Evening was coming on when their target roadhouse came into view. Waiting outside was a pair of cyndaren. Logically, this shouldn't have been weird. They had crossed the line into their "patrol lands" hours ago. It felt weird, though, this sudden reminder that their morphology was foreign to this planet. 

Blue waited for them to catch up and took Lidea’s hand for the rest of the journey. 

One cyndaren trotted up to meet them. They were the smallest of the four Corre indige by a fair amount, so they stayed between Sunny and Lidea's eye line as they approached. They walked on four thick limbs ending in split hooves. Their back limbs held their tactile hands, and they kept them resting, upside down, on top of their back, feathery fur in shades of blue and green hiding the form and angle. A long neck led to a square head sculpted into a short sorta-snout and tall, triangular ears. From the top of that head, the feathery fur began as a full mane behind their ears, ran down the top of the neck, blended with the back limbs and shoulders, then continued down the spine into a long, wide, brushing tail. 

Underneath all the fluff and fur, a canvas one-piece jumpsuit kept their relatively bare underbelly safe from the elements. A small pack bounced up and down in rhythm with their movement. Their hooves stomped a few times as the cyndaren drew up, and they lowered their head in a bow. 

"I'm Emissary Thaetl Near-the-Blue-Rock." Their Cottа́l was thick but clear, the slightest gurgle in the back of the throat. They pulled a little folding ID wallet from an outside pocket of their bag and flashed the card inside. The last line of quick reference identifying information had the letters "AB" in the general space of sex designation. 

"Do you have a preferred pronoun?” Thaetl asked. “You bipeds have so many of them.”

"I use 'he,'" Sunny said, showing his own identification card. "My fiancé  uses 'ey.'" Thaetl swayed hir head again.

"That's all square." Ze dipped hir head down to Blue. Ze rattled off in a shared chirping language, the cadence rising in question. Blue nodded and explained something with his hands. Not Sign just childish gestures to put his thoughts in order. Thaetl liked whatever response ze got and gestured back down the road. 

"Come along. You're staying with us tonight." Ze started trotting away. 

Both Lidea and Sunny jogged to catch up. In the meantime, the other cyndaren had sauntered closer and met them. This one's visible fur was a sickly combination of chartreuse and turquoise. The canvas jumpsuit covered more of them, covering their fur with stretches of dark gray. Their loose mane and tail were braided down into tidy knots. 

"This is Officer Fellerwhal," Thaetl introduced. "Ze's just here to shoot you if you weren't who you said you were." 

“See, and you were worried about safety protocols,” Sunny said to Lidea, a grim smirk lifting the edge of his mouth. 

“Shoot us with what?” Lidea asked. It had never occurred to em in all these years what kinds of weapons this collective of peoples used.

“A gun,” Fellerwhal replied blankly. 

“What kind of gun?” Sunny’s whole body lifted in intellectual interest. Weapons weren’t his specialty, but any kind of hybrid gadgetry would have an artificer gnashing their teeth in intrigue. Guns conceptually weren’t all that complex. A lot of mechanical parts that knocked on each other in predictable ways. Bullets, though… Bullets relied on a very specific kind of combustion physics that lost more and more of its reliability the denser the ambient magic became.

Telekinetic magic or knife skills were more consistent. 

Fellerwhal looked Sunny up and done, beady, mellow eyes sharpening. 

“A gun that shoots.” Ze made a clicking sound that smacked the roof of hir wide mouth then muttered something that was distinctly insulting sounding but not in a vitriolic way. A general annoyance. 

“Wait, so,” Lidea jumped back in. “Where are you taking us?”

“Back to the village,” Thaetl replied. “Blue’s mother is on the way, and she’d like to meet you when she arrives tomorrow morning. You’re perfectly welcome to do whatever, obviously. The roadhouse is safe most of the time. We have nicer beds, though. All up to you.” 

It felt like a threat. Almost. Like the dull edge of a knife pressed a little too hard into the softest part of the throat. Better to keep an unknown close than let it wander along your borders unattended. 

“We’d be happy to take advantage of your hospitality,” Lidea said for both of them. 

A village or township or enclave looking to properly hide itself did so with layers and layers of magic. The cyndaren here didn’t bother with that, the first buildings visible on the flattish plane as they rounded a corner in the road. The buildings were mostly single-storied, an occasional two-story with covered lifts on the outside leading into exterior doors. Made of stone and tabby, the walls were rough but sturdy, large and squat to allow room for cyndaren to maneuver inside more easily. These first sets of buildings had walls that hinged outward to open during nice weather. The tracks in the dirt suggested they had been open only a few hours ago. A few cyndaren were still closing up shop, feather-fur in shades between blue and yellow ruffling at them as they passed. 

Thaetl and Fellerwhal chattered at each other in some snippy snarls before the emissary rounded back a little to talk to them. 

"We need to pass through the residential rings, so behave." 

"We didn't intend otherwise," Lidea said, trying to dedicate the path they were taking through the blocks to memory. Sunny looked around in a general discovery pattern, looking for the different ways that the buildings came together. Blue had fallen between them, holding each of their hands.

 They broke through a ring of roads, and the structure of the city shifted. One road was wider than the others and lined with a hip-high stone wall on the side toward the center of town. Less of a barricade, more of a demarcation between zones. They all passed through a break in the wall, and the buildings immediately crowded in on each other, bigger and bulkier and closer together. 

The buildings had alleys in them that gave way to a small plaza and park, where it looked like most of the local population had gathered for the evening. A thunder of soft hooves moved through the sparse grass, kicking at rocks. It was mostly children making the noise, adults choosing to lie on the grass, legs curled underneath their bodies. A few cyndaren looked up as they passed, a sea of undulating feathers in shades between yellow and blue. Occasionally, a red or orange body moved among them before settling back down into the crowd. Officer Fellerwhal got a few greetings, but the bipeds weren’t of particular interest to the adults. Blue, however, picked up a few same-age companions as they walked, chattering aimlessly in the way that children did.

As they rounded a corner, a deep voice called out, and one of the cyndaren kids underfoot pulled away with a sigh. Lidea and Sunny turned to find the source of the voice. This cyndaren was larger than the others by a significant but not unreasonable or garish amount. Some of that size was plumage, green and yellow so bright it was neon in the fading orange light. It fluffed and puffed, pulling the kid underneath a wing-arm.

“Back to Mom,” Sunny muttered weirdly in Illurian. Lidea took a more thorough look around, paying closer attention to the size and shape of the crowd. Ey switched to Illurian when ey spoke.

“They’re all AB-gender,” Lidea said. Sunny perked up and gave a look around as well. 

“Is that weird?” 

Lidea tapped her fingertips against each other. 

“Just the way the As and Bs can go together. Reproductively. A with B; AB with both and each other.” Lidea worked the square in eir head. “Assuming even distribution across all possible match-ups, half the population would be AB, then a quarter each double-A and B. That was the only homozygous person we’ve seen so far.”

“Is there…are you suggesting something?” Sunny lifted the edge of an eyebrow, a gesture reserved for the most suspicious of impulses. 

“Oh, no. Just interesting. There’s probably some other quirk that affects everything. Ariesian genetic reproduction is deceptively complicated in terms of how hormone levels affect the viability of eggs with certain chromosomes.”

“Are you talking about ariesian two-part sex designation?” Thaetl turned back and asked in Cottа́l.

“Yeah, a little!” Lidea said back in the same language. “Oh. You understand Illurian.”

“Enough,” Thaetl replied. Lidea cringed. 

“Sorry for being overly clinical about reproduction. I was just noticing stuff.” Lidea dug the hand that wasn’t holding Blue’s into eir hip, fingers pressing to eir bone, hoping to escape out of this completely. 

“I just appreciate you using the preferred terms instead of saying ‘third gender,’” Thaetl said. 

“Oh. Yeah. Vestiges of human binary language.” Lidea hummed, unsure where to go in the conversation before deciding it was fine for it to be over.