"My father and brother are both animus dragons so I know some things about how they work and it sounds like the way you work is not that," she says. "Thank you. What is a rune?"

"A written symbol that carries some magically activable meanings."

"Who can use them? What are your advantages at it?"

"Anyone can use them. My advantage is that I'm selectively immune to magic, so if I use them wrong, I don't explode."

"...do people who use them wrong normally explode?"

"Explode is here metonymy for a variety of bad side effects many of which are not exploding."

"Are any of them 'turning evil'? People say that's the usual bad side effect of using animus magic too much."

"...not as far as I know but magic is not very widely picked up these days so it's possible it has happened and records merely didn't survive."

"Hmm. Troubling," she says. "Anyway, every tribe of dragons I know about ages at the same rate to about the same sizes, and you look like you're not like that—are you adult height for a scavenger? A human, I mean? I guess you don't know if you're adult height for a... SmallWing, or whatever you want to call your tribe."

"I'm adult height for a human. I don't have a dragon tribe name that I know about. I haven't been able to turn between human and dragon for very long so I don't know if I should expect to grow more in that shape."

"But if you're adult height for a human then you aren't a tiny dragon hatchling, probably, and as a dragon you're pretty hatchling-sized, so I think that on top of not being from any tribe I recognize you're also not from any tribe that grows up at the same speed as the tribes I recognize. Which suggests to me that you and I are hawks and bats to each other."

"That's possible, though it's also -

- so I mentioned dragons are extinct here, except for me and presumably one of my parents. That's because there was a war between dragons, here, and another magical creature, and I had been thinking that maybe the dragons were partially evacuated to wherever you're from. With some humans having already colonized the place, evidently, what with the Scorching. I don't know if the timelines even match, but it's not unusual for there to be multiple subtypes of a kind of magical creature, or interesting crossbreeds, or whatever, so I could be a pygmy version or you could all be descended from a giant kind or something, that I don't have a more specific guess about."

"Hmm. If your ancestors fled to Pyrrhia, would they have brought runes with them?"

"I would expect them to have done, but if there were dragons that didn't have my advantage with them it seems likely my kind would have specialized and maybe the other kinds were evacuated as civilians?"

"I think I see the shape of that. ...not literally, I still can't read your mind. I guess we'd have to find things out about history to be sure, and I don't think I can turn my prophecy around backwards to see it."

"Prophecy magic in particular does not seem obviously evacuate-as-civilian to me, honestly, but it'd be slightly less weird than there being completely unrelated dragon aliens."

"Is it very weird for there to be completely unrelated dragon aliens?"

"Well, there aren't any other completely unrelated aliens. - also you have humans on your planet, or at least creatures who look a lot like them, and even if you are an alien who looks like a dragon by coincidence, it'd be much more of a coincidence to also have aliens who look human by coincidence. Do our plants look familiar?"

"Yes, I think so. I'm not a plant expert but they seem to be the right sorts of colours in the right sorts of shapes."

"Which I think suggests the two places aren't completely unrelated, that would be a lot of coincidences. Do you know about how long ago the Scorching was?"

"Definitely a very long time. I think some thousands of years? I'm not sure exactly. I mostly do puzzles and drawing at school."

"Some thousands of years ago is about how long ago the dragon war was too."

"Do you know how many thousands yours was?"

"Ballpark of five to seven thousand. Of, again, local years, which are three hundred sixty five days, each of which is twenty-four hours, and you have been here for..." She looks at her watch. "About a third of an hour."

"...that sounds like about the right amount of time for an hour, and that's the right amount of hours in a day, and I think the right amount of days in a year...."