Elcenia Spoilers

[Alicorn]

I don't remember most of my original reasoning, but merfolk don't produce mages because how would you activate one under any ordinary circumstance.

[DanielH]

I can think of ways to activate water mages (freshwater, probably, or overly hot/cold/whatever water), air mages (drowning, like human water mages), and earth mages (rockslide again). I can’t think of how to activate fire mages, and most of these do sound more inconvenient for merfolk.

What’s the approximate mental progression of an Elcenian dragon egg/baby dragon? At what point do they become sentient (Barashin dragons at least believe their eggs are sentient, but there’s no evidence Elcenian dragon eggs are), do they understand language before they’re a month old, when are the earliest memories of the average adult dragon, do they not develop things like depth perception until ten times the age humans would (a bit more than four years), etc.?

I’m wondering in general, but this set of questions was prompted by me trying to decide if I should read “smashing of shren eggs” as closer to abortion or infanticide along various relevant axes.

[Alicorn]

Elcenian dragon eggs contents are asleep. When they wake up, they start getting on the business of hatching. They don't understand language before they're a month old, although they may have a period of a day or two where they understand but don't yet try to speak, around that time. Many adult dragons can remember all the way back to language acquisition, but not to hatching. Month-old dragon babies have nearly adult sensory faculties but not adult interpretive ability and inferior motor control.

[DanielH]

In that case, I have a really hard time reading about the smashing of shren eggs and thinking anything other than “abortion of a not-yet-conscious fetus-equivalent who would otherwise have an incurable, painful, debilitating, and socially stigmatized disease”, which seems like the kind of extreme case where many otherwise-pro-life people would say that abortion is an acceptable option.

Since dragon magic responds to their names, would it be possible to distinguish a doomed baby from a non-doomed one by naming them early and seeing if they react differently to hearing their names?

Is this development noticeably different for violet-group babies (because they hatch later), or does most of this still happen about a month after hatching?

[Alicorn]

Responding to their names comes at about the same time as language acquisition.

Violet-groups develop normally post-hatching.

[Bluelantern]

hum, how early naming can happen for dragon purposes and names-fairies purposes?

[Alicorn]

You can name a (going-to-survive) baby dragon immediately if you like; they delay for cultural reasons. Names will not stick to magic-impoverished dragon babies at all.

[BlueSkySprite]

So could dragons figure out if their babies were going to die by naming them and then seeing if the baby reacted to someone saying their name in a different room?

[Alicorn]

No, because the babies don't have language processing at that age.

[BlueSkySprite]

Okay, and that extends to noticing name magic too?
I thought that they might react to their name even if they didn't know what it meant.