Ehail tilts her head at him. "...Do I have something on my face?"

"Um. No," he says. "Not exactly. Sorry. You're - are you by any chance - um, I can't help noticing - your magic is in a state I'd describe as 'very stably just barely not dead'?"

"I... didn't know that was the sort of thing that anyone would be able to see."

"I'm the sort of anyone who sees that sort of thing," he says. "That looks really uncomfortable."

"Oh, it doesn't hurt once we're twenty or so," she murmurs.

"But it does before that? Um. That can't be good."

"It's only a side effect," demurs Ehail.

"It's not a good side effect," he says, inarguably. "It is the opposite of one of those."

"Well. I know," she says. "I'm just not sure how you can see it. Since the - magic thing - doesn't hurt directly."

"I'm not sure I'm seeing exactly the same thing you're talking about," he says. "The way that it looks uncomfortable doesn't exactly seem to hurt... it's just that it almost seems like your magic doesn't like itself very much. Or something."

"Oh. That." She looks away.

"Um?"

She shrugs. "You're right. It doesn't."

"That's not any good either," he says.

"Well, I would fix it, if I knew how, but I haven't gotten anywhere so far."

"I would also fix it, if I could fix things," he says. "Maybe I will go talk to the shady wish-mongerers."

"...What?"

"Oh. Um, in my world there are some people who have access to magic coins that grant wishes, and I find them vaguely intimidating and don't like to have anything to do with them if I can help it. But they really want me to do magic-seeing for them, so I could probably convince them to produce some wishcoins for you to try on your... problem."

"I would like to find out if wishes will work," he says. "Quantity is the next problem to solve after that."

"I wouldn't be first in line," says Ehail. "If it couldn't be everybody."

"You might end up being first in line just because you happen to be the one who is here," he says. "I don't know, I am probably not thinking this through as well as I could be. Um, this is a magic bar that brings people in from all different universes, by the way."

"I'm not sure. A lot of this depends on Chris. She is the shady wish-mongerer that I know," he explains. "She might not want me hauling a lot of coins around, in which case I would have to bring one of you to my world to try it, and then it would make the most sense for it to be you because you're already here and - what about what if there were a dragon?"

"Oh. Well... well, hmm. In that case I might have to bring Chris to... or, no... I'm not sure. This is complicated. Definitely calling Chris is an early step," he says. "Um, the thing about you being the test case is that this place doesn't show up for just everyone, but once it's shown up for someone once it will keep doing that, but it won't always do it very promptly, and time moves weirdly between worlds. So I would rather ask you to wait by the door while I lean out and call Chris than complicate things by having you go find someone you think would be a better test case and convince them about the magic interdimensional bar and wait until you find a door again while your person is reachable, and then wait for both of you to find me, and then lean out the door and call Chris. It is better to have the person who will be the test case right next to me when I call Chris in case she wants to talk to them specifically. I guess if you have someone in mind that you know you can go get while still holding the door, then you could go get them. But not if they are a baby, I guess, because then you couldn't bring them into the bar?"

"I couldn't. There might be a dragon here," says Ehail, shaking her head. "Probably not in natural form, unless the dragon was also a baby, but - I couldn't. Not unless I had Ludei bother the dragon council about making sure the place was clear first."

"Okay. Then yes. I guess I will... go call Chris," he says.

"Yes?"

"I have a thing I want to use wishes for," he says. "It will probably take a lot. Milliways is involved. I can't imagine you don't know about Milliways, I will be very surprised if you don't know about Milliways."

"I know about Milliways. Go on."

"I have met someone here who I would describe as most of a dragon," he says, "and I would like her to be the rest of a dragon because being most of a dragon looks terribly uncomfortable and she seems really unhappy about it. She says there are a lot more most-of-dragons and we would like to fix them all. I don't know how big a wish it will take or even if a wish will do it at all, but I really want to try."

"We don't just hand these things out, you know."

"I am aware."

"...All right. Will your 'most of a dragon' fit through the door? I'm... going to have to make a few calls, and then I might want her to talk to me. Or to somebody."

"She is currently human-shaped and will fit through the door just fine," he says. "And probably not have very much of a problem using the phone."

"All right. I'll call you back."

"Kolya please hang up the phone," he says. "Chris is going to call me back. Also can I bring a person into our living room?"

"Sure."

Ehail has been waiting patiently.

"I talked to Chris and she is going to talk to some other shady wish-mongerers and then call me back. Would you like to come into my world to wait to talk to her or whoever she gets on the phone? Does your world have phones, do I need to explain them? And you might be waiting for a long time if I let the door close, because the frequency with which I get doors behaves unpredictably, so I can stand there holding it open if you'd rather. And I have an invisible roommate who will probably be around being invisible."

"A long time could be a week or something. That's the longest I've gone without a door when I wanted one, and wanting one makes a difference."

"I'll come in, then," says Ehail. "If you don't mind. I don't have to eat much if that's a factor."

"Sure."

"Thank you Kolya," he says, to a room that has resumed being empty by the time he finishes the sentence.

Ehail blinks at the unfamiliar magic, but follows Lazarus in and looks around without terribly much curiosity.

It is a room. There are many, many books. Lazarus perches on a couch.

Ehail looks for something to sit on, and sits on it. She skims the titles of the books, quite indiscriminate about which language she is looking at from spine to spine.

There are a lot of languages on offer! And there is not much organization to them. Although in particular, the same book will often appear in English and Russian with both copies next to each other.

"Do you mind if I read one of these?" asks Ehail.

"No, go ahead," he says.

She tips a Dostoevsky book (in the original) into her hand, and starts reading.

"Most of a dragon, huh?"

"...Y...e...s..."

"Can I talk to her?"

Ehail peers at the phone, takes it, and says, "Алло - sorry - hello?"

"Hello. So what is the problem you want to wish away, exactly?"

"Being... 'most of a dragon' is a pretty nice way to put it," says Ehail. "The central problem is that we can't fly in our natural forms. There are hundreds of us," she adds.

"I see. What are the non-central problems, then? Lazarus wasn't really clear about the details."

"...I see," she repeats. "That does sound like a problem. It might turn out to be relevant, so I have to ask: how much does it hurt?"

"Not very much to start with, but it does keep piling up over twenty years. I'm not really sure how to describe - I don't know. I could probably leap off a hundred-story building and not care about the landing if I could be sure it wasn't going to ruin my human form."

"All right," she says. "I'd like to continue this conversation in person. It shouldn't take me more than a few minutes to get there. Could you hand the phone back to Lazarus, please?"

"Okay," says Ehail agreeably. She hands the phone back to Lazarus. "How long is a minute? I know how to work out how many there are in a day, from the language, but your days might not be the same length as mine," she asks him.

He is listening to the phone at first; then he says "Yes, okay," hangs up, and looks back at Ehail. "Um, a minute is... a shortish amount of time. I don't really know how to describe it except in terms of other units of time from my world, which doesn't seem like it would help. I have clocks you can stare at, if that would be informative."

"Do they show seconds?" she inquires.

Some kind of magic, it turns out. About five minutes after Chris's niece hung up the phone, a fairly magical person supplied with a number of wishcoins appears in the hallway outside the apartment.

He gets up and goes to answer the door without quite noticing that she hasn't bothered to knock.

Ehail puts the book down, debates whether she should stand up, and winds up remaining seated but looking very attentive.

"Hi, Lazarus," she says, coming in. "Hello, most of a dragon. My name's Libby."

"My name is Ehail," says Ehail.

"He said he was going to get in touch with people who have wishing magic."

"But he didn't say anything about how the wishing magic works, specifically? How wishes are made?"

"I don't actually know," says Lazarus. "I know they come in coins and I know the coins come from people who make coins but I don't know how you produce them."

"Coins are made out of pain," says Libby. "Which is why it might be relevant how much it hurts to be most of a dragon. Normally, coins being made out of pain is a significant limiting factor, because there aren't many people willing to make them who I'm willing to trust with the ability, and the ones who fit both those criteria aren't willing to make very many. But from what you've said, if I gave you the ability to make coins, you'd have a much easier time of it coming up with enough of them to complete a lot of dragons."

"Oh. Yes. I mean, as long as it's not something about the pain that we don't have any more, like - paying attention to it or caring. Then it wouldn't work."

"I don't expect it to turn out that way. But maybe Lazarus has better information."

"I still haven't seen anyone make a coin," Lazarus points out. "But I'd guess the same way you'd guess. For however much that's worth."

"It's worth something. So - Ehail. Do you want to try making coins?"

"I will if it will help," says Ehail.

"I will be a lot happier about trying to solve your problem if I'm spending coins you create without much trouble instead of taking them out of my limited and limitedly renewable supply. But once I give you the ability to make coins, I can't take it away again," she says. "So if I do, I'd like you to think very carefully about how else you use it. Wishes can do a lot of things, and it's important to use them responsibly. Does that seem reasonable?"

"Yes, I suppose so. I'm a wizard," Ehail adds. "I'm not a very good wizard, but when I'm at home I can cast spells that can also do a lot of things. Except not this thing. I haven't gotten anywhere trying."

"That makes sense," says Ehail.

Libby smiles slightly. "I like to think so. All right. I think the most sensible order of operations here would be to design a wish, see if small change" (she gestures to the row of coins on the table) "will do the trick, and if not, I'll make you a mint - someone who can create wishcoins - and see if you can produce them easily enough to be happier about forking over a seven than my next best source."

"I don't - think I'll be able to tell, if it works, without trying to fly," says Ehail. "If you even want to test it on me instead of someone else. I guess we would have to wait for the door to that place to come back to get anyone else though."

"I will be able to tell," says Lazarus. "It will be extremely obvious."

"Oh. All right then," says Ehail.

"In that case... what exactly needs to happen, to complete a dragon? Lazarus?"

"Well... there's a kind of magic that dragons and most-of-dragons have," he says, "and it comes in amounts. If you have a dragon amount you are a dragon, and if you have a little tiny bit less than that you are most of a dragon, and if you have even less you are dead. And apparently there are dragons with more than the regular dragon amount, but I haven't met any of those. There's also some complicated stuff going on with Ehail's magic besides it being a most-of-a-dragon amount, and I think those are most-of-a-dragon things - it's sort of - continually slurping up something that is definitely not the right kind of magic from something that isn't here, to cover the gap between the amount it has and the dragon amount, and the doing-thatness of it is sticky. You said you're contagious, right?" he asks Ehail. "I think I might understand how. So my guess is that in order to properly make her the rest of a dragon, you'd have to fill in the gap with the exact right kind of magic, and stop the slurping, and ideally also ward against the possibility of someone else's slurping getting stuck on later because it definitely looks like that is how the contagiousness works."

Ehail nods when he mentions contagiousness.

Lazarus blinks.

"The procedure for making coins is to experience an amount of pain and then move it across your mind," says Libby. "It's also helpful to be thinking about where you want the coin to appear - it will be somewhere in physical contact with your body, but exactly where is up to you. Hands are usually convenient."

"How much is enough?" asks Ehail. "I mean, do I need a knife, or...?"

"The amount that produces a three is very small - it might not be the exact minimum of pain it's possible for a person to experience, but it's close to it," she says. "You don't need a knife."

"Okay." Ehail pinches her earlobe. In her other hand appears a triangle the same color as her hair.

"So that seemed to work as expected," says Libby. "Somewhat more than that should get you a four - still not an amount usually associated with serious injury. Fives are about broken-arm level. Sixes are a ways past that. If you don't feel like breaking any limbs, I can probably come up with a magical solution that will let you generate pain more conveniently without damaging anything."

"I don't think you have lights here so it would be inconvenient to have a broken limb if I were going to use it. It's pretty hard to walk on a broken leg or pick up anything heavy with a broken arm." She bites her thumb, just barely not hard enough to break skin, and produces a silver square, then puts both coins on the table.

Ehail picks it up and looks at it. "Do I hold the buttons down or just press them once...?"

"While you hold down a button, you get the minimum amount of pain required to make the appropriate coin. The number says how much that is, on a scale where one is the minimum for a three. I've never bothered to find out the exact proportions before, so I decided I might as well make it show them while I was at it."

"Okay." Ehail holds the triangle, confirms that it reads '1', and then proceeds up through the other buttons, one at a time. "It goes up by powers of ten," she says, lining up a row of stars on the table calmly.

...Lazarus blinks at her, but doesn't say anything.

"What didn't work?" asks Ehail, still producing stars one by one.

Libby scoops them up, and vanishes them, and...

Lazarus abruptly sits up straighter. "It worked! You're the rest of a dragon!"

"Very definitely really," says Lazarus. "And you are impervious to slurpy contagion. Your magic looks much happier now."

"Can I - is there someplace I can go try - it's not that I don't believe you but -"

"It would probably be moderately inconvenient for a dragon to be seen flying around above Toronto," he says. "People might be alarmed. Libby? Clever magical solutions?"

"Coming right up," she says, smiling slightly. "Let's see... I could teleport us to somewhere extremely remote, and make us temporarily invisible to the rest of the world. Would that suit?"

"Yes," says Ehail. "...There aren't any dragons anywhere around, are there? If he's wrong?"

"There aren't any dragons anywhere around," says Libby. "As far as I know. It seems very unlikely that someone else from this world would happen to have brought a dragon from your world here from Milliways just now and would happen to bring them to the same remote location I teleport us to."

"Okay. Oh - um, when I shift there will probably be a few hundred years of lost scales. Is that a problem?"

"No. I'll teleport us now," she says, and then they are somewhere else. Specifically, they are on a large flat grassy area with no other people and very few notable geographic features in sight.

"...I did not know Earth locations came in this much flat," says Lazarus, looking around. "That is a lot of flat."

"I thought it might be reassuring," says Libby. "Now, in the extremely unlikely event that a dragon somehow showed up in this world, we would see them coming from miles away unless they also happened to teleport directly on top of us. But in case of passersby, we're also all invisible to anyone but each other until I take us back."

Lazarus applauds.

Ehail doesn't come down for a while.

"See? You are all of a dragon!" he says, beaming.

She is making big lazy circles over him and Libby. After some time, she breathes a silver plume of fire; her tail lashes happily when it works as expected.

Lazarus continues to be delighted about all this.

"You're welcome," says Libby. "Do you happen to know the exact population of - most-of-dragons in your world? If you did, you could save time by making enough eights before we go back to your world."

"I don't know it exactly. I can just make extras, though. New babies hatch all the time. Is there a reason not to make them back in my world?"

"There's no reason not to make them back in your world - although if you want to use them back in your world, I'll have to tell you how to do it safely. I just thought you might prefer to have a supply saved up ahead of time, to make going around distributing the wishes that little bit more efficient. How is the population arranged, anyway? Will you be able to find them all?"

"Some of them very easily - the rest will be harder, they're scattered, but this will be news, I'm sure they will all be found sooner or later, and the babies will be easier to locate than anyone else and they're the most important to do quickly. Most of us grow up in one of four houses. Some stay after that. The dragon council knows where to find anyone who's with their - families."

"Four," she says. "And there's three of us. If I brought Chris, and if you could arrange to vouch for us in all four places first, we could complete all the babies pretty quickly. In which case it would be very useful to have a supply of coins ahead of time, so we wouldn't need to teleport back and forth between you and our respective locations to get more."

"Okay." Ehail shifts back to her human form, a faint smile on her lips. "I could do that."

Libby smiles back.

"Should I just start making them here...? I don't have anywhere good to put them and they might get lost with all the scales since they're the same color."

"Hmm... I could give you something like I have, a wish that keeps your coins tucked away where only you can get at them," she says. "It's very convenient. Although while we're at it I think I might upgrade mine, now that I know there are potentially more kinds; it's handling the eights a little inelegantly. If you give me a couple of sixes and a little time to think, I'm sure I can come up with something better."

"Okay." Ehail makes three more sixes and hands them over.

"That is much more elegant than what you previously had," he says. "If I'm being drafted as a dragon completion assistant, then - yes, I suppose, all right."

She wishes on the third six. "There."

"Miracle-worker," suggests Ehail, when Lazarus says "dragon completion assistant".

"Dragon completion assistant might be more fun to say," he says contemplatively. "And less self-aggrandizing."

"You'll be called it anyway. It's a miracle. I'm a miracle."

"Well. Okay then."

Ehail sets about making the eight-pointed ones, slightly stiff but not complaining.

"At some convenient moment I can take us back to Lazarus's place," Libby mentions. "Or anywhere else, for that matter, but I'm not getting much of a tourist vibe from you."

"Not really," agrees Ehail. "I do think maybe when all the miracles have been handed out I might fly to the moon..."

"There's no particular reason not to show you our moon while you're here," she says. "If you're interested, and feel like sparing a six to take care of the atmosphere problem. I'm not sure what your situation is exactly, but around here, we need to breathe air and the moon doesn't have any."

"...Why wouldn't it have any?"

"Air collects around planets and places much smaller than planets aren't big enough to collect any. If you want a more complete and rigorous answer, I have an astrophysicist on call."

"I suppose that suffices. There must just be less air here in general, I suppose."

"Seems like a reasonable theory."

"It's not any trouble? Regardless of the no air thing?"

"Not at all. The slight amount of trouble it could potentially be would be covered if you gave me a six so I could arrange for the no air thing not to be a problem."

Ehail momentarily downshifts to six, hands over a six, and goes back to accumulating eights.

"Goodness," says Lazarus. "That's certainly comprehensive. Why not?"

Ehail nods.

"So tell me about your world," Libby suggests. "Right now all I know is that it has four houses full of most-of-dragons, and a moon with atmosphere."

"Most people aren't dragons or - shrens, that's the word for the most-of-dragons - most people are other things instead. There's a very high dragon infant mortality rate and they intermarry a lot. There's humans, like you, and some other things. Um. There's air everywhere? If that's your planet, it looks round from here; ours is square. There are three major continents on it unless you count Mekand in which case there are four."

"That's our planet," Libby confirms. "Earth. It's a sphere, plus details. All of the planets in this universe are spheres with details, as far as I know."

"Oh. I suppose that would work all right as long as they're big enough. And there's several kinds of magic. I do wizardry, which anybody can learn - from there, anyway, I don't know if you could. And some people are born lights, or sorcerers, or with the potential to become mages, and some people learn witchcraft, and there are species that can do specific kinds of magic too. Like dragons and what we do."

"I will be fascinated to see all of these kinds of magic," says Lazarus. "What do they do, exactly?"

"Um, well, you can see dragon magic. I'm in the blue group. We get extra shapeshifting slots. The green group is empaths, and the red group is better with fire, and the white group at flying - the shrens from those groups get a particularly sour deal - and the black group has better senses, and the violet group is effectively aquatic. Wizardy can do most things. I do it for household maintenance kinds of stuff, usually. Sorcerers are - telekinetic, and mages once they're activated each control an element, and lights are healers. Witches make potions."

"Hmm, yes," he says. "And I've met a red-group dragon, in Milliways, before. What sorts of potions do witches make?"

"Lots of things - stuff for conditions too small to bother a light about. Or for lights, since they don't work on each other. Shampoo. Birth control. Appetite suppressants. I don't really know much about it."

"I suppose I will have to find and stare at a witch, then," says Lazarus.

"I'm not sure if they'd look different from anyone else. Anyone can be one and they don't even use their channeling capacities."

"It will be interesting to find out!"

"In that case, I suggest we go back to Lazarus's place. Someone is going to need to open a door eventually if we want to find Milliways again, and I notice a distinct lack of those up here."

Ehail nods.

And they are back in Lazarus's apartment.

"Hello Kolya I went to the moon!" says Lazarus, beaming. There is no response, but this doesn't seem to perturb him.

Libby has already discovered, in dealing with the double handful of sevens she collected earlier, that a single coin can apply safety to many more of its own level. It won't be a problem. She might ask for an extra six and an extra seven to get up to that level in the first place, but she won't need more than that, in an absolute sense.

Ehail picks up the Dostoevsky she was looking at before again.

"I think I'll go tell Chris what an interesting afternoon I've just had," says Libby. "If you find Milliways, call me. I'll do likewise."

"Okay," says Lazarus.

And away she goes.

Ehail looks up when she leaves - then goes back to the book.

An hour or so later, the elusive Kolya announces from the hallway, "There's a bar in the closet."

Ehail puts her book down and gets up and looks for the source of the voice.

"Hi."

"Hi. You must be Kolya?"

"Да. And you're Ehail, I heard."

"Да." (Her accent is perfect - in fact, it's exactly his.) "Would you rather speak Russian?"

He shrugs. "Not especially."

Lazarus enters the hallway, trailing Libby and a blonde woman who is presumably her aunt.

"Hi, Kolya," says Chris, to the seemingly empty air previously occupied by a visible Kolya. "Or not. As long as you've still got the door, I guess."

The narrow closet door remains open, with Milliways on the other side.

In goes Ehail, tightly clutching her pocket calculator.

"How many eights have you got?" inquires Libby as the rest of them follow her in. "We should divide them up equally, and then I'll safe them. It takes one coin to do one of the next level up, or one coin to do a batch of the same level - I haven't discovered a limit on batch size yet. Hmm, I should give the coin sorters a feature for passing directly to someone else's sorter, faster that way and with less chance of dropping any - spare me a six? It shouldn't take more than that to make the change for all four of us."

"Four hundred and twenty, now." Ehail makes her a six.

"All right. So - " (she wishes on the six) " - a hundred and five each to me, Chris, and Lazarus. Hopefully the extras I've got will be enough to safe them all."

"When I let us into my world where does it let us out? Where I came? That's in my house. I can teleport to one of the others but I've never been to the other two before."

"Yes, we'll come out exactly where you came in - likely to be exactly when, for that matter. I expect to be able to teleport to them, and if not I expect to be able to fix that very quickly with coins. The teleportation power I'm using doesn't require specification in much depth; if there's only four houses I don't think it will be hard to describe them uniquely."

"Mine's Keppine, I can teleport to Lator, and the others are Sansee and Priskta. Priskta's an iceberg in the middle of the ocean."

"Send the Canadian," Chris suggests.

Lazarus snrks. "Oh, if you must. But, er - if you don't mind - I would like a six to protect myself against potential icebergy discomforts. That's the right denomination for accumulating general magical attributes, isn't it?" he inquires of Libby.

"Yep."

"And I can take someone to Lator and then come back to Keppine myself?" hazards Ehail. "If you talk to any of the house leaders - speaking an offworld language and claiming offworld miracles will at least get you a test subject and once you have one of those you'll get the babies."

"Yes," says Libby. "I expect it'll be worth you making the introductions at Lator, but if you don't know anyone at the other two, I'm sure Chris and Lazarus can cope. Oh, hmm - if the other houses want to try adult test subjects first, they might not have room for test flights where they are, and if your common local version of teleportation requires actually having been to the place in question, it's likely to be much faster if I just give Chris and Lazarus the version I have in case no one has been to somewhere appropriately remote. Some sixes, please?"

"Okay," says Ehail, handing over sixes to appropriate recipients. "The bottom of the world - or a side or the moon - would be safe."

"Thank you. 'The centre of the bottom of the world' would be a good enough specification for my teleportation power," she adds, for Chris and Lazarus's benefit.

"And it certainly sounds remote," says Lazarus. He contemplates icebergy discomforts, and then spends his sixes to copy Libby's teleportation power and award himself a generalized defense against inclement weather that includes Libby's extremely well-designed air ward as a defense against drowning.

Ehail distributes eights.

"Goodness," says Lazarus.

"All safe," Libby announces a moment later, although everyone's coin storage is already providing this information. "Okay. So we go through the door; Lazarus teleports to Priskta, Chris to Sansee, Ehail takes me to Lator for introductions and then returns to Keppine. We all complete as many dragons as our coin supplies will catch, babies first after any necessary demonstrations. And then I suppose we meet up at the Keppine house again, if you don't mind, Ehail - it seems logical - and I'm sure we can make comfortable living arrangements until someone finds a Milliways door again. The bottom of the world and a little magic, if nothing else. Sound good?"

"Meeting at Keppine is fine. Yes," says Ehail, starting to shake a little.

"Good," says Libby. "In that case, you can open the door."

They don't have to barely fit for long, because Lazarus teleports away promptly -

- and Chris is hardly a moment behind.

Libby brings herself and Ehail to the entrance of the Lator shren house as soon as it's clear that, for whatever reason, she's going to be quicker on the draw. Perhaps the local teleport procedure takes time, or perhaps Ehail is just (understandably) a little off-balance.

"My name's Libby," she says on the way, because doing so will not slow her down any. "I gather it'll be best to do oldest first, among the ones who are still too young to cheat at flying - you'll have to point out the order if it's not very obvious. But my miracles work quickly, so it won't ultimately make an enormous difference."

Very nearly as soon as she touches the baby, Libby says, "You can fly now. Try it."

"Your turn, go on," Libby says to the ruby.

"Go on - you too," she says to the diamond and the red, because there's been time to make the wish for both of them - the bottleneck here seems to be telling them she's done it.

"I have eighty miracles left," she says, "before I have to go back to Ehail and get more." And then, with a slight smile, "Make that seventy-nine."

"The others aren't urg - what, me?"

She shrugs. "You're right in front of me. We plan to get everyone. I didn't see any point in wasting time."

"All right," says Jensal. "Well, let's elsewise go youngest to oldest, maybe some parents will come for their children after all - I gather from the fact that the once-cured ones didn't fall out of the air instantly that when you've miracled somebody they stay that way?"

"Yes," she says. "My miracles are well-designed."

"All right. Dorms are this way. Do you need to see the children or can we just walk briskly down the hall and make an announcement at dinner?"

"I could probably make do with nothing but a list of names as long as there weren't any duplicates," she says. "All I need in order to miracle someone is a way to uniquely specify them. If 'the shren in this house called So-and-so' refers to exactly one person, it should work."

"No duplicate names in the house." Jensal leads Libby to her office and produces, after a little file-cabinet rifling, a list of young shrens in various age tiers.

"That's all until - what was the limiting factor, exactly? Did I correctly understand there to be one?"

"I'll volunteer if you'll have me," says Jensal. "Or possibly Rethkan, or Miski - what's the plan for in four thousand years or so when nobody's who's been through a full course of esu is still alive?"

"You'll have four thousand years or so to figure that out," she says. "Among other things, I expect that with enough carefully applied magic, any of you who want to be can be made immortal. I don't know for sure, of course, but it seems likely. And you seem like a pretty good minting candidate to me."

"I suppose once we're all dragons we'll be able to get the council to cooperate on our research projects," mutters Jensal. "Thank you. What do I have to do?"

"Thank you," says Jensal. She pokes the star button first, makes a coin - not in solid turquoise blue, but in a sort of unassuming dun with faint veins of her hair color traced through it, frowns thoughtfully, and then prods the button for the eights. She doesn't visibly stiffen like Ehail did, though her brow wrinkles a little. "I see. What coins do I use to wish the sevens and eights safe?"

"A coin will safe one coin of the level directly above it and a whole batch of coins its own level - the biggest batch I've done so far is four hundred and twenty. It's possible but debatably useful to safe the smaller coins, too - in theory they carry the same kind of hazard as the bigger ones, in practice they don't do enough damage to be noticeable - and for that, as far as I can tell, one coin will safe any number of miscellaneous smaller coins."

Jensal nods. "But you can't do miracles in batches?" she asks.

"I haven't tried yet. It might take some trial and error to find a batch size that works, and it's a little harder to clearly mark out a group of people than one person at a time; I didn't feel like experimenting when I knew that it worked fine one at a time and there wasn't a harsh limit on my coin supply. If you want to, though, go right ahead. If you make a wish that's too much for the coin you're using to handle, it just does nothing - the only thing you'll lose is the time it takes you to try it."

Jensal nods and pulls out another list of house residents. Eventually she announces, "I can do five at a time."

"Well, that's convenient," says Libby.

"Mm-hm." Jensal goes through the rest of the list. "The other houses are being taken care of?"

"Yes. Ehail's doing hers, and I sent my friend who can see magic to the iceberg and my aunt to the other one. With the handy capability to teleport to the bottom of the world in case any skeptical administrators want to go for test flights. I suppose if you wanted to you could send me after them with a bigger supply of coins and the news that batches of five work, but I'd expect them to have completed all the babies by now, so it shouldn't be too urgent."

Jensal nods and gets a green crystal out of a desk drawer. She thwacks it against the edge of her desk and holds it to her ear. "Hello, it's - No. No, none of the children have escaped. It - no." She switches to an incomprehensible language and starts talking sharply into the crystal.

"Hello!" says Lazarus. "I'm from another world and I can turn shrens into dragons. I just did it to all of your babies that I could find - there were eighteen - so you should go get them and tell them they can fly now. I can do the same thing for everyone else afterward but the babies are the most important, that looks extremely uncomfortable - I can also see magic, that is how I can tell. If you want I can make you a dragon too and teleport you to the bottom of the world so you can fly around a little and verify that I'm not kidding, but it will be faster for the babies if you skip that part and I am definitely not kidding."

The mercreature blinks clear eyelids, then hoists itself out of the water, turning once it's clear of the tunnel into a brown dwarf in cold-weather gear. "How did you get here, supposed miracle-worker?" he asks, producing a green crystal from his pocket. He thumps it against the iceberg.

"Through an interdimensional hub called Milliways," he says, peering at the crystal. "I met a dragon there and then I met a shren and her magic looked very uncomfortable, yours does too, would you like to be a dragon while you're standing around calling people on your mysterious artifact? It won't take any extra time."

"It's - three hundred fifteen residents at the moment," says the only adult present, turning into a dwarf again to watch the babies fly.

"Quaro." He's still staring at the children.

"Well. Hi. I'm about halfway through now, I think. No one's going to complain about this afterward, are they? I suppose I could have asked everyone first, but I'm not very aquatic, and if the state of continued shrenness has any advantages I certainly can't detect them..."

"No. No one's going to complain," says Quaro faintly.

"Oh good," says Lazarus.

"Do we - are we supposed to come up with some way to pay you, or - something?"

"Not really," he says. "It just seemed like the obvious thing to do once I found out I could. If you have an irrepressible urge to do me favours anyway, I suppose I won't stop you, but I can't think of anything I particularly want. Oh, and there are other people at the other three houses already doing the same thing, in case you were worried about them."

"Yes! Barring some kind of terrible catastrophe where everyone involved dies, but that is extremely unlikely," he says. "And I suppose there might be a problem in - hmm - what's the usual dragon lifespan?"

"...Average 2500 years, sometimes as much as four thousand, it's unpredictable."

"I wonder if I can do something about that," he muses. "If I can't, there might be a miracle shortage in a few thousand years."

"...Oh?" asks Quaro weakly.

"The kind of magic that miracles are made of comes from my world, but it is extremely difficult to make it in large enough units to miracle with - specifically, it is extremely painful to do that. So of course shrens and ex-shrens are much better at it than any of the people from my world who can. But that's only because of how you grew up, so when the last person who was a shren for the first twenty years of their life dies of old age, there won't be anyone left who can do it that easily. So I guess I should try to figure out why dragons die of old age, because I suspect it is a magic thing and I am very good at figuring out magic things."

"Oh. I mean," says Quaro, "even four thousand years with no shrens - plus I guess if you can stockpile it a while after that - would be wonderful..."

"Hmm. And I suppose if you stockpiled it the right way, then after you ran out of miracles the next few shrens to grow up like that could get the magic to make more... but I'm sure there are still plenty of dragons who would rather not die of old age if they can help it, and it would be nice if there didn't have to be periodic gaps in miracle coverage."

Quaro doesn't follow all of this explanation, but he nods at the last remark.

"And now I'm done dragoning everyone in this iceberg," he adds.

"Thank you," says Quaro. He shifts his weight slightly, but doesn't go anywhere.

"You're welcome!" he says cheerfully. "And none of you can catch shrenness again now. Not that I expect that to be much of a hazard after today."

"New ones will still hatch," says Quaro. "Unless you can miracle them in the egg. Did you get the home shrens?"

"What's a home shren?"

"Sometimes the parents will keep theirs instead of destroying the egg or sending them to one of the houses. I can't tell you where they are, but the council can, they have to have a map so dragons know where not to go." He pulls out his crystal again, offers it to Lazarus.

Lazarus peers at the crystal some more. "Hmm. Well, all right then. They won't mind if I call them?"

"They'll panic like headless chickens because the only reason I have the crystal is so if necessary I can warn them about rogue shrens. But they'll listen when you tell them why you're calling."

"Hmm," he repeats. He takes the crystal and strikes it. (Magically speaking it is extremely straightforward and, despite what he called it earlier, its method of operation is not really very mysterious at all.)

The voice on the other end, predictably enough, doesn't answer in English.

"Hi! I'm a miracle distributor and I would like a list of all the home shrens so I can go turn them into dragons. I have already done it for everyone on this iceberg."

"...You're Quaro's miracle-worker, huh?" says the fellow from the dragon council.

"Yes I am."

"Can you prove it?"

"I am at this very moment looking at eighteen baby ex-shrens happily flying around. They are extremely cute. Would you like to come see them for yourself, or did you have some other kind of proof in mind?"

"...I'll send someone to have a look. In the meantime I can give out the addresses regardless - you just want the ones under twenty or all the juveniles with known whereabouts?"

"That depends on how many there are. Definitely the ones under twenty, but if the rest are a very long list then I should probably wait to get to them until I've dragoned all the little ones and then gone and told them about it."

"Right then..." The dragon starts listing various addresses; he renders numbers into English where applicable but most of the rest of it is in an assortment of other languages.

Lazarus decides that the most obvious way to keep them all straight would be to teleport to each one as the dragon lists them. One, two, three, four, five - with those still fresh in his mind, he makes a wish - six, seven, eight...

"...Noets, Drast. That's the last one," concludes the dragon. "Is that everything besides the person en route to inspecting the site of the violets' house?"

Quaro's not there anymore. Perhaps he has disappeared into the iceberg to share the news, since there are now some larger dragons in the air too.

It's a house. It's very remote; this appears to be a farm of some kind.

Someone answers the door; she's got matte black hair that matches her baby's scales where he's sniffling in her arms. "I beg your pardon?" she says. She looks like it's possible that she hasn't had a good night's sleep in days.

"I am a miracle worker from another world and I just turned your baby shren into a dragon," he repeats. "He can fly now."

The rest of them are more or less like this, though the ones with two parents present tend to have at least one lucid enough to make perfunctory thankful conversation.

He waves goodbye to the youngest baby and returns to the iceberg ledge to see if Quaro or anyone who might be willing to give Quaro his crystal back is nearby.

There are more dragons in the air now. One of them could be Quaro; it's kind of hard to tell.

"I can get Quaro for you," volunteers the baby. "He is up but I can go up."

"You can! You can go up," says Lazarus. "I'm very glad you can go up."

"I can go up because miracles! Do you want Quaro now?"

"Yes, all right."

The little dragon licks him on the cheek, probably affectionately given the context, and flutters up to chase a large lazily gliding amethyst. Said large lazily gliding amethyst listens, then turns into a ptarmigan and flies down and then turns into a dwarf again. "Belthee said you wanted to see me."

"I came to give you your crystal back," he says, handing it over. "I didn't mean to interrupt your flying, but then Belthee offered to go get you and I found it very difficult to turn him down, on account of he's adorable."

Quaro laughs and takes the crystal. "Thank you." He pauses, then adds softly, "Inasotho."

"Hmm?" says Lazarus.

"Draconic. It translates to 'thank you'."

Meanwhile in Esmaar, Jensal gets off her own council crystal. "I've convinced her - that or the conversation I heard going on in the background did. I suppose all four of these are ringing to wake the dead on the council's end."

"Probably. Who did you convince of what, exactly?"

"Convinced my Dragon Council contact that there is a cure and they need to tell all the dragons and enough news outlets to notify all the adult shrens who don't live in the house and have fallen out of contact."

"Aha," she says. "Yes, that seems like a good plan."

"Yes. Of course, some shrens make themselves rather thoroughly scarce. If there are stragglers on record in a month I'll start coordinating miracle green-groups who've encountered the missing before, I suppose."

"My friend who sees magic could potentially help with that," she says. "So could wishcoins, for that matter. A model of the planet that shows little flags wherever there's a shren would only take a five."

"That would do it too; it's unclear to what extent we're being invited to impose on you."

"I'm inclined to be very helpful," she says. "So is Lazarus. Lazarus is motivated by general altruism and a fascination with new and interesting kinds of magic; I am motivated by general altruism and the potential to obtain a lot of coins from someone who won't mind producing them. If I'm magnificently lucky, somewhere in this world there could be a former or soon-to-be-former shren who'd like the idea of moving to my world to mint for me, but even the number of sevens you or Ehail could produce in five minutes would be a help."

"What do you do with them besides miracles for shrens?" inquires Jensal.

"Previously, not very much," she says. "Mostly I paid attention to see if any new mints were popping up so I could find them and make sure they were responsible people. Occasionally I gave a little bit of magic to someone who seemed like they'd use it well. But now that I've seen firsthand how much magic it's possible for one person to produce, I'm thinking of changing my approach. I don't have anything I'd describe as a plan yet, but broadly speaking, what I do is help people find things they're good at and enjoy doing and then arrange for them to do those things. I don't strictly speaking need large amounts of magic to do that, but it would still be something of a game-changer."

"Some people aren't good at good things," observes Jensal.

"On the whole, I prefer to make those kinds of arrangements for people who are. I like solving problems; I don't like creating them."

Jensal nods once. "Well, the shren houses are going to evaporate, more or less overnight, so there'll be plenty of unemployed miracles to sift through soon."

"Yes," she says. "I'm looking forward to it. Plenty of opportunity for my favourite pastime. It's just a pity I don't know more about this world; there's a limit to how helpful I can be without good background knowledge."

"I can tell you some things. I've been around a while, which means I've accumulated a lot, though it's neither guaranteed to be perfectly within date nor particularly well-traveled."

"Well, it'll be a start."

"Seen anything that's confused you yet? I don't know where you're from, but you look human, so it can't be that far a leap."

"I think the most obvious difference is that you seem to use magic for things that are done by mass-produced non-magical gadgetry in my world," she says. "Like lighting, and whatever you called the dragon council with. Is - I'm going to guess wizardry, based on what I've heard - is wizardry that commonplace here?"

"Anyone can learn it, and it's steady money - you have to invest in the schooling to be a full wizard, but enough people do. And it's not hard to learn just one spell or a small handful if that's all you want, so there's assembly lines of people who know - say - how to enchant communication crystals but nothing else, who do that after a two-week training course all day long. People learn perhaps ten household-use spells so they don't have to hire people to dust. People with teleportation licenses. That sort of thing. There's a few countries that don't use magic and a couple of species that can't use wizardry, but it's common most everywhere else."

"Hmm," says Libby. "Do you have interworld transportation? With local magic, I mean, not relying on anything from outside the world?"

"It exists. I'm not personally a wizard; you'd have to talk to Ehail. Or some other wizard. There's a school of them in this town, but I haven't interacted with it in the last few decades because the headmaster married a dragon."

"Noted. But the fact that it exists is heartening," she says. "The kind of interworld transportation that got me here works on its own unpredictable schedule; it's nice to have other options."

"It's not commonplace, but why that might be I'm unsure."

"I'll see if I can find out."

Jensal nods. "What else do you want to know?"

"Hmmm. How about an extremely basic geography lesson?" she suggests. "Most of what I know about your world is its shape. I haven't so much as seen a map yet."

"Extremely basic, all right." Jensal pulls out a sheet of square paper and loosely outlines three continents and some major islands. She draws a little cross in one of them. "We are here. Continent's called Espaal, country's called Esmaar. This continent is Nanela, this one's Anaist, the giant island is Mekand, these islands are various other countries - Petar Erubia Egeria - Ehail's house is here, the Corenta house is here, the iceberg one is here." She draws in a little island in the place where Mekand, Nanela, and Anaiast nearly touch: "That's Dragon Island, the council bases its operations there, you're not allowed on it unless you're a dragon or a thudia. Nanela's got three big countries -" sketch, sketch, "and a lot of informal sparsely inhabited wildnerness. Espaal's got six big countries. Anaist has got lots of little countries I'm not going to draw. Most of this north coast is part of Ertydo though. Mekand's it's own country. There's six nations of merfolk at least according to the recognition of abovewater governments; it might be more complicated down there, Quaro -" she taps the mark of the location of the iceberg house - "would know better than me."

Libby nods, examining the map. "It's a little weird that the edges of the map correspond to actual edges," she comments. "I'm used to spherical planets; if you want to map those on flat paper you have to pull weird geometric tricks and wraparound is unavoidable. But here, you conveniently produce paper the same shape as your planet."

"I don't think the choice of paper shape is related, but yes, it's handy if you want to draw an impromptu map. The oceans go through in some places, and everything's about the same shape on the bottom, but there's effectively nothing there. Or on the sides."

"Hmm, I didn't know the oceans went through. I did know the bottom was uninhabited - Ehail suggested it as a good location for taking skeptics on test flights."

"Occasionally someone tries to colonize it, but it's not near anything, and people who can teleport usually can also afford nicer places to live than halfhearted attempts at colonization. There's nothing to mine, the soil's worthless for growing anything, and no country considers it a successful escape from their jurisdiction if one flees there pursued by the law. So, it's empty, though I can't guarantee that you wouldn't find a hermit or three if you looked very hard."

"Hmm," says Libby. "For some reason I'm idly daydreaming about colonizing it myself, but that does sound impractical. If I ever have that much magic to spare I might as well just make my own planet. I get more design input that way."

Jensal raises an eyebrow. "I suppose that follows."

"I imagine there are a lot of things that would be easier with my very own planet. No rush on that, though. When are you going to make your announcement to the house?"

"Dinner for the general announcement. I'll warn the minders of the smaller children, first, and I'm sure there's already grapevine reports, but."

"And when's dinner? I'd like to attend the announcement if it's convenient, but I'd also like to go check up on Ehail and Lazarus and Chris."

"Two angles. You can be present if you like. So can your friends."