Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It’s kind of shaky on its feet and enjoys playing in puddles.

And look! It has grown wings! It must be close to maturing.

Young dragons are relatively defenseless. They are born with relatively soft scales, which are shed and replaced with harder ones as the hatchling matures. Once a hatchling’s wings grow in, it typically marks the beginning of maturation. At this point they are often capable of hunting on their own and are usually left alone by their mother.

A clumsy, affectionate little creature, this female loves human children and will happily scamper out of the water to play with them whenever they come near. However, her skills on land are... even less graceful than her movements in the water, and as such she often stumbles and trips and falls over. Oddly enough, her tumbles always seem to knock the ONE rich child in the group over into the nearest mud puddle, thus wrecking all his or her fine silken clothes. The child is delighted, but the parents generally shriek and hire dragon hunters to dispatch of her; only the love of the common people for the beastie has kept her from being brutally slaughtered.