“If [he][1] was unable to see that I had feelings for him (at least five, but sometimes as many as seven)…” - Carrie Fisher -- RecklessPrudence
Lyr watched Ambassador Shayde attempting to flirt with Rael. The impossible force against an oblivious stone. There had been more than one instance of interspecies dating that floundered heavily on the sending a signal stage. And not merely because of cultural difference. Subconscious body-speak could cause the most inconvenient miscommunications.
One species' flirting is another's aggressive manoeuvre. And in Rael's case, all signals were lost in the aether because he didn't even know what was sexy for his own species. ELF's whose essential data were proprietary information had a lot of that problem. Once every other decade or so, someone had the bright idea to make The Enlisted Man again, or create some gene-slave that bordered on the very cusp of legal. What followed when such efforts were discovered... Chaos was the mildest term. Rael faced years of legal purgatory with unreleased infants held hostage in cryostorage and essential medical information debated over as intellectual property of a company that was, in essence, dancing as hard as it could to stay out of the coals in their shoes.
The end result was that everyone on the station could tell that Shayde had a Thing for Rael. Except for Rael. He was almost more clueless than a writer, missing every obvious signal that Shayde sent. But he caught the occasional signal and attempted to shut her down. He avoided dating. Dating lead to mating. And thanks to the people who made him, he didn't have the slightest idea of what to do or if it would kill him when he got there.
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