Snort. "A thudia whose wings don't work. Well, I won't be a hundred and seventy forever."

"And then instead of passing for a thudia you can look like a small child! Fun."

"I'm pretty sure by that point word will have gotten around that The Last Shren is unusually tiny."

"Silver thudias will have to deal with fleeing dragons wherever they go."

"Oh no," he snickers. "I feel bad for them but at the same time weirdly vindicated. Like the first time somebody wrote in to complain about an article that didn't even allude to shrens just because he recognized my name."

"How is that vindicating? The thudias thing, not the name recognition."

"Roughly the same principle, even if less directly. 'Watch out, everybody, the Last Shren is tiny and silver!' It's, well, recognition."

"With you starring as the terrifying monster. I don't see the appeal."

"If people weren't so inclined to see me as a terrifying monster I wouldn't need the recognition," he says. "At least not the same way. If existing in public as a shren was not, itself, an obnoxious act of shrenhood, I wouldn't be so compelled to find vastly more obnoxious ones and do those."

"Your psychology is a strange and twisty thing."

"So we have established."

"I know not what strange and twisty passages the information might have disappeared into," says Aurin.

"Hey, it's not my memory that's in dispute here."

"Yeah, yeah." Aurin finishes setting up the game and moves a piece.

Mial makes a move in response.