The sight of Tara scribbling away on her clipboard jolted Grayson into gear. He hastily scrawled the term onto the handout in front of him and noted the plural ending.
“Next, some other familial terms.” Rorith pointed a blunted claw to the next line on the board. “Here, we havenoaandnuone. Any guesses?”
“Rorith, it’s like 5 a.m.,” Jenna groaned. “I barely remember English right now.”
“It’s 6:30, but point taken.” Rorith cleared his throat. “Noaandnuonaare Alpha son and Alpha daughter respectively. Then, there are the terms for Omega son and Omega daughter,aneruandainia. The general, neutral term for any child regardless of sex or gender isainuo.”
“Why are there so many words for children?” Jaeyong muttered, his pencil scratching over paper.
“Because we have two more categories than you,” Rorith retorted. “Or, had, I suppose.”
“What about the word for pregnant?” Tara asked.
“I’m getting there! Patience.” Rorith tapped the next line. “Parental terms. Alpha father isreio, Alpha mother isriue. Omega father isjaeiand Omega mother isjiei. To refer to a pair of female parents, you use the termreish, and to refer to male parents,jaish.”
“Slow down!” Grayson protested. “They’re already starting to sound the same.”
Rorith grinned. “Ah, I love being the newbie lead.”
When they’d finished writing, Rorith forced them to repeat each word until he was satisfied before moving on.
“Wait, you didn’t tell us the word for a male-female couple,” Tara interrupted.
Rorith hesitated. “That was, and frankly still is, frowned upon in Mer society. There was no word for a heterogender pairing until relatively recently, and it’s still not completely recognized. The word isjaresh.”
The five of them blinked back at Rorith.
“I didn’t know that,” Jenna said with a frown. “Why would anyone care if a pair is the same gender?”
“Same reason humans seem to dislike non-hetero couples.” Rorith shrugged. “You can’t look for logic in it. The main argument was that male-female couples are capable of producing any of the four combinations, while same-gender couples only produce one gender. Something about destabilizing the population.”
Guess bigotry is a universal trait.Grayson’s mind offered up flashes of confederate flags in his neighbors’ yards, and bumper stickers on lifted trucks that never did compensate for their owners’ fragile egos.
“Male-male couples only have male children?” Jaeyong asked, shocked.
Rorith’s brows lifted. “You didn’t notice?”
Now that he’d brought it up, Grayson himself had failed to notice the pattern too.
“I…” Jaeyeong paused. “I guess I never really thought about it. And we had a few male Alphas with daughters and female Alphas with sons, so…”
Rorith nodded. “But all those Alphas had a human Omega partner. The rule doesn’t apply to interspecies couples. A human Omega can give birth to any combination of sex and gender.”
Jaeyong just stared blankly at his notes. Grayson suspected he wasn’t accustomed to getting things wrong.
“Wow.” Aureli fell back in his chair. “I can’t believe they didn’t teach us that.”
“You’d be surprised what your programs fail to teach you about Mer biology,” Rorith said wryly. “Right, next word.Buais a male Omega’s reproductive orifice, andvuais a female Omega’s.”
In Grayson’s periphery, Jaeyong’s face had taken on an entirely new level of scarlet.
Chapter 18
Keld
“Safe word?”
“Seaweed.”
