"Maintenance reasons?" asks Katme. "Do you deep clean the corridors at night or something?"

"Some of the security measures aboard the ship need time to reset overnight. We have a policy of minimizing information about the details left over from the war. It's possible that policy will be changed at some point in the future, and as needed Captain Sierra or Commander Neh can suspend it."

"All right." And they will go be locked in their rooms.

Any of them who light sleepers might hear thudding and the muted sounds of what might be power tools.

The doors are unlocked in the morning, and an amalien staff member informs each that breakfast is being served in the shipboard cafeteria - though they can have the food brought to their room instead, if they would prefer. Additional Amentans, invited by the amaliens last night, will be joining during the breakfast. 

The Amentans are all happy to eat in the cafeteria! Who else was invited?

They asked for Amentans who were knowledgeable about current societal and systemic problems facing Amenta, so that they could figure out what sort of issues they should be prioritizing providing help with. Aside from the terraforming, of course. The group has someone from a population and eugenics board, some engineers, and some sort of economist or finance expert. They should be arriving shortly.

Meanwhile, there's a nice breakfast set out on a long table with an added nice table cloth for the Amentans - thee food is similar to the (actually quite nice) cafeteria food, but they won't have to stand in line to get it. Various crew members, mostly Amaliens but a few members from other species, are eating at smaller tables around the cafeteria.

Pahatun is curious about all the other species and will ask about them and where they're from while they eat!

Ferdinand is a human, wanted in the Federation for smuggling medicine to pre-warp planets. He joined the Amalian Expanse and was quite helpful in shaping policy on export restrictions. Technically the Federation didn't know he was here, though it was established during negotiations that they would have no obligation to report or penalize people whose actions would be legal had they been part of the Amalien Expanse. Neither side wanted the hassle of dealing with that.

Nupe is the one with the really long tongue. Yes, she does have a second mouth on her tongue. Yes, that second mouth does itself have a tongue. No one knows how many layers deep it goes. Her species was one of the ones given warp by Amaliens during the war.

Kora is a Ferengi - her father organized the financing of the Amalien Expanse war in return for 1% of whatever was left of what he raised after the war. He'd become extremely wealthy, and had been instrumental in modernizing the amalien economy ever since. Of course, he'd taken a small share of the verifiable GDP increase resulting from his expertise. The Amalien Expanse was lucky to have him, and it was hoped his daughter would become just as wealthy in just as mutually beneficial a manner.

The cyborg looking one sitting alone is sort of actually an amalien, just assimilated by the borg. The amalien explaining this looks uncomfortable discussing her.

The man and woman with pink freckled faces sitting silently on opposite sides of a table, alone, are Vranthir. No we don't understand their gender norms either, but they seem to be happy like that.

Their what norms?

"Gender. The norms they have about how their men and women interact. They differ substantially by species."

The Amentans look at each other as though it has only just now occurred to them to check what genders the others are. (As it happens, Spree, Katme, and Pahatun are all men.)

"The gender norms of other species is one of the three most common things reported to be sur-prising by species during their first contact."

"Huh! I suppose it's not that odd that some species would be sexually dimorphic enough to have cultural adaptations on top of that?" ventures Katme.

"It's common for planets to have some sort of cultural adaptations, yes. Places that have none are much more the exception then the norm."

He doesn't mention that there are a few, like parts of the Federation, that claim to have completely egalitarian cultural norms around gender despite that very obviously being false.

"There are sexually dimorphic species on Amenta but we're not one of the moreso ones," Katme says. "Though if there's some difference visible from the outside that we can't notice that would be fascinating, we've obviously never had the opportunity to find that out in the past."

"My impression is that thee most common reason for develop-ing diff-rent gender norms are long and somewhat debilitating pregnancies for the female members of a species. Though amaliens still have weak gen-der norms without that."

"Huh. Our pregnancies last three quarters of a season, most of the time, which is pretty long for an Amentan animal, is it short galactically?"

"That's about median for humanoid species."

"Huh. I wouldn't say it's debilitating either, though of course there are risks one would rather avoid when expecting."

"It's common for species to have emotional effects, as well as temporary physical disability. Is that not true for Amentans?"

"- well, of course it's emotional to be expecting a baby, but that's as true of the father, generally speaking..."

"Ah, I think they're are a bunch of bio-logical things that happen with mothers during pregnancy that affects emotions, I'm not sure ex-actly how it works - you could ask Vira if you'd like."

"Huh! I suppose if you did a blinded study it's not like the fathers would know, but no one would... do a blinded study that way, so all the data we have in quantity is about knowing fathers. Interesting."

"Not like the fathers would know?"