He finishes this explanation just as Aurin emerges from the bathroom and catches up with him. "Mial, there you are, where are you going?"

"Is this your cousin?" asks Mom Redhead. "Is he a shren too?"

Aurin is not very successful in decorously containing his reaction to this suggestion. "No!"

Aurin finds something deeply incorrect about this situation but can't articulate it.

"Have we upset you?" wonders Dad Redhead to Aurin.

"You don't just - you don't ask dragons if they're shrens," mutters Aurin.

"Around some dragons you don't even mention shrens but I'm used to Mial," adds Aurin.

"Don't even mention -? I'm confused," says Mom Redhead.

Aurin doesn't have any clarifications to add to that, although he doesn't look like it fully represents him in all particulars.

"Anyway, here's the auditorium," he tells the redheaded couple.

"Thank you," says Redhead Dad.

"Bye!" says Mial to the no-longer-lost people.

Then he turns to Aurin.

"If I ask you what that face was about are you not going to know what I mean?"

It's pretty great. And the swimming pool rekindles Mial's interest in something he's thought about but never gotten around to: properly choosing more forms than just human and merlin.

He wants to be methodical about this. Even as a blue-group, he only gets ten slots - he has no idea how he could possibly get by with just five. There are so many things to be, and he hasn't even heard of most of them yet!

When he gets home from Aurin's school, he begins a systematic research project that lasts him the next three and a half years.

He knows that he wants a swimming form (that's what got him started in the first place), but doesn't anticipate needing to breathe water, nor especially want to visit the oceans a lot, so he doesn't just go for merfolk and have done with it. After some back-and-forth on the subject of cephalopods - a month of it, to be exact, during which time anyone who talks to him hears about how exciting it would probably be to have tentacles - he tentatively writes down his favourite variety of river otter and moves on to the harder problem: climbing forms.

There are lots and lots of different climbing goats in the world. Many of them have cool-looking horns. Different species have been studied to different extents. But Mial has trouble envisioning such a goat climbing, say, a bookcase. He turns to other kinds of animal. Squirrels are neat, but a Mial-squirrel would be practically bite-sized; he'd rather go for something a little bigger. A cat, say. Even a cat would be fairly teeny, though... maybe a big sort of cat. Biggish. More than a pet but less than a lion.

Oddly enough, it's during a return to the subject of goats that he finds it: a species of snow leopard that preys on the goats and ibexes of the Rimarel Mountains on the continent of Nanela, and has developed astonishing balance and agility for this purpose. Their average size falls comfortably within a range that - he makes his mother calculate it, and then explain how she calculated it so he can check her work - would make a Mial-sized version come out just a bit bigger than an ordinary domestic cat. They are wonderfully fluffy. He'll be warm a lot when he uses it, living in a desert - but he'll have a form that will stay cozy when he visits cold places. He writes that down too, and selects a goat from among the prey species after several more months of deliberation. (They are mostly a lot like each other, and he wants to know which one is best, and it's hard.)

The next item on the agenda is to survey the non-climbing non-swimming animal species of Elcenia and see if there are any he desperately wants to try. But although he covers pages and pages with the names of species he thinks are interesting - bats and badgers, snakes and stoats - none of them, in the end, are interesting enough. He wants one thing that swims and two things that climb. It would be fun to slither or echolocate, but not fun enough to be worth using up another form slot out of his limited supply. Not yet.

He spends another month after that fretting about his choices, including wavering several times about whether or not he wants to pick a hybrid form for one of the three - it feels almost like a waste not to use this option, open to him but closed to any dragonish from a different colour group. Ultimately he sticks to single species, though: their characteristics are much more predictable. He'll have forms left over to experiment with, when he's older and has been using these ones for a while and wants something new.

And then, about two months shy of his seventieth birthday, he finally learns the three new forms. Immediately he begins spending most of his time as one of the climbers. Goat-Mial can climb the side of the house straight up to the roof with no trouble; feline-Mial prowls the tops of bookshelves and pounces fluffily upon his unsuspecting parents. And then upon his very suspecting parents, once they have developed a habit of checking all the tall furniture for evidence of fluff whenever they enter a room.