He laughs. "That's part of the idea, yes."

"Why do they want that to be hard?"

"Well, part of why it is how it is is that we've been doing it this way for ages, and the most important part is covering up the sex bits, so everyone is used to only seeing sex bits when they're about to have sex, so now if you don't wear clothes, as a humanoid in my world, everybody thinks you're doing that for some sex reason, and that's very distracting, and also upsetting if you think what's happening is that someone is doing a sex thing to try to steal your mate, or if it's your mate and you think they're trying to get someone else's attention. And Pelor's people think - well, two things, the first being that since everything is mostly okay how it is and it'd be a big mess to try to fix it, we should just keep going how we are, and the other being that even if things weren't like this, it'd be distracting to have people going around naked all the time just because it'd be less clear whether what they were doing was a sex thing or not, and having less of that kind of distraction lets us work together better - we don't have sex in public for pretty much the same reason, it's not how things are done and it'd be strange and distracting and upsetting for someone to be doing it all of a sudden. But Lastai thinks that that isn't giving people enough credit for being smart, and that you could just say, okay, this is allowed now, if someone does it all it means is that they want to and if you don't want your mate to go after other people you should talk to your mate about that, and she thinks that stopping people from doing things that make them happy when you could solve the problem another way instead is bad."

"- oh, we just have sex in public," says Uamok. "Which sounds a lot simpler than all that. How do you even know if somebody's got a mate, do you just have to be like 'hi my name is Uamok and I have one mate' or -"

"Most human cultures have some way of marking it; in mine it's rings, if someone is wearing a ring on this finger they're taken. Special adornments are pretty common in general, some places do skin paint, some places do special haircuts, that kind of thing. Dwarves do that, too, they braid their beards in special ways to say a bunch of different things about themselves, and that's one of them. Some places that are much more formal about it have specific ways you'd ask, or specific people - there'll be one person or a few people who help everyone in town find mates, and you never approach someone yourself, you go to one of them and tell them what kind of person you're looking for and they'll introduce you. And then this isn't common in humans but in a couple of other species you wouldn't necessarily find out at all until you'd been seeing someone for a while, and it's totally normal for people to let their mates have casual relationships."

"Wow. I think some places have matchmaking here. I sort of did that, I told all the girls in school that I wanted the sort of boy who goes to school and they should set me up with their brothers if they went to our school, and then I had Zoi."

"Sounds like a good way to do it. Is he studying something interesting?"

"Zoology!"

"Nice! That's a pretty popular topic for our scholars, too, and always important."

"I mean, you have monsters, that might make it more important."

"Well, that, and it's good to know things about the wilderness in general, to know how to use it and how to avoid wrecking it."

"Yeah, that's true. I study lots of different things, I haven't gotten specialized yet."

"That's good too. Do you have a favorite so far?"

"No, or I would've specialized! Uun tells me that I seem to just like being in school more than I like any of the content."

"Hm - how do you feel about math? One of our kinds of magic anyone can learn if they're clever enough, and it's not like math exactly but it's pretty similar to it."

"I like math!"

"Well if it turns out I can get home soon I can take you to meet some wizards and see if their magic looks interesting. They can do the widest variety of kinds, though most of them specialize at least a little - they can't make food the way I can but they can change animals around and make new ones, maybe you can figure out what's going wrong with domestic spren and fix it altogether."

"Oooooh, that would be amazing. And I'd be rich!"

"Mmhmm!"

"Is the tuition really high? Oh, and I'd have to learn the langauge."

"It's on the high side, but I don't know what the exchange rate will be like, and you do have more technology than we do, I bet you'll be able to manage it. Or they do offer scholarships for promising students. The language could be a bit of a problem but that's the sort of barrier it's my job to help with - I can teach you while I'm here and if you're still not comfortable with it when it's time it I can get you a translation necklace of your own."

"Oh, that sounds fun! You could teach the language to a whole circle - well, I think whether there should be boy teachers is still under discussion but I bet they'd let you since you're not a person boy."

"I doubt I'll be around long enough to teach a whole class on it in one go, but if they don't mind me doing it a bit at a time when I'm around, sure."

"Not every circle is necessarily a very formal one that matches up exactly with the school schedule," she assures him.

"That sounds like it'll work fine. Do they do lots of informal classes like that? I might want to take a few, if there's anything that doesn't need too much background."