"We need to know if your robot army can monitor a dragon intelligently, and also to put Prime to sleep so we can have the magic monitoring equipment."

"Uh, probably? What do you need to catch the dragon doing? Does Prime want to go to sleep, like, now?"

"We're putting the dragon on parole. And - sooner's better, but - Prime?"

"Bizarrely enough, I will need some time to wrap up some work of mine before I go to bed for twelve hours at a strange time of the day."

"I understand that you want to put the dragon on parole, I don't know what fine distinctions you need my robots to be able to make to put one on the job."

"If he does magic, violence, talks to other dragons, talks about sphinxes or comes up with a code to discreetly do so," says Cam, "we would like that reported to a non-robot."

"Yeah, I think Juniper-and-company can handle that. Can I get an extra robot or three to replace the one on mirrorwatch duty?"

"Yeah, no problem."

Don't mind Cypress, he will just be falling asleep on his wife over there. Zzzzzz.

"Okay then, you can - uh. Go back to bed, I think, sorry for bothering you in the middle of the night."

"Right. Prime, I'll be over in like - four, five hours to sleep you?"

"Sure. Thank you."

"'kay." The mirror disconnects and she hauls her husband back to bed.

Cypress is fine with being hauled! Sleep, yay.

"Right. So we should - pitch this to Phix and Max, and then if that works, the dragon."

"Yep." Cam flicks off the mirror connection to Prime and heads back to where all the portals are.

"I wait with bated breath," the dragon mutters.

Adana offers what she hopes is a comforting smile, and then - onward, to Medallion.

Where there are deer-and-kitty snuggles in progress.

"Hey," murmurs Adana, gently.

"Hi," says Max the deer.

"Oh, you can talk again."

Blink, blink. "... I can," he says, surprised. "I hadn't even been testing it, I just - okay, cool, getting a chant interrupted is something you can recover from, that's nice."

"Good, it would be really irritating if you had to be mute until we found an alt who could fix you somehow. You'd have to do magic by sign language..."