Qana'to giggles with mild exasperation, "See, that's the thing!" He waves his hand between the two of them. "Around here—something like this—it's already so far outside of acceptable discourse that we're basically already being tremendously rude just by broaching the subject." He holds up one finger, pointing at himself . "Where I come from, it's not! You'd just say, essentially, 'nice dick,' and I'd smile and glance away from you, and that would be a normal start to a conversation." He can barely finish the sentence before feeling compelled to explain. "We spend most of our time like this—nude, I mean—so seeing an erection is just," in his excitement, he had steadily gotten louder and more agitated, and at the word erection he suddenly gets quieter as he realizes it. "It's just a normal thing. They aren't weird, any more than seeing someone sneeze. You all have ways to respond to people sneezing, right? For us, there's no difference."

He sits back into the water and looks down thoughtfully into it. "Well, okay, it is different, in that it's sexual, I guess. It's a different way of relating to people," he concedes. "I guess it's that, for us, this isn't some strange way to relate. People get hard sometimes, and if you want to relate to someone through those means, well—" he shrugs emphatically, "good! That's a good thing. Especially in a situation like this, where we're supposed to be getting to know each other. Is that not a part of me? You can get to know me through that."

With that off his chest, the full weight of his aggressiveness suddenly hits him, and he smirks in embarrassment and looks away. "Forgive me, that was unprofessional. I meant no offense by my forthright description." Too many months of carefully dancing around others' sensibilities during delicate negotiations had left him anxious and reticent to speak his mind. That he could be so easily goaded to share feels like a liability. "I suppose I got a little carried away there."

He watches this outburst with amused bemusement, or perhaps bemused amusement, but once Qana'to settles down he turns a bit more thoughtful. "That is not too dissimilar from how it was for us at the Golmore," he says. "We only saw the women once every seven years. We—I don't know how much of this you know, but we look the same until puberty, and then some of us, about a fifth, suddenly and rapidly grow dicks." He smirks. "The process occasionally doesn't work perfectly, as you may have seen. But most of the time it does." Another shrug. "And then the men show up, have a go at siring the next generation, and abscond with those of us who turned out male, and then we don't come back until seven years later. 

"Relevantly this means that you have a cohort of fourteen-year-olds who just got a shiny new toy that's begging to be used and they have no one else to use it with than each other. We didn't particularly have very strong modesty norms, either."

"Seven years? That's a—like, everyone at once?" Qana'to blinks in befuddlement before collecting himself. "We also send men out to wander, but it's expected that they will just wander from village to village, without necessarily being out on their own for all that long." Half a year at the very most. If a woman selects you to sire children, that's just a personal choice. There's no big ambush of men all at once where everyone competes. Rather than say any of that, he nods after a moment. "Ah, but the relevant bit remains, as you said. A bunch of young men out in the woods, instructed to make nice right as the second growth is hitting." He chuckles and gets a faraway look. "Yeah, in short, in our culture, guys getting aroused by each other rather than getting aggressive with each other is considered the better outcome. We actually tell boys they should react with interest if others are aroused near them. Not necessarily to do anything further, if they don't want do, but a guy being hard near you is usually treated as an invitation to relax and socialize." He grins. "Rather than 'respect his private time.'"

"So you mean that my first thought of 'I want him inside me' was the one I should've acted on instead?"

“Well, maybe chat first. But yes,” he says with a smirk. “If this were the Black Shroud, you would have said, aenoh gworjaa horai, which is the usual way to start that conversation.”

"...what does that mean?" he asks, suddenly delighted.

“Like I said earlier: ‘he has a beautiful dick.’” He shrugs. “It’s a standard friendly compliment, flirtatious but not aggressive. Then I’d glance away, which is like, ‘oh, I’m flattered.’ And then I’d probably ask you a question or invite you to sit with me if I wanted to engage.”

"That's a very specific social script," he observes. "But what language is that?"

“No more specific than, ‘Hello, sir, how are you? Good, you? Good, thank you.’ It’s just a flirtier version because we want to have an easy segue to sex, I guess.” He laughs.

“The language is my language. It doesn’t have a name. We usually just call it ‘our language,’ among ourselves, or to outsiders we call it kiipahgo, which is literally just Hingan for Keeper language. That’s a product of trade.”

"キーパー語, Hingan I can speak," he says with a smile.

He laughs. “Yep, that’s it! We didn’t have our own special name for it, so we just took their term.” He tilts his head. “I think at one point, maybe, we called it piinoh suu? Flowery tongue?” His tail flicks as the thinks. “The term comes up in some of our old legends. But it’s usually used to mean talking poetically during courtship, not just the language in general. And these days we’d prefer piina’to suu, anyway.” 

"I hope you realise that you have just given me the mission to learn your language. Do you guys teach it to outsiders or am I going to need to go native or is it a secret? The language of the Golmore is a secret but I have no respect for their traditions and will teach anyone who asks. ...no one has, but still."

“Yes, it’s a terrible secret and you will have to pry it out of me with all the powers of seduction available to you.” He shakes his head slowly, “we definitely do not have a long history of teaching it to Seekers we took prisoner during war in the hope that they join us. And certainly we never let them believe they were seducing that information out of us to learn our secrets.”

He giggles to himself. “I hated the Chronicles of the Four Wars as a child. It wasn’t until I was older that the whole he took the prisoner by the spear and struck it until he cried out and wet the ground thing started to read less literally.”

That startles a positively undignified chortle out of him which he blocks his lips and nose to cover, but then he lowers his hands and grins again. "I see seduction features heavily, maybe I should practise."

He closes his eyes and raises his eyebrows in a parody of high-minded oration. “We split from the Seekers because they used men fighting to solve all their problems. It would be hypocritical if we didn’t try something other than combat to resolve our differences with them.” He purses his lips like he is suppressing a smile. “If you really want to understand the language, then I think you’ll need to understand the customs that inform it, yes. I’m happy to help.”

"わかった、がんばる！That's probably a long term project, though, without full immersion I'd need to spend a lot of time studying. You know, when I first left, I had a very strong accent in Hingan, because I only had other viera who had similarly never left the jungle to teach me, and I didn't speak any other languages. But nothing like being thrown in the middle of a place where no one speaks your native tongue to get you to learn really quickly."

“I can always bring you back to the Shroud with me, whenever I finally return.” A cloud of despair passes briefly over his face, but he waves it away. “But failing that, I suppose you’ll have to pry my secrets from me directly. If immersion isn’t possible, it seems like I’m the best means of intensive instruction.” The prospect once again has his dick bobbing just under the water, not quite fully hard but close, and he shifts his posture so that it breaches the surface briefly before submerging again. Red Fir seemed interested in his cultures attitudes about this sort of thing, so why not indulge in his native style of flirting?

“You seem likely to be at a disadvantage out here in a public bath, though.”

"If you have a suggestion for somewhere else we could be, I'm all ears." He wiggles his head a bit so that his floppy ears do the same.

He is fully erect now, though, so that is definitely going to, uh. Look like something. To any onlookers. He is trying to not let his Sharlayan "upbringing" tie him down, but he is very aware of it right now.

"And why would I concede an advantage unnecessarily?" he asks, rising from his lounging position to crawl toward Red with a look of malicious delight. "I am quite content to be casually out in public while fully hard—mark of pride to my people," he continues as he sits on his knees so his cock, which had true to form fully risen at the delectable scent on embarrassment rising off Red Fir, is totally above water, though strategically angled so that none of the other few patrons could see it. "If that doesn't suit you, it is surely incumbent on you to convince me to head back to my suite. Otherwise I am perfectly content to watch you stare like a jealous teenager, little Sharlayan boy."

"I am not embarrassed, merely aware of social judgment," he insists. And since he has permission to look, he will look everywhere. Starting with the cock which he didn't get that good a look at earlier. "If it were up to just me," and he lowers his voice for that, "I'd pin you to the ground and ride you until you were seeing stars. But I don't want to be banned from the Kugane onsen so instead what I'll say is aenoh gworjaa horai." His pronunciation isn't perfect, he only heard it once, but it very nearly is.

"Ooh, a quick learner," he coos. "Maybe just for that bucahr'wo daebi poro onniso," he said, slipping into kiipahgo. Sure, he was mostly showing off, but also it really was easier to express in his tongue. Good luck making "playing wolfess" sound sexy in Eorzean or Hingan. He practically lost his bone just thinking it. "Tell you what, I want to pop back to my rooms for a moment to grab something, and if you can follow me the whole way without dying of shame or shriveling like a vine in a drought, maybe I'll let you hang out in there with me." He stood up without awaiting a response, deliberately letting his cock bob just barely an ilm from the viera's face, and stretched ostentatiously. "Otherwise, I'll be back in a moment." He trots off, cock bobbing and tail swishing to wildly different rhythms.

With a roll of his eyes, Red Fir gets up and follows immediately, not giving Qana'to any time to get out of earshot or even polite conversation shot. "I told you I'm not embarrassed," he says, catching up easily. "My concern is for practical consequences, not propriety."

Qana'to doesn't respond except to toss a towel to Red Fir and then quickly pats himself dry with another one, making sure the rub his hard-on just enough to keep it fully fledged before tossing the towel away and tromping down the hallway towards his room. The receptionists muted reaction of surprise and embarrassment causes his closer ear to flick toward the sound, but otherwise he resolutely avoids noticing. Instead he pads to the room and pulls the door open, leaving it that way for Red Fir to follow.

Red Fir really should not rub himself very much because in addition to hard he is, uh. Dripping. So it's only when he's stepped into Qana'to's room that he starts actually trying to dry himself, fully aware that between his legs that'll be a lost cause.

(And that's making his mind go places, he's so wet, it wouldn't be hard at all for Qana'to to...)

"I don't want to press too hard on the matter," Qana'to says, having moved immediately to the small table and picked up a slim book, "but if you really want total immersion and aren't afraid of taking on big challenges all at once, I do have this...." He hefts the book and turns back toward his guest, holding the little booklet out. "It's actually the maritime laws governing the Kugane port's relations to outsiders. They have—very bad—translations into Eorzean, but I thought, well, it might be nice if Keepers could use it, right? We're prone to wandering and trade, so it would be best if I could grease the process of entry, leave it easier than it was when I did it." To what degree is the tone of his language deliberate? Even he doesn't know. "The Eastern and the Keeper tongues are side-by-side so it is easy to follow along as they play out." Dang it, another one. "Um, would like to take it?" Oh, heck.