"We do that in my world, too, but it takes a whole lot of clothes to stay warm all the way to the pole! It's much nicer with magic."

"And clothes make it hard to play in the snow probably."

"A little bit. Gloves are pretty good, though, they keep your hands from getting too cold and don't get in the way very much. And then you can pick the snow up and throw it at people, do people here do that?"

"Yeah! I can snow all my brothers in the face!" she chirps.

There are several more stops. A couple people decide to wait for the next train rather than get on with Raafi. Eventually Bav disembarks.

"This looks like where I'm going. Maybe I'll see you again sometime, though!" And he stands again and leaves the train.

"Bye, doodad monster!" says Kessamun.

"I can show you to my mother's before I get Col?" suggests Bav, as the train pulls out.

"Sure, that sounds good. Is there anything I should know about her?"

"You said you wanted to talk to her because of her being a paleoanthropologist, right? What else do you want to know?"

"Probably nothing, just sometimes people have quirks. And I haven't been around an adult female yet, if there's anything she'll be expecting of me because of that I don't know it."

"You saw Soramu, didn't you?"

"Mmhmm. I didn't have much time to make mistakes talking to her, though. But if nothing's coming to mind it's probably fine, I assume she won't expect an alien to have perfect manners."

"I've never seen her meet an alien before, but it stands to reason."

"All right, I should be fine then. And are we staying here for dinner, or going back up the mountain?"

"Oh, going back up, but maybe I'll invite my family as long as you're proposing to magic a bunch of steak into existence."

"That's the plan. I think I'll teleport back up, I can bring a few passengers if you think they'd like that. Five males or at least one female, I'm not sure if they'll count for two or four passenger slots at their size."

"One of my brothers still lives at home, I don't know if Mother'll grab my sister or other brother before she leaves, let alone their whole families too, but it could add up to too many people for you to bring. Maybe just me and Col."

"Sounds good to me."

The city has buildings aboveground but also plenty of evidence of underground habitation; the train itself disappears underground after this stop. The doors are all doubled in some way to allow males and children in without requiring them to manipulate doors sufficient for adult females. Their buildings get quite tall in some cases, up to eight stories. There's street food for sale - spren hearts on sticks, spren meatballs in vinegar sauce, fried spren ligaments.

It's probably not the best idea to alien his way over and cast magic on their food, even just to see if it's edible; he refrains. He doesn't refrain from rubbernecking at the architecture and passerby, though. "I'm curious how you build so tall," he says after a bit. "I've seen castles with towers like that a few times, but it's not something we can do easily enough to put just anywhere."

"Oh, I think it's - steel? Maybe some concrete? I wouldn't really know. If you walk the whole way to where Col's staying we might pass one under construction, that happens often enough, and you can see the insides."

Bav's mother lives in one such tall building. There are gendered elevators; they go in the one for men.

"Steel and concrete translate, but I have no idea how you'd put them together for it. Something to look into later, I guess."

He seems a little confused about the elevator car, but follows Bav in readily enough.

The elevator goes up! Bav gets off on the sixth floor and produces a key from his legpouch and opens the door. "Mother!"

"Yik?"

"Bav."

"Bav! Hello," says another male, emerging into the front room. There's a giant nest big enough for a female adult and her smaller family; there's a kitchen off to the left with appliances that do not seem to connect to chimneys.

"Hi, Rays," says Bav. "Is Mother home?"

"Stepped out to help the upstairs neighbors move furniture - what the heck is that?"

"An alien! Calls itself a hummun."

Raafi's stopped by the door again, rather than approaching. "Hi!"

"You found an alien and brought it here?" says Rays.

"It wants to talk to Mother. Will she be back soon?"

"Oh, yeah, she'll be back any minute, what does it want with her?"

"Ask it, it talks."

"I'm male, I'm just not sure how confusing that'll be, humans do it differently. Anyway, it looks like I might be stuck here for a while, and an anthropologist sounded like maybe the right kind of scholar to help figure out what I need to know to live here. Or at least more likely than a writer to know who I should talk to."