"'kay."

Smooch. "Have a good day!"

Smooch! "You too!"

And away flies shiny gold dragon.

And Anlei traipses up to her room. What a great world this is. She's so pleased.

Meanwhile, Mial starts spending rather a lot of time on the bottom of the world.

He accumulates a pile of wobbly waterspouts. They all outwardly seem to work just fine, but when he examines them with the elusive senses granted to him by his capacity for pain magic he can sense their flaws.

(He invents a wizardry analysis that detects the capacity for pain magic, and thereby verifies that it is an actual magical attribute he has and not just a matter of learning how to think a certain way or something.)

By experimentation he manages to come up with a much wobblier waterspout, which takes only a couple of degrees for its magic to start going haywire; the next time he opens it and turns it upside-down, flames shoot out. He tosses it on the pile and starts over. Ten more tries, twenty, thirty, fifty... he loses count around sixty-eight, and approximately a few dozen waterspouts later, he finally produces one without the flaw.

He eyes it, and eyes the heap of failures nearly as tall as his human form. "I hope I'm not going to need that many tries for every single spell."

So of course the next thing he tries to build is a scoot.

Several large explosions later, he has a scoot so unstable that it immediately starts ascending and refuses to stop. He sighs and tries again, this time aiming for a fully functional model scoot so that when they start to pile up he won't end up with an entire mountain of them.

It takes him a few more days, but the pile of rejects is at most a small hill when he finally manages to produce a model scoot without the troubling flaw in its structure.

...it occurs to him that he has just made a thing that flies.

He starts spending a lot more time on the bottom of the world.

He needs to be absolutely flawless at spellcrafting. And he'll probably need a source of power more reliable than self-injury, and easier to scale. Sure, he can hurt a lot of adult shrens for this, and while there are still babies in pain he can hang around the babies, but that's still ultimately not enough for projects of the scope he has in mind. Oh, and he should definitely figure out how to become immortal. Really truly completely no-takebacks immortal. He can't afford to die, not when he could be using this power to do good in the world. And if he gets really famous he will probably come to the attention of the unique green-group and he does not want to take the chance that she'll decide there ought not to be a shren with ultimate cosmic power.

(He could cure shrens. Probably. Maybe. He's sure not going to breathe a word of the possibility to anyone until he's got the theory worked out and is ready to test it. He's much surer that he could help the babies somehow.)

Okay, first things first...

He throws himself into the pursuit of magic. He stops signing up for scoot races. He eats conjured food and returns home only to sleep.

It takes almost a month for him to learn how to store power, and in the end the breakthrough is that he doesn't store the power; he builds it into an active self-reinforcing structure that eats everything he feeds it and turns it all into more magic. This is better for his purposes than power storage anyway. He builds it thirty-six times, each time detecting a flaw and dismantling the power structure and starting over again; several of those end up as blasts of flame scorching the dirt, but he's still working at a small enough scale that he never gets worryingly close to losing a form over it.

Once he's got that, he starts on immortality. This is going to be a little trickier, and he'll have more trouble undoing it since most of the point is that it should be impossible to undo. After some time spent contemplating the nonexistent overlap between 'people he would like to make very very immortal' and 'people he is willing to risk killing if he messes something up badly enough', he asks his mother for advice, and she volunteers as a test subject. He has a design sketched out in another few days, and spends most of the next month carefully refining it and constructing all the parts that aren't the final irrevocable emphasis. In between those, he visits the shren houses and hangs around outside them, picking up pain and stuffing it into his power amplifier. He isn't good enough yet to save the babies without risking blasting them to ash, so he doesn't go in to introduce himself. He also dismantles all the scoots and waterspouts and feeds the power from those into the amplifier, just to be tidy.

He is no longer working at a small enough scale to be sure he won't lose a form if he messes up. He takes a new form - elf, like his mother. Now at least if he loses his working form he won't have to reintroduce himself to everyone he knows. (He could work under a ward, but putting it on and taking it off every time he wanted to hurt himself for magical purposes would slow him down.)

In elf form, he finishes making his mother immortal, every piece of the spell except for the last. He paces around the bottom of the world and builds houses, mansions, palaces, cities, getting used to the rush of handling vast amounts of power. It's like flying thirty scoot races at once. It's terrifying and glorious and incredible.

He slips, once, and only barely manages to save the form afterward; the damage is so extensive that it's actually a little unpleasant. He immediately builds ten more cities, each bigger and more elaborate than the last, with indoor lighting and grassy parks and rudimentary wards and clever automatic food conjuration, practicing practicing practicing until he is sure.

Eventually, he is sure.

He brings his mother to the bottom of the world, and pulls a massive amount of power, and forms the intricate structure that will tie all the other parts of the spell together and make them self-renewing and self-reinforcing and self-correcting, resilient against hostile action, impossible to bend or break or recycle into raw power even if he tried. It takes him a continuous day and a half to build and comes out flawless on the first try. He gets a night's sleep, teaches her the basics of handling power, and then starts putting the pieces together for himself. It's a little harder, because he wants it to save him from form loss where possible; he also needs it to guard him against dragonish old age when he doesn't even know how that works, but in the end that's really just a subset of the problem 'guard him against literally anything that could possibly kill him even if he's never heard of it and has no way of studying it in advance', and that one he's confident he solved for his mother already.

Four months after he met Anlei, he becomes immortal.

Now he's ready to save the babies.

On the scale of the forces he's been playing with lately, constructing a spell to miracle a shren is almost trivial, easy enough that it's not even worth separately making the babies able to fly first. It still involves holding onto an amount of power that could obliterate an entire shren house and a significant chunk of the surrounding area if he let it loose, so he does them one at a time on the bottom of the world, starting with Finnah as proof of concept and because she's family. The shren houses want him to miracle the caretakers before the kids; he doesn't argue. It takes him three days and a call to the dragon council, but he miracles every single shren at every single registered location, and all the ones that any other dragonish knows how to find.

Except himself.

At first it's just because he's too busy to get around to it, but then he finishes all the rest and... well, really, what would be the point? Giving girls dragon rides? He's not Aurin. And he's hardly about to stop being a shren purely for its own sake. That would be tantamount to letting Draconic win.

He does make his shrenhood non-contagious. He's not cruel. And he doesn't exactly enjoy the way Draconic thinks of him, so he toys with the idea of building an alternative, but it turns out to be complex enough that other miracles take priority. He condenses the less aggressive parts of his immortality spell down into a simple, quick, manageable structure for making people effectively immune to illness, injury, and biological forms of old age; and then he advertises this service to the dragon council, because at half a degree per casting he's not going to cover the whole world by himself but he can at least do the loved ones of dragons while he works on a more broadly applicable solution.

Advertising it to the dragon council involves his father calling his grandfather for the first time since he was a baby. Piro answers, clearly expecting news about his grandson's miraculous return to dragonhood; instead, Mial cheerfully explains what he's actually up to, then adds that if anybody wants to immortalize their non-dragonish friends and relatives but doesn't want to have to interact with a shren to do it, he's happy to direct them to his mother for communication purposes and only show up for the actual spellcasting.

There is a long silence from the communication crystal.

Then Piro says, "...why?"

"Because Draconic doesn't get to tell me how to live my life."

"Don't be childish—"

"You haven't acknowledged my existence since I was less than a month old and you're telling me not to be childish? Ialsafei siaddaki, Grandfather," he says, using a Draconic genealogical term that is entirely neutral on the subject of familial bonds, and he deactivates the crystal and hands it to his father and teleports to the bottom of the world to work on scalable immortality.