She taps her lip.

"I don't think so. Or, well, no, I have tons of questions about what your world is like and how you got here. But I don't think I have any questions I need to know to do my job. Reading bank account policy paperwork to people or whatever isn't exactly something that normally comes up, but it's not like it's hard," she explains. "If we're waiting for the food anyway, though ... maybe you could explain what getting a lawyer would be like on your world, and so on, and I can point out what is different here so that you know what to expect?"

"My world has - there's a god called Abadar. He's the god of mutually beneficial trade, and law and contracts. And cities and travel. His clerics often also work as bankers and judges and other professions where it's very important for people to be honest and impartial and follow laws and agreements. And they're very highly trusted by everyone else."

"So at home if I had a draft contract I would ask an Abadaran, and I'd trust him to know whether he was right. Not just about the contract, but about - if he was qualified to help me or if I should go to someone else. What questions about the contract I should be asking. How much was fair to pay him, and so on. Any one Abadaran is just a man, but the church as a whole is - competent, about anything to do with laws and contracts and money."

"Here I can get a list of lawyers and talk to them one by one but there seems to be no - organization about it? I need a lawyer to help me make correct decisions, but I need to make a correct decision myself first when I choose a lawyer. At home, the choosing is just another thing that you'd pay someone for."

"And at home the government is run by Abadarans, so if I was offered a government job I could trust them about it, but the PRT - doesn't seem to be that way? Maybe it's because the justice system here is adversarial and a lot of other things seem to kind of be adversarial as well, even when they don't need to be. ...I still don't understand why juries but that's probably not important right now."

"That sounds ... different," Janice agrees. "It's true lawyers specialize in different things — like, you wouldn't go to a divorce lawyer about suing someone for personal injury — but I'm pretty sure you could walk into any lawyer's office and ask for a referral? I think lawyers do referrals. And they would send you to someone they know of who does specialize in whatever. Sometimes lawyers also work in big law firms with multiple people, and you can just always work with that one firm, and they put whoever the relevant specialist is on it each time you come to them."

She sips her ice water.

"I don't really know if the government is better in, like, Europe or whatever," she continues. "But I think Americans generally don't really trust the government? And that's not because they're untrustworthy, exactly, but it's because the British empire was really awful and we had to overthrow it. So the government we have now is, uh, designed around people not trusting it? Both just because people don't, right, and in the sense of ... the government is designed so that people could notice if it were going bad and needed overthrowing again, which means you can't be relying on the government to get things right."

"We also had to overthrow the Keleshites! They're, um, an overseas empire that conquered Osirion many centuries ago. But we managed to do that because we trusted the people who did the overthrowing, and then they became the new government. Maybe that's part of why we do trust them so much?" Ahmose really isn't sure why the Abadarans aren't helping to run any other countries.

"Some people already tried to explain American government to me, but I appreciate also hearing some common people's take on it!" Civics is turning out to be a surprisingly interesting (and socially and emotionally safe) topic of conversation!

"The government is a mess," Janice comments. "But it's better than everywhere else, except maybe Canada. They have a Prime Minister instead of a President, though."

"It's not like people didn't trust George Washington — he was the leader of the revolutionary army. They offered to make him king, even. But he refused because he didn't want the country to have to deal with overthrowing a bad king ever again. And just because one king is good doesn't mean the next one would be, you know? Washington became the first president — pretty much unanimously — and then voluntarily stepped down so that there could be a peaceful transition of power. That's where the tradition of presidents serving at most eight years comes from."

The waiter chooses that moment to deliver Ahmose's pizza. It is, as promised, a flat bread covered with a red sauce and a layer of melted cheese, with little flat circles of sausage.

Ahmose feels he doesn't understands her logic. "Doesn't that work for presidents as well? Just because one is good, you don't know if the next one will be. So once you have a good king - uh, president, you'd want to keep him longer. Changing the leader every eight years sounds like you'd have to end up with a bad one sooner rather than later. In Osirion if you have a really good king, you hope for him to live and rule for a long time!"

The little circles of sausage are nnnot good enough to distract him from having an Intellectual Argument.

Janice thinks about that one for a moment. "I guess? But with a king, the next king is just the previous king's son, right? And there's no reason to expect them to be any better or worse than some other person. But we choose our presidents. The candidates go on TV and make speeches and debate each other and so on, so you can make an informed decision."

"There have been bad presidents — like Clinton — but you also know you're not going to be stuck with them for more than four years. The first time they screw something up badly enough, they're not going to get reelected."

"The king can have many sons and choose the best one. Or I guess he can name someone else his heir, the law doesn't have to say his son inherits? Or you could elect the next one but - let a good one serve for a lot longer than eight years."

"I guess if it works better than other countries, I can't really argue with that? I'm just - not wise enough to understand why it works like that yet. Or how elections work at all, really, it feels like - the same thing as the juries, where you want random common people to decide on the most important issues instead of leaving them to professionals, and I don't understand how that works either." To be precise, he doesn't see how it avoids immediately exploding into a horrible mess that needs a revolt to set it straight again, but he's too polite to say that. "Anyway, I probably won't understand it anytime soon, so I should just focus on the things I actually need to interact with. Normal obvious things, like lawyers."

"Right, yes," she agrees. "Anyway, it sounds like the first thing will be finding a lawyer? Unless you already have one in mind. I don't know an employment lawyer off the top of my head, but we can probably find one in the yellow pages."

"Yes, I was advised to go to the public library and look in the yellow phone book for lawyers. I just need to pick up my draft contract to show the lawyer first. And I got the name of a lawyer I could go to from the PRT, but I'm not sure if your adversarial systems mean I shouldn't take that kind of advice from my prospective employers, so I wanted to get a different lawyer just in case."

Once they're done eating, they can briefly go back to the PRT HQ for Ahmose's contract, and then to the library.

Ahmose's has decided to place his portals on unused walls. This avoids blocking the road, and reduces the chance someone will touch them by accident (although he is very careful about not letting open portals out of his sight, just in case, and tries to close them as soon as he doesn't need them anymore).

Janice can be treated to a view of the Protectorate HQ roof! (He doesn't want to portal back through a window; he didn't think to ask permission for that before leaving.) It's not a terribly interesting roof but there's a pretty forcefield bubble around it.

There's also a twitchy guard who was not expecting them!

"Put your hands on your head and don't move!" he tells them, freeing his weapon but not actually aiming it at them. Then he grabs a radio with his off hand and speaks quietly into it.

"I, um, I think maybe the ferry terminal would be a better place?" Janice suggests, her voice a bit squeaky with nervousness.

He wasn't told not to come back here! This is where he went last time!

He puts his hands on his head, because following orders from lawful authority is a habit deeper than thinking. And doesn't move (much).

...he wasn't told not to speak, though?

"I'm Ahmose? Um. I'm supposed to pick up my contract from Mr. O'Brien? I'm sorry if I wasn't supposed to come here!" On second thoughts probably most people don't go through the roof.

Trooper Hammonds relays this into his radio. After a minute he relaxes.

"Yes, sorry Ahmose, but people are not supposed to come in via the roof unless they're expected," Trooper Hammonds explains. "This time it's alright — if you wait in that box by the door, Mr. O'Brien is on his way up. In the future, just check in with the guard at the bridge terminal, please."

Oh no, he messed up again. He's not sure how big of a deal this is, but he apologizes very sincerely, just in case. And goes to wait in the box by the door.

Janice can come with him, or if she'd rather stay on her side of the portal he'll pick her up soon.

She'll follow the (implicit) directions of the guy with a gun and stay near the cape who (probably) will help protect her.

A few minutes later, the door opens and Mr. O'Brien sticks his head out.

"Hello! I have it all drafted up," he says, smiling and handing a bundle of paper to Ahmose. "When you are ready to sign, come by the ferry terminal. I also put a copy of my business card in there, in case you need to call me with any questions."

Ahmose is unaware of alien implicit directions! To be honest, he misses them half the time at home; here it's not useful even to worry about it. (Which won't stop him from worrying, but it's a diffuse worry that's not spiking right now.)

He thanks Mr. O'Brien, takes the papers, uses the city map to find an unused bit of wall behind the city library to make a portal, and steps through with Janice. Can she help him find a list of contract lawyers in the city which seem open to cold calls?

She lets out a deep breath. Yes, she can certainly do that. She leads him around to the library's side entrance, nodding to some young men sitting on the steps.

Inside, the library is packed with books. It looks a great deal like the temple of Nethys, only with less religious imagery and fewer poorly concealed scorch marks. She leads him past the main desk and into a section of low shelves and tables which she calls the reference section.

There, she finds the phonebook and copies out the relevant section of lawyers.

"We're not supposed to use phones in the main area, so that people can focus," she explains. "But we can step out on the steps and call them."

The library-temple of Nethys is different from an American public library in two immediately obvious ways. One is that it's very tall, even by the standards of Brockton Bay. 

The other is that it's designed for mages, which means doing at every step the opposite of ADA rules in a country that has barely invented the elevator. The higher shelves require mage hand to access; the higher floors require teleportation or flight (or a friendly summon or shapeshifting or...) and the secret depositories, which are most of them, require more exotic spells than these. Floors past the second aren't indexed (divination exists for a reason); floors past the fourth aren't numbered.

Day and night, it's full of wizards ostentatiously wizarding.

Ahmose knows, intellectually, that tens of thousands of books are fabulously valuable and that providing them free of charge to the public is an incredible Good. It turns out he doesn't really feel it when the library patrons he sees treat the books as normal.

...he'll step out and call a random lawyer from the list! This only his second phone-call, both of them made to people he hadn't talked to before to buy a service, which continues to be anxiety-inducing but less so than talking to them face to face would be! Ahmose continues to appreciate cheap remote communications.

A young man in a pure white bodysuit lunges from beside the door and attempts to knock out Ahmose's lights.

Another man in a blue tiger mask leaps down from a window of the building on the other side of the street, and launches an air-blade at the same moment.

Janice screams and steps backwards.

Ahmose is completely unprepared to deal with surprise short-range physical assault! He is hit, stunned, and helpless against whatever the air-blade might do.