Hello, readers! This is a one-shot fanfiction I made for Halloween, but I did not think it could work as a fanfiction story until now. So, I figured I could post it here for people to enjoy.
To explain further, this is a one-shot story involving the card "Chris Pumpkinhead" from the card game "Shadowverse". I made this story based on the card's artwork, flavor text, and English-language voice lines when played in the game. All these are things that I felt offered the possibility of a story. If you want, you can look the card up on a few different databases for this game.
DISCLAIMER: "Shadowverse" is developed and published by the company Cygames. All elements from that game used in this story belong to the game's original creators.
Onward!
"Don't run away!"
She heard their laughing voices in her ears, the sound coming from multiple directions very close behind her. Her feet pushed her body forward at a stumbling pace, her heart rapidly beating to get energy to the needed places. Her muscles strained to keep moving; sweat ran down her back, the dark and narrow streets of cobblestone having a new way to turn at almost every block. She saw her way forward by the glowing lamps at each street corner, the only source of illumination with the Sun having gone down.
"We just want to play!"
She cursed these creatures under her breath, especially their childish voices. They had gotten the drop on her through those voices, luring her into striking distance. They had flown out from the shadows of a dark alleyway, just like many others that she ran by in her escape. Those creatures, spirits with misty bodies and white glowing eyes, had used their cold, crooked hands to dig through her head and into her brain, pulling out… something important. Many things, in fact. She needed those things back before she left whatever... this place was. She had known the name before, but it was now one of the many holes in her memory.
"Where are you going?"
She darted across a side street and charged out towards a traffic circle. There was no traffic, people or otherwise, out here now. The center of the circle had a statue of some dancing ghoul, its lopsided grin a carved imitation of her inner fears come to life. She had been able to get away from those spirits once; could she do it again? She looked away from the statue and back down the path she had run through. The spirit's laughter echoed in the air, but she saw no misty shapes in that direction. She breathed hard and pressed her legs on to get out of this open space.
The houses around the circle had darkened windows, their exteriors of stone and brick rigid and uncaring for the lone woman out and about. Every path she took led to more of the same, until it quite suddenly didn't. At some point in her wandering through confined passageways and past grimy walls, flashes of blue light shone out of the darkness. Not caring what the source of these lights were, only that they were different, she moved towards them. A few seconds later she stood in front of a three-story house with slanted roof with windows on each side. The light she had seen wasn't there now, which slammed her hope down through her boots and out into the hard stone.
Despair clung to her legs, pulling them down with the rest of her body. Her eyes burned with anger and fear-induced tears. A few glances at the house on her other side provided no help: the other building had a black roof and three floors as well. It was just as imposing as every other place in this town. It gave no hope, only fear.
A loud SMASH caused the woman to jump back up when the air around her exploded with sound and light. Looking up, she saw something big fall out of a high window at the formerly-lit house. Once she figured out it was coming down at her, the woman pressed her body against the closest wall to her position. This gave her enough space to avoid being smashed into the stone by the human-like body as it landed hard on the ground. She heard a loud CRACK on impact and shut her eyes from the aftermath. Another, smaller SMACK, came a few moments later, and then a stomach-twisting silence filled the area. The woman shivered, unable to tell her legs to run away. She certainly didn't run when a strange voice came from very close by.
"Aaaagh!" A male voice groans in apparent pain before something by the voice makes jangling noises. "That was not called for, no way! You agree, Cane?" A dog's bark followed this question, along with something moving about with loud sniffs. The woman's curiosity was not strong enough for her to open her eyes yet. She wanted to move, but her legs did not agree with her mental commands. Running might make whatever this thing was get angry and chase her, like those spirits had.
"Hey, you there!" The woman stiffened as she heard the same voice call out in her direction. "If you're trying to hide, you're not doing a very good job. Step on out where we can see you!"
So much for hiding. Then again, how could she have hidden from something so close by? It didn't sound like it was going to hurt her, but those child-shaped spirits had used false innocence to catch her off guard. She wouldn't be fooled by that again, that was against her… well against something she had been doing for years, but could no longer remember. The spirit's cold touch lingered in her thoughts and made this new voice threatening. What other things lived in this town, except spirits wanting to kill her?
Something small pressed against her boot, and then a wet thing pressed against her bare leg with several snuffles. She snapped her eyes open and automatically looked down at the invasive object. It was the nose of a small grey dog that stood on its hind legs to sniff her leg. The creature had wide brown eyes and notched gray ears; she couldn't see its teeth but imagined they were very sharp. She shook her leg to get the dog off, which earned her a harsh growl from the beast as it scampered back to the center of the narrow path. A dim orange light coming from the path revealed a series of stitches across the creature's body. Some were across its jaw, others on its back, and she was sure there were even more in other places.
"Easy, Cane," the voice said to the dog as it picked up a candy cane from right by a pair of very pointed boots. "Not everyone's nice out here." The voice carried a strong baritone, oddly comforting to the scared woman's ears. Some quality in the phrasing, supernatural or not, made her heart beat a little slower. The dog looked up to the speaker with a wide grin and lolling tongue, panting and wagging its tail as it chewed on the red and white treat in its mouth.
The woman, nerves tensed for a shocking revelation, looked up to the speaker. What she saw was not as shocking as she had expected. It had two arms and two legs, sported a gaudy leather coat over an orange vest and purple leggings, and carried a purple-and-red hat in one hand. The thing that really differentiated it from a regular human was its head. More specifically, the lack of one. In place of a head, and a face, was a giant pumpkin with eyes and a mouth carved into the skin. The eyes glowed orange, and the teeth inside the mouth looked very human-like.
"It's the head, isn't it?" The pumpkin-head's mouth moved just like a human's would as the man gave an annoyed sigh. He then twirled the hat in his hand before slipping it onto his "head". In what the woman figured was a trick of her eyes, she thought she saw the hat's surface turn into a red mouth for a second.
"It's always the head," the man continued, "that's what everyone notices! I have got to find a better replacement for times like this!" The woman blinked at the word "replacement", several questions smashing each other in her head for the chance to be asked first. She ended up saying none of them, instead whimpering against the stress of everything going on around her. This got the man's attention away from himself and towards her. He took a step towards her, and then stopped himself from going any farther.
"Okay, listen." The man raised both his gloved hands up in front of him in a gesture of harmlessness. "I don't mean to scare you. Can you tell me what's up? Are you actually scared of me? Maybe of Cane here?" The patchwork canine growled at the mention of its name. "Come on, tell me."
"All of it!" The woman's fear speaks through her lips, conscious thought squeezed against primal panic and the cold touch of death she had felt from those laughing ghosts. "I'm scared of everything in this town. I want to get out, I want to go home!" She looks to either side as if home was just a few paces away and bright as day. There was nothing like that in this cursed town.
"Okay," the pumpkin-man stated as the woman covered her eyes with her hands and started quietly crying, "where is your home?"
"I don't know!" she answered, her throat heavy with emotion. "Some ghosts ripped it out of my mind! They're going to kill me and I don't know how to stop them! I don't know anything anymore!"
"Hey, hey! Easy!" The woman's hands were pulled away from her face with a soft but firm grip. She looked up into those orange eyes inside the brighter pumpkin skin. They glowed with some kind of inner light, like a candle. It comforted her, somehow. She didn't know, or remember, how a candle could be comforting. Her tensed muscles started to slacken as the pumpkin-man firmly added the words, "No one is going to cause such chaos in my town."
"Y-your town?!" The woman tensed back up again. Was this claim true? It was very hard to believe. "What makes this your town?"
"I'm the lord here, of course!" The woman's hands are released as the pumpkin-man stepped back and did a formal bow, one hand holding onto his hat to keep it from falling. "Chris Pumpkinhead, pleased to meet you."
The woman gives Chris a strange look for several moments before slowly sitting to the ground, a sunken expression etched onto her face. The fact this pumpkin-man had a name, and oversaw this nightmarish place, rendered her sense of the world temporarily stunned. Adding to this the forced removal of many of her memories, and she hung on a small edge against a great abyss of madness and despair. She probably didn't act like this normally, she didn't know what was true anymore.
Chris Pumpkinhead saw this; Cane, too. The dog did not move forward or away from this shocked human. It looked up to Chris for guidance and only saw him shift uneasily on his pointed boots. His mouth didn't change from its human-like grin, but something about his posture and actions showed a change in his feelings. He cleared his throat once, and then again slightly louder. The woman did not respond.
Listen," he quietly informed the silent woman, "I'm not going to hut you. In fact, I can help you get out of here after you help me with something."
"What do you want?" the woman neutrally replied without looking back up at him.
"As sweet as this noggin is," Chris admitted with a pat to his pumpkin head, "it isn't my actual head. That head is the mark of my lordship in this town. It's one-of-a-kind, very important. I've got to find it in order to regain my power here. That power will let me get you out of here and on the way home."
This got enough of a response from the woman for her to look up at Chris. With a lost look in her eyes she confessed, "I don't remember where home is."
Chris hummed his disappointment. "That bad, huh?" He mulled on this while looking away from the woman. Cane, its earlier anger against the woman gone, pressed against Chris's leg and chewed a few more bites from his chew-cane. The woman looked at, or more likely through, Chris' inhuman face with slow and private thoughts moving through her hollowed mind. She would sit here and listen to this strange pumkin-man: it was the best thing she could think of doing right now.
"Okay," Chris said after some deep thinking, "once I get my head back, we can find your memories. Anything that steals thoughts usually puts them up for trade, and I know the wheelers and dealers in this part of town. That sound good for a plan?"
Chris and the woman looked into each other's eyes, relatively speaking. The woman ran through the plan in her head. Fatigue and a very correct fear of the unknown kept her from agreeing with the obvious advantages. This man could help her solve her problems, but could she really trust him? Those spirits had broken her trust, or at least most of it. She didn't think she could regain it for something this inhuman. And then a tiny part of her mind asked, "So what?" with a crazed glee that could only come from a mind with very little left to lose.
Her memories had been forcibly pulled out, to the point she couldn't remember where she had come from. She felt her stomach growl and her throat ache, and there had been no food or drink out here this late at night. Surviving until the dawn alone seemed quite dangerous: surviving with an inhabitant of this town sounded a little bit easier. She could walk away, she knew, but she still retained the knowledge that working together with someone else on a problem produced better results. The answer seemed obvious; the biggest barrier was her own fears.
There was certainly something scary about a man with a pumpkin for a head, and a dog with many stitches across its body that loves to eat candy. But, there was also something fun with them. "Go for it." The insane voice in her fractured thoughts grew stronger with each heartbeat, each breath of air into her lungs. "If he tricks you, you have something to hit back. Take the chance, it's the best you've got!"
"Okay." The woman nodded once to Chris, the beginnings of a smile on her face. Chris happily exclaimed, "Alright!" in a way that put an amused smile on the woman's face. He then turned to the dog and said, "Come on, Cane, let's put your smelling skills to good use!" The dog yapped twice through the cane still in its mouth as Chris got the woman onto her feet again. Chris led the three all of two steps before he stopped suddenly. The woman had just begun to ask what was wrong when the pumpkin-man reached down and snatched a few small wrapped candies from the ground.
"Take some of these," Chris told the woman as he put them in her hands. "They're from the witch inside that house." He pointed to the house he had just fallen out of, and then added that "She makes great treats, but she's not so sweet herself. I know that for sure."
Confused, but not very surprised, the woman unwrapped one of the candies and popped it into her mouth. She instantly felt the flavor – fresh strawberries, she could remember that fruit – flow over her tongue and taste buds. Her lips puckered up in momentary bliss from the sugary gift, but she regained her focus in time to see Chris standing a few paces away. With a small blush on her cheeks, she followed him and the dog "Cane" into the shadows beyond, Chris' glowing eyes acting as a natural light to guide their path…
Alright, that's the story!
What did you think? Does this story make "Chris Pumpkinhead" into an interesting character?
As is usual with my work, any feedback and constructive criticism you provide will be great to see. Maybe, if I feel up to it, I can make more of these stories. There are other cards I like to think have deeper stories behind them.
For now, Draconos is taking off!