"I would check, because most decent information-gathering is Sympathy and Illia's a resistance-based Effort specialist, but the short answer is 'magic' and the longer answer is 'I coax the universe into telling me things about you and how you compare to the other inhabitants of this building'."

"Huh," says Milan. "Well, now I'm curious."

How is Milan different? Besides the scarring, she already knows about the scarring.

There's some weird stuff going on in his underblood that might suggest he's not actually fully human, that's a thing.

"You've got weird underblood but nothing on a more macro level than that."

"Underblood?"

"It's--you're the same as your parent because of your bloodline, right, but it's not actually the literal red fluid that does it, so the stuff that does do it we call underblood."

"Oh. Okay, so what's weird about my underblood?"

"There's bits of it not generally found in the human genome."

"Well, sure, I'm part elven on my mother's side."

"Elven?"

"You're the one with the translation magic, you tell me if there's a word for 'elf' in Genoshan."

"There isn't. What's an elf?"

"They're people, but differently from humans."

"You have nonhuman sapients?"

"...Yes?"

"We don't. What're they like?"

"...Sapient. Nonhuman. It varies a lot, there's all kinds of people."

"I have so many questions there's no way you can answer."

He laughs.

"What are elves like, since there apparently exists a fraction of a representative of that species in this universe."

"...I'm really not sure how to transmit the cultural context," he says. "There are few absolutes, a lot of stereotypes, most of which have at least some basis in fact, and some of them are really awkward..."

"Well, if it's hard to describe them culturally, how do they physiologically differ from humans?"

"...Thinner, taller, pointed ears, much subtler gender differences... I've got none of that, even with Mother you can just barely see the point in her ears if you're looking."

Taller does indeed not seem to be operative here, Odette very firmly Does Not Say. "Huh. So you're pretty much just human, for practical purposes?"