"If you can refrain from acting like she might be a metaphorical rapist just because she has a metaphorical penis it might work out fine. But we're not in such dire need of stuff that I would expect that I'd be hugely eager to take you along if it didn't. My point about tourism wasn't that you would be useless, it was that you didn't need to come along. If my sister and I weren't world hopping we'd never get home, and if before we picked up Sivath and Tialle's Demon they had spent six and ten thousand years respectively in near solitary confinement."

"I admit that while I have my discontentment with the accommodations in Hell, solitary confinement is not the issue."

"What's the discontentment? It sounds pretty great with powers like yours. The worst thing I can think of off the top of my head is not being able to see loved ones that ended up in a different afterlife, and I don't think we could help with that."

"Oh, it's very comfortable - and are you sure? I do have pen pals I'd like to see - but it's short on meaningful contributions to make. That's why I take summons."

"...Well, if you have a way of getting letters across, I could be wrong. I wasn't naively assuming there was any way of transferring matter between afterlives. The meaningful contributions thing is a point. ...Hmm. Can you make fertilized eggs that will grow up to be intelligence-typical members of their species."

"...Yes."

"Dragons," she says seriously. "Are a fantastically endangered species, in the world Tialle's Demon is from. By which I mean that one dragon, Ancaladar, is the ancestor of almost all of the others."

"That... sounds inconvenient for them. However, dragons sound like the sort of thing that might be inherently magical. I might or might not be able to make dragon eggs. And I won't try until I know more about how the hatchlings will be brought up, because I feel responsible for any people I bring into the world regardless of whether I am doing so conventionally."

"I mean, absolutely yes we'll consult the unicorn with the psychic hotline to the god thing, but it seems like the kind of thing that we definitely should ask about."

"...What are we consulting the psychic unicorn about?"

"Whether it's a good idea for you to try to instantiate dragon eggs."

"I mean, I'll listen to the psychic unicorn's advice but I probably want to meet whoever would be raising these baby dragons."

"Makes sense. Well, I met Saravasse, she seemed perfectly nice."

"Nice dragons are certainly preferable to the alternative."

"Dragons in general are good, which is good because when they bond to someone they get All Of The Magic."

"All of it?"

"Well, not all the kinds, but a lot of what you have. I think? It would definitely have been an apocalyptic event if an Endarkened who was not a special snowflake had bonded to one."

"But the dragons are good, you said."

"Yeah, in general. I don't think they have special being good no matter what powers compared to other sentient beings, they just have a reasonably not-crap culture. And from what I've put together, they don't have a choice about providing their Bonded with magic. Take this all with a grain of salt, I spent less than a full day in that universe, but what I do know for sure is that this dragon and his demon are basically the same person."

"That's... weird. What do you mean, basically the same person?"

"I mean when we showed up on the island my sister's impression was of one mind in two bodies."

"This is atypical for dragons and their - people?"

"Yeah, there's apparently telepathy going on no matter what but normally it's more like my sister and me than that."

"Oh."

"Oh, relax. No one's going to try to bond you to a dragon."