Here be Dragons

They’re so relaxing to color lol. The “base” coloration usually only shows up when asleep or just very distracted, tired, sick, etc. Emotion colors+patterns are involuntary, like us they can have some control over it but often it’ll show on their skin in Some way if they’re mad, scared, etc. Getting the skin to align with the chosen color takes practice to refine into something they like, but more or less just takes some thought to keep together(kind of like remembering you’re breathing every so often). Same with complex foliage disguises, those are a bit harder since they have to focus on copying what’s around them and quickly changing colors when moving. Very skilled rainwings can move and change colors very quickly, while younger or less skilled ones keep more simple shapes and color schemes (taking a while to change).

Pet rainwings were a thing before the war, mostly in skywing and sandwing upper-class circles. Their queendoms were just starting to get into that southern area and just go crazy claiming territory and looting resources (as far as they could get into the jungle, that is. It’s very dense and deadly, a lot of it remains unexplored by anyone other than rainwings). It is generally understood NOW that rainwings are also intelligent, at the time it was thought they were some kind of pretty rainforest creature that could mimic your actions and speech, they just didn’t seem “dragon enough”: very small claws, (seemingly) no teeth, weird eyes, weird beak, short limbs, no Queen, no difference between sexes/little hierarchy, they eat fruit, they sit around for a lot of the day/don’t hunt a lot of the time, the list goes on. They realized soon enough that they weren’t animals, the rich just didn’t care. Anti-other dragon sentiments and the increased wealth gap made having another dragon as an accessory very popular and a symbol of status (especially since it costs a lot to have fruit and veggies brought in to keep them alive). Even if they don’t really care for the concept , any sandwing or skywing royal or noble of any notoriety has a collection of rainwings just to keep up appearances. It’s kind of like people who irresponsibly keep big cats, except that’s a whole person youve got in that cage.