"...shapes people can be?"

"You know, like how - okay, I was born on the summer solstice, and everyone else born on that day has the utilitarianism issue I mentioned, but also we can all sing pretty well but aren't really inclined to make a career of it, and our names almost all have Js and Ds in them, even if you name your kid something different on purpose they'll end up renaming themself something else with those, even absent cultural influence, and we're statistically more likely to have dark curly hair, and commit suicide, and care about the poor and donate to charities - and there's a collection of traits like that for every day of the year, where people born on it are just sort of the same person underneath, put into different circumstances.  How many of those do you have?"

"We don't have those. People are just individuals. I mean, I'm sure there are curly-haired suicidally-inclined charitably inclined persons named Jedediah or whatever who can sing but there aren't clusters like that - some things correlate, but like, that's there being a general factor of intelligence, things running in families, cultural accretion around various interests and subcultures."

"Oh."

"Two hundred and fifty six clusters that specific doesn't sound like enough, even if people are deliberately aiming for some particularly adaptable cluster of birthdates in March or something!"

"Enough for what?"

"Enough for a civilization with exciting contents like a Roman Empire and everything else that made this place look like where I grew up to casual inspection!"

"Why not?  Everyone's still different; environment affects a lot.  - And since I'm a solquinox that's like, not very typical; the traits cluster on different axes for different days."

"What is a more typical cluster?"

"Uh, well, everyone born on an even-numbered day tends to be, y'know, pretty normal people, not very ambitious, so there's less variation between the individual days.  And then every odd day is a little less regular, and every other odd day is more than that, with the pattern going up till you hit the first day of odd months - the solquinoxes - and then there's four of us and we're all on about the same level together, but very different from each other.  And these are all on average; there's nothing stopping somebody even-numbered from running for office or anything, just they mostly don't want to.  Does that make sense so far."

"I guess! Do you have some sort of affinity group? Does everybody with the same birthday get together and have a party once in a while? Does it matter enormously if a pair of twins is born around midnight?"

"It does matter!  I was just going to say that, actually; one of my guardians, Ian, was born on New Year's Eve, which is October, er, thirty-two, in decimal, and his twin's Unuary oh-one, and I was going to use Ian as an example of somebody even.  - I also have a twin, same birthday, but we don't talk anymore."

"... I have all the usual curiosities and I'm aware they are intrusive since we've just met but also I don't know which of them might reveal fascinating depth of differences between worlds."

"Yeah, mind'ja business if you would.  But Ian and Nicolas are on speaking terms and whatnot if you have questions about them.  - And also my other guardian, Jordan, is another gemini of mine, and he'll be home soon enough that probably you can figure some stuff out from him.  Geminis are people who share the same birthday."

"All right. Is there any understanding of why things would be this way?"

"How do you mean.  Like, philosophically?"

"Causally. Like, uh, testosterone has personality effects, for example, you can see 'em if you suppress it in a system that makes it or add it to one that doesn't, and we can figure out where in the body and especially the brain the hormone is acting, and speculate on the underlying evolutionary psychology, and it all gets sort of confused when you throw in magic people like me but I at least used to run on fairly explicable biology."

"Oh, it's the stars."

"And what is it that the stars are doing?"

"They like, move around, and where they are affects things."

"Yes, but how does the position of the stars come into causal contact with people's personalities in this way."

"What are your stars like.  It sounds like you do still have them?"

"We have them! They, and also the sun, are extremely large balls of high-energy mostly-hydrogen-and-helium."

"Are they also dead people, in addition to that?"

"No, I'm a dead people."