Tell us about Arish, and her fabulous Lightningness self :)
A lot of her friends (and her mate) are actually magicians. She met most of them by hitting them up for information on their connection to and use of magic, information which she continuously collects, collates, and sends back to a group of like-minded dragons in the Shifting Expanse for use in what she refers to as The Project. It appears to be an active attempt to build magitech.
Her participation in research is on the collection-and-analysis end, not the application end, but she really likes the results of more practical application. She is always sending away for mail-order mechanical toys from the Shifting Expanse, which she generally plays with for a few weeks and then loses somewhere on the Sunshield snappers’ migration route. Whoops.
She would really, really like to fly. She is secretly involved in The Project because maybe magitech airplanes. For now, hot air balloons are fine too.
She’s… not actually any good at designing hot air balloons. Fortunately, the Windswept Plateau also publishes mail-order catalogs (even if they all say “printed in the Ashfall Waste” in tiny print on the inside cover).
She is pretty good at telescopes, and regularly designs new ones for her starseer/astronomer mate. Sometimes she joins him at his astronomy, but she does not find his methodology particularly rigorous. She usually starts in on improving the telescope design about halfway through the night’s first horoscope.
Another significant talent is drawing up and examining contracts. She does not believe in verbal agreements. Everyone involved in a planned project has to sign on the dotted line.
Her noggle is a gift from Kitale and Kiambu, her closest friends. At one point she mentioned to them that she’d liked playing with her father’s noggle as a hatchling. Some weeks later, Ourense brought home a noggle from a training expedition and didn’t even get a chance to set it down. Arish was embarrassed, but deeply touched. She has since built it and Carrefour’s sunset lasher a very impressive tank.
She’s pretty impossible to argue with. If she doesn’t like what you’re saying, she just… doesn’t hear it. Cheerful selective deafness.
