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Aurin holds his mother's hand as she leads him from the street to his aunt and uncle's house. He's been here only a couple of times, and can't remember most of them distinctly; they're sort of awkwardly related, his dead father's half-brother and the wife thereof. But now they have a baby parunia, and that means there is a dragon related to Aurin who is not too far from his age, only thirty-one years younger. This is apparently the sort of relation that it will be particularly enriching for Aurin to meet. They can do this now instead of waiting a month, because parunias don't die when they're babies; this one is safe, unlike the miscellaneous cousins on his mother's side he's never met because they are all in too much danger to get attached to (and have all succumbed to that danger). So here they are. Even though it was a very long flight and he couldn't ride his mother for takeoff and landing when she had to be a heron, only for the middle part.
Alys knocks on the door.
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"I like some things about Corenta. Just not having to go to school. Also I guess I do meet most of my friends there."
"I," says Mial, "just convinced the junior branch of Scoot Lively to let me in even though I am six equivalent years younger than their next youngest member. I am good at convincing."
"Or maybe it'd be easier. But anyway you don't want me to do it so why are you trying to tell me it'd be hard?"
This is not the way to discourage Mial from trying to do a thing, Aurin.
This is not the way to discourage Mial from trying to do a thing, Aurin.
The first time Mial has a race as a league member, he is approached after the race by a reporter. "Hello! Do you have a few degrees?"
"Sure," he says brightly. He came in second; this is acceptable. He just needs to practice more, and maybe - no, Mom almost certainly won't let him tweak the spells on her scoot even a little tiny bit...
"As far as I've been able to determine you're definitely the youngest equivalency formal scoot racer in Esmaar, and possibly worldwide. Want to tell me about that?"
Mial shrugs.
"I'm eight-equivalent, but that's eighty-one years of actual time," he says. "If I was some species I'd have died of old age by now. If I was some species I'd have died of old age twice. And I still can't do a lot of things - I don't want to drink redreed wine or hold public office, but I do want to race scoots. So I found a league that didn't have a formal age restriction and I placed in their tryout race and hoped they wouldn't kick me out when I told them my age and species, and they didn't." He grins. "What can I say, I'm an impatient kid. I got my wizard certification when I was sixty-five."
"I'm eight-equivalent, but that's eighty-one years of actual time," he says. "If I was some species I'd have died of old age by now. If I was some species I'd have died of old age twice. And I still can't do a lot of things - I don't want to drink redreed wine or hold public office, but I do want to race scoots. So I found a league that didn't have a formal age restriction and I placed in their tryout race and hoped they wouldn't kick me out when I told them my age and species, and they didn't." He grins. "What can I say, I'm an impatient kid. I got my wizard certification when I was sixty-five."
The reporter writes all this down. "Do you feel that being chronologically eighty-one makes you significantly more mature than an eight-year-old human or an elf in their mid-twenties?"
"Maybe, maybe not," he says. "I think maturity is more about personality than time. What I have that an eight-year-old human definitely doesn't is seven more decades of experience. I've been flying my mom's scoot for ten years now. An eight-year-old human hasn't been alive long enough to get that much practice in, and a twenty-four-year-old elf would've had to start when they were four-equivalent."
"So you don't think the league or your family has anything to fear about your propensity for accidents."
He laughs. "Nah. I'm good, I'm careful, I've had ten years to get good at being careful. Ten years to get good at being good, too, as you can see." He holds up his second-place token.
"Oh, I'm a shren," he corrects absently, most of his attention on the actual substance of the question. "No, actually, I think maybe equivalency restrictions should be relaxed in general. If it's important that people should know how to do something properly, write a test and make them pass it, like with wizardry. I know it's not that simple, but equivalency restrictions are really annoying when you grow this slowly. Or at least they are to me. I admit there probably aren't that many eighty-year-old dragonishes desperate to join scoot-racing leagues."
"Oh." Mial laughs. "Sometimes it's awkward not to have a word for dragons and shrens as a group, when you're trying to talk about things like people who speak Draconic or age ten times slower than humans, so I made one up. Way back when I was just a baby, I think."