alicornutopia | something she can use

"I'll volunteer if you'll have me," says Jensal. "Or possibly Rethkan, or Miski - what's the plan for in four thousand years or so when nobody's who's been through a full course of esu is still alive?"

"You'll have four thousand years or so to figure that out," she says. "Among other things, I expect that with enough carefully applied magic, any of you who want to be can be made immortal. I don't know for sure, of course, but it seems likely. And you seem like a pretty good minting candidate to me."

"I suppose once we're all dragons we'll be able to get the council to cooperate on our research projects," mutters Jensal. "Thank you. What do I have to do?"

"I just made you a mint," she says. "You might have noticed that wishing isn't very flashy. The kinds of coin I know about look like this—"

She conjures illusions with a four, this time, of the six known types of coin in Ehail's silver. They hover in the air in a neat row.

"Threes, fours, fives, sixes, sevens, and eights. The plain polygons are more or less safe to use without any special preparation, but sevens and eights are hazardous to the wisher unless you use another coin to wish them safe first. In order to make a coin, you experience some pain and then move it across your mind; in order to wish on a coin, you touch it, focus on it, and make your wish. I'll give you the same conveniences I gave Ehail - coin storage magic so you can keep your coins private and organized and use them without risking dropping any, and one of these."

A device appears in her hand, calculator-sized, with a display showing the number 0 and a row of eight buttons each shaped like a coin. (The button for an eight is a somewhat stylized two-dimensional depiction of the three-dimensional figure.) She hands it over.

"That will give you the minimum amount of pain to make the relevant coin while you hold down a button. It would be much less convenient to make an eight without one. Since I gave you coin storage, coins you make will be put away automatically, but taking them out again, transferring them to someone else's storage, and pulling one out just far enough to wish on it should all be fairly straightforward."

"Thank you," says Jensal. She pokes the star button first, makes a coin - not in solid turquoise blue, but in a sort of unassuming dun with faint veins of her hair color traced through it, frowns thoughtfully, and then prods the button for the eights. She doesn't visibly stiffen like Ehail did, though her brow wrinkles a little. "I see. What coins do I use to wish the sevens and eights safe?"

"A coin will safe one coin of the level directly above it and a whole batch of coins its own level - the biggest batch I've done so far is four hundred and twenty. It's possible but debatably useful to safe the smaller coins, too - in theory they carry the same kind of hazard as the bigger ones, in practice they don't do enough damage to be noticeable - and for that, as far as I can tell, one coin will safe any number of miscellaneous smaller coins."

Jensal nods. "But you can't do miracles in batches?" she asks.

"I haven't tried yet. It might take some trial and error to find a batch size that works, and it's a little harder to clearly mark out a group of people than one person at a time; I didn't feel like experimenting when I knew that it worked fine one at a time and there wasn't a harsh limit on my coin supply. If you want to, though, go right ahead. If you make a wish that's too much for the coin you're using to handle, it just does nothing - the only thing you'll lose is the time it takes you to try it."

Jensal nods and pulls out another list of house residents. Eventually she announces, "I can do five at a time."

"Well, that's convenient," says Libby.

"Mm-hm." Jensal goes through the rest of the list. "The other houses are being taken care of?"

"Yes. Ehail's doing hers, and I sent my friend who can see magic to the iceberg and my aunt to the other one. With the handy capability to teleport to the bottom of the world in case any skeptical administrators want to go for test flights. I suppose if you wanted to you could send me after them with a bigger supply of coins and the news that batches of five work, but I'd expect them to have completed all the babies by now, so it shouldn't be too urgent."

Jensal nods and gets a green crystal out of a desk drawer. She thwacks it against the edge of her desk and holds it to her ear. "Hello, it's - No. No, none of the children have escaped. It - no." She switches to an incomprehensible language and starts talking sharply into the crystal.

Meanwhile...

Lazarus teleports to a front-doorish part of the iceberg house. He can't be much more specific than that without knowing how the place is built.

It turns out that the most front-doorish available location is a little ledge at the mouth of a tunnel, and the tunnel leads down into the underwater - and water-filled - regions of the iceberg. Lazarus peers down it, visually and magically.

He discovers that most-of-dragons are visible to his magic-sight from quite far off. He also discovers that his magic-sight can directly perceive the thing that makes them hurt, and how far along it is.

Many of them are quite far along.

He's really not sure how to get the attention of any nearby adult shrens - calling "Excuse me?" down the tunnel into the water probably won't cut it, although he does it anyway. But since it seems he doesn't need to be shown the babies, he sees no reason not to fix them all while he's figuring out the other thing. On the off chance that a single coin can solve the whole problem at once, he picks out all eighteen of the ones he can tell are experiencing the unpleasantness of not-flying, prioritizing by how far along they seem to be, and makes his first wish to apply to as many of them as it can cover. The number turns out to be five. He fixes the next five down, and then the next, and the next, and then the last three; if there are any more babies besides those, they must not be old enough to have started hurting yet.

Now all he has to do is find someone to notify.

Eventually, whether because he spoke or for some other reason, a... mercreature... with forked ears and a flat face and large black eyes and purple scales swims up the tunnel.

It opens its mouth and says something in an unfamiliar language.

"Hello!" says Lazarus. "I'm from another world and I can turn shrens into dragons. I just did it to all of your babies that I could find - there were eighteen - so you should go get them and tell them they can fly now. I can do the same thing for everyone else afterward but the babies are the most important, that looks extremely uncomfortable - I can also see magic, that is how I can tell. If you want I can make you a dragon too and teleport you to the bottom of the world so you can fly around a little and verify that I'm not kidding, but it will be faster for the babies if you skip that part and I am definitely not kidding."

The mercreature blinks clear eyelids, then hoists itself out of the water, turning once it's clear of the tunnel into a brown dwarf in cold-weather gear. "How did you get here, supposed miracle-worker?" he asks, producing a green crystal from his pocket. He thumps it against the iceberg.

"Through an interdimensional hub called Milliways," he says, peering at the crystal. "I met a dragon there and then I met a shren and her magic looked very uncomfortable, yours does too, would you like to be a dragon while you're standing around calling people on your mysterious artifact? It won't take any extra time."

"Sure," says the dwarf. Then whoever's on the other end picks up and he start jabbering at them in an extremely opaque and rather magical language. Inside of twenty seconds he's done with the conversation; he puts the crystal away and shifts merperson again and disappears into the iceberg again.

He's back a minute later with a purple baby - dragon. Who is tossed into the air and squawks with surprise when she successfully flies instead of falling back into his outstretched arms.

The merperson goes back and gets the other eighteen; they all swim up after him and climb onto the ice and flap their wings. Soon the air is full of purple and zinc and erythrite and amethyst and charoite babies fluttering around.

Lazarus picks the four other shrens who happen to be closest and includes them in the wish that takes care of the merperson-dwarf, just to be efficient. Then he continues batch-dragoning nearby shrens while the original adult fetches babies.

"I'm getting the rest of you now," he mentions when all the babies are in the air. "How many are there in total? If it's more than about five hundred I'm going to have to go fetch more miracles partway through, otherwise I can stay until I'm done."

"It's - three hundred fifteen residents at the moment," says the only adult present, turning into a dwarf again to watch the babies fly.

"Okay," says Lazarus. "In that case I have plenty."

Batch of five, batch of five, batch of five...

"My name's Lazarus, by the way, what's yours?"

"Quaro." He's still staring at the children.

"Well. Hi. I'm about halfway through now, I think. No one's going to complain about this afterward, are they? I suppose I could have asked everyone first, but I'm not very aquatic, and if the state of continued shrenness has any advantages I certainly can't detect them..."

"No. No one's going to complain," says Quaro faintly.

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