"Little bit. By all accounts she's as nice a wielder of terrifyingly powerful mind magic as you could ask for. Although if I'd been consulted I think I would've preferred that she not be a dragon since dragons can get really unreasonable about shrens. Still, I can just keep out of her way, she's demonstrably not going around wiping us from existence."

"I suppose."

He shrugs.

"...so what do you do besides race scoots? Why were you on the bottom of the world?"

"I'm a wizard but not employed as such; scoot racing brings in some respectable prize money when you're as good at it as I am. I was on the bottom of the world incinerating newspapers because I do that sometimes when they contain letters to the editor from unreasonable dragons complaining that they published an article about me."

"That's terrible."

"Isn't it just? —And I needed to be on the bottom of the world to do that because the vector of shren contagion is 'a dragon and a shren being within two hundred feet of each other while both in natural form', so it's kind of unconscionable to assume my natural form anywhere that might conceivably put me within two hundred feet of an unwarned dragon."

"- yes, I suppose. Even if they're unreasonable."

"The more unreasonable about shrens they are, the more they would be harmed by it. It's not unheard-of for shrens to kill themselves even when it didn't happen to them suddenly and traumatically out of the blue one day."

"Oh."

"So I'm really not risking it. I have extra safety spells on my scoot and everything. —when a dragonish is injured to the point of death in an assumed form, we involuntarily revert to our natural forms on the spot."

"I guess that's better than dying. - and I still think that if I speculate it about someone who is not you, yay."

"...um?"

"Sorry, the, uh, artifact is kind of hard to think around, I'm compensating with bad humor."

"Oh. Uh."

...he hesitates.

"...if you, uh, preferred not to be encumbered by those side effects, it's possible the unique green-group could help, although I don't know how open she is to doing favours for strangers and I'd want to know more about her before I'd be fully comfortable recommending that anyone ask her for that kind of help."

"It'd - depend."

"On?"

"I don't want to solve mindfuckery with more mindfuckery unless keeping this mindfuckery is going to be - unpleasant."

"- if you want me to ask her I will."

"I'm - I don't know. I know you said that you showing up out of nowhere with a pile of magical problems does not confer any obligations on me, but - what I want is... for all this to turn out well for you. And I don't know how to accomplish that but leveraging your rearranged priorities to get you to go re-rearrange your priorities doesn't seem like the right response."

"I'm - in general very averse to mind-reading or mind-alteration. I would have been scared to pieces of whatever artifact did this. But I don't think reversal is straightforward, I think I might wind up with memories I couldn't make sense of or - rebuilt instead of reverted priorities - and that's only better if there's an approximately practical advantage associated."

"Yeah. And, well. I hardly know where to start on evaluating - possible practical advantages."

"Yeah it's not really the best vantage point."

"I'm also not—entirely sure what factors go into that—"