She ate an awful lot. And it was mostly the kind of messy meaty food that Tresis himself didn't bother with any longer. But food was food, and the dragon slurped down vat-grown meat as easily as she did piles of grass or those ridiculous flowers which Wisdom had taken to liking.
"Wisdom! Go visit now," Neres said, and began making her way toward the doors of Tresis' quarters.
"Not now! Everyone is asleep!" Tresis begged the black dragonet. She was getting much too large for him to just pick up and haul bodily away from the doors. Now, he had to start getting sneaky.
But she was getting good at it too. "We are awake. I love you, feed me. Visit. Now."
"Which is is, my dear dragon? Food? Or visiting? If you keep pestering me about either of them, you'll not have any until tomorrow."
There was a slight pause. Then, the hair on Tresis' neck stood up on end. The sound coming from Neres Storm bore a striking resemblance to the sound the ship made when it was entering an atmosphere... Only louder.
"All right! All right! You can eat now! But you must wait until tomorrow to visit." Tresis caved like, well, like a harried father. He eyed Neres Storm when she started to make another noise, and got his Stern Father face back on. "To-mo-row," he intoned.
Neres dipped her dark head down, finally admitting that food would make her sleepy anyway.
She tore into the vat-grown stuff like it had been made for her: which it had. While she finished, and began to look woozy, Tresis wondered if it wouldn't be so hard to get the engineers who worked on that foul stuff to put some tranquilizers in it as well as all those nice vitamins and minerals...
"He is stronger and bigger than you are," Tresis made the mistake of pointing out to the adolescent dragon. She turned with angry eyes, and he could feel the heat she was producing even before she attempted to burn a patch of wall near her companion.
"I WILL FLY!" She hissed.
"You will fly when there are no people around," Tresis said. He thought to himself how much more 'normal' he had had to become since adopting this creature. Far from bending to his will and becoming a flaming puppet for his desires... She was almost impossible to predict, and that made her ever more dangerous than Tresis himself!
Neres Storm made one of her tantrum-sounds, a great rumble which shook the walls. Tresis moved the air around with his psionics, and kept the tapestries from falling to the floor.
"You can yell all you want," Tresis said, putting his hand on her hot nose, and scratching it, "but when you go out into even simulated light, you always come back shedding. It isn't because you're still growing, either."
Subdued briefly, Neres Storm sat on her dark haunches and grumbled to herself.
"When we get to a world," She said, "I will fly as far as I like. I will fly away from you."
"I will follow you," Tresis said, levitating into the air, "as you know I can fly too. And probably better than you."
"ONLY BECAUSE YOU WON'T LET ME LEARN!!!"
Tresis patted Neres Storm on her haunch. He could reach her shoulder but he would need to float himself soon, if she didn't start growing. She did enjoy some of the same things he did. Being in warm, dark places. But she also had this penchant for warming spaces which didn't need warming. Like the cool baths. Or the cold storage rooms.
Wasn't she cute?