"Which I appreciate very much. I'm a theoretician. I want to get a really good look at your magic and figure out how it's doing all that and what else it could do."

"Well, there's a wizardry analysis that sees ialdae but it's not very good and the wizard who invented it wouldn't tell me anything about how it worked," she says. "Ialdae can see itself much better. You're a dragon, so you could probably catch ialdae yourself, and then I could probably teach you how to see magic with it, if you want."

"Yes."

"Okay... the usual way dragons catch ialdae is by getting magic transplants, and you don't need one right now but I could give you one anyway, it's perfectly safe," she says. "Otherwise I'd have to figure out a different way to get a lot of ialdae on you. Levitating people for a long time works but I think it might not work as fast."

"The magic transplant is the same thing the old people are getting? I think I'd rather hold off on that until I know to my satisfaction what it is besides perfectly safe; at the rate you and your friends have been going there won't be any dragon magic left even as a museum piece soon."

"Do you know the incantation and pull for the ialdae analysis?"

She shakes her head. "I haven't seen it cast very often or very recently. Where are we, anyway?"

"Esmaar."

"I was in Esmaar before you called me, too. Do you happen to know where Parliament is? I met a nice vampire who works there, and I want to offer to make him immortal now that I know how to do that for vampires."

"...Parliament's in Daasen. Are you just going down a list of species?"

"Vampires were the next obvious one after dragons because their lifespans are obviously determined by magic," she says. "I think I'll have to invent something different and more general for everyone else, because I don't think lifespan is that simple for most species. And I think it might be hard to tell if something I try has worked, depending on what it is exactly. When there's magic directly involved then I can just see what's happening, but plain biology is much trickier, I'm not at all sure how to teach ialdae to see that."

"There's biology analyses but I don't know how they interact with what you do."

"I don't know either, but I should probably find out. If you're a theoretician are you the sort of person who'd be interested to know that some vampires have a kind of magic that lets them hear objects talking? I found that out today."

"Vampiric inanimate audition? That's psych stuff, I'm not particularly into psych stuff."

"If by 'psych stuff' you mean 'not a real kind of magic', ialdae disagrees," she says. "I didn't know about it at all until I saw it with ialdae and asked the vampire about it and she said most people think she is just crazy."

"That's not even a mild mental illness. Most of the vampires who get it wind up in mental hospitals, can't live on their own or even with amateurs minding them."

"...Right. Well, this isn't the most interesting thing I've learned this month, is it."

"I guess not. But it seems like the sort of thing people should probably know. I mean, if it drives most people crazy then maybe the best thing to do with them might be to take away the hearing magic instead of just leaving them in mental hospitals to be yammered at by the walls..."

"Well, yes, now that you've pointed this out that does seem obvious, but psych wizardry was not making any headway on it for apparently obvious reasons."

"Are you the sort of theoretician who publishes results, and if so, could you let people know about this one in between figuring out ialdae?"

"Aaah - look, are you really as young as you look?"

"I'm seven years old."

"Okay. I'm about a hundred sixty, which for dragons is not yet adult, and you are a seven-year-old miracle worker so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have noticed that adults are often terrible about paying attention to non-adults. Yes?"