"Either!"

"There's a little over thirty people in this room and several billion worldwide."

"I don't even know how many that is," the miracle says dreamily.

"...one to a body," summarizes Keo.

"What?"

"Are you having trouble with seeing...?"

"You probably don't have a name, do you," says Keo.

"What's that?"

"A word that means you specifically."

"Oh. 'You'... 'me'... 'I'... 'this'," she says. "Not those. Different thing. Do people have names usually?"

"Yes. Especially dragons, although I don't think you can get one that will stick now."

"Stick...?"

"Dragon names are magical, but they have to be given before a certain age and you're older than that. Unless the miracle-worker can do something?" Keo looks at Lazarus.

"Oh, yes, probably," he says. "I can also do something about - I don't have the vocabulary, excuse me - she's locked out of the only one of her available alternate shapes that she's taken? Because it died?"

"The ferret form?" asks the blue opal representative. "You can give it back to her?"

"Yes. Or free it up entirely, I don't know which she'd like better. I also don't know how much magic either one will take, but the bulk of the enormous magical crisis is past as far as I can tell and I can probably afford to experiment. Unless there is another group of dragons who is about to drop dead at any moment from easily fixable magical causes, which, now that I'm not distracted by a great big pile of horrifying, I'm beginning to suspect might be the case..."

"Uh, who?" asks the diamond representative.

"You can fix old age?" asks the iron.

"I can fix quite a lot of things," says Lazarus. "I can see magic and have access to a nearly unlimited supply of nearly arbitrary miracles. The only thing is that it's not immediately apparent why old age kills you. There is a difference in - in precariousness, between younger dragons and older ones, but I'm not sure where it's coming from. And it looks like if I fixed it too naively you would all just continue growing a foot a decade forever, which has got to get unmanageable at some point..."

"Quite," says the largest representative present, a gold who is pushing 4,000.

"I suppose I could just make all adult dragons variable length - pick any size between twenty feet and your personal maximum via normal growth rate, anytime you like," he muses. "And probably institute some sort of reasonable maximum so that a few million years from now some dragon or other does not decide to swallow this planet just to be obnoxious... I'm just throwing ideas around here, but I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work."

"Can we get back to you on that?" inquires the white opal. "In the meanwhile I have a list here of shrens who haven't been cured yet, unless you've been to see them without updating us."

"I have not! I would like that list! Um - but is there any warning before old dragons spontaneously die," he says. "Enough time to fetch me so I can do magic to them, preferably. Because if there isn't I might rather focus on that until it's solved."