Hi, I feel compelled to begin with my enthusiastic applause for this 
great story.
	Anyways that done I wanted to give some thought to an underlying 
question namely What's up with the Dragon.  Now in the story the dragon offers a 
small amount of it's blood to a sorceror/sorceress who can defeat it's minnions, 
asking for a quantity of the mage's blood in return.  Why would a dragon do 
this?  After all it's blood is infinately more powerful than human blood so what 
does it need the blood for?  Here's my theory:  The one thing dragon's like 
about humans is their entertainment value.  And the things humans feel strongly 
enough to resort to blood sorcery over are particluarly hilarous to them.  Now 
since it's it's blood powering the spell the dragon can watch the victom with no 
clues of it's voyerism.  And casters blood lets the dragon do the same by 
providing a sympathetic link.  This brings up the question of weather or not the 
dragon felt insulted by Shampoo's and Colougne's story about it.  If it did, it 
would be childs play for it to 'tweak' a few probabilities to insure their plan 
fail spectacularly.  And of course there would be no sign of it's tampering.
	Well, it's just a thought.