Anþasta makes a face, as though she's not quite clear how to take that.

"Alright. Well, I am going to go see who else is free to receive magic. Thank you for the lessons."

"The rest of us probably should as well," Genilha comments, reaching out to give Oskeli a hand up. "Sooner begun and all that."

"What would you like to do, Maenik? You're our guest, so I don't want everyone to just gallivant off and abandon you. I could make us some tea, or point you at people who are likely to be doing something interesting?"

"I'm fairly easy to entertain. I'd be happy helping with spreading magic around or learning more about how you do things around here. I can also potentially help in other ways if there's problems that would usually be hard to handle."

He frowns.

"That's an interesting question. I don't think we normally go around keeping lists of things that are particularly hard."

"Do you have a way of making sure the flour is dry without opening it up?" Oskeli suggests. "We like to have some available over the winter, but every time you open the barrels there's a chance that they won't re-seal properly. Every few years a barrel goes bad because some water gets in and we don't catch it."

"You could look with the fractal to check with the right practice. You could also dry out the barrel with magic. I have one for that, though it would take a bit of finesse to use it with wood barrels. A lot of things do better without water around."

Oskeli snorts. "Isn't that the truth. Living on a lake gives you a new appreciation for the difficulties of keeping water out of things."

"Well, if you did want to help check the stores, I'm sure that would be appreciated. Hmm. I'm not sure what else about what we do is terribly interesting. I could show you some of our weaving? I'm working on a winter wrap for Sigeþe."

"That sounds interesting. I think the thing to remember is that things become mundane when you do them a lot but they can still be interesting to people who haven't."

"Well, I suppose that makes sense," Genilha agrees. "In that case, let me fetch my loom. We can sit on my porch and be available to answer any questions that come up as everyone shares magic. Do you have much prior experience with weaving?"

"I've seen a few types of weaving as I've explored but every time it's been at least a little different."

"Alright."

Genilha ducks into his house, and comes out carefully toting a loom. It is technically a lap loom, in that it is clearly portable and designed to sit in one's lap, but it's also fairly large. A bolt of fabric is carefully bundled on one side, and the raw threads on the other.

He takes a seat on his porch, and waves for Maenik to take the opposite bench.

"So if you've seen weaving before a lot of this should be familiar. The warp is stretched between these frames here, and the weft is pulled between them by this shuttle. The heddle moves up and down, like this, to make it easier to slip the shuttle back and forth. That's all that's needed for basic cloth, but Sigeþe wanted a wave pattern down the side here, to commemorate ... well, that's her business. But the pattern is tricky, because you want to clearly separate the colors, but it doesn't have a clean edge like a lot of block work. So that's why I have this secondary shuttle ..."

And he will happily talk about weaving and answer Maenik's questions for as long as she has them. Unlike some of the embroidered border decorations that she may have noticed on clothing, the wave pattern on this blanket is a flat part of the cloth.

They can spend around half an hour at that before she runs out of questions some of them are about the weaving but there's just as many about the significance of different patterns and colors in what she's seen people wearing.

"Hmm. So the usual answer for children is just that the borders on people's clothing represent things that are meaningful to them," Genilha responds. "But its tricky, because sometimes the representation is more abstract, and sometimes its actually based on signifying closeness to other people who use the same motif. Plus, people can and do inherit clothes from relatives, and things like that, so it's not always about the person themselves."

He picks up the hem of his skirt and holds it out flat for her to see.

"I've got knotwork, which is a usual kind of border, especially because you can work words into it. A lot of people will have their names spelled out, actually. For me, I have the same pattern that my father had, which his father also had. It's tradition in my family that we start using the pattern once we're good enough at weaving to replicate it. Obviously everyone does some part of making cloth, but my family have been weavers for a few generations now. Which suits me just fine, because I prefer it to farming."

"Other than knotwork ... you might have seen Gornet, with flowers on his border? Those are all medicinal, because he's our local healer. Other times flowers represent summertime, or a particular food that someone likes. I think Soverasi and his children have apple flowers, and Kapan has grape flowers, because they cultivate apples and grapes, respectively. Oh, and Penþa has a rose, after one of their ancestors. But then there are the flowers that are more metaphorical — like the thistle, for romantics. Then you've got some that are based on a profession, like wheels for travelers, or diamonds for scholars. Around here, waves are fishers. But on the coast, waves are usually sailors and fishers are fish."

"And a few of the patterns are more about how a person wants to be seen. Like, you'll see more women with red backgrounds to their borders, men with green, and enbies with blue. Not that the colors are definitive — it's hard enough finding dyes that will fix, so it's pretty common for everyone's clothing to end up more or less brown. That's part of why people do box embroidery for their patterns: to make them stand out even once the colors fade."

Indeed, the hem of Genilha's skirt is worn enough that the very faint green behind the varicolored knots is clearly faded with time. The other clothing Maenik has seen around the village is mostly likewise faded and heavy-worn.

"And then you get into marriage patterns. So my border is knotwork, right? But if you look here, there are lilies folded into the corner of the knot at the start of each repetition. That's after my darling Mosetan, who had lilies for her border. Usually people will subtly incorporate a nod to their spouse's pattern."

"Ultimately, the meaning is pretty individual. Some people go really overboard with it, and try to stuff in every conceivable association. And then I charge them extra, because it's difficult enough to do one of the normal patterns. Of course, a few people also don't care, and just go about in plain clothes. It's more common for there to be borders on skirts, I think, because breastbands wear out so much faster. And winter clothes are already enough work. It takes a long time to make a proper sweater, without trying to get too fancy with it."

"Thanks for explaining." Do the colors correlate with anatomical features from what she can remember? It's not really important information but it is worth thinking about. "More broadly what does gender represent here? How does someone decide, or figure out, which gender they are?"

The colors broadly correlate with anatomical features, with the major exception that she has seen both male- and female-bodied people wearing blue. Minor exceptions include Oskeli, who had stripes of faded green and red, a taller female-bodied person at dinner last night with bright green decorations, another person who had so many flowers it was impossible to distinguish a dominant color, and a number of children running around with no obvious background color at all.

Genilha scratches his head.

"Ah ... that's sort of a difficult question to answer," he responds. "Hmm. I guess I would say that genders are ... groups of people that most people choose to belong in, that denote related ... roles, habits, and relationships. Like, people of a particular gender often share similar ... um."

"So imagine you have a fairy tale where one person is trying to save another from a ravine. You'd expect a man to lift them out, a woman to find a way out, and an enby to already know a way out. Only not every person would always behave like their gender, because people are different, and also there are as many different scenarios like this as stars in the sky. Like, what job would someone go into? Well smithing is manly, fishing is womanly, and organizing is non-binary. But weaving is sort of for everyone, even if I think more men make a career out of it."

"And mostly people with penises turn out to be men or enbies, and people with vulvae turn out to be women or enbies. But sometimes you get someone with the wrong parts, or parts that don't really look like any of those, and then it's anyone's guess what gender they'll pick. So you really have to ask the person, if they're not wearing clothing. And sometimes you'll get children who aren't sure whether they're one gender or the other yet, so they might try out all of them, to see which one feels right. But most people do have a gender that just sort of ... feels right to them. I never had trouble figuring it out, personally — I've always felt like a man. I was never very good with numbers. I like having manly kinds of relationships, I guess you could say, with people."

"And it's usually polite to assume that people are enbies, if you can't tell. But you seem to have a lot of womanly mannerisms, so people have been kind of guessing that you're a woman."

"Does that all make sense? What does your society do? I think most kids pick it up just from exposure, you know, so I've never really had to explain it before. Explain why there are three genders, sure, but not the whole thing."

"I think that's pretty close to how a lot of people handle it in my society. There's a huge amount of variation though. Some cultures about labeling themselves at all and things get very different when there's other species of people. Gender tends to relate to biology and different species can have very different biology.

"Some people decide that other species genders fit them better and other people invent entirely new genders out of thin air or develop elaborate subdivisions.

"Magic also makes it easier for people to change their biology so there's cultures where people get very fussy about people matching their biology up with their gender and others where most people change themselves to be in between biologically as a way of rejecting the divide. There's also people who switch back and forth either just with how they want to be referred to or all the way through to their biology."

"Oh! Well that makes sense. I can see why some people would demand that everyone's biology match their gender, although I'm not sure we really need that, since we already have clothes," Genilha muses. "Actually — I've been meaning to ask — do you have any social signals like that? I imagine that you're used to people missing them, since you travel so much, but the color of your shirt is so bright that I thought it might be."

"That's a good question. There's two sides of that, the first is the messages I'm trying to send to people I meet while exploring and the second is what I'm signaling to people form my society. On the first front, I'm not showing very much skin so as to avoid trespassing most nudity taboos, and I'm also not carrying anything that's visibly a weapon or a heavy pack. The lack of a pack tends to make me appear either a unprepared for a small sympathy bonus of else somewhat carefree. It also gives me a smaller silhouette to make me seem less threatening.

"There have been times where they instead make me look too other or fit into malign tropes but I think it's been helpful on balance. The make of my clothes also signals a decent degree of wealth to most of the cultures I've encountered and the thickness specifically often cuts against the bit about being unprepared since they hopefully don't look fragile.

"From the side of my culture, the flowers and brighter colors of my shirt signal both a positive disposition and a desire to stand out rather than blend in. The fact that my clothes are separate pieces instead of being connected and the fact that I don't have a helmet or gloves in my line of work signals that I'm prioritizing friendliness over protection and that I'm someone who leans more heavily into using magic over using technology. My shoes being relatively thin underlines that.

"The fact that I'm using quarantine magic and a projectile ward also suggests that I'm responsible and taking reasonable precautions. Beyond that, the fact that the outline of my breasts is visible and clearly seen as two separate breasts signals that I'm expecting most people to read me as female and that I'm comfortable with that reading. The flowers also play into that for some sub-cultures but not others, and so does wearing my hair relatively long."

"How interesting!" Genilha exclaims. Then he takes a moment to process those details.

"I think most of that makes sense," he muses. "Like, I can see why having a smaller profile and no weapons would generally be friendly. But why on earth does having thin shoes indicate that you rely on magic?"

"It's pretty common for people expecting to do a lot of walking or who are expecting to encounter rough or muddy terrain to wear larger thicker shoes to more thoroughly insulate and protect their feet." She takes a second then shows an illusion of someone wearing a pair of hiking boots. "Me forgoing that is a signal that I'm relying more on magic to cope with that sort of thing, or else that I'm someone who's focused on being in tune with nature and thus not insulating myself as much."

"Huh. I think we mostly only use boots when the ground is too cold for walking," Genilha remarks. "Most people don't like the feel of wearing shoes. I guess people with the trade caravans might do a lot more walking than we do, though. I've never really thought to check whether they were wearing shoes."

"I agree about some kinds of shoes and especially boots. While all those messages I talked about are important comfort is also a factor in how I'm dressed and that's certainly true with my shoes."

Genilha and Maenik chat for a while longer. Occasionally, someone will stop by with another magic question, but by and large the day passes peacefully. Around mid-morning, Penþa makes a long call with a shell-turned-trumpet, which Genilha says is the signal for anyone who hasn't heard that there's to be a meeting.

At some point during the day, Maenik finds the time to stop by and check the food stores. Okanel has hit a lull in food preparation around that time, and tells her a bit about how the village's diet changes with the seasons. After that, she can walk around to meet more people and hear about their stories.

And then soon enough it's time for an early dinner and then the day's meeting.