"...huh."

"What?"

"It's peculiar? That you would completely match only one of the parents whenever you're the same species."

"I couldn't exactly match my mom what with the biological sex thing."

"But I'm pretty sure most other species are, like, a mixture."

"Sure. Fullblooded dragons aren't. Or, not the same way - personality inheritance is as normal, and we can be either parent's color if they're different."

"Right, and that's kinda peculiar, is what I'm saying. So if there's a limited number of phenotypes fullblooded dragons can take, where did they come from?"

"Parunias; they're mixier. The headmaster and Keo have a new-hatched parunia who won't look exactly like her mom and would look even less like her mom if she were a boy."

"Ah, parunias are considered fullblooded, then?"

"Yeah, parunias are dragons."

"So, about the languages, how exactly does this automatic vocabulary thing for Draconic work?"

"Dragons speak all languages. Draconic is one of them, and it changes to fit what dragons want to talk about."

"But I mean—you mentioned when this language made up the vocabulary needed for talking about my magic, you would more-or-less understand the word anyway. Can you qualify that?"

"Uh - okay, take your time system. I don't know how long an hour is but I know it's sixty seconds and one-twenty-fourth of your world's days, because that's about how words relate directly, definitionally, to each other. So if I have a word, I can get that kind of structural information out of it and that's better than nothing."

"Ah. Hmm... But then wouldn't vocabulary about metamagic just end up self-referential all the time?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, metamancy vocabulary would refer to magic, which includes basically words about itself or other types of magic, and those words about magic would only refer to the magical effects themselves."

"In that sense all the information I can get out of a bare language is self-referential. But it's still useful to be able to note that something's a comparative and there's separately a superlative or that it's grammatically incorrect to refer to something in the plural or whatever."

"I suppose. And I guess if it does work and I can copy Draconic I could just use other words you already have about magic to explain the new ones."

"There you go. I know lots of magic vocabulary."

"I bet you do."

(Does he have any indication that touching would do anything harmful yet?)

Actually, all the dragon magic looks sort of delicate.

...sort of delicate is bad.

"First impressions: your magic looks sort of delicate, which I did not expect. Any idea why that would be?"

"...no? It isn't generally perturbed by outside forces of any kind so I imagine it doesn't have much reason to be robust, but when I've looked at it I have not done so in a way that tells me things like 'delicate'."

"This is just a first impression anyway, but hmm. Weird. How've you looked at it?"