"I found this book," Kaleva says, "and it says that you can help with nightmares by imagining a happy ending to them during the day? So your brain builds an association between the nightmare and the happy ending and when you're having it the happy ending happens."

"Huh." He's not sure he can come up with a happy ending to his nightmares that makes sense even by dream logic. Or, no, maybe dream logic is the way to go, there. The dreams usually end with him falling towards a lake of fire and waking up just before he lands; maybe if he imagined suddenly landing in a clearing in the woods instead he won't wake up? "It's worth a try, I guess." He kind of doesn't want to, because that involves thinking about the nightmares a lot while he's awake, but he needs to not be waking Kaleva up in the middle of the night, so.

"Um. I thought it might. Help. If you don't want to it's fine."

(He looks like he's desperately resisting the urge to do something.)

Bruce isn't sure what it is so he can't really help there, but he desperately needs a change of subject. "What are the stars like here? I saw something in a book that makes it sound like they're different from the ones I'm used to."

"They're hot balls of gas millions of miles away, which are reincarnated fireflies. Gods sometimes rearrange them into constellations to honor heroes."

"Reincarnated fireflies as in, they have minds? People ones or tiny firefly ones? Our stars don't have minds that we know of, and they're even farther away than that. Trillions of miles, way out at the edge of the universe." Tiny smile because outer space is cool.

"They might be trillions, let me look--" Kaleva looks it up in a book in the astronomy section. "I was wrong. Apparently the nearest star is forty trillion miles away. They have minds, and they're nonsapient if they were nonsapient before and sapient if they were sapient before. I think the sapient ones are telepathic or something? So they can still talk."

"Forty trillion? Wow, how big is your universe? It must be several times as big as the one I'm from at least!" He still doesn't see what any of this has to do with Christianity but it's very interesting.

"Thirteen billion light years which is, uh, a hundred and thirty sextillion miles. I think."

"Wow. Wow. Big universe." And very different. "Is the edge still a crystal sphere?"

"No? I think it's... curved, sort of? Like the surface of a balloon or an orange. If you somehow walked to the end of the universe and kept going you would just wind up back where you started. --But there's no inside to the balloon."

"That's . . . hmm . . . yeah, I think I can visualize that. That's so cool." Also, if this world is that fundamentally different from his own, that sort of suggests that other things might be different too. But he keeps getting hung up on the fact that the Bible is the same, and where would they have gotten it if not from the exact same God? He seriously needs to talk to a Christian and figure out what's really up with miracles. And learn more about the magic here, since it's probably connected somehow. "Do you have any books on magic? Not ones that teach part-fairies how to do it or anything, just, like, descriptions of what's possible and how it works."

"Yeah! The magic section's over here. Do you wanna get some books and go out into the woods?"

"Sure." Maybe in the woods he'll feel a bit less like an adult is about to sneak up behind him and ask him what he's reading. He scoops up his remaining Christianity books (mainly the detective one) and goes to take a look at the magic section.

There are several books with titles like Introduction to Magic, Principles of Magical Theory, Magic For Beginners, and Understanding Magic: A Guide For The Non-Gifted. 

If nobody stops him he's going to take all four of those. "Should we get, I dunno, a picnic blanket or something to keep the books on?"

"Yeah, give me a minute."

A few minutes later Kaleva returns with a blanket and a basket full of food. 

And between them they can get it all outside and set up wherever Kaleva thinks is a good reading spot.

Once they do, Kaleva lies down so that his head is almost but not quite touching Bruce's thigh.

Bruce starts reading the book by Basil of Baker Street.

Once it's been a few minutes and Bruce hasn't objected, Kaleva moves his head so that it is actually touching Bruce's thigh.

Bruce is pretty absorbed in this book! He was hoping for a sensible, detailed, clear-headed laying out of the situation regarding Jesus, miracles, the afterlife, why some people say they're Christian but act like they're pretending without knowing what they're pretending about, etc, and that's what he got. Aaaaand unless it's a very detailed fraud, about things that anyone who grew up here would be able to call out as a fraud, the world looks exactly how you would expect it to look if people had just appeared out of nowhere at random and some of them had written the Bible by the same processes that made heathens come up with stories about heathen gods, and actual God had had no involvement. He remembers another science fiction story, this one a horror piece about a world where God withdrew entirely from the universe after the Fall and the Bible never existed. Maybe something like that happened here: a world whose Creator lost interest in both the living and the dead.

He props one elbow on his knee and his chin on his hand to think about it. His other hand goes absentmindedly to pet the soft thing next to his other leg.

Mmmmm. Kaleva's evil plot has SUCCEEDED. 

He scoots his head up so that it is in Bruce's lap and pretends to read but is actually just flicking his eyes over the same sentence over and over again. 

Pet pet bizzare sense of potentially not being watched pet pet waitasecond. He realizes what he's doing and freezes for a moment, but apparently Kaleva doesn't object. "This is a very different world," he says softly, letting his hand come to rest on Kaleva's head again.

"Yeah," Kaleva says. "Your world sucks."