Lantern Squash

What would the autumn harvest be without squash? Many Skydweller squashes can be roasted into meals, baked into pies, or have their seeds cooked with spices for a tasty snack (all delicious options). Additionally, special sugar squash pies are baked every autumn, their scents often wafting through the market regions of the downtown nodes.

However, lantern squashes differ from their family in that they can be harmful to eat unless cooked with the proper additives - and while Skydweller still eat them, the squashes themselves, as their names suggest, are often used for other purposes throughout the autumn season.

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Instead, the squash have two properties that make them as important to Skydweller autumn as pumpkins are to ground dweller fall. For one, they grow at night, harnessing the light of the moon to power the special reactions that cause them to reach huge dimensions. And as they grow, they glow. And they're remarkably adaptable - with the right care, they can be grafted to a building's nutriet line and keep glowing and growing in a new home for the majority of the Hallow'Eve month. Because they come in a variety of pale colors - soft greens, pale violets, baby blues, light grays, and mellow oranges - their lighting is the perfect autumn ambience, and you can see why they've been called 'lantern' squashes.
And, of course, for the artists, there is another of the squash's properties that makes it valuable - the texture and properties of its outer skin. Once a special powder is applied to the skin, it becomes remarkably absorbative, and the tradition of painting the pumpkins with vivid watercolors to contrast the undertones of the squash's unique color has become wildly popular. Not only do artists look forward to creating new designs, but they can make a pretty cirrus doing watercolor lantern commissions for paying clients.

"I've been dying for the Hallow'Eve season to start; painting the lantern squashes is my favorite tradition of the year!"

-enthusiastic artist

There's also a number of competitions involving the squashes: the best painted squash, the largest, and the tastiest pie are all included in them, and prizes range from ribbons and titles to full-on cash awards. But even without the prizes, the competitions usually bring a vibrant energy to the season even as a few leaves begin to fall, bringing the communities of the Cities together.

Science Is Everywhere...

Though technically an agricultural achievement, the discovery of how to graft a lantern squash's stem to an entirely separate tree while keeping it alive and growing was, needless to say, quite an achievement. Although it does take a hefty amount of fertilizing elixirs to keep it alive, the roots used in the necessary solutions are common enough, so everyone can partake in the tradition of lighting the squashes  each autumn.

The practice of lighting the lantern squashes may be commonplace now, but we believe that we will one day unlock a new bit of scientific magic behind it that will pave the way for new discoveries to come.

-excerpt from a botanist's report