"I don't really mind. It's so interesting to watch your face, I feel like I'm starting to understand what your expressions mean. Um... A year is two hundred ninety seven days. 298 on leap years, which are every five years usually. You're usually fully grown and working at around... Fourteen, fifteen? Second tail comes in at around 25-26. I'm twenty, Mika's twenty six..." She gives more ages: Fifteen, nineteen, twenty, sixteen, twenty-two...

Mika gives Fei a Meaningful Look of some kind. Fei makes a shooing sort of hand gesture. Mika snorts and walks off again, doing a distinctively annoyed tail-flick as she does.

Wonder what that means. Anyways.

"Wow, that's pretty fast. I'm eighteen Earth years old, which is... about twenty three Iwami years, and that's considered barely an adult. I was still in school, actually. How long does it take for the other tails to come in, past the second?"

"Ah, so you're kind of a onetail too!" Fei's tail wags. "It's once every fifteen years after the second. Used to be you were lucky to survive 'till your fourth, now people can live through most of their fifth pretty okay! They invented these devices that they implant in you, right next to your heart, to dispense drugs automatically during medical emergencies. Hurray for medical science!"

"So it sounds like Kitsune live for a decade or so less than humans. The life expectancy in my country is I think eighty, which is about a hundred Iwami years. Although frequently people get cognitive decline a while before they die."

"...That would really suck*. The most tailed are the smartest, for us... You mentioned that people thought up aliens that looked like us earlier. What was that like, what kind of stories were they in?"

*The cultural translation of 'suck' as a mild negative swear is about accurate, but the actual word is a reference to getting covered in mud.

"The trope I was talking about... they weren't really thought of as aliens. It was more like, 'foxes are cool, wouldn't it be cool and/or sexy if there were people that looked kinda like foxes?' They featured sometimes in fantasy stories and art. Plenty of porn too. And it wasn't just fox-people, people came up with all kinds of human-animal hybrids."

Fei giggles. "Wow, that's kind of a stuffy word for it? Why 'porn' and not 'erotic-art'? Also, I bet all the hybrids are very sexy and cute. We kitsune certainly are, right~? And we have that too. Vork-people and fish-people and bird-people and snake and lizard people and lots more kinds. Very popular among certain crowds." Wink.

"Yes, you are." He gives her a gentle scratch behind the ears.

"I don't know how to begin to describe American cultural attitudes towards porn, nor do I know how they differ from your expectations... but I guess I'd say a lot of it isn't considered particularly artistically meritorious. Lowbrow stuff that appeals basically exclusively to the audience's lust and not their aesthetic sensibilities. It's an unfortunate state of affairs, I know."

She leans against him. Apparently, Kitsunes purr.

"Tragic, really. So much art gets tarred with the brush of 'lowbrow' and ignored. Sometimes you just want to watch explosions and punching and guns!"

Oh wow, she's purring. He'll keep petting her, then.

"So, do Kitsune kiss?"

"Oh, sometimes. Maybe humans would do it a lot more. Your noses might get in the way less. Switch ears once in a while so you get both, please~?"

"Well, the human style is to kiss each other's lips."

He gives that a try. And he'll give her ears some kisses as well.

"How is that?"

"...It's a little new, but I think I like it well enough."

She gives him a peck on the cheek in return.

"Further testing may be necessary. To acquire a sufficient dataset. Yes."

"Good. I need lots of practice."

They can practice then! 

Fei doesn't seem to think they need any more privacy than this lounge that nobody else happens to be in at the moment.

Neither does he. They experiment for a while. Sid is making observations. What does she like?

Light scratching on parts that have fur, and whispers, make her the most shivery. Chin scratching is good. Her tongue is slightly rough, not in a painful way, and apparently she likes licking skin. Also, she likes rubbing her tail over him, mostly for how he reacts.

She tries escalating to heavy petting after a few minutes.

Sid also enjoys the licking. Her tail is soft and pleasant and tickles him when it touches his face or neck. Not too much of that, please.

Heavy petting sounds good!

If they keep going in this manner they'll discover that the lower bits work pretty much the same way. Though the preference for licking continues. And Fei will have a lot of fun and then nap contentedly on Sid.

It's fun. He can nap for a while and hopefully have the time to take a bath before the doctor arrives.

Fei's tablet flashes with a grouptext saying that Doctors Without Borders will be here in 50 minutes* a bit later. She jerks, then relaxes and stands and stretches. 

"That was really fun! I've always wanted to do it with an alien, and even accounting for that it was really nice! I will forever be the first Kitsune to bang an alien!" Triumphant pose! "Ehm. It looks like there's still enough time for a quick bath and a snack before it's serious stuff time."

*Half of a long hour.

"Good. I enjoyed it too." He gives her a kiss on the forehead. "Let's get that bath."

Fei wipes down the furniture with a wetwipe-type thing from a little box in a drawer, first. There's a laundry chute situation to dump their clothes into. The communal baths have two others in them right now. The pair leave and another kitsune files in while they wash up. Fei will wash him and let him wash her during the bath but is sure to firmly mention that Bathtime Is Bathtime and mixing it with sexy-time is bad manners.

The bath towels and bathrobes are pretty multifunctional and Fei sees no problem wearing one downstairs or with Sid doing the same. There's a buffet of warm foods in buffet-style heated trays and room temperature foods like candy or little bread-bits on the kitchen half-wall counter. Fei casually grabs some and says hi to a couple others playing some kind of platformer game on a big wall screen.

Thank you for explaining that, Fei.

Sid gets clean, gets a bathrobe, and gets some food. What are his instincts telling him? Does it taste and smell good to eat?

The bread seems bread-y. The candy is weirdly floral and a little artificial-tasting. Most of the spread appears to be the same grain prepared in different ways- Bread, crackers, porridge, pancakes. The texture on most of the fruits and veggies is off, but they seem mostly fine. If generally small and weirdly pretty, for fruits and veggies. The meat is meat, but there's not much. Just one plate in little bite-sized chunks. There's no dairy products.

There's a clearly separated bowl of purpley ?sauce? with its own spoon- That doesn't smell like anything but makes his skin tingle and then go kind of numb if he tries it.