"I mean, he gets them out of the books, he doesn't usually homebrew entire dragons."

"Fair enough. I thought I remembered hearing that the books have loads of different kinds of dragon, but I haven't actually read the monster manual ever."

"There's like ten colors of them."

"That's more kinds than there are of most monster, but I guess it isn't really loads." She suppresses the sudden mad impulse to ask if one of the kinds is "green runecasting nerd".

"The chromatic ones are evil and the metallic ones are good and beyond that it's mostly like, what climates they like and what breath weapon they have."

"Huh. Neat. Anyway, I wonder where we can find someone who can read that writing we found."

"Good question, I bet a university or a church."

"Do any of our characters even know what's on the other side of these woods? Mine sure doesn't. I guess we'll find out next week either way."

"Joseph's guy might? I don't know."

"Maybe I'll ask him next week if we don't get out of the woods early in the session."

"Yeah. Or we can just all roll Knowledge on it."

"That works too. Speaking of outside these woods, how's the rest of your life been lately?"

"Pretty okay. My cousin's been selling some of my art at art fairs, so that's good."

"Ooh, I didn't know you did art! I'd love to see some pictures."

"Oh, sure - I don't have any photos on me but you could swing by my house if you want?"

"That would be awesome, I'd love to come see your art."

"This way." Brenda slithers through the roads of the Avalon. "It's mostly jewelry, little things that sell faster, but sometimes I do a bigger wall sculpture."

"Those both sound pretty neat! I've never really gotten into art; my thing is robotics club."

"I don't think we have one of those here. What do you do?"

"We're making a robot that can swing around on a network of ropes. I'm working on the control system that takes in joystick input and turns it into moving the arms."

"That sounds so complicated!"

"Yeah, there's a lot of fiddling around with wires. A trait it shares with my mental image of jewelry-making, though I might be totally wrong there."

"I do a lot of wire-wrapping, yeah!"

"Nifty!"

They reach Brenda's house, which she shares with an also-lamia mom and sister and a satyr little brother.

"Hey, who's that?" asks the little brother, looking Margaret up and down.

"Margaret from D&D," says Brenda. "Margaret, that's Dennis, and my sister over there with the headphones on is Cynthia."