For a while, the storm had raged and howled like stampeding cattle, with a pack of slavering wolves nipping at their hooves, yet as those bloated clouds settled in over the Kingdom of Aquaria, the heavy drops of rain became a self-satisfied purr as they rumbled steadily against the roof.
The scene within the informal guest hall of the palace was a determinedly peaceful one. It was a balmy time of year, so there was no need for a fire. Tallow-burning lamps lit every seating area, their flickering, dim light supplementing the pale glow that struggled it’s way in, through the colorful lead-glass windows that illustrated the story of the kingdom’s founding. Around those wan flames were huddled Queen Elisa, her entourage, and her guests, upon stout, unglamorous furniture, intended for use by both dragons and humans.
Among them were Luke, wearing a borrowed gray house-robe; his vermilion-scaled dragon, Karyu, who remained in much of his tack like a sexy young leather bottom from the SF-Eagle; Avelia, who wore nothing besides loose-fitting undergarments but had a sheet available to her in case she felt a draft; and Avelia’s steel-white dragon, Vrack, whose bridle and cruppers had been removed.
Karyu, being a sort of drake that was partial to other drakes (although not exclusively), was preening fastidiously over Vrack’s scales, which Vrack took in good humor and attempted gamely, if less amorously, to reciprocate. Avelia was sipping a rough mead from a very old-looking goblet made from bronze that was so worn and tarnished that it appeared, at first glance to be stone, and she was well on her way to becoming slatternly drunk. Luke was finishing the last of a room temperature soup, and he was trying not to slosh it too much as he sneezed and rocked in laughter from some of Avelia's stories about her travels.
The dragoness Anija and Queen Elisa were engrossed in an intense conversation, although they were keeping their voices too low to be heard, and inside the curve of Anija's body played three hatchlings and three human children that bore obvious resemblances to the queen (they were her grandchildren by her youngest child, the queen having begun bearing herself when she was 12). More audibly, the Sicilian Vaestro was chatting, over a card game that used a deck that was also used for fortune-telling, with a member of the queen's entourage, who went only by his nickname, "Whiskers," who said he didn't like the name given to him by his cultist parents; and the queen's dragon, Leviathan, had joined Whiskers' strange mount, Annie, an unusual rainbow-feathered dragoness called a quetzelcoatl, in a private corner of the room, nestled together in an absentminded manner that made it obvious that they had been mates for a long while (being the parents of the hatchlings that played in Anija's shadow with their future Riders).
Two human members of the queen's entourage, two incredibly muscular men named Oliver and Ethel, were practicing a mysterious form of combat that bore no resemblance at all to Asian-style techniques, being a form of Nordic sacred wrestling called "glima," and somehow, the two men had gotten transformed partially into dragons and had draconic digitigrade feet and were covered, over certain parts of their bodies, in copper-green and cinnamon-red scales, respectively. There was not sufficient room for their dragons to practice combat, so their dragons, who were both female, quietly preened each other, the two of them seeming to be loosely affiliated as mates. Like every dragoness that ever saw Karyu, the two hens were casting occasional glances over at the incredibly handsome vermilion-scaled dragon, they appeared to be discussing whether they should consider getting him to sire them a clutch. They occasionally whispered each others' names, the one with scales like tarnished bronze being named Astrid and the one with scales the color of wheat being named Hilda.
While every female dragon in Karyu's presence, besides Annie, conspired to try to con, bribe, and nag him into giving them clutches, the rain continued to batter the roof overhead, pattering constantly and monotonously against the bronze-tiled roof of the palace.
Let's determine which interaction to follow more closely, then, since there are plenty of options.