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"Aneta, calm down," you tell her quietly but firmly. You fix Kris and Mariaz with a stern look and shake your head. "You two, finish the food. I'm not going to toss you out just because you were born with scales, not just yet anyway."
"Weren't born with 'em," Kris contests, tugging at his scarf and revealing patchy black scales like glass chips around his collarbones. "They grow in as we get older. You think human puberty sucks, try growing horns out of your skull."
Aneta looks disgusted, recoiling with a shiver as she presses her lips into a thin line. It's not as though racism toward dragonbreed is uncommon and even you have to admit, the sight of the rough, jagged scales breaking through Kris's skin is obscene in ways you can't properly express with words, like seeing someone's exposed and instinctively revolting against it. But you're a good and honest reformist. If Queen Illyanne saw fit to pardon these creatures, then they at least deserve a fair chance.
"Was it even your house I was picking through?" you ask severely, channeling your experience as a cop into authority.
"We weren't lying!" Kris snaps defensively. "We *were* adopted. I was eight, Mariaz was five. Neither of us had the signs yet. Doc Kurek took us in and kept us even after we started showing."
"So how come you weren't buried in the rubble?" Aneta asks, her tone clipped and short, sounding like she might prefer it if they were.
There's an awkward pause, then Mariaz speaks up. "I was looking for mom. Kris came to get me from the ghetto, then there were explosions and we hid in a cellar with other dragonbreed. When we came out, there were soldiers everywhere, fighting and shooting, so we hid again. They wouldn't let us on the trains out of the city, so we were stuck here."
