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There are things Jing Yi expects when he flies through the window to his rooms.
Like his rooms. Like the floor being where he expects. Like all the furniture being out of the way of anyone flying through a window.
He finds none of those things.
There may or may not be a crashing noise. Or a very undignified yelp.
"Oh! Are you not? Sorry, I just assumed because of the dress. Gender's stupid anyway we should just abolish it. 'Ta' for everyone."
"Some people wear a pin with their pronouns but whenever I wear pronoun pins I just wear all of them at once because gender is a spook."
They have arrived at the coffee.
Aang orders some appalling concoction which consists of a truly unwise amount of sugar, milkfat, and caffeine.
Jing Yi is feeling adventurous, and and gets a coffee with milk in it, to find out what coffee is.
Coffee tastes quite bitter, apparently, even with milk and sugar in it.
Aang Wei can easily maintain his own conversation about hiking, shooting, places he has gone that he was not really supposed to go, mushrooming, the various times he mistook inedible mushrooms for edible mushrooms, his volunteer work with ROTC teaching teenagers about sabotage and explosives and shooting things and wilderness survival, his favorite books, the adorable adventures of his cousin Hope, and the more understandable things that Yiling is doing ("so the algorithm wound up pausing the Tetris game indefinitely so it couldn't lose--").
Coffee tastes bitter but it sure does have caffeine in it, which is a win in his book.
It means he can vaguely keep up with Aang's monologue. Well, not the tetris, he has no clue what that is other than a ?game? of some sort, and in general his knowledge of computing is a thousand years out of date.
Also this is exactly the sort of person who would teach the teenagers to make bombs. What other kind of person did he expect. Aang is the distillation of the sort of person who would volunteer to do that.
He scribbles down the names of the books on a napkin, to look at when he has time to read things other than 'An Introduction To Particle Theory' and 'Models of Early Human Migration.'
"...you might want to define that?" (And now for the fun game of balancing what he actually knows and has done, versus what the imaginary Gileadite version of him knows and has done.)
"Oh, that's a good question-- uh, I just mean that my number is saved in people's phones as 'no,' 'absolutely not,' 'love yourself,' 'you can do better,' 'you deserve better than this,' and 'RECONSIDER YOUR LIFE CHOICES' all caps so if you don't have any sexual experience you should go hook up with someone else instead, I'm a bad first choice."
"I'm not the one who's not being nice to me! Only the people who are saving my name in their phones are not being nice to me! And some of them give great head so I'll forgive them."
"Unless you were married before. Were you married before? I hear they get married really young in Gilead because they're not allowed to fuck."
Even if he has been trying to aim for technical truths or at least approximations of them, he is... not going to get into the 'was nearly married, and then she died (on account of the time travel I am not going to mention)' That would be depressing, and for all of Aang's charms, Jing Yi doubts 'dealing with depressing information well' is one of them. "I was never good at that whole 'rule following' thing.'
"But you don't know how gay flirting works? I guess you could try to knock up a Handmaid."
"You're going to need to get me 50% more drunk and 50% less caffeinated if you want stories." (aka give him time to come up with a coherent backstory.)
"Maybe another time? But also, yes, definitely." (He could probably convince him of arbitrary bullshit about Gilead as long as John didn't contradict him, but... no, he'd need prep time to manage to do that coherently while drunk.)
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