5. A Whirlwind of Calm
I texted Zenya, telling her that I would need her assistance with something that had come up, and then mentally messaged Beth, Sam, and Zoey, letting them know that the initial meeting had gone well and that they should be fine to come downstairs. I didn't text Cynthia -- she had tried to insist that she had some sort of obligation to be here at the start as a neutral observer, which, frankly, I disagreed with for a multitude of reasons. She had eventually acquiesced and remained upstairs with my mates, but not before both of us were frustrated. So, I didn't text her. Sam was with her, and she could relay the message, but for the moment, I was annoyed. Her insistence on overstepping, seemingly randomly from my perspective because it wasn't ever explained, combined with the stress of having to interact with five other dragons and I snapped at her. What she wanted was probably for my good (and, more confidently, good for Sam), but since she wasn't explaining why I needed her, I didn't budge.
In the end, I don't think it mattered much. The only thing she missed was an incomplete discussion on what made dragons dragons. Given that she lived with one -- and that the answers the dragons here provided didn't even seem to be entirely correct for me personally -- I couldn't imagine she was missing out.
I was a touch surprised when, after Zenya, Beth, Sam, Zoey, and Cynthia joined us, a trickle of other sharply dressed professionals followed them. It took only a few moments for me to realize what had happened. All of the dragons here had arrived with uncertain expectations. Like me, they had brought advisors and confidants with them to the hotel. Like me, they weren't confident what the initial contact with me would involve. If I was genuinely someone's heir, would conflict break out in the ballroom? The advisors had been kept outside, tucked safely away until any potential conflict was either averted or concluded. Now, it was time to capitalize on the assembly to negotiate, so the lawyers and advisors came out. Everyone besides Clement had at least one supporter join them as the talks began -- presumably because Clement was his own legal representation. There was no need to have someone else give approval in pencil only for him to have to come back in a minute and trace in pen when he could simply do it correctly in the first place.
Now, with the table set and the players assembled, while I scrambled to bring Zenya up to speed on how I wasn't being asked the tithe from my meager belongings but that I instead was being offered an olive branch by the eldest dragon in a way that would introduce me to the perpetual game they existed in, Cynthia got to observe the others. She got to watch as Clement and Arjun discussed operations in Turkey and the Caucasus. She got to listen as Eleanor and Adriana talked about the little bits of drama they were able to collect about the powers in their regions. She got to listen as Adriana and Arjun argued over shipping interests that passed between Santos and Itajaí on Adriana's end and Singapore and Shanghai on Arjun's.
That's how the next two hours went.
I watched, listened, and observed until my brain melted from boredom as the other five dragons discussed the absolutely most boring, trite, petty arrangements in the entire world. After about ten minutes, I wanted to shout that this whole meeting could've been an email. After an hour, when I had a better grasp on just how inconsequential the topics were, how small and insignificant they were in comparison to the combined powers sitting inside the room, I wanted to scream that it could've been an email between secretaries. There was nothing being talked about that required either an in-person conversation or the direct oversight of any of the dragons themselves. Maybe you could argue that the drama Eleanor and Adriana gossipped over was best done in person, but a coffee shop between the two of them would have sufficed -- not a gathering of all six of us.
In slightly more productive use of her eminently valuable time and experience, Cynthia got to listen to Zenya and I discuss how we wanted to handle Arjun's offer. Zenya listened as I relayed the information and then Clement's suggestions before posing the most potent question possible: what did I actually want?
Because, to her, I didn't need money. I wanted a house of my own for my family, to support Beth in going back to school, to raise a child with Zoey, and to allow Sam to tinker in the kitchen as much as she wanted, and, yes, all of those things did indeed cost money. But not an order of magnitude more than I needed, and I wasn't yet actively doing anything to support us. A house, with a more precise mana dynamo placed expressly where it would collect the greatest volume of magical energy, would pay for itself in a year at most. A loan for land and construction could be paid with physical labor or mana or my saliva rather than pure currency. I had advertising offers, both for me, me and the girls as a group, and the girls themselves, if I needed currency quickly. And I had a host of other offers if I wanted to dip my toes back into them.
In short, I didn't need currency from Arjun, at least in her eyes. Did I want currency? Arjun had suggested it, and Clement had stuck with it as he manipulated his explanation simply because it was straightforward and clean as a demonstration of how I could alter the deal for my own benefit. A mundane resort would be profitable. It was, notionally, on my lands, so I should claim a portion of the profit and call it a day. To the other dragons, who had been pushed out of the magical world and stuck trading mundane resources instead, monetary currency was the only currency they could conceptualize anymore.
I hugged Zenya when she said that. "Monetary currency isn't the only form of currency." She tensed at first, stiff as a board as my arms wrapped around her, before slowly relaxing. She smelled terrified for a second, but before I could withdraw and apologize, the smell shifted to overwhelming embarrassment, and she relaxed. Not entirely, and I ached at the reminder of what she must've endured. In hindsight, reactively moving quickly and wrapping myself around her probably wasn't a great decision, but it came so naturally and instinctively that I did it without imagining the consequences. The fact that she still wasn't fully comfortable hurt a bit, too. I mentally attributed it to her embarrassment to keep myself from visibly reacting.
She didn't seem to get it when I finally released her. "What? What did I do?" she asked.
"Made it easy for me," I replied. Because she had. She, apparently unintentionally, opened my eyes to what I actually wanted.
Money was useful. That likely would always be true. But they weren't the only form of currency, and, in my specific set of circumstances, there was another that was far, far more valuable. There were, as far as I could tell, only five stores of the currency that I wanted, jealously guarded and hidden away. All of them were in the room with me, besides one who was loitering in a room somewhere upstairs.
Information was the currency I was after. What parts of me were draconic, and what parts weren't? How did my saliva work on a fundamental level? How did my venom work? Was there any way to more precisely predict the outcome of childbirth? How did Sam siphon mana from me seemingly infinitely with far more efficiency than taking it from the crystals? Could the other dragons smell emotions like I could if they tried to, or was it truly unique to me? Did harnesses for my full form exist? Could I carry a passenger or two safely? Was the response to my shifting normal? Were the seemingly shared releases when I climaxed from the dragon or something else?
For most of those questions, it didn't actually matter. There were so few dragons in the world that all of it may as well truly have been unique to me. But, I was curious. I was curious how much of an outsider I was, even among the group of exiles I had been inexplicably inserted into.
It took another half hour before Arjun reconvened with me. He left his assistant to bicker with Clement over the specific wording of some kind of agreement over the grazing rights of one type of livestock in Uzbekistan.
"It doesn't even matter," he said with a smile as he sat down in a chair at my end of the table. "The agreement doesn't matter either way. It's inconsequential. They simply enjoy it. It's a game. An exercise for the mind."
"I see," I replied bluntly. I had surmised as such, but it felt grating, rather than amusing, to me, given my expectations for what the meetings would entail.
"Now, you've had some time. What will my hotel on Hawaii cost me?"
"How long are you staying in Philadelphia?" I asked in return.
"Through the New Year," he replied with a furrowed brow. "Might take a few day trips north. I don't see snow much where I currently live, and seeing the landscape blanketed in white is a nice change of pace. Why is it relevant?"
"I want to ask you for a nominal fee, something like 1% of your yearly profit, along with a complimentary stay for my family on a schedule that won't bankrupt you -- the numbers can be argued over later, if your assistant wishes to -- but I want another meeting as the upfront payment."
