Alicornutopia

Some of this was covered before, but not all of it.

In the “box” metaphor for dragon magic, life support is at the top of the box. Does this mean that unusual and unique dragons have “deeper” boxes in order to hold the extra magic and still keep life support at the top, does the extra magic go “above” the life support, or does the box analogy break down a bit here? Relatedly, I’m fairly sure that unusual and unique shrens are never born naturally, but can there be unusual or unique infected shrens?

Some of the group powers are expansions of standard dragon power "boxes". Whites, violets, and blacks aren't though. I don't actually remember if I established "where" their powers go.

Unusuals and uniques are not immune to contagion.

I figured they weren’t immune, but if the extra went “on top” I’d expect them to manifest shrenhood differently, and if not I’m surprised Lazarus could turn other dragons into unusuals or uniques.

Dragon Offspring Gender Questions!

1. What in fact happens if a dragon has kids with someone from the Six Gender System? Do they end up with a Two Gender System child, or a Six Gender System child, or is it totally up to the dragon parent, or...?
1a. Can a dragon assume a Six Gender System form?

2. If a dragon has kids with someone from a species whose members commonly experience involuntary-but-predictable sex changes over the course of their lives, are their thudia offspring going to end up dysphoric when they grow up and hit their first sex reboot, or does Convenient Dragon Gender Selection account for quirks like this?

3. My brain ran with Maggie's neat Six Gender System idea and came up with a worldbuilding notion in which everyone gets magic at puberty and magic-type is so strongly correlated with hormone balance that all societal gender expectations get loaded onto what magic you have and not what your body looks like. It's possible that children in this world actually don't have differentiated sex characteristics until puberty, I'm divided on that one. Anyway, would thudias of this species have a gender matched to their bodily sex? This would give them a very high chance but not an absolute guarantee of ending up cis when their magic comes in. Unless Convenient Dragon Gender Selection was aggressive enough to force their magic to align, but I'm not sure of the exact mechanism for the magic selection and I don't think it's determined at birth.

4. Not only have I forgotten what if anything we established about dragons and Thunderverse elves, I also managed to forget I wanted to ask about them in this post. Go me. XD

1. Depends. SGS people have several complications about who can knock up whom; it might be that people outside of their gender system are not normally able to reproduce with SGS folks. Even dragon crossfertility cannot get lesbians pregnant by one another without magical intervention. If you add magical intervention, the question boils down to "is this spell rated for..." which is a totally different question. If I wanted to allow a dragon and an SGS to have kids I'd decide what the dragon counted as - it'd probably be a consistent two options across dragons in general, at least until you had SGS parunias complicating things.

1a. Yes. Again, I'd have to decide what they counted as and until parunias were complicating things it'd probably be "all male dragons are desret all female dragons are harmi" or something.

2. Dragon Gender Selection works by chromosome selection plus forcing "be chill with that". If members of this species come in "chill with that", then the dragon's kids are all set. If they don't, then they will probably be pretty annoyed about the first or second sex, whichever is commoner in this species.

3. Depends on how the puberty works. If the hormone balance is in any way genetically-plus-limited-additional-magical-shoving determined, then that is how it will be determined. If the shoving is too limited, these kids might be screwed. (Anyway, dragons don't handle anything about unfortunate gender role cultural baggage. Someone with Lokibell's problem could crop up among dragons, say.)

2. Members of the species I was thinking of do come in "chill with that" - there's a minority who are dissatisfied with one or both of their sexes, and a larger and mostly uncorrelated minority who don't switch, but the commonest configuration is "born one sex, switch partway through life, comfortable with both".

3. Hormone balance is genetically-and-shovably determined, but there's a small chance of getting a magic type that doesn't fit your hormone balance even if your hormone balance is completely typical. So I guess unlucky kids in this scheme are just screwed. But at least they'll be fine with their nonmagical sexual characteristics.

And 4. Thunderverse - when a Thunderverse elf reproduces with a member of a compatible species, their nanotech goes over the resulting genome to make elfifying edits and then settles in to oversee the kid's development and stick with them for the rest of their life, so regardless of what chromosomes are on offer from the non-elf parent, the sex of an elf's child is always elf. Does this cause trouble for dragons reproducing with elves? I remember talking to you about this before but I can't remember if there were any conclusions.

I don't remember talking about Thunderverse elves + dragons at all. Possibilities include "children's sex is in fact always elf" and "dragon magic takes one look at the nanotech and goes fuuuuuck yooooooou". Or the first if the incubating parent is the elf and the latter if the incubating parent is the dragon.

The kid still has at least one fully functional elf sex chromosome from their elf parent even if the nanotech is interfered with, and I honestly have no idea what happens if you have a ZX or ZY kid with no nanotech overseeing their development. A sufficiently aggressive dragon-magicking could overwrite the offending chromosome and give the kid an ordinary human chromosomal sex, I guess, in which case the elf parent would be confused but the kid wouldn't have weird developmental abnormalities. (Or did "fuck you" mean "no, I'm not reproducing with this nonsense"?)

If the parents want an elf-sexed child, and they get one, and it's a parunia, is the poor kid un-linenameable and severely constrained in their choice of forms? Or does that just not happen because dragon magic is too offended, or does the kid end up with a binary sex in their natural form and a gender that is chill with both that and their elf-sexed elf form, or...?

"Fuck you" means "back off", not "I'm not reproducing with this nonsense". It probably wouldn't actually do that unless other things lined up in certain ways. But dragons do have the ability to accommodate different sex determination systems; birds (and skyfolk) use ZW sex determination instead of XY. So if ZY or ZX just doesn't work you probably get ZZ; if ZY or ZX do work then dragon parent decisionmaking factors in.

If they get an elf sexed child the elf sexed parent... of whom there'd kind of have to be one... can line name the kid. Thudias might be able to finagle an elf-sexed dragon-shaped second form; parunias I might allow an elf-sexed natural form but if they're going to turn into wombats or something they will be a binary sexed wombat one way or the other. They might be elf-gendered regardless. Dragons are not designed to accommodate this crap and won't be until one of those confused parunias breeds back into the gene pool.