And then those babies, too, may experience the joys of not being in horrifying amounts of pain.

The babies are very joyous about this indeed!

And once everyone's esu has been reset and everyone's wing injuries have been healed, Odette picks a likely-looking adult--in this case, the teleporting wizard--and asks if there's anything else obvious she can do to help.

"I assume if you could actually cure it you'd have done that," says the silver wizard.

"I don't know what it is to cure it. This world runs on magic a lot harder than mine does--my world basically doesn't do permanent magic--and I'm kind of leery messing with something I don't understand when it's part of a person."

"I have some notes... they might not help."

"They're presumably not in Genoshan or any other language I understand, but I'm under a translation spell, so it certainly couldn't hurt to have a look."

"I can go get them."

"Okay."

Ehail goes away and comes back with a bunch of paper densely packed with text about experiments and speculation and notes on old writing about shrens.

Odette goes over this carefully, and then asks permission to have a look at Ehail with magic.

That's fine with Ehail.

"I don't know what-all's going on in there exactly but it is insanely delicate and interdependent; if I tried messing with anything without knowing exactly what I was doing the whole thing could come crashing down. I could probably work out a 'cure' that killed the patient five times out of ten, failed twice and worked unproblematically three times. If I worked hard at it."

"'Worked hard at it' involves more people dying before I get that far. Why on Earth--or Elcenia--I get that there's social stigma strong enough to get parents to abandon their children, but--really?"

Nod.

"Why?"

"I don't mean, everybody would, but it's not a good thing to be a shren."

"Why not?"

"...people who aren't shrens or dragons don't really understand it."

"Based on historical precedent that sounds kind of like they're so horribly ableist at you that you've internalized it."

"...I'm not sure I've ever actually spoken to a dragon in my life," says Ehail thoughtfully. "Not more than a few words, anyway, not when I wouldn't have had my hair dyed..."

"Then I really don't understand why you think there's something wrong with you besides the inconvenience of nonfunctioning limbs. ...And the trauma of having put in your twenty years before I showed up to interrupt it."