[That simultaneously sounds like plausible dialogue in a show featuring an economist, and also deeply disturbing.  Like it's from an alternate dimension where economics doesn't quite... work right.]

[Well, there are also luxury airlines that have special lounges in the airport for their members to wait and serve tiny cheesecakes on the plane, they're just really expensive.]

[I never before conceptualized my private-tradeoff-virtue as being that person who says in a tone of Very Deep Concern 'The marginal cost of tiny cheesecakes should not be that high!' but I guess I am officially that person now.]

[Yeah, I don't spring for the tiny cheesecakes, I think it's mostly people who are even richer than I am or who are getting the membership as a perk from their job?]

[Maybe if we can just fix the marginal cost of cheesecake, everything else about your civilization will fall into place!  It could be there's just one problem at the root of everything and that's it.]

[Good luck with that one.]

'Good luck' simultaneously comes across as meaning something like 'good skill' while 'luck' comes across as the opposite of 'skill'??

[Is your couch or the hotel likely to be darker and quieter at night?]

[Depends on what floor of the hotel they put you on, higher up is pretty far from traffic. I'm reasonably high up but I talk in my sleep and you might be able to hear from the couch.]

[All else equal, sounds like the hotel is easier to sleep in.  I'm very open to considerations like the hotel being more expensive, harder to reach you from, containing obstacles I wouldn't know how to handle, would not let us solve computer-puzzle-games together at night before going to sleep, or such.]

[It is more expensive, telepathy works fine, if you handled the airport you can probably handle a hotel, do you... especially want to play computer games before bed?]

[I know I must sound like a terribly lawful person, but in fact I am not such a pure, sweet, perfectly-coordinated person that I'm not curious about what kind of computer games a civilization develops when it doesn't care about infohazards or superstimuli!  But mostly I was envisioning - standard social scripts for starting friend-business-partner-mutual-dependency relationships with people?]

[I don't mostly go for puzzle games, I like civilization-builders, and I'm a little worried that if I introduce you to Civ you will form a grand theory about how Earth is broken because it has Civ.]

[Don't worry!  When I fix your Earth it will be a perfect multidimensional improvement that makes all agents better off simultaneously according to their own preference functions!  You just watch me!  So what is this 'Civ', hmm?]

[...well, you, uh, start out as a very small culture and there are some AI-controlled other cultures, or you can multiplayer it but you don't have a computer, and then you try to keep your culture afloat and accomplishing things while negotiating conflicts of interest with the others.]

[Your computer games are so advanced that you can negotiate with factions inside them?  Why, that does sound like it might be secretly responsible for much that is different about your world!]

[It's not THAT sophisticated, it doesn't parse natural language or anything, but you can try it if you like.]

[I really am interested in playing computer games!  And similar new-friend activities like having you show me your interesting-favorite foods at our next meal, so you can see my expressions while I react.  But please stop me if I'm about to socially impose in a way you find at all unpleasant.  I really do not know your equivalent of the protocol for aspiring friends establishing comparable scales of desire and then comparing notes on how much they want various things in order to make sure they don't end up off their multiagent-optimal frontier.]

[I'm not sure we have... anything like that at all... but we do have food and I am absolutely stopping to eat once we're off the subway, do you want pasta-and-tomatoes or rice-and-fish?]

[Whichever seems more likely to be an exotic delight to a stranger from another world!]

[Sushi it is.]

They get off at Isabella's subway stop and she shows Thellim to a sushi place, where they can sit at the bar and behold raw fish. The guy behind the counter seems to know Isabella, asks her "the usual?" and gets a "yeah, plus a sampler for her". Thellim gets an assortment of slices of fish on pats of rice and also an avocado cucumber roll. Isabella gets a giant bowl of rice covered in raw fish and drizzled with mayo and sprinkled with fish eggs, plus a side of edamame and a few shrimps tempura.

Nom!  It's not the tastiest thing she's ever eaten but it seems noticeably outside the space of supposedly-wildly-creative dath ilani food variations in some way that's hard to describe!  Now this is a proper interdimensional adventure.

Isabella puts away her food very efficiently, pays by card, gets a complimentary matcha ice cream mochi for both of them to munch as they walk back to Isabella's apartment. "It's freezing out!" she tells the guy. "The better to appreciate your warm home!" he replies cheerfully. He has an accent. She eats her dessert.

"The food actually is different from anything on Earth - no, do not translate that, brain.  It is subtly different from anything in dath ilan.  And tasty!  I will chalk that up as minor evidence for your worries about insufficient internal variance in dath ilan.  We do have debates about that, you know, and different people have different opinions and everything!"

"Many cultures have internal debates and are still the same culture."

"Of course!  Civilization has a culture, it's just not a monoculture."