Abayoni

If a dragon from the Starfall Isles isn't dreaming, then they're probably learning something. Learning is usually an involuntary process in the Isles, occurring whenever curiosity's siren song drags someone horns-first into catastrophe. Or when catastrophe goes flying directly into the face of the unwary. Learning can be spiteful like that. The less curious a dragon is, the more likely learning is to club them upside the back of the head and force some sort of lesson into their brain.

But sometimes instead of a painful life lesson, a dragon can get Abayoni. Well, usually you have to request the tutor's services, but she's not against sneaking up on someone and giving an impromptu lesson either. That could be rather fun! But normally, Abayoni is a very tame instructor by arcane standards. She's quite patient and understanding, and unlike some Observatory professors, doesn't believe that a literal do or die experience is the best way to learn a new skill. (Not to mention how contrived of a situation you have to set up to make mycology immediately life-threatening.) She even acts as a nice, fluffy pillow to cry into when a difficult concept lies frustratingly and seemingly impossibly out of grasp.

That's not to say that Abayoni can't be harsh if she needs to be. She keeps a cane at her side to give a light, friendly bonk to the head of any students who are a bit too eager to put what they've learned into practice. Which is quite often, considering the average arcane dragon. They'll take a day's lesson in psychology and use it to make the lives of everyone in the clan extremely uncomfortable. But she only brings out the ice magic for the most impetuous of dragons. Not dangerous ice magic though. Instead, she merely induces a gentle hibernation that'll last until the offending student has calmed down. Perfectly safe. Abayoni would prefer not to hurt anyone. Even if she has threatened to freeze Endboss and Seren in blocks of ice and leave them in the clan's cold storage for a while.

It is a bit odd that a tundra has such an impressive knowledge of nearly any subject imaginable. After all, they're not a sort of dragon known for their memory. And Abayoni doesn't keep shelves upon shelves of notebooks like most scholarly tundra dragons do. In fact, she barely owns any books at all. She can tutor any subjects without any materials or preparation. Such a feat is normally considered beyond a snapper's memory, let alone that of a tundra. Abayoni can do it because, unknown to Clan _______, she isn't the one remembering any of the information.

Hatched in the Cloudscrape Crags, when Abayoni grew up she travelled out of flight to study in an arcane academy. Not for magic, but to learn how to cultivate strange and bizarre mushrooms, which would be able to grow in caves underneath the frigid mountains and provide a reliable food source for plant-eaters. She wasn't a great student though — she could never remember the difference between a blue entoloma and an emetic russula, or which mushrooms exploded in the presence of fire. Eventually, one of her disappointed professors decided to send her on an excursion to the Tangled Wood to... well, Abayoni doesn't remember what she was supposed to do, just that she was expected to either succeed or not make it out alive.

Of course, in a place like the Tangled Wood, she got lost immediately. She did succeed in her quest for mushrooms, if running headlong into a massive patch of them and inhaling far too many spores counts as success. She even survived (I know, what a surprise), stumbling out of the patch after who knows how long, without even even any debilitating mushroom-related poisoning. No, she actually felt better than she did before she went in, full of energy and with a clear voice in her head telling her how to get back to safety. A nice, friendly voice, one that explained that she was in no danger and was in fact quite fortunate.

Through the voice, Abayoni learned that she was now the host of a fungal colony that had been collecting knowledge for thousands of years. A completely harmless one, it claimed, unlike others of its species that definitely just drained all the knowledge out of a dragon's mind and killed them in the process. All this colony needed was for Abayoni to go out into Sornieth and learn new things, and through her, the colony would learn those things too. In return, she would get to share in all the mushrooms' knowledge, freely given, and with an eternal promise that she would never be assimilated into some sort of fungal hive mind. Without her consent, of course. The colony had learned of things like morality and caring for the feelings of others at some point, and now felt really bad about all the previous times it had done that sort of stuff and was making sure to never do it again.

Abayoni was okay with this situation, partially because she did want the mushrooms' knowledge, and partially because she still wasn't convinced she had a choice in the matter. Without any prodding from the fungus at all, she knew she shouldn't go back to the academy. There might be plenty of knowledge there, but she didn't really feel like being dissected by a dragon with a degree in mycology. They wouldn't have studied anatomy, so they wouldn't even be any good at the dissection part! No, a different clan would be a much better decision. One large enough to learn new things, but one without any dragons interested in mushrooms.

Of course, Abayoni still can't let her clanmates know about her situation. If they deemed her to be a danger, then whether they decided to get rid of her of the mushrooms wouldn't matter, it would be catastrophic either way. That's why she has a pet frog. If anyone gets suspicious that she's not the one who actually knows everything, she can claim it's the frog who's the real genius and has been telling her everything she knows. Then they'll never think to check deep in her fur for tiny mushrooms. This is a flawless plan.