That was very nearly flirting. Why is Jacob almost-flirting with the alien. 

Cas gives him a 'what the fuck are you doing' look behind Kadlawen's back, because what the fuck, Jacob. 

Kadlawen does not have omnidirectional vision, and is accordingly unaware of this interaction. 

“Well, it is your castle, and I am your host; I think that you can dispose of either as you’d like,” he says. ‘You’re pretty and unusual and even if I’m still not super impressed I’m interested enough to signal it’, he does not say but does imply.

“Should I just boop everyone who’d like to head on over so they can spend the next few minutes walking on air, or would you rather everyone be on board for the docking process, or...?”

"We'll stay on board until the ship is docked, which gives me time to ask the crew what they'd like to do," Jacob decides.

"You are welcome to stay and watch, either from the deck or floating in the air—so long as you don't get in the way." 

“Um... well, I suppose I’ll just mosey on up to the sky and do my very best impression of a strawberry buzzard, in that case, that seems least likely to result in accident. If you need me urgently, just say the word ‘palalka’- it’s Wecheyum for coffee- and I’ll be back in a flash.”

And so he ascends.

The crew set to work, bringing the ship in to dock at a suitable point.

As they work, Jacob talks to each of them individually and figures out a plan for what they'll do next. A few people want to stay on the Covenant for now, but these people travel to new worlds for a living. Most of them want to see the castle. 

Kirill, who has a dragon, wants to see the castle from the air. Su-Jin thinks this is a great idea and will go along to stop Kirill and the dragon getting into trouble. 

Cas and Linden will stick with Jacob and get a tour of the place. 

"I'm pretty sure we're safe here; we can let people explore on their own. The worst that can happen is someone'll get lost for an hour or two, and we should be able to find them between us if that happens." 

Other captains would worry about leaving someone in charge on the ship, with the captain, first mate and navigator all elsewhere. Jacob, who can see, hear and respond to anything that happens on his ship at any distance, pities those other captains. 

Getting the ship secured doesn't take too long. It's a little different to normal since they dock in the air rather than water most of the time, but they've made water landings before and it's not a totally unfamiliar task. They get it done without incident, and the crew separate into various groups, some disappearing into the castle while others stay on deck. Jacob, Cas and Linden disembark and wait for Kadlawen, along with a few other crewmembers. 

Kadlawen, who’s been pleasantly meandering in the crisp glimmer air, descends, once it becomes sufficiently obvious that they’re waiting for him.

”Lovely- um, okay, so! The castle can be divided into four wings. If you’ll follow me into the north wing, I can show you around the indoor hot springs, the indoor cold springs, the first section of bedrooms, the game room, the self-cooking kitchen, the fazdipu ring, the living rooms, the sunrooms, the neat little indoor butterfly garden...”

The castle, it transpires, is just as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside, and much more interesting.

"What's fazdipu?" 

“I suppose that wouldn’t translate- it’s a style of formal wrestling, we have more styles of wrestling than we know what to do with- your culture might not emphasize it as much? “

"Not really, no. I think I've heard of...maybe five or six different styles of wrestling that actually have names? So what's special about fazdipu?"

“It’s, um, played by four fully-clothed people, and at any given time, two of them are on the field as a team, one is on the field alone, and one is on the sidelines? The current team heads up against the current lone wolf, they almost inevitably manage to win- via the expedient of getting them to say ‘I give up’ or an equivalent, or else by pinning them for a full two minutes- and then it rotates? People win by losing the mini-matches more slowly and winning the mini-matches more rapidly? It’s very popular. And its name means ‘full-moon’ because it’s played in a circular, white ring, and because of vague mythological references that it’d be tedious to explain.”

"I've never heard of anything like that," Linden says.

"Two hundred years of travelling, and the universe still finds new things to show me." He looks around at the room they're currently walking through, and it's clear he's not just talking about the wrestling. 

“I hope to still encounter novelty when I’m a thousand!” chirps Kadlawen.

And they continue touring.

At some point, it occurs to Cas to ask about Kadlawen's preferred pronouns. "You guys have a lot more genders than we do, so your exact pronouns might not translate, but Arizvam said you have equivalents of our 'he' and 'she' that work for multiple genders? And I don't know how 'they' translates, that's the other commonly-used pronoun in our culture." 

“- in this particular context both ‘he’ and ‘they’ are translating as correct, even though the thing that ‘he’ directly translates to isn’t correct? ‘They’ is translating as the gender-category that I am- which is also used for mixed groups- but ‘he’ is... right, even though it’s wrong? Translation magic sometimes gets strange about this sort of language-to-language muckety muck, I wouldn’t worry about it overmuch.”

Cas nods. "I'll default to 'they' for anyone I'm not sure about, then, like I would at home—it's the one we use for mixed groups and people of unknown gender, plus some people actively prefer it. You won't offend anyone if you do the same for us."

That's an interesting translation weirdness and he wants to poke at it, but Kadlawen doesn't seem to want to talk about it so he won't. "Would you mind telling me, or rather us, a bit more about the way genders work here? I've picked up that they correspond to skin colours and that they come in groups, but not much else." 

“They also correspond to hair color, eye color, and blood color, though more loosely... the groups are ‘red to chartruese’, ‘green to azure’, and ‘blue to rose’, which want to translate as ‘they’, ‘he’, and ‘she’, respectively? You probably don’t want details on anatomical differences, but the-thing-which-unifies-the-green-to-azure-group is the only thing that doesn’t want to translate, so there’s nothing too estoeric going on? Each gender has a different selection of possible professions, possible and ideal roles in the reproductive process, that sort of thing- reds do social stuff, browns do food preparation and service, golds do clerk-ing and translation, chartreuses do academia, mints do corporate leadership and management, roses do medicine, other genders do hard-to-summarize combinations of things, nobles and royals mostly ignore the ordinary roles.

I’m not sure what else you ought to know- different genders have different nudity taboos? Like, greens normally go around just barely covering anything, violets wear headscarves, golds need to wear hats and roses need to wear gloves and browns don’t go barefoot in public, that sort of thing. Um. Each gender has three gods who are commonly considered to belong to it, they have different rates of facial hair and different median builds and such and you can almost always tell even in colorless photos, I’m personally red, Arizvam’s blue...”

"Apparently I read as red; is that just me or all of us?" Social stuff doesn't actually sound that far off, for Cas. 

“Um, you seem pretty distinctly red, it seems like your whole-“ he gestures vaguely in the direction of everyone else present- “ranges from plausibly red to plausibly brown to maybe-kind-of plausibly gold, color wise? In terms of non-skin based social cues you all range from ‘plausibly such and such’ to ‘incomprehensible’.”

"I'd be interested to know how I come across." 

“... probably as a moderately short mint, coloration aside?”

"Leadership and management? That sounds about right. What about Linden?" 

“- sorry, my apologies, nothing comes to mind. You look very thoroughly nothing-in-particular,” he says, to Linden.

"That suits me fine. If you're wondering, I use 'he' pronouns like Casimir and Jacob."