Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It enjoys running through a nearby pumpkin patch.

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.

One year, a magical blight killed all the squash vines in Lloyprij, so there were no new fruit for pumpkin dragons to move into. The only pumpkins Gekkanator could find were ones that had been enchanted in previous years to never rot, and they were all inhabited by bigger, stronger pumpkin dragons. Even gourds were being taken over by larger hatchlings! Fortunately, Gekkanator found a giant cucumber that responded well enough to the pumpkin-preserving spell. It wasn't perfect, and required a bit of traditional cucumber-preserving techniques to get it to last until the next year's pumpkin crop. Until the new planting of squash ripened, Gekkanator was in a big pickle.