Norms

It was strange to come back to Earth after a year or two of living in Atlantis. Not because Earth had changed, but because they were.

People on Earth lived in large communities – whether cities or even small towns, all but the smallest of them was larger than most Pegasus communities. But although they lived in large communities, they were very detached from other people in comparison to the natives of Pegasus. Pegasus communities were all intertwined, through trade and sheltering with other civilizations, often even merging several of them together after bad cullings – it was a bad idea to not make as many friends in the galaxy as you could when any day your entire civilization might be struck down by Wraith or disease or famine, making you depend on others to survive. And in Pegasus, it was far more common to see as many generations as were still living all living in the same house, with their spouses and children and parents and random relatives and friends thrown into the mix, in direct contrast with many Earth societies' living patterns.

It would be foreign to all but the most far-flung traders and Runners from Pegasus to walk into a marketplace and know no person there; much less one which they visited regularly. But on Earth, it was normal to do that, to be entirely alone in even the largest crowd in the most familiar settings.

Of course, all but the largest communities in the Pegasus Galaxy – the Genii and the Atlanteans – would, on their own, be smaller in population than even a small movie theater.