A stunningly beautiful dragon appears nearby.

Her scales are mostly black, shading into sapphire; her talons, horns, and spiky crest are all white as snow; her wings are white flecked with jet black.

She seems mildly startled by her sudden appearance, but settles back into calm after just a moment. On looking around, she spots May, spends a moment blinking curiously at her, and then walks over and carefully picks her up with both hands in order to inspect her up close. Her claws are very gentle, and her large curious eyes are a glacial shade of blue.

"AAAAGH hey put me down!"

The dragon makes incomprehensible growling noises and tips her face down to get her snout out of the way so she can peer at May's forehead from very close by.

Well, if asking doesn't work, time to try other tactics, like turning into ALSO A DRAGON.

She's smaller than this dragon, a deer to the, what, outsize wild boar, bulk of the stranger, but it should at least be enough to get her dropped so she can skitter back and away.

The strange dragon does indeed drop her, with a startled yelp.

For a few seconds she stands there frozen, hardly even blinking; then, cautiously, she... makes some more incomprehensible growling noises?

"I don't speak that language," says May, who, now that she is no longer being picked up off the ground by a stranger, is hastily reevaluating the possible features of a situation in which A DRAGON who is NOT HER MOM OR DAD has appeared to inspect her. It's not weird that they'd have their own language but a little weird that they'd choose to send someone to do recon who did not also have English...

"Rrrrowl ghgrrrk arrrnn llrruuilgh," says the stranger, or something along those lines. She takes a cautious step toward May, stops, and points at May's head.

Yup, that's May's head, ice-blue and horned.

"Don't pick me up again," she says, and she turns human again, waits for a moment to see if the gist of that got across before she goes for her writing things.

The stranger blinks at her and makes no move to interfere.

This is exactly the kind of slapdash spellcasting she was trying to develop past, but, well, she's in a hurry. She draws a nice big collection of runes, no proscriptions, and slaps her hand down on them and says, "Render me able to speak and comprehend all languages I encounter." She doesn't know how long it'll last but it'll at least get her started and she can trace it if necessary.

She looks up at the stranger dragon again. "You were saying?"

"Oh! You can talk now!" she says. "This is all very surprising and wasn't going to happen at all until it did. Why are you a scavenger who's a dragon and doesn't have any thoughts?"

"I don't think I understand the question. Why are you here?"

"I'm not here on purpose. I'm here by very surprising accident," she says. "Normally, in my experience, dragons stay dragon-shaped all the time and have dragon-shaped thoughts, and scavengers stay scavenger-shaped all the time and have scavenger-shaped thoughts. You changed your shape back and forth between the two, and you don't have any thoughts at all, but you can still talk, except when you can't. So I'm very confused."

"...if you're trying to read my mind, the reason you can't do that is that I don't want you to." Is this not a universal dragon power.

"If I was going to try to read your mind I'd have to be able to see it first," she says reasonably. "But it doesn't seem to be there at all. It's actually sort of unsettling. I wonder if this is what Listener feels like about me?"

"I don't want you to read anything about my mind. Most people I know can't do that so I'm not accustomed to tweaking it for their convenience."

"Hmm. I agree that most people can't read minds but I can't help feeling like I'm missing something. Anyway, can you explain how you manage to be a dragon and a scavenger sequentially?"

"Magic. Also this shape is called 'human', not 'scavenger'. You don't have it where you're from?"

"...we have scavengers where I'm from, but they're very distinctly not dragons. I guess maybe I'm not a scavenger expert and you could be something else, but you seem to have just about the same parts in the same places as the ones in my classroom. And what do you mean, magic? Are you an animus dragon?"

Well, unfortunately, May has no idea what breed of dragon she may be. "What is an animus dragon?"

"Animus dragons have the power to enchant things," she says. "But if you're not an animus dragon, then I still don't know what magic you did or how you did it, and I'd like to."

"I might be an animus dragon, I don't actually know much about my, uh, ethnic background."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Well, presumably at least one of my parents is a dragon but they're still fully under the magic that makes them look human, and dragons are widely understood, around here, to be extinct, so I don't know any others."

"Oh," she says. "That... certainly rotates some questions. Do you mean to say... you live among scavengers, and only learned you're a dragon by accident?"