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Bella didn't mean to take so long about eating her dinner. It's just that this book is really interesting. Supplemental history reading, recommended by the professor, by a different author than did their textbook, one who can really write, she'll have to find the rest of his work - and now she's one of six students left in the dining hall and it's closing. Four of them are a group of dwarves who she can only assume live in the dwarf housing; individual dwarves sometimes find their way into Harlowe and there is even one in Thatcher, but not a bunch of them. The other one's a mermaid.
Bella doesn't think the mermaid lives in Thatcher, which makes it Harlowe, but Thatcher's on the way to Harlowe from here.
She knows not to go swimming with her and this will have to do.
She goes up to the mermaid.
"Excuse me. I try not to walk around outside by myself. Are you heading towards Thatcher? Harlowe's right past it," she adds.
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subtly_artistic
"I don't really get dating," says Jala.
She shakes her head. "That whole pairing-off thing you humans do is a complete mystery to me," she says.
"Why?"
subtly_artistic
"I don't know all the history behind the cultural reasons, or behind the native - drives - but today, humans have romantic impulses that are pretty strongly correlated with sexual impulses, and our culture reinforces it. I don't know if you've read a lot of human fiction, but it tends to revolve around the subject more often than not. We grow up with parents who are usually romantically involved with each other, though not always, mine are divorced now. And being 'successful' at that kind of thing is also a source of status, in many social circles."
"Huh," says Jala. "It's different under the sea."
"Well... I grew up with a pretty small pod, maybe it's different for other people," she says. "But I know my mother is one of three girls who was laying the year before I hatched, and a couple of other pods came by that year so I'm not sure which one my father was from or who he is."
subtly_artistic
"Do you mind if I ask you questions about that? I don't know whether anything I might be curious about is going to be rude to ask."
"Go for it," shrugs Jala.
subtly_artistic
"So, in human cultures, we're almost invariably certain who our mothers are and usually have a very good guess about our fathers. We use this information for all kinds of things, but the practical one that springs to mind is avoiding inbreeding - we steer clear of reproducing with close relatives, and if we do anyway the kids often turn out badly. Is that not a problem with you? Is it a problem you solve a different way?"
"Oh! No, you can kind of tell - if a pod's guys swam by our eggs and they smelled too familiar, we'd turn them away, and if our guys were swimming by another pod's eggs and they smelled like home, they wouldn't - you know - on them," Jala explains.
subtly_artistic
"Sounds workable. Humans also get raised by our parents; what about you?"
"The whole pod does that. Well, some more than others. You know how it is. Not everybody wants to do all the same things."
"Mostly, yeah. Sometimes people shift around."
"...If they feel like it, I guess? Maybe if they don't get along with their home pod," she shrugs.
Jala nods.
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