The bar, despite being a substantial and intricate work of polished wood with no evidence of automation whatsoever, does not have a bartender. However, as she takes a seat, a napkin appears on the portion of bar in front of her. It has writing on it.

Welcome to Milliways. Can I get you something to drink?

- huh.

"Just water, please," she taps into the datapad and has it read out. "What is this place?"

A glass of water appears on top of the first napkin. Another napkin answers, A multiversal bar. It borrows doors temporarily; when you leave you will be back where and when you came from.

"All right." She holds the glass for a moment and then takes a sip. "Why?"

I'm afraid I don't have a satisfactory answer to that question.

"All right," she repeats. "Do you know if anyone here needs a healer?"

There are onsite staff for injuries and acute diseases; if you are interested in the work you may apply. Patrons may be interested in your particular skills for existing conditions or problems in their world, but you would have to find them yourself, or advertise; I haven't been asked about healing by anyone curently present.

"I don't think I'll be staying that long, but if anyone asks you can send them to me." She takes another sip of her water and looks around the room a little.

In addition to the door she came in through, there are a staircase upward and several other unmarked doors; a patron entering one reveals sunlight in the space beyond. The room has tables and booths in addition to the bar, and some near around a fireplace. There's a wider variety of styles of dress on display than species; most people in the room are apparently humans and nearly all of them are humanoids. A couple have smaller creatures nearby or on their shoulders.

Several people are sitting alone reading, mostly from paper books but a few electronic devices. A couple of booths might be dates in progress; one is strewn with the parts of some machine that a teenager is in the process of tinkering with. At a table, a man finishes a conversation with a small spherical droid hovering above another chair, picks up a case from the table, and exits through the door Devika came in, but to a rainy street, not to the corridor she might expect.

The fireplace catches her eye, and the conversation with the droid; she stares a little at the door after the man goes through before glancing around the room again, noting that nobody else seems surprised, and taking her water and her datapad to go sit by the fire.

While she's standing up, the droid produces a sign — not a hologram but a physical card — from a compartment in its mostly-spherical body and somehow floats it down to the table:

Seeking cultural exchange and trade opportunities.

- huh.

It's not much of a detour; she heads over. "What kind of cultural exchange are you looking for?"

It turns so its single central camera faces her.

In a feminine human voice it says, “Just about anything! We're looking for the kinds of opportunities that Milliways provides, and those almost always come in unexpected forms. Is this your first time here?”

She nods. "I found the door in the Jedi hospital on Tomiuq; I work there."

“Jedi?”

"Force sensitives," she nods. "The people with special powers - it's often considered magic by people who aren't familiar with it."

The voice — and the body language of the droid(?)'s few movable appendages, which seem to be possibly there for this purpose as well as other functions — seem gently amused at this. “I expect, just as a likely guess, that you'll find it useful later to say that the Force is the magic of your world. There's many ways for worlds to work.

“What kinds of special powers do they have?”

She shrugs at the correction. "Telekinesis and sensory powers are the most common - empathy, particularly, but some people learn other types. Mild precognition, often manifesting as luck. We can learn a wide variety of other abilities or improvements on those, with practice or from innate individual talent; I'm a healer."

Nodding. “For comparison — in our world all of our people can learn to perform a kind of telekinesis and related control of matter. It's how I'm controlling this avatar; it's not robotic in the conventional technological sense as it contains sensors and other specialized devices but no motors. No one has ever verifiably had any other type of power.”

"Interesting. Our telekinesis doesn't have enough fine control for that - most of us can only apply force in one way at a time."

“From what we've observed so far, it's very unusual in that way. Since finding Milliways we've done a fair bit of exporting otherwise-impossible handicrafts and mechanical and structural components.

“Do you have any questions about us, or about Milliways or other worlds? — I should mention first that you can also ask Bar for information,” glancing at said bar, “as she is thoroughly impartial and has her own sources.”

"I'm sure they'll send a diplomat in for most of that. What kinds of things do you export?"

“I don't have any art to show right now, but for a simple example of construction, we can make structural components that do not need matter in the intervening space.”

She produces four plain glass marbles and arranges them in a tetrahedron on the table, the apex floating in space rather than any of them touching each other, then slides it across the table.

"Huh," she says, squinting at it, and then attempts to lift the top marble telekinetically.

The entire structure lifts off the table. It's at least as rigid as if it were one piece of glass instead of four.

"I expect the engineers will be interested in that," she reports. "Do you have an idea of what you'd want in return?"

“We'll be happy to sell goods and services after working out an exchange rate, but in terms of what other worlds may have that we don't, we're most particularly interested in ways to improve quality of life, like healing and life extension, and teleportation or faster-than-light travel, though previous attempts to import those have failed.”

"We have FTL; I don't know if it will work for you if other kinds haven't. Force effects don't extend lifespan very much beyond what other healing technology offers, but we might be able to treat some things you can't. We also have kolto, a liquid that dramatically improves natural healing. And droids - autonomous robots that can do various kinds of work."

“We'll certainly be interested in kolto, then.”

She nods. "What kinds of healing technology do you have?"

She can explain the state of medical technology! Though this has somewhat more air of reciting from the encyclopedia than most previous remarks.

(They're very good at surgery, wound protection, and broken bones due to their unique advantage; they have almost no synthetic drugs, and the natural-product ones are as limited as the average single-planet civilization.)

They have synthetic drugs, and a much wider range of natural ones, and cloning for organs, and robotic prostheses that may or may not be of any particular interest given givens.

"You only have humans?"

“Within our solar system, yes, and we have no evidence of, and some evidence against, intelligent life elsewhere.

“This is one of the regularities of Milliways — most worlds have humans, they may or may not also have nonhumans, and many have absurdly similar histories despite their differences.”

"What kinds of similarities? Humans are the most common species in my world but not overwhelmingly so unless you count near-humans with us."

“Histories that are identical in most major events and many details down to the popularity of celebrities in a given year — despite having unique ‘magic’ or other differences that should perturb everything. Even many worlds that aren't that similar have strong parallels — different things that are filling the same role.

“And also, no matter how different a world is, there are often individual people — popularly called 'alts' — that are recognizably ‘the same person’ despite many other differences, even species.”

"That's very strange." She glances back at the door, and then turns to check the bar.

A few people have entered or left while they've been talking.

But nobody in recognizable clothes. Maybe they're having trouble finding someone to send, this time of night. She shrugs and turns back to Teytis. "We're in the middle of a war; the generals might want to coordinate with other people fighting the same one."

“If your planet isn't an ‘Earth’, that being the common name of the origin of humans — or your war isn't entirely on it — then it's unlikely that your war is part of the most common history, but you still might meet people from worlds similar to your own — an alt of yourself, even.”

“I'm sorry to hear that you are at war. What sort of enemy do you face?”

"Sith, another kind of Force sensitive. Twisted and cruel."

“Twisted? Do you mean their character, or their origin?”

"Both, I suppose. More the former."

She types a few things and erases them without having the pad read them out. "It's upsetting to think about, sorry. The Force isn't supposed to be used that way. I'm not sure if they're deranged to start with or if it makes them that way."

“I won't ask further, then. But you might well find aid in your war here, likely in more surprising form than soldiers and materiel.”

She nods. "I don't know much about it, logistically - MedCorps isn't closely involved - but I'm sure they'll send someone soon who does."

“—by default, time won't pass outside the bar while the door's shut. If you want to bring anyone else you have to hold it open until they arrive.”

"-oh."

"I suppose that explains it."

“Many people use the time to take a break from the urgent things in their life — or to collect resources before they return.”

She nods. "Is there somewhere to sleep?"

“There are rooms for rent from Bar. You're also allowed to sleep here or in the outdoors area, but you might be disturbed.”

"I should ask about that before I do very much else. Did you have any more questions for me?"

“I'd be happy to learn more about your world, but that can certainly wait. And it would be more efficient if we worked out data exchange first.”

"Data exchange?"

“Figuring out how to connect our computers to yours, or reading your storage formats, however your technology works.”

"Ah. I suppose you can't get much from a datapad?"

“I wasn't asking because I assumed it was your personal device — and you'd know better than I what kind of information is there or whether you want to share it.”

She types something noticeably longer than what it eventually says: "There isn't anything very personal in it. How are you understanding my language?"

“That's an ambient effect of being in Milliways! We would not understand each other if we left together. It works on any language but only when people here are doing the listening or reading — if you wrote something and I took it back to my world then I wouldn't be able to read it, and if I had a computer here then that couldn't parse it either.”

"Does it handle signed languages?"

“Anything! I smelled a conversation once.”

That makes things much easier, then, she signs, and goes through the pad's functions. It's fairly utilitarian and basic - the text to speech program, an unused scheduling feature, a picture album with a few dozen sunset photos and a couple of pictures of alien cats, a reader with a few things - a small collection of poetry, an in-progress novel, a couple of medical references, something that seems to be a Jedi religious book - and the local equivalent of a web browser, email program, messaging program, and web-based encyclopedia, none of which work well at all without the internet they're expecting. She can also get to the file storage system, though it takes a while for her to realize that that might be of any interest and she doesn't seem to know how to do much with it.

She has met a thousand worlds' computers, knows what things to look for, and has appendages with which to operate the datapad. Does the storage contain anything that wasn't already shown besides program files?

There's some cached files - an encyclopedia page about an obscure, alien congenital disease, a few more poems, a conversation where Devika was consulting on someone's tricky healing case. Nothing too surprising.

“I can't do much with just the datapad because it doesn't have network access as long as the door is shut. Do you mind if I read this while you see about a room?” she asks, pointing at the Jedi text.

Go right ahead. She heads for the bar.

The book is a collection of essays, fairly obviously intended for someone already familiar with the basics of Jedi philosophy. The general gist comes through just fine, though - emotional detachment, trusting the guidance of the Force, avoiding the kind of attachments that might cause bias or distract from the individual peace a Jedi is supposed to seek.

What to think of that depends on a lot of implementation details. She moves on to skimming the medical encyclopedia and forwarding it to experts.

(Bar is happy to rent Devika a room of any particular level of amenities. The price is not set per whole day or night since there is neither a consistent time of day nor passage of time in general, but quite reasonable.)

She doesn't have any credits on her but she's content to run up a tab; she doesn't expect to have any trouble getting the Council to reimburse her. Soon she has her room key and is heading back to Teytis' table. Any questions? she signs when she gets there.

She has a few, oriented around getting some context for future contacts. How large is known space, in planets and people? How easy is travel, at the scale of individuals and of ships? What governments exist? How do the Jedi relate to them?

She knows the answers to those, at least vaguely: it's a fairly normal galaxy, and well-populated, with somewhat over three million habitable planets. Hyperdrives don't allow for arbitrary travel - coming too close to a massive object will destroy them - so they follow set lanes that are known to be safe, which slows transit down some, but getting from one side of the Republic to the other is a matter of days or weeks, not months, and not prohibitively expensive. The Republic is a democracy made up of member planets, and claims the territory near the center of the galaxy, with its seat of power on Coruscant; the Hutts, a species of alien, have an empire ruled by powerful trading families, and the Sith have one that they rule, and the rest of the galaxy is ruled on a more local scale. The Jedi answer to the Republic and serve them in diplomatic and peacekeeping capacities, though they do have their own planet, Tython, and a reasonable amount of latitude to manage their own affairs.

She asks clarifying questions but doesn't have any comments that she shares with Devika. “I'll let you get back to your own plans.”

She nods, may the Force be with you, and heads upstairs.