"Oh dear. Let's go back to your room and you can tell me about it." She begins nudging the ambassador to let her up; he's slow to move but does after a couple seconds.

Skon starts to ask something and then subsides.

And they can make their way to the east ballroom and get settled in.

"So what happened - they told me you were out shopping?"

"He said something none of us remember the exact words of about how we could come along if watching him try on ten outfits sounded fun," says Uamok. "It did because we wanted to see how hummun fold up into clothes! But then it turned out he didn't want us to see him doing it at all."

"Ah. Yeah, Raafi can be pretty shy about that kind of thing - I'm a little surprised you hadn't noticed already, actually. Did he say anything else about it?"

"He said the prince was upset because it was very rude -"

"All I said was 'why not'," says Iss plaintively.

"I know that, smallness," says Uamok. "And he said it was okay to ask you if we still want to know but at this point that's kind of an afterthought."

"Ah. Okay, I think I can explain this for you. Had you noticed yet that Raafi and the prince are sleeping with each other?"

"We have not exactly seen them do it," says Uamok.

"And you won't," she nods, "but you can usually make a pretty good guess by how much people touch each other, once you know what's normal. Anyway, they are, and there's two things to know from that. One is what we talked about yesterday, that humans get mate feelings from all kinds of sex, so the prince is protective of Raafi. The other one is a little more complicated - Raafi has a secret, and the prince knows what it is, and you were accidentally demanding that he tell you about it."

"...We didn't want him to tell us anything!" says Uamok.

"You asked him to tell you why he didn't want you to see him changing, right?"

"Because we thought he'd offered," says Zoi.

"That's not how he and the prince saw it, though."

"I still really want to know how hummun fold up into clothes," Skon offers after a silence.

"I don't mind showing you that, but I think we should talk a bit more about this first - I'm sure the prince is worried you might upset someone at the ball, now, and I'd like to be able to reassure him about it."

"I guess we could just not talk," says Uamok.

"I don't think it's that hard to avoid. The main thing is that if someone seems to be offering to let you see them naked, that's pretty much either going to be because you've made a mistake, or because they're asking about having sex with you. And it's not impossible that someone will ask, but it's much more likely that you made a mistake - there are a few exceptions, me showing you how clothing works is one, but even if something seems to be an exception it's still probably one of those two, especially if they're offering instead of you asking them about it - which they might still think is about sex - or them just doing it without talking about it first at all. Does that make sense?"

"...I think so?" says Uamok.

"Can you explain it back to me?"

"Any time other than you showing us how hummun clothes work this time right now, we are only going to see hummun with clothes on, and should not try to change that, and if it seems like a hummun is trying to change that we are probably confused, or the hummun wants to have sex with us for some reason but that is less likely and we probably should not ask if that's what's going on."

"Right," she nods. "It is more complicated than that sometimes, but if you don't go looking for those times, that's what you should expect."

"Supposing a hummun does want to have sex with us what is the thing to do about that," says Kiv.

"Mostly you can just ignore them and they'll go away eventually, if you're not interested, and if someone is bothering you a lot and won't leave you alone when you ask them to it doesn't really matter if they want sex or something else, you'd take care of it about the same way in either case - here you'd go to the prince or the king or to Raafi, if you can, or call for the guard or just threaten them yourselves if you get stuck in a scary situation. I'm not sure it's the best idea if you are interested, right now - there's lots of things that can go wrong, and especially you shouldn't try to ask them about it unless you're already very sure they're interested. Even then you should ask in private, because they might not want anyone else to know. But if that does happen - talk to them about what they want, and talk to them about what you want, and do your best to make sure everyone involved agrees about what's going to happen during it and afterward, don't assume they're going to want to stay and be your mate. And maybe have Raafi come get me again, if you want more advice than that."

"Oh, we aren't interested," says Uamok, "but there are conventions about lots of surprising things so there might have been one for turning people down."

"I don't know, I'd try it," muses Skon. "If a boy hummun wanted, not a girl one, I'm taken."

"Well, ask Raafi to bring you to Greens sometime and I can introduce you to some men who might be interested."