"And I do like to be busy."

"What are you currently busy with?"

"There's the ongoing immortality project, and on the shorter-term front I'm deconstructing some unicorn magic, trying to convince Kexan to introduce me to his grandmother, setting up a test garden to see which of several spells is better at repelling gnomes and other pests, and - now - I'm going to have lots of notes on the Skyvault and maybe the sword to pore over."

"What exactly are you doing to unicorn magic? And who is Kexan's grandmother?"

"Kexan's grandmother is the King of the Dragons. I want to convince her to let me have a look at the King's Crystal. I don't expect to be allowed to touch it or do anything to it, but I give myself even odds on being allowed to look, possibly if I spend a month in indentured servitude to her first or something. So far Kexan's on the fence about it."

"Good luck," snorts Tony. "Kazul's an old friend of the family, and I wouldn't ask her for a look at the Crystal."

"I'm at least reasonably confident that Kexan will not introduce me if she'd be liable to eat me," says Bella. "Merely not getting a look at the Crystal wouldn't be so bad; I'm not getting a look at it now. But I have to be gentle and patient - which is hard - about wheedling Kexan, since of course if I annoy him too much he might present me without being sure if I'll get eaten. Dragons can be depressingly casual about people getting eaten."

"I had noticed that, yeah," says Tony. "And I come with a spare."

"...I had not been under the impression that this was how twins work..." says Bella.

"It isn't," says Sherlock. "Royal families, however..."

"So you think a dragon would think less of eating one of you because the other could carry on questing for a husband and produce an heir," says Bella, sighing. "Yeah, probably."

"From a dragon's perspective, individual humans don't last that long regardless of being eaten. Human continuity on the level of the family is more comparable to dragon continuity on the level of the individual."

"I think half the reason Kexan is willing to be friends with me is that I take the limitations of human lifespan very seriously as a bad thing that I plan to fix," Bella says, nodding. "I'm certainly not gearing up to produce an heir and he doesn't know my parents."

"Are you not?" says Sherlock, smiling.

"Gay as a rainbow that is only interested in other rainbows of the same sex," says Bella, gesturing at herself, "so, yeah."

Tony laughs.

"I mean, that's probably a relatively minor technical issue if I worked on it, but it's not a priority at the moment, I don't have a kingdom to hand down."

"...Relatively minor?"

"Well, I don't know really, I haven't looked into it, but it doesn't sound hard, not like living forever without turning into a rock or getting other people to understand one's cat."

"Is the cat thing really up there?"

"So, so up there," laughs Bella, "it's kind of ridiculous, it's so easy if it's your cat as to be barely a spell and so hard if it's not your cat - some people manage it for like a minute at a time, and then it fizzles."

"I know. I think it's something about the cats themselves interfering, but attempts at observing anything emanating from Cricket beyond witchcraft I deliberately channel through him have turned up zilch."

"Perhaps," says Sherlock, "it is precisely the cats themselves interfering."

"I don't think they're consciously obstructing the attempts. They have enough variance in personality that I don't think they could simply all be lying about wanting to help, and generally they don't object to being translated manually."