"...huh. Sounds a bit complicated. Furycrafting's just - elements and associations. You've got the physical, the actual air, earth, fire, water, metal, wood - and you've got the associations. Air makes you faster and sharpens your senses. Earth makes you stronger. Fire crafts emotions - except lust which is earth, don't ask me, I'm not a scholar. Water reads emotions, and heals flesh. Metal dulls pain. Wood lets you read and manipulate animals. You could fit the whole system on a scrap of parchment. And there's certainly no politics."

"Parchment! Fun. You could fit an explantion on a scrap of paper - each flame and its word - but it wouldn't be very in-depth. Storm, sky, sun, lightning, rain, mist, cloud," he counts them off on his fingers, "Always in that order because we see them in the seven colours of the rainbow. Storm is disintegration, sky is harmony, sun is activation, lightning is hardening, rain is tranquility, mist is construction, cloud is multiplication." He thinks, "And there are politics because the sky flame is seen as the leader's flame." 

"...huh. I think if I were going to call any of the flames the fancy important one it'd be the one that's literally at the top of the rainbow, but what do I know?"

"Ha, you might think so," he shrugs, "There's these personality profiles associated with them, which are only part-way bullshit," he explains. "They're based on the first generation of the oldest and most powerful of the Families, and the leader was a sky. Also, flame actives bond with each other, and bonds with a sky are different from all the others. Skies aren't always leaders, but it's kinda hard to tell if the number of the ones that are, are influenced by Tradition, or if they'd be that way anyway, you know?" He considers this for a moment, and then adds, "Skies being the rarest flame type influences things, too." 

"I'll bet. Every leader wants a legacy, huh? Even if it means saddling everyone with a system that privileges men whose only virtue is coincidence."

"Never a truer phrase spoken," he huffs, "The oldest sky descendant must inherit, of course! Never mind that there are plenty of more suited candidates. If they aren't skies, and aren't of the blood, the Vongola won't have them." He mimes spitting. 

"Don't have to be males or alphas? How positively egalitarian."

"Male preference, I think, and it used to be only men until the Ottava. The entire main bloodline died during the second world war, besides her, and then she won enough respect to pave the way for more leading Donnas in the wider underworld." He pauses, spins to look at Lexius, "Not familiar with 'alphas' though?" 

"...alphas? You've got male and female, then alpha, beta, omega? In our culture it's kind of an override, a female alpha can do whatever her brothers can. Because, I mean, what are you going to do, stop her? She'd bite you, and it'd be your own fault for being an idiot."

(The concepts come through as a sort of... parallel gender system, as he implies. Alpha for the ?masculine?, omega for the ?feminine?, beta for the ?default?)

"...yeah, we don't have that. Does that come with the furycrafting? Flames have some personality effects, but I wouldn't really list them with genders. Well," he considers, "I guess some of them affect what you get shoved into doing," he admits, "Suns are almost all healers, lightning men are almost all bodyguards. That kind of thing." 

"...no, it's got nothing to do with furycrafting - well, I guess you might be able to watercraft somebody into it, if you were a hell of a watercrafter. But I would've said yesterday that it was just how humans worked. None of the other species of people do it... though I guess they don't craft either?" He shakes his head.

"So what does it mean? I think gender's associated with physical sex, for most people - can you be a, what, transalpha-" he tangents, and then gets back to his original question, "Are there physical things involved or...?" He stops, "Or is this a question I shouldn't be asking you right off the bat or something?" He laughs sheepishly, "I'm learning diplomacy, supposedly." 

"...I've got no idea what 'trans' means or how 'physical sex' is different to 'gender' but - yeah, physical things - alphas are bigger and stronger and they've got absolutely massive dicks, just stupidly massive, even the girls, and in turn omegas have, you know." Fingering gesture. "And they're... usually... pretty small and slight."

(Lexius is, it may be noted, about 5'4; his build has the look of someone who has forced his body to develop muscles in spite of its strongly held personal beliefs.)

"There aren't that many of either, most everybody's a beta, usually it doesn't come up. But it's - you can smell it. Or we can. Alphas smell like - victory - and omegas smell like - well. Life."

He waves a hand at the trans comment, as if he can blow it away for another time, "And I guess I don't smell like either?" Jamie himself is slight but not small, out of context - at 5'9 he's about average. "I wonder if a mist could mimic it," he considers, "Maybe a storm could burn a scent off?" 

Lexius sniffs him, wrinkles his nose for a moment while pulling his lips back from his teeth, then turns and sneezes in the other direction. "Yeah, you smell like a beta. Well, you smell like perfume, but you smell like a beta."

(They're different words, but one is clearly derived from the other sufficiently to make the pun[?] work.)

"I don't know if you could mimic it, but clearly you can't smell the difference anyway, so it wouldn't be very useful."

What an expression! Jamie has enough control over his face not to smile too much about it or the sneeze which follows.

"Perfume...? Oh," he rubs at his neck, "Right. I get lectures nowadays when I forget," or 'forget', "To put it on. Anyway, it might be pointless to do it, but thinking about what flame'd be best for whatever is good practice." 

He reaches the edge of the most recent roof, this one looking out over a wide hillside, and starts clambering down. 

"It's a bit of a hike from here," he tells Lexius once they're on the ground, "I left my bike up in the hills a ways." 

"Fine by me. It's not skittish, is it? I never learned much woodcraft."

"Nnnno," he trails off, "Say, did you recognize the metal things on the streets?" 

"...no. I thought people were steelcrafting them into motion somehow, it was kind of-"

He slaps his forehead. "You don't have steelcrafting."

"We do not!" He agrees, "We have combustion engines and really advanced metalworking, though, compared to what they must have where you're from. I can give you some basic overview on how that works if you want, but I'd be at it all day if I tried to get detailed." 

"Combustion... they move with fire. Huh. That sounds, uh, dangerous. But I guess you've either figured out a way around it or you care a lot about moving fast."

"We do care a lot about moving fast, but it's not quite as dangerous as it sounds. That metalworking makes for some really well-sealed containers for the fire, so if a person didn't know it was there they might not even realize that's what was happening, if not for the smoke. Cars are like, uh, do you guys have carriages? Litters?" He shrugs, "They're faster than horses or people, and don't get tired, and yeah, people die in crashes all the time but statistically any given person isn't likely to."

"We have carriages. Hitch a beast to a box and sit in the box is not one of the hard inventions. Let's go to your extra special box drawn by fire which might kill us but not because of the fire."

"Mine's not a box, actually, it's more like a horse than a carriage but-" he hops up a rise, from which they can see a gravel road a hundred meters or so away, "It's up that road a ways." 

"A horse run by fire! Exciting."

When they reach the motorbike, he beholds it. "That is a very strange horse," he rules.

He squints at the front tire, pokes it, and sticks his tongue out. "What is that stuff?"