They were so cute when they were little! ("What happened?" jokes abound.)

Several others had bonded within the first moments. Lurish stepped in front of a copper hatchling with turquoise markings and grinned. Arinath looked up at the Zekiran.

You have wings! and the hatchling snapped out his wings only to lose his fragile balance and tumbled nose first into the sands with a yelp. As his rider helped him back onto his feet and not his nose, a bronze darted past them with unerring strides right up to another candidate.

One of the Journeymen Geneticists elbowed his partner. She glared at him, her eyes fixated on her task, but did not look at him until he hissed, “Look! We both win the bet!”

She frowned at this but then noticed that he was right - they had both wanted to create the same hatchling - a mix of copper and turquoise. This turned into a bet and a competition.

“It’s ‘ won the bet’,” the woman corrected, giving her glasses a push up on her face. “And no...we didn’t create the same hatchling - mine was copper with turquoise markings. That...is the opposite.”

“That wasn’t part of the bet,” the other Journeyman insisted. “It was...”

As they argued the terms of their minor competition - something that was not uncommon for the Genetics at the Hall or the IGPC - the hatchling flicked her wing in annoyance, trying to dislodge the pieces of shell stuck uncomfortably to her wingsails. Unable to do so, she walked, but her wings kept twitching as she continued to rid herself of the uncomfortable tag-alongs.

She walked right up to Rhei and sat down with a huff. Pleasseeeeee get these things off me. They are causing me to itch and I don’t like them...

Rhei looked down at Diandreth and smiled before doing exactly what her dragon wished her to do. “It’s not the shell making you uncomfortable,” Rhei chuckled as she flung the last of the shell away. “But I know how to fix that!”

Yippee! and Diandreth took off without waiting for her rider - thankfully going in the right direction.

Original Adoptables by http://sanja280.deviantart.com/ (deactivated da account) Original Character Sheet (full info in CIS format, it's quite large)