"I wonder how bad of an idea it would be to... oh, wow, an even worse idea than I thought," says Miles. "Why does this world contain so many things that kill you immediately if you get them wrong?"

"I'm not sure what idea just turned out to be so terrible, so I can't really comment," remarks Kaylo.

"Try to turn into a dragon. You run on a resource of some kind, but you don't actually expend it in the ordinary course of operating your dragon-ness, which is damn lucky for you because if you lost more than a drop the result would be instant death," says Miles. "And if it was just a drop I can't quite tell what happens but it doesn't seem to be anything good. All things considered I think I will steer clear of trying to duplicate that state of affairs for myself."

"Oookay. I'll just... continue being a dragon, then."

"It seems to be working out for you!"

"I'm a fan. At what point in the process of thinking about turning into one did you observe the problem with the idea? And how?"

"I thought of the idea of trying, looked at the example dragon in front of me to see what sorts of things might happen if I got it wrong, and discovered that the mechanism of dragonhood has terrible disasters lying in wait for anybody who violates its standard assumptions. I could take years to get precise enough with rilte to be comfortable trying to copy that mechanism, and I wouldn't throw naharr at it for the yearly tax revenue of the Cetagandan Empire."

"Reasonable of you."

"I thought so, yeah."

"So if the results vary, what subset of possible taieli did you walk away with? Well. Get summoned away with."

"Results vary on the Sense, and there's some personal aptitude and preference in the equation, but in theory I'm capable of doing the same things with taieli as any other atailora with access to the same materials. Having a functionality Sense does make it a lot easier to do anything for which analyzing systems and mechanisms is a help, and I am personally pretty drawn to rilte and pretty unsettled by epru."