Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, S.H.I.E.L.D's certified technoscientific geniuses, are examining the Tesseract. True to its name, it appears to be capable of manipulating spacetime in more than the usual 3+1 dimensions. That goes part of the way to explaining why it emanates a tetrahedron of warped space whose edges crackle with the blue light of energy rushing down some sort of hyperspatial gradient, but Bruce is still very surprised when it hits him.
"There is so much we don't know about physics. I can go over the math of how it's possible if you're curious but I should at least call the people I was with and tell them I'm okay and where I am first." (Surely they cannot classify the pure theory. Some of it is already on ArXiv. He'll just avoid anything about which of the possible things happened to him or whose lab he was in at the time.)
Oh, nice, maybe this will be more straightforward than she thought.
"What nation-state are you from, again? We can get you to a phone. And to an airport, if you want, but if it's anywhere on the Continent trains'll be a better bet."
....Okay damn it she cannot help herself. "Or, consider, if you wanted you could switch Chaos for a bit and we'll show you a night in the Down Under here in Kast. We got the best ballpit in the world. Won an award and everything."
"I'm from the United States. New York City. And I kind of do need to get back soon, sorry, people will be worried." They might have managed to trace it but they also might not have, in which case they'll probably think he's in space somewhere and it's not actually clear if he could survive that, and separately a party with a bunch of strangers who want him to 'switch Chaos' is just about the worst possible idea. He pulls out his phone and checks it, but of course he has no signal down here.
Wow he hasn't even heard of either of those. Must be a teeny tiny place somewhere or other, that happens to run a groundbreaking physics lab - maybe it's the sort of place where they need Law underground and want to avoid collisions? They can look it up on the Surface.
"All right. Let's take him up. I don't wanna dawdle down here if we have to front Law until this guy's sorted."
Atlas absolutely agrees. Atlas finds fronting in the Underworld really really weird.
"Ugh. Why'd we have to land in a cave. Oy, guys, steal some candles." It also feels REALLY WEIRD to say that with her Lawful half. "Tunnel's not lit and I'm not in the mood for a ritualistic rebirth through darkness or whatever."
"I'm sorry for disrupting your party," he says sheepishly. "Also do mind explaining what 'fronting law' is?" Shit, if he asks too many stupid questions they're going to want to know how he speaks the language and that really can't be explained without classified stuff. He'll have to ration further stupid questions more carefully.
This gets him weird looks from all of them, but it's not like being rude to the stranger will help with anything at all.
"Well, we're going to the Surface, right," Ronda explains. (Ennis is better at the general domain of "people stuff when Law is involved" but she's not going to switch fully just for that, she'll just try to pull a bit of that in.) "Where everything gets done, right, so we can't be leaking Chaos up there. ...Okay, you have to have a Chaos region where you're from. Is it an island?"
"There are . . . places with more crime or worse law enforcement?" Probably everything they know about America is from TV and wildly exaggerated, and he's suddenly aware that he's representing his country and probably giving them all the impression that Americans are morons.
Nolita is so confused! She looks helplessly around to see if anyone else has a better idea what's happening; she's working on it but she still struggles a lot with feeling-out-of-the-loop.
There are a lot of things that no one knows, yet.
(Most people's Law personas tend less curious, less open-to-novelty, than their Chaos sides. Layne's never had this. He considers it one of his best strengths.)
"...Um. So. It - sounds like you might be from somewhere...else." Who knows where?? Not him!!! He's starting to worry it won't even be findable in the Records. Which is going to give Veth conniptions, if he's right.
Wow.
"I'm - sorry, I'm trying to figure out where to start and what order to go in. Um, right now we're in the Underworld. Which is Chaos. We don't have rule of law here. 'Crime' isn't a thing. Uh, things are still pretty tame on this level, because someone decided to round up a lot of friends and mount defences a few levels further down to keep hooligans out of their nightclub. And," a flash of a grin that's almost but not quite Antat, "because we're boring squares up here and what'd the hooligans even want to bother with us for. But really soon we're going to get to the Surface and that does have law and you really shouldn't do any crimes, our reporting is second-highest in the nation."
"I'm not going to--I don't want to do any crimes but it occurs to me that I don't know what the laws are here, is there anything I'm likely to run afoul of other than 'don't injure or deceive people or mess with their property'?" Like, for example, being in the country without a passport or any form of identification or permission to be here. He's probably going to catch some shit trying to get back into the US, but once he's somewhere on his phone's network he'll call Coulson and Coulson will do mysterious government person things until Bruce is back where they want him. It's the closest thing he's seen yet to an upside of being considered a military asset.
"If you generalize 'injure' to all the ways of harming people that aren't literally picking fights, I think that should mostly get you through? You'll be with us. ...Also, I mean, don't - randomly leave your clothes on a fence and wander around naked singing, or stand in the subway doors so they can't close, or knock over all the cereal in the grocery store - but it's not illegal to delay trains or whatever, it's just rude."
He seems so freaked out! Veth tries to smile reassuringly at him. "Hey, you'll be fine. You're with us."
Oh dear, facial expressions. He misses his tiny cabin in Brazil. "I'm going to try to avoid inconveniencing people in full generality. More than I already have, I mean. Also, I don't think you ever actually said what country this is?"
". . . I think I am worse at geography than I thought I was." Or whatever the Tesseract did isn't handling proper nouns intuitively and those are all unfamiliar names for very familiar locations and he's going to look like he's never heard of Asia.
They walk for a while through a dark rough-cut tunnel lit only by flickering candles, and then emerge through a curtain of - is that vines - no they're fake vines, carefully and lovingly made of silk and embroidery floss and some other materials -
- into a much larger corridor where every single surface of everything is coloured in gloriously colourful graffiti. A different group of teenagers, these ones wearing masks that hide their faces, are working on a new section. They're hanging off ceiling harnesses to do it, laughing and shoving each other so they sort of bounce around against the walls.