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After a busy morning, Sooraya comes in through the lake door. She drops wearily into a seat at the Bar, rubbing at her temples.
Bar takes her order for a serving of qabili pilau and cold tea. She takes them to a quiet corner, someplace where neither door is in her line of sight.

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She catches that, and winces. Apparently her speculation missed the mark.
"2003. My world's in the middle of a kind of...genetic upheaval that's caused friction among the human population," she answers carefully. "Do the terms 'X-Gene' or 'Genosha' have any particular meaning to you?

In turn, he catches the wince. He lowers his gaze for a moment, rather wishing he had a moment before. She caught him off-guard.

"X is just a description of alleles whose function we haven't identified fully yet. For the other term, nothing whatsoever."

"Lucky you. It's not unidentified on my version of Earth." She hesitates over divulging the rest, though now she's mentioned it...well, outlining the situation in general didn't mean she had to give out her own secrets. Or not yet.

"There's a few of them. We've mapped the code." Prideful scientist? Well, yes. "That doesn't mean we've determined the function of every gene."

(And since most worlds haven't gotten that done until thirty years later. . . well, someone's been unusually busy.)

"X-Gene for us means a mutated gene that turns active, usually at adolescence or a little later. Multiple traits have resulted,
some of them useful or survival enhancements, some...not so much, but that's the way evolution works."

"Really? I wonder if you're distant ancestors of the subsets of humanity Suzi belongs to? She calls them 'gen' and 'sime.' There are a few visible morphological changes, but the mutations appear to be mostly biochemical, with an extrasensory branch. She mentioned the primary causes of environmental change were dragons. Are those a problem on your world?"

Oh. Oh, right, she was kind enough to explain natural selection. "Fascinating," he adds, belatedly.

"Extrasensory perception, but that's only one branch we're seeing. And 'visible' doesn't begin to describe it," ruefully.

"...dragons? No, thankfully."
She laughs wryly. "Is it? You sound as if you're familiar with the science, which is more than I was, to be honest. It's been a case of field study for me."

"Oh, she has tentacles. Anything more dramatic than that and I couldn't guess if you're related." He nods. "Probably not, then.

"I've studied cellular biology and genetics. I work in a laboratory, actually." He dismisses that in the next sentence. "Organizing, cleaning up the place."

"She might fit in where I'm from," she observes blandly, "probably she would.
Sounds like interesting jobs, if busy," and she means that, "do you have a chance to see those studies at work, as it were?"

"Well, I studied them," he repeats, in a dismissive tone. "When I'm not putting things in order, I'm dealing with papers. It's not quite the interesting job it sounds like."

(If he took out "interesting," that would still be true.)

"Do you think you'll stay with that field, then, or branch out to something more challenging?" Boredom+science are a recipe for either crack or trouble, in Sooraya's experience. Or both.

"Oh, it's certainly challenging--I'm just not at the level I want to be." He shrugs. It's probably time to turn this around for a little while. "What do you do when you're at home?"

Both. Both, both, both.

How to describe her job without being here all night, hm.
"[survival isn't]" she stops, annoyed at herself now. She's got a habit of slipping into her native language when not sure how to express herself, but that's rare these days. English, she reminds herself sternly.
"I and the team I work with are in training as field operatives, not military but not noncombatants either. It's a matter of doing/going where we're needed. Sometimes into combat, sometimes, well, someone compared it to disaster relief. That's not so far off."
As for what she does on her free time, that's something she has to stop and think about. Leisure time? What's that?

Ehhh?

"Combat on whose behalf?" Disaster relief? Yeah. No kidding.

"That can vary. Either it's defending our own people, or civilians from
troublemaking nonhumans, most often." Occasionally, internal...squabbles, arise, too, but she is not going to go into that. "We're U.S.based, for now at any rate.
Missions might take us anywhere. Freelance, sort of--We don't ally permanently with a government or corporations. Politics tend to be a bit too malleable for that to be a good idea."

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