Within meters below the Earth's surface lay the hellish lair of the evil Christmas demon, Krampus. Anyone who gets captured by the haunting figure himself and dragged away into that unforgiving place would never be seen again. Each of Krampus's victims were incased in snow globes and kept on a shelf. Globes that don't allow the user to travel between location to location in the blink of an eye like his maker/ex-partner. No, they trap his victims in a setting of their old hometown untouched by time itself. The echoes of solid, thumping footsteps accompanied by the rattle of chains could be heard everywhere inside of the lair. Living with him were the evil demonic toys and dark elves; all of them as equally devious and cunning as their master.
The towering demon himself was looking over his naughty list while listening to Silent Night on an ancient gramophone, listening to it's gentle, soothing chorus whizzing throughout the area. Behind that screaming old man face of a mask, Krampus narrowed his rectangular eye pupils on the list grasped in his claw-like fingers. He crossed out the various people he found naughty that he had captured in West River on Christmas previously. He crossed out the names of the West Rivers civilians with a feather pen and blood red ink, including those of the Engel family. Suddenly, he stopped at one particular name on the list.
Max Engel.
Krampus froze when he happened upon this name written in cursive. The one child he spared on that Christmas night. The boy who decided that he had enough of Christmas and wished it gone. The yuletide demon emitted confused growling sounds as he tapped his finger in thought, pondering if he should cross this name out or not.
All of the sudden, there came a flash of black that zipped across the air in a matter of seconds, disrupting Krampus from his thinking. He looked up from his list and sensed something in his lair. Something he was unfamiliar with. Gracing his talons over the gramophone to shut it off in order to listen to whatever made that distracting sound and find out who was infiltrated his lair under his nose.
"Hello, my friend." said a chilling voice in the darkness. Krampus turned to face a slender, pale man in a black robe and sleek black hair. It was none other than Pitch Black, the Boogeyman.
"Pitch." greeted Krampus in his Austrian accent.
"Pardon my intrusion. I was just happily going my merry way and I couldn't help, but overhear you going over your own naughty list." Pitch explained in his cunningly smooth tone. "North would look over his the same way you would. Sitting here in your chair, listening to Christmas tunes on outdated music devices."
"Why are you here, Boogeyman? In my personal domain uninvited?" demanded the German-associated demon firmly.
"I come here because I hear through the grapevine - a.k.a. my Nightmares - that you've missed a child on your list." responded the Nightmare King.
"Max Engel?"
"That's the one, yes." nodded Pitch.
"He is not naughty. He wanted everything Christmas to go away. So I did just that. Not only that, but everyone in his town, not just his family, have clearly forgotten the true spirit of Christmas. And that sort of discouraged negligence comes with a consequence." explained Krampus.
"I hear you loud and clear, Christmas demon. But that's not all why I'm here." Pitch began, holding his hands behind his back. "My Nightmares inform me that this Max child has been taken to the North Pole by Jack Frost."
"The winter spirit?" Krampus asked.
"And Guardian of Fun. The one you helped the Guardians trap me deep in the depth of my own domain by turning my Nightmares against me. They smelled my own fear, I'm sad to admit, and dragged me away." explained Pitch, who felt almost crushed, having to confess expressing fear.
"The Boogeyman afraid? Of his own minions?" Krampus exclaimed with confusion.
"Don't ask. Anyway, I hear Max is planning to find you and free his family from your captivity."
Krampus bellowed his deep, unsettling chuckle as it echoed throughout the lair as well as his footsteps would.
"No mere mortal can ever find my lair. Not even in the Underworld. Not in one piece, that is. Besides, his family are naughty and shall never see the light of day again until they learn their lesson." retorted Krampus with disbelief.
"Oh, he won't be alone. Jack Frost will be with him along a few other spirits around the spirit world. They're trying to find away into Father Time's world in order to enter the Underworld." Pitch explained even further.
"Father Time. Bah!" spat Krampus. "That nosey old goat really knows his way around the universe, especially in the Underworld. And yet, he's never managed to find my lair, the miserable coward."
"And don't forget Mother Nature, my daughter." added Pitch.
"If what you say is true, that Max and his spirit friends are searching for a way here, than I must stop them at all costs." Krampus declared.
"Yes. With your evil toys and my Nightmares, they'll have no change of finding a way here." Pitch said as he then turned to leave until the Christmas demon stopped him before he went he further.
"Not so fast, Boogeyman. I sense that you not only here to tell me of Max's journey here. What's the other reason?" asked Krampus in an authoritative tone of voice.
"Because I've been trapped away from the mortal world for too long. My Nightmares are my eyes and ears above the surface. My only ticket out of imprisonment is with your help." Pitch explained.
"You need my help to get you free?" related Krampus in a confused and non-beliving tone.
"I do, indeed. I know it's hard to understand, but you're my only hope." Pitch said.
Krampus thought hard about this for a second or two. He has never helped anyone before in his life. Finally, he made up his mind.
"Alright, Boogeyman. You have me word."
"Excellent. So good to have an ally." Pitch grinned devilishly. "But I don't have enough black sand to make more Nightmares and I only have few right now."
"Well, I have my dark elves and my toys. Who else can help us?" asked Krampus.
"Don't worry about that." Pitch assured before a wide, toothy grin from ear-to-ear made it's way on his face.
Meanwhile, Max, Jack and Bunny were hiking through the vast jungle overgrowth of the island of Moloka'i of the Hawaiian Islands as they have previously realized. Together with the snow globes, they can be anywhere they wanted, thought Max. But they only had like 12 snow globes before they used the one to get here and now they have 11, so they have a limited chance of traveling the world. So they needed to choose there next location wisely. The trio stopped in the middle of a clearing to rest for the moment.
"So how are we gonna find Father Time anyway?" Max asked as he sat down.
"First of all, it's gonna take more than one spirit to open a gateway into his realm. There's only two of us. Me and Jack. And we don't have enough power together to open the gateway." Bunny explained, twirling his boomerang around with his fingers.
"We need more spirits together in one as a team. Only then can we enter Father Time's dimension." Jack explained next.
"Okay. So let's go over our traveling arrangements. How can we get from one place to another besides the snow globes?" asked Max, changing the subject.
"Well, we don't have that many snow globes to get us everywhere. That's for sure." responded Jack.
"You flew me all the way over to the North Pole." suggested Max.
"Yeah, but I don't have the strength to carry more than one person through the air. Especially with this sack of globes." Jack shrugged and gestured to the sack he was carrying on his back.
"We can't use my tunnels either." Bunny added as well. "We barely have any idea as to where we should go and I have to know where I need to go before I open a tunnel."
"We could build a boat." suggested Max.
"A boat? How?" asked Jack.
"There's a lot of wood around here." Max gestured to the area around them. To the bark on the trees to the the branches and sticks on the ground.
"But I've never ridden on a boat before, let alone sailed one." Jack said with concern. "Besides, how are we gonna build one?"
"We don't have glue..." Bunny began.
"We'll use tree sap." Max suggested.
"Uh, Max, I hate to burst your bubble, but none of us know how to sail." Jack said, attempting to dissuade the boy.
"My aunt, Elisa, taught me how to sail a boat once when we were vacationing in Outer Banks. It shouldn't be that hard." explained Max.
"Do you even know how to build a boat?" asked Bunny.
"If I can build a tiny scale model canoe out of plastic pieces and paint, then I can't design a life-size boat out of wood and sap." Max said as he started picking up branches and sticks to begin his process. He took off to find more woods somewhere else before the two spirits could protest some more.
Jack and Bunny looked at each other with concern and confusion. The boy was desperate in sailing the ocean, but neither of them wanted to. But if building a boat was there only option of travel, they had no choice. So they helped Max out with finding more wood. There even had to carve some of the trees of there barks for bigger pieces when they couldn't find any more on the ground. They even used leaves to collect sap from the trees. It took about a few hours of work to build the structure, but they finally managed to succeed.
The boat was big enough for all of them, complete with a sail made from an old canvas that Max found lying on the ground. There were no holes in it, so that was a good thing.
"I gotta admit, after all that hard work, we've really pulled it off." Jack said, tired from all the labor, but glad nonetheless. "But where exactly are we gonna go on this?"
"We'll just keep sailing until we find another island." Max said as he hopped in.
The other two shrugged and started to push on the boat to get it into the water.
"And then what?" asked Bunny.
"Well, what other spirit lives around here?" asked Max.
"No one that we're familiar with." answered Jack. "I'm not even sure if there is one here."
With one final push, the boat was in the water and the two Guardians took their chance to hop into the boat before it floated off without them. Max unfurled the sail and the wind pushed them outward into the ocean, letting both the wind and the ocean carry them off to where they were going to go.
"You sure you know how to sail?" asked Jack.
"It's coming back to me." Max said.
On they went, sailing out onto the ocean. Max even gave Jack and Bunny a few pointers on how to sail. It's been three years since he learned to sail a boat from Aunt Elisa. The trio sailed on the boat for what seemed like hours. Hours turned into days. They took turns sailing as they needed sleep. Again, none of them had a plan on where they were going, so it seemed that were just sailing aimlessly. One night, Jack noticed Max wearing something around his neck.
"What's that?" He asked.
Max pulled out a makeshift necklace he made from Omi's bauble from Krampus using twine.
"It's a bauble that Krampus left my grandmother when she was a kid after she took her family away." Max explained, clutching the ornament in his hands. "It's all I have left of her."
"She meant a lot to you, didn't she?" asked Jack.
"Yeah. If I ever see her again, do you think she'll see you?" Max asked him.
"Like I said, she's aged and probably forgot about me. So I don't know."
Suddenly, the wind started to pick up and proved to be a little stronger to sail the boat and was even causing the boat to move jerk around from the gust.
"Jack?" Max said nervously.
"I'm not doing this." He defended, wondering what was going on.
"I don't like this." Bunny said as the wind got stronger and stronger and the ocean got more frantic, creating large waves.
A storm followed suit, raining heavily upon the poor souls on that boat as the rapid waves carried them across in rapid speed. They held on tight to something as the storm boomed and thundered, carrying them through the raging sea like a knife through butter. After a while, the waves appeared to have settled when suddenly a large wave formed in front of them. It was already too late for either of them to try and turn around as they knew it would do no good. With a flash of lightning, the wave struck them and their boat, sending them unconscious in the water.