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My hero, who is pronouncing his name as Gee-yohm, is blinked into existence in Mary's home in England in 2018. His dress and appearance (T-tunic and leggings) are well-worn medieval European. He doesn't speak a language that Mary recognizes, and her attempts at English, French (which she knows a little), German, and Italian come up with just shakes of his head. Mary deduces that the hero's name is the French Guillaume, and that he has time-travelled into her home, perhaps from Norman England.

She doesn't want to turn him over to the authorities. She decides to keep him and teach him English, but she doesn't know how to get him documents that he will need to exist in modern England. She worries that he is bound to get sick from modern germs, and will need to go the doctor. How can she go about "legalizing" him? Posit that she doesn't know how to obtain those documents via illegal channels.

GinnyBethoc
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  • I'm not sure I see the worldbuilding angle. You are asking about our real world. – user535733 Apr 25 '20 at 23:00
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    Legally obtaining the documentation requires going to the authorities. They are the ones providing that stuff and getting them using false information is seriously illegal. – Ville Niemi Apr 25 '20 at 23:23
  • @user535733. This is a time-travel story. There's going to be lots of his reactions to everyday things we take for grated. This may be a real thing in our world, but I'm building fiction. – GinnyBethoc Apr 25 '20 at 23:31
  • @Ville Niemi. Mary is willing to do illegal things; she just doesn't know how to go about it. – GinnyBethoc Apr 25 '20 at 23:37
  • @GinnyBethoc I think your question can be improved by offering guidance on which real-world elements you want to suspend or bend. Example: You imply that it's bad if The Government gets involved; maybe a somewhat more tolerant Home Office listens to a crazy-haired professor from Cambridge, and decides Guillaume is (provisionally) not an illegal migrant after all. Then he can have fun exploring grocery stores and trains and bad television instead of Living In Fear. England today has, by some estimates, almost half a million folks who face Guillaume's problem. – user535733 Apr 25 '20 at 23:54
  • Please check the [tour] and [help] to learn about how this forum works. You're not asking a question of worldbuilding. You're asking us how to write your story. We don't do story questions and we don't do real world questions, especially involving criminal activity. If you'd like to ask about a particular issue of time travel in your fictional world that has you stumped, *that* is the kind of question that fits here! – elemtilas Apr 26 '20 at 00:54
  • I will try to do better in my next questions. Thanks for your constructive criticism. – GinnyBethoc Apr 26 '20 at 01:03
  • Possible duplicate of: Papers, please: Can characters trapped in our reality acquire enough paperwork to be legal? – Alexander Apr 26 '20 at 01:10
  • @Alexander. In fact, that is exactly what I was looking for, and no amount of my searching turned it up. Thank you. Perhaps a moderator should close this question? – GinnyBethoc Apr 26 '20 at 01:33

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