Alicornutopia

I'm reading Amounts of Dragon, and I've reached the part where Mial is picking his climbing and swimming forms. He's reminding me of what's so excellent about the blue group: There are just so very many things to be.

You could go through so many forms just for senses, even just for vision. Sharp vision, like an eagle. Night vision, like an owl. Polarization vision, like a cuttlefish. Spectrometric vision, like a mantis shrimp. Infrared like some snakes. Ultraviolet like bees. Depth vision like wolfriders. That's seven there - a set out of the reach of any dragon but a blue group. That's before considering echolocation, scent tracking, magnetic senses, or so many other things.

How do you pick even just ten things to be?

Black groups wouldn’t need all of those because they have extra senses, but I agree that it would be hard being able to turn into things but only a limited number. Still an improvement over not being able to turn into things, of course.

Could a dragon turn into a wolfrider, or would that cause some sort of weird interference because they wouldn’t have a wolf?

Wolfriders can't normally survive long without a partner, so it is not customary. However, Mallyn's little cousins Nivah and Aji are planning to turn into a pair of wolfriders when they can, and if they do it together and appropriate precautions are taken to link them up, this will work fine.

...Would a mindlinked Nivah and Aji be able to safely swap which one was in wolf form and which one in rider form, and would they do that?

Yes and yes.

That sounds incredibly adorable. Will we get to see this?

Nivah and Aji are currently just shy of twenty and their parents aren't going to let them try dangerous experimental forms in the near future, so probably not.

Alicorn wrote:Nivah and Aji are currently just shy of twenty and their parents aren't going to let them try dangerous experimental forms in the near future, so probably not.

How the wolfrider link works with the change of shapes and will they need to take precautions everytime?

As long as they closely coordinate their shifts it'll work fine.

Lazarus finds dragon magic to be opinionated and obnoxiously hostile. Separately, the New Disciples of the Generous Lord believe approximately that the wizarding reservoir is God. Taken together, these two possibly-volitional entities drive a large proportion of the state of Elcenia.

This leads me to consider the possibility that the world of Elcenia is what happens when a wizarding reservoir and a dragon magic reservoir love each other very much.