"Is that the sort of thing one saves up?"

"I don't know! I certainly wouldn't want to run low on it, in any case."

"Tell me about it. When I have kids they might stay that way for a couple hundred years."

"Yikes. That sounds like a challenge. What do you mean, 'might,' though?"

"Dragon habit is to marry non-dragons, most of whom don't live as long as we do or take as long to grow up, at least for the first thousand years or so. Most of those kids take after their non-dragon parents but occasionally you get a dragon egg instead."

"...You can casually interbreed with other species? Must be a magic thing."

"Most sapient species can interbreed. And if they can't and want to: magic."

"How many sapient species do you have? I was assuming it was you and humans, pretty much..."

"Oh, no, there's lots. I mentioned sprites, there's them. There's elves and dwarves and halflings and leonines and skyfolk and merfolk and fairies and pixies and vampires and... I'm probably forgetting something but that's at least most of them."

"That's a lot. I'm going to guess you have so many sentient species because of magic somehow."

Shrug. "I think we've established I don't remember clearly what basic things are in fact magic."

"Oh, sure. I'm just blaming everything flagrantly different about your world on magic at this point."

"I don't blame you!"

"With the possible exception of the gender thing, since genders per species varies even in my world."

"Yeah, that I have no explanation for. I mean, there are people who are born sort of in-between or unusual in some way? Either in how they're shaped or how they feel about it. But they're not common. Also it's not a thing that happens to dragons, we get to sex-select kids and the sex-selection doesn't make mistakes."

"Honestly, the fact that you have humans with only two sexes is way more surreal to me than the fact that you have giant scaly lizards that can shapeshift. And have only two sexes."

"Well, you're clearly not the same kind of humans, I'm inclined to translate it that way but that's just an approximation really."

"And if you find a way to convince the part of my brain that find things surreal of that I will be impressed."

"What are the differences besides smell, anyway?"

"...Between desret and desan and between haran and harmi?"

"Yeah."

"Well...for one thing, the smell thing is a bigger deal than you seem to think it is. It, hm, it doesn't just tell you factually what gender someone is. There's, you know, meaning to it. Like the fact that I have breasts doesn't just tell you factually that I'm a childbearing gender, but also serves as a focus for attraction. And everyone smells differently, so you can tell someone's gender but you can also tell who they are. On I guess a more practical level for someone like you...on average, harmi have larger breasts and wider hips than haran, and desret are a little taller and a little more muscular than a desan, and of course the interfertility thing," she gestures at her chart.

"...Can you not tell who everybody is by looking at them?"

"Well, yeah, but I'm not trying to describe its practical utility, I'm trying to describe its social importance. Think talking to a species that doesn't have a spoken language and explaining that you can tell people apart by their voice, kind of thing."

"Sprites don't have spoken language! They communicate by dancing."