"When the van hit me I was on my way to school shortly post-breakfast, so I'm not hungry yet. Thank you though."

"You're welcome. Should we, I don't know, be comparing worlds or something?"

"Maybe? Uh, mine has only humans as the sapient species, and only artifacts by way of magic... I think if you had electricity in here I would be able to notice wiring with this sense..."

"Elcenia has enough sapient species that I'm not confident I can list them all off the top of my head - humans dragons elves dwarves halflings merfolk pixies sprites - and varieties of magic likewise, although there's fewer. Wizardry and witchcraft are the most commonly practiced, and dragonishes have magic of our own, and then there are mages and lights and sorcerers which are all inborn magical gifts, and merfolk have some merfolk-only stuff. Oh, and wolfriders, those exist and arguably are or have magic."

"What kind of magic do you have besides, uh, turning into a human?" Is she pink she might be a little pink.

Mial does not indicate having noticed any pinkness.

"I can speak any language I've heard of, plus Draconic which is only available to dragonishes, it's notorious for thwarting every translation spell that's been tried. I can assume forms other than my natural one and shift into them and back at will," he turns into a little silver-accented merlin and then back into a little silver-eyed human, "and my natural form can breathe fire, and my name is a magical property I have, and I'm a blue-group so I have ten form slots instead of five and can assume hybrid forms. Black-group dragonishes have enhanced senses, red group's thing is fire, white group's thing is flying, violet group is aquatic, green group are empaths. —You basically won't find anyone outside my house using the term 'dragonish', mostly people just talk about dragons and either don't know shrens exist or wish they didn't, but shrens are by any sane standard a variety of dragon and I am one."

"...I wonder if it thwarts my translation artifact. Why is a shren different from a regular dragon?"

"Shrens are not siaddaki," he says in Draconic.

"...thwarts my translation artifact."

"Well. Shrenhood is a contagious condition which some dragons hatch with. It makes us unable to fly in our natural forms, and a lesser-known property of dragonishes is that if we spend too long of a solid interval not flying under our own power, we experience esu, which starts out as lethargy and progresses through increasing amounts of pain until we reset the timer by flying. Dragonishes age ten times slower than humans and can't shift until we're about twenty. Being a baby shren is not fun."

Small unhappy noise.

"Sorry. I'm fine, honestly, I cope unusually well for a shren. Anyway, the other thing is that Draconic is a magical language and for the most part it is very convenient about providing words with the exact connotations the speaker wants to use, but on the subject of shrens in particular it is emphatically opinionated, specifically to the tune that we definitely aren't dragons, cannot reasonably be categorized alongside dragons in any sense more narrow than 'they are both kinds of sapient being' and sort of dubiously even then, and are inherently horrible and disgusting and shouldn't exist." Pause. "I cope better than average with that too."

"...can I hug you anyway?"

...he smiles. "Sure."

Hug.

Hug. "Thanks."

"Of course."

"Yeah."

He lets go.

"—do you not want my mother knowing about the thing or was it just, uh, awkward to bring up—"

"If you want to tell her you can but she's - not entitled by virtue of being the subject and it's awkward."

"I'm probably going to tell her. It's likely to be relevant to any discussion of continued contact between our worlds and whether or not you might want to stay in this one. —You don't have to know the answer already but do you think you'll want to stay in this one?"

"Maybe?"

"Well. All right. Anyway, continuing the magic comparison - I am also a wizard, which means I can do wizardry, that's how I teleported you here. Doing wizardry consists of making power pull gestures corresponding to the magnitude of a particular spell's cost while saying the name of the spell and mentally specifying any intentional components it has, and then the spell happens. Spells are inventable, it just takes fully specifying the spell and then naming it something that doesn't already refer to another spell. And spell costs draw on a thing called channeling capacity which varies in magnitude from person to person - you probably don't have one, not being from Elcenia - and if you cast something that costs more than half your CC it hurts and if you cast something that costs your entire CC or more you die."

"Can I get one?"

"I don't know of any research into the subject. Maybe."

"I wanted to study artifacts at university but they won't let you into the department unless you agree to being periodically mindread."