Purple wants to know if her scales and claws and whatnot take a lot of maintenance!

I only care if I can use them, so not really. Just occasional cleaning in water and honing on a stone. You should see Bloom, though! I think there's pictures, plenty of people were taking them. Emeralds get feathers all over, between their scales, and she spends ages making them beautiful.

Orange wants to know how, with Draak so spread out, they manage medical care.

We mostly don't? Adults mostly don't need it and hatchlings live near one parent who can help if they want to. There's a few experts who can adjust your hibernation period or how your colors come in or regrow teeth and bones right if you can get to them and pay them.

Ooh! The next person called on, a grey, wants to know if the color thing could be exported for people who have the wrong hair color.

That sounds probably easier than nudging springs down, which is what Bloom came to try! 

That's very exciting! Next person is green and wants to know how Draak school works.

Draak teach each other if there's something one wants to learn from another. Usually for token payments in Shiny Things. There's nothing organized, unless you count Darktooth the Wise's Test of Wisdom. To pass the Test of Wisdom you have to learn to read and write and do math and make simple circuits and a lot of ancient history and learn about different schools of thought and what the flaw in each of them is! I think only like two hundred Draak have actually passed the Test. Most don't bother trying.

Another green hops up and down, hand in the air, and when called asks why they only have schools of thought with known flaws in them.

I'm not sure what you mean! Everything has a flaw in it from at least one perspective. Even the school of Number, which can always generate an indisputably correct answer, but indisputably correct answers to multiplication problems aren't always very useful. That's the flaw: Math can't do everything for you.

That seems like a flaw in application, not in math itself! says the green.

It was more like ways of thinking about the world. Math isn't a way of thinking about the world. Trying to use math to solve everything is, and that's flawed!

Isn't a blend of ways of thinking about the world itself a way of thinking about the world?

Yes! And it's still flawed, but you do your best anyway.

You seem like the kind of person Darktooth might enjoy talking to. What's your name?

Shiknema Shafio!

I'll try to remember it and mention you to the great Elder if the chance comes.

Next question?

Purple wants to know if lots of Draak are going to be visiting soon.

Not lots. Mostly we're kind of scared of Amenta and there's many more of you than us.

Why are you scared? asks the purple.

You're like some other aliens that we lost two awful wars to. Most of us hatched after that but lots of people remember them as scary and bad and dangerous.

Are we related to them somehow? a yellow wants to know.

I don't know! But you look like you could be.

Here's that classic image of a bearded warrior in bronze armor again, slightly indistinct. And another one, of a sprawling medieval city seen from above.

Is there any kind of entire galactic community we can hope to join? wonders a green.

It doesn't seem like it. Other aliens exist, but nothing... Organized like that?

Do you wanna start one? asks a three-year-old blue Mahkemiken calls on.