"...are we... on a street?"

"Apparently?" He rocks Meng Xuanyu. 

THIS IS NOT HIS CRIB!!!! IT IS SOME DARK COLD PLACE THAT IS NOT HIS CRIB AND HE IS MAD ABOUT IT.

"Shhhh, I know, buddy, I know." Rock rock rock. 

"...we have got to get him some formula."

There are cars going by, and street signs in English that say 68TH ST and SUNSET AVE and DOUG'S SOUP SHOP (subtitle: The health department allowed us to remain open under certain conditions we are trying to comply with!) and MICK'S: OUR PRODUCTS ARE SLIGHTLY MORE EXPENSIVE THAN WALMART BUT WE'RE CLOSE ENOUGH FOR YOU TO READ THIS SIGN.

This is a weird street.

That sounds like a problem for Future Meng Yao who doesn't have a sobbing baby in his arms. 

"Mick's?"

"Sounds good."

"I miss sleep."

MENG XUANYU MISSES HIS CRIB.

Mick's sells formula for what are indeed slightly worse prices than Walmart. Do they have money?

They have money because Meng Yao is sleeping in his slacks and buttondown because pajamas are for people who aren't working sixty-hour weeks with a newborn. 

(He is cutting back at work. He's SO cutting back. He hasn't even run to fill his father's seat yet, so there.)

They should get a sling, too. And diapers and wipes. 

Mick's will sell them all those things. The machine declines their credit card but - with a little squinting at some of the newer bills - the clerk will take their cash. "Welcome to Mick's, so far you're above-average customers but only because the lousy ones are incredibly bad, did you find everything?"

Late-night clerks are always weird. "Thank you, we have where we need. Apologies, do you know what street we're on? We got a little bit turned around."

"Sunset Avenue," yawns the clerk.

Is that in DC?

"...apologies, what city?"

"Kansas City. Missouri."

What.

"Thank you," he says and finishes paying.

To Lan Xichen: "...Why are we in Missouri?"

"Kidnapping?"

"Not funny." 

Meng Xuanyu will graciously accept this tribute of formula as a small reparation for being SUDDENLY DEPRIVED OF HIS CRIB.

"Seriously, let's call an Uber, go to a hotel, and then worry about it."

He pulls out his phone to try to do this.

No signal.

"Now what."

"Maybe we can buy a new one?"

"With what money? Your card was declined."

"Which is ridiculous, I'm going to call my accountant--"

It is so sexy of him to have an accountant.

"Excuse me, sir?" he says to the clerk. "I'm really sorry to ask, but by any chance could you call us an Uber? Our phones don't have any signal, and our cards were declined so we can't buy a new one. I promise you we'll pay you back in the morning-- you can look up my husband online, he works at Georgetown--"

"Your husband is really hot but I wasn't planning to Google him," says the clerk. "I don't know what an Uber is but if you give me the number I guess I can call them."

This person is super baked. Which is fair, because Meng Yao had also been super baked when he was working a night shift at a minimum-wage job. 

"Can you call a taxi?"

"Yeah, okay." He calls a taxi. This consists of dialing a number on the store's landline and then saying, "Hi, I decided to call these random customers a taxi 'cause it's not super busy and they're really hot. Their card was declined but they have some cash. They didn't say where they wanted to go except that one of them works in Georgetown. I don't know where that is. Wow, that far? Yeah, I don't think they can afford to go all the way to Georgetown. Cool." He hangs up. "Five minutes," he tells them.

Go with God, extremely baked Mick's employee!

He slings the baby and sings Hush Little Baby.

"What's a baby gonna do with a diamond ring?" the extremely baked Mick's employee inquires.

"Suck on it, presumably."

"That sounds dangerous. Might swallow it. I guess not as dangerous as a looking glass but you won't have to cough that one up. Lotta ifs in that song. Visionary."

"He's cute," Xichen says quietly in Meng Yao's ear.

"Slut," Meng Yao says with tired affection. He gives Meng Xuanyu a finger to suck on.

Daddy's chest is better than a crib. He sleeps.

"We don't sell mockingbirds," the clerk informs them regretfully. "I'm not even sure you can get one in a pet store. Maybe a specialty pet store. Oh, there's the taxi."

Taxi!

Meng Yao is handling baby so it is Lan Xichen's job to do awkward social interactions.

"How much to go to the nearest hotel?"

"Actually I don't know where the nearest hotel is from here and when people ask me to drive them to a hotel I always go to the Marriott. The meter'll say whatever it says, I'm not good at math."

"The Marriott is fine."

He is going to fall asleep in the car.

They are deposited at the Marriott. The meter says ten dollars and seventy-five cents.

He pays cash with a reasonable tip.

Into the Marriott!

"He's a good tipper," calls the taxi driver to a bellhop.

The bellhop scurries up. "How can I help you?" he smiles. "I'm hoping for ten bucks but I'll be much more innovative about helping if it's twenty or thirty."

"We can do thirty if you get us a hotel room with a bed and a crib as quickly as possible."

"You got it, sir."

In five minutes they are in room 177 with a crib and a bed!

...and they are out of cash. 

"I'm sorry," he says, "I can get you some when I go to the ATM in the morning?"

"Okay. Name's Paul," says the bellhop, apparently quite unconcerned about whether they will in fact pay him in the morning.

Great!

Baby in crib and he is going to collapse in the bed with his extremely beautiful husband.

In the morning he wakes up, feeling slightly human. Meng Xuanyu is, blessedly, still asleep. 

He can. Uh. ...does this hotel room have a paper that might have Chief of Staff And Prominent Political Science Professor Mysteriously Disappeared somewhere in it? That's the kind of thing people cover in newspapers, right? They're both very good-looking.

The hotel has newspapers down in the continental breakfast zone. He can pick up a USA TODAY with headlines including sports, weather, the death of somebody Meng Yao has never heard of, and an item about a woman accusing another person Meng Yao has never heard of of raping her, which, according to the article, was swiftly followed by his confession and arrest.

Meng Yao should be that man's PR guy, he'd be so much better at it. 

He's going to... look for a landline and call his congressional office? Apparently they still have landlines in Missouri.

They do! He's welcome to use the hotel's.

The number reaches an Arby's in Virginia.

In order of increasing desperation: Su She, Xue Yang, and Lan Wangji. 

Busy signal, a deaf little old lady, and the number you have dialed is not in service.

He is going to do a murder. 

He fills up his plate with continental breakfast and... reads more of the newspaper? He guesses? Looks around for a TV to watch?

There's a TV! It's showing a talk show where an interviewer is asking a guy about his recent movie, a historical about ziggurats which Meng Yao has never heard of. It sounds incredibly boring.

It cuts to an ad.

"I'm an employee of Chase Bank. Our bank is basically like other banks in every way that polling shows matters to customers, but we try to make it really easy to switch to us, and about seventy percent of new Chase customers think it was pretty painless to get their account moved over. So if your bank has been bothering you lately, I'd like you to consider switching to Chase. It's a normal quality bank, and if it's not the one you're using right now, you can use us to punish your existing bank."

...

What the hell.

He looks for the bellhop. 

Paul is in the lobby, hauling somebody's luggage to their car for them.

"My husband is incredibly rich but our cards keep being declined for reasons I don't really understand," he says, "so you should tell the guy in charge to let us stay here without paying until we get that sorted out."

"Huh. I can tell him but he's kind of a dick," says Paul.

"So he's going to--"

Meng Yao stops. Opens his mouth. Closes his mouth. There were totally words for this concept yesterday he knew them where did they go. 

"The sky is purple."

"Wow, cool! Do you think it'll stay that way long enough for me to get a picture?"

"No, it's changed back."

"Aw, man."

He goes upstairs.

"--Xichen, try to say any of the words you normally associate with saying something that isn't."

...

...

...

"What."

"Something very very weird is going on. I told the guy downstairs that the sky is purple and he believed me-- and a famous person was accused of rape and then they just confessed-- the advertisement for Chase bank says that they're exactly as good as every other bank but make switching easier-- none of the phones are connected and I can't get Su She or my office or Lan Wangji or anyone--"

This distress has WOKEN MENG XUANYU UP and he is DISPLEASED ABOUT THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS.

Lan Xichen makes him a bottle. "Let's turn on the TV in here."

The hotel TV has the following channels available:

- all nature footage all the time, with a soothing British voice telling you the likely mortality statistics of every baby turtle and fleeing gazelle depicted
- sports (car race)
- sports (baseball)
- sports (football, including a digression by the commentators about the concussion risk and the fact that many players are from poor backgrounds looking to support their families and then go on to hit the families due to accumulated brain trauma)
- sports (equestrian dressage)
- history, in the form of an extremely boring televised audiobook about the Meiji Restoration
- reality TV, at the moment a cooking contest where a contestant is explaining that he was really tempted to lob a fork into another contestant's soufflé but figured it would get him disqualified
- televised instrumental music concert
- a documentary about the cross-section of people who visit a particular laundromat, with each buttonholed and questioned in turn

Meng Yao knows his husband and leaves it on the Meiji Restoration channel.

"...history sure is different if no one can say things that aren't."

"I wouldn't know, gege."

"Are we trapped in some kind of-- children's fable about the importance of telling the truth? But we both are honest with each other about everything."

ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

"Of course we are, gege."

Whether he is trapped in a children's morality tale or not, Meng Yao is going to solve this problem without telling the truth about anything.

He looks at the commercials.

"I have opened a new McDonald's franchise at 55th and Shawnee. It's got one of those indoor playgrounds you can release your children into to get a few minutes without them bothering you. The food is the same at this McDonald's as at all the other ones. I remembered to ask all my employees during their interviews if they were going to spit in the food and only hired the ones who said no."

"Do you have a dog? This kind of dog food has a lot of fillers in it so it's really cheap, and most dogs we tried are willing to eat it. As far as we know it doesn't cause any acute health problems but the state of veterinary nutrition science is dismal so this dog food, like any dog food, might have some kind of hard to notice chronic result. Now available in chicken flavor, which doesn't seem to matter to the dogs at all but might help you feel like you're offering them more variety."

"There's a new movie coming out about the Spanish Inquisition. It has disturbing content but some people think that's cool. If you like disturbing content, please watch the Spanish Inquisition movie in theaters this Sunday."

"The expected value of life insurance is negative, because if we couldn't charge you more than we expect to have to pay you accounting for investments, overhead, and transaction costs, we couldn't be in business. But if you die before most people like you do, or you're kind of stupid about managing money that you have on hand but okay at paying bills, then life insurance might make sense anyway, because it'd provide your family a big lump sum at the time of your death in case they need to replace your income or hire a nanny to account for you being dead. Allstate is an insurance company that sells life insurance, and if you want some, we're a decent option. This is the phone number you should call if you want Allstate life insurance."

"I applied Old Spice deodorant before filming this commercial. You can't tell through the TV, but if you want to have a more sensorily immersive appreciation for what it would be like to be near me in person, you could go buy some Old Spice, and smell it. You could even ask your man to use it. Then he'd smell like me, at least at times when I'm wearing Old Spice deodorant. To make this commercial more memorable, I'm sitting on a horse while I talk to you."

"We put Energizer batteries and Duracell batteries in some appliances and in some appliances, like clocks, Energizer batteries last about three times as long, but Duracell outperforms Energizer in flashlights specifically. I don't know why it came out that way and I'm kind of awed and frightened by how much there still is to learn about engineering. If you have a battery operated clock, you might want Energizer batteries for it. Unless it lights up. Then I don't know. We didn't test that."

"Average testers required 252 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie pop. If you buy a Tootsie pop you will be consuming a fairly small volume of candy but you can make it last for kind of a long time unless you bite it. Most people bite their Tootsie Pops, but you don't have to."

"This is the new Chevrolet Impala. It looks like this. It can make this noise," vroom! "but only under conditions you shouldn't try to replicate under normal circumstances because it's bad for the car. It's available in all these colors, but you can still buy an Impala if you don't like these colors, because it's possible to re-paint cars. It's expensive but not as expensive as the car, which is thirty thousand dollars up front or more than that if you prefer our predatory installment plan."

"Did you eat the Cheetos that I left here?"
"Yes."
"Why did you do that?"
"It's part of the advertisement we're filming that I eat them, and I volunteered to be the one to eat them because I really like Cheetos."
"I really like Cheetos too! That's why after the director says we're done with this commercial I'm going to eat one of the other bags we have lying around."
"I guess at least two people like Cheetos, and it wasn't hard to find the two of us, so probably a lot of people like Cheetos. Cheetos can be purchased in most stores that sell snacks."

"At Mattress Emporium, we have a lot of beds! You can lie down on them! Most of our staffpeople won't even tell you off for jumping on them! You can try to figure out which of them you would like to sleep on, but sometimes it feels different to lie on something for eight hours than to lie on it for a couple of minutes, so we have a return policy that looks pretty generous in principle but leaves us some room to decline a return if we think you're taking too much advantage. If you buy a mattress from us and have it delivered we can take away a mattress you already have at no extra charge and they usually make it to the landfill but once one fell off an overpass and the mover was too lazy to go get it. It fell in a pretty boggy area. I'd like it if you came and lay down on mattresses at Mattress Emporium and bought one! I am indifferent to the possibility that you will come lie down on mattresses and not buy any and I have an unhealthy amount of resentment about the possibility that you will lie down on our mattresses and then use what you learn to buy one from another seller."

"My political opponent, Ted Vicks, says he doesn't expect to be able to come up with a budget that satisfies everyone without raising taxes. I think it's plausible he's not being very creative! Sometimes people who make budgets don't make sure they stay up to date! Sometimes people can be satisfied with things other than money, like fancy titles and sexual favors! My wife is okay with it if I have to blow a senator to get something accomplished politically and the idea kind of turns me on. If you vote for me, I will try really hard to avoid raising taxes and still get everything the government needs to pay for accomplished!"

"If you feel you're stagnating professionally, one thing you could try is getting a degree. That would be pretty hard, but you can get a diploma mill degree much more easily. Many employers are lazy about evaluating resumes, so telling them you graduated from Kennedy-Western might work fine to get you a job. Visit our website for more!"

"It's a big ad. Very big ad. It's a big ad we're in. It's a big ad. My word it's big! You can see how big it is! It's a big ad! For Carlton Draught! It's just so freaking HUGE! It's a big ad! Expensive ad! This ad better sell some of ouuuuuuur beer!"

"One way people can fail to improve themselves is by giving up. The FS Army can circumvent that by making it illegal to desert, while almost all other industries are forbidden to kill people for trying to leave. In addition to the benefits of military training, we will also pay you, and use our political power to make it easier for you to get a civilian job after your discharge. You might die, but a lot of army personnel have non-combat roles even though we make them do basic, and it's not as dangerous as being a lumberjack. Some people find the homosocial environment really suits them and the restrictions on their behavior help them develop personal qualities they value. A lot of soldiers have mental problems instead. There's only one way to be sure which kind of person you'd be! Be all you can be."

"A lot of people are in too much of a hurry in the morning to make a hot breakfast. Cold cereal is fast and simple. Frosted Flakes is cheap and has a lot of sugar on it, so a lot of people like the way it tastes. We put a picture of a tiger on the box even though none of the ingredients appear in a tiger's diet and tigers aren't among the ingredients, because we think children will want to have a picture of a tiger in their home and bother their parents until they get it. Sugar is probably bad for you, but eating breakfast is probably good for you. Frosted Flakes: kids with a taste for sweets often think they're great!"

"My name is Sandra McLean. If you have been injured in a vehicular accident, or in a vehicular intention, you are likely to be legally entitled to compensation. It's annoying to deal with that while convalescing, so if you give me the information I need about the circumstances of the injury, I'll get the money for you and take a percentage of it. My business model doesn't involve charging you directly. I take a bigger percentage than some of my competitors but I'm less likely to be full up on cases at any given time."

"I'm washing my hair with L'Oreal Nutri Gloss Shampoo and the camera is angled so you can almost, but not quite, see my tits, because the director really wanted to look at them himself and thinks many viewers will also be intrigued. Hair is dead, so it can't really be nourished, but some of the same chemicals that nourish living things seem to do nice stuff for hair sometimes so the manufacturers put some in. I don't really understand it because I'm a model, not a chemist. It does smell pretty good, though. And my tits are great."

"This footage is from Six Flags at St. Louis except for the second clip which is from Six Flags Great Adventure. It looks like the people in the footage are having fun. That's what people come to Six Flags to do. If you like fun, you can try this way to have it."

"In addition to furniture, IKEA sells Swedish meatballs, stuffed animals, the same kind of bag you can use in the store but in a different color, housewares, and other random objects! We have the store laid out to make it really difficult to skip any of our displays because that seems to tempt people to buy more, so if you want to come and buy something, you should budget a lot of time. Our furniture is okay and at the low end it's the cheapest on the market for new purchases. All of it has names. This is a stuffed shark that we named BLÅHAJ."

"These sunglasses are FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. An economist told us there's no objective sense in which anything is worth any specific amount of money, so we can charge FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS for these sunglasses. And because we're putting this commercial on really frequently, anyone who sees you wearing them will know that you had FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS to spend on sunglasses even though cheap ones cost very little. They're distinctively ugly, so no one will mistake them for cheap sunglasses instead of ones that cost FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS."

"Hi, Billy Mays here to demonstrate a knife sharpener. I've practiced with it a lot so I make it look easy. It's called the Samurai Shark because samurai wielded swords and sharks have a lot of teeth, both of which are sharp, and that's the association the producers want to create with their product. There's tungsten-carbide involved in here, and I'm putting a serrated bread knife in here even though normally you don't sharpen serrated knives. It's shaped in a way that lets me use it on scissors but I cut myself once when I was learning how to do that. It's pretty small and portable. You can get one for ten dollars, and if you do it specifically by calling this number in response to this ad, you'll get two for ten dollars, which is twice as many for the same amount of money. If you don't like it you can send it back at your own expense and customer service agents will try to avoid giving you a refund but eventually give you one if you're persistent enough in spite of it only being ten dollars and you needing to cover the cost of shipping. Here are some more things I can sharpen with the Samurai Shark."

"Look at these markers! They can change color! The chemistry is actually really interesting but I'm trying to appeal to kids so I won't get into that right now. The results look so cool because the people we have drawing with the markers for this ad have a lot more practice and talent than the typical elementary schooler, so most customers' art won't look this good even if you don't count the ones who never open the box, but the markers do in fact change color."

"Oxytrol is an incontinence medication! If you need an incontinence medication, you could suggest this one to your doctor; lots of doctors sacrifice depth of knowledge for breadth and won't have a better idea. Being incontinent is pretty embarrassing and taking Oxytrol is less embarrassing than that according to most people we polled."

"If we stay here you can become a politician."

"Ha ha."

"I would support you blowing a senator to get bills passed."

"Apparently it's harder to have homophobia if no one can be in the closet."

"...how are we going to pay for the hotel room?"

"Tell them we're going to pay them?"

"We'll have money soon! It's not saying things that aren't, it's being chronologically challenged."

"Okay, but we're saying things that are. We're in a children's morality tale and I'm not going to be the subject of an embarrassing comeuppance where I learn a valuable lesson about the importance of saying things that are."

Meng Yao isn't either but his strategy involves being better at lying than this world is at morality tales.

To the front desk!

"Hi!" says the front desk person. "I hate my job. How can I help you?"

"If I were you I would also hate your job," Meng Yao says. This is fun!

"My family is absurdly rich, but I can't access my money because there's a very nasty very complicated situation with the bank"-- specifically, it is in a different universe-- "but we will pay you back plus ten percent, and five hundred dollars for you for your trouble, as soon as the bank situation is resolved."

Meng Yao's stomach feels like he's sitting in a roller coaster slowly rising to the top of the first drop. 

"Gosh. I don't know if I can convince the computer to put up with that, it's really rigid, but I'll give it a go." Poke poke. "Oh, cool, I can just use the part of the program that we use if the credit card thingy is broken. You're all set!"

Oh my god he would be the most powerful person in the world if not for the fact that his husband believes in ethics. 

"Thank you!" he says. 

"Hey, for five hundred dollars I'd do worse! Good luck with your bank situation."

"Do you think this will work to get us lunch at a restaurant?"

"I want to go to the government."

"What."

"Do either of us have practical skills that could get us a job."

Why would they need that. They could just pretend to be rich until these people discover the concept of saying things that aren't so, and then go on a book tour, because fraud isn't even illegal.

"You could teach."

"I have a PhD from another world in political science based around the idea that politicians sometimes say things that aren't. And your job is based on your network which you don't have."

They can just do fraud!!!!!

"Government it is, gege."

"Excuse me, sir," he says, "how do we contact the government if we have something very important to share?"

"Well, if it's very important I guess you could just call the White House and say so."

What what what what. "Do you have the White House's phone number?"

"I can look it up. You'll probably have to tell a few layers of secretaries and so on about it first? I don't know, I've never called the White House, the idea is really intimidating." She Googles the White House's phone number and provides it.

"Hello! Is this the White House?"

"Yes sir, I really hope you're not going to waste my time, what's up?"

"My husband and I are visitors from another universe and we'd like to speak to whomever is in charge of resolving that sort of situation."

"- gosh! I don't think we already have anyone in charge of that specifically, will the Secretary of State do?"

"The Secretary of State will be fine."

Behold the intoxicating feeling of power. Maybe the government isn't so bad.

"Just a moment! He's taking a dump."

Meng Yao is on hold for a minute, and then: "Secretary of State Antony Blinken here. You're from another universe? It's a good thing I just came out of the bathroom, I might have shit myself."

"Yes. Are visitors uncommon here?"

"I've never heard of one before! I guess maybe they happen pretty often and just usually catch a disease and die before they can tell anybody!"

"I'm certainly glad we didn't do that! We'd like to arrange for transport to an airport so we can have a meeting in private?"

"In private?"

"Well, right now we're in a hotel room in Kansas City and the front desk person could probably hear if he were determined."

"- so you want to meet in person for some reason instead?"

All of his instincts are wrong for this!

"In my home universe it is customary for important meetings to happen in person, would you mind accommodating us?"

"Sure, that's fine! I can have my assistant get you a plane ticket. Where are you coming from?"

"Kansas City, Missouri. We need one for myself, my husband, and our son."

"Okay, I'll have her get right on that. Do you need anything else?"

"Nope!" The government can figure out how to pay everyone back later probably.

"Okay! It's an honor to meet you!"

He calls a taxi while Meng Yao bounces Meng Xuanyu.

When the taxi driver arrives, Lan Xichen says, "My husband and I are both incredibly good-looking and we were wondering if you would be willing to accept some kind of sexual favors as payment instead of money."

What!

"Etiquette," he says serenely, "is about fitting in to local norms."

"I'm straight," says the taxi driver, though he doesn't seem particularly offended. "And trying to save up for my kid to go to college."

"All right. We don't have any money but we're working with the government on something that is not currently public knowledge and we expect that the government will be able to track everyone who helps us down and pay them back."

"Okay, but if you're not going to pay me today I want extra. I think I can probably get fifty percent extra because the government seems really careless about budgeting."

"I will tell the Secretary of State that you deserve that."

"Cool." And off they go to the airport.

Meng Xuanyu has AWOKEN and has PROTESTS.

"I think it's probably technically illegal to drive a baby around without a carseat but I expect you don't have any options that involve a carseat and I really want the fare," the driver says conversationally.

"We want to minimize how many people the government has to track down and pay. Please drive safely."

Because he is a troll, Meng Yao sings Rock A Bye Baby.

WHAT IF MENG YAO BREAKS THE DRIVER AND HE CRASHES THE CAR!

The driver does in fact stop the car very abruptly! "There's a baby in a tree? Where??"

"Don't worry, we've already talked to someone about the baby in the tree and it's being fixed. The baby's all right."

"Oh good." On they drive.

Meng Yao is bracing himself for how they handle airport security.

...Or for that matter, airport food. 

The way they handle airport security is that you have to say that you do not plan to do any violence on the plane. That's it, that's the whole thing. No metal detectors, no baggage searches, no patdowns. That girl over there is apparently flying in full cosplay with a real sword.

Airport food is as expected in content but they do have signs up saying "this is more expensive than normal McDonald's food because it's more convenient not to have to go very far from your gate for it!" and "QuickDonut - just drop your cash in the jar and let us know on the way out that you've paid" for a self-serve donut display with one guy reading a newspaper who is barely nodding at all the affirmations that people paid.

What if he just doesn't pay for his donut. 

The ethical boyfriend is CRAMPING his STYLE. 

AIRPORTS ARE WORSE THAN CARS ACTUALLY

Newspaper guy does not remotely notice that a donut has gone unpaid for. One person looks suspicious but relaxes immediately when Meng Yao clarifies aloud that he paid for his donut.

"I'm really annoyed that you can't keep your baby quiet," someone tells Lan Xichen. "I'm kind of fantasizing about strangling it."

"You can't possibly fantasize about strangling him as much as I do."

"Yeah," says the stranger, nodding, and he goes to sit as far away as feasible from the screaming baby.

Meng Yao braces himself for the airplane.

The safety announcement goes like this:

"Hey everybody! The pilots are not drunk so we're almost certainly going to be totally fine, but just in case, please raise your hand if you have any questions about the safety features of this aircraft that aren't answered to your satisfaction on the little card in front of you!" (No hands go up.) "Great, I hate having to go over all that again when we have newbie flyers. Last time we had a middle school field trip and they wanted the entire spiel! It was awful! If you want something that a flight attendant can reasonably provide and you're too dang impatient to wait for us to come around with beverage service, you can press your call button! You can also do it under other circumstances but it won't help. I hope you enjoy your flight because surly nauseated passengers are way less pleasant to deal with!"

Meng Yao loves this place. 

Something is HAPPENING to Meng Xuanyu's EARS and it is BAD.

"I hate you," says the little old lady in the aisle seat next to them calmly, and she takes out her knitting and starts furiously purling socks.

"I'm very sorry. If I had access to my family wealth I would be taking a private jet instead."

He is going to rise to a position of tremendous power by being the only person in politics who can lie and then he will have his OWN private jet with NO people making obnoxious comments. 

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MENG XUANYU'S EARS???? IS HE DYING

The flight is basically uneventful, although at one point someone loudly announces, "I walk really slowly but if anyone beats me to the lavatory the rest of this flight is going to smell really bad!" and people get out of his way to let him shuffle up to the bathroom.

Honestly that's very courteous of them.

Is there someone here to pick them up at the airport?

Yup, the Secretary of State has sent them a dude holding a sign that says I AM WAITING FOR THE VISITORS FROM ANOTHER WORLD.

...he never thought he would miss Xue Yang. 

"Hello!" he says. "That's us."

"Oh good, my feet hurt," says the dude. He escorts them to a limo.

"Do you have a car seat?"

"I have a booster seat, I didn't know how young your son was. He's cute and I want to pet his hair."

"You can pet his hair."

"He's actually Meng Yao's nephew but we adopted him."

The limo driver pets his hair. "I can see if the rental car place has rental baby seats."

He bounces Meng Xuanyu and sings to him in Chinese while this is sorted out. 

"I find it threatening when people around me use languages other than English!" says a woman walking by, but she doesn't stop to chat further.

The limo driver reappears with a baby seat from Hertz.

Into the car!

"Do you like your job?" Lan Xichen inquires politely. 

"I like it better than my last job as a waiter and not as much as I think I would like being a rock star," says the limo driver.

"Being a musician is a very enjoyable job. Some of my relatives play in orchestras."

"Is there anything you think we should know about the Secretary of State?" Meng Yao says, concerned that small talk is going to lead to them not taking full advantage of this situation. 

"Oh, probably, but I don't know what it is. We don't really talk."

Dammit. 

"Do you know any interesting gossip about politicians?"

"The junior West Virginia senator is married to his second cousin and cheats on her with his intern."

He loves this place. It is his favorite place in the world. 

"Do his constituents know?"

"Probably not all of them? I don't think anyone went door to door about it."

Never mind he hates this place actually.

There is traffic. Sometimes people in the traffic lean out their windows to shout at each other, things such as "I am full of brief but intense rage!" and "I suspect you of being intoxicated!" and "I may be ignoring the posted speed limit but you are driving on the shoulder to get past me at an even greater speed!"

He sings to his baby in Chinese until they arrive at the Secretary of State's office.

The Secretary of State has a staffer in the office who apparently understands Chinese and is really alarmed that the baby is apparently a rabbit! "He doesn't look like a rabbit!"

"You misheard. Actually those syllables mean 'cute little baby.'"

The staffer furrows his brow and mutters to himself in Chinese and says something about getting what you pay for from Duolingo and leaves. A different staffer shows them to the Secretary of State's office.

The Secretary of State is pleased to see them - he says so! - and wants to know how they have found this universe so far.

"It's lovely! Remarkably similar to ours in a lot of ways. I didn't expect that Wal-Mart would be present across universes."

"Can we arrange for someone to watch our son for a little bit?"

"Sure, we have onsite daycare." He summons his assistant and the assistant comes to ferry Meng Xuanyu and his accessories to the onsite daycare.

"You're doing a good job of accommodating working parents!"

"Thank you! I'm nostalgic for an era where it was normal for women to be stay at home parents but this polled well. Anyway, welcome to our universe!"

"So far I've noticed one major difference between my universe and yours."

His dreams of wild political success are melting away.

"What is it?"

"We can say things that aren't."

"That aren't what?"

"Maybe an example would be helpful-- 'you are a woman.'"

"I -" She looks down at herself. "Well, the political climate hasn't really let me, ah - and my wife wouldn't like it -"

"Did you think you were a woman before Lan Xichen said that?"

"I... well, that's an interesting question, I'm not really up on the modern gender related lingo... I'm not sure."

"Maybe we should try something that's not a social construct."

"Well, at least I should put him back the way he was-- you are a man."

"Oh, thank goodness."

"My hair is yellow."

"That's a really convincing wig."

"The hair that you currently see on my head is yellow. --This is an ability people from my world have. I can say that my hair is any color I want, blue or pink or purple or red."

"I think the light in here might not be very good."

"This conversation is not very important and you don't remember anything from it."

Blink blink. "Well, I think that's enough smalltalk for now. Welcome to the Fractious States, how can we best establish relations with your universe?"

He can rewrite the personalities of the most powerful people in the world and no one can catch him. 

"Unfortunately, we've never made interworld contact before, so we don't know a lot about how to do it properly." For example, what to do about being able to mind-control people. 

"Well, I'm new at this too! How did you come to be here?"

"We have no idea. We just woke up here one day."

He is... not going to talk until he can get Xichen alone and find out what Xichen thinks about being able to rewrite the president's personality, how about that. 

"Huh! Nothing weird happened beforehand where you came from or where you landed?"