"...The bar's a she?" he asks, eyeing said bar. It looks like a perfectly ordinary long wooden counter with barstools along it, and not the kind of thing that would usually have a gender, but then: talking squirrel. Magic door-eating apparently-dinner-establishment. The usual rules don't seem to apply anymore.

"Why, what language are you speaking?" he asks Mallyn.

"Maybe." He looks at the door again. "Probably."

"Uuuum, the world or the country? Or the house?" asks Rithka.

"Whichever," he shrugs. "All of 'em."

"What's it mean to be good at Mallyn?" he asks, more or less of both of them but perhaps mostly of Rithka.

Felicity smiles very slightly and finishes his cupcake.

"How's your house have plants growing on it?"

"Our aunt Rhysel made it like that," says Rithka. "It was her wedding present for Mom and Dad."

"Does it have a dirt roof or something?"

"I think so. Or like - funny magic rock. Aunt Rhysel is an elemental kama. Kyma are the kind of magic person from Barashi."

"And what's the kind of magic people from - whichever world yours is? Or wait, you said there's lots?"

"Yeah, there's a bunch. There's Elcenian kyma now too since Aunt Rhysel worked out how to do that. Mom is a wizard. There's sorcerers and mages and lights, and there are magic things that only some species can do."

"No magic where I'm from. As far as I know," he says.

"Nope. Unless everybody who has it is hiding for some reason. There's not magic that everybody knows about that does things like make houses out of magic rock."

"What kinds of all kinds of stuff?"

"Big family," comments Felicity.

"Yeah, kinda," says Rithka. "Dad has a whole bunch of brothers and sisters and some of them have kids. Uncle Batai and Aunt Karyn were the ones who adopted Mallyn's other sister and brother. And Aunt Ryll and Uncle Lerrel have two adopted ones like me and our little sister, on top of five regular kids."

"I have a mom," he says. "I guess I must've had a dad at some point but I never met him and I don't know anything about him except that he's not around. And Mom has a husband, and he's why I'm not going back."

"Personality-revisioned? Is that a magic thing?"

"That's creepy," he says. "I wouldn't mind it happening to Reggie, though."

He takes a bite of his second cupcake. It is tasty.

"It's just you?" Mallyn asks.

"Family-wise? Yeah. You heard the list. I don't have any siblings or cousins or anything."

"How'd that happen?"

"Esmaar and Aristan had this deal that if anybody Esmaar thought was being abused got to Esmaar, Esmaar could keep them safe there," says Rithka. "Esmaar is so much stricter. Mallyn's birth parents were being illegal in Aristan too but not by as much. And Aristan was like 'well, okay, we don't think any of our kids are going to run away to Esmaar' but then Mallyn did. He couldn't take Lyrrae and Renn because he had to go a really long way and they're littler," says Rithka. "And then Esmaar was like 'okay so Mallyn stays here' and Aristan was like 'this is really embarrassing, we will look after Lyrrae and Renn all by ourselves'. But Aunt Ryll is an Aristanian senator so she got Uncle Batai and Aunt Karyn to take them so they're still related."

"Lucky," he says. "I guess. If you wanted to still be related."

Mallyn gives Felicity a confused look.

He shrugs. "You might not. I don't know if I would, if I had siblings. But I know I don't care much about seeing Mom again."

"I wouldn't've - I mean - I could have left earlier," says Mallyn. "I found out about Esmaar earlier. And I wanted to stay to keep them safe - only I couldn't, so I left in case someone else could."

"Huh," says Felicity.

"They're littler than me," Mallyn reiterates. "Lyrrae especially. She might not remember any of it later, even."

"Lucky her."

"You got named when you were a month old?"

"Mm?" says Felicity.

"Like getting named when we are a month old," says Rithka. "That's a thing dragons do."

"That's about when we figure out how to talk," adds Rithka.

"I don't think humans learn that early," he says.

"Well, yeah, you have to learn it," says Rithka. "We just - talk. We know all the languages, we couldn't learn them. There's too many, and anyway nobody can learn Draconic."

"...Is it magic or something?"

"Dragons knowing languages? Yeah."

"And the language nobody can learn. That sounds pretty magic to me."

Felicity grins. "Sounds like fun."

He laughs.

"You're fluffy," he informs Rithka.

"I know," she says, sounding very satisfied with herself. "I learned to be a squirrel not too long ago! I like it."

"If I could turn into a squirrel I bet I would," muses Felicity. "Is there a kind of magic that does that?"

"Dragons get to do a lot of cool stuff," he observes. "Can - kyma - do cool stuff too? Other than turn into things?"

"That's a lot of cool stuff!" he says.

"Usually one kama doesn't know all those things," amends Rithka.

"Still."

"Aunt Rhysel is an elemental kama," Rithka says. "And she's working on wild and death kamai too because she's starting the whole kamai program at the magic school and has to know more kinds. And her husband does elemental too and also image and death and those are all the kinds there are."

"There's a whole kind called death? What cool stuff does it do?"

"Kill bugs or kill anything?"

"I'm not a kama either," Mallyn points out.

"Yeah, but you knew it did more things, you might've known what some of them were."

"I'm just pretty sure Uncle Tekaal's not teaching a whole course on how to kill things," says Rithka. "So there must be other stuff."

"Maybe killing things is complicated and it takes a whole course to learn it," says Felicity.

"I guess," says Rithka dubiously.

He giggles.

"Oh, now I remember," she says, snapping her fingers, "if you do death kamai in Barashi you can talk to ghosts, but Elcenia doesn't seem to do ghosts."

"...huh," he says. "I wonder what the difference is?"

"Maybe gods," suggests Mallyn. "Barashi has them. If Elcenia does they're sort of hiding."

"Why would gods hide? If I was a god I wouldn't hide."

"I don't know," says Mallyn. "In Barashi they don't. You can see them and talk to them sometimes. In Elcenia people have all different religions and none of the gods just walk down the street or anything."

"What are the gods like in Barashi?"

"I haven't met one," says Mallyn. "I saw Aiath from a long way off, once? You can really, really tell, even from far away, that they're not regular people. Even though they look like whatever species you are when you look at one."

"They go around doing stuff, though? Like what stuff?"

"Aiath was at some kind of party, when I saw him. He's basically the god of parties. I knew what they all did once but I didn't spend very long in school and it was a few years ago," says Mallyn. "I know the ones with seasons - Kevia for spring and Gorath for summer and Cumeni for autumn and Maeus for winter. Oh, and the pilots of the suns are Agosh and Zaquea and the moon pilot is Keela..." He seems to be dredging up the information from far away.

"...Suns, plural? Two of them? And they have pilots?"

"Where I'm from we've got one, and the planets move around it. And nobody has to pilot any of it, that I know of."

"There's a bunch but people only live on one."