[It seems that perhaps we should speak,] Isibel says to Lycaelon. She wishes him a cup of tea, wherever he is, hovering in the air waiting for him to take it. [Though I confess I do not know where to begin.]
His aura is noticeably different in flavour from the Bells' magicmagicmagic and the Jokers' theatrical center-of-attention. It advertises that he is powerful and capable, but doesn't bother specifying exactly what he is capable of.
"I've figured out one part," he says. "Enhanced senses. But I can tell there's more to it, and I have no idea what it does."
"Ooh, the senses are a template attractor," Glass says, blinking at him, "that didn't have a way to get at you till just now but took the chance when you gave it an opening. The rest of it looks - not exactly like Sarion's. Yours is more... metaphorical? Is it okay if I have a peep at your mindscape? And it's cooperating with some other stuff that isn't aura that was already protecting your mind, looks very Thilanushinyel-y."
Glass nods, closing her eyes to focus on the forest. "Yeah - the outer forest will sort of entrap anything that tries to get into the inner forest, unless you lead it in. The mind-protecting magic you already had wouldn't have done anything about a dragonbond, but this will, you'll basically be able to escort Ansharil between inner and outer forests whenever you like."
"I've never looked at a Wildmage before, so these are all guesses based on how it's shaped and so on," Glass says, squinting at him. "It's... hooked up to something that isn't you which isn't here. That hookup might be at least partly informational in nature - telling you - things of some kind. There's something in your pocket involved. It's very attached to you, whatever it is, I think it could get ahold of you regardless of world-hopping, what have you got in your pocket?"
[My aura gave me a different kind of mind protection. I was right; it was exactly what I was looking for. My mindscape is now a forest hidden in a bigger forest - no one can find it without an invitation. So I won't feel like there's someone just around the corner all the time.]
[That sounds like it will be helpful, yes. Although it would still be potentially problematic if Lazarus's protective wish broke on adding another mind to the Dragonbond, it would not be immediately so - I would like at least in principle to be able to share things with my beloveds that I do not wish passed on, even though no examples come to mind.]
[Yes. But because our respective auras will do all of the immediately necessary work, and because Lazarus might well need to look at all of us to make a diagnosis, it should probably wait until Aianon has awoken and you and Ansharil have gazed at each other for some time and appropriate celebrations have concluded.]
"...All of the dragons whose eggs I conjured up are templates. Your alt; and then a Tony, a Sherlock, an Anna, and a Darcy. There is a Sandy, who is an elf, and a Libby, a Chris, and a Virginia, all human."
When the dust settles, the conclusion is: the Tonies have no idea what to do about a new one of them without any obviously recognizable reference points, and the Sherlocks think that someone with dense information output like Sue or Elspeth should give their dragon alt a crash course.
There are many worlds (that's where Elspeth's from) (that's where Isibel gets all her unheard-of magic) (that's why she's talking to them - worlds have copies of personalities - their alts (alts are this thing (Elspeth is the daughter of an Isibel alt, herself)) thought this would be a good way to summarize things.) Alts are not always the same species (none of theirs are dragons (many worlds don't even have dragons) (Isibel's dragon has alts who aren't dragons, too)) and only usually have similar names. Both of them are common templates, second only to Isibel's, and Isibel's dragon's (and those directly attached to them such as Isibel's parents) (and attached templates aren't always friendly; there is in particular a problematic one attached to Tonies, but Isibel will be happy to take care of him if one here makes himself known, though she does not expect one in this case).
Liselen appears.
"Hi!" he says. "Elspeth is unicorn-approved, promise." He prances up beside her and leans his shoulder on her a little.
"All right, I'm convinced," the grey dragon admits.
"Sherial," the other one exclaims, "you just made important people come here and tell us things! Why did you do that?"
"Well, presumably, if this person is here telling us things - " she points a single large claw at Elspeth " - then they're important things and it matters whether or not we believe them. And if she was here telling us nonsensical lies, I'd think the Bonded and the unicorns should be the first people to know, wouldn't you?"
"I guess," says the red-gold dragon.
"I do not mind in the least," laughs Isibel. "I have some responsibility for you, after all, and your alts are friends of my friends. I would have come to speak to you myself if it were not more efficient for Elspeth to do so. I would have your advice on approaching the other three from your - batch, as their alts did not have particular advice."
"They are certainly welcome. Although none asked particularly to come when Jane inquired of them how best to introduce you to the news. If nothing else, there will in some days be a large party of my alts and our friends, including all of the Sherlocks who care to appear."
"None of your alts are dragons. Most worlds do not have dragons; there is one other world that has, but they are very different, and we do not know any of them to be templates of any kind. Humans are overwhelmingly common for all of the templates we have found, with exceptions like you and me, here and there. It is the same with elves. Some templates here that I have just discovered," (this description is intended to include Lycaelon, who she only recently discovered to be a template, though it was years ago she discovered him at all) "are human, like their alts, but I, the five of you, my beloveds, and another recently-discovered template who is an elf do not match."
"There are as many ways for magic to be known or hidden as there are worlds. For example, on Angela's world Samaria, only a handful of people know that magic of any kind exists at all. The world has none of its own, and she has not told more than a few family members and friends about the sort she has brought in from elsewhere. In Glass's world Chronicle - this is the only other world with elves or dragons - there is no particular secret about magic existing; the local sort is abundant and varied and Glass has no reason to be secretive about the exotic varieties. In Pattern's world Origin there is no native magic, but she has been using foreign kinds for more than a decade and a half. While most people do not know how it works or where it comes from, and she might not like to explain you if you asked to visit because people would think she had made you instead of realizing that you could have come from somewhere else, she performs useful workings openly. In Rêverie, enchanting - what I have mostly done, if you have heard much of how I spend my time - is the native sort of magic, but few people knew about it until my alt there, Rose, began using it on a grand scale; other kinds are not common knowledge, but nor are they secret, and so you would be puzzling but not alarming to a typical resident."
"We can present this curiosity to Glass, when she arrives. But we do learn that things previously invariant are not so on a regular basis and she is not always equipped to provide advance notice without examples to look at. For instance, I expressly wished that the five dragons I conjured up be unrelated to each other and the existing dragons, yet in all other cases where Tonies and Sherlocks have existed in pairs, they are genetically identical."
"The Libbies have no obvious attachments to any particular other template, although Glass has said they are slightly attracted to your own template even if we haven't routinely seen the combination appear together. I... suppose we could expect Arianna to wind up attached to the elf of Sandy. There is no one obviously lying in wait for Sidanar."
"We don't really know, but I can see it," says Glass, continuing to peer at the dragons. "I can tell by looking what template someone is, some things about what that means for their personal characteristics, and how templatey they are - Bells and Jokers are the templatiest, but Sherlocks aren't far behind - and things about how their template attractors have interacted with their worlds, and about the worlds themselves, and about how templates are sometimes inclined to appear together."
"Well, it's not our magic," he says, with a shrug that ripples his iridescent black wings. "Of course it doesn't not want to work for dragons; dragons mostly don't exist where it's from."
"Do I want magic," scoffs Arianna. "Of course I want magic! Dragons are the most magic thing in the world but we don't get to keep any of it, it's supremely unfair." She digs her glossy white claws into the ground.
"Presumably, you will dragon, yes," says Sarion. "The fact that you have a likely potential Bonded wandering about also warrants some caution. One of him works alongside your aforementioned alt and is reasonably harmless. Another has a list of crimes that would be longer than you are even if it were written in fine print. I do not know which sort the local is."
"Your templates are pretty thoroughly paired," Glass says. "If you're saying you can just avoid him, that's going to take more work than it would if he were just some guy, and I'm not sure if it would work anyway even if we wish up a bubble enforcing sufficient distance. Template attractors have produced ridiculous improbabilities before. One person we know spontaneously developed the tendency to uncontrollably teleport between worlds specifically because his template requires its constituents to undergo more suffering than he was going to get where he was from."
"...Um," he says, blinking, and continues hesitantly: "I See you."
"I can just go try telling Sarion that you won't mess up her world if given the chance, and see if it comes out all sparkly-true," says Elspeth, "but that's more likely to produce conclusive results if you give me some information to work with. I can only produce sourceless truth on an unreliable basis."
"Well, people are allowed to ask her questions. And she has interesting friends from other worlds. And she considers this entire world to be her responsibility and she will be embarrassed in front of all her interesting otherworldly friends if one of its population acquires a minted dragon and does anything destructive to or with her before she can put a stop to it."
"I'm here to learn enough to have a better chance of saying accurately whether it'll be okay or not," says Elspeth. "If you don't have any idea then you can't tell me, I suppose, maybe Sarion will just have to disappoint the dragon." She hmmms. "I could," she says, "invite one of you here in case that would be any help."
(And this is what has passed between them so far, and there is Arianna who is an Anna and a dragon of Ansharil's kind, and maybe they won't Bond but it sure seems likely, and she wants minting, and there's Sandy, but then again there's Chainsaw, and then there's the one who's Chelsa's pet -)
"...So our entire template is sadists," says Sandy, "I mean, as far as I know, I haven't personally met the one in Gift or anything, but we're not necessarily bad sadists. Chainsaw is only Chainsaw because of Downside, and if you read between the lines with what Eights says about him he's pretty much settled right down, he just can't admit it because he spent so long needing to be the scariest asshole around that it's probably going to take him a few centuries to shift gears."
"My ingot power is that I go to this place in my dreams with a bunch of... kind of distilled versions of me in it? And I have for a really long time, so I'm used to them by now, and I've figured out that they're ultimately pretty harmless if you take them on their own terms and therefore so am I. It, uh, took a lot more figuring than it sounds like."
She is definitely the most visually impressive of the five conjured dragons. Tianthonet's symmetrical patchy red-and-gold is striking, Arianna's asymmetrical swirling red-and-white is fascinating, but Sidanar's scales are a deep midnight blue with a pattern of branching white lines that look like lightning.
"It is not that it has ever happened," says Sherial, "it is just that none of us has very much experience with people of your stature, and it is a natural worry given that lack. Also I imagine it is unsettling to be teleported directly into the midst of an unprecedentedly large number of small fragile people."
"Yes," says Sidanar, "that."
"Well... I was already going to leave the matter of my future Bonding up to fate and the Wild Magic," he says. "I don't think any of this new knowledge changes that, except that it seems my likely future Bonded and I are already good friends in another world. So I don't think I need to do anything different."
(This is how the granddaughter thing is, complete with a footnote about vampires in Aurum and Elspeth's princesshood, and how Isibel Sarion figures into it, and how alts work, and also they are about 60% confident that there is a dragon the local Libby could Bond to...)
"Most of them work for Bells - one of them moved universes to work for a Bell when her existing plans didn't pan out. They make good personnel officers - they're good at reading people, figuring out how to arrange them so they have what they need. They set priorities - actually that's probably why she wants to meet you; if she runs into you when having a dragon enshrined in her priorities would upset something then that will be inconvenient, so she may as well incorporate you now if it's going to happen. The connection between your templates isn't that strong. You can easily spring up alone completely independent of each other, neither of you is 'leading' or 'following' there, but when there's the both of you in a world you'll eventually wind up being important figures to each other - there's a certain set of books you're both attached to, in worlds where the books exist, and the characters in question are enemies but there's none of that necessarily spilling into reality. There is one who took up world conquest with the use of a template Bells do not like, who has the power to make people like or stop liking each other - the Bell in that world has yet to produce her explanation of why she didn't do more about this than she did, but the regime is being phased into something more palatable now they have coins available, anyway."
"I don't have one in my world even though I have - am married to, actually - a Sherlock," says Glass, "so this is hearsay and a smidgen of looking-at-templates, but it has sounded to me like they organize things - especially people - in their lives as more or less important in a way that's legible to us as opposed to sort of... haphazardly not doing that, the way that, say, Jokers do."
"I can see metacausality - I can tell what template someone is by looking and stuff like that - and there is something about you that I'm seeing, have seen on one other person who wasn't a template from another world, and have no idea what it means. Except that it involves you being attached to this world particularly."