leareth and bruce fight god
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"...It certainly sounds intriguing. I do wish to learn some more general background about your world's present, in addition to the historical document that is the Bible." 

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Bruce has a laptop and his laptop has Google and Wikipedia! "Can you read, like, concepts and procedural knowledge out of my mind as well as words? That'll be a better way to explain than trying to remember all the assumptions I'm making, and be faster, and I might get called for dinner any minute."

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"Yes, that ought to work." Leareth unshields a little and reaches out to read Bruce's surface thoughts, ready to probe deeper. "If, hmm, you attempt to think them at me, I think that will help." 

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Bruce mentally packages up the entire experience of using the internet, searches and hyperlinks and comments and trolls and logins and wikis and videos and keyboards and mice and all the rest, and tries to beam the whole wad in Leareth's general direction.

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...All right that's a lot of content. It's not quite overwhelming but he definitely grabbed onto the gist more than any particular details. That's probably enough, though. "Thank you. I can manage from here, I think." 

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That's good, because a woman's voice calls out, "Bruce, dinner's ready!" from the kitchen. Bruce responds "Coming!" and unless Leareth has any last ideas he proceeds to disappear for an hour or so.

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That works fine for Leareth. He can sit on Bruce's bed, concealed by an illusion just in case, and use Bruce's laptop to do a quick preliminary skim of this 'Wikipedia'.

Geopolitics: what are the main powers in Bruce's world? How to do governments work generally? Tensions between nations?

Cultural norms: what are the dynamics within families; what are the main family structures? How is marriage practiced, and what are the expectations here? Are there different cultural scripts for men and women? 

Religion: what does worshipping God actually look like? Does this differ much between regions? Does anyone practice a religion that isn't worshipping God or Jesus? 

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Geopolitics: the main temporal powers are the United States (where they are now, and it's a republic), Russia (ruled by a hereditary Tzar), and China (doing some extremely complicated thing that seems to cash out to "it's corrupt but it keeps things mostly functional"). There are also several other big countries and a whole lot of small, slightly poorer ones. There are tensions between countries, over trade and the question of which government is best, but lately weapons are so fearsome and war so terrible that the big ones avoid it in favor of glaring at each other.

Family: marriages are between one man and one woman of similar age, usually between 16 and 25, and are indissoluble in any circumstances. Having children is expected though not technically mandatory, and recent advances in medicine have the world population exploding into the billions with no sign of slowing down. Men are expected to work outside the home, to fight in time of war, and to have final authority over decisions made for their households; women are expected to work inside the home, do nearly all the childcare, and be morally and spiritually pure, as demonstrated by never being alone with a male non-relative.

Religion: different countries have different amounts of organized and centralized Church hierarchy (in Russia, it's practically a second government; in America churches are mostly local). God doesn't seem to interface formally with any of them. Worshipping God looks like everyone saying a few sentences of praise to Him first thing in the morning and last thing when they go to bed, plus weekly services with more praise (sung and spoken) and a pastor giving a speech about some aspect of ethics AKA His will, plus more services on holidays. Worship is universally the same everywhere, with the main variations being the celebratory customs around various holidays. There are a handful of humans living in places so remote, and with such willingness to murder intruders, nobody has been able to explain the Gospel to them; this is considered a tragedy (since they're inevitably going to Hell until someone does) and expeditions keep being sent.

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It's so uniform. That's Leareth's first thought. Not at all like his own world, with a dozen overlapping religious groups. On the one hand, that does make sense in a world with one god instead of dozens, but on the other hand, people are people and he'd at least expect more, well, disputes on the exact correct method of worshipping God, especially since it sounds like nowadays God doesn't do much in the way of day-to-day reminders or providing clarification. 

He wonders how much the very impressive archive of information that he's reading right now is censored. 

Bruce still isn't back, so he starts poking around for Wikipedia pages on natural laws in the material world, properties of Heaven and Hell, angels and demons and magic. 

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The material world: is a crystal sphere with the Sun at its center, with Earth and the other planets orbiting it. The whole thing was created over six days, 6543 years ago, with laws of nature that, when God isn't directly doing something, have everyday results pretty similar to Leareth's world but without magic (Bruce's demon-derived magic isn't mentioned).

Angels and demons are discussed, but not much is known about them. Demons started as angels but rebelled against God; there are seven types of each with a hierarchy of power between the types. Only the two least powerful tiers of angels, confusingly named angels and archangels, have been seen on Earth; the rest are only known to exist from prophetic visions. It is widely suspected that the most powerful demons can occasionally access Earth from their confinement in Hell, and generally use this ability to harm people and/or turn them away from God.

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If demons can access Earth from Hell, then travel in the opposite direction ought to be feasible; if he can arrange at some point to observe with mage-sight as Bruce's demon arrives and departs, maybe he can replicate the method.

Bruce is probably going to be back any minute, but in the meantime he can poke at whether angels can be summoned or requested, or if they only appear at random times according to the capricious will of God. 

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There are occasional reports of angels showing up in response to the prayers of the especially devout, and helping them with whatever emergency they were praying about, but nothing systematic. And now Bruce is back, with some food.

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Leareth is pretty hungry at this point, and starts at the food. "How was supper with your parents?" he asks a few mouthfuls in. 

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"Told them my day had been quiet; got them to tell me about theirs so I didn't have to come up with more lies. How's your reading going?"

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