"That's... close to right, yeah, though, again, they are not called scavengers amongst themselves."

"I am not very good at thinking the same thoughts as other people," she says. "This seems important, though."

She sits very still for a few seconds, then says, "Are you taking yourself out of the future? Can you stop?"

"Am I what?"

"The future. You aren't in it, and you should be. It's making everything very strange and I'm having a hard time figuring out when my brother will get here, which is important because I think we should have all the questions straightened out into a story before he shows up."

"You can see the future? I might be blocking that and I'm reluctant to stop till I know more about it."

"What is it that you want to know?"

"How does it... work. What does it let you learn about me."

"...it's the future, and you should be in it, because you're in the present, but you're not, so there isn't one, and I am all aflibber about it. I'm sorry, I'm no good at having the same conversation as the person I'm talking to, it's of a piece with the thoughts situation, and this is important so I'm trying very hard but I'm not used to having so little to work with."

"I've never met anyone who could see the future before! I don't know how much information you get from it!"

"I don't know what you mean to ask, and I can't check, and I don't know what you hear when I answer, and I can't check that either. How did she do it? No wonder everyone lies to her all the time. Oh, it's all a mess." She squeezes her eyes shut. "I... think... the information in the future... is the same kind as the information in the present, but differently... presented. Like, there's mostly only one present that's the one that you're in, but there are lots of different futures depending what choices people make on the way there. But... we don't see... all the futures at once. Just... glimpses, of things that could happen, often without knowing quite how to get there. My brother... mostly uses it to get our parents not to fight. He can see just far enough to know when to distract them. I... mostly use it... to try to have... normal conversations... and then I fail anyway, because having normal conversations is so, so hard."

She cracks an eye. "How was that? Can you tell me what it sounded like I meant, please?"

"It sounded like you meant that you are using glimpses of possible futures delimited by plausible choices people make to, among other things, compensate for some kind of conversation-related disability...? Mostly what I'm worried about here is like, if you could decide to spend all week doing whatever would make me your best friend, and then in that possible future I told you something in confidence, would the version who is not my best friend, here in the present, know the confidence."

"Thank you. I think... that I would not do that, and, if I tried, I would not succeed, for many reasons. I think that my brother who is very very much better than I am at charming people still probably could not become most people's best friend in a week, and, even if he could, would not be a good enough seer to ask their futures things and get back answers he understood. I think that the best seer in the whole tribe, who I haven't met yet but I've seen a lot of in the future before I stopped having one, is mostly too busy averting lots and lots of doom to have any time for asking people questions in their futures that she can't ask yet in their presents, so I can't tell you if she would have been going to succeed at it because she wasn't going to try it, not even slightly. But the guess that I have is that you would notice, if she did that, because before she could find out what you would tell her if she spent a week becoming your best friend, she would need to spend several days tracing that path through the future so she could see what was at the end of it, which, I think, would make it harder for her to spend a week becoming your best friend. Which I am also separately not sure she could do to begin with, even if she planned very carefully."

"It was just an example, but - yeah, okay."

May is in the future now.

"Oh," she says, slumping with relief. "Thank you, that's much better. I was starting to worry that I'd gone back in time to before the Scorching somehow and I didn't have a future because I wasn't going to have existed anymore. Now it seems like I have different problems from that, and they are probably better ones!"

"Scorching?"

"The Scorching is a historical event. It was mostly too long ago for people to still know what happened, but before the Scorching we think scavengers lived in most of the places where dragons live now, and then the dragons decided to live there instead."

"Ah. Do... you know where the dragons lived before that?"

"I do not! I am starting to think, though, that this just isn't Pyrrhia, and humans may not be the same thing as scavengers, and dragons may not even be the same thing as dragons? How old are you?"

"Me personally, seventeen, though if you're from another planet you might have different-length years. Why do you think humans may not be the same thing as scavengers?"

"It actually starts with dragons not being the same thing as dragons. When you were dragon-shaped you were so small that I think if you were any kind of dragon I've heard of you would be very young and would not be nearly so good at holding a conversation. I am not the best person to ask about who is good at holding conversations but that is still what I think. And you have mysterious powers that work differently from all the mysterious powers I know about, unless you're enchanting things very quietly, or something."

"I can enchant things but can also cast non-enchantment spells. I do assume that we are not the same kind of dragon, but you seemed to have heard of a kind I could be?"

"I asked if you were an animus dragon but I do not know if an animus dragon is actually what you are. If... hmm. If you pick up a rock, and tell it to turn pink, what do you expect would happen?"

"I'd need to use a rune but I could do it."

"Okay. If you were an animus dragon—if the explanation for you was 'animus dragon', then if you picked up a rock and told it to turn pink, it would be pink, and all of the other magic you could do would be the same kind of thing, at its heart, as picking up a rock and telling it to turn pink. If you need to do more to turn a rock pink than tell it so, then you are probably not an animus dragon, and if you can do things that are not at their heart the same kind of thing as picking up a rock and telling it to turn pink, then you have powers that are not the powers of an animus dragon." Somewhat hesitantly, she asks, "Can you tell me what it sounds like I meant again? I went a lot of different places with that sentence and I'm not sure whether you followed me to all of them."

"You think I am not an animus dragon because my magic does not work in the precise way you understand their magic to work. - also, humans can use runes, I have some advantages but not to the point of needing to be a dragon to use runes at all."