Lynn scampered around the Grimaldi University campus. She looked like a short student of indeterminate species. Or, if you were less generous, a student's weird sibling who was running around unsupervised. But Lynn was neither a student nor an unsupervised child. She was a gremlin, a very lesser demon. And she was on a mission! She didn't remember what it was most of the time but in her heart she knew that she was accomplishing something, probably!

She had been hanging around campus so much that she knew the place pretttttttty decently. She knew where all the best trash cans were and all the choice dumpsters and definitely which vending machines were easiest to break. Lynn knew all the best places to scrounge food and naps.

Lynn was briefly discombobulated when the place changed on her. All the trash cans and dumpsters were still where they should be. But there was a new thing. A section of the Grimaldi suddenly sported orange roundy things. The likes of which Lynn had never seen!

It took her a while to process this change and trust it enough to investigate. Gremlins were low on the pecking order. New things could be for eating or biting or fighting or obeying. And sometimes it wasn't always obvious. So she lurked. She lurked the Grimaldi University Haunted Pumpkin Patch.

(The patch actually was haunted, although the event organizers had no idea.)

Pumpakins. Big n' orange. What they for?

For sitting?

Lynn saw crownbelly Grace sitting on one of the bigger pumpkins. But other notgraces were marking smaller pumpakins to look like faces.

Oh! Crownbelly! Lynn was supposed to be finding her! Good job, Lynn! Ugh, but the mystery of the pumpakin... Lynn tried to watch both Grace and the pumpakins but eventually Grace left the haunted pumpkin patch and headed off.

Lynn grabbed the closest pumpkin and ran after her foxy target, unsteadily wobbling under the big round and orange weight.

--

"What is pumpakin?" demanded Lynn of Grace. She held the big orange round up at the fox.

"Oh! Hi Lynn!" Grace beamed to see her good friend visiting her, even if at such a strange hour. "Did they let you take a pumpkin home from the patch?"

"Yuh," said Lynn, in the sense that if they couldn't catch her and take it back, in that sense they let her take it. Finders and runners keepers.

"Oh, pumpkins are just great!" Grace said. "You can draw a silly face on it and make it a jack o'lantern or carve it up and make it a real o'lantern with a real o'candle! Oooh! And, of course, there's pumpkin pie and roasted pumpkins seeds and all kinds of stuff you can do with the insides!"

"Insides tasty?" asked Lynn, very interested. "Big orange round opens up?"

"Yeah but you need a knife or some... thing..."

Grace trailed off as Lynn sat down on her dorm room floor, braced the pumpkin between her legs, cracked the gourd and tore the top of it loose. The little gal practically salivated looking at the stringy insides and seeds.

"Wow!" said Grace as Lynn stuck her head in the craniectomized pumpkin and started noisily eating it raw. "Your grip strength is crazy good! Or maybe the pumpkin was rotten and mushy and you shouldn't be eating it?"

Lynn kept eating it.

Deep in her gremlin heart, she knew one thing. There were more pumpakins, they were easy to steal, and they were tasty!

---

Lynn also gets to enjoy Halloween! Nobody explain trick or treating to her!

I feel that the logical endpoint of this new discovery of hers is that she will try to eat a pumpkin themed decoration that is not actually a pumpkin and she will not realize its not food even after she starts chewing pieces off.

---

Lynn the horrible gremlin owned by me
Art by  temporarywizard