A Good Going-Over

[Cobalt]

A whole species that mostly just had sex and reproduced when they felt like doing precisely those things. Romance was a rarity, not an expectation. Seemed a little like elves and humans had taught the poor motherfuckers to love.

What a crime against the universe, she considered, disdainfully flicking a bit of ash from her fingers. Leave it to bipeds to ruin dragons.

Zea considered asking if Oblirin had ever indulged in that kind of emotional play-acting, but immediately disregarded it as a line of questioning she'd hate. They'd start getting all personal and things would get unpleasant and then she'd have to never speak to him again.

"How long does it take for your particular variety to reach physical maturity?"

[SilmeriaElemred]

''Females aproxematly 500 years. Males need about a hundred years longer. Males then also leave the group of females they grew up in. Females who live in groups of about four or five and split in new groups when the males leave. Males live for 15000 years before they die of old age. Give or take a few years of course. Females live longer. 18000. Males are bigger in average to females too. A full grown Sorran male can be 9 meters. A full grown female, 8. We grow until we are aproxemantly 9000 years old.'' he said calmly with a smile.

Zea's questions did not bother him although he did noticed she did not ask him if he was into emotional acts of 'love'. But since she did not ask she did not bring it up. Not yet anyway

[Cobalt]

Zea gave a low whistle. As a life scale went, that was an incredibly long time. The idea of being burdened with a child felt sufficiently repellant to her without it being a half -millenium obligation. With a lifespan like that, though...

...no, she couldn't even contextualize child-rearing on that sort of a timeline. Comparing ratios was one thing, but Zea suspected it would not even get close to articulating what point of view and priorities it'd lend to such a long-lived organism.

"Wow." She shook her head. "So what the hell are you ever doing even hanging around humans? I don't exactly form complex personal rapports with butterflies no matter how pretty they are."

[SilmeriaElemred]

''Humans, elves, fae, I find them facinating. The love thing is not meant for me though and surely someone tried. But people, they are full of suprises and are capable of a lot of things. I look human now but surely am not. My views are different. I like to learn what is there to learn about other races. Right now I have lived over 2000 years.''

After a brief pause he continued, thinking of how to put it to words. ''But I will never know everything. Put 10 people in a room and there are 20 different opinions. Just like you. I like to learn. Usually we calmly live our lives. Pick places hard to reach by people. Males fly, occasionally drop rain on places that need it, restore the land if it had been damaged by a wildfire or war and will be on our way again. Females often stay on the ground. Raise the young, teach them what they know and move on. I have two children whom I will never see. It is not my job to raise it. But if my mates call out I will hear it. If not me, another male will to see if there is anything they need. Most of my kin give their life little thought. I just like to explore things a bit more. Even though it got me caught in the first place.''

[Cobalt]

Oh fuck Oblirin was going to share some kind of personal heartbreak shit wasn't he? No no no. Abort. Divert. Something. If this was a hint of conversational tangents to come then it was Zea's responsibility to do something to prevent it. She needed to take decisive action and save herself.

Oblirin had young that he didn't have any particular interest in--and by fuck didn't that sound familiar--because obviously why not just knock up a female and fuck off, assuming that if there were a major problem obviously Oblirin would find out in time. Sure. Because that always worked.

Sounded like male dragons--for all their fantastic lifespans--were just as fucking stupid as everyone else's. Why couldn't Zea have found a female?

"Long as you're willing to pay the price, no reason to stop doing it. That much I do know." She pointed a thumb backward over her shoulder. "You want to head out? Probably best to get you someplace safer to sleep before you crash." Someplace safer, and ideally someplace that'd let her foist off responsibility for him until she could figure out who'd been tapping him like a wine cask.

When he'd been in trouble, had anybody heard him call out? Or had they all been too busy raising his abandoned offspring? Who the fuck knew. Zea had changed the subject and that was what mattered.

[SilmeriaElemred]

''You're probably right.'' Oblirin replied. ''Did my words make you uncomfortable? If so I apolagise. I lack certain mindsets. Or at the least they had not been taught to me. I am still an animal after all. And our ways... you may not always like or agree with them.'' he got on his feet. Moving certainly seemed to go easier then before due to feeling less pain. ''I do wonder how my young are actually. To bad my mates did not agree on me staying'' he chuckled putting his sword between his obi and the whip around a special holder waiting for Zea to lead the way. ''thank you for the leaves by the way. It did help.''

[Cobalt]

"Hey, you know me," which he most assuredly did not. Zea pushed down on her knees to lever herself up to stand. "Always willing to experiment on other people."

Not a lie, happily! Could dragons tell when someone was lying? She should ask that one later.

"And the fact that you are an entirely different species operating with a wholely separate set of assumptions and priorities is sort of not a surprise to me. I knew that when I decided to ask a dragon how they fuck."

Zea turned her back immediately--that was sort of an extension of trust, right?--and pushed directly through undergrowth to take the straightest route back to the path. She was glad that none of her usual colleagues could hear her address a near-stranger with so familiar and indeed vulgar a tone. They'd get all judgy. But what did Oblirin know? He didn't even have anything to do with his own young; relating to another much smaller species was not the kind of thing she'd have relied on him to do.

[SilmeriaElemred]

''Well experiment all you like. If I can endure pain for years in a row a bit more will not bother me if it helps someone.'' Oblirin replied. He had no idea what Zea would do to him or have in stock for him but he would not mind. She helped him, he would help her.

''If you are not airsick and you could be interested I could take you to a group of females at some point'' he suggested. It would be a while from now though. He had to regain the blood he had lost. Get his strength back, let Zea do her thing and recover from that too.

[Cobalt]

That offer gave Zea a moment of internal pause. Talking to the females, the ones who actually had anything to do with their own kind besides fucking and leaving to go spend time with weirdly-ephemeral creatures like humans. Certainly seemed more useful, but Zea wasn't certain she was the girl for the job.

"You probably want a different kind of scholar for that. I don't do well with kids. There are some folks who'd do better, but my primary work is in bodies and how they die or don't, not culture or parenting." A beat. "But if you know of any dragons that can live on sunlight like plants, I wouldn't mind working with one of those."

A plant dragon.

That would be perfect.

Maybe all she could do was turn as many remaining humans as possible into something like that dragon or its kin, but did that count? Saving humans by replacing them?

Zea supposed it did. At least the next generation would do better.

[SilmeriaElemred]

''There is a new Dryad grove in Serendipity that has small dragon like creatures that do exactly that. But they are so small they can sit on your shoulder.'' Oblirin replied. He had flewn over and rested there once. But the Dryad had not shown herself to him other then hiding behind her tree.

''I can understand your choice. Still. Who says the group has kids.'' he winked but doubt she saw. He was following her after all. But would Zea change her mind then she knew who to ask he supposed.

''Condering researching me. What would you like to do first?''

[Cobalt]

"Oh.... ffpbbbb." Zea blew air out through her lips, trying to figure out how much she could even say beforehand. So much of this was a matter of inspiration, of sitting down with tissue samples and seeing how they reacted to grafting, to herbal remedies, to healing or preservative magic, to blood magic, to... well, whatever she had to hand. So much of it was about intuition.

"Well, you live a long damn time, by the sound of it. So I think I would probably start by taking a tissue sample and seeing what conditions kept it alive longer than a comparable human one, then scaling up to bigger samples to see if the pattern holds."

Just feeding people dragon blood to lengthen their lives wasn't good for shit except perhaps to keep herself around long enough to keep her research going. It wasn't a solution. People were going to need to be different. Feeding mortal things a steady diet of something non-renewable wasn't a solution; Zea needed to change people. Dragon blood, almost no matter what, just wouldn't be enough. She was going to need more.

[SilmeriaElemred]

''My kin has a gem on the forhead. The bigger it is usually the more magic the dragon has. I am relativly young so mine is not much of a big deal, not to mention it has been removed before. I do note that when damaged or removed it takes a hell of a long time to get it back.'' not to mention it hurt like hell. The pain itself would knock him out for sure but he would not mention it. Even if he would, he permitted her. So no complaining.

[Cobalt]

A gem. It had something to do with what made a dragon physiologically unique, but unless Zea could find some way to grow them outside of living self-sustaining dragon flesh, the gem did not sound especially useful to humans. Where would she graft one in, anyway? The forehead? Too obvious. Somewhere better hidden, so that if someone thought to target her subjects it would be easier for her to hide them.

"Unless I could use that gem to permanently change a human, I don't expect that I'll have much need for it. Temporary boosts in ability or lifespan are honestly pretty easy to come by. Unfortunately, what you get with those is a dependence on repeated... I don't know, doses, exposure. That sort of thing. The fundamental problem remains."

Zea stretched her arms above her head as she walked, knotting her fingers together so that she could crack the joints.

"See, I'm working on this mortality thing. At the temples we're supposed to be experts on death, but not everybody is really figuring out what it is about some species that means they just sort of... don't last. They just say oh they're not made to, which isn't an answer, you know? And you don't really solve the problem by making humans into vampires or liches or whatever, because then all you have is something that still relies on a fundamentally-mortal food source, which when you think about it makes them damn near as mortal as they were before. It doesn't work, not really. Just buys time."

[SilmeriaElemred]

''Mortality huh?...'' Oblirin said pondering. ''It is a curious thing why some species last longer then another. Of course knowing why is an interesting matter. I will tell you one thing. Living this long. It can be dull and boring. For some it can be hard to keep things interesting. If they can't, they can become insane. I have seen it. But. I am still willing to help you obviously'' he assured. ''I am interested in it perhaps as much as you are.''

[Cobalt]

Zea did not give even one third of a flying fluorescent shit how dull and boring life could be after a sufficiently long time living it. If people wanted to call it quits at some point out of sheer boredom, that was their call. What she didn't approve of was the degree to which perfectly productive lives were simply wasted to ensure that the local ecosystem had adequate fertilizer. Worms would eat absolutely anything; she didn't have to let them eat humans.

Additionally... Zea wasn't ready to go. If someone killed her than someone killed her, but the inevitability of being thrown back to the spirits her mother had brought her to Thanatos to escape... it was wrong. She refused to do it, not after so long free from their endless whispering and icy desperation.

"I think you underestimate the urgency of my research. A dragon could spend centuries or millenia working and be content with whatever progress they make. I've got decades to solve this problem. I can't count on anybody picking up where I left off; Inima encourages principle, not ambition. In all likelihood I have to finish this myself. Soon."

[SilmeriaElemred]

''well...'' Oblirin said pondering. ''There is ancient forgotten and most likely by now forbidden magic where a dragon and other being became one by the being eating the dragon's heart in a ritual grating the other person the same lifespam as the dragon. The catch is though that if either of them does so does the other. I read it in a library somewhere but it most likely is not the type of long life you are looking for is it.''

[Cobalt]

Zea first responded with a deep sigh, low and rough. This was exactly the kind of half-assed quick fix necromancers had been content with for basically all of recorded history and almost certainly beyond that. All they cared about was keeping themselves around just a little longer. Zea could understand their desperation, but that was no excuse to come at the problem like a short-sighted squeamish layman.

"No. All the most common and obvious ways require piggybacking off of something else that's already got a good lifespan. But that's not sustainable. It turns anybody or anything with a long life into a resource too valuable to preserve because everybody's going to just raze the population into the ground."

People did it with Thanati forest and farmland. Why wouldn't they do it to dragons?

[SilmeriaElemred]

''Just saying that the possibility is there. Dragons would not just allow anyone to do this though. It was often a pact. A form of trust, or when they saw someone as family. Personally I would not see it as a resource. A very long time ago there was an Order or guild. It specialised themselves into extending their lifespams. Wanting to become immortal. But their researches, I heard that they were horrible.''

There had been more rumors about dragons. Filling a tub of their blood and bathing in it for multiple times would turn one into a dragon. Some people seemed so desperate Oblirin had wondered if it would ever stop.

[Cobalt]

Pact. Zea wrinkled her nose. Yes, lining up her entire species in symbiosis with another species that it had no way to relate to. Sure. That would be a great solution that surely every future generation would be thanking her for, thanking her for chaining them into dependence upon dragons to see their great-great-great-great-great grandkids grow up.

"It's a common way of thinking. Thinking small, thinking short term. Just staying alive and screw whether the solution scales well to an entire population."

Zea rubbed her scalp above her forehead in irritation, fingers digging under her thick curling hair.

"Necromancers with no real ambition are one of the most pitiful wastes in the entire world. They think they're so fearless and special because they want to live. Fucking coral wants to live, but that doesn't mean it makes a good professional role model."

[SilmeriaElemred]

''Well. My body is yours to do with it what you think nessesary.'' Oblirin said stating the obvious of earlier. He would need time to actually fully understand Zea's way of thinking though. Mortals were meant to be mortals. It was exactly what made their lives so invalueable. But a few, perhaps should live longer then the rest.