A foreign building with a bar across one side, exploding stars out the window, and a... person?... sitting at the table. The person was wearing trousers like a barbarian, but made of some weird material Jing Yi had never seen before, and their hair was bright purple. 

Are the exploding stars dangerous? ...better question: if they were, could he do anything about that?

The best course of action for the ?magical? ?foreign? building in the middle of Chang'an is to investigate.

First step: talk to the purple haired stranger. Can people have purple hair? No one he's ever heard of from Samarkand to Silla has had purple hair, but who knows what the hell is happening out west. Maybe they have a fashion for incredibly expensive wigs. He should probably treat them as if they were the sort of the person who could afford a wig of Tyrian purple and who can afford fabric so exotic he has literally never seen it.

"Greetings! Is this your establishment?"

"It appears to be run by mysterious extradimensional entities represented by a sentient bar," says Fortitude, who is having a great time. 

...he understood the first half of the sentence, but then it just rapidly devolved.

"But not by you?" Because at this point he will take any scrap of confirmation he can get in the face of 'mysterious extradimensional entities.'

"No, I came through a door, same way that you did. --Well, you came in through a window. I didn't even know that Milliways came in Window."

"Windows are so much more convenient!"

"Are they? --Anyway, first drink's free." 

"Thank you for letting me know." Interacting with the bar is probably the next logical step on this fact finding mission.

He goes up to it.

Hello! the bar napkins. 

Does he talk to the bar or write to it? He's going to try talking first. "I hear the first drink is free?" What would be the most informative drink... "I'd like to try something from where your other guest is from."

Certainly! 

He blinks, and suddenly a cup made of ? glass ? appears on the countertop. It comes with a straw. 

...He has fallen through a window into a magical drinking establishment. Which he already knew, of course, but the additional confirmation does not make it any less weird.

He sits at the table the purple haired stranger is sitting at. "Do you recognise this?"

"Salted cheese lychee tea."

"Ah, tea. Some things do stay the same, at least." They are definitely a foreigner, if the purple hadn't proved it. Cheese. In tea. Why? "I'm Jing Yi, by the way."

"Fortitude. What's your world like?"

"I come from a great and civilised empire."

"I do too. --I like that you look human, the last guy I talked to here I had a very confusing conversation with because he was an octopus and many ideas I thought were obvious are apparently not obvious to octopuses."

"...I could see how that would happen. It's all just been humans and octopuses?"

"Just you and the octopus so far."

"Well, I'm glad to be easier to talk to than an octopus." He takes a sip of his drink. It is incredibly rich and sweet and it's definitely an affront to tea, but he can't bring himself to complain about it. "This is a good invention."

"Thank you! --My deal, in the space of all possible deals, is that I like to recreationally go off into the woods and hunt and fish and forage for food, and to climb mountains and go into caves, and to acquire various obscure and archaic skills."

"Oh, I know the type, even if I am too much of a city slicker for that. I just work for the government."

"I work for the government too! I approve applications for quiet cards."

"Quiet cards?"

"My city government issues cards that say that you have a certain level of self-control and can be trusted not to scream or hit people or otherwise disturb others, and you have to present one to be allowed in to many nice restaurants or theatrical productions."

... "I can see how those would be useful."

"What do you do?"

"Investigate murders and treason, and help run the tests to choose other people to investigate as well."

"Cool! Are you a monk or a layperson? --I guess I shouldn't assume other countries are governed by monks."

"Oh, I'm laity. We've gone to, uh, lengths to get the monks out of the government."

Fortitude looks shocked. "Why?"

"Because they weren't paying taxes and were trying to keep it that way. Also a pretender to the throne claimed to be Maitreya and founded monasteries about it."

"Monks weren't paying taxes?"

"Oh, but you see, they were very generously holding onto the money to help people gain merit. Very nice of them, really."

Fortitude looks extremely confused. "Well, of course the church is going to hold on to the money so that they can give it to the poor and build temples and schools and bridges..."

"And have feasts and gild everything, can't forget that. ...I shouldn't make fun of that, proportionate gilding is fine."

Fortitude looks even more confused, and a little upset. "The monasteries were taking people's taxes and wasting them?"

"They weren't taking people's taxes, they were taking donations and then not paying their own."

... he has no clue if Fortitude is naive, or if their monks are actually that... ideal.

"Those aren't different words in my language. Donations are... special taxes you pay to the monastery?"

"They're voluntary, to gain merit. Is 'merit' coming across right?"

"It's coming across as a word with the synonyms-- excellence, quality, virtue, worthiness, value, benefit..."

"It's-- something you gain by taking good actions. And you can't really measure it, not unless you are Heaven itself, but you do know what you can do to gain it?"

"What are taxes then? They're involuntary?"

"Yes, you have to give them. ...you have an empire with voluntary taxes?"

"Forty to sixty percent of the money the government has comes from voluntary taxes. The remainder comes from land rent and taxes on goods or services that hurt yourself or other people but that we shouldn't ban."

...

"You have some of the most generous citizenry I have ever heard of."

"Well, the monasteries aren't different from the government, so probably that explains the difference."

"But giving to your monasteries doesn't give the donor merit?"

"Well, we don't tend to think about it that way? Giving to a monastery gives you outcomes you want in the world, like clean and fast trains or better schools or vaccines for children. It doesn't matter how it affects your personal moral standing, it matters what the outcomes are."

"...vaccines?"

"Where you inject someone with a weakened version of a virus so their immune system gets practice defeating it?"

"That's, uh, a string of words?"

"...does your society have, uh, steam engines or printing presses or noise-cancelling headphones?"

"We have woodblock printing."

"--uh, good news, societies can be much much better than your society. In my society only 1% of people are farmers but everyone still has more than enough to eat, and only 1 out of every 4000 children die before their fifth birthday, and you can send a book from one side of a continent to the other in less than an eyeblink."

...

He is a the son of a vice minister. He is a member of the Three Judicial Offices. He is not actually entirely qualified.

And he couldn't tell you how many people were farmers, or how many children died, but... it was more than that.

"Do you know how? --I understand if you don't."

"Time doesn't move as long as we're inside here, but at some point I will prop my door and ask my family to call a monk and then the monks will verify that this is real and then you can get a medical caravan. We don't even have to let time move in your world until the caravan is ready."

"Do we have a plan for getting a caravan out of a window?"

"...well, actually, we'd just need to get a cold-chain refrigerator through a window which... is not actually that much easier..."

"I don't know how big that is, but I do believe you. There's also a drop on the other side, if that helps."

"Anyway there are a bunch of engineers who would be overjoyed to discover they now have to figure out how to fit medical supplies and textbooks through a window."

"The textbooks have to be easier."

"But one of the most important projects of my empire is giving vaccines and medicine and nutritional supplements to everyone outside our borders, so we can do it for your empire too. --It'll probably be easier, since you already have a government and monks even if they aren't very good ones."

"You will have to be careful to appear like you are in the spirit of trade and not conquest-- though you might be the strangest traders, you're not going to be that much stranger."

"How would we conquer you via a window?"

"You would be able to fit people through that window, and then you'll have them in the middle of our capital city."

"And then someone could just close the window and our soldiers would be trapped in your capital city, except that we don't even have soldiers, just caravan guards, because wars of conquest are a really bad idea."

... how does this empire even function. How.

"That is fair."

"If you conquer people that don't have enough cultural similarities with you, they get very mad and will blow themselves up around key infrastructure. And at a certain point of civilization you have to educate someone from their earliest childhood so they can participate and you can't really assimilate the people you conquer anymore, except by forcibly educating their children, which will piss them off and then see my previous sentence."

Ah, so Fortitude's empire isn't very good at empir-ing, noted. (Or maybe they are so good internal power struggles are moot?)

"I'll take that under advisement."

Fortitude thinks. "I guess you're probably not as advanced in the Teaching as we are, so society isn't built around people mostly being advanced in the Teaching."

He somewhat doubts this. "Should I know what the Teaching is?"

"It's-- knowing what the will of Heaven is and being able to follow it?"

"Oh, no, we have that more or less handled."

"Well! That's good. I didn't pay that much attention in Verbal so I don't know much about the history of the Teaching and when we developed what. And I guess you could have a high level of the Teaching without having much technology."

"Functional governments that follow the will of Heaven are useful for everyone."

"Maybe," Fortitude hazards, "when I say 'monk' it's translating as something different and what we think of as monks are... something else...?"

"Possibly. We have scholar officials running the government,  does that translate as anything meaningful to you."

"You have... civil servants who read a lot of books?"

"--That's a fair description of us. We are experts on the Classics and on the knowledge of good governance is how we would describe it."

"Good governance? Statistical analysis, accounting, legal precedents, ethical philosophy, that sort of thing?"

"Ethical philosophy, mostly."

"...Statistical analysis seems more important," Fortitude says dubiously. 

"You can't rule rightly unless you know what is right."

"Yes, that's what the statistics are for."

"I'm not saying the maths doesn't help,  but you can't really use it without an ethical foundation."

"I don't think civil servants get any more ethical training than any other monk...? I think they get less, in order to make time for all the statistics. Being a judge is complicated but if the people have given you a mandate to make the trains run properly you don't need any great ethical insight to know what you're supposed to be doing. You just need to be able to interpret ridership statistics."

"If you have a mandate to run the salt mines, you need maths for that, I wouldn't deny that. But you wouldn't want someone who knew less about ethics to do that."

"Well, you'd want to make sure they are ethical, but that doesn't mean you'd need them to study philosophy, because all their ethical decisions would be very obvious. I think. I don't know anything about salt mining."

"I'd be able to make my point better if I also knew anything about the salt mines.  Other than that they're why I work in a building and not a shed."

"Judges know a lot of ethical philosophy because they have to rule on novel or unusual situations, or on cases that don't come up very often. But most people just need to know whatever ethical philosophy is relevant to their lives." 

"You never know when someone is going to have to deal with a novel situation!  --I meant that as a joke, but I do think it is a little bit true."

"Here we are in an interdimensional bar."

"And aren't you glad to be with a trained member of the civil service!"

"Well, I don't know how good the testing is," Fortitude says.

"You wound me. -- The testing is quite selective. I would not worry about it."

Fortitude grew up in a society where all politicians are inherently trustworthy people and thus feels extremely reassured. 

"Time is stopped while we're here. Do you want to fuck?"

...? What?

It's not that he can't see the connection between "time has stopped" to "so, why don't we fill it in." But also, ow, his neck, that was quite the whiplash!

"I'm flattered, but no thank you." What is a good polite reason that a purple haired barbarian would agree with? "My wife would kill me."

Fortitude looks extremely confused. "What does your wife have to do with it?" She seems to have an epiphany. "Oh! We have contraceptives, you don't have to worry that I'd get pregnant."

"That's... nice, but it would not be her main objection?"

"What... would be...?"

??? "She does not... want me having sex with other people... without a very good reason?"

"And 'it's fun and I don't have anything else to do' isn't a good reason? --If you're not attracted to me it's all right, I won't take offense."

"You're very beautiful!" It's half true, and half 'I have not had time to work out how I feel about purple hair. ' "Its just we have neither had difficulty conceiving children yet, nor is the fate of Great Tang at stake?" Well, technically it is, if he somehow insults Fortitude. But hopefully she will take the rejection in good grace.

"Your wife sounds very controlling, are you all right?"

"What, no? These are common opinions among women? Usually less enforced,  but not uncommon?'

"Of course lots of people want their spouse not to have sex with other people! But it's very unreasonable to ask for that. You have to remember that your spouse loves you and won't leave you just because they also like other people. Frankly, it's especially unreasonable for a woman to ask it of a man."

... what are the purple haired barbarians even doing? Okay, no he can picture it,  but still.

"I will talk to her." Does that count as politely demurring?

"I don't want to pressure you into it," Fortitude says earnestly. "I don't know if you're trying to give me a soft 'no' and I'm not going to take any offense if you don't want to. I just wanted to make sure you knew I was up for it. Should I get you something else from the bar?"

"I am trying to politely decline. Maybe another time." Read: never, unless it was really strategically important. "I wouldn't say no to another drink, if I would not be taking advantage of your hospitality."

"Okay! Bar can take money from my bank account and I don't know how it adjusts for inflation but I think a drink might be way cheaper for me than for you. What do you want?"

"How about something from where you live?"

Fortitude returns with a cup of what is recognizably tea and a bowl of... something... over rice. There is recognizably cheese, and some sort of bean, and some kind of leaf, and a green mush of unknown provenance.

Of course they eat cheese. "Thank you."

Does the green mush at least taste like its made of plants.

The green mush is made of a plant!

...A delicious, delicious plant. Holy shit. 

 Note to self: see if they are willing to trade for delicious plant. Or trade for the seeds of the delicious plant. Arbitrary amounts of silk for delicious plant seems like a fair trade. "What is this, it's very nice."

"Avocado, but they also put in lime and red onions and cilantro."

"Oh, you have limes too. Good to know we don't have completely different plants." Damnit, he should have spotted that taste, now that's one less thing they can meaningfully offer in trade.

"I feel like I should talk about how to prioritize getting your country industrialized, but I'm a really bad person to do that and time is stopped. So I kind of just want to ask you random questions about how your world works!"

"I can do my best to answer any question I can." Read: he knows the answer and it's not something that should be kept secret.