This man, for example. He wakes before dawn and looks around, confused, before packing up his bedroll and heading up the road toward the city.

It's a long walk.

Also heading toward the city is a bus, which comes to a stop well behind him so the driver can lean out the window and ask if he needs a ride.

"Yes please!"

He's a little confused about how to get on, but he can figure it out.

Inside the bus there are several rows of seats, most of them about half full. He could sit next to someone (some of them look potentially friendly although a large fraction look a little shell-shocked for some reason and someone is crying silently), or pick the last empty row (with slightly damaged seats), or stand in the aisle.

Well, he needs time to himself for his devotions, first; he makes his way to the empty row and watches out the window, fascinated, until his spells come in.

Out the window things gradually look less abandoned. There are farms, but they seem not to be run with any particular attention to efficiency - lots of niche herbs and attractive landscaping - and every single farmhouse looks to be in good repair.

Parts of the city they're heading for are dozens of stories tall and the ground starts sloping up as they get closer, so the city is visible a long way away. By the time he's done with his spells they're still not there yet, although it's becoming clear just how huge it is.

Wow. Where is he?

He watches for a few more minutes and then gets up to head for the front of the bus, glancing at the other passengers as he passes them - he should know more about what's going on before he tries to talk to anyone who's visibly upset, but that wasn't all of them, and maybe one of the others will be willing to answer questions.

There's someone who looks concerned that he's walking around while the bus is moving and someone who watches him with the dead stare of someone who is not taking in anything else until they've rested and someone who looks up from their book to smile and wave.

(Walking is a little tricky, but he's been on ships before and picked up a few tricks; as long as he takes it slowly he should be all right.)

He sits by the one with the book. "Hi!"

"Hi." They seem a little at a loss for what to say but they bookmark their book and shut it. (The cover shows a picture of a pair of children playing under an arbor and the title A Child's Garden of Verses.)

"I'm Raafi - cleric of Fharlanghn, and I'm wondering if the name is even familiar here."

Blink blink.

"...Not to me, anyway. Is this a... sorry, I'm sure there's a politically correct word that isn't 'demon', uh..."

"-no, Fharlanghn's neutral. God of travel. So am I - good leaning, there's just a bit of history there. Though if the first thing you think of when I mention being a cleric is demons I suspect there's more to explain than that."

"...None of that made sense. I just mean, you know, there's probably only the one kind of supernatural creature, and I don't want to call all of them gods... but where are you from?"

"Not here, definitely, I could name three dozen types of magical creature that I've personally met. I've only been here since this morning, though, I couldn't tell you whether this is some uncontacted plane of the world I'm used to or I'm farther afield than that somehow - we call the world I'm from oerth but I don't expect that to be useful."

"...Okay, well, this is heaven, and normally if someone had just appeared here I'd assume it was because they died, but you don't sound like you came from the world of the living."

"-I was expecting at least another forty years and wouldn't expect heaven of all places to have me. I suppose it's not unheard of, at my age, though - really?"

"Well, I guess it could all be an elaborate ruse? You can get a book about it in the city. Fair warning, most of what they say about it at home isn't true. Although I guess I have no idea what you've heard."

"I haven't heard much, I was leaving it as a surprise! I suppose I should have had a little more faith on that count." He touches the wooden pendant hanging from a cord around his neck.

"Then you'll probably be plenty surprised. You seem to be taking it pretty well." They glance around the bus. "You know."

He shrugs. "I mean, I was never going to be done there, and I wasn't leaving this as a surprise because I wasn't curious. I'm a cleric of the god of travel, exploring new places is what I'm for."

"That makes sense. Um, just so you know, I don't think any of the religions I've heard of are completely accurate, they don't have much to go on back there."

"I'm still not sure what's going on with that, if we're from different worlds originally but ended up in a place we've both heard of. I guess it might be that there's more than one material plane that heaven is an afterlife of? Mine does know things about it, we can call on the... do you not have the word... angels is close but they're a slightly different sort of creature... we can call on them too, though, all the sorts of creatures that are native to the afterlives, and ask them questions and things."

"Getting people back home from any of the afterlives is tremendously difficult and I don't think it's widely known that it's possible at all. And I am... uncomfortable using the word 'angels' for anything that actually exists, personally, because most of them are pretty disappointing."

And they're going to not argue too hard that his religion might be fake. That sounds like an uncomfortable argument all around and maybe he's really from another planet or something.

"I haven't found them to be, particularly - what were you expecting them to be like? Maybe they end up overblown if they're rarer to see."

They hesitate for several seconds, making a face. "...Universally righteous."

That's not much of an answer but it's not incomprehensible; if gods and mortals can wind up with different ideas about what parts of good are most important then obviously angels can too, and it'd be jarring to expect one to agree with you and find out they don't. Especially for a lawful person. "I suppose that's understandable. So, it sounds like you've been here for a while?"

"I died in the seventies! So not that long as they think of it here, but yeah."

"I have no idea what seventies you mean."

"The 1970s. AD."

"I guess that's confirmation that I'm from a different plane than yours, if we needed it. I've been to elf cities that counted years from something that long ago but none that I know of is so big that anyone would expect me to recognize it offhand."

"Elf cities. You have elves?" They're practically vibrating with excitement.

"We have something like a hundred species of people. But elves are one of the common ones, yes - elves and dwarves and humans and gnomes and - you're missing a word again - does 'halflings' sound sensible?"

"Not really. Sounds insulting." Someone into the right kind of fantasy might have heard the word at some point but as far as this person knows it's just an awkward calque from whatever their native language is. "Tell me about them?"

"They're nomadic and a bit clannish - they travel in groups of fifty or a hundred, a few families from a few different clans usually, and they carry trade goods or breed animals or do crafts that work with the lifestyle. They're little, too, hence the name - they come up to about human waist height. And there are some other cultural differences, but they and humans are the most similar to each other of the common species, they're a little more adventurous but otherwise about the same as us in personality."

"Weird. That's not what I was expecting from aliens. It... almost reminds me of Elfquest, I guess. Tell me more?"

"About halflings? What do you want to know?"

"About any of them. I don't know. Can any of them fly?"

"None of those can. There are a couple of kinds of birdfolk, though. And pixies, and dragons."

They're too overwhelmingly interested to ask questions and just going to stare at him hoping he'll say more.

He can tell stories. He's met dragons - was sort of helping raise one, in fact - and pixies, and earth elementals, and lived under a lake with water-element-touched gnomes for a season once, and met cave gnomes who considered the sky a myth, and done a hundred other things besides.

They're so into this.

When they reach the city they're visibly disappointed but they have things to do. They offer Raafi a scrap of paper with their email address on it.

"I suppose I can figure out what to do with this. See you around."

So where... is he? Other than 'a very, very big city'?

The city doesn't have walls, but it does have gates, which serve primarily as places to funnel immigrants through and make sure they've been offered city maps and translation magic. The bus stops at one of those.

He has his own translation necklace already - it's odd how his gear came with him, come to think of it - but he'll take a map, sure.

Do any of his fellow passengers look like they could particularly use a buddy?

The one who was looking dazed earlier is looking less dazed now but still seems totally at a loss for where to go from here. Some of the others aren't all right but at least they look like they're doing things.

He heads over to the dazed-looking one, unfolding his map as he goes. "Hey, want to help me figure out what to do next?" He turns it so they can see too, and starts looking it over. "I think we're..... here, about? Since we came from the southeast? And there's got to be some kind of hotel or something we can stay in, if this is heaven; do you see anything likely?"

She looks; it makes the map, which magically zooms in to whatever area someone is trying to look closely at, behave oddly to have them both watching it.

"...Oh, that symbol looks like it could mean a hotel... Hey, try looking at that spot over there, I want to see if it compresses the space between there and there or if it turns sideways so they both fit on the page..."

He does. "It's pretty impressive either way, I've never heard of a map doing that before."

"Me neither." She sounds as if she thinks there's something odd about that comment, but she doesn't follow up on that. "Oh, look here, see it says 'information'. We could go ask if they can tell us how to get on the dead people version of the internet and then ask zombie google for hotel reviews."

He understood some of those words! But 'information' was one of them, he can ask about the others there. "Sounds good to me, let's see..." he studies the map for a few seconds to memorize the route, and then folds it up and sets off.

Where they are now there aren't skyscrapers; the city center is mostly older than the necessary construction techniques. His companion is gawking a little, but more like she thinks it's alien than like she thinks it's impressive.

"Really not what I expected," she says. "Fewer clouds and harps, and where are my wings and halo?" She laughs weakly.

"At least it won't be boring."

Shiver. "Maybe."

"I'm sure it can't be too bad; it's heaven, right?"

"Is it? I'm not a Christian."

"That's what the person I was sitting with said, and they've been here for a while. They did say it's not like the living usually think it is, but they didn't seem to think we'd be in trouble here or anything."

She nods. "That's probably fine, then. Do you think that's the place?"

Down this street is a building whose sign says "INFORMATION AND MAPS" next to a stylized picture of a compass.

"Looks like it! I'll let you go first, I'm going to have some extra questions."

She's pretty nervous about facing them but okay. She can go first. The person behind the counter, it turns out, does have wings, sky-blue with a few accent feathers in white. No halo, though.

"Hey, um, I was just... do you have internet here?"

"Yep. You can borrow a computer here or at the library. Also, we have books for newcomers, if you want to tell me your cultural background I can recommend one that doesn't, say, assume you'll get a bunch of references to Spanish pop culture when you're from Scotland and hate pop culture. Otherwise I'll just give you The Afterlives For Dummies and if you're going to get mad and think I'm calling you a dummy then you'll have to live with the fact that culture exists."

"...I know what the For Dummies series is. I didn't realize there were any here. Is that... authorized? Or is it some kind of copyright infringement?"

"No clue, but here, have one."

"Thanks. You said we could borrow the computer? Do you have the same internet?"

"Not really but the home page works like Google."

She nods an excessive number of times. "Got it. Thanks."

And she'll look for hotel reviews while Raafi asks his questions.

"Hi! So I might be a little more lost than you're used to, or is getting people from other worlds something that happens here sometimes?"

"We are aware of almost sixty worlds and we think that's all of them. Where are you from?"

"The prime material plane of Oerth."

"...Not on our list, congratulations. I do have books that try not to presume anything about your background but that turns out to be really hard to do at all and really hard to balance with being at all engaging and concise. And, uh, would I be right in guessing you're not dead?"

"That seems likely! I wasn't expecting to kick off just yet, and I still have all my gear, magic and all."

"In that case, it's going to be more urgent for you to get set up with food and shelter than it usually is. They're both available for free, if you're not very picky, and I can walk you through signing up for them and explaining your special circumstances so they won't leave you waiting for a week."

"I can actually take care of my own food - I'm a cleric of our god of travel, that's one of the spells he offers. I will need a place to sleep, though."

"There's public housing. I can help you get the form filled out for it - you'll need contact information, do you already have email here or anything like that?"

"I have no idea what an email is."

"Well, do you know what a computer is?"

"Not at all."

"Wow, I have never gotten to explain computers before. This is neat. A computer is a machine that learns, stores, processes and displays information. They commonly come with keyboards, which you use to input text one character at a time. And then you can store your texts on the computer, or you can put them on the internet. The internet is - I don't think it has a single physical location? It's just that computers can interact with other computers, and if you put something on the internet, then people with other computers can read it from their computers. An email program is a - an internet thing where you tell a company or an organization or a person something to call you, plus a secret password you can use to tell them it's you when you're on another computer, and then they receive your mail for you and when you go to a computer and visit their website and tell them your name and password, then you can read your mail. So you can have years of correspondence in your pocket, as long as you're somewhere you can connect to the internet. And when you log in to read your mail you can also send mail that way. Does that make sense?"

"It sounds clever but I think I'm going to need to see it to make sense of it."

"Of course. Hm, let me check something..." She takes something rectangular out of her pocket and taps it several times. "Okay, yeah, I don't have anything sensitive on here. Take a look at this, see?" She tilts it so he can see the screen. "The picture on this can be anything, and right now what it is is my inbox. See, all these are subjects - what someone said their email was about - and this column is who sent it. And if I touch this thing it'll pull up a thing where I can type an email. Want me to show you how that works?"

"That does make sense. Please do."

Then she can email herself "testing" and wait for it to show up in her inbox and read it.

"Bear in mind there's not much verification that someone is who they say they are, you can get an email address in a new name or even a fake name. People who make it here abuse that less than people topside but less isn't none."

He nods. "I'll keep that in mind."

Then she can walk him through getting an email address and filling out the form. It's not a very long form; he just needs to give them contact information, date of arrival, size of household, and which if any hours of the day he most needs quiet. There's a freeform field to list additional requirements, if any, and there's a checkbox to tell them it's unusually urgent and a freeform box to tell them why that is.

That's simple enough; he keeps fairly early hours and is otherwise pretty easy to accommodate, though he does ask what kinds of additional things people tend to ask for.

"That the kitchen should already be kosher, that the neighbors should appreciate amateur drum playing, that everyone in the household needs a separate bedroom, that the feng shui should be good, just... stuff."

He considers this. "-I suppose I ought to mention that I won't be staying very long. Since I'm a cleric of the god of travel."

"Hm. About how long do you expect to stay?"

"Probably at least one month and no more than three - I can manage shorter pretty easily if that's an awkward length for some reason."

"Mm. People do stay that long, sometimes. If it were going to be a week I'd see if we could get you a hotel room instead."

"Ah. Well, I expect there's more than a week's worth of things to see here."

"There really is. Welcome to New Jerusalem. It's to die for."

Hee.

"So, that's housing, and I'll be handling my own food in the short term - it sounds like you do use money here, what do I need to know about that?"

"There's a way to do it electronically - uh, over the computer - but there's also physical currency and it's arguably safer to stick to that. You will have to pay for almost everything, other than food and housing. Well, the housing comes with water and wifi, too. And sometimes you can get old clothes for free if people are giving them away. You, uh... do work for people, and then they give you money. There are websites for finding work, you can look them up later, but basically if you agree to an hourly rate it usually shouldn't be less than two silver - they're not made of silver but that's what they're called. In the older parts of town people are more likely to haggle when they're buying things, especially at one of the outdoor markets. That happens less in some of the newer neighborhoods and pretty rarely if you're buying online. And taxes exist, there are taxes on, uh... buildings, but you won't be owning one so it won't matter to you, and cosmetic surgery, and sales taxes on, lemme look it up... incense, silk, cotton, perfume, gold and silver jewelry, gold and silver drinking vessels, Tyrian purple, indigo, cars, gasoline, coal, computer games, live animals, plastic objects, habit-forming psychoactive substances, and inhaled substances likely to be offensive to neighbors. The responsibility for those is on the person selling things, so you have to worry about that if you're selling but not if you're shopping. And that's... pretty much everything, I think?"

"Hm. Just to check, there won't be any problems with me selling spells? I don't have anything that obviously overlaps with that list, but I'm not sure how you're defining cosmetic surgery exactly and I have healing spells, and summoning isn't selling a live animal but it's not entirely unrelated."

"Congratulations, I have literally never fielded either of those questions before. Let's see... procedures are medically necessary if they prevent or reduce pain or loss of normal function, and they're cosmetic if they do neither of those things and change shape, size, appearance, number of limbs - I guess what I paid for these must've included tax but I only checked the total," she says, wiggling her wings. "And if they reduce function or increase pain. Uh, so you know, though, if your healing magic just does normal healing you're not going to have all that many takers because dead people regenerate. And I would probably need to know what summoning is, exactly."

"Summoning calls a creature or group of creatures from another plane to this one, for a few minutes at most, and some of the creatures are basically animals. I like it as a sort of defensive spell - if I'm attacked I can summon something to distract the attacker while I run - or for utility reasons - if there was a fire I'd summon a group of water creatures to help put it out."

"...I don't think that should count."

He nods. "What happens if it turns out you're wrong about that?"

"The realistic worst case scenario is that you end up owing taxes, then. In theory they can add interest when people deliberately refuse to pay but... there's absolutely nothing on here about summoning animals, and what you're describing isn't selling them - maybe it's buying them, I guess - and they don't charge interest on back taxes when there's a good-faith mix-up. Which they'd conclude this was, because you asked me about it and I told you what the law says and I gave you my educated guess about whether it applies to you. And they will know I did that because, uh, people appearing from previously unknown worlds is important and I am going to write a report about it, on which topic you should let me know if you've told me anything very private."

"I'm not especially in the habit of keeping secrets, but the person I was talking to on the bus seemed a little concerned when I mentioned being a cleric, I might not want that being spread around without context if it's going to alarm people."

"...Why would that alarm people? I mean, we can keep that quiet, but what are you worried about there?"

"I don't actually know, it's just that their first thought when I mentioned it was that it had something to do with demons. If it was just that one person I won't worry about it."

"Aha. The top two most popular religions among the living teach that there is only one god and anything else is either an angel, which is his servant, or a demon, which is evil. Most people, once they get here, realize neither of those religions is... well... true. But also all the very powerful entities seem to be broadly the same category of person, like all humans are humans even if they have different personalities, and most of them are terrible, so some people end up applying a word like 'demon' to the whole category. It's not really fair but you can expect half the people you meet to assume your god is either made up or 'a demon'." She adds sarcastic airquotes. "But none of them should hurt you about it or anything. There's a weird number of people out there going 'well, I guess Jesus is actually a demon' and celebrating his birthday and singing his praises."

"That's... really strange. Well, the place I'm from has lots of sorts of people, most of which are relatively normal mortals but some of which aren't, and we do have gods, several of them, and types of people who my translation magic says would be recognizable as angels and demons, which are noticeably distinct from each other."

"If you've met them personally you can just tell people that."

He nods. "I've met angels and demons; I haven't met a god as such but Fharlanghn has contacted me once or twice." He touches the wooden pendant he's wearing around his neck. "If you want to put that in your report."

"I will. And... is there any reason we shouldn't try to contact him?"

"Fharlanghn? Well, he's generally very busy, but if he doesn't already know about this world he'll be even more thrilled than I am to find out about it, you shouldn't have trouble on that front, and I can try too - he should be able to see me here even if he can't otherwise see the place. And if that doesn't work and it's difficult for you to keep trying you may want to wait for me to be able to get home under my own power and tell people that way instead, I'd expect it to be five or ten years before I can cast a ninth-tier spell to do it."

"Will it disrupt the process of you gaining spells if you die in that time?"

"-it would at home, if someone raised me to continue working on it in the first place; it'd set me back by a full tier which is years of work at this point. I have no idea what would happen here. I'm not even sure that wouldn't send me to one of my home's afterlives."

"Then it's strategically important that we keep you alive. So if we do try to contact your god... what would he be likely to want from us?"

"To set up free or reasonably free travel between this world and ours, to see you improve your transportation infrastructure and share the things you've invented for it with us - presumably through trade - and possibly some political consesions to make travel easier in your territory. And I'm assuming you don't have any slavery here that I haven't run into yet, he'll expect that to stop if you do."

"...We don't," she says, slowly starting to smirk.

"-we're quite serious about the slavery thing, is there something I ought to be looking into?"

"Yes. Yes, there is. - I guess arguably most of what I'm worried about is more like torture and prisons and indoctrination but I think some of it will count as slavery." She is grinning so much now. "Possibly what you should do is read up on things and then get an appointment with the king."

"Prisons count, it's the denial of the right to travel that matters. Torture's not itself a problem but I'm obligated to help people leave situations they don't want to be in, and indoctrination's a subtler issue but I'm still not a fan - please do."

"Right, okay. Books, then. Let me just..." She squats down to look at something on her side of the counter, and comes back up with two books for him, a thick one with an unillustrated cover called A Guide to New Jerusalem, and a slimmer one, whose cover has a picture of an altar with candles and blades, called I Found Jesus (Right Where He Said He'd Be During Office Hours). "This one," she says, tapping the first, "tries not to assume you know anything. And this one," she says, tapping the second, "assumes a lot but one of the things it assumes is that you take religion seriously and want to hear all about the religious implications of everything here. And, uh, there are books about modern technology that you should read, but I don't have one on hand for you so you'll have to try a library. Anyway, once you're oriented, you can schedule an appointment with the king through his website."

"Sounds good. Should I come back here or try at the library, if I have questions? Or do the -" he waves vaguely - "mail thing, I guess."

"You can come back here but you'll probably find borrowing a library computer to look online works fine and the librarians will know how to find information about a broader range of things."

"All right." He takes the books. "When will I know about housing?"

"Uh, we told them why it's urgent, so check in a few hours and if it gets to be evening and you haven't heard from them then... maybe try offering hotels magic for a room? Or find a library or maybe a restaurant, those usually have places where people can rest, libraries especially, but you'd have to be quiet. And if that fails, it's usually warm and dry this time of year."

"I can definitely camp if I need to, as long as that won't bother anyone." He takes the books and moves off to a table to get his map out again and take a look at the area - he should figure out where the library is sooner or later but first he needs to find someplace to sell spells, or perhaps some of the trade goods he has on hand.

There's a pawn shop a ways off, not quite in the same direction as the nearest library but not too far. There are shops, and there are places that sometimes hold outdoor markets; on the way to the pawn shop he'll pass places that sell cookware and furniture and soap and jewelry and computers and phones and textiles and haircuts, as well as a handful of very nice homes that have been only slightly updated this millennium.

He heads off in that direction, wandering through the shops to look at the prices on the merchandise and keeping an eye out for an alley or other secluded place to get into his storage.

There are lots of little alleys around here.

He finds one that seems private enough, waits a couple of minutes to be sure he hasn't misjudged the amount of foot traffic it gets, and spreads his portable hole on the ground so that he can double check the inventory he has inside.

He's not interrupted.

Good. He climbs out some ten minutes later, list in hand, and continues on his way to the pawn shop.

Inside there are collections of things hanging from the walls or displayed under glass. A couple of people who seem to be together are looking at instruments and knives, while someone else is just finishing up pawning an excessively fancy day-of-the-week calculator.

He waits for the customer with the calculator to be finished and steps up to the counter. "Hi! I have some things to sell - probably not all of them, I need to know which ones you're most likely to want before I bring them in." And he presents his list:

gold, silver, copper coins, about 10lb each

platinum coins, about 2lb

diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, misc. sizes/cuts (mostly medium to large)

exotic seeds, misc. decorative and medicinal plants/trees with descriptions of growing conditions

experimental fabric (good quality), 1 bolt each blue silk and green/silver linen

trio of marble carvings of cats, about 1' tall

expertly carved blue oak serving set with acorn decorations - 2 large bowls, 2 medium bowls, 2 serving spoons, platter

fox fur cloak, red and silver, men's cut, full length, with matching handwarmer

large light yellow amber pendant, teardrop shaped, with trapped dandelion seeds

The shopkeeper frowns at the list for a while.

"What makes the fabric experimental?"

"The manufacturing method - I don't actually know much about it, it's a bit of a long story."

"Hm. Well, I don't usually deal in bolts of fabric or plants. Depending on how much you're asking for them I can imagine they could be worth it, though. The coins, I'd want to see for myself just how much gold and silver is in them, and the gems and pearls, likewise... I rarely have an easy time finding buyers for emeralds or rubies, gem prices just keep going down these days, but diamonds and pearls are easier... I really can't in good conscience not let you know I know where you can sell the cloak for more than I'd pay for it. But I'd take a look at it anyway. Hm. Hmm. I definitely want to at least see the cats and the pendant and the gems and precious metals, if you'll bring them in. And... how much space would the serving set take up?"

"The platter's like this," he gestures to show the size, "and the bowls are like this and like this." It's a reasonable to slightly oversized set, all told. "And the coins are like this-" he takes a linen bag out of his belt and retrieves a gold coin from it, then replaces it to pull another one from the same pouch - where there clearly wouldn't be room for both - to take a silver coin from, and hands them over. "They'll have different markings but should all be about as pure. I'll have a hard time hauling everything in today..." he looks thoughtful, "unless you have an open space in the back or something that I can use for a few minutes. It's related to my long story with the fabric, I'll tell you if you want."

"I'm always interested in long stories but I don't have an open space you can borrow just now."

"All right. Well, I can bring the gems and pendant and a reasonable amount of gold and silver, if those look good to you, that's easy enough, and one or two of the others."

"Bring the cats, I'm excited to see those."

"All right." He holds out his hand for the coins.

He can have his coins back.

And out he goes. He's back after twenty minutes, carefully carrying the stone cats - they're white marble with relatively faint blue-grey veins, probably all carved from the same piece, and quite realistic; one is sitting up, another loafing, and the third is curled on its side as if sleeping, with grey felt on the bottom to protect them and whatever they're set on. Raafi shifts to put them carefully on the counter, then fishes the pendant out of his belt - it's very light yellow indeed, and the dandelion seeds are nicely distributed inside and quite visible - followed by more linen bags with labels on the ribbons tying them closed marking them as diamonds, rubies, pearls, emeralds, and miscellaneous.

Most of these pieces would be worth a lot more, to the right buyer, than the pawnbroker is willing to pay for them. But finding the right buyer would take much longer than this.

"Well, to start with," he says, before getting into the gems, "what would you say to five silver each for these cats and half a silver for the pendant?"

"For this craftsmanship?"

Haggling ensues. Raafi is savvy, but not pushing all that hard.

He can be argued up. Especially on the statues, which he's kind of looking forward to displaying somewhere he can see them all day.

Of the gems, he's most interested in the diamonds and pearls. But even with those, he lowballs by a lot, relative to what Raafi's probably used to, and can't be argued up as much as for the statues or the pendant.

Raafi eventually gives up on selling the diamonds and rubies, opting to keep them. He does let the others go for what he fairly obviously thinks is too low a price.

"And my mysterious story is that I'm from another world," he says as he's gathering his payment and gems up and tucking it into his belt pouches. "I'm carrying fabric I don't know much about because it's a trade secret at home; I was meant to send anyone who was interested in it to talk to the craftsmen who made it. We have magic, too; none of those are," he nods at the things he's just sold, "but I need diamonds and rubies for some of the spells I can cast, and I've been carrying all this stuff around in magical storage."

"...Uh-huh. Well, welcome to our world. We have synthetic gems here. Although I think they have those on Earth, too, and gems are still cheaper here."

"Huh, thanks for the tip."

Next: library. Hopefully the funds he has now will be enough to cover it.

The nearest library is not quite back the way he came but almost. It's in a small stone building, and inside there are two computers, some bookshelves, and a cozy corner with beanbags. One of the beanbags is taken by someone reading about wolves. There's a self-checkout machine and a librarian at a desk.

He ogles the self-checkout machine a bit on his way over to the desk. "Hi! What's your fee schedule?"

"Aren't you a blast from the past? We haven't charged fees in generations. Unless you're overdue or destroy library property."

"Huh! All right. I am a little out of my element - I'm from a new world, and just got pulled here this morning; the woman at the information desk suggested I come here to read up on things while I'm waiting to hear about housing."

"Well, this is the place for it. You can read books here and after you get your housing situation straightened out you can sign up to borrow them. If there's anything else I can help you with just let me know."

"I will, thanks."

He claims the other beanbag and gets out the books - realistically speaking he's not going to read all the way through either one, but he'll start with the religion book and check the other to try to clear up any confusion as he goes.

This one informs him that Jesus exists, and that he says he is not older than humanity or omnipotent. According to this book, at least, Jesus definitely died and rescued more than a hundred thousand people from one of the hells. It's pretty clear there are other stories the reader is expected to have heard.

So one of the first things I wondered was how I got here without being a Christian. The answer is, we don't know. The best guess anyone has for who goes here is that it's somehow related to your personality. It might also be related to participation in rituals intended to cleanse or sanctify. There's been a lot of ink spilled on this topic and we're barely less in the dark about it than people on Earth.

Well, I figured I'd make the best of it. I wasn't as wronged by Christianity as some, and I figured, hey, at least Jesus is trying to do something about all the hells, and they're not his fault to begin with, so if I have to spend the rest of eternity singing his praises I can at least be a little genuine about it. You might be thinking the same thing. And if you're happy about that, don't let me stop you. But before you invest in harp lessons, you should know something very important: Christianity isn't true. Oh, sure, Jesus exists. He even really died for us. But lots of people have died for me who don't own my soul. If it wouldn't make any sense to say it about a firefighter, it probably doesn't make any sense to say it about Jesus.

If you look at the claims in the Nicene creed, they're mostly wrong. We don't know if there's one God. We don't have any reason to think Jesus is his son. We know Jesus isn't older than all worlds and that they weren't made through him. Arguably, "ascending" is exactly the wrong metaphor to use to describe how we get here.

(But if you were looking forward to the harps, nine of the gospel ensembles in town include harpists.)

The book goes on to explain that Jesus is a mostly hands-off ruler (most of the day-to-day governance is done by elected leaders who theoretically answer to him) who sometimes teaches part-time at one of the local universities (all his lectures and books are available online but if you enroll in his classes you can drop in during office hours to talk to him). What his mystery father is is unclear but it might be one of the demons from one of the hells. Also, he can pass on nifty magic powers which people sometimes get strongly enough to pass them on themselves. The waiting list for those is very long. Otherwise, he's pretty ignorable and probably not actually capable of reading anyone's mind even if he had unlimited attention which he does not seem to.

They explain that there are Christians here, but the denominations are divided up differently: there are several sects that think this isn't the real heaven and the local Jesus is an impostor; there's a sect descended from the Cathars but which believes in the physical incarnation of Jesus; there's a wildly popular adoptionist sect with what the author says is absolutely kooky theology (the details of which are not included); there are some of the sects from modern Earth; and, of course, there are a lot of Arians. But the author ended up joining a coven, of which there are actually several around (the book includes addresses for the websites for three of them). The city has a large Jewish population, largely Karaite but the author can also provide addresses for Orthodox and Reform synagogues (what they are or aren't reforming, the reader is assumed to know). There are several pages dedicated to interesting things about local Islamic theology, which has diverged considerably from Earth's sects; unfortunately, very little of it makes sense without some passing understanding of what they're building off of. Mohammad lives on this plane, although not in this city. But it gets weirder than that. There are Greek mystery cults and dozens of other pagan faiths - not revived or reconstructed, so, in some sense, more authentic than the Earth versions, but still very different from the historical versions from having spent so long changing and adapting to new circumstances. In some cases their gods turned out to be demons and in some of those cases they've schismed based on whether they believe their real gods are out there somewhere; in other cases they have no more evidence for their gods than they did back on Earth. There's been some very interesting drama from some of the older groups meeting their modern counterparts in the past few decades. When they even have modern counterparts, which some of them don't.

There are websites and physical addresses given for a lot of different faith communities. Many of them consider helping lost strangers part of their mission statement, and many others are at least interested in welcoming their co-religionists.

It's pretty clear that the evidence for any gods existing at all is extremely scant. No one here is a cleric, unless you count whatever is happening with the powers Jesus is distributing, which are definitely not the usual divine magic. The author practices magic, some sort of alien kind involving lots of ritual and results that are difficult to distinguish from random chance. That seems to be par for the course for local religions.

Also, this book isn't about the other afterlives but it's clear there are several where people are eternally tortured.

Raafi ends up skimming the parts about local religions until he's confident none of them have obvious magic, and skipping the rest of that section; on the other hand, he spends a while trying to find the passage in the other book that explains demons, and checking to see if the harps or any of the other references are things it's important to know about. By the time he's done it's lunchtime, and he asks the librarian to recommend a nearby park or something for him to sit in to eat.

The other book tries to avoid loaded terms like "demons" but describes powerful supernatural entities, usually but not always humanoid, usually but not always malevolent. It doesn't mention harps at all.

The nearest public park is a longish walk away, further than the pawn shop and in an entirely different direction, in another neighborhood built during a very different period in the history of architecture.

- huh. Is there anywhere nearby he can sit and eat?

A few businesses and homes have gardens with raised beds and retaining walls people can sit on. Arguably the edge of the city is nearby. And the nearest market square isn't hosting a market today.

A retaining wall works fine. He magics himself food for the day and wraps up the portions for dinner and for breakfast in the morning to stash in his belt before starting on his meal.

Someone who might be a child, but it's hard to tell with how creative they've gotten with their body plan, watches him bemusedly.

He waves, in between bites of sandwich.

They wave back.

"You know, you'd think I'd have heard of you, if you live around here and you're powerful enough to do that. But I don't think I have."

"I'm new, I just got here today. Name's Raafi."

"Angélique! Nice to meet you!"

"Likewise. Do you know what kind of magic people around here might be interested in? I have a few kinds."

She frowns.

"I think people mostly complain about how it's too hard to go home. Or get people out of hell. Or give more people magic. Also I think cooking is hard and I want to be able to make fancy cakes but I can't. Also it is completely unfair that I can't breathe fire. And. Hmm. I think it's very hard for people that they can't choose how many children come here at once?"

"Well, I can probably do something about some of those. Not the firebreathing or the cooking, unfortunately."

"Well, if you can then you should. Probably. How are you going to do that?"

"Well, it's been recommended that I talk to the king about hell, and that seems most urgent, so I'm going to do that before I make any plans. But if I can get to the world this is an afterlife of, I may be able to resurrect people there, or actually just teleport there with them, and it's not impossible you'll be able to pick up the type of magic I have, or one of the other ones from the world I'm from if I can get back there to bring you teachers."

"I approve, you should do that."

"I'm working on it. I was hoping to be able to support myself by selling spells while I'm getting oriented, though."

"Hmmm. Maybe if you can make weird food. Nobody pays for normal food but you have to pay for, like, ice cream or fresh vegetables."

He blinks a bit at that. "Any particular kind of fresh vegetables?"

Shrug. "I like the kind you can dip but I'm broke so I guess you should ask someone else."

"No, I mean - the spell I have that does food won't do anything very fancy or rare, but there are plenty of vegetables that aren't rare, so I'm not sure if that's what you meant or not."

Shrug. "You know how the boxes only have pickled ones? So not pickled ones."

"Huh. Well, that should work, then. Here, I have some carrot sticks I made for dinner, do you want them?" He gets the relevant bundle back out of his belt.

"Thanks!"

He finishes up his lunch and goes back to the library. "So my book said the king teaches classes, and there's a way to see them without taking one, how can I find out more about that?"

"Uh... I would check the university website for the lectures. You can borrow one of the computers for half an hour or until someone else wants it, whichever is longer, and if you're going to listen to things you should use headphones. And we have some of his books but they might be checked out right now."

"I've never used a computer before, should I be figuring that out first?"

The librarian can get him set up with a tutorial for that first if he wants.

He has no idea whether this is a vital skill or some niche thing that he'll never use again, he's just following her lead, but he'll do the tutorial, sure. And if nobody is waiting for the computer by the time he's done, he'll go look at the university website from there.

Nobody's waiting yet.

The lectures from a number of different courses are available online. Many are beginner-friendly. Many are from the king. The overlap between the categories, though, is fairly small: just Considerations in the Response to Extraplanar Humanitarian Crises, Theories of Identity and Population Ethics, and Historical Approaches in Jewish and Christian Exegesis.

Theories of Identity sounds fascinating, but he'll come back to that, Humanitarian Crises is what he's here for.

In this lecture series he assumes some background familiarity with the assorted hells and talks primarily about what has gone into the decisions they've made about whether and when and how to try to intervene in which of them. They've had to try to answer both empirical and normative questions, and they've had to move forward with a lot of remaining uncertainty.

The first lecture is just an overview of the questions they've faced and where they've looked for answers. To what extent is it right to prioritize protecting what they have? To what extent does delaying matter, when they have eternity? What can they expect if they limit themselves to accepting immigrants and protecting their own society? What can they do without antagonizing anyone? What are the risks if they antagonize one or more hells? Are demons morally relevant? How many people are suffering right now? Can they more effectively intervene on Earth to help more people make it to a more comfortable afterlife? At what point can they countenance another society's problems and ally with them, or is that even the best framing for that question?

They've been working on all these questions for a while and the current policy is conservative about antagonizing anywhere that doesn't already hate them and mostly focused on diplomacy and facilitating immigration. They're looking at military options; not all of the details of that are public, but what is public is that nothing along those lines is in the works right now.

His notes are minimal; he doesn't need them and he doesn't want to stick to an outline he might think better of later. He's spent two thousand years picking up jargon and he uses almost none of it without an explanation. He speaks like someone very used to making his voice carry exactly the right amount, and like someone who is very good at making what he's saying sound important.

Raafi'll have to wait and see what he's like in person, but so far this looks promising. Can he find anything about setting up a meeting?

He can, with a little work, discover an email address.

Cool. So. It's just like writing a letter, right?

Greetings, Your Majesty;

My name is Raafi; I arrived here unexpectedly this morning from a world that your world hasn't previously been in contact with. We have magic there, of several kinds. I in particular am a powerful cleric of our god of travel, Fharlanghn, who I understand would be displeased at the situation in some of the hells here, as he objects to any person being denied their freedom; as such, I'm interested in helping to remedy the situation, and it seems that working with your established plans and resources will be the most effective way of doing so. I'd be interested in discussing this with you in person at your convenience; I can be reached at this email address to make arrangements.

Thank you for your consideration,
Traveler Raafi

Before he hears back about that, there's a response to his application for housing; they'll have a place ready for him by tonight, here's the address, here's the range of times when if he stops by there'll be someone there to hand over the keys and show him where to find things.

He should probably do that before looking at the other lecture. Oh well; it'll be there when he gets to it, apparently. He gets his map back out and attempts to find the address he's been given on it.

It's a very long way off, far from both the library and the gate. He might want to take the subway.

He in fact fails to figure out that the subway is an option, though he does notice that it's too far to walk. He puzzles over it for a bit before deciding that he'll fly, and heads outside to do that.

He draws a lot of attention but not really negative attention, mostly.

Wheee!

He doesn't make it quite to his destination in one shot; he has to land and check the street signs against his map again when he gets close enough to recognize landmarks.

The buildings get taller as he gets closer. They've assigned him an apartment on the fortieth floor of one of them, not far from the nearest park. People give him space to land. Otherwise it'd be hard to find a place for it; as he gets closer to this edge of the city, the crowds get denser and the streets narrower.

Skyscrapers: wow.

He spends a minute just admiring them, then finds the building he's been assigned to and heads in to find someone to talk to.

There is someone to talk to.

"Hi, I understand I've been assigned a place to stay here?"

If he can just give his name and date of arrival they can confirm that and hand over the keys.

- he hasn't found the date yet but he just got here this morning. Also he's from a world that hasn't previously been in contact with this one, he's not familiar with how they do things and probably needs to be shown how to get to the room and so on.

That works. He can get shown there, and also get a tour of the apartment and an explanation of things like light fixtures and faucets if he needs one. There's a kitchen and a bedroom and a bathroom.

The building rules are posted on the inside of the front door (nothing that didn't already come up in the email: no pets, quiet hours ending around dawn, bad enough failure to deal with trash may result in annoyed neighbors getting management to let them in to deal with it), and the person giving him the tour wants him to confirm that he's read them and understands them.

He signs where he's asked to and asks about nearby libraries.

This person knows quite a bit about the neighborhood and doesn't mind talking about it. The closest public library is very new and built from the ground up with mass transit, electricity, and the internet in mind. He can also probably but not definitely get into the nearby church library. Or if he wants to go further out there's a bigger, fancier library with a bigger collection.

Ooh, he wants to see the big library. -actually, he's gotten a little sidetracked, he wanted to ask - how was he meant to get here? He started out way over at the edge of the city where the bus dropped him off, and then he was assigned here, and it was obviously too far to walk - he ended up flying over with some magic he has from his world, but how was he supposed to do it?

"Oh, well, if it works then it's how you're supposed to do it, but I would've taken the subway."

"I only get so much magic a day, I can't do that for everything. How does taking the subway work?"

"It's just a train that runs underground. You find the aboveground stations and you take the stairs down and get on the right train for your destination and, uh, some routes and some times of day you'll have to pay for a ticket first."

"I can probably figure it out from that. What times of day are free, and how do I know which train is the right one?"

They can explain that.

He thanks them and sees them out, spends some time settling in, and decides to have a wander around the building - there's probably an amazing view from the top floors, if he can get up there.

He can. If he pokes around a little he can even get up onto the roof.

There are a number of similarly tall buildings nearby, but there's also a park right in the middle of things, and some construction work not far off, and then there's no more city in that direction, just the low rolling hills and some roads leading off in different directions.

Oh wow it's incredible. He finds himself reciting a prayer without even pausing to decide to.

He's maybe going to hang around up here for a while, transfixed by the view.

After a few minutes someone else, who might be up here for the same reason, says hi.

He has to take a second to shake himself back to reality. "-oh. Hi there."

"Haven't seen you around before. Have you been finding everything okay?"

This person has dark circles under their eyes and very short, slightly uneven hair. They look from Raafi to the view below, and back again, as if at every moment they want to be looking at something other than whatever they're looking at.

"More or less. I just got in an hour ago, I haven't had much time to look around yet. - name's Raafi."

"I'm Sam. Probably."

"Probably?" he asks, curiously.

"Hard to say what really counts as a name, especially when I might have another one and have forgotten it."

"That sounds like a story."

"Arguably. Just went by a lot of things for a while. I didn't come straight here, is the thing, and some places they like to keep switching things up, new names every few years."

"Huh. I've been places where people will take a new name when something important happens, but I don't think I've heard of one where people do as a matter of course. Or at least not that often, anyway."

"Oh? What sorts of places were those?"

"Ones in the world I'm from - I'm from a new one, they'd never heard of it before at the information booth. Mostly not human places, though I wouldn't be surprised if some humans somewhere do it like that. Mostly gnomes that I saw, though, and I think halflings once or twice."

The person looks uneasy about this for reasons they don't volunteer. "...What are gnomes and halflings like?"

"Gnomes are very curious and mostly artists and inventor types; halflings are known as freespirited wanderers, and that's pretty accurate - I think people take them a little less seriously than they ought to, sometimes, though. And both of them are very short species." He gestures indicatively at about waist height.

Nod. "How'd they happen?"

"Their gods made them. Which probably sounds more alarming here than it actually is, we do have gods and those two in particular are perfectly nice."

"I'm glad some of them are."

"It is a little alarming here, from what I've heard so far. Though you're doing all right in some ways, we don't have anything like this." He gestures at the building at his feet.

"The height or the... other parts?"

"The height, the glass, the appliances - I probably haven't even noticed everything yet, but it's very impressive."

"That. Yeah. It's mostly not even magic." They consider saying something, and then say something else instead. "Best world I've ever been to, this is."

"I've heard that," he nods. "I only have the one other to compare it to, personally, at least as far as places we could live go, and I'm not sure they're similar enough to compare, really."

"No? I guess maybe it's pointless to ask how they're different, then."

"Well, I did only get here this morning, I also don't know much yet. But you've managed to make the libraries free, and you have enough food to give it away to everyone, but also somehow fresh vegetables are a luxury - I have no idea how you'd wind up with enough food to give it away but no vegetables in springtime, that would never happen at home."

"Wh... oh, it's not no vegetables, it's that food for the deliveries is conjured out of nothing and for some reason that's more efficient if they do big batches rarely so it's mostly shelf-stable. Nothing stopping you from buying vegetables, or so I hear."

"Ah, that makes more sense. We have conjuration too, but it works differently, it wouldn't be remotely possible to feed a city with it - I might do dinner for the building sometime, though."

"Then I bet you'll be popular. Although I don't think the entire building can all eat the same things. Or eat together. Or be polite to each other at the same social get-together."

"Huh. Well, I doubt I'll be around long enough to get that sorted out."

That gets him a knowing nod. "Any idea where you're going afterward?"

"Only part of one - conjuration isn't the only magic I have, and the god I get it from objects to people being imprisoned; the woman at the information booth said the king will probably want to talk to me about helping with some of the other worlds where that's a problem."

"That sounds like the sort of thing he'd do, yeah. I've never been sure if he really hates the hells or just wants to be popular with people who do."

"Who's that?"

"The people who hate hells? There are a lot of them, at least around here. This whole place is about hating hells."

"That's not bad, then. There's certainly worse things than wanting to be popular with the people you rule."

"Probably true. Well. How about I give you my email and then you'll have someone local to ask if anything comes up while you're staying here."

"I'd appreciate that."

They can do that.

They'll be out here a while longer but they don't have much else to say unless he does.

He eventually casts another flight spell and spends fifteen minutes swooping around looking at the streets from above before going in.

He stays in for his devotions in the morning, not yet sure he can find his way back without spending magic on it, and then heads down to the lobby to conjure food for the day - it's the same spell to feed a crowd as himself, and better not to waste the extra capacity; he aims for mostly fruit and vegetables and leaves a note saying 'free - magically produced - fades tomorrow morning' on what he doesn't take, and then heads out to find the nearby library he was told about the day before.

The nearby library is near a subway stop and a bus stop. It's several floors tall. There are multiple computers just dedicated to having the catalog open and searchable near the main entrance; there's also a room full of borrowable computers, half of them in use.

There's a cozy room, with every wall lined with shelves of easier novels and guides to dozens of topics all aimed at a lay audience and the center of the room taken up by tables and chairs and reams of loose paper and cups of writing implements waiting on the tables for someone to take them. (Several someones are doing just that.) There are three huge halls of nonfiction on - maybe not every topic in the world, but a credible attempt at that. There's a children's section, all in bright colors, with lots of open spaces and child-sized furniture and puzzles in addition to the short bookshelves; two of the children in there are trying to collaborate on some kind of report about whales and getting into an argument about taxonomy that would probably turn out to have no substance if they had several concepts they do not, at this point, actually have. There's a room dedicated entirely to fantasy, and one dedicated entirely to a genre of novel that almost resembles a sitcom, and one dedicated entirely to religious and uplifting fiction; that's all in addition to the miscellaneous fiction section.

It would seem busy, were it a remotely reasonable size, but as it is it's not all that full. Not at the moment, anyway.

Well, the first thing he's going to do is check his mail.

-no, the first thing he's going to do is stand and ogle for a minute. But after that the first thing he's going to do is check his mail.

He has mail from the king; the timestamp is from early this morning.

Greetings, Traveler Raafi,

I would be very interested in meeting with you to discuss the hells and your god. How about Thursday (the day after tomorrow as of my writing this email) at eleven in the morning at my office on the university campus?

Yeshua, King of New Jerusalem, PhD

He sends an email back confirming, looks up how to get there, and then - how about that other lecture, Theories of Identity and Population Ethics?

In this one, he seems like he's having a lot of fun nerding out about one of his favorite subjects.

There are a number of competing definitions of identity. Most people in the intended target audience, if they haven't thought it through already, default to a definition based on spiritual continuity: each person is a soul, which can change over time and be instantiated in different worlds but cannot stop existing. But that definition is unfalsifiable and not directly observable. If living people didn't have souls, and dead people were only copies of them, how would anyone ever know? These kinds of concerns give rise to other definitions. Maybe it makes sense to define identity based on observable facts about a person: if a newly dead person behaves just like they did when they were alive, remembers the same things they did when they were alive, and feels the same feelings they felt when they were alive, then maybe it doesn't matter if they were copied or teleported or something else. But they aren't identical; they see new things, and that makes them feel new things and do new things and make new memories. Over time they forget things. Over time they can change everything about themselves. An implication of defining identity based on specific traits is that this constitutes becoming a different person. But which parts constitute that? Does every change make someone a new person? Does having one thing in common with someone make you the same person? Most people reject both of those options. And he'll go into detail on some of the more popular specific definitions of identity, but first...

Why is this relevant to population ethics? In some cases it isn't; under, for example, total hedonic utilitarianism, it doesn't particularly matter if there are two people who are happy for a thousand years each, or one person who is happy for two thousand years. But under the person-affecting view, it's wrong to make someone less happy, but not wrong to cause a less happy person to come into existence instead of a happier one; it's therefore essential to define identity somehow. And under the maximin principle, the welfare of the worst-off person is the priority - so under certain interpretations, it matters which experiences belong to the same person. This is even a problem for all of ethics, not just population ethics - some definitions of personhood allow for one body and soul to have multiple persons simultaneously, making it hard if not impossible to distinguish between someone consenting to experience some pain for a later reward, and someone choosing to hurt someone else for personal gain - but this course is only about population ethics.

After the introduction, the rest of the course is organized around a few specific definitions of identity and personhood, going into detail about how each one would interact with each of a few specific ethical theories in a few example scenarios.

What a cute nerd. Raafi'll have to remember to have a few soul-related spells available for the appointment.

So now he's basically prepared, is there anything else he should look up... actually yes there is, he should look into what they do with rescuees, it's always a good idea to be able to answer peoples' questions about what they're getting into in a new place.

 There's a little information easily findable on the internet. There's an article on the concept of refugees that links to an article on the special challenges posed by refugees from one of the hells in particular, where they're taught to serve their demon overlords and then sometimes unleashed on the world of the living to trick people. There's the personal reflections of someone from one of the hells (a different one), who came to New Jerusalem a few years ago and has found the culture hard to adjust to but appreciates the lack of torture; they mention that there are public services they didn't avail themself of, but not what services those are. There are news stories about living refugees on Earth, which are probably less relevant.

That's not quite what he's looking for. He'll go ask a librarian.

The librarian can point him at a book titled Approaches to Refugee Integration in New Jerusalem and Allied Polities, a page on the New Jerusalem government website consisting almost entirely of links to the websites of or contact information for charities that work with refugees, and someone's memoir about their experiences working with refugees.

He'll look into Approaches, first, maybe it won't be too dry to get anywhere with.

According to this book, approaches vary most by the general goals of the polity implementing them, but also by the specific histories of the refugees. In New Jerusalem, many of those rescued from hells are processed the same way as other new arrivals: offered food, shelter, translation, and maps, and left to figure out for themselves what to do next. If they or their families ask for it, they can get free spiritual counseling or classes on certain basic skills or a handful of other things. But sometimes this is not an adequate solution.

For instance, sometimes they didn't have much of an education before death, because they died young or had neurological problems or were raised by animals or any number of things, and then spent their entire afterlife getting not-very-educationally tortured, and then they come to New Jerusalem or another not-very-bad polity as adults who lack even the skills necessary to independently figure out how to get oriented or what they need to know. Translation magic can only do so much for people who don't have a first language; maps aren't much use without the concept of representational art; common sense founded in experience isn't much use in sufficiently unfamiliar situations. Some polities that accept some refugees still sometimes won't accept people who don't have at least one language, or can't count, or don't know what a society is or what a law is. Some will accept them and dump them out in the wilderness somewhere they won't get in the way. New Jerusalem sometimes places them with people or families who think they can help and seem competent, and sometimes keeps them in institutions where they can be kept out of other people's way and taught what they need to know. There's substantial debate within New Jerusalem about how strongly to incentivize them to learn quickly. On the one hand, it's not like they'll die if left alone in a big walled garden for a while if they're too suspicious or tired or overstimulated to want to engage with a class; on the other hand, the longer they stay, the longer it takes any given facility to be ready to handle more, and they also can't make their own informed choices about how fast to learn because they can't know what they're missing because not knowing that is their entire problem. The good news is, at least, that dead people are very hard to permanently damage, and don't have much trouble picking up a first language at age five hundred.

A thornier problem is the places that try very hard to convince people to do things that are popularly glossed as "evil" - torturing people, going to Earth to talk living people into hurting others, or possibly coming to New Jerusalem to cause problems. They sometimes end up detained, as well, but that's less common. It's less clear that this benefits them and it's not that easy to do unfixable harm in the time it usually takes New Jerusalem's law enforcement to respond to a problem. The current policy is that if they're not trying to break the law and they want to be left alone they should be left alone. But not all of them want that; some of them are badly out of practice making choices, and some have lost confidence in their own judgment, and some don't want to take the risk that they'd be alone if their former overlords sent anyone after them. At any rate when they pass through official channels directly from their hell of origin - as opposed to sneaking in, or immigrating after living peacefully in an allied polity - the available services are opt-out, not opt-in. It's different in other polities, of course; some won't take them and some don't let them go free without passing some sort of evaluation, and on the other end of the spectrum, the Dead Republic's official position is that immigrants from all cultures are equally welcome and no one should be singled out because of their background. Most polities' policies are controversial - people criticize New Jerusalem in particular for not trying harder to make help available, and for making it too hard to avoid, and for aiming to make people more convenient for their neighbors in ways that aren't in their best interest, and for not trying harder to teach these people right from wrong, and for letting them immigrate at all, and for treating innocent victims with such unreasonable suspicion...

Ugh, books. He skims enough of it to be reasonably sure it's only talking about edge cases and sets it in the receptacle to be shelved.

He really should know, though, if he's going to be advising people - maybe his neighbor from the roof will know something useful; he gets back on the computer and after some fumbling sends an email asking if they're available to talk to him tomorrow. Then - the woman from the information booth might have an idea, too; he flies back over to see if she's there today.

There's a different information person today. No wings this time. But they can field questions too.

He waits for a lull before going over to talk to them.

"Hi! I've been through here already but I'm still new, and I have a question I haven't had much luck with at the library - I'd like to know about what you usually do for people coming in from other worlds, who've been rescued or what have you."

"Uh, usually it's the same if you came from Earth or one of the afterlives, so you'll've been through it coming here."

"Huh, all right. What are the exceptions?"

"Well, some of the worlds torture people, and when people come from those, they sometimes benefit from extra help healing, so I'd give them a list of free resources they could look into - I can print that list out for you if you'd like. I only see people who can ask for a list like that, though, so I wouldn't really know what they do for people who can't."

"The list sounds like what I'm looking for to start with, thank you."

Then he can have one. "Anything else?"

"That's all for now, thanks."

He'll try the subway to get back home; either it works and it saves him a teleport or it doesn't and he's no worse off than not trying it.

There are automatic ticket machines; there are signs that explain how to use them, with illustrations, and he can hang back and watch for a while first.

Then he will successfully get into the subway. He looks over his printout while he's waiting for the train.

There's a website and a physical address for an organization that teaches classes, mostly aimed at educationally neglected adults, on topics like arithmetic, literacy, budgeting, personal hygiene, geography, civics, statistics, history, and literature. There's contact information for a friar who is apparently good at talking people through hard times, and for a couple of other people with broadly similar skills. There are several people who do things in the general genre of spiritual cleansing or will attempt the dubious local magic practices. There's a meditation retreat.

The friar sounds like a promising contact.

He puts the list away again and waits for the train.

The train doesn't take long. It's a bit crowded.

Crowded is fine. Raafi watches out the window.

They go through a tunnel for a while. It's not terribly visually interesting, at first. But this line happens to pass part of the trip aboveground, eventually passing some farms where the city curves and the train track takes a shortcut. No one bothers him.

It may not be very interesting per se but it's still very exciting; he watches raptly until he gets back to his stop, then heads to the library again to send the friar a brief explanation of his situation and what he's doing and ask for an overview of the state of things here.

It's a bit early for lunch, still, when he's done; he gets out his map to look for nearby parks or things to visit in the meantime.

By the time he's back to the library Sam has gotten back to him ("Sure, on the roof at noonish or what?").

For a sufficiently broad definition of "nearby" he could see a park or an art gallery or a museum about the history of architecture in New Jerusalem or a small amusement park.

Noonish works, he can bring lunch, do they want anything in particular?

Ooh, an architecture museum. He heads off to see it.

It's in a building which is itself an interesting shape. The exhibits are mostly drawings and models, but there are some photographs too. New Jerusalem's architecture traces its roots back to a few styles from Earth, but it's gone in interestingly different directions. The plaques are written for an audience that doesn't necessarily know much about architecture yet.

There's a little gift shop in case he'd like a pillowcase printed with someone's sketch of an old temple, or a book about architecture, or a notebook of graph paper.

He can always use a good notebook, and he's never seen one with graph paper before.

He eats his lunch, and then - hm, it would be good to have some kind of income, not to mention that if he's rescuing people they might want to know about their prospects there. He heads back to the library to see if this is the sort of thing one looks on the internet for.

There are job search websites. This one specializes in matching freelance programmers, technical writers, and science journalists with projects. That one is aiming to be all things to all job-seekers and unshakably convinced that everyone on the entire plane would like to see five ads (for each of five possible shifts) for the same bus driver job on the first page of results no matter what they search for or where they are. Another one is specific to transportation-related jobs and has some sort of system for verifying applicants' skills. One won't show all the details for free. And finally there's one that turns out to actually be the website of a temp agency.

Hm.

If he wanted to hire someone to do magic, how would he do that, does a search turn up anything?

Some of the ads posted on one of the websites are looking for magic-users. There are also some magic-users' personal websites that mention how to hire them. There are some people talking about which ones are worth hiring and some other people talking about whether magic is evil.

What kind of magic are the sites looking to hire people for?

Conjuring things. Interplanar transit. Jargon the meaning of which is opaque even with translation. Garbage cleanup. Water treatment. Emotional changes.

Water treatment he can do, and emotional changes and garbage cleanup maybe, depending on what they're looking for exactly. He sends emails.

It's mid-afternoon by the time he's done, and he doesn't feel like spending any more time indoors. He heads out onto the streets to take a walk.

There sure are streets. Some of them are lined with greenery. A few buildings have been painted with murals; most others have designs of various kinds, but a few are solid colors or solid colors with trim.

Nearby there's a building where the first five floors each hold a different store - a trendy clothing store, a store for work clothes, an ice cream parlor, an art supply store, and a garden store. Down the road a little there's a hobby shop and two restaurants and an office supply store and places that sell electronics and cookware and carpets. There's another information place, not nearly as obvious as the other one and almost deserted. There's a public bath-house and a karaoke bar on opposite sides of the street. There's a rec center with a big hall that advertises dance lessons, dance parties, martial arts lessons, and an upcoming presentation on the history of Catholicism. Scattered between all these are a few empty places for rent or for sale. Most of the buildings are several stories and more than half have at least one floor devoted to apartments, office space, or both.

He gets a small strawberry ice cream to eat while he walks, taking note of the places he passes; on his way back he stops into the rec center to check their schedule and the bath-house to get an idea of their offerings, and then heads home.

The ice cream comes with a compostable bowl and spoon. The rec center's schedule has a bunch of openings in the coming weeks when he could rent the place for events, and other than that it's dances, martial arts, regular arts, a couple of classes, and a religious group that doesn't have their own space to meet in yet. The bath-house has facilities for washing, and different facilities for enjoying the water, and a small attached spa. Back home, someone has left a thank-you note for the food.

His meeting with his neighbor is the next day at noon.

He's there a little early for it after a morning spent exploring the neighborhood, with a picnic basket full of sandwiches and salad and fruit and cheese.

Ooh, exactly the kind of food they don't usually get. They could go for some of that.

"So what's up?"

"Oh, I'm curious about how it was for you when you moved here, mostly. If I'm going to be bringing people in I want them to know what to expect."

"Ah. Well. They'll need to be ready to say no and keep saying no to... help. If they want. They won't get in trouble for it and they might not know that."

He nods. "I can pass that along. Is there anything specific they should be looking out for?"

"Mm. If anyone wants them to stay in a place, they don't have to do that, but they might not be told they don't have to do that. They're not required to accept the food but it's not conditional on anything and the housing mostly isn't either. But it really depends on where they're from, what they'll expect. Where are you getting people from?"

"I don't know yet - I might have my pick but it sounds like we'll need to worry about politics, and I don't know anything about that yet. I'll probably know more tomorrow, I have an appointment with the king."

"I don't know what he'll want you to do but I came from one people around here sometimes call the underworld, and I know people from the valley of shadow and the stone city, and I only know what I've read or heard about the others. So talking about what I know best, if you get people out of the underworld or the stone city, they'll be surprised how much the king doesn't care what they do - like, there's an entire movement of republicans who hate the monarchy, and he doesn't care, even if they stand around outside the university chanting about it. And they'll all want to know that people say you go to hell for being a worse person than the kind of person who goes to heaven. That the kind of thing you want to know?"

"Sounds like it. I think I might be missing something about the last part, though."

"Mmm. There's a religion that teaches that you get to heaven by being completely perfect. Not that people around here usually believe that, but..."

"But they haven't decided it's completely wrong, either, I suppose. Is it going to be controversial, bringing people here? What's the general feeling about that?"

"Oh, bringing people here from places like that is wildly popular - I mean in New Jerusalem, I can't speak to the other cities, but I think anywhere that would object doesn't have open borders with us - last survey I saw on the topic, most people wanted to import people faster. Because they're too nice to want other people to spend eternity being tortured just to make their own afterlife a little nicer, right, we're not all going to turn this place into hell and there are more of us than them so it's a... worthy sacrifice, to tolerate us." They shrug. "That's really specific to New Jerusalem, though."

He nods. "That makes sense. Anything else?"

"Mm. So much. But if I have to boil it down to something quick to explain it's... people here act very... nice, very gentle, and it's not all sincere and it's not all an act. It's important to keep your wits about you, not let your guard down, always say 'thank you', never say anything seems too good to be true even if it does, and never tell them anything was better back home."

"-one second." He gets out a notebook to write their words down. "Wouldn't do to garble that."

"Makes sense." They can repeat that if necessary. "Is this sort of thing new to you?"

"Yes and no - usually I have a whole world to offer people, trying to help everyone fit in to one place is new."

"Hm. It's not like this is the only place that isn't hell, no matter what some people say about it. But I guess sending people to Rose City or Elysium doesn't have to be your job."

"Honestly I'd rather, if they'll cooperate with it at all. That's not - getting people out of places isn't really my calling; getting people to places is."

"A lot of them won't have any way to know where they'd rather go anyway. And New Jerusalem will give them all the languages and let them leave if they can get anywhere else to take them."

"Advising people on their options is part of my job, that way - I bet I can get a spell to talk to the ones that don't have language, even. But if New Jerusalem has the best setup for getting people to a point where they can decide for themselves it makes a good default, at least."

"Huh. What kind of spell are you thinking of?"

"I'd expect it to be a bit like telepathy but more to do with body language - like an intuition for how to move to make yourself understood, basically, and for what the other person's movements mean, even when you shouldn't really be able to know. There are a couple of other spells like that - druids can talk to plants and animals with magic - but clerics don't usually get them, that's just how I've heard they work."

"That sounds so useful. You... might need to get in touch with the people who handle those people now and I'm sure the king can find you a number to call, for that."