"Are you?" he inquires. "How do you know?"

"The magic bar told me! And Miles is a unicorn and Ivan is a firebird but he seems not to like that and Bothari is a fuzzy bear thing."

"What magic bar?"

"Ivan found it! And he got me, and I got Miles, and there were our grownups in it, and they gave us stuff and we came home from it. Look at this!" She puts her pen in drawing mode - this takes her a couple tries; it's not that accustomed to her gestures yet - and draws a squiggle through the air. "One of my grownups invented these!"

"They didn't look like me the way Miles's grownup looked like Miles and Ivan's grownup looked like him - Gregor, Ivan's grownup was so boring, it's sad - but the bar said they were my grownups, I'm going to be like them when I grow up except different looking. And a dragon. And adopted, they weren't adopted."

"Where was the magic bar?" he asks next, frowning thoughtfully.

"It was out the door to the garden but it's not there anymore. They said so, but I checked, and it really wasn't."

"Does this have anything to do with why Cordelia had to go home early?"

"She had to come home to take Miles to the doctor to check that really truly the grownups fixed him and he can learn to walk okay now, yeah."

"Hmm," says Gregor. "So being a dragon isn't at all like being a fairy, then, because being a fairy was pretend."

"Yeah. I wasn't even pretending the right thing! There weren't any fairies in the magic bar at all. I can't turn into a dragon yet because I don't have a magic thingy but we're going to learn to make them, we got magic books."

"Can I see your magic books?"

"Sure! I can send them to your pen. You get a pen. It's the one your grownup picked. He wasn't there but they had one so they knew what kind you'd want." Nika performs arcane pen gestures.

"Where is my pen?" he asks reasonably.

"It's in the box of pens. This way." Nika shows him this way, and the box of pens, and finds the one labeled Gregor. "You get the pointy kind."

"If you wave it around it will teach you to use it!" she says. "I've had mine for hours now, it's the best thing."

Gregor waves his pen around experimentally.

This calls up a tutorial! The tutorial explains that a pen is very like a comconsole. It tells him that he can change its default gestures if he wants, and explains the default gestures to a) make the pen work almost exactly like a comconsole, b) draw, c) write with gestures in Cyrillic, d) do specialized pen-things that comconsoles cannot do. He is supposed to imitate these gestures as they are introduced so the pen can learn how he holds it and moves it. It is a very good tutorial. Linyabel hires excellent help.

Gregor becomes totally absorbed in figuring out the pen. It's fascinating.

Nika sits by him and hugs his leg with one arm and does pen things with the other hand.

"I wonder if you're a thing," says Nika, when she notices what he's reading. "Bar couldn't tell, because you weren't there."