She is going to solve this problem. By taking some surveys. As in, grab photo paper, gather up a list of lines to go visit, and then knock on some doors and ask some questions and create a book series that organizes all possible forms, all known forms, what known lines look like in the forms - that sort of thing.
She starts with blue groups, because blue groups have the most available forms - she's gotten all of the big lines (well, all of the big lines that gave her the time of day) and is on the smaller ones. The ones with only one or two people. Or, in some cases, none.
This particular one's easier than some others; she doesn't need to fly to another country. It's Esmaar. She flies to the address of one 'Avar,' no line name. Apparently he had one and had some kind of explosive spat about it and gave it up. Not that it's her business. He's just another person for her survey.
She knocks on his door.
"Hi," says Avet, "I'm doing a survey on shapeshifting forms - I am going to be making a centralized book on it because I think all of the available ones are rubbish. Do you, and any other dragons in this household have a few degrees?"
Oh.
Blink, blink. Processing. Taking the part of her head that wants to run away and hide in a corner and tossing that in a box while the rest of her functions properly.
Does being a shren actually have anything to do with shapeshifting?
... Not really, no.
"But if you like you're free to take the survey, too. I should have specified, this is not dragons only."
Anymore.
"And that's it, thank you." She smiles at Finnah. "And if you don't mind, could you get any other -" ... There is a word. Missing. In Draconic. Avet frowns. ".... Dragons or shrens? In the house, could you please ask them if they'd like to take the survey?"
Why isn't there a word for that?
(Ugh no seriously why is Draconic missing a word?)
It's not a Draconic word, though, it's a Leraal neologism - e'sisaak.
"I did a lot of research when I was picking out my next three forms after merlin and human," he explains. "I was highly dissatisfied with being limited to only ten forms out of all the species in the world, so I wanted to pick the best ones."
"I sympathize greatly with the feeling," she agrees wryly as she writes. "I have exactly one form. This is not for lack of research or because I don't care. Actually this entire thing came about because I was dissatisfied with the information available. It needs to be better. So here we are." She finishes writing. "And, may I take a photo?"
"Thank you, then. If any of you pick any more forms and would like to further contribute to my obsessive project to catalog forms, my name is Avetlarin, feel free to mail me. Also if you would like a copy of the thing when I've finished, feel free to ask and I'll send copies. Though it's going to take a while to finish, I think."
And then she teleports away to the next people to survey.
Eventually, she is at a different door. She's made it to golds (having already tackled every shren house that will give her the time of day) and knocks on the door to her latest survey victim.
Soon enough, she finishes polling all relevant dragons that are willing to participate. Well. 'Soon enough.' It still takes a damn long time, but honestly gathering the information was the easy part. Now she has to compile and organize. Ugh. So much information to sort through and organize...
She does other things while sorting. Reading the paper, for instance. She does that while sorting, it's not like sorting's all that hard. Just tedious.
For instance, this section covers various forms of competitions, like the all-Espaal scoot race that takes place once every five years between all the major leagues on the continent. There are profiles of the top five placers, including one whose blurb is mostly about how precocious he is and has been for such a long time.
... Hey. Wait. No, she recognizes that name. Mialavar? That's the parunia turned shren who challenged her to survey shrens along with dragons. Huh. Good for him, she supposes. She's glad he's enjoying himself being super precocious.
The next edition of the same newspaper features a dragon in the letters-to-the-editor column, objecting to the "unwarranted" coverage of "unfortunate" individuals who would be better served to be allowed to privately nurse their affliction rather than having it trotted out on the continental stage to upset readers and embarrass the subject.
... What.
What?
Privately nurse their affliction. Rather than having it trotted out on the continental stage. To upset readers and embarrass the subject?
...
She's not usually one to write to newspapers, but this time she's going to make an exception.
The letter she writes is six pages long. Six. It contains such highlights as, "I for one enjoy reading a newspaper that doesn't have the moral compass of a frightened deer so afraid of a mere word on a paper that they wish for the entire rest of the world to move beneath their feet to protect them from it," and, "I fail to see how celebrating a several decade long achievement in a sport that takes quite a lot of skill and practice can, in any way, be for the purpose of embarrassing the subject," and, "For similar reasons I fail to see how anything your paper has written is unwarranted - perhaps if your journalists were tackling people in the street to interview for the sake of drama and ratings, it would be unwarranted, but anything less here is failing to report an actual event fueled entirely by prejudice." Then she blatantly is a dragon for a paragraph or two, then she signs it in Draconic, just to be obnoxious.
She only realizes after she sent it that she maybe lost her temper there.
The actual survey of it is basically done. Violet groups were a pain - I have a merfolk form entirely because of them - and several shrens think I'm completely insane. Dragons, too. But my 'people that want a copy' list is taller than I am, so I must be doing something right in my insanity.
Now I'm compiling and organizing, because of course I am. It's going to take longer than the survey itself.
Hah. A list taller than my natural form wouldn't be that impressive. It's as approximately half-sized as the rest.
Do any of these help?
Pff. Mine's a normal size, so the list would just be terrifying. Thankfully I'm not two thousand or something. I might want to flee to the moon if that were the case.
Those were incredibly helpful, thank you! I had a lot of those, but not all. I bet you just saved me a month. Maybe two.
Months later, she is sick of sorting through survey results, and decides that she needs a break. Her friends are busy, in another country visiting family, or otherwise indisposed. She checks the nearby library, but no books catch her eye, and she's already read most of them. She could watch a play, but there aren't any playing that she thinks she'd find interesting and hasn't already seen. She could visit family, she supposes, but she dismisses that idea pretty quickly; the thought doesn't appeal. She could maybe pick up another hobby, but doesn't have a great idea of what exactly to shoot for.
She notes that there is a scoot race that looks like it's a big deal going on. She notes that Mial is participating. Without anything better to do, she supposes she can go show up and obnoxiously be a dragon rooting for the person obnoxiously being a shren. Maybe that'd be fun.
Off she goes, to see if it'll be fun.
He's not being a shren that obnoxiously; you wouldn't know unless you'd already heard of him. Of course, plenty of people have heard of him. He has fans.
For some reason, though, none of the other people cheering him on are dragons.
He wins. It takes some seriously fancy flying, but he edges ahead of his closest competitor.
... Okay this was more fun than expected. She can kind of see the appeal of the sport, now, though she doesn't think it's the sort of thing she'll ever want to personally participate in. She suspects she's going to show up again and watch more scoot races.
Mial now has one more fan. Screw the other dragons that aren't cheering him on, he's good. She cheers sincerely when he wins.
She learns so many things about scoot manufacture! Her eyes do not glaze over when reading his long letter. She pays attention to the explanations. And then when she writes a reply, it is filled with questions. Questions that prove very thoroughly that she was paying attention to the letter.
Eventually her (very scoot manufacture based letter) has a paragraph at the end that does not have anything to do with scoot manufacturing.
On another completely separate note (but please do not neglect the above for this, the curiosity might kill me) I've reached kind of an awkward point in survey compilation. I'm actually organizing how the book will be set up, now. A turquoise I talked to mentioned that some shrens might not take the knowledge of the lines they come from very well. I sort of don't know how to present the information without upsetting them. If it were just upsetting dragons I might just not care and do it anyway, but - that is not the situation. The only solution I've thought of is to have a separate book with shrens only, but that seems... Eh. I don't really want to do it that way. Help?
Honestly, and I'm sure you can imagine me holding my nose as I write this, the best solution for everyone's comfort is probably three books. One with only dragons, one with only shrens, one with both. (Otherwise I can only imagine the majority of dragon readers will set the book on fire the first time they notice it has a shren in it, which, while it is a hilarious mental image, is also going to make your project totally useless to them.) But if you do all three, then people can choose which one to consult according to their comfort levels.
I'm trying to think of alternate solutions involving writing it up with various kinds of information concealed, but nothing workable is coming to me and all the approaches I can think of just make it less convenient for the people without assorted hangups.
The visual of you holding your nose while writing came in just fine, yeah. I'm not completely happy with the solution either, but that sounds like the best thing to do. Three books it is, then. I'll publish them all at once instead of playing favorites, I think.
Now, how to ask dragons if they would like the complete book instead of dragons-only while being diplomatic and not getting any book set on fire. Why do I do this to myself.
I guess anyone who's reading the complete book in the first place won't be inclined to whine that hard about "dragonishes", but it's so annoying having to drop out of Draconic to get the word you're looking for, you know?
There, there. Someone else can go survey the vampires.
He shrugs. "None taken. But yeah, that's what it looks like. Infected or hatched, same result either way. Mother was originally trying to find some kind of cure, but it's not the kind of condition you want to mess with if you don't know what you're doing, and at a certain point you can't figure out what you're doing any better except by messing with it."
"We're going to fix the language thing," he reminds her. "Well, try, anyway, with at least as much effort as we try fixing shrens and probably first. So what's left is flight and lizards. I can fly, just not in my natural form. It's not really a big deal to me by itself. That leaves lizards, and honestly, if all the other shrens in the world were cured and I stubbornly remained, getting yelled at by lizards for my degeneracy would bring me immense perverse joy. No, the only real reason to stop being a shren is the tiny risk of accidentally infecting somebody else - and assuming a working cure that's any damn good at all, that's much less of an issue all of a sudden. So why would I want to stop being a shren? Just to stop being a shren? No thank you."
"Sort of," he says. "Not even proving. It would be accepting that they were right. And they're not. If I decided to stop being a shren just to stop being a shren, I would be acting like there was something wrong with being a shren. And I have gone to a great deal of trouble my whole life to maintain that there isn't, in the face of intense and unceasing opposition from the word itself."
(If he were an empath, he would likely catch a brilliant flare of admiration, even when purposely not paying attention. But he's not.)
"I think I understand," says Avet slowly. "I would call it brave but that seems - condescending. Mm." Draconic. C'mon. You can do it. Ha, look, she has a word for this one! "Admirable." (In a moral sense, in the sense that what is being admired is what the world should be, in the sense of seeing someone fight for a cause and agreeing with it)
Progress is... slow. Dragon magic declines to be easily analyzed. Inventing a spell for 'tell us what the dragon magic is doing' is not happening anytime soon, and neither of them are inclined to bang their heads against the brick wall of needing one specific solution.
It's much more reasonable to work on a dragon magic analysis that will tell them which part of the magic is moving when a dragonish does something magic. For example: speaking Draconic to one another, and seeing which part of the magic wibbles. They have charts, now. They can't narrow down everything that way, but they can certainly make progress. Speaking Draconic, shapeshifting, and singing a dragonish's dragonsong are easy. Green color group's empathy is similarly easy. A dragonish declining or trying to have kids is... Less easy. On account of no one wanting to watch a dragonish declining or trying to have kids.
A dragonish breathing fire should be easy. But Avet's wizard buddy is a shren. And she is a dragon. She could possibly go ask his mother to do the analysis on her instead of having Mial do it. But that sort of problem-dodging solution is not one she wants. She looks pensively at the chart.
"...It occurs to me that my father is a dragon and my mother is a research wizard," he says. "If, um. If we wanted to ask her to gather data for the 'declining to have children' section of the chart."
"If it wouldn't be um, too awkward. Then yeah, that would be helpful." She pauses, looking at the chart. Okay, this is stupid. She takes a deep breath. C'mon Avet, you can do it, it's just a sentence. "And we can go take care of the firebreathing data in your yard, if you're. Um. Okay with it."
"It's not really a matter of if you'd hold it against me," she says. "It's - I am poking at my reasons for not being okay with it and they're flimsy and I don't think they're good enough to have command over my life. I trust you. Finnah's at work and even if she were here, I trust her reasonably well. I don't think a random shren is going to show up out of nowhere and turn out to be the correct flavor of cruel and spiteful. I don't think either of us will spontaneously lose a form. There is no legitimate reason to be afraid. I don't want to have a, a flinch reaction to something in my head that I don't actually agree with, and let it control my life. I don't want to be that kind of person. If I were legitimately afraid I wouldn't volunteer, and I'd possibly be kind of upset with you if you expected me to, but this is - the sort of thing I am inclined to conquer, not cower from. So it's not, actually, involved with you at all, you're an innocent bystander." Pause. "So uh, sorry, innocent bystander, I am still attacking the lizard parts of my head, it takes a while. It's kind of entrenched."
And then she shifts to gyrfalcon, with pale white feathers and coppery spots.
Choosing a new form activates the whole form slot, right up to where the shift-activated section of the next unused form slot should begin. The mystery of the inactive sections is explained.
"Draconic, shrens - where shrens want that one, anyway - baby dragons dying, esu, dragonishes dying randomly and unpredictably of old age, forms being able to be lost forever, the really small number of max forms for everyone but blues, not being able to pick where your color group color goes, not being able to see what your forms look like until after you pick them, the growing-at-a-constant-rate-until-you-die - there should be a cap, the entire thing where certain color groups rust or patina or tarnish, and - I don't even know how to handle the thing with thudias versus parunias, but I am not okay with it and any situation where my children die before I do is unacceptable." Pause. "There are likely more, that's just off of the top of my head."
"I lived with one form for most of my life," she points out wryly. "I just - generally acted like a human who could occasionally shapeshift into a dragon. Now that I have three I'm not sure I'll even be inclined to use them much - though now that I have merfolk I might go travel to some underwater cities and see what they're like." She shrugs. "Personally between ten forms and empathy, I'd stick with what I have. I occasionally need to cheat." She snorts. "During my surveying I needed empathy to figure out why a gold was smiling at me in a particular way, I was so confused. Turns out, he was propositioning me. Shapeshifting wouldn't have saved me there."
"Eh. He's a little indiscriminate, but I promise he notices individual characteristics. I've had to listen to him go on about them often enough. But no, seriously, much as I may tease him for how enthusiastically he likes girls, the word is like" (sincerely appreciate in a friendly warm interpersonal way; noncentral connotational overtones of romance), "not just vaguely-want-to-sleep-with."
It is not immediately clear how to proceed.
And then they are at Avet's apartment. She didn't bother dropping them outside and then opening the door, and instead they are in her living room. It's - slightly a mess, there are papers everywhere, but the apartment itself is nice.
As promised, there are three completed books of various forms. They are laid out in a very sane and rational manner, organized by form type, then color group. It's very orderly.
She could possibly ungently extract her, but - what in the world would she say? 'No go away there is a shren here right now'? 'I worry that you will upset my friend if you are at all exposed to him'? Then she'll ask, and then - it might explode. Litet's always been a nice relative, surely it wouldn't explode?
"Not, um, really, I have a friend over, I can take care of it," she tries, for lack of a better idea.
"He's checking over my uh, book, it's finished and he's reading it so I really don't have anything better to do until he's done, definitely time to rearrange my cold closet, don't worry about it."
.... Wait, that might have been the wrong thing to say, what if Litet wants to see it, that would put her in the same room as Mial.
She can think of a few decent lies to use here, but - does she really need to? She doesn't particularly want to lie to family. "Different versions based on relevancy. So you don't have to flip through more book than you have to in order to get to the relevant line."
Technically, this is true!
The suspected location of book contains: three of book, and one of presumably-Avet's-friend, reading one of book. He's human-shaped, and seems oddly short for a human-formed dragon, but he hasn't looked up from his reading so his eye colour isn't available to resolve the question.
The book falls from her fingers and she looks like she's going to be sick. "Avet! Avet, what, why, why would you include - oh no did you survey them did you go and - and personally photograph, a whole, whole bookful -"