"If you've ever had a roommate complain, I guess. You could try a library, they often won't complain if you nap in between books if you're quiet, but if you snore that won't work. If you've got a snack budget you don't really have to sleep tonight, get yourself some coffee and have fun."

"I don't have a budget, I was sort of hoping for some kind of soup kitchen or event-with-pizza-at-it."

"Uh... people at my dance club bring snacks to share and the admission fee’s not really enforced, come find out if you’re still dyspraxic?"

"Huh, I might not be? Sure, sounds fun."

He can provide her with the address and the time, a few hours from now.

"Thanks." Does her snazzy map make finding that easy?

He can point to it on her snazzy map, even, which probably makes it trivial.

"Thanks, you've been very helpful. Anything else someone in town for just a couple days must see?"

"Well, that depends! What do you like?"

"Nerdy stuff but in a march of human progress way rather than a Dungeons and Dragons way?"

"Museum of Vaccine History? Unveiled Cathedral? Or just enjoy our libraries, they're great and they're free."

"I do like a library." Where is the nearest one, Snazzy Map?

Couple blocks thataway and on the third floor of a building. It's just a little one, but it's the closest.

It'll get her started, she can't read a big library in a few days. "See you at the dance club."

Off she goes.

The library has one big picture window and a big bright chandelier over its central table. The walls are all warm colors with delicate gold detailing. There are science and engineering books, books on philosophy, ethnographies, travelogues, some miscellaneous nonfiction on other topics, and a collection of fiction in an assortment of languages and genres; and besides that there's a shelf of tapes and DVDs and a computer for using the internet.

She is going to skim the titles on the ethnographies and if nothing is very grabby she will check out the internet.

There’s one about an Iraqi village and one about an Arian congregation in New Jerusalem and one about high school in America and one about the Dragon’s Cave and one about transgender people who transitioned with help from this one clinic in the Dead Republic and one about a company town in the Midwest and on and on and on.

...okay she's actually going to read the one about high school in America so she can do some sort of conceptual algebra to figure out the audience.

The audience is not assumed to know what high school is like anywhere. The audience is not assumed to be familiar with typical American family structures. The audience is assumed to know some basic facts about Christianity and is assumed to have heard of Christmas, but is not assumed to already be familiar with typical American Christmas traditions.

It is an amusing read.

What is dead people internet like?

Relatively fast. The browser on the library computer opens to a search engine blatantly modeled on Google with a link to an encyclopedia which is not a wiki near the bottom of the page.

Aww, not a wiki, that's sad.

Is there anything good in the search results for, oh, how about "newbie's guide to being dead"?

There's a forum for that and three pages by approximately that name and ads for several books some of which are free online. There are several books each that assume the reader is from China or India and The Afterlives For Dummies, which she already got from the Dead Republic waiting area, and I Found Jesus (Right Where He Said He'd Be During Office Hours) which was just published this year.

...okay, she likes the title of the Jesus book and will go for that one.

It was written by a Wiccan and it's pretty focused on the religious implications of the things the writer found out after arriving here. It explains that Jesus definitely exists (the writer has met him) and he doesn't claim to be omnipotent or older than humanity but the Harrowing of Hell does seem pretty well-corroborated.

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.)

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. There are several pages dedicated to interesting things about local Islamic theology, which has diverged considerably from Earth's sects. 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.

So what should you expect from Jesus? You don't even have to think about him if you don't want to. He's like a president except there aren't election ads: he won't necessarily notice you as an individual. And he's probably not reading your mind even when he is paying attention, he probably can't do that. In theory he's an absolute monarch; in practice he's kind of busy and not good at governance and areas elect leaders that answer to him when he bothers to have opinions. He does teach part-time at one of the universities (all his lectures are available online, along with the full text of all seventy-three of his books; the main benefit of enrolling in his classes is getting to talk to him during office hours).

The type of thing that Jesus is is... unclear. He says he's never actually met his father. It's possible he's the same kind of thing as the demons in some of the hells, or half that kind of thing, but it's just a guess. The theological implications are underwhelming, and more damning for Christianity than for most other religions. Don't expect the writer to convert any time soon.