"There are humans that small without potion side effects but not many."

"Humans have more size variation than natural-formed dragonishes, but I probably wouldn't have been twice this tall without the potion, dragonish assumed forms don't tend toward extremes. It is occasionally inconvenient to be this short but I don't really mind it. Even comes in handy once in a while."

Nod.

"I bluffed my way into a junior scoot racing league when I was eighty-one by wearing an opaque helmet to their qualifying race and stating under lie detection that a poorly tested medical potion stunted my growth!"

"...assuming years here are about like at home and I remember the conversion factor right that's very young!"

"Equivalent of a human eight-year-old, yeah. I was an enormously precocious and consequently an enormously frustrated child - age restrictions work on an equivalency basis and I did not take well to the fact that I had been around for longer than some species' entire lifespans and still wasn't allowed to do hardly anything interesting. So I flew the qualifier for the junior league of Scoot Lively and came in third and they didn't kick me out when I took my helmet off and I've been racing ever since. —I suppose without wizardry you wouldn't have scoots; they're magical flying vehicles."

"We have airplanes."

"Can one race them?"

"I suppose one could but it's not customary."

"One is missing out, then, racing scoots is amazing. Well, it's not for everyone. It's amazing for me, anyway."

"It sounds fun."

"It is! What's the approximate range on your weird sense, I wonder if it's safe to teach you how to fly a scoot..."

"Couple hundred feet sharpish and blurrier for another couple hundred feet."

"Hmm. Well, maybe."

"- I'd like to check if I can read."

"—that's a good idea. Uh—"

He makes a gesture and says a thing and a readout of the current time appears in the air in Leraal numerals, ticking along every few seconds.

She breathes a sigh of relief. "Good translation artifact."

"Oh good."

"Yeah that would have been bad. I write a lot."

"I wouldn't like to be blind and deaf but I would really really not like to be blind, deaf, and consequently illiterate," Mial agrees.

"Yeah this could have been way worse. There's pairs of artifacts that just straight up kill you - I guess some of those I might not have noticed yet - a single artifact won't do that at least."

"...there's pairs of artifacts that not only straight-up kill you but also wait a while before doing that so you can't be confident they aren't going to??"

"It'd be like, there's one that makes you need to sleep for twenty hours a day, it'd combine badly with one that gave you insomnia."

"Well that's terrible."

"Yeah. I don't think any of the drawbacks I've noticed have obvious collisions though."