"The most significant holy symbols."

"All by themselves, not enchanted or anything? Really?"

"Really."

"I wonder if an archetype flower or an aspects mark or a Kiaor's Sign would do it."

"Probably not. Only some local religions have this effect."

"Huh. Why those?"

"I'm really not sure."

Aurin flops onto his side and twirls the end of his tail in the air lazily. "Huh." And: "I wonder how long my cousin's going to take to figure out how to haul me back. Obviously he hasn't done it lickety-split."

"Is he usually faster?"

"The exact situation hasn't come up before. He might be having technical difficulties or be reassuring my doubtless frantic mother or fixing whatever led to me landing here in the first place lest it swallow my entire province or something."

"How enterprising of him."

"That's Mial. If this is a province-swallowing sort of problem I may be in for a wait. I don't have any local money..."

"Are you or are you not covered in solid gold?"

"Yeah? ...Is it particularly valuable, here? I don't even bother keeping dropped scales usually unless they're the big plates."

"It's reasonably valuable. A few of those and you wouldn't have to worry about much unless you're extremely picky about your living situation or expect to be here for a year."

"All right. Not going to be great fun to pry them off but it's probably better than perching in a tree to sleep."

"Probably, yes."

"But for all I know I'll whisk away in a tick so I won't start trying to dig a claw under the loose one under my wing just yet."

"How sensible."

"Mm-hm. Although I'm definitely going to be hungry enough to get started on the process in an angle or three."

"In a what?"

"It's a unit of time. Uh, unless you have really different day lengths here it's probably not far off from an hour."

"Sounds like a reasonable guess."

"How do you tell time here? I have the vocabulary but assembling it into instructions would be laborious."

"Instructions of what type?"