He shifted, but realized too late what she was doing. Lock struggled under her, then sighed as he better directed her hand to his hair, before he decided to make the best of the situation. He nuzzled into her chest and occasionally ran his teeth and tongue over her soft flesh. A hand at her hips, a gentle squeeze as far around as he could reach, a nip here and there where it wouldn't be seen.
Lock still ran his tail over her legs. Whether he woke her up or riled her up, he was game either way.
Sally quickly got the basket and gave Carver a gentle farewell, and a request to come visit again in the future.
The rest of the night went by as well as it often did in Halloween Town, with ghosts and ghouls going about their usual business before the sun rose. Shock got a decent haul of forget-me-lots from the graveyard, but knew she'd be making some trips out into the Hinterlands for the next few days to ensure a good stock while the graveyard plot replenished. She also took over Oogie's old bedroom to hang the forget-me-lots she and Carver collected to safely dry. Barrel re-stocked the cupboards and checked one of the old cookbooks for a stuffed toadstool recipe to try for dinner tomorrow. Both of them set aside time to practice their individual parts of the band before settling down to sleep. Carver was welcome to join in.
The pumpkin sun rose, and Halloween Town's many creatures of the night settled in for a good day's sleep. A few hobbled about in the day, such as the Behemoth tending to parts of the pumpkin patch where it was easier to differentiate colors and textures. A few others tended to nooks and crannies that were otherwise hidden in the night's shadows.
When it went down, many creatures arose. Far off in the cemetery, deep in the crypt, Lock stirred, still curled on top of Lillith. The enclosed space of their shared coffin gave him just enough room to glance up at her face. He always enjoyed how peaceful she looked in those last moments. Lock nuzzled against her chest, and carefully unwrapped his tail from around her waist.
She wouldn't be sleeping peacefully for much longer.
He reached up to graze his sharp teeth over her neck, then gently bit at her flesh.
"Good evening, my bloodsucker," he said before he gently bit her again.
Both he and Sally frowned at the mention of the fight.
"Shock always was headstrong," Jack said as he shook his head.
Sally nodded in agreement. Carmilla was the only one in town who could really give the oldest trickster a taste of her own medicine in that regard. Her frown deepened in camaraderie when Carver mentioned being grounded. She knew that feeling only too well.
"I'll get the basket," she said. "Would you mind getting me a little bit of henbane too while you're out, Carver? I noticed we were running low."
Sally tilted her own head in solidarity. She gracefully clasped her hands in front of her.
"That's very thoughtful of you," she said, knowingly. "And the after-affects of the smell resulting in the Doctor and Jewel being a bit occupied for a while won't hurt, either?"
Like most of the town, Sally was aware of Carver's friends. She also understood, more than anyone, the need to get away from Dr. Finkelstein. The doctor was overbearing and controlling, and her little sister needed her space.
"Yes. She's in the kitchen. We were about to have a late-night lunch."
He smiled as he lead her inside.
"You can join us, if you'd like."
Sally was just coming out of the kitchen with plates of fish bones to set on the table. She always made a little extra when she cooked, in case she or Jack was hungrier than expected, or as the case may be, an unexpected guest. She looked up as Jack entered with Carver. A crooked smile formed over her lips as she set the plates down and came over to greet them.
"Hello, Carver," she said sweetly. "How nice of you to visit."
~~~
Barrel paid Agatha little mind as he collected his wares and headed out of the shop. He got the cupboards restocked, and he got to cause trouble. Agatha acted a little weird today, but it quickly went to the back of his mind as he thought of what else he could do with the salamander tongues.
"Not on Halloween," Shock said. "We'll do it before, halfway through preparations so it looks like the afterparty."
She grinned.
"A prank's no fun if it doesn't disrupt them in some way."
And getting in the way of preparations definitely made it more exciting. Shock climbed down the rope ladder.
"I'll check the graveyard," she said. "You find what you can in the Hinterlands."
~~~
"Oh."
He tried not to sound too disappointed. And to think, Agatha, the picture perfect, well-behaved witch, wanted to cause trouble! His shoulders slumped a bit, but he perked when she spoke again. She was definitely up to something. Maybe it was a first solo venture, and she just needed advice on how to get there?
"And you need a way to get to him?" he asked, deciding to just go for it. "I can assist."
Original bogeyman. Was the original ruler of Halloween Town, and was booted for getting too "power-hungry". He was known as the Shadow King. Jack has the title of Pumpkin King to differentiate. (+1)
Realized he had a life before this (+1) and rebelled against Primus for this. He had a daughter he was stolen from in life (+1), and sees LSB as the parallel to this, as they were stolen from their mother and made outcasts with no proper guardian (+1).
Primus changed him into Oogie to contain him. (+1)
Originally spirited LSB away as a "fuck you" to Primus, who was bringing them into the new Halloween cycle (-1), but in time actually grew fond of them (+1). His primary goal is to take down Primus, but he's convinced himself that he saved them from Primus (+1).
Legitimately fears they will be replaced. (+1)
Daddy Pitch! He legitimately wants them all to become a family. (+1)
Until his rebellious children rebel, and then he starts going off the deep end. (-1)
Started off using the trio as henchmen, and legitimately grew fond on them. (+1)
Forced personality change as Oogie as further punishment. This explains the contradictions between Oogie and Pitch's personalities, and the trio's legitimate fear of the former. (+1) Pitch is aware of this, but unable to do anything about it until Jack gets rid of the Oogie form. (+1)
Total sympathy points: 10
Santa Claus
Starts off as NMBC!Santa. His frustration at Jack during the vents of NMBC ("To fix Christmas? Of course there is! I'm Santa Claus!") sets Primus off to prevent another Pitch and create a new holiday cycle. Santa was just stressed, but Primus took it as ego.
We actually decided Jack taking over Christmas is the catalyst, because now the holidays are aware other holidays exist, and that's a threat to Primus's power.
North is the new reincarnation.
Primus
Originally meant for his holiday leaders to remain eternally. Pitch realized he has a life before this, and rebelled, which caused him to start cycling out leaders and citizens to prevent it.
Some of the original citizens in Halloween Town fade away and are replaced because they blindly followed Jack. LSB get to stay because they did their own thing.
LSB are aging because Primus wants to keep them in the new cycle, but not as children. Pitch will see this as him looking to replace them, because teens are already pushing it in terms of trick-or-treaters.
Agatha and the vampire twins were humans who Primus decided would fit. Not every citzen was once human, though. They don't question where they came from. Neither does anyone else, except LSB after a time (likely because Pitch planted that thought in their heads to awaken their memories).
Little Demons reference. LSB were Jonathan, Cynthia, and Bradley in life. This is what Pitch uses to a) start awakening their memories, and b) convince them that he is their father figure.
Djahli bleated again and struggled against Pierre’s grip. He’d lost sight of Shock, but Pierre’s lifting him up actually allowed him to spot Barrel’s short green tufts of hair as he came out from under another table and scurried towards the kitchen, the little monster easily lead there by the smell of food. Upon spotting Phoebus, Djahli became more frantic, wanting the captain’s attention. He stopped struggling long enough to nod towards the kitchen before he riled back up again. Lock and Shock were still somewhere among the crowd, and if he could just get free, he could weave through the crowd and hopefully catch one of them.
The second Madame Serpente cleared the stairs to get to the drinking party, Shock quickly made her way up, now that they were empty. She climbed onto the banister at the top...and from there, the rope that held up the main chandelier. After a quick test to make sure it would hold her weight without swaying the chandelier too much, she carefully scurried up the rope and up onto the chandelier’s wooden base, taking care to mind the lanterns that hung from it and lit the room. Her weight would tilt it a little, but with practiced grace, Shock slowly lowered herself to sit on the edge, making sure to not move the chandelier too much so the patrons below wouldn’t notice the light shifting, though admittedly between the drunken environment, the dancing flames in the fireplace, and the focus on Gaston, most of them wouldn’t give it a second thought.
Just as she settled herself, Shock noticed a familiar ball of red feathers sitting in the rafters and looking down at the scene below. She grinned under her mask, confident Iago hadn’t noticed her yet. Shock tightened her legs around the frame to keep her balance, then reached into her pocket and pulled out her slingshot and a small stone to use as ammo. There was plenty of other time for trouble, but right now, she readied her slingshot for an easy target, leaning back just enough for a clear shot at his tail feathers.
"Why would you have such a high quality and expensive table in a bar if you have patrons like him around?"
Madame Serpente got one more parting shot at the little redhead before she made her way to the heart of the ruckus.
“A good, sturdy table can take a lot from an unruly crowd,” she said. “That doesn’t give you an invitation to damage it.”
A few more of the crowd gathered around the table to watch Verton and Merida’s contest, many of them amused at such a waif taking that sort of challenge. A few placed bets.
Gaston quickly found himself holding only the stranger’s cloak. He tried to catch him, but the man had already sidestepped away and pulled the cloak from his grasp. With a growl, Gaston tried to follow, to find his leggings suddenly loose and about halfway down his thighs. He barely caught his balance before he stumbled forward...only for Esmeralda to smile sweetly and sidesweep his ankles, knocking the massive buffoon to the floor.
She bowed to the cheering crowd. Gaston growled and tried to pull himself again, but tripped over his loose pants again, to much of the crowd’s laughter. He hastily stood up and tugged his pants back up around his waist. He held them up with one hand as he tried to hone in on Esmeralda. She had already moved behind him.
“Looking for something?” Esmeralda asked.
Cassim had the belt, but she wanted Gaston’s focus on her. She got her wish. Gaston turned around and spotted her.
“No one makes a fool out of me,” he snarled.
“No one except Gaston,” Esmeralda said coolly.
That got the crowd roaring again. Red-faced, Gaston tried to find Cassim again to get his belt back. He noticed the blue-cloaked thief near the strange foreign soldier he’d hardly paid a passing glance to before.
"Who knew people in this city were so rude."
He ignored the comment, his focus still on Cassim.
"Is it normal for you to attack envoys to your city in such a way? I'm not sure your King would be happy to hear that you are setting up a bad precedence for those who wish to establish trade with your fine country."
“He threw that tankard and stole my belt!” Gaston bellowed. “And unless he gives it back, I’m going to--!”
“--Take it outside!” a firm, furious voice finished for him.
Madame Serpente finally made it to the front, having had to shove her way through the crowd. Most of the tavern went quiet, now that the Madame’s wrath had been evoked.
“Or I’ll take you outside,” she threatened.
Gaston turned to her.
“No one--!” he started.
Madame Serpente gave him a glare that would have sent Claude Frollo running for the hills, curse his damned soul. Several patrons bowed their heads, turned away, or quickly found something else to talk about. Some took interest in the drinking contest going on in the far corner. A few others pointed to Cassim and the soldier, quickly marking the troublemakers before the Madame could ask. They knew better than to make her ask.
“You lot,” she said coldly as she pointed to Gaston, Cassim, and the foreign soldier. “Outside. Now. You can come back in when you’ve settled this among yourselves.”
While the Madame handled Gaston (and with a mental note to put in a good word for Cassim once she found the little monsters), Esmeralda slipped through the crowd to continue her prior task. It only took another second to spot a little figure in red near the fireplace.
Lock grinned under his mask as he grabbed a fire poker. He spotted Esmeralda, then quickly ducked back into the crowd. Several patrons hesitantly went back to their regular business, quickly taking drinks, making bets, quietly striking up conversation, and otherwise acting like the current standoff between the Madame, Gaston, and the strangers wasn’t there. A few cheers came from the drinking game corner as Merida and Verton each downed another tankard of the Madame’s finest, most potent mead.
Once he put some distance between them, Lock pushed the tip of the poker against the backs of the patrons' legs and knees, just hard enough to be felt, though he made a beeline to slide under an open table at every opportunity solely to evade Esmeralda. He laughed with glee at the cries of pain and sudden confusion of several patrons. A few particularly drunk patrons smacked those next to them in retaliation.
Lock, Shock, and Barrel all heard Zero's wail. But surely Jack could wait just one more minute. The fun had just begun, after all!
~~~
Zero’s howl did little to sway the dark figure approaching in the distance. The shadows behind it formed a sort of dark fog that swept over Paris, even more obvious now. While the city was already dark save for a few candles in the windows, or the occasional torchlight from a patrolling guard, even those lights eventually vanished. Notre Dame’s towers ominously loomed over the fog, as if even the church had succumbed to the encroaching danger.
The herald was closer now, enough that if Jack looked closely, he would pick out a creature of sorts, a twisted, grotesque form with no truly definable shape in the dark, but one with strong, thick limbs. It leapt with animalistic power and grace to reach another rooftop. The only distinct detail to come into focus was that it indeed wore a cloak.
It stopped on a rooftop just a few blocks from the tavern and stared in the direction of the tavern’s roof, its cloak caught in the gentle night wind. Maybe it noticed Jack - or better yet, his glowing companion with his even brighter nose. It then started to come closer.
A few shadows crept out from the alleyways and thin spaces between the tightly-packed Parisian homes, these closer than the strange cloaked figure. Many of them had twisted, monstrous forms, though holes in the shadows formed eyes and mouths in macabre mockeries of faces. They spread out to reveal a familiar silhouette in the courtyard across from the tavern: a silhouette of a woman with long, straight hair, ragged ends of a dress that reached her knees, and tiny hands and feet. She hobbled as she took a step, because she was missing one of her high-heeled shoes.
"Right," Shock said, a devious smirk on her lips. "He also created that new agent to dissolve it faster because of it. Which is useful when we spill it on ourselves, but not so much for trouble."
A pause.
"...Unless we're making something come undone."
Shock put the fog juice bottle back and gestured for Carver to follow her back into the main room. She then pointed to a calendar on the wall and concentrated for a few seconds. The pages lifted from September and October to show November.
"Because we're going to make the whole town skip Halloween," she said, "or at least, we're going to make them think they missed it."
Shock moved her hand and the calendar pages fell back down to reveal September again. She flexed her hand, knowing she'd need to concentrate more to truly make this work, at least enough to hold the fog juice bottle up for a minute. Every part of this plan would take some time and effort, but the pay-off would be more than worth it.
"We'll get the fog juice later," she said as she headed for the front entrance. "We're going to need a lot of forget-me-lots to make this work."
~~~
That sent him into a fit of giggles.
"We could torment him for days!"
Barrel didn't catch her wink, but he was already thinking about who they could give such a potion to. Clown? The Mayor? Wolfman? One of the vampires? He looked back at Agatha, and noticed her eyeing him again. She really wasn't going to let him out of her sight for a minute, was she? Barrel shoved his hands in his hoodie pocket and leaned against the other end of the shelf. His hands were accounted for, and he wasn't going anywhere, so maybe he could get her to lower her guard. He raised a brow in interest, and smiled again.
"It sounds like you've already got someone in mind," he said.
"Did you ever get around to using that on the doctor's skull?" she asked.
But that seemed trite, old school. She was pretty sure they'd glued every surface of Halloween Town at some point, especially Clown's face, the doors to the Mayor's hearse, the vampire's coffins, and Jack's chair. She needed to think bigger. Something that would put the entire town on their toes. Shock looked over the other items on the shelf: slime mold, monster flytrap seeds, fog juice, her scorpion box to keep the most viscous ones contained, a few cans of instant spider web...nothing seemed to catch her eye at first as she started to rummage through a box of firecrackers, before a wicked thought came to mind. Shock went back to the shelf and grabbed the bottle of fog juice. She shook it to get an idea of how much was left and frowned.
"Damn. Shame I didn't think of this before Barrel went to the shop, but that's fine. This one's gonna take some time to set up, anyway."
Shock examined the shelf and confirmed what else she needed wasn't there. Well, the graveyard often had plenty of herbs and flowers. She was pretty sure she could acquire it easily; it'd just take time to dry them out.
"...Powdered petals of forget-me-lots have a temporary memory loss effect if inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through the skin, correct?"
~~~
Barrel went over to the shelf at her suggestion.
"Oooo, salamander tongues sound delicious! They'd probably be great in stuffed toadstools."
He turned back to Agatha, his mouth stretched into a grin, though he caught himself before he could look too gleeful at the hint. Was she suggesting what he thought she was suggesting...?
"Sounds unpleasant," he said.
Even more so for the unlucky bastard who drank it, if he had to make a guess.
