"Is this really weird to you? Did you just not know gender identity was a thing?"

"It just seems like if your species isn't sexually dimorphic, it would be hard to tell the difference between gender identity and species identity...? But oracles exist, and that explains how you know."

"Gender identity is apparently really consistent across species! Elves have some weird cultural stuff about it, though, you occasionally get bisexuality even in elves who aren't half something else and being attracted to men is seen as this really weird fetish."

"I guess it makes sense, with how your species seem to be so... similar? Integrated? That gender would be a consistent thing."

"I think similar works better than integrated."

"You are way more integrated than humans and athrai, though, and that's obviously having societal effects. If you had an entire planet with nothing on it but elves for dozens of generations and no contact with the outside world, they might lose the concept of gender completely!"

"Elves don't die of old age," she reminds him. "Unless someone kept murdering generations that recalled gender being a concept we probably wouldn't."

"It might take longer, but it's not like they'd be getting any day-to-day use out of it..."

"I still think they wouldn't forget it was a thing, but you could get to a point where the younger generations never learned about it," she concedes.

"Anyway, how old do people tend to get? There are people who don't die of old age in Haela but there aren't any of the same such people that there were ten thousand years ago. Even Talovir's only about six thousand. Accidents happen, and so does murder."

"I honestly couldn't tell you, Arshalei's only been around for about a thousand years and none of the settlers were very old."

"Well, I'm not going to try settling an isolated planet with elves just to see what happens if I leave them that way for a few thousand years, so I guess I'll never know."

"Maybe someday we can figure out a way to get to less war-torn parts of the worlds as I know them and see if anyone's done it!"

He grins.

"I wonder if there'll be portals, now that there's been a death toll. Don't especially think so, but it's possible."

"We can keep an eye out. What do portals look like?"

"Shimmering, freestanding irregular shapes."

"Huh, okay."

"If we don't get portals I expect overpopulation's going to be an issue eventually, at least assuming Dakker's genesis doesn't produce a species with the age problem..."

"...Honestly, by that point I'm pretty sure I will be able to build a new planet with local magic."

"How would we get there without portals, though?"

"We will figure that out in the thousands of years it takes us to overrun this one!"

"Fair enough!"

"We should figure out what planets this solar system already has, first."