"I don't know about the lake," says Ehail, glancing towards the door. "I would be a little surprised if my world wrapped around like that, but I don't know for sure that it doesn't."

"I'm going to have to rethink how I understand people talking about their worlds," she says thoughtfully. "Until now I thought they meant, well, worlds. Collections of alucines, or networks of them linked by portals. But I guess they come in more configurations than that."

"I don't know a lot about other worlds," says Ehail. "I think I probably would have heard about it at least once or twice if most of the ones my world's people know about aren't at least sort of like ours, though."

"Your world knows about a lot of others?"

"Sort of? It isn't my field," says Ehail apologetically. "We know that there are a lot of others. There isn't much ongoing contact with any of them."

"And what is your field?"

"Er, most of the time I just do householdy magic," says Ehail. "But research-wise I am working on, um, a cure for something. I'm not really getting anywhere."

"Oh? A cure for what?"

"...Something. You can't get it. Unless that's not your natural hair color." Ehail shuffles her feet a little. "I don't think you can possibly have heard of it."

"Maybe not," she says, "but I'm curious."

"Well," says Ehail with a small sigh, "it's called being a 'shren'."

"You're right, I haven't heard of it."

Ehail nods. "So, in my spare time, I work on that. But not very effectively."

"I have an interest in solving difficult problems," she says.

"What else can you tell me?"

"We're -" There is a moment of guilty pause, as Ehail had not actually quite admitted up until this point that she has the thing she wishes to cure. "Something that happens to dragons. Very like dragons, just not quite. We can't fly, in our natural forms." Pause. "We're contagious. In our natural forms, though, not like this."

"We don't have dragons where I'm from," she says. "We do have a lot of interesting kinds of magic that don't seem to be common anywhere else. What have you found out so far about your problem?"

"Not very much. I think we don't have enough magic, that it's a - survival mechanism. A lot of baby dragons just die. But no one is going to let me near a baby dragon to compare."

"...Not enough magic?" she repeats. "What kind of magic is this, exactly?"

"Dragon magic. The same kind that's letting me speak your language, and turn into a human."

Judging by the way Ehail flinches and contracts towards herself, no!

"I am not a very usual tephramancer," she says. "I have a nice stable empire and no intention of expanding it into strange worlds I find in bars. And it seems to me that if insufficient magic is your problem, I have an obvious solution."

"It would have to be the right kind," says Ehail, half-uncurling. "If I could do it with wizard magic I would have managed it years ago."