"Thank you. One thing all my favorite people have in common is that they've never summoned me to foreign climes unexpectedly." Pause. "Crystal's dead but I should probably song Mother. And my cousin."

"And that means...?"

"Means you get to hear my lovely dulcet tones. Mother's'll take ages, Mial first -" And then he sings a few bars. He is not a particularly gifted singer but he manages to stay in tune, for otherworldly values of "in tune".

"And what effect did that have?"

(Among its effects: Mial immediately teleports straight back to Alys's house, still holding the reference book he was reading, and says, "Aurin just songed me! He's in another world!")

"Well, I don't know, until he songs me back," says Aurin. "If it let me send arbitrary telepathic messages I wouldn't even bother buying communication crystals. Just a sec." And he sings a much longer song.

("Oh," breathes Alys, still staring at the snake, unable to produce any more eloquent statements of relief. "Can you get him back?")

("Eventually, yes," says Mial. "I need to look up the right spells, though. I'll go do that." Back home he goes with his book. As an afterthought, he songs Aurin back, just to demonstrate that he's paying attention.)

"Okay," says Aurin, "probably my cousin will summon me back any minute now. What an interesting misadventure this will have been."

"Your cousin has access to casual interdimensional transportation? How nice for him."

"He's a wizard. I don't think he's ever done it before, it'll probably take him a while to look up the spell and draw out the circle."

"And then you will vanish as mysteriously as you appeared. Well, substantially less mysteriously, but with about the same level of control or effort from either of us."

"For all I know Mial will also figure out why I vanished in the first place. Probably it would bother him if he didn't."

"Perhaps Mial is at fault," he suggests whimsically.

"Well, I was rambling on more than he really likes about a topic he cares very little about, but this is not quite his style of retribution."

"Oh? And what is?"

"Used to be he'd start talking over me very loudly about topics I do not care about. Scoots, most often. Sometimes he just throws Finnah at me instead, she's fine to talk girls with on occasion."

"Scoots?"

"And the weaknesses of autolinguistics are made manifest. Uh, capsule-y things with seats in them that zoom around in the air or scoot around on the ground by magic?"

"Enthusiastic about them, is he?"

"Built his own. Races it. Wins, usually. Has been since he was a kid up against people twice his equivalency."

"Equivalency?"

"Yeah, Mial ages like a dragon." Pause. "Youuuu know so little about dragons that I'm surprised your language has a word for us at all, but, dragons age about ten times slower than humans? Till we're two hundred, then we stop. In assumed forms, anyway, natural one keeps getting bigger."

"The word applies to a diverse set of probably-mythical creatures of which most are large winged lizards," he says. "Are you in any meaningful sense a large winged lizard?"

Aurin turns into a large winged lizard. "Ta-da."