"What would I do with an army if I had one?" wonders Mial.

"That is also a question I asked myself when I was seventeen," says Miles, "but it was of rather more practical relevance at the time."

"Anyway, none of you seems to be dragonish, so I don't think you'd understand the coughing-fit-inducing news if I told you. But I should probably catch you up before I go get Aurin... all right, I'll try for a short version," says Mial.

"I am a shren. Aurin is a dragon. Dragons and shrens have a lot of very similar properties, one of which is that we speak a magical language called Draconic. Draconic is very opinionated about shrens. According to Draconic, dragons are awesome and shrens are definitely not awesome. Draconic-speakers will go through the most amazing linguistic contortions to avoid putting dragons and shrens in a single category, and it feels totally natural to do that, I'm a Draconic-speaker too, I know. The actual practical difference between shrens and dragons is that shrens can't fly in our natural forms - what would be our dragon forms if we counted as dragons, which we emphatically don't. I'm not even sure I should still be saying 'we', it's been a couple of angles, I might actually be the last shren already - yeah, so, shrenhood is normally incurable, but some offworlders showed up with offworld magic and casually went around turning all the shrens into dragons over the course of a few days. But when the miracle-worker showed up at our door, I turned him down."

"Of course you did," says Miles, nodding along. "I would've done the same."

"Really? I mean - I know we're theorizing you're my alt here, but I can't help feeling like I maybe didn't explain the impact well enough."

"Gotta win with the hand you're dealt, right?" shrugs Miles. "I know the feeling."

"...yeah," says Mial. He smiles slightly. "Yeah. Wow, you are my alt."

"...Okay then. Going and getting Aurin," says Mial.

Teleport!

Mial teleports them both to the other world in the back of Finnah's candy store.

"Everybody, this is Aurin. Aurin: my dwarf alt Stalas, my human alt Miles, Miles's brother Mark, Miles's cousin Ivan, some lady who hasn't had time to introduce herself. Hi, some lady."

"I'm Linyabel, Miles's wife," says some lady.

"And," says Aurin innocently, "does that imply that you are very good at scoot-racing?"

"...No. What is a scoot?"

"Flying vehicle thing, Mial's mad about them."

"I do not race any sort of vehicle."

"Nice," Finnah mouths under her breath, looking between Miles and Linyabel.

Mial is doing a broadly similar kind of looking between Miles and Linyabel.

"I think we're still missing a name here," says Miles, looking at Finnah and choosing to ignore the way Finnah is looking at his wife.

"So you're a human," Aurin says to Ivan. "How's that working out for you?"

"Pretty decently. How's being a dragon? Last time there was one of me in here he was six and, according to the magic bar, a firebird."

"...I could turn into a firebird if I wanted to but I've never really seen the point," says Aurin. "Being a dragon's pretty great."

"The firebird mini-Ivan looked exactly like a human and was very surprised by the bar's pronouncement," mentions Ivan, "he wanted to be normal."

"Dragons aren't exactly common but we're not abnormal," shrugs Aurin.

"The five-year-old Miles was a unicorn," mentions Miles.

"'Unicorn' isn't ringing any bells," says Mial.

"It's another mythical creature. Come to think of it, the five-year-old Miles's adopted sister who was inexplicably and unfortunately an alt of my wife was allegedly a dragon."

...Mial cracks up.

"Hey!" says Miles.

"No, I know," says Mial, snickering helplessly, "it'd be much less funny if I'd been there, it's just the way you put it—" and he's off again.

"She couldn't've been our kind of dragon if she was passing for human particularly effectively," says Finnah.

"No, I imagine it was another sort," agrees Isabella. "My other alt to have been through here was a half-human, half-telepathic-alien, which was also interesting."

"So, Mark, is Aurin as inexplicably fascinating as I am? You didn't wind up meeting mini-me."

"You're inexplicably fascinating?" asks Aurin.

"Are you asking me to explain the inexplicable?"

"Well, no. Do you not expect to be interesting?"

"I do not expect to be interesting in the way that Mark finds me interesting," Ivan clarifies.

"Explicability," says Ivan. "Intensity. Clear trajectory from point A to point B. The part where at no point have I attempted to seduce either you or anyone who cares about your opinion."

"Isn't him being your cousin a reasonably clear trajectory?" wonders Aurin reasonably.

"You would think that. But no, absolutely not," says Ivan.

"Mial races scoots. Every so often he comes down with an immense crush on someone else who also races scoots," says Aurin.

"Miles was various flavors of depressed about the concept of girls for a while until he landed on a semi-hostile planet and improbably carried off a maiden from it," says Ivan.

Finnah snorts.

Mial and Miles look at one another.

"Unflattering but basically accurate?" says Mial.

"Yep," says Miles.

"—heh, you're not a shren, what does your cousin do when you're in a mood?"

"...Well, it depends on the severity of the mood... why, what does yours do?"

Instead of answering, Mial inexplicably bursts out laughing.

"Well, see," says Finnah, "when shrens, or for that matter dragons, don't fly around enough, we get tired - to start with - which doesn't help when the solution is 'fly around' -"

"So when he gets in a particularly prolonged mood sometimes I have to defenestrate him," says Aurin, "why do you have a word for that."

"You would have to ask a historical linguist," snorts Miles. "Haven't you ever just not flown?"

"When I'm too far gone for it to work, he knows not to try it," Mial explains. "That's not often, though."