...And then suddenly she is not in a desert, but standing in some kind of pattern drawn on the floor of a room and Odette's there, Odette's okay and she's not in the desert anymore and she just kind of flings herself at her sister and clings and cries a bit.

"I'm sorry, I should have been sooner, I'm sorry," Odette murmurs, hugging back fiercely.

"I'll be in the staffroom," the wizard says, and he leaves to give them some space.

"Where on Earth are we?"

"Not on Earth. It's--some kind of square planet, with weird magic--they said something about a hotel room, did you get any sleep? I'm so sorry."

"No, I didn't. And I've been walking and running for--can you carry me, a bit?"

"Of course." Illia lightens considerably. Odette takes her hand and goes to find the person who offered to get her a hotel room.

Receptionist! She is delighted to get them both a hotel room. On the house. (They must be taking a hell of a cut on the de-agings.) Here is a lovely inn, Sainted Magnolias Bed & Board.

Odette can consider what they're taking on the de-aging later. For now what's important is getting Illia food and water and sleep.

Sainted Magnolias has lovely Corentan cuisine and cozy beds.

Odette also elected to sleep off her all-nighter, but she spent hers in a comfortable office sitting down, not running in a desert. She woke up, acquired a Corentan novel, and has began familiarizing herself with the style of literature by the time Illia opens her eyes.

They seem to be big on the sainted flowers thing, which is not explained in their popular literature at all.

"Much better. Still kind of sore. Hungry."

"I'll see if I can get you something to eat," Odette says, and nips out to ask the hotel staff.

They will be happy to provide room service! Here's a menu. They can also recommend local restaurants.

Which one would be quicker?

Quickest would be someplace that serves really quick food, or just taking some fruit from the lounge. Room service is faster than a full to-order meal from a restaurant.

Room service, then, and a couple pieces of fruit from the lounge until then. After what she went through yesterday Illia shouldn't be skimping on food at all. It's a good thing she likes fruit as much as she does.

Room service brings a lovely platterful.

Corenta is not all human. There are totally bird people around, and stuff.

Wow, there's so many kinds of people. It makes her feel downright uncosmopolitan, considering that there's nothing but humans back home.

The bird people do not wish to be stared at. It may cause ruffled feathers.

She doesn't stare! Well, not any more than she stares at anything, she doesn't stare at them in particular, this place is so different! Architecturally as well as anthropologically.

The architecture doesn't mind being stared at a bit.

Almost a shame they're going home sooner rather than later, but it wouldn't do to make their parents think they were dead any longer than necessary.

When do the wizard people close? Odette decides to head over to see if anyone's still around to talk to. Illia accompanies her despite the lingering twinges in her legs because she never got a translation spell and therefore cannot talk to anyone else unless they happen to be a dragon.

Wizard office is open until a little after dinnertime.

Odette doesn't know when dinnertime is, around here. The fact that it's after dark may or may not mean it's closed.

It's open!

Oh, excellent. Presumably there will be someone interested in talking to her, considering how excited they all were yesterday.

They're very excited! What can they do for her? Would she like some more old people?

First she would like to talk about getting home. For one thing, can they send her home and bring her back, because she is definitely interested in de-aging more people but also she would like their parents not to think they are dead, did she mention that they came here fleeing a murder attempt?

...Oh? A real technical problem, one assumes, and not merely an...error introduced by their enthusiasm...and she will find this even if she asks completely unrelated wizards?

What? Of course a real technical problem! Look, here is a textbook on transworld spells. See, they weren't summoned here - as far as they know - and therefore cannot be unsummoned; but they are also not Elcenian, so it's likely they can't be sent.

Okay, that does sound like a very real technical problem. Why did they not mention this earlier.

It didn't occur to them, usually people don't enter the world without having been summoned! They apologize, they're very sorry, the technical problem will not apply to shuffling their parents or correspondence around...?

...Well. If they can summon their parents that would be significantly better than nothing.

They will get right on that. Both at once or one of them first?

Will it be faster if they do them one at a time?

They are perfectly happy to have two wizards working in parallel on this and can have both parents here in an angle if she desires.

That sounds better than not, at this point.

So they draw up some diagrams and have her and Illia (provided with a free translation spell of her own) serve as foci and perform the summons.

The wizards cast translation spells for them and welcome them to Elcenia!

The wizards get out of the way.

Smart wizards.

Eventually the twins persuade Karole to go back and explain to people like the registrar that they are not dead but they are a bit trapped and see if they can complete coursework very off-campus or something. They attempt to persuade both parents, but no, Raikel is not letting her children out of her sight right now.

When they ask the wizard's happy to unsummon Karole.

Eventually Odette disentangles herself from her mother and sister to start quizzing wizards on how things work here, since at least two of them are stuck.

The wizards would be happy to tell her how things work. ...what things?

How does one adult in this country? What are the standards of education, what are policies on people who did not in fact announce entry into the country at the border, are they going to have to worry about taxes..?

Odette would like to know what other long-term problems the world has besides people dying of old age. She would like to remain enrolled, if long-distance, in her university back home, or else that would appeal.

The world has an array of geopolitical problems but that's probably not what she means. Uh, lights can't heal themselves? The wizards will be happy to make arrangements for sending things to and fro for her to remain in touch with her school.

Healing lights: presumably a thing she can do. ...Can wizards not do that? Why not?

Wizard magic is just not super good at things as simple conceptually and difficult technically as healing, and besides, there are lights and witches.

Explain witches.

Witches make potions. Those work on lights fine and are the front line for dealing with ailments in lights.

"If wizardry can't heal, what does it do besides interworld stuff? ...And teleporting. And--a ton of other stuff, presumably. But not healing, really?"

Wizardry does lots of things. Would she like to look at their catalog? It has lists of services they offer. Conception spells, appliances, teleportation on demand to their other sites, translation, enchanting scoots, detecting mage potential, sunscreening for vampires or just people who are outside a lot, wards, conjuration and banishment, lie detection. There are spells that will fix broken bones, that's fairly simple, but healing-in-general not so much.

Well if they could do healing the way mages do it they would be able to de-age people, wouldn't they.

Apparently! Lights don't de-age people.

How do lights work, exactly?

This one wizard is also a light. He cups his hands and gets a little ball of gray-white sparks hovering there. If somebody touches it they will be healed of things.

Okay but how does being healed of things work.

So it just burns out pathogens and closes wounds? Is cancer a more complicated thing? Will a light reset a bone or do you risk requiring rebreaking if you touch it while your leg's a funny angle?

Lights heal cancer just fine without complications. It'll set a bone but if it's healed wrong you do have to rebreak; same with scar tissue.

So what counts as complicated, then?

Things you have to reinjure. They train midwives separately. Anything embedded in an injury, that's specialized work.

Huh. So there's no skill element at all to the actual magic part.

Not for lights, no.

Weird. ...Does it hurt?

...no?

Magic that doesn't hurt to do. Wow.

Wizardry hurts to do and the elemental kinds of magic hurt to get but lights and sorcerers and witches do not have this problem.

What's sorcery? And elemental magic, what can they tell her about that?

Sorcery is moving stuff around without touching it. Some people are born with the potential to control one of four elements (earth, air, fire, water); this potential can be detected with wizardry. The power's dormant until the power is necessary to save your life. You can activate air powers by just leaping off something tall and not hitting the ground, but the others are typically activated on a lot of painkillers or while outright unconscious.

It is weird that most kinds of magic don't hurt to do, here, but given that it makes sense that the one that's the most doing magic-ish instead of random superpower-ish would be the one that does.

It only hurts if they're doing largish spells for their capacity.

What, really?

Yeah, stings a little if they use more than half and goes up from there and this is why teleportation circles are so expensive, hardly anyone can do them and if they can do them they have to use full or near-full capacity.

Huh. Well, this is a square planet. It does make sense that things would work completely differently.

Why, what's her magic actually like to do?

Uh, it hurts? And it has the following mental side-effects.

How is it weird? They're the weird ones.

Well, none of their magic has mental side effects, that just sounds like a terrible way to do magic.

Well, doing magic involves pushing on the universe with your brain! Why wouldn't the universe push back?

That is improper universe behavior.

Say the people on the square planet.

What's wrong with their square planet? It's perfectly good for all planetary purposes.

It has ocean going all the way through in several places and it looks like one well-placed jostle would destroy the whole thing.

...but things don't really jostle planets.

Do they not have meteors in squareworld?

No?

Huh. Okay. A sufficiently magic thing could probably jostle the planet, though.

...why would anybody do that? Is she going to do that?

She's not going to do that, but they have magic users and people make stupid decisions sometimes.

They're pretty sure nobody has the CC to shove a continent and earth and water mages don't have that much power either.

What about sorcerers?

Sorcerers can't even push, like, a big boat.

Okay, so almost certainly nothing's going to happen to their planet. That doesn't make it sensible.

What's so great about her planet, then, huh?

They think a spherical planet sounds intensely silly.

Why?

It would just be so... round. Wouldn't it feel weird constantly standing on a round thing? Which way is down?

Down is towards the center, and it's so big you can't tell it's a sphere while you're standing on it.

...weird.

Also convenient for things like fossil records.

How so?

Odette explains fossils and how they are scientifically useful and why she doesn't expect Elcenia to have them.

They have some of those but admittedly not many. They can just use past-scrying to look at stuff though.

Doesn't that get harder the further back you go?

...no? Well, except insofar as you need a clear idea of what you are looking for, but you can just look for a certain location a certain number of years ago and then pan around looking at the sights if you want.

...Can they past scry other worlds?

Sure.

Okay, she's actually profoundly curious about this one historical event that happened five hundred years ago--how much does transworld past-scrying cost?

Flat fee about on a level with transworld diagrammy spells in general and then per degree as the wizard steers around the image for you.

Okay, well, not a huge priority but she'll keep it in mind.

Up to her!

Right now she'd like to visit a library.

They can provide directions to one.

Okay, great. Is there anything like an encyclopedia?

There is!

Okay. So she knows that elves and lion-people and dragons and bird-people exist, what other sentient species are there?

(The lion people are leonines and the bird people are skyfolk.) Vampires! Halflings! Dwarves! Merfolk! Pixies, sprites, fairies! Wolfriders! Assorted crossbreeds!

So many. Wow. What are some of the most important political units?

She's in Corenta. Corenta thinks Corenta is pretty great. Ertydo's also a big deal. Esmaar's kinda a big deal, and Nirlan, and Mekand. Oridaan in its own way and Eem in its.

She will go ahead and spend a few hours researching various features of this odd square planet.

The odd square planet is extensively documented.

Oh, good. Anything as interesting as the fantastic diversity?

There's lots of magic (though it's not allowed everywhere; Illia landed in a place where it is not allowed) and very little technology. It has religions and languages and foods and clothes and customs.

...Ugh. That one place looks repulsive.

It is widely agreed to be pretty repulsive. Its neighbors take refugees.

Good for its neighbors. Why hasn't anyone tried doing anything about the place, does it say?

Sometimes people overfly it and collect refugees who haven't made it all the way to the border. It seems like nobody wants to, like, conquer it, and you can't issue trade sanctions when there's no trade.

How come no one wants to conquer it?

Then they'd have to administer a bunch of people who hated them and wanted to kill them. By squarewide standards the place has no useful resources, natural or labor. If somebody wants land that would require annoying amounts of cultivation to be pleasant to live on they could just go to the bottom of the world, also perennially unpopular. (Someone has written an entire book about Why Nobody Conquers Ryganaav.)

That's hilarious. Goodness these people are non-expansive, the humans in her world would have been crawling on every available square inch of surface area this place has.

Nobody lives on the moon, either!

...Presumably the moon is harder to get to. Right?

Well, you can't walk there, but you could take a scoot or get a dragon to fly you there or an air mage. And once you'd visited it you could teleport.

Say, how does down work on the moon, since it's a hemisphere for some crazy reason.

The flat side has down and the round side does not!

This place is bizarre. Can she find any physics textbooks?

Not as such!

...Chemistry? Biology?

Yes, although chemistry seems obscure and biology seems to be principally observational - taxonomy, animal behavior, etc.

...Well, if doing magic doesn't hurt then they probably don't need to leverage it as much. Still. They--do they even know about underblood?

They don't call it that, but yes. Comes up discussing plant and animal breeding, the design of conception spells, identical twins, etcetera.

What do they call it? And how much do they know about how it works?

The Vansalese for it translates as "descent" and they had to figure out sex chromosomes for conception spells (apparently lesbians can only have girls) and have a solid grasp of simpler inheritance rules where they apply.

She should ask the wizards if they think anyone would be interested in having science imported. Although probably the physics people would have to kind of start over here.

Probably, what with the whole "gravity's not a thing" thing.

What the hell even causes down here.

Magic!

What kind of magic?

Down magic! It is speculated that any sufficiently large flat surface will have a down at it.

This is ridiculous and obviously requires thorough scientific testing.

If she says so. The books have no comment.

She decides to skim a few books on Corenta to see if there are any obnoxious social problems that would be more obvious to an outsider than to someone who grew up marinating in the stuff and head back to the wizard place.

Corenta is great, say Corentan books on Corenta found in Corenta. Apparently some people like to rank countries by their popularity with dragons, who will up and move if they think you're pulling shit; Corenta is in the top five by dragons per capita in spite of the presence of a shren house.

"In spite of." That sounds promising as a potentially problematic social institution. What's a shren house?

It is a house where there are shrens whose parents did not opt to raise them. Some dragons keep their shrens but it's not very popular.

...And what is a shren that makes them so popular for abandonment?

It's mostly like a dragon, except horrifyingly diseased. The condition makes them unable to fly, which is very painful until they're twenty.

So it's a disabled dragon with horrifying social stigma attached. Why is this painful until they're twenty.

Dragons have to fly, and can't shapeshift until then.

...well, there's no cure for it, they explain, when somebody who knows what a shren even is hears the conversation.

Okay, but if doing magic here doesn't hurt why don't they do anesthesia?

...none of these people know very much about shrens but they probably do have potion painkillers for it...

If these were dong a good enough job presumably she wouldn't have found in an encyclopedia that being a shren younger than twenty is horrible.

None of these people are witches either.

And wizardry can't do anesthesia? At all?

Well, they can render somebody unconscious? There's probably some reason the shrens do not spend their entire infancies unconscious. It would be hard to feed them that way, for one thing. Might delay their learning to shapeshift if 'learning' isn't just a term of art; none of these people are dragons either.

Teleporting's pretty cheap! They can go to many locations national and international.

Great. Which shren house seems most likely to be interested in answering her questions and receiving help from an outworlder with outworld magic?

...the wizards do not know that, but after they have looked up where the shren houses are the one they can land her closest to is the one in Paraasilan, Esmaar.

Good enough.

Teleportation!

And then presumably she can get directions and walk or fly the rest of the way there herself. Um, can she arrange a time to be picked up later for teleportation or something...?

Sure, someone will be happy to meet her there at a specified time. There is a fee if she's not there then.

Sure, fair enough. Let's say, um, around sunset?

Sunset it is!

A woman with sky-blue hair opens the door. She looks at Odette's hair. She makes unamused eye contact. "Yes?"

"I'm from a completely different universe and I have a kind of magic that no one who's known about shrens has ever had before and I don't know what exactly I can do to help but I want to try," she says earnestly. Hopefully the fact that she's speaking Genoshan will lend her claim some credibility. "...Off the top of my head it's possible to fly with my kind of magic, and, um, doing it hurts but maybe not as much as this esu thing. And I can do anesthesia but it's kind of lossy so it's almost certainly not a long-term solution."

"Um, good question. I don't know exactly but my father might, he's a theoretician, especially since he doesn't actually practice anymore, if you have a wizard handy you could probably send him a letter and get a response pretty quickly? And by lossy I mean that if I take pain away by magic--as opposed to just healing the source of the pain, which is completely different--doing that always causes me more pain than I'm taking away. But, um, and I really don't recommend this, I'm special circumstances, I did magic to my brain to make me not mind pain. I don't know if it has a limit, but it might."

"I don't have a wizard. And don't recommend you testing the limits of your masochism on any shrens more than five years old," remarks the blue-haired shren. "But I can get you a five-year-old."

"Okay. I can send a letter tonight, I am staying in the vicinity of wizards who want me to keep doing nifty offworld magic with their company. If the effect's continuous then I don't know if I can do anything meaningfully permanent. ...Not until I learn enchanting, anyway, I wonder if that might work as a cheat..."

"I wouldn't know," comments the blue-haired shren.

"I'm thinking aloud. Um, is there any risk that interrupting the pain would make it worse when it comes back?"

"Nothing inherent, but I wouldn't know whether your magic would invite some kind of rebound effect."

"No, there are a couple things that hurt the target as well as the caster, but anesthesia isn't one of them."

"Then if you would like to try it I can get you a five-year-old."

"Yeah."

The blue-haired shren motions her in and sits her down in an office and goes and reappears with a shiny black hatchling squirming in her arms.

"Until I know if I can teach you magic it's probably the best I can do and letting children be in pain when I can stop it isn't okay."

That one can be not in pain too for a while. "Holding."

The blue-haired shren seems to know which ones are how old; she might be figuring it out by size or just from knowing the kids. She indicates a sparkly blue one.

She picks up that one's pain too. "Starting to get a little uncomfortable."

There's plenty of babies. White sparkly?

"There's a reason I was stepping you up gradually," says the blue-haired shren.

"I'm okay," she says, wincing. "...I am more okay than not doing this would be okay."

"Not sure. Couple hundred miles, maybe."

"They're farther away than that, but we could shuffle them around, it might be more efficient to concentrate you on a few older ones."

"That...sounds efficient."

"How many this old," she picks up the third-eldest, "and up could you do?"

"Um." She bites her lip and shudders a little. "Not sure. Ten? I'd have to try it."

...Aww. Babies. She's not in so much pain that she can't be distracted from it at least a little by small children.

They're very cute! They have figured out that she is the one doing the thing! It is a good thing and she is a good human and she can pet them if she wants!

She wants! She will happily fuss over small not-in-pain children until it starts getting close to sunset or Jensal comes back or something.

Jensal comes back. "The Kep Island house wizard is going to bring over the eldest two from there and then go to the Corenta house for theirs; the other house will have to wait until we have a tank."

"Okay. I really hope I can teach my magic, this is very much a stopgap solution."

"If you can, how hard will it be to learn?"

"If all you need is flight, and you're already in this much pain, probably not that hard. Flight isn't tricky, or anything, it just hurts more than, say, running really fast. Might need to practice some doing other kinds of magic first to build up the power--oh. And, um, meditation--my kind of magic has mental side effects--" she describes the relative mental side effects of Sympathy, Effort and Conquest and how some people are more resistant to them than others and how meditation and related forms of self-discipline ameliorate that. "But if it's just flying every now and then to keep the esu away it probably shouldn't have a huge effect."

And Odette--cringes, drops a handful of the younger ones, and assumes the pain from the new baby.

She drops a handful more. Dammit, why can't she be better than this. She grabs the new baby.

The new baby is the worst one. Some of the dropped babies de-swarm in protest.

Nng she hates having to leave any of them uncovered--and she can't do this overnight--she had better be able to teach this stuff.

"It'll take a while for Ehail to get to the Corenta house," Jensal says when the silver has left again. "Where do we start with seeing if we can learn the magic?"

"Try--ugh, I don't know any words for it--I wish--no, this is worse. I know a telepathy-thing but it's very brief and it hurts a lot, but it's not as bad as esu, at least not for the older ones, I could try showing you what it's like..."

"You sit through a few years of that," Jensal points at the oldest baby, who is now rolling over and over on the floor, "you don't care much about anything less."

"I'll try showing you or a different adult what it's like and we can see if you can get anywhere with that before trying it on a kid regardless, of course."

"Try me."

Jensal doesn't even flinch. Though she does tilt her head curiously and try turning into a bird.

The faint echoes of pain that lingered after the first sharp shock don't fade any slower as a bird.

She turns back. "Estimated amount of practice necessary to get to the point of anesthetizing babies? I imagine they'll learn better if someone else can hold the pain for them while they're working on it."

"Um, I could fly three years in...I was doing kind of gratuitous amounts of magic, though. On the other hand the babies are lighter than I was, at the time, and that's most of the work..."

"They're very light. They could even flap, if that helps, just not hard enough."

"It might. Or--wait, is that the issue? Because putting more strength in your muscles is easy."

"The issue is unclear, but they can move their wings, just not fly with them." (A baby flaps illustratively.)

"Maybe the muscles thing will work. ...We should see if you can do any magic at all, though. Try lifting something small?"

Jensal finds a small toy and holds it in the palm of her hand and stares it down. Effort seems most natural to her.

It takes a few seconds to start lifting into the air, but even before that the slight muscle ache lets her know that she's doing something. Odette clasps her hands together in delight. "It worked!"

Jensal smiles, slightly. "Does everyone just pick whichever form they like more, or which seems suited to a task...?"

"Suited to a task, strongly weighted towards what you've got a resistance to and what you've got a talent for. I can do almost everything I really want to with Sympathy."

"Resistance to?"

"The mental side effects don't hit everyone exactly the same. Depending on your personality you may be more or less strongly hit by any given side effect."

"Is that predictable without experimentation?"

"Um, some, but not completely. I don't really know you well enough to even guess."

"What would you need to know about me to guess?" Jensal asks, forcing the toy up and up and up until it hits the ceiling and then forcing it to fall slowly.

"What...you're like? I mean I can think of a handful of features that I would guess individually would mean higher or lower resistances all other things being equal but it's awfully complicated. And it's not all stuff that's meaningfully visible on the surface--like, two people might both believe something, and the first one just sort of happens to believe it and the second one really believes it right down to the bottom of their soul and they might not act differently about believing it but the difference could matter to resistance. For example."

"Believe - what?" The toy reaches her hand. She tries Conquest to zoom it up.

"Oh--that hurting people is wrong, that names are important, that it's a bad thing that people die, that vengeance is justified...the point is less the beliefs themselves and more how different parts of your mind are anchored together, and so on."

The toy hits the ceiling. Jensal catches it. She tries to coax it up by Sympathy. "I think I require a more thorough explanation of the effects under discussion."

"I'm really not a theoretician. I know that I have a fantastic Sympathy resistance, a slightly above average Effort resistance, and a significantly below average Conquest resistance, and sometimes my friends and I would make a game at guessing peoples', but usually the way you find out is by doing small things for a few days and then figuring out how your moods have been affected."

She gets the toy to wobble upwards. "Effort seems the most straightforward to me, but I suppose that might not correlate with a resistance."

"It often doesn't. My mother was very talented at Conquest and had--not a lot of resistance for it. 'S why she doesn't practice magic anymore."

"I could probably stand to be more agreeable, I suppose."

"That's also a way people decide what to use, is which side effects they think they can best live with."

"Do the babies need to strengthen their own muscles to see if that works or can someone do that for them?"

"It's possible to have someone else do it but that makes it harder to get just the right amount so you get them as strong as you want without getting it so they damage something when they move. ...On the other hand, I can heal."

"Or we can get a light. Anything that doesn't outright kill them we can just get a light, only the younger ones would even notice a broken wing, and flying for even a few seconds will reset the esu to zero."

"I can try it."

"Try the borrowed ones first."

She reaches out a hand and places it delicately on the wing of the first little one that was brought in, and delves into the precise working of the limb. Carefully, delicately, she threads power into the wing and its partner. "I did something experimental," she tells the baby. "Try flying--I don't know if it will work, but try."

The baby frowns and nods and jumps and flaps.

The babies are all SO EXCITED and all want to be next. Jensal picks one to be next.

This is very, very tricky. Some of the injuries are worse than a dislocation. ...Some of them need to be healed and try again, because they hurt themselves in a way that makes flying intractable.

She's starting with the older ones and they don't care at all if they're broken or dislocated they want to FLY NOW PLEASE MAGIC HUMAN.

She's working on it! She's working on it as fast as she can!

Well, as she lets the babies fly, she can stop painkilling them. The esu vanishes in an instant once they're flying.

Once she has--room--she grabs the littler ones again.

They are pleased and accept being lined up for their turns. Jensal calls a light. And Ehail again.

A light? ...She's just been healing them herself. They should totally get more babies in here, though, that's a good idea.

Corenta: totally the place where her sister is! Her sister who is also a mage!

...can her sister fly babies? They could just tell her where the house is and Ehail can go to Tenebirokalamikikek instead.

Her sister is unlikely to be able to do anesthetic but can totally fly babies.

Flying babies is the important part. They provide the location of the Corentan house and redirect Ehail.

Er, she's not actually in contact with her sister until sunset.

...what happens at sunset?

The wizard who teleported her here from Corenta comes to pick her up.

She could just go to the station and call a wizard over early.

Okay, yeah.

Before she goes she is thanked profusely for flying the babies. By babies and adult shrens both.

She wasn't just going to let babies keep hurting, not if she could do anything about it, she's not a monster.

Well, they thank her anyway.

They're welcome. Back to Corenta.

Corenta welcomes her! Abstractly.

Presumably the shren house in Corenta will welcome her and her sister (and their mother, who comes along in a non-mage role) somewhat less abstractly.

Yep, Jensal called ahead and explained, babies are this way, light's already here, come come.

Oh, these poor babies. Fly, babies, fly.

The babies fly, they fly! They swarm the nice magic humans!

The nice magic humans will, unfortunately, have to take the magic off their wings to go deal with the babies at the last house. Or were they going to be brought here...?

The Corenta house doesn't have anyone who can teleport there, but the magic humans are welcome to wait here for a delivery of babies once the Kep Island wizard has been to both locations and can teleport between them.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to teleport them there?

It's cold there. Also the house operator would need special permission from the dragon council to have shrens in natural form above water.

Cold is not so much a problem because magic but please explain this dragon council.

They are sort of a supplementary ruling body over dragons. Shrens aren't dragons, of course, but dragons are the people who are in danger of contagion if shrens are contagious in unexpected places, so there's a system for the dragon council to make sure no one's in danger if that's happening.

Is there any particular reason not to include shrens under the Genoshan word for dragon? The concept of dragonhood in the twins' home world does not require flight. Shrens are contagious?

Well, they suppose if the concept includes diseased reptiles with present but nonfunctional wings, Genoshans can call shrens that. And yes, if a dragon and a shren both in natural form are too close together, bam, two shrens. This is obviously not okay and they are very careful and it hasn't happened in so long.

A baby dragon getting turned into a shren does sound pretty terrible, yeah.

It's no fun for adults either. Anyway, the shren house locations are all designated okay places for shrens to be and teleportation doesn't cross the intervening space.

Losing the use of a pair of limbs at any age would probably be unpleasant, she acknowledges, it's just hard to be concerned about that comparatively lesser inconvenience while there are babies in large amounts of esu. How long is it going to take the wizard to get there?

A while. The place isn't near a teleportation circle.

Ugh. Fine. They can be swarmed by babies in the meantime, which is not ugh.

The babies are so cute and so grateful. They have claws but they are kind of soft and don't do much damage.

She can have some spillover swarm.

Why even are non-human babies this adorable to a human-brained person, it is delightful and evolutionarily mystifying.

It probably helps that they can all talk fluent Genoshan and do so in small chipper voices.

Baby voices are probably part of it, yeah.

It takes Ehail a while to get to Tenebirokalakmikikek's shren house, and then a while to get to the Corenta house, but once she has done that she ferries in babies.

And then those babies, too, may experience the joys of not being in horrifying amounts of pain.

The babies are very joyous about this indeed!

And once everyone's esu has been reset and everyone's wing injuries have been healed, Odette picks a likely-looking adult--in this case, the teleporting wizard--and asks if there's anything else obvious she can do to help.

"I assume if you could actually cure it you'd have done that," says the silver wizard.

"I don't know what it is to cure it. This world runs on magic a lot harder than mine does--my world basically doesn't do permanent magic--and I'm kind of leery messing with something I don't understand when it's part of a person."

"I have some notes... they might not help."

"They're presumably not in Genoshan or any other language I understand, but I'm under a translation spell, so it certainly couldn't hurt to have a look."

"I can go get them."

"Okay."

Ehail goes away and comes back with a bunch of paper densely packed with text about experiments and speculation and notes on old writing about shrens.

Odette goes over this carefully, and then asks permission to have a look at Ehail with magic.

That's fine with Ehail.

"I don't know what-all's going on in there exactly but it is insanely delicate and interdependent; if I tried messing with anything without knowing exactly what I was doing the whole thing could come crashing down. I could probably work out a 'cure' that killed the patient five times out of ten, failed twice and worked unproblematically three times. If I worked hard at it."

"'Worked hard at it' involves more people dying before I get that far. Why on Earth--or Elcenia--I get that there's social stigma strong enough to get parents to abandon their children, but--really?"

Nod.

"Why?"

"I don't mean, everybody would, but it's not a good thing to be a shren."

"Why not?"

"...people who aren't shrens or dragons don't really understand it."

"Based on historical precedent that sounds kind of like they're so horribly ableist at you that you've internalized it."

"...I'm not sure I've ever actually spoken to a dragon in my life," says Ehail thoughtfully. "Not more than a few words, anyway, not when I wouldn't have had my hair dyed..."

"Then I really don't understand why you think there's something wrong with you besides the inconvenience of nonfunctioning limbs. ...And the trauma of having put in your twenty years before I showed up to interrupt it."

"It's hard to explain."

"Can you at least give me a general category? Is it that there's some subtler inconvenience that's difficult to put in words?"

"Not, not exactly, it's - it's the word..."

"The word?"

"Shren. It's Draconic, you can't even learn Draconic."

"Why not?"

"It's unlearnable. It changes too much. We can speak it as part of the speaking all languages thing."

"Changes so much you can't naturally learn it? So it's, what, another magic thing?"

"Yes."

"So you have a magic language being ableist at you in your head."

"I guess."

"That sounds really unpleasant."

Nod.

"Do you have any idea why your magic language is horribly ableist?"

"No."

"Damn. Ugh."

Ehail shrugs and looks at her shoes.

"I wonder if I could convince it that it was being horribly ableist and should stop. That's sort of how my favorite branch of my magic works, is convincing things of things."

"...I'm not sure what's there to be convinced, but I suppose you could try it, if you can normally convince things that aren't thinking."

"Convincing things that aren't thinking is how Sympathy magic works. Could you say some things in Draconic so I can see if I can get my magic to tell me things about it?"

Draconic: is the thing that is going on.

Okay, yes, but what is Draconic, exactly?

It's a language! An ever-shifting arbitrarily connoted language. Except hereish, it's not arbitrarily connoted hereish.

Expand upon hereish, please.

And why are shrens shrens?

They're grotesque and contagious and mockeries of true siaddaki dragons who are what the species is meant to be. They're wastes of space, of magic, of emotion. Draconic would be remiss if it didn't make sure these important facts were known.

Okay, but alternately, how about not that?

BUT SHRENS.

...Okay, but what about slightly less that?

Nah. She's not even a dragon it doesn't care what she thinks.