"Well... if nobody wakes them up, they might oversleep and miss the start of spring," he says. "I guess they must figure it out somehow in the places where there aren't any ponies to help, but I don't know, I've only ever lived in Equestria. And bunny censuses are important for tracking the bunny population, obviously, so you can tell if there's a change that doesn't look right and might mean something weird is happening to the bunnies. Cordial could probably explain it better, she's the one who takes them."

"These are like... farmed bunnies?" wonders Saasnil.

"No...? What would you farm a bunny for?"

"Dinner," says Korulen.

"...Ew," says Joy. "Ponies don't eat, like, creatures."

"Some dragons eat creatures, but I'm civilized, I eat plants and eggs and milk and stuff. And gemstones. Gemstones are tasty."

"Okay, well, we eat plants and eggs and milk too but not gemstones, although I guess if you don't care where they're from it'd be easy to - I mean, if you were going to stay, but we do have to send you home in a few degrees," says Korulen.

Joy perks up intriguedly. "It'd be easy to what?"

"Oh, it's easy to conjure up gemstones, it's illegal to sell them so people mostly don't do it but it's not illegal to eat them," says Korulen.

"Cooooooool. Can you give me a bunch of gemstones when you send me back? If it's not too much trouble, I mean? It's hard to find them at home."

"I mean, to actually give them to you we'd have to do a much more complicated spell or take down the ward," says Korulen dubiously.

"Oh. Okay. Don't worry about it, then."

"Sorry," says Saasnil.

"It's okay. What do you mean by take down the ward, anyway?"

"Well, we didn't know we were going to get a friendly little dragon," explains Korulen. "We could have gotten anybody when we cast the summoning spell, it's random, it could've been somebody dangerous."

"Oh," he says. "That makes sense."

"Yeah. But you aren't going to be stuck for long, soon Nemaar will get out of his class and we can prove we could cast the spell and then you go back where we got you," Korulen says.

"What if I wanna come back? This place seems pretty cool."

"I mean, I guess we could summon you again with a non-random spell? But we are completely not allowed to let you out of the ward without getting you checked over first," says Korulen. "We weren't really allowed to summon you in the first place but that's less for safety reasons, more just we aren't graduated enough to do this big a spell unsupervised except we completely pulled it off because here you are."

"Oh. Okay."

"Like I could get my mom to check you but she'd want to know why we'd met a friendly little dragon from another world and wanted to summon him. I'm sorry."

"It's fine, don't worry about it."

"Okay. But we can chat while we're waiting for Nemaar's class to get out, if there's more stuff you wanna know about our world."

"Sure!" he says brightly. "Like what's up with your weird magic, and how do you turn the seasons if it doesn't involve waking up creatures?"