"Mmhmm. I've heard of people running into that exact problem with dwarves, actually, where they'll try to move into a city that's almost all dwarves and the dwarves don't believe them that a human is an adult at twenty and beardless instead of forty. -beard is the word for the hair on my face, dwarves have big long beards once they're adults."

She pets his face. "And yours doesn't get longer?"

"It can; not like a dwarf's though. And it's hard to keep clean if I let it get too long."

"Oh, I didn't even think of that. I don't know if people wash woolies. The woolies probably wouldn't like it."

"I don't know; most animals at home don't need to be washed but there are some exceptions. Humans wash ourselves, though - some big cities even have heated bathhouses for it, those can be really nice."

"We have baths! But we don't have to get soap in between all those - is that thousands - of little hairs."

"Probably thousands, yeah. It's not that hard with the kinds of soap we use, the soap gets into the water and the water gets it everywhere it needs to go."

"I guess maybe that would work. Wow." Pet pet.

"Mmhmm. I generally bathe in private but I could show you some soapy water sometime if you want to see what it's like."

"We have soap and water, I know what that looks like, I just didn't know how you'd get it all through your hair enough to clean all the little bits. Why in private?"

"For a couple reasons, but the main one is that where I grew up it's a little bit taboo to let anyone but your mate see you without clothes on - I'll do it if I need to, but I haven't needed to often enough to get used to the idea, most people in my world think it should be that way."

"Awww, that's cute actually! I heard somebody say you don't have one though."

"I don't, yeah. There's a couple reasons for that, too, but the main one is that I'm a cleric - we get magic from being very devoted to a concept, and everyone knows that we'll be more interested in that than in any mate we end up with. And travel clerics don't ever settle down in one place, so it's especially rare for us to find partners."

"Couldn't you find a mate who was a cleric too?"

"That's how it usually works when we do partner up," he nods. "I think humans might be a little less interested in having families than your species is, though - still interested, most of us do find mates and have children, but it's not that surprising that someone who was busy with something else wouldn't spend time on it - I have a brother and a sister and as far as I know my sister never took a mate, either, she's been busy with church business. Six of my brother's seven children are partnered up, though, that's a more normal number."

"Your sister doesn't have one either! Oh no, your parents must be so upset!"

"Oh, she's got a very prestigious job instead, they were very proud of her." He sounds kind of bitter about this.

"They won't have any grandchildren!"

"-you don't count lineage through males? We do. And seven grandchildren from three children isn't many, but it's respectable."

"Oh, I mean, they might have grandchildren but they might also not, you know. I don't call Keshkun Grandmother because she's Bav's mother and we aren't positive who's my father. I just call Mother's mother Grandmother."

"-huh, I really can't see humans thinking about it that way. Usually it doesn't come up, we usually pair up one and one or it's one male with a few females, sometimes, but I've met a couple of human families with more than one male and they all just thought of all the children as belonging to all of them."

"One male and a few females? How many females do you have? Don't they fight? And anyway it doesn't matter much to Bav if I'm his, because I'm definitely his mate's and anyway he raised me, but Keshkun isn't raising me."

"I think this has to do with how humans just have less of a difference between males and females - we swap it around, too, males are more likely to be in charge among humans, but either one can go to their parents and go 'this is how I want things to be' and have about the same chance of them listening to them. And we might like babies a little more, too - does your species ever adopt children?"

"Not, like, for fun. If my parents all died I'd take care of my brothers till they found mates. If somebody really important needs an heir and can't manage to have a daughter they probably have some way to deal with that."

"Well, that'll do it. Humans like raising children, and we get just as attached to ones we or our children adopt as ones we have ourselves."