Aurin restrains his slightly hysterical sporfling reaction.

Piro snorts.

"I'm sure you don't have to have anything to do with them if you don't want to," says Mial. "Father's managed all this time on extremely limited contact. Because Piro was being a lizard."

Aurin doesn't say anything.

Koridaar looks over at him inquiringly.

Aurin starts edging towards the door.

"What are you afraid of over there?"

Aurin shakes his head and edges faster.

"Okay then. Piro, make yourself useful - what will the dragon council actually want with me if I spontaneously become a dragon?"

"We keep track of every dragon's contact information, location, genealogy, and noteworthy skills or other potentially useful characteristics," he says. "If we have a use for someone's noteworthy skills we expect them to oblige us. We expect people to report any dragon-relevant information they come by, and we distribute reported information as appropriate. We assist dragons who are threatened or inconvenienced by anti-dragon prejudice. And there are a couple more things which you don't need to hear because you aren't currently a dragon but which I definitely don't expect you to have trouble with."

"That sounds... potentially acceptable," says Koridaar. "Still. Even if being a dragon is not more trouble than it's worth, it's still more trouble than would be ideal. I might just rather be... dragonish."

And with that Aurin flees the house.

"...You can't be serious."

"Oh, I don't mean I want to be a shren. That would seem... a little like overreaching. Perhaps I should have led with that," she adds, glancing out the door. "But miracles have done a lot of unprecedented things lately. Why can't they expand the category of 'dragonish' a little?"

"Good question. I will happily find out," says Mial. "I mean to go pester Lazarus about his opinions on communication crystals anyway."

"Lazarus has opinions on communication crystals?"

"He thinks they're ridiculously inefficient."

"I look forward to seeing what you replace them with," says Koridaar.

"Damn right. Oh! I have a brilliant idea," says Mial. "You know what I'm going to do, I'm going to design better dragons. With Reform Draconic and shifting forms and maybe dragonsong and stuff, but no esu and no spontaneous death of any kind. Grandfather, make yourself useful again, go tell the rest of the council about this and say I'm willing to accept design input from any dragon who's willing to be in the same room with me to talk about it. Oh, who wants miracle teleportation? It's much sleeker than the wizard kind. Arbitrary passengers, no gesture or spell phrase, no CC-related constraints, no need to have visited the target location as long as you can specify it within a decent tolerance of uniquely."

"...I'll take it," says Piro. He glances half-consciously at Mial's parents.

"Why yes," says Koridaar, "he is like this pretty much all the time. I'll take that too, Mial. You should really look up his scoot racing career, Piro."

"I'll take it too. Do the miracle workers know what they've unleashed?"

"You bet they do. Done all three." He makes a little shooing motion at Piro. "Go on, now, I intend to hold this meeting tomorrow at noon so you'd better make sure people hear about it before then. Mom, Dad, can I have it in our living room?"

"I don't see why not, as long as the number of participants stays reasonably low. And you can always move outdoors if that happens."

"Great. Ialsafei siahrraki, Grandfather, and get lost."