Amentans are from a planet with long years! They can have kids in the spring, once per year, but usually have fewer (in the country these Amentans represent, you buy permission to have one from the government, which replaces taxes). They take four of their years to grow up, and live to be forty, but can't have kids once they hit twenty. They have six castes, which aren't perfectly correlated with natural hair color but it's pretty close. They have bones and muscles and skin and membranes and eyes and fingernails and brains and stuff! Their xenobio guy did study some Amentan biology before tracking into xenobio so he knows things to tell them.

Mermaids have years about a quarter of the length of Amenta's and can reproduce year-round, although very small merchildren emit a chemical that prevents their mothers from conceiving more while caring for them. They grow up slightly slower, taking twenty of their years to become a full adult, but are fertile younger than that. In modern times everyone is fitted with a removable birth control device when they hit the age at which people start to become fertile. Scale color and pattern are correlated with where your ancestors came from, but not aptitudes as far as anyone knows. They also have bones and muscles and membranes and eyes and brains! They sorta have skin. They don't have extruded keratin to make hair and fingernails. Why is hair a thing?

Many animals related to Amentans have hair all over their bodies at about the same length to keep them warm; in Amentans it's very fine and sparse over most of the body and only substantial on the scalp and eyebrows (and eyelashes). They're actually not sure why scalp hair persisted originally - it might have stuck around to retain ancestor species' social grooming habits while otherwise disappearing, and lasted long enough to acquire cosmetic and social significance. Eyebrows and eyelashes both keep stuff out of their eyes, which are delicate and must be open to see.

That makes sense. Mermaids solve the eye thing with transparent membranes over their eyes. 

Giving birth to a fully-formed baby who is not in an egg sounds uncomfortable.

In the modern day they have good enough painkillers, but yes, it is uncomfortable, sometimes even a little bloody. The moms recover very fast though.

That's good! 

Amenta must have such different stars. 

They DO! Would they like to see pictures of Amentan constellations?!

YES!!!!!!!!!! 

(These are such green mermaids.)

The greens are delighted. They bring up Amentan constellation images.

The mermaids are so excited!!! Is their sun visible from Amenta? If so, which one is it?

Their sun is visible from Amenta! It's this one.

Oooh!

The mermaids do some calculations on their suit computers. So that means that...they project an image of the night sky from this planet...that means that this star is Amenta's sun, right? 

That's right!

That is so cool. 

Mermaids and greens continue to green at each other for several hours, until a group of several mermaids is spotted swimming in this direction. 

"Are those friends of yours?"

"Oh! Yes! That's Councilor Aoieaaue, I voted for them last election cycle," the mermaid says, pointing at one near the front of the formation. "It looks like they were believed!"

"What do councilors do?"

"City councilors like Councilor Aoieaaue run cities. Provincial councilors run provinces, and the national councilors run the country."

"How many countries are there on this planet?"

"Ninety-seven."

"Are you on good terms with them?"

"No one's currently at war, but there are some I wouldn't say we're friendly with."

"I'm glad we didn't land in the middle of a war! Amenta is at peace now too."

"Wars are terrible," the mermaid agreed. "I watched a documentary that included footage taken by a war correspondent, once, and I couldn't sleep without nightmares for ages."

"We've had some in living memory, but things were calm when we invented faster than light travel, and have stayed that way since!"