"No, not nearly everywhere. It's dominant in seven city-states and known enough that you can get along with it in another five, six."

"How many city-states are there?"

"On my continent it's like... forty-something that are definitely city-states and a bunch of little villages that arguably don't count."

"We have three and two arguablys. I'm sure we'll get to forty eventually."

"If your population will eventually stop growing because you don't mass-import humans, where's it going to stop at?"

"Depends how seriously you take the people who try to project that sort of thing from math - and small differences affect the results a lot - I can't do math, of course, but for an example if our birthrate were 1.98 we'd close out at forty million people, and if were 1.99 we'd close out at eighty million people."

"What do you mean, of course?"

"You know how your people think cutting your hair off is a gender signifier? Even though it could as easily have been the other way around? My people think math is a gender signifier."

"...Math."

"All the impressive mathematicians are women. Men do try but they aren't as good. It's probably not innate, though, that wouldn't make any sense."

"It really wouldn't. We don't have that one at all, it doesn't seem like it would help distinguish somebody who was walking down the street a ways away and that's the primary purpose of cosmetic gender markers."

"I don't think I've ever been confused about that and we don't have many cosmetic gender markers."

"I can tell you apart okay, but it's not as easy as it is with humans."

"Because humans follow the cosmetic gender markers, or is there also less innate difference?"

"Some of both, I think, although the skew depends on whether you count the option of having a beard as the one or the other."

"I can't wait to meet more humans and see which things about you are things about you and which are things about humans."

"I can tell you some of that, but I guess it's not as good in hearsay form."

"And lots of the things I pick up are sufficiently fine-grained that I expect something'd be lost if I tried to ask you whether it was typical of humans and you tried to answer."

"Maybe, yeah. Also a lot of it would sound like bragging. Why, yes, I am an unusually intelligent and thoughtful human, thank you for noticing, etcetera."

"What would you say are the respects in which you're most unusual for a human?"

"I'm more bookish and introspective and goal-oriented than most. It's hard to tell what's innate intelligence and what's caring more, my best guess is some of both."

"Oh, and the clumsiness thing, that's really unusual. And I have weird dreams!"

"Huh. There's a Vala of dreams, if you want them soothed or stopped or anything."

"They don't bother me usually, they're just weird. And I don't want anybody tampering with my head."