Yeah, definitely. He expects there'll be people interested in that sort of thing showing up for the megaproject on the Crafter side, too.

He looks thoughtful for a few moments.

"... I think this particular difference might be related to why we don't keep as many animals, actually," he speculates. "Unfamiliar animals activate the same feeling of being around people. And even familiar animals can do the same when someone is already feeling overwhelmed. But animals can't communicate with us, so we can't get the ... certainty about what they're feeling, in order to dismiss and redirect our attention."

"That's speculation off the top of my head, however. Don't take as being too certain. It also might change if we start picking up Crafting and the thinking animals pick it up from us — I think a lot fewer people would have a problem with having an animal sharing their territory if it could communicate."

Huh, that's very different from how Crafters relate to animals, yeah. Most species can't communicate with crafting, though they can answer simple questions, but that doesn't really matter because they aren't socially relevant in the same way another Crafter is; having an animal in their territory or being touched by one just isn't the same sort of thing at all. Even with the communicating animals it isn't, for most Crafters. Which is good; it'd be hard to meet his social needs if he couldn't just have dogs around for it. 

"Answering simple questions would be plenty, because you could ask them specific questions to find out what is wrong," Vesherti replies.

"I was imagining that Crafters had fewer social needs, since you're more solitary. But maybe that isn't the case. Are you unusually social because you like traveling, or do many Crafters keep animals for social reasons?"

Sort of both; he's not unusually sociable but he's on the gregarious side as Crafters go, which means he'd expect to start really feeling it after a week or two if he didn't have animals in his household to interact with and he needs to interact with other Crafter-tier people in person at least a few times a year and by writing more regularly than that; it's not particularly unusual for a Crafter to never see another adult Crafter again after their mid-twenties but that's definitely the more solitary side of the species. And basically all Crafters have animals of some sort, he's not actually sure it's possible to run a household without them, and while he could see someone not thinking of social things as an important reason to have animals he'd be very surprised at someone never socializing with their animals anyway.

Vesherti hums, and then quickly looks up some statistics.

"That is less sociable than us on average, yeah. The typical person here is more similar to you, in that we would feel bad if we didn't see someone for about two weeks, although there's a pretty wide spread. Some people like going months between visits, and some people need to see others every day."

"So the reason we came to the park first was to let you adjust and ask questions about people's general behavior. Do you want to hang out here more, try some different food, go see the building with territories that the occupants agreed you could come visit, go see other outdoor parts of the city, or something else?"

He's getting a lot out of being here, actually; there are a lot of subtle differences in how the locals act compared to Crafters that he's noticing and getting used to. Though he's also pretty clearly going to need more than just today to acclimate, so if there are things they want to show him now is fine; he is going to want to see other parts of the city at some point even if he doesn't care that much about whether it happens today.

"Hmm. So there are definitely things that we want to show you, but I also don't really care what day they happen. I am happy to do whatever you would like most. So if you want to sit here and keep people-watching that's fine with me, I just wanted to confirm that explicitly," he explains.

In the park the group of people playing a game apparently finish and start congratulating each other. Some of them break off, doff their robes, and go jump in the pond to cool down.

He does expect he'll feel like he's had enough of this for the day at some point this morning, but he's not there yet, yeah. He's interested in their megaprojects and trading system, too, for later or if Vesherti gets bored before he does.

(He fairly obviously notices the people stripping to swim, not in a way where he seems surprised about the nudity but in a way where he's conscientiously not looking too much at it.)

"Since I've seen the city before, I expect to find it less interesting to watch than you do," Vesherti admits. "But that's why I brought a book — I'm perfectly content to spend time reading if we run out of things to talk about."

Vesherti is not really sure why Traveler would care about the swimmers. Perhaps just because it's not usually a group activity for Crafters?

"Swimming is also something we tend to do with other people, mostly for safety reasons. People do swim alone, but I think it's less common than swimming in a group."

Crafters don't swim together very often, and usually not in the nude; it's safer if they have some crafting material on them that they can turn into a boat or at least a flotation device in an emergency. It's a little uncommon to go naked in public in general, too, a fair portion of Crafters feel private about being seen that way, and different Crafter communities have different expectations about how people will handle that.

"Oh, I see. We do have flotation devices, but it would be inconvenient to take them everywhere, so they're mostly used when you know ahead of time that you will be going out on deep water," Vesherti explains. "Different cities also have different expectations about wearing clothes. In this city, the default is to assume that someone not wearing clothes outdoors is blue and not pink, until you get a chance to explicitly ask. Indoors in public spaces it's the same, but indoors in private spaces they're assumed to be red until they clarify. Except that some public indoor spaces have more specific expectations that people going inside are told."

Vesherti recenters himself before he goes down an unnecessarily detailed tangent about different kinds of indoor communal spaces.

"Some people feel private about not wearing clothes, but those people just don't take off their clothes and that's fine."

That does help to know, he appreciates it. Though he's not sure of the exact boundary between blue and pink, or for that matter the difference between blue and green. Or he's fine with just continuing not to look at people if it's an uncomfortable topic; it would be for a lot of Crafters.

For all that Vesherti has gotten plenty of practice with the Crafter language at this point, he's still constrained by the cruel whims of vocabulary.

"Now that we have more words I can try to give you a more detailed description of those colors. Let me see ... Blue, green, and pink are all social colors," he begins. "But they are ... focused on different things. Blue is mostly about wanting to talk to people. Not just being open to being near people, but wanting to interact with them. Pink is similar, but it's more about wanting a specific subset of interactions with people. The subset is kind of fuzzy, but it's things like ... wanting someone to be your partner, or wanting someone to have sex with, or wanting someone to kneel at your feet. Green is open to being near people, but not specifically seeking out either of those kinds of interactions, because you're focused on something else, like learning or physical activity."

"People get very elaborate with these things, but ... anyone in a social color, it is fine to talk to them or interact with them if you want to. Someone in blue would prefer that more than someone in green would, unless you're joining the green person in some shared activity. Someone in pink is like someone in blue, except that they're letting you know that they're interested in that particular subset of interactions, so that you know to ask about it if you feel similarly."

"The color system used to be simpler, but when we came up with ways to make more colors, and people could have more clothes, it got more detailed. And unfortunately there's some drift between cities," he admits with some chagrin. "But as long as you have the basic red-vs-not-red the rest of it is really just extra information that you don't necessarily need to care about. I'm not sure what topic might be uncomfortable here, though?"

Crafters tend to feel even more private about sex-related things, even just as a conversational topic, than about nudity, though he feels somewhat less that way than most and this conversation is fine. (Not that he's comfortable enough to look away from the screen as he replies, though.) A Crafter wearing pink in the local sense in public would definitely have their neighbors talking about them, back home.

It is good, in a sense, that it's different here, but that's not a conversation he wants to have today and really not a conversation he wants to have at all.

"Okay. Then we don't have to talk about it."

Vesherti makes a mental note to avoid the parts of the city zoned for public sex; they're pretty small and easily evitable, for obvious reasons, although it does mean that they'll have to take the long way around if Traveler wants to see the waterfront.

If someone with less tact were conversing with Traveler, they might make comments about how þereminians view intimate relationships, but he just said he doesn't want to talk about it and Vesherti has more self-control than that. The people on the diplomatic team have sort of been waiting for the shoe to drop on something that Traveler will dislike about their society; it was really a matter of time.

"Is there any kind of pattern in the colors that Crafters choose for their territories?" he asks instead. "Obviously it won't be something as ephemeral as how they feel at the time, but maybe there are still trends?"

Hm, there's not really a lot of patterns, but there are a few, mostly that very unsociable Crafters tend to choose very plain colors for themselves - he's actually seen territory markers that were just monochrome, a time or two - and more sociable Crafters tend to choose patterns that are fancy in some way; the glitter in his indigo and the reflectiveness of his gold are examples of that. His fleshcrafter friend who's very sociable has a peach themed triple ombre going on, as another example, orange and yellow and purple. Sometimes Crafters who aren't that sociable do pick fancier designs, especially when they're young - younger Crafters tend to be more sociable anyway but it's also more common for them to guess wrong about themselves in the more-sociable direction - but a really plain design is a pretty reliable sign that someone would rather not be bothered.

"How interesting! Can people change their chosen colors if they don't fit, then?"

Yep. Usually not all at once, for teens and adults, but it's not especially uncommon for Crafters to make minor changes to their personal designs that add up over time. He used to incorporate a white border into his design, for example, and then eventually decided he liked it better without that. Sometimes Crafters make changes to demarcate major life events, too; he did that when he took up traveling, he had the indigo and a shiny bluish green back then and added the glitter after a couple months when he was sure he'd been right about it.

"Huh, interesting! And the colors themselves are just what appeal to you?"

Pretty much, yeah. Crafters do avoid having designs too similar to their neighbors' - that's one of the things he's getting used to right now, it's very weird to see so many people in similar colors - but that's the only limitation.

"That makes sense. I do think our personal glyphs are maybe a bit more flexible there, because it's easier to distinguish similar designs and know they're definitely different. My glyph is Vesherti, but if someone else had Wosherti, that's an obviously different person even though parts are similar."

That does seem like a clever system, and obviously the Crafter way of doing it fails immediately if you have this many people in one place all doing it. He likes being able to identify people at fifty yards' distance, though, and he's not sure how he feels about the idea of people being able to see what mood he's in at that range - it's not the kind of thing he thinks of as being intimate, exactly, but he's used to it being more intimate than that.

Huh.

Vesherti imagines what it would be like to live in a world where you couldn't tell whether someone wanted to be bothered, or what the general mood of a crowd was except by asking. Probably you'd just get ... a lot of people never speaking to anyone in public places, and only making friends through existing connections?

"To me, since I'm used to the way we do it, not being able to tell if someone wants to talk before you approach them sounds stressful," he replies. "But I can see why you'd feel that way."

He can usually tell by looking, can the locals not? It's harder for him with other Crafters than with animals but not that hard.