"...you just - know? Like you know society wanted you to be stuck in a marriage, only felt - and more about career, I think, than anything to do with mating life - do you not have that?"

Toy-Mun shakes her head. Then thinks a bit.

- Others having that feeling would… actually explain quite a lot in their behaviour. But I don't have it, and I don't know the word for it. It probably saved my life, too.

"Someone having it, or you not having it? Saved your life, that is."

<💭>This is our breasts, isn't it.</💭>

- My not having it. If I had it, I might not have had the guts to run away and would be forced into early marriage and… you know, birth. - Again, the mere thought seemingly sent shivers down Toy-Mun's spine. - You can see, my hips are quite… narrow for a female. I probably wouldn't survive my first child.

"I'm sorry." He gropes for some way to counter Toy-Mun's doubtlessly biased gratitude for his own observed history, to illustrate how an extra sense wouldn't really have hurt him - but he doesn't have enough information. It's frustrating. "Was that - frequent? Did you have access to good data saying whether it was frequent?"

<💭>Toy-Mun is from a farming society, right? I don't think the rate of maternal death for poor farming societies on Gahai, even for young mothers with the narrowest hips specifically, was ever above a few percent.</💭>

"Not that you didn't have justification to treat forced childbirth as murder, or something, either way, I'm just trying to understand your world again." Clumsy.

Toy-Mun hugs her own shoulders, clearly looking vulnerable.

- We buried someone because of that once in a year or two. Usually a young and skinny girl, which bill I would definitely fit. And we weren't too big a village. Nearly everyone knows someone whose mother died this way, I guess… Although rich people can afford magic to survive a womb dissection. Our village definitely couldn't, it was only done if… if the woman was already doomed anyway.

He - commits to asking about the village size later. He probably won't actually remember, not in the near term, but he really doesn't want to press Toy-Mun further now about what seems to be a sore subject while he is supposed to be getting rest.

There are two sets of tracks running through the station, entering from and then disappearing into dark tunnel. On each side of the track-pair is a wide waiting-platform. You get to the train on the other side by means of a little pedestrian tunnel scooping underneath the tracks. They're already on the right side for their train. Knowing there are a couple minutes left before the next train arrives on the opposite set of tracks and has whatever effect on Toy-Mun it has, and a few minutes between that one and the one on their set of tracks that will take him home, he gestures toward one of the big color-coded subway maps of Sareksal, posted on the wall for travelers' convenience.

To a glance, it looks like an anatomist's attempt at faithfully capturing the inner piping of a creature once possessed of radial symmetry, but since dead, deformed, and the remains fragmented, until only splinters suggesting the shape of the original thing remained. On closer inspection, the lines are far too clean and straight to have been done by hand, and the labelled nodes, in discrete sizes, with further tags decoded by a detailed legend, are far too confident to reflect a state of ignorance on the part of this cartographer as to the true nature of his subject's parts.

He touches a finger to the glass, above a red star shape about halfway outward from the creature's center. "That's us," he says. He slides his finger outward from the star, along a silver stream - bending, weaving, crossing other streams - to a white, medium node about three-fourths of the way out from the heart. "That's the stop where we're going. My apartment building's a two-minute walk from there."

Toy-Mun looks at the lines, even tracing the silver stream after Kwaiets's finger with her own - still hugging herself with the other hand, as if having forgotten it's there.

- Beautiful, - she slowly says, not having quite regained calmness, but getting there. - These are… roads, right? And, since so many people are here, standing, waiting… They don't have a vehicle of their own and waiting for one to go and pick them up? That's a very cool idea.

An obvious reminder that "stupid" and "unaware of how statistics works" are not coextensive.

<💭>They don't have trains? Or - maybe he's used to steam-train rails and just doesn't recognize the squashed-looking maglev tracks.</💭>

"Very fair assumption, but they're train tracks. They only don't look like the normal kind because they power the train that sits on them - float it forward and along with a ridiculously strong electromagnet." He'd been hoping that part would come as a surprise, but he highly doubts he would have noticed that part himself right away.

Toy-Mun carefully looked at him. Then looked again.

- I guess you'll explain it to me later when I will be able to understand more...

The sudden noise of a train was, perhaps, quite familiar to Kwaiets, but not to Toy-Mun - and in the next moment Kwaiets found himself pressed to the wall, with Toy-Mun firmly holding him, thus showing both reflexes and strength of a professional swordsperson, and protecting him with their own body, as if the ceiling was going to fall on them or a huge beast would attack them. They only calmed down and let him go when the source of the noise became obvious and stopped nearby.

- S-sorry, - they whispered, blushing, letting Kwaiets go.

"I -

I've been trying to err on the side of assuming you know stuff but that frankly might not be safe of me.

Anything with semi-flexible wires andor one of those wall contraptions - " on their way to the ticket machine, he gestures at a cluster of differently-shaped electrical connectors sticking out of a wall, some mated to cords going somewhere  - "is probably carrying electricity and just to be safe you should not touch it until you learn what you are doing, because if something fails a lot of force could be delivered through your body at once and injure or kill you."

- Certainly isn't, - Toy-Mun readily admits, following Kwaiets. - Our worlds probably have different histories but, since you were hinting my world has similarities to your past, if you assume I have no familiarity with things that were created later than anything I wear on my person, it will be safer. For both of us. Even if it's not always true - I'm certainly not wearing carts on my person, but we do have carts.

<💭> <3 it is impossible to carry carts on one's person. that is a very funny image <3 </💭>, says a very stupid part of his brain that was not effectively shut down after poor Toy-Mun reflexively tried to ???take a bomb??? for him.

Nod. He hurries depositing coins into the ticket machine, drops one, has to scramble after it. "It's not really safety-relevant that I can think of, except for some far-fetched situations - but anyway - this machine works by throwing light that is too purple, too high-energy, to see, into the coin, and measuring the energy level of the light that comes out, with high precision, such that different elements - gold, silver, carbon, or iron, for example, would give different light signatures." He hands Toy-Mun a ticket, scans it, walks through the tall turnstile to the train side of the barrier, and motions for Toy-Mun to do the same.

Toy-Mun follows the instructions with precision of a craft apprentice and effortlessly gets their ticket scanned.
- "Too purple to see" is a funny concept. Can you be "too yellow to see"? Or "too green to see"? - they respond when they meet up on the other side of the barrier. - We are waiting for another… loud railcart, right?

"Oh, yeah, another loud railcart, it should be here in a minute or so." The crowd is fairly thick in front of and behind them. "So - have you ever seen a rainbow?"

Toy-Mun is somewhat surprised by the question but nods.
- Sure. After a rain, usually. I've seen a couple. Why?

"The concentric circles would keep going all the way to the middle, and all the way out, if you had better eyes - and if the Sun emitted all kinds of light. But the first bottleneck is your eyes. Light that's 'too purple to see' is light that's on the inside of the rainbow."

Toy-Mun is silent for a couple of seconds, seemingly trying to absorb the information.

- So… there's some order between colours, same as in rainbow, and they go one after the other. Does it just start with red, or is there "not red enough"? And what about colors not on the rainbow, like gray or brown?

"Not red enough" is in the sections outward of red, it's called 'infrared', like the "too purple" inward of purple - 'ultraviolet'. Gray and brown, and any other colors you don't see in the rainbow, aren't actually pure shades of light, surprise! A 'pure shade of light' is actually a single wavelength -" and he's drowned out by the arrival of their train. He looks apologetic. "Explanation-forthcoming, I swear."

This time, Toy-Mun doesn't do anything as rush when the train arrives. It's easy to see they were still startled a bit, though. Nodding to the promise, they enter the train with Kwaiets and look around.

- Train, - they say slowly. - It's a train of railcarts. Multiple carts joined in a tow. Hence - train.

"I'd actually never thought about that, they've been around since before my great-grandparents were born, but yeah."

Large windows line the wall - right now they show the station. The seats are separate, individual, arranged in two pairs of rows in the middle of the aisle. They have seatbelts, but most people aren't using them. He sort of boxes the crowd out of a pair of them so they can sit together. A screen on the wall counts down the few remaining seconds until departure.

Toy-Mun takes off their belt with sword, collects it in the hand of the arm that doesn't carry their beg, and sits near Kwaiets, deciding that if he sat, they should sit too. They don't quite ignore seatbelts, looking at them with interest, but don't use them, either.

The clock reaches zero. The doors close, the clock starts and finishes a shorter countdown, and, with the train now mostly full of settled-in people, a tone sounds and they begin moving - backward from the direction Kwaiets and Toy-Mun's half of the car is facing, it so happens. Kwaiets makes a face at his failure to remember the orientation they should have favored. He puts on his seatbelt, showing Toy-Mun how to do the same, before there's a brief feeling of weightlessness.

"That was the wheels retracting," he says. "We're actually moving by magnet now."

The tunnel outside - lit dimly to an Earthling's eyes but well enough for a Gaha'ei* to see clearly - is pure blur, and still accelerating.

*[Gahai: the place

Gaha'e: adjective meaning 'of Gahai'

Gaha'eka: plural demonym

Gaha'ei: demonym, singular]