to put one underwater? Or check if one of the safer worlds is adjacent to somewhere other than Cube.

Yeah, they will once they have a safe-enough route work on figuring out where else this neighborhood touches theirs. They will also put an underwater dome down.

And back to the here and now.

There is someone miserable in an apartment. He lies still for hours, and when he gets tired enough that it gets hard to think about math he thinks about coffee instead. He has no idea where they sell it. He has no idea if it’s safe to panhandle here but he’s leaning no, and he has no local money, though maybe they’ll take dollars. Apparently those things were just not as high a priority as telling him he should obey if he wants to be a good person. And also if he doesn’t. Where has he heard that before. (To be fair to the whole idea, his extremely vague recollection is that France might also have been like that and wasn’t awful.)

So, no coffee. And this is the only place he’s sure he can be. And there’s nothing anyone will ever really need from him.

He shaves when he itches too much to keep putting it off (with shaky hands and a naked razor blade but who really cares, right?) and then goes and sits on the balcony in the hope that it will be more bearable than being inside the apartment.

There's a lady on the next balcony over. Smoking a cigarette. She raises her eyebrows at him. "You're new."

He looks at her. He shrugs.

"Lady who had that place before you was standoffish too."

He used to have a convenient response to people who got annoyed at him for not talking to them and now he doesn't. Thanks, Missut.

"I've taken a vow of silence," he says, drawing his knees up to his chest. It was supposed to come out very deadpan but he's having a little trouble keeping his voice steady at the moment.

"Wow, okay, have fun with that." She takes a drag.

He looks at her again and sighs. But he’s not scowling and doesn’t even look very dead inside now.

"I didn't take a vow of silence though," she says after a moment. "Hello, my name is Arlene and my daughter resurrected me last week but I don't know why she bothered if she was going to be so inhospitable, all, 'smoking is banned here Mama' and 'you should get your own place Mama' and 'you've missed a lot Mama' and 'Johnny doesn't want to see you Mama'. What gets into a girl that she brings her mama back to send her to live somewhere all by herself without even a cig?"

....Shrug??? He looks kind of bewildered about all this. "Did she get you out of Hell or do you not have that here."

"Nah, if I got out of Hell I'd be a demon and it'd be a summoning not a resurrection."

"...I'm so sorry," he says gently.

"Being dead's not like anything for normal people." Puff.

"I hope that's true and you're not just a copy of someone else who's suffering somewhere."

"Wow, do you moonlight teaching people how to give folks nightmares? What a thing to say!"

He flinches convulsively and after a moment of horrified staring he curls up very tightly.

"Jeepers," she adds after a thoughtful plume of smoke.

Ristrell didn't think - Ristrell claimed - he understood Ristrell as claiming - 

- he thought he remembered understanding Ristrell as claiming -

- but here he is, horrible to listen to. He's just going to bluescreen about that for a minute.

"Are you having a seizure over there? I used to have a dog that had seizures. That's another thing that I don't like about all this," ash-tap, "modernity. They won't let you get your pets back, just people. Or you can do it but you have to go to someplace five times as expensive for some reason. It's not like it'd be any harder to bring back a dog than a person."

Fuck fuck fuck he’s going through caffeine withdrawal and he usually drinks so much coffee that he literally can’t fall asleep even after multiple days spent awake. His hands aren’t steady enough, and he’s not awake enough, to fix what Missut did.

He isn’t actually sure what "having a seizure" means so at least he’s not tempted to answer. He is kind of tempted to ask what the fuck she’s talking about but he doesn’t.

"I’m sorry," he says, even though probably he shouldn’t say anything.

"Have I gotta call the ambulance on you?"

"...I don’t have an opinion. I’m so sorry and if there’s some way I can make it up to you I’ll try."