"Well of course if they pardonned our riders they can hardly condemn or imprison us," Sandrock said, though in a doubtful tone, "but I can see why they'd think breathing plasma is an entirely unreasonable thing to pass down to your offspring."
"I don't breathe plasma," Scythe growled, and puffed out a curl of flame through his nostrils. His black leathery hide briefly sprouted blood-red patches like some kind of evil mask and faded back to rest-black.
"No, you're just half-chameleon," Kai retorted, making a show of cleaning her long, sharp claws. "Who would want that passed down to their eggs I don't know. The egg would come out all lizardy."
"The egg would not come out lizardy! The egg would come out just fine! And we can tell," he hurried before she could interrupt him, "because Wing's half-bird and Zero came out of the shell with just as many feathers as she's got! So hah. My eggs would not come out scaly, and shut up."
"Zero has more feathers than Wing does, actually," Heavyarms commented lazily, with the innocent air of someone planning to throw a great deal of oil onto the fire. "Perhaps if we let him breed, his own offspring will have gone back to being birds. Carrier pigeons, was it?"
Watching Kai rear back and hiss, tail curled to shield her heavy, egg-laying-ready belly, Scythe was for one brief moment very, very vindicated. Teach her to succumb to that too-young (and ridiculously powerful) upstart (with the impressive crest and jaw-feathers and plasma breath.)
(Teach Wing to succumb to that creep Epyon, while he was at it. No, seriously. Epyon? Wing'd chosen to get an egg by Epyon rather than him?)
"So, er. Hey, 'Arms." He didn't want to say his theory was wrong, though -- his descendents were not going to be lizards, dammit! -- but anyone who could get on Kai's nerves so beautifully he technically approved of. He sidled closer. "Whaddya say about testing a theory--"
"You're not giving me an egg either, lizard-boy," she drawled.
When his partner got there with the good news that he wouldn't have to be snipped after all Deatscythe was still sulking.
Goddamn.
"There, there," Duo whispered to him. Scythe manfully pretended not to hear him choke down a snicker. "Maybe there'll be easier-to-impress dragonesses with the Maganacs."
Deathscythe perks up. His partner laughs. Bah, he doesn't get the brilliance of Deathscythe's new plan. Surely once they see the magnificent eggs he's been siring on everyone not them, the only three dragonesses in his class will realize the error of their ways.
And in the meantime he gets a lot of tail.
This can not fail.