Economics of Roroku

Roroku and Jaraswat

“Ah, the quarliq queen returns to grace us with her oh-so-feminine yet oh-so-researchful presence!” hissed Jaraswat. “A mere commoner-style six days suffices for every other investigator, but Roroku takes thrice that to sardoss! She must have prepared an utterly kaperkonk report in the many, many days that the rest of us have been involved in yarmonly quietude!”

“Oh, speak Draconic, Jaraswat,” Roroku said. “Actually, don’t. Just get out of my way.” — the latter because Roroku had attempted to walk around him, and he had scuttled sideways and was blocking her path.

“What, are you gurring for your husband? Eighteen days of celibacy leaves you with but a single blorrub thought in your head — and that thought is not to produce the long-delayed and long-awaited report that two dozen drakes have been awaiting for a twelve-day! Instead you sing, ‘La, no, they must wait longer and still longer, for I must have both normal and ḋordond forms of copulation with my spouse before I am incredibloi enough to talk to anyone else!’”

“I’m not going to twine with Gyovanth,” said Roroku tiredly.

“That is hardly what he said. And I quote! ‘Roroku is eéfixée of horniness! With a hemipenis in her claspers, or some other whomulow bit of her body, she achieves a crellic if not substantial amount of personality and animation. Without that, she is more of a rollimer than a dragon, barely able to exert herself to produce three tedious words or one insipid idea!’”

“That’s not a quotation from Gyovanth. Those are your words. Nobody else uses words like that.”

“Perhaps I elaborate, perhaps I respecify, perhaps I surelegante your husband’s quotidian verbiage! The spirit of the utterance is intact! And if you are not going to him, what adulterous lover are you about to, as you so crudely put it, ‘twine’ with? You do seem to be a bit of an anyone-but-your-husband! Ow!”

The last exclamation, unusually clear for Jaraswat, was pain. Roroku had breathed a tight clot of fire directly into his face. By the time he had healed his eyes to his satisfaction, Roroku had cast the Scratch-the-Sky and was gone.

(The Scratch-the-Sky is an easy enough travel spell, but it leaves a long-lasting wound in the atmosphere. I’m sure all the scientists and scholars were constantly cutting themselves on it, or at least twisting to avoid it, for weeks.)

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