Efron once again looked at Gretel with uncertainty. “An electric type… with a revealer hatchling. You mentioned him before; you said he was Clay's friend who stopped me from bleeding out, right?”

She frowned. “Yeah. But I don't get what Clay sees in him; he's… scary.”

“I was scared of him at first, too,” her friend admitted, “but did you see Grace? She was completely at ease around him… Happy, even. Given the trauma she must have endured from her exile, even if she was newly hatched at the time, well… keeping her that content would be very difficult, even in the case of biological parents. But to be a totally different dragon type makes it even harder to earn trust like that.”

“Really? How would it be harder?”

“You and I both struggled to understand his intentions when he asked me about my heritage,” the violet revealer reminded her.

“Huh. True…”

“Different dragon types express themselves in different ways, and that makes it hard to identify potential threats. Hatchlings as young as Grace rely on body language more than verbalizations; the fact that doesn't feel threatened at all by that electric type raising her is a testament to how much he's earned her trust.”

I never thought that deeply about it… But of course Efron would be keen on these things; he and the hatchling are both social dragons who've experienced bad treatment in the past. “So what do you plan to do?”

“He brought her to the medic to treat her raw scales, and he stopped her from eating the feathers and bones from the duck you brought me,” Efron recalled. “Him asking me for advice on how to raise revealers seems genuine. So… I think I should help him.”

The little wind dragoness shrugged in response. “It's your choice if you want to help them. I have no idea what his deal was, or what Clay sees in him, but he did cauterize your wound last night. As for Grace, well… none of this is her fault. She deserves to be treated well, and if you can give advice to her caretaker on how to do that, then I agree with your choice.”

Her companion smiled slightly. “Thanks. Speaking of Clay, where did he go?”

Gretel blinked, then cast her sights over to the mud puddle she had seen Clay disappear into half an hour ago. When a large frog hopped near it in an attempt to eat a burrowing worm, webbed hands suddenly reached out of the mud to clutch the amphibian, dragging it under in such a swift motion that the juvenile wind dragoness barely registered what had happened despite clearly seeing it.

“Oh,” Efron uttered the sound, astonished. “That answers that.” Gretel laughed, and his green eyes focused on her again. “Well, I do plan to help that electric type with Grace. But, um… could you come with me?”

His friend gazed up at him. “Of course! Maybe we'll get more answers about how she ‘saved’ him, too.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Just remember to keep your guard up around Grace, though. Like I said, revealer hatchlings lack control over their reveals until they're four months old. You can't predict when Grace might reveal you until then.”

“Right. Well, I'm ready to visit them whenever you are.”

“Okay. Let's go now, then.” Efron crouched and pinched some mud up from the footprint Gavin had left, then scented it. His smile dropped and he lifted his head toward the slope, marching up to the top of it where the next prints were. “Wow. Electric types are hard to track; they leap so far that they might as well be flying. They don't leave a scent until they land, and they land so far apart that there is no scent-trail.”

Gretel’s hot pink eyes shone with fascination. “Really? Wow. I don't think I've ever even tried to track someone by scent… Unless the wind carries their scent to me.”

“Huh? How does that work? Wouldn't the wind dissolve it?”

“Wha-a-at? No! Well, maybe if the scent is scattered around by unpredictable winds, we wouldn’t be able to track it. But smells are actually tangible. They don't ever just ‘dissolve,’ they just get spread around to the point where we can't detect them anymore.”

Now it was Efron's turn to be fascinated. “I had no idea.”

She giggled. “Air moves a lot like water does. Wind is like water currents; smells are like mist. When water ‘dissolves’ it doesn't disappear, it just scatters into fine mist that condenses into the clouds in the sky; when those misty-clouds get too dense, they rain the water back down!”

“True. I learned about the water cycle when I asked my grampa once. But what does that have to do with smells?”

“Like I said, smells work the same way! When a smell ‘dissolves’ it also becomes a ‘mist’ or gas that gets trapped in the sky. Sometimes it's too high-up for anyone but wind dragons to notice. But when it ‘rains’ back down, usually the ocean, algae, and–to a lesser degree–trees, will convert it into breathable air.”

“That… makes sense,” he realized. “It's just hard to compare water to air because we can see and feel water. I can't see or feel air unless there's wind.”

Gretel's jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

He tensed nervously. “Uh, yeah?”

“What about the gas from a fire dragon?”

“I've never been around a fire dragon. But my grampa also mentioned that their ‘methane gas’ is invisible and doesn’t have a scent.”

The wind dragoness could only gape incomprehensibly. “What about my sonic attack? Did you see that?”

“Uhh… I saw the dust and debris getting swirled around…”

Gretel sat down, struggling to process this. “So you're telling me that only wind types can sense air and gas? All this time, you didn't notice any winds I've summoned?”

Efron shrank. “L-Like I said, I did see the debris kicked up from it, and I did feel the winds when you helped me fly… I even felt the vibration from your voice.”

The juvenile wyvern could only stare incredulously at him.

“It's just… like… the air right now? It's still. If it weren't so chilly, I wouldn't even notice it,” he clarified.

She shook her head. “But you still breathe, even if it isn't chilly! Don't you notice if what you're breathing is changed? Like, with that footprint just now!”

“Smelling and breathing are different…”

Gretel’s jaws parted even wider with shock. “But breathing and smelling, and even breathing and tasting, are the same thing!”

“What?! No they aren't! You can’t smell things unless they’re close to your nose; you can’t taste things unless you lick them with your tongue…”

“But the air you breathe passes through your nose, or over your tongue if you breathe through your mouth…!”

The violet revealer just stared at the wind type, completely at a loss for words as the realization of their varying sensory-ranges became evident to both of them.

I can't believe other dragon types aren't sensitive to these things…! This entire time, I'm detecting things that none of them can? “I… I think I need a moment,” she laughed nervously.