"Okay good. Half-human parunia, and." Shrug.

"Yeah, I get the picture. Half-elf parunia, my mom's in her two hundred thirties, I called this meeting intending to make her the first third-siahr."

"That makes sense. Can I write a novel based on you later maybe?"

"Maybe."

"Cool. I'm going to be a novelist." She finds a seat.

He checks the sky for incoming fliers and glances around again to assess the attendees.

People are settling in, for various values of "settling". Some of them look pretty jumpy - there's a garnet boy a little younger than Mial, over there, and a spelter girl with gritted teeth, and a highly uncomfortable looking fellow dressed like an Oridaanlan plutarch, trying to evade the gaze of a short emerald woman. A turquoise lady looks disgusted with the visibly uncomfortable people but isn't engaging anyone in conversation. Many of the attendees have brought notetaking materials of some kind.

"Bigger turnout than I was expecting," Mial remarks as he turns away from the pavilion's entrance and towards the seated attendees. "Hi, everybody. I'm Mialavar and I want to design a better dragon. Who here actually came with specific design input in mind?"

The spelter's hand shoots up; nobody else has such an insistent reaction, although the garnet asks, "What do you mean 'specific'?"

"I mean an idea you have already thought of for how third-siahrs should work." He indicates the spelter girl. "Yes?"

"Hi. I can't introduce myself because I don't have a name. This is a problem and it should be fixed."

"...Yes it should. Lazarus, fix her problem, please. This is Lazarus, he's one of the offworld miracle workers, he can see magic and is useful for finding things that are wrong with dragons and fixing them."

"You're actually not the first dragonish I've seen with the name problem," says Lazarus, "but the other one had so many other troubles that that one sort of fell by the wayside. I can miracle your name slot open again and then you'll have... it looks like about a year to pick a name you want, does that sound reasonable?"

"I don't know if that's long enough, I haven't thought of anything I like in an entire life of not having a name," says the spelter.

Mial looks at Lazarus assessingly, and decides not to interrupt this tangent. Lazarus has a very Lazarus look going and it would probably be unproductive to try to get him back on task.

"Hmm... if I approach the problem from a slightly different direction, then I can do it without the time limit becoming an issue," says Lazarus. "And you will just go on being able to name yourself until you pick something. Acceptable?"

"People can't ordinarily line name themselves. But I have miracle magic. Do you want to be able to line name yourself?"

"As amusing as this side discussion is, I think the actual question of whether or not Nameless Spelter Girl can line-name herself is best left for her and Lazarus to hash out after the meeting," says Mial. "Okay. So the current parameters for third-siahr are: definitely no spontaneous death, probably no dragon magic for clean-slate and not-being-a-siad reasons, and now no expiration of ability to be named. And I might want to change how names work for third-siahrs more generally because my mom's first name happens to have three syllables. Being a blue-group I'm also strongly tempted to give them a baseline of at least ten form slots because, really, why not."

"How are you going to do that without dragon magic?" asks the garnet.

"Miracle magic can accomplish nearly arbitrary things," says Mial. "It can screw around with dragon magic freely enough that I have absolutely no reason to think it can't duplicate any particular effect thereof. Third-siahrs are going to have something powering their various characteristics, but it's not going to be a substance that one can run out of like dragon magic is. It will not draw on a limited pool like dragon magic does, and it will not spontaneously and lethally abandon people over two thousand years old like dragon magic used to before Lazarus happened to it."

"What will power the characteristics, then?" asks the garnet.

"Will you be deeply unsatisfied if I just say 'miracles'? I'm getting the sense that you will be deeply unsatisfied if I just say 'miracles'."