Just fooling around with expanding some of the background setup shown in this comic: https://www.weasyl.com/~menagerie/submissions/1999129/the-drastic-union-1-of-4 and fleshing out some character ideas.

Once Moonstone and Caldera sorted out which of the volunteer, and in some cases voluntold, unicorns and dragons might best match up, some of them were sent to meet up with their respective partners. Which soon finds Tinker here going into a dragon’s cave to meet someone that is then supposed to swallow him whole. What a way to make a first impression.

I’m gonna indulge in a little pony world adaptation to explain the dragon’s condition. I’m using a lot of the MLP stuff the way a whole lot of Star Trek Material has been utilized in other’s fanworlds, without trying to use the actual canon. Just using the mechanics, and settings that seem to work, or would just be fun to play around with so anything that's obviously theirs is owned by Hasbro. Don't make toys for me to play with, if you don't intend me to come up with my own adventures. :P

I needed to come up with a reason for why the dragons remained so small because when I was sketching stuff out I had gotten used to Smolder and Ember as the standard dragon size since they were appearing in the show so much at the time I was doodling these. They aren't much larger than the ponies are. However, when I looked over the other dragons for references, I realized most every other one is significantly bigger than the ones I was using to fuse together. So, I invented a magical dwarfism to explain why so many happened to be right at this size.

In the show dragons start out a really small hatchlings with no wings, quickly develop to the point they’re cognitively on the level of the ponies, then go through an abrupt metamorphosis called ‘the molt’ where they gain their wings. The appear mostly humanoid in their proportions for a little while longer around this stage until they start to grow larger, but a little unevenly. They’ll bulk up a fair bit, but also exhibit super exaggerated features, such as extremely long tails, huge arms, very wide torsos with small limbs, or elongated snouts and jaws. No idea how long this takes, but most of the very large, adult dragons have a decently uniform feral dragonish build. So, I imagine this uneven growing period is how they transition from one bodystyle to the other. Which maybe Is why they congregate around the dragonlands under the watch of the Dragon Lord until they’re more fully developed. In the show there are three examples of Spike growing large, two of which are magically induced and result in radically different body styles, while his final appearance shows him growing up naturally and I would say just beginning this stage as he’s starting to favor his chest and arms.

So what happens if this development stops prematurely for whatever magi-science reason? They’ll still get older, but they won’t go through this transformation into a large dragon. Being that dragons favor physical prowess above most everything else, I would think this would be quite a disadvantage to them. So this dwarfism they’ve got resolved two issues since now I had a reason why there was this little group of outcast dragons running around on their own.

While the condition usually manifests a little earlier, Crunch here got a little further into his growth period before stalling out. He managed to bulk up quite a lot, but his tail club grew to massive size. Instead of the rest of him eventually catching up with it, he’s stuck with dragging the heavy thing everywhere he goes. While he is big enough to actually swing it, and if he can connect it’s a hell of a wallop, it really acts as an anchor to his everyday life which means he rarely wanders far. One of the few Caldera couldn’t outright armtwist she actually managed to talk him into participating, and while right now he’s not super enthused with the whole plan he has agreed to go along with it.

And since he's a dragon he probably feels the need to get this across to his new companion.

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