That shouldn't be a problem at all; he doesn't need ongoing explicit reassurance or anything, the body language is enough.

Vesherti nods.

"Alright. I'm a little worried that there will be differences in body language, because some of our people are more or less good at both projecting and reading body language. But we can try it whenever you next want to go inside a building. I am more able to consistently project legible body language than average — it's a useful trait for being good at talking to people."

"I don't need to let you in anywhere right now, but when I do I will let you know that I want you to take my hand. Generally, I don't mind you touching me unless you're going to poke me repeatedly or hold me down, because I don't have your instinct. But I don't actually affirmatively want to be touched right at the moment."

Being in someone's territory is pretty low stakes, anyway; the worst case scenario if something goes wrong with the body language part of that is that he no longer feels able to be there and has to leave, which shouldn't be more than an inconvenience. And for entering a territory, he can request that touch, if there's a problem with doing it the other way; touching and being touched are different in terms of the instinctual reaction to them - being touched by someone who seems indifferent to it is fine - but not in terms of receiving the permission.

"What an interesting way for it to work," Vesherti comments.

"I can ask for the touch just fine when we need to go somewhere; for me, I'm indifferent to your touch but I want to be able to help you go places and see our world. So once it's time for that, I will predictably want you to touch me for instrumental reasons," he explains. 

"Is that not how it works for Crafters? We don't have strong instincts about being touched, but we usually don't positively want other people to touch us unless it's for a reason or it's someone we're close to. Although the reasons can be pretty trivial, such as social bonding, or a game."

Wanting it for instrumental reasons is fine, he's just not able to assume that if he can't see it, even if it's predictable. That's not usually how it goes between Crafters because they arrange the logistics differently; if a Crafter isn't enthusiastic in at least some sense about having someone in their territory they'll bring whatever thing out for them rather than bring them in to it, or just skip it altogether. And most Crafters actively disprefer being touched in most situations; he's an outlier on that one so he can't explain it as well as some Crafters can, but it's stressful and confusing when it isn't sufficiently well signposted, even if it's clearly by accident.

Vesherti nods thoughtfully.

"Alright; well, let me know if there are any buildings you want to see inside of."

He looks back out over the people going about their day. From census data, he knows that most people spend most of their time at home; but there are enough reasons to leave the house — food, jobs, exercise, activities — that the streets of the city are always mildly busy. A delivery truck nudges around a corner and whirs down the street by the park at a bit above walking pace, occasionally stopping for pedestrians. A pack of children run down one street with sample collection kits and make for the pond, while a learning supervisor follows them more sedately. A person reading a book expertly dodges people and trees without looking up, before tripping over someone lying prone in the grass and apologizing.

"So I think I made an accurate guess, when I thought that explaining money would help you understand what people are doing; but I don't think I could make five more accurate guesses like that. Are there any things people are doing that you can see and would like an explanation of, or would you just like some time to observe people on your own, or something else?"

He's not seeing anything he thinks he needs an explanation of - the group of kids with one adult seems a little strange, but mostly because it's in public, it's not unusual for a group of kids to decide they want an adult to do something with them. He's not sure what the truck is for but someone having an unidentified vehicle for unspecified purposes isn't strange. The people who were casually holding hands earlier seemed strange to him but he knows the locals do touch differently. He's sort of surprised that so many people are reading and so few are writing, and the lack of animals is pretty weird to him.

"The truck is probably delivering supplies to the shops," Vesherti replies. "As for why so many people are reading ... are most things that Crafters write only read once? Because otherwise there has to be more reading going on than writing going on."

Lots of things Crafters write aren't read back even once; writing is good for organizing your thoughts, too.

"Oh, I see. We do that too, but ... probably only half of writing that the average person does isn't read back. About a quarter of it goes to one other person. And the remaining quarter is usually seen by several people. So on average there has to be more reading occurring than writing," he explains. "But that's not a full explanation, because there are a relatively few works that are read by a lot of people, which tilts things further. Crafters have a Library; do you also have the thing where one sixth of the collection gets read much more than the other five sixths combined?"

Yeah; the library's organizers have a special designation for the most popular books, even, to make them easier to find.

"Well, with so many people writing things and a global library of our own to organize it all, our best books are really good," Vesherti reasons. "So lots of people enjoy reading them. Of course not everyone likes exactly the same books, but most people can find a subcollection that they enjoy reading."

"Hm."

He thinks this is a combination of... Crafters who are readers the way he's a traveler usually don't do it in public, they'll have their territories set up with whatever kinds of spaces they like to read in. He thinks that's probably not as possible for the locals, if their territories are as small as they'd need to be to make a city happen, and he gets the impression that their territories are mostly or entirely indoors, which isn't the case for Crafters, so if a local person likes reading outdoors they'll need to do it someplace like this. And then also, for Crafters, it's often easier to focus on the type of cognitive task that writing is good for with other people around, which means doing it in a public area; that might not be true for the locals or they might have a different setup for it.

... huh.

"Yeah, you're correct that people who want to read outdoors mostly need to do so in public. Or choose to live outside a city, where they can have more space. In a sense, you're seeing the most social half of us, just because the less social half lives outside the city and are less convenient to visit. But I'm not sure I understand why it would be easier to write with other people around; I frequently find that it is easier to write when there are no other people present. So maybe that suggests that we are just different from Crafters, or maybe that we're using writing for different things."

Huh, it's weird that that's different. For Crafters, being around other Crafters feels different from being alone - it's just a little bit activating, like stress or excitement but neutrally valanced, even if nothing in particular is happening. Being alone is better for most purposes but for things that are difficult to focus on, the activation helps. Different Crafters have different amounts of tolerance for it, though; the thing where they're only seeing the more sociable half of the population isn't a surprise to him at all.

He already knew Traveler was an alien, but this really confirms it.

"We do also find being around other people stimulating — that's why it can get to be too much, if it's too much stimulation. And sometimes one of us will feel understimulated and want to go out in public for that reason. But I don't think we particularly find that the stimulation from being around people helps with focusing on things. If anything, it's the other way around, because when I'm near people I spend some of my attention on figuring out what they're doing and thinking. Maybe some people feel that way though — there's a lot of variety in how people cope with problems focusing on things."

Huh. Well, it's not like they didn't know they were different species.

Vesherti laughs.

"I was just thinking the same thing! I suspect there are a few things like that we've yet to discover."

He chuckles.

"One of the reasons people are excited for your visit is that it gives people who like thinking about how we came to be intelligent more data to work with. Our species are clearly related somehow, because we look too much alike, so similarities don't tell us much. But differences tell us which things don't have to be the same about intelligent creatures, and are therefore contingent on the particular way we came to be intelligent creatures, which is fascinating."

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.