Chapter 3 – Different

I wondered if she truly had financial difficulties, like one of the possibilities that came out when I estimated her. My mood was too low to feel any hunger but I obediently sat at the table anyway.

"Thank you for the food."

I wasn't sure what the correct thing to say was and went with something generic. She gave another smile and nodded.

"You're welcome. Go ahead and eat."

She was a woman who smiled a lot. I took hold of a spoon placed next to the plate and thought that at least the tableware wasn't different from what I knew. Slowly, I fetched one "bean" and put it into my mouth. It tasted good, with a crunchy texture and a flavor different from anything I ever experienced before. Yet, it wasn't incredibly delicious either. It might have been a staple food in this place.

The woman, Suuru, followed my lead and started to eat her food. From the beginning to the end, I forced myself to put the beans in my mouth. We ate in silence, neither of us talking until we were done. Dinner was short considering that the meal quantity was meagre in the first place. Soon, we faced each other once more, having nothing to occupy ourselves anymore.

"W-what is your name?"

She tried to engage in conversation awkwardly.

"I'm Tila Urtek."

"Tila. Good. I've never talked to someone speaking a foreign language before. Do you come from a faraway dome?"

I wasn't certain what she was talking about but decided to go ahead with the excuse she conveniently offered.

"You could say that."

"Wow… How were things in your dome?"

I frowned and she immediately flinched.

"Ah, I'm sorry! It's fine if you don't want to talk about it."

"…Thanks."

"…But I still need to know what a… person like you was doing so close to the dome, alone like that. How can I help you otherwise?"

Was she being careful of the way she called me due to my previous reaction? She was quite attentive. Of course, I would be crazy to reveal I came from another world and decided to poke her on that part.

"Well… Come to think of it, why did you call me a girl before?"

Even though I had zero experience with the other sex, I still had a small amount of pride left in me. No one ever told me I looked feminine too.

She seemed troubled for a moment and anxiously questioned.

"I-if you aren't a girl, what are you?"

"A man, of course."

"I think there's an issue with the way I'm interpreting sel. This word isn't translated and just comes out as it is."

'Sel? Is that what they call ryl in this world?'

My critical adaptive training sprang into action and I instantly converted all references of "ryl" in my mind to "sel". A normal person wouldn't be able to do that but I wasn't a normal person. To be exact, I was made not to ever be a normal person.

"You don't know what a man is? A boy? A male?"

"Sorry… All those words are coming as is without any translation. What's a man?"

I wanted to ask if she was kidding me but chose to be patient.

'How do you explain what a man is anyway?'

I thought about it for a moment and tried my best to put it into words.

"A man is like…err… the contrary of a woman."

"The contrary?"

Seeing her clueless look, I expanded on my explanation.

"Like, well, if a man and a woman get together, they can become a couple, and have children, and so on…"

I was aware of how pitiful my attempt was and this was confirmed by Suuru right after.

"I'm sorry, I still don't understand."

"I mean… You know how children are made, right?"

"Who doesn't know that? Babies grow in the ground."

"…"

"?"

"What?"

"Babies… grow in the ground?"

Now, I seriously wanted to flip the table and scream at her to ask if she was serious. It took all my willpower to not do it, considering how kindly she treated a pure stranger like me so far. I took one deep breath after the other to calm myself down while she watched me like I was a weird endangered species.

"W-what do you mean by that? Are you joking with me right now? I'm not in the mood for that sort of thing."

"N-no. Why do you say that? Isn't it common sense that babies grow in the ground?"

Was she for real right now? At the very least, I couldn't see any trace of a lie in her expression even though I was trained to detect such things. Not caring anymore, I just directly asked her the critical question.

"Do you know what sex is?"

"Seks? No, I don't know."

She shook her head, making me feel completely lost. Could it be that this planet worked completely differently from where I came from? Come to think of it, wasn't it weird that there would be a human species on a different planet? If the evolutionary path was how I learned at school, wouldn't that be too much of a coincidence? Maybe she just looked like a human but was completely different on the inside? Maybe her species laid eggs and buried them under the ground until they hatched like some reptiles from my world?

"I think I've been lacking in my education. Can you explain how growing babies in the ground works?"

"Were you sleeping during classes? Hehe. That's fine, I'll try to explain. When two women decide to have a child, they wait for a section of the baby field to get freed. When they have a spot, they head there and combine their sel to mix their essences and create a protective layer for the baby to grow into. They place it into the soil and the sel in the ground will help the growth of the baby."

'Holy space cutter! That's insane! What are these people thinking about?'

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