A stunningly beautiful dragon appears nearby.

Her scales are mostly black, shading into sapphire; her talons, horns, and spiky crest are all white as snow; her wings are white flecked with jet black.

She seems mildly startled by her sudden appearance, but settles back into calm after just a moment. On looking around, she spots May, spends a moment blinking curiously at her, and then walks over and carefully picks her up with both hands in order to inspect her up close. Her claws are very gentle, and her large curious eyes are a glacial shade of blue.

"AAAAGH hey put me down!"

The dragon makes incomprehensible growling noises and tips her face down to get her snout out of the way so she can peer at May's forehead from very close by.

Well, if asking doesn't work, time to try other tactics, like turning into ALSO A DRAGON.

She's smaller than this dragon, a deer to the, what, outsize wild boar, bulk of the stranger, but it should at least be enough to get her dropped so she can skitter back and away.

The strange dragon does indeed drop her, with a startled yelp.

For a few seconds she stands there frozen, hardly even blinking; then, cautiously, she... makes some more incomprehensible growling noises?

"I don't speak that language," says May, who, now that she is no longer being picked up off the ground by a stranger, is hastily reevaluating the possible features of a situation in which A DRAGON who is NOT HER MOM OR DAD has appeared to inspect her. It's not weird that they'd have their own language but a little weird that they'd choose to send someone to do recon who did not also have English...

"Rrrrowl ghgrrrk arrrnn llrruuilgh," says the stranger, or something along those lines. She takes a cautious step toward May, stops, and points at May's head.

Yup, that's May's head, ice-blue and horned.

"Don't pick me up again," she says, and she turns human again, waits for a moment to see if the gist of that got across before she goes for her writing things.

The stranger blinks at her and makes no move to interfere.

This is exactly the kind of slapdash spellcasting she was trying to develop past, but, well, she's in a hurry. She draws a nice big collection of runes, no proscriptions, and slaps her hand down on them and says, "Render me able to speak and comprehend all languages I encounter." She doesn't know how long it'll last but it'll at least get her started and she can trace it if necessary.

She looks up at the stranger dragon again. "You were saying?"

"Oh! You can talk now!" she says. "This is all very surprising and wasn't going to happen at all until it did. Why are you a scavenger who's a dragon and doesn't have any thoughts?"

"I don't think I understand the question. Why are you here?"

"I'm not here on purpose. I'm here by very surprising accident," she says. "Normally, in my experience, dragons stay dragon-shaped all the time and have dragon-shaped thoughts, and scavengers stay scavenger-shaped all the time and have scavenger-shaped thoughts. You changed your shape back and forth between the two, and you don't have any thoughts at all, but you can still talk, except when you can't. So I'm very confused."

"...if you're trying to read my mind, the reason you can't do that is that I don't want you to." Is this not a universal dragon power.

"If I was going to try to read your mind I'd have to be able to see it first," she says reasonably. "But it doesn't seem to be there at all. It's actually sort of unsettling. I wonder if this is what Listener feels like about me?"

"I don't want you to read anything about my mind. Most people I know can't do that so I'm not accustomed to tweaking it for their convenience."

"Hmm. I agree that most people can't read minds but I can't help feeling like I'm missing something. Anyway, can you explain how you manage to be a dragon and a scavenger sequentially?"

"Magic. Also this shape is called 'human', not 'scavenger'. You don't have it where you're from?"

"...we have scavengers where I'm from, but they're very distinctly not dragons. I guess maybe I'm not a scavenger expert and you could be something else, but you seem to have just about the same parts in the same places as the ones in my classroom. And what do you mean, magic? Are you an animus dragon?"

Well, unfortunately, May has no idea what breed of dragon she may be. "What is an animus dragon?"

"Animus dragons have the power to enchant things," she says. "But if you're not an animus dragon, then I still don't know what magic you did or how you did it, and I'd like to."

"I might be an animus dragon, I don't actually know much about my, uh, ethnic background."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Well, presumably at least one of my parents is a dragon but they're still fully under the magic that makes them look human, and dragons are widely understood, around here, to be extinct, so I don't know any others."

"Oh," she says. "That... certainly rotates some questions. Do you mean to say... you live among scavengers, and only learned you're a dragon by accident?"

"That's... close to right, yeah, though, again, they are not called scavengers amongst themselves."

"I am not very good at thinking the same thoughts as other people," she says. "This seems important, though."

She sits very still for a few seconds, then says, "Are you taking yourself out of the future? Can you stop?"

"Am I what?"

"The future. You aren't in it, and you should be. It's making everything very strange and I'm having a hard time figuring out when my brother will get here, which is important because I think we should have all the questions straightened out into a story before he shows up."

"You can see the future? I might be blocking that and I'm reluctant to stop till I know more about it."

"What is it that you want to know?"

"How does it... work. What does it let you learn about me."

"...it's the future, and you should be in it, because you're in the present, but you're not, so there isn't one, and I am all aflibber about it. I'm sorry, I'm no good at having the same conversation as the person I'm talking to, it's of a piece with the thoughts situation, and this is important so I'm trying very hard but I'm not used to having so little to work with."

"I've never met anyone who could see the future before! I don't know how much information you get from it!"

"I don't know what you mean to ask, and I can't check, and I don't know what you hear when I answer, and I can't check that either. How did she do it? No wonder everyone lies to her all the time. Oh, it's all a mess." She squeezes her eyes shut. "I... think... the information in the future... is the same kind as the information in the present, but differently... presented. Like, there's mostly only one present that's the one that you're in, but there are lots of different futures depending what choices people make on the way there. But... we don't see... all the futures at once. Just... glimpses, of things that could happen, often without knowing quite how to get there. My brother... mostly uses it to get our parents not to fight. He can see just far enough to know when to distract them. I... mostly use it... to try to have... normal conversations... and then I fail anyway, because having normal conversations is so, so hard."

She cracks an eye. "How was that? Can you tell me what it sounded like I meant, please?"

"It sounded like you meant that you are using glimpses of possible futures delimited by plausible choices people make to, among other things, compensate for some kind of conversation-related disability...? Mostly what I'm worried about here is like, if you could decide to spend all week doing whatever would make me your best friend, and then in that possible future I told you something in confidence, would the version who is not my best friend, here in the present, know the confidence."

"Thank you. I think... that I would not do that, and, if I tried, I would not succeed, for many reasons. I think that my brother who is very very much better than I am at charming people still probably could not become most people's best friend in a week, and, even if he could, would not be a good enough seer to ask their futures things and get back answers he understood. I think that the best seer in the whole tribe, who I haven't met yet but I've seen a lot of in the future before I stopped having one, is mostly too busy averting lots and lots of doom to have any time for asking people questions in their futures that she can't ask yet in their presents, so I can't tell you if she would have been going to succeed at it because she wasn't going to try it, not even slightly. But the guess that I have is that you would notice, if she did that, because before she could find out what you would tell her if she spent a week becoming your best friend, she would need to spend several days tracing that path through the future so she could see what was at the end of it, which, I think, would make it harder for her to spend a week becoming your best friend. Which I am also separately not sure she could do to begin with, even if she planned very carefully."

"It was just an example, but - yeah, okay."

May is in the future now.

"Oh," she says, slumping with relief. "Thank you, that's much better. I was starting to worry that I'd gone back in time to before the Scorching somehow and I didn't have a future because I wasn't going to have existed anymore. Now it seems like I have different problems from that, and they are probably better ones!"

"Scorching?"

"The Scorching is a historical event. It was mostly too long ago for people to still know what happened, but before the Scorching we think scavengers lived in most of the places where dragons live now, and then the dragons decided to live there instead."

"Ah. Do... you know where the dragons lived before that?"

"I do not! I am starting to think, though, that this just isn't Pyrrhia, and humans may not be the same thing as scavengers, and dragons may not even be the same thing as dragons? How old are you?"

"Me personally, seventeen, though if you're from another planet you might have different-length years. Why do you think humans may not be the same thing as scavengers?"

"It actually starts with dragons not being the same thing as dragons. When you were dragon-shaped you were so small that I think if you were any kind of dragon I've heard of you would be very young and would not be nearly so good at holding a conversation. I am not the best person to ask about who is good at holding conversations but that is still what I think. And you have mysterious powers that work differently from all the mysterious powers I know about, unless you're enchanting things very quietly, or something."

"I can enchant things but can also cast non-enchantment spells. I do assume that we are not the same kind of dragon, but you seemed to have heard of a kind I could be?"

"I asked if you were an animus dragon but I do not know if an animus dragon is actually what you are. If... hmm. If you pick up a rock, and tell it to turn pink, what do you expect would happen?"

"I'd need to use a rune but I could do it."

"Okay. If you were an animus dragon—if the explanation for you was 'animus dragon', then if you picked up a rock and told it to turn pink, it would be pink, and all of the other magic you could do would be the same kind of thing, at its heart, as picking up a rock and telling it to turn pink. If you need to do more to turn a rock pink than tell it so, then you are probably not an animus dragon, and if you can do things that are not at their heart the same kind of thing as picking up a rock and telling it to turn pink, then you have powers that are not the powers of an animus dragon." Somewhat hesitantly, she asks, "Can you tell me what it sounds like I meant again? I went a lot of different places with that sentence and I'm not sure whether you followed me to all of them."

"You think I am not an animus dragon because my magic does not work in the precise way you understand their magic to work. - also, humans can use runes, I have some advantages but not to the point of needing to be a dragon to use runes at all."

"My father and brother are both animus dragons so I know some things about how they work and it sounds like the way you work is not that," she says. "Thank you. What is a rune?"

"A written symbol that carries some magically activable meanings."

"Who can use them? What are your advantages at it?"

"Anyone can use them. My advantage is that I'm selectively immune to magic, so if I use them wrong, I don't explode."

"...do people who use them wrong normally explode?"

"Explode is here metonymy for a variety of bad side effects many of which are not exploding."

"Are any of them 'turning evil'? People say that's the usual bad side effect of using animus magic too much."

"...not as far as I know but magic is not very widely picked up these days so it's possible it has happened and records merely didn't survive."

"Hmm. Troubling," she says. "Anyway, every tribe of dragons I know about ages at the same rate to about the same sizes, and you look like you're not like that—are you adult height for a scavenger? A human, I mean? I guess you don't know if you're adult height for a... SmallWing, or whatever you want to call your tribe."

"I'm adult height for a human. I don't have a dragon tribe name that I know about. I haven't been able to turn between human and dragon for very long so I don't know if I should expect to grow more in that shape."

"But if you're adult height for a human then you aren't a tiny dragon hatchling, probably, and as a dragon you're pretty hatchling-sized, so I think that on top of not being from any tribe I recognize you're also not from any tribe that grows up at the same speed as the tribes I recognize. Which suggests to me that you and I are hawks and bats to each other."

"That's possible, though it's also -

- so I mentioned dragons are extinct here, except for me and presumably one of my parents. That's because there was a war between dragons, here, and another magical creature, and I had been thinking that maybe the dragons were partially evacuated to wherever you're from. With some humans having already colonized the place, evidently, what with the Scorching. I don't know if the timelines even match, but it's not unusual for there to be multiple subtypes of a kind of magical creature, or interesting crossbreeds, or whatever, so I could be a pygmy version or you could all be descended from a giant kind or something, that I don't have a more specific guess about."

"Hmm. If your ancestors fled to Pyrrhia, would they have brought runes with them?"

"I would expect them to have done, but if there were dragons that didn't have my advantage with them it seems likely my kind would have specialized and maybe the other kinds were evacuated as civilians?"

"I think I see the shape of that. ...not literally, I still can't read your mind. I guess we'd have to find things out about history to be sure, and I don't think I can turn my prophecy around backwards to see it."

"Prophecy magic in particular does not seem obviously evacuate-as-civilian to me, honestly, but it'd be slightly less weird than there being completely unrelated dragon aliens."

"Is it very weird for there to be completely unrelated dragon aliens?"

"Well, there aren't any other completely unrelated aliens. - also you have humans on your planet, or at least creatures who look a lot like them, and even if you are an alien who looks like a dragon by coincidence, it'd be much more of a coincidence to also have aliens who look human by coincidence. Do our plants look familiar?"

"Yes, I think so. I'm not a plant expert but they seem to be the right sorts of colours in the right sorts of shapes."

"Which I think suggests the two places aren't completely unrelated, that would be a lot of coincidences. Do you know about how long ago the Scorching was?"

"Definitely a very long time. I think some thousands of years? I'm not sure exactly. I mostly do puzzles and drawing at school."

"Some thousands of years ago is about how long ago the dragon war was too."

"Do you know how many thousands yours was?"

"Ballpark of five to seven thousand. Of, again, local years, which are three hundred sixty five days, each of which is twenty-four hours, and you have been here for..." She looks at her watch. "About a third of an hour."

"...that sounds like about the right amount of time for an hour, and that's the right amount of hours in a day, and I think the right amount of days in a year...."

"Huh, that's a bit of a coincidence. Maybe you are a time traveler."

"Or maybe I just came from a very large coincidence. It's hard to be sure. I hope I'm not a time traveler, though. I still can't see clearly when my brother might be showing up, and I don't want it to turn out that that's because he only exists if the future comes out just right."

May flips back to the spellwork she was working on. "It's very distantly possible that I accidentally brought you here, though it'd be a hell of an accident."

"...what were you doing that could have accidentally done that?"

"Trying to invent a teleportation spell. It really really shouldn't have done this but it's the right general genre of thing, I guess."

'Teleportation' is not a natural construction in this language, but after puzzling over it for a few seconds, she says, "Yes, I think I can see how that would make sense. Because it was supposed to move things between distant places, and it did that, but not how you expected?"

"Not how I expected, and not when I was in fact casting a spell. Normally I'd say my magic suppression power also ought to have intervened but I was at the time trying to leave it pretty open so I could see what side effects there were."

"...is spells casting themselves without your help a usual sort of thing?"

"Not at all, no, I'd be much more confident it was my fault if I'd gotten to the point of testing anything."

"Curious," she says. "I wonder what could do that?"

"I don't know. Do you want me to try to send you back? Or to bring your brother who you mentioned here?"

"...hm," she says. "What happens, if you try to send me back, and something goes wrong? Could I end up somewhere else entirely by accident? I think it would not be good, if you tried to send me back, and I went somewhere that was not home and not here, and then my brother came here looking for me. I think that could end up causing a lot of trouble."

"I don't deny it. How would he get here?"

"I would expect him to tell a doorway to lead to me, or something like that. But if he instead tells the doorway to lead to where I went, without realizing that that's not the same thing as where I am, then he could end up here without me."

"How long do you think he'll take to notice you've gone missing?"

"Well, that depends," she says consideringly. "We're not in the same class because I'm not attuned to the mysteries of school, so if he goes home straight away he might assume I'm out hunting by myself and then he won't notice until dinnertime. But if he comes looking for me to take me home which he sometimes does, then he won't find me and he'll start to worry and he'll look for me in the future and he won't see me at all and then he'll be very worried indeed... Oh, but I forgot! He's meeting Clearsight today! So he'll be very distracted by being in love with her, and he probably won't think of me at all until tomorrow." She frowns slightly. "I would like to be there when he meets her, though. I think the future of the tribe might suffer if I'm not."

"Why would the future of your tribe suffer if you aren't there while your brother hangs out with his girlfriend?"

"No, no—he's meeting her. For the first time. And I don't know exactly what will be different but I know Clearsight will expect it to be when I meet her—or, would have, when I was going to meet her—I guess I'm not anymore, if I'm not there. Or was that going to be tomorrow? Or next week? I felt so sure I knew, but then it turned out that feeling sure and knowing aren't the same at all."

"Clearsight sees the future too, so she already knows your brother, who has not met her but will be her boyfriend?"

"Yes. And he knows her too, but not as well, because he's a worse seer. And I don't know what will happen when they meet but I know I saw Clearsight worrying about it and I know the future will turn on Clearsight's worries."

"Why will the future turn on Clearsight's worries?"

"The reason she worries all the time is because she's the best seer the tribe has ever had, and the future can be very frightening when you understand it properly."

"Are you facing down a... big natural disaster or something...?"

"She hasn't been going to say."

"Huh. I don't know what to make of that."

"Can you say more things about how you would try to get me home?"

"I would write down a bunch of runes that might have related meanings, do my selective antimagic at it real hard, and tell the diagram to send you home, pretty much."

"If something went wrong with that, what might it be?"

"Whatever brought you here when I wasn't trying to cast anything, which is mysterious as heck to me, might act up again, and if I didn't draw the diagram big enough I guess it's possible I could send you partway but not all the way."

She considers this.

"If you sent me partway but not all the way to a different place in the ordinary way of places, then I would end up at some place in between the place where I started and the place where you meant to send me. I do not at all know what happens if you send me partway but not all the way between Pyrrhia and Not Pyrrhia. But," she says, sounding a little doubtful, "it's possible I could see it in the future, if you were going to try it?"

"How does that work, how strongly do I have to be going to try it?"

"I'm not at all sure. I'm supposed to have seer lessons but I haven't learned very much from them because I haven't been to any yet."

"Does that interfere much, considering? I can start drawing the diagram, if that helps."

"It makes it much harder to focus on lessons and I am not a dragonet who needs any more help not focusing on my lessons. Let's see what happens if you draw the diagram."

So May clears a large space - she doesn't have paper quite as big as this might need - and starts drawing runes.

Whiteout stays very carefully out of her working area but peers very curiously into it.

Bunches of lines in a big rectangle!

"It's so extremely orderly," she says, fascinated.

"Were you expecting something else?"

"I don't think I was expecting. But it so very isn't the way drawing normally works. I've filled many a page with the colours my eyes saw, and that's hard, but I think drawing a shape the way the page sees it might be even harder."

"What do you mean the way the page sees it?"

"Instead of the way your eyes do. Your eyes see the lines tilted and skewed, but the page they're drawn on sees them just how they're laid out, all at once without the distortion of distance."

"I'm not sure I get it. Would you say I'm drawing this as the page - well, the ground - sees it?"

"Yes! You're putting it on the ground the way it lies on the page, not the way it looks if you stand over it."

"I guess it is very geometrical that way. I'm not used to thinking of the things as different - I suppose our vision might be really different."

"You still have two eyes close to each other, right? So you see the world the way it looks from the front of your head. Things that are farther away look smaller, and things that are tilted look squished. Unless they don't, I suppose."

"Yes - well, the first thing, I'm not sure I'd say 'squished' about tilted things." Rune rune rune. Check check check.

"When you tilt something away from you it squishes, doesn't it? So that if you draw it you have to draw the tilted part shorter than you would if you were paper underneath it and could see it all proper."

"It distorts, yes."

"What isn't squished about them?"

"I think in my language that implies more softness? Rigid things can be distorted by tilting."

"Oh, I see! Yes, tilted things squish very straightly, they don't wiggle about at all."

And then May's diagram is finished and she starts double- and triple-checking it.

Whiteout watches in fascination, careful to stay well clear of the workspace. "It's like a puzzle," she muses, "to fit all together. But it's much harder to do a puzzle by drawing, when you don't have the pieces all ready to play with."

"Sometimes I do, actually, when I'm working on spells I sometimes use pre-made tiles to lay them out and make sure it all works, but there are some limits to that approach and since I have antimagic I don't need it for a one-off spell only I am going to cast."

"Oh!" she says, delighted. "Really? I think I would like that puzzle very much."

"Then maybe you would enjoy learning magic, though I think you'd have a hard time making small diagrams, and the bigger they are the more power output they have."

"Hmm. I've always thought the tips of my claws could draw pretty finely, but I've never had a drawing contest with a scavenger about it. I could try to draw the smallest I can, if you have ink and paper, and you could tell me if it's small enough? —after you finish the thing you are in the middle of doing which is also important?" (This last comes out with the embarrassed air of someone who has only just remembered about it.)

"I have ink but it's in pens, not in like, inkwells you could dip a claw in." Checking checking.

'Pens' is another awkward construction in this language; Whiteout has to think for a few seconds to decipher it. "Oh. Humans don't have claws. That makes sense. Maybe I could... carve very small lines into a tree? I'm worse at carving than drawing but it would still say something about how small I can make a line."

"You could do that. Or some fallen wood, maybe."

Whiteout investigates the vicinity for signs of fallen wood. (She's still being very careful not to get close enough to May's diagram to disturb it.)

While she is doing that May goes through her final check, literally checking things off a list, and declares her diagram done.

By this time Whiteout has found a fallen branch that's hefty enough to hold steady, and stripped some bark from one end, and carved a little square into it that's impressively tiny for a dragon of her size and not really all that small from a human perspective—an inch or two across. She looks up from trying to carve a smaller one next to the first.

"I think I see a little bit of sending in the future, but it's not coming clear enough to tell how it turns out. I made a small square! I tried to do it from the perspective of the branch." (It is indeed pretty square and straight.)

"Well done. I could... compose a more involved incantation if that might make the future clearer?"

"It might do that!" she agrees, peering at her square-and-a-half. "Is it small enough, do you think?"

"Well, small enough for what?"

"To do the puzzle magic safely?"

"I think so. Though you'd go through lots of wood, you can't reuse a spell once you've scribed it."

"I think I could draw this small in ink too. Maybe even smaller. You can be a lot gentler with liquids."

"Do you want to try a pen?"

"I am doubtful of pens. But I can try one anyway."

May's got spares, here's one. She'll uncap it for Whiteout.

Whiteout makes a very determined attempt to wield the pen. It's comically small in her taloned hands and she has to experiment quite a bit to figure out how to grip it securely; she entirely forgets, amid all the pen-dropping shenanigans, to remember that she'll need to ask for paper in order to move on to the next step.

May remembers paper! There is some waiting for her whenever she's ready.

She earnestly applies the pen to the page, at first with insufficient force, then with force that is still insufficient but getting there. Eventually she makes a mark. Having calibrated her approach, she now moves on to trying for precision. A series of rectangles ensue, each smaller than the last, all proportioned and oriented just like the page she's drawing on. She does make some mistakes along the way, but with patience and focus she manages to draw very small indeed by the end, and very straight.

"Nice! You could totally write spells at the size I usually work at."

She swishes her tail.

"And I have an incantation written up." It goes Deposit this dragon safely back at the precise location whence she came, no nearer and no farther, none the worse for wear.

Her head begins slowly tilting to one side as she gazes into the middle distance; it reaches a comical angle before she reports, "I think I see myself going home."

"Cool! - do you in fact want to just go straight home without making any arrangements for interplanetary trade, are you in a hurry?"

She un-tilts her head. "I am in a few hours of hurry but not a few minutes. What do you want to trade?"

"I don't have anything specific in mind but it would be sad to discover a whole planet full of other probably-humans and definitely-dragons and then bid you adieu forever!"

She pauses for a few seconds before asking, "When you think about the future do you think of mostly good things?"

"I'm not sure how to answer that, can you rephrase it?"

"If you have a future that is mostly good and I have a future that is mostly scary then it might not be good to tangle them together too much, especially since Darkstalker is meeting Clearsight today."

"- hm, but isn't it possible that I could help with whatever the problem is?"

"It's hard to guess without knowing what the problem is. And I don't know if your future is good or scary, since you don't have a Clearsight to see it."

"I'm optimistic but I concede that I cannot see the future and don't know anyone but you who can."

"I could try to see if your future is good?" she says doubtfully. "But I am not as good at that sort of thing as Clearsight."

"It could still be better than guessing!"

"True..."

She sits up in the manner of a cat, curling her tail around her paws, and closes her eyes and tries to follow the threads of the future. What are some things that might happen to May, if Whiteout is around long enough to see them?

May drawing spells - May flying, invisible, in dragon form, across British Columbia - May reading a book -

What if she tries to focus on the scariest possibilities? She has never been very good at that, but Clearsight isn't here so Whiteout will just have to do her best.

May having a shouted argument with an old lion-scavenger-hybrid-looking-person - May in a wheelchair - May at a computer -

That's about as much of the future as she can stand before she gets dizzy.

"The future I see for you is mostly not scary," she says. "I saw you sitting and drawing and flying and shouting at someone but I did not see anything terrible enough to make me act like Clearsight. Then again, I don't see anything that terrible at home, either. And I don't know if there are scary things that can take themselves out of the future like you can."

"I'd bet one of my parents can? And possibly other relatives depending on how exactly dragon-ness got into my family."

"Oh, are your parents scary?" she asks, very much in the tone of one who doesn't consider this a particularly grave or foreboding question.

"Not apart from the presumable ability of one of them to take themself out of the future."

"So I think I can still mostly guess that your future is not as scary as mine, and it's still just as hard to guess whether you can help make mine less scary."

"Most people on Earth don't know magic exists and destabilizing that incorrectly would be bad so I can't get as much done as much as I want. I think my powers'd go farther somewhere without that problem."

"I don't know what there is at home to destabilize. It might be nothing or it might be lots of things."

"It's evidently not 'the common expectation that magic definitely isn't real', but yeah I take your point it could be something else. ...do you maybe want to evacuate more of you guys here? It would be... hard... but if I were on it full time I could maybe finagle something... you'd have to like, time the stock market for me or something..."

"I'm not sure," she says doubtfully. "I think my brother wouldn't do well in a world where people shouldn't know magic exists. And my parents don't do well anywhere. I could... try to bring you some scavengers...?"

"...that might be good or it might just be, uh, kidnapping."

"The scavengers in the enclosure at school might like to be here instead?" she says uncertainly.

"If they're humans, yeah, they probably don't like being class pets very much. - you read minds, right? Which is separately fucky but like can you tell if they're people."

"I can tell that they... have thoughts and feelings? I am not so good at telling what the thoughts and feelings are. In general and also specifically with scavengers; they're harder to read than dragons."

"Do you read the minds of, like, squirrels and sheep and whatnot?"

"I mostly can't tell whether whatnots have feelings."

"...squirrels, sheep, and other animals not in the context of this conversation candidates for sapience."

Confused blinking. "Yes, those are the general kind of creature whose feelings I mostly can't tell about."

"Just checking, your answer made me concerned we'd miscommunicated."

"It's good of you to check. Miscommunicating with me is very usual."

"Dragons don't talk to - scavengers - at all? None of them have learned your language or vice versa?"

"Scavengers make sounds but I've never wondered before if they made a language of them."

"Nobody keeps scavengers as pets long enough that a baby one could grow up hearing dragons talk?"

"I haven't heard of any such thing, but there are many things I haven't heard of..."

"Because I would expect a human child to pick up language they were exposed to that way but I'm not sure adults would."

"I don't know very much about how people normally learn to talk. I was very bad at it myself."

"Well, I don't know how dragons do it. - I am a dragon but I am clearly a different kind of dragon and in particular I think all the kinds of magical critters on this planet are basically psychologically like humans."

"Oh, are there many kinds? Do you all change back and forth?"

"There are many kinds. Some change back and forth on their own, some need magic items to do it."

"Is it more of your drawing magic?"

"The magic items probably were a few thousand years ago."

"Do you mean that you're not sure if they were made with drawing magic, but you think so?"

"Right. The knowledge of how to do it was lost but drawing magic is the best candidate followed by it being something sphinxes could do directly back when they were alive."

"Sphinxes?"

"Another species of critter. Like dragons, widely understood to be extinct, but I'm not counting on it."

"And they could do more magic than just the drawing magic?"

"Maybe! There's not a lot of information that's survived that long."

"Hmmm," she rumbles.

After a few seconds of contemplative silence, she says, "How would I bring back the scavengers from the classroom?"

"I don't think you have to fetch them, I can't see any reason you'd need to make a round trip so I can extract them. I just need to - know what I'm grabbing, so I grab the right people."

"...what do you need to know about them, then?"

"I'm not sure, this is my first time deliberately yoinking somebody from another planet. Do they have names?"

"I don't know names for them."

"Can you describe them - or draw them -"

"Hmm... I think I can draw them," she says, and looks around for where the pen and paper have run off to.

Right over there with part of May's backpack keeping them from blowing away.

She settles in to draw. Since there is no need to maximize precision, her drawing takes up most of the page. It's quite good—not necessarily the most technically competent, but with an excellent eye for how a scene really looks.

The drawing focuses on two figures, though there's enough background to tell that they're in a sort of terrarium or hamster cage type situation. They're both human, or nearly so. One is sitting, the other standing. Their hair looks very poorly cared for, and they're wearing rags that barely qualify as clothing. They seem well fed, but tired and unhappy, with downcast eyes and hunched, tense posture.

"I'm not sure I ought to bring these people to the woods in the middle of nowhere, B.C.. I don't have - a hairbrush. I don't have clothes for them. Also they won't be able to talk to anyone besides me..."

"It is very unlikely that they will be eaten anytime in the next few months," says Whiteout, perhaps less reassuringly than she intends.

"Okay I'm gonna see if I can summon them to the woods in the middle of nowhere B.C."

Draw draw draw. Great big runes.

Whiteout blinks curiously at this outcome, and, half a minute into the drawing phase, ventures the conclusion, "Even very unlikely is too much chance of them being eaten for your comfort?"

"Yes??"

Thoughtful nod.

"Like, even if they definitely wouldn't be eaten because someone regarded them as beloved pets they probably know that dragons eat their species, right, and they're around dragons all the time."

"Yes," she agrees.

"And I think that would be very bad for people and they do not look well." Draw draw. Protractor. Compass.

"It is hard for me to tell how well people look even when they're dragons."

"Well, fortunately you're a very gifted artist."

"I like drawing. The things my eyes see are nice to think about."

"Can you tell if the incantation I've got will work to bring the one on the left here? I'm doing one at a time."

"I will think very hard about that," she says, adopting an expression of meditative concentration which is at least somewhat legible despite the differences in culture and facial architecture.

After a minute, she blinks and shakes herself a little. "I looked for you succeeding and saw it, and looked for you failing and didn't see it."

"Okay.

Deposit that human safely here before me, well and whole and none the worse for wear."

Here is one very surprised and alarmed human!

"Hey. Hey it's okay you're safe. I could put you back if you want but I thought, well, if I were in a terrarium, I would rather not be."

"Aaaaaaahhhhh???!"

Whiteout, with uncharacteristic insight, backs away slowly in case she is part of the problem here.

"Yeah I know this can't be that much less terrifying in the immediate term. - I can talk to the dragon, she won't eat you."

"—a-are you sure??"

"If she tries to eat you I have a spell to send her back to the planet with all the dragons on it."

She looks at May, at the dragon, at May, at the dragon, and then she bolts into the trees.

"I don't really recommend running off! Can I show you to my car, it's like a building on wheels!"

Too busy fleeing to argue!

May can't chase down a fleeing person but she can trace over her spell in another color and repeat the incantation.

"—noooo don't feed me to the dragon!"

"I'm not going to feed you to the dragon. Look. This is another planet. You don't know anything about how to survive here. You don't speak the same language as anyone else here. If you don't want to be near the dragon, we can walk at a sedate pace to my car and you can sit there while I summon your cagemate."

"...why???"

"Why which of those things?"

"Why not—let me go—"

"You'd get yourself killed! I summoned you because I didn't want you to die."

"Are there more dragons in the woods?"

"No, but there are cars - they can go real fast on their wheels and could hit you - and cliffs, and bears."

Disbelieving look. "You're keeping me prisoner because of cliffs?!"

"I don't want to keep you prisoner but this is not actually a planet that a human can live alone in the woods on, in spite of the low density of dragons. I would have just run after you but I can't run. Do you want me to get your cagemate or not."

"Augh! Yes, fine, being your prisoner is better than being in a cage surrounded by dragons!"

"I would have waited till I had some better plan for housing you guys but the dragon wasn't very reassuring about how likely it was you'd get eaten in the time that would take." Sigh. Trace the spell again.

Nervous grumpy half-audible muttering.

The second human, on arrival, looks around wildly and then huddles in terror against the first.

"Hello. I'm sorry to alarm you. The dragon is not going to eat you; I can talk to her. This is another planet where humans are the dominant species but you two do not know how to live here yet and will need help and to learn a local language."

"...gaaaaah?? What??"

She repeats herself.

"I tried to leave and she wouldn't let me," the other one says. "Said I might run off a cliff. Or into a bear."

"Better than a dragon," the second one mutters.

"Is it? What, do they play with their food?"

"They kept us in a CAGE and STARED at us and sometimes one of them came over and SHOOK IT."

"Yes, you didn't look like you were doing well at all but surely being mauled by a bear would also be extremely bad!"

"Lot of fancy talk from somebody who just wants me to be stared at by hungry dragons some more!"

"I am happy to show you to a safe place to wait where she won't be able to see you."

"...fine." Suspicious glaring.

She walks the class pets to her car. "I'm May. What are your names?"

"...Fern," says the suspicious one, reluctantly.

The quiet one doesn't say anything.

The car is parked on a turnout by the side of the road. She didn't get very far into the woods, just enough that nobody would see her. "The dragon you saw is the only dragon who's gone from your planet to this one, and I can talk to her, and she helped me help you - she drew a picture of you two so I could target the spell. I don't think she will try to eat you, but if she does, I will stop her by force if necessary. I am going to go talk to her for a while longer and then come back and try to connect you with some kind of housing situation. If you're hungry, these bags tear open easily and have food in them but I can't promise it will be recognizable or appealing to you, I have no idea what the dragons were feeding you." It's Goldfish crackers and a trail mix. "If you have to pee, please don't do it in the car, it'd be a pain to clean. I'm going to leave it unlocked so you can get in and out, like so." Car door demonstration. "It'll keep bears out. Questions?"

Fern shakes her head.

"If you decide to run off into the woods together I c- well, I could stop you but I'm not going to keep doing it, but you have my very strong recommendation not to. This planet is not like what you are used to, and not just because it's not the inside of a terrarium, I predict that even apart from easily communicable issues like bears you will run into bizarre problems that would be very hard to explain in advance if you ran off into the woods unable to speak to anyone without magic that at the moment only I have. After I've finished talking to the dragon, we can talk about retrieving more people from your planet, okay? There's no reason I can't get everybody you know and everybody they know and so on but I will only do that if we have something that seems to me sane and appropriate to do with you all."

Fern glares suspiciously some more.

"I'll be back soonish." And she leaves them in the car and heads back to where Whiteout is.

Whiteout is thoughtfully studying her drawing of the two humans.

"Hey. They're either waiting in the car or fucking off into the woods to discover new and exciting problems. They are definitely people who can talk and everything."

"Yes, I saw you talking to them. Though I couldn't understand anything you said."

"I had to reassure them that you were not going to eat them and that if you tried I could stop you. And recommend that they not run off into the woods, I think they'd have a bad time even if before they were classroom pets they were experienced hunter-gatherers."

"What is a hunter-gatherer?"

"A human who finds food where it's growing or living and gets it from there. Most humans on this planet instead plant or raise food where it would be convenient."

"Oh." She considers this. "Do you mean that this place's humans," the loanword comes out a little awkwardly, "moved all the food away from places like this into places where more of them live, so it's easier to reach there but harder to find here?"

"No, but I don't want to bet those people's lives on their ability to identify things here that are safe to eat, not get hit by cars, not freeze if they're still here in winter..."

"Is winter a freezing time here?"

"Yeah."