<Do I always have the six younger siblings?>

"Yes. Even in societies where it's an unusual number, I think."

"It's deeply unusual in Anitam."

"Were yours sisters?" she asks Anaander.

"What a bizarre question. No, a mix."

"I don't think it's bizarre, the phenomenon at work could use any manner of weird parameter to decide how to manifest. It's also not very important that you're all tall, and yet."

"All yours are brothers?" he asks Aitim.

"Yes."

"My parents had girls on purpose because they could inherit."

"Mine did the same thing, except that boys could inherit."

"Would it be a very personal question to ask what sort of mix, Anaander?"

"Female, male, female, male, female, female, female."

"Huh. That feels - less than random, actually..."

"What do you mean?"

"I didn't register a guess beforehand, which would have been more responsible, but I think I expect intuitively that in cases where there's a mix, if we find more of those, Maitimos and Curufinwës will match Fëanáros, Tyelcormos won't - that one surprised me a little so obviously my intuition isn't very reliable - Macalaurës will be male either way, Carnistirs and Ambarussa could go either way."

" - huh."

"Are we always the gender that can inherit and hold political power, if there is one?"

Nods all around.

"Do your more-human subjects actually not notice or care about people's various sexually correlated characteristics or is it just gauche so they don't admit it?"

"It's not hard to notice. I don't know what a good analogy is - it's not hard to notice if people have facial acne and it's not very weird to have sexual preferences that they not but if you go around sorting people by it then everyone will think you're well out of line."

"The analogy I was making in my head was to ethnic characteristics as understood in my native culture circa my lifetime."

"That might fit."

Osirians seem to find all of this extremely weird.

"My foster parents occasionally made a big deal about how since I was blind I didn't know what ethnicity any of my foster siblings were and this was somehow very virtuous of me."

"...Ah-huh."