"Oh, moderately. Well, I suppose that depends on how shady a character you're willing to sell them to."

"...what do my options look like?"

"I could find you a buyer among the demon community, but they might find some sort of nefarious use for them. I'm sure there are plenty of nefarious uses for otherworldly dragon scales. Or you could wait until tomorrow and look for someone who doesn't know that magic exists and will therefore be confused about the shape your precious metal supply comes in but unable to use it to harm you or your relatives."

"...Uh. Okay. Assuming I prefer option two, am I eating small rodents in the interim or can I borrow some whatever-one-buys-things-with here?"

"I will lend you twenty dollars and let you sleep in my crypt for the night, because I'm nocturnal and won't need it. It's reasonably comfortable as crypts go."

"Can you quantify twenty dollars in terms of something like, I don't know, bread, sofas, whatever would be likely to be about the same cost in real wealth both places?"

"Several loaves of bread. A small fraction of a sofa. One or two meals at restaurants, maybe three depending on the restaurant."

"Okay. I guess I should probably try to at least nap, overnight, but I don't think I can fall asleep right now. I might want to overfly the area, get an idea of what it looks like, any reason that's a bad idea?"

"Some people might be alarmed to see a large golden dragon flying around. Some other people might decide to try to fight you."

"What if I do it while shaped like so?" Now there is a booted eagle with slightly irregular coloring but otherwise pretty inconspicuous sitting on the gravestone.

"Well, an eagle at night is mildly bizarre, but not nearly as obtrusive about it as a golden dragon. What a convenient sort of large winged lizard you are. This cousin of yours, is he a large winged lizard too?"

"...Well, technically, y- well, actually he's small, for a winged lizard of his age. Potion reaction when he was a baby."

"Oh?"

"He's not technically a dragon per se. You haven't got a word for his thing. But he is in most respects including the convenient shapeshifting very similar."

"...I haven't? Is 'dragon' unsuitable in some way? It seems to be a very all-purpose word. Managed your variety of large winged lizard just fine."

"He's not a dragon. He used to be but he had an accident."

"Not the same accident that caused him to be a smaller-than-usual winged lizard," he guesses. "And not one that directly altered his winged lizard status. Is your translation magic suffering some sort of inscrutable bug, or is this a cultural artifact?"

"I have a word for his species but it'd just sound like a nonsense word - he's a shren," says Aurin. "He's still got the wings, but they don't work, he can't fly anymore."

"So he is exactly the same sort of large winged lizard that you are, plus an unfortunate disability or two, and there is absolutely no reason from my perspective why you couldn't share a word in this language which neither of you has encountered before today."

"Okay, one, no, two, also no, three, still no."

"Do explain where I went wrong."

"I'm not remotely sure I want to have this conversation. I am very unusually tolerant of shrens as dragons go, and I don't think I want to have this conversation anyway."

"You can always tell me which nonsense word goes with the unimpaired version, so I can properly disambiguate varieties of otherworldly winged lizard, and then I will stop harassing you about semantics."

"Draconic for dragon is siad."

"Sure. How about your cousin, can I harass him about semantics?"