"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?"

"Yes," she agrees. "One of the vampires I met today thought I was making believe when I offered to make him immortal. I think his husband might be more sensible, though."

"Sure, they're not all terrible, but some of them are terrible. So I publish, but I do it anonymously. If I publish stuff you tell me, you can't tell anybody you've been talking to me, you need to pretend you've been chatting with a hermit Saraanlan elf named Kalobes Ansal."

"That makes sense. Okay," she agrees.

"Great. Okay. So. Vampiric inanimate audition: real thing, who'd'a thunk, I will whip up a cure in my spare time probably shouldn't be too hard now I know what the problem is and be hailed the world over as a boon to the vampire mental health community. Next: ialdae."

"Next, ialdae! Oh, but anyone who can see ialdae will know you have it after you catch it. So I guess I've been talking to you and Aar Ansal, separately."

"You can have been talking to me because I'm a dragon," says Kaylo, waving a hand.

"That's a reasonable reason for me to talk to somebody, I guess... oh, there, you caught ialdae," she says, lowering him back to the floor. "Ordinary levels of it for a dragon, it seems like. I'm not completely sure how to teach you how to see it without an analysis - hmm, but if you cast any magic-seeing analysis on yourself and then took it off, it might generalize. So if you have one for witchcraft or wizardry or anything then you can try that."

"I've got loads," says Kaylo, and he looks one up and casts it. "Just take it right off again?"

"Wait a tick first if you want, but I haven't seen any indication that it takes ialdae a long time to learn an analysis, especially now that it's been taught so many of them."

Kaylo waits a tick. Then he reverses the spell.

"It's a nice analysis, isn't it? This is gorgeous. I like it. I like it very much," says Kaylo, peering around.

"Oh, this is just cheating, I'm going to get my entire list pared down to a weekend hobby and have to take up sailing," says Kaylo, laughing delightedly.

"List is, here, you can look at it -" He rummages in his desk and turns up a clipped-together stack of papers in many colors of ink with questions, some crossed out, most annotated with marginalia.

"Thanks!" She peruses the list.

It includes things like channeling capacity: what the fuck and nail down where conjured matter &c comes from once and for ALL and firebirds: why and evolutionary history of wolfrider mindlinks, compare/contrast w/ unique green and likely disparate power requirements for different dragon types; explain.

"What about channeling capacity? And what are firebirds and wolfriders?"