I don't have enough information to be confident in any of my ideas about it. Autumn is not actually very bad for us, though. Winter is the one I hate.

"What's your winter like?"

You become incredibly lethargic and sleepy. You feel heavy and slow all the time. You want to hide from everything, and the sun is too bright. Every morning it's a struggle of will to get up and go outside. If you bury yourself, you'll hibernate - if you resist the sleep, it's absolutely miserable to try and get anything done.

"That sounds awful. We don't have a season like that, it sounds pretty... pointless."

There are other things that cause great sleeps. There's usually at least one or two between the ages of two and ten, three seasons or so long. Occasionally an adult Draak will estivate for a truly long time. I slept for four local years once. We don't have a clear understanding why all this happens, though there are various theories.

"What other things cause them?"

Prolonged periods of hunger. Loss of an egg, sometimes. Having worked very hard on a task and finally completing it. None of these do it consistently, but those are the correlates.

"Huh! Hunger makes sense, but I'm not sure about the others."

Like I said, we don't understand it. Yet, perhaps.

Amentans nod.

She hangs out for about an hour, apparently content to just look around at all the pretty forest in silence. Then she flies over it for a bit and returns to the conference.

The other egg, in his place in a blue estate's garden, tentatively reaches out for anyone who can hear him's attention.

One of the blues bustles out. Hi! Do you need something?

Oh. He seeps surprise that they actually came out. And so quickly.

Uh. He's not uncomfortable or anything but he was thinking about measuring things and wondering what else can be measured besides temperature? And how measuring temperature even works?

Oh, let's see. We measure time, and distance, and weight, and lots of other things. I don't know how temperature measurement actually works in detail.

He likes the idea of knowing things definitely-for-sure. His Creators said that the world has lots of mysteries and that seems vaguely scary.

There are many things we don't know, but we learn more all the time.

Good! He wants to help.

That's great! You'll be able to do a lot of neat things when you're older.

Everything has to wait for him to be older. For him to hatch at all.

...That's okay. He can be patient. Being patient is sort of like sleeping.

We could find you a tutor who could tell you things while you're in the egg, if you want, it'd just be hard for you to do your own measurements or anything like that.

Listening and thinking sounds nice. He doesn't know how to do anything else yet.

Do you just want a general science tutor?

Sure? How can he make important decisions when he doesn't know hardly any things? His new caretakers should decide. They seem smart, and they want to help him, which gives him warm fuzzy feelings.

They feel fuzzy about him too! They will find him a good tutor.